The Dreaming Hunt (56 page)

She watched frantically as the remaining soldiers tied up her friends with glacial slowness. Were they going to life her friends or not? The Dominion magic caster waved his hand at her. “Tie her up. Kill her if she resists.”

“Why should we save her? She's useless.”

“Less than useless,” someone else scoffed.

“The Heart pays to get its people back. They pay especially for the ones in white and blue.”

A dozen inhuman stares turned her way. “But why?” one of them asked in blank disbelief. “She's as weak as a newborn babe—could not defend herself from even the simplest spells … has no weapon!” The last was spewed in tones of deepest disdain.

Her jaw sagged. They did not recognize the neutrality of the White Heart? Soul-deep terror roared through her. She was completely vulnerable to these barbarous changelings. For the first time in her life, genuine fear that she was going to die permanently coursed through her. She had
no means whatsoever
of defending herself.

The reality of what it meant to venture into the wilds thus unprotected finally registered upon her in all its awful risk. This had been insane. White Heart members in their right minds should never venture into these places. Not unless they had a wish to die often and early. No wonder people commented that White Heart members never lived to see old age.

She was a lamb for the slaughter to these people. Sharp longing for Hrothgar or any of the other Royal Order of the Sun guardians in Dupree roared through her. And to think she'd spent all those weeks desperately wishing to get rid of them.

Rough hands grabbed her, and a rag was stuffed into her mouth. No! Now she could not heal her friends even if her captors did unparalyze her! Without words to help her shape the magic, she couldn't form spells that would do any good. Her hands were yanked behind her back, and she was bound, hand and foot. She shook like a leaf.

One of her captors shoved his snout close to her nose. “You and your fancy symbol mean
nothing
to us.”

If she'd been afraid before, she was petrified now. She was well and truly on her own. If even the Heart itself did not reach out here, she had nothing to protect her except an oath meaningless to and scorned by these creatures.

The magic caster bent down to Eben and cast a tiny bit of healing into the big jann. Eben jolted to life and then sucked in a breath of agonized pain. His right shoulder looked terribly dislocated, and his entire body was covered with deep gashes and stab wounds. He might still be mortally wounded but be internally bleeding out slowly. He needed a lot more healing than that paltry dribble if he was to survive.

She could only watch on helplessly as, one by one, her companions were lifed or healed barely enough to regain consciousness. Except for Rynn. When the Dominion got to his body, they blindfolded all his eyes, gagged him, and bound his hands and feet so he hung from a long pole. Then they lifed him and immediately hit him on the back of the head so he would not regain consciousness. All the while, the Dominion gave Rynn's limp form suspicious looks and his limbs wide berth. He must have put up quite a fight before he'd gone down for the Dominion to fear him even now.

The man who seemed to be in charge was strange looking. A porcupine changeling if she had to guess. In place of hair he had long quills that lay back flat against his skull at the moment. In battle, however, they'd stood up from his head in a deadly helmet of sharp points.

The porcupine changeling gave brisk orders to his men to get all the prisoners up and on their feet and to prepare to move out. Someone grabbed her arm roughly and shoved her forward. She turned to glare at the fellow and was backhanded for her troubles. She staggered and righted herself, the entire left side of her face on fire.

Angry, Raina glared at the changeling who'd hit her and then shifted her glare to the porcupine changeling in silent demand for permission to finish her work. It was all she could do not to summon magic to her bound hands, but she dared not act in a threatening way among these violent creatures.

His stare narrowed menacingly at her. “Cause me trouble, any trouble at all, and I will kill you and your friends. I will leave you for last to watch the others suffer as I torture them to death.”

And she believed him.

*   *   *

Ceridwyn Nightshade moved quietly through the shadowed blackness of the trees. The stealth was necessary, for she had no doubt the Empire would dearly love to question her at length about the contents of the journal she'd turned over to Kodo a few months back. In it, she'd documented every single instance of corruption, embezzlement, graft, and outright theft she'd ever seen Anton Constantine commit. The governor had wrongly assumed that, by her silence, she tacitly approved of his behavior and that she must have been engaging in the same sorts of behaviors herself.

