Fool’s Quest

I smiled. “I doubt that. They don’t remember Commander Ellik, either, I’ll wager. I think that each man will catch whatever he can and keep it for himself. Why come back to share with you? What good are you to them? Oh. Maybe the horses. They might come back to take the horses from you. And then they will leave you here.

“Tell me about the child you took. And the woman you tried to rape.” I spoke each word in careful Chalcedean.

He shook his head. “I didn’t. There was no little girl. We took only—”

I leaned forward. I smiled. “I think a rapist should look like a rapist instead of a handsome man.” I set my knife to the bottom of his left eye socket. He caught his breath and held very still, thinking it was a threat. Foolish man. I sliced him from eye socket to jaw. He shouted and thrashed away from me. Blood began to sheet down his jaw and the side of his neck. I saw his eyes roll back as he struggled not to faint from the pain. Fainting, I knew, has nothing to do with courage. The right amount of sharp pain and anyone will faint. I didn’t want him to become unconscious but I did want him to fear me. I leaned closer to him and set the tip of my knife to his groin. He knew now that some things were not merely threat.

“No!” he shouted and tried to scoot away.

“Tell me only about the woman in the red dress and the child with her.”

He took three slow, shallow breaths.

“Truth,” I suggested to him. I leaned on the knife a little. I keep my knives very sharp. It sliced the fabric of his trousers.

He tried to crawl backward in the snow. I leaned on it harder and he grew still.

“Tell me everything,” I suggested.

He looked at his groin. His breath was coming in small pants. “There were little girls there, at the house. Pandow has a taste for them. He raped one, perhaps more. I do not think he killed any of them. We did not take any of them.” He scowled suddenly. “We took very little from that house. I took the sword. But we only took two captives. A boy and his servant. That was all.” I saw confusion grow in his eyes as he tried to assemble his memories of the raid while not remembering Ellik.

“Where is the boy, and his servant?” My knife widened the slash in his trousers.

“The boy?” he said as if he could not recall what he had just told me. “The boy is gone. With the others who fled. They went in all directions, running and screaming.”

“Stop.” I held up a hand. “Say exactly what happened when you lost your captives. From the beginning.”

I lifted my knife blade and he took a long shuddering breath. But quick as a cat I sprang closer to him. I set the tip of the blade to the hollow beneath his eye on the good side of his face. He lifted his bloody hands to defend himself. “Don’t,” I suggested, and forced him to lie back in the snow. Then I cut him. Not deeply, but enough to wring a tiny shriek from him.

“Softly,” I said. “Now.”

“It was night. We were drunk. Celebrating.” He paused suddenly.

Did he think he would keep a secret from me? “Celebrating what?”

He took several breaths. “We had a prisoner. One that could do magic. Could make people not see us . . .” His voice trailed away as he tried to make sense of shredded and dangling recollections.

“I hate you,” I told him affably. “I enjoy hurting you. You might not want to give me an excuse to make you bleed more.” I cocked my head at him. “A rapist does not need to be handsome. A rapist does not need a nose. Or ears.”

He spoke quickly. “We had the soft man. The man who looks like a boy. Vindeliar. The one who can make you forget things. We’d separated him from the pale folk and convinced him to enjoy himself. To use his magic for things he might want to do. We wanted to make him like us and think we were his friends. And it worked. He was worth more to us than any of the others, more than anything they offered us. We were going to take them all back to Chalced, sell them in the market there but keep the magic-man.”

A bigger story here, but not one I cared about. “You were celebrating. Then what happened?”

“I wanted a woman. I should not have had to ask for one. They were plunder, I had a right to my share, and there were plenty of them. But we had not had them . . .” Again, his words dangled. With no Ellik to recall, he would not know why they were working for women, let alone why he had refrained from raping them. He scowled to himself. “I had to take the ugliest one. The one that most of us thought was probably not a woman at all. But that was the only one . . .” Again he paused in puzzlement. I let him try to gather his threads.