Weapon of Blood (39 page)

His heart leapt in his chest as his wife
emerged from her hiding place.  Wiggen was soaked and shivering, but she was
alive, and clutched Lissa to her breast.  Lad could have sobbed with relief. 
It was over.  The masters were dead, and his family was safe.

Wiggen’s eyes took in his injuries, the
blood, and her face paled.

“Oh, gods!  Lad!”  She hurried forward,
but then stumbled to a stop.  Her eyes widened, and a startled expression
crossed her face.  “Lad?  I don’t…”  She took one more staggering step and fell
to her knees.

“Wiggen?”  Lad lunged forward to catch
her, his pain forgotten.  He clutched her, then caught Lissa as her arms went
slack. “Wiggen!  What—”

“I…can’t feel…” she gasped in panic. 
“Lad, I…”  Her eyes lost focus, and one last sigh escaped her lips.

“Wiggen!”  Lad clutched her close with
one arm.  He was vaguely aware of Lissa wriggling in his grasp, crying as the
rain pattered onto her little face.  Wiggen’s heart fluttered against his chest
like the wings of a caged sparrow.  “No, Wiggen.  Please.  Don’t…”

Wiggen’s tremulous heartbeats slowed…then
ceased.  Her head dropped back, her beautiful eyes staring sightless up into
the weeping sky.

“NO!”

Lad didn’t know if he actually voiced his
scream, but it echoed raucously in his mind, a cavern of confusion and pain. 
Wiggen couldn’t be dead.  If anyone died, it should have been him.  He was the
weapon…the killer…the assassin.  Not her.  Wiggen was just an innkeeper’s
daughter, a wife, a mother, a lover, a friend…

The pain of his wounds vanished in a sea
of anguish as a thousand memories rushed over him.  Wiggen with her eyes
closed, tenderly cupping a sparrow in her hands.  Wiggen in the kitchen,
humming as she prepared oatcakes.  Wiggen lying beside him in bed, smiling
sleepily in the candlelight, the sweat of their lovemaking beaded on her
breasts.

Nevermore
…

Eventually, Lissa’s cries penetrated the
fog of loss that obscured Lad’s mind, and he slowly recalled himself.  He
looked to his child, but even his relief that she was safe and sound couldn’t
allay his grief.

I must care for her
, he thought numbly. 
Wiggen would want that
.

Gently, Lad eased his wife to the sodden
ground.  As he pulled back his hand, however, his fingertip brushed something
hard in her back, and he plucked it out.  A chill that had nothing to do with
the rain washed over him as he stared at the small dart that had been lodged
deep in her flesh.  The metal shaft was black, fletched with a tiny tuft of black
feathers, its tip beveled and hollow.

He stared at his dead wife, then at the
dart in his hand.  Like a smoldering bonfire rekindled, rage ignited in his
heart.  Someone, somehow, had murdered Wiggen.  Lad lurched to his feet.  He
had thought his fight was over, but now he knew it was just beginning.

“Lad!  What—”

Mya stared down uncomprehending at
Wiggen, or rather, Wiggen’s corpse, Lad’s wretched cry ringing in her ears. 
What
the hells happened
?

Lad evidently had not heard her.  He just
stood there, staring down at his dead wife, the squalling babe held limply in
one arm.

“Lad!”  She touched his arm, and when he
still didn’t respond, she grabbed him by the wrist.  Despite the chill rain, it
felt as if his skin was burning.  “Lad!  Come on!  All this noise is bound to
attract the City Guard.  We’ve got to go!”

Lad turned blank eyes toward her, his
gaze as dead as his wife.  “They murdered her.”  He held out a small dart,
bloody rainwater pooling in his palm around the tiny cylinder of black metal.

Confusion clouded her thoughts.  “They
couldn’t
have!  She’s wearing the guildmaster’s ring!”  There was no time to discuss
this now.  She tugged on his wrist.  “Come on!  We’ve got to go!”

“The ring…”  His eyes snapped to needle
sharpness.  “Here!  Take Lissa.”  He thrust the crying babe into her arms.

