Three Coins for Confession (41 page)

When he returned to his horse, he remembered that his backsword
had been cast aside while he rode. Contáedar’s sword. He took Taelendar’s blade
to replace it, wiped the blood from it on her cloak before he slipped it to his
scabbard.

Chriani and Dargana were both ready by the time Farenna swung up
onto his horse. He whispered an incantation to set the dead talisman at his
wrist pulsing with blue-white light once more, studying it carefully. Then he
spurred forward to shoot along a shadowed trail hung with moss, Chriani and
Dargana following close behind.

THE LÓECHARI RAN in near silence, the grey of their
leather all but swallowed by the shadows beneath the trees. They matched their
pace to the hiss of the wind as if by instinct, shifting with the movement of
the forest canopy overhead as it shed sunlight to spread in ripples and waves
across the ground. All five were on foot with bows drawn, moving a half-dozen
paces apart and facing away from each other. Scouting the full circle of the
forest around them, no way for anything to move unseen within their field of
view.

Then one of them died, almost as silently as he moved. Chriani
appeared behind him out of empty air in the same instant his arm came around
the Ilvani’s neck. His other hand plunged a long-knife straight in through
leather and bone to the archer’s heart.

The power of the black ring at his finger had let Chriani follow
the cult patrol unseen, but he felt that magic disrupted as he struck. The
forest around him shimmered back into place, like the shadow the ring’s power
set across his eyes was burning away.

A hiss sounded from the closest Ilvani as Chriani was spotted, as
he’d known he would be. He shifted back to let the body crumple before him,
threw himself behind a screen of young limni as a hail of arrows slid past to
one side. Then he shifted back again, dodging more arrows as he made sure the
Ilvani could see him.

The four of them came together in a line as they closed, driving
Chriani back into an open clearing. No cover for him as another hail of arrows
arced toward him. Then those arrows passed through the space where he’d been
standing as he vanished again.

At the same moment, Farenna and Dargana shot from the screen of
the trees where they’d been waiting, dropping the two scouts at the outside
where Chriani had led them into perfect position. He appeared again at the far
side of the squad an instant later, taking what he assumed was the captain in
the lower back, punching a long-knife in beneath a chain shirt whose lacquered
links gleamed black. With a second knife, he came in across the Ilvani’s
throat, ending it as quickly as he could.

Four down in less time than it would take to describe it. The
last Ilvani panicked, dropping her bow and bolting into the trees. Farenna’s
bow sang out faster. It was over.

Chriani stood for a while over the body at his feet. It had been
Farenna’s plans and orders to do it this way. Let Chriani get close, then use
him as a lure to draw the others into ambush. Kill them quickly. No other
options.

It wasn’t something Chriani was used to. Killing up close, no
chance for quarter. Not for the first time, he thought of how fighting with a
bow, fighting from horseback across the shadowed spaces of forest paths, felt
so much cleaner than this. Less chance to think about the dead as they fell
beside and behind you, unseen. No reason to ever look into the eyes of the ones
you’d killed.

The gold light that was in all the cultist’s eyes still burned
brightly in the leader’s gaze, staring sightlessly upward. His mouth was
twisted in a grimace of anger, defiant even in death. Then that grimace was
changed to a silent scream of pain as all five bodies began to convulse.

Chriani had to look away, waiting for the dark magic to pass. Not
wanting to see the coins appear again.

“Their uniforms,” Farenna whispered when it was done. “Before the
blood sets. Unless you and your ring wish to go alone, Ilmari.”

The attack had been Farenna’s plan, built around the magic held
in the black ring. Chriani had all but forgotten that the captain knew about
that magic, from the time he’d tested it on their ride to Sylonna. The need to
move unseen was paramount. The lóechari patrols had the advantage of numbers
and position. An intimate knowledge of the territory. The mind magic of the
coins meant that Chriani and the others had to move quietly. If they were
spotted, they would have to strike just as fast.

They had left the horses a half-league behind them, at the point
where the trails narrowed to barely visible footpaths. Shortening the reins
across their necks to keep them from catching on anything. It hadn’t seemed
right to Chriani to simply let them run free, but Farenna was insistent. “They
will wait for us,” the captain said.

They stripped the Ilvani cultists of their leather and weapons
quickly, trading off pieces between themselves to find the best fit. Farenna’s
mood was dark again, a weight pressing down on the captain as he claimed the
chain shirt of the leader, directing Dargana and Chriani to take specific
badges and gear from the other fallen scouts. The details of rank and insignia
among the Ilvani had a subtlety to them that Chriani had no hope of
understanding, leaving him to trust Farenna’s directions.

The plan to steal uniforms for the final approach to whatever lay
at the end of their trail had been the captain’s as well, but he had rejected
Chriani’s suggestion that they take the armor of the scouts they had skirmished
with earlier. Chriani understood his reasons now, seeing subtle differences in
the leather of the riders and the armor of the foot scouts on closer patrol.

Farenna spent a good amount of time adjusting Chriani’s armor,
even ordering him to remove it once so he could don a tunic beneath it. The
captain cut away part of this to reveal the Halobrelia sigil at the heart of
Chriani’s war-mark, then set his armor and some sort of sash of rank to
carefully conceal the rest of it. The four names scribed in his own hand, which
would give away the irregular nature of the mark the first time it was seen.

“You will need to stay behind us,” Farenna said to Chriani when
they were done. The hunter’s heart he wore was still dark, but the light of the
captain’s spell-magic was pulsing brighter as he held the talisman high, felt
for whatever message it had been giving him as he read its unseen connection to
the place where its power originated.

