Margaret Weis - Heroes And Fools

“Come on,” I said when it seemed Cae had taken all she would. “We have some ground to cover before night.”

We made good time after that, but a darker silence attended us now as we went down through the aspen wood. The sky grew heavy overhead, and clouds moved in from the east, changing the sun’s gold disk to dull silver. The trees, the earth, the strengthening wind itself smelled of rain. All this I saw, and none of it, it seemed, did Griff note. Up hill and down, across streams and on trails thin as shadows, he listened to ghosts whose rest was a long time coming. His gentle mother, his father, his sister, and his baby brother — all these cried their deaths to Griff as he went walking with the grandchild of their murderer in his arms.

They did something to him, those voices, and they had more power over him now than they used to have. Through the darkening day I saw it: They changed him, they hollowed him, and it seemed to me, as I led him along the secret paths of Darken Wood, that Griff was actually losing flesh, growing white and stark and starved. Griff Unsouled, spirit-killed and animate, he went like Death, walking down to Haven with ghosts shouting in his head and an infant resting trustfully in his arms.

Trustfully, aye, and she grew quieter by degrees, sleeping sometimes, more often simply lying still, exhausted. When she did rouse, her hungry cries were but whimpers. By the middle of the afternoon the whimpering turned to silence. For the first time I wondered, would the child survive the trip to Haven? Griff wondered, too. I saw him check on her often. No gentle word did he speak now, no soft, whispered comfort remembered from another time. He looked at her with hard eyes and cold, assuring himself that his little passport to vengeance still lived.

Wind picked up, whirling leaves down from the trees, rattling in the brush. Leaden clouds hung lower till you could see them clinging round the hills like ragged shawls on the shoulders of old ladies.

“Keep going,” Griff said, shifting Cae in his arms, tucking her warmly beneath his cloak.

He said that as the first fat drops of rain pattered on fragile leaves.

“No.” I made my voice hard enough to tell him I wouldn’t be gainsaid. “Now we stop. Haven isn’t going anywhere before tomorrow.”

I led him and the baby and all the ghosts aside from the trail, across a small stream, and round the back of a small hill. There the wind broke, whining around the rising ground, and there I found an overhang of stone, lone outrider of the hills we’d left behind. Griff put the infant down on a clear patch beneath the overhang. She stirred a little, but there wasn’t much strength in her for crying.

I peered out into the darkening day. “I’m going to find us some supper. See if you can find enough dry wood to get a fire started.”

I had a pocketful of snares and the notion that a warm broth of whatever I caught and killed might go down Cae’s throat easier than water. When I looked behind me, I saw Griff standing over her, the child a little bit of life at his feet. His eyes were almost gone in blackness, the planes of his face carved away by shadows.

He was sitting before a hot, high fire when I returned, Cae in his arms. He had nothing to say when I showed him the rabbits I’d snared, and he didn’t eat what I skinned and cooked. Not until we had a good broth of the leavings did he unbend and rouse himself. The child must be fed, and he went at that work as he had before, soaking a twist of cloth and tempting her to take it.

For all he tried, Cae didn’t take the food. She’d been a day and a night without her mother, without the rich milk she needed. I knew it looking at her: Nothing we’d concoct would help her. I knew it, but Griff didn’t, or he wouldn’t admit it. He kept at her, teasing the cloth to her lips. No word did he speak, though, and not the smallest bit of tenderness did I see from him. All that, it seemed, he’d spent in the afternoon. He had only the single-minded need to see her fed, and she wouldn’t feed.

I believed, as I rolled myself in my cloak to sleep, that Olwynn Haugh’s little daughter would soon join her mother in whatever land of the dead folk travel to when all the warring and striving is done. She’d go and leave Griff with no way to his revenge and me no path to those steel coins that would keep me warm and in dwarf spirit through winter.

Damn, I thought, falling asleep. Damn me if easy money isn’t the hardest to earn.

Cae didn’t go to join anyone, though; she held tight to her little strand of life. I saw it was so when the night had flown and gray morning hung low in mist. Griff stood just beneath the stony overhang, and he turned when he heard me up. Cae lay in his arms, covered in folds of his green wool cloak. Killer Griff, Griff Unsouled, looked around at me, empty-eyed, his scarred pale face written in lines of hatred sharp as knives.

“How’s the child?”

He shifted the baby in his arms, and if I didn’t know better I’d have thought it was a sack of rags he held, so limp was the child now. Coldly, he said, “I’ll have my vengeance. Let’s go.”

We went, and no other word did he say all the way down to Haven.

You find a man in a city the same way you find a man in the wood. You track him. In Haven, Olwynn Haugh’s father wasn’t so hard to track. We found his trail all over the city, that double-eagle stamped on ale kegs and wine barrels and on the flanks of barges. He was a rich man, a well-known importer, and only one question, dropped in the right tavern at the right moment, found him for us. His name was Egil Adare, and he lived on the hill, his house overlooking the city and the harbor where his barges brought in goods from all over Abanasinia, even from beyond. Sight of his ring opened the door of that fine house for us. Sight of his grandchild sent the servant scurrying, an old woman looking over her shoulder and clucking like a hen as she led us through the grand house, up winding stairs and down breezy corridors.

They live well, the merchants of Haven, and I saw in every room I glimpsed that this one, this Egil Adare, lived like a king. Griff saw it too, his eye alighting on golden statuary, silken hangings, rich velvet draperies. He saw, and he said nothing, only followed the servant, Cae in his arms. Like grim Death he went stalking, and like Death, white and hollow, he stood outside the door of his enemy, waiting as the servant knocked, then entered.

“Griff,” I said, “I’ll wait-”

— outside to guard the door, to find a way out of this mazy mansion once the killing was done. He gave me no chance to say so.

“Come with me,” he said. To me, but looking at Cae all the while.

The door, shut by the servant, opened again. Griff lifted Cae to his shoulder. Her little head lolled, her thumb fell from her mouth. She whimpered faintly, then stilled.

Griff stepped before me into the chamber, a counting room where the largest piece of furniture was a broad desk upon which ink wells gleamed like jewels and quills marched in perfect alignment, the merchant’s little soldiers. No sign of the merchant himself did we see, but his double-eagle, those two heads in opposition, glared at us from every panel, from the hanging behind his desk, even from the thick blue and gold carpet underfoot. Griff’s shoulders twitched, just a little, to see those sigils, but he never lost his stride. Boots tracking mud across the richly woven carpet, he made a little thing of the distance between him and the desk.

I shut the door, paneled oak and heavy, firmly behind us and stood with my back to it. Cradled in Griff’s arms lay Cae, unseen beneath the green cloak, hidden. Cradled in mine lay Reaper, not hidden. The tapestry behind the desk stirred. A hand pushed it aside, and Egil Adare stepped into his counting room.