“I don’t—”

“
Take her!
”  The sudden murder in
his eyes brought her up short, and she took the child, holding her close to
block the rain.  The crying eased, and Lissa opened her eyes—
eyes like his
—and
looked up into Mya’s face.

Lad dropped to his knees beside Wiggen’s
body, leaning over her.  He took her hands in his, kissed them gently, then
slipped the guildmaster’s ring off her finger.  For a long moment he just knelt
there, looking at the ring.  Finally he spoke.

“They murdered my wife, Mya.  They must
have hired someone outside the guild.  I’m going to find them, and I’m going to
kill them.  But I need your help.  I need the
guild’s
help.”

“There
is
no guild, Lad.  Look
around!”  She waved a hand at the litter of bodies in the morass of churned mud
and blood.  “It’s destroyed. 
We
destroyed it.”

“No,” he said firmly.  “We killed
some
of them, but there are more.  As long as there’s a guildmaster, there’s a
guild.”

Mya shook her head. 
What is he
talking about
?  “There
is
no guildmaster, Lad.  Hells, I’m the only
master
left!  There’s just—”  She choked on her words as Lad raised his hands.  “
No
!”

He slipped the guildmaster’s ring onto
his finger.

Mya froze as Lad stared at her, his
luminous eyes glowing in the gloom.  In that moment, she could count every
raindrop that fell between them, as if they took an eternity to descend from
heaven to earth.  The sight of the gold and obsidian ring on his finger stabbed
through her.  All the fighting, all the killing, everything she’d done to
prevent this, and here she was, a slave once again.  She looked into his eyes,
but she no longer saw the man she knew, the man she loved.  Lad was gone; only
the weapon remained.  She could do nothing but obey.

Lad lifted Lissa from Mya’s arms and
nodded toward the tangle of corpses.  “Take the other masters’ rings.”

“Why?”

“
Take them!
  We’ll need to appoint
new masters from the surviving journeymen.”

“But—”

Lad’s voice grated between clenched
teeth, low and dangerous, as he leaned toward her.  “I’m the new guildmaster,
and your life is mine to spend!  Now get the other rings, or I swear, I’ll kill
you right here!”

My life…his to spend
, she thought, swallowing the bile that flooded her
throat.

Mya splashed through the mud and
recovered the other four masters’ rings.  The creature that had been Neera had
melted in the rain, the scaly horror dissolving away to reveal the corpse of a
shriveled old woman.  When she returned to him, Lad handed his daughter back to
her and gathered Wiggen into his arms.

“Where to?”

“I’m taking Wiggen home.”  He turned away
from her, starting toward one of the tunnels out of the courtyard.  “And you’re
coming with me.”

“Yes…Master.”  Mya fell in behind Lad,
and they vanished into the gloom of Twailin’s rain-soaked night.

Chapter
XXV

L
ooks like a
band of ogres came through here.”  Sergeant Tamir toed the hilt of a broken
sword, then stumbled back when it slowly shifted from a rapier to a
broadsword.  “What the hells?”

“Careful, Tam.”  Norwood steadied Tamir
as the sergeant’s heel struck the corpse of a man who had been neatly cut in
half.  “Try not to fall on the evidence.”

“Yes, sir.”

Norwood concurred with the sergeant’s
assessment of the scene.  Corpses were strewn everywhere, some slashed, some
twisted, some crushed, and some little more than smoldering puddles of
liquefied flesh.  Most bore weapons, which he would expect given the violence
of the scene, but others confused him.  One woman was dressed like a high-priced
courtesan, but sported a deep wound between her eyes.  Another, a wrinkled old
woman with a crushed skull, wasn’t dressed at all.  Norwood maneuvered around
an uprooted tree, trying to put together a reasonable scenario that fit the
evidence.

