The Gentleman Bastard Series (111 page)

“At the moment, I think I’d take my chances with your pigeons if I could,” said Jean. “Damn, I’m sorry for leaving the Wicked Sisters up there, Locke.”

“Why in Venaportha’s name would you have brought them down? There’s nothing to apologize for.”

“Although,” said Jean, “maybe there is one other thing I could try. You carrying sleeve steel?”

“Yeah, but it’s in my boot.” The rain was beating down fairly hard now, soaking through their tunics and wetting their lines. Their light dress and the stiff breeze made it seem colder than it really was. “Yourself?”

“Got mine right here.” Locke saw a flash of bright metal in Jean’s right hand. “Yours balanced for throwing, Locke?”

“Shit, no. Sorry.”

“No worries. Hold it in reserve, then. And give us a good silent prayer.” Jean paused to pluck off his optics and tuck them into his tunic collar, then raised his voice. “Hey! Sheep-lover! A word if you please!”

“I sort of thought we was done talkin’,” came the man’s voice from above the cliff’s edge.

“No doubt! I’ll wager using so many words in so short a time makes your brain feel like a squeezed lemon, doesn’t it? You wouldn’t have the wit to find the fucking ground if I threw you out of a bloody window! Are you
listening? You’d have to take your shoes and breeches off to count to twenty-one! You’d have to look up to see the underside of cockroach shit!”

“Does it help, yellin’ at me like that? Seems like you should be prayin’ to your useless Thirteenth or somethin’, but what would I know? I ain’t one of you big-time Verrari
felantozzers
or whatever, am I?”

“You want to know why you shouldn’t kill us? You want to know why you shouldn’t let us hit that valley floor?” Jean hollered at the top of his lungs while bracing his feet more firmly against the cliffside and pulling back his right arm. Thunder echoed overhead. “See this, you idiot? See what I’ve got in my hands? Something you’ll see only once in a lifetime! Something you’ll never forget!”

A few seconds later, the man’s head and torso appeared over the edge of the cliff. Jean let out a cry as he flung his knife with all of his strength. The cry became triumphant as he saw the blurred shape of his weapon strike home in their tormentor’s face … and changed yet again to a frustrated groan as he saw the knife bounce back and fall away into thin air. It had struck hilt-first.

“Fucking rain!” yelled Jean.

The bandit was in serious pain, at least. He moaned and clutched his face, teetering forward. A nice hard smack in the eye? Jean fervently hoped so—perhaps he still had a few seconds to try again.

“Locke, your knife, quickly!”

Locke was reaching into his right boot when the man thrust his arms out for balance, lost it, and toppled screaming over the edge of the cliff. He got one hand around Locke’s main line a second later and fell directly into the crook of Locke’s waist and rope, where they met at the iron descender on his belt. The shock knocked Locke’s legs away from the cliff as it knocked the breath from his lungs, and for a second he and the bandit were in free fall, flailing and screaming in a tangle of arms and legs, with no proper pressure on the line in the descender.

Straining himself to the utmost, Locke curled his left hand around the free side of the line and tugged hard, putting enough strain on the rope to snap them to a halt. They swung into the cliff face together, the bandit taking the brunt of the impact, and dangled there in a struggling mess of limbs while Locke fought to breathe and make sense of the world. The bandit kicked and screamed.

“
Stop that
, you fucking moron!” They seemed to have fallen about fifteen feet; Jean slipped rapidly down beside them, alighted on the cliff, and reached out with one hand to grab the bandit by the hair. With the hood
thrown back, Locke could see that the fellow was grizzled like an underfed hound, perhaps forty, with long greasy hair and a gray beard as scrubby as the grass on the cliff’s edge. His left eye was swelling shut. “Stop kicking, you idiot! Hold still!”

“Oh, gods, please don’t drop me! Please don’t kill me, sir!”

“Why the
fuck
not?” Locke groaned, dug his heels into the cliff, and managed to reach the edge of his right boot with his right hand. A moment later he had his stiletto out at the bandit’s throat, and the man’s panicked kicking became a terrified quivering.

“See this?” Locke hissed. The bandit nodded. “This is a knife. They have these, wherever the fuck you came from?” The man nodded again. “So you know I could just stick you right now and let you fall, right?”

“Please, please, don’t.…”

“Shut up and listen. This single line that you and I are dangling from right now. Single, solitary, alone! This wouldn’t be the line you were just chopping at up there, would it?”

