Oathblood Read online

  “That why you’re a bit short on custom?” she asked. “Not having travelers?”

  “Nah—it ain’t market-day, that’s all. We never was much on overnighters anyway, only got three rooms upstairs. Most folk stop at Lyavor or Grant’s Hold. Always made our way on local custom. I bring you your wine, eh? You want that pie cold or het up?”

  Tarma shuddered. “Cold, cold—I’ve had enough heat and dust today.”

  “Then it won’t be but a blink—”

  The innkeeper hurried through the open door in the far wall that presumably led to the kitchen. Tarma sagged her head back down to her hands and closed her eyes.

  Leslac frowned. This was not going as he’d expected.

  The women—he’d expected them to be taller, somehow, especially the swordswoman. Cleaner, not so—shabby. Aristocratic. Silk for the sorceress, and shining steel armor for the swordswoman, not a dull buff homespun robe and a plain leather gambeson. And in his mental image they had always held themselves proudly, challengingly—shining Warriors of the Light—

  Not two tired, dusty, slouching, ordinary women; not women who rubbed their red-rimmed eyes or fought with their hair.

  Not women who avoided a confrontation.

  He studied them despite his disappointment—surely, surely there was some sign of the legend they were becoming—the innkeeper had seen it. He’d been concerned that they could take on Lord Gorley’s men and win—and wreck the inn in the process.

  After long moments of study, as the innkeeper came and went with food and drink, Leslac began to smile again. No, these weren’t Shining Warriors of the Light—these women were something even better.

  Like angels who could put on human guise, Tarma and Kethry hid their strengths—obviously to put their targets off-guard. But the signs were there, and the innkeeper had read them before Leslac had even guessed at them. But—it showed; in the easy way they moved, in the hands that never strayed too far from a hilt, in the fact that they had not put off their weapons. In the way that one of them was always on guard, eyes warily surveying the room between bites. In the signs of wear that only hard usage could put on a weapon.

  Undoubtedly they were intending to remain here—but they didn’t want Lord Gorley alerted by staying in the inn.

  Leslac mentally congratulated them on their subtlety.

  Even as he did so, however, there was a commotion at the inn door—and red-faced and besotted with drink, Lord Gorley himself staggered through it after colliding with both of the doorposts.

  Leslac nearly crowed with glee and pressed himself back into the rough stone of the corner wall. Now he’d have what he’d come so far to witness! There would be no way now for the women to avoid a confrontation!

  Tarma was sipping the last of her wine when the drunk stumbled in through the door and tripped over Warrl’s tail.

  Warrl yelped and sent ou a Mindshriek that was comprised of more startlement than pain. But it left Tarma stunned and deafened for a moment—and when her eyes cleared, the sot was looming over her, enveloping her in a cloud of stale wine fumes.

  Oh, Lady of the Sunrise, I do not need this—

  “Ish zhish yer dog?” The man was beefy, muscle running to fat, nose a red lacework of broken veins that told a tale of far too many nights like this one—nights spent drunk on his butt before the sun was scarcely below the horizon. His wattled face was flushed with wine and anger, his curly brown hair greasy with sweat.

  Tarma sighed. “Insofar as anyone can claim him, yes, he’s mine,” she said placatingly. “I’m sorry he was in your way. Now why don’t you let me buy you a drink by way of apology?”

  The innkeeper had inexplicably vanished, but there was a mug or three left in their bottle—

  The man would not be placated. “I don’ like yer dog,” he growled, “an’ I don’ like yer ugly face!”

  He stumbled back a pace or two—then, before Tarma had a chance to blink, he’d drawn his sword and was swinging at her.

  Wildly, of course. She didn’t have to move but a hand’s breadth to dodge out of his way—but that only served to anger him further, and he came at her, windmilling his blade fit to cut the air into ribbons.

  She rolled off the bench and came up on her toes. He followed so closely on her heels that she had only time to dodge, drop to her shoulder and roll out of his way again, under the shelter of another bench.

  As he kicked at her shelter, she could see that Warrl was beneath the table, grinning at her.

  You mangy flea-monger, you started this! she thought at him, avoiding the drunk’s kick, but losing her shield. She scrambled to her feet again, dodging another swing.

