Master of Whitestorm (13 page)

“How?” Carralin’s voice showed more hysteria than belief. “How will you kill a thing that moves faster than a man, and carries a poisoned bite?”

Korendir turned with a vicious smile. “When I find out, I’ll skin the pelts of the slain for your hearth rug.”

Carralin sat up, shocked. The coverlet crumpled under her hips as she swung her long legs to the floor. Moonlight touched her shift like smoke, and the ripe, rounded body underneath. “You have no plan,” she accused.

Korendir said nothing. Backlight from the window masked his expression, as though he deliberately hid something.

“You have no plan,”
Carralin repeated, frightened. She fingered her shift with hands that in shadow no longer seemed chapped. Her thread of composure broke. She hurled herself across the chamber, painfully in need of male contact to bolster her failed reassurance.

Korendir’s hands caught her shoulders, not gently. Unprepared for the roughness of him, Carralin cried out. Her discomfort softened nothing, but seemed only to sting him to further harshness. She glimpsed his face as he twisted: impervious to pity as sleet-smoothed granite. Then he spilled her gracelessly onto the windowseat, and retreated to the darkest corner of the room.

Disheveled, disturbed beyond tears, Carralin listened to the rasp of his breath. With a shock of intuition, she interpreted his distress as avoidance. Surprise supplanted her terror. She blunted her edges of uncertainty with husky, female command. “My Lord of Whitestorm, how long since you shared your bed with a woman?”

He did not answer. Painfully still, Carralin waited while he recovered a control that chilled the heart to contemplate. When his breathing steadied, and still, he did not speak, she tossed back long hair and shamelessly stepped forward so the moon would highlight her body. “How long, my lord?”

Korendir shifted slightly in the darkness. Carralin could not see him to know that his eyes were closed, his jaw clenched hard against words. His hands stayed clamped to his face, as if the feminine beauty of her called up some private hell that seared his sanity to envision. Only one thing held meaning for him in this world. Like a litany, he locked his mind upon memory of Whitestorm’s windy heights; the dream of the holdfast begun there seemed to steady him.

His throat unlocked. Most of the sweat dried from his brow, and he framed the best words he could manage. “Lady, there is only one comfort a man like me can offer.” Taut as the hair-trigger latch on a crossbow, he snatched his sword from the bedstead. On through the opened door he hastened, and never once looked back.

The girl on the windowseat stared after him, confused and startled to anger. “Great Neth, you’ve gone crazy!” She called again, unwilling to believe his tread on the stair. “Go out by dark and you’ll be torn to screaming pieces.”

Korendir never answered. He did not return. Touched by unassuagable sorrow, Carralin hurled herself onto his empty bed. He had gone, been driven away by the very consolation she begged to offer and receive in turn. The sheets where his lean, swordsman’s body had lain seemed suddenly chill as a grave. Carralin muffled her weeping in his pillow. As her tears soaked the linen beneath her cheek, she exhausted herself finally into sleep.

* * *

The taproom of the inn was not empty when Korendir reached the bottom of the stair. Oil lamps still burned over the trestles; between starred swaths of shadow and light, the master of the tavern sat guarding the door, a pipe of Sithmark clay clenched between stumpy teeth. He turned his head as Korendir crossed the floor. His eyes glinted through a haze of smoke and his dark brows lifted in surprise.

“I thought, when you asked to retire, that you’d put aside your quest until morning.” And he grinned, sure indication that he knew of Carralin’s excursion up the stair.

Korendir tested the sharpness of the swordblade which rested unsheathed in his hands. “Not anymore.” He set the point down, leaned the quillons against his knee, then caught his cloak from the peg in the common room. His wrists moved, once, and cloth settled soundlessly over his shoulders. “Open your door, good man.”

The innkeeper jumped up and gestured with the hand that clutched the pipe. “You can’t be serious! In the dark, the wereleopards are changed to man-form, and—”

Korendir flashed a glance that killed the man’s protest to silence. The lanterns burned steadily as he adjusted his garment to free his sword arm, then lifted his weapon from the floor. “Your townsfolk hired me to kill wereleopards.”

The baleful intensity of him daunted; the innkeeper stared at the unnaturally still face, then the poised blade. The angle of the steel was not friendly. Caught at a loss, he stood aside. “We’ve gone into debt for a suicide,” he muttered as Korendir brushed past.

