Simon Hawke - The Outcast

The corners of his mouth turned down as he thought of that traitorous brigand. He was not through with Rokan yet, not by any means. By now, the marauder could be halfway across the desert, only he wouldn’t do that. He might flee from a battle he knew he could not win, but he would not give up the war. Not that one. Besides, there was still the matter of his face. Timor smiled. Rokan would remain, so long as there was the promise that he might be healed. And if that promise were not kept, then Rokan would do everything in his power to kill him. Oh yes, Timor knew his man. Rokan was a man he could understand. And he could still be useful, but as to what extent, well... that depended to a large degree on Rokan.

For the present, Timor had to concern himself with the one wild card in the game—the elfling, Sorak. He did not know to what extent the elfling might upset his plans, but he had no intention of taking any chances. He had sent five well-armed and dangerous men to kill the elfling, and they had failed. If you want a job done properly, he thought, do it yourself. He pulled out a key he wore around his neck, then went over to a small, wooden chest he kept on the sideboard. He unlocked the chest and opened it. Within it, on a bed of black velvet, lay his spellbook. He tucked the spellbook within the folds of his tunic and put on his cloak. It was late, but the night was not yet over, and he had much to do before the dawn.

Rokan winced as the healer gently probed the wound around the crossbow bolt. “Stop messing about and pull the blasted thing out!” he said, gritting his teeth.

“Bad enough you woke me in the middle of the night and threatened to slit my throat if I did not see to your wound,” the healer said wryly. “I have already gathered that I am not going to be paid for this. I do not need the added burden of your body to dispose of. That bolt may be the only thing holding a blood vessel together. If I were to simply yank it out without a careful examination, you could start leaking like a sieve.”

“You talk too much,” Rokan muttered sullenly. “Be on about your business.”

“I will if you stop squirming. Now sit still.”

Rokan scowled, but complied.

“What happened to your face?” the healer asked as he continued to examine the wound.

“It was burned away. Can you restore it?”

“I have not that sort of skill. The old templars had that level of power, but not me.”

“Never mind my face and see to my shoulder. Or is that beyond you, too?”

“Hold still,” the healer said.

He took hold of the crossbow bolt and pulled.

Rokan cried out with pain and grabbed the arms of his chair with all his might. The healer pulled the arrow free and held it up. “There,” he said. “Did that hurt much?”

“Yes, damn you!”

“Good. You are a lucky man. It could have been much worse. Some healing salve and a bandage to cover the wound and you should recover completely. That is, of course, unless someone shoots you again. And I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do that to such a pleasant fellow as you.”

Rokan grimaced. “I can do without your witticisms,” he said. “Maybe this will dull your humor.” He tossed a silver coin to the healer.

The man caught it, glanced at it with surprise, and grunted. “Well... consider me the soul of humorlessness. This is rather more than I expected.”

“It is meant to buy your silence, as well.”

“This is the elven market, my irksome friend,” the healer said dryly. “I see similar injuries, and worse, every day. Discretion comes with the treatment, else I would not stay in business long.”

Rokan winced as the healer applied the salve to the wound. “Pah! It smells worse than kank dung!”

“It’s nothing compared to what your wound would smell like in a few days if I did not apply the salve,” the healer replied. “I will give you some to take with you. Bathe the wound and apply some every day, as I am doing now, and change the bandage before it becomes dirty. If you have any difficulties, come and see me. Or, better yet, go threaten someone else in the middle of the night. There, that should do it.”

Rokan glanced down at the bandage and tentatively moved his arm and shoulder.

“Are you left-handed?” asked the healer.

“No, right.”

“Good. If you must kill someone, use your right arm. Try not to move the left too much.”

“I am grateful to you, healer,” Rokan said. The healer shrugged. “I am grateful to be paid, and so generously, to boot. It makes me not mind losing my sleep so much.”

“There are more coins where that one came from,” Rokan said.

“Are there, indeed? And what dastardly thing would I have to do to earn them?”

“What do you know of poisons?” Rokan asked. “A man in my profession, in this neighborhood? A good deal. But I will not supply you with any poison to kill someone. I am a healer, after all.”

“Fair enough, I ask only for the knowledge. I can obtain the poison elsewhere.”

“In the elven market, you could obtain it on almost any street corner,” said the healer dryly. “As for the knowledge you require, that should be worth at least another silver coin.”

“Done.”

“Hmm. I should have asked for two. What purpose do you want this poison to serve?”

“I want something I can smear upon a crossbow bolt, like this one,” Rokan said, picking up the bloody arrow the healer had pulled out of his shoulder. “And it should be strong, strong enough to drop a kank in its tracks.”

“I see,” the healer said. “I am no expert on poisons, but I knew a bard who taught me a little. I would recommend the venom from a crystal spider. It is thick enough to smear upon an arrow, though I would not do it with my fingers, and it paralyzes at once. Death follows in moments.”

“Venom from a crystal spider.” Rokan said with a smile that gave his ravaged face a hideous expression. “How very fitting.” He tossed another silver coin to the healer. “You can go back to sleep now.”

Timor rode the kank through the Grand Gate and disappeared out into the darkness beyond the city walls. The guards on duty at the gate passed him through without remarking on his leaving the city at such an unusual hour. It was not their place to question a templar, much less the senior templar himself, and if they wondered what errand he was on in the middle of the night, they kept it to themselves.

With his cloak wrapped around him against the night chill, Timor turned the kank and followed the outer city wall, going past the king’s gardens and the templars’ quarter, past the stadium and Kalak’s ziggurat, toward the brickyards and the old slave pens, now standing empty. He turned east, away from the city wall, and followed a dirt road for several miles beyond the work farms until the road began to rise, leading up into the foothills.

The road did not continue up into the mountains. It stopped at their base, at a wide plateau that spread out beneath the foothills. During the day, hardly anyone ever came here. At night, the place was always deserted. The only sounds were the whistling of the wind blowing over the desert and the scrabbling of the giant kank beetle’s claws on the hard-packed soil. Timor tapped the beast’s antennae with a switch and got down from its back. He dropped the switch and then tied the creature’s leads to a rock outcropping. The kank simply stood there, docile, its huge pincers opening and closing as it scanned the ground around it for some food.

Timor gazed out at the deserted cemetery. This was where Tyr buried its dead, in simple, mounded graves marked by nothing other than red clay tablets with the names of the deceased incised upon them. The heaped dirt mounds stretched out across the wide plateau and up the hillside. A cool dust cloud, making ghostly undulations in the night breeze, obscured many of them from view.