  :I did no such thing,: Warrl replied coolly. :It was purely accident—:

  She got a table between herself and the sot—but the drunk swung, split the table in two, and kept coming.

  Lady’s teeth, I daren’t use a blade on him, I’ll kill him by accident, she thought. And then I’ll have the townsfolk or his friends on our backs.

  She looked about her in a breath between a duck and a dodge. In desperation she grabbed a broom that was leaning up in a corner by the kitchen door.

  Since he was flailing away as much with the flat as with the edge, and since she could pick the angle with which she met his weapon, she was now effectively on equal footing. Mostly.

  He was still drunk as a pig, and mad as a hornet’s nest. And he wanted to kill her.

  She countered, blocked, and countered again; blocked the blade high and slipped under it to end up behind him.

  And swatted his ample rear with the business end of the broom.

  That was a mistake; he was angered still more, and his anger was making him sober. His swings were becoming more controlled, and with a lot more force behind them—

  Tarma looked around for assistance. Kethry was standing over in the sheltered corner beside the fireplace, laughing her head off.

  “You might help!” Tarma snapped, dodging another blow, and poking the drunk in the belly with the end of the broom. Unfortunately, the straw end, or the contest would have finished right there.

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t think of it!” Kethry howled, tears pouring down her face. “You’re doing so well by yourself!”

  Enough is enough.

  Tarma blocked another stroke, then poked the sot in the belly again—but this time with the sharp end of the broom.

  The man’s eyes bulged and he folded over, dropping his sword and grabbing his ample belly.

  Tarma ran around behind him and gave him a tremendous swat in the rear, sending him tumbling across the room—

  —where he tripped and fell into the cold fireplace, his head meeting the andiron with a sickening crack.

  Silence fell, thick as the heat, and Tarma got a sinking feeling in her stomach.

  “Oh, hell—” Tarma walked over to the fallen drunk and poked him with her toe.

  No doubt about it. He was stone dead.

  “Oh, hell. Oh, bloody hell.”

  The innkeeper appeared at her elbow as silently and mysteriously as he’d vanished. He looked at the shambles of his inn—and took a closer look at the body.

  “By the gods—” he gulped. “You’ve killed Lord Gorley!”

  “Your husband may not have been much before, Lady, but I’m afraid right now he’s rather less,” Tarma said wearily. Somewhat to her amazement, the innkeeper had not summoned what passed for the law in Viden; instead he’d locked up the inn and sent one of his boys off for Lady Gorley. Tarma was not minded to try and make a run for it—unless they had to. The horses were tired, and so were they. It might be they could talk themselves out of this one.

  Maybe.

  The Lady had arrived attended by no one—which caused Kethry’s eyebrow to rise. And she wasn’t much better dressed than a well-to-do merchant’s wife, which surprised Tarma.

  It was too bad they’d had to meet under circumstances like this one; Tarma would have liked to get to know her. She held herself quietl
y, but with an air of calm authority like a Shin‘a’in shaman. A square face and graying blonde hair held remnants of great beauty—not ruined beauty either, just transformed into something with more character than simple prettiness.

  She gazed dispassionately down on the body of her former Lord for several long moments. And Tarma longed to know what was going on in her head.

  “I’m afraid I have to agree with your assessment on all counts, Shin‘a’in,” she replied. “I shan’t miss him, poor man. Neither will anyone else, to be frank. But this puts us all in a rather delicate position. I appreciate that you could have fled. I appreciate that you didn‘t—”

  “No chance,” Kethry answered, without elaborating. She’d signaled to her partner that her damned ensorcelled blade had flared up at her the heartbeat after Lord Gorley breathed his last. Plainly his Lady would be in danger from his death. Just as plainly, Need expected them to do something about this.

  “Well.” Lady Gorley turned away from the body as a thing of no importance, and faced Tarma. “Let me explain a little something. In the past several years Kendrik has been more and more addicted to the bottle, and less and less capable. The Viden-folk took to bringing me their business, and when Kendrik hired that gang of his and began extracting money from them, Ibegan returning it as soon as it went into the treasury. No one was hurt, and no one was the wiser.”

