The Warlord's Domain (10 page)

“Professionals.”

“We’re in trouble.” There was a pause, then: “But who hired them?”

“Damned if I know.” Aldric was already belly-down in the snow, squirming for a better position, with the seven-foot bow clamped crosswise between elbow-joint and biceps. “I’ll ask that question later, if I’m alive to ask or they to answer”—he ducked as sparks and sharp-edged fragments sprayed from stone when another crossbow bolt probed at their shelter and went humming off at a crazy angle—”because I don’t think taking me alive is part of their contract.”

A thread of crimson oozed down Kyrin’s face from a gash left by a splinter, and she pressed a fistful of snow against it to staunch the bleeding. “Or anyone with you,” she said, initial surprise becoming grim belief in all that he had told her these past weeks. All the fears, all the precautions, all the things which she had nodded at and agreed with, if only out loud but never in her heart.

Matters were different now, facedown in the snow with her face stinging, weapons in her hands and the occasional intermittent buzz or metallic smack of passing bolts as a constant reminder that she was going to have to hurt or be hurt. Kill or be killed. Kyrin looked at the coldness in Aldric’s face, a coldness which had nothing to do with the snow-melt soaking him, and shivered at the sudden grim reality of it all.

For just a moment she wanted to be sick, right then and there on the ground before her face; then the feeling passed into no more than a clammy shudder in her guts, and she braced her own bow across her arms as he had done and wriggled after him in the crushed snow of his wake.

Ivern’s steading might have been designed with defense in mind, and if it had been built in the past ten years there was no “might” about it. Except for the wooden doors, the stone buildings were sturdy enough to absorb a point-blank strike from anything that mounted raiders could have carried. The layout of house, annex, stables and outbuildings was such that there were no positions from which a missile weapon could dominate more than twenty feet in any directions; a range so short that leaden slingshot slugs or Army-issue weighted throwing darts would be of more use than the slow-to-reload crossbows—the kind of range at which Alban
telekin
excelled.

“Our one advantage is,” said Aldric quietly as he paused well short of a corner, “that a
telek
doesn’t need reloading after every shot.”

“So what about the bows?” Kyrin touched her own shortbow with the tip of one finger. “Keep them or put them aside?”

“Keep. We might get a clear shot somewhere. But this”—he indicated the ominous corner with a jerk of his head—”is likely to be
telek
work.” He was breathing fast, and Kyrin could see the flutter of a rapid pulse in the hollow of his throat as he half-turned to lean his own bow and bundle of arrows against the wall.

Aldric went round the corner in a half-roll and a flurry of snow,
telek
leveled at where a target might most likely be. There was no one there, but enough footprints marred an otherwise smooth snowdrift to suggest that someone had been, and recently.

“Do you mean we have to kill them all?” whispered Kyrin in his ear. “Couldn’t we drive them off?”

“How?” The monosyllabic reply was bitter. Despite his well-feigned confidence he doubted that the pair of them could win unaided against five
tulathin
, let alone chivvy them away like a pack of annoying cur-dogs. Rather than kill all of the remaining assassins, it was more likely that the
tulathin
would kill them. Aldric looked sidelong at Kyrin, at the way her teeth nipped nervously at her lower lip, at the softness of her face, and privately decided that killing would be all that would be done to her—even if he had to make quite certain by doing it himself. He was angry at letting her get involved in this, putting her life at risk because of… whoever of the far-too-many in his past had sent this execution detail after him.

“Look there.” Kyrin spoke very softly, pointing with her
telek
at what had drawn her attention. A little puff of something that looked like smoke was trailing into view from beyond the hay-barn, and even as they watched, it was joined by a second. “Fire? Or breath?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s not one of us; that’s enough.” A swirl of wind-driven snow slapped Aldric in the face, making him flinch. “Stay here. Mind your back. I’m going round that way”—he jerked his chin at the other side of the barn—”and if he comes out first, kill him.”

“What if—”

“Just make sure it’s him, not me.” He left his great-bow where he had propped it against the wall, winked at her—though that could have been a flake of snow in his eye—and moved quickly out of sight.

