Bastion (28 page)

Now, any reasonable person, at least in Mags’ estimation, who found himself confronted by an angry Herald in full Whites—scarcely someone whom you could mistake for anything
but
a Herald—would acknowledge the fact that he’d been caught red-handed doing something he shouldn’t and surrender.

This fellow was evidently not a reasonable person.

He tried to knock the sword aside and went for Jakyr. Jakyr was handicapped by the fact that he really didn’t want to hurt the fellow, and the fight that ensued, though short, turned into something rather brutal. By the time it was over, the chair and table were good for nothing but kindling, the pottery in one of the cupboards and the basin and pitcher were shards, Jakyr had a black eye and bruises on his throat, and the only reason that the fight had ended at all was because Mags had managed to get behind the man and brain him with the flat of his own ax.

After they’d bound him and shoved him into a corner, swept out the broken pottery and thrown the ruined furniture—and the lid on the bed box—into the woodpile, Jakyr woke the interloper up with a rude pail of ice-cold water from the little well to the face.

The man spluttered into consciousness, tried to rise, discovered he was bound, and glowered at them.

“I’m trying to be charitable here,” Jakyr said carefully, “but it’s damned difficult.
What
are you doing in a Herald’s Waystation?”

“What are you doing in my house?”
the man roared back.

“It’s not your damned house!”
shouted Jakyr.

“Wait!” Mags interrupted, holding up a hand. “This ain’t gonna get us nowhere. Lemme Truth-Spell ’im.”

Jakyr paused and blinked at Mags. “You’re right. We don’t have to get consent for the Truth Spell when we catch someone breaking the law.” He waved at their captive. “Do it, Mags.”

It was Dallen, not one of the teachers at the Collegium, who had taught Mags the Truth Spell. Dallen had taught Mags practically everything he knew about his Gift, and since Mags had an exceptionally powerful Gift of Mind-magic, Mags could lay the strongest possible variation of the Truth Spell on a miscreant—or someone who simply wished his story to be believed. This version could compel the truth out of the person it was placed on, and more. It would compel them to tell the
whole
truth, blurt it out in fact, without needing specific questioning.

This would be the first time Mags had ever put the Truth Spell on someone who wasn’t a fellow student, and it felt very odd to be doing so. Even odder was the part of the spell where you concentrated on a pair of . . . eyes. He actually
saw
the eyes hovering over the miscreant’s head for a moment, and from Jakyr’s start, so did the Herald.

Then they blinked out, and the blue aura of the Spell enveloped the man.

Mags could not help thinking, though, as Jakyr moved in and took his place to question the man, about the eyes. Because the assassin’s magician who had gone mad had babbled about eyes watching him. Were these . . . the same eyes?

He didn’t get a chance to think about it for long, however, as Jakyr barked, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my home!” the man snarled back. “My father gave it to me! What the hell do you
think
I’m doing here?”

11

“N
ow what do we do?” Mags asked aloud. The man had finished ranting, he had dismissed the Truth Spell, and they had gagged him because he still kept ranting about “his house” and “his rights.” He was sitting on the edge of the empty bed box, and stared up at Jakyr, hoping that the senior Herald had an answer.

“I confess I am at a loss,” said Jakyr, staring down at the man, who glared back at him and issued muffled and incoherent sounds from behind his gag. “We clearly have a problem here. This should not have happened. At all. Someone at that village—what is it?”

“Therian,” Mags said, consulting the map. He wasn’t surprised that the name had flown out of Jakyr’s mind; it had gone from his as well. What should have been a routine, if somewhat irritating, Circuit was turning into something unexpected and ugly.

“Someone at Therian thinks he has the right to give away Crown property, and I will be unsurprised to discover it is the Headman, given the general attitude out here.” Jakyr paced back and forth—even though there wasn’t a lot of room to pace in. The man continued to glare. Jakyr continued to ignore him. “He couldn’t do that unless one of two conditions obtains. Either the rest of his village doesn’t know, or the rest of his village is convinced they don’t have to obey the law. If it’s the first, we can probably come down like the Wrath of the Gods Themselves and frighten them all into appropriate behavior—probably even get the Headman dismissed. If it’s the second, we have a real problem on our hands. Right now we don’t know which condition is the one we are about to face.” He paced some more. “I’m minded to turn right back around and get the Guard. Except that might make things worse.”

