Murder in Halruaa (9 page)

“It’s a footprint and a paw print,” the halfling marveled in Pryce’s ear.

“By all the electrum in Maeru,” the bogus Blade said. “It’s a jackalwere print!”

*****

“What is a jackalwere doing this far south?” Pryce wondered aloud as they made their way northeast from the city.

“How would I know?” Wotfirr complained. “I only said I’d never seen a footprint like that before. I didn’t say I knew anything about the blasted creature’s migratory habits!”

The halfling was worried, and not just because he was carrying Gamor Turkal’s body across his shoulders. The weight was no problem—Wotfirr was used to hauling heavy kegs of ale—but they were moving farther and farther away from the safety of Lal-lor’s walls. “If we must search for this jackalwere lair, must we also carry around this—” he paused and cringed at the term he couldn’t avoid using “—this dead weight?”

“I told you,” Covington admonished him, carrying the other body on his own back. “We can’t take the chance of anyone else coming upon this living proof of my true identity!” He grimaced at his extremely poor choice of words. “Well,” he corrected himself, “not living proof, I suppose. Anyway, if we are to discover the truth of the matter, we can’t afford to wait until tomorrow to find the jackalwere. I’ve had some experience with those beasts. They’re constantly on the move, preying on unsuspecting travelers.”

“Oh, good,” Wotfirr moaned. “That certainly puts my mind at ease!”

“We’re not in any danger,” Pryce said. “We’re suspecting travelers. Like all ambush artists, jackalweres prefer finding unprepared victims rather than prepared adversaries.”

“Even so,” Wotfirr complained, “we must be mad to do this!”

“I’m sorry, Gheevy, but we have to find a place to hide these bodies, and we have to discover if this jackalwere knows anything about their deaths. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“But why—”

“Shhhh,” Pryce suddenly instructed, slowing down as the road approached a forest of dead trees. The landscape around them was a series of small valleys interspersed among low hills. Trees were plentiful, but their bare, empty branches looked like the fingers of starving men clawing at the sky. There was no way a gang of marauding brigands could hide behind them, or in the coarse, briar-lined bushes that covered the hills. But the foliage would be perfect for smaller creatures.

The two heard a low moan coming from around a curve in the road just ahead of them. Pryce leaned over to whisper. “It sounds like a traveler in distress.”

Wotfirr peered into the murk. “I don’t see anyone,” he said, stepping forward.

Pryce hastily held him back with a single outstretched palm. Then he placed a forefinger to his lips. Silence did not reign long.

“I say,” came a clipped, civilized voice from the gloom ahead. “I say, is someone there? I seem to have fallen and twisted my ankle. Can you help me?”

Concerned, Gheevy hopped to Pryce’s side. “Let me see if I can help this fellow,” he said. “He sounds harmless enough, and he’s obviously in great pain.”

“You will do nothing of the sort,” Covington said quietly.

“But my family knows of certain healing ways,” the halfling

retorted. “Let me put my burden down and supply some aid—”

“The only thing you will supply is this evening’s repast,” Pryce snapped. “And that burden, as you call it, is probably the only thing keeping you from being set upon immediately.”

Gheevy opened his mouth to reply, but quickly shut it tight.

“I say,” the voice continued. “I’ve twisted or broken my ankle or some such. Dash the luck. Can anyone give me a hand?”

“What a shame,” Pryce called ahead. “Sadly, our hands are full at the moment.”

“Really?” came the smooth reply from the darkness. “How awfully inconvenient for us both. Well, let’s see if I can—” there was some painful grunting and authentic-sounding moaning—”manage to regain my feet____Ah, there we are.”

The two reluctant body snatchers heard an ominous shuffling coming toward them.

“I say, I do hope you won’t mind my accompanying you for a short way. Perhaps I could be so bold as to request some guidance? Perhaps you might even deign to allow me to lean on one of you fine examples of humanity for some slight support?”

The person who appeared to them out of the night was the most benign-looking gentleman imaginable. He had a long, sympathetic, somber face, the kind you might find on an understanding uncle who would always offer you his shoulder to cry upon. His wardrobe had at one time been elegant, but now it was a bit frayed, like that of a traveler slightly down on his luck.

