A Rescue is Mounted
“Dwarfs were a sea-faring people once, you know,” Torvul said, as he and Idgen Marte drifted along in their borrowed rowboat in Londray’s harbor, the gloomy hulk of the outer sea-facing wall of the Dunes looming above them and casting shadows on the swells that lapped against the boat. “I think I feel it still in my blood as I make the oars sing.”
“You’re gonna feel it in your boots if you don’t shut up, dwarf,” Idgen Marte said. “And if the oars sing, we’re done for, so keep rowing only when we stop drifting.”
Torvul grumbled quietly and readjusted his grip on the oars. Idgen Marte crouched at the stern, bow in hand, sword shifted so that it rested against the small of her back, the hilt projecting out past her hip. The oarlocks were muffled with cloth, for all the good it did. She still thought they were far too loud.
“We didn’t have to leave a gold link for the fisherman, you know,” Torvul replied. “I’m sure it’s worth no more than two silver.” He gave the oars a quick and efficient pull, and the rowboat glided forward several more yards.
“Why did I even bring you along?”
“You can’t row and carry the walls single-handedly at the same time, I suppose,” Torvul murmured. “And besides, I have an idea or three.”
That’s more than I’ve got, Idgen Marte thought, but she shoved that thought down. There’s a problem. I’m reacting. I’m going to get him out. No thinking needed.
“You sure our new friend will do what you asked?”
“Sure as I can be,” Idgen Marte whispered back, with a shrug. “He won’t throw himself off the next quay, I don’t think.”
“He does it, there’s chaos. Maybe the city burns.”
“It won’t. Not where their anger’ll go.”
The wall was drifting closer. Torches were faintly visible along its top as guards went on their rounds, but either Idgen Marte’s prayers for shadow were answered or the single rowboat simply wasn’t visible from that height. “One more pull,” she whispered, the dwarf obliged, and suddenly the boat was within the shadow of the walls. It struck the wall, stopped with a force that shivered its side, and, she was sure, was audible to the entire keep.
They’d sailed right into a portcullis set low along the harborside wall—a possible sally port, or a place for emergency supplies to enter in a time of siege, Idgen Marte reasoned.
“This, also, is why you brought me,” Torvul replied. “Grab a hold and make the boat fast.”
Idgen Marte leaned forward and found a cold iron bar, wrapped her free hand around it as Torvul rummaged among his many pouches. By the time he spoke again, she’d taken a spool of rope that was fastened to a cleat on the boat and tied a mooring hitch around the bar.
“Now,” he said, “take this skin. It’s uncorked. Do not squeeze it. I can’t emphasize that point enough. Do not squeeze.”
“Why?”
Torvul sighed, even as he carefully leaned forward to hand her the skin. “Always with questions. Just do it.”
Idgen Marte took it, a small leathern bag that sat heavily in one hand, but wasn’t terribly large. “Now,” Torvul said, “this fleece. Pour some of the liquid onto it, then rub it across the bars, and work fast.”
She reached out and accepted the thick piece of lambswool he handed her. “Why?”
“Because if it does what I expect it’ll do to the gate, you don’t want to see what it’ll do to your hand, and the fleece will only absorb it for so long.”
“Why aren’t you doing this?”
“Well,” Torvul said, still whispering, though his patience was clearly thin, “if you’d like to take the risk of flipping the boat as we clamber over each other in the dark, let’s. But honestly, if you just want to clamber over each other in the dark, this is hardly the—”
“Finish that thought and die, dwarf,” she whispered, before she went to work. As instructed, she made sure the fleece covered her entire right hand, holding the skin in her left; she carefully poured out a measure of the stuff, and instantly felt her hand begin to warm. She wrapped the fleece around a bar and rubbed, then a second, third, fourth.
The fleece began to smoke, and Torvul hissed, “Drop it. In the water. Now.”
She did, and the ruined bit of wool hissed as it hit the water, and disintegrated on its surface.
“I’ve another. Now we need to work fast. This might make some noise coming free, and they’ll send someone to investigate it.”
Idgen Marte paused as she reached out for the second fleece, and suddenly voiced a thought. “Why are we bothering? It’s not like the walls can stop me.”
“Can you take me in with you? Or Allystaire out?”
“Ah.” With that, she repeated the process, rubbing the strange, burning liquid all over the bars the boat rested against. From behind her, Torvul suddenly hissed in alarm.
“Stones! Cut the rope. Cut it now. Now!”
She saw the danger as soon as he said it, and time seemed to slow as she threw the fleece overboard and reached for a dagger. Her blade bit into the rope and began to saw through it, even as the portcullis gave a sigh and slid free, as if cut in half, everywhere she had rubbed the alchemist’s strange liquid.
The rope gave. The resulting splash tugged on the boat, and was loud, but didn’t drag them under, and Torvul gave the oars a quick tug to shove them into the channel of water flowing into the castle’s bowels.
“Well,” Torvul said, “that went well. We’ve got a quarter of a turn, mayhap a bit more. Hurry. Take that liquid with you. Mind that you get none of it on your skin.”
“Noted. What’ll you do?”
“I thought I might set a few likely places on fire.”
“We aren’t here to burn the keep to the ground.”
“No, and I don’t mean to. Just enough to give them something to think about.” The dwarf struck something against the side of the boat, and quickly a tiny shuttered lantern flared to life in his hand. There was a ramp cut into the stonework and a small dock to tie up to, though with the amount of rope they’d lost, Idgen Marte simply hopped out, splashed along in the shallows with Torvul following, till they could tug the bow up onto the ramp itself.
“Goddess go with you, Idgen Marte,” Torvul said, a bit solemnly. “If you find him, and you can’t get back here, or I’m not here when you do, just go.”
“We are all walking away tonight, Torvul.”
“Oh, I don’t mean t’die here. No. I’ll get clear—but he has t’get out, and you know it. Promise you’ll not wait for me.”
“Shut up, dwarf,” Idgen Marte said, filling her hand with a dagger and disappearing into the darkness surrounding them.
“Now,” Torvul murmured to himself, “where would I be if I were Baron Delondeur’s wine cellar?” He thought a moment, pointed the tiny ray of light his lantern provided, and walked off.
* * *
For once, the sorcerer came bearing a light source other than his own trails of red—an expensive and large wax candle protected by an even more expensive glass lamp atop a silver tray. The sudden intrusion of that small point of brightness after so many turns in the dark caused Allystaire to recoil briefly.
