Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [147]
Whit had been drawn off to help the Raintree men secure prisoners. He returned to Dag’s side and draped a blanket around his shoulders. Dag smiled up gratefully. Whit stared wide-eyed at the gray-faced Chicory. “Is he going to die?”
“Can’t say yet. Can you find me Remo or Barr? Where the blight have those two gone off to?”
“Back of the cave, I think. I’ll go check.”
“Thanks.”
Whit nodded and picked his way through the rubble. Dag thought his young tent-brother was holding up well, thrust into scenes of such lethal brutality for the first time in his life. He wouldn’t have sent Whit to assist Wain, though. Dag grimaced at the ugly thumps and yells from the interrogation going on over at the far side of the cave, cutting through the moans and groans.
Whit brought Barr and Remo back in a few minutes. The pair looked black indeed, and not only from their first experience with putting down farmer bandits.
Remo held up a sharing knife. “Look what we found back there.”
“Yeah, there’s a cache piled to the ceiling,” Whit put in, sounding amazed. “All the most valuable stuff, I guess.”
Dag squinted. The knife was unprimed. “Could it be Crane’s?”
“I found it in amongst what has to be a whole narrow-boatload of furs,” Remo said. “Looks like Crane’s crew didn’t always avoid Lakewalkers.”
Dag carefully set Chicory’s head between his knees and raised his blood-soaked hand to take the knife. Remo recoiled to see Dag’s sleeve wet with darkening red, but he reluctantly released the knife to the gory grip. Dag held it to his lips. Unprimed, yes. And with a peculiar stillness in its embedded involution.
“Whoever this knife was bonded to is dead now.” So, probably not Crane’s, though Dag supposed he could hope.
Barr, startled, said, “You can tell that?”
“My brother is a knife maker,” Dag said vaguely; the two patrollers’ brows rose in respect. “Keep this aside.” He handed it back.
Remo slipped the bone blade back into its sheath and hung the thong around his neck. As he hid it all inside his shirt, his voice hushed in outrage. “They must’ve murdered a Lakewalker without even letting him share!”
Or her. Dag didn’t want to think on that. There would have been women amongst the boat victims from time to time, but there weren’t any around now. Can’t let any run off to tell, Skink had claimed. Should Dag hope that they’d died quickly, and were his hopes worth spit?
Chicory’s drainage was clotting off again, blight it, the pressure in the blood pocket growing once more. “Did you find any sign at all of Crane?” Or of those mad Drum brothers who seemed to have become his principal lieutenants; Dag definitely wanted to locate them—dead, alive, or prisoners.
Barr shook his head. “Not within half a mile of here, anyway.”
“We have to find him. Take him.” And not only for his monstrous crimes. If the Lakewalker leader was not tried with the rest, perfunctory as Dag suspected the trial was going to be, the boatmen would always suspect the patrollers had colluded in his escape. “Blight it, what’s taking Wain so long…?”
As if in answer, Saddler crunched across the cave to stare down at Dag, shake his head in worry at Chicory, and report that all the bandits were accounted for but five. Two, it seemed, had left the night before last, cashing out their stakes and quitting the gang permanently, unable to stomach the Drum brothers’ grotesque cruelties any longer. Crane and his two lieutenants had left separately early the next morning, some hours before Alder had flagged down the Fetch. It had been a chance to the boatmen’s benefit, it seemed, because the bandit crew, bereft of their leader’s supervision, had broached some kegs Crane had been saving, and had been a lot drunker than usual this night.
So, up to five bandits still loose out there, including the worst of the bunch. Have we left enough men to guard the boats? Dag suddenly didn’t think so. But he dared not move his two charges yet, and besides, there would be no point jostling them up over the hill in litters