Jalia At Bay (Book 4) (2 page)

2.
              
Dell

Daniel established that they had been attacked by two men and someone smaller, possibly a woman. They followed their trail through the forest. Jalia took the lead. It was not as if following required a good tracker. Four donkeys and two horses left marks enough for even a fool to follow.

Jalia strode out in front of Daniel with feral intensity, shaking with barely suppressed rage, not helped by the pain in her feet. Daniel had been brought up barefoot and walking without boots was no hardship for him. The soles of his feet were as hard as leather. Jalia, however, had been brought up in luxury in Bagdor and always wore something on her feet. She cursed and moaned each time her foot caught on a stone or was pricked by a bramble; something Daniel found highly amusing. Especially as the curses she was came up with were original and inventive.

Daniel reflected on Jalia’s anger. He had not seen her like this since the time he gave the Black Pyramid to the Fairie. He had stolen it from her and betrayed her trust. She broke his legs as punishment and would have killed him, he reflected ruefully. She certainly had not been aware the Fairie had placed a healing spell on him. After all, he hadn’t known about it.

Jalia had become less prone to kill people and ask questions later in the time they had traveled together. In Telmar, she was sickened by the assassinations they carried out.

Daniel was sure that was the reason she wanted to go home, to find out who she had become by comparing herself with the girl that fled Bagdor.

“Damn it!” Jalia cried as she stood on a bramble with large and vicious spikes.

Daniel grinned and was about to say something when he heard a rustle in the bushes beyond. He froze instantly, as did Jalia. In Jalia’s case, this involved precariously balancing on a single leg. Daniel dropped into the ferns and began to move in a circle that would bring him around the bushes. Jalia saw him drop and knew exactly what he was up to. Daniel had a talent for walking unseen and not a single fern stirred as he started to move.

Jalia hopped to face the bushes. She ripped the bramble spike from the sole of her foot. The foot stayed in the air. There was no need to let the person in the bushes know that she was fully able to fight.

A boy aged about thirteen or fourteen came into view. He held a long wicked looking knife. He dressed like a peasant, though his leather jerkin was of higher than usual quality. The boy held his knife in front of him and took up a fighter’s stance, ready to slash his knife across Jalia’s face or stomach. Most people would have regarded him as a significant threat, especially if they were standing on one leg, unarmed and wearing only underwear. Jalia relaxed, as she realized that this was going to be easy.

“Who are you?” the boy asked as he inched closer. A seasoned fighter would have kept his distance, moving closer served little purpose unless he intended to kill her. The boy did not have a killer’s look in his eyes.

“My name is Jalia, what’s yours?” Jalia asked in a friendly manner. She made no attempt to put her foot on the ground and moved her hand across the sole of the foot in question as if still feeling for painful spikes.

The boy turned out to have less than perfect vision. As he got within three feet of her he gasped in shock.

“You were dead, we checked. You and the man were dead.”

“You killed him, but I was only knocked out. Do the locals treat all travelers like that?”

The boy nearly dropped his knife in fright, undecided as to what to do next. Then he decided to run and spun to find Daniel blocking his way. Daniel tilted his head as if asking a question. Again, the boy faced a choice and decided that getting past Jalia would be the easier route. He swung his knife from side to side as he started towards her.

Jalia pivoted on the leg she was balancing on and kicked the boy in the groin with her apparently injured foot. The boy never saw it coming and the force of the blow wrenched the knife from his hand. The kick lifted him in the air before he fell to the ground at Daniel’s feet. Daniel winced in sympathy at the force of the blow and wondered if the lad would survive it.

Jalia followed through on her kick, ending up on all fours. She performed an acrobat’s roll, plucking the boy’s knife from where it had fallen in one fluid motion.

The boy gamely tried to reach for the knife before the pain of Jalia’s blow hit him. Then his hands flew to cup his injured groin and he wretched pitifully. Jalia slid the knife into her woolen underskirt and reached for one of the boy’s legs. She had taken off his shoe before he knew what was happening and slipped it on her own foot.

“Perfect fit,” she said in triumph to Daniel, who grinned.

When she reached for the boy’s other leg, he tried to kick her. She slapped his left inner thigh so hard that he screamed in pain. Jalia retrieved his other shoe while he writhed in agony. She put the shoe on her other foot with evident pleasure.

“I know peasants like you can walk around barefoot all day. But more sophisticated people, who were brought up in civilization, need something sensible on our feet.”

“The lad still seems to be alive,” Daniel remarked in surprise. “Are your kicks getting weaker these days?”

