The Warlord's Legacy (38 page)

“All of which is utterly immaterial,” Jassion growled, unable to swallow his rising impatience—and, just perhaps, taken aback by the fervor of his niece’s hate. Mellorin leaned back, breathing heavily, and allowed the interruption to go unchallenged. “We need your help
finding
him. Nothing else matters.”

“I have no loyalty to Rebaine,” Davro said thoughtfully. “And precious little affection for him.”

“Then—”

“But I also don’t need trouble from the likes of him again, and he knows where I live. I like my solitude; you might’ve picked up on that. I’m not convinced it’s in my best interests to get involved.”

“Is that so?” The baron took a single pugnacious step. “Then perhaps, ogre, you might consider what sorts of attention we can call down on your valley! You’d never be left alone again, if you—”

“
No!
” Kaleb shot to his feet, grasping Jassion’s shoulders and spinning him around. “You might try
not
talking for a change, old boy. You
clearly
need the practice.”

“What the hell do you think you’re—”

“How do you think Rebaine got his help in the first place, you idiot?” he hissed, casting a glance at Davro’s rapidly reddening face. Then, to the ogre, “My apologies, Davro. My companion spoke without thinking. We would not, of course, attempt to force your cooperation.”

Jassion glowered, but said nothing.

Davro himself nodded in Kaleb’s direction, though his lone eye never left Jassion. “Apology accepted.”

“Good.” Kaleb stepped in front of Jassion, a clear signal that it was he, not the baron, with whom Davro would continue to deal. “We’ve no intention of interfering with your life here, or of bringing trouble—be it Rebaine or
anyone else
—down on your head. Please, just tell us anything that might help us in our hunt. We’ll bother you no more, and you just might acquire some small measure of that justice you earlier mocked.”

Inhuman shoulders rose and fell in a heavy shrug. “I’m really not sure what I can tell you. I’ve neither seen nor heard word of Rebaine
since I left Mecepheum six years ago. He’s obviously not with his family, so I have no sodding idea where he might’ve gone.”

“That’s
it
?” The words practically quivered as they escaped Jassion’s tightly clenched teeth.

A second shrug. “Seems so.” A pause. “Maybe if you’ve access to a sorcerer. After the war, Rebaine cast …” Broad lips quirked into a scowl around the two protruding tusks. “We haven’t met, have we?” he asked Kaleb abruptly.

“I think I’d remember. Why?”

“I don’t know. Something vaguely familiar about you—but then, all you two-eyed little dwarfs look the same to me.”

“Maybe,” Kaleb said, “but I can assure you, we’ve never met. You were saying?”

But it was no good. Whatever the ogre had seen in Kaleb—or imagined he’d seen—was apparently too much. “No, I don’t think so,” Davro told him, rising from his stool to tower above them. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

“Damn you,” Jassion began hotly, “there’s no way—!”

“I think there is.” Somehow, without the twitch of a single muscle, the ogre’s hand drew their attention to the massive blade at his side. “Go away. You want answers? Go ask Seilloah, the witch, if Theaghl-gohlatch doesn’t eat you—and if
she
doesn’t, for that matter.
I
still have cows to milk.”

Without another word, Kaleb offered a shallow bow, and led both a puzzled Mellorin and a sputtering Jassion through the cavernous doorway.

“A
LL THIS WAY
!” M
INUTES AND SOME
few hundred yards later, the baron remained furious enough to chew horseshoes into nails. “For nothing! Just more wasted time. We ought at least to make sure that damn monster pays for his
own
crimes before we leave!”

Mellorin scowled but chose, for the moment, not to respond. “I don’t understand,” she asked Kaleb instead. “He was about to tell us
something
. What happened?”

“I don’t know,” the sorcerer admitted with a much smaller shrug than Davro’s. “Maybe he sensed something of my magics? Ogres aren’t much taken with sorcery. Or maybe I really did remind him of someone.”

“Or maybe he’s just a lunatic!” Jassion snapped. “What does it matter?”

“It’s just, if we could convince him to finish what he was saying …”

“He doesn’t have to,” Kaleb told her. “I know what he was saying.” Then, “If you two keep staring at me like that, your eyes are going to pop out and roll away.”

“You
know
?” Jassion squeaked.

“I’m almost certain that’s what I just said. It’s what I
heard
myself say. Perhaps I need to clean out my ears.”

Despite his warning, the others continued to stare.

“During his various campaigns,” Kaleb said with a sigh, “Rebaine cast a spell on his lieutenants, so he could find them again if necessary. It’s a flimsy, tenuous magic, and no, before you even ask, I
can’t
use it to trace him back. If the spell had been cast on me personally, I could probably do it, but as it is, the connection’s just too faint.”

“Oh,” Mellorin said, disappointed. “I guess maybe we
did
come all this way—and kill that ogre,” she added deliberately, “—for nothing.”

Jassion, however, was frowning, not in his typical disapproving scowl but apparently in thought. “I admit, I know almost nothing about magic …”

Kaleb’s eyes went comically wide. Jassion ignored him.

“But would such a spell last indefinitely?”

“No,” the sorcerer told him. “A long time—decades, potentially, if no other magics interfered with it—but not forever.”

“So wouldn’t Rebaine have likely cast the spell on Davro again, after his war against the Serpent? In case the old one eventually faded?”

“Quite possibly. Are you going somewhere with this, old boy? Thinking of taking up magic? It’s a little late, and I’m not sure you’ve got the brains for—”

“It just seems to me, in my
ignorance,
” Jassion said with a slow smile, “that if the first one hasn’t dwindled yet,
two
such spells on the same subject might leave a heavier magical trail than one. Wouldn’t they?”

