King's Shield (39 page)

His reaching hand tweaked harder at Tau’s memory—that hand, where had he seen it? Close, close, yes . . .
gripping his arm.
Lindeth harbor, the guild mistress’s house. That same hand stopping him from following Inda, just after the pirate battle, when they’d gone to pay for supplies at Lindeth. He recalled those sardonic dark eyes, the drawling voice that did not hide hostility,
Is he really Elgar the Fox?

So who was the fellow chasing after now? Puzzled, Tau flicked a glance to the top of the stairs, a heartbeat before another familiar figure vanished down the hall. An instantly recognizable figure despite the blue Runner’s coat: that height, those shoulders, and above all the long, dark red horsetail Tau’d been riding behind for weeks.

Tau pinched the skin between his brows. Could this possibly be some assignation? He watched the dark-haired man squeeze past the women at last as they leaned forward, both arguing with the proprietor. Tau’s interest sharpened when the man pressed past the second woman, a hand going revealingly to his side the way one did to steady a hidden weapon.

Assignation—or assassination?

The sharp inward goad of danger propelled Tau through the last of the crowd and up the stairs. Tau grimaced at how very angry Evred would be if Tau thrust his way in on a privately planned encounter, but instinct was against anything planned on Evred’s part, especially with this Lindeth fellow.

Tau tried to slip past the women—but his own looks worked against him. One of the women gasped, lips parted, and Tau nearly tripped when the proprietor stuck out a foot. “Who are you?”

“I’m . . . meeting that fellow who just went up. Dark hair? Dark eyes?”

The proprietor’s jolly face puckered into wariness. “Last one in was one of them Marlovan fellows. Red hair. What are you trying to pull here, pretty boy?”

The women were eyeing him speculatively. In desperation he bent toward the surprised proprietor and whispered into his grizzled ear, “I was trained by Saris Eland of Parayid.” He added the insider code, and as the man’s jaw dropped, Tau straightened up and forced a smile at the women. “If you’ll excuse me a few moments, why don’t I entertain you both? You can pay for the price of one, and I’ll donate the second price.” He indicated the proprietor, whose surprise altered to the smile of a good bargain made.

As the woman whispered, pooling their last coins, Tau murmured, “Where’d you send the redhead?”

The proprietor said in a whisper, “Four suns on the door.”

Tau galloped past them and up the stairs, grimacing. There was no possible way he was going to avoid either farce or tragedy as soon as he opened that door. He just hoped it would not be both.

The doors were differentiated by painted suns, stars, and moons, arranged in charming groups. This was another of his mother’s touches. He raced past the triangle of three suns and was just pulling up to listen at the next door when from within came thuds and a choked cry.

He knew the difference between cries of passion and cries of pain. He shouldered the door open into the small room furnished only with a low bed and a chair. Those within froze for the single heartbeat it took him to take in:

The naked young man lying on the bed, a widening pool of crimson sinking into the mattress, the knobs down his thin back pale and vulnerable as he curled round his slashed gut.

Evred, hair loose over his bare chest, one arm and his ribs slashed and bleeding, a deliberate nick dripping down into one of his wide, hazel eyes.

And the dark-haired man standing over him with a bloody dagger, intending to play with his prey before killing it.

Skandar Mardric jerked a glance Tau’s way.

He had not expected the king to defend himself, which just added to the fun. Now, carried on the tide of triumph, he recognized that beautiful face, golden hair, golden eyes. “Elgar’s lover?” he gasped in amazement.

Evred’s mouth whitened.

Tau crossed the room in three steps.

Mardric grinned and slashed at Tau with the knife.

Two steps, snap-kick to the downward slashing knife hand, whirling palm-heel strike, and Mardric fell to his knees with an
oof.
Tau glanced once more at the young man lying there in shock, blood leaking between his fingers, and kicked again, this time straight at Mardric’s head. “Wrong,” he said.

Mardric seemed to hear, or maybe his plans had never included the possibility of his own death; his brows crimped in pained question just before Tau’s heel snapped his head back, and he was dead before he hit the floor.

