Wren looked sick. “Hard,” she said. “We’re former Saint of Steel. If he’s berserk, he, um. Would be very hard.” She pushed the rest of her food away. “He’s very strong.” She took a deep breath, and then her voice flattened out and assumed the odd, almost dreamy tone that Marguerite had heard before, when discussing assassins in the fortress. “Shane prefers a two-handed sword and will be slower as a result of it, but you must assume that any hit he lands is likely to be a lethal one. He compensates for the slowness by wearing heavy gauntlets and he will punch with them. His reach is what you would expect from a man of his height. His distance vision past about twenty feet is poor.
He is right-handed. He has an old knee injury on the left side that troubles him in bad weather, and it takes him a few minutes to work the stiffness out in the morning. Once he is berserk, it is impossible to guess how he will fight. It will be brutal, efficient, and unpredictable. If he’s been unable to obtain a replacement two-handed sword, he may try to compensate with a shield.” Wren paused and swallowed and sounded a little more like herself. “He was never terribly good with a shield, though.”
Dead silence filled the hall. Davith had stopped eating and looked as ill as Marguerite felt.
“Well,” said the senior paladin finally. “That was an extraordinarily clear and concise report.”
Wren nodded, still staring at her plate.
“I think,” said the priestess gently, “that we have kept you all awake long enough. Beds have been prepared for you. In the morning, we’ll talk more.”
Wren nodded again, rose, and saluted. There was a mechanical quality to her movements, as if her body was running on old instinct and the real Wren was locked away somewhere inside. Probably not far from the case.
Marguerite took her arm as they left the hall. “It will work out,” she said, and the beauty of not being a paladin was that she could lie.
FORTY-EIGHT
THE FIRST RAIDER that Shane saw had large, dark eyes that might have been called soulful if they had been in a less murderous face. He was watching over a group of a half-dozen children who were struggling to wash clothes in the stream, though his air was far more that of a prison warden than a nanny.
The sounds of laundry slapping against rocks covered the sound of Shane’s approach. And if they were ordinary children, they should be loud enough for an elephant to sneak up on them. That they aren’t shrieking and laughing and trying to drown each other is not a good sign.
The raider had his arms folded and his back to a tree. His chin had sagged to his chest, though he lifted it every few minutes to glare at his charges. Shane judged the distance he’d have to cover to reach the man and grimaced. The Saint of Steel had not chosen His warriors for stealth.
Even if Wisdom keeps me from accidentally hurting one of the kids, I don’t trust this fellow not to decide to use one as a shield.
It would have been an excellent situation for Erlick’s bow, but the older man was working his way down the hillside overlooking the steading, where Shane would presumably need him rather more.
Right. If I creep around through the woods, perhaps I can get behind…shit!
One of the children left the stream and went toward the bushes where Shane was lurking. Shane froze, trying not to breathe. Had he been spotted? Would the child raise the alarm?
The boy couldn’t have been much more than eight or nine, and he proved without a doubt that he was a boy by unbuttoning his trousers and pissing about eighteen inches to the left of Shane’s hiding spot. Shane stifled a sigh.
The boy turned slightly from side to side, apparently trying to hit a particular section of shrubbery.
Shane closed his eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
It didn’t come. Instead he heard a gasp and opened his eyes to see the boy staring directly at him.
It was very, very hard to use the paladin’s voice in a single whisper, but Shane did his best.
“Shhhh.”
The child’s eyes were huge. Shane risked a whisper. “I’m here to help.”
“I…I…” The boy darted a glance over his shoulder at the raider. Shane winced. Might as well hold up a sign saying, “I Am Doing Something Wrong Over Here.”
The raider caught it immediately. “Hey! What’re you doin’ over there?”
“Nothing!” squeaked the boy, an answer guaranteed to spark paranoia in the most trusting adult.
Heavy footsteps heralded the raider’s approach. Shane tensed, hand closing over his dagger.
“Nothing, eh?” The man stalked up and dealt a stinging slap to the side of the boy’s head. “You’re supposed to be working, you little snot.”
The child fell down. The raider turned to face him, drawing his foot back, which left him both off-balance and with his back to Shane.
Stabbing a man in the kidneys was a remarkably good way to make him think about his life choices, but he only had a second or two to do so before Shane followed up by cutting his throat. He shoved the man to one side so that he didn’t fall on top of the startled boy and waited glumly for the screaming to start.
It didn’t. All six of the children stared at him in silence, round-eyed, like a line of little owls.
Shane wiped his dagger off and pulled the boy to his feet. “Do any of you have somewhere to go?” he asked.
The oldest looking of the children, a girl of perhaps eleven, said, “’M from Hangman’s Glen.”
“Do you think you can get back there on your own?”
She shrugged. “Can try.”
Shane wanted desperately to herd them away himself, but if he did, they would wind up with Wisdom’s people, and he couldn’t bring himself to feed children into the demon’s maw. It’s summer and warm enough. They won’t freeze at night, and they undoubtedly know the area better than you do. “Go north,” he said, “and circle around the hills. Go now. Take the others with you. I don’t know how long the raiders will be distracted.”
The girl nodded. She grabbed the smallest child by the hand and beckoned to the others. “C’mon, you lot. Keep quiet.”
The boy wiped his nose, looking up at Shane. “You gonna kill the rest of them?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Good.” He directed a kick at the dead raider.
“Get going,” said Shane. The others were already crossing the stream and vanishing into the brush. “Stick together. And, lad…?”
“Eh?”
“Button up your trousers.”
THE RAIDER HOLDING hadn’t been much to look at from above, and wasn’t much to look at from ground level, either. The huts all shared stone walls where possible, leaving two semi-circles
flanking a straggling central area, with the stream on one side and a stone cliff face on the other.
In theory, such a layout should have been defensible and well-protected.
In practice, Shane simply walked up to the half-asleep guard, cut his throat, and ducked back around the edge of the farthest hut.
Someone eventually came out to check on the guard, and Shane cut his throat as well, then dragged the body back out of view. He had a vague urge to find whoever was in charge and yell at them about the value of redundancy in guard posts.
Probably he could have kept doing this for all dozen raiders, except that a woman came past, saw the dead guard in the chair and froze. Her eyes shot to Shane, who gave a tiny wave and put his finger to his lips.
She let out a shriek to wake the dead, and Shane sighed.
The woman stumbled back, still shrieking. A gabble of voices went up from the holding, mostly in the vein of “Who’s yelling?” and “What now?”