37 – A Place to Plan

  After sitting for twenty minutes or so, Ward decided he ought to coax his horse back to the road, and after that, he stood there staring toward the clump of scrub brush where he’d left the sorcerer’s corpse. He’d had the guilty thought that he ought to bury the man or something, but when his eyes sought out the dark form on the rough ground, he saw the faint blue luminescence of mana motes drifting out of the body.

  He grabbed the reins of both horses and led them over to the boulder he’d been sitting on, near a patch of not-quite yellow grass, and left them to graze while he walked over to the corpse. Something seemed different about the mana motes. It had been a while since he’d watched mana coming out of a corpse, but he remembered the motes being exceedingly fine, like blue, sparkling dust. These motes were thicker, like grains of sand, and though they still shone with the same ghostly blue light, every now and then, he swore he saw something like a flash of sparking, arcing electricity run through the cloud.

  Was it a side effect of how the man had died, or was it the fact that he’d been a sorcerer? Was his mana more potent? Of course, those questions made Ward wonder what his own corpse would look like. Would he have brighter, bigger mana motes than the average dead man? “No, wait a minute…” he whispered, remembering what he’d learned about the mana that lingered around dead bodies; it was a side effect of a person’s anima being spent. It wasn’t their actual mana leaking out. “Something special about this guy’s anima, then?”

  Hesitantly, Ward moved his hand, fingers splayed into the cloud. He could feel the electric tingle in the cloud, but it didn’t hurt. Closing his eyes, he steadied his breathing and grounded himself, welcoming the flow of mana by opening himself to the cold air, the hard ground, the stars lingering above the blanket of clouds, and, of course, the mana. As he’d experienced many times, he felt the tingling, electric sensation of a mote sinking into his hand and traversing some hidden pathway up his arm into his body. He shivered with the pleasure of the sensation, but before it passed, a dozen more entered his flesh.

  This time, he noted a marked difference in the feel of the mana; it was more intense, and along with the tickling, goosebump-raising sensation of pleasure the mana always gave him, he felt something else—like an electric spark moving wildly up his arm and into his chest. He caught his breath, feeling a ball of warmth right in the center of his body, almost like he’d taken a hearty swig of whiskey.

  Rather than distract him from his meditative state, the sensation seemed to pull Ward deeper into it. A sinking sensation overwhelmed his mind, and though he opened his eyes, all he saw was darkness, and he swore he was falling toward a slowly pulsing orange-red glow. The glow grew brighter and brighter, and the heat in his chest continued to radiate, spreading through his torso, his limbs, and his head. Then, the sinking sensation faded, and he saw, before him, a smoldering orb, like a moon or planet set alight, though it didn’t blaze with fire; it glowed with an orange luminescence that struggled to break the surface.

  Ward stared, stunned, wondering what he was seeing. The orb felt vast to him, hence his comparison to a moon, but he wondered if that was just the strange perspective he was enjoying; he seemed bodiless, floating. What was the orb? Was he having a vision of a distant world? Was it some mystical place attached to the mana he’d been gathering?

  Staring at it, he began to note things that challenged his assumption that it was a heavenly body. It was smooth, and the weird orange glow periodically broke the surface, rippling like a river of something that couldn’t possibly be fire or lava; it moved more like a serpent or tentacle, surging up from the smooth gray surface, then falling, passing through and fading away. No, Ward decided, this was something else. This was some kind of metaphysical or spiritual vision, and he had no idea what he was supposed to make of it.

  It felt like he floated there for twenty seconds or maybe a minute, and then the blackness began to fade, and the gray-tinted darkness of mundane night replaced it. The cold breeze returned, and Ward looked down to see that the cloud of mana motes had moved away from his hand; he’d absorbed all he could. When he stood, Ward felt invigorated. Of course, he always felt good after collecting mana, but this was different. He felt like something had changed. There was a warmth in the core of his being that hadn’t been there before.

  He pressed his palm to his sternum as though he could feel the change physically, but nothing tickled the palm of his hand. “Gonna need the hemograph,” he grunted. Looking down at the dead sorcerer, Ward suddenly felt a new kinship with the man, a sense that they’d shared something, even if it was after the other’s death. Nodding to himself, knowing it was the right thing to do, Ward dragged the body to a nearby jumble of stones and began building him a cairn.

