Irrial, apparently having taken his warnings to heart, was already back, waiting for him on the workbench.
"I'm afraid," he said, dropping hauberk and tabard in an untidy heap by the door, "that I didn't-Irrial! What's wrong?"
For he'd seen, finally, that the gaze she'd turned his way was harrowed, her face so terribly pale that her freckles stood out like blotches of rust, the dark circles beneath her eyes as gaping sockets.
"I think my cousin's dead, Cerris," she told him softly.
"What-Duke Halmon?" He'd meant to go to her, to comfort her, but found himself sitting down hard, all but falling, on a barrel across from the bench. "How…?"
"They're just rumors," she admitted, chewing the ends of her hair, "but so many…
"I spoke to friends and family of half the resistance," she said after a moment, regaining some measure of composure. "But nobody's heard from anyone. Either everyone left is hiding very quietly, or…" There was no need to finish. They both knew what or meant.
"It was while I was in the taverns," she continued, "that I heard the rumors. Some of the people the Cephirans have rounded up from other towns say that there's a reason beyond the normal squabbling that's keeping the Guilds and the nobility from responding to the invasion. They say a lot of Guildmasters and nobles have died recently. Including-including Halmon."
"I heard a little something about that," he said, deciding that now wasn't the time to mention precisely who had told him. "But I never heard anyone named, or I'd have told you. And they didn't say exactly what-"
"Murdered," she told him intently. "By Corvis Rebaine."
The barrel tilted beneath him. Cerris's legs twitched, his arms flailing as he struggled to keep his balance against what felt like a physical blow. "Wh-what did you say?"
She shook her head incredulously, misinterpreting the cause of his shock. "I know. Of all the times for that godsdamn bastard to crawl back out of his hole. If it's true, no wonder the nobles are so hesitant to give up their soldiers. And no wonder the Guilds are that much more determined to have them. This is all we bloody needed, isn't it?" Then, more softly, "Hasn't he hurt us enough?"
Cerris actually trembled, just a bit, his jaw hanging mute.
"Oh, Cerris, I'm sorry." Casting her own grief aside, she rose and laid a gentle arm about his shoulders. "You must be exhausted. Come, we've got some cots back here that'll do for the night. We can decide what to do tomorrow."
Numbly, he allowed the baroness to lead him across the room, to tuck the blankets around him as though he were a child. But despite a weariness so deep it pressed upon his soul, Cerris found sleep an elusive quarry for many hours to come.
"My sincerest apologies, good sir." The speaker had a greying beard and heavily lined face, but though his physique was running to fat, the peculiar rippling of his flesh suggested a powerful musculature beneath. He wore a leather apron scorched a dozen times over, and smelled strongly of smoke. "I didn't rightly expect it t' take me so long."
"Quite all right," the younger fellow replied as the blacksmith led him past the forge and into the workroom beyond. "I knew it was an unusual commission from the start." He grinned without much mirth. "I'd have to have been crazy not to, really."
The blacksmith wisely chose not to respond to that. "I know we've been over this," he said instead, "but I have t' ask once more. Are you certain this is what you want? You'll find no better armor'n mine, but those spikes you asked for… Someone strikes 'em at the wrong angle, they'll guide the blade right to you when it might've missed."
"I'm willing to take that chance. May I see it, please?"
A callused hand yanked away a heavy cotton blanket. Both men stood rigid, a faint chill running up both spines even though the younger had designed the abomination before them, and the elder had forged it.
Even unoccupied, it loomed, straining forward on the rack as though ready to wrap metal fingers around exposed throats. Black steel, white bone, spines sharp enough to skewer anyone who so much as looked at them wrong…
But it was the helm to which they were irresistibly drawn, rats staring up at a swaying serpent.
"If nothin' else," the old man offered with a forced chuckle, "nobody who sees you in this monstrosity's goin' to forget you anytime soon."
"That," the other said, "is entirely the point."
The gaping sockets of the iron-banded skull looked into their souls, and the jawbone laughed in silence. CERRIS AWOKE, blinking away the dream and the afterimages of that blasted skull, to find the blankets twisted into a veritable rope around his body. Obviously, his fatigue notwithstanding, he'd not experienced the most restful sleep.
'Why, it's almost as though you had something weighing on your mind.'
Disentangling himself and tossing the blankets to the floor, he sat up and peered blearily about. The light gleaming through the high windows and the sounds of the street outside suggested that he'd slept away not only the morning, but part of the afternoon as well. No surprise, that. As the various shocks and disappointments of the past days filtered slowly into his brain from wherever memories hid at night, he rolled off the cot, made quick use of the copper pan currently serving as a chamber pot, and stumbled halfway across the workroom. Then-limping on a newly aching toe and loudly cursing the leg of the workbench, but substantially more awake-he crossed the rest of the chamber, dipped a mug into a barrel of lukewarm water, and washed some of the nighttime grit from his mouth and throat.
And it was only then that his mind caught up with his senses, and he realized he was alone.
"Irrial?" And a bit more loudly, making a slow circuit of the room as though she might've been hiding behind a barrel. "Irrial? Are you here?"
Nothing.
All right, no reason to worry. She could be elsewhere in the shop, perhaps arranging with Elson or Rond to acquire some food. She might even have darted out for supplies, or to find out what was happening in the city, though he wished she'd waited for him to cloak her in another illusion. Or perhaps-
He stumbled to a halt at the far wall, where a polished sheet of brass hung as a makeshift mirror. A large pair of shears lay open on the floor, amid a scattered heap of auburn tresses. Cerris nudged it with his bare feet, seemingly unable to comprehend its presence. Despite the poking and prodding, the hair revealed nothing new.
Now, perhaps, it was time to start worrying. Obviously, whatever she was doing, she'd taken rudimentary steps to keep from being recognized, and that assuredly meant it was something Cerris didn't want her doing alone. He dressed swiftly, ready to go hunting for her, scooping up Sunder and reaching for-
The Cephiran hauberk and tabard were gone.
"Oh, gods…" Cerris burst through the door and pounded into the street, legs pumping, only just remembering to cloak himself in an illusory disguise. And if it proved insufficient, if any of the "Royal Soldiers" made to stop him, he'd cut them down. By pairs, by squads-it didn't matter.
Because he knew, as surely as if she'd tattooed a map into his flesh, exactly where Irrial was going.
'Ah, you're just pissed that she has the stones to do what you should have…'
Maybe he'd been blessed with an extra dollop of Panare's fortune that morning, or perhaps, after the past few days, the sight of a crimson-clad soldier racing pell-mell through the streets didn't draw much attention. Whatever the case, while he received more than his share of startled glances, nobody made any effort to stop him as he pounded across the cobblestones, twisting around or even leaping the occasional vendor's stall, until he finally arrived at Rahariem's Merchants' Guild.
He blew past the clerk at the desk-who may well have shouted a protest, but Cerris never heard it-and hurled doors from his path, sometimes hard enough to crack wood against an adjacent wall. A hired guard stepped into his path, more likely to ask his business than to stop him, but Cerris drove a knee into the man's groin and two fingers into his sternum, and was off and running once more before the man finished crumpling to the floor. Stairs flashed by beneath his feet, three, even four at a time, until he'd reached the highest floor. Around the corner, down the hall, praying he wasn't too late…