Evil for Evil (84 page)

The sound of the axe falling; someone swearing in exasperation; a shout, three parts weariness to one part fury. She was standing up, grabbing his arm and yanking on it. He had to get up, or she'd have dislocated his shoulder.

His legs buckled twice on the way to the gate. As they passed, someone said,

"Where are you going?"; his heart froze, but she dragged him past and into what he supposed was position for the maneuver they were about to attempt. He'd forgotten the details of the plan already.

The gate opened. The guard's shoulder brushed his face, but the guard didn't stop or look round. They'd passed him, and she was hauling at his sleeve. The gate had been left open.

He wasn't aware of taking the six or seven steps; the thunder in his head was too loud, and he couldn't feel his legs. But they were on the other side of the gate, and the guards came bustling past, hauling a man by his wrists; his back was arched and he was digging his heels in, so that they plowed ruts in the mud as he was dragged past; his head was as far back as it would go. All told, he was in a bad way, but he made tolerable cover. Perhaps, if he'd known what a service he was performing for the Ducas, it would've made it easier for him to bear. Perhaps not.

She was pulling at him again, like a lazy horse. He followed, ambling. It was, of course, ridiculous; they wouldn't get twenty yards. In between waves of terror, he occupied his mind with wondering why she'd taken him with her. She seemed so efficient, so self-possessed; not the sort who needed a man to look after her. The most he'd be able to achieve would be to get them both caught. The thought crossed his mind that she fancied him. He managed not to laugh out loud.

Well, they'd made twenty yards. Perhaps she was telling the truth, and she really couldn't tack up a horse on her own. Some women were afraid of horses, the way some big, strong men were scared of spiders. Perhaps she thought that as soon as they were across the border, the Ducas' loyal retainers would come scuttling out of their hidey-holes in among the rocks to fight over the privilege of sheltering them. Perhaps she'd seen how very, very frightened he was, and had taken pity on him. (Well, quite. Nothing like looting the dead for a living for honing the delicate sensibilities.) In any event, they were in the open. Behind them, the biscuit-barrel stockade was a vague, looming shape, lit by a fuzzy yellow glow from the hurricane lanterns. Ahead of them, pale shadows that had to be tents. She steered him away from them—for someone who needed him along because only he knew the way, she had a superb sense of direction—toward a dark open space on their right. Closer; he could make out the dark gray outline of rails. The horse-fold, surrounded by a ring of gate hurdles. Was she really thinking of stealing a horse? Not a good idea, in his professional opinion as the duty big, strong man. Highly unlikely that the Vadani kept their tack in a neat pile in the corner of the fold. Bareback and without a bridle, a horse would be a liability rather than an asset. Not his place to argue, though. She led; he followed.

Up to the hurdle fence; over it (the middle rail was brittle and snapped under his weight with a noise like a tournament), through the fold—horses raised their heads and stared sleepily at them as they passed—and over the other side. Now that
was
smart: a short cut, to avoid going through the middle of the camp. Suddenly it occurred to Miel that they might get away with it, after all. But it seemed so pathetic… why hold still and be killed, when you can just walk away with only a little luck and determination? Could you really opt out of death so easily, like skipping a tiresome social engagement by pretending you had a cold?

She was talking to him.

"… All we've got to do is get across this flat bit of ground and we're on the uphill slope. They won't even—"

She stopped dead. A shape was thickening out of the darkness; a man, blocking their way. Oh well, Miel thought; and then, The hell with giving in. We've got this far.

"Hold it," the man was saying. "No civilians past this point without authority, so unless you've got a pass…"

She was talking to him: "Oh, I'm terribly sorry. We were just taking a walk, we hadn't realized we'd come so far. We'll head straight back."

"That's all right," the sentry was saying, when Miel hit him with a rock. He wasn't sure how it had got into his hand. He must have stooped and felt for it, but it had come to him like a properly trained dog; he could just get his fingers around it comfortably. The sentry's head was turned toward her—had he even noticed she wasn't alone?—and he wasn't wearing a helmet.

The trick was to throw the stone without actually letting go of it. Judge it just right and you can crack a man's head like a nutshell. Miel saw him drop; he let go of the stone and jumped on him, his knees landing on his chest and forcing the air out like a blast from a bellows.
What the hell are you doing
? she was saying somewhere above him, as he scrabbled about looking for the sentry's sidearm—he was half lying on it, which made it horribly awkward to get it out of the scabbard; lucky the poor fool was either already dead or thoroughly stunned. After two or three massive tugs he got it free; she was nagging,
Come on, leave it, we don't need it, you'll ruin
everything
.

Women, he thought, as he carefully located the hanger-tip over the hollow between the sentry's collarbones, and leaned on the handle. Miel felt the sentry's legs kick out and his back squirm, but that was usual, like a chicken beating its wings after its neck's been broken. The humane dispatch of game is the first duty of the honorable predator.

"What the
hell
," she was hissing at him, "do you think you're doing?"

"Killing the prisoners," he replied.

"
Leave it
." (Like he was a dog with a dead bird he'd picked up; the spaniel, the brachet and the lymer are bred soft-mouthed, to release retrieved game without spoiling it.) "Come on. Now."

He ignored her, drew the hanger from the wound and placed its tip delicately in the dead man's ear. There would be a crunching sound as he put his weight on it. She was pulling at him again; reluctantly, he allowed himself to be dragged to his feet. He left the hanger and stumbled after her, clumsy as a drunk.

