i be90349f18331670 (14 page)

“Nothing, I guess.” Dallin’s voice was quiet, and his tone probably not at all convincing. “I thought…”

He shook his head, eyes still moving, troubled. “I don’t know—
some
thing.” He turned to Wil. “Don’t you feel it?”

105

The Aisling Book Two Dream

It

felt
like Wil should feel it. It felt like anyone within a hundred paces of Dallin should feel it, like it had physical shapes and he just couldn’t see them.

“C’mon,” Wil said anxiously, tugged at Dallin’s elbow and tried to drag him down the steps. “Let’s
go
.” Between his teeth this time, and quietly uneasy. Whatever was thrumming through Dallin was now leaking out onto Wil.

He tugged again; this time, Dallin let himself be moved.

His right hand went automatically to the revolver strapped to his thigh, flipped the fastenings and rested his fingers lightly to the butt; his left hand reached for Wil’s arm, latched on. “Put your hat back on,” he told Wil, angling them down the steps as Wil complied. Dallin turned them back down the little side lane from which they’d come. “Back to the alleys,” he muttered, eyes trying to look everywhere at once, words from dreams haunting—
the Watcher is watched
—yammering through his head like a sinister mantra, except he couldn’t bloody
see
anything. No one lurked, no one stalked; everywhere he looked, he only saw ordinary people going about their ordinary business on an ordinary Market Day.

He pulled up short when they reached a crisscross pattern of lanes leading off in six different directions.

Almost unbearably on-edge now, Dallin pulled Wil over toward a stand of bushes ringing a dooryard behind an ageing heap of stone that likely used to be the very impressive home of some prosperous citizen but was now rundown and depressing in its dilapidated gloom. He had to stop a moment and get himself together. There was no good reason for the absurd anxiety, and all he was doing was ramping up Wil’s already unpredictable state of being. Except Dallin couldn’t find that cool reserve, that remove that normally walked him through tense situations.

The Watcher is watched.

106

Carole Cummings

And yet there was nothing—no one—there. Anywhere.

“Is it gone?” Wil wanted to know, eyeing Dallin with trepidation and as close to dread as Dallin had seen him since they’d shown Dudley their backs.

It wasn’t gone. It was getting worse. The afternoon sun was whining in Dallin’s head with an insectile buzz that was drilling into his teeth, making his peripheral vision too bright and too sharp. They were being watched, and it wasn’t just in his head, it was real, he could feel it all the way to his bones.

Dallin didn’t answer, instead threw his glance about the spiderweb of alleyways, chose a random direction, and tugged Wil’s arm again. “This way,” he ordered.

Amazingly, Wil didn’t argue, didn’t even try to get loose from Dallin’s grip. He allowed himself to be pulled, following Dallin without objection or comment. They headed down a dirt lane, winding between squat, decrepit brick structures, the purpose of which Dallin didn’t pause to ponder. The atmosphere was growing seedier, the air taking on a rank smell of piss and dirt the farther they went.

The buildings crowded together, blocking most of the light. They passed doorways and niches carefully, Dallin edging around each one first, holding Wil back until he determined they were safe enough to pass by. One or two seemed to serve as living-quarters, ragged men lurking in their corners and growling balefully at them, but they cowered at the sight of Dallin, and even more so at the sight of the weapons. Dallin and Wil passed unmolested, until they came upon an alcove outside of what appeared to be a less-reputable hostel, its alleyway strewn with rubbish and the remnants of piss-pots emptied into the gutters and not washed away.

A haggard woman lurched up from her crouch in the hovel’s recess, staggered at Dallin, hands outstretched like she was greeting an old friend. She was thin as wire, dried 107

The Aisling Book Two Dream

up and wispy as a husk, eyes sunken and vague above a delicate, near-toothless grin. Her muscles twitched with uncontrollable tics, her breathing labored and rheumy.

There was a sour smell about her, over and above the pervasive stench of the alley, the clothes hanging off her thin frame rank with ages-old dirt and rot. She was dying, wasting into nothing—Dallin could smell it on her—and the soft, dreamy look all but beat the drum for it. She was this close to death from one thing or another—lung-sick, maybe, or blight, who could tell?—and that beatific look of serene peace in her eyes told Dallin she truly didn’t care.

A leaf user.

