Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild (19 page)

“All the more reason to get after them,” Meggins said.

Kaige straightened and put both hands in the small of his own back, stretching it, as if still trying to confirm that his wound was healed. He looked down at the man lying at their feet. “He needs to be buried. We can’t leave him here.”

Ilbei nodded. “We’ll see it done. It’s only right. And after, we’ll get back to Hast and fetch some more men. With only us, and havin Mags along, it ain’t prudent to keep goin up there. They know the country, and we don’t, and that gives em more advantage than they need. We’ll have the whole mountainside brimmin with folks what want to do fer us.”

“Mags knows the country,” Meggins said. “Don’t you?”

Mags looked to Ilbei, who scowled, his tatty mustache bristling around his mouth. “I do,” she said anyway. Honesty required she admit that it was true.

“Well, we still ain’t goin, fer all them other reasons I gave. We come close enough to gettin both Jasper and Kaige brained—not that either make much use of em—so I’m sayin we go back.”

“Since when did you go all soft and motherly, Sarge?” Meggins asked. “We already cut the Skewer’s numbers to less than half. You told us the miners said there were only eight. Well, now there are three. And they know we’re not to be messed with.”

“We ain’t goin on without orders. The mission’s changed, and that’s the end of it.” He looked briefly to Jasper, who was still holding the gold reverently, then to Mags. “Mags, this dead feller got any folks anywhere what we could send that to?”

“I believe he’s got a sister who lives in Norvingtown or somewhere nearby on the gulf of Dae. I don’t know her name, but his was Scaver, and his father was a tanner out there. We can find her.”

Ilbei nodded, as relieved that she had that information as she appeared to be that he had asked. He turned back to Jasper. “I expect ya got somethin in that bag of tricks of yers to get word to Major Cavendis about the murderous nature of them criminals movin that way. He ought not to take so lightly to the woods alone knowin what we know. Them criminals is just as happy to cut down Her Majesty’s men as butcher a man workin hisself a stretch of stream, and an officer covered with gold and silver baubles would make a nice prize.” He shook his head ruefully as he said it, lamenting what had become of humanity, a race that supposed itself to be the most civilized on Prosperion.

“I do have a scroll for it,” Jasper said. “It’s actually one I did the enchantment for myself.” He looked pleased. “What should I tell him?”

“What I just told ya. Tell him Ergo the Skewer and at least two more are headin his way with a taste fer murder and gold. Make sure he knows the uniform of Her Majesty’s army don’t mean a heap of dragon dung to them fellers, and they’ll likely gut a major as easy as they would have done any one of us, and like they done that poor feller lyin there.”

“What if he asks why we are here at all?”

A portion of Ilbei’s beard and mustache slid up toward his right eye at that. “Don’t ya have some way of communicatin what ain’t two-way? Like a magic messenger pigeon or letter carrier, so as we don’t have to get no reply?”

“The army would only pay for me to make two-way message scrolls. It’s what I was doing right before they dragged me off down here. The cost to make them is only marginally higher than making one-way reporting spells, so there’s really no reason not to, given that carrying both only takes more space. The mitigating reagent is silver, actually, and it amounts to only a seventeen percent difference, purely for that, not counting the others. Although I read once tha—”

Ilbei cut him off before he could ramble off on a lengthy technical, magical and bureaucratic dissertation on the processes required for enchanting magic onto parchment. “Just get to it, son. We got half a day’s march ahead, and you’ll be a week in that story there.”

Meggins made no attempt to hide his disappointment at the finality of Ilbei’s decision to go home. “But what about that old, nasty harpy in the stream? Aren’t we at least going to yank it out of there like you said? For the sake of the water supply?”

“The whole point of makin the water better is so that nobody gets sick or killed,” Ilbei said. “I’m thinkin gettin one of them span-long crossbow bolts through the head will kill ya deader than any creek-born harpy craze. And quicker too.”

