Chapter Text
"A blonde? Here? You've been drinking too much of this paint thinner."
"Hey, old man, I swear—"
I tuned the rest of the conversation out, knowing that the two of them would finish arguing about the time the Spotted Goat Inn and Tavern started serving imported Grasslands beer at reasonable prices instead of the cheap and nasty Calerian wine we were all drinking. Well, okay, the argument would end when Ace either left the table to sniff after another woman or planted himself face down in his sea of empties—he never could hold his liquor as well as Joker.
Beside me, Jacques was well on his way toward the face-planting stage, slumped in his chair looking out at the world through glazed and heavy-lidded eyes. Poor bastard. We were supposedly here to celebrate his twenty-first birthday, but he hadn't bargained with Ace's idea of what a "celebration" was. Of course, he might just have thought Ace was too cheap to pay not just for the vodka to spike his orange juice with, but to bribe the guy behind the bar to do it on the sly. I might have bailed him out, but if in nearly four years, he hadn't learned to be careful of Ace, he deserved the hangover.
Queen and Aila had given up on us menfolk completely about half an hour ago and moved to another table, where they were whispering and giggling. Hearing Queen giggle is quite an experience, but then she was drinking the same rotgut as the rest of us longtime members of SFDF Unit Twelve. Fortunately for the rest of us, Aila still preferred soda, though— there'd still be one sober person in the place to help Jacques, Joker and Queen get to bed.
Just another normal evening on the ground floor of the Spotted Goat—or at least, it was until he walked in.
He didn't really look like much without his blue uniform—just a brown-haired kid who might have been about Jacques' age—but I make a point of remembering faces. It's important in our line of work. The question was, what was Bishop Sasarai doing out here on the frontier, dressed as an ordinary Second Class Citizen, without even his perpetual hanger-on, Dios? And why was he wearing that uneven strip of leather as a headband?
Then someone else followed him in the door, and I found myself setting my mug down, very carefully. The stranger was wearing a Calerian headdress, and one of the over-robes some of them used to deal with the chill of the highland night, but his skin tone was wrong and so was his build—I've never seen a Calerian that stocky. And he had an odd way of moving, sort of like he was floating above the floor and just making incidental contact with it now and then to propel himself along. There was something familiar and threatening about that.
I heaved myself to my feet and started threading my way between tables. It might have been a bit of a reckless thing to do, but, well, we'd been drinking since midafternoon, and while I hadn't had enough to affect my reflexes, I was still pretty well-lubricated. Geese hung heavy at my belt, but I wasn't quite ready to draw her yet and start a panicked stampede for the door. Gods only knew what kind of mess that would result in.
Then I saw the stranger's hand come out from under his robe holding something metallic, and I knew I'd run out of time. I gestured sharply, invoking the power of the Thunder Rune I carry in my left hand to make the presence of my True Rune less obvious. Really, I'd have preferred to just throw an empty mug or something, but since I'd lost my eye I could never be sure I was going to hit what I was aiming at that way.
The explosion that followed surprised even me—I mean, lightning does make things go bang, but I'd never seen it splatter a human body all over the walls before. Someone screamed, and I had to knock a couple of people out of my way to get to Sasarai and his ex-pursuer.
The bishop was splattered with blood, but he didn't seem to have been hurt. The other guy . . . The explosion had blown his right hand to bits and made a big ragged hole in his chest and stomach, so that a loop of intestine spilled out when I kicked him over on his back. The metal thing he'd been holding wasn't in the best of shape either, but there was enough of it left that I could recognize it. A gun. Howling Voice Guild? Lovely. It did explain why the way he'd moved had screamed "Threat!" at me, though—last time I'd seen any of those guys, they'd been trying to kill Wyatt, and I'd been in the way.
"Boss, what the hell?" That was Ace announcing his arrival. I was standing in a cleared semi-circle now, with my troop behind me. Even Jacques was there, although from the looks of it, Aila was holding him up.
"Party's over for tonight," I said. "Get everyone upstairs." The bartender was already marshaling his forces for the cleanup—the Spotted Goat saw at least one death every year, and while this one might have been a little more spectacular than most, the staff wasn't likely to stay stunned for long. Still, we'd have to get out of town early tomorrow, and stay there until everyone had forgotten this, even if no one was likely to do much investigating. Not of me, not on behalf of a stranger . . . assuming that anyone had even figured out what had happened or that I was responsible.
