The Warlord's Domain Page 8

  "Look there." Kyrin spoke very softly, pointing with her telek at what had drawn her attention. A little puff of something that looked like smoke was trailing into view from beyond the hay-barn, and even as they watched, it was joined by a second. "Fire? Or breath?"

  "Doesn't matter. It's not one of us; that's enough." A swirl of wind-driven snow slapped Aldric in the face, making him flinch. "Stay here. Mind your back. I'm going round that way"—he jerked his chin at the other side of the barn—"and if he comes out first, kill him."

  "What if—"

  "Just make sure it's him, not me." He left his great-bow where he had propped it against the wall, winked at her—though that could have been a flake of snow in his eye—and moved quickly out of sight.

  Kyrin stared for several seconds into the whiteness, fixing his vague outline in her mind just in case of accidents, then returned her attention to the barn. The snow flurries were dying away into a heavy, steady fall like those she remembered from back home in Valhol, hard to see through and almost hypnotic to watch. She considered the telek for a moment, then thumbed its safety-slide into place, shoved it through her belt and set an arrow to her bowstring.

  Better the weapon you know than the weapon you just claim to know, she thought with a crooked little smile. At least Aldric hadn't asked her whether she would be able to put an arrow through another human being. Her answer might have shocked him. These people were trying to kill her, and had only themselves to blame for the—

  How the man had crept up behind her was all too plain, with the falling snow deadening both sight and hearing, but the only reason why he hadn't shot her in the back must be that he'd spotted she was female and was minded to a little fun before he finished her off.

  That was his mistake. For all that he was a taulath and a professional assassin skilled at killing people, he had small ability at attempted rape, especially when the subject of his unwelcome attentions was more than just a frightened farm-girl.

  He got as far as wrapping his left forearm around her throat and—instead of jamming a dagger under her ribs as the neck-pressure suggested he might do—began pawing at her breasts with the other hand. Mauled, outraged, but still very much alive, Kyrin dropped the bow and its nocked arrow and reached up with both hands.

  She snapped his little finger like a twig, then wrenched the pain-loosened forearm from her neck and used it as a lever to hurl her attacker to the ground. The taulath landed with a jarring thud on his tail-bone and the back of his skull, an impact that knocked even the uncompleted scream of pain out of his lungs as no more than a grunt.

  "Bastard!" hissed Kyrin, clawing the telek out of her belt.

  "I'll gut you for that, bitch!" the man snarled back with his first regained breath, rolling over with a shortsword gripped in his uninjured hand and already clear of its sheath. Kyrin froze—because the words and the accent were both Alban.

  That shocked hesitation was almost enough to kill her, for it let him regain his feet, his balance and enough time to lash out the beginning of a cut with the taipan shortsword—also Alban, she could see that now—which would have taken her face off. The pause when time went slow was almost long enough for her to die, but not quite. Her telek snapped back on line and jolted in her hand to put a single lead-shod dart into his eye.

  Kyrin's heart was beating too quickly and too loudly by far, seeming almost to advertise her presence, and there was an acid queasiness in her stomach which came not from the killing but where the killed man came from. The implications of that, already running through her brain, were too ugly to be believed and too urgent to be kept secret for longer than it took to find Aldric again—somewhere out there in the snowstorm, not knowing that the men he stalked were his countrymen, trained as he had been himself and most certainly more ruthless. They were people he might hesitate to kill for one reason or another, as she had almost hesitated, whereas to them he was a job of work, payment on completion and no more.

  She was not so panicked that she was about to do something stupid; but whatever she did, she would have to do it fast…

  The man lying at Aldric's feet wasn't dead, but he would likely wish he was when he came to his senses and the egg-sized lump at the back of his head made its presence felt. Shooting the assassin would have been as easy, but given the chance of choice Aldric had left him alive. Why, he didn't know. But he wasn't about to correct the error by killing a helpless enemy, good sense though that might have been.

