The Oathbound (20 page)

She decided to make a grandstand move out of this. She stalked to the challenger’s pavilion, where more of her would-be opponents had gathered, and cast the hand down at their feet.

“Assassin’s tricks, ‘noble lords’?” she spat, oozing contempt. “Is this the honor of Felwether? I’d rather fight jackals. At least they’re honest in their treachery! Have you no trust in the judgment of the gods—and their champion?”

That should put a little doubt in the minds of the honest ones—and a little fear in the hearts of the ones that weren’t.

Tarma stalked stiff-legged back to her own pavilion, where she threw herself down on the little cot inside it, and hoped
she’d
get her wind back before they got their courage up.

 

In the very back of one of the drawers Kethry found a very curious contrivance. It was a coil of hempen twine, two cords, really, at the end of which was tied a barbless, heavy fishhook, the kind sea-fishers used to take shark and the great sea-salmon. But the coast was weeks from here. What on earth could the seneschal have possibly wanted with such a curious souvenir?

Just then Warrl barked sharply; Kethry turned to see his tail sticking out from under the bedstead.

There’s a hidden compartment under the boards here,
he said eagerly in her mind.
I smell gold, and magic—and fresh blood.

She tried to move the bed aside, but it was far too heavy, something the seneschal probably counted on. So she squeezed in beside Warrl, who pawed at the place on the board floor where he smelled strangeness.

Sneezing several times from the dust beneath the bed, she felt along the boards—carefully, carefully; it could be booby-trapped. She found the catch, and a whole section of the board floor lifted away. And inside ...

Gold, yes; packed carefully into the bottom of it—but on top, a wadded-up tunic, and an empty bottle.

She left the gold, but brought out the other things. The tunic was bloodstained; the bottle, by the smell, had held the narcotic potion she was seeking.

“Hey-la,” she whispered in satisfaction.

Now if she just had some notion how he could have gotten into a locked room without the proper key. There was no hint or residue of any kind of magic. And no key to the door with the bar across it.

How
could
you get into a locked room?

Go before the door is locked,
Warrl said in her mind.

And suddenly she realized what the fishhook was for.

Kethry wriggled out from under the bed, replacing tunic and bottle and leaving the gold in the hidden compartment untouched.

“Katran!” she called. A moment later Myria’s companion appeared; quite nonplussed to see the sorceress covered with dust beside the seneschal’s bed.

“Get the priest,” Kethry told her, before she had a chance to ask any question. “I know who the murderer is—and I know how he did it, and why.”

 

Tarma was facing her first real opponent of the day; a lean, saturnine fellow who used twin swords like extensions of himself. He was just as fast on his feet as she was—and he was fresher. The priest had vanished just before the beginning of this bout, and Tarma was fervently hoping this meant Kethry had found something. Otherwise, this fight bid fair to be her last.

Thank the Goddess this one was an honest warrior; if she went down, it would be to an honorable opponent. Not too bad, really, if it came to it. Not even many Sword Sworn could boast to having defeated twelve opponents in a single morning.

Even if some of them had been mere babes.

She had a stitch in her side that she was doing her best to ignore, and her breath was coming in harsh pants. The sun was punishing-hard on someone wearing head-to-toe black; sweat was trickling down her back and sides. She danced aside, avoiding a blur of sword, only to find she was moving right into the path of his second blade.

At the last second she managed to drop and roll, and came up to find him practically on top of her again. She managed to get to one knee and trap his first blade between dagger and sword—but the second was coming in—

From the side of the field, came a voice like a trumpet call.

“Hold!”

And miracle of miracles, the blade stopped mere inches from her unprotected neck.

The priest strode onto the field, robes flapping. “The sorceress has found the true murderer of our lord and proved it to my satisfaction,” he announced to the waiting crowd. “She wishes to prove it to yours.”

Then he began naming off interested parties as Tarma sagged to her knees in the dirt, limp with relief, and just about ready to pass out with exhaustion. Her opponent dropped both his blades in the dust at her side, and ran off to his side of the field, returning in a moment with a cup of water.

And before handing it to her, he smiled sardonically, saluted her with it and took a tiny sip himself.

She shook sweat-sodden hair out of her eyes, and accepted the cup with a nod of thanks. She downed the lukewarm water, and sagged back onto her heels with a sigh.

“Sword Sworn, shall I find someone to take you to your pavilion?”

The priest was bending over her in concern. Tarma managed to find one tiny bit of unexpended energy.

“Not on your life, priest. I want to see this myself!”

 

There were perhaps a dozen nobles in the group that the priest escorted to the lord’s chamber. Foremost among them was the seneschal; the priest most attentive on him. Tarma was too tired to wonder about that; she saved what little energy she had to get her into the room and safely leaning up against the wall within.

“I trust you all will forgive me if I am a bit dramatic, but I wanted you all to see exactly how this deed was done.”

Kethry was standing behind the chair that was placed next to the desk; in that chair was an older woman in buff and gray. “Katran has kindly agreed to play the part of Lord Corbie; I am the murderer. The lord has just come into this chamber; in the next is his lady. She has taken a potion to relieve pain, and the accustomed sound of his footstep is not likely to awaken her.”

