The Haunted Wizard - Wiz in Rhym-6 (5 page)

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"Oh, no!" Alisande moaned.

"Maybe it's better if we aren't the ones to tell them the news, anyway," Matt consoled her. The door opened and the sergeant hurried in.

"One." Matt counted seconds, holding up fingers. "Two… three… four…" A scream tore through the door and wrenched at their heartstrings, but the roar that followed it should have shattered the panel. The sergeant stumbled out backward, pressing one hand to his cheek and the other to his forehead, then fell unconscious. Petronille stepped over his body and turned toward Alisande. She saw her hostess and screamed again, running toward her, hands hooked into claws. "You have slain him! Your vile people have slain him!"

"Traitors! Poltroons!" Drustan roared, only one step behind her. "Have you no guards, have you no Watch? How could you let your scum slay a true prince?"

"Your Majesties, I am most deeply sorry," Alisande said, face pale. "I share your grief."

"Be sure that you shall!" Drustan bellowed. "Be sure that you shall share it at spear's point!" Every Merovencian soldier in the hallway slanted his pike or halberd to guard position. The Bretanglians saw and readied their own weapons.

"Nothing can console you for such a loss," Matt said quickly, "but I shall find the murderer and haul him before you for your vengeance!"

"We have the murderer," one of the Bretanglian soldiers snapped. "It's the pimp who—" Petronille spun to face him, eyes wide and wild.

"—who fought him trying to ravish the maiden," the soldier ad-libbed quickly. "We have both him and one of his doxies in custody, Majesty!"

"I shall see him drawn and quartered!" Drustan thundered, glaring at Alisande.

"That is the punishment for treachery or the slaying of a prince," she agreed, wooden-faced.

"The surgeons must save him first," the Bretanglian soldier said in his heavy accent "Your son gave the man quite a drubbing, Majesty, and slit his weasand for him."

Something about the way the man said it set Mart's built-in lie detector shrilling.

"Call out all your surgeons!" Petronille commanded. "We must preserve the louse for royal vengeance!"

"Indeed we must," Alisande returned. "Death in combat is far too gentle an ending for a prince-killer."

"Did he act alone?" Matt asked.

He said it softly, but the whole hallway fell silent. Then Petronille asked in a strangled tone, "What do
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you mean?"

"Only that," Matt told her. "Princes are trained in fighting; alley urchins only learn it by winning often enough to stay alive. I don't think a street fighter could have killed a skilled swordsman without help."

"The prince had no sword," the Bretanglian soldier said instantly, "only a dagger. He was disguised as a peasant."

Again Matt's alarm rang, but this time because he was guessing right. He ignored the question of why the prince had dressed down for his evening's recreation and said, "With or without a sword, he should have been more than the equal of a gutter rat. Who came at his back?" The hall was silent, the Bretanglian soldiers staring at one another. Finally Drustan smelled a running rodent, too. He turned on his guardsmen, demanding, "Well?"

"There was the man who went out the window," one of; them said hesitantly.

"And you did not pursue him? Fool!" Drustan backhanded the man across the chops so hard that he fell back into his mates. "No one will find him now! The trail is cold!"

"Cold or hot, I'll find him," Matt assured the king. "If you don't have one murderer to chop up, you'll have the other."

"Then you shall accompany him!" Drustan jabbed a finger at Sir Orizhan. "You, disgraced knight who failed in your charge!" He kicked the fallen sergeant. "Wake this one and send him, too." The assignment spoke of a lack of trust, but under the circumstances, Matt could understand it. He stepped around the king to the Bretanglian guardsmen. "Tell me about this man who went out the window."

They eyed him warily, and one said, "How could you catch him when the trail is more than an hour cold?"

"I'm the Lord Wizard, remember?"

"Tell him!" Drustan shouted.

They told.

If anyone happened to be awake and noticing Matt through their windows that midnight, they must have shuddered and pulled the drapes shut, muttering a quick charm. Dressed in a dark brown leather jerkin and black hose, Matt looked pretty grim. Sir Orizhan wore similar clothing, and Sergeant Brock's indigo livery was just as gloomy. It didn't help their image that they were nosing around under the tavern's window.