“He will kill miners up at Fall Pools and Cedar Wood,” Meggins said, which made Ilbei frown. Meggins raised his eyebrows optimistically. “I’m just saying, leaving has its own set of risks. It’s not just the major we have to worry about.”

“If we didn’t have this here woman along—” Ilbei turned back to her, “no offense—I’d be all right with pressin on. But we do, and I ain’t draggin her into another fight, as the last one might have done fer her as well as the rest of us.”

Mags actually did look offended, and she thumped the butt of her reclaimed quarterstaff on the ground as if she were about to protest, but Meggins beat her to it by a blink. Or at least he tried to. “But they’re going to—”

Ilbei silenced him with a glare, tipping his weight forward, his squat, burly body swelling with the familiar sort of breath that famously preceded a tirade or, worse, a straight-up beat down.

“By Mercy’s light, the lot of ya. I said we’re gods-be-damned goin back, and that’s the end of it. Meggins, if’n ya make one more snivelin squeak, I’ll bust yer head so lumpy yer phrenologist will still be tellin the stories ten years from now. Ya hear?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Meggins said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Just hungry for payback was all.”

“Hey,” called Jasper from over by the horse. “There’s something wrong.”

They turned as one to face him.

“What’s wrong?” Ilbei asked. He moved to where he could glance down at the scroll the young magician held unfurled in his hands, as if somehow he, rather than Jasper, might be able to spot a problem with it.

“The spell. It’s not working. The first line keeps dissolving back when I get to his name.”

“Son, I don’t know what that means.”

“The locus line, where I fix the object of the spell as written on the page to the image in my mind. They have to match for the smoke writing to work.”

“Still meanin nothin, Jasper,” Ilbei said. “Pretend I don’t know nothin about magic and start again.”

Jasper’s eyes rolled heavenward, the mind behind them seeking a way to properly simplify. “It’s not letting me start the spell because the object of the spell isn’t working. Like aiming a crossbow at a target that isn’t there.”

“Like who isn’t there, the major?”

“Yes. There’s no object to stick the spell to. It’s as if he does not exist.”

“Well, that’s the most fool thing I heard come out of ya yet. ’Course he exists. We just spent a fair miserable stretch of days in his company.”

“That is precisely my point, Sergeant. We did. The spell should work. But it doesn’t. Here, watch what happens to this first paragraph as I read. Do you see here, where I’ve filled in his name, this whole set of lines starting at the top?” He tilted the scroll so Ilbei could see, pointing to where he had written the major’s name in a space near the end of the third line. Beyond those two words, Ilbei didn’t recognize another one on the page. The whole thing was one great wall of indecipherability, the sort of thing that made him very glad he was a man who made his way in the world with his hands. He had no patience for all that chicken-scratch nonsense. “Now, just watch,” Jasper said. “These words at the top will disappear as I read, and then, when I get to his name, the whole thing comes back again—I wrote it that way because, well, if I am permitted a bit of vanity, because I can. This is the army after all, and death is quite possible, so I included that circular enchantment in the locus lines so as not to lose a valuable scroll in the event of this person or that person’s death, which of course makes targeting them impossible. Otherwise, this scroll, which cost Her Majesty a full half-crown, would already be used up. It’s really a very clever piece of magic, if I do say so myself. I found the return magic in an enchantment the dwarves used on their catapults, believe it or not. Such is the value of a little research, I should say. It seems they had the ability to—”

“Jasper, sweet Mercy! I’d rather the gorgon turned my giblets to gravel than hear another word. Just show me what you’re meanin to show before my retirement years pass me by.”

The insult set one of Jasper’s eyes to squinting, but, being outranked as he was, he began to read the scroll anyway, mumbling in the low, singsong voice of magic underway. Ilbei focused on the lines as directed, marveling at the words as they really did disappear, making it easy to follow, one word, then another, then the whole first line, as if it were all being slowly erased by an invisible finger pointing as Jasper read along. Ilbei had never seen a spell being read before. He’d seen scrolls used, of course, but never actually looked at the page as the enchanted magicks were being released. First went the top line, and then the second. The third line began to disappear as well, fading away toward where the major’s name was written in. And then the page was full again.

