The black tide poured through Shane. Spin around, but not toward the blow, they expect you to
turn toward the blow, so go the other way, so if they’ve got a knife in their off-hand, you’re not throwing yourself onto it— His vision was still full of pinprick flashes, but that was fine, he could hear that there were at least two of them. No point in drawing his sword, the ceilings here were much too low to use it. The tide told him that his assailant was here and he reached out and grabbed someone’s upper arm in his left hand and that was perfect —finish the turn, you’ve got their arm now, right hand slides downward, closes over the wrist, they try to wrench away, good, good, let them, that means your left hand is down by the elbow and all you have to do is push up with one hand and down with the other…
The crack of bone echoed through the corridor, followed by a hoarse yell of pain. Someone else yelled, “Shit!” The owner of the arm sagged, and Shane didn’t feel the need to hold them upright. He heard scrabbling at his feet, then “Come on, come on!” and running footsteps.
The tide hissed that he could catch them, break some necks as well as arms, but Shane forced it down. He still couldn’t see well. He shook his head, trying to clear his vision, but a wave of darkness obscured it. Had he been hurt worse than he thought?
No, his left eye was burning as if there was something in it. He wiped it clear. His fingers came away black in the moonlight. Blood. Ah, yes.
Scalp wounds, he thought, annoyed. Always so dramatic. All the epics about people being stabbed in the heart and “the blood gushing forth, as a river in full flood” should have been about being hit in the head.
Although it’s probably not as epic a tale of heroism if the noble knight makes a heroic last stand and the enemy just dings him behind the ear.
He sighed heavily, found a handkerchief, held it to his head, and went to go wake Wren and Marguerite.
“Sweet blithering gods!” Marguerite said, when she entered the common room. “What the hell happened?”
“Someone hit me over the head,” said Shane. He sounded almost tranquil about it. Seeing the bloodstained towels strewn about the table, Marguerite was not nearly so calm. It looked as if someone had butchered a hog in the middle of the room.
“What?”
“The head,” he repeated patiently. “Someone hit me on it. I’m fine,” he added.
Marguerite clutched her own head. “Who? Where? Why?”
“I don’t know, the outer corridor two floors down, and I don’t know.”
Wren, who had dipped a cloth in water and was dabbing the wound said, “It’s not that bad.
Scraped you all along the side, which is why it’s such a spectacular bleeder, but nothing that actually needs stitching up.”
Marguerite dropped into her own chair, appalled. “Start at the beginning,” she said. “Tell me the whole story.”
Unfortunately the whole story didn’t shed much light on the matter. Marguerite massaged her temples. “It’s not impossible that they were trying to mug you,” she said. “That sort of thing does happen occasionally, which is why there are court guards. But if they were trying to lift someone’s purse, why go after someone your size?”
Shane shrugged. “Some people think that big men must be slow.”
“Well, I think it’s safe to say that you disabused them of that notion.”
“Just bad luck?” asked Wren. “Or someone trying to take out your bodyguard?”
Marguerite shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. It could be either.” She mistrusted coincidence, but she also knew that her own fears were more likely to have her jumping at shadows and seeing conspiracies under every bush. They didn’t succeed. That’s the important thing. Shane is fine.
“Shall we report this to the guard, then?” asked Shane. Wren had managed to get the bleeding stopped and was wrapping a bandage around his skull.
“I suppose we’d better. Not that I expect them to be much help, but if something else happens, I don’t want to be left trying to explain why we didn’t report it.” She snatched up a cloak to cover the dressing gown that she had thrown on when she heard the commotion in the outer room. “Can you walk?”
Wren snorted. Shane looked vaguely offended. “I could jog the whole way in full plate, if you like.”
Marguerite rolled her eyes. “We’re not all paladins! Most of us would want to go to bed with brandy and sympathy after something like this!”
“Do we have any brandy?” Wren wondered.
“I’ll send a page for some.”
“And the sympathy?” Shane asked.
“I’ll send a page for that too.”
“I DO NOT KNOW how useful that was,” said Shane, as they left the offices of the guard commander an hour later.
“I do,” said Marguerite, “and the answer is ‘not very.’”
The guard commander had taken their report and made sympathetic noises, but that was as far as it went. His job was to break up drunken brawls and prevent outright murder, so he had promised to increase the patrols in that corridor, but unless they struck again, he clearly wasn’t hopeful about catching Shane’s assailants.
“I was really hoping he’d say something like “This is the third time this week!” Marguerite said glumly. “Then I’d know that it wasn’t targeted at you—and me—specifically.”
“Do you think that the Sail is behind it?”
“If it was targeted, then probably.” Marguerite scowled. “An attack like that means that they’ve
got enough manpower to risk losing three men if they got caught. Only nobles can make that work, particularly if they’re bringing along a load of younger relations. No, if another merchant was out to get me, they’d be trying to tamper with my samples or sabotaging my attempts to sell. No one but the big trade delegations can field enough staff to bring actual thugs.”
“Why would nobles be involved?”
“Normally they wouldn’t be, but the Red Sail could easily buy or blackmail someone to have jumped you. Their pockets are deep enough, and plenty of nobles are light in the purse and the morals.
But I’d honestly expect them to use their own people and not make such a sloppy job of it.”
“If I were not what I am,” said Shane, reaching up to touch the side of his head, “it might not have been a sloppy job at all.”
“Ah.” Marguerite considered this most of the way back to their rooms. “That doesn’t fill me with confidence.”
“No.” Shane straightened. “Still, I will be more careful about what corridors I use in the future.
And if this was something other than a random crime, it cost them a great deal more than it cost us.”
“There’s that,” said Marguerite. She bid the paladin goodnight and went to her bed. He was right.
They had come off lightly, and there was no permanent harm done.
But the question that ran in circles around her head, as she stared at the ceiling, was So how many men will they send next time?
TWENTY