Brimstone and Lily (Legacy Stone Adventures) (39 page)

“Boggs? What’s he done now? I swear, he’s so accident-prone it’s a wonder his horse’s wings don’t fall off.” Still grumbling, he stomped off to check on his man.

While waiting for the Stone’s light to fade, I dug that apple out of my haversack and held it out to Alcibiades. The gorgeous golden beast chomped on it like he’d never tasted one before. He gave me a grateful look, the same you’d see after sneaking candy to one of your friends during school. Stroking his long shining pale mane and rubbing his soft nose, I wondered if Tyrell might let me have him once the war ended.
That’s assumin’ that the Cap’n’s not a soul-destroyin’ agent of the dark side.

“Uh, I hate to say it, but I think the Reb’s off the hook,” Jasper said.

I frowned. “What d’you mean?’

“The Stone.”

Grabbing it, I felt the freeze run halfway up my arm.
Huh?
I looked over at Tyrell, who trudged back over after finding out that poor Boggs had no problem after all. Then I stared at Al, dripping apple juice onto the marshy ground. I backed up a couple of steps, mouth hanging open. I’d found my spy. Now I understood how the bad guys always knew where to find me.

“Aw, Al,” I moaned to myself, “how could you?”

“That’s a first,” Tyrell said as he returned from his vain trip. “Boggs’s tack looks perfect. Why did you---?” He put his hands on his hips. “What’s wrong?”

Holding up the glowing Stone, I told him, “The Stone detects dark magick.”

“So? There’s none of that here anyplace. My men are all---you mean Al?”

I nodded. “’Fraid so. The Stone’s never wrong.”

“Well, it’s wrong this time, little lady. It’s literally impossible for a Norn horse to be turned.” He reached out to cuddle Alcibiades’ neck.

“Get back!” With Stone-strength I wrenched Tyrell back by his collar, tossing him six feet behind me. I couldn’t tell from his horrified look which alarmed him more, his horse being a spy or me being that strong. “He could witch you.”

Poor old Al just gave me the saddest look I ever did see. He seemed to sag with the weight of his betrayal. It was such a woeful gaze that I was tempted to cuddle him myself.
Gotta be strong now. Much as you may like him, he has to be done away with now. Grit your teeth and do it.
I’d just about mustered up the gumption to put him down—or at least get Tyrell to do it, anyway—when I noticed that Al’s miserable eyes weren’t even looking at me. They were aimed at his rump.

“What’s he lookin’ at?” Jasper wanted to know.

“Good question.” I stepped to the horse’s rear and poked around. Not seeing much, I ran my hand along his backside until I found a half-inch lump. Parting the hair, I saw what distressed Alcibiades. “Yuck!”

Tyrell leaned in to look for himself. “Ah. A tick. Been feedin’ a while, too.” With a small knife from his boot he pried the nasty blood-swollen thing off and tossed it far over his shoulder. “That should fix the problem.”

It didn’t fix the problem at all, it only shifted it. When the little sucker had flown from the captain’s hand, the Stone had begun to fade.

I smooched Alcibiades right on his adorable nose. “Good for you!” I cried, turning to see where the tick had landed. Lucky for us, it had stuck to a boulder at the base of a pine tree. “Quick, kill it! Before it gets a message off.”

“The tick?” Tyrell frowned, like I’d lost my mind.

“It’s been usin’ dark magick to help ‘em track you! And me!”

My serious face must’ve convinced him. Striding over, the knife raised like he was charging a Yankee line, the Reb made ready to slay the horrid thing.

But just as he got there a sort of crackle snapped through the air. In another second an eight-foot tall angry purple tick had swatted him clear back to land at my feet.

30/ Redeemers

“A disappointed demon is a creatively vengeful one.”

Jasper made an
eeew
sound. “The Merchantry must be havin’ trouble recruitin’ quality help these days.”

Maybe you already think ticks are disgusting, but I’m here to say that they’re a powerful sight ickier when they’re the size of a milk wagon. Having one go for you with a two-foot snout barbed like a whaling harpoon makes it even worse. The thing’s body, usually flat, had swelled up to more than ten times its normal size from drinking horse blood.
Poor Al.
We faced a red-blue monstrosity that looked for all the world like an enormous eight-legged vampire grape. Its black eyes stared at me with a kind of hate that you wouldn’t think a bug capable of. That was the most awful part. The eyes were human.

