“You might as well quit,” the priest said. “You can’t win now—two of you couldn’t defeat me.”
“Gird’s grace,” said Ambros between clenched teeth. “I won’t quit—I will kill you.”
“I think not, boy,” said the priest with a smile. He made a gesture toward Ambros’s face, and a length of something gray flicked at him. Ambros blinked but kept fighting. “You’re a stubborn fool, boy—are you hunting your death?” Paks struggled with the web, hardly aware of the Company curses she shouted. She could see blisters rising on Ambros’s face, like the mark of a fiery whip. The priest spared her a look. “You won’t get clear of that in a hurry, sweetling. ’Tis made of Achrya’s own webs. As is this—” He lashed once more at Ambros’s face. The yeoman-marshal screamed, one hand clawing at his face. “You see, boy, what you drive me to? Why will you not submit?”
Paks could see that the blow had caught his eye, but somehow Ambros had kept hold of his sword. He fought on, with less skill now, his movements jerky. Paks sawed frantically at the web, cursing again when it touched her bare skin; it burned like fire. The priest said something, a string of words she did not know, and the web moved, shifting around her, so that the cut strands were out of reach. Ambros called to her.
“Paks—call on Gird! With me—” he gave a sharp cry of pain as the priest’s gray whip touched him again.
Paks opened her mouth to say something else, and found herself yelling, “By the power of Gird Strongarm, and the High Lord, and all the gods of right—” Ambros, too, was yelling, holding his Girdish medallion now with one hand, as he flung himself on the priest. Light flared around them; Paks could hardly see, in the flurry of movement, what happened. Then the web lay still around her, and nothing moved in the heap of robes behind the chair. And the rest of the party, suddenly freed, ran forward full of questions and noise.
17
Suli grabbed the web strands that bound Paks, then yanked her hand back as welts rose on her palm. Arvid ran past Paks to look at Ambros and the priest.
“He’s dead,” he said shortly.
“Both?” asked Mal.
“Yes. Both.” Arvid sighed, then turned back to help Paks and Suli hack the web apart. “Lady, that’s a dire trap you’re caught in.”
“I know.” Paks could hardly speak for mingled anger and shame—Ambros was dead, and she had not been able to fight. She kept cutting grimly, until finally she could step out of the web. Her clothes were charred to rags, and Arvid looked at her mail with respect.
“That’s . . . very good mail you’re wearing.”
“Yes—” Paks touched one of the burns on her face gingerly, and went to look at Ambros’s body. The priest’s gray lash had laced blistered welts across his face. Together, she and Mal straightened his body, wrapping his cloak around it. Arvid and the other yeoman stood watch at the door, but no sound came from the corridor. Paks suspected that with their master dead, and his control broken, the men they’d fought had fled, either to the surface, or to deeper hiding places. Suli roamed the room idly, staring at the tapestries, then stooped over the dead priest’s body.
“Look at this,” she said, lifting a silver chain around the dead priest’s neck. “It’s got—”
“Drop that!” Paks remembered the Achryan’s medallion in Rotengre. “It’s magic.”
Suli looked startled, and dropped it less quickly than Paks intended. But nothing happened.
Paks could not define what she felt. She had not wanted to go back underground; she had not wanted to meet another evil mage. But she liked Ambros, had gotten used to his cheerful face. When he told her his dream, she felt his trust in her—and as always, gave trust for trust in return. In a vague way she had hoped—and made herself believe—that what they might face under the keep was not nearly so bad as the possessed elf-lord had been. She had thought Ambros’s dream was the dream of an untried soldier, a recruit thinking too much of the coming battle.
Now he was dead. She had failed him. She, the seasoned soldier, had not been able to fight. The untried recruit, the boy (as she thought of him), had fought on, alone, and died without her aid. He was as dead as Macenion, as Saben, two others she had not saved. As she took the precautions she knew to take—setting a watch, planning their return to the surface—her mind roiled.
Only after they had started back did she begin to realize what her position might be. What Sir Felis would think. What the Marshal would think. What everyone would think, when their yeoman-marshal lay dead and the experienced fighter let herself be trapped in a net. She did not know how grim her expression was until Arvid spoke.
“Lady? Do you foresee some trouble I do not? Your sorrow for the yeoman-marshal, yes, but—what else?”
Paks shook her head. “I did it all wrong.”
“All wrong?” Arvid looked at her with obvious surprise. “We went against a larger force, on their ground, and have only one dead and a few wounded, and you think you did it all wrong? By Simyits’s eyebrow, lady, we could all be dead.”
“No thanks to me that we aren’t.”
“Nonsense. You forget that you fought that priest too. Quite well, I might add—and you were right to jump ahead in the dark when you did. I only thought afterward that if flint and steel wouldn’t spark, then my oil flask probably wouldn’t burn anyway. That young man died bravely, but not because you failed. Though I expect you won’t miss an overhead net trap again.”
Paks shook her head, but felt a little better. The others said nothing, but smiled at her shyly when she looked at them. They were at ground level again when Arvid beckoned her aside.
“I’ll be saying farewell,” he said with a smile. “Good luck to you, Lady Paksenarrion—you have the makings of a great warrior. You’re already a good one. Keep thinking on all sides of a question—”
“But what do you mean, are you going?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“My work is done,” he said with a shrug. “I was hired, as I said, to kill or convince the fellow to join the Guild. In my judgment, he would have made a poor member, even if he had been willing to join. I have seen him dead, and I have taken enough value to repay the Guild some of what it lost by his unlicensed theft.” Paks had not seen him take anything; while she was still sorting that out, he dipped into a pocket and handed something to her. “Here—a gift for you. Unlike your gnomish friends, I prefer to pay my debts at once.” Paks felt a something like a handful of pebbles through the thin leather of her glove. “No—don’t look now. Gratitude bores me. You see, I don’t think I’d like to explain everything to the Marshal—or have another talk with Sir Felis. You have enough witnesses to your actions; I need none for mine, if I go now.” He lifted her hand, still clenched around his gift, to his lips; Paks had never seen or imagined such a gesture. Before she could say anything, he had dropped it and moved lightly away, not looking back. She stuffed the handful, still unseen, into a pocket in her tunic, and turned to the others.
“And if I say it’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard? Ambros, at his age, to go haring off after a priest of Achrya! You, to let him—!” The Marshal, brows bristling in fury, strode back and forth in the grange, hands thrust into his belt. Paks, Mal, and the other yeomen stood against the wall; Ambros’s body lay on the platform, still wrapped in his cloak.
“Marshal, if I may—” Sir Felis looked almost as angry as the Marshal. The Marshal stopped in midstride, balanced himself, and nodded shortly. Sir Felis looked at all their faces before he spoke. “Marshal, when he told me what he planned, I thought as you. A fool’s plan, I told him. I think—I think I was wrong.”
“Wrong! With him dead, and—”
“Wait, Marshal. I told him he had no experience. I told him that orders were orders. I insulted her—” he nodded at Paks, “—and told him he was a fool to go anywhere with a thief and a mercenary. And then he told me, Marshal, that his orders came not only from you but from Gird.”