The Lone Warrior (15 page)

“Oh yes.” Mehcredi grinned. “But I kneed him in the balls and broke his finger.” Amusement fled. “He said he’d be back, with his friends. That was one of the reasons I ran.”

She risked a glance. Walker’s face was stony, his jaw tight.

For the first time in her life, Mehcredi found the nerve to ask straight out. “Are you angry?”

He shot her a fathomless glance. His lips barely moved. “Yes, but not with you.” In a single lithe movement, he rose. “Anything else is none of your business.”

As he walked away, she studied the tail of his hair, as thick as her wrist and blacker than the night sky. Gods, she loved the way it fell, bisecting the broad expanse of linen shirt, just brushing the taut curve where his ass began.

If the swordmaster was aware that Mehcredi watched him all the way back to the salle, he gave no indication of it.

Deep in the Trinitarian Republic, an itinerant scribe set up his shingle in the shade of the north wall of the Grand Pasha’s palace. Beneath a snowy head cloth, he wore spectacles mended with tape and a mildly anxious expression. His throat had the flabby look of one who’d lost weight quickly and recently. Behind him, huddled up against the huge roughly hewn blocks of masonry, sat a figure concealed by all-enveloping black robes. As he put together a shabby traveling desk and laid out parchment, ink block and brushes, the scribe ignored his companion, despite the rocking and muttering. More than one passerby averted his eyes, making the sign of the Trimagistos, the briefest touch to forehead, heart and groin.

The open square baked in the afternoon sun, mangy dogs dozed and pedestrians sauntered, the light linen of summer robes swishing about their calves. Nothing much happened until a matched set of eight male slaves, oiled and gleaming, rounded a corner and trotted toward the tall gates. Knees lifting smartly, all in step, they bore on their muscular shoulders an ornate sedan chair. As it drew level with the scribe, the gauzy curtains parted and a large hand emerged holding a knobby cane. A barked command, a vicious blow on the nearest back and the chair came to a halt, the slaves shuffling their bare horny feet in the dust.

The little scribe came to his feet and bowed so low his nose nearly collided with his knees.

A small female slave, dressed economically in a few strategic swathes of cloth, leaped out of the conveyance and hastened to unfold a set of steps. That accomplished, she held up a trembling hand to support the weight of the huge man who emerged. The scribe glanced over from under his lashes. It would be more than his life was worth to be caught staring. Clad in robes of dazzling white, relieved only by a midnight blue head cloth, the man was not so much fat as simply enormous, broad and beefy as well as tall. His heavy jaw gleamed with sweat.

“How may I be of assistance, Pasha?” murmured the scribe. “My talents, meager though they be, are at your disposal.”

The man poked the scribe in the shoulder with the point of his cane. “Who are you, one-name?” he rumbled. “You’re new.”

“Hantan, I am called, Pasha. I have come on pilgrimage to the Tri-Lobed Temple, as all men must do at least once before they die.”

“What’s that?” A stab of the cane indicated the bundle of black robes.

The scribe’s lips thinned. “My sister Dotty, mighty lord. She’s not right in the head, but what’s a man to do?” He spread his hands.

A grunt. “Couldn’t sell her, hmm?”

“Regrettably not, Pasha.”

The big man fingered a fleshy lower lip. “Hmpf.”

Without another word, he clambered back into his sedan chair, the slaves staggering under the weight. As he was carried past the Janizars on the gate, they snapped to attention, hands falling to the hilts of their wickedly curved blades.

The scribe perched on the rickety stool behind his desk. “Know who that was, Dotty?” he said to his sister.

The black bundle emitted a string of numbers, fingers writhing as she counted.

“That,” said the Necromancer, with tremendous satisfaction, “was Nerajyb Nyzarl, the Grand Pasha’s senior diabloman.” His mild blue eyes rested thoughtfully on the palace towers, reaching white and narrow into the blinding azure of the sky. “How very fortuitous.”

“Diabloman,” said Dotty suddenly, briefly channeling the Technomage Primus she’d once been. “May also be defined as demon master, but there are no empirical studies of demons and therefore no proof of their existence.”

“If I offer your sorry carcass to Nerajyb Nyzarl, you’ll find out, won’t you?”

“Dead,” she said. “Dead. Good. Be dead.”

“Not yet, my dear,” said the Necromancer. “You’re still too useful, I’m afraid.”

Dotty keened, a high and eerie sound.

“By Shaitan, will you shut up!” He hopped off his stool to administer a swift, satisfying kick.

With a startled squeak, Dotty resumed counting.

“Are you Walker’s friend?” asked Mehcredi as she emptied a drawer of shirts. The healers had pronounced Dai as whole as he would ever be and he was moving out of what she now knew to be Walker’s room and back into his own.