The mercenary set to work upon bolts and bars. Moved by the man’s brash courage, the innkeeper reached behind his chair and lifted a heavy, bronze lamp that once had served a freight raft as storm lantern. “Take this along,” he urged. “Merciful Neth, out there you may need a light.”

Korendir thrust his wrist through the carrying ring. “Light the wick,” he said quietly.

The innkeeper bit his pipe and complied with hands a great deal less steady. Spark snapped from the striker, and flame flared with a hiss and a reek of hot oil. Korendir closed the shutters and set his fingers to the door latch.

As he pushed the panel wide and stepped out, the innkeeper groped for words to wish him luck. Not a sound left his lips. The Master of Whitestorm crossed the board stoop and descended the stair beyond, then his cloak blended indistinguishably with a night pitch black with threat.

The innkeeper’s nerve vanished with the mercenary. Overcome by shivering panic, the portly man banged his door shut and dropped the bar with a crash that shook the lintels. Then, bereft of confidence, he scrabbled in the gloom for the tobacco pouch he had laid aside, but could not remember where.

* * *

The moon dropped behind the wooded slopes that flanked the River Ellgol. There the water flowed in a shallow, reed-choked channel, dragged to white snags where the current tumbled over obstructions. Korendir did not walk the banks to trace the river’s course, but instead picked his way along the ridge top, where the chuckle and rush of the foam did not fill his ears to distraction. The heavy, shuttered lantern swung on his arm and his sword was poised ready in his hand. He had crossed the bare fields of Mel’s Bye without disturbing so much as a shadow, but reassurance did not follow. Only during daylight did wereleopards prowl the open; in man-form, they preferred to lurk under cover. Korendir made his way forward with slow, tentative strides. He waited for the rustle of each footfall to end before starting his following step.

Between times, he listened to the infrequent croak of frogs, the rasped songs of crickets, the sigh of wind through evergreen boughs. For a league or more, the forest night seemed tranquil. His nose burned with the reek of hot oil, and his palm sweated on his sword hilt. He eased himself over a deadfall; his cloak scraped across rotting bark with a soft slither of sound. Abruptly the crickets stopped chirping. Korendir stiffened, took another step, paused. Then, from behind came a staccato snap as a twig broke.

Korendir threw himself flat. He rolled headlong down the slope, heedless of the lantern which bounced and bruised against his side. The shutters clanged back, and sparks winnowed and danced through a flying whirl of damp leaves. Korendir rolled faster with the increased pitch of the slope. His wrist cracked painfully into rock as he held his naked blade from his body. He gave the discomfort no thought, but looked back over his shoulder. Through a tumbling whirl of light, he gained a first glimpse of his attacker.

The wereleopard bounded down slope after him, its eyes slitted with lust, and its fanged, triangular jaws dripping venom. Tufted ears lay flattened back against a skull uncannily human. Clawed, five-fingered hands extended from lightly furred arms that even now reached to rend and slash. The speed of the creature’s rush was uncanny. It saw with precision in the dark.

Korendir fetched up against a fir tree. Dry needles showered his head. Some fell into the opened lantern; a flare of pitchy flame showed the wereleopard gathered for a leap that must end with deadly, venomed jaws tearing flesh.

Hopelessly outmatched, Korendir raised his sword arm. He tossed the cumbersome lantern into the trunk that pressed like a fence at his back. The casing struck with a crash. Bronze shutters clanged open, and thrown sparks touched needles and dry resin and ignited.

Flame blossomed. The river bed flared with sudden light that outlined the wereleopard with all the clarity of a nightmare.

Korendir braced to fight.

That same moment the beast hurtled in a bound from shadow into fiery brillance. Slit pupils contracted to compensate; and the sudden shift in illumination catalyzed startling transformation, The wereleopard’s clawlike hands blurred, shortened, and abruptly reshaped into paws. The savagery of its rush continued, but in a form gone eerily fluid. The facial structure altered, became wholly that of a beast. Weight, bone, and muscle redistributed into cat-form, and during the immediacy of the moment, the creature’s reflexes were slowed. Unbalanced, almost clumsy, the wereleopard crashed short of its prey.

Korendir reacted without pause to analyze. He lunged away from the fir trunk. His blade thrust deep into spotted hide, even as venom-wet teeth snapped closed, and claws raked out to rend.