“Exile!” she cried. “Ye’ve come! Bless.
Bless
.”

She reached for Dallin, her fingernails thick and yellowed beneath the layers of grime on her shaking hand.

Dallin stepped back to avoid the touch and knocked into Wil, who stood staring, horrified fascination inside grim surprise.

“I’ve watched, I have,” she murmured, her soft giggle all the more unnerving for its girlishness. She held her filthy hand out palm-up, waggled her taloned fingers.

“Redeem your word and I shall redeem mine.”

Dallin almost brushed past her. Wil shouldn’t be seeing this, and the stiff posture, the inability to drag his revolted gaze away, told Dallin that Wil knew exactly what he was looking at. But something about what she’d said, or maybe just the way she’d said it, made Dallin stop. He stared down at her dirty hand, its meaning universal and very clear, gave Wil’s arm a light squeeze in apology.

“Remind me of my word, Miss,” Dallin said, reaching to his belt for his purse—slowly so her abstracted gaze could follow. “You’re not the only one watching, after all.”

“Ah!” she cried, giggled again and shook her finger.

108

Carole Cummings

“And I thought I was yer one and only.”

Mother’s mercy, the woman was trying to be coy. She was bloody
flirting
.

Dallin dragged a smile onto his face, made it as easy and pleasant as he could, and squeezed again when he felt a light shudder run through Wil. “Oh, but you are certainly my favorite,” Dallin told the woman, winked and broadened the smile when she giggled some more.

He shook the purse. “And what was our agreement?” he asked her with a lift of an eyebrow.

“Five gilders,” she told him, eyes sly and smile going a bit sideways.

Lying, of course. Whatever she’d agreed to do for this Exile and whatever price she’d agreed to do it for, it was likely more along the lines of a few billets. Nonetheless, Dallin made quite a business of taking the proper coins from the purse, turned around and handed the rest to Wil.

“Hold onto that,” he muttered. “And get on the other side of me, in case you have to grab for the rifle. Just don’t rip my arm off doing it, if there’s trouble.”

He didn’t actually think the woman dangerous—Wil had been right: leaf and violence were rather mutually exclusive—but she was showing signs of withdrawal, and addicts deprived of their addictions were predictable only in their unpredictability.

Dallin turned back to the woman, holding up the coins.

He kept silent, and merely lifted his eyebrows, expectant.

Her playful smile turned joyous as she stared up at the glint of gold, clapping her hands like a little girl. She sauntered closer, eyes fixed to the coins, leaning in like they were conspirators. “The one you seek comes to you,” she murmured, sour breath puffing too close to Dallin’s face, but he kept his mien graciously encouraging. “Wait and Watch,” she whispered, then pulled back and covered her 109

The Aisling Book Two Dream

ruined mouth with her hand; the effect was nauseatingly coquettish.

The words made Dallin’s eyes narrow slightly, and he didn’t know what they were doing to Wil—he daren’t look back yet to find out.

This couldn’t be what Dallin thought it was. He must be hearing things through his own skewed expectations.

All of the secrecy that seemed to surround this whole business, men killing for it, and this filthy slum leaf-freak
knew
?

“This one I seek,” he said, smoothly cordial, “what does he look like?”

The smile fell, but only a little. “Ah, walks in shadows, he does, poor lad.” Amazingly, the woman managed to pout through the smile that was more and more making Dallin want to smack it off her skull-like face. “He’s the feel of the culled, but I know him when we sleep.” Her head fell back and her arms crossed over her small, flat breasts.

“Touches my brow with his tattered fingers, plucks at my Thread, and sings me to dancing.” An ungainly bit of a sway, to-and-fro, and her eyes fell shut. “I know it’s him by how he marks me.” A spindly hand came up, swept at her brow. “Blood to blood,” she murmured, hummed, tuneless and ragged.

Dallin actually looked closer to make sure there wasn’t in fact a bloody fingerprint on the woman’s forehead.

He turned to Wil—somewhere between disbelief and confused revelation.

Wil’s eyes were pinned to the woman, sickened and horrified, but held by macabre fascination. He turned his gaze slowly to Dallin’s, shook his head, mouth working but nothing coming out of it. His eyes were doing that thing they did, going murky and bright at the same time, color twisting inside them.

