Widowmaker Page 5

  It was a look frightening in its intensity and in its implications. Any thought of forbearance abruptly withered. These men were beaten; that was true enough. All they had left to them was their contempt for Bayrd Talvalin and everything he represented, and the cold comfort that he thought them dangerous enough to deserve death.

  But because of that contempt, if he dared to let them go they would be laden with such a weight of insult as needed revenge. High clan or low, backed by powerful allies or not, they would hunt him and those dear to him. Until these ten men were dead, neither he nor his family nor his friends would ever be safe again.

  As if a chill wind had stroked across his cheek, Bayrd Talvalin shivered. He remembered the axe that had almost planed his face off his skull-bones. These…these children were just as much of a threat.

  And with that shiver came a stab of suspicion as sharp as an unseen thorn in a bunch of roses. His words hadn’t just been empty boasting. He did indeed hold the rights of justice in his own domain, and never more so than in the matter of prisoners taken under hot trod. But the man who held those rights had to know something of the law. In this Land, he needed to be not merely justiciary for both prosecution and defence; he also needed to be something of a policeman.

  Whatever that might be in Alban terms.

  There had been policemen in Drosul – or at least the constabulary of the city of Kalitzim – whose function was the solving of crime and the apprehension of criminals. Their activities had been a source of sarcastic amusement to the mercenary cadre in their barracks. So much of their success seemed to be luck, and so much of their failure apparently involved rank and privilege or the greasing of palms. Yet some of their methods had been sensible, and some had rubbed off on at least one Captain-of-Ten with nothing better to do that day.

  Those methods were nothing complex, thank the Fires; young Bayrd ar’Talvlyn had been paid to be a soldier, not a thief-taker. But there was a certain elegance about the way in which logical questions applied to evidence could lead down a crooked path towards the truth. It was just such a question that a still, small voice had uttered in the back of Bayrd’s mind.

  Who stands to profit most?

  That profit hadn’t involved horses, or cattle, or any of the other recovered plunder. Nothing so blatant. But when the question became Who would be most likely to gain from ten fanatics swearing vengeance on Clan Talvalin? then only one name came to mind.

  Lord Gerin ar’Diskan.

  His hands would be clean, whatever happened. Bayrd would have done nothing against him, nor he against Bayrd. The Talvalin Clan-Lord would have shown himself – as always – humane enough to gain the approval of everyone. Everyone, that is, who had heard only of the extreme youth of the ten raiders, but had not seen what they had done, or the way they looked, or how they wore hatred like a well-cut cloak.

  It was easier to believe than the alternative. Bayrd’s first marriage had taken place when he was nineteen, for complex dynastic reasons that seemed very unimportant now. It meant that the youngest of these ten young men was almost of an age to have been his own son, a son to take the lordship of the clan from between his hands as the last night drew darkness over his eyes. Instead, he had no son to call his own… He put that thought from his mind. It hurt him; and worse, it hurt Eskra. But what they had done hurt more.

  No matter what he might or might not do as punishment, he didn’t want to believe that they had done what they did from sheer wanton cruelty. No-one ever wanted to believe that about children and the young. There had always to be some outside influence, something to preserve a vestige of innocence. Otherwise the whole fabric of society threatened to fall apart.

  What angered Bayrd as much as anything was the simplicity of the plot, if plot it was. An elaborate, convoluted stratagem with half-a-dozen strands as tightly meshed as the rings in a coat of mail would have been a compliment of sorts, a nod in his direction that implied he was worth so much trouble. This…

  This was just insolent.

  Like the constables of Kalitzim, discovering the probable identity of a malefactor was not enough. They and he both needed proof; and in this instance, proof was impossible. Bayrd was certain that not one of the ten knew they had been manipulated, and would ridicule the suggestion if he made it. But somehow they had been induced to ride and raid through Talvalin territory rather than that of some other lord. His was the one domain in a hundred miles to either side of its borders where they would find Elthaneks being treated as – they would have said, daring to behave like – every other ordinary human being who worked their clan-lord’s land.