“I do hate polluting my work room with this unnecessary light, but I do not come alone,” Bhimanzir said, and Allystaire could not help but note the hint of gloating in his voice. Behind him came a short, thin boy of perhaps ten or eleven years, Allystaire thought. The light from the candle was minimal, so details were hard to make out, but the boy’s skin appeared dusky, lighter than Idgen Marte’s, but darker than most barony folk. Whatever his hair might have looked like, it had been carefully shaved. His eyes were large dark pools above cheeks still round with youth.
And behind them came a guardsman, wearing Delondeur green, armored, with a sword hanging at his side, dragging a woman behind him. It wasn’t hard to tell she was a prisoner, wearing a ragged homespun dress that was too big for her, chains on wrist and ankle, and her eyes downcast.
Dress probably fit her when they took her, Allystaire thought, and he felt his hands curl into stiff-fingered, aching fists.
“If I am right about what is going on in your head, well then, I think I have the key to unlocking it.” He turned to the guard and gestured with the hand holding the candle towards the nearby table. “Put her there, if you would.”
The woman mumbled something, but was in no position to resist as the guard roughly shoved her towards the scarred wooden table, then onto it. He had some fuss getting her on her back, but once there she simply lay there moaning softly.
Allystaire heard the chains bound around his wrists creaking, felt the metal digging into his skin.
“There will be no heroics from you, I think,” the sorcerer said, and raised a hand. The chains binding Allystaire’s limbs suddenly glowed, not with heat, but from the power Bhimanzir commanded. Suddenly their weight was tenfold what it had been, twenty. They drew tighter, and Allystaire felt his hands and shoulders and ankles going numb.
“Now, boy. Hold this.” He moved the candle in the direction of his student without looking back at him, and the boy glided noiselessly to the sorcerer’s side, reaching out and taking the silver and glass lamp by its curled handle.
The sorcerer moved to the table and laid a red-tipped hand upon the rack of instruments. His fingertips danced over them: shears; a long, flat blade with no point; a very long and thin knife; and a wicked, black-crusted hook with a wooden handle.
“All blood carries power. One of the gifts of my order is the ability to unlock it, you see,” the sorcerer said, and his intentions, which Allystaire was already certain of, became perfectly clear. “Why, I believe you saw some of what Gethmasanar could do with even the thin, weak stuff of peasants.”
The paladin felt the song of the Goddess’s anger begin to flood his limbs, and yet the music was distant and hard to hear, and his arms were weaker than they should have been.
The chains did not budge.
The sorcerer took the shears and began cutting away the woman’s filthy dress. She was an older woman, Allystaire saw. Not elderly, but a few years older than him, probably, and she could only struggle feebly, with her hands bound behind her. She was, he suddenly realized, of an age with many of the women who’d been taken from Thornhurst. He remembered Idgen Marte’s words to him back in the village, on the day the Urdarite monks had come. Someone did see value in enslaving women of her age after all. The chill that had danced along his spine returned, only with a drumbeat of certainty in his thoughts.
They were sacrifices.
Allystaire strained against his ensorcelled chains, and he thought he felt them move, yet he was still bound. Certainly they rattled, he thought, grimly. That’s something.
The student had turned to him, drawn, perhaps, by the noise, but his darkly shaded eyes flitted back to the sorcerer.
Impulsively, Allystaire spoke. “Boy. You, without a name. Is this the man you want to give you one, eh?”
The sorcerer turned to Allystaire then, his eyes narrowed red slits. “Why are you talking to my student?” Then his attention turned to the boy. “Did you speak to him? Were you instructed to do so? No!” the sorcerer roared, and the guard near the doorway quailed at the power in his voice. The woman on the table let out a long and loud sob, and Allystaire felt his ear pop.
The sorcerer backhanded the boy across the face, and while the student stumbled, he didn’t drop the candle. He simply regarded his master silently.
“Answer me. Answer me or I will have you upon the table, regardless of what Gethmasanar tells me about your untapped power. Perhaps it is your blood that will unlock this upstart for me!” He leaped forward and seized the boy’s tunic in one hand, dragging him close.
“You said yourself he was a clumsy fool. He is a coward as well, afraid to ply a blade to anything not bound for him. And you would have a name he bestowed?” Not sure what good this is doing, Allystaire thought, for while the boy’s face turned to him, he still did not speak.
The sorcerer turned, eyes wide open and raging red, leaped towards Allystaire. “I will be reading signs in your vitals next. The haruspicy warned of a mother, and so I took mothers and I read the signs in them, and it showed me death. Death! As if something as insignificant as you could threaten me. I will have three upon my table tonight and I will wade in your innards till this farce is clear to me!”
As the sorcerer was raging at him, the student, still holding the candle, raised his free hand, and Allystaire felt some new note in the music that played, slow and dim, in his body.
The glow upon Allystaire’s chains winked out of existence. They were no longer a heavy weight. They were linen, or silk, laying lightly against his skin.
The boy nodded, Allystaire thought, at him.
The sorcerer whirled upon his student, a wordless roar of frustration emanating from his lips.
The wooden frame Allystaire had been bound to exploded into splinters as he suddenly ripped his hands free of it, links of chain scattering across the floor. He leaped to his feet, his body flooded with rage, and he took but one step forward before his left hand closed around the sorcerer’s neck. He meant to crush his throat, to tear his head from his shoulders if need be. It felt possible.
But when his fingers found the sorcerer’s flesh, something rushed into them, some throb of knowledge suddenly in his hand. Rather than squeeze, Allystaire poured the anger, the crying out for justice, the molten power his body thrummed with, into the sorcerer’s body.
And healed him.
The red glow in Bhimanzir’s eyes and his fingertips guttered and died, and the sorcerer collapsed with a strangled cry.
Allystaire leaped past him and barreled straight into the guard, delivering a powerful over-handed right fist directly into the man’s mailed chest.
The guard had his sword half out of his scabbard when Allystaire hit him, and he staggered backward against the door, breathing raggedly. His hauberk was broken where Allystaire’s blow had landed, and blood trickled through where the torn rings of his mail had pushed into the meat of his chest.
“Painful,” Allystaire said, as he crouched over the guard and snatched his sword away by simply ripping the scabbard from the belt. “Yet not fatal.” He drew the sword, tossed the scabbard away, and said, “I will remedy that if I must.”
