The Torc

ZNITHA (4)

Znitha had a large mug of very decent bitter, and had just settled in for a night of steady drinking when she noticed the drop of blood fall right in front of her onto the rough oak table. She took a long swallow, and debated whether to ignore it. She knew it was blood—how could she not, given her acute sensibilities towards that life-sustaining, miraculous fluid?—but she didn't want to get involved. She got into enough trouble in the course of her work. And she got paid for that. This was her off time. She took another swallow, and turned her eyes away towards the brown-haired beauty in the corner. She admired the sweetly curving breasts and the narrow waist, and let her eyes rest for a minute on the soft full lips and the faint blush of color which tinted her cheeks.

When the second drop fell, Znitha sensed it at once. She actually heard it this time. To anyone else, the faint plop as the droplet hit the boards of the table would have been inaudible. And no one else would have smelled the rich coppery tang of the blood. She sighed, and cursed silently to herself.

“What the good Goddess’ creation...?” she said aloud, pointing to the small splat on the wood.

Her companions—not friends, just fellow drinkers—turned drunk faces towards the spot she was indicating. They goggled at it for a full minute before one of them stretched out a quivering finger and dabbed it into the blood.

“It's blood!” he ejaculated, peering drunkenly and accusingly at Znitha.

“Yeah,” replied Znitha, wishing once again she had a better choice of drinking pals. “That's what I thought too. Your insight does you credit, Rabyon.”

“It's coming from there,” said Rabyon, pointing to the ceiling, after a moment of intense thought. “It's not yours at all.”

“No.” Thickie, thought Znitha, not for the first time. She waited for him to think of it, and when he didn't, she suggested, “Maybe we ought to go and see what's causing it. There must be a dead pig or something up there.”

Rabyon and the others gaped at her.

“We'd better go and have a look,” she added, patiently.

As they went up the rickety stairs, Znitha turned to look at the woman she'd been lusting after all evening, and caught her eyes on her. It would happen now, she thought, grumpily. Just when it looked as if I might have a chance!

Znitha took a minute or two to work out which room upstairs was the source of the blood. Its door was locked. She looked at Rabyon, who was big, big with muscle, not fat. “You and me, Rab, we'll have to break down the door.” She let the thought percolate into the muddy shallows of his mind, then said, with authority, “On the count of three!” She counted, and together they launched themselves at the sturdy planks of the door. The bolt gave way on their third attempt.

The body on the floor was almost as sizable as Rabyon. She knew who it was at once, and she was hoping he was dead when she went to feel his pulse. The smell of blood in the room dizzied her, but she had no doubt about the the main thought in her head. It was relief. She had disliked Yakon since he had tried to take her by force one dark winter evening, outside the Pig and Whistle. She had known as she'd drawn her sword on him that he wasn't one to forgive the slight or forget the setback, and she'd been waiting for his next move. She'd seen him around Tanasthe and had made sure he knew she was prepared to do whatever was needed to preserve her independence. She hadn't been worried. She'd been a soldier, and had dealt with much more poisonous specimens than Yakon. But he was sly and devious, and she wouldn't put it past him to implicate her in someone else's quarrels which would have been harder to deal with. She had heard that he was reputed to own The Duke’s Torc, but she had no intention of stopping going there. It was close to her lodgings, in fact just across the road, and it suited her to visit the inn when she felt like it. She didn’t want to let Yakon believe that she was either afraid of him or of deigning to notice his power. Without thinking about it, she felt the reassuring outline of her dagger in its sheath, and the sword at her hip.

She heard a rattle and a scrabble from outside the window. She stepped round the pool of blood on the floor, and peered out of the window. There was a slim man just turning to let himself down from the edge of the roof over the stables. She recognized his curly chestnut hair and greenish eyes. She'd seen him around Tanasthe, and had even once contemplated hiring him for the night. It wasn't a lack of attraction that had stopped her, but more the thought that once she started having to pay, it was the end. Even given the impossible demands of her family, of her own nature, she wasn't yet ready to do that.