  He moved the heavy rocks into a circle surrounding the unnamed sorcerer’s body, and then he had to trudge around the meadow, looking for more rocks to pile over the top. It probably took him an hour, and when he returned to the horses, he checked through saddlebags for some water, desperately hoping he’d missed some rations. Finding nothing, he wondered if he ought to go back and check on Haley and Lisa. He was surprised they hadn’t caught up to him yet. “I told her not to hurry,” he reminded himself. More than that, he’d told her to search all the dead hunters, and if he knew Haley, they were burying the bodies.

  Ward secured his sword to the stallion’s saddle, then climbed up, turning back the way he’d come, and that’s when he saw a pair of bright lanterns coming his way. Smiling, he strained his hearing, and sure enough, the sounds of many hooves moving at a leisurely pace came to him. He clicked his tongue and started the stallion walking, the sorcerer’s horse close behind, its lead hooked to the back of Ward’s saddle.

  A few minutes later, when he could pick out the bright shapes of people and horses, Ward saw Haley and Lisa, each on a horse, and two other living bodies bound over the saddles of different horses. As he drew closer, he raised a hand to wave, and Haley shouted, “Ward! Did you catch him?”

  “I did!” he hollered. When they’d gotten close enough that he could be heard by simply raising his voice, he asked, “How’d it go? Any trouble?”

  “None, but Lisa’s not well. She overdid the magic, and now she’s sleepy from a healing tonic.”

  “I’m fine.” Lisa waved a hand dismissively, her eyes glinting in the lantern light as she looked at Ward.

  “Good. We’ll get some rest when we get back to town.”

  “Um,” Haley interjected, “about that—where will we go? We can’t ride in with a train of horses and two prisoners. Well, we could, but I think word would get around town pretty quickly.”

  “I hadn’t planned that far ahead,” Ward admitted.

  “My cousin has a country house—a hunting lodge—north of town. There are roads skirting the city. We could go there to plan our next steps.”

  “Sounds good.” Ward looked at the two trailing horses with their prisoners. “They have anything to say?”

  Lisa shook her head. “Keene won’t stir for a long while. As for the other man, he begged for release, swearing he was just hired muscle and knew nothing.”

  Ward nodded. “We’ll see about that. You didn’t want to take any of the other horses?”

  “We thought we presented enough of a spectacle as we are.” Haley nodded to the bound men. “Are you upset?”

  Ward snorted. “Nah. We’re walking away with six horses and whatever you got off the bodies.”

  “Speaking of things we gathered…” Haley slapped Ward’s pack tied to the rump of her horse. “Found your boots and belt, too.”

  “Not ruined?”

  “Nope!”

  “All right, give me a few minutes to get dressed, then we can get moving. You find anything good on the other bodies?” Ward slid from his saddle and grabbed his stuff off the back of Haley’s horse.

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  “Quite a few glories, some valuable jewelry, a very nice crossbow, some silver bolts, and a silver dagger…” Lisa paused in her recitation and gave Ward an appraising glance. “Haley told me about how that affected you. We ought to look into that, don’t you think? Seems like a sizeable weakness.” When Ward only grunted his acknowledgment, she continued, “We dragged the bodies into the burned house, and Haley tied a rope to the chimney stack and pulled it down with a horse. Everything collapsed.”

  Ward grunted again, arching an eyebrow at Haley. “I figured you’d bury ‘em.”

  She grinned, her teeth bright in the dark. “Better than some of them deserved.”

  “Right.” Ward finished lacing his boots and then climbed back into the saddle. He tugged the reins until the horse turned back toward town. “Lisa, tell me where to turn.” With that, he started his two horses forward, and he heard the others clicking their tongues and flicking their reins to follow.

  They made much better time on horseback than they had on foot, but the eastern sky was lightening with the impending dawn by the time they reached Lisa’s cousin’s “hunting estate.” It was nestled among the trees atop a broad ridgeline that commanded an expansive view of the countryside, and, in the distance, nearly at the horizon line, Ward could see the lights of Westview overtop the trees on the steep slope below. “What was his name again?” When Lisa looked at him blankly, he added, “Your cousin.”