  And after that, the whole scheme hinged on his past reputation in the matter of such raids. Granted, none of his people had been killed before, much less murdered as brutally as those peasant farmers, but still…

  He was Bayrd Talvalin, magnanimous and forgiving, the man who treated those who preyed on his land as no more than naughty children, to be smacked on the wrist and sent home.

  Until he met real children, and killed them.

  He was being manipulated, just as much as they had been, and he could prove none of it. This was a plot that had taken all the things which made him a good man and a good lord, and had turned them into a dagger for his own throat.

  And the most disturbing part was that it felt wrong.

  For one thing, it was far too subtle for ar’Diskan. Gerin and his late father Serej were two of a kind. The ar’Diskan Clan-Lord’s crest was a black bear on the clan colours of red and white, and both men behaved as though they too were bears. Rough, direct, noisy and violent. Their idea of subtlety – and Bayrd knew it well enough, having almost lost an eye to it – was to swing a blade without the preface of a challenge.

  He’d fought a duel with old Serej, for some reason or other that he had forgotten and no-one else troubled to remember. After that, he had been Bannerman and Companion to Gerin for more than half a year. Dainty refinement was not part of that clan’s character, either in good humour or in bad. Even a paid assassin would be too much; killing an enemy at one remove would lack satisfaction.

  There was someone involved besides Gerin, and right now there was no way of learning who it was.

  * * * *

  “No answers yet?” Bayrd gave Marc a quick look that was laden with dour, sardonic amusement. His Bannerman had still not ventured a reply, much less an opinion. “Not as easy as you made it sound before, is it?”

  He closed armoured fingers on the taiken’s long hilt once more and as he drew the longsword from its scabbard Isileth Widowmaker’s edges whispered softly, a faint scrape of metal against metal. It was a sound to chill the blood, shockingly close to the final faint breath exhaled from the windpipe of a cleanly-severed neck, a gasp of protest uttered even though the head might already be rolling on the ground. Both men were already far too familiar with it.

  Marc glanced sidelong at the blade. “You had already made your mind up?” he said.

  Bayrd nodded. “I’ll tell you later.”

  Ar’Dru hadn’t seen that hopeful, hateful expression flit across young Dyrek’s face. Without the evidence of his eyes, explanations would be long, tiresome and with Marc in his present mood, ultimately unconvincing. This was neither the time nor the place for such a discussion, but Bayrd was grimly certain that it would be the last time he would hear any retainers question their lord’s decisions.

  Even so, it should have been someone other than Marc. They had been friends for a long time, but – and the realization was unsettling – there were some occasions when friendship had to be set aside. After all was said, a clan-lord’s decisions were his own, not to be helped, and certainly not to be hindered or changed, by anyone else.

  He hefted the taiken in both hands, shifting his fingers on the braided leather of the grip, and saw again the sluggish flutter of blue-white flames over the black-armoured gauntlets. This wasn’t anger, or even the lack of control that Marc had accused. It was just determination to be finished
with the ugly consequences of an ugly decision, and any lingering resentment there might have been was directed entirely at Gerin ar’Diskan.

  Bayrd lifted his gaze from the grey gleam of the sword-blade and the barely-seen azure haze that hung about it, turned towards the prisoners – and his eyebrows came together in a frown at what he saw.

  The ten had been disarmed directly they were captured, all but their tsepan daggers. Those weapons were no threat; the battle harness worn by the fully-armoured men surrounding them was proof against all but the luckiest stab with the fragile little blades, and anyway, not even the most honour-lost outcast would use one as a fighting knife.

  Each tsepan carried more than the personal crest engraved on the pommel; it carried the hope, never voiced but always present, of a quick, clean end to pain after suffering wounds that no other healer could cure. The presence of that crest was to avoid feud or clan-war, because each man’s dagger, at the last, was carried for himself.

