A Magic Broken (6 page)

“Are you holding any dwarves here?” Nicolas wasn’t easily shocked, but at times the sheer depravity of these Malkanians bid fair to accomplish it. It was not easy to keep the contempt off his face.

“No, not a one,” answered Aetias. “I have seen more than a few with unusual tastes pass through over the years, but none with an appetite for any such absurdities. I don’t own a single dwarf, still less would I employ one here. Do you suppose it might be a simple robbery? There are some gold plates and goblets that I expect would be of interest to a dwarf.”

Nicolas listened skeptically. Malkan abounded with far more lucrative targets than a brothel, even an exclusive one like this. For gold, a bank. For a whore, a whorehouse. Was it possible that the dwarves were after the same treasure
he
pursued? That was hard to imagine, but it was just barely conceivable.

“There is an easy way to find out.” Nicolas drew his sword and beckoned to the four house guards, two of whom had obtained torches. “Go now, my lord. Don’t stop here again until you see me or one of the men on the front steps.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and ran up the blood-stained marble steps toward the darkness lurking behind the open double-doors. He’d never fought a dwarf, but he was supremely confident that they would die as readily as any man, elf, or orc he’d slain.

Once inside, he was surprised to discover that Aetias, or more likely one of his slaves, had decorated the Golden Rose in much the same manner as his private residence. There were in evidence no red velvet wall-hangings or obscene statuary of the sort so common in such places. The large entry hall looked not unlike the mansion from which he’d so recently come. The wide, carpeted staircase was toward the back of the hall.

Nicholas took a torch from one of the guards accompanying him and mounted the steps two at a time. He could hear the men behind keeping pace with him. Being guards rather than soldiers, they might not be worth much in a fight, but at least they had courage.

Upstairs, the whore with the bloody nose had said, and she was on the landing. That meant that the dwarves, assuming they were in fact dwarves, were after something on the floor above that. Or someone.

Sure enough, as soon as Nicolas reached the first floor, he saw the figure of a man, presumably another guard, lying dead or unconscious on the floor at the far end of the hall. The hall extended in both directions and formed a square around the open space of the stairwell. There were three doors on each side and two on the far end. The guard lay in front of one of them. The other was ajar, and the flickering glow of a candle or hearth fire inside was casting shadows that danced about the walls of the hall.

“There,” Nicolas whispered. He sent two men around the left of the stairwell, while he and the other two went right. If anyone emerged from the room, they’d find their exit blocked unless they were amenable to a leap over the railing and the resultant plunge.

As he crept closer to the half-open door, sudden terror flared within him as the darkness triggered a memory of a previous night filled with steel and fire and blood. He took a deep breath and steeled himself, fighting the urge to risk releasing the power held within his sword. Too soon… It was too dangerous.

With a conscious effort, he conquered his mindless fear with fey humor. How ludicrous it would be for him to perish here and now, in a whorehouse brawl! His poor shade would bid fair to perish itself from sheer mortification.

Nicolas leaped through the door frame with his teeth bared, holding the torch out before him in his left hand as he kicked the wooden door to the side.

But no sword rose to meet his entrance, no giant double-bladed axe descended to split him from sternum to crotch. The room was not empty, but there was no danger to be found in it now. Death had already come to this place, and he had come in a merciless form for the distinguished, dark-haired man slumped lifelessly against the blood-spattered wall opposite to the door.

But Death had not come alone. Someone had brought him here, and unless Nicolas was very much mistaken, that intruder had also taken someone else away. He cursed in helpless anger. One failure was mere chance. Two began to stink of bad fortune.

“Check the other rooms,” he ordered the guard with the other torch. “Take him with you. There should be a few girls hiding in their rooms. When you find one, bring her here.” He turned to the guard standing next to him. “Do you know who that is?”

“I think that might be Lord Baern, Captain. The banker.”

“A big man in the city, then?”

“Yes, Captain. Very big. He’s on the Council of Seven…
Was
on the council, I should say.”

