“By Shepherd’s blessing, what happened to you?” the watchpost guard asked. The bandit didn’t rise to greet Sieg. His post was akin to a tiny cave which kept him shaded and cool.
Sieg had to stand in the full blast of the sun, whose only redeeming quality was the instantaneous ability to dry him off. The blood stains didn’t wash off though. “I was down in the sanctum of the temple, where all the… mess is. I don’t recommend it, but there was a spy. The Ferrets of the Grass Sea tried to assassinate Muharib, but got the wrong man.”
The guard whistled, and another man stuck his head out from a cubby in the sandstone to ask, “Is that what all the clamor is about?”
Sieg grinned. “Partly. The spy died in the struggle. He died right on the altar and his blood…” He drew it out as much as he dared. The camp was a whirlpool of men trying to kill him, and they’d find him soon enough. “The angel of the city has awoken at last. Vita fed upon his corpse and lives once more.”
The watch post guards froze. They waited for him to say it was a joke. Then they cheered. Both of them threw their hands into the air and leapt out. They embraced Sieg and they embraced one another, laughing almost to the point of tears.
Sieg stayed them with a raised hand. “It’s not time to celebrate yet. Vita is alive, but weak… what’s more, Muharib has sworn a vendetta against the knights who did this. Before the spy was killed, he said there were more killers like him waiting.”
The first guard frowned. “So…?”
Sieg tapped him in the chest and gestured up the riverbed road. “So come on. We’re taking horses. If there’s a lot of them, we come back with the whole camp. If there’s just one or two… well… a snake needs to feed, right?”
The second guard wetted his lips and glanced back to the heart of the camp. “We can’t just abandon our post… what if they slip by and just waltz in?”
Sieg said, “That’s why I’m only taking one of you with me. The other stays. Come on, these are direct orders from Muharib.”
The guards glanced at one another, studied each other’s face, then shrugged. The first guard picked up his bow and quiver, slinging them over a shoulder with a nod. “Let’s go. I’d love to be the one to feed one of those bastards to the emissary.”
“Come on, before they realize something has happened to their assassin,” Sieg said, and the two of them jogged down to a sand swept horse stables. It stank of ammonia and the two horses were delighted to be unhitched. It meant they might get away from the biting flies. They weren’t warhorses by any stretch of the imagination, but neither Sieg nor the guard had armor weighing them down. The white mares were used for finding merchants and other prey, so they were kept saddled. The two of them leapt onto them and took off at a trot.
They were around the first bend before anyone went to question the watch post, and they vanished to the wastelands before other horses could be found for pursuit. “Come on,” the guard said. “If there’s anybody coming from the north to sneak up on us, I know just the place they’d go.” It proved not far from the camp, which was fine by Sieg.
He still had to go back and kill Muharib somehow.
The guard led him up a slope between two mounds of weathered rock and they dismounted. The bandit stuck a finger to his lips to hush him, then squatted down. They crept through the crevices, setting their feet as softly as possible against the ground. The man shrugged off his bow and nocked an arrow. A thorn bush rustled in the wind and he peered through it, squinting at the hiding spot he assumed had northern knights in it.
There was nothing but sand and stone and the shadow of my crow flying overhead.
“Damn, not here,” the guard said and stood. He scratched his beard, considering where else to check. Sieg did much the same, but he was considering something else entirely. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Why do you have a sword but no scabbard for it? I don’t even see your belt.”
Sieg glanced down. He didn’t have a convincing lie for that question. “Ah, well, during the attack–” He stabbed the guard up through the stomach and into his lungs. There was a wet ripping through the flesh as the guard choked on blood and collapsed. That meant the blade was getting dull. Sieg pulled it free and spent a moment inspecting his weapon. To his horror, the blade was merely riveted onto the handle, and almost ready to come loose. A Vassish blacksmith would have killed himself from shame if he had produced such a shoddy thing, but Sieg was almost on the other side of the world and it was what he had to work with.
He also helped himself to the guard’s supplies. He took the man’s bow, his unbloodied scarf, and his sword belt. Finally able to sheathe the blade, he almost looked innocuous.
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Eleven of fifty bandits slain, Sieg picked a perch overlooking where the two horses had been left. He sucked down the dead guard’s wineskin as he waited. To call the swill wine was a disservice to every vineyard I’d ever been to, but the drink slaked his thirst and filled his stomach. Leathery aftertaste notwithstanding.
Waiting for his pursuers became a sensitive affair. The boy was anemic despite healing his injuries with the power the gods put in him. Even a stigmata as potent as his could not create matter from nothing, so every drop of blood he lost had to be replaced and wine was a poor substitute. The sun looked down upon him mercilessly, until sweat beaded on his skin without a breeze to whisk it away.
