The Warlord's Legacy (33 page)

The swamp erupted. The murky water was the blood of the earth, gushing from the wound inflicted by Kaleb’s invisible hammer. A ferocious tide slammed into her, threatening to knock her from her feet, and for the first time she was actually
grateful
for the tight grip of the muck below. Mud, bits of plant matter—even a smattering of dead frogs and snakes—rained across the bog, blinding Mellorin to anything, everything, else. Her ears rang with a deafening crack, followed by a second enormous splash. Spray spattered her face, the surface of the swamp roiled against her legs, and even without sight she knew the cypress had fallen.

Mellorin finally managed to wipe the worst of the gunk from her
face—remembering, first, to sheathe the dagger she’d held in that hand—and gawped at the carnage Kaleb had wrought.

The tree was indeed gone, snapped unevenly just above the waterline. Only that jagged stump, and a few branches long enough to break the surface where it had fallen, suggested it had ever existed. The ogre lay facedown, limbs sprawled every which way—including a few in which they weren’t at all supposed to bend—and the sorcerer himself was struggling to flip the fallen giant onto its back before it drowned.

Jassion, who’d been closer than Mellorin, was only now picking himself up out of the swamp. Water sluiced through the rings in his hauberk, matted his short hair into stubby clumps, and dribbled from his lips as he emptied his lungs with a racking, body-shaking cough. Filth streaked his face, clinging stubbornly despite the sudden bath, and Mellorin thought some of it might be blood.

They reached Kaleb’s side at roughly the same time, helped him in flipping the ogre. Jassion, wincing with pain, dug into his pack and removed a coil of waterlogged rope, but the sorcerer shook his head.

“Not necessary. Now that he’s out, I can keep him unconscious as long as we need.” With a grunt, he manhandled the ogre to slump against the broken stump, ensuring that he’d neither float away nor sink beneath the swamp.

Only once that was done did Jassion give Kaleb a fearsome shove. It wasn’t
quite
enough to send the sorcerer splashing back into the water, but his awkward flailing was satisfaction enough.

“
What
?” Kaleb demanded, struggling to recapture some measure of dignity.

“What the hell was
that
, Kaleb?” Bits of swamp water from the baron’s hair splashed Kaleb’s face as he shouted. “By the gods, were you
trying
to kill us?”

“Certainly not Mellorin,” Kaleb answered calmly. Then, as Jassion’s face reddened, “Oh, calm down. I
had
to hit him hard enough to make sure he was out. If I was trying to
kill
anyone, I’d have hit him—or you—with the spell
directly
, rather than casting it
nearby.
”

“You mean to tell me that was a
miss
?” Mellorin gasped, horrified.

“Well, not
really
. I hit what I was trying to hit, didn’t I?”

“I …,” Mellorin began.

“You …,” was Jassion’s contribution.

“Nobody’s dead,” the sorcerer insisted. “I’m sorry if I scared you—”

“I wasn’t—” the baron protested, but Kaleb wasn’t about to let him finish.

“—but you
had
to be close. I had to make sure he was too distracted to see the blast coming. It’s not
entirely
invisible—” Here Mellorin nodded. “—and if he’d dodged it, if he’d realized he was facing a wizard, he’d probably have sounded that damn horn, and we’d be dealing with the entire tribe.

“So,” he continued, driving a finger into Jassion’s sternum, “why don’t you assume that I know what I’m doing, try something brand new just for a change, and
quit flapping your lips for half a bloody minute!
”

Jassion’s face couldn’t actually go any redder, but it certainly made its best effort. Mellorin was a bit surprised that she couldn’t actually feel the breeze from his twitching eyelid.

“I, uh, don’t want you to think that
I
assume you don’t know what you’re doing,” she said hesitantly, “but couldn’t you have just put the ogre to sleep or something? Was it really necessary to drop a phantom anvil on him?”

