Captain's Fury

Chapter 58

The crowbegotten crowd kept on screaming his name, and Tavi wanted to tear his hair out in pure frustration.

Arnos was getting away.

The Senator had vanished from his spot on the wall, and Tavi spotted him heading into the crowd, lifting the hood of his practical brown cape. That explained why he'd worn the simple traveling clothes instead of the expensive robes, then.

Tavi pointed at him and shouted at his men to pursue Arnos, and the roar of the crowd grew louder. No one set off in pursuit, though, and Arnos was headed into the thickest part of the crowd.

Tavi turned to Kitai and screamed her name.

There was no way she could have heard his call, not over the furor of the crowd, but her head snapped around toward him, her features set in concern.

Tavi flashed her hand signs for enemy and fleeing and pursue. Then he pointed at Arnos.

Kitai's eyes widened, and she turned her head, following the line indicated by Tavi's finger. Her eyes narrowed, and she shouted into the ears of the Marat near her. The barbarians rose and began bounding from one roof and ruined wall to the next, lithe and agile as hunting cats.

One of them landed in the circle of space the detachment of the Battlecrows had cleared for his mother and shouted something to Ehren. Then he rushed into the crowd.

Tavi signaled him with stay and defend, and trusted him to work out that he was to stay with Isana.

Ehren nodded and signed back understood, which happened to be a motion very like a Legion salute, and stepped closer to Isana, who looked distracted and preoccupied. Little wonder. Even up on the roof, the storm of emotion in the crowd below was grating against Tavi's senses. His mother must have been half-unconscious from it.

Tavi turned and looked at the wall, where Araris waited. He'd never actually made a leap of that distance before tonight, and his ability to jump so far had been strictly theoretical until he'd actually done it. He wondered if he'd be able to do it without a murderous maniac at his back to encourage him.

No help for it. He'd never get through the still-roaring crowd on the ground.

So he focused on his intentions, drew strength from the stone beneath him, speed from the night breeze, and hurtled back across the same space to the battlements.

He'd leapt too hard, and he slammed into a massive stone merlon before he could stop himself. His armor soaked up much of the impact, and he pushed away from the stone as Araris came to his side.

"Amos!" Tavi wheezed.

Araris nodded once, his eyes intent on the crowd below. "I see him."

"Go," Tavi said.

Araris broke into a run, moving down the battlements, and Tavi followed him, peering down at the crowd, until he saw the brown-cloaked hooded figure roughly pushing his way through them, heading for the far side of the ruined city.

Then Arnos stopped in his tracks and began backpedaling. Tavi looked past him, and saw a pair of Marat crouched on a wall ahead of Arnos, their dyed manes blowing in the wind.

"Here!" Tavi said. He turned to another ladder mounted on the wall, took a few rungs normally, then clamped his boots to the outside of the ladder and slid rapidly down it, until he hit the ground. He turned and hadn't gone two steps before Araris hit the ground behind him. The singulare sprinted past Tavi, drew his sword, and ran forward, striking at the stones of the ground as he went. Each strike sent out a shower of sparks, a flash of light, and Araris bellowed, "Make way!" as he went.

The crowd parted before him.

Tavi moved forward, taking his cue from the Marat, who had formed a slowly tightening ring around Arnos in a classic hunting technique. None of them, he noted, were actually attempting to apprehend the Senator. The Marat had a strong sense of the appropriate. Arnos was Tavi's enemy, foremost. Barring any practical considerations that might alter the situation, they would leave it to Tavi to deal with him.

Tavi caught up with Arnos as the panting Senator shoved through a group of camp followers, knocking an old peddler over, and seized a woman by the arms. He shook her, snarling something at her Tavi could not make out over the noise.

"Guntus Arnos!" Tavi bellowed.

Arnos's head snapped around. He bared his teeth, his eyes desperate, and hauled the woman around, putting her body between his own and Tavi's, holding her by the hair. He drew a dagger in his other hand and held it to the woman's throat.

"This wasn't the plan!" Arnos shouted.

Araris took a few steps to the left, and Tavi to the right. Tavi had drawn his sword again at some point. He realized, with a little shock of recognition, that the woman was the First Spear's companion. The noise of the legionares and civilians around them became confused and began to dwindle.

"It's over, Arnos!" Tavi said. "Put the knife down!"

"I won't," Arnos spat. "I won't. It isn't going to end like this."

"Yes," Tavi replied. "It is. Let the woman go."

"Madness!" Arnos cried, shaking the woman's head through his grip on her hair. "Madness! You can't let this go on! You can-"

Suddenly both Arnos and the woman jerked, and the steel head of a Canim balest bolt erupted from her chest.