Kyrin stared for several seconds into the whiteness, fixing his vague outline in her mind just in case of accidents, then returned her attention to the barn. The snow flurries were dying away into a heavy, steady fall like those she remembered from back home in Valhol, hard to see through and almost hypnotic to watch. She considered the
telek
for a moment, then thumbed its safety-slide into place, shoved it through her belt and set an arrow to her bowstring.

Better the weapon you know than the weapon you just
claim
to know
, she thought with a crooked little smile. At least Aldric hadn’t asked her whether she would be able to put an arrow through another human being. Her answer might have shocked him. These people were trying to kill her, and had only themselves to blame for the—

How the man had crept up behind her was all too plain, with the falling snow deadening both sight and hearing, but the only reason why he hadn’t shot her in the back must be that he’d spotted she was female and was minded to a little fun before he finished her off.

That was his mistake. For all that he was a
taulath
and a professional assassin skilled at killing people, he had small ability at attempted rape, especially when the subject of his unwelcome attentions was more than just a frightened farm-girl.

He got as far as wrapping his left forearm around her throat and—instead of jamming a dagger under her ribs as the neck-pressure suggested he might do—began pawing at her breasts with the other hand. Mauled, outraged, but still very much alive, Kyrin dropped the bow and its nocked arrow and reached up with both hands.

She snapped his little finger like a twig, then wrenched the pain-loosened forearm from her neck and used it as a lever to hurl her attacker to the ground. The
taulath
landed with a jarring thud on his tail-bone and the back of his skull, an impact that knocked even the uncompleted scream of pain out of his lungs as no more than a grunt.

“Bastard!” hissed Kyrin, clawing the
telek
out of her belt.

“I’ll gut you for that, bitch!” the man snarled back with his first regained breath, rolling over with a shortsword gripped in his uninjured hand and already clear of its sheath. Kyrin froze—because the words and the accent were both Alban.

That shocked hesitation was almost enough to kill her, for it let him regain his feet, his balance and enough time to lash out the beginning of a cut with the
taipan
shortsword—also Alban, she could see that now—which would have taken her face off. The pause when time went slow was almost long enough for her to die, but not quite. Her
telek
snapped back on line and jolted in her hand to put a single lead-shod dart into his eye.

Kyrin’s heart was beating too quickly and too loudly by far, seeming almost to advertise her presence, and there was an acid queasiness in her stomach which came not from the killing but where the killed man came from. The implications of
that
, already running through her brain, were too ugly to be believed and too urgent to be kept secret for longer than it took to find Aldric again—somewhere out there in the snowstorm, not knowing that the men he stalked were his countrymen, trained as he had been himself and most certainly more ruthless. They were people he might hesitate to kill for one reason or another, as she had almost hesitated, whereas to them he was a job of work, payment on completion and no more.

She was not so panicked that she was about to do something stupid; but whatever she did, she would have to do it fast…

The man lying at Aldric’s feet wasn’t dead, but he would likely wish he was when he came to his senses and the egg-sized lump at the back of his head made its presence felt. Shooting the assassin would have been as easy, but given the chance of choice Aldric had left him alive. Why, he didn’t know. But he wasn’t about to correct the error by killing a helpless enemy, good sense though that might have been.

Instead, he came very close to killing Kyrin as her anonymous shape appeared out of the falling snow. His
telek
was leveled and his fingers were already putting four of the necessary five pounds’ pressure on the weapon’s long trigger before he saw just who it was aimed at and twitched the muzzle to one side.

Kyrin’s face was pale enough already, and the experience of staring down the bore of a weapon whose power she had had demonstrated barely seconds earlier was enough to leave her as white as the falling snow.

“
Doamne’ Diu
!” he snarled. Alone, things would have been easier, since with Ivern and Dryval and all the others away from the steading, anyone else would have been an enemy and could be dealt with as such. Despite, or maybe because of her courage, Kyrin tied his hands by refusing to hide. But there was another way out, if the snow continued to fall as heavily as it was doing now; a way out in the most literal sense.