  Instead, he came very close to killing Kyrin as her anonymous shape appeared out of the falling snow. His telek was leveled and his fingers were already putting four of the necessary five pounds' pressure on the weapon's long trigger before he saw just who it was aimed at and twitched the muzzle to one side.

  Kyrin's face was pale enough already, and the experience of staring down the bore of a weapon whose power she had had demonstrated barely seconds earlier was enough to leave her as white as the falling snow.

  "Doamne' Diu!" he snarled. Alone, things would have been easier, since with Ivern and Dryval and all the others away from the steading, anyone else would have been an enemy and could be dealt with as such. Despite, or maybe because of her courage, Kyrin tied his hands by refusing to hide. But there was another way out, if the snow continued to fall as heavily as it was doing now; a way out in the most literal sense.

  "Back to the stables. The horses are ready to go; we'll mount up and get out of here while the weather holds bad."

  "You mean run?'''

  "Escape sounds better. We're still outnumbered—"

  "Barely! They'll be easier than the others—"

  "No, dammit! I know more about tulathin than you do. We've been lucky so far—"

  "There's no such thing as luck!"

  "Then we've—" His patience gave way at last and he grabbed her by the arm. "Argue later, for God's sweet sake. But right now, mover

  Kyrin opened her mouth to say something savage; then the focus of her eyes moved from his face to a place behind him and her heel hooked round behind his knee so that they both went tumbling sideways. Two bolts from the three crossbows she had seen in the instant they were leveled went scything through the snowy air where they had stood and exploded sparks and splinters from the hay-barn wall. And that left one.

  As Aldric rolled from the fall and back to his feet, Widowmaker came from her scabbard with a whisper of steel on wood… and then froze halfway to a guard position as the man with the last loaded crossbow walked forward slowly, enjoying his moment of absolute superiority. Behind him, the other two slung their missile weapons and drew shortswords for what would now be only butchery.

  "Aldric Talvalin," said the first taulath. He spoke excellent Alban, with a Pryteinek accent, so that Aldric glared hatred. The man's crossbow wasn't aimed, but pointing nonchalantly at the ground… for now.

  "Keep the girl safe," said the hateful Alban voice behind the hood. "Girls are for dessert."

  "Sweets are bad for you," said Aldric, deliberately using the highest form of the Alban language as an unsubtle insult. It was the way a clan-lord would address a beggar, if the clan-lord deigned to communicate with more than just his riding-quirt.

  The taulath's crossbow came up, steadied, sighted on Aldric's forehead… and loosed. Blue fire exploded unsummoned from Widowmaker's pommel-stone and enveloped her blade in the instant of the missile's flight. The longsword shifted to guard in a flicker of hot blue-white light, and emitted a shrill metallic screech as her edges met the accelerating crossbow bolt and sheared it point to nock in two. Aldric hid disbelief behind a hun-gry feral grin and whipped the blue-burning taiken through to an attack posture—

  And then there was a slap of impact and the center of the taulath's hood went explosively concave. As his companions dived for cover, the assassin took a single tottering step backward and fell. Aldric matched his movement with a raking stride forward that slammed his heel square into the center of the masked face, then brought Isileth Widowmaker down with all hi
s force onto the crown of the hooded head.

  The taulath lay quite still in the snow, split to the middle of the chest, crumpled and bloody and somehow smaller now. The other tulathin were nowhere to be seen.

  "What—what happened?" Kyrin had spent the past few seconds face downward in the snow, displaying good sense for what Aldric considered was the first time in far too long. "I thought you were dead!!"

  "Exaggerated rumors." Aldric's sardonic smile was not a particularly pleasant thing to see, especially since it was spattered with the dead man's blood. "Now, quick, and quiet: to the stables."

  "I said what happened?"

  "Slingshot." He augmented the laconic answer by turning her hand palm-up and dropping into it what looked like a small egg. Kyrin glanced down—then made a shocked little noise as she realized exactly what he meant, dropped the still-bloody lead slug into a snowdrift and scrubbed her smeared hand hard against the leg of her riding-breeches. The slug had been completely round when it left the sling, but now it was slightly flattened—because a human skull can always put up some resistance, even to a slung lead shot…

  "Who killed him—not you?"

