The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [145]
“Done, then. You have my pledged word.”
It was getting on toward dawn before Nevyn slept that night. First he heard what Salamander, Jill, and Rhodry had to say about their time in Bardek; then he shooed everyone out and closeted himself with Gwin for hours. Although Gwin had never risen far in the hierarchy of the assassin’s guild—he had little talent for dweomer though a lot for killing—he had spent most of his life as a Hawk, ever since he’d stumbled onto the guild’s existence as a runaway slaveboy of ten. He knew names, and places, and secret signs and rituals; he’d overheard scraps of plans and details of feuds within the Brotherhood; he was also willing to spill every one of them, searching through every corner of his well-trained memory as he sat on the floor in Nevyn’s chamber. He had made his change of loyalties as ruthlessly and scrupulously as he would have carried out a mass murder before, yet Nevyn could see that the change had nothing to do with honor and precious little with moral principles. Gwin only knew that his whole life had been a tangle of suffering, and that his love for Rhodry, a feeling both blind and wise, was his one last chance to cut that tangle and win free. Nevyn was more than willing to use any weapon that would get anyone free of evil, just as he would never scorn a medicinal that would save a patient just because it didn’t happen to be mentioned in the best herbal s.
“Now this is the most important thing of all,” Nevyn said finally. “Do you know where the Old One lives?”
“I do and I don’t. They don’t tell lowly journeymen like me all the details, but I know he got that estate from the archons of Vardeth.”
“Ye gods! It can’t be all that far away!”
“Just that. You know, my lord, I keep thinking that he drew us here, like. That we’ve been thinking we’re as clever as clever, but all the time he’s been drawing us in like a spider that’s got a wrapped fly on a thread.”
“You’ve been spending too much time around Salamander and his lurid imagination.”
“Maybe. It’s just that you hear all these rumors about the Old One. Even my master back in Valanth used to say that half of what you heard couldn’t be true, but he didn’t know the false half from the real one. But then, the stinking Brotherhood never told us more than the bare bones of what we needed for a job.”
“You know, I hadn’t realized just how much the Hawks hated the Brotherhood. Back in Deverry we always assumed you worked hand in hand.”
“Only when we were paid to, my lord. They say that the Brotherhood founded the Hawks, hundreds of years ago, back when there was plague in the islands and everything was a proper mess and the archons were too frantic to worry about a dark lodge or two, but I don’t know if it’s true or not. If it is, they parted company soon enough.”
“That was probably inevitable.”
“Probably.” Gwin looked up, his eyes brimming pain. “My lord, can you cure Rhodry? Can you undo what that swine did to him?”
Nevyn considered—briefly—telling some reassuring he.
“I don’t know. I won’t know until I try, and I won’t be able to try until we’ve disposed of the Old One. I’ll need time, and I’ll need to concentrate. Wondering if assassins or evil dweomermen are going to drop out of the sky upon you tends to ruin a man’s ability to pay attention to his work.”
Gwin smiled, a twitch of his mouth with no real humor in it.
“Gwin, you must have seen what happened. I take it Baruma was mostly using physical pain to break down Rhodry’s defenses.”
“He was, but he tried to use shame for a weapon, too. He started torturing Rhodry when we were still in Slaith, and all the pirates would stand around and watch. They thought it was a bit of fun to see just how much pain the silver dagger could take.” His voice was so conversational and ordinary that it was chilling. “They were laying