The Oathbound (31 page)

“Uh—” he thought hard for a moment, then smiled triumphantly. “The Great Demon-Wolf of Hastandell!”

“Oh, that’s too easy. Warrl!”

A shadow in a corner of the hearth uncoiled itself, and proved to be no shadow at all, but the
kyree,
whose shoulder came nearly as high as Tarma’s waist. Closer inspection would reveal that Warrl’s body was more like that of one of the great hunting-cats of the plains than a lupine, built for climbing and short bursts of high speed, not the endurance of a true wolf. But the fur and head and tail were sufficiently wolflike that this was how Tarma generally thought of him.

He padded over to the table and benches shared by the ill-assorted trio. The conversation of all the other occupants of the inn died for a moment as he moved, but soon picked back up again. After three days, the patrons of the inn were growing a little more accustomed to the monster beast in their midst. Tarma had helped that along by coaxing him to demean himself with a few tricks to entertain them the first night of their stay. Now, while the sight of him still unsettled a few of them, they had come to regard him as harmless. They had no notion of his true nature; Tarma and Kethry had tactfully refrained from revealing that he was just as intelligent as any of them—and quite probably could beat any one of them at chess.

“Here’s your Demon-Wolf—one of his kin, rather.” Tarma cocked her head to one side, her eyes far away as if she was listening.
“Kyree
is what they call themselves; they come from the Pelagir Hills. Warrl says to tell you that he knows that story—that Ourra didn’t know the sheep he’d been feeding on belonged to anyone; when he prowled the village at night he was just being curious. Warrl says Ourra had never seen humans before that lot moved in and settled; he thought they were just odd beasts and that the houses were some kind of dead growths—believe me, I have seen some of what grows naturally in the Pelagirs—it isn’t stretching the imagination to think that huts could grow of themselves once you’ve seen some of the bushes and trees. Well, Warrl wants you to know that when the priestess went out and gave Ourra a royal tongue-lashing for eating the stock, Ourra was quite embarrassed. Without there being someone like me or Kethry, with the kind of mind that he could talk to, there wasn’t much he could do by way of apology, but he did his best to make it up to the village. His people have a very high sense of honor. Sorry, little man—Ourra is disqualified.”

“He talks to you?” the little priest said, momentarily diverted. “That creature truly talks? I thought him just a well-trained beast!”

“Oh, after all our conversation, I figured you to be open-minded enough to let in on the ‘secret.’
Kyree
have a lot of talents—they’re as bright as you or me. Brighter, maybe—I have no doubt he could give you a good battle at taroc, and that’s one game I have no gift for. As for talking—Warrior’s Oath—sometimes I wish I could get him to stop! Oh, yes, he talks to me all right—gives me no few pieces of unsolicited advice and criticism, and usually with an ‘I told you so’ appended.” She ruffled the great beast’s fur affectionately as he grinned a toothy, tongue-lolling grin. Kethry tossed him one of the bones left from their dinner; he caught it neatly on the fly, and settled down beside her to enjoy it. Behind them, the hum of voices continued.

“Now I’ll give
you
one—evil that served only itself. Thalhkarsh. We had firsthand experience of that one. He had plenty of opportunity to see good—it wasn’t just the trollops he had stolen for his rites. Or are you not familiar with that tale?”

“Not the whole of it. Certainly not from one of the participants!”

“Right enough then—this is a long and thirsty story. Oskar?” Tarma signaled the host, a plump, shortsighted man who hurried to answer her summons. “Another round—no, make it a pitcher, this may take a while. Here—” she tossed him a coin, as it was her turn to pay; the innkeeper trotted off and returned with a brimming earthen vessel. Kethry was amused to see that he did not return to his station behind the counter after placing it on the table between Tarma and the priest. Instead he hovered just within earshot, polishing the tables next to them with studious care. Well, she didn’t blame him, this was a tale Tarma didn’t tell often, and it wasn’t likely anyone in Oberdorn had ever heard a firsthand account of it. Oskar would be attracting folk to his tables for months after they’d gone with repetitions of the story.

