The Path of the Sword (60 page)

“So how's Higgens working out?” Jurel asked more to fill the silence than to hear about the ill-tempered lieutenant.

Gaven snorted and shook his head before responding. “Tight-ass? He's just as pleasant and engaging as ever. Any more engaging and he would have to shit through his teeth.”

“Tight-ass. I like that,” Jurel laughed. It was a nice play on the man's first name: Titius. With a clink, his shackles shifted and his laughter stopped. “Damn it, but I hate these things.”

Gaven fell silent as well and he picked at the black iron chain. “I wish we could just take them off.”

Hope flared in Jurel, a hot dizzying flash, and it was all he could do to avoid pleading that Gaven do just that. Instead, schooling his voice, he said as jovially as he could manage, “You and me both.”

Gaven's eyes remained glued to the shackles as he pondered. Finally, he nodded and Jurel felt his heart thudding in his chest. Would he? Would he?

“Why not? You're my charge anyway, and you haven't tried to run away since we caught you. It seems unfair that you can't even stretch in the morning. And your wrists. By god, but they're chafed.”

Producing a crude key, barely more than a twisted piece of iron, from one of the sundry pockets in his cloak, he inserted the end into the tiny hole and twisted. With a snick, the cuff fell open and dropped onto Jurel's lap. Another twist, another quiet snick and both his hands were free.

When the leg irons had been removed, Jurel stood and stretched his arms wide, luxuriating in the feel of long unused muscles moving again for the first time. “Oh, that's good,” Jurel moaned.

“Yeah, yeah. Try not to get too excited,” Gaven replied with a wry grin. “It may not be for long, depending on what the captain says.”

Jurel sat, nodding and smiled. “Still, any chance to move as a human should is welcome in my books.”

“I know. But you have to promise me something. You have to promise not to try anything foolish,” his tone had turned from warm to somber so quickly that Jurel had to look twice to make sure it was still Gaven that spoke to him.

“Would I do that?” He was the epitome of innocence.

“I heard about what you said to the captain the first day we got you, how you had to do anything you could to get out of here. I'm placing a great deal of trust in you, Jurel. Please don't let me down.”

Jurel nodded, trying to look contrite and honest all at the same time.

“I'm going to regret this.” With a sigh, Gaven rubbed the back of his head.

Of course he would. Kurin and he had worked out a plan. It was not much of a plan but it was what it was. In the end, the hardest part had been figuring out how to get Jurel out of his shackles. He liked Gaven. He did not want his friend to get in trouble but he had to get away. They were going to burn him alive. He smiled at Gaven and patted his arm reassuringly and Gaven returned his smile. It almost broke his heart.

Chapter 50

“
God's what a shithole,”
he thought to himself as he limped along one side of the narrow muddy street.
“I can't believe he lived here for so blasted long.”

Keeping his dark, tattered cloak wrapped tightly and the hood pulled up, he moved stiffly and with a slight hunch; the walk of an injured man. The people who dared look at him, gasped and quickly averted their eyes, and moved away from him. Some were so repulsed by the apparent vagabond, they crossed the street, muddying shoes and hems and trousers alike. Even those that did not look at him, still moved away as though he posed some sort of physical threat to them. The end result was that, as he limped, favoring his injured ankle, the crowds separated around him like a wave breaks over a boulder. At least he did not have to fight his way through the throngs that milled in the streets.

Shivers wracked him as he walked; he needed a healer. He was sweating and he was cold in turns, in nasty little cycles that left him all the more spent as the fever played its insidious games with him. He had seen strange things the last few days. He had seen his mother smiling at him, lovingly calling to him that dinner was ready. She was dead these past fifteen years but he had seen her. He had seen Lofren, his old teacher, berating him for getting another stance wrong. Another living dead. There had been a creature, a snake with eight legs or perhaps it was a spider with a snake's sinuous body, that had reared up and glared malevolently down at him from unimaginable heights. He had nearly wet himself with that one.

This time, he saw colors. A strange rainbow that intermingled, weaved in and out, dancing with the grace of a water nymph. The colors glinted and gleamed and sparkled in the weak, steely light and he stopped, stared, mesmerized by the sight. This hallucination was different from the others. The others had all come when he was so exhausted he collapsed. The others had happened directly in front of him and then disappeared within moments—the only reason he had been able to hold his water when the snakespiderthing appeared was that it was gone before he completely lost control. He was tired, certainly, but he was still moving. The shimmering lights were not far at maybe a hundred paces, but they approached with their graceful dance. Eighty paces. Seventy.