Allystaire stepped to the table where the intended victim still sobbed quietly. He helped her sit up, quickly tugged the leather thongs binding her wrists free with finger and thumb, and then turned back to the guard.
He reached down and hauled the wounded man to his feet with his free hand; it felt like picking up a blanket. Pointedly, he lifted the man clear in the air before setting him back on his feet.
“Was the woman kept nearby?”
The guard nodded, clutching at his wound with one hand.
“Boy, can you manage the woman?”
There was a pause as the student considered, his head tilted to one side. “Yes.”
“Good. Bring your former master’s tools as well.”
“Why?”
Allystaire wasn’t listening to the boy’s questions. He bent down, lifted Bhimanzir from the floor with his left hand, tightened his right around the hilt of the unfamiliar sword, and leveled it at the guard.
“Take—”
A strangled cry from the limp sorcerer gave him pause. With his sickly red light gone out, the candle seemed to blaze brighter than it had, and Allystaire peered closely at the old wisp of a man clutched in his hand. Before his very eyes, age overtook Bhimanzir’s features. The sorcerer’s skin creased and folded; his eyes clouded over and sank into their sockets. His cleanly shaven head sprouted hair that began brown but faded rapidly to silver and then to white as it grew, and all of this in the span of a breath.
He heard the nameless apprentice stepping closer behind him, could practically feel the boy’s attention focusing on his master.
Bhimanzir raised a hand slowly, feebly, reaching for the boy. The skin turned papery and thin, as if the very bones were rising up against it. The sorcerer croaked some words Allystaire could not make out, then fell forward to the stones of the torture chamber and lay still.
Allystaire put a hand to his neck and probed with the Goddess’s Gift for any spark of life. There was nothing but a dark and impenetrable blackness, something harder and meaner than mere death or injury.
“What was he saying,” Allystaire asked.
“He was trying to utter a curse, but his power had utterly left him. How did you do that?”
“I am not quite sure,” Allystaire replied. “I am sure that now is not the time to discuss it.”
The boy walked forward and squatted down, putting his hand in front of the sorcerer’s mouth, satisfying his own curiosity it seemed. The boy stepped back, then extended the toe of his boot to touch the sorcerer’s limp head. Hair, skin, and bone crumbled away like ash, and the rest of his body followed, till there was nothing left but a pile of dust.
The boy stood and tucked the case of knives and hooks under one arm.
“He was a fool,” the boy said. “I am glad he is dead,” he added, simply, as he stood waiting, looking expectantly at Allystaire.
Meanwhile the guard had started to edge away. Allystaire cleared his throat meaningfully and the guard halted.
“Take us to where the women are kept,” he said to the soldier. The guard looked from the sword that had never wavered to the sorcerer’s limp and desiccated form, swallowed hard, and waved one hand.
It was not a long walk; the stone corridor outside was well lit. The torches lining the walls made each step brighter than the one before.
They rounded a curve, the guard in front, when a voice suddenly called out.
“Back for another one so soon? Well, we’re empty. He usually takes a little longer. Be a mess for the mornin’ change t’clean up.”
Another guard, green-tabarded, mailed, sat on a stool in front of an iron-banded oaken door. Keys dangled from his belt, next to a heavy flanged mace.
The tone of his voice struck Allystaire, the casual discussion of the prisoners they guarded, of their fate. The disregard. It ignited the fury of the Goddess to a pitch beyond his endurance, and before he realized what he was doing, he had shouldered the first guard aside, lunged forward, and driven the point of the borrowed sword straight through the key-holder’s chest, cutting him off in mid sentence. Allystaire didn’t stop; he kept pushing the blade forward, stepping close till his bare skin brushed against the guard’s mail and surcoat, till the hilt was buried in the dead man’s body and his blood had poured in a torrent over Allystaire’s arm and chest.
When the paladin stepped back, the sword he’d stripped from the guard was buried a foot deep in the stone of the dungeon wall. The guard’s body slumped forward against it obscenely, the stool clattering away from under nerveless limbs.
Allystaire ripped the man’s belt away with his suddenly weaponless hand, and threw it over his shoulder, drawing the heavy mace free and brandishing it at the guard who was backing away.
“You knew,” Allystaire said, his voice cold and menacing. “You knew what you were guarding these people for. What end you brought them to. You knew,” he repeated, spitting the last word out like a curse.
The guard backed away another step, a small well of blood seeping up between his fingers where he clasped his wounded chest. Allystaire stood before him, naked, half of his torso covered in fresh blood, his white knuckled grip so hard the haft of the mace he held cracked.
It was too much. The guard’s nerve broke; he turned and ran.
He got two steps before the thrown mace took him in the back of the head. His skull crumpled like a curled leaf under a heavy boot, and he fell to the ground.
Allystaire spent only a moment contemplating the two corpses. “Take these,” he said, tossing the boy the belt with the ring of keys still dangling from it. The boy was small, with thin, gangly limbs, dark eyes deep-set on his dusky face, with his head shaved so close there was no trace of hair upon it.
He caught the belt and simply wrapped it twice around himself, tying off the ends where Allystaire broke them.
Meanwhile, Allystaire picked up the mace and broke down the door. It took two blows. The first bent the door inward. The second ripped it clean off its hinges. Inside was a dimly lit stone room, much like the one where he’d been held.
“I do not think there are any more slaves,” the boy called from behind Allystaire, and the paladin whirled on him, glowering.
“They are not slaves, boy. No one is a slave, not in my sight. Not in the sight of the Mother.”
The peasant woman cleared her throat. Her eyes were red but her sobs had ceased, though she maintained a wary distance from Allystaire. “It’s true though, m’lord. I was the only one bein’ kept there.”
Allystaire nodded, but strode into the room anyway. On the back wall, heavy iron rivet-loops had been driven into the stone, each holding a ring for chains to be threaded through. Allystaire set down the mace, took a ring in each hand, and, with a twitch of his song-filled arms, ripped them free; he moved first one way down the wall, then the other. There were a dozen rings when he started, and a dozen holes in the dungeon room when he was done.
“This work was new,” he murmured, as he strode out, and reclaimed the dead guardsman’s mace. “At least that much is true.” He took a deep breath, fearing, if only briefly, the wavering of the Goddess’s song, and the power it brought. But still Her presence filled his mind and powered his limbs.
“Do you know where my armor was taken? My arms?”
“No, but the guards you killed are wearing some. Is yours so different?”