He would be wrong on both counts. Honor was not a code among her kind. It was tantamount to a religion among the nulvari people. Their first rule, memorized by every nulvari child as soon as they could speak, said it all:

Honor is spirit, together as one.

Honor is fabric, invisibly spun.

Honor is victory, silently won.

Honor is all, the rest forever shun.

Which was the reason she was out here tonight in Lochnar, skulking around like a common criminal. She was quietly investigating the assassination of Gregor Beltane. Her recently concluded investigation of Leland Hyland's death revealed that Dominion agents had almost certainly not been responsible for his death. Someone else had killed Hyland and tried to frame the Dominion for it. Not that she had any great love for those fur-covered felons. But she wanted the truth and sought proof of who everyone suspected had engineered Hyland's murder. Likewise, she was convinced that the assassination attempt upon Jethina Delphi also had not been a Dominion attack.

Which called into question who'd attacked Gregor Beltane. Her sources in Estarris were adamant that Occyron the Six-Gilled had not ordered a Merr hit upon Lochnar's landsgrave. Furthermore, they were adamant that if Occyron had sent his best warriors to do the job, they bloody well would not have been seen.

And then, of course, there'd been the Boki incursion that she'd narrowly pulled Landsgrave Talyn clear of. Those had not been top-drawer Boki warriors. She'd seen the thanes fight before, and they would not have stormed through the woods in a battle rage, heedlessly announcing their presence and giving warning to their target.

The way she heard it, the Boki invasion of Dupree itself had been pretty much the same. Although the orcs seemed to have stirred up the native greenskin population into a fine froth, that had not been the main Boki force that attacked Dupree. If it had been, the outcome of that fight likely would have been much different and certainly would have been much bloodier.

So. Someone was trying to increase tensions in the region. To convince the leadership of Dupree, and perhaps even the Empire in Koth, that the colony was under attack literally on all sides. The Dominion controlled the region north of Dupree. The Merr controlled the Estarran Sea that formed the long western boundary of Dupree proper. The Boki, while they made their home in the northern portions of Dupree, operated freely among all the greenskin tribes of the region surrounding the colony.

She smelled the lake before she saw it in the trees ahead, a faint glitter of water under moonlight. Loch Narr. Which was the old lizardman name for the lake, of course. But it had stuck with the coming of the Empire.

Beltane's murder had been the most perplexing of the four attacks on Anton's landsgraves. Beltane's body had never been recovered. For days afterward, Gregor's people had held out hope that they might receive a ransom demand from kidnappers or that he might resurrect somewhere nearby. But neither had ever happened. He'd just disappeared.

She crouched in the lee of a tall river birch to study where he'd been attacked. It was a good-sized lake. She could barely make out a structure on the far shore. Only a light shining through a window gave away its presence at all.

Loch Narr's surface was glassy smooth tonight. A small dock lay not far away to her right, several rowboats tied up at it, and a matching dock was visible on the heavily treed island in the middle of the lake.

Before she'd fed him a forgetting potion and erased all memory of the interview, Beltane's soldier had described rowing out to that island and being attacked as they disembarked there.

She hated the idea of being so exposed out on the surface of a lake in bright moonlight, but she had no choice. She'd come all this way to find out what had really happened.

Ceridwyn crept along the dock and picked the smallest rowboat to untie and step into. Settling the oars into the oarlocks, she eased away from shore. It did not take long to get the knack of rowing relatively evenly across the surface of the water. The quiet splash and drip of the oars, the smooth oak turning in her palm, the silence and the isolation were soothing.

