The Copper Promise (25 page)

‘You mean you don’t remember me, Rin?’ he said. There was a fiery pit of rage in his stomach, but his voice was strangely calm. ‘You wanted to see if my blood was black.’

Yellow-Eyed Rin’s face went slack, his jowls pouching in an unlovely gathering at his throat.

‘You are dead,’ he said, his voice toneless. The torturer’s eyes crawled over Frith, and he could well imagine what he was looking for; the missing ear, the scarred face, the ragged fingertips. Frith watched the confusion on his face and felt a cold joy in his heart. He smiled.

‘After what you did I should be dead? But you didn’t finish the job, did you? Couldn’t resist drawing it out, could you?’ Frith glanced at the woman on the bench, who was watching them both with mute terror. Rin took the opportunity to leap forward, slashing the scalpel at his face. Frith knocked his hand aside with the flat of his sword and the small blade fell to the floor, skidding across the flagstones. Rin hissed with pain, grabbing at his wrist with his other hand. Frith held the point of his sword in front of the torturer’s face.

‘Call for help and I will cut your throat out.’ Rin looked as though he might shout anyway, so Frith inched the blade closer, resting the tip on the wrinkled skin around the man’s Adam’s apple. Then he spoke in a softer tone, without looking directly at the girl on the bench. ‘He will free you in a moment. When he does I want you to run down to the very bottom of this tower, and find a door beyond the storeroom. You won’t have seen it open before. Go through it and follow the tunnel north. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’ The young woman’s voice was stronger than he expected. That was good.

‘Untie her,’ he said to Rin. ‘And know that if you make any sudden move I will take great pleasure in watching your guts defile the floor.’

Rin bared rotten teeth at him, but he moved to the bench and undid the straps holding the girl in place. She cringed away from him as soon as she was free, and then darted forward and spat in his face. Rin roared with anger and the girl ran from the room.

‘Quiet yourself, Rin,’ said Frith. He closed the gap between them again, the point of his sword always trained on the torturer’s throat. ‘I have a few questions for you. From what I remember, you were quite fond of questions.’

‘Why should I tell you anything?’ spat Rin. He was frightened; Frith could smell it on him, a rank, insidious smell like stagnant water. The torturer’s brow was damp with sweat, and his fingers, fingers that had dealt so much pain to so many innocents, were trembling slightly. Frith tightened the grip on his sword and nursed the hate within him, just as he had once nursed the pain the mages had inflicted on him in the lake.

‘Because every second of life you have left is now a gift from me,’ he said. ‘You live now only by my sufferance. Where is the Lady Bethan?’

Rin scowled, glancing from the blade at his throat to Frith’s steady gaze and back again.

‘Not here. I don’t know where she is. Off looking for something to line her own pockets with, no doubt.’

Frith took hold of Rin by the collar of his greasy tunic and pressed the edge of the blade against the torturer’s throat. A thin line of blood oozed across the steel.

‘Don’t!’ Rin’s voice was a whine at the back of his throat.

‘Tell me where she is,’ said Frith. ‘Tell me where she is, you miserable worm, or I swear you will die screaming on these very stones.’

‘I don’t know!’ gasped Rin, and there was a genuine frustration in his voice. ‘After the mess at the castle Fane was angry, he sent her away. Far from Litvania, they said, far from Istria even. Fane knows, not me!’

His revenge, so close it was an appetising scent on the air, had once again been torn away from him. She had been
there
, she had watched what they did to him, ordered them to shatter his leg …

‘NO!’

A great pulse of yellow light swelled from the centre of Frith’s chest and filled the room in an instant. Rin was thrown up in the air and then, impossibly, stayed hanging there, unable to move. The knives and pliers and tongs from the bench were similarly suspended, as well as a number of bloody buckets and rags. They hung rigid and immovable, while Frith stood in the centre of it all, amazed.

‘What have you done?’ cried Rin. The torturer tried to move, his flesh tensing with the effort, but he was as stuck as a fly in amber. Frith, entirely unaffected by the strange pulse of light, slid his sword back into its scabbard and plucked one of the floating knives out of the air.

‘It seems, Rin, that you may not die on the floor after all.’

