CHAPTER 12 #2
“I’m sorry, would you have preferred I let her freeze to death in the rain? Or perhaps just let the horse carry her off to a broken neck?”
Brenner frowned. It was a different expression from his habitual scowl, and Caliban liked it a lot less. Dark hair fell into his face like a curtain.
Is this jealousy, or something else? How close are they, anyway?
“If you’re getting any ideas,” said Brenner softly, “I would keep them to myself, if I were you.”
Caliban put up an eyebrow. “Why do you care, anyway? You’re sleeping as cold at night as the rest of us.” He shifted his feet, and heard pine needles crunch underfoot.
Why am I baiting him? This is stupid. I should just say, “No, no, I’m not interested, all yours.” Do not bait the assassin. Did I take a blow to the head when I wasn’t looking?
Brenner tilted his head. His eyes flickered, but the point of the knife never wavered. “Oh, I won’t deny I wouldn’t like another chance at our Slate. She’s a dear thing when she’s not waiting to die.”
Caliban wasn’t surprised. He’d been more than half sure they’d been lovers once—there were too many intimacies between them that friends never achieved. This was only confirmation after all.
What did surprise him was the sudden knot in his stomach, and the hot, dizzy feeling inside his head.
What the hell is wrong with me?
What a stupid question. You’d need quite a list.
Nha, ghaa, ngh’aa…
The demon’s voice alone should have stopped him, but he could still taste the knot of—yes, fine, it was jealousy, or maybe only envy, that the assassin had done what he could not.
How had she looked at him when they were together? You could read every emotion on Slate’s face, usually from a mile off. What expressions had crossed it when the assassin had been in her bed?
Oh Dreaming God, we’re being fools and she’d kill us both if she knew.
“Fine,” he rasped. “Plead your case to her, not me. She won’t be best pleased if we stab each other.”
“Oh no. That’s not my point,” said Brenner, smiling now, which was even more ghastly than the frown.
“It isn’t?”
“It’s an odd thing,” he continued in a light, conversational tone, “but every killer I’ve ever known who killed for pleasure rather than money—and I’ve known a few—had the same thing going on in their heads.
They got sex and death all tangled up, and if they couldn’t get the one, they’d have the other. ”
Caliban had expected anything from a brotherly threat of bodily harm to a former lover’s outrage, and had thought he was prepared to weather it.
He hadn’t expected this.
“What?”
“Now if there was ever a repressed lot in life, it’s temple paladins, and frankly, I don’t care what you may have done. But if you start getting all tangled up about our Slate, and I come back one fine evening and discover that you chopped her into little pieces, I am going to be pissed.”
The knight raked a hand through his hair. “Are you—my god, you’re not serious!”
Can’t he just wave his knife around and say, “I saw her first!” like normal men?
“I’m very serious,” said Brenner, in a voice that was low and almost friendly, the paladin’s voice through a black mirror. “Killing I know very well. And believe me, my fine knight-champion, I can make you die slow.”
“I would never—” He groped for a phrase, found “randomly dismember Slate” on his tongue, and couldn’t get it out.
Well, I wouldn’t.
“Never? Seems to me you did it once already.” The assassin was circling him now, still with the knife out. Caliban realized that he was no longer sure that Brenner wasn’t just going to kill him. “Oh, excuse me. Eight times.”
“I was possessed!” the knight shouted.
“I don’t believe you,” said Brenner.
Caliban drew steel. Brenner came up on his toes with a wild smile on his face.
They circled each other, once, twice.
“It’s a neat trick,” said Brenner. “The demonic voice thing almost had me fooled. But I don’t buy it. Probably you got a taste for killing people you claimed were possessed. You killed those people, and you enjoyed it and you found an excuse that kept your neck out of the noose—”
“Burning,” rasped Caliban. “The punishment for apostate paladins is burning at the stake.”
“Then I don’t blame you for trying to avoid it,” said Brenner, grinning, “but you’re not trying it on our Slate.”
He made a sudden dash forward. Caliban fended him off with a sweep of the sword.
A net dropped over both of them.
Caliban’s first thought was that this was some trick of Brenner’s. Then he saw the assassin was also struggling under a net.
His second, wilder thought was: Couldn’t Slate find a bucket of water to throw on us?
He tried to get his sword the rest of the way out of the sheath. A foot stepped on his hand—no, it was a hoof?—and someone kicked him in the ribs. A few feet away, Brenner was being relieved of his knife in a similar fashion.
