Alex Bledsoe - Burn Me Deadly

He closed the pad and looked at me. “I imagine, then, given your occupation, that you plan to conduct your own investigation based on some idea of personal honor and revenge.”

“Me? Nah. I plan on sleeping off this headache, which the priestess up the hill says may take six months even with whatever spells she does. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing on my schedule.”

Argoset tapped the tablet thoughtfully against his chin. “You really don’t seem like that kind of person.”

“He is,” Liz assured him. “I’ve seen swatting a fly exhaust him.”

Argoset put the tablet back in his pocket. “So you’re content to leave the investigation up to the people the king assigns to do this sort of thing?”

I shrugged. “It’s your job, not mine. I don’t have a client.”

He nodded again. His eerie, steady quality made me nervous, especially since it emanated from such a boyish face. I could imagine what it would do to someone who really did have a guilty conscience. Finally he said, “I don’t believe you, Mr. LaCrosse, but I do believe that your injuries will slow you down considerably and keep you from getting in my way. So I’ll leave you with this. A crime has been committed, and as far as we know, you are one of the victims. It wouldn’t require much traveling to look at things from the other side and see you as a suspect. Do you understand?”

I nodded, very slightly this time.

A slow, knowing smile spread across his face. It was not reassuring. “Right.” Argoset stood, nodded respectfully to Liz and left. Muscles fell in behind him. Liz followed, watched them descend the stairs, then closed the outer door behind them. She crossed her arms and said, “That was all kinds of strange, wasn’t it?”

I sighed and sagged in my chair. Even sitting up straight was exhausting. “Yeah. A sword jockey and some farm girl get ambushed, and suddenly the king’s security forces are all over the place.”

“What do you think it means?”

Before I could answer there was a soft, furtive knock at the door. Liz palmed a knife from her belt and stood flat against the wall beside it. “Yeah?” she said.

“It’s me,” Gary Bunson said. Liz let him in. “Did you talk to Argoset?” he asked at once.

“And his charming gorilla,” Liz said.

“Of course we talked to him,” I said, annoyed. “After you told him all about us, how could we not? Thanks for being such a pal.”

Bunson waved his hands in front of his face as if warding off bees. “Hey, Eddie, we’re friends, but when it comes down to a choice of asses to watch, my own comes first. I don’t know whose toes you stepped on, but this has to be serious. I didn’t think King Archibald even knew Neceda existed, and I’d just as soon he forgets that it does. So you better lay low for a while.”

“I’m getting that advice a lot.”

“I’m serious, Eddie. Argoset is the golden boy up in Sevlow, and he has the king’s ear. He whispers, and people go away permanently. And he didn’t look happy when he came downstairs.” He looked from me to Liz and back, trying to impress us with his urgency.

“So why is he interested in this?” Liz asked.

Bunson shook his head. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. We all have good things going here in Neceda. I don’t want to see any of us not around to enjoy them anymore.”

“Well, I’m too tired to do much about it right now,” I said honestly. “I’m going home and back to bed.”

Bunson looked at Liz. “You make sure of that?”

She smiled. “Absolutely.”

LIZ lay asleep beside me, naked, one leg draped over mine. A single candle on the table lit her skin in flickering waves of amber. Distant music from Angelina’s tavern mingled with the street sounds into a rolling, tinkling buzz. Inside we were warm, safe and sated.

Liz shifted a little, and clutched me tighter. I grunted as my ribs protested, but Liz didn’t wake and I wasn’t going to disturb her. Nothing like nearly dying to make you appreciate things like sex with your girlfriend. I was too weak to participate much in the physical part of our reunion, but my enjoyment seemed reward enough for her. If the situation was reversed I’d feel the same way, so I accepted it. Luxuriated in it, in fact. It was a feeling I never expected to have in my life, and I tried very hard not to second-guess it.

Our place was on the second floor of a rooming house three buildings down from the tavern. The old lady who owned the building dealt in small-time tariff-free liquor on the side, which everyone knew about but no one minded; Neceda collected shady entrepreneurs like manure drew flies. It meant being awakened by the occasional loud confrontation in the middle of the night and stepping over fresh bloodstains on the stairs in the morning, but the rent was cheap and the rooms were cool in the summer and warm in the winter.

Liz yawned and raised up on one elbow. She traced a finger down the old sword scar on my chest and said, “You’re not going to let it go, are you?”

“You know I’m not,” I said.

“Another man in your position might count himself lucky and just put it behind him. It really had nothing to do with you; you just stumbled over it and got caught in it.”

“That makes it my problem.”

She firmly grabbed my beard and turned my chin so I had to look her in the eye. “ Why, Eddie?”

What could I tell her? The truth was that too many women in my life had died when I should’ve protected them. When I was sixteen it had been Janet, sister of my best friend, raped and killed while I was forced to watch. Years later it had been Liz’s twin sister, Cathy, a story I still kept from her. There had been dark Jenny, on the island of Grand Bruan. And now it was Laura Lesperitt.

But what I did tell Liz was also the truth. “A sword jockey who lets someone riding with him get killed, and then doesn’t do anything about it, won’t get much work after a while.”

“Is that the real reason?”

I grinned. “It’s a real reason.”

She shook my chin with playful annoyance. “Okay, so what’s our first move?”

“Hm. Well, I want to see where that farmer found me. Maybe there’s a clue left lying around. That house where they took us to torture the girl can’t be too far away.”

“It’s been over a week. By now they must know you’re not dead.”

“I know. But I have to start somewhere.”

“What can I do to help?”

“Other than what you just did?”

She grinned. “That helped us both.”

“If you feel like it, you could try to find out who else Argoset talks to, and what he’s really doing here. He’s looking into something, all right, but it’s not me. And if he wanted to frame me for the girl’s death, he would’ve done it already. He just wanted to scare me out of the way.”

She nodded. “I’ll ask around.”

“But watch yourself. This isn’t a simple thing.”

“I know. That’s why you need help with it.”

I turned and looked at her. The soft candlelight smoothed out her lines and made her look much younger: as young, in fact, as my memories of her twin sister, Cathy, over fifteen years ago. Soon I’d have to tell Liz that story, because it hung over us like a sword only one of us could see.

But not at that moment. At the moment I only had to kiss her again.

It grew easier to move around the more I did it, so it made sense to keep doing it. The next day I went down to the livery stable to arrange for another horse. Liz had her office there, just as mine was above the tavern. Her delivery business was a one-wagon, one-woman operation, but she’d been so successful lately she’d considered hiring an additional person. I did not have that problem.