David Drake - The Mirror of Worlds

She'd been wrong about there not being time for personal feelings.

Sharina trotted forward as quickly as the robes permitted; they weren't tight, but they were so long and heavy that they were likely to wrap around her ankles and trip her if she weren't careful. Cashel strode down the steps to gather her in. He lifted her soul as well in a sudden flood of safety and contentment. "Tenoctris is lying down inside," Cashel said. "She had to do some hard things. And there's a thing you need to see." Raising his head slightly, he said to Zettin,

"Sir? You'd better come look at it too. Whatever it is, it's something for soldiers to know about." "Yes," said Sharina, squeezing Cashel once more before releasing him. She didn't know what the problem was yet, but she knew that neither Cashel nor Tenoctris overstated dangers. Over her shoulder as she mounted the steps she said, "Lord Zettin? Will you call a courier from the duty room in the next building? It sounds like we'll need to summon Prince Garric." "I've already done that, Sharina," said Tenoctris, standing to the side in the doorway. "The officer in charge there thought Garric should be able to get back by mid-morning if all goes well." "Fine," said Sharina, embracing the older woman lightly as they passed. It's good to have friends who'll make the right decisions before you need to.

"Then we'll call a council meeting for the tenth hour. Now, let's see what you've got." It was good to be a person who made the right decisions herself, too. Even when she was really tired.

Chapter 3 Ilna paused at the head of the valley. She whispered,

"Are you going to claimthis wasn't the catmen's work, Temple?" She scowled at herself. The pattern in her hand made it clear that the Coerli were well beyond the sound of her voice by now. Perhaps she was speaking quietly in respect for the dead-a thought that made her scowl even blacker. "No, Ilna," Temple said calmly. "A band of Coerli killed them and did worse I suspect. There will have been children." Asion was part-way up a tree for a better view of the valley than Ilna and Temple got from the ridgeline. Karpos, crouched several paces behind them watching their back-trail, said, "What will we do now, mistress?"

"What?" said Ilna. "We'll go down to the farm and see if we notice anything important from closer up. Then the two of you will track the beasts to their daylight lair-it's a bright day and early enough in the morning that you shouldn't be in danger. And when we know precisely what the situation is, we'll kill them. As usual." She was surprised to hear the anger in her voice, though she supposed anger was never very far from the surface. The sight of three bodies below had scraped off the cover. The threehuman bodies, that was. Ilna didn't care about the donkey butchered in the corral to the side of the main house, nor about the milch goat with her kid who'd run nearly a furlong from the kicked-over bucket and stool by the house. At another time she'd have been angry at the way the killers had deliberately torn the nanny's belly open and gripped her intestine so that she pulled it out as she ran, but they'd done the same to the woman who'd been milking her. She rose to her feet. "I'll wait here,"

Karpos said. He was out of sight. Ilna glanced at the cords in her hand, then began picking out the pattern. "There's no need," she said, but she didn't argue with Karpos as she started down the slope. He wasn't doubting her word, just continuing to do the things that'd kept him alive for however many years he'd been hunting dangerous animals.

Temple and Asion, who dropped from the tree, joined her. The farmstead had been neat-looking. Oh, not neat by the standards to which Ilna'd kept her quarters and Cashel's in their uncle's millhouse, but with animals and no doubt children as Temple had said, not even Ilna could've guaranteed perfect order. The walls of the main building were logs trimmed with an adze and chinked with clay; they'd been touched up recently. Several roof shakes were brighter than their neighbors also, showing where rot and wind damage had been repaired. And none of it mattered now to those who'd lived here, because a band of catmen had killed them all. Ilna lips moved, though no one watching would've recognized the expression as a smile. She couldn't help what was past, but she was as sure as she was of sunset that this particular gang of beasts wouldn't repeat their slaughter. "Two days, I'd judge," Asion said, squatting by the corpse of the man who'd had time to snatch a sickle from the outbuilding. It had a wooden blade set with sharp flints, a dangerous enough weapon if he'd managed to strike anything with it; but of course he hadn't. From the tear in the corpse's bearded throat and the rope burn on his right wrist, a beast had thrown his line around the fellow's arm and set its hooks in his neck so that his attempt to slash with the sickle only dug them deeper.

Either the beast holding the line or one of his fellows had then jabbed a slender point through the man's diaphragm, leaving him to slowly suffocate or bleed out. Helman, the butcher who slaughtered hogs when his circuit brought him through Barca's Hamlet, did so with equal cruelty, but Ilna herself didn't behave that way. She smiled again, though with no more humor than the expression of a moment before. If the hogs had trapped Helman some dark night on his rounds, she at least would've thought it a rare instance of justice being done. She entered the house. The door, suspended on leather hinges, was open but the sturdy crossbar lay just inside where the catmen had dropped it when they left. There hadn't been time to close the window shutters, so the catmen had entered through a casement, tearing the covering of leather which'd been scraped thin to pass light. Temple held his bronze sword before him, but his buckler was slung over his back to leave his left hand free. He knelt to touch a spatter on the floor of halved logs, puncheons. The blood was dry enough to flake away, as Ilna would've expected. "How many do you think it was lived here?" Asion asked. A bed was folded up against the back wall; he prodded the frame with the point of his knife, gouging out a splinter.

He seemed tenser than Ilna'd expected. Ilna realized with a touch of amusement that it made the hunter nervous to be in a house. Had he and Karpos slept outdoors when they'd trekked into town to sell their lizard gall? She snorted. Most likely they'd stayed drunk the whole time, or at least drunk enough to ignore the roof over them. "The parents in the bed, with the infant in the cradle at the foot," Ilna said. As she spoke, she climbed to the half-loft above the single room. There was a real ladder nailed to the wall, not merely a young pine with the branches lopped short to form steps. "Up here…"

She looked at the bedding, rolled neatly against the roof slope, and estimated the width of the portion of loft floor which wasn't being used for storage. "Three older children, probably. Though the tallest can't be more than a cloth-yard-" A normal yard and a thumb's-span; she'd heard folk from Cordin call it an ell. "-unless he sleeps doubled up." There was no chance, none, but Ilna nonetheless crawled to the bedding and pulled it back to make sure that no child had hidden within it when the catmen came. That hadn't happened, but she didn't mind wasting a few moments to be sure she wasn't leaving an infant who'd fallen unconscious after an elder had concealed it. She had enough on her conscience already. The blankets were goat wool, but they hadn't been loomed here. When Ilna touched the cloth, she got an image of stone-built farm buildings and a pair of old women murmuring as they worked their shuttles. "And the other man?" Temple asked. He isn't a peasant, Ilna remembered. Aloud she said, "A hired man; he's wearing the master's cast-off clothes. The tunic's too small for him.