The Essence Gate War: Book 01 - Adept (9 page)

Morland was saying, “Now, we could transfer that accord to you, a
s would be only––”

Amric twisted in his seat and struck the guard behind him in the throat with rigid fingers in a hard upward motion that catapulted the man backward
. In a flash, the swordsman was out of his chair and across the table. Morland had a split second in which to gape in shock before Amric hammered into him, overturning the merchant’s chair and landing astride him with hands locked about his throat as they slid to a halt on the marble floor. The jeweled goblet hit the floor with a wet clang and skittered away. Amric witnessed a fleeting gamut of emotions flicker through Morland’s bulging eyes: terror, pain, fury, appraisal, scheming. Then they were hooded once more. The man must have ice in his veins, a detached part of Amric marveled, to retain his sneer in the face of his own demise. The explosion of movement occurred with such blinding speed that the remaining guards were rooted in astonishment for a long moment before putting hands to sword hilts and charging forward.

“Come no closer!” Amric
commanded, his grip tightening on the merchant’s throat. “I can snap his neck before you take another step.”

The guards stumbled to a halt, uncertain, and then fell back as the merchant gave a surreptitious signal with one pinned hand
. Morland’s neck was very near its breaking point, and yet he managed a glare through the agonized wince.

“You,”
he said, his breath wheezing through his constricted windpipe, “are a very fast man.”

“And your
indifference to the fate of my friends offends me,” Amric said. He leaned his face closer to the merchant’s, until the tips of their noses almost touched. “All this wealth, all this power, and I can end it right here in an instant. I wonder, does Vorenius stand to inherit it all?”

“Now you are being purposely cruel, swordsman
. You have my attention, but you still need something from me. How shall we proceed?”

“
Remove the price from our heads, and give us the sum of all information you supplied my friends, so that we may follow their trail. If they live, we will find them, and they will deliver the information they owe you, as per whatever agreement they struck with you.”

“I will suspend the price on your heads,” Morland countered in a rattling gasp, “
and remove it once the information is delivered to me by your friends or by you. It will be reinstated if you return empty-handed.”

They remained
frozen for interminable seconds, Amric glowering down at the merchant while the latter scowled back in defiance. The guard that Amric struck in the throat thrashed onto his side on the floor, drew one short, whistling breath, and vomited with conviction.

“Agreed,” the swordsman said finally
. “But before I release you, bear in mind that my Sil’ath friend Valkarr is inside your manor at this very moment, having infiltrated unseen earlier this evening, and he is faster than I am. He will depart your estate grounds after we have done so, safely.”

Morland’s black eyes glittered
. “Understood.”

Amric released him and sprang to his feet
. The merchant sat up with a grimace and put ginger hands to his throat, drawing deep, ragged breaths. His angry gaze raked over his guardsmen waiting with their fists curled tight around their sword hilts, then to the weapons piled at the far end of the table, then to Bellimar and Halthak standing before their chairs, and at last back to Amric, poised on the balls of his feet.

Finally he spoke in a rasp,
“Get them the maps, and get them out of my sight.”

The interior of the carriage was primarily silent on the ride back to the estate perimeter, as the three companions each sat lost in their own thoughts. Amric held tight to the leather satchel containing the merchant’s maps and papers, his mind already racing ahead over the necessary preparations for the coming journey.

There was but one interlude of conversation.

“Amric?” Halthak whispered.

“Yes?”

“Was it true, what you said about Valkarr?”

“No, I am slightly faster.”

“I meant about him being in the manor house, ready to act.”

“Ah, yes, that part was true.”

Morland
sat in the high-backed chair, tapping the heavy ring on his finger against the base of his goblet. Each tap was accompanied by an audible clink that echoed through the great hall. He did not move otherwise, but his gaze sifted through the corner shadows as he waited. Remembering Amric’s words, he quelled a spark of unease that the warrior’s Sil’ath friend might have stayed behind after all, might have evaded all the searching patrols and come here for him. He had sent all his guards from the room, as his next guests were peculiar, and the common soldiers found them unnerving. They always made his flesh crawl, despite their devotion to him, but now he felt too vulnerable alone and just found himself hoping they would arrive before some faceless intruder found him instead.

When they appeared, it was from the opposite direction he was facing
. It always was, he thought, irritated; but then, that’s what made them so good at what they did. He spun around at the low sound of their laughter. Twin shocks of white hair above pale, mocking faces seemed to hang disembodied in the air, and then dark leather-clad forms formed beneath them. Nyar and Nylien, the twin Elvaren assassins, stepped from the shadows.

“I do not like to be kept waiting,” Morland snapped.

The Elvaren said nothing, and Morland felt a chill. He relied on their speech patterns to know when their ever volatile natures were turning against a target, and he did not want to inadvertently become one. He tried a different tact.

“You heard everything, I trust?”
he said.

“We did, lord,” one replied
. Nyar or Nylien, he could never tell them apart. “You were very tolerant of its boorish behavior.”

“Then you heard our arrangement as well
. They are to complete a task for me, and then they will be yours once more. They must live for now.”

“We understand, lord
.” There was a petulant quality to his voice.

“You need not worry, my boys,” Morland soothed
. “I will find targets for you until they return.”

“
As you command, lord,” one of the Elvaren said, mollified. They turned, faded back into the shadows and were gone.

Morland began to sift through the papers on the table, paused at a thought, and spoke into the air
. “The guard who was struck down tonight and failed me, I have no further use for his service.”

The reply was a whisper, directionless
. “Thank you, lord.”

Morland
sipped from the goblet and resumed reading.

