Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (60 page)

He turned the blade over across his hand. Such an elegant weapon compared to the swords he was accustomed to. Light, graceful, balanced for fast handling – quick as thought in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. If he’d had the time, he’d have enjoyed learning to master it.

The inscription winked in the light of the hovering glims. He tilted the blade to study the flowing script but his Gimraeli was limited to the courtesies and few simple phrases, nowhere near enough to attempt a translation. Pity he hadn’t thought to ask N’ril what it said; maybe the blade had a name, like the swords in stories:
Spite
or
Kingkiller
, or Prince Corum’s blade
Thorn
.

That got him thinking about his own sword, which he’d left in Zhiman-dar with N’ril. A plain soldier’s weapon in a worn scabbard that his foster-father had flung at him in a moment of bitter recrimination. It was the only possession he’d brought out of Leah; everything else, bar the clothes he’d stood up in, he’d had to leave behind. In time he’d grown into the sword’s length and weight, wearing it across his back even though he’d been tall enough to carry it on his hip since he was thirteen, and he’d made it his own.

It hardly needed a name, but if he were to give it one, he knew what it would be.

Vengeance
.

His knuckles whitened on the
qatan
’s long hilt. In the pit of his stomach he felt the sick lurch that told him he was far from where he ought to be. Most days it was no more than a vague discomfort, like something he’d eaten that wouldn’t digest. At other times it rose up into his throat so thick and fiery he thought he’d choke on it.

I can’t stay here
.

Except he’d given his word and, damn it, he was no oath-breaker.

Nothing had gone right since they’d stepped off the docks at Zhiman-dar. An ambush in the souq, a sandstorm, more Cultists than even Alderan had expected, and they had naught to show for it. Under his shirt, the cut along his rib throbbed steadily. Nothing but scars.

I should never have come
.

He growled in frustration. Sometimes, trying to do the right thing just turned around and bit you on the arse.

Carefully, he sighted along the blade one last time to be sure there were no nicks or burrs he’d missed with the stone, then ran it through an oiled rag a couple of times before slipping it back into its scabbard. No harm in being cautious, even in a dry climate. He couldn’t imagine much worse than needing to draw a sword in a hurry and finding it stuck.

Somewhere outside, a cat yowled, then another, and a brief, shrill fight ensued. He frowned, realising how late it was: long past curfew – more than an hour past Low bell, in fact – and Alderan still had not returned.

He got up and cracked the shutters on the nearest window to peer outside. Across the moon-washed foreyard the preceptory stood shuttered and dark, the sisters long abed. No sign of anyone moving, and apart from a shutter banging closed some distance away, he couldn’t hear any activity on the nearby streets.

‘Damn it, Alderan,’ he muttered. ‘Where the hell are you?’

Too tired and sore to stand for long, he prowled back to the table only to find himself too restless to sit. Even the idea of working in the archive palled: he hadn’t been able to concentrate for more than an hour after supper before he’d found himself pacing like a beast in a menagerie, measuring the limits of its confinement.

He touched the teapot next to his cup. Cold. Making another pot would at least give him something to do. He refilled the kettle from the cistern in the kitchen, hung it over the fire and stoked up the coals under it. Then he wandered back to the window to worry and watch for Alderan whilst he waited for it to boil.

Outside, the sky was clear and velvet-dark. Miriel, the first moon, was near setting; a gibbous Lumiel stood high over the distant towers of the governor’s palace, bright as a diamond on a black crown. The third moon, Simiel, wouldn’t rise until nearer dawn, after the first had set, but the interval was shortening by a few minutes every day as the trinity approached. In less than three months, Lumiel would catch up with her larger, slower sisters again. All three moons would hang in the morning sky together, and ships everywhere would ride it out on deep water. Not even the sea-elves would risk a landfall under a trinity moon, not when the tides raced and fought like spring hares.

In the stories he had devoured as a child, the trinity was always a portent to some dire event: the rise of a tyrant, or a catastrophic flood like the one that had drowned Al-Amar. He was not much given to superstition, but with the Veil weakened and a trinity rising . . . well. The coincidence was striking.

