The Last Garrison (Dungeons & Dragons Novel) (14 page)

The largest kenku chopped the scalp from one of the farm hands and hung it on an effigy. He did the same with the other. The third scalp was tossed at the feet of Jodpa. As was a fourth—the scalp of his son. He was on his knees, crying and shaking, but the largest kenku squawked to one of his comrades, and Jodpa was raised to his feet. The creature pushed him toward his horse until he mounted it. The largest kenku wiped blood from his beak—blood that had spattered during the scalpings—and pointed back toward Haven. “Heya!” he said to Jodpa. “Heya!”

Jodpa prompted his horse and rode away as quickly as he could make the beast gallop. He heard the casques break open, and even though he did not want to turn to look, he did. There were dozens of them emerging from the woods. Dozens heavily armed. And coming soon. He could feel it. There was an arrogance and an urgency to the way they spoke. Jodpa had showed them just how unprepared Haven was for them, he was sure of it. He had doomed the village, and he had lost his son for it.

Jodpa returned. He was met in the village square. The pain of his wound had become a powerful throb. Through his tears and his pain, and through the injury to his mouth, he tried to say, “My son! My son!” but it was merely noise.

Londih came to him and held him by the shoulders. “Your men?” he asked. “The cattle? The wine?” Jodpa shook, overcome with grief. “Your child?”

Jodpa kneeled before the Crook of Haven and wept, apologizing for his arrogance through his incoherent speech. The gathered crowd could make out little of what he said, but the way he said it made the message clear enough. They were near, they were powerful, and they would not be dissuaded from their pillage of Haven.

Somewhere deep down, Londih recognized that the result of Jodpa’s fool’s errand to speak to the kenku was a kind of victory for him—in less desperate times, he would have admired his ability to maneuver the man into his own defeat in the eyes of the villagers—but he saw it as hollow. The danger was much worse than he had expected. Later, he and Orick discussed what had happened to Jodpa.

“I don’t think I understand, Honored One,” said Orick. “Jodpa says they killed the cattle without regard for what could be saved. The frost seems to be getting stronger. They did not even give Jodpa an ultimatum. If they are bandits in need of goods, why would they act like this? What do they truly want?”

“I don’t know, Orick,” said Londih. “No more parties sent out to ask, though. Find a man or two to scout out there and give us some warning about when they will arrive. And pray with me that my son is successful and returns to us soon.”

B
eyond the bridge, a road led north. Dusk was falling over the city, and Sten and Spundwand led the Haven youths up the road. A mile hence, Sten walked the party into the woods. In thirty yards, they came upon a clearing. At the center of the clearing, a figure sat hunched over. Sten approached and called out. “Imony!” he shouted. The figure remained hunched. “Imony, my friend.” And still nothing. “When she gets involved in her meditations, it is sometimes difficult to pull her free of her work,” he told the others. “Come on.”

The group walked into the clearing, Sten at the lead. The figure they approached, the woman, was slight and simply clothed in a long gray robe. Her hair was very short, cropped as close as Sten’s, but it was a reddish blond and thick where Sten’s was steel gray and thinning. When they were close enough
to see her face, Nergei noted that she was plain and serene looking, a little wrinkled, somewhat heavyset, and radiating grace. She stared down at a parchment in the grass in front of her, and held a brush in her hand. She was tracing a symbol on the parchment, over and over, but the brush was dry, and there was no inkpot near her. She repeated the same five lines, though, slowly, deliberately.

“Imony?” said Sten. “Are you in there, my dear?”

Imony continued to trace the symbol on the page. Kohel snorted. “What is this? Who is this person, Sten? You think this woman can help us?”

Nergei was wondering the same thing. Imony had no weapons, no armor—just her robe. She did not appear to have a staff or orb, either, the trappings of a practitioner of the arcane. And she appeared to be so focused on her tracing that she did not even react to the approach of the group. A trained combatant would at least react to a sudden interruption, even by friends. One could never tell. The kenku who had attacked the youths in the woods were able to mimic the voices of others. If the same had happened here, if the one who had called to her was someone pretending to be Sten, she would’ve been killed without even having a chance to react, to parry a blow, to dodge an arrow. Perhaps Sten was not the judge Nergei had thought he was. Perhaps Kohel would be proved right, and
be given yet another opportunity to gloat. “Are you sure?” asked Nergei quietly.

“Imony is deep in concentration,” said Sten. “I must admit I find it fascinating that she is able to do this.”

“I’ve always found it quite—unsettling,” said Spundwand.

“That’s simply because it would require more strong ale than exists in the bars of the city for you to reach a similar state of focus, dwarf,” said Sten. “Watch her, young ones. Learn something about discipline from my friend Imony.”

Kohel was agitated. He stared at Imony for a moment, raised his eyebrows and hopped in front of her. “Hello?” he said. Imony traced and traced. “This is futile,” he said, and he reached for Imony’s hand. “Stop writing,” he said, grabbing at the brush. In a fluid motion, Imony was up and behind Kohel, one of her arms locking his behind his back and her brush up his nostril.