As he lowered himself off the roof, Fion looked at her, and the desperation and pleading in his eyes was heartrending. She knew that if she had been in the same position, she would probably have done the same thing. There was a moment when she could have alerted those inside to the presence of the killer, and ensured that a stream of vigilantes had run out of the tavern into the alleyway to catch him. But she had seen, along with everyone else who'd been in the common room, just how Yakon had dragged Fion upstairs. Everybody else would remember, too, soon enough. Her silence would give Yakon's killer a small chance of escaping the inquisitors. She hadn't been mistaken when she'd suggested that a pig had been killed. Yakon was a stain on the face of creation, and she gave a brief prayer of thanks to the Great Spirit that he was dead, not forgetting to ask for mercy for him, for none of us is perfect in the eyes of the Goddess, and all of us will surely need Her mercy when it is our time.

“Someone had better call the guard,” she said, closing the casements and turning back into the room.

“Yes,” said Rabyon, his eyes alight with excitement and blood-lust. He charged off down the corridor. He bumped into the crowd which had come up from the common room to gawk, scenting trouble and therefore entertainment, crying, “Make way, make way,” his self-importance and bombastic tones filling her with a surge of irritation. Goddess, the man was such a turd!

She looked down at Yakon's corpse, and sighed. The inquisitors would eventually find Fion. She would do what she could to soften any eventual punishment by telling them what she had seen earlier. She didn't know how many of them were in Yakon's pay, though that could go either way. He wasn't a man to inspire loyalty or love. The Duke, on the other hand, was known to be an honest man, one who cared about the welfare of his people. Cared more than most aristos. The guards and the inquisitors might not bother to pursue Fion. But somehow she doubted that. She went back down to the common room and found that someone had drunk her beer. Perfect. She ordered another and waited for the guards and the inquisitor.

To Znitha's relief, there hadn't been an inquisitor. They were truthsayers. For a while, in the general revulsion against elves and elvish things, wizardry had been suspect. After the wars were over, the inquisitors were back, more influential than ever. You didn't lie to a truthsayer, even if that was the only thaumaturgical skill they possessed—and most possessed more. But the guard hadn't thought to ask whether Znitha had seen who'd killed Yakon. After all, there was plenty of evidence, anyway, that Yakon had dragged Fion upstairs, and that Fion had most probably been the last person to have seen Yakon alive. The guard had gone away well pleased. Yakon was dead, which was good. And they had a strong suspect, who would be easy to find, and had no noble or rich protectors to keep him out of justice's paws.

After the questioning was over, the woman Znitha had been admiring came over to her table.

“Poor little beast,” the woman said.

“Yeah. I hope the guard aren't too hard on him.”

“Yakon was a pig. A bully. A murderer.” She was bitter and angry.

Znitha downed the last of her beer. “I'm just across the way. D'ya wanna... ?”

The other woman smiled at her, and Znitha felt her insides melt.

****

It was a warm night. Znitha stood at the open casement, listening to the soft endearing snores of her partner asleep in the double bed behind her, and watched the night sky, its black so black it seemed to have a sheen like satin in candlelight from the rich sprinkling of stars. She drew in a breath of the night air, cool and sweet, scented with the smells of summer. She wondered about the fugitive out there, what he was doing as he enjoyed—or endured—his last hours of freedom. She was unable to get him out of her head. Her love-making with Trika had been entirely satisfying, but she had seen on Fion's face a loneliness and alienation which mirrored her own. She knew what it was like to be an outsider. She remembered how she had felt when her mother had told her of their heritage. She had been so angry and bitter. And the partners they had picked for her! A solid, stolid man from a family already connected to theirs; and a woman who, she admitted to herself now, hadn't in fact been too bad. Her mother had been patient at first when Znitha had wailed that she wanted love, not an arranged marriage and a lyuban chosen by her parents, and then she had simply gotten tired of explaining and lost her temper. I would be more philosophical now, Znitha thought. She hadn't found love after all. Not love. Oh, she'd had plenty of lovemaking. But a lyuban—or even a lyubon? No one. There had been a man once, a good man, kind and funny and loving. But he had been killed in one of their punitive raids on some cattle-rustling primitives up north. That had taken the shine off the army, and love. Now Znitha preferred it this way, just a few casual liaisons. The elves of course have many words for love, for all the nuances between out-and-out manic desire and the gentle, contemplative, loving sex you could sometimes have with friends. They drew a distinction between lyub, the earth-shattering mix of love and desire that was supposed to define your relationship with your lyuban or lyubon, and perhaps, if you were lucky, your husband or wife; and the softer (but perhaps because of that, deeper) love, dliga, with a close friend. They tolerated—embraced—the huge diversity of possible relationships between people. They lived so long they had to. She sighed. This wasn't elfhame. It didn't happen here.

