Jimmy the Hand (37 page)

And I feel
like boar-meat tonight.
It would be a prideful moment, the head
borne in on a platter, the tusks gilded, and Elaine glowing with
delight at her husband’s deed.

Bernarr slung
the bow over his back and yanked his broad-bladed boar-spear from its
socket, plunging past trees and leaping his horse over rocks, never
letting his prey from his sight. By its size and the sharp, unblunted
outline of its tusks the creature was young, in its full strength but
still reckless, giving the Baron reason to think this would be an
easy kill. An older, more aggressive male would have turned to fight
already.

Suddenly the
boar faced a thicket too dense to crash through.

It turned first
left, then spun right, then came to bay, facing Bernarr in a flurry
of dead leaves, its little hind legs stamping as it set itself to
charge, to rip at the horse’s belly or the rider’s legs.

The Baron slowed
only a little, to adjust the aim of his spear for the over-arm thrust
that would split the beast’s heart or spine from above. He
would give the inexperienced boar no time to charge and endanger the
horse.

Before he could
make the thrust an arrow came from behind and to his right. The thick
bone and gristle of the boar’s shoulders would have stopped it,
but the shaft struck right behind the shoulder, the broad-bladed
hunting head slicing like knives through the beast’s heart and
lungs.

It collapsed,
spewed blood, kicked, voided itself and died.

Bernarr pulled
his horse up hard, causing it to rear and almost fall back on its
haunches. He turned to find that Zakry had followed him; the younger
man was just lowering his horn-backed hunting bow.

Zakry, his
mocking grin in place, spoke, but the words seemed indistinct to
Bernarr, and then the youthful rider was gone.

Bernarr was now
riding with his wife’s other friends from Rillanon, a stag
carried proudly behind him by bearers. Then the images faded.

Well, it’s
not all that different from being a sneak-thief in Krondor,
he
thought.
Just be sensible and don’t try to walk too quickly.

It had been a
day and a night since they’d bedded down in the cottage; the
old couple didn’t seem to find it odd that they chose to stay
and spend their days mooching about the woods.

Or perhaps
friend Jarvis’s silver contains their curiosity,
Jimmy
thought, stifling a sneeze. He was watching the manor from behind a
sheltering belt of bushes, and something in the bushes made his nose
and eyes itch. Plus the musty green freshness of it all was
disconcerting; Krondor smelled bad, right enough and often enough.
But the stink was what he was used to, not this meadow-sweet
greenness. At least spring had decided to be spring, with blue sky
and warmth and some fleecy-white clouds above, instead of cold rain.

Their
curiosity but not mine!
his thoughts went on.
Something very
nasty is going on at old Baron Bernarr’s house, and unless my
bump of trouble has lost its cunning, Mr Coe is looking into
it—looking into it for someone.

‘Find
anything?’ Jimmy asked casually, conscious of Coe coming up
behind him.
I may not be able to identify every rustle and squeak
in the woods, but I know a man’s footsteps well enough,
he
thought with some satisfaction. It was just a matter of filtering out
what didn’t matter, same as in town.

‘There’s
an odd absence of bigger game towards the house,’ Coe said.
‘Plenty of insects, plenty of lizards and birds and even
squirrels, but anything near a man’s size evidently feels a
man’s unease about the place. You keep watch on the gate; I’m
going to circle around the other side.’

‘Yessir,
right, sir,’ Jimmy muttered under his breath as the older man
ghosted across the road and into the brush on the other side. ‘Why
don’t we just get in there?’ Coe’s caution was
beginning to make him itch, almost as much as these damned bushes.
Jimmy wanted something to happen.

Something did. A
pair of figures came around the central block of the fortified manor
house; he knew the stables and sheds were there, so as not to spoil
the view from the road, he supposed. They were leading horses; soon
enough they mounted, and began to canter towards the outer wall and
the gate.

Ah-ha!
Jimmy thought, as they came closer.

In their
twenties, but looking older; one slight and wiry, the other like
something a smith had pounded out of an ingot. A weasel and a mean
pit-fighting dog, Jimmy thought, as he got a good look at them. In
Krondor he’d have picked them for Bashers—or Sheriff’s
Crushers. They wore rough leather and wadmal, travelling clothes, and
buff-leather jerkins; but their swords were good, if plain, and they
had a noteworthy array of fighting knives in belts and tucked into
boot-tops. One of them also had a short horn-bow in a case by his
right knee.

