Arm Of Galemar (Book 2) (45 page)

Her arm movement suggested a diagonal slash upward, a
strike that could instantly switch into any number of follow-up attacks.  She
might intend to skirt the blade along his torso to his unprotected neck.  She
could slash across his eyes.  She could stab into his face.  With his sword
corded, he could never draw it before she killed both him and Hilliard.

His instincts took over and launched his next action. 
Marik jumped at the woman.  He turned in the air as he flew like a
catapult-flung boulder, presenting his back to the slashing knife.

The impact jarred through him.  He’d succeeded in
surprising her.  Her blow was wasted when her blade struck the sheathed sword
slung across his back.  His ribs felt the knife’s tip digging in until his mail
prevented it from piercing further.

Marik struggled for balance as he fell back against
her.  He scrambled to keep from falling when his legs bounced off the couch’s
side.

She was knocked off Hilliard to the floor.  Despite
the shock, she retained the grip on her blade.  The woman landed softer than
Marik could believe and regained her feet in an instant, ready to spring.

He wrestled with his sword.  Several jerks failed to
break the cord binding hilt to scabbard.  The lady assassin, shrewd as a fox,
quickly used the opportunity to strike.

Marik danced backward while the first blow cut the air
before him.  He gave a mighty tug on the hilt.  The sword came free of his back
still clad in its leather sheath.  Bound together as one, the blade was
suddenly clumsy and unwieldy.

She slashed again.  Marik’s reflexes were too slow.  A
ragged gash ripped open his shirt’s belly, exposing the chainmail.

He lunged.  With his covered blade in both hands, he
might be able to club her down.  His biggest problem was the length of her
knife, designed for close-in work, so he could not step inside the blade’s arc
to reduce its danger.  That would only increase it drastically.  On top of
everything else, his spine buzzed like an angry wasp swarm.  Marik pounded his
brain for a tactic he could use to end this quickly.

A shout from behind drew her attention for the barest
instant.  “Marik!”  Good, so Dietrik had
heard his shout earlier and
followed.

Marik reacted the same moment she averted her eyes. 
She instantly refocused on him, but not in time to dodge.  He put all his
strength behind the right hook he pounded into her jaw.

Had he utilized his strength working, he might have
completely fractured her skull, if not snapped her neck.  Pain shot through his
fist when he stressed the flesh injured during his showy demonstration
earlier.  She rocked back, her eyes rolling up.  Marik could hear Dietrik
approaching while he rubbed his swollen knuckles.

“No!” he shouted at his friend.  “Don’t go near her! 
She has some kind of magic working for her!”

He turned…and saw Landon instead.  The archer replied
without looking away from examining Hilliard.  “Then you handle her.  Kerwin! 
Help me carry him.  He’s passed out cold.”

Marik found Dietrik standing close by.  “We were all
chinning when you shouted,” he explained when Marik questioned him with his
eyes.  “Ah, what a crackling bloody mess!  Do you happen to have any idea what
is going on?”

“No.  I only felt her do something.  I haven’t felt
strange like that because of magic for a long time, so I figured whatever it
was, it wasn’t good.”  Marik saw no need to admit he’d nearly ignored the
warning for what it was until nearly too late.

Dietrik stared at the half-naked woman.  Her dress’s
top half bunched around her waist.  “If she’s one of your type, then why did
she attack you with this, mate?”  He picked up her knife.  “And come to think
of it, how did she get it into the house?  We weren’t searched as we were
invited guests, but I know Sestion’s servants would never let a courtesan into
the house unsearched, no matter how highly priced she is.  The nobility’s lost
too many members that way.”

“Ask the stiff stick at the gate.  But you’re right
about the knife.  I don’t understand that.  I don’t see any decorative weapons
hanging on the walls.”  He studied the unconscious form at his feet.  She
certainly possessed beauty, a fact she no doubt played upon to lure young
Hilliard away.  Despite the moment’s tension, his eyes were drawn to her bare
breasts.  Marik berated his green behavior.  Bad enough he had almost allowed
Hilliard to be killed.  Now he let himself become distracted.