Roki watched the woman’s eyes widen with fear. He smiled at her as he reached over the stall and took the biggest apple from the meagre pile. Keeping his eyes on her, he bit into the slightly wrinkled skin. It would be good to be near her now, to smell the fear as it came over her. Women produced such a delicate scent when they were afraid.

The apple was bitter on his tongue. Roki looked down to see a grub wriggling out of the brownish flesh, half its body missing. He spat the morsel onto the floor.

‘This is rotten!’

He threw the apple at the woman’s head and it bounced off her shoulder, causing her to shriek and hold her hands up in alarm. Next to him, his brother barked shrill laughter and slapped Roki on the back.

‘You think this is funny?’

‘I think your aim is terrible.’ Enri picked up another apple from the pile and threw it with considerable force at the woman, who was now cowering behind her goods. Fane, who liked to witness their daily trawl through the market, boomed laughter at the pair of them.

‘That one was rotten too!’ said Enri.

‘I’m sorry, lords,’ she stammered, not quite daring to meet their eyes.

‘What about this one?’ Roki picked up a tomato from another pile and made a show of sniffing it before pitching it at the market vendor. The tomato, long since past its best, exploded in a shower of reddish muck, streaking the woman’s face and neck. This time she turned to run, her hands shielding her head, but Enri took his whip from his belt and brandished it at her.

‘My good woman! We aren’t finished choosing yet.’

There was a splash, and suddenly Enri was soaking wet, his long blond hair sticking lankly to his cheeks.

‘I think you are,’ came a voice from behind them.

Roki turned to find the scruffy red-headed woman who had eluded them previously standing behind them. She was holding an empty bucket and grinning. Instead of a helm she was wearing some sort of odd leather hat pushed up onto her forehead, with blue-glass lenses resting just above her eyebrows. Before he could speak, the woman threw the bucket and it struck him in the chest.

‘Guards!’ bellowed Fane. ‘Seize this woman!’

Half a dozen guards appeared through the crowd, weapons drawn. The woman drew two long daggers.

‘I have a proposition for you, Fane,’ she said in a strong, clear voice. ‘I think you’ll be interested to hear it.’

Fane sighed.

‘What is it?’

‘I wish to fight your monsters here,’ she said, jabbing a dagger in the direction of Roki and Enri. ‘Not these useless guards. Anyone could gut them in a second. I want a fight worthy of the Copper Cat of Crosshaven.’

Fane snorted.

‘Am I supposed to have heard of you?’

‘Not likely. This is my first visit to this delightful place. Next time I am short of ugly men, I shall know where to come.’

Enri stepped forward, a grin on his face as sharp as a knife. Roki had seen that look many times, and it always meant a fight. He was pleased. The red-haired woman had a mouth on her, and he looked forward to beating it shut. He loosened his swords in their scabbards.

‘Let us play with the little girl,’ said Enri. He shook his head, showering the ground with droplets of water. ‘We like to play rough. Would you like that?’

The woman rolled her eyes at him.

‘If you must,’ said Fane, picking idly at the scars on his face. ‘But keep her alive. This one knows where Lord Frith is, and I’ve still got a vault to find. Once I have that information we can give her to Bezcavar.’

‘Wait,’ she held up one of her blades and pointed at the black-clad guards still hovering behind her. ‘Send these away. I’m fighting the pretty boys here, and I don’t want a sneaky sword in the back from a fat old guard.’

‘Yes, send them away,’ agreed Roki. They would play, and then she would die. He wanted to see her eyes widen as he slid the blade home. He wanted to smell her.

Fane nodded to the guards, who melted back into the crowd.

‘All the way back!’ shouted the red-headed woman.

‘An early night, boys,’ said Fane, smirking slightly, ‘and tonight we shall drink to this woman’s stupidity.’

‘For Bezcavar,’ said Roki.

The enchanted gauntlet shivered next to his skin, as it always did, and began to glow. There was that delicious feeling of doubling, and a moment later a copy of himself stood by his side. And then another, and another.

‘You wanted to fight a monster,’ he called to the woman with the daggers. ‘Let’s see you fight a score of them.’

So far, so good
, thought Wydrin.

She glanced up at the sky. It had been a largely clear day, with a few streaks of cloud dallying on their way to the west, and the sun was making its journey to the horizon now, staining everything crimson and lurid orange. It hung in the sky just above the tree tops, and the shadows were growing long.