  But now three of the youngsters had drawn their tsepanin, and Dyrek ar’Kelayr was one of them.

  Though it had looked at first like an attempt to avoid Talvalin justice, Bayrd could see that there was more to it than that. None of the three had risen from where they knelt; none had made any aggressive gesture other than the futile one of drawing weapons as useless in their present situation as so many icicles. But Bayrd Talvalin felt his hackles rising all the same. There was a tension in the air that had not been there before, an anticipation of violence more intimate than just execution.

  Dyrek looked from side to side, a cool, haughty glance that took in his companions and dismissed everyone else as unworthy of his notice. “We deny your rights, ar’Talvlyn. We deny your justice. We deny your lordship, and we give you our defiance.”

  “Are you offering to fight me for your life?” Bayrd had been half-expecting something like this for a long while, and the only surprise was that the supercilious whelp had take so long to get around to a challenge.

  Except that this was not a challenge.

  Dyrek ar’Kelayr put his head back and half-hooded his eyes behind their lids before subjecting Bayrd to a disdainful scrutiny. Bayrd was hard pressed to decide what he felt more: offence, or sombre amusement. The haughty expression would have done credit to the late Overlord Albanak himself, but on the face of a twenty-year-old kailin it looked ridiculous.

  “We would not pollute our swords by letting that wizard-forged blade touch them,” the boy said. “And we will not pollute our blood by letting that blade spill it. We do not fear you, ar’Talvlyn.” For the first time his voice was growing unsteady. “But you should fear the Red Serpent. We will be avenged.” He nodded once, and watched the other two young prisoners as they exchanged their daggers. Then he nodded again, and watched without a flicker of visible emotion as each gave the other his tsepan back again.

  Point first, and under the ear, where the big blood­vessels ran.

  In the instant of shocked silence that followed, and even as the corpses began to fall, ar’Kelayr turned his own tsepan over in his hand. There was no-one to exchange it with, and thus an instant’s deadly hesitation among the men surrounding the prisoners before any of them moved to stop him. It was all the time he needed.

  In that instant he stabbed the tsepan upward under his raised chin. The dagger’s needle point went through the taut skin almost without resistance, pierced the roof of his mouth and drove into his brain. His lips moved, but whether he was attempting some dramatic parting words or just another cold smile, he completed neither. Bayrd could see a thin glitter of steel behind the boy’s teeth as blood seeped between them, and he saw the life go out of those scornful eyes like the flame fading from an empty lamp.

  Dyrek ar’Kelayr sagged sideways to the ground, but he was dead before his upright body even lost its balance.

  * * * *

  Bayrd-arluth Talvalin wiped the Widow Maker clean and ran the long blade back into its scabbard. A single ribbon of blue fire ran snakelike along the steel as though burning brandy had been mixed with the sheen of blood. It swirled briefly and vanished as though it had never been there. Bayrd closed his eyes and stared at the glowing afterimage etched on the darkness inside them. The warriors of his household might be regarding him with a new respect, but right now he felt drained, and weary, and just a little sick.

  Marc ar’Dru looked very sick indeed, and very shocked. “I thought you would have let the others go,” he said. “After that.” There was no reply. “I mean, Bayrd-ain, three of them—”

  “Saved me some effort,” said Bayrd, hiding how he felt behind the brutal words. “That was all.” He swung up into Yarak’s saddle and turned the little mare’s head towards Dunrath and home. “Marc, you talk to me as though I was the hero of some storymaker’s tale. But what I’ve just done would make me the villain. Don’t you think?”

  Now it was Marc’s turn to say nothing. He mounted his own black Andarran gelding and fell into step beside his lord and friend. There were times when all a friend needed to do was listen, and he suspected that this was just such a time.