“Different enough. Even so, your point is not entirely without reason.” His ears alert for any sound of clattering footsteps, the jingle of mail or weapons, but hearing none, Allystaire paused to strip the dead guard of his tabard, and to throw it on over his otherwise naked body. Cold of a lot of good it’ll do to stop a sword, or an arrow.
“What time is it?”
“Almost three turns past the new day,” the boy answered, without pausing to think.
“Where does the Baron sleep?”
“I don’t know.” The boy tilted his head to one side, wrinkled his brow, and asked in a tone as if he addressed a simpleton, “Why would you think I would?”
“Never mind,” Allystaire said. He thought about stripping the hauberk from one of the dead guards, but just as he knelt on the stone, he heard the sound he dreaded—the stamp of boots. Stone swallowed the noise, and the corridor ahead of him branched in three directions, so he could not locate precisely where it came from.
“Boy, is there anything you can do to help me in a fight?”
“Give me time to think on it.”
“We may not have any,” Allystaire replied, and as soon as he did, the shouts down a corridor became clear. I know orders being yelled when I hear them. How would they know so fast?
He heard some member of the detachment, a sergeant or bannerman, he was sure, yelling ahead of them. “Intruders in the keep! Fire! Ware the guards. Stand to, every man!”
Fire? Intruders? Allystaire had little time to puzzle over this before ten guards, spears at the ready, poured into the far end of the corridor.
He raised his mace and said, “Boy, good woman, stay behind me.” Cautiously, holding the weapon in two hands, Allystaire began to move forward.
Two guards, he saw, cocked their arms and readied to throw, bracketing him with their aim from either side. Solid plan, that, he noted, then he charged, barreling to his right as he did. The spear thrown to that side took him in the left shoulder as he pushed himself against the wall, while the other clattered harmlessly to the stone.
More spears were raised, and he was still ten paces away and unarmored. He took a deep breath, expecting the pain, expecting the spear. Then, unexpectedly, he felt something, a presence, and he allowed himself a smile.
A long-limbed shadow materialized amidst the guards and began weaving between them, a crescent of darkness extended from one of its hands, cutting their legs out from under them, tearing throats open.
Allystaire paused for just a moment, switched the mace to his left hand, and pulled the spear free from his shoulder. The pain registered in his mind more than his body.
He reversed the spear in his right hand, took a step, and threw. It whistled in the air and made a horrifying crunching sound as it pierced one of the guards through the side of his body, punching through mail, flesh, and bone. He dropped, blood pouring from his side and his mouth, as Allystaire tossed the mace back into his right hand, and pressed his left awkwardly against his own wound. In a moment, it closed, and he let it be. There will be pain, and a scar. As it should be, he thought, followed closely by, It was freezing stupid to walk in here like I did.
There was little work left for him to do among the guards. When the Shadow had killed two and cut the legs from two more before the others could even react, it had taken the fight out of them. Allystaire’s spear-throw had broken a pair of them, who turned and ran, but three now pressed upon the form that had ambushed them. She was still a figure of weaving shadow, hard to see, harder to catch, but one of the three remaining men—the sergeant Allystaire had heard bellowing—was smart.
“Backs to the wall,” he ordered, “spears set for a charge.”
Idgen Marte—he knew it was her as soon as he’d felt her moments before she’d appeared—vanished from sight. Unable to come at them any way but from the front, her advantage was diminished. Allystaire, the strength of the Goddess’s Gift still flowing in his veins—longer than it ever had before—recognized the man giving orders as Chaddin, the sergeant of the detachment that had imprisoned him.
“Chaddin,” Allystaire barked out, hoarsely. “Throw down your spears. You can better serve your barony if you listen to me. If you do not, all you can do is die.”
The sergeant’s gaze swiveled towards Allystaire, though the point of his spear never wavered. “I see it three against two. Even if one is some kind of demon.”
Shaking his head, Allystaire took a step forward, though he kept his mace-hand below his hip. He took another step; one spear point shifted in his direction. “I do not seek your death,” the paladin said, addressing the guard. “Yet if you stand in my way I will have no choice.” He took another step forward, and reached down to one of the limp, cold bodies on the floor, its throat a ruined gash. He reached up, fumbling at the steel pot helm, with nose and cheek guards that sat loosely atop the dead guard’s head. He left his borrowed mace sitting on the floor when he stood.
Pointedly staring at the three sweating, spear-brandishing guards, he pressed the helmet between his two hands and crumpled it into ball, then turned his hands and let it fall to the stone floor with a heavy thump.
The two guardsmen got the message. Their spears clattered from hands that suddenly shot up in surrender, even as Chaddin fumed. “I’ll see both of you hung,” the sergeant spat, before suddenly lunging at Allystaire with his spear.
The man was well trained; the spear was level, held properly with hands spread for power and control. He pushed off his back foot and led with strong, straight steps. The point was aimed straight at the center of Allystaire’s mass, and would certainly have driven through his unarmored flesh.
The paladin did not move. He thought, simply and pointedly, Try not to kill him.
No training, no form, was a match for the Shadow of a Goddess. Idgen Marte barreled into Chaddin from the side while her sword described an arc in the air so fast it appeared as a blur, driving his spearpoint into the stones at his feet. The shaft splintered and buckled and the weapon was torn from his hands, and he collapsed in a heap. She was upon him instantly, sword laid against his neck.
“I don’t think he wants me t’kill you,” she said, her face grim, “but I’m not too keen on doing just what he wants right now. So go ahead and move for your sword.”
“We have no time for this,” Allystaire said, even as he bent to one of the moaning hamstrung men Idgen Marte had toppled. He laid his left hand against the man’s pale cheek, and poured some of the Goddess’s power into him. Not much, just enough to keep him from bleeding to death on the stones. He did the same to a second. Then he confronted Chaddin.
“Sergeant, I have escaped your Baron’s torture, killed his sorcerer, and together with this…” He looked to Idgen Marte, then back to Chaddin, and said, “Demon, was it? With this demon, we have routed your men. Remember these two things: I did not come here meaning to fight, and I could have let those two men die. Instead, they will live because the Goddess I serve gave me leave to save them. I think loyalty matters to you, sergeant, but it is time to decide if you are loyal to your Baron, or to your people. Because you can no longer serve both.”
Allystaire paused to let that sink in, then said, “Where are my arms? Where is the Baron? In that order.”
“Compel him,” Idgen Marte spat, through gritted teeth.