The kettle began to murmur and he scanned the foreyard again. ‘Come on, old man. We need to get out of here.’

Still nothing to see. He was about to turn away when a flicker of movement caught his eye. A dark shape changed the silhouette of the wall by the gate – another cat, perhaps, running along the top of the wall on its nocturnal patrols. Then the shape leapt down into the yard and he realised it wasn’t a cat, not unless the cat was the size of a small man.

A thought extinguished the glims. Someone slipping over the wall like that could only mean trouble.

Scooping up the
qatan
from the table, he loped for the guest-hall door, butter-soft Gimraeli boots almost silent on the tiled floor. At the door he pressed his back to the wall, straining to hear any sounds from outside. There. A faint squeak, as of a bolt being drawn, then the rising burble of the kettle drowned anything more. Damn it. His pulse quickened and he eased the sword from its sheath.

Heavy breathing sounded right outside the door, and a strange snuffling. At least two people, then, or a man and a beast of some kind. Carefully, Gair lowered the scabbard to the floor to free his left hand and waited.

The latch lifted and slowly the door swung in, away from him. A moon-shadow spilled across the floor in the shape of a
barouk
-clad man. The one hand he could see held no weapon. Where was the second man?

The intruder took a couple of steps into the guest hall, head turning as he scanned the common room. Dressed in black from
kaif
to boots, he was averagely tall for a desertman, which gave Gair a full head height advantage.

He let the fellow take one more step inside then launched himself forward. His left arm went around the man’s neck to seize his opposite shoulder and he used the leverage of his greater height to wrench the intruder around to face the way he had come, and anyone who might be following him in. The fellow struggled and Gair levered the man’s head back with his forearm as he brought up the naked
qatan
to just below his veiled chin.

‘Stand still or I’ll cut your throat,’ he said.

The struggling ceased. A hand slid up the inside of his thigh and took a firm, confident hold of his stones. ‘Not if I geld you first, Empire.’

The woman spoke common with a sensuous purr that in other circumstances would have been acutely distracting – particularly with her hand between his legs. Two more figures appeared in the doorway, one supporting the other who was head-down and clearly close to collapse.

‘This man is hurt,’ said the able-bodied one, through gritted teeth. ‘And I assure you our intentions are honest.’

‘Honest intentions usually knock. Bring him inside.’ Gair put up his sword and released the desertwoman. Her grip on his stones eased, but she did not let go. He stared at her. ‘Do you mind?’

Sloe-black eyes regarded him over her sand-veil, tilted up with an unseen smile. Pushing herself off his chest, she treated his masculine parts to a deliberate caress and murmured, ‘I did not mind at all.’

Only as she walked away did Gair see the dagger in her other hand. She twirled it nonchalantly over her fingers then tucked it away somewhere inside her
barouk
. He swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.

Ouch
.

The fellow in the doorway sighed. ‘
Sayyar
, may I remind you that this man is bleeding? And also heavy.’

He shifted his grip on the injured fellow and the man’s head lolled back. It was Alderan, eyes swollen shut, his face sheeted with blood that looked like black paint in the moonlight.

Holy saints.

Gair scabbarded his sword and shoved it through his sash, then hurried to help the grumbling desertman. Between the two of them they managed to get the old man laid out on the table. He was barely conscious and, judging by the noises he was making, having some difficulty breathing.

Light, first, so he could see what he was doing. Gair summoned half a dozen fist-sized glims above the table and heard the woman gasp behind him. Her companion took a half-step backwards, eyeing the blue-white globes warily.

‘Sorcery?’ he asked.

‘You can call it that.’ Gair started stripping off Alderan’s
barouk
. ‘It’d take too long to explain.’

The Gimraeli, all in black like his companion, shook his head. ‘And you thought we might be a threat to
you
?’

‘People dressed in black sneaking around in the dead of night? I didn’t know what to think.’

The wadded robe went under the old man’s head to support it. His face was a mess. Bruised and swollen, his lip was split and his nose thoroughly broken. Most of the blood appeared to have come from a deep gash on his brow that ran up into his hairline.

