Three Coins for Confession (16 page)

The warrior swinging that blade was perched on the turret’s
sloping roof like a bird of prey, long hair shrouding her face. The backsword
favored by the Ilvani was a single-edged blade, curved and tapered. Sharp
enough to slice bone like passing through paper. Chriani made two quick feints
against it, forcing it high. Then he grabbed the Ilvani’s hair and pulled hard,
pivoting off his hip to drive her over him and down to the tiles. He tossed
away a handful of that hair as she scrabbled to hold on, almost slipping to the
roof’s edge before she found her feet. Her sword clattered past her and over
into darkness, but she had long-knives already drawn from scabbards at her
thighs as she paced carefully up the slope of the roof toward him.

Chriani felt Kathlan come through the window behind him, reached
out to touch her as she stepped close. He watched the movement of the Ilvani on
the roof around them, measured the shifting of their slow approach. They’d
expected an ambush, not sure what they were dealing with anymore.

“Four of them,” he whispered. “Straight and left, two behind.”

“I see them.”

“Stay close.”

It was a useless command by virtue of the roof offering no real
alternative, but Chriani said it anyway. He had to fight the urge to turn all
his attention to Kathlan, keep himself between her and the Ilvani as they
closed. Remembering the feeling of seeing her struck by the arrow meant for
him.

“Ilvani attack!” Chriani shouted to the night sky. “Call the
guard!” But he heard only fast footsteps from the street below. From this high
vantage point, the curtain of rain gone, he could see the keep’s southwest
gatehouse. The lights of its windows were burning bright against the cold. No
movement there, though. No reaction to his warning, his voice muted by the
rising wind.

The eyes of all the Valnirata were burning gold in the shadows.
They were watching him as he stepped away from Kathlan, his sword and dagger
sweeping the air. The Ilvani’s first strikes were tentative, assessing them
both. Chriani and Kathlan kept them moving, shifting along the slick tiles. He
felt her close beside him, let all his senses expand to wrap around her,
listening for movement beyond.

He heard two quick strikes of steel, saw from the corner of his
eye as she parried and deflected a two-handed knife fighter striking from the
upslope. His own attention was focused on two warriors pushing in to his front
and right, timing their movement to strike at once, give him no chance to
parry. He surprised them by going wide, hooking the long-knife attack so that
it sent the sword strike past him by a finger’s breadth.

He felt the Valnirata focused on him. Trying to get past Kathlan,
but they weren’t attacking to kill him. He could read it in their movements, in
the timing of their strikes. Like in the woods, when they had waited for the
moment to unleash the magic of the black arrow. They had something else in mind
for Chriani if they took him down this night.

The Ilvani kept their silence as they fought, but the leather of
their boots was loud against the tile. Swords and knives flashed in the
starlight, pressing harder now as Chriani and Kathlan shifted beside each
other, using the inn’s three broad chimney stacks as cover and backing. Chriani
drew first blood, taking advantage when an Ilvani knife fighter slipped on the
slates and went down to her knee. A moment’s distraction, but enough for him to
punch his sword through armor and breastbone with a full-body thrust.

They weren’t attacking to kill Chriani, but as long as Kathlan
was at his side, that wasn’t a courtesy he could afford to return.

He heard her behind him as she tagged a second warrior, the
crunch of bone and cartilage that said she’d taken him through the hand. He
spun around to refocus on that same target, catching him off guard and off
balance. His sword cut deep into the warrior’s neck on the backswing, sending
him crashing to the tiles, then over the edge of the roof to the dark street
below.

He heard shouting from that street, but it wouldn’t be enough.
Rising from the rooftops adjacent to the inn, he counted eight more figures in
the shadows, saw them take measured steps and leap the arms-wide gap across the
alleyways that surrounded them. Two pressed quickly toward the window, cutting
off that route of escape.

“Chriani!”

Kathlan’s voice was his only warning as a figure shot up out of
the shadows behind him. A lithe warrior in a shimmering cloak of ilvanweave,
helping to mask her movements as she’d crawled prone along the far slope of the
roof, coming up from the dark alleyway behind the inn. She hammered at him with
a succession of two-handed backsword attacks, Chriani blocking them but gaining
no chance for a counterstrike. But it wasn’t the Ilvani’s sword he was focused
on — it was the horsebow hanging across her back, the combat quiver
at her hip.

