Summerblood (52 page)

Merryn could only watch with a certain grim satisfaction as the two men struggled on the ground. Eventually Inon got Shaul beneath him, striding his hips and pinning his arms to his sides, while the larger man wriggled, twisted, and swore.

“Enough!” Inon kept yelling, sounding more than a little drunk himself. Which made sense if he'd been into the walnut liquor, as it tended to do its damage all at once.

“Enough! Enough! Enough!”

“Enough indeed!” another voice roared from the direction of the house. The voice had a hollow sound, but Merryn recognized it exactly as Inon did.

“Orkeen, stay out of this,” Inon shouted.

“By the Gods, I will not!” Orkeen yelled back, and stepped into the light.

Merryn's blood froze.

The helm gleamed on Orkeen's head. His right hand held the sword; his left, the shield.

He hadn't activated them, as far as she could tell, but that was surely sheer blind luck.

“Take that off!” Inon roared without relaxing his grip on Shaul.

“Mine now,” Orkeen laughed roughly. “If you're good, I might still let you have, oh, say, a province. As long as I get to be king.”

“Idiot!” Inon yelled again. “Ivk, Tahlone, tend to him.”

Tahlone was on his feet at once, but Ivk hung back, clearly reluctant to engage in violence with someone he knew—who was also drunk and wearing magic armor.

“Stay back!” Orkeen warned, leveling the sword at the both of them as Tahlone dodged past Inon and Shaul.

And in that leveling, he shifted his grip, which finally triggered the blood barb in the hilt. At least that's what Merryn assumed afterward. What she saw was a sudden jerk in Orkeen's sword arm. With it came another from his shield side, by which she assumed one shift had prompted another.

He still hadn't activated the helm-gem, however, which meant the other two were both feeding him power, while also, in a sense, contending for attention.

And Orkeen was an enemy to everyone the gems knew. They wouldn't like what was happening.

“Eight,” Merryn gasped, clutching at Krynneth's arm. “Oh, Eight, Kryn—”

Lightning masked the rest.

An explosion of light, rather, followed by a clap of thunder and a roar of flame that raked out from the sword's tip to blast the tree nearest the campfire.

“Orkeen!” Inon yelled, and finally released his hold on Shaul.

Too late, because the power had hold of Orkeen but Orkeen could not control it. And as reflex sent Inon rushing toward him, Orkeen's reflexes set the shield before him. Inon hit it— and bounced back, screaming, his entire torso a mass of red where the shield had ripped the top few fingers of skin, muscle, and bone away, and sent them to the Overworld.

It was his own momentum that did it, Merryn knew. The sword called matter from there and manifested it here as force; the shield took force from here and manifested it there as matter. But if that force was attached to something solid, that substance went with it.

“Dead,” Krynneth breathed beside her. A sixth word.

“No, but he'll wish he was and probably soon will be. I—”

“Bastard!” Ivk screamed, as he likewise threw himself at Orkeen.

Orkeen turned toward him and brought the sword around. Lightning flashed again. Merryn saw Ivk's body as a blot of darkness against that light, and then he crumpled. But even as his body collapsed into the fire, Shaul finally made it to his feet. “Hey, 'Keen,” he called drunkenly. “Le' me try tha'.”

But Orkeen was mad by then—or frightened. It didn't matter. Faster than Merryn could see, he spun around again, and a third time lightning spoke. Shaul died where he stood.

“Ork …” Tahlone dared from where he was backing away. He was trying to sound reasonable, but Merryn had carried that sword when first it had been made and knew better than anyone how it liked to have its way.

“No!” Orkeen shouted. “Mine!”

The bolt that killed Tahlone rode the sweep of the sword down from the sky. But it killed him as effectively.

“I'm king!” Orkeen roared. “Now rise and acknowledge me.”

No one did, because everyone was dead.

He took a step forward and froze. Abruptly he dropped the sword, then the shield. Both hands reached for the helm and wrenched it off. It made a dull thump as it hit the sand.
Not
the pavement, a part of Merryn that never slept entirely was glad to note. The helm had suffered too much abuse already.

As for Orkeen—He was simply standing there, eyes glittering in the firelight, while the stench of scorched leather, burning fabric, and cooking meat filled the air. Something wet glistened between his eyes where the helm-gem had pricked him. To no avail or too late.

And then, he was moving again—slowly, oh so slowly, as though he had to consider each moment, or was prisoner of some vast unseen hand that propelled him along. One step, two steps, and Merryn saw his features more clearly as he approached the fire.

And most clearly of all right before he stepped into it.

For a moment she didn't believe what she was witnessing. A man—even a madman—would not do that. Instinct would prevent it.

If instinct lived.

In any case, it wouldn't live long, because the fire had ignited Orkeen's breeches, and a flame from them had found one baggy sleeve, which in turn set fire to his braid.

In an instant he was burning all over.

At some point pain—or something—regained sufficient control to tell him what was happening, and he began to scream, long and loud and helplessly. But his body didn't move.

The good thing about screaming, Merryn thought dully, was that it let the fire into the lungs, and that hastened death.

What actually killed him, however, she never knew, because she was still throwing up her last meager meal when the screaming ended.

Only when she was on her feet again and fumbling for the water pitcher Ivk had left, so as to rinse out her mouth, did Krynneth block her hand. She looked at him blankly. He stared back, and added a seventh word to his vocabulary.

“Key.”

It took Merryn a moment to realize what he meant. And then fear filled her in truth.
The only key to this place was somewhere on a dead man outside!

And the tack room—as she discovered over the next several hands—had been built very well indeed.

