The Reign Of Istar (24 page)

Toukere had had the same straight-on look in his eyes as Alyce did now when he'd said
that. By that look - its absence or its presence - I'd always judged a man's nature. Or a
woman's. I guess I reckoned on it this time too.

“Who's this partner of yours?” I asked. “A lover?” She tossed her head, and her short,
dark hair swung and bounced. “Dinn's a friend. Sometimes he acts like a hotheaded fool,
but I love him dearly. He comes from people who have only one word for both loyalty and
honor. Hard enemies, these people, and good friends. My father earned his friendship, and
Dinn says that I inherited it.” Her voice dropped low. “On his soul and my father's sword
I swear that I'll deal honestly with you, Doune.”

It was a powerful oath. I knew none like it to offer her.

She asked if I had a father; I told her I must have at one time. A mother? Dead, I said.
No sister or wife, she supposed. I told her she supposed right, and none of the women I
knew had the kind of soul I'd care to swear an oath on. She looked at me with a mocking,
exaggerated expression of pity.

“Well,” I growled, “I don't expect they're swearing any oaths on my soul either.”

The kender whistled a rising note, like a question, to catch Alyce's attention. When he
had it, he hit his two fists against each other, then clasped both hands together. Alyce
shrugged with the air of someone who has come to the bottom of the coffer and expects to
find nothing but dust. To me she said: “I don't suppose people in your line of work have
many friends.”

“Not many,” I said flatly, “and the one who was closest to me is a long time dead.”

“Was he a good friend?”

A good companion, an honest partner, and one who made his escape from Istar in such a way
as to leave plenty of witnesses to the fact that I'd had nothing to do with it.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “He was a good friend.”

She thought about that for a long moment, her blue eyes no longer bright and jeering, but
soft and very serious.

“Swear by your friend's memory, Hunter-Doune. Swear that you'll deal honestly with me.”
Then I couldn't see her eyes at all for the veil of her dark lashes. Only her lips moving
in a secret little smile. “It'll be well worth your while.”

That's all I needed to hear. I placed my hand over hers and took an oath on a friend's
memory.

Good thing she waited until I'd sworn before she told me that her partner was the minotaur I'd brought to Istar's jail only hours ago. Good thing
for her, but not so good for Peverell. The mute little kender laughed so hard that he fell
out of his chair. And not so good for me. I'd been two days in the minotaur's company and
I suspected he'd not readily agree to become my partner in the hunt for Kell. But I was
sworn now, and by Touk's memory.

Too, there was all that gold to consider. *****

Peverell was hot to pick every lock on every door in the jail. When I told him that we
wouldn't get in that way, he showed me how deeply he resented this slight to his thievish
abilities. Mute he might be, but he'd raised the skills of obscene and insulting gesture
to high art. Alyce calmed him, and from there the night's work was no more than the usual
game: Get some weapons for the minotaur, some mounts for Alyce and me - no sense getting
horses for Peverell or Dinn; Alice said that neither would ride if you paid 'em - then
bribe the right guard and pay off the right cleric. The bribe and the payoff were huge,
took all the ninety gold pieces I'd earned on the minotaur and a lot more besides. Alyce
had to part with her beautiful sapphire necklace.

“I consider it an investment,” she said. She cocked a thumb at my empty purse and grinned
coolly. “You should, too.”

I did. A quarter share of Kell's bounty would make the gold I'd paid in bribery seem like
the pittance in a beggar's cup.

I was right about Dinn. He joyfully would have given up all hope of freedom for even the
slimmest chance of killing me. But Alyce managed him, and it was something to see her go
toe-to-toe with that brute, harrying him in hissing whispers like an angry fishwife.

“Use your head, Dinn,” she said. And she insisted - often - that he remember why they were
here. She demanded - just as often - that he carry through with what he'd promised.

The kender, over his fit of the sulks, came up close to the tall, red-furred minotaur,
gestured elaborately. Dinn growled and shook his horns at Peverell, sullenly asking Alyce to translate. “He's saying just what you know is true, Dinn. We NEED you!” That made some difference, caused the minotaur to subside. “Arr, well,” he growled, glaring at me. “Let's do it then.”

“Thank you, my friend.” Alyce patted his rough-furred shoulder and rose up on tiptoe to
kiss that ugly snout (which made him growl and HARRUMPH and shuffle his feet).