She held up a wineglass. “Some of that same potion was mixed in with the wine that was in this glass, but it did not come from the batch Lady Myria was using. Here is Myria’s bottle,” she placed the wineglass on the desk, and Myria brought a bottle to stand beside it. “Here,” she produced a second bottle, “is the bottle I found. The priest knows where, and can vouch for the fact that until he came, no hand but the owner’s and mine touched it.”

The priest nodded. Tarma noticed with a preternatural sensitivity that made it seem as if her every nerve was on the alert that the seneschal was beginning to sweat.

“The spell I am going to cast now—as your priest can vouch, since he is no mean student of magic himself—will cause the wineglass and the bottle that contained the potion that was poured into it glow.”

Kethry dusted something over the glass and the two bottles. As they watched, the residue in the glass and the fraction of potion in Kethry’s bottle began to glow with an odd, greenish light.

“Is this a true casting, priest?” Tarma heard one of the nobles ask in an undertone.

He nodded. “As true as ever I’ve seen.”

“Huh,” the man replied, frowning with thoughts he kept to himself.

“Now—Lord Corbie has just come in; he is working on the ledgers. I give him a glass of wine,” Kethry handed the glass to Katran. “He is grateful; he thinks nothing of the courtesy, I am an old and trusted friend. He drinks it, I leave the room, presently he is asleep.”

Katran allowed her head to sag down on her arms.

“I take the key from beneath his hand, and quietly lock the door to the hall. I replace the key. I know he will not stir, not even cry out, because of the strength of the potion. I take Lady Myria’s dagger, which I obtained earlier. I stab him.” Kethry mimed the murder; Katran did not move, though Tarma could see she was smiling sardonically. “I take the dagger and plant it beneath Lady Myria’s bed—and I know that because of the potion she has been taking—and which I recommended, since we have no Healer—she will not wake either.”

Kethry went into Myria’s chamber, and returned empty-handed.

“I’ve been careless—got some blood on my tunic, I’ve never killed a man before and I didn’t know that the wound would spurt. No matter, I will hide it where I plan to hide the bottle. By the way, the priest has that bloody tunic, and he knows that his hands alone removed it from its hiding place, just like the bottle. Now comes the important part—”

She took an enormous fishhook on a double length of twine out of her beltpouch.

“The priest knows where I found this—rest assured that it was
not
in Myria’s possession. Now, on the top of this door, caught on a rough place in the wood, is another scrap of hemp. I am going to get it now. Then I shall cast another spell—and if that bit of hemp came from this twine, it shall return to the place it came from.”

She went to the door and jerked loose a bit of fiber, taking it back to the desk. Once again she dusted something over the twine on the hook and the scrap, this time she also chanted as well. A golden glow drifted down from her hands to touch first the twine, then the scrap.

And the bit of fiber shot across to the twine like an arrow loosed from a bow.

“Now you will see the key to entering a locked room, now that I have proved that this was the mechanism by which the trick was accomplished.”

She went over to the door to the seneschal’s chamber. She wedged the hook under the bar on the door, and lowered the bar so that it was only held in place by the hook; the hook was kept where it was by the length of twine going over the door itself. The other length of twine Kethry threaded
under
the door. Then she closed the door.

The second piece of twine jerked; the hook came free, and the bar thudded into place. And the whole contrivance was pulled up over the door and through the upper crack by the first piece.

All eyes turned toward the seneschal—whose white face was confession enough.

“Lady Myria was certainly grateful enough.”

“If we’d let her, she’d have stripped the treasury bare,” Kethry replied, waving at the distant figures on the keep wall. “I’m glad you talked her out of it.”

“Greeneyes, they don’t have it to spare, and we both know it. As it is, she’ll have to spend most of the seneschal’s hoard in making up for the shortfalls among the hirelings that his skimmings caused in the first place.”

“Will she be all right, do you think?”

“Now that her brother’s here I don’t think she has a thing to worry about. She’s gotten back all the loyalty of her lord’s people and more besides. All she needed was a strong right arm to beat off unwelcome suitors, and she’s got that now! Warrior’s Oath, I’m glad
that
young monster wasn’t one of the challengers. I’d never have lasted past the first round!”

“Tarma—”

The swordswoman raised an eyebrow at Kethry’s unwontedly serious tone.

“If you—did all that because you think you owe me—”

“I ‘did all that’ because we’re
she’ enedran,”
she replied, a slight smile warming her otherwise forbidding expression. “No other reason is needed.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts,’ Greeneyes.” Tarma looked back at the waving motes on the wall. “Hell, we’ve just accomplished something we really needed to do. This little job is going to give us a real boost on our reputation. Besides, you know I’d do whatever I needed to do to keep you safe.”

Kethry did not reply to that last; not that she wasn’t dead certain that it was true. That was the problem.

Tarma had been stepping between Kethry and possible danger on a regular basis, often when such intercession wasn’t needed. At all other times, she treated Kethry as a strict equal, but when danger threatened—

She tried to keep the sorceress wrapped in a protective cocoon spun of herself and her blades.

Then the answer occurred to her.

She glanced over at Tarma, at the distant, brooding expression she wore.

She glanced again at her partner.

T
he sorcerer was young, thin, and sweating nervously, despite the cold of the musty cellar chamber that served as his living area and workroom. His secondhand robe was clammy with chill and soaked through with his own perspiration.