“It was more of a push than a kick, Daniel. This little thief knows where our property is and I can hardly get answers out of him if he’s dead, now can I? Once we get the information we need, then I’ll kill him.”

Jalia dragged the boy to his feet and pulled his leather jerkin from him. A few seconds later, she was wearing it.

“It’s a bit loose around the chest, but this will do nicely. Do you want any of his clothes before I start questioning him? They may not be wearable afterwards.”

Daniel shook his head. He saw comprehension dawn in the boy’s eyes and he tried to suppress the regret he felt. The boy was a thief and a murderer, or an attempted murderer at best. Justice in Jalon took no account of age in such matters, and Jalia seemed in no mood to show the lad mercy.

“Don’t kill me,” the boy cried desperately. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know, I promise. My name is Dell Taldon and this was my first time at the trap. My uncle Adon Taldon made me come along. Him and Twist Falfit set the log to fall on you. I just watched them do it. Please don’t kill me, I’m the only one my mother has.”

“You should have thought of that before you decided to rob us,” Jalia said without a trace of sympathy. “Where can I find these thieves and where have they taken our property?”

“The village, they’ve taken all your stuff to the village. There’s a market there today. We get people from miles around come to it. Uncle Adon said they’d make a lot of money out of your things, especially the donkeys. He said the lead donkey would make a small fortune.”

Jalia gave Daniel a despairing look at the mention of Ferd. Daniel grinned in relief. At least the thieves would have treated Ferd well if they had recognized his worth.

“Uncle Adon had a lot of trouble with that donkey. It kept trying to go back to where we attacked you. Uncle Adon had to whip it to get it to move at all.”

Daniel frowned. If Ferd was hurt, somebody was going to suffer.

“There was a small fortune in the gold in my money belt,” Jalia hissed at Dell. She wondered if forest people were stupid.

“People of the forest have no use for gold,” Dell said quietly. “Wealth is in things you can use, wear, or eat, not in lumps of shiny metal.”

“Wonderful. These people are too thick to appreciate gold.”

“What is the name of your village and where is it?” Daniel asked. Jalia was being sidetracked on trivial matters and they had to get answers out of the boy before he realized he could lie and they would be none the wiser.

“Sweetwater, sir, on account of the stream and how good its water tastes. It’s about an hour’s walk that way,” Dell said, pointing east. “I can show you if you want?”

“Won’t be necessary and you’ll be dead by then,” Jalia told him. Dell blanched and looked into Jalia’s blue eyes for the first time. It was at that moment he knew he was about to die. His bladder failed him and a flow of urine trickled down his leg.

“Jalia…”

Daniel never finished the sentence because Dell chose that moment to make a desperate break for freedom. Jalia broke his left leg below the knee with a swift kick from behind. She knelt down on top of the squirming boy and locked her arm around his neck. The boy slumped and was suddenly still.

“You could have let him live. It was his first time,” Daniel said looking at the boy’s body on the ground. Dell’s broken leg lay twisted at an unnatural angle.

“Hah! You are going soft if you believe a lie like that,” Jalia retorted. “Let’s go and retrieve our property before those bastards sell it.”

Jalia stalked off in the direction Dell had pointed. Since the tracks of the horses and donkeys were clearly visible, they had hardly needed Dell to tell them the way.

Daniel took one last look at the boy and shook his head. After all their travels together, she was still the old Jalia when it came down to it.

Jalia hurried them along the trail until the spot where Dell lay was far behind. She did not want Daniel to discover that she had only squeezed the boy unconscious. Jalia was afraid Dell would wake up and cry out while they were still close enough to hear.

The broken leg would slow his return to the village until after they were gone. If he could not get back to his village with a broken leg, then living in the forest would kill him anyway. Jalia had given the boy a reasonable chance of survival and the rest was up to him.

Most of all, she didn’t want Daniel to think she was growing soft. She worried she would lose Daniel’s respect if he discovered what she had done.

3.
              
Village in the Forest

Jalia practiced throwing Dell’s knife as they moved along the trail. The knife was entirely the wrong shape and balance to make any kind of decent throwing knife. But then Jalia was exceptionally talented at the art of throwing anything that could be thrown. Her first efforts bounced off the tree’s and Daniel was treated to a virtuoso rendition of the best curses Jalia knew.

He mused to himself that it could not be argued that Jalia had failed to pick up the cultural mores of the places they visited. He would have run out of curses in a few minutes, but Jalia was still going strong, without a single repetition, more than half an hour later.