I kept one eye on Dinn, for all that everyone seemed happy and friendly together. I'd been
the one to shame him by dragging him chained and hobbled into Istar. Minotaurs usually
like to erase the memory of shame by killing anyone who knows about it.

*****

An unwelcoming place, the savannah; hot and dry and without landmarks. This is the land of
the nomad clans, and there are no borders to cross; nothing to warn you that you're in
some clan's territory, for the nomads have no individual territories. Always moving,
settling nowhere, the long-braids consider the whole savannah theirs. They have a hard
greeting for visitors - a flint-tipped arrow, a lance's stony head.

We went carefully, Alyce and I riding; Dinn loping ahead, a tall, homed outrunner tracking
steadily west to the blue-hazed mountains. Sometimes Peverell trotted beside him, unseen
but for the parting of the high grass as he went, the wake of a small, mute kender. More
often, he stayed by Alyce. Like all kender, he loved to talk, and she had more patience
for his silent language - and clearly a greater understanding of it - than the minotaur
did.

I was used to riding alone since Toukere and I had parted ways, and I was used to quiet.
But soon I found myself liking the sound of Alyce's voice: low because of the danger,
thrilling when she was keen on her subject, gentle when she was thinking aloud. Alyce did
a lot of thinking out loud, about politics and history and gods.

“I'll tell you something, Hunter-Doune,” she said, one blazing noonday when the savannah
ran rippling under a hot wind. “I've always heard that gods are about balance good and neutral and evil all lending their weight in the measure against chaos. I think
it's politics that makes heretics, not wrong thinking. Which, if you believe what you
hear, is just what this outlaw, Kell, thinks.“ She glanced at me out of the comer of her
eyes. ”If you believe what you hear.”

She seemed to know a lot about Kell, and I wondered if she'd conceived some romantic fancy
for the outlaw. I asked her about this, in a joking way. Peverell, trotting beside us,
looked up at me, signing swiftly, laughing silently.

“What'd he say?” I asked.

“Kender nonsense,” she said stiffly. “I have no fancies about Kell. A good hunter should
know what she's hunting, how the prey thinks, what it will defend, where it goes to hide,
where it is vulnerable.” She smiled, as though to herself and over private thoughts.
“Don't you agree, Hunter-Doune?”

I said I was a bounty hunter, not a boar hunter.

“So you are.” She laughed, mocking again. “And a good one who wastes no time thinking
about the heretics you hunt. Right?”

“No sense in it. They're nothing more than the promise of gold, payable on delivery.” I
slipped her a sideways grin. “Thanks to politics.”

Again Peverell gestured, his whole bright face a question; this time Alyce translated.

“He wants to know whether heretics are people to you.” I shook my head. “They're profit.”
The kender signed again, and Alyce looked at me for a long moment, her eyes all soft and gravely thoughtful, as if she were weighing the balance
of me on a scale.

“Empty enough for the wind to howl through, aren't you, Hunter-Doune?”

“Did he say that?” “No. I did. How'd you get so empty?” “Tricks of the trade.” I shifted
uncomfortably to another tack. “Why are you worrying about how I feel? I don't see that YOU'RE holding a
whole lot of mercy for Kell.”

She looked away, out across the golden, shifting savannah. “My feelings for Kell are ...
personal,” she said. “I'm not a bounty hunter by trade.”

“Oh? What'd he do, steal the pennies off your dead father's eyes?”

She winced, and I was sorry I'd said it. I'd come close to some truth, one that hurt.

“Come on, Alyce,” I said, and surprised myself to hear how gently I'd spoken. “Don't worry
about me and my feelings. They haven't got all that much to do with you anyway, eh?”

The old, taunting light, brittle and bright, came back to her eyes. “Not much,” she said,
and she laughed.

I thought the laughter was forced. *****

That's the way we talked during those long, hot days on the savannah. Sometimes she
mocked, as she'd done in the Hart; sometimes she was serious, and I liked that best. Soon
I began to wish that the kender would stay with Dinn. I was getting to like Alyce's
company, the nearness of her, her voice, even her thoughtful, considering silence.

There were possibilities in her silence. At night, as I slept - Alyce wrapped in rough
woolen blankets with a tall fire between us - those possibilities changed into dreams in
which the minotaur and the kender had no roles to play.

