The Rebellion (27 page)

We waited in silence, and I spent the time adopting various creative ways of breathing in an effort to filter out the foul stench of the place.

The door opened again, and the man indicated that we were to enter. Brydda gave me an encouraging pinch as I preceded him. If possible, the smell inside was worse, and it was all I could do not to vomit. The rebel seemed completely impervious to it. I gulped and was glad I had an empty stomach.

The innkeeper brought us to a room with a brown door and held out a dirty paw. Brydda dropped a coin into it, then knocked, and the innkeeper scuttled away as if he did not want to be there when the occupant appeared.

This made me very nervous.

The door opened a slit.

“Enter,” a papery voice rasped, and a shiver ran up my spine at the sound of it.

At first, I thought the chamber completely unlit, but it was simply that Brydda’s bulk had blocked the light of a cheap lantern, which was shaded to throw its light toward
us, leaving the rest of the room in darkness. The windows, if there were any, had been blacked out.

The only thing I could see clearly was the pitted surface of a wooden table and two enormous scarred hands with thick, powerful wrists resting on it. Between the hands was a curved dagger, carved with odd symbols, and the little scrolled note Brydda had sent in.

The atmosphere of threat in the room was almost palpable, and my heart began to gallop as Brydda stepped forward. “I am Arkold Bollange, sirrah.…”

“You do not resemble your brother,” the man said, his skepticism patently obvious.

“Different fathers, sirrah,” Brydda said, and it was all I could do not to goggle at him in astonishment. In the blink of an eye, without the benefit of even changing his shirt, the rebel had transformed himself into a self-important fool whose pompous facade barely concealed the sniveling coward lurking beneath.

I did my best to shape myself into the sort of cringing nitwit that I imagined such a man would choose as a servant. At the same time, I loosed a probe. It moved sluggishly because of the taint in the walls and floor. The first thing it told me was that the man seated behind the table was not alone. There were three others standing against the wall behind him.

I bent my mind upon one of them and learned that he and the man next to him were hired killers. The third was known to them only as the slaver’s assistant. The two hirelings carried knives, unsheathed, and had instructions to kill instantly after a certain combination of words.

I tried the slaver’s assistant, but his mind was shielded.

“Why did not your brother come himself as was arranged?” the slaver was asking Brydda.

“As he wrote in that note, sirrah, Evan feared he was being followed and sent me in his place. I am here only as an emissary to discuss, ah, price.”

“Who is this gypsy?” The slaver’s voice cracked out like a whip, and I jumped.

The two men with knives tensed, and so did I. “My servant,” Brydda blustered. “You could not expect a man of my stature to go about in an area like this without even a body servant? I can’t very well use my own people. You need not worry about him, though. He is defective except for a peculiar strength with his hands and feet that make him a useful guard in spite of his small stature.”

Again the silence, and I prepared myself to coerce the two with knives if the slave supplier gave the signal to kill.

“Very well,” he said at last in his sibilant voice. “But I do not want him brought again. I do not like gypsies, full or half-bloods. They are trouble and are carriers of disease.”

“Of … of course, sirrah,” Brydda babbled.

The slave supplier became businesslike as he spoke of the price he would pay for each slave and how this would increase with the number of slaves offered. The men in the shadows relaxed.

“How will I reach you if there is a problem before collection?” Brydda asked.

“There will be no problem,” the slaver said with chilling finality.

“Of course not,” Brydda babbled idiotically. “I understand perfectly.”

The slave supplier stood, and even his hands were swallowed up by the shadows. A moment later, a bag of coins fell onto the table.

“This is an advance on the payment for the five. You will
get the remainder when I get the slaves and make certain they are sound-limbed and not defectives.”

“I assure you …,” Brydda blustered.

I swiftly summoned a coercive probe, realizing I had been so busy listening to the interchange that I had forgotten what I was there for. Sending the probe to the slave supplier, I was flabbergasted to find my way barred by another farseeking probe. Wrapped delicately around the slaver’s mind, the alien probe had taken on the shape and feel of the host mind and in some places was indistinguishable from it.

Unwilling to disturb the probe until I knew its purpose, I cast about until I found its source. It was the man in the shadows whose mind I had been unable to read. The slaver’s assistant was a Talented Misfit!

I hovered uncertainly, my mind reeling with shock. I had promised Brydda to get what information I could about Salamander, which meant getting past the othermind.

I clenched my teeth and readied myself to attack.

“Collection of the slaves will take place in two days,” the slave supplier was saying. “Here is a map. The shed where you are to bring the slaves is marked on it. When you hear a knock thus …” He rapped in a sequence. The movement brought him into the light for a fleeting second, and I glimpsed bad skin, dark-brown eyes, and a vicious slash of a mouth before he moved back into the shadows. “Then you will open the door. Do you understand?”

I braced myself for a battle and let an aggressive coercerprobe fly toward the slaver’s assistant. To my complete astonishment, I met no resistance. The othermind opened to me—and I recognized it!

20

W
HEN WE CAME
outside, the sky arching above was a deep, icy blue, and there were few stars, for the sun was near to rising. We could only have been inside the inn a short while. I felt as if we had been in there for years.

Gahltha whinnied a welcome, and I stroked his neck in mute affection, realizing unexpectedly that whatever the enigmatic stallion felt for me, I loved him.