"What do you think to find, milord?" Sergeant Brock asked, but there was no respect in his tone.

"I was hoping for soft ground and a footprint," Matt told him.
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The sergeant gave a mirthless laugh. "In a back alley in the roughest section of your town?"

"He is correct, I fear," Sir Orizhan said. "You will find only hard-packed earth with a light coating of garbage."

"Gotta remember to tell the queen about a public health program …" Then Matt grinned "Whattaya know! Cheese rinds and horse dung work just as well as the soft dirt in a garden bed." He pointed. The other men stared down at the footprint in the garbage.

Sergeant Brock frowned, doing some pointing of his own, farther away from the wall, sweeping his finger in a broad arc. "There are more footprints there, many more. What makes you think this one was made by the foot of our runaway?"

"Because those are all going to left and right," Matt said. "This is the only one going away from the wall. Besides, it's cutting into the others and over them, which means it's much newer."

"Good enough," Sir Orizhan said, frowning, "but I see only two prints going away; then they join the others. How shall you follow them?"

Matt took a vial of powdered chalk from his pocket, tapped a few grains into the footprint, then set the bottom of the vial on top of them chanting, "Marking powder carbonate, With this footprint resonate! On rocky road or bog path sodden, Show me where this foot has trodden!" Sergeant Brock frowned. "You use wizard's words among common ones, but what good will they do?"

"There!" Matt pointed.

The others looked and saw a trail of tracks gleaming brighter than the rest, reflecting moonbeams as though they, too, had been dusted with chalk.

Matt put the vial back into his wallet. "Let's go!" He set off through the moonlit night, imagining sinister presences looking over his shoulder and watching him from the shadows— at least, he hoped he was imagining.

They came to a patch of shadow, and Sir Orizhan stared. "The footprints glow without light!"

"It's a useful spell." Matt glanced at Sergeant Brock. The man's face was set and grim—maybe his response to fear of the supernatural; Matt had seen people react to his spells in a host of different ways. The footprints came out of the shadow and gleamed in the moonlight again, and the knight and sergeant relaxed a little. Matt blessed the silver crescent and wished it could stay up a little longer, but it was a young moon early in the month, and had to be in bed at a decent time. If it stayed with him another hour, he'd be lucky. Of course, Sergeant Brock was holding a torch to guide them after that. Mart's spine prickled as he remembered that the man he was tracking wasn't the only footpad in this part of town. "Y'know, men, we may be dressed for rough work, but our clothes are much better quality than most of the garments people wear around here."

"What of it?" Sir Orizhan asked, frowning.

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"He means that our garments show us to have money," the sergeant explained. "Do you track a murderer, yet fear simple footpads, Lord Wizard?"

"Good clothing might be enough to put a small gang with clubs and daggers on our trail," Matt told him.

"You are a knight as well as a wizard," Sir Orizhan said softly. "You should have no need to concern yourself over peasants."

"Don't underestimate the poor, Sir Knight," Matt answered. "They can be tougher than you think, especially if they travel in packs—and they could slow us down a lot." Sergeant Brock looked pleasantly surprised—he was a peasant himself, and not used to having knights view his kind with anything but contempt.

Matt rested a hand on his sword just in case.

Sir Orizhan couldn't believe his ears. "Surely you do not fear them!"

"Of course not," Matt said, nettled. He'd been knighted, after all, and courage was one of the side effects of the knighting ceremony, at least in this universe. "I think of peasants the same way I mink of electr—uh, lightning, Sir Orizhan. I don't fear them, but I do treat them with a very healthy respect." Sir Orizhan looked scandalized, but Sergeant Brock almost smiled.

The footprints led out of the alley and into the street, which wasn't much better—but the center was clear of refuse, and the footsteps disappeared as they hit hard-packed dirt. Matt sighed, wishing there had been a little rain early in the evening. Since there hadn't, he took out his vial of chalk and sprinkled it lightly before him, chanting, "Powder of the old antacid, Show me where the foot has pass-ed!" A few grains glowed dimly in the night.