I touched Joker's shoulder and pointed out Sasarai to him. His eyes widened slightly, and he nodded. Then I led the way into the main part of the inn and up the stairs, secure in the knowledge that our wayward bishop would be coming along even if Joker had to put him in a wrist lock and drag him.
They were the last ones up the stairs. By that time, the rest of us had already taken over the upstairs sitting room— there had been a couple of people there, but one glare from me and they'd cleared out. I seem to have that effect on people. Maybe it's the eyepatch.
Queen propped her feet on the table and turned to me expectantly. "So, is someone going to explain what the hell happened down there?"
"Your captain saved my life." Sasarai seemed awfully calm, I thought, for someone who'd just had a rather narrow escape, and still had bits of someone else spattered all over him. Crystal Valley politics had to be even more cut-throat than I'd thought.
"He did?" Ace must have been really thoroughly sozzled, because he's not usually so slow on the uptake.
I held up my hand. Instant silence. "Mind telling us what you're doing here, Bishop—incognito, and with the Howling Voice on your heels?"
"It's a long story."
"Maybe I should send downstairs for another round before you start, then," Ace suggested.
Queen glared at him. "You've had enough already, I think."
"Shut up, you two—I want to hear this." Joker was still standing by the door, due to a lack of chairs, and looking more sober by the minute.
"It started not long after the war ended. Well, strictly speaking, I suppose it started a while before that, but it was Hikusaak's disappearance that brought everything to a head, I think." Sasarai stared at the table as he spoke, and now that everything had quieted down a bit, I could see that he looked like hell, and not just because his clothes didn't quite fit and seemed to have been slept in, either. His face was a shade thinner than I remembered, and there were fine lines around his eyes—he looked like he'd aged ten years in the three since we'd seen him last, even though, as the bearer of the True Earth Rune, he shouldn't have been able to age at all.
"Hikusaak? You mean your High Priest? I thought he'd gone missing a long time ago." Aila tipped her chair back so that she could lean it against the wall.
"He stopped making public appearances almost two centuries ago," Sasarai corrected, "but up until three years ago, he still appeared before the Bishops' Council from time to time, and sent us letters when he couldn't be there in person. But there's been nothing since shortly after the war, and even that was only a brief note. This is the first time that there's been more than a couple of months between messages. I can't be certain, but I think that . . . certain factions . . . have seen this as an indication that he no longer cares what happens to Harmonia, or to those of us who still support him. Recently, there have been a number of deaths of First Class Citizens. The circumstances have often been somewhat mysterious or ambiguous, but most of them suggest murder, and I . . ."
"And you got framed for at least one of them," Ace said. "Hey, what're you guys staring at? It's obvious, isn't it?"
"It's just that you don't normally do such a good job of connecting the dots when you're plastered," Queen said.
Joker snorted. "I would've said just the opposite—that his brain doesn't normally work all that well because he doesn't lubricate it properly . . ."
I held up my hand for silence again, and nodded to Sasarai.
"I was framed, yes," the bishop said. "I assumed that the matter could be quickly cleared up—Dios is normally with me nearly every moment of every day, and thus would be an invaluable witness to the fact that I neither committed these murders, nor had them contracted out—and I allowed myself to be placed under house arrest. However, shortly after that, members of the Howling Voice Guild tried to kill me, and it became obvious that I wasn't meant to live to stand trial. I fled Crystal Valley with Dios, but he was injured in another attack, and we agreed that I was to go on alone. I headed for Caleria with the intention of crossing the pass into the Grasslands and seeking sanctuary with the Flame Champion and the Karaya Clan . . . and then I encountered you downstairs."
I turned that over in my mind—Karaya Clan, all right, they had let Wyatt hide out from the Howling Voice with them, but I hadn't thought the Sasarai I had met during what was now being called the Second Fire Bringer War would have run away and left an injured friend behind to be killed by the Howling Voice. Then again, he did spend most of his time embroiled in the cutthroat world of politics, and I hadn't known him all that well. Face it, Geddoe, you're just not as good at judging people's character as you thought you were.
"You think my clan would have accepted you?" Aila asked, eyes flashing. "Karaya don't run away from our enemies— we kill them!"