She didn't say anything to him until sunrise, by which time they'd been trudging uphill for hours. He'd quickly lost track of time. In his mind, over and over again, he was running through the killing of the sentry (the rock, the hanger, the two penetrations; the sounds, the feel. They were moments that he was comfortable living in; they nourished him, like supplies sensibly rationed, and he savored them).

"Where are we?" she said.

Good point. He stopped and looked round to get his bearings.

Easy enough. There was Sharra, too far away for them to see smoke rising from the chimneys of the Unswerving Loyalty, but he knew it was there, just below the horizon on the other side. Falling away from it, the long combe in which Framain's house lay hidden like an embarrassing secret. He considered the merit of heading for it; they might just get there before collapsing from hunger and fatigue, or they might not. There'd be water and shelter there, but probably no food—had the Mezentines set fire to the place when they rounded them up? He couldn't remember that far back. "I know where we are," he said.

She nodded. He looked at her, properly, for the first time. She was dirty, ragged, painfully thin; there was caked blood on her forehead and in her fringe, probably from one of those scalp wounds that bleed like a fountain. "All right," she said,

"which way?"

That was just a little more than he could take. He sat down awkwardly on the rocks and burst out laughing. When she began swearing at him, he explained (quite patiently, he thought, in the circumstances) that there wasn't a way, because there was nowhere for them to go.

25

It was, ran the general consensus, one mystery too many. Why the Ducas, magnanimously reprieved by special order of the Duke himself (the messenger had been questioned and had vowed repeatedly that he'd delivered the reprieve to the Ducas personally), had seen fit to break out of the stockade, murdering a sentry in the process, nobody could say for sure. It stood to reason, however, that it must be something to do with the treason for which he had originally been condemned. It was remembered that, on the fall of Civitas Eremiae, he hadn't immediately joined his duke in exile, as was his duty, but had used the resistance as an excuse to stay away, safely out of the reach of justice. It could hardly be a coincidence that he had shown up immediately after the failed Mezentine attack, particularly since, by his own admission, he'd been with the Mezentine garrison at Sharra shortly before the raid took place. There was also the bizarre way in which he'd tried to have Daurenja, the savior of the rear echelon, arrested and condemned for some mysterious crime he was supposed to have committed years earlier. Duke Orsea's refusal to comment was simply aristocratic rank-closing. It did him credit, to a degree, that he was prepared to cover up for his friend, even though that friend had already betrayed him at least once (and wasn't there supposed to be something going on between the Ducas and Orsea's wife? Some business with a letter); in the circumstances, however, his attitude came across as a stubborn attempt to obstruct Valens' quite legitimate inquiries, and won Orsea no friends among the Vadani. The details were irrelevant, in any case. The Ducas had murdered a Vadani soldier in cold blood. Complex issues of jurisdiction no longer mattered. He was a criminal in the eyes of Vadani law, and would pay the penalty if and when he was caught—though that seemed unlikely if, as was generally believed, he'd returned to the safety of his Mezentine friends at Sharra. Meanwhile, the Vadani had other, more pressing concerns, and delaying the march on account of one fugitive renegade was, naturally, out of the question.

Four days after the change of course, he found the courage to talk to her. They'd stopped for the night in a little combe, not much more than a dent in the hillside. He assumed it had been chosen because of the stand of tall, spindly birch trees, which masked them from sight. It was a dark, cold place; he was sure nothing lived there. She had climbed down from the coach, pleading cramp after a long day. Of course, they couldn't have a fire, for fear that the smoke would give away their position. She was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree, squinting at her embroidery in the thin red light of sunset.

"Are you still doing that?" he asked.

She looked up. "Of course," she said. "It's nearly finished. I've put so much work into it, I couldn't bear the thought of leaving it behind." He looked at it: a baldrick, the sort you hang a hunting horn from. A goshawk and a heron; the hawking livery of the Orseoli. She was making it for him, of course.

"It's very good," he said awkwardly. "Can I see?" She held it up. "You've seen it before," she said. "I've been working on it for three months."

Implication: he should've recognized it. But one piece of cloth with patterns stitched on it looked very much like all the others; apart from their wedding day, he couldn't remember seeing her without some rag or other on her knees. It was, after all, what women did.

"Of course," he said, "I remember it now. It's coming on really well." She sighed. "I've run out of green silk," she said. "So I can't finish the background—here, look, the patch of reeds the heron's supposed to be flying up out of. I've got some other green, but it's the wrong shade."

He frowned. "Couldn't you turn that bit into a bush or something?"

"I suppose so. But then it wouldn't look right."

"I won't mind."

She looked up at him, and he realized she wasn't making it for him. He was the pretext, at best; she had to embroider, and decency required that the fruit of her needle should be some useful object for her husband. Now, because of the Mezentines and the war, she couldn't finish the work, and it wouldn't be fitting for her to start something new until the baldrick was completed. Accordingly, here she sat, the workbasket on her knees, the baldrick spread out, but no needle in her hand; like a cow in a crush, waiting patiently because it had nowhere it could go.

"It'd look wrong," she said. "I'd have to put something else in the opposite corner to balance it, and that'd mean unpicking what's there already. Besides, I haven't got enough brown left."

He wanted to say: so fucking what? I'll never go hunting again, so I'll never use it. Put the stupid thing away and talk to me instead. What he said was, "Perhaps we'll run into one of those merchant women on the road. They sell embroidery silks. I remember, we met one a few days ago." (No; longer ago than that. But each day seemed to fuse with the others, like a good fire-weld.) "If I'd known, I could have asked her."

She shrugged. "I don't suppose she'd have had the right green," she said. "It's not a particularly common one. I got what I've been using from that woman who used to call at the palace, back in Civitas Eremiae. I don't know what the chances are of running into her again."