K M Frontain, page 13
“Why run?” he said. “Isn’t this what you do for a living?”
“I choose to whom I render my services,” Vik said frigidly. “I choose! And I don’t choose some menacing stranger who frightens highborn lords out of his door. Who the hells are you?”
“Your next lover, of course,” the other said with certainty. He moved forward again.
Staring at him in amazement, Vik forgot about running. Hands rose, clasped his head and drew him closer. The enemy’s lips were warm on his flesh, but with their touch, the chill in Vik’s centre seemed to become a solid mass of foreboding. He snatched at the unwelcome hands, but his suitor clutched at his wrists and held him fast, the lips now twisting into a mocking sneer.
“Is that the type you are? The kind who like to protest? Who like rough treatment?”
“No! I don’t enjoy pain!” Vik performed a quick manoeuvre Wilf had taught him and freed his arms. He backed off several feet, rubbing his wrenched wrists while the man regarded him darkly. “Is that the type you are? Someone who likes to give pain?” Vik demanded in turn. “You should visit Someren’s establishment. I gave him a fine black eye earlier.”
“Did you?” came an interested reply.
“We are perhaps mismatched,” he suggested.
“I think not,” the other denied. “I don’t like overly perfumed men who pretend to be women.”
The youth’s expression took on a confused cast. Marun remained where he was, watching closely. The boy’s cheeks had flushed from the confrontation and the heat. The high wind whipped his straw hair about, blinding him regularly, occasionally veiling a fine straight nose beneath pale blue eyes. The brows above arched with more elegance than could be found on most peers of the realm, and to the south, the cleft in the chin was at once delicate and manly. His bottom lip was a perfect expanse of subtle pink, the top a set of thin, but sweet curves that gave a hint of arrogance to the expression. Pleasantly, there were no signs of cosmetics on the boy’s skin to mar this perfection. He was faultless, the perfect angel. Astabe could be lauded for his choice.
“What is your name?” Marun asked.
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Vik eyed him uneasily, thinking again he should just run.
“What are you worried about?” the enemy posed. “I am a poor host for not making introductions at once, and therefore hardly worthy as your suitor. Tell me your name, at least, before you show me your fine backside running from my view.”
“Your sarcasm is hardly soothing my apprehension,” Vik replied witheringly.
“Then I’ll curb my poor temper. I apologise. Most abjectly. Please, tell me your name.”
Looking at him uncertainly, Vik opened his mouth to answer, but an unexpected interruption ensued, and also a discovery most unnerving and unanticipated.
“Shut your mouth!” a familiar voice shouted from the direction of the manor.
Vik looked upward in surprise. His eyes bugged. “Kehfrey?”
Was he dreaming? Was that his dead brother’s ghost standing in the doorway wearing a towel?
A towel?
“Kehfrey?” he cried again.
“Don’t give him your name, fool! He’s a sorcerer! He uses names to make slaves of people!” the false ghost hollered.
“Kehfrey!” Vik shouted a third time and rushed past the stunned sorcerer. He darted up the steps toward his brother. “You’re alive!”
“Of course I’m alive. The bloody stone worked.”
Vik ignored this strange answer and hauled Kehfrey up, towel and all.
“We’re getting out of here!” He turned with his brother in his arms, only to find the sorcerer standing below and looking up at them coldly.
“So. Someren’s little visit to Rhet was no coincidence,” he said icily.
“No, it wasn’t.” Vik set Kehfrey down and slapped his right forearm.
A dagger appeared in his hand.
Marun eyed the weapon without a sign of worry. “That’s what I felt attached to your wrist earlier. Interesting contraption.”
“And effective,” Vik said frostily. “Back off.”
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“Of what interest is this boy to you?” the enemy demanded without moving.
“He’s my brother,” he said tightly.
“Your brother?” Marun looked at Kehfrey, weighing what he saw all over again. “It would appear that your family worries over you as much as you them,” he remarked presently, and stepped upward, all trace of displeasure vanished from his features. Even so, Vik crouched, ready to gut him. “That won’t hurt me,” Marun said, and then walked by the two without looking at them. “Come back inside, Kehfrey.”
