Masques s-1 Page 13

  Edom stood over him, his attention momentarily diverted to Aralorn. Half-raised in his right hand, he held a sword that was not the sword he’d been using in the sparring match. It glowed gently, with a pulsating lavender light.

  The sight of it sent a cold chill up Aralorn’s back as she recognized the weapon for what it was: a souleater. The last of them was supposed to have been destroyed centuries ago—but, she reminded herself grimly, that was storytelling for you: You could only trust it so far.

  Even minor wounds from a souleater could be mortal.

  The section of the ledge that she stood on was just far enough above Edom to be out of the sword’s reach. Crying out an alarm to the camp, she drew her knife and shifted it lightly by the blade in a thrower’s grip. At this distance she didn’t even need to aim, so she had it in the air before he would have been able to see what it was she threw. He certainly shouldn’t have been able to dodge it, but her blade landed harmlessly on the ground behind him.

  The speed of his move told her that he was a much better fighter than he had shown himself to be. Easily good enough that he could have fooled her into thinking him unskilled if he’d wanted to. Darranians being singularly prejudiced against women, she thought, Edom probably simply hadn’t bothered.

  His face, revealed more by the light of the souleater than the modest campfire, appeared older—although that could simply have been an effect of the light. He smiled at her.

  She was unarmed against him. Normally that wouldn’t have worried her, but the souleater made the situation anything but normal. She could only hope to hold out until someone from the camp got there. Preferably lots of someones.

  All the shapes that she could take quickly were suited to her chosen trade as a spy: the mouse, several types of birds, a few insects. Nothing that would hold off an experienced swordsman for long enough to keep both her and Wolf alive.

  She took an apparently involuntary step sideways, away from Edom, and lost her footing. She made sure that the fall carried her past Wolf’s ledge and on down the hill into some brush.

  Edom had two options, either he would follow her down, getting more distance between that sword and Wolf, or he would turn to finish Wolf off—giving her the extra few seconds that she needed. She planned for either—and he turned back to finish his business with Wolf.

  She chose the first form that she could think of; it was deadly, though small. The icelynx had no trouble with the steep climb and launched herself at Edom’s back before he even had his sword raised at Wolf.

  Warned by the brief shadow she caused when she ran in front of the fire, Edom turned—sweeping aside her rush with his sword arm, but not before she raked his back with her formidable claws. Hissing, she faced him as she crouched between him and Wolf, still held captive on the ground.

  Pale sword and paler cat feinted back and forth: she, just out of reach of the lethal blade; he, careful not to expose himself to the poisonous fangs of the icelynx.

  Suddenly, Edom spoke softly as if not to antagonize the cat, though his tone carried anxious desperation. “It’s Aralorn. She’s a shapeshifter, don’t you see it? She’s here to destroy us, betray us. I came up to ask Wolf about something, and I found her here, with Wolf like that. You’ve all heard of the arcane practices of shapeshifters. Help me before she kills him. Quick now.”

  Aralorn didn’t have to look to see what her nose had belatedly informed her. A half dozen armed people from camp had just shown up to rescue the wrong person. They were too far to do anything—yet. It wouldn’t take them long to reach her.

  She couldn’t speak when in animal form without more preparation—which she was too busy to do—and so was without her most formidable weapon.

  Edom continued, even as he tried to maneuver closer to Wolf. “I’ve heard that shapeshifters need to kill when the moon is full. I guess that Wolf, out here alone, seemed an easy victim. I found this sword near, it must be Wolf’s. She seems afraid of it.”

  Aralorn knew that she had to do something before the time to act was gone entirely. If he succeeded, Wolf would be dead. Disregarding the sword, she leapt at his throat while Edom was still distracted by the sound of his own voice.

  She missed as he threw himself flat on the ground. However, Edom managed to nick her with the sword as she passed him. Her rear leg became icily numb and folded underneath her, but worse was the strange sucking sensation that consumed her. The sword was alive, and it was hungry.

