a man who's been hit with an axe does not grit his teeth and fight back, as
sometimes happens with a sword wound. A man hit solidly by an axe tends rather
more to being thrown to the ground with the impact, bleeding copiously and
screaming for his mother. Admittedly an axe isn't much use as a defensive
weapon, but Hawk never had believed in fighting defensively. He was much more
comfortable with an all-out attack, backed up by dirty tricks. Hawk looked
disgustedly at the narrow dueling sword in his hand. If it came to a fight, he'd
probably be better off throwing the damn thing like a spear.
He scowled, and then winced as a stab of pain flared up around his glass eye.
The damn things always made his face ache after a while. The last doctor he'd
seen had told him the pain was all in his mind, to which Hawk had angrily
retorted that it was all in the eye socket, and what was the doctor going to do
about it? The doctor had recommended a change to a less stressful occupation,
and presented Hawk with an inflated bill, which Hawk refused to pay.
The tour of the ground floor was accomplished without incident. The windows had
all been marked, and there was no sign of the freak anywhere. The large rooms,
designed for entertaining were easy to search, and the open, well-lit corridors
offered few hiding places. Jamie led the group up the curving stairs to the
first floor, which was mainly bedchambers and bathrooms. Everything was still
and quiet, the only sound their own echoing footsteps. Hawk felt like a child
sneaking through his parents' quarters while they were out.
The endless quiet and occasional false alarms began to gnaw at Hawk's nerves,
but he just shrugged it off and kept going. He had to set a good example to the
others, who were all starting to show signs of strain. Jamie was getting jumpy,
and showed an increasing tendency to check things twice or even three times
before he was satisfied. Alistair's scowl was deepening, and he'd taken to
hefting his sword impatiently, as though anxious for a confrontation. And Marc
had withdrawn so far into himself he seemed to be walking alone through the
empty corridors.
The rooms were lavishly appointed, and would have interested Hawk greatly under
different circumstances, but as it was, each gorgeously finished room blended
one into another as the tour continued. The first floor passed in a blur of
empty rooms and silent, deserted corridors, and they made their way up the
stairs to the second floor. Hawk began to wonder if they'd underestimated the
freak. They'd all been talking about him as though he were nothing more than an
animal, all instinct and ferocity, but that was wrong. The freak was a man, and
cunning enough to hide his dead victim in such a way that the body wasn't found
till hours after the murder. The more Hawk thought about that, the less he liked
it. It was more than possible they were doing exactly what the freak wanted:
wasting time trying to find his lair while he planned ways of attacking them… or
those they'd left behind…
The second floor consisted of servants' quarters; clean and fairly comfortable
but essentially nondescript. The only exceptions were Greaves's and Brennan's
rooms. The butler's room had a bleak simplicity that suggested he spent as
little time there as possible. Everything was neatly lined up and squared off as
though for inspection, and Hawk knew without having to be told that woe would
betide any maid who moved anything an inch out of place while dusting. Brennan's
quarters, on the other hand, were littered with a lifetime's collection of
keepsakes and souvenirs, most of them military in nature. There were daggers and
swords mounted on the walls, and trinkets and mementoes brought back from a
dozen campaigns. Hawk looked them over briefly, and frowned as he realized how
dated they were. It was as though Brennan's life had come to an abrupt halt when
he came to the Tower; that there was nothing from his new life worth the
keeping…
The third floor was storage; endless storerooms packed with the accumulated
clutter of generations of MacNeils. Few of the rooms had any windows beyond the
narrowest arrow-slits, but Jamie marked them as best he could, and they moved
on.
They tramped wearily up the final set of stairs and stepped out onto the open
battlements. Hawk took a deep breath as the cold wind hit him, blowing away the
cobwebs of fatigue from his mind. The view was magnificent, from the dark
labyrinthine sprawl of Haven to the great jagged cliffs that surrounded it, to
the vast expanse of the open sea. Gulls hung on the sky far above them, keening
on the rising wind like lost souls banned from heaven or hell. Hawk felt he
could stand there forever, just drinking in the view.
Alistair stared about him with obvious nostalgia, while Jamie was predictably
blase, having seen it all before. Marc, on the other hand, looked once at the
sea and the cliffs, and turned away, apparently uninterested. And then he looked
out over Haven, and couldn't tear his gaze away. Hawk shrugged inwardly. No
accounting for taste.
Finally Jamie led them back down through the Tower to the ground floor. There
was still no sign of the freak anywhere, and Hawk could sense they were all
beginning to relax a little. The general feeling seemed to be that the freak
would have attacked them by now if he was going to. Hawk distrusted the feeling.
The freak was up to something, he was sure of it; something so obvious Hawk
couldn't see it for looking. It was as though the freak didn't care whether they
found his lair or not… which would seem to suggest he'd found a better place to
hide. Hawk scowled ferociously and chewed at his lower lip as Jamie led them
through the entrance hall and out the main door.
The gusting wind caught Hawk's attention again, and he looked around him. Even
after the unobscured view from the battlements, he'd still been half expecting
to see some shimmering mystical barrier cutting the Tower off from the rest of
the world, but everything seemed perfectly normal. The cliff edge stretched away
before him, and the wind ruffled the long grass on either side of the trail that
led back down to Haven. A sudden thought struck him. He only had Jamie's word
for it that the wards were actually there. If by some chance Jamie himself was
the spy's contact, what better way to draw attention away from himself and
Fenris than by concocting the story of the murderous freak? Or could Jamie be
Fenris? Either way, it would explain why the spy had headed straight for Tower
MacNeil.
But, on the other hand, if the freak was real and the wards were real, that
would have thrown the spy completely off balance. Being trapped in the Tower by
the wards would have been the last thing he'd expected. He'd have to be getting
pretty desperate by now. And desperate men make mistakes. Hawk pursed his lips
thoughtfully. So, it all came down to whether the wards were actually there.
Either way, the answer to that question would tell him something important.
Unless Fenris had let the freak out for some reason… Hawk decided he wasn't
going to think about it anymore for a while. It was all getting too complicated.
All that mattered for the moment was checking whether the wards were actually