“From all we could put together afterward, Thalhkarsh was a demon that had been summoned purely by mistake. It was a mistake the mage who called him paid for—well, that’s usually the case when something like that happens. This time though, things were evidently a little different,” she nodded at Kethry, who took up the thread of the story while Tarma took a sip of wine.

“Thalhkarsh had ambition. He didn’t want to live in his own Abyssal Planes anymore, he wanted to escape them. More than that, he wanted far more power than he had already; he wanted to become a god, or a godling, at least. He knew that the quickest ways of gaining power are by worship, pain, and death. The second two he already had a taste of, and he craved more. The first—well, he calculated that he knew ways of gaining that, too. He transformed himself into a very potently sexual and pleasing shape, built himself a temple with a human pawn as his High Priest, and set up a religion.

“It was a religion tailored to his peculiar tastes. From what I know most of the demonic types wouldn’t think of copulating with a human anymore than you or I would with a dog; Thalhkarsh thought otherwise.” Tarma grimaced. “Of course a part of that is simply because of the amount of pain he could cause while engaging in his recreations—but it may be he also discovered that sex is another very potent way of raising power. Whatever the reason, that was what the whole religion was founded on. The rituals always culminated with Thalhkarsh taking a half-dozen women, torturing and killing them when he’d done with them, in the full view of his worshipers. There’s a kind of mind that finds that stimulating; before too long, he had a full congregation and was well on his way to achieving his purpose. That was where
we
came in.”

“You know our reputation for helping women?” Kethry put in.

“You have a geas?” ventured the little priest.

“Something like that. Well, since Thalhkarsh’s chosen victims were almost exclusively female, we found ourselves involved. We slipped into the temple in disguise and went for the High Priest—figuring if he was the one in charge, that might solve the problem. We didn’t know he was a puppet, though I had guessed he might be, and then dismissed the idea.” Kethry sighed. “Then we found our troubles had only begun. He had used this as a kind of impromptu test of the mettle of his servant; when the servant failed, he offered
me
the position. I was tempted with anything I might want; nearly unlimited power, beauty, wealth—and him. He was incredibly seductive, I can’t begin to tell you how much. To try and give you a notion of his power, every one of his victims
ran
to him willingly when he called her, even though they
knew
what their fate would be. Well, I guess I resisted him a little too long; he became impatient with me and knocked me into a wall—unconscious, or so he thought.”

“Then he made me the same offer,” Tarma continued. “Only with me he demonstrated his power rather than just promising things. He totally transformed me—when he was done kings would have paid money for the privilege of laying their crowns at my feet. He also came damned close to breaking my bond with the Star-Eyed; I swear to you, I was within inches of letting him seduce me—except that the more he roused my body, the more he roused my anger. That was his mistake; I pretended to give in when I saw Kethry sneaking up behind him. Then I broke his focus just as she stabbed him; he lost control over his form and his worshipers’ minds. When they saw what he really was, they deserted him—that broke his power, and it was all over.”

“She’ enedra,
you were in no danger of breaking; your will is too strong, he’d have needed either more time to work on you or power to equal the Warrior’s.”

“Maybe. It was a damn near thing; too near for my liking. Well he was absolute evil for the sake of it—and I should well know, I had that evil crawling around in my mind. Besides that, there were other things that came out afterward. We know he took a few innocent girls who just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place;
we think
some clerics went in to try and exorcise him. It’s hard to say for certain since they were hedge-priests; wanderers with no set temple. We do know they disappeared between one night and the next; that they did not leave town by the gates, and that they had been talking about dealing with Thalhkarsh before they vanished.”

She trailed off, the set of her mouth grim, her eyes bleak. “We can only assume they went the way of all of his victims, since they were never seen or heard from again. So Thalhkarsh had plenty of opportunity to see good and the Light—and he apparently saw it only as another thing to crush.”

The little priest said nothing; there seemed nothing appropriate to say. Instead, he took a sip of his wine; from the distant look in his eyes he was evidently thinking hard.