  "I wish…" Aldric pushed open the stable door and led the way in with the muzzle of his telek. Apart from agitated horses, the place was empty. "No, I just made sure. He shot at me, and then that thing took part of his head off. The other two got out of sight; they're still out there somewhere." He swung up into Lyard's saddle, leaving one foot free of its stirrup so that he could lean sideways, kailin-style, along the horse's neck, and looked back at Kyrin. "So are the others, the tulathin in white who killed him."

  "More tulathin! Friends of yours?"

  "Just more assassins. They don't want the first squad to kill me—that's the only good thing about them. As for what they want, I think it's me again. Alive, this time."

  "No encouragement to stay."

  "All right, you win." Aldric laughed, a harsh bark of sound with something of a tremor in it even now. "Let's go!"

  They rode out of the stable and the blizzard closed around them in an icy, impenetrable curtain of white, whirling around black horse and gray, roan packpony and bay. It struck their faces like chilled feathers, enfolded them, sifted across their tracks and bleached the vagueness of their outlines until not even the trained eyes of a taulath could have told which mass of white was horse and which was rider, and which was merely drifting snow.

  And by the time one or other of the tulathin had both time and safety enough to look those looked for were gone.

  Chapter Four

  There was confusion in Cerdor. To those who had lived there during the past thirteen days, it felt as if there had never been anything except confusion in the city, ever since the king had died and all his lords save two had fled back to their own lands. It had little to do with that death anymore, regardless of what the rumors said, but had a far more sinister source that even rumor was reluctant to touch upon: the uncertainty of powerful men.

  Granted that King Rynert's death had been the first cause of all the trouble, still it had stemmed less from his passing than the manner of it. That had been interpreted not merely by uninformed second- and third-hand sources but by men who had been there in person as the action of an overly-ambitious and haughty clan-lord—Hanar Santon—slighted over some matter by the dead king. That the truth of the matter was very different had no significance now, for the error had gathered its own momentum and was impossible either to disprove or to stop for all that its consequences were already spreading across Alba like plague-marks covering the face of a once beautiful woman.

  There had been no meeting of the Alban Crown Council since that night, not even to vote on their establishment of a regency to rule the country—Rynert having failed to leave an heir. Most of the lords present at that last fateful meeting were now watching each other from the dubious safety of their respective citadels, setting to rights the fortifications which long years of peace had allowed to fall into disrepair and mustering enfeoffed lesser lords to their defense. None would listen to reason; not since they had seen what they thought was reason conversing with a hired assassin and moments later slashed open and slain on the steps of his own throne…

  "At least there are no declarations of faction yet." Hanar Santon patted the sheets of dispatch reports together, aligning their edges with punctilious neatness for the tenth time since their delivery half an hour before.

  "Yet." His companion's voice was without inflection, neither echoing nor squashing Hanar's optimism. "That doesn't mean anything, either way." If there was cynicism in the statement, it was not the studied art practiced by younger men. Aymar Dacurre had had many years of experience in which to get his practice right. The old clan-lord had as much faith as anyone else in his fellow men; he simply didn't anticipate it without proof.

  "But you heard the names, didn't you? Powerful high-clan-lords, all of them."

  Aymar sighed. These children, he thought. They learn history, but they never learn from it. As if the mere fact of being high-clan-lords was enough to absolve them of blame for anything… It was all written down in Ylver Vlethanek, and the Book of Years was being echoed far too closely for Aymar Dacurre's comfort. The same postures of pugnacious defense had been adopted five hundred years before, and by the ancestors pi the same men who were adopting them today. Those disagreements had become the Clan Wars, and so far as Dacurre could see it would require very little force to push the present situation over into a repetition of the conflict which had left such a bloody stain on Alban history. But now there was another factor to take into account, a factor which the old lords had not needed to worry over and which their descendants either failed or refused to consider. The source of the push: the Drusalan Empire.