  Edom quickly regained his feet. On three legs, fighting the pull of the sword, she didn’t have much of a chance. Aralorn watched as the sword descended.

  Abruptly, it was jerked out of its intended path. Aralorn could feel the sword’s intense disappointment as Edom was suddenly consumed in flames. The smell of burning flesh offended her feline-sensitive nose almost as much as the light bothered her nocturnal eyes.

  Apparently, someone—she found out later that it was Stanis—had finally thought to remove the ropes holding Wolf down. The spells that allowed the ropes to hold him unable to move or work magic didn’t keep someone from simply pulling them off.

  Wolf did a more thorough job of burning Edom than was absolutely necessary, but then it must have been maddening to lie there and know what was going on without being able to do anything about it.

  She yowled at him demandingly. With her leg numb and the odd dizziness that accompanied the wound, she was stuck where she was—too close to the flames. He also made her nervous, putting so much effort into burning a dead body. He needed a distraction. When the yowl didn’t do it, she rolled until she could bite him on the ankle, hard enough that he could feel it, but not hard enough to release the venom in the glands underneath her fangs.

  Abruptly, she was gathered up and set gently down on his bedroll. Wolf grabbed his staff from wherever he put it when he wasn’t using it and balanced it on its feet so that he could examine her wound in more certain light. She noticed with interest that the rest of the camp was staying well away from them. Well, Wolf’s pyrotechnics had been pretty impressive.

  Wolf traced a quick design over the wound with a finger; Aralorn decided that it was to break the sword’s hold rather than close the wound, since human magic-users were not the best healers. Nothing seemed to change. He frowned and traced it again, and this time she could feel the power that he used. Still nothing happened. She meowed at him nervously. He ignored her and chanted a few words.

  Abruptly he stood and looked toward the crispy skeleton that was all that was left of Edom. Aralorn rolled to stand shakily on her three good legs to see what he was looking at. At first she didn’t see it, but a flicker of movement caught her eye. It was the sword. Edom, or the thing that was Edom, had kept its grip on the sword. Now it lay a good foot away from the body. Except for the flicker that caught her eye at first, she hadn’t seen it move again—but it was undeniably closer to her than it had been when she’d first seen it.

  The coldness that numbed her leg seemed abruptly to be spreading. It could have been her imagination, spurred by the thought that the sword was coming for her. Aralorn lost her precarious balance and fell, missing exactly what Wolf did.

  With a harsh, almost human cry of anguish that she heard only partly though her ears, the sword broke. Abruptly, the numbness ceased, and for a brief moment the pain made her wish it back; then it was only a small cut that bled a little.

  The icelynx twitched its stubby tail and exploded to its feet with legendary speed. When she was sure all her legs were working, Aralorn arched purring against Wolf, who was still kneeling beside the blankets.

  When she’d stood, she heard someone cry out, reminding her that there was an audience. Looking at all the fear and hostility in the surrounding faces, Aralorn decided that it might defuse matters if they weren’t being reminded that she was a shapeshifter. She transformed herself into her usual shape and dusted off the innkeeper’s son’s tunic that was looking the worse from her roll down the wet hillside. Surreptitiously, she kept a close ey
e on the others. She’d expected them to be worried about her, but they were all staring at Wolf.

  He had furnished an excellent display of what happens when a wizard with his strength lost his temper. They all must have known that he was powerful, but knowing something and seeing it were different matters.

  Most people also lacked the casual acceptance of gore that mercenaries had. It didn’t help that Wolf didn’t wear his mask to sleep in, and his horribly scarred visage had been clearly revealed in the flaring light. He wore his mask now, but the knowledge of what lay underneath it was with them all. What was really needed at that moment was someone to take control.

  Aralorn looked around to see if she could find Myr, but he was conspicuous by his absence. There was always the possibility that he was still asleep, unaffected by the magic disturbance that had waked the rest of the camp; but, given what she knew about him, Aralorn thought that unlikely. The noise alone should have brought him out.

