“What?”
“Now if there was ever a repressed lot in life, it’s temple paladins, and frankly, I don’t care what you may have done. But if you start getting all tangled up about our Slate, and I come back one fine evening and discover that you chopped her into little pieces, I am going to bepissed.”
The knight raked a hand through his hair. “Are you—mygod, you’re not serious!”
Can’t he just wave his knife around and say, “I saw her first!” like normal men?
“I’m very serious,” said Brenner, in a voice that was low and almost friendly, the paladin’s voice through a black mirror. “Killing I know very well. And believe me, my fine knight-champion, I can make you die slow.”
“I would never—” He groped for a phrase, found “randomly dismember Slate” on his tongue, and couldn’t get it out.
Well, I wouldn’t.
“Never? Seems to me you did it once already.” The assassin was circling him now, still with the knife out. Caliban realized that he was no longer sure that Brenner wasn’t just going to kill him. “Oh, excuse me.Eighttimes.”
“I was possessed!” the knight shouted.
“I don’t believe you,”said Brenner.
Caliban drew steel. Brenner came up on his toes with a wild smile on his face.
They circled each other, once, twice.
“It’s a neat trick,” said Brenner. “The demonic voice thing almost had me fooled. But I don’t buy it. Probably you got a tastefor killing people you claimed were possessed. You killed those people, and you enjoyed it and you found an excuse that kept your neck out of the noose—”
“Burning,” rasped Caliban. “The punishment for apostate paladins is burning at the stake.”
“Then I don’t blame you for trying to avoid it,” said Brenner, grinning, “but you’re not trying it on our Slate.”
He made a sudden dash forward. Caliban fended him off with a sweep of the sword.
A net dropped over both of them.
Caliban’s first thought was that this was some trick of Brenner’s. Then he saw the assassin was also struggling under a net.
His second, wilder thought was:Couldn’t Slate find a bucket of water to throw on us?
He tried to get his sword the rest of the way out of the sheath. A foot stepped on his hand—no, it was a hoof?—and someone kicked him in the ribs. A few feet away, Brenner was being relieved of his knife in a similar fashion.
Someone green stepped into his field of vision. Caliban looked up into a face that wasn’t human, and the sharp end of a sword.
There was a loud and unmistakableshiing!of steel being drawn and someone shouted.
Aw, shit. Brenner really did try to kill him.
Slate snatched up her knife and ran for the river, Learned Edmund hot on her heels.
Hell if I know what I’ll do once I get there. Help whoever’s losing, maybe. Shit, shit, shit…
She dodged around trees, skidding through the mat of pine needles.Goddamn, how far away did they go?
A minute later she slowed. “This is crazy. Where are they? No one would go this far for water.” The sounds of a struggle had ended almost as soon as they’d begun, and now only silence greeted them.
“Brenner! Caliban!Where are you?”
No reply.
“Brennerrrrr! Helloooo!”
