Jack Whyte - The Skystone

"What d'you think? He's in there?"

The other's voice was a low growl. "Oh, he's in there, all right. No place else he can be. He didn't have time to go anywhere else. He's in there. "

"I'll get help. "

"No!" The command was barked, and I could imagine the expression of surprise on the first one's face. "You'll get no one. We'll handle this ourselves. "

"Why? The others are around here somewhere. It won't take a minute to get them. "

"We don't need help, you fool! Use your head, for once in your life. Don't you know who this whoreson is?"

"No. " The voice sounded vaguely plaintive. "Who is he?"

"I don't know his name. Nobody does. But you remember a few years ago we were all told to find a grey-bearded whoreson with a twisted leg?

Nesca was offering ten golden auri. Remember? It must be at least five years. "

"Aye, I remember that. No one ever found him. You think this is the same one?"

"I don't know, but the whoreson has a grey beard and a twisted leg and he ran. You want to share ten gold auri with the others?" There was a short silence, then, "What if he's not the right one?"

"If he's dead when we take him back, he's the right one. You think they're going to question a corpse? Let's go in and get him. " I took a deep, silent breath as they stepped into the doorway and stood there, so close to me that I could smell them. I could have reached out and touched them from behind the pile of fork handles between us.

"It's dark, " the smaller of them breathed.

His companion took one step into the gloom and crouched there, his head moving as he scanned the darkened space in front of them. He held a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. The smaller one moved forward, too, and noticed the ladder stretching upwards into the gloom. He touched the other's arm, nodding towards it. Neither of them so much as glanced behind in my direction. They were convinced that I would have sought safety in the darkness ahead of them.

I looked hard at them in the light that fell through the doorway. The large one was the one with the apelike face. Neither of them wore armour of any description.

Ape Face pointed to the ladder and signalled to his companion to go up, indicating that he would remain there, on the floor, and they both moved forward cautiously, scanning the shadows ahead of them. Then, apparently satisfied that I must be up above, the big one signalled again, more urgently, for the other to go up the ladder. The smaller man started to climb, slowly, using only his right hand, his sword clutched in his left, his eyes straining up into the gloom above him where he thought the danger lay. Ape Face stayed where he was in the middle of the floor, about four paces from me.

I transferred my sword into my left hand and grasped the hilt of the skystone dagger in my right, my arm stretched across my body, not daring to unsheathe it lest the sound alarm them before I was ready. When the climber reached the eighth rung, I judged the time was right and launched myself like a lance, my left arm extended to cut down the distance between Ape Face and myself and my right whipping the skystone dagger out of its sheath. The point of my sword took the big fellow low in the back with all my weight behind it, and as he arched away from the stabbing blade I brought my right hand whipping round in an arc and plunged the dagger, point first, up into the softness beneath his chin, driving for the brain, killing him instantly. I released the sword immediately and kept on turning with the impetus of my swing, pulling the dagger free and dropping to my right knee as my right arm came back behind my head ready to throw.

The man on the ladder made a perfect target. His companion's death had come so suddenly and unexpectedly that he was caught completely by surprise. He teetered there, gaping at me lacking the presence of mind s even to shout and presenting the full breadth of his chest for me to aim at. I threw with all my strength, aiming for the centre of his chest. The skystone dagger made a silver streak and thudded into the hollow at the base of his throat, cutting his chance of screaming forever. His chin snapped downward against the hilt; his eyes flew wide and his mouth moved uselessly, making a wet, gurgling, choking sound. Then he fell slowly forward, bolt upright, crashing head-first to the floor. I was beside him almost as he hit the ground, pulling my dagger from his throat. I cleaned the blade roughly on his tunic and then scrambled to the body of his ape-faced companion, rolling him over without ceremony to retrieve my sword. My heart was hammering in my ears and I was ready for anything, fully expecting the noise of the killings to have been overheard. But the moments passed, and no one appeared in the doorway; I heard no shouts of alarm.

My eyes had grown accustomed to the dimness by this time, so that the shadows were no longer quite so black, and the sprawled corpses appeared to be lit now by bright sunlight. I looked about me more carefully. There were bundles of hay piled in one rear corner of the stable and a tall heap of straw in the other. Apart from those, the place was empty. I reviewed my options and discovered, not to my surprise, that I had virtually none. I could stay there and hide, or I could try to run. My own companions were less than two streets away from me, still loading our wagon with hemp, but it might as well have been twenty miles. I was a marked man. The whole town would be looking for a grey-bearded man with a limp, and there were people everywhere. I might be able to hide my face somehow, but I couldn't possibly walk without limping. I had to stay there and hope for the best, which meant that I had to hide the bodies of Ape Face and his friend.

It took me several minutes of strenuous pulling and hauling to drag them over to the piled bundles of hay and rearrange the stooks to cover them, and at every second I expected someone to appear in the open doorway to the midden. Finally I had them lying together and almost out of sight. I broke the binding of two bundles and scattered loose hay over their sprawling forms, and then I crossed the floor and scattered loose straw over the blood that lay puddled where they had fallen, stamping it down to soak up the moisture and scattering more fresh stuff on top of that. There was a lot of blood, and as I tried to hide it I was thinking ironically of my debate with myself on the morality of killing. Satisfied at last that I had done all I could to hide the signs of violence, and more conscious than ever of the door that gaped so widely onto the midden, I withdrew into the opposite corner from the corpses and crouched behind the pile of straw, my eyes fixed on the white rectangle of light. I did not even consider climbing up into the loft. I was trapped badly enough, there on the ground. This was one of the few occasions when I experienced no urge to vomit after violent action. That would come later, only after all danger was past. I had another sickness in my gut that told me I would have to wait a long time.

I gave not a moment's thought to the possibility that one of my own men might unwittingly betray me to Nesca's people. My own soldiers were encamped a few miles from the town, in a clearing within sight of, but well hidden from, the road. The six men who had come into town with me were all farmers and all taciturn. They did not enjoy having to travel to the town and they had no trust in, or patience with, the people who made their living there. If asked by any stranger about having seen a limping, grey-haired man, they would automatically assume I was in trouble, and they would deny any knowledge of me. At the same time, I hoped, they would start looking for me themselves.

I had almost schooled my heartbeat to a moderate pace when a new danger set it to racing again. I had completely missed seeing the door that suddenly crashed open, spilling lamplight into the darkened stable and bringing my heart bounding in terror into my throat. It was flush with the wall I was crouching against, and made from the same rough planking. It was flung open with such violence that it crashed all the way back to the wall, missing me by inches, and then rebounded to mask me from the man who stepped through the opening, muttering under his breath. He crossed the open floor in eight great strides and busied himself with closing and barring the outside door, all the while keeping up a string of curses and imprecations.