“We of Anathei are not fools, Sworn One,” he said finally, “Even though we may not deal with evil as if it were our deadly enemy. No, to throw one’s life away in the foolish and prideful notion that one’s own sanctity is enough to protect one from everything is something very like a sin. The arrow that strikes a friend in battle instead of a foe is no less deadly because it is misdirected. Let me tell you this; when dealing with the greater evils, we do nothing blindly. We study carefully, we take no chances; we know everything there is to be known about an opponent before we face him to show him the Light. And we take very great care that he is unable to do us harm in his misguided state.”

Tarma’s eyes glinted with amusement in the shifting light. “Then it may well be your folk have the right of it—and in any case, you’re going about your conversions in a practical manner, which is more than I can say for many. Once again we will have to agree to disagree.”

“With that, lady, I rest content.” He bowed to her a little, and the bench creaked under his moving weight. “But we still have not settled the point of contention. Even if I were willing to concede that you are right about Thalhkarsh—which I am not—he was still a demon. Not a man. And—”

“Well if you want irredeemable evil in a human, we can give you that, too! Kethry, remember that bastard Lastel Longknife?”

“Lady Bright! Now
there
was an unredeemable soul if ever there was one!”

Kethry saw out of the corner of her eye that Oskar had not moved since the tale-telling had begun, and was in a fair way to polish a hole right through the table. She wondered, as she smothered a smile, if
that
was the secret behind the scrupulously clean furniture of his inn.

“Lastel Longknife?” the priest said curiously.

“I doubt you’d have heard of that one. He was a bandit that had set up a band out in the waste between here and—”

“Wait—I think I
do
know that story!” the priest exclaimed. “Isn’t there a song about it? One that goes ‘Deep into the stony hills, miles from keep or hold’?”

“Lady’s Blade, is that nonsense going to follow us
everywhere?”
Tarma grimaced in distaste while Kethry gave up on trying to control her giggles. “Damned impudent rhymester! I should never have agreed to talk to him, never! And if I
ever
get my hands on Leslac again, I’ll kill him
twice!
Bad enough he got the tale all backward, but that manure about ‘Three things never anger or you will not live for long; a wolf with cubs, a man with power and a woman’s sense of wrong’ came damn close to ruining business for a while! We weren’t geas-pressed that time, or being altruistic—we were in it for the money, dammit! And—” she turned to scowl at Kethry. “What are
you
laughing about?”

“Nothing—” One look at Tarma’s face set her off again.

“No respect; I don’t get it from stupid minstrels, I don’t get it from my partner, I don’t even get it from
you
, Fur-face!”

Warrl put his head down on his paws and contrived to look innocent.

“Well, if my partner can contrive to control herself, this is what really happened. Longknife had managed to unite all the little bandit groups into one single band with the promise that they would be able—under his leadership—to take even the most heavily guarded packtrains. He made good on his boast. Before a few months passed it wasn’t possible for a mouse to travel the Trade Road unmolested.”

“But surely they sent out decoy trains.”

“Oh, they did; Longknife had an extra factor in his favor,” Kethry had managed to get herself back into control again, and answered him. “He had a talent for mind-magic, like they practice in Valdemar. It wasn’t terribly strong, but it was very specific. Anyone who saw Longknife thought that he was someone they had known for a long time
but
not someone anywhere within riding distance. That way he avoided the pitfall of having his ‘double’ show up. He looked to be a different person to everyone, but he always looked like someone they trusted, so he managed to get himself included as a guard on each and every genuine packtrain going out. When the time was right, he’d signal his men and they’d ambush the train. If it was too well guarded, he’d wait until it was his turn on night-watch and drive away the horses and packbeasts; there’s no water in the waste, and the guards and traders would have to abandon their goods and make for home afoot.”

“That’s almost diabolically clever.”

“You do well to use that word; he was diabolic, all right. One of the first trains he and his men took was also conveying a half-dozen or so young girls to fosterage—daughters of the traders in town—the idea being that they were more likely to find young men to their liking in a bigger city. Longknife and his men
could
have ransomed them unharmed; could even have sold them. He didn’t. He took his pleasure of each of them in turn until he tired of them, then turned them over to his men to be gang-raped to death without a second thought.”