Nicolas groaned. This was ugly. He wasn’t sure exactly how this might complicate things, but he knew it wasn’t going to make them easier. The man was not only dead, but emasculated too. The first stroke had missed and opened his left thigh. The second one had rendered him a eunuch of the most extreme degree. Though not for very long, as the dead man’s unstained hands told Nicolas that the third stroke, the one that had killed him, must have followed almost immediately. There were at least two killers, he observed, as the wound on the dead man’s thigh was not very deep, whereas the killing blow had caved in the entire right side of the banker’s head.

“Yes, it would appear there is now an open seat. Go to the front steps and get Lord Aetias’s attention when his coach passes by. Bring him up here and tell him to wait for me. There should be no danger. Whoever did this is already gone.”

“Wait for you, Captain?” the man asked.

“Someone did this. And they’re not here. So the question is, how did they leave and where are they going?”

• • •

Quadras Aetias looked as if he had been sick when Nicolas and the guard who accompanied him on his search of the brothel reached the top of the stairs for the second time that night. Even in the shadows cast by the candles that had been relit in the hallway, his face was visibly pale, and his hands were shaking.

“Murdered,” he whispered harshly to Nicolas. “A Counciller of the Seven, murdered in my establishment!”

“Lord Aetias,” Nicholas said, “you were not here. I can testify to that. There were a dozen witnesses, two dozen, who can testify on your behalf.”

“No, I was not here. Unfortunately, that will make no difference!” Aetias smiled thinly. “An influential man, a banker of extraordinary importance, is dead. Upon my property. There will be an inquisition at the behest of the Council, and who knows what crimes will be uncovered? Some real, some imaginary, who can say? Whose hands are truly clean? I have wealth, I have influence, but not enough of either when it is the head of the House of Baern who lies dead in my establishment!”

Nicolas saw his opportunity. “There is only one way, my lord. If we find the killers, you can bring them to the Council before you are questioned yourself. They will be tortured, they will confess, and there will be no question that you were a victim of circumstance.”

Aetias laughed wildly, desperately.

“If I find the killers? They have already disappeared into the night!”

“No, my lord.” Nicolas shook his head. “They are dwarves. They have disappeared into the ground. I already found how they entered and departed. Come to the cellar and see.”

“Dwarves?”

“Exactly. And two or three dwarves, on foot, burdened by a whore, can hardly think to outrun a man on a horse. Give me two horses, two weeks’ provisions, and I will leave the city tonight if you can get me past the walls. I can find them. I guarantee it.”

“Yes, yes, by all means, anything you need. But you intend to leave tonight? They cannot get past the walls tonight, not unless they know which guards can be bought, and I can’t imagine dwarves would.”

“I tend to suspect the dwarves have their own means of entering and exiting the city, my lord. They built these walls, after all. They dug the sewers, as well. I imagine they’ll have their own ways in and out.”

“Yes, I see what you mean. No doubt you are correct.” Then he stopped, and his eyes narrowed. “How do you know about the whore, Captain?”

Nicolas laughed. “When one comes upon a man lying dead and naked in a whorehouse, one need not be a philosopher to surmise there was a whore involved. I assume the dwarves were hired to find her, but instead of trying to buy her, they decided to keep their client’s gold by digging a tunnel underneath the building and taking her. I doubt they intended to kill Lord Baern. He merely chose an unfortunate time to go a-catting.”

“Unfortunate indeed. And poor Baern too, of course. What they did to him…hideous, simply hideous. But you cannot go alone! I will give you ten men, no, twenty! Even if I am not placed under house arrest, the city guard will be posted outside my house. No one will dare to attack me unless the Council itself decides to act.”

Nicolas shook his head. “I’ll travel faster with one or two men at most, if you have any that ride well. But first there is one thing I would like to know. Who was the whore? What sort of woman bears a price so high that she merits a team of dwarf assassins to steal her?”

“No woman, Captain, but an elfess. The most exquisite beauty Malkan has ever seen, and all but immortal to boot!”

Although Nicolas had been anticipating the answer, he nevertheless gritted his teeth with frustration when Quadras Aetias confirmed his hopes and rendered unnecessary any need to quiz the women of the brothel.

