The Inquisitives [1] Bound by Iron (27 page)

Pomindras, the erstwhile commander of the
Silver Cygnet
.

Cimozjen’s sword bashed into the man’s shield, and at the same time he felt a bolt of electricity course through his body. The impact and jolt nearly caused his sword to drop from his enervated fingers. He cried out in surprise and nausea as the shock trembled in his joints and curdled his stomach.

He stepped back from the leader and lunged hard and fast toward the mage.

Deep within the folds of his criss-crossing tendons, Four felt his neck crack.

His head flopped to the side, resting on his shoulder.

But he didn’t fall.

He didn’t think he could fight effectively while viewing the world on its side, so Four stepped back from his attacker, who was startled into immobility over the warforged’s resilience. Once at a safe distance, Four reached over with his left arm and pulled his head back upright once more. It was unstable but serviceable, and it kept his perspective the way he was used to.

Thus satisfied, he again gripped his battle-axe with both hands and moved toward the mace-wielding foe.

The attacker promptly dropped his weapon and ran into the misty night.

Four turned to Minrah and gestured with one hand in the direction of his retreating foe. “Can they do that?” he asked. “I did not think that was allowed.”

Half-blinded by pain, Cimozjen surged forward. The mage stood, slightly hunched, his eyes and mouth forming nearly perfect O’s of surprise and fear. Cimozjen ran him through the gut without breaking stride, ramming his broadsword so deep that the hilt slammed into the unmoving wizard’s floating rib.

Simultaneously Cimozjen’s shoulder struck the man in the breastbone, and the double impact knocked the mage over. He fell, sliding off Cimozjen’s weapon. Years of training and practice kicked in, and Cimozjen drew his sword back out of the man as he stepped past him and spun to face the leader again. Turning his head, he saw that the leader was not charging him, so he took an extra vicious strike at the downed mage. The wounded man grunted, but said no more.

Cimozjen readied his sword.

A shadow in the mist, commander Pomindras turned his head back and forth between Cimozjen and Four, then fled into the night.

Cimozjen listened to his footsteps depart, but then the fading sound was suddenly overwhelmed by a gruesome crunch behind
him. Cimozjen turned to see Four just pulling his axe out of the sundered body of a halfling. The warforged looked carefully around, turning his entire body instead of just his head. He spotted the first attacker Cimozjen had felled, the flail-wielder with the broken face, and walked over to him, raising his battle-axe.

“Four!” called Cimozjen. “Stop!”

“Why?” asked Four, stopping.

“Because we won,” said Cimozjen.

“We did?” came a quiet voice.

“Yes, we did, Minrah,” said Cimozjen. “You can get up now.”

Keeping his weapon out, he moved toward his companions, scanning the darkness for any new threats. In the nighttime mist, the blood-splashed cobbles looked colorless and rather ordinary. Even the bodies of the fallen were not particularly loathsome when stripped of detail by the haze. The mage lay splayed out on his back, while behind Four two other bodies, one large and one small, lay crumpled. In contrast to the sights, or perhaps because of it, the mist served to enhance the horrid odor of internal organs.

“Um, you have … a sword in your back,” said Cimozjen.

“Please remove it,” said Four. “It is causing me difficulties. My neck is damaged, too.”

“Your neck?” asked Cimozjen, withdrawing the blade from Four’s organic wrappings. “Do you need attention?”

“I am in functional condition,” said Four. “However, we should avoid further combat.”

Cimozjen leaned his staff against the wall and ran his fingers along the wound in his side. “I can agree with that,” he said. He walked over to the man he’d first struck and looked down at him. He was still alive, his pained breath hissing in and out through his teeth. Cimozjen nudged him with his boot. “Get up.”

The man slowly rose, weaving back and forth as he struggled to maintain his balance. He kept his hand held protectively over the left side of his face.

“Who sent you?” asked Cimozjen. “I know your commander, but were you also on the
Silver Cygnet
?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Who are you with? Whom does Pomindras serve?”

The man shook his head.

“Listen,” said Cimozjen, “I hold nothing against you. You did as you were told, or perhaps as you were hired to do.”

As he spoke, he pulled out his holy talisman from beneath his tunic and gripped it. He said a brief prayer, and it began to glow. The divine light starkly showed the massive bruising that marred the man’s face. Murmuring another prayer, Cimozjen reached out with his left hand and gently ran one finger along the edge of the bruising, and the unsettling sound of bone knitting whispered in the quiet of the night. The man gasped at the discomfiting sensation.

“There,” said Cimozjen. “It’ll still be sore, but it’ll not keep you up all night. So. Who sent you?”

“Not likely. If I tell you, they’ll kill me.”

“Tell me who you’re with.”

The man sneered. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you? We were just going to teach you a little lesson, send you packing back to Karrnath with your hands covering your backside. But now, now you’re in real trouble. Pomindras will find you.”

“I healed your cheek,” said Cimozjen sternly, “and I can retract that service if you have no gratitude for the Host’s blessing.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

Cimozjen hit him with the hilt of his sword again, a hard blow right where he’d broken the cheek a few moments earlier. The man went down with a cry. Cimozjen hauled the man up by his collar and kneed him hard in the stomach twice, then let him drop again. He hauled him up a third time and pressed the tip of his bloody sword against the man’s jugular vein.

“Hoy,” whispered Minrah, “Cimmer is boiling over.”