Kaleb’s jaw sagged, practically unhinging itself very much like a snake’s. “I’m an idiot,” he said to Mellorin.

“I just want it noted,” Jassion announced smugly, “that I’m not the one who said that.”

T
HE
S
UN HAD SETTLED
beyond the mountains by the time Davro returned to his house, carrying a bucket of milk large enough for Mellorin to have bathed in. His eye narrowed in a fearsome glower at the sight of her perched on his stoop.

“I told you to leave!”

“We did, Davro. Kaleb and Uncle Jassion aren’t here. It’s just me.”

“Fantastic. That’s two-thirds what I asked for, then, isn’t it? What are you doing here, Little Rebaine?”

Mellorin rose. “I want …” She swallowed once. “I want you to tell me about my father.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re crazy, then. Go away.”

“Davro …” She rose to her feet, which brought her barely up to the giant’s waist. “I don’t know what drove you to live out here, apart from your family and your tribe. And I don’t
need
to, to know that it can’t have been an easy choice.

“But it was a choice
you
got to make. I don’t know my father anymore—I suppose I never really did—and that’s not something I chose. It’s something that was
taken
from me. I know he’s not your favorite topic …” She smiled. “Understatement, again?” she asked.

Despite himself, Davro grinned back at her.

“Please, Davro, just tell me
something
about him. Then, I promise, I’ll go.”

The ogre set down the bucket with a deep sigh and dropped into a crouch. “All right,” he agreed. “But just a little bit.”

“Thank you.”

“I suppose,” he began, deep in thought, “it makes—” He yawned deeply, his head splitting into a gaping chasm of chipped teeth and
jagged tusks. “I’m sorry, it must’ve been—” Yawn. “—a more tiring day than I—” Yawn. “—realized. It makes most sense—” Yawn, a few blinks. “—to start with—”

The ogre toppled with a crash that set a dozen startled sheep to bleating. His snores, sufficient to shake the earth and shame the thunder, began instantly.

An unwary mind, and a few moments of contact
.

Mellorin’s body flexed, bulged, and melted like candle wax. A moment of hideous distension and impossible shapes, and then Kaleb stood in her place, blinking rapidly as he acclimated to the change in height. Swiftly, he knelt at Davro’s side, casting a second spell to keep the ogre deep in slumber. When he finished, he glanced around and found he remained alone.

“Hey! Are you two just going to leave me standing here with my bugger-stick in my hand, or were you planning on joining me anytime soon?”

A shuffling in the nearby grasses presaged a pair of silhouettes rising into view.

“I think I’m appalled. Must he say things like that?” he heard Mellorin ask plaintively.

“I don’t know if he
must,
” Jassion replied with unaccustomed humor, “but I’ve noticed that he very often
does.
”

“Keep watch on him,” Kaleb said as they neared. “He should be out for hours, but I’ve never tried anything quite like this. Fiddling with Rebaine’s location spell
shouldn’t
have any effect on the magics keeping him asleep, but let’s not take chances.”

And then, despite his insistence in calling them to his side, Jassion and Mellorin could do nothing but wait as Kaleb knelt over the ogre’s chest and muttered his incantations.

“So?” Jassion asked as the sorcerer rose, his expression weary, more than an hour later. “Did it work?”

“I’m not …” Kaleb shook his head and leaned against the wall of the towering house. “Maybe. A little.”

“How could it work
a little
?”

“Even with the two spells layered on each other, the trail’s so tenuous I can barely feel it. I’m sensing a
slight
pull, but it’s about as precise
as pissing into a crosswind. I can tell you that he’s somewhere between south and east of here.”

“Ah. So we only have to search about a
third
of Imphallion, rather than all of it,” Jassion groused. “At this rate, Rebaine will be dead before we ever get near him.”

“He may not be the only one,” Kaleb said.

“At least it’s something,” Mellorin interjected, not in the mood for another argument. “It’s more than we had before.”

Kaleb offered her a gentle smile.

“There’s another option, isn’t there?” Jassion asked. “As I recall, Rebaine was known to have had
four
lieutenants during the Serpent’s War. We’ve only found three. We could try to find—Ellwyn? Something like that.”

“I thought you were getting tired of traipsing all over the map hunting for these people,” Mellorin said.

“I am. But I’m not sure how traipsing all over a third of the map looking for Rebaine is any better.”

“Ellowaine.”

The baron and the warlord’s daughter both blinked. “What?”

“Her name,” Kaleb said, “is Ellowaine. She’s already been dealt with. She can’t offer us anything new.” And that, no matter how Jassion insisted and Mellorin cajoled, was all he would say.

“Fine!” Jassion, clearly, felt he’d had enough. “Let’s conclude our business here, and we can be on our way.” He moved toward the slumbering ogre, hand closing about Talon’s hilt.

“No!” Mellorin hadn’t even realized she’d spoken until the faint echo came back with the sound of her own voice.

“Oh, come
off
it!” her uncle snarled. “You want to snivel for the life of some random ogre, that’s your call. I needn’t understand it. But this is
Davro!
How many did he slaughter under Rebaine’s orders? How many more will he kill if we let him live?”

“He doesn’t look like he’s all that interested in killing anymore,” she noted, gesturing at the surrounding vale.

“This is not up for discussion,” Jassion said coldly. “And
you
need to learn to think with your head, rather than your heart.”