  As the thought crossed her mind, Myr—his clothes covered with bits of brush and blood—took the same path down the side of the hill that she had. Plague it. She must have woken him up when she went to check on the horses. If he’d been following her around, there was a good chance that he thought that she’d been the one who murdered the guards. As she had not been trying to hide anything, her footprints would be much more conspicuous than Edom’s.

  Myr ignored the commotion in favor of investigating the blackened corpse. Aralorn wondered how much he hoped to learn from the scorched, skeletal remains, and suspected he was using the time to think. When he stood up, he seemed slightly paler, though it could have been a trick of the light.

  Composedly, he directed his question at Wolf. “Who was it?”

  “Edom,” answered Wolf, his chilling voice even rougher than usual. If Wolf’s hand hadn’t been locked on her shoulder with a bruising grip, Aralorn would have thought him unaffected by the events of the night. It was obvious from the incredulous looks they directed at Wolf that most in the little gathering were disturbed by his calmness.

  “Is he the victim or the attacker?” asked Myr, voicing the question that was on almost everyone’s mind.

  “The attacker and the victim, though he didn’t intend to be the latter,” answered Aralorn, deciding to take part in her defense. Myr, at least, had already known what she was. She continued to tell them what she had done and the discovery of the dead guards. “I came to see if Wolf wanted to help track him down and found Edom with his nasty little sword drawn, standing over Wolf.”

  An unfamiliar voice asked, “How do we know she’s telling the truth? She could have laid a spell on Master Wolf so that he thinks that she has the right of it. Shapeshifters can do things like that. Edom was just a boy. Why would he attack Wolf? As for magic rituals, I spent three days teaching him how to move a stick without touching it. He didn’t have hardly any magic at all.”

  Wolf spoke, and even the most unobservant could see that he was not in control of his temper yet. “I assure you”—he looked at the man who’d spoken, and the man took a quick step back and stumbled over a rock—“I am certain of what took place tonight.”

  Silence fell.

  Wolf’s gaze found the ropes that had been left tangled on the ground. He gestured and the ropes burst into flame so hot it was blue and white rather than orange. The three or four people nearest them flinched, even Myr.

  “Also,” growled Wolf in a voice like a coffin dragged over rock, “the sword Edom fought with was a souleater. It did not belong to me. Aralorn, with her shapeshifter blood, could not have held anything so unnatural for long enough to draw it.”

  Good to know, Aralorn thought. In the unlikely event of her running into another one.

  Myr said, “Our guards were dead before Aralorn found them.”

  Tobin spoke up from his position as Stanis’s shadow, his eyes on the blackened bones. “Edom had a lot of books in his tent written in Darranian.”

  There was a brief silence. Aralorn almost smiled as she saw the meaning of Tobin’s words echo in the minds of all present. It was Tobin’s testimony that bore the most weight. A shapeshifter, being, after all, native to the Rethian mountains, was better than a Darranian. If Edom was a Darranian, it put an entirely different light on the events of the night.

  All the same, nobody but Myr met her eyes as they left to collect the bodies.

  They buried the guards in rough graves dug in the night, as Wolf said that it was the best. He had counteracted the runespell as best he could, but the runes enacted on the living flesh of dying people were stronger than they might otherwise be. He never made clear the exact purpose of Edom’s runes, but he said that burying the bodies would give strength to his own spells.

  When the last shovelful of dirt had been spread Wolf raised his hands and spoke words of power and binding. It was coincidence, Aralorn knew if no one else did, that it started pouring rain at the moment Wolf finished speaking.

  The huddled group of people stood uneasily for a minute under the rain. The sting of death was no new thing to any of them, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. They all shared guard duty, and it could have been any of them. None held any illusions that they would have escaped better than Pussywillow had. The magic they had witnessed this night had its effect as well. Most of them were not quite comfortable with magic even though they could work a touch of it themselves.