"It was that or take ship for Falena," Sasarai said. "I can't fight the Howling Voice alone."
Okay, I admit it—I have enough curiosity for three normal people when it comes to stuff like why Harmonia's assassin guild would suddenly decide to target a member of the priesthood who was supposed to be giving them orders, even a disgraced one. Besides, I find it's a lot safer to have sources of disruption where I can keep my eye on them, and we were going to have to leave town for a while anyway . . . and I'd never liked the Howling Voice much, and I owed Sasarai a bit of a favour for not spilling the fact that I had the True Lightning Rune to the rest of the Bishops' Council, so . . . "Falena might be your better bet," I said. "The Karaya Clan's still recovering from having their village burned down, and they've gotten a little touchy about outsiders, especially Harmonians. We'll take you with us as far as Vinay del Zexay. You should be able to find a ship there."
"Thank you, Captain." Well, that's what Sasarai said— everyone else was staring at me, even Jacques, although I doubt he understood what he was looking at.
"Since this isn't an official mission . . . well, I won't try to disband the unit again," I said, remembering just how well that hadn't worked last time, "but I won't think less of anyone who wants to take a couple of months of vacation somewhere quiet right about now."
Aila snorted. "Who wants a vacation? This sounds like it might be interesting."
"And we certainly wouldn't want to risk you forgetting to pick us up on the way back," Queen added.
"Right," Ace said after half a beat, and stretched. "I'd better get a move on, then—writing up a report on this that Headquarters'll accept is going to take me the rest of the night."
He was halfway out of his chair when there was a commotion downstairs that made everyone stand up except Sasarai—even Jacques made it to a sort-of-vertical position somehow. I closed my hand on Geese's hilt, and didn't take it off even when the first person climbing the stairs turned out to be someone I knew.
"Geddoe, what the hell is this?! We just get into town, it's almost the middle of the night, and now we can't get anything to drink because you decided to kill someone in the middle of the only bar in town that doesn't spike the drinks with cockroaches!"
"Hello, Duke," I said, trying for a neutral tone of voice.
"'Hello, Duke' my—Wait a minute, who's this?" The red-head squinted at Sasarai, and then his eyes went really wide. "You!"
Damn! Geese was almost clear of her scabbard when Ace said lazily, "You've met before? Wonder why he didn't join your team, then."
"Join?" Duke blinked. "Isn't this—"
Ace grinned and ruffled Sasarai's hair, while I slid Geese quietly back into place. For a moment, the bishop— probably ex-bishop by now, I supposed—looked outraged, but a second later, he'd hidden it. "This is King, our newest trainee. We met him on the way up from Dunan. He had some business to finish up before he met us there, and it was the tail end of that that happened downstairs—sorry 'bout that."
Duke did his best to circle the pair . . . which wasn't a very good job, given how little space he had to do it in, but he tried. "'King', eh? Wonder how long it's going to take you to collect Two to Ten, so that you'll finally be playing with a full deck?"
Joker yawned. "Do you mind? We're heading out for Vinay del Zexay tomorrow, and we'd like to get some sleep."
"Yeah, I guess someone your age would need it. See you in the morning, Geddoe."
"If you can make it out of bed that early," I replied lazily. Okay, so the whole rivalry thing between Duke's unit and mine should really have been beneath my dignity, but Duke had always kind of annoyed me, and he was too thick-headed to grasp that he was eighty years behind me in terms of experience and would never catch up.
Apparently he was fresh out of snippy replies, too, because he just gave me a dirty look before starting back down the stairs. It was only when we couldn't hear his heavy footsteps anymore that we all relaxed.
"Think he bought it?" Ace asked.
Queen snorted. "Not for a second, but he'll keep quiet. Guess we owe him one. Anyway, Joker's right—we need to get some sleep."
"Hope you don't mind spending the night on our couch," Joker added to 'King'.
"You don't have to—" But again, there was that little flash of outrage and distaste, coming and going so quickly that I doubted anyone else had noticed it. Well, a couch in a shared room in a second-rate inn couldn't exactly be what Sasarai was used to.
"Yes, we do," Joker corrected. "Ace is going to be up all night, the captain always takes that room at the back that's the size of a shoebox, and the girls won't let you in with them. Besides, Jacques and I have the biggest room, and the only couch."