He was beginning to grow drowsy when he heard hoofbeats. The time elapsed could have been minutes or an hour in his mind, though I knew only ten minutes had passed. His pursuers charged down the riverbed road in a group of four. They came armed with spears and bows and spotted the abandoned horses. They slowed to a stop in some confusion, rounding on them. After a quiet discussion, three dismounted and one stayed ready to flee.
It was that bandit which Sieg set his eyes upon. The boy drew the bow taut, until the wood cried in his hand for the tension, and emerged from his cover. He loosed before they spotted him and the shaft flew true. The tip plunged into the man’s chest and stuck. Not as deep as it should have gone but deep enough. The tip pierced deep enough to turn the man’s shirt red. The bandit screamed, panicking his horse which scampered in a circle.
“Son of a whore, get him!” one of the others shouted, each of them scanning the rocks.
Sieg had already moved, descending down the backside of the rocks. He stole across back towards the camp and waited. The injured bandit eventually wrestled control of his horse once more and put his heels to the animal. Each trot jolted him with agony and made the man moan. Sieg sat close enough that he heard the rustling chain beneath his shirt as the man approached. Then he loosed a second arrow into the man’s back and dropped him off the horse.
Rather than stay and deal with the bandits hunting him down, Sieg burst from hiding. He ran down the road, leapt over the corpse, and grabbed the confused horse by the reins. Jamming one foot in the stirrup, he threw himself upon the animal and rode it back to the encampment.
Before his face could be made out, he wrapped the stolen scarf around his face and shouted, “We found him! He’s to the north, hiding in the hills. There’s a whole army coming down on us though. Raise the alarm!”
Some men had been gathered along the north end of the camp and obeyed his cries from habit. Soon a hammer was beating on a sheet of copper, summoning the rest of the men over to it. They let Sieg ride in among them without loosing a volley of arrows at him, and to their surprise he rode straight past them. Several of them frowned and turned their heads. They asked one another, “Was that the… what color was his skin just now?”
A moment before they could confer with one another on what they had just seen, before the most courageous among them could shout, “That was him!”, Sieg abandoned the horse and threw himself into an alley. Then the chase was anew, darting and dashing between shadows. The bandits attempted to surround him, to make a search perimeter and trap him like a fish in a net, but could only do so by shouting between each other. They practically told the boy exactly where they each were.
While many of the larger buildings in Ennia’s Crossing in fact burrowed into the stone as a means of warding off the heat, the growth of the ancient city had often cleaved off the backwall and made a building from a cave to a freestanding structure. The resident masons in turn dug beyond to make a new hovel, leaving nearly random cut throughs and passages and backdoors. Rather than face the business end of a spear in a tight alley, he drew his sword once more and shoved through one of those backdoors.
It wasn’t a bandit that blinked back at him in surprise, but the doctor’s assistant. She snatched up a surgical blade and pointed it at Sieg. Before she could open her mouth and scream, the doctor interjected with a soft, “Don’t.” He stepped around the corner, from the front room and to the storeroom. He walked carefully, stepping between the shelves of clay pots and keeping his hands clasped behind his back.
“Why?” Sieg asked.
The doctor frowned. “I should have realized you weren’t the other Vassish boy when I first saw you. Arram was so eager to drag you off… I had just noticed the stigmata across your chest.”
“What about it?”
“The size,” the doctor said, and shrugged. “Whatever it does, I get the impression that you’re quite capable of killing every single person in this camp by yourself.”
“And?”
The doctor nodded towards the wall. The bandits outside were sounding off, closing the net. “My job is to keep them alive. They’re just boys in a sense, like you. Is there anything I can do to convince you to spare them?”
Sieg sucked his chest full of air and let it out. He straightened his stance and walked over to the older man. At his full height, he could just barely loom over him, and he said, “Help me get Muharib’s head and I will leave.”
The doctor nodded. “That will be hard, now that he’s begging favor of the emissary.”
Sieg narrowed his eyes. “Why aren’t you begging for Vita’s help against me?”
The doctor smirked. “Because I don’t trust her. I’ve never heard of Shepherd having a snake for an angel.”
Sieg laughed. “You should have seen her eat that corpse. There was nothing angelic about that, that’s for sure.”
The doctor winced and shook his head. He ordered his assistant to put the knife down and be quiet. The search had grown more distant in their shouts and it seemed they didn’t realize they had missed the boy so easily. The doctor at last nodded to him and said, “I will help you get Muharib, as much as that pains me, because it will free us of his vendetta. If the snake attacks you however…”
“I’ll deal with that if I have to.”