  Gradually, they drifted back to their tents until Aralorn, Myr, and Wolf were the only ones left by the new graves.

  Myr hit the stone he was standing near with a clenched fist, hard enough to break the skin. He spoke with quiet force. “I am tired of feeling like a cow waiting for slaughter. If we didn’t realize before this that the ae’Magi is just biding his time until there isn’t something more interesting to turn his attention to, we know that now. Edom is . . . was too young to be anything but a minor servant, and we almost didn’t stop him in time. When we face the ae’Magi, we don’t stand a chance.”

  “Edom was older than he looked, and more than a minor servant if he worked the runes that were on the bodies,” commented Wolf calmly, having recovered most of his usual control. “Carrying and hiding a souleater from me is not much easier. Don’t make the same mistake that the ae’Magi is: He is not invincible.”

  “You think that we have a chance against the ae’Magi?” Myr’s tone was doubtful.

  “No, but we can bother him for longer than he thinks that we can,” said Aralorn briskly. “Now, children, I think that it is time for us to go to sleep. Don’t forget that we have the sanitary facilities to dig in the morning. Wolf, if you don’t mind, I think that everyone would be a little more comfortable if I sleep in your camp rather than the tent I’ve been sharing.” Me, too, she thought, I’ll be much happier here. “Let them meet their shapeshifter in the light of day.”

  SIX

  Somewhere in the darkness, a nighthawk cried out in defeat, and the mouse escaped for another night. Aralorn sympathized with the mouse, as she knew exactly how it felt.

  Edom’s remains had been gone when she’d arrived back at Wolf’s camp with her belongings. Nothing remained of the blackened body except a slight scorched smell, as if someone had left the stew on the fire too long. She supposed that Wolf had disposed of the body somewhere; she hadn’t been inclined to ask.

  Now that the excitement was over, it was time to rest, but she couldn’t do it. When she closed her eyes, she could all but feel the not-quite-cold metal cutting her and tearing at more than the flesh of her thigh. Every time she managed to doze off, she had nightmares about arriving too late to help Wolf or the sword’s bite cutting all the way to her soul and leaving her bleeding to death from a wound that no bandage could stem.

  As she lay awake in the chill air of early morning, the blankets she used seemed too thin to protect her from the cold and damp. She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them in an effort to get warm, but even that didn’t seem to help. She shivered convulsively and
knew that some of it was due to fear rather than the night air.

  She sat up and rested her forehead on her knees. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t stop the jumbled images from presenting themselves to her.

  If she hadn’t decided to find out what was bothering Sheen, or Edom had been just a little swifter in his work, Wolf would be dead. Not only would that have meant the end of any chance of defeating the ae’Magi, but she would have lost her enigmatic companion. Some part of her was amused that of the two results, it was the second that bothered her the most. Ren would not approve.

  She was so intent on her thoughts that she didn’t notice that Wolf had gotten up until he sat down beside her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked softly.

  She started to nod, then abruptly shook her head—without lifting it from her knees. “No. I am not all right. If I were all right, I would be asleep.” As she spoke, still without looking up, she scooted nearer to him, until she was leaning against his shoulder.

  There was a pause, and then he slid an arm around her shoulder. “What’s wrong, Lady?”

  He was so warm. She shrugged.

  “Is there something I can do?”

  She let go of her legs and snuggled closer until she was almost sitting in his lap. “You’re already doing it, thanks. I’m sorry. Just jittery after the fight.”

  “I don’t mind.” He sat still, holding her almost awkwardly—but his warmth seeped in and alleviated the cold that blankets hadn’t been able to dispel.

  Aralorn relaxed but felt no pressing need to move away. “I must be turning into one of those women who moan and wail at the first chance they get—just so a handsome man will take them into his arms.” Yes, she was flirting. It didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Hmm,” he said, apparently considering what she had said. “Is that why they do it? I have always wondered.”