The size of the back room was less of a consideration for me than the fact that the window opened over the roof of the kitchen and could be used as an exit if you were careful—I'd tested it, oh, at least three times over the years. Other than that, Joker was right.
"I don't know how I'm ever going to repay you," Sasarai said after a moment.
"Don't bother." Ace waved his hands expressively. "The captain takes it into his head to do things like this every so often, and the rest of us have learned to humour him." I gave him a nasty look, but Ace is used to my glares . . . and no one takes him all that seriously, anyway.
The meeting broke up after that, with the understanding that we would all be downstairs and ready to start the month-long trek back to Vinay del Zexay at first light.
We didn't make it there, though. Not even close.
It was still dark outside when I woke. Lying there on my back, I tried to figure out why I was awake . . . and smelled smoke. What?
Frowning, I heaved myself up into a sitting position and reached for my boots—except for them (and Geese, who was hanging from the bedpost), I'd gone to bed fully clothed. Once I had them on, I grabbed my weapon and the pack that was waiting in the corner and opened the window.
And closed it again right away, because the heat was nearly singeing my eyebrow off. Kitchen's on fire. Arson? Too much coincidence if it isn't, I decided.
The door out into the common room was cool, so I kicked it open. Empty. With unpleasant visions of my people having been slaughtered in their beds, I drew Geese and used her hilt to hammer on Ace's door, which still had light spilling from underneath.
"Who's there?"
I relaxed a little when I heard his voice . . . but just a little. "The building's on fire. Get your pack and help me get the others moving."
"Right. I thought I smelled something funny, but I figured it was just the new apprentice they had in the kitchen screwing up tomorrow's bread . . . "
Queen's and Aila's door was next, but I bypassed it in favour of Joker's, Jacques' . . . and "King"'s. They were the ones I was most worried about—if the fire had been deliberately set, it had to have something to do with Sasarai.
I pounded twice on the wood, then kicked. The door shot open . . . to reveal Joker standing barefoot beside his bed, the Pale Gate Rune on his forehead glimmering, half-invoked. Sasarai was sitting up on the couch, and even Jacques had managed to prop himself up on one elbow.
"Trouble?" This wasn't the first time I'd had to come barging into Joker's room in the middle of the night, and he knew the drill. He sniffed the air. "Guess someone's trying to smoke us out. Right. King, help me with Jacques—I doubt he's going to be able to get anywhere very fast on his own."
Sasarai looked surprised for a moment, then shook his head violently, as though trying to get something out of it. He shrugged and reached for the pair of too-large boots he'd been wearing when he arrived.
By the time they'd gotten Jacques on his feet, Ace had the girls up, and we all went charging down the steps together in a group . . . and ended up in the middle of chaos.
There was smoke swirling through the ground floor of the inn, more than there had been upstairs, which struck me as odd. I didn't have much time to think about it, though, because two grappling figures were stumbling towards me out of the dimness. I slashed reflexively with Geese, and one of them went tumbling to the floor.
The other one was Duke, and he gave me a dirty look. "It would have to be you," he said, voice raspy with smoke. Meanwhile, I was looking down at the corpse, seeing black clothes, a cloth mask that clung wetly to the lower half of the face . . . and a gun. Howling Voice again, and prepared to work in a burning building. Looks like we didn't get out a moment too soon.
"Outside," I snapped, and grabbed my would-be rival by the arm, propelling him ahead of me.
"Geddoe, you fool, there's more of them out there!"
"Then we're going through them." The others were arranging themselves behind me, Queen and Joker to the left and right, with Aila, Jacques, and Sasarai between them and Ace bringing up the rear. Duke glared at me with reddened eyes, but kept moving.
The front door was shut, but we crashed straight through it and into the plaza outside the inn . . . and straight into another batch of Howling Voice operatives. Eight—no, ten. Or maybe eleven? I wasn't sure I even saw the last figure, short and hanging back in the shadows. I was too busy staying alive . . . and truth be told, I was as angry as hell, too. We hadn't been the only ones staying at the Spotted Goat that night. How many people who weren't involved in this at all were still inside, choking on smoke?