“Greetings,” he said bravely, favoring his right leg. “Please allow me to introduce myself. The name is Cunningham, and I am but a humble vagabond who wants nothing more than to be on my way and of no bother to the likes of you gentlemen.”

“Greetings,” Pryce replied. “You may call me Darling, and I’m told I’m delicious in a Halarahh wine sauce.”

The old gentleman stiffened, his dark eyes suddenly piercing as he turned his gaze on Gheevy. “What is your associate talking about?” he said intently.

“I’ll be cursed if I—” the halfling started to say, looking up.

“Don’t look him in the eye!” Pryce cried, but it was too late to warn him of the creature’s magical gaze now. Wotfirr’s vision grew cloudy, his eyelids slammed shut, and his small, squat form crumbled to the ground beneath Gamor Turkal’s cadaver.

The change that came over the self-styled Cunningham raised the hair on the back of Pryce’s neck. Then the entire scene changed enough to raise the hair all over Covington’s body.

The wounded man’s leg strengthened and straightened. He smiled… and when his lips arrived at the point where a human’s lips should stop, they kept right on going. They stretched wider and wider and never seemed to come to the end of this character’s teeth.

Soon the smile was satanically wide, but still the lips kept stretching and curling, and the teeth multiplied like reinforcements joining a battle line. The bottom of the creature’s face distended with a wet, audible cracking sound. His nose sniffed and his nostrils flared, but instead of returning to their natural position, they remained open, growing even wider and darker.

Cunningham had given the impression of being unshaven— the better to match his disguise as an itinerant wanderer—but now his five o’clock shadow had become a midnight thicket of coarse orange-red fur. His dark eyes had become yellow, but no less piercing. Fusing from his thickening hair were two quivering cones of fur-covered flesh. His hands, too, had become much larger, and his fingernails now looked like steel knives.

He snapped his head forward and back, and his appearance became completely feral. Frighteningly, his face still held the obvious intelligence of an educated human—a malevolent, dangerous, violent human, but an educated one nonetheless. Even so, he emitted a sound that was part whistle and part death rattle.

Covington knew from experience what was coming, and he heard them before he saw them. Cunningham had called his children … full-blooded jackals, although born of a jackal mother

and jackalwere father, with no human consciousness whatsoever.

The little beasts appeared from all around Pryce, forcing their emaciated, starving bodies from the prickly brush, their skin torn from the briars. If they weren’t so dangerous, they’d be pitiful.

There were a half a dozen in all, snarling, coiled, and ready to strike. Pryce’s eyes darted this way and that, carefully noting their positions and making sure none started to nip at Gheevy. Pryce could practically smell their hunger and resentment.

From the moment he and Wotfirr had walked away from the Question Tree with the bodies, Pryce had been preparing himself for this eventuality, but now had to wonder whether he had the courage to get rid of these fresh corpses and elicit information from a dangerous jackalwere at the same time. At this point, he hardly had a choice.

He waited in the center of the circle of jackals, trying not to be paralyzed with fear. To keep his fear from taking over, he kept thinking over and over, “I am Darlington Blade, master mage and hero, and I know I am in complete command here!”

“What is that you are carrying?” Cunningham suddenly hissed. The threat inherent in his question was unmistakable, and the interruption in his thought process made Pryce freeze in place.

“You really don’t know, do you?” Covington snapped nervously. The jackalwere was taken aback by the man’s sharp retort, but Pryce didn’t leave it at that. “That must mean that these bodies appeared at the Question Tree after your visit there.” It had to be that way. If the jackals had found these carcasses earlier, they would surely have eaten them.

“The Question Tree… ? How do you know I was there?” But then the creature’s animal rage boiled over. “Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

“Do you?” Covington countered, dropping the body at the

jackalwere’s hairy, clawed feet. The corpse landed with a heavy and horrible thud, face up, his eyelids seeming to stare at Cunningham. “Do you recognize him?” Pryce held his breath; nearly everything depended on what the jackalwere replied.

The red and black fur-covered face went from the dead man to Pryce. “I don’t need to know him,” he growled, “to devour him!” He took a threatening step forward.