Yawning, he wondered what time it was. 
Probably another three hours until daylight.  It had been well after midnight
when he received an urgent summons from the captain of the City Guard.  A terse
note explained that there had been a battle near Fiveway Fountain, and that
Norwood and his Royal Guard should come immediately.  He had nearly had the
messenger arrested for waking him with an obvious prank—the thought of a battle
taking place in Twailin seemed ludicrous—but now that he had seen it, the
evidence that this had indeed been a battle was hard to refute.

“How many, Captain?” he asked his City
Guard counterpart.

“Hard to say exactly, but our best
count’s around thirty or so.”  The captain indicated one of the puddles of
remains slowly being incorporated into the courtyard mud by the rain.  “Going
to have to count bones to figure out if that was one or two.”

“I know this one, Captain,” said a city
guardsman, pointing at a corpse with a deep chest wound and the top of his
skull sheared away.  “His name’s Youtrin.  He’s head of the Bargeman’s Guild.”

“A guildmaster?”  Norwood’s pulse
quickened as he thought,
Not only more violence, but now we’ve got city
leaders being killed.  The duke will have my head!
  He stepped over two
more bodies and looked down at the face frozen by death in a snarl.  The hands
of the body still clutched the hilt of a shattered knife and a hand axe. 
“Looks like he was more than just a guildmaster if he was involved in this.  He
certainly doesn’t look like an innocent bystander.”

“What’s a guildmaster doing at this time
of night in this part of the city, sir?”  Tamir’s question was rhetorical, but
it started Norwood thinking.

“Guild war,” he murmured, remembering his
late-night visitor’s claim.  Five years ago he would have laughed at the
thought of an upright citizen being involved with the Assassins Guild, but the
experience with Saliez had taught him differently.  “I wonder who won.”

Tamir, the only one close enough to have
heard his captain’s musings, looked skeptical, but refrained from commenting.

“Well, we’d best get started, Tamir, but
be careful.  Send for Master Woefler to examine the scene for evidence of
magic.”  He poked the broken blade that had distressed his sergeant with the
toe of his boot.  The hilt shifted from a broad cross to an ornate basket guard
right before their eyes.  “Like that.”

“Right, sir.  Come on, people!  Work in
from the edges, one body at a time.  Everything gets bagged and tagged.  It may
be muddy as a pigsty, but that’s no excuse for missing evidence!”

As Tamir directed his men, Norwood
stepped out of the way.  The bodies would be taken to the City Guard
headquarters for identification, if there was enough left to identify. 
Somehow, he didn’t think many family members would be coming forth to claim loved
ones.

“Knew things were coming to a head, but I
didn’t think it’d end up like this.”

Norwood turned to the City Guard
captain.  “End up?  You think this is the end of it?”

“Maybe not, but with so many dead, I
don’t know how many more would be left to carry on.  Somebody must have won
here, and whoever lost, lost big.”

“I hope you’re right, Captain.”  Norwood
looked around at the bodies again and wondered if his mysterious visitor lay
among them.  Since he had never seen the man’s face, there was no way to know. 
“We’ve obviously got some higher-ups involved here.  Maybe without their
leaders, the violence will ease off.  But what the hell am I going to report to
Duke Mir?”

“I don’t envy you that job.”  The City
Guard captain nodded farewell and picked his way through the carnage, gathering
his men and leaving the Royal Guard to their grisly job.

“Captain!” Tamir called, waving him
over.  The sergeant had an incongruous grin on his face, one that sent a shiver
of worry up Norwood’s spine.

“What, Sergeant?”

“You’re gonna
love
this, sir.”  He
knelt beside the corpse of a young man and pointed to a dark speck on his
neck.  “That look familiar?”

“What the…”  Norwood knelt, oblivious to
the bloody mire soaking his trousers.  The dark speck did look familiar.  He
grasped the tuft of feathers and drew a black dart from the dead man’s neck. 
“Well, I’ll be a…”

“Yes, sir.”  Tamir held out an evidence
bottle.  “Don’t need a wizard to tell me it’s the same as that other one.”

“Right.”  Norwood dropped the dart into
the bottle.  “But have Woefler check the poison to make sure.  Keep an eye out
for any more.”  He examined the body and noted the lack of other injuries.  “Pay
particular attention to the bodies that aren’t hacked up.”