I ended up back-to-back with Queen, fighting three of the Howling Voice types . . . which soon became two when the first one didn't survive a Soaring Bolt. The other two grimly threw their guns aside and came at us with knives. They were very good and very, very fast, and I had to take a couple of strikes on my armour. I didn't like doing it, though, because the edges of those knifes gleamed balefully green in a way that couldn't just be due to the oddities of the light.
Aila, Jacques, and Sasarai seemed to have taken shelter inside the market stall that was built up against the wall of the inn, and Ace and Joker and Duke and his people seemed to have fanned out around it. I couldn't stop for a better look, though, because the assassin I was fighting had homed straight in on my weakness, and was constantly attacking my blind side. And I had to treat any attack that came from there as real even if I thought it was a feint; I'd learned that the hard way, many years earlier.
Then I got lucky—I managed to parry my opponent's blade upwards and slam my free hand into the pit of his stomach, then hit him with another Soaring Bolt in the instant that it took him to recover. That left him kind of doubled over and charred- looking, holding his knife in both hands . . . and then in no hands at all, as I brought Geese down and severed his wrists. Any normal person would have screamed, but this one just glared and tried to kick me. It didn't quite connect, though, and he overbalanced, collapsed, and couldn't get up. I slashed across the side of his throat, just to be sure that he wouldn't be getting up again and kicking me in the back, then turned on my heel and attacked Queen's opponent from the side. With the two of us working together, he lasted . . . oh, maybe five seconds . . . so we both looked around for more.
"Pull back!" A woman's voice, or a very young man's. I didn't recognize it, and couldn't tell where it was coming from. "Pull back!"
There were seven of the assassins left—one was on the ground with one of Aila's arrows in his eye—and when they heard that voice, they all started backing away from the semi-circle of fighters in front of the merchant's stall.
"Let them go," I called when Aila seemed about to jump out and start running after them. I was trying to catch my breath, and Geese was dripping blood on the ground in front of me. Tongues of flame were poking out the windows of the Spotted Goat, and off to the side, someone was starting to organize a bucket brigade. I hoped that everyone inside had gotten out alive.
"Guess we all made it," Queen said from beside me, voice rough—well, we'd all breathed smoke at some point during this mess. Ace was in the middle of the plaza now, standing beside Elaine and Gau from Duke's Fourteenth Unit, blotting a cut on his face with the back of one hand. Joker was bent over Duke himself, the Flowing Rune on his left hand glowing, while Duke's man Nicolas hovered in the background, watching. And Aila and Sasarai were emerging from behind their wooden barricade, supporting Jacques, who was still only semiconscious.
I bent down and tore a rag from the clothes of my first opponent so that I could clean Geese and sheathe her, then headed over to where everyone seemed to be clustering around Ace, Joker, and Duke's lot. Queen trailed after me, still breathing harshly—she wasn't bouncing back from things like this as quickly as she once had. Well, neither was I, really. I might have been thirty-six for eighty years, but thirty-six isn't twenty . . . although I admit that it's been a long time since I could clearly remember what being twenty was like.
"Geddoe, you bastard." Those were the first words out of Duke's mouth when I got close enough for him to talk to me without the whole plaza overhearing. "You've gotten involved in something big again, haven't you?"
I shrugged. "Who knows?" I certainly didn't—not yet.
"Figures. Get yourself—and 'King'—out of town before Headquarters gets burnt down or blown up and we're all out of a job. We'll cover for you somehow—Elaine's fiction- writing skills are as good as Ace's any time. And, Geddoe?"
I raised my eyebrow, waiting.
"Come back in one piece, you hear me? I can't prove I'm better than you if you go off and get yourself killed by someone else."
And that, I decided, wasn't even worth dignifying with a reply.
"She's their administrator? I'd never have guessed," Joker said as we all turned toward the town gate.
"How did you think I met her?" Ace replied.
"Where are we going?" Sasarai asked quietly, after a moment of silence. I think the rest of us had half-forgotten he was even there.
"For now . . . there's a cave up in the hills, not too far from here, where we usually regroup after having to leave Caleria in a hurry," Joker said. "We'll stay there until morning—we can't go very far until Jacques can travel under his own power, anyway. After that . . . well, that's up to the captain."