“Stay still,” she said in a high, sweet voice. “This is merely uncomfortable right now. It will take very little for me to really make it hurt.” She added a little pressure to the end of the brush and Kohel felt it, sharp and insistent. He let out a tiny cry and she relaxed the pressure.

Padlur reached to his belt for his blade, but Imony cocked her head and gave him a look. “Please, child,”
she said. “Don’t make me ruin this young man’s face by ripping my brush free. He is pretty enough right now, but the scar will not flatter him.”

Sten and Spundwand it found all quite amusing, and allowed themselves another hearty laugh. “Sten,” said Imony, noticing the warrior for the first time. “And my friend Brickboots.”

“Good evening, Imony,” said Sten. “Kohel there is no threat. He is with me. You can release him.” Imony responded again with fluid motions. She freed Kohel and was seated on the grass in front of them. Nergei admired the beauty in her movements, the way each part of her seemed to dance or to keep harmony with every other part. Nothing wasted. “Imony is a practitioner of a sort of combat that trains one to make a weapon of whatever happens to be around,” he said, directing his comments not to Kohel, or Padlur, or even Nergei, but instead to Luzhon. “And in the absence of things, her hands and feet suffice.”

“What can I do for you, Sten?” said Imony.

“Well, my dear,” he replied, “we have been asked to—”

“I’ll go with you,” she said.

“Imony?”

“I will accompany you.”

“I didn’t tell you where we are going. Or why. Or even that we will be leaving the city for possibly quite a while, Imony.”

“Yes,” she said. “No matter. I’m going to come along. I have decided. I look forward to whatever it is we are going to do. It is always good to be with my dear old friends Sten and Brickboots.”

“Well, then,” said Spundwand, looking at Kohel, who was rubbing his nose. “You see how charming my friend is, young man?”

“Brickboots is coming with us too, yes? And we’re going somewhere? Should we leave now?” asked Imony, suddenly lively and engaged. She walked to the edge of the clearing, where she had secreted a small pack. In it, she placed the rolled parchment in a wooden tube, and from it, she took a pair of worn leather sandals, which she slipped on in two clean circles of her arm. She tucked her brush above her ear, slung her pack on her back, and began walking to the road. The party had to hurry to keep up.

“Enthusiastic,” Sten said, again to Luzhon. “And better than that, she has no interest in gold. She wants only to travel. And be near Brickboots.”

“Brickboots?” Luzhon said to Spundwand.

“A name she has for me,” he responded dismissively.

Imony turned her head. “Try as I might, I can’t seem to push our mutual friend down, young one. He is impossible to get off his feet. Where do we go now, Sten?”

“We need range and we need magic, Imony. I think I know a pair who might be able to help us there. We go back to the city and search.”

On the market green, Sten saw the first of the siblings he’d come to see, the elf woman Magla. The market street had been partially cleared, creating a makeshift range for Magla and her newest mark, a human bowman who didn’t yet know that he was indeed a mark, a man full of confidence who would soon part with his gold. Sten would never call Magla a thief or a hustler—she would not have suffered him to try, and he had seen her knock down men as big as him over less—but that did not mean she was above using the ignorance of the city’s less-worldly citizens against them. And how ignorant they were, thrown off by both her sex and her beauty. Sten watched as she removed her green cloak, revealing the tall slimness of the woman beneath. Magla wore black leather armor that fit tight against her lithe body while leaving her shoulders and arms bare, save for a leatherwork bracer strapped against her pull hand. She was pretty—even Spundwand, who had no great love for elves, would have to agree—with the high cheek bones and pale, smooth skin of her race. Despite the grace of her movements, there was strength in the muscles of
her bare arms, her leather clad legs, in the long, sure fingers of her hands nocking an arrow into her bow.

Sten watched her face, compared it to the face of the male human who would shoot first. His was bright, animated, ruddy with drink or else excitement. Hers was pale, passive, empty of everything but the shot.

Maybe empty of that too, thought Sten. He’d seen it before: A warrior who had failed to prevent some atrocity—or else committed one themselves—and who could not forgive, could not forget, until what wrong they had done became the center of their being, replacing whatever better thing had been there before.

He might have been wrong about Magla, hoped he was, but as he watched her fingers upon her aquiver bowstring, he did not believe that he was.

“Watch this,” said Sten, directing Nergei and Luzhon’s gaze away from the human archer—already pulling his bow back, already firing too fast, so that even Nergei knew the man would miss the target—and toward the elf woman instead. Kohel followed their gazes, burning the whole time. In the mind of that man, that old man, who had been engaged to come to Haven and protect their village, the orphan and the girl had become the authority to which he demurred. The orphan and the girl, instead of Kohel, the rightful
leader, inheritor of the role of primary, head of Haven. He had been relegated as merely a hanger-on, merely an associate to a young man without land and without even a father. And a girl who he had decided was not worthy of his name—perhaps only worthy of being a concubine to him when he had wed and settled into his role as leader of Haven. Perhaps he would cuckold her husband—some farmer—one day. He looked to Padlur for someone to share his frustrations, but the other boy was engrossed in the preparations the archers were making.