  “Laurent DeGrand. He won’t be here, though—probably just the caretaker.” They’d stopped outside an empty-seeming stable building, and she slid from the back of her horse and walked across the gravel lane toward the big log-cabin-style house. Over her shoulder, she called, “I’ll let him know we’re here. Don’t worry; he knows me.” The windows were dark, but a gas lamp burned near the front door. Ward wondered where the gas came from in a setting like this. There wasn’t any chance a copper pipe ran all the way out there from the city.

  “Let’s get the horses put away,” Haley suggested and, nodding toward Keene’s bound body, added, “What about these two?”

  Ward looked at the two men. Both were bound thoroughly—roped hands and feet, and hoods and gags over their heads. He slid from his saddle and moved to loosen the ropes holding Keene. “I’ll put ‘em in the stables—an empty stall.”

  Haley nodded and began leading the horses into the building one at a time. By the time Ward had taken the two captives into a stall, one silent and breathing deeply, the other struggling and cursing around his gag, Lisa had returned. “There wasn’t an answer at the door, and when I looked in the letter box, I found a note from Mr. Gand, the caretaker; he’s gone into the city for supplies and won’t be back until the end of the week.”

  Ward straightened up, pressing a boot into the small of the thrashing prisoner’s back. “So no one’s here?”

  “Doesn’t seem so.” Lisa shrugged. “I wish I could say I had a key, but—”

  “I have a key!” Haley announced, stepping into the stall. When Ward looked at her, puzzled, she added, “From the spire!”

  Ward snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah! Wanna give it a try?”

  “Yes, of course.” Haley turned and jogged out of the stable.

  Ward shrugged at Lisa. “Better go with her. It’s your cousin’s house, after all.”

  “Right.”

  When she left, Ward grabbed the conscious prisoner’s shirt, hauling him to his feet, and pushed him across the stall until his back slammed, not so gently, into the wooden planks of the wall. “Hold still, you piece of shit,” he growled, putting as much wolf into the words as he could muster. He drew his knife and lifted it to the gag going around the outside of the hood, slicing through it. Then, he pulled the hood off.

  “Help!” the erstwhile hunter screamed, and Ward put one big hand on his throat, driving his head against the boards while he glowered into his face.

  “I know it’s not too bright in here, but you ought to be able to see my face, yeah?”

  “Yeargh,” the guy wheezed, struggling to speak around Ward’s vise-like grip.

  “You’re in the middle of a forest near an empty hunting lodge. Screaming will accomplish one thing—irritating me. Do I look like the kind of guy you want to irritate?”

  “N-no.” The man tried to shake his head, but Ward’s pressure on his neck wouldn’t allow for it.

  He relaxed his grip but lifted his big knife so the guy could see it. “I don’t need two prisoners. Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes!” The man’s eyes opened wide, and Ward could see the lantern near the entrance to the stables reflected in his pale brown irises. He wasn’t very old—maybe thirty—but he looked like he’d had a rough go at life. He had a full head of hair, but about a quarter of his scalp was covered in pink scar tissue, and there were quite a few other signs of rough treatment—a broken tooth, black eyes, a flattened, crooked nose, and a notched left ear.

  “You know I could slit your throat and bury you out here, and nobody’s gonna come looking for you, right? That’s the price you pay when you sign up for skullduggery like you and your pals had planned tonight. I could kill you without losing a wink of sleep, you know why? Because you were going to kill my friends—good people, unlike you and the other assholes I already dealt with.” Ward gestured to Keene’s insensate form. “Unlike this piece of shit.”

  “I understand,” the man hissed, the word shortened by an accent Ward wasn’t familiar with.

  “So, here’s the good news for you: I don’t necessarily like killing. I’m good at it, but if I can let you live, I will. How do you figure you can earn a chance at living from me?”

  “T-talking?”

  “Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me who this piece of shit works for.” Again, Ward prodded Keene with his boot. “Tell me something about his employer or the robbery of my hotel. Shit, man, start spilling your guts, ‘cause if I don’t hear something interesting, I’m gonna start cutting parts off you.”

  “He works for rich folks in Westview. I dunno their names, mister, I swear!”

  “So, you don’t have anything interesting? Pity.” Ward lifted his knife.