“Listen, Aundairian, I’m going to spare your life, and you’re going to show me some gratitude. Do you understand?”

The man nodded.

He pressed the sword even more firmly into the man’s skin.
“Neither you nor any of your friends is going to attack us again, or I will not be so merciful. Do you understand?”

The man nodded again, more emphatically.

“And you tell your masters that we want the one responsible for the death of Torval Ellinger of the Iron Band. If they turn him over to me, we’ll leave. Understand?’

The man nodded once more. “Torval Ellinger.”

“It’s not good enough, Cimmer,” said Minrah. “I know his type. He’s a thug. Brave when in control, weak when threatened.”

“Do you swear it?” shouted Cimozjen.

“Swear!” said the man. “Yes, I swear, we’ll let you be. Torval Ellinger.”

“Not enough, Cimozjen,” said Minrah. “The instant he’s away from your sword, he’ll be plotting to kill us—and with more people. You have to kill him.”

“He swore. By the soldier’s code—”

“He lied, Cimmer. He’s no soldier. You can’t trust those like him. My folks, they did, and—! Just do it, Cimmer.”

Cimozjen released his grip on the man’s clothes and took a step back, lowering his sword. “I’ll not kill a defenseless man, Minrah.”

“You have to!”

“No,” said Cimozjen. “It’s not right.”

“He knows you won’t. That’s why he’ll swear anything to get you to let him leave. Cimozjen, you have to kill him!”

“I can not.”

Four stepped forward and swung, cleaving the man’s skull where he stood.

“I can,” he said.

Idyllic, Not Peaceful
Zol, the 24th day of Sypheros, 998

C
imozjen stared at the warforged, aghast. “What was that for?”

“Minrah said it had to be done, and you said you could not do it.”

“But there was no reason to kill him!”

“Yes, there was,” said Minrah, who nonetheless shielded her eyes from the carnage. “People like that are like rabid rats. You can’t let a single one of them get away. If you do, they only—”

“One of them did get away, Minrah,” said Cimozjen. “Pomindras? Commander of the
Silver Cygnet
? Perhaps you remember meeting him once or twice. He ran off when he saw he was the last one standing.”

“So did the third one I faced,” said Four. “If I had known that fleeing was an option, I would have tried it once or twice during my battles. It is probably better that I did not know, for I did win all of my fights.”

“See?” said Cimozjen. “Two of the six already ran off! Here I had a chance to send a message back to them, but no, you had to get bloody handed! Not even you—you left it to him,” he added, jerking a thumb at Four.

“I’d rather be bloody handed than a pristine snob who can’t do what needs to be done! I swear, Cimmer, you’d let a troll eat your legs if it were using proper table manners!”

Cimozjen rolled his jaw for a moment, then wiped his sword on the cloak of one of the fallen and grabbed his staff. “Clean your axe, Four. Let’s move.”

He led them on their way, and after a short block or two, they left the zone where the magical fog held sway. Seeing only one or two other civilians in the distance, Cimozjen sheathed his sword.

“I tell you the truth, your perception is fundamentally flawed, Minrah,” he said. “You see my oaths as chains. You think they restrict me from doing things that I would otherwise normally do. Now I can understand that to a point. Even the name ‘oathbound’ brings to mind the trappings of slavery. But my oaths are not a fetter around my limbs, nor a yoke upon my neck. My oaths protect me, uphold me, and assist me to prevail. They are not a noose. Rather they are the straps that hold the armor of virtuous ideals securely in place, protecting my heart, my mind, and my soul. They are the firmly embedded nails that hold me together. They keep me upright, defend me against doing that which is indefensible, and they shield me from shame and self-loathing. Just like armor halts the blade that one fails to deflect, so do my vows halt me from the evils I might perpetrate when my guard is down.

“In short, Minrah, any warrior’s fury can get the better of him in the midst of battle. My oaths bind my highest ideals to me so that in the midst of rage or self-pity or bitter vengeance, I, unlike a certain other person, do not end up with my undergarments around my ankles.”

Minrah clucked her tongue. “Are you insinuating something?”

“I have no need to.”

“You’d better strap your lips, Cimmer.”

After a pause, Cimozjen nodded. “That was uncivil of me, and for that, I apologize.”

Minrah giggled. “Besides,” she said, waggling her eyebrows, “dropping my straps is my best weapon.”

Cimozjen shook his head and sighed. “You are a very beautiful young woman, Minrah, intelligent and energetic. So sad it is that when the day of your wedding comes, you’ll have nothing special left to offer your husband.”

“I’m special.”

“Your own actions speak otherwise of you.”

“I’m not going to get married, anyway,” said Minrah. “And at this rate, you’ll ever get me under the sheets.”

“On that we are agreed,” said Cimozjen, disappointed in spite of his better judgment.

“Ah. An agreement,” said Four. “Now that you are done with the requisite arguing, I have a question. When does the man come to repair me?”

The other two stopped. “What?” said Minrah.

“The man. When does he come to repair me? As I said earlier, I have a damaged neck and several severed linkages within my torso.”

“There’s no one who does that for you now, my friend,” said Cimozjen. “Come morning, though, we can find someone.”

“Why does he not find me? He always has every other time I have been damaged.”

Cimozjen gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “That’s part of being free, my friend. You get to take care of yourself.”

“That’s great!”

Minrah laughed. “I don’t much think so,” she said. “Life was a lot easier when my parents took care of me. I had hardly a care in the world.”