“If I must,” Allystaire growled back. “What will it be, sergeant? Do you tell me what I need to know of your own will or do I tear it from you?”
He could read the back and forth of duty and uncertainty, of fear and courage, in the soldier’s face. I could bring him to my side, Allystaire thought, if I had time. He knelt, reached out for Chaddin’s neck. The man flinched, started to back away, but Idgen Marte’s sword-edge came to rest on his throat again. He stilled.
Allystaire seized Chaddin’s chin and throat, pushed against the soldier’s mind with a sense he still didn’t quite understand, and asked, “Where are my arms and armor?”
“The Baron meant them for a trophy. Probably the great hall.”
“Where does he sleep?”
“Northwest Tower.”
“Allystaire, we haven’t the time for this.”
“Fine,” he said, adjusting his grip on the now wide-eyed and pale-cheeked man’s jaw. “My last question. What did you know about the prisoners?”
“What prisoners?”
“Her,” Allystaire said, gesturing with a jerk of his chin towards the woman he’d freed. “And there were others. Slaves, taken on your own barony’s land with your Baron’s knowledge and consent. Some, like she was meant to, met their death at the hands of a sorcerer, feeding his divinations with their blood.”
“I just returned from campaign,” Chaddin whispered, all the color now gone out of his face. “I was at the far reaches of the barony, working against Innadan—”
“I do not need your report, sergeant.” Allystaire stood up, wobbling slightly, the first hint that the incredible strength thrumming in his muscles was waning. “I need you to understand the truth. You heard his words yourself. Rabble, he called you. To men like him, for all his soldier’s affectations, you are just another resource, a tool, a possession.”
Finally on his feet, Allystaire started to turn away, then whirled back suddenly and dropped a glancing blow from his clubbed first against Chaddin’s temple. He sank to the floor, his eyes rolling up in his head, unconscious. “If he is perfectly healthy when they find him, they will kill him. Better this way,” he explained to Idgen Marte, who was already darting ahead to the end of the corridor and scanning the ways ahead.
Allystaire turned back to the boy and the rescued woman, whose brown eyes were wide with fear as she clutched the shreds of her dress. “The two of you,” he said, “follow us and nothing here will harm you, if we can prevent it.”
“Why?” The question came from the boy. “You have repaid me for dispelling my master’s sorcery by defeating him. Why would you do more?”
“Follow and I will do my best to answer. In the meantime, many angry men with spears are going to show if we do not move, and they will kill you.” Allystaire looked around at the carnage before them, sighing faintly at the waste of it, and pointed to one of the spears that lay nearby. “Pick that up. Do not try to stab anyone with it. Just point it menacingly if I tell you to.”
The boy shrugged, and did as Allystaire suggested, hefting the weapon uncertainly, with both hands, holding it across his body like a quarterstaff.
Idgen Marte waved them on. “We don’t have time for all this. We’ve got to find Torvul and clear out.”
“To the Great Hall. I am not leaving without my arms.”
“There’s not a shortage of them, you know,” she hissed.
“Good armor is expensive, and that plate was custom made to my needs by the Master Armorer at Wind’s Jaw. Besides, we may run into the Baron on the way.”
Idgen Marte shook her head resignedly. “Never rescuing you again.”
“Agreed,” Allystaire replied. “Now where will Torvul be?”
“Follow the shouts of ‘fire,’ I suspect,” she replied. “Now, let’s go. There’s a stairway down that hall.” She pointed to a passage and trotted off. Allystaire waved the boy and the woman to go ahead of him and followed.
As they moved along, Allystaire grew impatient at the slower pace enforced on them by the woman and the boy. Down a passage, up a stairway, another passage, without encountering guards. We’re near the ground floor. All keeps are much the same from the inside, he thought.
“This is still a terrible idea,” Idgen Marte said.
“The Great Hall has no tactical value, confers no advantage. They will not expect it. We collect my arms and then we find Torvul.”
They had just crested another narrow staircase when they heard the sound of tramping feet and the calls of “Fire! Fire in the cellar!”
Allystaire turned towards the nearest door, took three steps, and threw his shoulder into it. The Goddess’s strength had not left him, and the door flew open, bursting its lock. “Inside. Now!” He stood in the doorway tilll the woman skirted past him, and the boy, the butt of his spear dragging on the ground. Then he and Idgen Marte darted inside.
It was a closet, the size of a small peasant’s cottage. It held stacks of linens, piles of wood, coal scuttles, buckets and brushes, the kind of things that kept a keep running. He hefted his mace and slid to one side of the door. Idgen Marte bracketed the other, while the student brandished his spear and the farmwife crouched behind a stack of chairs.
Suddenly a voice sounded from outside the door. “I think you’re clear now. The sight of half the Baron’s precious wine cellar going up in flames ought to keep them occupied for a bit. Come on out and let’s quit this place.”
Allystaire nudged the door open, and Torvul smirked from where he leaned on his cudgel.
“How did you find us?”
Torvul tapped the side of his head with one long finger. “I used Her Ladyship’s Gifts, and my not inconsiderable store of wit and wisdom. Come on now. They’ll get that fire dealt with soon enough. Once they’re organized and start patrolling every floor…”
“The wine cellars of the Dunes are legendary,” Allystaire noted, a touch of wistfulness in his voice. “Did you really?”
Torvul sniffed. “Only the barrels of the inferior stuff. And, well, perhaps a few tuns of the better won’t pass muster. Let’s say I merely helped it on its natural course.”
“Meaning?”
Torvul tapped one of his many pockets. “I turned it to vinegar.”
Idgen Marte stepped out of the room and smacked both of them on the back of the head, so fast they grunted simultaneously. “If you two are done, we’ve a castle to escape, and a Baron to kill.”
“After my—”
“Yes, after we collect your toys,” she spat, before stalking off to the end of the corridor, ripping her sword from its sheath and swirling the tip in the air in front of her.
Torvul grunted and retreated a few paces. “And in case you’re wondering, the fire won’t spread out of the cellar, but they’ll have a job of getting it under control.”
Allystaire motioned for the youth and the woman to emerge. “Stay behind me, in front of the dwarf. He is a friend.”
“And they are?” Torvul asked, gesturing towards them with his cudgel.
“Fellow escapees,” Allystaire muttered, as the small column began to move.
Take the next left, girl, then straight down the corridor. Stairway on the right leads up into the Hall. Bound to be guards. Put them down if you can. Allystaire heard Torvul’s thoughts before the rumble of his voice.