This is a person…or used to be.

Since I had to concentrate on avoiding its clumsy charge I didn’t have time to worry about whether it might be a mage shifted into this form by choice or some poor sap who’d upset the Merchantry and ended up a tick as a penalty. Smacking Alcibiades on the rump to get him out of the way, I hauled the half-conscious Tyrell out of the monster’s path. That fearsome snoot stabbed the damp ground right where we’d stood. Mud and grass sprayed up as the tick yanked its weapon back out and turned toward us. It ignored everyone else and just went for me. I got the captain on his feet and pushed him away. All around me the Rebs had overcome their surprise. They started cocking pistols, carbines, and anything else lethal.

Tyrell threw up his hands. “No guns! You’ll bring Bill Phelps’s whole brigade down on us.”

His men looked at him like Union infantry might be the lesser of two evils, but holstered their weapons anyway. Sabers screeched out of scabbards. They’d fight the thing on its own terms. Somebody grabbed my collar and dragged me back away from our attacker. That irked me but at the same time I didn’t much want to reveal myself to the whole group by waving Morphageus around if I didn’t have to. With a quick glance over my shoulder I saw that it was Romulus.
Of course.

“What?” I said, keeping a wary eye on the angry tick. It butted two troopers into trees with a twitch of its head. “You think I can’t handle one measly bug?”

“Ain’t that,” he answered, holding his Bowie knife by the blade, “I just thinks you ought t’ pick your battles. “They kin handle this.”

That was a matter of opinion. Another pair of soldiers lay on the ground now, run over like unlucky matadors at hell’s bullfight. Horses scattered out of the way, neighing in excitement. I heard no terror from Al or any of his fellows, just the thrill of battle. The trees were too thick to make the Valkyrie mounts any help here. They couldn’t spread their wings and get above the beast. One of the Rebs did it without them. He’d scrambled up a tree and dropped onto the tick’s swollen back. But as he slid with boots-first and sword raised toward its head, the giant bug scraped him off by crashing into the same tree. Then it speared another trooper dead in the chest. My stomach churned as the harpoon went through the man like he was warm butter. With one quick gurgle he went limp and dropped dead to the grass. It was the luckless Boggs.
I guess you really were accident-prone.
The tick pulled its gory weapon out of the corpse. It ignored the other two cavalrymen and the woozy Tyrell. Finding a wide-enough path through the trees it lowered its head and made the ground tremble as it lumbered at me.

“Looks like this battle picked me,” I said, holding up the rune-bladed Morphageus.

Romulus nodded and raised the knife. “Sho’ nuff does.”

I’d already given Jasper an image of what I wanted to do. As Romulus snapped his arm forward and threw the huge knife into the monster’s eye, I stabbed my sword tip into the earth and jumped aside. By the time the tick hit Morphageus it had grown up and out into a giant silvery guillotine from the Gaulle Revolution. The charging bug crashed full-tilt into it, getting jammed inside the frame. Its remaining all-too-human eye glared hot at me for a second before, I swear, the look turned to something like relief. Then the angled blade slid down to shear the horrid thing’s head clean off.

“Yuck!” complained Jasper. I touched the guillotine. It shrank back into its normal sword shape, rune-light fading with no dark magick left to fight. “These things definitely do
not
taste like chicken.”

“Sorry,” I said with a snide smile, “I’ll try to get attacked by a giant Porterhouse steak next time.”

“Oh, don’t tease me. You’ll just break my heart.”

I planned another snappy comeback, but froze when I saw all eight remaining Reb troopers staring, mouths hanging open. After turning around to see who they were looking at, I realized it was me. It felt like I had two heads, or a beard, or tattoos.
Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up and see the amazin’ warrior girl! Only two bits. No women or small children, please.
It must’ve been something to them, laying eyes on the true Stone-Warden. Pretty hard for them to take, watching a twelve year-old tomboy slay the monster that’d humbled them, and with a magick guillotine that appeared from thin air, no less. Especially a girl looking as rough as I did, all crusted with blood, bruised, filthy, clothes crude-mended from raven claws. Their legends had led them to expect Lancelot in golden armor.

Tyrell stepped forward, a knot on his forehead. “You are the one. That’s Morphageus, the sword they told us of.”