“Yes, sir.”  Tamir pocketed the evidence
bottle and continued his work.

“Too many questions,” Norwood muttered,
scowling down as if he could get the answers from the dead man’s eyes.

Kiesha placed the matte-black metal tube
snugly into its velvet-lined case, and ran her fingers over the neat row of
black darts, each tucked into its own recessed nook.  A half-dozen nooks were
empty; the night had been eventful.  She frowned.

So much death
…

Pulling a dart from its nook, she pressed
her fingertip against the hollowed point.  She barely felt the tip pierce her
skin.  Blood welled from her finger, and she licked the crimson drop with a
flick of her tongue.  The dart she’d picked wasn’t envenomed, of course.

Maybe it should be
.

A knock at the door startled her.  She
hadn’t heard footsteps, but in this house that wasn’t unusual.  She reinserted
the dart into its nook, closed the case, and turned to the door.

“Come in.”

The latch turned and Hensen walked in,
resplendent as always, his embroidered jacket fairly glowing in the lamplight. 
That he was still dressed meant he’d waited up to learn the outcome of the
evening’s events, and Kiesha’s heart dropped.  She’d hoped to put off her
report until morning.  She was wet, cold, and…disheartened.  The physical
discomforts she could ignore, but rarely had a job affected her thus.  All she
wanted right now was a warm bath, a large brandy, and the oblivion of sleep.

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

She shrugged.  “You taught me well.  I’ll
have a detailed report for you in the morning, sir, but—”

“I want the highlights now.  Are Mya and
Lad still alive?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the other masters?”

“All dead, sir.”

“Ahhh!”  One of Hensen’s plucked eyebrows
arched, and Kiesha wondered vaguely if she should warn him about wrinkling his
brow.  “The confusion of succession should provide us with a unique opportunity
to further advance our interests into Assassins Guild territory.  How were the
Hunters able to overcome all the other factions?”

Kiesha sighed before answering.  She
really didn’t want to go into details tonight.

“They didn’t, sir.  Mya and Lad killed
the masters, and many of their underlings as well.  Lad had delivered her in
bondage, but it was a ruse.  They fought together.  I killed a few assassins
whom I believed might harm our charges.  The rest fled.”

“They killed
how
many?”  Hensen’s
tone was part curiosity, part skepticism.  Kiesha didn’t blame him.  If she
hadn’t seen it, she wouldn’t believe it herself.

“I didn’t count, sir.  Two dozen at
least.”

“
What
?”

“Mya is…”  She hesitated, wondering how
to tell him what she’d seen.  This was why she preferred written reports; it
gave her time to think things through.  “She’s not what we thought, sir.  She
moved like Lad.  As fast and as deadly as he is, but with one exception: every
wound she took healed instantly.”

“Magic!  Gods, she must have some kind of
magical enhancement.  The guildmaster’s ring doesn’t bestow that kind of
power.”

“No, sir, but, in fact, Mya wasn’t
wearing the ring.”

“What?”  Hensen couldn’t hide his
surprise.  “Sereth told us she did!”

Kiesha wished he would just go away and
leave her in peace.  This was not how she wanted to tell the story, piecemeal
in response to his peppered questions.  She was too tired to organize her
thoughts.

“Sereth told us what the masters thought,
but they were wrong.  As it turned out, Lad’s wife, Wiggen, actually wore the
ring.  She used it to protect herself and the baby.”

“What do you mean, ‘wore it’?  She
doesn’t any longer?  How can that be?”

He doesn’t miss a trick,
Kiesha thought bitterly.

“She’s dead, sir.  The battle had just
ended when a figure ran out of the tunnel right below me.  I thought she was
another assassin.”  She paused and gave him a regretful look.  “I reacted
prematurely.”

Hensen stared at her, and Kiesha was
unnerved by the hint of fear in his eyes.

“Did Lad see you?”

“No, sir!  I left immediately.  All the
other assassins were already dead or had fled.  If he saw me…”