By late afternoon the heads of the bandits had been piled in a grisly cairn by the side of the road as a mute reminder to their fellows of the eventual reward of banditry. Their bodies had been dragged off into the hills for the scavengers to quarrel over. Tarma had supervised the cleanup, the three apprentices serving as her workforce. There had been a good deal of stomach-purging on their part at first -- especially after the way Tarma had casually lopped off the heads of the dead or wounded bandits -- but they'd obeyed her without question. Tarma had had to hide her snickering behind her hand, for they looked at her whenever she gave them a command as though they feared that their heads might well adorn the cairn if they lagged or slacked.
She herself had seen to the wounds of the surviving guards, and the burial of the two dead ones.
One of the guards could still ride; the other two were loaded into the now-useless cart after the empty boxes had been thrown out of it. Tarma ordered the whole caravan back to town; she and Kethry planned to catch up with them later, after some unfinished business had been taken care of.
Part of that unfinished business was the filling and marking of the dead guards' graves.
Kethry brought her a rag to wipe her hands with when she'd finished. "Damn. I wish -- oh, hellspawn; they were just honest hired swords," she said, looking at the stone cairns she'd built with remote regret. "It wasn't their fault we didn't have a chance to warn them. Maybe they shouldn't have let themselves be surprised like that, not with what's been happening to the packtrains lately -- but still, your life's a pretty heavy price to pay for a little carelessness...."
Kethry, her energy back to normal now that she was no longer being drained by her illusions, slipped a sympathetic arm around Tarma's shoulders. "Come on, she'enedra. I want to show you something that might make you feel a little better."
While Tarma had gone to direct the cleanup, Kethry had been engaged in stripping the bandit chief down to his skin and readying his unconscious body for some sort of involved sorcery. Tarma knew she'd had some sort of specific punishment in mind from the time she'd heard about the stolen girls, but she'd had no idea of what it was.
* * *
Now before her was a bizarre sight. Tied to the back of one of the bandit's abandoned horses was -- apparently -- the unconscious body of the highborn lady Kethry had spelled herself to resemble. She was clad only in a few rags, and had a bruise on one temple, but otherwise looked to be unharmed.
Tarma circled the tableau slowly. There was no flaw in the illusion, if indeed it was an illusion.
"Unbelievable," she said at last. "That is him, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, indeed. One of my best pieces of work."
"Will it hold without you around to maintain it?"
"It'll hold all right," Kethry replied with deep satisfaction. "That's part of the beauty and the justice of the thing. The illusion is irretrievably melded with his own mind-magic. He'll never be able to break it himself, and no reputable sorcerer will break it for him. And I promise you, the only sorcerers for weeks in any direction are quite reputable."
"Why wouldn't he be able to get one to break it for him?"
"Because I've signed it." Kethry made a small gesture, and two symbols appeared for a moment above the bandit's head. One was the symbol Tarma knew to be Kethry's sigil, the other was the glyph for "Justice." "Any attempt to probe the spell will make those appear. I doubt that anyone will ignore the judgment sign, and even if they were inclined to, I think my reputation is good enough to make most sorcerers think twice about undoing what I've done."
"You really didn't change him, did you?" Tarma asked, a horrible thought occurring to her. "I mean, if he's really a woman now..."
"Bright Lady, what an awful paradox we'd have!" Kethry laughed, easing Tarma's mind considerably. "We punish him for what he's done to women by turning him into a woman -- but as a woman, we'd now be honor-bound to protect him! No, don't worry. Under the illusion -- and it's a very complete illusion, by the way, it extends to all senses -- he's still quite male."
She gave the horse's rump a whack, breaking the light enchantment that had held it quiet, and it bucked a little, scrabbling off into the barren hills.
"The last of the band went that way," she said, pointing after the beast, "And the horse he's on will follow their scent back to where they've made their camp. Of course, none of his former followers will have any notion that he's anything other than what he appears to be."
A wicked smile crept across Tarma's face. It matched the one already curving Kethry's lips.
"I wish I could be there when he arrives," Tarma said with a note of viciousness in her harsh voice. "It's bound to be interesting."
"He'll certainly get exactly what he deserves."
Kethry watched the horse vanish over the crest of the hill. "I wonder how he'll like being on the receiving end?"
"I know somebody who will like this -- and I can't wait to see his face when you tell him."
"Grumio?"
"Mm-hmm."
"You know," Kethry replied thoughtfully, "this was almost worth doing for free."
"She'enedra!" Tarma exclaimed in mock horror. "Your misplaced honor will have us starving yet! We're supposed to be mercenaries!"
"I said almost." Kethry joined in her partner's gravelly laughter. "Come on. We've got pay to collect. You know -- this just might end up as some bard's song."
"It might at that," Tarma chuckled "And what will you bet me that he gets the tale all wrong?"
"Not only that -- but given bards, I can almost guarantee that it will only get worse with age."
Nine
The aged, half-blind mage blinked confused, rheumy eyes at his visitor. The man -- or was it woman? -- looked as awful as the mage felt. Bloodshot and dark-circled eyes glared at him from under the concealing shelter of a moth-eaten hood and several scarves. A straggle of hair that looked first to be dirty mouse-brown, then silver-blond, then brown again, strayed into those staring eyes. Nor did the eyes stay the same from one moment to the next; they turned blue, then hazel, then back to amethyst-blue. Try as he would, the mage could not make his own eyes focus properly, and light from a lanthorn held high in one of the visitor's hands was doing nothing to alleviate his befuddlement. The mage had never seen a human that presented such a contradictory appearance. She (he?) was a shapeless bundle of filthy, lice-ridden rags; what flesh there was to be seen displayed the yellowgreen of healing bruises. Yet he had clearly seen gold pass to the hands of his landlord when that particular piece of human offal had unlocked the mage's door. Gold didn't come often to this part of town -- and it came far less often borne by a hand clothed in rags.