  “What about—” Tarma coughed politely. “Begging your pardon milady, but that kind of scum generally is bothersome to young women—”

  She smiled thinly. “The men satisfied their lust without rapine—Kendrik knew I wouldn’t stand for that, and Iwas the one who saw to his comforts. One week of doing without proper food and without his wine taught him to respect my wishes in that, at least. And the one time Kendrik took it into his head to abscond with a Viden-girl—well, let us just say that his capabilities were not equal to his memories. I smuggled the girl out of his bed and back to her parents as virgin as she’d left.”

  “So that’s why—”

  “Why none of us cared to see things disturbed,” the innkeeper put in, nodding so hard Tarma thought his head was going to come off. “Things was all right—we’d warn travelers, and if they chose to disregard the warnings—” he shrugged. “—sheep was meant to be sheared, they say, and fools meant to share the same fate.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Tarma asked, then realized in the next breath what the problem was. “Ah—the bullyboys. Without Kendrik to pay ‘em and to keep his hand on ’em—”

  Lady Gorley nodded. “Exactly. They won’t heed me. I would be in as much danger from them as my people. We’re farm and tradesfolk here; we would be easy prey for them. It will be bad if I keep them, and worse if I discharge them.”

  Tarma pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Your respect, Lady, but I’ve got no wish to take on a couple dozen bad cases with just me and my partner and less than a day to take them out. But maybe if we put our heads together—”

  “You’ve got until moonrise,” Lady Gorley said, handing a pouch up to Tarma that chinked as she looked inside before stowing it away in her saddlebag. Light streaming from the back door of the inn gave Tarma enough illumination to see that more than half the coins were gold. “That is really all the time we can give you. And I’m sorry I didn’t have much to pay you for your discomfort.”

  “It’ll be enough,” Tarma assured her. “Now—you’ve got it all straight—at moonrise you raise the hue and cry after us; you offer fifty gold to the man who brings back our heads, and you turn the lads loose. They’re going to hear the word ‘gold’ and they won’t even stop to think—they’ll just head out after us. You do realize this is going to cost you in horses—they’ll take every good mount in your stables.”

  Lady Gorley shrugged. “That can’t be helped, and better horses than lives. But can you lay a trail that will keep them following without getting caught yourselves?”

  Tarma laughed. “You ask a Shin‘a’in if she can lay a trail? No fear. By the time they get tired of following—those that I don’t lose once their horses founder—they’ll have had second and third thoughts about coming back to Viden. They’ll know that you’ll never keep them on. They’ll think about the kings’ men you’ve likely called in—and the good armsmen of your neighbors. And they’ll be so far from here that they’ll give it all up as a bad cause.”

  The innkeeper nodded. “She’s right, Lady. They drifted in; they drift out just the same with no easy pickings in sight.”

  “What about that little rhymester?” Tarma asked, nodding back at the tavern door. They hadn’t noticed the minstrel trying to make himself a part of the wall until it was too late to do anything about him.

  “I’ll keep him locked up until it’s safe to let him go,” the innkeeper replied. “If I know musickers, he’ll have a long gullet for wine. I’ll just keep him too happy to move.”

  “Very well—and the gods go with you,” Lady Gorley said, stepping away from the horses.

  “Well, Greeneyes,” Tarma smiled crookedly at her partner.

  Kethry sighed, and smiled back. “All right, I’ll geas them. But dammit, that means we won’t be seeing beds for months!”

  Tarma nudged Ironheart with her heels and the battlemare sighed as heavily as Kethry had, but moved out down the village street with a faint jingling of harness. “Greeneyes, I didn’t say you should geas them to follow us now, did I?”

  “Then who—”

  “Remember that loudmouth, Rory Halfaxe? The one that kept trying to drag you into his bed? He’s in Lyavor, and planning on going the direction opposite of this place. Now if we double back and come up on his backtrail—think you can transfer the geas?”

  Leslac slumped, nearly prostrate with despair. His head pounded, and he downed another mug of wine without tasting it. Oh, gods of fortune—do you hate me?

  He couldn’t believe what he had seen—he just couldn‘t!

  First—that—farce with the broomstick. He moaned and covered his eyes with his hand. How could anyone make a heroic ballad out of that? “Her broomstick flashing in her hands—”? Oh, gods, they’d laugh him out of town; they wouldn’t need the rotten vegetables.

