Chapter 32
Commander Sarkis gave the impression of not so much having aged as having weathered like a granite outcropping. His dark hair was shot with gray and his skin had the texture of roughly tanned leather. He was four inches shorter than the Dervish and at least a foot wider in the shoulders.
His eyes went wide and he said, “Dervish—?”
The Dervish punched him in the jaw.
He hadn’t intended to. He needed Sarkis’s help. But as soon as he saw his old commander’s face, rage swept through him like a wildfire and then Sarkis was staggering back and Zale let out a squawk of alarm and the Dervish’s knuckles stung with pain.
“The great god knows I deserved that,” his old commander said, and rushed at him.
The Dervish couldn’t get his hands up in time to ward off the attack. Sarkis’s arms went around him and grasped tight.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” Sarkis said, his voice cracking, and that was wrong, that was all wrong, the commander’s voice wasn’t supposed to sound like that, he was invincible, indomitable, he was—
Hugging the Dervish. And the Dervish lowered his head until it touched Sarkis’s shoulder and he was supposed to fight, he hated Sarkis, Sarkis was the architect of all his misery, except that he’d been embraced like this before and it was familiar and something broke loose inside his chest and the Dervish began to sob on his old commander’s shoulder as if he were dying all over again.
He didn’t know what he said in that long time out of time, while Sarkis patted his back and said meaningless soothing things in his deep rumbling voice. When the Dervish could hear himself again, what he was saying was “I hate you, I hate you, I missed you so much…”
The arms around him started to feel like a prison again, and he pulled away. Sarkis let him go at once and stood looking up at him—Sarkis was short, even if he didn’t act like it—and said, “Well?”
The Dervish wiped his eyes. “What do we do now?” He shouldn’t ask, he should rage and scream and draw his daggers and carve his hatred on Sarkis’s skin, but still …
it was the commander. Ancestors help him, asking him what to do felt normal, in a way that nothing had been normal for hundreds of years.
“I’d let you murder me a few times if you wanted,” Sarkis said. “The great god knows that you’d deserve it. But it would upset my wife and I can’t have that.”
“Your wife. I still can’t believe that.”
“Believe it,” someone said behind him, and the Dervish turned to see a plump blond woman with wide, guileless eyes, and the rather large crossbow she was aiming in his direction. “Sarkis, love, my arm is getting tired. Have you two gotten it out of your system?”
Sarkis looked at the Dervish. Zale looked at the ceiling. The Dervish, with some difficulty, pulled his eyes away from the tip of the crossbow bolt—she was aiming with alarming precision at bits that had, so far, not turned silver and which he’d prefer to keep that way—and looked at Sarkis.
“I wanted to kill you for a long time,” he said. “But it wouldn’t fix anything, would it?”
“No. I wish it did. I am so damn sorry,” Sarkis said. “I could tell you that for the next century and it would still be true and it still wouldn’t change anything.”
The Dervish took a deep breath and let it out. Rage still lay coiled under his breastbone but he felt as if a dangerous pressure relieved, the wound lanced and left to drain. “Have you seen Angharad?”
He didn’t realize how much hope Sarkis had been trying to conceal until it went out of his face. “No. I had thought maybe you … well. I knew it was a long shot.” The commander rubbed his eyes, looking older and more worn than ever.
The Dervish nodded. “You can put down the crossbow,” he told Sarkis’s wife. “I need his help.”
The commander’s wife was named Halla, and she was frankly delightful. She actually rather reminded the Dervish of Edmund. There was the same air of wide-eyed fascination and the same sense that if you didn’t keep an eye on her, she would walk off a cliff while looking up at an interesting bird.
Edmund would probably not have held a crossbow pointed at his good bits. The Dervish considered that one of his more sterling qualities.
Halla had also learned the trick of managing the commander, which the Dervish had never had much luck with. It was inspiring to watch.
“Of course I’ll help,” said Sarkis. “But I can’t just leave Halla here by herself.”
“No, of course not, dear,” Halla said, moving around the small apartment and gathering up their possessions. “That’s why I’ll come with you.”
“No. Absolutely not. This will likely be hard fighting.”
“I’m sure it will.” She began neatly folding clothes and sliding them into a pack. “Zale, will we have a wagon?”
“I’m afraid we’ll be on horseback.”
Halla grimaced. “Ugh. Well, needs must.”
“Halla, I’m serious. These are the cultists who kidnapped me and killed your uncle’s friend. They’re dangerous people.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’ll have two fierce warriors to protect me.” She winked at the Dervish.
“Halla…!”
“I don’t propose to charge headlong into battle, dear, but someone has to carry your sword.”
“Maybe Zale could do it?”
Zale, who had started folding clothes alongside Halla, looked up. “Who, me?”
“Zale’s not a warrior either, dear. I’ll hold your swords and stay well out of sight and that way, if one of you does get killed, we’ll still have the swords and they won’t fall into the hands of the cultists.
” She held Sarkis’s blade at arm’s length, frowning.
“Perhaps I can disguise them somehow. Wrap them in bolts of cloth, say.”
Sarkis stared at the ceiling and counted to ten in his own language. “But you’re not immortal, love.”
“I’m not either,” Zale pointed out.