Leaving Tau alone with one wounded pleasure-house worker, and a very shocked, angry, spectacularly bloody king who’d rolled up into a fighting crouch.

Tau had grown up learning all about the symbolic boundaries of clothing. If you pretended it was there even if it wasn’t, then you handed back the invisible wall of reserve to those who required it. He also knew better than to castigate this self-isolated, volatile-as-fire king. Evred’s entire life was bound up with military necessity: the fact that he’d come away without a guard evidenced how desperate he was. The crushing weight of impending war day and night would distort the thoughts of the sanest man.

Tau’s mind raced.
You will not grant me the authority to speak of your duty to your Marlovans, but I can speak within my own realm.

“I grew up in a bawdy house. I can arrange these things with a lot less risk.” He nodded toward the bed. Then, without waiting for an answer, he bent, slid his arms under the knees and shoulders of the wounded young man, and picked him up. “There will be a private exit out that way,” he added, pointing with his chin toward the other end of the hall. “Kick the door shut behind me.”

He hurried out with his moaning burden.

Twenty fast steps—he counted each—then he just had to get down the stairs. “Quick, help.”

The proprietor gasped, casting an anguished look at the young man’s face and the blood dripping down his bare flesh.

Then the screams and shouts began.

Chapter Thirty-four

THE sun was just lifting the eastern darkness when the Venn longboat, its sail lowered, the oars silent, drifted on the tide toward the headland above Castle Andahi’s bay.

Nine Drenga, the Oneli’s sea marines, all dressed in black, slid noiselessly overboard into the shallow water, gripped the black-pointed boat’s sides, and ran it up onto the sand without a splash.

The tenth person leaped out, a tall, strong woman of middle years, wearing the blue robe of a dag. She stood aside as the nine swiftly used sea wrack to cover the boat.

There were no sentries in sight. The Drenga had landed themselves well west of the patrol line.

Motioning quietly, the leader dispersed his men in teams of three. As they progressed over the headland, in the strengthening light they spied a peculiar pall over the inner part of the bay, reaching as far as they could see between the enormous, sheer cliff walls. They moved belly flat in the brush so that they did not create a silhouette along the top of the headland, stopping when they could look down into the bay.

Squatting squarely between the bay’s long, naturally terraced shingle beach and the narrowing gorge forming the Pass of Andahi sat a massive castle. From under the rocky ridge below the precipice the Venn crouched on, the northern branch of the Andahi River poured into the bay. The dull granite of the outer curtain wall was warm lit in the rising sun but the eastern side of the castle, still in shadow, did not look at all like their carefully drawn map. The whole east side was distorted in an enormous tear-shaped mass.

They puzzled over that as the sun crested over the eastern headland, bringing the shadows past them, down, down into the bay, then vanishing, and at last they made sense of the startling change. Gone was the great road that they were supposed to find curving round the base of the cliffs at the east side of the castle. Instead, a sharply slanted fall of loose dirt angled up the mountain from the castle, revealing a raw wound in the mountainside.

The Marlovans had collapsed an entire slope in order to block access to the pass.

The dag motioned peremptorily to the leader of the nine-man team and pointed with meaning at the lower paths along the headland as she started up toward the mountain heights. This sort of thing was exactly what Dag Erkric had planned for.

The ships of the invasion were right behind them, soon to be visible. Until then, no word must go up the pass and over the mountains to Ala Larkadhe.

As soon as Dag Mekki was well out of sight, the Drenga leader cursed. Dags had no business interfering with a military exercise. But the Marlovans had just invited them in, with their damned mountain foolery.

The Drenga continued along the headland single file, where they surprised their first outer perimeter sentry, who was admiring the hanging dust pall instead of doing his job. It was the last thing he saw.

 

 

 

DAWN’S bleak blue light had harshened the contours of the old wooden building in the riverside market town, rendering bright paintings garish, and cozy cushions and mats into trampled, dirty wads of cloth that would not just require cleaning but restitching, the floor strewn with empty mugs and plates. Tau slowly picked his way across them to take leave of the proprietor.