“Back to the stables. The horses are ready to go; we’ll mount up and get out of here while the weather holds bad.”

“You mean
run?’’’

“
Escape
sounds better. We’re still outnumbered—”

“Barely! They’ll be easier than the others—”

“No, dammit! I know more about
tulathin
than you do. We’ve been lucky so far—”

“There’s no such thing as luck!”

“Then we’ve—” His patience gave way at last and he grabbed her by the arm. “Argue later, for God’s sweet sake. But right now,
mover

Kyrin opened her mouth to say something savage; then the focus of her eyes moved from his face to a place behind him and her heel hooked round behind his knee so that they both went tumbling sideways. Two bolts from the three crossbows she had seen in the instant they were leveled went scything through the snowy air where they had stood and exploded sparks and splinters from the hay-barn wall. And that left one.

As Aldric rolled from the fall and back to his feet, Widowmaker came from her scabbard with a whisper of steel on wood… and then froze halfway to a guard position as the man with the last loaded crossbow walked forward slowly, enjoying his moment of absolute superiority. Behind him, the other two slung their missile weapons and drew shortswords for what would now be only butchery.

“Aldric Talvalin,” said the first
taulath
. He spoke excellent Alban, with a Pryteinek accent, so that Aldric glared hatred. The man’s crossbow wasn’t aimed, but pointing nonchalantly at the ground… for now.

“Keep the girl safe,” said the hateful Alban voice behind the hood. “Girls are for dessert.”

“Sweets are bad for you,” said Aldric, deliberately using the highest form of the Alban language as an unsubtle insult. It was the way a clan-lord would address a beggar, if the clan-lord deigned to communicate with more than just his riding-quirt.

The
taulath’s
crossbow came up, steadied, sighted on Aldric’s forehead… and loosed. Blue fire exploded unsummoned from Widowmaker’s pommel-stone and enveloped her blade in the instant of the missile’s flight. The longsword shifted to guard in a flicker of hot blue-white light, and emitted a shrill metallic screech as her edges met the accelerating crossbow bolt and sheared it point to nock in two. Aldric hid disbelief behind a hun-gry feral grin and whipped the blue-burning
taiken
through to an attack posture—

And then there was a slap of impact and the center of the
taulath’s
hood went explosively concave. As his companions dived for cover, the assassin took a single tottering step backward and fell. Aldric matched his movement with a raking stride forward that slammed his heel square into the center of the masked face, then brought Isileth Widowmaker down with all his force onto the crown of the hooded head.

The
taulath
lay quite still in the snow, split to the middle of the chest, crumpled and bloody and somehow smaller now. The other
tulathin
were nowhere to be seen.

“What—what happened?” Kyrin had spent the past few seconds face downward in the snow, displaying good sense for what Aldric considered was the first time in far too long. “I thought you were dead!!”

“Exaggerated rumors.” Aldric’s sardonic smile was not a particularly pleasant thing to see, especially since it was spattered with the dead man’s blood. “Now, quick, and quiet: to the stables.”

“I said what happened?”

“Slingshot.” He augmented the laconic answer by turning her hand palm-up and dropping into it what looked like a small egg. Kyrin glanced down—then made a shocked little noise as she realized exactly what he meant, dropped the still-bloody lead slug into a snowdrift and scrubbed her smeared hand hard against the leg of her riding-breeches. The slug had been completely round when it left the sling, but now it was slightly flattened—because a human skull can always put up some resistance, even to a slung lead shot…

“Who killed him—not you?”

“I wish…” Aldric pushed open the stable door and led the way in with the muzzle of his
telek
. Apart from agitated horses, the place was empty. “No, I just made sure. He shot at me, and then that thing took part of his head off. The other two got out of sight; they’re still out there somewhere.” He swung up into Lyard’s saddle, leaving one foot free of its stirrup so that he could lean sideways,
kailin-style
, along the horse’s neck, and looked back at Kyrin. “So are the others, the
tulathin
in white who killed him.”