‘I need some warm water. The kettle’s boiling, and there’s a kitchen through that door there.’ Using his belt-knife, Gair began cutting off Alderan’s ruined shirt. Bruises were developing on his chest and shoulders, too, purple-black on his weather-browned skin. He’d been beaten hard, a while ago, with feet as well as fists. A less hale man of his years might not have survived.

When neither of the Gimraelis stirred, Gair glared at them. ‘Well? Are you going to help me or not?’

The man simply folded his arms and looked away. His friend, perched cross-legged on the furthest bench, picked a date from the bowl by Alderan’s feet and dropped her veil to pop it into her mouth.

‘Blood and stones!’ He drove the knife point-first into the table and stalked into the kitchen.

A trawl of the cupboards found some dishcloths and a large basin which he half-filled with water, laced with a handful of salt. Back in the common room, he topped it up from the kettle and set about bathing Alderan’s wounds as carefully as he could. His patient stirred, then drifted back into unconsciousness, blood bubbling in his mashed-up nose with every breath.

‘What happened?’ he asked as he worked, striving to keep his tone neutral. His injured side burned, enough that he thought he might have torn a stitch lifting the old man onto the table, and it wasn’t helping his temper.

‘We found him like that,’ said the black-robed man. He’d crossed over to the window and closed the shutters to the merest slit that was still possible to see through. ‘In the street.’

About as helpful as a paper andiron
. ‘How did you know to bring him here?’

No answer. Gair looked up again and caught the woman watching him. She spat the date-stone into the hearth and smiled impudently, then selected another, larger date and pushed it slowly into her mouth, her full lips pouting around it as if it was, well, something else entirely.

That took him to the limit of his patience. Angry at her goading, stricken by the memories that filled him, he straightened up and hurled the bloody dishcloth into the basin. Water slopped over the side and dripped on the floor.

‘All right. Talk. Who the hell are you two?’

The man turned from the window.

‘Does it matter, so long as your friend is safe? We are done here,’ he said and walked towards the door.

As the desertman thumbed the latch, the Song leapt to Gair’s will. Solid air slammed the door back into its frame and held it there.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ he growled. ‘Tell me what I want to know or by the Goddess neither of you leaves this room.’

The woman surged to her feet, reaching into her
barouk
for her knife. Gair drew his sword and knocked the dagger from her hand. As it skittered away across the floor he grabbed her shoulder, kicked her feet from under her and sat her down hard on the bench again with the tip of the
qatan
hovering at her chin.

‘I meant what I said about cutting your throat.’

Her mouth tightened and she gave him a surly glare, but spread her hands. A sound behind him whipped Gair’s head around, sword flicking out to stop the approaching desertman in his tracks. ‘Give me one good reason not to, after the day I’ve had today.’

The man glanced at the
qatan
, then his dark eyes crinkled with a smile. ‘Days like that are not unfamiliar to me.’ He lifted a hand towards his sand-veil. ‘May I?’

Gair gave him a cautious nod. The face beneath the veil was younger than he’d expected, middle- to late-twenties at the most, finely carved, with a neat, short beard framing his mouth. His bold nose and the set of his brows were similar enough to the girl’s to suggest a family resemblance – siblings.

‘You know N’ril?’ he asked.

‘N’ril al-Feqqin?’ The man nodded. Gair kept the sword levelled, uncomfortably aware that he had taken his eye off a woman who might be carrying more than one dagger in her sash. ‘I know him.’

‘We are . . . friends of his.’

He caught the hesitation. ‘Open your shirt.’

Eyebrow crooked – with curiosity or amusement Gair couldn’t tell – the desertman did as he was asked. There was no sun tattoo on his chest, but he had a puckered scar below his right nipple, from an arrow by the look of it. Whoever this man was, he believed in something enough to wager his life on it.

‘Thank you,’ Gair said, releasing the air-Song. ‘Perhaps we can start again.’

He sheathed the
qatan
and stepped away from the woman. She pouted, pushing out her bosom enough that he couldn’t fail to notice how perfectly rounded it was.

‘Don’t you want to look inside my shirt, too?’

Mother have mercy, she was relentless. She wielded her sensuality like a weapon.