Part of that unfinished business was the filling and marking of the dead guards' graves.
Kethry brought her a rag to wipe her hands with when she'd finished. 'Damn. I wish -- oh, hellspawn; they were just honest hired swords,' she said, looking at the stone cairns she'd built with remote regret. 'It wasn't their fault we didn't have a chance to warn them. Maybe they shouldn't have let themselves be surprised like that, not with what's been happening to the packtrains lately -- but still, your life's a pretty heavy price to pay for a little carelessness....'
Kethry, her energy back to normal now that she was no longer being drained by her illusions, slipped a sympathetic arm around Tarma's shoulders. 'Come on, she'enedra. I want to show you something that might make you feel a little better.'
While Tarma had gone to direct the cleanup, Kethry had been engaged in stripping the bandit chief down to his skin and readying his unconscious body for some sort of involved sorcery. Tarma knew she'd had some sort of specific punishment in mind from the time she'd heard about the stolen girls, but she'd had no idea of what it was.
* * *
Now before her was a bizarre sight. Tied to the back of one of the bandit's abandoned horses was -- apparently -- the unconscious body of the highborn lady Kethry had spelled herself to resemble. She was clad only in a few rags, and had a bruise on one temple, but otherwise looked to be unharmed.
Tarma circled the tableau slowly. There was no flaw in the illusion, if indeed it was an illusion.
'Unbelievable,' she said at last. 'That is him, isn't it?'
'Oh, yes, indeed. One of my best pieces of work.'
'Will it hold without you around to maintain it?'
'It'll hold all right,' Kethry replied with deep satisfaction. 'That's part of the beauty and the justice of the thing. The illusion is irretrievably melded with his own mind-magic. He'll never be able to break it himself, and no reputable sorcerer will break it for him. And I promise you, the only sorcerers for weeks in any direction are quite reputable.'
'Why wouldn't he be able to get one to break it for him?'
'Because I've signed it.' Kethry made a small gesture, and two symbols appeared for a moment above the bandit's head. One was the symbol Tarma knew to be Kethry's sigil, the other was the glyph for 'Justice.' 'Any attempt to probe the spell will make those appear. I doubt that anyone will ignore the judgment sign, and even if they were inclined to, I think my reputation is good enough to make most sorcerers think twice about undoing what I've done.'
'You really didn't change him, did you?' Tarma asked, a horrible thought occurring to her. 'I mean, if he's really a woman now...'
'Bright Lady, what an awful paradox we'd have!' Kethry laughed, easing Tarma's mind considerably. 'We punish him for what he's done to women by turning him into a woman -- but as a woman, we'd now be honor-bound to protect him! No, don't worry. Under the illusion -- and it's a very complete illusion, by the way, it extends to all senses -- he's still quite male.'
She gave the horse's rump a whack, breaking the light enchantment that had held it quiet, and it bucked a little, scrabbling off into the barren hills.
'The last of the band went that way,' she said, pointing after the beast, 'And the horse he's on will follow their scent back to where they've made their camp. Of course, none of his former followers will have any notion that he's anything other than what he appears to be.'
A wicked smile crept across Tarma's face. It matched the one already curving Kethry's lips.
'I wish I could be there when he arrives,' Tarma said with a note of viciousness in her harsh voice. 'It's bound to be interesting.'