“I see. And given that you’re escaping, I take it the baron didn’t ask you over for brandy and a pipe?”
Allystaire snorted. “He turned me over to a sorcerer. Name of Bhimanzir.”
Torvul coughed discreetly, and his scuffling boot-steps stopped for a moment.” And what’s become of said sorcerer?”
“I healed him,” Allystaire said, as they walked. “Dragged the magic right out of him, and he aged, oh, three or four scores of years right in front of me.”
“Five-score at least,” the boy corrected. “Possibly twice that much.”
The dwarf whistled low. “They aren’t gonna like that, boy,” he said, while turning his eyes at the nameless youth behind him.
“I said they would learn fear. Now is the time they start,” Allystaire said, trying to edge between the dwarf and the former apprentice. Torvul noticed, he was sure, but said nothing.
Guards! He heard Idgen Marte’s voice in his head and rushed to her. There were two guards at their post, and Allystaire arrived just in time to see Idgen Marte knocking them both senseless with the hilt of her sword.
The doors of the Hall were barred from the inside. Torches burning in sconces to either side of the wooden double doors. Idgen Marte stepped under the torches, where the shadows were thickest, and vanished. The bar scraped against wood and iron as she lifted it, and the doors swung open. Inside, all was darkness.
They hustled inside, Torvul messing with the cylindrical, shuttered lamp hanging from his belt. Soon the lamp was glowing steadily, a brighter, more direct light than that of plain fire. He adjusted some knobs and light pooled in a wide circle around them as they advanced. The columns with their trophies rose up around them like great stone trees.
“Lot of risk for some steel,” Torvul offered.
“How can I be a knight in shining armor if I am naked?”
Torvul harumphed at that, moving his lamp to and fro, fiddling some more with the knobs on it so that it focused into a tight, narrow beam. “Damn if this thing ever worked half so well before.” They’ll probably have found the boat by now. We need another way out.
I have some thoughts on that score, Allystaire thought. I think we will leave by the front gate.
Goddess save us from you doing the thinking, Idgen Marte thought.
There are more ways out of the keep if we need them. Tunnels my Master used. He could Step, as well, but I am afraid he did not teach me. The voice sounding in all three of their heads was unfamiliar, careful, and unusually accented.
All three swiveled as Torvul’s lantern-beam focused on the former sorcerer’s apprentice. The boy blinked his eyes against the sudden brightness, and readjusted his grip on the spear. “I’m sorry. Was that rude? I thought if I could hear you, then…”
Allystaire, Torvul, and Idgen Marte stared, first at the boy, then at each other.
“Later.” Idgen Marte spoke first, cutting off all debate with a single chop of the edge of her hand.
Allystaire’s narrowed eyes lingered on the unblinking and wide-eyed gaze of the boy before returning to the search.
Torvul’s beam swept the room, suddenly stopped. “Over here.” The light canted for a moment as the dwarf set his lantern down, and then some clattering as he began gathering up pieces. “Here.”
He handed Allystaire his belt, with the hammer still snug in its ring. Securing the belt back around his waist made the paladin feel a little less naked. He stuffed the mace through his belt on the other side. Resignedly he added the thick leather strap that held his heavy sword; through the thin fabric of the tabard he wore, it began to chafe his skin as soon as he settled it.
“No time to get the armor on,” Allystaire said, but Torvul’s hands were already flying among the straps and buckles, long and skilled fingers moving certainly and nimbly despite the faint light. Soon enough he had it tied in convenient bundles, took two for himself, and handed one to Idgen Marte. The dwarf handed Allystaire his shield, the light of his lantern reflecting brightly off the battered blue face and golden sunburst.
They found the stairway that led straight down to the keep’s main gate, but below them they heard a clatter, raised voices, armor rattling, steel hissing against leather. Idgen Marte halted and the rest of them came to a stop behind her.
“We should make for the boat,” she said.
“Long walk,” Torvul offered. “And they’ve surely found it by now.”
“Will five fit on this boat?” Allystaire asked.
Idgen Marte fixed him with a hard stare that Allystaire returned. She looked away, shaking her head, eyes narrowed in frustration.
“We go onward,” Allystaire said. “The front gate.”
Torvul spat between his boots with pinpoint precision. “Men are already raised. How many between us and safety?”
“Her strength has not left me yet. We can fight free if we must.”
They halted as the tumult of raised voices became more distinct. A shout briefly rose above the din.
“You speak of mutiny! Treason!”
Similar calls rang out, but the rattling of metal quickly swallowed them.
At the bottom of the stairs, two groups of men in armor and Delondeur green shoved and yelled at one another. In the very midst of it stood a familiar figure, Chaddin, his blond hair standing out among the crowd of more anonymous men in helmets and coifs.
“You knew what the sorcerer was doing here,” the sergeant bellowed. To Allystaire, Chaddin seemed young for his rank without his helm, like a child stripped of a vital part of a costume. “Your entire detachment knew, Sir Leoben.” The sergeant was taller than the knight he stood face to face with. Despite the disadvantage of the steps, he gave the knight a hard shove that sent him reeling backwards, clattering onto the stairs in his green-enameled and silver-chaised mail.
Sir Leoben was quickly hauled up by his men, his face darkening with rage. “First you talk treason. Now you dare lay hands on your—”
Chaddin drew his sword in a flash, the point leveling just in front of Leoben’s face. The knight froze. “Say it. Say ‘upon your better’ or ‘upon your lord.’ See how much that matters to me right now, Leoben.”
There’s hope for this one yet, Allystaire thought, smiling inwardly, even as swords were drawn all around. The men—common soldiers in tabards—who gathered in a knot around Chaddin appeared calm compared to those on the steps above them, who were jittery and shifting from foot to foot, unable to stay still.
“Your political debate is thrilling, gentlemen,” Torvul hollered, advancing down the stairs. “But alas, it impedes my exit, and so it must end. This is your warning.” They had gone unnoticed by the opposing bands of Delondeur men, but there was no clear way past them now.
Allystaire was already drawing his hammer free; the weight returned to his arm like a comfortable old shirt sliding over his shoulders.
Both groups turned to them. Chaddin was suddenly seized with indecision, the point of his sword wavering.
Cover your eyes, all of you, and get the woman’s, too. Torvul’s hand dove into a pouch and produced a small, cloth wrapped bundle. He began to stroke the back of the bundle with the ball of his thumb, chanting a few low, rumbling words of Dwarfish.
