Tarma's jaw dropped as she realized the truth of that. "Shek," she said. "Turn me into a sheep! You're right!" She threw back her head and laughed into the morning sky. "Now all we need is the fortune and a king's blessing!"
"Don't laugh, oathkin," Kethry replied with a grin. "We just might get those, and sooner than you think. After all, aren't we demon-slayers?"
Eight
Someone wrote a song about it -- but that was later. Much later -- when the dust and dirt were gone from the legend. When the sweat and blood were only memories, and the pain was less than that. And when the dead were all but forgotten except to their own.
"Deep into the stony hills Miles from keep or hold, A troupe of guards comes riding With a lady and her gold. Riding in the center, Shrouded in her cloak of fur Companioned by a maiden And a toothless, aged cur."
"And every packtrain we've sent out for the past two months has vanished without a trace -- and without survivors," the silk merchant Grumio concluded, twisting an old iron ring on one finger. "Yet the decoy trains were allowed to reach their destinations unmolested. It's uncanny -- and if it goes on much longer, we'll be ruined."
In the silence that followed his words, he studied the odd pair of mercenaries before him. He knew very well that they knew he was doing so. Eventually there would be no secrets in this room -- eventually. But he would parcel his out as if they were bits of his heart -- and he knew they would do the same. It was all part of the bargaining process.
Neither of the two women seemed in any great hurry to reply to his speech. The crackle of the fire behind him in this tiny private eating room sounded unnaturally loud in the absence of conversation. Equally loud were the steady whisking of a whetstone on blade-edge, and the muted murmur of voices from the common room of the inn beyond their closed door.
The whetstone was being wielded by the swordswoman, Tarma by name, who was keeping to her self-appointed task with an indifference to Grumio's words that might -- or might not -- be feigned. She sat across the table from him, straddling her bench in a position that left him mostly with a view of her back and the back of her head. What little he might have been able to see of her face was screened by her unruly shock of coarse black hair. He was just as glad of that; there was something about her cold, expressionless, hawklike face with its wintry blue eyes that sent shivers up his spine. "The eyes of a killer," whispered one part of him. "Or a fanatic."
The other partner cleared her throat and he gratefully turned his attention to her. Now there was a face a man could easily rest his eyes on! She faced him squarely, this sorceress called Kethry, leaning slightly forward on her folded arms, placing her weight on the table between them. The light from the fire and the oil lamp on their table fell fully on her. A less canny man than Grumio might be tempted to dismiss her as being very much the weaker, the less intelligent of the two; she was always soft of speech, her demeanor refined and gentle. She was very attractive; sweet-faced and quite conventionally pretty, with hair like the finest amber and eyes of beryl-green. It would have been very easy to assume that she was no more than the swordswoman's vapid tagalong. A lover perhaps -- maybe one with the right to those magerobes she wore, but surely of no account in the decision-making.
That would have been the assessment of most men. But as he'd spoken, Grumio had now and then caught a disquieting glimmer in those calm green eyes. She had been listening quite carefully, and analyzing what she heard. He had not missed the fact that she, too, bore a sword. And not for the show of it, either -- that blade had a well-worn scabbard that spoke of frequent use. More than that, what he could see of the blade showed that it was well-cared-for.
The presence of that blade in itself was an anomaly; most sorcerers never wore more than an eating knife. They simply hadn't the time -- or the inclination -- to attempt studying the arts of the swordsman. To Grumio's eyes the sword looked very odd and quite out-of-place, slung over the plain, buffcolored, calf-length robe of a wandering sorceress.
A puzzlement; altogether a puzzlement.
"I presume," Kethry said when he turned to face her, "that the road patrols have been unable to find your bandits."
She had in turn been studying the merchant; he interested her. In his own way he was as much of an anomaly as she and Tarma were. There was muscle beneath the fat of good living, and old swordcalluses on his hands. This was no born-and-bred merchant, not when he looked to be as much retired mercenary as trader. And unless she was wildly mistaken, there was also a sharp mind beneath that balding skull. He knew they didn't come cheaply; since the demon-god affair their reputation had spread, and their fees had become quite respectable. They were even able -- like Ikan and Justin -- to pick and choose to some extent. On the surface this business appeared far too simple a task -- one would simply gather a short-term army and clean these brigands out. On the surface, this was no job for a specialized team like theirs -- and Grumio surely knew that. It followed then that there was something more to this tale of banditry than he was telling.
Kethry studied him further. Certain signs seemed to confirm this surmise; he looked as though he had not slept well of late, and there seemed to be a shadow of deeper sorrow upon him than the loss of mere goods would account for.
She wondered how much he really knew of them, and she paid close attention to what his answer to her question would be.
Grumio snorted his contempt for the road patrols. "They rode up and down for a few days, never venturing off the Trade Road, and naturally found nothing. Over-dressed, over-paid, underworked arrogant idiots!"
Kethry toyed with a fruit left from their supper, and glanced up at the hound-faced merchant through long lashes that veiled her eyes and her thoughts. The next move would be Tarma's.
Tarma heard her cue, and made her move. "Then guard your packtrains, merchant, if guards keep these vermin hidden."
He started; her voice was as harsh as a raven's, and startled those not used to hearing it. One corner of Tarma's mouth twitched slightly at his reaction. She took a perverse pleasure in using that harshness as a kind of weapon. A Shin'a'in learned to fight with many weapons, words among them. Kal'enedral learned the finer use of those weapons.
Grumio saw at once the negotiating ploy these two had evidently planned to use with him. The swordswoman was to be the antagonizer, the sorceress the sympathizer. His respect for them rose another notch. Most freelance mercenaries hadn't the brains to count their pay, much less use subtle bargaining tricks. Their reputation was plainly wellfounded. He just wished he knew more of them than their reputation; he was woefully short a full hand in this game. Why, he didn't even know where the sorceress hailed from, or what her School was!
Be that as it may, once he saw the trick, he had no intention of falling for it.
"Swordlady," he said patiently, as though to a child, "to hire sufficient force requires we raise the price of goods above what people are willing to pay."
As he studied them further, he noticed something else about them that was distinctly odd. There was a current of communication and understanding running between these two that had him thoroughly puzzled. He dismissed without a second thought the notion that they might be lovers, the signals between them were all wrong for that. No, it was something else, something more complicated than that. Something that you wouldn't expect between a Shin'a'in swordswoman and an outClansman -- something perhaps, that only someone like he was, with experience in dealing with Shin'a'in, would notice in the first place.