  “No! No! I know plenty! Hold off!”

  Ward leaned down, putting his angry, scowling eyes a few inches from his prisoner’s, and from the depths of his belly, a low rumble rose as he growled, “Talk!”

  Words began to flow from the man’s mouth, “Some of us work for Keene, see, on a sort of retainer. When he calls, we gotta come running. So, when he put the word out for all his ‘dirty hands’ to come to work, we showed up. He says we gotta kill a big son of a bitch—no offense!—and a couple of ladies. Thing is, Boyle was there, he’s another of us dirty hands, and he said he saw you, said you was a shifter, a bear inside a man’s body. He saw you rip a man in half and smash his head like a cantaloupe against the wall. He was one of them what robbed you, see?”

  “Go on,” Ward growled.

  “So Keene says not to worry, says he brought in a couple of specialists. I bet you met ‘em back there, yeah? One was a sorcerer, and t’other said he kilt men like you ‘afore.” When Ward continued to stare balefully, the man continued stammering, “So we rode out, and, sure, we was cocky—us being more than ten with a couple of expensive mercenaries along. On the way, Keene did a lot of talking to those men, the hunter with the fancy crossbow, and the wizard. I heard a thing or two that you might want to know.”

  “Are you getting cute?” Ward could hear Haley and Lisa in the stables, seeing to all the horses, and he knew they were listening in. Still, he couldn’t keep the growl out of his voice as he gripped the man’s shirt tight in his fist, straining the fabric as it squeezed his neck. “I decide how to reward you—a quick death, a slow death, or maybe release into the wilderness. Your only hope is to tell me everything you know. Understand?”

  “Yes,” he gasped, and when Ward relaxed his grip, he panted briefly before continuing, “Keene said there was a sorcerer with someone named Dame Ruby. He was trying to act big, like he knew someone important. He said the man was the Dame’s relative from over the sea, and he had the touch, enough so that he was going to use the ‘artifact,’ whatever that is.” Ward stared, contemplating the words, thinking of a follow-up, but the man took his silence as a demand for more and began to babble, “Maybe she’s the one who hired Keene! I don’t know much else, but like I said, I think Keene was trying to sound impressive.”

  “Come here.” Ward stooped to pick up the hood and gag, then gripped the man’s upper arm, dragging him out of the stall and down the aisle, past the horses, and into the last stall on the opposite side. “I’m going to gag you again, but you might have earned your life. I’ll talk to my friends about it.” With that, he hooded and gagged him again, then grabbed another rope, conveniently hanging in the empty stall, to bind him to a post.

  When he walked back to Keene, Lisa was there, and he could see a question in her eyes, but he held up a finger to his lips and then stooped to hoist Keene over his shoulder. He nodded toward the exit, and Lisa followed him out. “How long until this guy wakes up?”

  “Hours.”

  Ward looked into her green eyes. “I’d like to learn that spell.”

  “And I’d like to learn your spell for finding secrets!”

  “Fair enough.” Ward forced a grim smile. “Did you hear what our little friend in there said?”

  She nodded. “Seems my instincts were correct—Dame Ruby is behind the robbery.”

  “Worse, she’s not trying to get rid of the artifact; she’s going to use it.”

  “Should we act now? Do we need to speak to Keene?”

  “Let’s not do anything stupid. For all we know, she’s going to wait until the next full moon to have her ‘relative’ use the artifact. No, let’s wait until this asshole wakes, then use what we learned from that other guy against him. The more we learn about Dame Ruby and her setup, the better our odds. Meantime, we should get some rest.”

  As she followed him toward the house, Lisa gripped his elbow, steadying herself. Ward looked down at her. “You okay?”

  “Just exhausted. The healing tincture took a lot out of me.” She nodded toward a pile of saddlebags and other objects near the door. “Haley’s been bringing our bags and the things we took from the criminals into the house. I noticed an interesting staff tied to your horse’s saddle.”

  “Yeah, I got it off the, uh, wizard I killed.”

  “May I take a look at it?”

  Ward nodded, stepping onto the wooden stoop, Keene’s unconscious form bouncing on his shoulder. “Yeah, sure. We should go through all that stuff, but my number one priority is food. I feel like my stomach is cannibalizing my body.”