“What did you find?” Brydda asked as we mounted.

“Another mindprobe,” I said. “Wrapped around the slaver’s mind.”

Brydda turned to stare at me. “Are you saying there was a Misfit among those who skulked in the shadows of that room? Protecting him?”

“Not just a Misfit. A Talent. And not protecting, though that is what I thought at first.
He
was trying to get into the slaver’s mind, too. I traced the mindprobe back to its owner. Do you remember Daffyd, who brought Dragon to Obernewtyn when I was ill?”

“The Druid’s armsman? The probe was his?”

I nodded; then we both fell quiet, for we had come to a lane where people were bustling about in preparation for the day’s trading. In one tiny market square, a fire had been lit in a metal barrel, and cloaked men and women stooped over it, warming their fingers. They were busy and preoccupied with
their own affairs, which made it easy to weave a coercive net that would make it difficult for anyone to keep their eyes on us. I wondered at the absence of soldierguards, given the events of the previous day.

I thought of my first meeting with Daffyd—a chance encounter, if such meetings were ever really chance. I had been waiting in the Councilcourt to undergo the Misfit trial that would see me sentenced to Obernewtyn. Daffyd and another man had been waiting to see about a trade permit for the high country. I could not recall what words had passed between us that day as we sat there, but somehow, Daffyd had given me the courage to hope.

I had never forgotten his brightness in that dark moment.

We had met a second time after I had been taken captive by the fanatical ex-Herder, Henry Druid. Daffyd had been one of his armsmen. It had been at the Druid’s secret encampment in the White Valley that Daffyd and several others had been simultaneously awakened to their Misfit Talents and emotionally enslaved by a powerful Misfit baby, Lidgebaby; it was there that he had fallen in love with Gilaine—daughter of the Druid and despised by her father for her muteness.

I had shown them how to free themselves from Lidgebaby’s powerful overmind in return for their help in escaping. When a firestorm razed the Druid camp to the ground, Daffyd alone had escaped.

Discovering the loss of his friends, he had been heartbroken, but he remained with us in the mountains for some time. He had left us during the last summerdays, after Maryon had dreamed of his friends. He had been convinced they had survived and was determined to find them. Maryon had told me the dream had been vague and the faces unclear, but Daffyd had not cared.

We had not seen nor heard from him since. Until now.

“Elspeth?” Brydda murmured with faint exasperation, and I realized we had entered an empty street.

“I’m sorry, I was thinking about Daffyd. Yes, it was his probe. I am sure that his working for the slaver has something to do with his friends from the Druid camp, though there was little time for him to explain. I farsent him the location of the safe house, and he said he would come when he could.”

“It is a pity we did not know that he worked for the slaver all along. It would have spared you reading his mind. I doubt that was a pleasant experience.”

I licked my lips. “Brydda, I didn’t farseek the slaver. I couldn’t. His mind is sensitive, and he would have felt me at once. Daffyd stopped me just in time. He has spent months trying and still has not managed it.”

“If he has been working for the slaver for so long, he must have some notion of where Salamander is,” Brydda said.

“I think not, since he is trying to get into his mind for that very reason: to find Salamander. That much he did tell me.”

The rebel said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Brydda.”

“I know you are not to blame, Elspeth,” he said heavily. “But if Daffyd does not come by tomorrow night with the knowledge of Salamander’s whereabouts, we will have lost the chance to stop him.”

“But surely we can follow the slaver until he meets with—”

“You don’t understand. Two nights hence, when I do not take the five slaves to the abandoned warehouse as agreed, Salamander will guess something is wrong. Knowing his reputation, there will be a short and savage bloodletting during which anyone with any connection to him will be slain. That slaver we met tonight will be one of the first to go if he knows
what Salamander looks like or how to reach him. And perhaps Daffyd, too, though his ignorance might protect him. So you see, there will be no one to follow back to the source.”

“Daffyd will come,” I said, crossing my fingers.

The air was damp with the promise of more rain, and dark clouds obscured the waxing moon as we came in sight of the safe house. In the gaps between clouds, the sparse morning stars were winking out one by one.

We rode into the yard, dismounting to the squeak of leather and the jingle of metal buckles on the harness. When the horses were released into the grassy holding yard, Brydda bade them thanks with his finger signs, saying aloud to me that he would not come up. “Reuvan expects me back by sunrise, and it is moments away. Where are the drugged Councilfarm workers being kept?”

I told him the cellar’s location that I had taken from the overseer’s thoughts.

“I will return tomorrow night,” the big man said as he strode away. “Let us hope Daffyd has come by then with some news for us.”

Instinctively, I glanced up, seeking the pitted face of the moon. Maruman had always attributed his darkest foresight to it, and I had come to see it as a bad omen, too. As if summoned by my thoughts, the moon suddenly sailed clear of the clouds.

I felt a mindless rush of fright at the sight of it glaring down on me like the eye of some unearthly hunter. But even as I laughed at my melodramatic imagination, I felt oddly unsettled, and it took me a long time to sleep.

I woke just before midday.

Gray daylight streamed in through the sky windows of the
sleeping chamber, but there was no warmth in it. I stretched under the covers, then sat up reluctantly, reaching for my robe. Ariel’s face came into my mind, and I froze in the act of climbing out of bed, remembering that I had dreamed of him.