As they approached, the colors bled away, until all he saw was a dull gray gleam. Instead of dancing, the hazy gleam bobbed up and down rhythmically, and continued to approach.

“Aw damn,” he muttered.

This fever would get him killed. It dulled his senses. Hid the obvious. Those weren't fey rainbow lights conjured by his imagination. Well, they were, but the pretty colors hid the truth as pretty colors often do. That was armor.

He spun on his heel and stumbled, hissing in pain. Wrong foot. Pushing open the closest door to him, hoping it was a shop and not a home, he walked as normally as he could manage and took in his new surroundings. More colors. What in bloody blazes? He squeezed his eyes shut and wiped away the icy sweat and when he reopened his eyes, the world resolved itself.

The colors remained but this time, they were the mundane colors of cloth. Racks stood in neat rows, draped with shirts and trousers. The walls were lined with shelves that held rolls of linen and cotton. Here and there, a bolt of brightly colored silk or satin shimmered like errant diamonds scattered amidst coal, in the faint light of the torches that hung on the walls. A seamstress's shop? Maybe a tailor's.

“What do you want?” a surly, prissy voice asked from somewhere off to his right.

Turning in that direction, he searched the dimness for the owner. For a moment, he saw nothing until movement caught his attention. He was about to dismiss it as another vision when a man, presumably the tailor, stepped out from behind his counter and stopped a few paces from where he stood.

He was a thin stick of a man. Even through clothes, bony elbows and knobby knees were visible. He guessed the tailor was about fifty years or so: a band of graying hair wrapped around the back of his head like a basket handle while the top was so bald it shone more brightly than the silk, tiny wire-frame glasses perched on the end of the beak he was certain the tailor called a nose, and eyes squinted disapprovingly from a face that was worn and lined but had not yet graduated to wrinkled and decrepit.

“Well?” the tailor asked. “What do you want?”

“I-” He paused, not quite sure what to say.
I'm hiding from the guards. I'm sick as a dog, feverish, and I'm seeing my dead mother and snakespiderthings. I'm looking for a man that I've never met or even seen so that we can...what? So that we can...
“I need a healer.”

The tailor snorted. Gesturing to his ragged, tattered, and altogether filthy cloak, he smirked scornfully. “I think you need more than that.”

“You're right,” he replied. Lifting an edge, if it could even be called an edge anymore, he smiled weakly. “I need a cloak too.”

The smirk dropped away and the tailor glared at him. “No charity. Get out,” he said and turned away.

“I can pay of course.” Desperate, he lifted his purse and shook it, filling the air with the tinkling of coins.

The tailor froze in his steps. With a broad smile, he approached. “Well then, that's different,” he beamed. “Why didn't you say so in the first place? Let's take a look and see what we have, shall we?”

The magic of silver never failed. The tailor, his demeanor completely reversed, started puttering around his shop, fingering one fabric then another, all the while keeping up a litany of friendly chatter: the weather, “cold isn't it?” And why not? It
was
still winter after all; the lack of custom, “Something's afoot. Causing my trade to dry up.” If he only knew the half of it.

“As I take a better look, I can see that your cloak was of a fine cut, hmmm? How about this one?” He lifted a bright yellow thing off of a rack.

“No. Something a little more...conservative I think.”

“Of course. I should have guessed. My apologies sir.” The flood of words continued (inane gossip, “Javon was mighty put out with Niklas for letting them out of his sight. I heard Niklas is scrubbing pots at the barracks now.” Better men than this Niklas had lost
that
particular quarry) and he searched the racks for what he thought would be appropriate. “I take it from milord's condition that the roads are dangerous to travel, hmmm?”

“Something like that.”

The tailor lifted another cloak, this one so red it made his eyes hurt. “This one? No. More conservative, you said.” He laughed and shook his head. “This one doesn't exactly scream conservative, now does it?” He continued, from one rack to the next, expertly flipping clothes out of the way to expose others to his scrutiny. “I hear that strange things are happening in the east—did you come from that way?—soldiers are roaming the caravan routes. They say—this one? No. Too blue. I can see that you are a man of distinguished tastes—they say that strange lights appear in the skies at night and that an entire platoon of God's Soldiers were found slaughtered.”