As another sword thrust came for him, he let it slip by him,
heard it hiss past even as he twisted in toward the assailant. He took an elbow
to the side for his trouble, but he’d expected that. With his bare foot, he
kicked down to smash her knee, felt her crumple at his feet. He fell with her,
rolling twice along the slates before he released her, letting her carry on
over the edge of the roof and down to the street below.

When he came up, his longsword was gone but he’d yanked her bow
free, had a single arrow in hand.

He forced the bow’s lower limb between his feet as he flexed and
strung it. He had time to set the arrow and pull, feeling the weapon’s draw and
tension, sensing and assessing its curve and balance in the single instant of
aiming.

He twisted to sight the gatehouse. The windows were still bright,
but a smaller point of light was the lantern hanging above the locked gate on
its black iron bracket, hooded against the night. Chriani judged the distance
at three hundred paces, a long shot for an Ilvani bow even if he’d had full
light.

He let his fingers flick from the string, saw the arrow arc up
and over the nearest rooftops, disappearing into shadow. He saw the gatehouse
lantern shatter where it was hit dead center, heard a shout go up as the door
was thrown wide.

“Attack from the Greatwood!” Chriani screamed it to the black
night, hearing his voice echo even against the wind. “The prince’s guard in
combat! Sound alarms!”

Tile shifted at his back. He spun to bring the bow down hard,
cracking it across the face of the Ilvani slipping across the roof toward him,
sending him off balance and onto his back. Chriani dropped to the warrior’s
chest with both knees, tearing the long-knife from his grasp as he heard ribs
break.

Off at the gatehouse, the rise of a tolling bell told him the
guards had heard him. Three strikes, then a silence. Then three strikes again,
echoing. The alarm call of the prince’s guard.

Chriani rolled off the body beneath him and was running for
Kathlan. She was caught between knives and sword, two Ilvani pressing even as a
third loomed up out of the darkness.

He shouted. “Lóech arnala irch niir!” It was a moment’s instinct,
nothing more, when a moment was all the time Chriani had. As his voice rang out
across the rooftops, golden eyes flashed toward him, two of the Ilvani at
Kathlan momentarily distracted.

The third Ilvani was bare-armed in black leather, dark hair hanging
wet to shroud her face. She had a dagger in one hand, a handaxe in the other.
Taking advantage of the distraction in her two companions, she lashed out with
both blades, taking each of the other Ilvani across the throat.

Chriani faltered. Stared.

Kathlan was scrambling back as the two warriors that had pressed
her tumbled to the tiles, clutching vainly at their necks as their life left
them. She had her rapier and dagger up, watching the figure in black, but the
new arrival looked past her to meet Chriani’s gaze. Dark eyes flashed in the
starlight, the figure twisting as two more Ilvani rose from the slope of the
roof.

In the brightness that his eyes revealed, Chriani saw the tangle
of black and red that was the war-mark at the dark figure’s shoulder.

As the warrior slipped toward Kathlan, she twisted to go back to
back, fighting with her. In the four steps it took Chriani to get to the two of
them, rapier and dagger, dagger and axe flashed out. The Ilvani pushing in were
forced back as Chriani jumped into the fray, let himself slide along the slates
as he spun. With the long-knife he’d claimed, he cut through the warrior
closest to Kathlan. The other tried to step back, stumbling as her boot caught
the edge of a tile.

The black-armored figure tumbled forward and up, both arms
crossing over as she rose. The Ilvani who had stumbled keeled over backward,
his leather parted across his chest in a bloody
X
.

A long moment of silence hung. Mist twisted along the rooftop,
caught by the rising wind. Chriani sensed no movement, no life in the scattered
bodies, though he knew his senses were distracted by his focus on the figure
before him. He recognized her face, though he had never expected to see it
again.