Tearing his eyes away, they came to rest on a golden
bracelet around her wrist.  It had meant nothing to him during the frantic
rush.  An inch wide, it was covered with tiny hooplike links.  From each link
dangled a small, golden charm.

“Wait a moment,” he said to no one in particular. 
Something...  Something…  This charm bracelet snagged his eye, a minor detail
about it off-center from every other charm bracelet he’d ever seen.  After a
moment, he realized what.

“Look at this,” he said to Dietrik.  The bracelet came
free of her wrist with hardly a tug.  “See this?  All these little metal shapes
look like weapons.  Don’t women usually load up their bracelets with rabbits
and horseshoes and four-leaf clovers?”

“That is my experience, mate,” Dietrik agreed.  “Is
there anything to it?”

Marik opened his magesight and quickly distinguished
faint twists in the etheric energies of the mass diffusion surrounding the
golden circle.  “
Something’s
to it all right.  But I don’t know what.  I
think this thing is what I sensed.  She’s only an assassin, either going after
Hilliard direct or trying to damage Sestion’s reputation.”

“If this had been a solitary occurrence,” Dietrik
admitted, “then I might be tempted to believe Keegan wanted to tarnish Ferdinand’s
image.  But I don’t believe in coincidences that astronomical.”

“Neither do I,” Marik agreed as Landon returned.  With
him walked Ferdinand.  The mercenary anticipated an angry demand from the noble
to know exactly what in the hells was going on.  Apparently Landon had already
explained the basics.

“Is she still alive?” he asked.

“Quite,” Dietrik responded.  “I imagine you will call
the cityguard to take her away.”

“Of course,” Ferdinand responded.  A building rage
burned in his eyes.  “What’s that?” he demanded, gesturing to the bracelet in
Marik’s hands.

“I don’t know,” Marik responded.  “But whatever it is,
it’s a magical item.”

“What?  How do you know?”

“Because it has magical residue all over it.  I don’t
know how this works, but I’d wager my pay it’s an assassin’s tool.”

Ferdinand studied Marik anew.  With an air of fiery
pride, he declared, “I will have no assassins in my house, nor anything reeking
of magic.  Take this foul thing away from me.”  He stepped to the door.  “A
carriage will be waiting by the time you escort Lord Garroway to the front
entrance.”

Marik winced while Ferdinand departed.  “I think we
slung mud on Hilliard’s reputation,” he muttered.  For an instant, he wondered
if being a mage was as distasteful to the noble as being an assassin.

“Not at all,” Landon countered.  “In the hallway, I
told Sestion that we needed to be on our way.  With Hilliard dead drunk, and an
attack directed on him, Ferdinand assured me he quite understood.”

“Where’s Hilliard?”

“A few rooms down with Kerwin.  It was empty.”

Marik shook his head.  “Let’s get out of here.”

They left the room while four men Marik recognized
from the smaller parlor entered.  He guessed Ferdinand had conscripted them to
guard their sudden prisoner.  They entered the empty room near the stairs.

Landon and Kerwin each supported Hilliard when
Ferdinand reappeared.  “A carriage is waiting.”  He focused on Marik.  “I will
also be informing the cityguards that you have taken…custody…of this…artifact.”

“I don’t intend to keep it.”

Ferdinand nodded once before vanishing.

They received quite a number of stares as they
trundled down the steps and into the hallway.  When they passed the room
containing the beauty Marik had spoken with, he saw she was still there.  She
read no longer, involved as she was in a heated conversation with Ferdinand in
the far corner.  The gabbling, half-drunk nobles crowding the hallway stole
their words from his ears.

His duties demanded his attention so he forced himself
onward, saddened that he had missed the opportunity to talk with her.

*        *        *        *        *

Judging by the pale light sifting through cracks in
the shuttered windows of Swan’s Down’s common room, Marik guessed pre-dawn must
finally be lightening the world in shades of gray.  After wrestling Hilliard
into his bed, oblivious to everything around him, Marik had only managed two
marks worth of troubled sleep.  Disjointed dreams and a dark sense of danger
provoked him from his rest.