Kaleb chuckled. “Poetic. No, I’m afraid I couldn’t.
Keeping
someone asleep is easy. Putting them out in the first place? That’s rather more like mesmerism. It requires a few moments of contact, and a relatively unwary mind. You think the ogre would’ve been willing to sit down for a nice long chat with us? I’d say it’s about as likely as your uncle over there founding the Braetlyn chapter of the Corvis Rebaine Appreciation Society and Knitting Circle.”

“Kaleb …,” Jassion warned darkly.

“You’re right,” the sorcerer said apologetically. “I should have just had the ogre talk to you. You’d have put him to sleep in a minute flat.”

“Can we just get on with this?” Jassion sounded almost plaintive. “You dragged us all the way out to this hellish place just so we could find an ogre. Great, we’ve found one. So let’s be done with it, shall we?”

“Fine.” Kaleb knelt in the muck beside the cyclopean giant, placed a hand on the creature’s neck, and began to chant.

Unwilling to interrupt, Mellorin sidled over to her glowering uncle. “You want to tell me what we’re doing, exactly? When Kaleb first talked about coming to this wretched swamp, he said tracking down an ogre would help us, but he didn’t tell me how.”

Jassion shrugged. “Not much to it. Kaleb can use the blood of someone’s relative to find that person, as long as they’re not protected. One of your father’s old lieutenants was an ogre. They’re all an extended tribe, so pretty much
any
ogre can lead us to him. Or that’s the hope, anyway.”

“Kavro?” Mellorin offered, wracking her memories for half-heard tales of the wars.

“Davro, but yes, him.”

They watched, both standing with arms crossed.

“Is that why you let me come?” she demanded eventually. “To use my blood to find my father?”

“At first,” Kaleb admitted, rising from his crouch. “Corvis is protected, but the spell might prove useful anyway.

“But,” he added, voice and features softening, “that’s not the only reason anymore.”

Her expression remained unreadable.

“Have we got it?” Jassion asked him.

“Yes. As long as he doesn’t decide to go sightseeing before we get there, I can take us right to him.”

“Good. Then we don’t need
this
any longer.”

Mellorin gasped and started forward, hand outstretched, but there was nothing she could do. Jassion whipped Talon over his shoulder and down in a brutal stroke. The waters reddened, and the ogre’s head bounced once off the stump before floating gently away across the swamp.

The baron stepped back from his somber duty and promptly toppled once more into the waters as his niece violently shoved him. He stared upward, spitting and gasping, too shocked even to be angry.

“You didn’t have to
do
that!” she screamed down at him. “He wasn’t any danger to us! We could have just walked away.”

“Mellorin—”

“My father’s not the only monster I’ve got to deal with, is he?”

“Mellorin, it was an
ogre.
” And then, apparently bewildered that his explanation wasn’t sufficient, he could only blink as she unleashed a low growl and stalked away as rigidly as the marsh would allow.

Kaleb, too, watched her go, brow furrowed in thought, and made no move to aid Jassion out of the muck.

B
OISTEROUS CACOPHONY
and stifling heat battled for the right to claim possession of the Third Sheet’s common room, while a thick miasma of alcohol and body odor waited in the wings to challenge the victor. Shutters and the front door gaped wide, propped open by sticks or stones, but the gentle breeze that wafted through, stirring sawdust across the floor and hair across many heads, was no match for the roasting temperature within. Press so many bodies together, fill the air with the hot breath of laughter and conversation, add just a pinch of smoke from the kitchen fires, and the result was a refuge where summer lingered long after the rest of the city had kicked it out.

Given its halfway clever name, Corvis had hoped for more from the Third Sheet, but it was just another tavern. Tables and chairs stretched unevenly across the room. Laborers and craftsmen—some as uneven as the furniture—sat scattered around those tables or along a bar formed of a single tremendous log. Barmaids with harried faces and pinch-bruised bottoms wended through the throng, delivering drinks and plates of roast something-or-other on orders from a bearded bartender with an equally harried face (though, one might assume, a less battered rear).