They were to light the fuses at sundown.
Not much time left
, thought Wydrin,
but time enough to show these people that Fane and his ilk can be beaten.

The Children of the Fog advanced, the gauntlets beginning the strange ritual of lights. As she watched they shimmered as though seen through a heat haze, and then there were four of them, then six, then eight. The one she had thrown the bucket of water over shook his head again, shaking droplets of water from his hair, and his fog-brothers all did the same. In the last of the daylight the drops were as ruddy as blood.

Wydrin pulled the Secret Keeper’s goggles down over her eyes, and everything turned sea-blue, as though she stood on the bottom of the ocean floor. She had a moment to wonder what her father would make of such a thing before Enri’s whip snaked towards her out of the air and smacked the air next to her ear. She slid away easily enough, but three of Enri’s copies made identical moves, so that the evening breeze was full of the crack of leather. They weaved and shifted amongst each other so that the real Enri and Roki were soon lost in the crowd of identical men, the wicked barbs of their whips glittering in the last of the sun, while the double swords shone like firebrands. And which of them was real?

‘Show me,’ she muttered under her breath, hoping this was the correct way to use the Secret Keeper’s creation. ‘Show me the truth.’

And it did.

She could see the Children of the Fog clearly through the lenses, their white-blond hair now a ghostly blue, could see their identical grins as they closed in on her, weapons shining, but now two of them burned with a strange, phosphorescent light. When she had been quite small, her father had taken her and her brother out on one of the fishing boats late at night, and a bloom of jellyfish had swarmed past their boat. They had shone with an eerie white light in the black water, and now Enri and Roki shone with a similar effervescence. The real Children of the Fog were now impossible to miss.

After that, it was fast. Wydrin was not the strongest or the surest blade in Crosshaven, but she was always the quickest. Two of the illusory Rokis stepped up to her, twin swords slashing in a showy attack, and Wydrin slid past them, catching one blade on her dagger and turning it aside. For a brief moment one of the Rokis’ sides was exposed and she could have slid her dagger into the soft unprotected leather over his armpit, but to do so would leave her open for an attack from the other Roki, and besides, he was made of mist, so she kept going, letting her momentum carry her past them both. And then she was faced with two Enris, whips curling like sea-snakes in a swift current.

One of the Enris was the true one, burning as bright as the sun amongst the blue. The Enri next to him, who now looked insubstantial in the sapphire light, snaked the whip out at her legs with a deafening crack, and she felt it wrap around her ankle and bite there. The pain was immense.

‘I think the Copper Cat has a thorn in her paw!’ cried Fane. There was laughter in his voice.

Wydrin feigned an attack at the fake Enri, both daggers brought up to his face, and then she swung to the left, burying Frostling to the hilt in the neck of the grinning blond man. For the barest second it was almost as though he was too surprised to react, and then a spurt of blood poured from the sudden hole in his throat. Wydrin pulled her dagger clear and Enri, the real Enri, pressed a hand to his neck in confusion. He opened his mouth, whether to scream or make some protest Wydrin never knew, and blood flowed from his lips in a dark current.

As he pitched forward to his knees, all the fake Enris, all the men made of mist and fog, winked out of existence. There was a shocked pause from everyone watching, followed by a ragged cheer.

‘No!’ screamed Roki, and all the other Rokis screamed in unison, their faces twisted with grief and rage. The real Roki, who was still burning like a candle through the crystal goggles, flew at her, swords a blur, but his outrage made him sloppy. Wydrin dropped one knee and avoided the onslaught, then brought her own wickedly sharp blade down on his unprotected hand, putting all her strength into the blow. She felt the blade travel down through his fingers and hit the hilt beneath, saw the crimson droplets leap into the air, and that was when the barracks exploded.

For Sebastian, who watched Wydrin from the edge of the crowd, it was as though a huge warm hand came and pushed them all back.

He staggered, almost falling over a smaller man behind him. Shielding his eyes with one hand against the sudden bright light he saw the barracks building on the far side of the market shudder violently, huge waves of orange flame with a greenish glow flashing at every window. There was a second cataclysmic rumble and the evening air was filled with screams from the guards inside.
The floors have collapsed
, thought Sebastian numbly. A second later the thatched roof was ablaze, and then all was chaos.