“You don't say.”

“Hmmm? Well, no matter. Here! I think this should do.” He pulled a length of dark fabric. It was hard to tell if it was blue or green, but it looked well made, about the right size, and warm.

“Fine. How much?”

“For this? It's a fine piece. Beautiful craftsmanship. I made it myself, you know. Look at the thickness of the wool-”

“How much?”

The tailor's oily smile faltered and he stared wordlessly at him for a moment before remembering himself. The smile returned, though it was a little more sickly.

“Five silvers.”

He guffawed, certain he had misheard. “
Five?
Five
silvers?
Are you insane? That would buy half your inventory. No. Do better than that.”

“I'm sorry, milord, but times are hard. The roads are dangerous and I don't know when I'll get my next shipment in. A man's got to feed his family, after all.”

“His family and half the neighborhood apparently,” he growled. The bloody swindler!

“I can see that you have encountered difficult times so I will be generous. Say four, and ten.”

“Two.”

Sweat popped out on the tailor's brow and he began to tremble. “The quality is unmatched anywhere between here and Threimes itself. Four,” he countered.

“I will make one final offer. Two and five and even that's easily more than double the value. I'll throw in my cloak also. Perhaps you can salvage some of the material. For a handkerchief or something. Take it or leave it.”

The tailor slumped his shoulders and held out the cloak. It was green. When he counted out the appropriate coins—and saw his purse heavily diminished for it—he shrugged off his old cloak and donned the new one, tying the lace at his neck.

“Now, as to my other request?” he asked.

Since the transaction was complete, the tailor resumed his surly expression and gestured beyond the door. “There is one down the street.”

He was not a tall man, but he had never needed height to be intimidating. He let his glare pin the tailor to the spot and in the most grating voice he could muster, he asked, “Where?”

The color drained from the tailor's face and wide-eyed, he began to tremble again. “Four doors down. A woman by name of Magan.”

“Thank you.” With a toothy grin, he turned away and stepped out the front door. Certainly, enough time had passed by now that the guards should be a long way down the road.

He looked left, then right and when he saw no steel and no rainbows, he sighed with relief. Four doors down, the tailor said. All right then. Four doors. He limped on, reading the signs that hung over the doors until, just as the tailor promised, he saw the one he needed. Putting his hand on the latch, he paused when a strange sight caught his attention. There, across the street, was a small shop with boards nailed across the door and a sign painted red that warned 'NO ENTRY'.

Was that...? No, it could not be. He could not be so lucky.

Curious, he crossed the muddy tract, barely noticing the horse that almost trampled him, barely hearing the irate stevedore that roared at him to watch where he was going, and stopped in front of the boarded door. It was the only shop in his field of view that was closed and he was pretty sure he knew why.

Casually, he strolled to the mouth of the narrow alley that ran along the side of the shop and with a quick glance to make sure he was not noticed, he slipped down the dark path. Making his way to the back of the shop, very narrow from the front but remarkably long, he stepped over the stinking debris that was so common in alleys such as this. When he reached the back, he jumped the fence, making sure that he landed on his good foot.

A shed with windows running from end to end, a small garden with a strange overhang that seemed to serve no other purpose than to keep light from whatever grew there, and a well. That was it. Nothing of interest. The shop and the attached residence would be empty. That would have to do. He needed rest. His guts were screaming at him and his ankle felt as though it had been wrung out by the world's strongest laundress.

The back door was locked but that was no problem. Injured or not, he was immensely strong—decades of weapons training had seen to that. A solid grip, a quick twist of his wrist, and he heard a small snap. The latch gave easily and he entered into a kitchen. A haze of dust sparked in the squares of sunlight that patched the floor but except for that, the place had that indistinct colorlessness of disuse as though with the tenant gone, it had lost its soul and faded. He thought he could still smell lingering traces of cooking in the air, though only a hint remained under the mustiness. Skirting the wooden table that stood in the center of the room, he approached the door that should lead out into the front portion of the structure. The shop. If he was right, if this was the place he thought it was, then he may be in luck. Gods, he hoped he was right. He needed to rest. He needed proper care. Through the door then. He steeled himself and pulled.