“What are you doing here, Brek? This is my patrol route tonight, may the sergeant’s eyes be blasted from his head.”
“Can a man not keep his friend company on this dreadfully dull stretch of night?” Brek asked. “By the heavens, there is nothing else going on up here to keep one awake.”
Eskaras chuckled and resumed walking along the battlement, and his friend fell into step beside him. He watched Brek from the corner of his eye, feeling a mix of envy and annoyance at the man’s jaunty, carefree gait with his own crossbow resting upon his shoulder. Brek somehow seemed utterly at home no matter where he was, and was at ease talking with anyone, regardless of station or appearance. Eskaras had never enjoyed that talent, finding all too often that his tongue became thick and clumsy when he tried to converse with superior officers or attractive women.
They walked together, and though Brek evinced no urge to break his affable silence, Eskaras grew ever more agitated. He could count on his friend for any favor, no matter the size or risk, but Brek was just as quick to make requests of his own, and helping the man seldom came without consequence. And just as old scars sometimes itched before a coming battle, he knew that Brek was after something. At last, Eskaras could take it no more.
“Out with it,” he said. “What are you after?”
Brek blinked at him with wide, ice-blue eyes that had unlocked more than a few bedroom doors. “Whatever do you mean, Eskaras?”
“Save your honeyed words for those who do not know you as well. You risk punishment for us both by abandoning your patrol route to join mine.”
“Bah,” said Brek, lifting his hand from his sword hilt to give a dismissive wave. “Our beloved sergeant favors the guard house by the northeastern corner, since it is nearest the refectory. With his great girth, he can only climb the long stairs to the wall-walk once or twice per night or risk heart failure, and he has already been up to glower at me once tonight. If he achieves the battlement again tonight, he will surely lack the wind to come within sight of your route.”
“But if he does, it will put him at the end of your route,” Eskaras said. “And you can scarcely afford to incur his wrath yet again, just as I would prefer not to share it for knowing you.”
“You raise an excellent point, Eskaras,” Brek said with sudden gravity. “I am a poor friend indeed for not having considered the reflection upon you should my plans tonight go awry.”
“What plans?” Eskaras asked as a sinking sensation developed in the pit of his stomach.
“Well, I had no wish to make you complicit in my own tangled affairs,” Brek said, lowering his voice and glancing about as if fearing to be overheard. “There is a certain merchant’s wife, forlorn in her plump, sweaty husband’s absence only slightly more so than when he is in town…”
Eskaras rolled his eyes. “I should have known.”
“I find I cannot be so callous as to abandon her to her plight,” Brek said.
“To be sure,” Eskaras said, wringing sarcasm from each word.
“So I must slip away from my pointless post this evening for a time, that I might console her,” Brek continued, as if his friend had not spoken. Eskaras snorted, and the other ignored that as well.
“As I said, however, I had not considered the potential impact on you, my closest friend, were my absence to be noted. I am resolved to take the compassionate path over treading an empty wall all night, but I could not ask you to cover for me on the lovely lady’s behalf.”
The man lapsed into silence, furrowing his brow and chewing on his reddish beard as he sought a solution. Eskaras glared at him through narrowed eyes, but Brek was as incapable of shame as ever and continued with his pensive display, seeming unaware of his friend’s eyes boring into him as they walked. At long last they reached the point on the wall where their respective patrol routes met. Eskaras sighed and cleared his throat, shrugging aside the familiar feeling of having been maneuvered.
“If we put aside the only sane choice, the one where you do not leave your post,” Eskaras said with a pointed look that met only an intent and innocent expression on Brek’s part, “I suppose I could walk the full eastern wall tonight. If I encounter the sergeant on your route, I can tell him that we switched routes because you owed me some obscure favor and I preferred the breeze off the sea at the northern edge of each loop.”
This last part was true, of course, and Eskaras found himself looking forward to the salty tang of that cooling breath. Brek broke into a broad, triumphant grin.
“I can mention that I saw you quite recently, but I will lie no further if he goes searching for you in earnest,” Eskaras warned.
“A sound plan,” Brek said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I could ask for no more, and I thank you, Eskaras.”
Eskaras waved a hand, dismissing the man and his gratitude at once. “Be gone, you greased eel, before I reconsider.”
His friend set off at a jog back the way they had come, heading for the southeastern stairwell. Eskaras sighed again, watching him recede into the distance. Then he shouldered his crossbow and continued the longer route to which he had just agreed. Searching for stars in the hazy night sky, he wondered if Brek’s escapades would this time cost them both more than poor watch assignments.
A cool breeze played along his back, carrying with it a strange medley of sounds, and Eskaras halted. He squinted along the battlement in the direction Brek had gone, but he could make out nothing except the distant glow of the lamp in the last bastion. He moved to the interior wall of the battlement and peered down into the city. Even at this late hour, the cobbled city streets in this section were well lit and people moved in miniature along them. He frowned. The wall played tricks with sound, often carrying the faintest of sounds to the heights of the wall-walk, or allowing one guard to overhear another’s words over great distance. Eskaras thought he had heard a man’s cry and the clang of metal upon stone, but he could see no sign of conflict below. It could have been some shady dealings in an alley below that was screened to his view, but he had an uneasy feeling. It had sounded like his friend Brek, and the draft that carried the sound had come from that direction, when the winds up here tended to run firmly the opposite direction. Most puzzling of all, the breeze had been almost frigid in an otherwise hot and humid night.
Eskaras braced his crossbow, drawing the string back and fitting a bolt into the channel. He held the weapon ready as he stalked back along the battlement in the direction Brek had gone and from whence the sound had seemed to emanate. If it was another of Brek’s pranks and he received a bolt in the leg for his efforts, it would serve him right.
The evening hung still and stifling once more. The sound did not repeat, and Eskaras began to think he had imagined it all. Then, as he approached the nearest lamp-lit bastion, the air grew colder with each step, and he noticed a blue tinge mingling with the amber glow spilling through the doorway. Through that arch he saw a crossbow lying in the middle of the floor on its back, as if cast aside. Eskaras hesitated, his breath hanging in a mist before him, when a gurgling moan from ahead galvanized him into action. Uttering a cry meant as much to bolster his own courage as to startle whatever he found within, he plunged through the entry and into the bastion.
Inside was a sight that froze the blood in his veins.
Brek was lying supine in a corner, his sword in one outstretched hand while his other arm was flung up before his averted face, trying in vain to fend off his attacker. He must have been trying to reach the alarm bell, Eskaras thought, as he was but a few feet from it.