It wasn't as if she wasn't good-looking. Sometimes, she even thought she might be beautiful, but with an old soldier's superstition, she never tempted the Weavers by thinking that. She had streaky blond hair, tied back into a warrior's queue, and soft brown eyes. Her training exercises and swordplay, which she tried never to miss, kept her muscled and slim, with a waist as narrow as it had been when she was fourteen. Perhaps it was her strength and character that made men and women steer clear of her. She was strong, she knew, and her experiences had made her stronger. She had left her family when she was just sixteen to join the army. They had taught her resilience and self-confidence. And how to use weapons. She had risen to the rank of sergeant, and she had liked the responsibility and the ability to change things. She was good at soldiering.

She watched the perfection of the night sky above her and decided, yet again, that it was precisely that confidence and responsible air which brought her work and simultaneously kept away suitors. She was a sword for hire. What did she expect from life? Her rich parents would have been horrified and shamed, and she would have had a very different life if she had stayed with them and done what they insisted. It was too late to go back now, even if she had wanted to. And there were always the old soldier remedies for sorrow and regret, drink and dakh and sex, which she used when she had to and avoided when she had to, too.

She heard Trika shift in the bed, then her footsteps across the floorboards to the window.

“Znee? You all right?” Trika slid one warm hand down the curve of Znitha's buttocks and the other over her hip into her groin.

Znitha turned and kissed her deeply, and led her back to the tangled sheets. Who cared about tomorrow when now was so good?

****

She woke from a deep sleep, sweating. The dream was clear in her mind, too clear. Dreadful winged demons, with wings like scraps of leather. She knew in the way she always did in this kind of dream, with a horrible clarity, that they were after her. Not just her, though—two others. One was a handsome young man with a shock of blue-black hair and startling violet eyes, and the other was Yakon's killer. She knew that all three of them were in danger, though as so often in her dreams which had afterwards turned out to be prophetic, the Weavers (or whoever it was who sent them to her) kept something back. She had no idea just what the danger was. She was absolutely certain that it was real, and that somehow she had to help the other two.

She wondered, as she always did when she dreamt true, why she had been selected by the Mother for yet another trait that set her apart from everyone else. Her dreams came true too often for her to shrug them off as mere chance. Anyway, everybody knew that true visions often came in the form of dreams, when the mind was receptive to the messages from the otherworld. As the sweat cooled on her, her thoughts drifted again to her family. Her mother had always been strict with her. Znitha supposed, when she had learned about the secrets that had weighed on them all that her mother had had good cause, but it didn't make it any easier to remember her with love. Her father had been funny and sweet and kind, and of all her family, she missed him the most. She had some happy memories of her two sisters and her younger brother, and of their house in the merchants' quarter of Cappor, the way the light would fall through the venerable plane trees in the square outside, the smell of the spices and the rich cloths brought from all the far corners of the world to their warehouses, the familiar rich odors of her mother’s cooking jam or savory stews. She thought of the servants, of the comfortable bed, of the exquisite Kaphuan carpets and wall hangings, of dinners accompanied by subtle and distinguished wines, and felt the familiar pangs of regret. She stared for a long time at the ceiling and the first soft light of dawn had started to fall softly through the shutters before she slept.

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Chapter 5>>

© 2009 Nigel Puerasch. All rights reserved.
Romantic m2m novels and short stories