“Can you imagine, Captain? Alone, she was worth more than this building and every useless whore in it!”

She is worth far more than that, you fool, Nicolas thought savagely. She is worth far more than you can possibly imagine. So close, so close I was, and I missed her again. But she cannot have gone far, not if she is still in the company of the stump-legged ones.

• • •

Lodi breathed in the sweet morning air with a sense of relief. He was well-accustomed to being overground now, after his years as a slave in Amorr, but he had never developed any liking for the cities of Men. Even dwarven-built places like Malkan had been made disgusting and dirty, reeking of decay and Man filth. Having to endure the wide open spaces and the ominous red morning sky was a small price to pay for finally escaping the walls of the stinking mountain city.

Few, if any, Men knew, but four of the five dwarf inns in Malkan were actually underground. Their imposing three-level stone edifices were mostly a sham to deceive the tall ones, as with the exception of the ground-floor taverns, the rooms overground were used for nothing more than storage. All five inns were connected via underground tunnels that permitted dwarves to move freely about under the city. And there were two tunnels that extended beneath the great walls, one under the north gate and the other pointing to the south.

Lodi glanced over at the elf girl they’d rescued. She looked like a tall, half-starved child curled up underneath a woolen blanket. She was wearing the dead man’s blood-stained tunic over her green silk dress, and her slender feet, clad in his ill-fitting sandals, protruded from the too-short blanket. In preparing the provisions for their travel, he’d forgotten that a brothel slave would have no clothes suited for the purpose, and none of their dwarven clothing fit her.

Nor had they had the time to arrange for anything better once they’d reached the Pick and Axe. The impatient guide who led them through the tunnels and beneath the walls had given them the choice of leaving immediately or waiting until the following evening. Seeing the way the elf shivered when she emerged from the blankets, Lodi wasn’t entirely sure he’d made the right decision, but listening to his instincts had kept him alive so far. And last night, his instincts had screamed at him that if he didn’t escape the city walls at once, he never would.

The elfess was still silent, as she had been since the previous evening when they had interrupted the Man whose misfortune it had been to procur her involuntary services at the precisely wrong time. The four young dwarves, on the other hand, were anything but silent, as they grumbled about everything from the lack of fire to the brightness of the sun and the hard, uneven ground upon which they’d recently awoken.

“Something is strange,” Gulfin said as he looked up at the sky. “Lodi, I think we’re on the south side of the city!”

“Yes,” Lodi agreed. “That’s why I chose the Pick and Axe. It’s on the south side, and it is the closest to the tunnel beneath the wall.”

“But we have to go north to reach Iron Mountain!”

“We’re not going north. We’re going south.”

“South?” All four of the young dwarves almost shouted in disbelief, and even the elf girl glanced at him with what looked like surprise in her green, cat-like eyes.

Lodi merely laughed and continued rolling up his blankets. “Lads, if you wish to survive long enough to grow proper beards, you will need to learn to think less about what you wish to do and more about avoiding what your enemies wish to do to you.”

“What does that have to do with going south?” Thorald asked.

“We were seen last night. In the event we are pursued, and there is every chance there will be a serious pursuit of the dwarves who assassinated a man rich enough to patronize such an establishment, they will assume we’ve headed north into the Tessini deeps.”

“As we should have done! We could have made it there by sundown tonight!”

“Only if we’d travelled the mountain pass. And if we had run north, we’d have been ridden down before noon by the riders who probably rode out the northern gate as soon as the sun came up. Even if we hadn’t taken the pass, we’d have found them waiting for us at the gates of the deep road. Lads, not all Men are stupid, and the Malkanians know dwarves better than most. They may not know where all the deep roads are, but they know where all of our main trade thoroughfares are. So, they go north, we go south, and with any luck, we make it safely home before spring.”

The young dwarves dropped into subdued silence. Lodi glared at them until they all had their blankets stowed and what remained of the bread and sausage with which they’d broken their fast had been returned to their packs. The elf, he noted, hadn’t eaten anything. He shrugged. If she wasn’t hungry now, she would be by the time the sun hit its height.