The captain and Dargana wore the cult armor and regalia as
effectively as the lóechari themselves, but the faintness of the Ilvani
features Chriani had inherited from his father would give him away far too
quickly. Up to the point where his own stupidity had revealed the war-mark to
the Aerachi and his life had broken apart, Chriani had lived that life by
trusting in the minimum amount of subterfuge it took to hide who he was from
the Ilmari around him. The Ilvani wouldn’t be so easy to fool, though.

“Chriani’s ears won’t be as big a problem as all our eyes,”
Dargana said evenly. “Any of the cult get close enough, they’ll see we’re not
them.”

Chriani shrugged. “They might take us for their blind agents. Or
we just keep our distance.”

“Easy to say when we have no sense of who we might meet or what
it is we search for,” Farenna said coldly.

It took Chriani a moment to realize that the captain was looking
to him for response, but he had none. He had no plan. Not really. Just a
picture of how he wanted this to end, and an instinct for action that would
carry him toward that end if he let it. An instinct he had learned to trust.
The problem was, his instinct carried him and him alone. He had no way to
explain it, no way to ask anyone else to trust it.

It had happened that way with Kathlan, he realized. Not seeing it
in that full light until this moment, the truth hidden away within its place of
shadow where all of Chriani’s fears would hide. This was the same instinct that
had sent him out of the stables in Rheran before dawn to follow Lauresa,
because Barien with his last breath had ordered Chriani to protect the
princess. This was the instinct that carried him along the Clearwater Way, that
had brought him home to Kathlan.

This was the instinct that had forced his tongue to silence over
the truth of what had happened along that road. The instinct that had driven
the slow wedge between Kathlan and him. The instinct he had turned away from
when he told her the truth.

“We find the temple,” Chriani said at last. “We uncover what it
is. We need to see the magic. This isn’t our fight to win, but the Ilvani
sorcerers, the Ilmar’s war-mages, need to know what’s here. That’s the only way
we’ll beat them. Break the magic, then break the cult.”

“And if we can’t?” Dargana said.

“Then we find out where the cult is vulnerable. Take that back
and regroup. Try again.”

“And what of the lóechari’s interest in you?” Farenna asked
quietly.

“The cult wants Caradar’s dagger,” Chriani said. “It’s got
nothing to do with me.” He almost believed it.

During the ride from Sylonna, Chriani had already been trying to
think through the Captain’s question, to sift the pieces of the puzzle in his
mind. The cult seeking him, and why. All of Veassen’s talk, and Chriani’s
absolute certainty that whoever or whatever the blind seer’s legends sought, it
wasn’t him.

The lóechari attack had left him reeling, though, his thoughts
scattered. Taelendar’s death had shaken him. The transformation she had
undergone. No warning. No chance to save her.

He didn’t think on what Dargana had asked him. Wouldn’t meet her
gaze now.

The quiet anger Chriani had seen in the Ilvani warrior was one he
recognized. Her challenge to him on the ride from the Hunthad to Sylonna.
Acting without thinking. Chriani understood it because he had lived with it his
whole life. Likewise, he understood how Farenna had been able to tame that
rage. The command and control he had demonstrated, shaping and honing the anger
in Taelendar like the edge of a blade.

Barien had tried to shape the anger in Chriani the same way. He
had almost succeeded. Chriani had been the one to stop him.

The day his grandfather died, his mother already dead a year
before, Chriani had expected to follow them both in short order. And though
Barien’s intervention had staved off that fate, Chriani had been pushing toward
his own end every long day since. The thought came to him now with a clarity
that angered him. A thing he should have understood a long time before but
hadn’t. The piece of the puzzle he couldn’t see.

The pack wolf’s instincts sent it to the edge of the herd, set it
to pick off the weakest prey. Part of the delicate dance of survival, balancing
risk and safety. It was the ultimate reason why those creatures thrived. By
comparison, the instincts of the fell wolf were what kept those great monsters
in check. Their need to not just hunt to survive, but to destroy for the sake
of destruction. To fight simply for the sake of fighting.

Lauresa had said it to him.
You judge by the instinct of
emotions that have their own will, and you never understand that will until too
late. You never learn to think except by your rage.

Kathlan had said it. Barien. It hadn’t mattered in the end.

They were running now, flat out along the trails that cut through
the Ghostwood’s twisted stands of limni, draping moss and black mold to the
ground. Chriani could be quiet when he needed to. He had always trusted to the
senses his father’s blood had given him, to his ability to see the shadows,
hear the faintest movement. He had always made good use of the instincts for
speed and silence that his mother had instilled in him. But as the three of
them drew closer to the unseen temple, he realized that he was a pretender to
the senses and the stillness, the speed and grace of the Ilvani. Nothing more.

He stayed behind Farenna and Dargana, and was grateful that
neither of them looked back to see him struggling to keep their pace. He could
move at speed easily enough, and he could move in near-silence when he wanted
to. But Chriani had only rarely pushed himself to do both at once, and he felt his
footsteps thudding out around him now as if he might be driving cows before him
as he ran.

Because they were armed and armored as a lóechari patrol, they
did their best to maintain the pace of the squad they had ambushed. The fear in
Chriani was of what would happen if they came across another patrol, no way to
guess what routes they ran or what call signs they might be using. He had kept
the black ring on, a plan in place that if they were stopped, he was to fall
back unseen, then come around from the other side. Farenna and Dargana would
buy him time enough to strike, or so they hoped. In the end, though, they
detected no signs of the cult except tracks along the paths, no signs of any
other Ilvani ahead or behind.

They saw the shadow then.

The day was still bright above the forest canopy, but the wood
had been steadily thickening as they advanced, the gloom darkening to the point
where even Chriani’s eyes were having trouble picking out detail in the far
distance. So it was that a deeper darkness caught at his sight even before
Farenna and Dargana had seen it, Chriani hissing as he halted.

The three of them melted back into the trees, watching. Waiting.
The forest was silent, no sign or sense of any movement around them.