It made no sense. Then again, nothing Kylin had experienced since he'd hatched his ill-considered scheme to get himself captured made much sense.

And hadn't
that
turned into a fiasco? Instead of being left alone in the dungeons—from which Kylin had assumed he might possibly find some way into the ventilation system that had served him so admirably before—he had, after that first day, been installed in Zeff's quarters. In a windowless closet adjacent to them, more properly, from which he could hear not a word, but into which food appeared at intervals sufficient to keep him healthy, and from which he was fetched from time to time and asked to play.

Not that they didn't ply him with questions, but not one had been anything to which they didn't already have the answer, as far as he could tell. Besides which, he was proving to have a decent natural immunity to imphor, so
that
interrogation was progressing very slowly indeed.

Which was all well and good, except that he was no closer to rescuing Avall than he'd been when he'd arrived there with some notion of accessing his friend through the vent system
and smuggling him out that way. He'd hoped they'd leave his hands unbound, counting on his blindness to preclude any major subterfuge. Which would have left him free to proceed as planned. Barring that, he was reasonably certain he'd have been able to pick any lock they'd put on him, using a pick he'd sewn into the hem of his sylk eye mask.

He hadn't counted on becoming Zeff's pet.

Of course, he'd taken what advantage of that situation he could, but had mostly learned that Zeff knew the armor he'd captured was not the armor he'd expected. More to the point, he knew that Zeff had had some kind of bad experience with the insane master gem—but that he had, perhaps recklessly, decided to mount it in the sword anyway, using information (so Ahfinn had let slip) that had come to him when he'd drunk from a Well.

In any case, what mattered now was keeping his feet as he was hustled along by two burly Ninth Face guards, neither of whom seemed to recall that he was blind and
couldn't
maintain the pace they set without an occasional foray into clumsiness. A third person had his harp, but what their destination was, he had no idea. Something had changed—he knew that much from the scraps of conversation he'd picked up since awakening. But it was impossible to tell more than that Eron had finally made some sort of move.

He wasn't even certain where they were, save that they had gone down several levels and might've been tending outward. Fortunately, that situation clarified when Kylin heard one guard jog ahead, followed by the distinctive squeak that characterized the hinges of the arcade doors. He smelled wood polish, too, which no one else would even have noticed. A moment later, his location was confirmed when he felt a breath of wind that could only have originated outside. The footing changed as well, from solid stone to pebble-stone.

It was an arcade, then.

But not—to his surprise, if Eron was about to attack—a full one.

Indeed, as best he could tell, the place was almost deserted, though he wasn't in a position to assess the minutiae of his situation until they'd steered him to a seat. By comparing paces they'd covered to the known width of the arcade, he suspected he was within a span of the balustrade—a supposition borne out by the increased strength of the breezes thereabouts, which he'd felt more than once in happier times.

Someone set his harp down close by his side and backed away. He waited for a request to play, but no such request was forthcoming. Which freed him to do what he'd become very good at of late: assessing his surroundings. So it was that he determined several things fairly quickly. One was that the men who'd brought him there, along with what he thought were three others already present, were all dressed in war gear. It was their boots that revealed as much: Ninth Face soldiers had studs in their boot soles that gave their tread a distinctive metallic quality, especially when they trod on stone. And of course there was also the rustly jingle of mail and the occasional clink of metal on metal that marked heavier armor, all softened by thick, ribbed fabric. More telling was the breathing: short, impatient bursts that hinted of haste and worry.

But there were more subtle sounds as well, for by tuning his hearing toward the Vale at large, he caught the creak of siege machines and the susurration of voices from the battlefield: impossible to hear singly, but a gentle rush of language when multiplied several thousandfold.

Finally, there was a sound that simply didn't fit, though it most resembled a large tavern sign blowing against the wall of a stone building. More to the point, it came from very close by, to the right, and carried with it the raspy, gritty growl of iron grinding against granite. Even more puzzling was the fact that every time it impacted, Kylin caught a soft grunt or groan, which he didn't understand at all.

He glanced that way reflexively, but saw nothing through his mask but a slight brightening that represented all the vast, intricate detail of the world beyond the railing.

By the quality of the air and light, he reckoned it was late afternoon. From far off, he caught the scent of woodsmoke. Closer in came the sharper tang of metal oil and leather. Soldier smells.

His fingers sought his harp for comfort, flailing a little before someone moved it into range. “Should I play … ?” he asked carefully.

“Wait,” someone replied. Young. Female. That was all he knew.

“Zeff will be back anon,” someone else added. “He would not like it if you anticipated him.”

Kylin sat. And waited.

Before long, he caught the slap of Ninth Face boots approaching. Zeff, by the stride and heaviness of the step. He wondered, suddenly, what Zeff looked like. If he had the gem—if someone sighted had the gem, rather, and would share it with him—he
would
know. As he would know many things. But with sight such a rare and precious thing, why waste it on the face of an enemy when he'd not even seen the faces of all those he considered friends?

By the sound of leather sliding onto cloth, displacing mail in transit, Kylin determined that Zeff had sat down across from him and crossed his legs. Someone poured wine. He caught the splash and the heady odor, and heard leather gloves touch metal as Zeff accepted a gobletful.

“Play for me,” Zeff murmured. “I need—” He broke off. “It doesn't matter what I need. Play something soft to help me wait.”

Wait for what?
Kylin wondered.
Battle, probably
, he answered himself. Except that didn't make sense, given that Kylin was all but certain that the day was waning. An ultimatum, then? Or an answer? But given by whom to whom?