He recognized the dagger as the warrior slung it to a scabbard at
her back. It bore a thin haft of steel and bone, its cap and spiked guard
gleaming dully with the look of mottled silver. A scalloped blood-edge marked
the base of the blade, which was acid-etched with markings Chriani recognized
as a match to the war-mark at the dark figure’s shoulder. A match to the mark
at his own shoulder, and to memories he wanted desperately to forget.

The unexpected ally was smiling coldly. “No greetings for old
friends, half-blood?”

In the brief time in which Chriani and Lauresa had been captives
of the Ilvani exile leader Dargana, he had seen her smile only once. She had
called for his execution as she did so, the expression carrying no mirth. Only
a sense of malevolent power.

“Not the time or the place,” he said at last. As if in answer,
the guardhouse alarm was echoed, a deeper tolling sounding out from inside the
keep, then again from farther out toward the city walls. More bells sounded out
in the night, the guard across Rheran on sudden alert.

“More true than you know.”

Chriani stepped close, long-knife raised, his bare feet sensing
faint warmth on the tiles. He glanced down to see that he was standing in
blood, washing away from two Ilvani where they had fallen.

He saw the gold of their eyes flash in the starlight as the
bodies lurched with unexpected movement.

A trace of fear ran up Chriani’s spine as the Ilvani began to
convulse, one by one. Their limbs contorted, chests heaving as if something
might be driving into them from the roof below. Their dead mouths moved as
though trying to speak, spitting red-black froth but making no sound.

“Blood and moonsign…” Kathlan made the moonsign as she said it,
stumbling back. Chriani shifted across the tile to stand beside her. The
crescent was scribed across her heart in red, her tunic marked by the blood on
her hands.

He watched Dargana’s expression as the movement of the bodies
slowed, then stilled. No surprise there. Just a cold recognition.

Even in the faint light of the cloud-streaked sky, Chriani saw
the flash of gold at each of the bodies’ swollen tongues, the clasp of their
fingers. Three coins for each of the dead, not there a moment before.

The Ilvani fallen closest to him had twisted her head over, the
coin slipping from her mouth to spill to the black tile. An instinctive
revulsion twisted through Chriani as Dargana crouched to carefully collect it,
then just as carefully pulled the other coins from mouths and fingers, one by
one.

“Chriani?”

He heard a dozen different questions in Kathlan’s voice. She was
shivering, but whether more from the chill of the rising wind or the aftermath
of the fight, he didn’t know. This wasn’t the first time she’d killed. That had
been on their third patrol into the Greatwood, when a perfectly placed bowshot
had taken out a rogue Ilvani who had leaped from the trees overhead onto the
back of their squad’s lead rider. Chriani had seen the same look in Kathlan’s
eyes then that he saw now, but he could only shake his head to her in an
awkward call to silence. No way to answer her. Not yet.

“Does she speak Ilvalantar?” Dargana scooped rainwater from the
roof to her hand, sifting the fistful of bloody coins within it as she called
to Chriani in that language of the Ilmar Ilvani.

Chriani responded in the Ilmari tongue. “Anything you say to me,
say to her.” He had no idea whether Dargana spoke anything other than the
Ilvani tongues he had heard her use in the past, but the exile leader shrugged
to tell him she understood.

“You’re being hunted,” she said in Ilmari, only the slightest
trace of an accent catching at the words.

Chriani caught Kathlan’s look from the corner of his eye. “And?”
he said.

“And you’d be in their hands now if not for me.”

Kathlan spoke up, an edge of defiance and distrust in her voice.
“We didn’t need your help to deal with this lot…”

“You needed me to deal with the six I left in the street south of
here. The ones set to come through the inn and take you while you were
distracted by the attack from the roof.”

Kathlan’s response was cut short by Chriani’s hand in hers,
squeezing it gently. Dargana shook the coins dry before she slipped them to a
pouch at her waist. From another pouch, she pulled something, tossing it to
Chriani. He grabbed it without seeing it, half-closed his fingers to hold it.
Saw a pulse of red light welling up within a chunk of bloodstone set within a
golden claw.

It was the same talisman he’d taken from the dead Ilvani in the
forest, but the leather cord that strung this one was sliced through and dark
red. As he had before, he felt the power of the hunter’s heart calling to him.
The stone was oily even to his wet fingers, its magic seeming to seep into his
skin.