The man nodded vigorously, his good eye wide.

“Isn’t that splendid? Well, if the shock of your fall didn’t break it, we’re probably safe for a little while longer.” White light flashed somewhere above them and thunder rolled, louder than before. “Though I have been
much more comfortable
. So don’t kick. Don’t flail. Don’t struggle, and don’t do anything fucking stupid. Savvy?”

“Oh, no, sir, oh please …”

“Shut up already.”

“Lo … er, Leocanto,” said Jean. “I’m thinking this fellow deserves some flying lessons.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” said Locke, “but
thieves prosper
, right, Jerome? Help me haul this stupid bastard back up there somehow.”

“Oh, thank you, thank—”

“Know why I’m doing this, you witless woodland clown?”

“No, but I—”

“Shut it. What’s your name?”

“Trav!”

“Trav what?”

“Never had no after-name, sir. Trav of Vo Sarmara is all.”

“And you’re a thief? A highwayman?”

“Yes, yes I am.”

“Nothing else? Do any honest work?”

“Er, no, not for some time now …”

“Good. Then we are brothers of a sort. Look, my smelly friend, the
thing you have to understand is that there
is
a Thirteenth. He
does
have a priesthood, and I’m one of his priests, savvy?”

“If you say so.…”

“No, shut up. I don’t want you to agree with me; I want you to use your misplaced acorn of a brain before the squirrel comes looking for it again. I have a blade at your throat, we’re seventy feet above the ground, it’s pissing a nice hard rain, and you just tried to murder me. By all rights, I ought to give you a red smile from ear to ear and let you drop. Would you agree to
that
?”

“Oh, probably, sir, gods, I’m sorry.…”

“Hush now, sweet moron. So you’d admit that I must have a pretty powerful reason for not satisfying myself with your death?”

“I, uh, I guess!”

“I’m a divine of the Crooked Warden, like I said. Sworn to the service and the mandates of the god of our kind. Seems kind of a waste to spit in the face of the god that looks out for you and yours, doesn’t it? Especially since I’m not so sure I’ve been doing right by Him recently.”

“Uh …”

“I
should
kill you. Instead, I’m going to try and save your life. All I want you to do is think about this. Do I still seem like a heretic to you?”

“Uh … oh, gods, sir, I can’t think straight.…”

“Well, nothing unusual there, I’d wager. Remember what I said. Don’t flail, don’t kick, don’t scream. And if you try to fight, even the tiniest bit, our arrangement’s off. Wrap your arms around my chest and shut up. We’re a good long way from sitting pretty.”

2

AT LOCKE’S urging, Jean went up first, hand-over-hand on the slick cliff face at about half his usual speed. Up top, he rapidly unknotted his own belay line from his belt and passed it down to Locke and his shaken passenger. Next he took his harness off and slid his main line along the cliff edge until it too was beside the dangling men. They certainly didn’t look comfortable, but with all three good lines in their reach they were at least a bit safer.

Jean found his frock coat on the ground and threw it on, grateful for the added coverage even if it was as sopping wet as the rest of him was. He thought quickly. Trav seemed a fairly meatless fellow, and Locke was lightly built—surely they were no more than three hundred pounds together. Jean was sure he could hoist nearly as much to his chest, perhaps even above his head. But in the rain, with so much at stake?

His thoughts turned to the carriage, about a quarter-mile distant through the woods. A horse would be a vast improvement on even a strong man, but the time it would require, and the trouble inherent in unhooking, calming, and leading a beast whose master had been clubbed unconscious …

“Fuck it,” he said, and went back to the cliff’s edge. “Leocanto!”

“Still here, as you might have guessed.”

“Can the two of you make one of my ropes good and fast to your belt?”

There was a brief muttered conversation between Locke and Trav.

“We’ll manage,” Locke yelled. “What do you have in mind?”

“Have the idiot hold tight to you. Brace your arms and legs against the cliff once you’ve lashed yourselves to one of my lines. I’ll start hauling on it with all I’ve got, but I’m sure your assistance won’t hurt.”

“Right. You heard the man, Trav. Let’s tie a knot. Mind where you put your hands.”

When Locke looked up and gave Jean their private hand signal for
proceed
, Jean nodded. The secured rope was Jean’s former belay line; he seized the working end just before the coil that lay on the wet ground and frowned. The sludge underfoot would make things even more interesting than they already were, but there was nothing else for it. He formed a bight in the rope, stepped into it, and let it slide tight around his waist. He then leaned back, away from the cliff, with one hand on the rope before him and one hand behind, and cleared his throat.

