Arisaydia, you son of a bitch, Penric swore, internally. For the stable owner he managed a thin smile. What was left in Pen’s pockets wouldn’t hire a pony for a ride up and down the street.
He waited till he was out of earshot, stamping back up the road, to curse aloud. It didn’t relieve his feelings much. The blasted man hadn’t won wars, Pen supposed, by sitting around waiting for the battle to be brought to him. He should have remembered that.
He was smooth, agreed Des, unhelpfully. If he’d demanded that purse for his own hands, you wouldn’t have been near so quick to hand it across.
Pen growled.
And had Nikys agreed, or argued and been overridden? Gone along eagerly, or regretfully? Pen supposed the clench to his heart made no practical difference either way.
Returning to the inn, Pen cleared his case and sack from a room he could no longer afford, and tried to come up with his next scheme. Walking after his quarry in an attempt to overtake them would be futile. More futile, he suspected, would be catching them. Horse theft, even if a temporary borrowing, would be tricky. Not impossible, though. But if that was his plan, he needed to carry it out quickly.
He’d have to wait for nightfall to revisit the moneylenders of the gods in the temple, although raiding the same place twice in a row seemed imprudent. If anyone had noticed the sudden shortfall, they might set a watch tonight. Alternatively, he could give up and start walking to the coast. His worn Cedonian sandals were not his idea of marching gear, but he could replace them at the next town. Where there would be another temple, likely, although perhaps more impoverished. He gnawed a piece of dried fruit from his sack, and fumed.
Mulling feasibility, he hoisted his case and sack and returned to the first livery. It harbored more horses to choose from, but also more people about. Sneaking an animal out in broad daylight would certainly pose a challenge, even for a sorcerer. Waiting for the cover of darkness would be pointless, if the entire purpose was to catch Arisaydia and Nikys. If he were going east afoot, better to start now.
He stood concealed across the street in a niche between two whitewashed houses and, slowly, tore his own hopes in half. He’d done all he could. East it was.
A pair of coaches rolled up, noisy and dusty, each pulled by a lathered team of six. Someone had been paying for speed, to be sure. The ostlers and servants, interpreting the signs of impending largess, swarmed out to take charge. About to step forward, Pen instead jerked back, as the vehicles disgorged a troop of ten soldiers and a sergeant, a man in the loose white robes of the Bastard’s Order in Cedonia, and the all-too-familiar figure of Velka.
Heart hammering, Pen scrambled up the side of the house, fingers and toes scraping raw on stonework and sills, to take a concealed vantage on the flat roof, peering down into the street and a bit of the inn yard. Of course coaches. If Velka had tried to march a troop after Arisaydia, they wouldn’t be more than forty miles from Patos by now.
After some milling about and a rush on the livery’s privy, and the successful sale of some tankards of ale swiftly quaffed, the sergeant rounded up his men, counted them off, and sent them spreading out in pairs through the town. “You know what questions to ask by now,” he shouted after them. Penric bet he knew, too. Bastard’s teeth.
Velka, who bore a thin white bandage around his brow, was stiff and limping. It might be the lingering effects of Pen’s rough treatment of him three days ago at the villa, but the gray-bearded man in the rumpled whites moved almost as stiffly, so maybe it was just the coach. The glint of silver from the man’s shoulder braid would have told Pen what he needed to know even without Desdemona’s tight, Well, Pen. We have a colleague.
Can you tell anything more without revealing yourself?
Not yet.
Velka began interrogating the ostlers and servants, who answered readily, pointing in various directions. A handing-out of coins reduced the directions by maybe half. Penric wanted to thump his own head—their memory of his recent queries must send Velka on to the other livery much sooner than he would have found it otherwise. Although he would certainly have arrived there in due course. Arisaydia and Nikys couldn’t be more than ten miles up the track by now. Maybe there were a lot of possible side trails? Penric hoped for dozens.
It would take Velka some time to collect intelligence, decide on a course, hire or conscript thirteen riding horses. Though the sergeant was already bargaining with the inn servants to get his men a hasty meal, which might well be accomplished while horses were found and saddled. Their demands would strip this stable of mounts, apart from the dozen spent coach horses, useless to Pen. The Temple sorcerer passed within, perhaps looking to his own sustenance.
Velka would shortly know that Pen had been seen separately from Nikys and Arisaydia, and more recently. Pen wondered briefly if he should show himself to get them to chase after him instead? They could well catch him, he recognized ruefully, although they would soon regret doing so. But Velka had enough soldiers to split his forces if he were forced to. He only needed the sorcerer and a couple of men to go after Pen. The rest could ride south, unsparing of their mounts.
Arisaydia would fight to the death before allowing himself to be captured again, Pen suspected, and where would that leave Nikys? Fallen into the hands of some remnant of enraged men, out for revenge for their dead and wounded? Unless the twins should decide to travel together one last time. It seemed a horribly plausible nightmare either way.
Pen swallowed, swung back down the side of the building, collected his case and sack, and slipped through to the next street, not that Skirose had many streets to choose from. He loped west, parallel to but out of sight from the military road. Sneaking up opposite the small livery through someone’s scanty grove of olive trees, he spotted two of Velka’s men coming back already, marching double-time with their news.
He swore under his breath, waited until they’d angled out of sight, and darted across the road to the stable.
The stable boy rose in far too much alarm to be greeting a potential customer. Pen made one futile attempt to motion him to hush, then, as he turned, yelling and starting to run, tweaked the nerves in his legs and, as soon as possible, his throat. The lad recoiled in terror as Pen rolled him to the side of the aisle, whispering, “Sorry—sorry! It will wear off in a bit.” He hoped. He hadn’t as much time to prepare his strike as with the soldiers in the villa.
Only one horse was left, a rangy bay gelding turning restlessly in a box stall. Looks good, said Des. Its legs are even longer than yours.
It also had a spine like a sawblade; ten minutes of bareback trotting would slice a rider up the fork. Pen searched feverishly for a saddle and bridle, and saddlebags, into which he stuffed his case and sack. Back in the stall, he discovered the reason for the beast’s lonely state was that it was a biter. And a kicker. And generally uncooperative. At its second yellow-teethed snap, Des gave it a good sting on the nose, mysterious to it since the human it was trying to savage hadn’t touched it, and again at the third. It stopped trying after that.
Fitting the bit into its mouth involved ear-wrestling and a near-loss of valuable sorcerous fingers. Pen rechecked the girth—aye, it was a blower, too—and prudently mounted while still in the stall. He let Des undo the latch and swing open the door, and concentrated on keeping the animal’s head up on a short rein, and his head down instead of smacked into the door lintel, as it pronged out into the light of the afternoon.