Let’s
follow them,
he thought.
But carefully.

As they passed
through the wrought-iron gate the thicker-built one reined in.

‘Come on,
Skinny,’ the bigger one called. ‘You heard the man—he
may be sixty leagues away.’

‘The more
reason not to get lost in the first league, Rox,’ the
weasel-faced man replied, looking down at something in one hamlike
fist. ‘Ah, straight south.’

‘Why don’t
you set up for a prophet, then?’ Rox gibed. His friend rumbled
something that sounded like obscene instructions, and they both
laughed.

Jimmy waited
until they were half out of sight along the road southward before he
brought his horse out and mounted it.
Jarvis Coe made a big point
about how he could track horses and tell them apart, he thought. He
can track mine if he wonders where I am.

After two days,
most of the aches of his first ride had simmered down to occasional
shooting pains: he was young and supple and strong. Coe still made an
occasional mocking comment about his form; especially his flapping
arms, but he could usually keep the mild-mannered old horse going in
the direction he wanted, even if it seemed determined to amble; the
two bashers’ mounts weren’t exactly fiery, snorting
steeds either.

This section of
road didn’t have much traffic, but it did have enough that one
horseman wasn’t conspicuous; Jimmy kept the two he was
following at the limit of vision for most of two hours, before they
halted at a stream to water their mounts. He ducked aside from the
road in a dip that hid him from them and vice versa, found a
convenient tree to tether his mount—you had to do that at
head-level, he’d learned, or they could step over the reins and
do dreadful things—and slipped forward on foot for the next
hundred yards. If he could get within earshot without their noticing,
he might pick up something interesting about their employer and
goings-on in the household of the Baron.

A murmur of
voices came from the road ahead. Skinny and Rox were there, standing
on the stepping-stones of the ford while their horses stood
fetlock-deep in the water, muzzles down and slurping. Jimmy eeled
along the ground behind a fallen hemlock that was sprouting a fair
assortment of bushes from its rotting trunk and listened.

‘S’odd,’
the bigger man, Rox, said. ‘Look how the needle points straight
no matter how you turn it.’

It was evidently
something Skinny held in his hand; he extended it towards Rox, and
the thick pug-faced man shied back as if being offered a scorpion.
‘It’s magic!’ he said, his voice going shrill. ‘Of
course it’s odd. It’s bloody cursed!’ A pause.
‘That house is cursed, too. And that magician—that
demon’s lover the Baron keeps around—he fair drips with
curses.’

‘This is
cursed, that is cursed, you’re not happy unless you’ve a
good curse going,’ Skinny jeered. ‘It’s six hundred
gold if we bring him in, you fool. With that much, we can retire—buy
that bawdy-house you’re always talking about.’

Well, there’s
an ambition,
Jimmy thought.
Six hundred gold. That’s
serious money, even for a baron with a town and a farm income. You
could buy a modest whorehouse with that, and stock it too—if
the girls weren’t too pretty. Who’s this ‘he’
they’re talking about? And a magician? Friend Jarvis will be
very interested.

The two hired
swords led their horses out of the water and prepared to mount;
Skinny stopped them with a soft oath as Rox put his foot into the
stirrup.

‘Wait,’
he said. ‘The needle quivered, like. See, it moves if I put it
left or right, always towards right ahead of us! And I hear
sumthin’.’

Jimmy did too,
over the purling rush of the stream against its own bed and the flat
rocks set in the ford. The familiar hollow clop-clop-clop of a horse
ridden at a fast walk.

He looked up,
squinting between ferns sprouting from the dead tree-trunk that
sheltered him. The ground beneath him was damp; he was down nearly to
the river-level, and it took him a minute to make out the rider
coming down the low slope toward the water. The horse was nondescript
and the tack cheap; the man on it . . .