  “I’m neither hero nor villain,” said Bayrd. “But I’m the lord of a turbulent domain, trying to keep it as safe as I can in turbulent times. And sometimes that means…”

  He glanced back to the row of lances sunk half their length into the ground, between the standing stones, and at the head spiked on each one, and he shrugged. There was little else he could do. “Maybe I should have killed all ten of them. It sounds as though I’m already being blamed for it. But I think I can trust the five who are left. For a while. At least until they get clear of Talvalin territory.”

  Marc looked at the heads, and his mouth twisted slightly. “And you know that you can trust those others. Wasn’t that what you were going to say?”

  “No. Otherwise I’d have said it. But I’ve been fair, yes? They killed five of my people, I killed five of theirs. Even if three of them saved me the trouble. But if there’s a next time, I’ll take two for one. Or five. Or ten. Or as many as it takes. And anyway, your reputation’s still clean.”

  Ar’Dru coloured slightly. “That wasn’t my concern,” he said, and if the denial came out a little too quickly, Bayrd had the good grace to ignore it. “At least Gerin knows you can’t be taken lightly any more.”

  “If it was Gerin after all.”

  “Still harping on that string? Who else could it be? How many enemies have you?”

  “Enough. More now than before. And even so…” His voice trailed off, and though his eyes stared at the horizon for a few seconds, Marc guessed that he wasn’t looking at the landscape. Or at least, any landscape he could see. Then Bayrd came back abruptly from the brief daydream and shook himself as though awakening from sleep. “I need to talk to Eskra about this. The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t even have an Alban feel about it.”

  Marc looked quizzically at him, then forced a laugh. “I know all that. Because it’s too devious for simple sword-swingers like you and me. Think again!”

  Bayrd returned the meagre laugh with a smile, and though it still lacked form a little, it was evidence that the bleak mood was leaving both of them at last. Those killings would stay with him for a long time, but privately, not in public. How he felt about them was his own affair.

  “A pleasant change from being told I think too much,” he said. “But remember what I told you. Gerin wants…” Bayrd glanced backward again. “He wants my head, not my good name. And he wants to take it himself.”

  “Then why do you worry about Eskra and the children?”

  “Because, old friend, I suspect that Gerin ar’Diskan has found himself retainers and Companions far less squeamish than you. Ten years ago, we were just mercenaries in the pay of Kalitz. There wasn’t land and title and the inheritance of both to get in the way of a straightforward feud. Times have changed, and not for the better. You heard that arrogant little swine.”

  “I heard. I didn’t like it.”

&nb
sp; “Pride is one thing, but it’s being warped. And who’s doing it. Remember: who stands to benefit?”

  “Ar’Diskan, obviously.”

  “Not obviously. I told you why. At least, none of them named him.” Bayrd shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. “And even though both clans wanted the Dunrath lands, I can’t see any son of ar’Kelayr supporting his father’s rival, even to bring me down.”

  “The boy didn’t name Lord Vanek either,” Marc pointed out. “Not even at the end, as a threat. Just the Red Serpent – whoever he might be.”

  “No Alban I’ve ever heard of. So…not an Alban.”

  Marc ar’Dru smiled sourly. “Name the old High Lord of your choice, then. Even the ones we call our allies. Gelert of Prytenon, Yakez of Elthan, Torhan of Cerenau. All of their children. All of their lord’s-men. Everyone who’s lost something because of us.”

  “And how would someone not an Alban persuade people like young Dyrek and the others like him to have anything to do with them? You saw. You heard.” Bayrd opened his water-canteen and took a swig, making a face at the brackish, leathery taste. “We’ll save this problem for Eskra. She’s Elthanek. She knows more about the way they think than I do.”

  “And might have some answers?”

  Bayrd grinned crookedly and shook his head. “Knowing her, just more convoluted questions. We’ll see.”

  3

  Serpent

  For the sixth summer in succession Dunrath-hold echoed to the sound of building. Saws rasped their way through wood and stone, hammers thudded against timber or clinked on masons’ chisels, pulleys squealed, and always in the background was the rumble of the ponderous fifty-man treadmills that powered the largest cranes.