The Inquisitives [4] The Darkwood Mask (19 page)

Less than ten feet from him, Soneste knew she couldn’t miss, but his proximity to the edge made her nervous. With her free hand, she swept a stray lock of hair back from her eyes, raising her crossbow for better aim.

“Far enough!” she shouted. Hadn’t this same man scaled the Ebonspire?

“Sorry,” he answered with a shrug, stepping back again—

—and dropped soundlessly over the cliff’s edge, falling out of sight.

Soneste cursed, lunging forward and dropping her crossbow to reach for him with two hands. As she reached the edge, she saw he hadn’t fallen far at all. He clung with both hands to a pair of steel bars protruding conveniently near the cliff’s edge.

No, not merely convenient. The two metal rods he’d worn at his belt hung in the empty air by some invisible magic, and as his body swung beneath them, they didn’t quiver at all.

On her knees, Soneste stared down at him. “
That
was your cunning escape?”

Though exerted from the maneuver, he winked back at her. She flushed, then turned away to retrieve her hand crossbow. With speed and agility that belied his slender frame, Tallis vaulted upward and reached his feet to the edge. As he did, the floating rods released and locked again, providing him the means to leverage his body up and over the edge.

Soneste picked her crossbow up and started to turn, but Tallis was already there. A kick to her hand sent the weapon clattering against the wall. Despite the pain in her wrist, she began to draw out her rapier. Tallis grasped the blade halfway from its sheath, arresting the attempt.

“Enough!”
he grunted, lifting her light frame and slamming her back hard against the wall. The force of the blow expelled the air from her lungs, and she was unable to stop him as he pressed one of the rods into her stomach.

The rod locked again firmly in place, pinning her against the stone. Dodging her kicks, he grasped one ankle and placed the other rod just beneath her foot. It held there, allowing her weight to settle on it. The pressure against her stomach subsided sleightly. Tallis drew a length of black cord from his left sleeve and coiled it fast around her wrists, binding them together.

Soneste’s felt her face burn, ashamed to be so swiftly subdued. “The law will not be forgiving,” she said, struggling for air. “You are admitting your guilt.”

“My guilt?” Tallis shook his head, then glared up at her. His face was flushed from the struggle. “Look, Miss Not Some No-Name Sleuth from Sharn, if you’d taken the rail like most folks, you might have had the time to read up on Karrnathi justice. I was guilty the moment my name made Hyran’s list as a suspect. The first poor fool you bring in will get the sword. Then everything
will quiet down until the real killer kills again. Hyran means well, but politics demand retribution.
Not
justice.”

Soneste stared back into his silver-gray eyes but wriggled her body slowly in an attempt to extricate herself. Tallis snapped her rapier free from its sheath then lifted the tip of the blade to her neck. “What is your name?” he asked again.

Her heart thundered inside her, but Soneste had been in situations more perilous. She glanced down the alley and saw a few curious citizens looking on from a distance.

“The White … Lions!” she dared to call out, her voice raw. Soneste prodded the enchanted rod at her stomach in an attempt to disengage it, a difficult feat with her hands tightly lashed.

Tallis sighed again and angled the rapier’s tip just behind her neck. She winced as the tip grated against the stone. At the same time she felt the ribbon binding her hair fall away. With his hand, Tallis pulled the strip of blue linen away and held it before her eyes. “Call out again and I will stuff your mouth with your own pretty bow.”

“You won’t,” she said.

“Fine.”

Tallis turned and tossed her rapier over the bluff’s edge. She heard it skitter against the cliff face before landing somewhere far below. That was expensive magewrought steel!

“Dagger take you!” she oathed.

“Your name?” Tallis asked again as he picked up her hand crossbow. The bolt had not dislodged.

Soneste shut her eyes and composed her body, inhaling slowly. If Tallis was going to kill her, he would have done so already.

In her mind, she pictured herself alone in a vast, empty chamber. Her mental counterpart sang a single, resonant note which rippled outward and formed a ghostly net in her hands. She cast it out in a circle around her, snaring errant emotions within its reach.

“If you didn’t murder ir’Daresh,” Soneste asked calmly, opening her eyes and staring down at Tallis, “then who is framing you? Why were you at the Ebonspire?”

With a mere thought, Soneste drew the mental net back
within her. She
saw
exasperation, doubt, and fear flow out from Tallis, invisible to those without the psychic capacity to perceive it. She heard her mental song fading away, the lingering display of her power. Tallis glanced down the alley as though he, too, had heard the unearthly sound. Her fingers found a minute button at one end of the rod.

“I don’t know,” he finally answered with a tired voice. With a click he withdrew the small bolt from the hand crossbow. He examined its tip, still glazed with the blue toxin. “Yet.”

Soneste pressed the button and the metal rod dropped easily into her hand. She stepped to the ground to fight her way free, but Tallis immediately kicked her foot out from under her. Instead of falling, she fell into his grasp. With his arms around her body, he swept her to the ground. In the scuffle, she felt a sharp stab of pain at her wrist like the bite of an insect.

The broken cobbles of Korth’s back streets were not gentle beneath her.

“I didn’t kill Gamnon,” Tallis said quietly, inches from her face. “Sleep soundly, Breland’s lovely, nameless sleuth. And please don’t follow me again.”

Almost immediately, all stimuli began to recede. Sound was muted and the gray clouds grew darker still. The only things that remained focused in her field of vision were Tallis’s eyes, resembling quicksilver so close to her own.

“Don’t … do this …” she whispered, and started to wonder if the words were her own. Her limbs didn’t respond to her at all. “Just tell me … what …”

She saw Tallis’s shape moving away. A darker shape was rising over her—the discarded cart, one wheel spinning uselessly as the Karrn raised its bulk over her. All light had disappeared, and even the sudden scent of waterlogged wood was fading away from her.