“Yes, but I wouldn’t be as upset if you…” Both Halla and Zale stared at him, and Sarkis turned the end of the sentence into a cough. “Err, that is to say, I would be very upset, obviously, and would pursue your killers to the ends of the great god’s hells.”
“I suppose ‘You know that I value you as a friend and colleague, Zale’ was too much to hope for?”
“You know what I mean.” Sarkis looked around desperately for allies and his gaze settled on the Dervish. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“More than I would have thought possible.” The Dervish gave Sarkis his sweetest smile. “Commander, I think you’ve lost.”
Sarkis sighed. “It’s a wise man who knows when to retreat.” He narrowed his eyes. “But Halla, love, swear to me that you’ll stay away from the fighting or I’m not going to move an inch from this spot.”
“I will absolutely do my best to keep away from trouble of any kind,” Halla said, cinching up her pack and slinging it over her shoulder.
Her round face was the picture of innocence. Sarkis scowled. “I know you will. It’s just that trouble seems to have a hard time keeping away from you.”
The Dervish was all for leaving the city immediately and at once.
When Sarkis pointed out that it was past midnight and they would be moving at a snail’s pace on dark roads, the Dervish nearly hit him again.
Sarkis just folded his arms and gave him the Look—the faintly exasperated, use-your-head look that the Dervish had received a great many times, which went directly to the spine and bypassed the brain altogether.
“We can either spend the hours until dawn moving at a crawl, hoping our horses don’t step in a hole and break a leg, or we can sleep and make the same amount of distance in an hour, except that we and the horses will be well rested. You know this.”
The Dervish closed his eyes. The commander was right, and the Dervish knew he was right and he hated it and that didn’t make it less true.
A warm hand gripped his shoulder. “We’ll get him back,” Sarkis said. “We just need to do this the right way.”
There were only two people on earth that the Dervish would have admitted it to, but Sarkis was one of them. “I’m scared,” he said, to the darkness behind his eyelids.
“I know. Whenever Halla has gotten into trouble…” Sarkis’s breath went out in a whoosh.
“If I wasn’t immortal, my hair would be white by now.
” He patted the Dervish’s shoulder. “I’d tell you to sleep, but you probably won’t.
There’s a little courtyard behind the library that nobody ever uses.
You want to try to hit me again? Maybe when my wife isn’t holding a crossbow on you? Though I will hit back this time.”
“Ancestors,” said the Dervish. “I thought you’d never ask.”
In the morning, they left the city. Sarkis went back into the sword for about five minutes to heal up the black eye and the Dervish grudgingly consented to do the same for his turned ankle.
Halla and Zale exchanged a speaking look but didn’t comment.
Dog Violet said something in gnolespeech to the gnole at the stable that sent them all off into fits of laughter, but declined to translate.
He hadn’t expected Dog Violet to join them, until they went to the stable and found her there, chatting with the gnole named Brindle. “We’re going after Edmund,” the Dervish said.
“Right. Give a gnole five minutes.” She scrambled over the top of the stall door and he heard the familiar sounds of things being thrown into a pack.
“Ah … I didn’t mean…” It hadn’t even occurred to him that the gnole would want to come along. “That is, you don’t have to…”
Dog Violet’s head popped up over the door, her teeth bared. “Is knife-man going to say something stupid?”
“Ah…”
“Maybe something like ‘Oh no, this is for humans, a gnole should stay at home’?”
The Dervish, by many measures, possessed the emotional intelligence of a dying oyster, but even an oyster could have recognized that tone of voice. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “I’d be very glad to have you.”
It was with resignation that he watched her lead Greathoof out of the stable. “We’re going to have to trade off horses at the posts,” he said. “Are you sure you want to—”
Dog Violet made a scoffing sound. “A gnole’s horse will keep up with any tiny human horses. And if a gnole’s horse needs to stay at a post, stable-humans will take best care of him.”
“I believe they will,” said Zale. “At least, if they value their lives.”
Dog Violet grinned at the priest. “Lawyer-human knows.” She clambered up on Greathoof as if climbing a tree. “Come on, knife-man. We go get your mate back.”
“He’s not my—”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, humans can’t smell. Come on.”
They rode north, along the same trunk road that had brought the Dervish and Dog Violet into the city, a week and several lifetimes ago.
The Dervish had the wild thought that they might actually encounter Large Francis and her entourage if they went far enough north, and wondered if that would be a good thing.
Francis would insist on helping, and the Dervish wasn’t sure if the situation would be made better or worse by a twelve-foot-long pillbug.
“Was the ferry this slow last time?” he asked Dog Violet, as the boat crawled across the water at the end of its chain. His mare was so much shorter than Greathoof that the two of them were actually at eye level.
“A gnole thinks yes. Knife-man is just…” She made a gesture, then stopped in mid-motion. Waiting for Edmund to tell her the right word, the Dervish thought, and felt as if he’d driven one of his own daggers into his heart.
Approximately a hundred years later, the ferry reached the far side. The Dervish resisted the urge to push his horse into a gallop as soon as the mare’s hooves touched the road. He threaded through the crowd around the ferry landing and didn’t stab anyone, no matter how thoroughly they deserved it.
It was another hundred years before they reached the outskirts of the ferry landing and the road opened up before them. He looked back over his shoulder and saw his troops—ha—fall in line behind him, and finally, finally they could go.