Traveling with Jalia while she was learning to throw a knife was not without its hazards. She threw the knife forward and when she was level with Daniel, it was safe. However, when she stopped to search for the knife in the undergrowth and Daniel walked ahead of her things became tricky. As she got the knife under firmer control, the blade would whistle past Daniel’s ear to embed itself lopsidedly in a tree beyond.

“I am very fond of my ears,” Daniel remarked as one flight came particularly close. He touched his ear lobe and examined the blood on his fingers critically.

“Don’t worry,” Jalia called as she ran past him to drag the knife from the tree it was embedded in. “I promise that as soon as I cut of them one off I’ll stop. You do have two after all.”

“Throwing the knife will leave you defenseless. Shouldn’t you be practicing attacking moves?”

“I don’t need to practice knife fighting, but throwing an unfamiliar knife is a quick form of suicide.”

“And the problem of being defenseless after you’ve thrown it?”

“Daniel.” Jalia placed her hands on her hips and blocked the path in front of him. “If I throw the knife, the person I was fighting will be dead and I’ll have the time to retrieve it.”

“And this is why you carry two knives.” Daniel gently put his hands on Jalia’s shoulders and turned her until she was facing ahead. Jalia made no attempt to resist him, which told you exactly what she thought of Daniel, if you were to know Jalia at all.

“Not all of us have a dagger that comes back to us,” she reminded him. Jalia swiveled and the knife shot from her hand. It ended up quivering in a tree thirty feet in front of them.

“I don’t have one of those either, at the moment,” Daniel said and he sighed. “I had hoped our trip to Bagdor would be uneventful. I believe the King will cause us trouble enough, once we arrive.”

“Brun Trep is a wapner,” Jalia said with some feeling. The word was one she had picked up in Brinan and meant someone addicted to self gratification to the exclusion of all other sexual behavior. “But you would like Bagdor, Daniel. It is the place of great culture where the major guilds of Jalon train their apprentices.”

“If by major, you mean the guilds of the Assassins and the Alchemists then I would agree. I’ve visited Bagdor’s many times, though I never moved in the exalted company you did. I believe it would be better if kings stayed in their palaces and left the rest of us in peace.”

The conversation petered out as they came to the top the ridge forming one edge of a small valley and they looked down at the village below.

The great cities of Jalon had been mapped out in rectangles from the age of the Magician Kings when rigid order had been considered the height of aesthetics. Their high city walls still reflected older times and tended to be oval in shape. Villages like Sweetwater grew randomly as people built houses to be close to their families or convenient for water. Most villages followed a stream or a river.

Sweetwater was a big village, at least thirty houses clustered along either side of a brook that ran through the valley. There were three bridges visible from their vantage point and that was two more than most villages possessed.

On slightly higher ground was a larger and more stoutly constructed building that they assumed was the village’s
Lord’s House
. This was a building owned by the whole village. It was a place to make merry, to hold marriage ceremonies and take refuge in times of crisis, built large and fortified to provide a place of safety. Judging by the number of people around it, it was also the place where the market was being held.

“We could be too late,” Daniel pondered, as they started to walk down the trail that became a hard dirt track alongside fields striped with basic crops. Most villages farmed in strips so that each villager got a share of good and bad land.

“I expect they save the donkey sales till last. They probably get more perverts that way,” Jalia said as she grinned good humoredly at Daniel and he grinned back. They were alive and traveling together. What could be better than that?

If anybody thought that Jalia should be wearing more than a woolen underskirt to protect her modesty they did not mention it as they strode towards the Lord’s House. One or two children pointed at Jalia and giggled, but then they often did that when she was fully clothed. The thieves had taken Daniel’s coat and shoes, but apart from that had left his clothes alone, as they were not worth stealing.

Their horses were standing outside the Lord’s House, still wearing their saddles and packs. They were tied to a large hitching post. Jet whickered at Daniel as he got closer and Daniel smiled. Jalia had given him Jet on the Ranwin Bridge nearly a year ago. He was a horse built for riding rather than plowing fields and he was as black as his name implied.

“It’s all right, boy. I’ll get that nasty saddle off you and give you a rub down as soon as I can.” Daniel stroked Jet’s head. Swift, Jalia’s grey nudged Daniel in the back, in an attempt to remind him that there were two horses to be tended to.

Jalia snorted, sounding very like a horse herself. “Can we deal with the thieves first or would you rather stable and water the horses first?”

Daniel sighed. Jalia was right; there was more pressing business to deal with. He stepped to one of the double doors and Jalia to the other. They nodded at each other and kicked the two doors in.