The steel pierced the wereleopard through the heart. Even then death came with difficulty. The creature spun with a hair-raising, coughing yowl that rang throughout the forest. Its claws plowed furrows in the earth and its tail lashed up dead leaves. Over and over the fey thing thrashed in the throes of its dying.

Korendir felt his sword twisted violently from his hand. He jumped clear, barely ahead of disaster. Fanged jaws clashed where his calf had been only an instant before. Droplets spattered his legging, a fresh threat; wereleopard venom was poisonous enough that contact with the skin could be fatal. Korendir backed off instantly. He cut away the tainted cloth and tossed the smoking fabric in the coals. Then, wary of his dying enemy, he hooked the lantern ring with his sword and dragged it clear of the brushfire. He set it upright upon the ground, arranged his cloak to protect his hand from burns, and readjusted the wick.

The wereleopard shuddered at last into stillness. Even dead, it was a sight to inspire dread. The venom-flecked muzzle was drawn back to reveal five-inch fangs, and incisors aligned like razors. The eyes were jewel green, banefully opened wide. The pelt, sleek, golden, and mottled in diamonds of black, might have been the delight of a royal lady; jolted from reaction, Korendir recalled the piteous terror that haunted Carralin. Foolish he may have been, to linger where a wereleopard’s dying might draw others in to retaliate. But as if his promise to the girl was the driving motive of his life, the mercenary drew his dagger. He knelt in the unguarded open to skin his kill by lanternlight.

The creature’s flesh was unnaturally hot and the blood, when Korendir cut, almost scalded. He worked without flinching and wondered if wereleopards were connected with the alter-reality of Alhaerie, that otherworld existence that White Circle enchanters tapped to power spells. Not all wizards had benevolent intentions, and the creation of shape-changing killers might stem from a conjured curse.

Korendir peeled the pelt from the forepaws, cautious of the razor talons. The tendons ran like cables from flat sheets of muscle to bone, every sinew knitted with an artistry designed for death. As the hunter dressed out his pelt, he kept his ears tuned to the forest. The brushfire had burned to embers at his back, and frightened by the heat into silence, the crickets no longer sang their measure of assurance. A wereleopard attacking now might find easy prey if a man grew inured to his danger.

Korendir arose and wrapped the bloody skin into a bundle. Sword resting against his thigh, he used a bit of sinew to lash the pelt to his waist. Then he wiped the knife on his leggings and reached down to pick up the lantern. He stopped with the gesture half complete. A wereleopard watched from the dark, its eyes glaring ovals of green just at the edge of the flamelight. It hissed as Korendir saw it. Clawed fingers twitched in agitation, yet it hesitated, strangely reluctant to attack.

Korendir lifted his sword. In the process he knocked the dangling tail of the pelt into motion; and the man-formed thing in the shadows shied back.

Fired by a leap of intuition, the mercenary divined why he had not been slaughtered outright. The wereleopard seemed intimidated by the fate of its fellow. As if the fur of the slain were a talisman, Korendir feinted then followed with a throw of his skinning knife.

His aim went true and the dagger struck. A terrible cry split the night. With a rattle and a crashing of brush, the creature spun and fled into darkness.

Korendir shouted in exultation. Lamplight showed a spatter of blood on the leaves, steaming in the chilly air. His fingers clamped tight to his first pelt, the mercenary pushed forward to track.

* * *

Daybreak saw the Master of Whitestorm returned to the square in Mel’s Bye. The lantern dangled cold from his belt loop; one sleeve of his shirt was shredded, the wrist beneath furrowed where a near-pass with a wereleopard had shallowly gashed his hand. The blood which spattered his boots did not issue from any wound, but drained in clotting strings from the raw, diamond-spotted pelts strapped three deep at his belt. Towed through the dust at his heels by a tawny crown of hair, the man-shaped corpse of a fourth horror dragged in loose-limbed death. This one his sword had slain before sunlight could catalyze the shift into cat form.

The inn’s stout door remained barred as Korendir reached the entry. Unfazed, he dropped the wereleopard corpse with a thump on the wooden stoop. Then he settled his shoulder against the signpost, and with a rub rag, began cleaning his sticky blades.

Chain rattled a minute later, followed by the grinding slide of bolts being drawn. The door opened. Without looking up from the work in his hands, Korendir said, “Someone tell Carralin I’ve brought her a present.”