Soneste felt the shame of failure as she succumbed to the poison. The last thing she could sense, in the confines of her own drowsing mind, was the raw frustration she’d seen leaking from Tallis like burning tears.

Propaganda
Mol, the 9th of Sypheros, 998 YK

S
oneste woke with a start sometime later. The White Lions had found her curled up beneath the cart Tallis had placed over her body. By the time she’d opened her eyes, Jotrem had come upon the scene and was standing over her with an unreadable look on his rigid face. Aegis stood behind him, flanked by a pair of White Lions who watched him closely.

Face flushed, Soneste refused assistance and climbed to her feet. Not only had Tallis tossed away her rapier, but she was enraged to learn that he’d taken her crysteel dagger. Though Jotrem waited for her in silence, she was too overcome with fury and shame to speak.

It was Aegis who eventually broke the silence.

“They detained me, Mistress,” the warforged said with an emphatic gesture at the White Lions. “I could not assist you.”

Soneste gave the guards a scathing look but simply didn’t have the energy to berate them. The blue whinnis had been thorough. Even now she wanted to search again for Tallis, but her body had had enough. The poison’s effects would melt away soon, but the day had already been a long one.

She’d been so close!

She recalled Tallis’s frustration, sorrow, regret, rage. She was certain Tallis was not the killer, had not intended the death of the ir’Daresh family at all. But she was also certain that he knew more—much more—about the situation. Finding him again was imperative. It would not be easy, given that he knew she’d be looking for him now.

“It wouldn’t have mattered, Aegis,” she said tiredly. “He was difficult to catch, even for me.”

Jotrem spoke up at last. “His flight is further evidence against him.”

Soneste looked at him, incredulous. “Are you an idiot, Karrn?” Her weariness had also robbed her of inhibition. “The Ministry wants him—
you
want him dead for somehow wounding your pride and Host knows what else. Tallis
does
know something about this, yes, but he’s not the assassin. What was it you told me? Oh yes.” Soneste spoke with a stiff, Karrnathi accent. “ ‘I doubt he would hesitate to kill you, Miss Otänsin.’ Well, I’m still alive.”

Aegis slammed his fist into his arm-buckler, an obvious expression of impatience. “Mistress, this half-elf, this Tallis. I fought with him and he defeated me. If he is not responsible for the murder, he will know who is. We
must
find him.”

Soneste nodded, too flustered for more words.

She suspected she wouldn’t find Tallis again soon—he
knew
she was looking for him now—so finding his residence was Soneste’s next step. It had been only a matter of speculation and inevitable deduction. He was a customer of the Bluefist of Mror, obviously drawn to the place with its ready arsenal of unusual weapons. The dwarves of the Mror Holds were famous for their interest in commerce and the gold it could bring them. They did not question their clients as long as those clients took the effort to conceal their criminal associations.

Soneste searched the levels above the Bluefist for evidence of Tallis’s presence. Jotrem followed closely, allowing her to take the lead.

To avoid upsetting any of the building’s tenants, she’d ordered Aegis to remain outside with the White Lions. Apparently an
untended
warforged drew a lot of attention in this land. She’d glimpsed a few since arriving in the city, but all of them appeared to be laborers and bodyguards, usually under the watchful eyes of their employers.

Soneste moved in silence and observed every hall and stairwell, putting herself in the mind of a military man gone rogue who did not want to be found by legitimate authorities. She suspected Tallis’s skill wasn’t in clinging to the shadows like the thieves of Sharn. Instead, he blended in with the crowd. He was just one Karrn among thousands and did a good job seeming nothing more. Until today, he’d evaded Korth’s local inquisitives and the Justice Ministry.

In her experience, men and women who did not want to be found were creative about their place of residence. Soneste knew what to look for and wasn’t disappointed in either Tallis or herself.

Her mind was exhausted of its extrasensory power, so she relied on instinct alone. A few choice questions to the building’s occupants and a thorough search of its halls yielded a room on the third floor that matched her criteria: remote, neighbors to blend in among, and close enough to ground level to effect a quick escape.

At the second to last door of this wing, she paused and looked closer. Jotrem looked on thoughtfully, traced a finger along the faceplate of the lock, then walked past her and stopped to look at the last door.

“It’s not that one,” he said.

“I think it is.”

“That door is trapped. It’s a decoy. Leave it.”

Soneste examined the lock again, noting trace amounts of fine black powder. She dabbed at it with two fingers then rubbed them together. A revolting smell rose up from the substance. Some sort
of smokestick variation? If the lock was picked and the doorknob turned, more of this alchemical powder would foul the air and probably be a warning to someone nearby. Someone … next door?

She looked down to where Jotrem examined the final door. He’d produced a set of lockpicks and was working at the lock.

Not bad, old man, she thought silently. How did I miss this? Soneste was still dead tired. With a sigh, she climbed to her feet and joined him. A minute later, Jotrem had picked the lock and pushed it open with one of the tension wrenches from his set.

Tallis’s apartment was clean and sparsely furnished, maintained as if expecting a raid. There were no obvious weapons in sight, but she soon found a thin dagger hidden on the underside of an ordinary desk near the wall. All signs suggested that Tallis did not actually spend much time here. It was a place to sleep for him, little more, a transient space in which to wait before moving to the next.

Was this any way to live?

“Evidently, Tallis is a petty thief as well.” Jotrem extracted a small velvet bag from the hollowed leg of the apartment’s only chair.

He upended the bag onto Tallis’s only desk and separated the objects with his wrench then left them for her to examine. Soneste felt uneasy as she looked upon them: a slender necklace on a delicate silver chain, a bejeweled bracelet, and a pair of gem-studded earrings. All women’s jewelry, seeming of considerable value—and clearly none of it Tallis’s.