Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

‘That’s it?’ Brand was incredulous. ‘Rutters, Steven, you killed him over a reference to onions? We do have onions in Eldarn, you know that!’

‘There was more. He said “God” twice. Not “gods”, but “God”, singular. Gilmour doesn’t do that. A singular god is our God, not your gods of the Northern Forest.’

‘That’s still pretty thin.’ Garec was looking back and forth between Steven and the storage bin as if expecting Gilmour to heave his broken form from the dirty floor like Harren Bonn had done in the spell chamber at Sandcliff Palace.

‘Then he told me to take a nap.’ Steven shook his head. ‘It was too much; that’s just not a phrase Gilmour uses. Taking naps, as if they’re tangible, you know, as if they come in a carry-case, that’s one of our sayings as well. It had to be Mark.’

Kellin drew her sword. ‘Is he here?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Steven said. ‘And there was something else. Did you see the wound on his wrist? It wasn’t right; it was a fake. I mean, it was ugly and bloody, but it wasn’t full of pus and dripping with all that stinking infected shit like the others.’

‘What others?’ Brand asked.

‘I caught a glimpse of Malagon’s when we were on the Prince Marek, only for a moment, but it was an unholy mess. Then there was a dead security guard in the bank lobby; the cops had covered him with a blanket but I had a chance to get a look at him. And finally, I saw Bellan’s. She’d been wearing gloves, but I saw where Nerak had forcibly entered her body, when she reached up to hit me with the hickory staff, just for a moment. So I’ve seen enough to know that the wound on this guy’s wrist was bullshit.’

‘So he’s not here?’ Kellin still wasn’t convinced. She stood facing the vegetable bin, brandishing her sword.

‘No,’ Steven said, ‘if he had been here, that wound would have been real. That was a decoy, just something to throw us off long enough for him to kill me.’

‘Demonpiss,’ Brand whispered.

‘How did he know all that about me?’ Garec asked.

‘You and Mark have spent a lot of time together,’ Steven explained. ‘He didn’t say anything earth-shattering, did he? He didn’t mention anything from your youth.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Brand asked. ‘He obviously knows where we are.’

‘Maybe not,’ Garec said. ‘Maybe he sent out a whole company of those things, each armed with just enough information to lull us into a false sense of security. He’s not stupid. Of course he would check all the farms in the area.’

‘Farms, caves, lean-tos, everything,’ Steven agreed.

‘So there could be others,’ Kellin said. ‘How will we know if the real Gilmour comes back?’

Steven looked to Garec. ‘You need to think of something only Gilmour would know, something he would never have shared with Mark. When he gets here-’

‘If he gets here,’ Kellin interrupted, still unconvinced.

‘When he gets here, we’ll ask him.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ Brand said. ‘We’ll post a watch for the rest of the night, but at first light, we need to move north.’

‘Agreed,’ Garec said. ‘I’ll take the first watch.’

‘What do we do with… well, whatever it was over there?’ Kellin motioned towards the bin where the soldier’s body had fallen.

‘Leave him,’ Brand said. ‘It can’t smell any worse in here.’

Garec smirked. ‘It might improve things, actually.’

Hoyt ducked into the stable as a soldier passed, her gilded black uniform glinting in the torchlight. The main road running south from Pellia to the Welstar Palace encampment was dotted on both sides by merchants’ homes and ranches. The farm houses, while similar in size and grandeur to the homes of shipping magnates or industrial executives, were easy to spot, for they were invariably flanked by barns or stables and had a patchwork of fenced-in fields. This was an expensive area and those who owned property here were all in business with the Malakasian military. Supplying goods to Welstar Palace was lucrative enough; supplying the Welstar encampment and shipping goods to other regions of Eldarn would put Pellia’s largest companies amongst the wealthiest in the land, rich and powerful enough to rival even the massive export companies of Falkan.

This is where Hoyt chose to hunt.

He could hear animals in the night: sheep bleating, cows lowing, horses nickering and pulling at mangers of hay. This district south of the city was redolent with the scents of manure, winter hay, wood-smoke and the faint tang of burned blood: there was a slaughterhouse somewhere further along the road. Hoyt was wondering why shipping and industry tycoons would choose to live alongside smelly farms and noisy animals when it struck him that these were the smells of silver, great piles of silver. The fancy carriages, the elaborate stained-glass windows, the houses built of brick or stone: they all screamed out I have sold myself to Prince Malagon, and this is what I have reaped.

Tonight, Hoyt planned on some reaping of his own. He had been out the last few evenings, and had acquired mostly copper, mixed with a few silver Mareks, mostly from lazy tavern owners, and once, a ship’s captain who’d returned to his cabin drunk and slept like the dead. But to Hoyt, stealing from the hard-working people of Pellia was wrong. Granted, he thought, hidden behind the stable wall, Churn and I used to fleece most of Southport, regardless of whose silver it was; that never mattered to us. But things had changed. Hoyt had seen too much ever to steal from the common people of Eldarn again. That sort of robbery left him feeling hollow. Tonight would be different.

These people, the whole rotten district, deserved to be stripped of every penny they had made from shipping food, weapons, clothing – anything at all – to that gods-forsaken army.

The farmhouse across the road from the stables was a grand, two-storey edifice, with multiple brick chimneys, a stained-glass atrium, a slate roof, and a side entrance for servants. Smoke billowed from three chimneys, but the only windows illuminated this late at night were the upstairs corner rooms, front and back, on the north side. Hoyt waited until the soldier was out of sight, then, patting a curious plough horse gently on the nose, he slipped into the shadow of a tree by the road.

In through the servants’ entrance, down the main hall and out the back, he thought, now focused intently on the upstairs windows, watching for a candle flicker or a moving shadow. The silver will be in the office; all these places have an office, some private sanctum for the master of the house to gaze out over his domain, rutting stuffed-shirt horsecocks, all of ’em.

He crouched another moment. Then it’s either out the same way, or through the back entrance and into the fields. Two means of escape, and both of them away from the main route downstairs and out the front door. Perfect.

When he was certain there was no movement behind the windows, Hoyt crept into the street. For a moment, he was exposed: a dark figure moving warily into the farmyard. The frozen road and snowy fields were a stark, moonlit backdrop against which Hoyt was suddenly conspicuous. The stables and the lone linden tree provided the only cover between the farmhouse and a stone wall marking the property line, but that was three hundred paces to the northeast.

Hoyt was halfway across the farmyard and nearly beneath the sheltered overhang of the servants’ recessed entryway when he heard wagons on the road. He had an instant to make his decision – hide beside the farmhouse or scurry back to the stables? With the wagons still out of sight in the darkness, Hoyt turned and fled across the road, running low to the ground, trying to look like a farm dog, or maybe a fox out for a late-night hunt. He tumbled to a stop beside the linden tree, then crept back inside the stables.