He spent the remaining time after abandoning further
sleep on a tall stool at Walsh’s bar.  An earlier patron had left the
collection of Tavern Puzzler cards scattered over the bar’s surface.  Marik
scooped them together to shove them back into their little wooden box so he
could ponder the evening’s events without further distractions.  The topmost
card caught his eye in the dim light before he shut the lid.  Instead of a
brain-bending puzzle or logical problem, it read:

I have four wings, but cannot fly,

I creak and moan, but never cry;

On the same spot I'm always found,

Toiling away, round and around.

Marik snorted.  He hardly needed more riddles bouncing
around inside his head.  Hilliard presented quite enough already for his
tastes.

To his mild surprise, Walsh had kept him company until
nearly dawn.  The innkeeper usually spent most of the morning asleep, letting
his cook have the run until lunchtime crowds filled the common room.

Walsh had been concerned, and eager to know the
details of his champion’s troubles.  Marik related the situation only in part,
describing the cloud hanging over the young man in general terms.  Though
well-meaning, the innkeeper had been a distraction.  In the faint illumination
from the night lanterns, Marik wanted to concentrate on picking apart the
puzzle of Hilliard Garroway.

Out of respect for his troubles, Walsh left him with a
wine bottle.  The mercenary had never been attracted to wine, preferring
instead the simple ale that flowed so plentifully in Kingshome.  His few
experiences with wine left him unimpressed.  He had long since decided that the
drinks of the aristocracy were best left to those who measured a drink’s worth
by its price tag rather than its taste.

The vintage Walsh insisted he partake of was gradually
changing his opinion.  A red wine, with a name he could not recall, and
smoother than the other wines he knew, lacking the bitter under-taste.  In
fact, a faint sweetness hovered in the background that remained obscured until
after the mouthful had been swallowed.  On the whole, Marik decided that it
made a pleasant change.

He
dipped his fingertip into the wine and ran it around the thin glass’s rim. 
Walsh had shown him how the glass could be made to ring in a silvery tone. 
Accomplishing the feat still lay beyond Marik.  It had not looked very
difficult.  Absently, he kept at it while his mind worked.

A rooster crowed in the faint morning light.  Who
would keep a farm animal in the city proper?  The blasted thing must annoy
everyone within blocks.

Down the stairs came a shadowy form.  A moment later,
Landon pulled out the stool next to him in the eerily empty common room.  He
glanced at the bottle.

“I take it you didn’t sleep long.”

Marik nodded once.  “No, not much.  I’ve mostly been
trying to figure out what in all creation is going on.”

Landon ducked his head in acknowledgement.  “Starting
with that?”  He gestured to the golden bracelet sitting on the countertop
beside the wineglass.

“I wanted to start with that, but Walsh turns out to
be an overly-inquisitive night owl.  He only just left a bit ago.”  He lifted
the object.  “I
know
this is magical, but I can’t figure out what it
does.  And I can’t figure out if it is important or not.”

“It is valuable, at the least.  The Crimson Kings are
bound to hand over all magical objects they discover during the course of their
contracts.”

Nodding, Marik said, “Anything containing
magic
is rare, I know that much.  I know that binding a spell of any kind to a
physical object is ten miles beyond difficult.  Enchanting an object so it
stays enchanted on its own is much harder than even that.  That’s what I’ve
been thinking about.”

“This could prove a valuable clue for us, especially
since we know for certain.”

“Somebody’s after Hilliard, I’m convinced of that,”
Marik agreed.  “But that only leaves an entire city out there where they could
be hiding.  We don’t know for sure exactly who our enemy is, or how many, or
what type!”  He slammed the bracelet down with a loud
thunk
.  “I thought
I might be able to pry information out of this, but I don’t have a gods damned
clue what I’m doing!  I’m not a real mage by any standard that matters.”