Her gaze fell upon the large black cloak the farmer was wearing.
She hated to steal it, especially considering that she had killed one of the man’s cattle. If she could find a stream, she could do her best to wash the worst of the blood from her clothes, but even so, she still needed a way to conceal the symbiont from curious eyes if she were to go about unnoticed in Geirrid-and that meant she needed the cloak.
As she bent down to remove it from the unconscious farmer, she spoke. She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. “My apologies. If I had any extra silver on me, I’d leave you some in payment. But I can’t afford to part with any of my coin. I’ll need all the resources I have to draw on to complete my mission.”
She stood and put on the cloak and fastened the clasp. It was military issue-in fact, she had one like it back at the lodge-and while it was a bit large on her, that was good. The extra cloth would help conceal the symbiont. As an afterthought, she also took the man’s night-seeing glasses. They’d likely come in handy as well. She donned the glasses, drew the cloak’s hood up over her head, and with a last apologetic look at the unconscious farmer, she headed off in the direction of Geirrid.
As she walked, Lirra felt the tentacle whip’s sullen anger over leaving the farmer alive. Go ahead and pout, she thought. Just as long as you don’t slow me down.
Lirra continued on into the night.
Averone’s throat felt sore and he swallowed painfully several times as he struggled to sit up. His head pounded and he thought something must’ve happened to his eyes because everything was so dark.
She took your glasses, fool, he thought, and that’s when he remembered the blood-covered woman, the one with the trained serpent or whatever it had been. The memory cut through the fog enshrouding Averone’s mind and he groped around on the ground, searching for his crossbow. He found it and quickly saw that it was unloaded. He remembered loosing the bolt at the woman, but then her serpent had somehow managed to pluck the bolt out of the air, and then it had tried to jam it into his eye.… Things got hazy after that, but Averone decided not to worry about the details. Though he’d traded in the life of a soldier for that of a cattle farmer, his military training told him that he was alive and that was all that mattered. But if he wished to stay that way, he needed to make sure the area was secure. He hadn’t brought an entire quarrel of bolts with him as he owned only a handful left over from his soldiering days. He carried the extras with him in one of his cloak pockets. He started to reach for a bolt, and that’s when he realized that the woman had taken his cloak as well.
“At least she didn’t take your head,” he muttered resignedly. In retrospect, he decided coming out to investigate the noises he’d heard-noises he now knew had been made by the woman when she slaughtered his cow-hadn’t been the wisest choice he’d ever made.
Without his night-seeing glasses or additional bolts for his crossbow, Averone decided that the smartest thing to do would be to head back to his cabin. He could put up a better fight there, if need be. He could barricade himself in and he had a sword he kept mounted on the wall above his fireplace. And come morning he could patrol his fields and see if any more of his cattle had been killed. His wife had left him before last winter for, of all things, a weaver who lived in Geirrid, and they’d had no children; therefore, he had no one to worry about protecting except himself. He felt a twinge of disappointment in himself for being so ready to retreat. After all, he was a Karrn, and his people were tougher than that. But his military career had lasted long enough for him to learn the value of pragmatism on the battlefield. It was night, he was unarmed, and he knew next to nothing about his enemy-or enemies. One of the first things he’d been taught during his training was that a dead soldier was a useless soldier. So it was back home for him, and he would resume playing soldier once the sun had risen.
Averone was just about to start walking in the direction of his cabin, when he heard the sound of someone approaching. He fought an urge to run, knowing that it would do him no good without his night-seeing glasses, especially if it was the woman returning and she was wearing them.
“Good evening, gentle farmer.”
The voice was male and friendly enough. There was enough moonlight for Averone to make out the silhouette of a man approaching, though something struck him as odd about it. It appeared as if the man had something riding on his shoulder, such as an animal. A familiar, perhaps? Was the man a wizard of some sort? Averone didn’t trust wizards. He’d never met one yet that was entirely right in the head.
Just in case the man’s night vision wasn’t any better than Averone’s, the farmer raised the crossbow as if he was making ready to attack. A soldier used whatever weapons were ready to hand, even if all he had to fight with was a bluff.
“Get off my land.” Averone tried to speak in a strong, confident tone, but he couldn’t keep his voice from quavering.
The man continued approaching. He glanced at the dead cow as he passed it and shook his head.
“You really should take better care of your animals. This poor thing looks as if it was slaughtered by a blind butcher with a dull cleaver and a bad case of arthritis.”
The man let out a high-pitched giggle at his joke, and the sound sent a chill racing down the length of Averone’s spine. It was not the sort of sound a sane person would make.
The man stepped closer, and Averone was able to make out his basic features, enough to see that he was a thin, middle-aged man. At first, Averone relaxed a bit. The farmer was young and strong, and if it came down to a physical contest, he had no doubt he’d be able to take the older man. But there was that thing on his shoulder, and Averone noticed that one of the man’s hands was significantly larger than the other. He remembered the serpent the woman had commanded, and for the first time he wondered if it had been a serpent at all. Whatever the woman had been, he had a feeling that this new arrival was something similar, and that scared him. He’d been lucky to survive his encounter with the woman, and now he was being confronted by a second lunatic. Even more, there was something about the man’s manner that told Averone he was far more dangerous than the woman.
Despite his training, Averone found himself backing up several steps as the man approached.
“I don’t want any trouble, so why don’t you just be on your way?”
The man smiled, his teeth gleaming blue-white in the moonlight. “I’m not here to cause you any trouble. I’d just like to you stand still for a bit.”
Before Averone could react, the man opened his mouth and a thin tendril not unlike the serpent thing possessed by the woman shot forth. A barbed tip struck Averone at the base of the throat, and a sensation of coolness swiftly spread throughout his body. His muscles spasmed and locked tight, and within seconds he could no longer move, though he could still breathe, if only shallowly.
The tendril withdrew into the man’s mouth. “That’s better,” he said.
Averone calmly wondered how the man could speak with such a strange tongue, and a distant part of his mind realized that his body wasn’t the only thing that had been paralyzed. His emotions had been too. He felt no fear, no concern over what might happen to him while he was unable to move. Only a mild curiosity.