I looked at the sword for a moment, then melted it back into a cup and hung it on my belt. “Yeah. If you didn’t think so, why’ve you been helpin’ me all this time?”

“We do as the Coterie Redempteur orders us. They said you were the Stone-Warden and to guard you, so we did. Until now I had my doubts that their intelligence had been good.”

Hands on my hips, I gave him a stern look that didn’t match how I felt inside. “Well, this girl’s intelligence is no good at all. I’ve spent a week runnin’, hidin’, and barely keepin’ my life and my sanity intact. I need to know what’s going on and you’re gonna tell me.”

The Reb captain nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s get Boggs buried and then I’ll tell you all that I know.”

Turned out it wasn’t just Boggs that needed burying. As I shuffled past the dead tick the air crackled again and the headless thing faded away. In its place was a man’s body, face-down. I yipped and jumped half a mile. After a sheepish look around I mastered my queasy tummy and took a look.

The dead man looked to have been young, under thirty. All he wore was a pair of blue 18
th
century pants. His neck, wrists, and ankles were bruised and cut. All across his broad back ran long livid red stripes. Black burns scarred his feet and hands.
Somebody treated you even more horrible than I just did.

“Tortured,” Romulus said. He’d retrieved his knife from the head, which lay several paces off. “They does that. Then they offers you freedom if you does a mission for ‘em.”

My eyebrows went up. “By makin’ him a horse tick in a war zone? Some freedom.”

“They also like to hold your family hostage and threaten them with the same hospitality,” Tyrell said.

“Ah.” I looked at Romulus. “Anybody we know?” I had no interest at all in looking at that head for myself.

“No. Looks to be a Gaulle, from the style of clothes. Could be anybody.”

I thought of Eddie, maybe stuck in the same prison where this poor fellow had come from. “He’s not, though. Probably had a wife, kids. Tryin’ to keep ‘em safe.”

Tyrell nodded. “A warrior, then. That we can honor.” He turned to his sturdy long-bearded sergeant-major. “Bury them together. Say all the right words. Mark the grave well. Be quick, we can’t stay here long.”

“Yes, sir,” the other trooper said with a salute. He pointed at Romulus. “Come dig, boy.”

Before I could give him what for, Tyrell did it for me. The sergeant-major found his neck in a savage grip from his own commander. “He’s not your boy, understand? This here’s a Marshal of the Equity, not some runaway field hand. Treat him with the respect he deserves or you’ll be digging the grave by yourself. With your bare hands.”

Gulping and rubbing his throat, the trooper croaked out a “Yes, sir” and moved away. Romulus stared at Tyrell as if he’d just seen a volcano sprout up in the woods.

“I only treated you awful for show, on the road,” the Reb captain said. “Part of the job. I couldn’t be sure who might be spying on us at any moment.” He looked down at the unknown dead man. “Looks like I was right. And for what it’s worth, I didn’t turn you in to the Provost-Marshal. Some civilian did. At least, he looked like a civilian. Just bad luck, that.”

Maybe. But I’m thinkin’ we don’t have bad luck. Somebody else had wanted Romulus out of the way. Them masked fellers, I expect.

By way of accepting the apology, Romulus answered, “I thinks I’ll go help bury your man, if it’s all the same to you.” The two exchanged a look of understanding, then the big Marshal went off toward the sergeant-major.

“Fortunate to have him,” Tyrell told me as we walked toward a flat boulder that looked to make a good bench.

“Don’t I know it,” I agreed. “But I doubt fortune had any more to do with it than meetin’ up with you did.”

“I expect you’re right there.” We sat on the rock, our faces dappled by morning sunlight making its way through the leaves of the trees. My witched senses took in the smell of pine needles and salt air. Ocean waves were audible, though the beach probably lay farther away than it sounded to me. I wanted to believe that resting on Roberta’s ship would be better than my past week on land had been.

“So, I’ll tell you what I know and you do the same?”

“Agreed, unless there’s something that the Redeemers have to keep secret, to preserve our safety.”

“OK. Start with lettin’ me in on just who these Redeemers are.”

Tyrell took off his kepi to shake out his long dark hair and let the breeze air it out. “You know about the Honourable Merchantry?”

“Some. My friends’ve been droppin’ nuggets here and there, in between all the panic and screamin’ and death.”

“We heard about that first night. It’s amazing you survived it, being thrown into an existence you knew nothing about.”