  Then—that Lord Gorley died by accident! Gods, gods, gods—

  “This can’t be happening to me,” he moaned into his mug. “This simply cannot be happening.”

  And as if that wasn’t enough—the collusion between Gorley’s widow and the other two to lure the gang of bullies away without so much as a single fight!

  “I’m ruined,” he told the wine. “I am utterly ruined. How could they do this to me? This is not the way heroes are supposed to behave—what am I going to do? Why couldn’t things have happened the way they should have happened?”

  Then—the way they should have happened—

  The dawn light creeping in the window of his little cubby on the second floor of the inn was no less brilliant than the inspiration that came to him.

  The way they should have happened!

  Feverishly he reached for pen and paper, and began to write—

  “The warrior and the sorceress rode into Viden-town, for they had heard of evil there and meant to bring it down—”

  KEYS

  I love locked-room mysteries, and I thought it would be fun to do one with a different setting—one in which magic was used in place of forensic detection, but magic itself was not used to create the mystery in the first place. And who better to take that setting than Tarma and Kethry?

  She stood all alone on the high scaffold made of raw, yellow wood, as motionless as any statue. She was cold despite the heat of the summer sunlight that had scorched her without pity all this day; cold with the ice-rime of fear. She had begun her vigil as the sun rose at her back; now the last light of it flushed her white gown and her equally white face, lending her pale cheeks false color. The air was heavy, hot and scented only with the odor of scorched grass and sweating bodies, but she breathed deeply, desperately of it. Soon now,
soon—

  Soon the last light of the sun would die, and she would die with it. Already she could hear the men beneath her grunting as they heaved piles of oily brush and faggots of wood into place below her platform. Already the motley-clad herald was signaling to the bored and weary trumpeter in her husband’s green livery that he should sound the final call. Her last chance for aid.

  For the last time the three rising notes of a summoning rang forth over the crowd beneath her. For the last time the herald cried out his speech to a sea of pitying or avid faces. They knew that this was the last time, the last farcical call, and they waited for the climax of this day’s fruitless vigil.

  “Know ye all that the Lady Myria has been accused of the foul and unjust murder of her husband, Lord Corbie of Felwether. Know that she has called for trial by combat as is her right. Know that she names no champion, trusting in the gods to send forth one to fight in her name as token of her innocence. Therefore, if such there be, I do call, command, and summon him here, to defend her honor!”

  No one looked to the gate except Myria. She, perforce, must look there, since she was bound to her platform with hempen rope as thick as her thumb. This morning she had strained her eyes toward that empty arch every time the trumpet sounded, but no savior had come—and now even she had lost hope.

  The swordswoman called Tarma goaded her gray Shin‘a’in warsteed into another burst of speed, urging her on with hand and voice (though not spur—never spur) as if she were pursued by the Jackals of Darkness. Her long, ebony braids streamed behind her; close enough to catch one of them rode her amber-haired partner, the sorceress Kethry; Kethry’s mare a scant half a length behind her herd-sister.

  Kethry’s geas-blade, Need by name, had awakened her this morning almost before the sun rose, and had been driving the sorceress (and so her blood-oath sister as well) in this direction all day. At first it had been a simple pull, as she had often felt before. Both Kethry and Tarma knew from experience that once Need called, Kethry had very little choice in whether or not she would answer that call, so they had packed up their camp and headed for the source. But the call had grown more urgent as the hours passed, not less so—increasing to the point where by mid-afternoon it was actually causing Kethry severe mental pain. They had gotten Tarma’s companion-beast Warrl up onto his carry-pad and urged their horses first into a fast walk, then a trot, then as sunset neared, into a full gallop. Kethry was near-blind by the mental anguish it caused. Need would not be denied in this; Kethry was soul-bonded to it—it conferred upon her a preternatural fighting skill, it had healed both of them of wounds it was unlkikely they would have survived otherwise—but there was a price to pay for the gifts it conferred. Kethry (and thus Tarma) was bound to aid any woman in distress within the blade’s sensing range—and it seemed there was one such woman in grave peril now. Peril of her life, by the way the blade was driving Kethry.