Covington matched him, stepping forward himself, his thumb under the cloak clasp that had been previously covered with the dead man’s arms. “Then do you recognize this?”

The reaction was extraordinary. The jackalwere stood straight up, and every visible hair on his body stood up with him. Immediately all the jackals around Pryce froze in place and arched their backs, their own fur standing on end like quills. They spit like frightened felines.

“Darlington Blade!” Cunningham almost screeched. “Of all the—” he began, but then his words changed into a night-rending howl. The others raised their heads and joined him, filling the dark with an eerie, howling chorus.

“Shut up!” Pryce bellowed. “Shut up, all of you!”

The cries stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Pryce surveyed them carefully. The small jackals were shivering and frightfully thin. Their fur was slick with their own blood, since they had suffered many cuts from hiding in the briar patches. He spun to look into the shocked face of their father.

“Do you want to eat?” he demanded. “Do you want to survive in this land of the hostile, the powerful, and the prepared?”

“Curse you, adventurer…”

“There’ll be time for curses later,” Covington said evenly. “Now it’s time for answers, and then you will eat. There will be plenty of freshly killed meat for you and your pups.”

He saw Cunningham’s conflict in the dance of the jackalwere’s facial muscles. The monster would like nothing better than to tear at the despised flesh that stood before him, for the skin of

wizards was said to be the most succulent of all. But the monster knew that the legendary Darlington Blade would make quick work of any attack … and then his offspring would continue to suffer and slowly starve.

“You would give us this meat?” he growled, nodding at the fallen bodies as drool coursed from between his teeth.

“I don’t want to,” Pryce replied honestly, a catch in his voice, then realized Gheevy was still prone on the ground. “Not the living one!” He hung his head in shame. “But the recently killed … meat… yes.” He felt deep, abiding regret, but he had to save himself from these beasts as well as the Council of Elders’ vengeance. A painful trade-off was called for. “If’you answer my questions!” he suddenly demanded.

“I do not need to answer your questions!” the jackalwere snarled.

“Answer and you can eat,” Pryce said intently, leaning daringly toward Cunningham. “Don’t answer and you can continue starving to death.”

The jackalwere stood still for a moment, then spun to the ground. Pryce jerked in surprise, but managed to keep from crying out or stepping back. Blade or no Blade, any sign of weakness meant certain death.

When the jackalwere stood again, he was once more the kindly, civilized traveler known as Cunningham. Pryce realized that this humiliation—bartering with a human!—would be easier to accept this way. “Goodness, sir,” he chirped. “What a predicament!”

Pryce ignored Cunningham’s opening gambit… and the sweat that coursed freely down his forehead in the cool night air. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “What could a jackalwere hope to gain by coming to a place where magic reigns, where the great majority of residents could easily defeat a savage such as yourself?”

“A… creature invited me,” he said with shamed tones.

“What creature?” Pryce asked, still careful not to get too close.

“A misshapen creature, the likes of which I had never seen before. It made me promises that were too good to be true … a steady supply of meat… spectacular hunting… the flesh of unearthly wisdom. I should have known better,” he said bitterly.

‘This misshapen one offered you the flesh of spellcasters?” Pryce asked incredulously.

“Not in so many words…”

Covington couldn’t afford to dwell on this. The longer he spoke to this creature, the greater the chance that its unreasoning children would attack, and then the beasts would be in for a pleasant surprise. They would discover that the person they thought was the great Darlington Blade was actually a mere messenger from Merrickarta with no magical powers whatsoever. “When were you at the Mark of the Question?”

Cunningham seemed pleased at the change of subject, since he no longer had to talk about his gullibility and humiliation. His sad eyes wavered in recollection. “Early this morning … I believe.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I had been told to meet someone … that he would have food.”

“Who told you?”

“The dust… dust on the wind!” Cunningham raised his head and started a pathetic, accented, off-key howl.

“Stop that!” Pryce demanded, annoyed at the creature’s behavior and the possibility that Gamor helped lure it to the Lallor area. “Did you meet this person?”

“No,” Cunningham said sadly. “He never arrived.” His eyes began to become bloodshot. “Nor did the food …” Covington heard the young jackals behind him start to snarl deep in their throats. He was rapidly running out of time… and questions.