The prow of her vessel thudded into the island's tiny dock clumsily, and it took her a few minutes to maneuver alongside it, steady the boat, stow the oars, manage to climb ashore, and secure the boat. She did not relish swimming all the way back to shore.

Right here was where the soldier said the Merr assassins had emerged from the water and taken down him and a second oarsman. The Merr had timed it well. The soldiers would have been distracted handling the boat and not on guard against an attack. The man said Beltane had already disembarked and been walking down the short dock when the Merr attacked.

Which meant Beltane had probably made it fully ashore. She traced his steps thoughtfully. He would have turned here. Maybe seen his men fighting.

Did he run back out on the pier to engage the Merr? It would have been the man's style to defend his troops. Except the soldier described being pulled under the water. To her knowledge Beltane was no expert at fighting underwater in spite of being a formidable warrior. Lizardmen had searched every square inch of the lake and never found Beltane's body or any evidence that he'd gone underwater to fight and die with his men.

If the soldiers had been going down or already disappeared by the time Beltane realized what was going on, that would have put him on shore and aware he was under attack. She glanced over her shoulder at the heavy growth just beyond the narrow strip of sand.

He would have retreated for the trees. He knew this island. Was a brilliant tactician. He'd have wanted to even the odds. Get the Merr on his turf. She trudged through the soft sand up the beach. There was no apparent passage through the brush to the interior of the island. She ended up crawling on her knees to get through the worst of it. Beyond the first barrier of thick bushes, the forest thinned out to something more reasonable, and a sandy path became visible.

Following the path, she expected to come out on the far side of the island but instead was shocked to emerge into a clearing in front of a tall, stone tower. The structure was white in the moonlight. Round. Very old-fashioned, with crenellations for archers around the top of it. Narrow windows spiraled up its side, suggesting rooms on perhaps three or four levels.

She'd never heard of Beltane having anything like this secret retreat in his holding. The front door looked like wood, but blackened with age, or maybe painted with some sort of tar. Hard to tell in the scant moonlight. She took a step toward the structure and all of a sudden, internal warnings sounded in her head.
Trap
.

Using her excellent low-light vision, she searched the ground and spied the faintest outline of what might be a pit trap just in front of her. Or it could be a pressure sensor stretching across the entire path. Either way, the white tower was not without defenses. Carefully, she circled wide of the traps, stepped over trip wires, and finally made her way to the front door.

It had no latch. No handle. No visible means of opening it. Frowning, she ran her hands around the margins of the wood panel. Nothing. Well, not nothing. A faint tingling passed through her palms to indicate that some sort of magic spell was attached to the door.

No sooner had she detected the magic and stepped back, frowning, than the door opened silently, swinging inward to reveal inky darkness.

“Who goes there?” a rough male voice asked from within.

“A friend. I mean no harm.”

“That's what everyone who means harm says.”

One corner of her mouth turned up wryly. “True. I come seeking understanding.”

“Of what?”

“Who am I speaking to?”

“No one,” the voice replied harshly.

She frowned. “Do you live here?”

“I am not sure I would describe myself as alive, but this is my home.”

Was he a ghost? “Can you show yourself to me?”

Silence.

“I do not mean to intrude. I have come in search of answers regarding a friend of mine. He is said to have died here a few months ago.”

More silence
. Then, “What sort of answers?”

“Well, his body was never found. I'm worried that he might have been kidnapped and even now be languishing somewhere, waiting for a rescue that will never come.”

“Ceridwyn?” the voice said hesitantly.

Shock coursed through her. She was disguised, wearing a deeply hooded cloak. Nobody could see her face. How did this disembodied voice recognize her? “Who are you?” she demanded, taking a step back and to one side, out of the direct line of fire from inside.

“Careful. One more step back and you will find yourself the victim of a most unpleasant pit trap.”

“Did you see anything the night Gregor Beltane was attacked on this island?”

“Yes. I saw quite a bit.”

“Tell me. What happened? Did he die? Did he get dragged under the water like his men?”