Gormin wiped the sweat from his brow, surveying his crops in the failing light
. He was down to just two of his largest fields, all he could manage alone, but they were thriving and he felt a fierce exultation. He had finished harvesting the oats today, and could start on the barley with the morrow. It would take several days by himself, but then he could load his wagon and commence bringing loads to the city, and both vindication and profit would be his. Then his gaze slid over his other fields, all lying fallow, and his mood soured.

He beat the day’s dust from his wide-brimmed hat and cast a look back at the barn he had just finished locking up for the night
. It was difficult to recognize as a barn any longer, with all the fortifications he had added: boarded windows, reinforced doors, buttressed walls and a ring of outward facing stakes. His early years in the Marovian infantry had served him well, though he had never expected his experience defending military camps and forts to be used later on his own farm.

From inside the barn came a coughing grunt and the protesting creak of wood
. Gormin paused to listen, but it was not repeated. The graffas, short-tempered beasts at the best of times, had been worked hard today and should be quick to slumber this night. Great, bullish draft animals, they were more costly than oxen but Gormin had never regretted the expense; their prodigious strength and constitution more than compensated for the additional cost and their irascible natures.

He turned
and trudged toward his house. It bore many of the same defenses as the barn, and just past the edge of its roof he could just see the gleaming walls and towers of Keldrin’s Landing in the distance. The sun was setting behind the city and a blood-red hue seeped across the intervening land. His was one of the farms nearest the city, and, as far as he knew, the last remaining. The rest of the smallholders in the surrounding lands had abandoned their lands and fled. Between the drop in production and the severe overcrowding in the city, food prices had risen dramatically. As the only grower still tending crops, Gormin knew he was sitting on a fortune.

T
he financial prospects would have been even better, he thought with a frown, had his family and his hired help not retreated to the city. If they could have cultivated all the fields, what an opportunity! They had borrowed heavily to buy this much land, and in one stroke they could have shaved years from that debt. He swallowed a lump of bitter disappointment. He would not run to Keldrin’s Landing with tail tucked to become a penniless beggar on the streets, would not abandon his holding to some infestation of wild pests. There was nothing for it now but to prove them all wrong, and he would do that by riding into town with a mountainous harvest yield.

As he neared the front porch of the house, a large shape
rose to its feet in the shadows by the eastern wall. Gormin bit back an oath, his hand going to his hip for a sword he no longer wore before he realized it was just the dog. Other than the two graffas in the barn, the dog was the only animal remaining on the farm. Shaggy and long-limbed, its head reaching nearly to his chest, the beast was far too large for his wife and children to feed and board in the tight quarters of the city, and so they had been forced to leave it behind. What had they named it? Vulf, or Wulf, or something like that? Gormin could not recall. It had a voracious appetite and did no work on the farm, and so to him it was just another mouth to feed. But his family had loved the ugly brute, and so he made no overt efforts to drive it away, though it could also be said that he made no especial efforts to prevent it from leaving, either. He sneered at the dog, and it gave a low growl in return.

Gormin stomped up the steps to the porch and into the house, with the dog several wary steps behind
. Once they were both inside, the farmer dropped a heavy bar into place behind the door, lit a lamp, and fell into a broad chair. A few moments of rest, and then he would prepare a meal for himself. And the mutt as well, he thought with some reluctance. He felt the aches and pains of the day fade somewhat as he relaxed, and his gaze settled, as it always did, on the picture tacked over the fireplace. It was a charcoal rendering of the children, done by his wife, Tiri. She had a real talent, he had always thought; she had captured their small faces and impish smiles with a gentle hand. He felt a rising tide of bitter loneliness threaten to engulf him, and he shoved it away, squeezing his eyes shut.

Soon enough
he would show them all how they were overreacting. Soon enough, they could be together again…

A steady, rumbling growl woke him some time later, and he sat forward in the chair, blinking away the fog from his senses
. The dog was in the middle of the room, hackles raised, staring at the door. Gormin rose to his feet, hushing the dog. He crossed to the door and pressed his ear to it. Faint through the thick wood, he heard a clamor from the barn. The graffas were going berserk, bellowing and throwing their bulks against the stalls. Gormin cursed. The barn was well fortified, but if the scent of some wandering predator drove the graffas to injure themselves, he would be unable to harvest, or to bring his loads to the city afterward.

His triumphant plans threatened to slip from his grasp
. He stormed to his room, buckled on his old infantry saber, swept up his pike, and returned to the door. He braced himself to lift the heavy door bolt and paused.

He had
heard the tales told by refugees fleeing to the city. Who had not, after all? They told of monstrous creatures and brutal slayings, and he had discounted them as exaggeration, thinking roving packs of wolves a more likely explanation. Graffas were tough beasts and did not frighten easily, however, and the clamor from the barn sounded like panic. He wavered, listening to the beasts bawl and hammer at their containment, feeling all his plans hanging in the balance. He set his jaw and lifted the bar, being as slow and quiet as he could manage. He would at least peek to determine the source of the disturbance, and if it was something as mundane as wolves, he felt confident he could drive them away with shouting and fire.

He set the bar aside and cracked the door an inch, putting his eye to the opening.

The night sky had not fully darkened yet, the hint of an ember glow still lingering on the western horizon. He had not dozed long, then. Straining against the twilight, he could just make out an indistinct upright silhouette at his barn door. He heard hacking and splintering, and saw the figure bow momentarily with the effort of prying at the door. Then it resumed cutting at the door. Anger flared within Gormin. Not wolves, then, but a man! Evidently he was not the last man to brave the wild pests and capitalize on the opportunity, after all. The rogue was doubtless after his draft animals, and that would cripple his plans. He was surprised at the reaction of the graffas, which did not frighten easily, but the sharp chopping sounds in the middle of the night must have unnerved them.