Allystaire caught a glimpse of a painfully intense brightness and saw Torvul’s arm cocked to throw before closing his eyes. Even with his arm covering his eyes, there was an intense red flash and the sudden screaming of men and a clatter of mail and weapons as they fell about, toppling each other down the stairs.
“Now! The effect will wear off soon!” Torvul scampered down the stairs, moving as fast as Allystaire’d ever seen. Torvul crouched among the downed men, searching for something for a few seconds, before finally shaking his head and moving on.
Allystaire waved the woman and the sorcerer’s apprentice down the stairs before him, then bounded down two at a time, his bare feet slapping hard against the stone.
They passed the heap of blinded, yelling soldiers and guardsman without a backward glance, and had reached the wide and ancient oak gates of the keep’s outer wall when a voice of command suddenly rolled over them.
“Where do you think you’re going, Coldbourne?”
Allystaire whirled, giving his hammer a tentative swing, and saw Baron Delondeur, clearly just roused from sleep but carrying a naked sword, with a pair of knights at his side. The Baron wore a green silk nightshirt with his sigil, the sand-colored tower, patterned all over it. He looked faintly ridiculous with his swordbelt cinched around him, Allystaire thought, but his voice was hard, his eyes were clear, and his thick-wristed arm held his sword with casual ease.
“I am forced to refuse your hospitality, Lionel,” Allystaire said, “but I do not wish to destroy your home in the process.”
“You up-jumped mountain simpleton,” Delondeur spat, “you’ve destroyed nothing. You won’t make it out of the city.”
“I think you are about to have greater problems than what to do about me, Lionel,” Allystaire replied. As if it were a cue, Idgen Marte took a couple of steps forward, ready to launch herself towards the Baron, but Allystaire stopped her with a sudden thought.
No. Not like this. It cannot look like an assassin in the night. It has to look clean.
He’s right, Torvul added. If he’s killed by a blurry shadow, we’re no better than murderers as far as the regular folk will see.
“What problems are those?”
“As I see it, there are two,” Allystaire replied. “The first is that too many of your men, your good, loyal, seasoned men, now know what you were doing here. One of them is damned unhappy about it, too. The second—how will the sorcerers react when they know that one of their own died in your keep, under your care?”
“You can’t kill a sorcerer!” Lionel’s voice was steady, but his mouth tightened, his lips twitched nervously.
“I already have,” Allystaire said, lifting his chin. “Your sorcerer, your diviner of secrets, the weapon that would win you a throne, lies dead upon the floor of your dungeon. If you doubt me, send a man to find his decrepit corpse. I am afraid we cannot wait.”
The Baron’s eyes widened, and after a swallow, he pressed on. “Even on your best day you’d never have been able to kill a sorcerer. You’re lying.”
Allystaire laughed hollowly. “You know that I cannot, Lionel. And when his brethren come and ask what happened, you tell them the truth as I tell it to you now. Tell them it was me, the Arm of the Mother. I was unarmed, naked, and bound, before I took his magic. Tell them his bones turned into powder at a touch when the Mother was done with him.” Allystaire paused, felt his rage swelling in his throat. “Then tell them where to find me. I will await their coming, and I will be neither alone nor unarmed.”
“There are too many guards between you and the gates of my city, Coldbourne,” the Baron replied, though his face had paled noticeably and the sword in his hand shook, but the uncertainty passed in a moment, replaced with his casual military swagger. “Even if you make the wall of the Dunes, you’ll get no further.”
“Why, Lionel,” Allystaire said, “one would almost think you were afraid to face me yourself, with that kind of talk.”
“Don’t try to goad me, Coldbourne. You know me better than that.”
“No,” Allystaire replied. “I knew you.” Whatever he’d been about to add was interrupted by the clatter of footsteps as the conflicting parties of guards raced towards the gate, with Chaddin’s hardened bunch in the lead.
“M’lord! Guard yourself from mutineers,” came a shout from Leoben. The knight was suddenly silenced as one of Chaddin’s soldiers—a broad and thick-waisted man taller than the Baron—turned and drove a mailed fist into his face. This set off a general scuffle between guardsmen and knights, mostly conducted with fists and elbows, hilts and blade flats. No blood was drawn, though surely it would have been had Delondeur not whirled on them and bellowed, almost wordlessly. A lifetime of shouting orders in the field gave his voice the unmistakable note of command, and the men stopped and snapped to attention.
“What is the meaning of this? Why do my own men fight? Why has one of my own knights had his nose bloodied by a man-at-arms?”
“There are accusations, my lord, that must be answered,” Chaddin said, his voice and fair features barely concealing his anger.
“I must answer nothing,” the Baron shot back, imperiously. “Especially not accusations leveled by the soldiers in my service.”
Allystaire’s eyes flitted from Chaddin to the Baron and back, and something suddenly fell into place, and before he knew it, he was speaking aloud.
“He is your natural son,” he said, lifting his hammer to point to Chaddin. “He is, Lionel, do not deny it. He has the Delondeur features.”
Chaddin’s jaw tensed, and he defiantly kept his eyes locked on the Baron. Conspicuously he did not look at Allystaire, but he didn’t have to. As soon as the words were spoken aloud, the entire crowd in the entrance of the courtyard realized the truth of the paladin’s words; in many ways Chaddin was a young mirror image of the Baron. Before the Baron could deflect or defend himself, Allystaire pressed on.
“How long have you kept him under your thumb, kept him thinking that someday you will acknowledge the truth he wears on his face, in his eyes, his hair?” Then, a knot of anger growing in his stomach, he added, “His accusations will not do because he is what, a sign of your own inadequacies? Your own lack of will? Because you deny his parentage, his word is worth less than the words of that coward?” The paladin pointed to the knight, Sir Leoben, who was probing carefully along his split lip with his fingertips.
Leoben suddenly flushed and began to draw his sword. “I will not be called coward, sir. I demand—”
“If you finish that demand, you will die like the guard of Lionel’s slave pen did,” Allystaire said, “pinned against the wall like a tanning hide. Silence yourself now or be silenced forever. Choose.” The paladin fixed Leoben with his clear blue gaze. He was still blood-spattered, much of it drying to a dark brown upon his skin, and he hefted his hammer speculatively. In his mind, Allystaire was already lining up the throw.
Leoben matched Allystaire’s stare for a moment, but his brown eyes wavered and then lowered. He swallowed once, then slipped his sword back into its sheath.