Assuming that I could make up my mind. We still had the option of taking Sasarai to Zexay, or even just dumping him by the side of the road for that matter, but I had a feeling that that getting rid of him wouldn't be the end of our problems. The Howling Voice had already shown they were willing to burn a town down to get at our wayward bishop. They were bound to come after us even if we got rid of him, unless we tied him up and presented him to them on a silver platter with a bow in his hair . . . and I couldn't think of any set of circumstances that would be enough to make me do that.
And then there was the bigger picture: politics. For most of my lifetime, the conquering juggernaut that was Harmonia had been slowing down—going from gobbling up a country every three or four years, to every seven or eight years . . . and since the conquest of Queen's home, Sanady, they'd ground nearly to a halt—Luc's little adventure in the Grasslands and their contribution to the invasion of Highland notwithstanding. But if whatever faction had sent the Howling Voice Guild after Sasarai gained control of the country, I had a nasty feeling that the juggernaut was going to start up again. And if the Grasslands weren't going to be the first target, they'd still end up as the second or third.
I'd spilled a lot of blood to protect that land. I had some good friends there—and some others who were buried there—and I wasn't going to let Harmonia have one square inch of it. If this turned out to be a real threat and not just me jumping at shadows, I was going to need Sasarai, because right now, he was the only string I had to pull.
So we were going to keep Sasarai for the time being. The question was where to take him. From outside Caleria, we had several choices, but I was having a hard time figuring out which was worst. Deeper into Harmonia was out of the question—the Howling Voice would be stronger the nearer we got to Crystal Valley. West into the Grasslands was a possibility, but we'd have to cross the pass to get there, and I couldn't think of a better place for the Howling Voice to ambush us—it's like an open-topped tunnel for a lot of its length. South into Dunan . . . wasn't a good idea for us right now—we'd come from that way, and left a hornet's nest behind us that I didn't want to go walking back into. That left east or north, along the fringes of Holy Harmonia. To the east, we'd eventually reach the coast, where our options would widen out again. To the north, we might be able to slip through the lesser-known pass near the old Safir Village, which didn't have the problems of the high pass near Caleria, and reach our allies in the Grasslands . . .
"Sasarai." By the time I spoke to him, we had left the road and were scrambling through thorny scrubland.
"Captain?" Not the form of address I'd expected to hear from him, but I didn't exactly care.
"You were talking about being framed for some murders—where did they take place?"
"Iddaran Province. I ended up having to look it up— I'd barely even heard of the place before."
Iddaran. My mouth stretched into a mirthless smile. Well, of course. Given the kind of night I was having, how could it have been anywhere else?
"Then we head north in the morning." As I said it, we emerged onto level ground just outside the cave.
"So we're investigating murders now?" Ace must have been paying more attention to what he was saying than where he was walking, because he staggered and nearly fell into the grasp of an amorous thorn bush.
"You got a better suggestion?" Joker asked.
"It's just that it's a little outside our area of expertise, you know?" Ace had stopped walking in order to wave his hands expressively.
"Can you think of any other strings we can pull right now?" Queen asked. "All we've got right now is what Sasarai can tell us—pardon me, Bishop, but—"
"If I knew what was going on, I would never have ended up in this ridiculous situation," said our refugee. "Captain Geddoe's suggestion strikes me as probably being the best that any of us is going to come up with."
It hadn't really been a suggestion . . . but I really couldn't force the man to follow my orders, either.
Joker grabbed Ace by the shoulder and pulled him toward the cave. "Let's get some rest. We've got a long way to go from here."
I sat down on the ground near the cave, with my back to a boulder, while the others filed inside—someone had to keep watch, and I wanted to be alone with my thoughts for a little while . . . alone with Geese, anyway. I drew her and set her across my knees, ready to hand.
Iddaran. A forested stretch of north country set athwart the upper portion of the Great River, between the shoulders of the mountains. A place I'd never intended to return to. A place that had left huge bleeding holes in my soul that had never quite healed.
Would Geese recognize her homeland when we got there? She'd been away for a long time and gotten pretty battered about. I'd done my best to take care of her, gotten the best smiths I could find to repair damaged edges—in fact, now that I thought about it, I'd probably spent more money, over the years, looking after my sword than I had on anything else . . . but then, Geese was more than a weapon. Like the True Rune I bore, she was a sacred charge, a legacy.
Maybe, I reflected as the rising sun struck fire from her edge, it was time that the two of us went back after all.