Mags thought about this very hard. He could see how getting the Guard would make things worse. The whole idea was that villages were to enforce the laws on themselves. But if they brought the Guard into it—there would be even more resentment, if not outright rebellion, and there would be no way to enforce the laws without
keeping
a detachment of the Guard there. “How about if I sneak down there, get hold of Amily, and find out what they’ve learned?”

Jakyr stopped pacing. “That seems to be our best option. Meanwhile, I am going to help myself to dinner here, since our thief has provided it.” It was Jakyr’s turn to glare down at the man, who was uncowed. “Perhaps a lecture delivered while I eat might bang some sense into his head.”

Mags nodded and went outside. Jakyr would probably need his Companion soon, but Jermayan couldn’t be left to stand in the cold, unprotected. He threw a blanket over Jermayan, but did not unsaddle him, and mounted Dallen. A brisk gallop through bleak forest got them to the edge of cultivated land and within sight of the village just about sunset. There was a glare of light on the western horizon, and the sky was a deep and sullen crimson.

There he dismounted near a hedgerow and used it as cover to get into the village itself without being seen, slipping along the bushes bent over, so as not to show above the top. When the hedgerow ended, he crouched and peeked around the bottom of it, assessing the two or three dozen buildings of the village. He found the inn quickly enough by the wheat sheaf carved into a board above the door and by the fact that it was roughly twice the size of any of the other buildings in the town. Making sure there was no one about to spot him, he ran to the shelter of the nearest house, put his back to the wall and edged toward what passed for a street, ran across to the inn, and slipped in behind it. Still keeping his back to the wall, and moving as quietly as possible, he slid over to the attached stable—an actual stable, this time, a not merely a lean-to shelter. As he expected, the stable held the vanners, who regarded him with benign indifference as he hid himself between them. There were no other horses here, but the fact that this inn actually had a real stable told him that it got a respectable amount of traffic, probably in the warmer part of the year.

Then he crouched down in the straw between the horses, closed his eyes and sought the familiar sense of Amily’s mind. As he searched for her, he tried to make note of the contents of stray thoughts, and at least he didn’t sense any overt hostility. Although when the villagers discovered how they had treated that interloper, that could change in a heartbeat.

He found her; the connection seemed a lot stronger between them now, and once again he wondered if she had a Gift that was somehow late in coming, and whether it was slowly awakening now that he was “talking” to her.
:Amily. We got problems. I’m in the stable,:
he sent to her. He caught her startled assent and the general sense that she was coming to him.

He waited, crouched in the straw, relatively comfortable in the warmth being radiated from the two vanners. It was hard to tell in the darkness whether the stable was kept up well or not—but it certainly didn’t smell poorly kept. Even an empty stable that hasn’t been mucked out regularly had a stink of ammonia and old droppings to it. From where he crouched, he could see the door and the yard outside it clearly. After what was probably a quarter-candlemark, he spotted someone hurrying to the stable in the thin moonlight. As soon as the girl—he could tell it was a girl by the shape—got close, he heard Amily call, softly, in the direction of the stable.

“Mags?”

“Over here, ’tween the vanners,” he called back softly. She waved once and joined him, dropping down into the box stall with him so that no one coming in would see her.

“What did you mean by problems?” she asked breathlessly. “I hurried as fast as I could. I was helping Bear with the local farrier and a patient. A human patient. The farrier is the closest thing they have to a healer here. Except for the inn, there isn’t much. It’s all herders and farmers. From what I gathered, Lord Hallathon doesn’t even claim them, they’re too far outside his holding.”

“When we got to the Waystation, some fella had took it over,” Mags explained. “We caught ’im, and he acted like we was the ones at fault. Said his pa had given it to him.”

The straw rustled as Amily startled. “Wait—what?” Amily replied. “But that’s illegal!”

