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2

The Apprentice Warrior

It is easy to fly into a passion—anybody can do that—but to be angry with the right person and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way—that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.  

—Aristotle

When it comes to throwing a fit, it's better to give than to receive—and much the best to avoid the whole thing entirely.  

—Walter Slovotsky

 

The air in the thatch hut was cool and quiet; the killing had been over a long time. But it didn't feel that way. It hadn't felt that way before, and it didn't now.

"Ta havath, Jason," the dwarf said. Literally, it was the verb to maintain in Erendra, but it meant take it easy. Relax. Don't get excited. "It happened a long time ago." His voice was quiet, but rasping, the sound of an old saw, still sharp.

"Too long," Jason Cullinane said, bending to feel at the rotting straw covering the floor. Soggy, more than half-rotted, it had not been changed in many tendays.

The shack was dark, and quiet, and no longer reeked of death, as though it never had. If anything, it smelled too good. The damp, musty reek of the thatch overhead, the fresh wind blowing in the open door and out through the torn greased paper that had covered the window, and the cool smells of the forest all combined with the rotting straw in a way that was disturbingly pleasant.

It should have smelled of death.

An old man and an old woman had been killed here, murdered here.

By my best friend, he thought. Mikyn . . . 

Enough. Straightening, he turned to the dwarf. Ahira's easy good humor hadn't deserted him, not even here and now as he stood where morning sunlight splashed golden on the rotting straw. There was nothing of a broad smile on his face, but just a trace peeked through his black beard. It held something of reassurance in it, perhaps, and perhaps more than something of an announcement, perhaps something of a warning.

It said, I have dealt with worse than this, and this too I will deal with. 

Jason envied his self-assurance.

"There's nothing more we can do here," Ahira said.

"More?"

Ahira's laugh might have been forced, or perhaps not. It was hard to tell, "Nothing, then."

They exited into the too-bright sunlight. Nareen was waiting out there, floating comfortably in the air above the three battered rucksacks. The wind kept the grasses waving gently, like the Cirric on a quiet day, but it didn't appear to affect Nareen. Little did.

His appearance was exceptional for a dwarf. While he had the large bones and even larger joints of his breed, Nareen lacked the huge bundles of muscle that generally wrapped around a dwarf's bones. His skin hung on him loosely, as though he was somehow deflated. Instead of the gentle rounding that softened the harsh bones of Ahira's face into something warm and familiar, Nareen's cheekbones and eye ridges kept his look almost skeletal. It was like having a skull looking out at you, and Jason didn't like it much at all.

"There is, I take it, no sign of your friend?"

Jason shook his head. "None." He had hoped to find some trace of Mikyn, something he had left behind, something that Nareen could use to trace him, but it had been unlikely, and it was too much to ask. But maybe, just maybe.

He had the beginning of an idea, but it was one that scared him silly. It probably required more cleverness, or more fighting skills, than he would ever have. But it made sense, at least on one level, and it was the sort of thing that Walter Slovotsky would think of.

Purely logical: who else was looking for Mikyn? The Slavers Guild was, and they were based in Pandathaway. That might be the place to find out where Mikyn was—although it was also a place where Jason and Ahira were wanted, dead or alive. It would take much trickiness to get in and out alive. More of a Walter Slovotsky thing than a Jason Cullinane thing.

Leave it be, for the time being.

 

 

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