As Vik straightened in confusion, Kehfrey stomped back in the house, slapping his bare feet grumpily on the marble floor. “What do you mean it won’t hurt you?” he said.
“Kehfrey!” Vik cried. He rushed into the manor and snatched the boy’s arm, at once commencing to haul him away.
“Leave off, Vik!”
“No! You’re coming home!”
“He is home!” the sorcerer barked, turning in the middle of the hall.
Vik paused to gape at him. “What the hells are you on about?”
“The boy is mine now,” he said flatly.
“What? He’s what?” Vik stepped forward, the dagger rising upward.
He ignored the strange icy cold that flooded the hall. “You fucking baby fondler!”
Kehfrey tried to correct his brother. “Vik, don’t! He’s not into that.”
Vik shoved him backward once again. “Kehfrey, get out of this house!”
“He’s not into that! He said so! It’s true!”
Marun’s gaze darted down to the boy and conveyed a brief flash of puzzlement. Contempt quickly replaced it when his regard reverted to Kehfrey’s brother. “I don’t bugger children. I have other uses for the boy.”
“Such as what?” Vik challenged.
“He might make a fine apprentice,” the sorcerer informed the youth.
The statement stunned both brothers. While they were mentally preoccupied by this pronouncement, Marun took the opportunity to inspect each bewildered face. Kehfrey’s bath had cleaned him up nicely, 105
as he’d hoped. Perhaps better than he’d hoped. The urchin was actually a beautiful child, bearing a definite resemblance to the elder brother. He could see it now that he’d been alerted, but the younger didn’t have the cleft in the chin and his nose was delicately hooked rather than straight.
But the lips, the lips were the same combination of sweetness and arrogance.
“Are all the members of your family this beautiful?” curiosity prompted Marun to ask.
Kehfrey snorted and stomped back up to Vik’s side. “Except for Gamis,” he said ungenerously. “He’s an ugly butthead.”
“Kehfrey!” Vik pulled the boy back behind him, his eyes never leaving the enemy, to whom he said, “We’re going home. I don’t care what use you think you have for him.”
“Leave off, Vik,” Kehfrey said impatiently. “I made a deal with him to keep the rest of you safe.”
Vik straightened and gaped as the child thrust forward again. “What?
What deal?”
“I believe he wishes to negotiate an alliance with the Syndicate for me,” Marun said with a wry voice.
“Shit! You told him about the Syndicate?” Vik cried, aghast over his brother’s imprudence.
“No. He didn’t,” Marun denied. “The thief my assassins caught last night told me. Would you like to see what’s left of him?”
The siblings eyed him warily. “Would we like to see it?” Kehfrey asked in turn.
Marun smiled coldly. “Probably not. But a look might be useful. The Syndicate might find your reports educational during the negotiations.”
Kehfrey lifted the towel up higher around his chest. “Fine. Lead on,”
he said, accepting the challenge.
Marun smiled again, a sort of amused and sardonic uplift of one corner of his mouth. He turned away.
“No!” Vik rejected.
“Oh, come on!” Kehfrey called. He flounced off after the sorcerer, pulling his long towel up heroically when it slipped again. Lips pressed thinly in trepidation and disapproval, Vik shoved his dagger into its hidden sheath, and stalked after his intrepid but very foolish brother, 106
thinking he was as foolish for following. But with the Syndicate’s existence tossed out into the open, he felt he had no choice but to stay and brazen out the dangerous game into which Kehfrey had fallen.
The sorcerer led them toward the kitchen. As he opened the door, a silence descended on the space, a domain of metal pots and implements that hung practically everywhere against a backdrop of wood washed to dullness. The master ignored the cook and his helpers. Following in on Kehfrey’s footsteps, Vik noticed there wasn’t a woman amongst the staff, who were of various ages to be certain, but none female. Marun walked out of the kitchen through another door on the further side. The next corridor boasted a series of windows that afforded a view of the kitchen garden. Within this bright passage, Marun approached yet another door.