Well, the lad
on it,
Jimmy thought. He didn’t think the rider was much
more than two or three years older than himself. Rough-cut golden
hair, face saved from prettiness by a strong jaw and straight nose,
frank blue eyes, an outdoorsman’s tan. His clothes were rough
and serviceable, a farmer or hunter’s, perhaps; he had a long
yew bow slung over his back, along with a quiver of arrows, and a
long knife at his belt as well as the usual shorter all-purpose tool.

‘Greetings,
friend!’ Skinny called.

He looked over
his shoulder at his friend. Skinny still had the whatever-it-was in
his hand; he moved it from left to right at full extension, then
nodded with a pleased smile.

‘He’s
the one,’ he said. ‘And right into our arms, too! Easy
money!’

Skinny sauntered
up the rutted roadway toward the newcomer. ‘Good place to water
your horse,’ he said, in a voice dripping with a bad imitation
of goodwill.

Evidently the
handsome stranger thought so too; Jimmy could see him frown, and
touch his bow. Evidently he wasn’t used to being on
horseback—the longbow was a footman’s weapon—and a
bit uncertain with it.

A better
rider than I am, but not by much,
Jimmy thought.

‘I’ll
pass by, friend, if it’s all the same to you,’ the young
man said. He had a rustic accent a lot like Lorrie’s.

Am I always
to be rescuing farmers’ children?
Jimmy thought with
irritation along with a healthy hint of fear.

Taking on two
grown men, and experienced killers if he’d ever seen any, was
no joke—no alley scuffle, either. He couldn’t count on
being better at running and hiding in the woods than either of the
mercenaries.

What to do, what
to do?

Skinny didn’t
appear to have any doubts. He waited by the side of the road until
the traveller was by him, then darted in with a yell and grabbed for
the young man’s ankle, plainly intending to heave him out of
the saddle, leaving him stunned and helpless on the ground.

The young man
kicked instead, and Skinny staggered back with another yell,
clutching at his face. The traveller clapped his heels to his horse
and went through the water at a plunging gallop.

‘No, you
fool!’ Rox yelled, as Skinny pulled the short thick bow from
its case on his saddle and drew a shaft to the ear.

The big man’s
shout went to wordless rage as Skinny loosed, nocked another shaft,
drew and loosed again. The first arrow passed so close to the blond
rider that Jimmy thought it had struck him. Then he was close by, and
Jimmy could see that it had—just along the lobe of one ear, the
razor edge of the head slicing it open into the sort of wound that
bled freely but didn’t slow you. The second went into the
cantle of the saddle with a
thunk!

‘You kill
six hundred gold and I’ll kill you!’ Rox bellowed.

He pulled
something of his own from his saddlebow, then began whirling it
around his head; Jimmy had just enough time to recognize three smooth
pear-shaped iron weights connected by strong cords before it turned
into a blur over the big man’s head. He cast it when the young
rider was twenty yards away and moving fast; cast it at the horse,
not the horseman.

It moved fast
too, whirling through the air like a horizontal disk. The young man’s
horse gave a terrified shrieking whinny and crashed kicking to the
ground; where it lay writhing and struggling with the weight wound
around its hind legs at the hock. The golden-haired bowman lay
immobile for a moment, then began to stir. Rox and Skinny bellowed
triumph, drawing their swords and dashing through the ford towards
the fallen horse and youth.

I could just
steal their horses,
Jimmy thought.
No, let’s get close
and see what we can do.

None of them
were looking at the roadside woods, and the growth there was thicker;
because the edge got more sunlight, Coe had told him. Jimmy trotted
quietly along, trailing the two mercenaries by a few paces, close
enough to hear their eager breathing and curses.

By the time they
reached the spot both man and horse were back on their feet; the
horse had evidently kicked the bola free, for the iron weights lay
scattered in the deep dust of the roadway. The blond youth was still
woozy, his side and shoulder spattered with the drops that rained
from his slit earlobe. He tried to get his bow off his shoulder, but
by then the two mercenaries were close, and he tossed it aside rather
than trying to nock a shaft, drawing his long knife instead.

‘You tried
to kill me!’ he cried—as much in surprise as indignation,
Jimmy thought.

‘Na, na,
yer worth too much alive,’ Skinny said, grinning and showing
bad teeth. ‘Put the slicer down and come peaceful, and y’ll
not get hurt.’