Dallin’s stomach dropped a little and he reached 110

Carole Cummings

out, laid a hand to Wil’s shoulder. “Hey,” he said softly, gentling. “You’re all right, there’s nothing—”

“—the big one first,” came from almost right behind him, and he spun too late, instinctively shoving Wil back at the same time his vision was blocked by something wide and very hard smashing into the side of his head. Fucking
hell
, that hurt. Damn it, he’d let himself get distracted, forgot the first rule of both offence and defense, and let someone get behind him, hit him blind.

Dazed, Dallin staggered, blinked to keep blackness from taking his vision or his perceptions. There was a scream and several shouts, winding their way through the dull ringing in Dallin’s ears. Everything happened at once, almost too fast for it to convey itself into anything like sense. Still, he tracked everything, reacting even before commands moved from his brain to his limbs.

He felt a tug at the rifle’s strap. Hoping desperately that it was Wil who’d done the tugging, Dallin dropped his shoulder and let it be pulled away. At the same time, his left hand dropped to his hip, drew the gun from its holster. All of this before he’d even completed the turn to face his attackers and put himself between them and Wil.

His glance flicked down to each end of the narrow lane before settling back on the men in front of them.

There were five of them. The guard from the gate was standing foremost, even more smug than he’d been before, pig-eyes glittering with petty vengeance. Bloody hell, Dallin must have
really
pissed him off. Dallin reached up, swiped at his temple, fingers coming back tacky with blood. With a scowl, he noted a broken length of timber at the feet of the gate guard. A
big
broken length of timber.

Had that tree-trunk broken over his
head
? No wonder his ears were ringing. If Dallin was lucky enough to get out of this without much more damage, he was at least going to have a bugger of a headache once the adrenaline wore off.

111

The Aisling Book Two Dream

The woman was on the ground, on her knees, crawling about and collecting the gilders that had scattered from Dallin’s hand. She was still smiling, peered up at Dallin as she scrabbled up the last gilder. She gave him a happy grin. Dallin resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

Wil stood to Dallin’s right, rifle cocked and ready. Face set hard, Wil had already sighted down into the center of the small cluster of men who faced them. Three of them had swords drawn. The other two had standard military pistols aimed alternately at Dallin’s chest and Wil’s head.

“Back off and we’ll be on our way,” Wil said calmly.

Dallin was absurdly proud of him. Thirty seconds ago, Wil had been all set to panic; now, with the rifle once again in his hands, he was cool and more deadly than any of these men could imagine with their small minds.

Two of them snorted; one of them waggled his eyebrows, mimed a kiss. They all had the same look to them. Small, mean men who got their few meager pleasures out of making others their prey. This wasn’t personal. They were just looking for their twisted version of fun, and Dallin had crossed the gate guard’s path on the wrong day. He hated to think what sorts of prison guards they’d make.

“This is my fault,” he murmured to Wil. “Sorry. I don’t know why, but my instincts have turned to shit.”

Wil adjusted his grip, tilted his head and shut one eye.

The barrel of his gun was now pointed directly at the gate guard’s chest. “After we get out of it,” he murmured back, “I get to keep the gun.”

Dallin didn’t dare twitch a smirk, but he wanted to.

That rifle looked more at home in Wil’s hands than it had ever felt in Dallin’s, and Dallin wouldn’t dream of taking it back now. He reached down, let his fingers twitch over the new revolver when he saw one of the men follow the movement with his eyes.

112

Carole Cummings

“Don’t shoot unless you have to,” Dallin told Wil.

“You counted six before, and there are only five now—

watch for another.” Took a deep breath. “Here goes.”

He pushed himself away from the wall and took two slow steps forward. “I don’t know what this man has told you,” he said calmly, “but I am a visiting constable from the province of Putnam, and therefore probably a lot more trouble than you bargained for when you agreed to this little… party.” He watched their eyes; three of them showed obvious surprise then doubt. “Walk away now, and it goes no further. We’ll be gone before day’s end.”

They stared, all of them still and silent. Dallin watched the eyes of every one of them, but mostly kept an eye on the one from the gate. If this went bad, it would be on his signal. If that one made a move, the others would back him up. It was just how these things went. One stupid leader and a handful of followers who were too used to obeying orders and pretending at loyalty to talk sense into him.