Joseph wavered, and a third, hitherto silent shape said, “It could work.” Jean-Claude willed them all to come into focus, but the universe was noncompliant to his wishes.
“I don’t like it,” said the skeptic, almost plaintively, as if greed were slowly strangling his good sense. “And Thornscar said kill him here.”
Thornscar again! The man seemed to be everywhere, damn his eyes.
Jean-Claude shoveled on another layer of horseshit. “Ah, so Thornscar is paying you a pittance to do his dirty work, while he collects a princesa’s ransom. You take all the risk, and he gets all the reward.”
“I say we kill him now, like we agreed to do.”
Perhaps it was Jean-Claude’s wishful thinking, but he sounded like a man willing to be talked out of it.
“But what if he’s telling the truth?” Joseph said.
“Money doesn’t do a dead man any good,” said the third.
“You should have thought of that before you took up with Thornscar,” boomed a new voice from the formless space behind the kidnappers. The men whirled and stared, momentarily paralyzed with surprise. A firearm bellowed, spitting flame and smoke. One thug fell. The skeptic reached for a knife, but a green blur came through the smoke and pricked his throat with a rapier thrust. Crimson blood sprayed. Joseph tried to run, but the green blur leapt after him.
“Don’t kill them all!” Jean-Claude tried to yell, but the smoke choked him. He heaved with all his might and managed to achieve nearly a sitting position before collapsing backward and toppling off the bench. There was a heavy thump from the direction in which Joseph had fled.
Jean-Claude rolled to his belly. His boiling humors had finally scoured away enough of the grime from his eyes that he could make out individual planks of the rough wooden floor. He had pushed himself slowly to his knees, trembling with the effort, when a strong hand gripped him under the upper arm.
“Come on, old man, let’s get you up.”
Jean-Claude jerked away from the grip, twisted, and landed on his rump, staring up into a blurry face with blurry blond hair. “Who are you calling old?” He might curse his age, the creeping weakness that stole in with every passing moment, but he did not give anyone the right to notice it. And what of this blurriness? Would it pass, or was he to be crippled like some sexagenarian with cobwebs across his eyes? The idea was too terrifying even to think about.
The figure raised his hands in a gesture of supplication. “No offense intended, monsieur, but you seem to have been drugged. May I offer you my hand in friendship? My name is Martin DuJournal.”
Isabelle’s nom de plume? What new quackery was this? Whatever the case, Jean-Claude was not about to let a good rescue go to waste. “Pleased to meet you. I am Jean-Claude, His Célestial Majesty’s King’s Own Musketeer, and I thank you for your timely assistance. How is it that you stumbled across this little tête-à-tête?” And why in the world do you care?
“I attended Princess Isabelle’s masquerade, but I had left the ball and was on my way to her domicile to await a promised audience when I witnessed your abduction. I followed these ruffians and used the distraction of your fascinating repartee to approach them undetected.”
“Why didn’t you simply summon the palace guards?”
“Because I was not at all sure whose side they would be on.”
Jean-Claude grunted by way of acknowledgment. Yes, the kidnappers had been in possession of royal livery. Had Thornscar suborned someone in the royal household? Breaker’s balls, but the man was inconsistent in his resources and his methods.
“And what compelled you to involve yourself in my troubles?” Jean-Claude asked.
Martin replied cheerily, “For one thing, what they did to you was entirely dishonorable, and I could not stand to see such a crime committed to one of my countrymen. For another, you are Princess Isabelle’s favorite, and I thought rescuing you might increase my stature in Her Highness’s eyes.”
“Indeed.” This man was a liar, a trickster, and very interested in the princess. Another problem. Another lead into another one of Aragoth’s factions perhaps. “She is generous with her thanks, but she will be very interested to hear how you came to know the name Thornscar.” And DuJournal.
“From the mouths of your assailants. I thought it might startle them to hear it.”
“Are you saying you’d never heard it before?”
“Should I have?”
“Perhaps not.” For all the havoc Thornscar caused, there were an awful lot of people who had never heard his name. He ought to have existed in the storm cloud of gossip, if not as a lightning bolt of fear, then at least as a distant rumble of rumor. Yet the only people who seemed to know his name were minions he had recently employed. None-too-bright minions, in fact. Someone who employed such people should be known about even if they were not known.
He asked, “And you wish an introduction to Princess Isabelle?”
Martin produced an insolent grin. Jean-Claude could tell it was insolent from the way it gleamed through the fog of his vision. “I already have an introduction. She has invited me to attend her to discuss a matter of mutual interest, a math problem of sorts.”
Jean-Claude coughed a laugh; he could imagine Isabelle’s chain of thought on that one, and he would have been willing to pay for the privilege of seeing her dismantle the monkey who sought to steal her best clothes—even if she did it in the foreign language of math—just so long as he was there to protect her from any violence an exposed fraud might seek to commit. “So you are a mathematician?”
“Au contraire; I am the mathematician, the world’s foremost master of numbers.”
Jean-Claude chuffed. “Not shy.”
“Fortune favors the bold. It is well-known that she has a fine appreciation of the intellect and an awareness of the importance of mathematics—she published my monographs, after all—so I seek her patronage. Speaking of which, if I am going to take advantage of this opportunity, we should get you back to the citadel.”
Yes. His whole body ached, and he could still barely see. “You didn’t kill all of these scoundrels, did you?”
Martin prodded the limp forms with his boot. “I am afraid I was overzealous.”
Conveniently silencing any testimony they might have been able to give, but there was no point in criticizing DuJournal on that score; the man had saved his life, or at least interrupted his would-be murderers. It was not outside the realm of possibility that this entire scenario, from kidnapping to rescue, was nothing more than a ruse to get DuJournal close to Isabelle, but the man apparently already had an appointment, assuming that wasn’t also a lie. A few words with Isabelle should straighten that out.
“To the citadel, then,” Jean-Claude said.