Dai gave a soft snort. “Doesn’t have friends.”

“I thought everyone had friends.” She retrieved an errant sock.

“Too cold, too scary. Never . . . smiles.”

Mehcredi thought of the deep pool of silence that seemed to surround the swordmaster. When he passed through a crowd, people melted away without seeming to realize they’d done so. She’d seen it. “But you, ah, like him?”

Dai shrugged. “Got my back. I got his.”

“Loyalty’s a part of friendship?”

The swordsman stopped stuffing garments into a duffel bag to shoot her an interested glance.

“There has to be more?”

Dai nodded.

“So how do you know if someone’s your friend?”

He’d developed the habit of speaking in short bursts, presumably to spare his throat. Mehcredi wasn’t brave enough to ask how much it still hurt.

“They . . . take care of each other.” Pause to cough. “Laugh together, know . . . each other’s secrets.”

“Oh.”

When Dai bent to roll up the magnificent rug, she hurried over to help him. “Rose’s,” he said. “Loan.”

“Is Rose your friend?”

A shadow crossed Dai’s face.

“Sorry,” said Mehcredi immediately. Shit, that was stupid. Hadn’t Walker said the swordsman fancied himself in love with the oh-so-beautiful Rosarina?

“Dai?”

“Hmm?” He buckled the straps around a duffel, securing them with vicious jerks.

“Would you tell me a secret? Just a little one, about you?”

She tried not to flush as he studied her face for a long time, but her stomach pitched with nerves. Then the corners of his lips tucked up and his shoulders moved in a
what-the-hell
shrug. “Was a . . . virgin’til . . . nineteen.”

Mehcredi’s eyes went wide. “That’s a secret?”

Dai inclined his head, then gestured.
Now you.

Shit, she hadn’t thought that far ahead because she hadn’t expected��Right. Squaring her shoulders, she got it out before her nerve failed her. “I’m a terrible assassin.”

Without missing a beat, Dai said, “Is that . . . a secret?”

Mehcredi dithered, pleating the fabric of her shift with nervous fingers. Something warm bubbled up inside her, fizzing until her head swam with it. “You made a joke.”

When he smirked, her own smile grew so wide her cheeks bunched up. “I must be bad at it because you’re still here, that’s it, isn’t it?”

She didn’t wait for a further response. “Gods, that
is
funny.” The giddy feeling exploded out of her in gales of giggles. Wrapping her arms around her middle, Mehcredi laughed until she couldn’t see straight.

When she finally wiped the tears from her eyes, the swordsman was leaning against the wall watching her, a small smile on his lips. “Tell you . . . another . . . secret.”

“What?”

“I’m the best . . . card player . . . in the Isles.”

“Really?”

She got a blandly wicked smile. “I cheat. Teaching boy . . . teach you too. Move room first.”

Stuffed too full of joy for speech, Mehcredi grabbed the duffel and took off down the stairs two at a time.

Memorizing the numbers and symbols on Dai’s battered pack of cards wasn’t too difficult, though it took Mehcredi a couple of hands and the rough side of Florien’s gutter tongue before she figured out the actual purpose of the game. After that, the various strategies became clear enough, so much so that a few days later, she raked in the biggest heap of dried beans, while man and boy cursed and glowered.

“I won!” she caroled, dancing about the room. “I won!”

“Enough with . . . nice,” rasped Dai, reaching for another pack. “Cheating now.”

Learning how to cheat turned out to be as difficult as the
nea-kata
, and for similar reasons.
Control,
growled Walker every morning.
Concentrate, woman
.

“It all shows on yer face,” snapped Florien as he arranged his pile of dried beans. “Gotta control yer feelings, see?”

Feelings
.

Sister in the sky, these days she was bursting with the damn things, as if she’d lost a layer of skin and all her nerve endings were exposed to the unforgiving air. Every night, she promised herself she wouldn’t do it, but the temptation was beyond her to resist. Pulse pounding, she’d bury her face in Walker’s shirt, inhaling the man-smell in deep gulps. The next few moments varied, depending on what sort of day it had been. Most often the tears flowed hot and salty, but sometimes she rubbed the fabric against her cheek, smiling. She hadn’t used the shirt to find release again. The experience had been so strange, so powerful, that whenever she thought of it she shuddered all over. Such an extremity of pleasure. Next time she might die and while it wouldn’t be a bad way to go, dead was nonetheless dead. Life had become a thing of color and interest, two steps forward and one step back.

She’d never been so happy—nor so angry and confused.

Mehcredi’s world shrank to the House of Swords, the swordmaster at its center, but at the same time, it had never been so large, so enormous with marvelous possibility.