Soth didn't wait for an answer, but strode to the door and called for Azrael. To his surprise, the dwarf was laughing as he entered the store. 'Hey, Magda,' he said between chuckles. 'Your mutt tried to bite that miner's feet off. Pulled off the sole of his boot trying to get at him.'
'I will be meeting with Malocchio Aderre three days from now,' Soth informed the dwarf as he directed him toward the shadowy corner. 'You will arrange it.'
'Are we going to kill him?' the dwarf asked eagerly.
'You are not attending,' Soth replied. 'Your time will be better spent discovering the identity of the White Rose.' He grasped Azrael's shoulder, and the two disappeared into the darkness.
Inza and Bratu came in a moment later, Ganelon between them. The young man was limping heavily. His left boot had been torn apart.
'That beast went crazy again,' Inza began. 'It attacked him and wouldn't stop. You really should destroy that thing before it kills someone.'
Magda came to Ganelon and knelt before him. She examined his foot, wiping away the blood with the hem of her dress. The sole of his foot was gray. Odd scratches crisscrossed the heel and arch.
'There is nothing I can do to help this,' she said, backing away quickly. 'I am truly sorry.'
That's all right. Ill be fine,' Ganelon said, then started up the stairs. A small splash of blood marked the fall of his left foot on each step.
Bratu scratched his head. 'You've healed dog bites before. Why can't-' Magda silenced him with a look.
'Those wounds are not the mark of any hound,' the raunie said softly, once Ganelon had reached the balcony. 'Besides, we have other matters to tend to.' She turned to her daughter. 'Call a meeting of the tribe.'
'For what purpose?' Inza asked. 'To strengthen the oath you swore to keep Lord Soth's history secret.'
A scowl crossed Bratu's face. 'There is no need for that, is there?' He absently ran his hand across the top of a crate. His fingers came away coated with the dust that settled over everything near the mine. 'And these people call us unkempt, eh?'
From across the room, Magda was studying the man. He feigned an ease he clearly did not feel. The muscles at the back of his neck were tight enough to break boards over. 'How much did he pay you?' she asked.
To his credit, Bratu did not lie or try to hide his crime. In fact, he puffed out his chest as if he had actually accomplished something noteworthy. The money was more than enough for the little I gave him,' he said. 'Some of that wasn't even true.' 'You broke your word,' Magda said.
Bratu glanced at Inza. He hoped to find support in her eyes, but the raunie's daughter kept her attention focused on the wooden chest. The man's confusion quickly became defiance. 'An oath to a dead man is not an oath,' he said. When he saw that he was making no headway on that tack, he swiftly took another. 'We owe nothing to Soth!'
Magda turned her back on her tribesman. The oath you swore was to me,' she said. All emotion had fled her voice. She stood as still as a statue. To all who wish to hear, to man and-'
'Magda, no!' Bratu shouted.
'And to beast-'
The burly Vistana rushed toward her. 'In mercy's name!'
'I declare you Oathbreaker.'
On the upper floor, Helain screamed herself awake. Ganelon and Ambrose tried to comfort her, but to no avail. Her shrieks drowned out their gentle words and underscored Bratu's pleading.
'Inza,' he cried. 'Make her take it back. Help me.'
The girl looked up from the carvings on the chest. There is nothing I can do,' she said, fingers lightly tracing the twining vines and leaves.
'It is done,' said Magda. 'It cannot be undone.' She told her daughter to leave Ambrose a note about the trade, then left the store.
Inza set to work on the note, ordering the shop-keep to use the chest as a container for the salt owed them for the carpet and other items. 'They wouldn't appreciate it anyway,' she said brightly. 'I know now what I'll store in it, too.'
Tears streaming down his cheeks, Bratu fell to his knees at Inza's feet. He clutched at her skirts. 'Make her take it back,' he begged. 'If you don't, 111 tell her there were others.'
'No, you won't,' Inza said. There was a sudden edge to her voice, a viciousness that stopped Bratu's blubbering. He looked up into her green eyes and found them empty of everything except anger. 'There are worse things than the Beast, you know.'
'What will I do?' he whimpered. 'What will I do'
Inza walked into the store's shelving, strolling up and down the aisles until she found what she was looking for. She returned to Bratu and dropped a knitting needle into his hands. 'The Beast may just be a myth, of course. But if it isn't, this may help.'
She did not turn away as Bratu raised the needle to his ear and drove it in, first the right, then the left. Howling, he dropped the Moody spike to the floor. He rocked back and forth, hands clasped to the sides of his head. After a time, he looked up at her with fear-wide eyes and rasped, 'The Beast! Oh, Inza, I can hear it whispering!'
Four
Azrael trusted the dark.
It had spoken to him many times over the years, in many different places, and while the dark always told the truth, it never used the same voice twice. Sometimes its voice was masculine, sometimes feminine. Occasionally it was strident, more often sonorous and vibrant. The dark told Azrael things he should know and, more importantly, things he should do.
The first time he listened to the dark was in far-off Brigalaure, on the day he caved in his father's skull with a hammer. Azrael's mother had banished him from her workshop for shattering a priceless lava opal, just as his father had dismissed him from the family forge a month earlier for causing a fire. He had no chance of landing an apprenticeship after those disasters, but his father still insisted that he pay for both the gem's replacement and the forge's restoration.
In the midst of the resulting argument, the old dwarf shouted at his wastrel son, 'What's wrong with you?' for what very well could have been the thousandth time. Bored beyond belief, Azrael decided to do something he'd never done before: He attempted to answer the question.
The priests had always said the quickest path to solving such unsolvable questions was 'soul searching,' so the young dwarf did just that. He turned his vision inward, to hunt for what he imagined his soul to be. If there were something wrong with him, as his father seemed so convinced, surely the flaw could be found here. But Azrael didn't find his soul. He found only the dark.
It whispered to him in a voice that sounded very much like his own, only without the edge of anger and resentment he'd grown so accustomed to hearing from himself. He'd long ago forgotten exactly what the dark said to him. He knew, though, that the words had made more sense than anything his parents or the clan priests or anyone else had ever told him. So he acted upon them.
Azrael liked to think the blow came as a particular surprise to his father, since the old man always said his son was never any good with tools.
The dark didn't tell him to complete the slaughter of his family. It didn't have to. Azrael understood the instant his father's corpse finally stopped jerking and twitching that he had found his calling. The blunt fingers his mother had always disparaged as useless for any sort of delicate craft work proved more than adequate to snap her neck. He might not be strong enough to work a bellows for hours on end, but his kin were too slow and muscle-bound to catch him when he fled into the narrow tunnels that channeled waste from the vast underground city.
The dark spoke to him again in the lightless labyrinths outside the city, as he hid from the Politskara, those much-feared police who were hunting him for the murders of his family and anyone else he'd managed to ambush in the months since his father's demise. In return for a promise to destroy beautiful Brigalaure and all who dwelled within her jeweled walls, the dark gifted Azrael with lycanthropy. He'd heard of werebeasts before, but the stories