The woman's face went white, and her eyes rolled back in her head. Her knees gave way, and she melted slowly to the ground, her arms spread to her sides, her open mouth to the sky.

Arnos stood in place behind her, and the dagger fell from his fingers. He looked down at the blood flooding from the hole in his chest, where the bolt that had spitted them both emerged. He screamed, a sound full of protest and terror. It was a breathless scream, one with no strength, and his hands scrabbled at his chest, as if he thought he could brush the wound away if only he acted quickly enough.

Tavi walked over to him, Araris at his back.

Arnos was letting out desperate little grunting coughs, and blood bubbled from his lips as he did. His hands kept moving, but his fingers seemed to have gone limp, and he was only slapping uselessly at his lifeblood as it spilled from the massive wound the Canim projectile had left in his chest.

Tavi flashed signals to the Marat. Archer. That way. Find.

The barbarians loped into the ruins, eyes bright. Their night vision would give the unseen assassin nowhere to hide.

"Healer!" Tavi bellowed. "Now!"

Amos turned a look of pathetic gratitude on Tavi, reaching out with his useless hands to grasp at the young man.

Tavi slapped Arnos's hands away with one motion and dealt him a contemptuous blow to the face with the back of his hand with the next. Amos fell to the ground and landed on his side, shaking his head. He tried to speak, but blood strangled whatever he'd been going to say.

"For the woman. Not for you." Tavi squatted next to Arnos, and said, "I'm doing you a kindness you probably don't deserve, Senator. This is a better death than the Canim would give you."

Arnos's head jerked, and his eyes went out of focus. He made a few thrashing movements, his expression twisting, knotting, becoming absolutely agonized. Tavi didn't want to feel the man's terror and pain and confusion, but he still did. Logically, his actions had merited far more than what he had received-but he was still human, still Tavi's countryman, and someone who, in a perfect world, Tavi would have protected from his own ambition.

Arnos died there in a pool of his own blood, frightened and friendless and broken.

Tavi wouldn't lose any time mourning the fool-but he regretted the needless deaths of so many Alerans. Even the Senator's.

Things like that shouldn't happen to anyone.

Tavi pulled Arnos's cloak over his face and head, and asked Araris, "How is she?"

"Not good," Araris said. He'd torn off his cape, folded it into a pad, and had it pressed hard against her back. "Pulse is thready. I think she's got a hole in her lung, and she might be bleeding into it. We don't dare move her, and-" Araris froze for a second, then leaned forward, his nostrils flared.

"What is it?"

"I think… I think this bolt was poisoned."

Tavi leaned down and sniffed himself. There was a faintly corrupt odor from the wound in the front of the domestic's body, underlying a sharper, almost lemony scent. "That's heartfire," he said. "Master Killian taught us to recognize it. It speeds up the victim's heart until it bursts. Blinds them, too. I don't know what the other scent is."

"Rancid garic oil," Araris said.

"I've only read about that. Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure."

"Crows," Tavi said. "She's the First Spear's woman."

Araris shook his head. "Bad bloody luck."

"This way!" called Kitai from behind them. A moment later, she arrived leading a score of Marat and a trio of weary-looking healers, including Tribune Foss.

The bearish Tribune immediately examined the wound and listened as Tavi explained about the poison. Then he and the other healers loaded the woman onto a stretcher as gently as they could and carried her away, while the Marat took position around Tavi.

Tavi watched them go and rubbed at his forehead with one hand. "Get me two horses. Tie the late Senator over one of them."

"You can't ride out to the Canim," Araris said. "They aren't dealing in good faith. Look what they just did to Arnos."

Tavi shook his head and rose. He held out one hand, and said, "Arnos was about this tall."

"Yes," Araris said.

"And the woman was bent back, with the top of her head level with his."

"Yes."

"Arnos's wound was in the center of his chest. Hers was in the same spot, but more to the right, because of where she was standing." Tavi extended a finger in a straight line. "The bolt was traveling horizontally and fast enough to pierce them both. Which means it was fired from fairly short range, from inside the walls."

Araris followed the line of reasoning. "You don't think the Canim did this."

Kitai came to stand beside Tavi. "He thinks Alerans are far more capable than the Canim are when it comes to treachery and back-shooting," she said quietly. "He's right."

Tavi found her warm hand with his, and squeezed tight. She returned it, gripping hard.

"Which leaves us with a question for which we have no answer," Tavi said.

Araris nodded. "If not the Canim," he murmured, "then who did it?"