This one was fashioned from heavy oak and had a bar athwart it.
“You have a prison in the manor?” Kehfrey said.
“This is the wine cellar,” Marun told him.
“What’s it doing with a bar on the outside?”
“You will see,” the sorcerer answered ominously.
He lifted the bar off the hooks and let it drop. It swung down and thudded to the side of the door. The loud knell sounded like a knocker meant to alert the occupants within. What occupants there might be in that cellar, the brothers had no idea. Only grim imaginings came to mind.
The sorcerer pushed the latch and opened the door, afterward descending into the darkness without hesitation. Kehfrey paused and then scurried after him. Swearing beneath his breath, Vik followed, grabbing the boy by the shoulder to slow his progress to a more cautious one.
“It’s nice and cool down here,” Kehfrey remarked. “Where have you gone?”
His master’s voice wandered the darkness to them, a muffled sound in the fetid gloom. “Here,” he said.
Both brothers hesitated at the bottom, neither of them liking the smell or the obscurity. “Well, that’s useful. Where’s here?” the younger said.
A green flame erupted in the darkness. Kehfrey blinked in
astonishment. Marun stood in the centre of a wide aisle made of old barrels, a witch flame in the palm of his right hand. “Come forward,” he said.
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“He’s going to kill us!” Vik hissed. His words carried despite the softness with which they were uttered.
“I will not,” the sorcerer denied, and strode back toward them. Vik at once pulled Kehfrey behind himself. The enemy’s lips curled upward scornfully. The man halted before Vik and held the uncanny flame higher.
The light transformed the youth’s flaxen hair into a green horror and cast a glow over his skin that made him ghastly to look upon. He seemed a pale-eyed corpse within the radiance. But oddly, the witch light had turned Kehfrey’s ginger hair a luscious brown and his fair skin had become as verdant as leaves. He gave the illusion of a glowing wood sprite come down into the dark with them. It was as if the illumination collected over him, as if he attracted it. Odd.
“As I stated already, I have uses for the boy,” Marun said, dragging his eyes away from the child. “And as for you…” He grabbed Vik by the back of the neck and pulled him forward, to bestow upon him a rough and demanding kiss. Vik gasped against his lips, but shortly managed to shove him away.
“Get off my brother’s face!” little Kehfrey shouted, an outraged defender oblivious of his minuscule size. “You don’t just grab him!”
“Don’t I?” Marun replied, his mouth forming another of his small, sinister smiles.
“No!” the boy affirmed.
“What do I do, then?”
“Uh—!” Kehfrey fumbled, surprised an adult should pose such a direct question about an undisclosed activity.
“Oh, leave off!” Vik protested. “He’s only a little boy!”
“He’s unusually precocious, wouldn’t you say?” Marun observed.
Vik glowered at him, unable to refute this, uncertain he should.
Kehfrey’s precocity might be all that saved them from this disaster.
Seeing that his challenge wasn’t to be met, Marun turned his back on them and walked down the aisle a second time. “Come now!” he said.
Kehfrey looked up at his brother, shrugged away his unease and walked forward resolutely. Not so easily brave, Vik hissed between his teeth and followed. The sorcerer had stopped where he’d been standing previously. The brothers approached warily. Neither of them saw a dead 108
thief anywhere, at least not in the weird light glowing above the sorcerer’s palm.
“So. This is educational,” Kehfrey said.
The master looked down at him witheringly. “Have patience, brat.
He’s in the dark for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“The dead don’t enjoy the light.”
Kehfrey and Vik gaped at him; then they heard the shuffling. Marun smiled at their shocked faces. Vik was first to turn his head and see them.
He choked on his own spit trying to scream. The moment Kehfrey became aware of the others, he lost his towel, his fingers having gone useless with fear. And suddenly the green luminosity seemed to scatter from him. He stood naked and white in the gloom, his skin seeming as dead as the two thieves shuffling toward them. Marun stared at the child in fascination, but the boy only had eyes for the approaching horrors.