Sergeant Brock gawked. "What are those spots that glow so?"

"Grains of the powder I sprinkled, that landed where the fugitive stepped," Matt told him.

"How can they tell his steps from all the others?" Sir Orizhan was striving for composure.

"The Law of Contagion," Matt explained. "I made the powder identify his footsteps back beneath the window, so it still does, even though we can't see them."

Sir Orizhan frowned, not understanding. Matt wasn't sure he did himself, so he let it pass. He set off following the trail, sprinkling a little powder and chanting a couplet every ten feet or so. Sure enough, the faint glow confirmed that he was still going in the right direction. "Just hope our man went to ground nearby."

"Why?" Sergeant Brock asked.

"Because he has a two-hour lead," Matt explained. "If he just kept going, I can't possibly catch up with him before I run out of chalk."

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"Is that all that substance is?" Sir Orizhan asked, wide-eyed "Just powdered chalk," Matt assured him.

"The magic is in the verse I made up, not in the powder itself." The footprints led him out of the maze of crooked alleys and into a nicer part of town, or one that was at least a little less run-down.

"Luck is with us." Sergeant Brock pointed at the faint glow of the powder. "Either that, or your spell has weakened."

The footprints stopped at the door of the first decent-looking inn.

"Or," said Sir Orizhan, "our quarry is overconfident."

"I don't think it's my spell." Matt started to knock on the door, then hesitated; Sir Orizhan's words raised a doubt.

"Yes, you see my point," Sir Orizhan said. "The man we are hunting must be supremely overconfident to have done no more to escape than to take a room in an inn for the night."

"You might be right," Matt admitted. "I would have expected him to try to climb the city wall, at least."

"The lout didn't even choose a bolt hole that would be hard to find," Sergeant Brock grunted. Matt nodded. "We could have done nothing more than send a dozen soldiers knocking on the door of every inn in town, asking if a man had checked in within the last two hours. What would he have done then?"

"Gone out the window and into the night again," Sergeant Brock answered. Sir Orizhan agreed. "Soldiers asking questions would have been all the warning he needed." Matt couldn't very well disagree, considering that their quarry had already gone out the window once that night. "I still can't help feeling that we might be stepping into a trap." Sir Orizhan looked up, startled. "Why, so we might!"

"Aye, now that you mention it," Sergeant Brock growled. "That might be reason enough for hiding so plainly, might it not?"

"I think we'd better take precautions," Matt told them. "Sir Orizhan, you pound on the door and wake the landlord. When he lets you in, find the inside door to the yard."

"A distraction?" The nobleman frowned.

"That," Matt told him, "and enough noise to flush our quarry like a pheasant from a brake."

"And you and I shall watch the windows?" Sergeant Brock asked, teeth gleaming in a grin.

"No," Matt said. "If someone's pounding on the door, he'll expect soldiers outside. He'll jump down into the innyard and hide in the stable or try to go out the wagon door."
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"Where we shall be waiting!"

"Right" Matt stepped back, addressing them both. "Let me confront him. You two stay in the shadows and be ready to help out if he tries to fight."

Sir Orizhan nodded. "Surprise is always the best weapon."

"Right. Let's hope he thinks he's safe. Give me a few minutes—count to two hundred slowly, then start pounding and yelling." Matt turned away from the door. "Come on, Sergeant." They went around the side of the building to the great wagon door—like most medieval inns, this one was built around three sides of a courtyard, with the fourth side closed off by stables, and doors wide enough to admit carts and wagons. They were shut, of course, but it didn't take Matt more than a few minutes to swing over the top and land lightly inside. He heard the soft thud as Sergeant Brock landed behind him, but didn't look.

Stables blocked his view to either side; he went past them and looked about the innyard. The moon was still helping out, though it was very low, and he could make out the shape of the well with its watering trough, the railed balconies outside the guests' rooms, and the dark shape of several wagons. But the moonlight struck only the center of the yard, making the shadows all about seem even darker. Matt noticed movement in those shadows, off to his left, and felt reassured that Sergeant Brock was sliding into place.