“Well, aye. We know that, but it seems like the fella we caught either don’t know it or don’t care. So we kinda need to know just how far this village has gone afore we come ridin’ in with him all trussed up like a hen fer the pot.” Mags rubbed his temple unhappily. “’Cause if most of this village reckons that Crown laws don’t hold, we could have ourselves a bigger piece of trouble than we thought. Reckon the people to find out are Lena and Lita. Lita mostly. If she ain’t found out already.”

“I’ll go find out,” Amily said immediately, and stood up and ran off before he could say anything else. Not that there was anything much more to say, really. That left Mags still crouching in the straw, unhappy, and not getting any happier as the time passed. He was cold, he was uncomfortable, he was hungry, and he was acutely aware that he was surrounded by a village full of people who might very well consider
him
some sort of criminal.

Not the most pleasant situation to be in at best. It was certainly not one he had envisioned himself to be in before they started this trip.

Course, I could be trussed up in a wagon bein’ kidnapped again, ’bout to be drugged, and turned into some sort of . . . I dunno . . . shell for a ghost?

There certainly was that. Given the options, this current situation was better. It wasn’t as if, even if the worst happened, he and Jakyr couldn’t mount up on their Companions and be out of there before anyone could blink. A handful of villagers, however angry, were not going to be able to prevail against a Companion in full fighting mode. Since the Bards, Bear, and Amily weren’t obviously connected with Heralds and had already been welcomed, they would be safe enough. The villagers were hardly likely to pursue as far as The Bastion, and they could continue on down to the Guardpost at need, bringing back retribution.

But he didn’t want to do that. Jakyr didn’t want to do that either. That would, in many ways, just make things a whole lot worse. He wanted some way to work this out so that the fools who had done this realized how much they had transgressed and how much was at stake when they lost. Which they would. Bringing an armed Guard troop down on a bunch of poorly armed villagers—or even a bunch of
well
-armed villagers—would earn no credit for the Crown. Valdemar governed by cooperation, not by repression. Mags wanted this lot of empty heads and grabby hands to figure out they were the ones in the wrong.

He wanted them, in short, to figure out on their own that they’d been idiots.

Wish I could con ’em like Jakyr conned Lita; go to give ’em what they think they want, an’ they quick find out they don’t want it—

Amily returned about a candlemark later. “Lita’s trying to find out what she can. She hasn’t seen any overt rebellion; these people are pretty much like the last village. She thinks that if there is a problem, it’s just the Headman getting above himself. Maybe since they don’t answer to Lord Hallathon, the Headman thinks they’re independent and don’t have to answer to anybody.”

That sounded better. He and Jakyr might be able to work with that. “Lemme tell Jakyr. I’ll Mindspeak him. No point in my ridin’ all the way back just to turn around again.”

“Do that, and I got you something to eat,” she said, pressing some bread and cheese into his hand. “I can’t warm you up here, but at least I can make sure you don’t faint from starvation.”

“You’re a star,” he said gratefully. He couldn’t imagine how she had guessed how hungry he was. He’d been thinking about chewing on a handful of the horses’ oats at one point.

“I just heard your belly rumbling,” she giggled, and kissed him, then sat back on her heels and let him work.

He closed his eyes, reached out into the wilderness where the only minds were birds and animals, found Jakyr’s mind, and relayed what Amily had told him.

:Stay there, we’re coming,:
the Herald replied.
:I’ll meet you at the edge of the village fields. One way or another, this is going to have to be dealt with, contained, or quarantined, and right now. You tell Amily when we’re there, so she can tell Lita. At least under circumstances like this I can count on Lita to have some good ideas about what to do.:

Hmm . . . that sounded interesting. He suspected that Jakyr had been having the same thoughts he’d been. Well, of course, he must have been; he was a Senior Herald. He must have seen exactly this sort of situation at least once in his life.

Even if he had seemed as blindsided by it as Mags had been. But you could be blindsided by something and still have plenty of ideas about how to fix it. Jakyr was one of the smartest people he knew, and among Heralds, that was saying something.
Concentrate on solutions.