“Tired of dangling, or shall I let you have a few more minutes down there?”

“Jerome, if I have to cradle Trav here for one second longer than I absolutely must, I’m going to—”

“Climb away, then!” Jean dug his heels in, allowed himself to lean even farther back, and began to strain at the rope. Gods damn it, he was a powerful man, unusually strong, but why did moments always come along to remind him that he could be even stronger? He’d been slacking; no other word for it. He should find some crates, fill them with rocks, and heave them up a few dozen times a day, as he had in his youth.… Damn, would the rope ever move?

There. At last, after a long, uncomfortable interval of motionless heaving in the rain, Jean took a slow step back. And then another … and another. Haltingly, with an itching fire steadily rising in the muscles of his thighs, he did his best impression of a plowhorse, pushing deep furrows into the gritty gray mud. Finally, a pair of hands appeared at the edge of the cliff, and in a torrent of shouts and curses, Trav hoisted himself up over the
top and rolled onto his back, gasping. Immediately the strain on Jean slackened; he maintained his previous level of effort and just a moment later Locke popped over the edge. He crawled to his feet, stepped over beside Trav, and kicked the would-be bandit in the stomach.

“You fucking jackass! Of all the stupid damn … how difficult would it have been to say, ‘I’ll lower a rope, tie your purses onto it and send them up, or I won’t let you back up’? You don’t tell your bloody victims you’re just going to kill them outright! You come on reasonable first, and when you have the money you run!”

“Oh … ow! Gods, please; ow! You said you … wouldn’t kill me!”

“And I meant it. I’m not going to kill you, you cabbage-brained twit; I’m just going to kick you until it stops feeling good!”

“Ow! Agggh! Please! Aaaaow!”

“I have to say, it’s still pretty fascinating.”

“Aiiiah! Ow!”

“
Still
enjoying myself.”

“Oooof! Agh!”

Locke finally ceased pummeling the unfortunate Verrari, unbuckled his harness belt, and dropped it in the mud. Jean, breathing heavily, came up beside him and handed him his soaked coat.

“Thank you, Jerome.” Having his coat back, sopping or no, seemed to salve some of Locke’s wounded dignity. “As for you. Trav. Trav of Vo Sarmara, you said?”

“Yes! Oh, please, don’t kick me again.”

“Look here, Trav. Here’s what you’re going to do. First, tell no one about this. Second, don’t fucking go anywhere near Tal Verrar. Got it?”

“Wasn’t plannin’ to, sir.”

“Good. Here.” Locke reached down into his left boot and drew out a very slender purse. He tossed it down beside Trav, where it landed with a jingling plop. “Should be ten volani in there. A healthy bit of silver. And you can … wait a minute, are you absolutely sure our driver’s still alive?”

“Oh, gods yes! Honest truth, Master Leocanto, sir, he was breathin’ and moanin’ after I thumped him, he surely was.”

“So much the better for you, then. You can have the silver in that purse. When Jerome and I have left, you can come back and take whatever we leave. My vest and some of this rope, for sure. And listen to me very carefully. I saved your life today when I could have killed you in a heartbeat. Sound about right to you?”

“Yes, yes you did, and I’m so very—”

“Yes, shut up. Someday, Trav of Vo Sarmara, I may find myself back in
these parts, and I may need something. Information. A guide. A bodyguard. Thirteen help me if it’s you I have to turn to, but if anyone ever comes to you and whispers the name of Leocanto Kosta, you
jump at their word
, you hear?”

“Yes!”

“Your oath before the gods?”

“Upon my lips and upon my heart, before the gods, or strike me dead and find me wantin’ on the scales of the Lady of the Long Silence.”

“Good enough. Remember. Now fuck off in the direction of your choice, so long as it isn’t back toward our carriage.”

Jean and Locke watched him scamper away for a minute or two, until his cloaked figure had faded from view behind the shifting gray curtains of the downpour.

“Well,” said Jean, “I think that’s enough practice for one day, don’t you?”

“Absolutely. The actual Sinspire job’ll be a bloody ballroom dance compared to this. What say we just grab the two spare coils of rope and make for the carriage? Let Trav spend the rest of the afternoon out here untying knots.”