But the kender was with us more often than not, and so we three were together - Alyce,
Peverell, and me - when, at the end of our third day of travel, the sun set in a blaze of
red and ahead of us Dinn spotted the nomad woman and her child.

My horse danced skittishly, sidled away from the minotaur's horns. Dinn smiled thinly when
he saw that, tossed his head so that a horn came dangerously close to the horse's shoulder
... and my leg. He pointed to the tall grass where it parted counter to the wind's
direction.

“Two,” he said to Alyce. “Long-braids.”

The nomad woman ran swiftly, though she went hunched over, burdened by the weight of the
small boy clinging to her back. The boy's head bounced limply in rhythm to her swift,
ground-covering stride. His sun- browned leg was streaked with blood. The woman's course
would take her right across our path.

Answering the instinct of fifteen years, I reached for the coil of rope hanging from my
saddle. One good cast and I'd have her and the child roped, down, and trussed. Alyce, seeing my gesture, said, “How
much for those two, Hunter-Doune?” Eighty gold, I told her. Forty for each, the woman not being worth more than the child. Alyce smiled coldly. “Your share of Kell's bounty is worth ten times that. Are you with me, Hunter-Doune?” I didn't answer. I was watching the
woman run.

Although the wind covered our whispering and our mounts were still, something - a silence
of birds, maybe - must have spoken to her instincts. She threw a swift look over her
shoulder and stumbled, startled to see us. Her eyes were large and dark, like empty holes
in a mask of terror. The sight chilled me, squeezed my heart so that it was as if I felt
the desperate fear myself.

The woman recovered quickly, hitched the boy up higher on her back, and ran faster.

I took my hand away from the rope, saw Alyce watching me - not weighing anything, not
taunting. Rather, she smiled the way you do when you first meet someone and you're
thinking that you like what you see. Peverell looked from one to the other of us, then
gestured something. His hands flew too fast for me to get his meaning, but Alyce did. A
dark scowl replaced her smile as she told him to stop talking nonsense.

*****

They say that the red moon, Lunitari, is the daughter of Gilean, the deity who is the
keeper of all the knowledge possessed by the gods. Solinari, the silver moon, is
Paladine's son, and he watches over all the magic being done in the world. That night,
while the others rested, I walked the first watch and saw these two moons - gods'
children, if you will - rising. First to rise was Lunitari. When I squinted eastward
across the plains, I thought I saw the tall towers of Istar silhouetted against the red
disk, dark like a jagged bite taken out of the moon's rim. Second up was Solinari, and he
rose a little north of Istar, avoided the teeth of the Kingpriest's city.

Foolish fancy, eh? Well, I had a lot on my mind - too much for sleeping - and I kept
coming back to the memory of how I'd felt when Alyce smiled after I'd let the nomads go. That was just more foolish fancy. Why should I care how I weighed out in her eyes? Aye, she was long-legged and lovely. Her blue eyes, when
they weren't mocking, spoke of possibilities, inspired dreams. She was round - and surely
soft and warm - in all the right places, but so was many another woman, and I knew that
well enough. The only difference between Alyce and them was that she was a good hand with
a sword, good to talk to ... and she was leading me to a quarter share of a fine, large
bounty.

Sometimes she looked at me in such a way as to make me want to be what she seemed to hope
I was.

Empty? Maybe once. Maybe still, but Alyce, when she looked at me with her eyes soft, a
little hopeful, and gravely thoughtful, made me think that she might be able to fill some
of those empty places in me.

I shook my head hard, as if I was trying to shake out this nonsense. It WAS nonsense, I
told myself. Isn't one woman just as good as another on a cold night?

I was looking at the silver moon when I thought that, so I guess you could say I was
praying for something, maybe for an answer, or a way to understand why it mattered to me
what Alyce thought.

Of course, Solinari didn't have much to say about it. The children of gods have their own
business to tend.

*****

When the moons were past their heights I left my watch, stepped carefully around the
sleeping minotaur, and sat beside Peverell at the campfire. He gave me a sideways look,
then signed something to Alyce. When I asked her what he'd said, she didn't answer right
away. I had the idea that she wasn't thinking about how to translate, but whether to.
Finally she repeated his gestures, slowly, the way you enunciate each word for the hard of
hearing. A long reaching up with both hands to cup something, an abrupt dragging down
motion.