A number of the larger men, and no small handful of women, carried themselves with the posture of professional soldiers. Even half
drunk, clustered around a table and trading jests coarse enough to send a sailor diving overboard, they kept watch on the door, and on occasion a particularly startling sound inspired a few to drop their hands toward their waists.

Corvis, clad in the scruffiest traveling leathers he possessed—which was saying something—had seated himself a few tables away. He nursed a tankard of more foam than ale, and tried his best to make sure they noticed him watching them, all while appearing as though he was trying to be inconspicuous.

Harder, by far, than it sounds.

Eventually, however, one of the women met his gaze once too often. Scowling, she elbowed the fellow beside her and whispered, pointing Corvis’s way with a chin so pronounced it was practically belligerent. Her companion, in turn, said something to the man beside
him
, and a moment later Corvis found his table surrounded by five tipsy soldiers.

This plan made a lot more sense before I actually put it in motion
, he thought grimly.

‘
Don’t most of them
?’

“You got a problem?” the woman who’d first noticed him demanded, leaning across the table on her knuckles.

“I do,” Corvis told her, deliberately keeping his hands well away from Sunder. “But not with you. Actually, it occurs to me you might be able to
help
me.” He offered up what he hoped was a friendly grin. “Join me for a round?”

“You buyin’?” one of the others rasped.

“Wouldn’t be a very polite invitation if I wasn’t.”

Amazing what the promise of free drink did for their attitudes. As Corvis waved over the nearest barmaid, he found himself suddenly surrounded by his best friends in the world.

More of them, he realized with a quick head count, than had actually come to threaten him in the first place.

“So,” he said, once everyone was settled with tankard, mug, horn, or flagon in hand, “it seems to me that you folk have the look of fighting men. And women,” he added, with what he hoped was a respectful—and perhaps just
slightly
appraising—glance at the sharp-featured soldier.
She smirked and raised her mug. “And I’m thinking, with you being here
in
the city, and rumor telling me that the various House and mercenary companies are assembling
outside
the cities, that at least some of you must be city guards. Right so far?”

Nods and assenting grunts proved adequate, if not eloquent, response.

Corvis took a deliberately messy swig of his own beverage, wiping foam from his mustache. “So would I also be right in guessing, then, that some of you could tell me a bit about those murders that happened here recently?”

The table went dangerously silent, smiles flipping over and inside out into aggressive glowers. “Some of us lost friends that night,” one man muttered darkly. “What makes you think that we’d want to talk to you about it?”

“Look,” Corvis said, leaning inward, “I think we’ve all heard who was responsible, right? Well, there’s an
awfully
large price on his head because of it. I don’t pretend my odds of finding him are all that good, but I’m looking to collect on it. A man could retire on what they’re offering, and the gods haven’t yet answered my prayers about getting younger.”

“You’re a bounty hunter?” the women to his left asked.

“I am.” Then, after an almost imperceptible pause, “Evislan Kade, at your service.”

“We don’t need any help from your kind,” the first fellow grumbled.

“I don’t doubt that,” Corvis said lightly. “But you’re stuck here. If You-Know-Who is still in Denathere, fine, you’ll get him, and gods help him when you do. But you think he
is
still in Denathere? He’s killed folk from here to Mecepheum, and if he’s moved on, wouldn’t you want to see him get what’s coming to him? Even if you can’t do it yourselves?”

The guards glanced and mumbled at one another, working through the logic in what “Evislan” said. While they considered, Corvis took the opportunity to order them all a second round, wincing only slightly at the tab he was racking up.

It did the trick, though. “All right,” the woman said to him, hostility once more gone from her voice. “What is it you want to know?”

T
HE CLOUDS HUNG LOW AND PREGNANT
over Denathere, overripe fruit seemingly ready to burst. The scent of autumn rains perfumed the air, but the mischievous sky would only tease, withholding the cleansing showers it promised.