Mur’s ghoul was in better shape. Ofmen’s was accountable for the shuffling noise. His corpse hauled itself toward them, both legs missing up to the knees. The hands held the remains of severed limbs. The joints scraped across floor, only a few strips of flesh yet hanging off the bone.
Kehfrey stared at bloody mouths and realized where the flesh of the thief’s legs had gone.
“I’ve seen enough now!” he blurted. It seemed to him he heard a distant thud. He hoped it wasn’t the door shutting them in.
“Are you sure?” Marun said.
“Yes!” he squeaked.
“Best pick up your towel, then,” his master suggested.
“They might get me if I look down!”
“I don’t think so. See? They’re holding still now.”
Kehfrey grasped that the horrors were indeed motionless. They had stopped between two stands of barrels at least seven feet away. “Why did they stop?” he said breathily.
“I willed them to,” the master informed him.
“Right.” Carefully, he knelt and groped for his towel without looking.
It was at this moment he realized Vik was missing from his side. “Vik!”
he cried. Then he noticed his brother sprawled to the side. “Vik?”
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“He fainted,” Marun told him.
Kehfrey looked up. The sorcerer’s face betrayed a glint of cold humour. “You think that’s funny?” the boy said petulantly.
“Yes. You didn’t faint, and you’re only a little boy.”
“Of course, I didn’t faint!”
“Why not?”
Kehfrey looked up at him blankly. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He pulled his towel around his waist and shivered in the cold air. “Can we go now?”
“Hold out your hand,” his master commanded.
“Why?”
“Do it!” Marun snapped.
The shadows in the room swelled around them, and Kehfrey heard the ghouls groan in a fashion suggestive of pleasure. He held out his hand quickly. Marun lowered his right hand and deposited the witch light onto the child’s unsteady palm.
“Keep it as high as you can,” he said.
Kehfrey lifted his arm obediently. The sorcerer stared at him as if he were perplexed. “Should I hold it higher?” the boy said.
His master didn’t answer. Upon accepting the flame, Kehfrey had turned into a woodland sprite again. Marun could fathom no reason for this effect. After a moment, he bent down and lifted Vik. He carried the youth toward the stairs.
Kehfrey rushed after him, glancing back to be certain the ghouls didn’t follow. He was almost on Marun’s heels as the man ascended the steps. When they walked out of the open entrance, Kehfrey realized it hadn’t been the door he had heard thud while they were in the wine cellar. It had been Vik falling to the earth.
Marun directed Kehfrey to shut the thick door and bar it again, but after shutting the door only, the boy stood indecisively with the witch light still in his palm, uncertain what to do with it. The bar was too heavy for him to lift with only one hand.
“Put the light out,” the sorcerer snapped at him.
Kehfrey looked up at him questioningly, but Marun did not speak further, merely watched narrowly without offering a suggestion how to 110
go about dousing the unnatural fire. Slowly, Kehfrey closed his fingers around the green flame. He shivered and then bared his palm again.
There was nothing in it. Quickly, he pulled the bar up and onto the holders, losing his towel in the process. He snatched the cloth up at once, but the master had already turned away and was marching out the further door, turning sideways so that Vik’s head wasn’t knocked.
“Where are we going now?” Kehfrey asked him, catching up in the kitchen. They both ignored the silent, fearful servants.
“You are going back to your room,” the sorcerer said coldly.
“What about my brother?”
“You will not concern yourself about him.”
“That’s not likely, is it? He’s my brother. Are you going to hurt him?”
“No.”
“But you hurt Ofmen. You like hurting people.”
Marun halted and glared down at him. “I like hurting my enemies.
Are you and your brother my enemies?”
Kehfrey stalled before him and shook his head firmly. Still scowling, Marun turned away once more. Kehfrey pursued him up the main stairs, but he stopped before his door and watched from there as Marun continue on to his own. Just before he reached it, Kehfrey shouted at him.