“I know there’s something missing in your story,” the owner said hoarsely. “A murderer just picks out a random Marlovan for assassination? But the knife was there, and the murderer was there, and my sister’s son with his gut slashed. I don’t know what was worse, the sight of him like that, or the panic after. So bad for business. So bad.”

Tau gave a tired nod. He’d helped the proprietor turn fear into excitement—his mother had trained him for that, too—by organizing the panic-stricken patrons in a search. When they discovered the dead man, the panic ended. Criminal found, end of threat, Tau there to congratulate everyone on the satisfying end to the mystery and to help along the spreading word.

Then everyone had to offer their version of what had happened—no one knew the dead man—not one of
us
—and the proprietor offered a free round of drinks for all. Tau went up to the prettiest woman there and began an Iascan hand dance, in which one or both hands have to be touching the partner at all times. The musicians picked up their instruments and hastily assembled themselves, weaving round them a merry tune. With her willing participation they’d made their dance so lascivious everyone soon was laughing, dancing, or going upstairs to carry on.

The proprietor, also thinking back over the surprising night, gave a short nod, his jowls jiggling. “But you earned your right to a secret or two, I’m thinking.”

He cast a meaningful glance over his shoulder toward one of the larger suites across the main parlor, where parties with more than one partner usually disported.

After the dance, the waiting pair of women had appeared, and Tau enthusiastically kept his promise. After months of enforced celibacy (though plenty of offers had come his way, he did not think a dalliance with anyone in Evred’s army a wise idea) it had not exactly been a trial.

The two women were just leaving, a garland dropping from one’s hair, the other softly singing, their arms around each other’s waists.

Tau and the proprietor fell quiet as they walked past. The taller woman, dark-haired, some of her ribbons still untied, reached up to lay her hand against Tau’s cheekbone. “I’m always going to think I dreamed you.” She laughed soundlessly.

He caught her hand, kissed it, ran his fingers along her palm as he let her go. She laughed again, and walked out of the house, and out of his life.

The proprietor said, “You saved Ulec. The healer said he would have bled to death not two glass-turns more. And the way you got ’em all singing instead of yelling—” He groped forward, then shook his head. “If you come back this way, know we’ll give you a place, a night, a meal. Whatever you ask. Even half the business,” he added shrewdly.

Tau smiled and moved to the door. The proprietor sighed, then turned wearily back to his disaster of a parlor.

Tau stepped outside, breathing in fresh, pure air. It was going to be sunny, maybe even hot. Not good if he had to walk; by now his horse would be long gone from the hitching post. At least armies were not subtle about leaving trails.

He almost stumbled into the boy sitting on the porch, arms folded over his knees, supporting his brow. At Tau’s step he raised a weary head, squinted, then said, “You know a Marlovan called Sponge?”

“Yes,” Tau said.

“I was to tell you that the horse is at the stable.” The boy added importantly, “He gave me a
whole golder
to make sure you found it.”

And so Tau rode back, discovering that the army had not departed after all. From the dust and noise coming from the hills above the river bend, they were engaged in a war game; yes, there was Inda riding along the riverbank, watching intently.

Tau left the horse with the Runners on stable detail, and walked through the mostly packed camp to his tent, still standing. Inside were two ensorcelled buckets.

When he emerged, feeling cleaner if no less tired, there were several of Vedrid’s staff waiting to collapse the tent. But what surprised him was Signi waiting with them, her ubiquitous guards just out of earshot.

She had never precisely ignored him, she just did not speak often, and never when Evred was present, unless he addressed her first. And she was so far Tau’s superior in the art of self-effacement, he’d rarely noticed her unless he sought her out.

Yet here she was before him, her sandy hair untidy, her rumpled old clothes sun-faded, having sought him out for the first time. “The king returned last night bleeding over his eye.” She touched her brow. “I think he was hurt elsewhere, for he moved as if in pain. And he was very angry.” Her Marlovan had improved; the only reminder of her origin was her accent. She made one of her little gestures, tipped her head and smiled faintly. “No one asks a king questions—except Inda, and sometimes his friends. But you know Inda.”