J. Tomlin - The Templar's Cross

Law leaned back to rest against the wall and took a deep breath, letting some of the tension go. “Thank you, lad. That feels better.”

“I’m not a lad,” Cormac muttered. He finished rewrapping the bandage and looked up into Law’s face. “Do you think that they’re dead?”

“I doubt it.”

“But you dinnae ken where they are.” He sounded panicked. “If you cannae find them they must be dead. What if you’re the next one someone kills?”

The young man glared at him, his lips pressed in a tight line so hard they turned white. “How many people are going to be murdered over that cross that you have hidden, and you not doing a thing about it? Do you think you’ll sell it for a huge pile of gold? You won’t get it if you’re dead.”

Law’s face felt hot as his temper rose. “The man the most danger to me is the lord sheriff, and that cross can help me find a murderer to hand him in my place. If you think I’m going to hang for any of them, you are wrong. I’m using it as bait to bring them together.”

“ A mhic Ifrinn ! So you’ll end up dead with a blade in your back instead.”

“If you’re going to curse at me, use words that I ken!” Law jumped to his feet, flinched, and carefully laced up his doublet. “I’m going out to see if anyone is left in this goddamned burgh. From how well I did earlier, I suspect everyone except us has left.” He stomped out.

The afternoon light had turned to pewter gray as the sun sank. For once the sky was clear. High clouds scurried across the sky before a high wind. If anyone was going to show up at the house Carre was using, after dark was the most likely time, so he trotted through the emptying streets. He took the winding back-alley route that Carre’s guards had used to take him there the first time since it would be as well if he weren’t seen.

When he reached the narrow street, far ahead a brazier burned on a distant street corner. Narrow beams of light striped the dusk from houses on either side. The thin sickle of a moon cast a cold glow and in the distance a dog barked.

Law slipped through the gate of Carre’s house and walked softly through the dark garden, keeping an eye out for guards. Faint light from a candle shone in one window behind closed shutters. He went up to the door and listened. The house was silent. He pressed his ear to the door. Still he heard nothing, so he tried the door. It was locked. He crept to the window where there was light and tried to look between the boards of the shutters, but all he could see was bits of the wall and the corner of a table. When he tried the shutters, they were barred.

He tiptoed around to the back of the house, where there was another window. When he tugged on the shutter it opened. The room within was cloaked in darkness.

Law was considering climbing through the window when the silence was broken by a thump at the front of the house and a loud, rasping groan. Law left the window and walked toward the door. It opened before he could reach it. A man, not tall and slightly built, crouched like a black silhouette in the opening against the faint candlelight within. Law stopped and grasped the hilt of his sword.

Sounds came out of the man’s mouth but they were nothing more than a liquid gurgle. He held onto the door and swayed. The other hand pressed to his chest. He didn’t seem to see Law but he made another agonized rasping sound and said, “I meant to-” There was a horrible bubbling sound that covered the rest of his words as he fell forward.

Law leapt to the door and dropped to his knees. A single gush of blood sprayed from the fallen man’s mouth onto the ground. With his head turned to the side, now Law could see his face in the faint candlelight. It was colorless, the eyes blank and his mouth lolled open although no more blood came out. There was no mistaking the young man who Law had seen leave the house, the same Marguerite had met in the garden a few nights past, Law thought. The back of his yellow doublet was soaked with blood. Law cursed repeatedly as he felt the still body to see if there was any trace of life in him. His chest didn’t move with breath. He was still as death. His face lay in an irregular pool of blood.

Law continued muttering, “Devil take them.” He looked up and down the dark street before he scurried inside, grabbed the body by the ankles and dragged it in. He quickly slammed the door and slid the bolt closed. Another dead body on his hands and no witness that he hadn’t done it. He cursed.

Was he the only one here? Where were Carre and his guards? But a quick run through the house confirmed that it was empty.

Several candles were burning on a nearby sideboard. Law brought one over to put better light on the body. In spite of the blood the man had spewed, there was no wound in the front of the body. He unlaced and opened the doublet. When he rolled the body over, the back was wet with blood and had two gashes in it. He had to wrestle the shirt off, not easy on a limp body. It was sodden as well in the back and had two cuts, the same size as the ones on Duncan’s body.

Suddenly, the room smelled of piss. Law jumped back to avoid the widening pool of piss that spread from the body. He stepped around the puddle and knelt by the body, again holding up the candle.

The hairless chest had no injury at all, not even a scratch. Lifting the limp hands, he examined them, but the young man had made no attempt to defend himself-or had had no chance to. When Law turned the body facedown, the stab wounds were much like those on Duncan’s body though he’d been stabbed in the chest. But where had it happened? Surely he had not gone far, coughing up blood as he had been. Law picked up the candlestick and looked around the room, the same where he had shared drinks with Carre.

There was one chair overturned but the other where Law had sat was upright. Beside the table was an overturned wine cup in a pool of red. Law squatted and touched the liquid with his finger. It was sticky and when he sniffed it had a coppery smell.

Blood. So the young man had probably been stabbed here. He might have lain unconscious for a short time, though not long or he would have bled out. It must have been done before Law arrived at the door. The stabbing and the murderer’s escape could not have been so silently done that he wouldn’t have heard even a single noise.

Another cup stood undisturbed beside the flagon, with the dregs of wine still in the bottom. Someone had been here. A guest? One of the guards? But it wasn’t likely the youth would have been drinking with a mere guard. Almost certainly, the same person who had stabbed the young man had partaken the wine.

No fire burned in the hearth. Law held his hand over it and there was not even a trace of heat. Where the devil was Carre and why was this young man, who had seemed to be part of his household as Law had seen, here alone? He might be Carre’s son? Not a servant certainly from his fine clothing.

He left the wine cups where they were and went to the window. This was the one that was barred but Law tried it anyway to be sure. He took the candle along with him into the next room, a storeroom by the look of it, with only a barrel and a bag with a scent of apples. If there had been dust on the sill, it was clean now. Either the servants were careful or the window had been used for an exit.

Of course, the murderer might simply have gone out the door, but Law suspected he had cut off escape, so the murderer had taken another way out. Or she? Even a woman could have climbed out. And a woman could stab someone in the back as easily as hitting Law over the head. Perhaps more so since, like him, they might not have feared her.

So the young man had been unconscious on the floor when the murderer fled.