The fat man eyed me cautiously. Hatred smouldered behind his eyes. I tried to direct it. “I’m going to kill him.”
“All right. Slow? Like my brother?” “I don’t think so. If it isn’t fast and sneaky, he wins. Or she. There’s two of them, actually. I don’t know which one will come.” I figured we could buy a lot of time if we could take out one of the Taken. The Lady would be damned busy with black castles for a while with only two pairs of hands to help her. Also, I had an emotional debt to pay, and a message to make clear.
“Let me send the wife and kids away,” he said. “I’ll stand in with you.”
I let my gaze flick to Silent. He nodded slightly. “All right. What about your guests?” “I know them. They’ll sit tight.” “Good. Go take care of your part.” He left. Then I had it out with Silent and the others. I had not been elected to command. I was running on momentum as senior officer present. It got angry for a while. But I won my point. Fear is a wonderful motivator. It moved Goblin and
One-Eye like nothing I’ve ever seen. Moved the men, too. They set up every gimmick they could imagine. Booby traps. Hiding places prepared from which an attack could be carried out, each glossed with a concealing spell. Weapons prepared with fanatical attention.
The Taken are not invulnerable. They’re just hard to reach, and more so when they’re ready for trouble. Whoever came would be.
Silent went into the woods with the fat man’s family. He returned with a hawk that he tamed in record time, and cast it aloft to patrol the road between Meadenvil and the inn. We would be forewarned.
The landlord prepared dishes tainted with poison, though I advised him that the Taken seldom eat. He petitioned Silent for advice concerning his dogs. He had a whole pack of savage mastiffs and wanted them in on the action. Silent found them a spot in the plan. We did everything we could, and then settled in to wait. When my shift came, I took my turn getting some rest.
She came. Almost the moment my eyes closed, it seemed. I was in a panic for a moment, trying to banish my location and plan from my mind. But what was the point? She had found me already. The thing to conceal was the ambush.
“Have you reconsidered?” she asked. “You cannot outrun me. I want you, physician.”
“That why you sent Whisper and the Limper? To return us to the fold? They killed half our men, lost most of theirs, wrecked the city, and didn’t make a single friend. Is that how you win us back?”
She had not been party to that, of course. Pawnbroker had said the Taken were acting on their own. I wanted her angry and distracted. I wanted to know her reaction.
She said, “They’re supposed to be headed back to the Barrowland.”
“Sure they are. They just go off on their own any time they feel like it, to settle grudges ten years old.”
“Do they know where you are?”
“Not yet.” I now had the feeling she could not locate me precisely. “I’m outside the city, lying low.” “Where?”
I let an image seep through. “Near the place where the new castle is growing. It was the nearest place we could put up.” I figured a strong thread of truth was in order. Anyway, I wanted her to find the gift I meant to leave.
“Stay where you are. Do not attract attention. I will be there soon.” “Thought so.”
“Do not test my patience, physician. You amuse me, but you are not invulnerable. I am short of temper these days. Whisper and Limper have pressed their luck one time too many.”
The door of the room opened. One-Eye said, “Who you talking to, Croaker?”
I shuddered. He stood on the far side of the glow without seeing it. I was awake. I replied, “My girlfriend,” and giggled.
An instant later I endured a moment of intense vertigo. Something parted from me, leaving a flavor both of amusement and irritation. I recovered, found One-Eye kneeling, frowning. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.
I shook my head. “Head feels like it’s on backwards. Shouldn’t have had that beer. What’s up?”
He scowled suspiciously. “Silent’s hawk came in. They’re coming. Come on downstairs. We need to redo the plan.” “They?”
“The Limper and nine men. That’s what I mean, we need to redo. Right now the odds look too good for the other side.”
“Yeah.” Those would be Company men. The inn wouldn’t fool them. Inns are the axes of life in the hinterlands. The Captain used them frequently to draw the Rebel.
Silent did not have much to add, except that we had only as long as it would take our pursuers to cover six miles.
“Hey!” The old comes-the-dawn. Suddenly I knew why the Taken had come to Meadenvil. “You got a wagon and team?” I asked the innkeeper. I still did not know his name.
“Yeah. Use it to haul supplies down from Meadenvil, from the miller’s, from the brewer’s. Why?”
“Because the Taken are looking for those papers I’ve been on about.” I had to reveal their provenance.
“The same ones we dug up in the Forest of Cloud?” One-Eye asked.
“Yes. Look. Soulcatcher told me they have the Limper’s true name in them. They also include the wizard Bomanz’s secret papers, where the Lady’s true name is supposedly encoded.”
“Wow!” Goblin said.
“Right.”
One-Eye demanded, “What’s that got to do with us?”
“The Limper wants his name back. Suppose he sees a bunch of guys and a wagon light out of here? What’s he going to figure? Asa gave him bum dope about them being with Raven. Asa doesn’t know everything we’ve been up to.”
Silent interjected, in sign, “Asa is with the Limper.”
“Fine. He did what I wanted. Okay. The Limper figures that’s us making a run for it with the papers. ’Specially if we let a few pieces go fluttering around.”
“I get it,” One-Eye said. “Only we don’t have enough men to work it. Only Bullock and the landlord that Asa don’t know about.”
Goblin said, “I think you better stop talking and start doing. They’re getting closer.”
I called the fat man. “Your friends from the South have to do us a favor. Tell them it’s their only chance of getting out of this alive.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The inn
Ambush
The four southerners were shaking and sweating. They did not know what was going on, did not like what they saw. But they had become convinced that cooperation was their only hope. “Goblin!” I shouted upstairs. “Can you see them yet?”
“Almost time. Count to fifty, then turn it loose.”
I counted. Slowly, forcing myself to keep the pace down. I was as scared as the southerners.
“Now!”
Goblin came boiling downstairs. We all roared out to the barn, where the animals and wagon were waiting, whooped out of there, stormed into the road, and went howling off south like eight men very nearly taken by surprise. Behind us the Limper’s party halted momentarily, talked it over, then came after us. I noted that the Limper was setting the pace. Good. His men were not eager to tangle with their old buddies.
I brought up the rear, behind Goblin and One-Eye and the wagon. One-Eye was driving. Goblin kept his mount right beside the wagon.
We roared into a rising curve where the road began climbing a wooded hill south of the inn. The innkeeper said the forest went on for miles. He had gone ahead with Silent and Bullock and the men the southerners were pretending to be.
“Yo!” someone shouted back. A scrap of red cloth