Allystaire pointed to the woman huddling behind Torvul. “What of her? A woman of your own barony, taken by reavers, sold into slavery, and bought with Baron’s gold,” he shouted. “Thrown upon a table to be butchered by the sorcerer the Baron hired. This is the man you are taking orders from—no better than the commonest reaver!”
“Still your mad ravings,” the Baron roared, turning to Allystaire and lifting his sword.
“If you deny it, then attack me, and prove your innocence upon my person,” Allystaire said. He spread his arms wide. “Neither of us are armored, and I have just spent the day being tortured by your pet sorcerer. That ought to even us for your advanced age.”
That, it appeared, was enough, for the Baron roared and leaped to attack. Allystaire swung the haft of his warhammer so that the base of its shaft thunked into his left palm and he used it like a staff to ward off the blows Lionel leveled at him.
Age had taken little from the Baron as a swordsman, his swings as strong and fast as many a younger man’s. Allystaire was never the swordsman Lionel had been, but he didn’t intend the fight to last long. A vestige of the Goddess’s strength lingered. It will be enough.
He pushed the Baron, with enough force to send the old man staggering to one knee. Allystaire lowered his hands to the bottom third of his hammer, keeping them a few inches apart, ready to swing in a wide arc.
Lionel noted the change and began circling, shuffling his feet, shifting his weight. Both the Delondeur men and Allystaire’s own party instinctively gathered in semi-circles to either side of the combatants.
His sword held in his right hand, Lionel lunged. He was a tall man, with long arms and legs, and his lunge was fast, impressive, and hard to defend for a man not wearing armor.
Allystaire didn’t try to meet it with his hammer. Instead, he simply turned his body and let the blade score across his ribs as he stepped forward. The pain was a sizzling line across his flesh, but he had drawn close enough to the Baron to do precisely what he wanted.
When his left hand closed on the Baron’s shirt, the paladin lifted him off the ground, turned, and ran a few steps, till the older man’s body slammed into the outer wall. Allystaire slammed him once, then twice more, till the sword fell from his fingers. Then he dropped his hammer to the stones, and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the Baron’s wrist, as it dove for the dirk belted opposite his empty scabbard.
He squeezed, just a bit, and felt bones creak, saw Lionel’s eyes water. For a moment, Allystaire felt a pang of guilt. The Baron’s age had made this fight a charade when compared to Allystaire’s strength.
Then he remembered the sight of the bloodstained table in the dungeon, the stink of fear in the slaver’s warehouse in Bend, the misery that he’d followed like a determined dog for all these months. He remembered the indignation of a little girl he’d found huddled and freezing in the cold well of her father’s inn when she learned, for the first time, that her lands were ruled by a Baron who simply did not care for the weakest of his people. Who simply did not care for her, her parents, or any of the folk of her village.
His hand tightened till a bone in the Baron’s wrist popped under his fingers. He stopped himself from turning the man’s arm into a limp tube of bone fragments, shredded muscle, and agony.
“Tell all of us, Lionel. Raise your voice so your men can hear. You know slavers operate in your barony, and you profited from it, yes?”
Through pain-gritted teeth the man grated, “Yes.”
“You even bought some of the captives, yes?”
“Yes!”
“And some of them came here, to the Dunes. And you never saw them again, because Bhimanzir was murdering them by ripping their vitals out with hooks and barbed knives. You may not have known that, but you knew when you gave him a woman that she was going to die. Did you not?”
The Baron clenched his teeth and strained his jaw, trying to twist out of the paladin’s grip to no avail. The two knights who had walked at his side suddenly leapt forward, swords in hands, but Idgen Marte darted between them. There was a heavy smack of metal against flesh and bone, and they dropped their swords from nerveless fingers as she retreated back into the shadows.
“Say it, Lionel. You were putting your own people on a sorcerer’s table for slaughter in order to help your aims. To found your kingdom. I will tire of asking, Baron,” Allystaire said, increasing the pressure around his wrist, “then I will tire of letting you live.” He worked hard to keep the easy confidence in his voice, for he felt blood beginning to stick the tabard he wore to his skin, felt the strength slowly draining from his limbs, which began to ache from the effort of holding the Baron against the wall. This needed to end soon.
“I knew. They were sacrifices for their barony, for their lords. They couldn’t be soldiers, but they could do this. Bhimanzir promised victory; his kind have never been defeated. He needed flesh, mothers, he told me. They were my people! Bound to serve me, and they did!”
Allystaire let the Baron drop in a heap, disgust rising in equal measure as anger. “My people, Baron, does not mean the same thing as my sword, or my boots, or even my horse. It does not mean that they serve you. It should mean that you. Serve. Them.” He turned to the soldiers behind him; they looked angry, in the main. Most of the anger, it seemed, was aimed at the man slumped on the ground, holding his fractured wrist. Hands tightened around swords, but did not draw them. Jaws quivered with tension, eyes flared. None seemed willing to challenge the paladin.
“You heard it from his own mouth, Chaddin. You are a sensible man. Take charge of him. We are leaving. We will kill any man we see in green between here and the gate. Aye?”
The blond sergeant stepped forward, his sword level, not pointed at Allystaire, but not pointed at Lionel either—thought it wavered in the direction of the Baron. He swallowed once, and said, “I will send word to the gates between here and there. You will not be harmed.”
“How will word go ahead of us? No. I need more than word.”
Chaddin strode forward and squatted at the nearly unconscious Baron’s side, then seized his hand. Lionel tried, weakly, to pull away. The sergeant, his son, held fast and quickly pried something free. He came to Allystaire, holding out his hand. In it sat a heavy golden ring set with stones that glittered darkly green in the guttering torchlight.
Allystaire took it, glanced at it briefly, and held it to Torvul. His arm shook, very slightly, as he extended it. Hope no one noticed that.
“This will come back, Chaddin. You have my word on it. I will leave it with the guard at the outer wall.” As Allystaire and company turned for the last set of stairs that would lead to the castle exit, he heard Chaddin begin to speak to the men. Knight’s voices raised and quickly shouted down. He slid his left hand under his tabard, wincing as it felt blood and the slash across his stomach. He reached for the compassion, the love of the Goddess, to heal himself. He almost fainted with the effort of it. It felt like trying to draw the foundation stone of a tower out of the earth with his bare hands. It shifted, but only just. Blood crusted and dried under his hand. There would be a scar.