  If what Aldric Talvalin had said was true—and Dacurre had seen no reason to disbelieve the young man's words whether they were heard at first hand or related through his foster-father Gemmel—the Empire had been casting speculative glances toward its neighbor for some time. What galled most was the reason behind it all; not expansion by conquest, or even simple acquisitiveness, but simply so that a bureaucrat could continue to justify his function.

  The military dictator who styled himself Grand Warlord had lost most of his influence in the Western Empire when the new Emperor Ioen had belied his youth and revealed that he possessed a mind of his own, rather than the collection of thoughts and opinions borrowed from the Warlord like so many of his predecessors. The Emperor had negotiated peace—or at least pacts of mutual nonaggression—with all the countries on his borders by revoking the unpopular provincial annexations that were the source of so much unrest. He and his advisers had taken what at first seemed considerable loss of face until it became clear that they had lost nothing. More, they had gained the respect of many on all sides who had grown weary of the constant brutal round of rebellion and suppression in provinces seized for no better reason than that their and the Empire's frontiers ran together for longer than a given minimum distance. But without war, the position of Woydach became superfluous, and Warlord Etzel faced redundancy, loss of rank and power and privilege—and the long-leashed vengeance of all those who had survived the trampling of his rise to power.

  The danger had become clear almost five years ago, during an insignificant incident which had exploded into scandal and slaughter with the resurrection of a long-dead sorcerer and the butchery of all save one of Alba's foremost high-clan families, the Talvalins. The idea behind that had been for the Imperial legions to intervene, as they had done before in other places, to restore "equilibrium and peace" as the then-Emperor interpreted the term; an intervention whose payment was invariably the province or country which it liberated. That had been the first indication of what was to be a constant threat just beyond the horizon, and one which had lately grown still more significant.

  During the course of the past year, after acrimonious exchanges at all levels of the Imperial Senate, the Grand Warlord had split away from the
Emperor's "pacifist" faction and had retired to the old capital of Drakkesborg. There he had set up an Eastern Empire, Woydek-Hlautan—the Warlord's Domain in the guttural Drusalan language—whose political aims were those of the old emperors of the Sherban dynasty rather than those of their milksop descendant: bring unity by the swiftest means. Swiftest of all those means was force of arms and of course, while the "Empire" was at war, it required a supreme military commander, a Grand Warlord, once more.

  Alban foreign policy had never been particularly subtle or ingratiating where the Empire was concerned. Lord Dacurre knew that much even before he had begun working his way through the archive records of past Council meetings. He could remember several occasions when his had been the sole dissenting voice against the condoning of acts of piracy against Imperial shipping—and to his shame, the two meetings where he had agreed that arms and financial support should be tendered to insurrections in the Imperial provinces now freed by Emperor Ioen's policy of conciliation. At least he'd been able to prevent the issue of letters of marque, which would have been equivalent to a secret declaration of war on the Ocean-Sea; Cernuan and Elherran privateers were not the most controllable of auxiliary troops, and he had said as much, to the great offense of Lord Diskan of Kerys in Cerenau.

  And then other things had started coming to light, like drowned corpses during a spring thaw and smelling about as sweet. Aymar Dacurre had discovered things in the Archive which had never been mentioned by the late King Rynert, for all that they had been written down by assiduous hanan-vlethan'r—the court recorders who noted everything of significance for all that their writings were often edited later. These records were not edited, and it galled Dacurre to realize that had his fellow councillors seen what had been written there, they would not now be peering at each other and the rest of the country over ramparts. What he had seen, and what he had read, had been the truth behind Rynert's version of what Aldric Talvalin had been doing in the Empire, and in Seghar and—most significantly of all—in Egisburg where Dewan ar Korentin had died. Considering such things, he was astonished that the Imperial threat had not materialized already in the form of warships off the Alban coast, and that nonappearance had given him cause to wonder what Aldric was doing in the Eastern Empire—or to it—that might keep its ambitious Grand Warlord so busy.