Jasper looked up at him right after, his expression the sort seen most often upon the faces of hungover men. “You see,” he said, grimacing, and rubbing the side of his head.

“Well, as you’re intent on makin a fuss about it, seems clear it ain’t supposed to be that way. So what’s it mean?”

“I think it means he’s dead.”

“How can ya be sure? Maybe he’s just gone back to Twee.”

“I can’t be sure,” Jasper said. “But the spell has no limits to range. That means, if the spell won’t go to him, then he’s not there for it to get to.”

“So that’s it, then. He’s already done fer? Ain’t nothin else it could be?”

“Well, since I haven’t spelled his name wrong, the only other thing would be if he wasn’t who he says he is.”

“Like an imposter?”

“Yes.”

Ilbei scratched his head, his mouth wiggling beneath his mustache. “But wouldn’t there still be a Major Cavendis somewhere, if’n the man we know as him weren’t him? The
what
the spell ought to get to by rights?”

“Well ….” Jasper had to think about that for a moment or two. “No, I shouldn’t think that would work. For one, he might have made the name up. But even if he hadn’t, it still wouldn’t work that way because the man I know as the major wouldn’t be the same man as the one attached to the name I wrote down. It’s the bringing together of language along with an idea. So, if he were an imposter, neither of them would suffice as the proper object of the spell.”

“So then, ya either spelled it wrong or he’s dead?”

“Well, he still might be an imposter, although he’s rather highborn to bother with such a thing. And he is a lord of South Mark, where Cavendis is a well-known family name. Meaning the most likely answer is that he is dead. Maybe the man who ran off yesterday got to him.”

Ilbei harrumphed. “Or that odd rip of a hunter, Locke Verity.” Ilbei leaned forward to glance at the scroll again, which Jasper tipped for him to see. In truth, Ilbei knew he wouldn’t know any better than Jasper would how to spell the major’s name, if there were any irregularities as to how it ought to be done, but it looked right to him as it was. As much as he hadn’t liked the young lord, he’d hate to think he’d gone off and left the man to be butchered all alone. That could come with ramifications all its own. Still—and gods knew Cavendis had behaved oddly enough for a man acting the imposter of some kind—there was an ironic sort of hope that he wasn’t dead, despite the fact that Jasper sure looked confident that he was.

Ilbei let go a long, tired breath as he straightened and stared out across the top of the scrub, the endless-seeming bramble sloping gently away into the north. Manzanita gave the landscape a blue-green tint, and all the crooked trunks showed their color like the dried blood of old hemorrhages. He let his vision slide out over it all, moving northwest toward the edge of the Sandsea and beyond it to where the garrison and Hast lay unseen in the distance. Three days at least. Maybe four, depending on the heat.

“We should go back and check on him,” Meggins said. “He wasn’t much as an officer, but we ought to go look.” Eagerness glimmered in the soldier’s eye, an underlying desire for adventure poorly hidden behind the premise of his stated intent.

“That’s borderin on insubordination, soldier. Keep yer opinions on the qualities of yer betters inside that pointy head.”

“Yes, Sergeant.” Meggins was grinning, though, because he knew his shot had scored.

Chapter 16

B
y the time they reached the spot below Cedar Wood where they’d last seen the major, the sun was already lost behind the mountain peaks to the west, pulling the draperies of the evening across the foothills a full hour earlier than in the flatlands. Ilbei ordered silence as the small company crept through the trees, listening for sounds of Ergo the Skewer and his two remaining men or for Gad Pander and whatever he might think to do. When the old campsite came into view, nobody was there. The major’s tent had been packed up and taken away. Only the log Meggins had sat upon the night they’d played ruffs marked that it had ever been there.

After skirting the perimeter to verify that the space was indeed vacant and safe, they came out from the pines and looked around for signs of a fight. There were none, no smear of boot heels or patterned placements of feet to indicate swordplay, no blood or body parts, no sign that predators had come along and eaten anything.