Chapter 30 #2
The Dervish smacked the door knocker against the door, waited, and as soon as the toad opened it, he jammed his foot in the gap. “Where’s Edmund?”
The toad gaped at him and tried to slam the door in his face.
The Dervish’s shoes were comfortable for walking—thank the ancestors, an eternity with uncomfortable shoes really would be hell—but not made to stand up to doors.
The pain in his foot only made him angrier.
He drove his shoulder into the wood, driving the toad back a step, and then Gervase reached over the top of his head, caught the edge of the door, and opened it in much the same fashion that a battering ram opens castles.
“Very nice,” the Dervish said. Gervase grunted acknowledgment. Squashed between door and wall, the toad made a gurgling noise.
Gervase shut the door. The toad slid gently to the floor. The Dervish took out a dagger and waved it under the servant’s nose.
“I want you to know,” he said, in his most charming voice, “that I am very angry and looking for an excuse to do something violent.”
“Nrrgh,” the toad said.
“Want me to thump him?” Gervase asked.
“No. He’s going to tell us everything he knows. Aren’t you?”
The toad nodded frantically, eyes riveted on the dagger point.
“Where is Scholar Andraste?”
“She’s … nrr … not here.”
The Dervish clucked his tongue. “That is a bad answer. Would you like to reconsider?”
The toad’s eyes nearly crossed trying to watch the dagger. “N … nnh … she’s really not! I swear it! You can check the house!”
Annoyingly, he seemed to be telling the truth. The Dervish gritted his teeth. “When did she leave?”
“Y-yesterday…”
Shit. I was in the sword overnight. At least. He leaned over the toad, twisting the dagger to make the light flicker off the blade. “When is she coming back?”
“I don’t know! She didn’t say!”
“What about the prisoner?”
“P-prisoner?”
“The man I came here with.” The Dervish let the dagger drift to the underside of the toad’s throat.
“He … he wasn’t a…” His eyes bulged as the dagger point began to press into his skin. “I didn’t know he was a prisoner! No one told me! They all left together, in a hurry, I wasn’t informed, no one told me…” He swallowed and a bead of blood welled under the dagger point.
The Dervish would have preferred it if the man was lying, because then he could do something really nasty with a clear conscience. Unfortunately he still seemed to be telling the truth. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t kn—eerp! I don’t, I really don’t! She leaves sometimes! I just watch the house while she’s gone!”
“Did they take a carriage?” Gervase’s voice was a low rumble. The Dervish glanced at him, surprised.
“Yes, yes. All of them in the carriage. I called it. She told me to.”
Gervase nodded. “How much food do you pack when she goes away?”
I have made the classic mistake of thinking that because someone is large and uneducated, they must be stupid.
The Dervish nodded approvingly at Gervase while the toad babbled.
“M-maybe three days’ worth? Bread and cheese mostly and pickles and wine and a jar of sardines because Scholar Andraste likes sardines and I can’t imagine the smell in a closed carriage but it’s not up to—ulp! ”
“Could last a lot longer than three days, if she’s stopping at inns along the way,” Gervase said.
“And you have no idea where she goes?” the Dervish asked the toad. “Not even a guess?”
“I … I…”
The Dervish applied a little more pressure with the dagger. The servant closed his eyes and whispered, “I don’t want you to kill me if I guess wrong.”
“He’s got a point there,” Gervase said. The Dervish sighed. He had really been hoping to kill someone deserving, but the toad’s worst sin seemed to be that he was a mediocre butler. Also I’m not sure if Gervase would thump me. I get the feeling that murder might cross the line.
“Fine,” he said, taking the dagger away. “How many other people are here?”
“No one! I give the staff a holiday when the scholar’s away, to save money, you understand, except for the maids and they go home for the night.”
“Right. Put him in a closet or something and lock the door.”
Gervase picked the toad up by the collar, cutting off the stream of groveling thanks.
The Dervish turned away, disgusted as much by his own desire to kill the man as anything else.
He’d told Edmund that he’d realized that he couldn’t just kill the right person and fix the past. It was a damn shame that enlightenment had come to him just at the point where a killing spree would be incredibly satisfying.
He went through the house as methodically as he could, despite the panicky feeling under his breastbone that Edmund was getting farther away the longer he waited. Find out where he went. If you find out where, you’ll be able to go after him.
Most of the house was just a house. Andraste had not left any convenient notes on the wall of the pantry saying, “By the way, I have traveled to the following location.” Her bedroom was minimalist to the point of being austere.
He found a workroom scattered with scribbled notes and rough sketches of metal objects—including swords—that made him nervous, but the notes were in a language that he couldn’t read.
Most of them looked like incidental notes anyway, not the sort where you’d lay out your nine-part thesis on how to jam a soul into a chunk of steel.
On the second floor, he found the room where he and Edmund had sat and talked to Andraste like lambs having a conversation with the butcher.
There were no suspicious bloodstains. The Dervish told himself that he hadn’t expected any, that he’d know if Edmund was dead, but it was still an enormous relief.
He yanked drawers out of the desk and found nothing but penknives, quills, and a half dozen bottles of ink, some of which were clearly dried up.
And then, just when he was about to give up in despair, he saw the corner of something sticking out from under the far side of the desk, as if it had been dropped. The Dervish reached down and scooped it up. A book, with a leather tie around it.
He recognized it immediately, even before the folded paper bird slipped from between the pages and drifted to the floor.
As if in a trance, the Dervish opened Edmund’s journal.
He saw drawings of trees, of flowers, of pinecones and Sweetness the mule.
He turned pages, reading Edmund’s complaints about the temple and notes about the weather.
Large Francis appeared, with careful notes about her people, her homeland, and the exact anatomy of her lungs.
He saw a quick gesture drawing of Dog Violet that managed to convey exactly what she thought of being asked to pose for a human.
And he saw himself. Over and over, more than anything else in the book, from quick little drawings in the margins that captured only a few lines to detailed studies obviously drawn by firelight.
The Dervish knew nothing at all about art, but he understood love when he saw it.
“Fuck,” he whispered, and then somewhere in the distance, someone hurt his wielder.
Edmund!
The sword’s response was instantaneous. The Dervish had no warning at all. The spot in his chest where the magic seemed to focus was suddenly a rope around his heart, pulling him in the direction of Edmund’s pain.
Part of his mind was reflexively trying to break the hold. Another, larger part, was shrieking that Edmund was being hurt, he was in pain, he might be dying, do something!
The Dervish tried. He banged his thigh painfully on the edge of the desk as he tried to follow.
The magic was pulling him in the right direction, but this wasn’t like a battlefield, where he only needed to dodge around a few other people to get there.
This was miles away, but still the magic dragged him forward like a compass needle, toward—
The Dervish went through the door, past the startled Gervase, and slammed into the wall. A moment later, the pain stopped.
Dead? Is he dead? Please, ancestors, let him not be dead, please let him not … No, the Dervish still had a wielder. He could feel it. Which meant that Edmund was alive and the hurting had stopped.
He sagged against the wall with a whoof of exhaled air.
“Um,” said Gervase. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” the Dervish said. The journal was heavy in his hand, but the rest of him was seized with a sudden wild elation. He didn’t need to know where the scholar was going. He could find the direction himself.
Somewhere on the other end of that invisible rope was Edmund. He just had to figure out where.