Someone green stepped into his field of vision. Caliban looked up into a face that wasn’t human, and the sharp end of a sword.
There was a loud and unmistakable shiing! of steel being drawn and someone shouted.
Aw, shit. Brenner really did try to kill him.
Slate snatched up her knife and ran for the river, Learned Edmund hot on her heels.
Hell if I know what I’ll do once I get there. Help whoever’s losing, maybe. Shit, shit, shit…
She dodged around trees, skidding through the mat of pine needles. Goddamn, how far away did they go?
A minute later she slowed. “This is crazy. Where are they? No one would go this far for water.” The sounds of a struggle had ended almost as soon as they’d begun, and now only silence greeted them.
“Brenner! Caliban! Where are you?”
No reply.
“Brennerrrrr! Helloooo!”
The stream gurgled by. Leaves hissed softly in the wind. There were no shouts, no moans, no sounds of two people cutting each other to pieces.
They can’t be fighting somewhere. Fights aren’t quiet things.
She turned and looked at Learned Edmund, who spread his hands helplessly. “I have no idea.”
“They have to be here somewhere!”
“Could one have killed the other?”
“We’d still find one of them, and a body.”
“Could one have stabbed the other and run? And the other gave chase?”
“I suppose, but—”
Slate stopped.
The discarded water bucket lay at the edge of the water. The ground was trampled and scuffled, pine needles kicked up in great gouts, which could have meant something or nothing at all.
“I’m no kind of tracker, but they were here and…something happened.”
“Brenner seemed angry with Sir Caliban,” observed Learned Edmund.
“Yeah, but if he killed him he wouldn’t try to hide it, and if Caliban killed him, he wouldn’t try to hide it either.”
“What’s that?” asked Edmund, pointing.
She turned.
Something lay on the ground, a bit of gaudy green twine laced with small black and white feathers. The white quills gleamed, even in the failing light.
“Woodpecker feathers,” said Edmund, picking it up.
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea, but I’m guessing that they didn’t leave under their own power.”
“Hmm.”
She stared at the twine. It looked like some kind of bracelet, but it had been ripped off.
“Well,” she said. “At least there’s no blood. They took them alive, I think.”
“Should we go after them?” asked Learned Edmund.
“I’d love to. Pick a direction.”
“You can’t tell which way they’ve gone?”
“Can you?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
They looked for signs, in a broadening circle around the river clearing. There weren’t any or there might have been dozens. The wood was full of things that looked like trails and weren’t. Any one of them might have been real, if they’d only known how to look.
They slogged back to camp. It was too dark to see, even if they knew what they were looking for. Slate dropped down next to the fire and put her face in her hands.
What do I do now? I can’t rescue them if I don’t know where they are!
She waited for Learned Edmund to say something snide, but instead he handed her a roasted potato. “No good will come of us starving ourselves, Mistress Slate.”
“No, I suppose not. Thanks.” It was indeed an excellent potato. She choked it down through a throat gone thick.
What do I do? I can’t leave them!
What if they’re already dead?
Caliban has to be alive. He has to be alive so I can think of something really cutting to say to him, the metal-plated ass.
She gnawed on a fingernail. She wouldn’t cry, because that would be useless, and it would also confirm all of Learned Edmund’s worst fears about her.
Slate glanced at him, a slim, miserable-looking figure hunched inside his robes. Something about his posture, and the way he kept blinking, made her think that he might be worried about crying too.
Somehow that was cheering. Not because she wished him ill, but because there are few things in life as steadying as someone you have to be brave for.
“Well, a fine pair we are,” she said. “And we thought the hard part would be in Anuket City.”
He smiled weakly. “I suppose—”
The horses lifted their heads. Even the mules pricked up their ears.
“They hear something,” said Learned Edmund.
A breeze rippled through the trees, and after a moment, over the crackling of the fire, Slate heard it too.
It was music.
There were drums in there, and pipes, a low beat and a high skirling whine threaded through it.
It wasn’t a pleasant music—every now and then the beat would skip, which jolted the listener as if their heart had skipped—but the fact that it was music at all, in the middle of the woods, fired Slate with relief.
“Come on.” She got up and kicked dirt over the fire.
“Where are we going?”
“After the music.”
“You think the musicians took the other two?”
“I think it’s the best lead we’re going to get.”
They left the horses tied up and picked their way down to the river. Slate wasn’t sure if the music was coming from there, or if the sound just carried better over water, but they had to start somewhere.
They got partway down the slope and the trees opened up. Learned Edmund reached out and caught her arm.