Arvid wished he’d gone back up—ambushing these two would be easier up there and quieter, too. But he would not have left the child behind.
Now the footsteps were loud, on the same floor; they did not immediately head for the next ramp but approached the south wall … and he had to make his move.
A bolt from his crossbow took the first one in the neck; before he hit the floor, Arvid was on the second, a choke hold and the tip of a dagger laid under the man’s nose. “Come quietly,” he said. “Or die.”
“Grrhgh—”
“Quietly.” He let the dagger tip dig into the sensitive point under the nose, and the man made no more noise. Arvid manhandled him around the corner, into the angle of the wool sacks, and shoved him facedown into the sacks, where any cries would be muffled. He moved the knife point to below the man’s ear “Quiet and still,” he said again. The man obeyed, but his muscles were stiff with either fear or anger.
No matter. Arvid had dealt with such men before. Soon he had the man trussed so he could not kick the floor and gagged so he could not yell, braced in a cradle of wool sacks, held down by more, but with a small space for air … if he did not move and tumble another sack down to close it. Arvid explained this quietly, watching the eye he could see go from terror to fury to terror and, finally, to resignation.
The other man’s body presented a dilemma. Hide it? Drag it to the top floor? Surely someone would come to find out where those two had gone, why they had not returned. He pulled the bolt free of the neck, swiping blood from the grooved shaft thieves used for inside work instead of fletching. He stripped the man’s pockets and pouches, looking for anything that might help him, then lifted the corpse, grunting at the man’s weight, and carried it carefully around the piles of wool sacks to lay it out of sight; he pulled another wool sack down on top of it.
Now. Up or down? If he could get the child killers to come to him in ones and twos, it would be easier, but his stomach churned at the thought of three children already dead and a man—Goram—who seemed to enjoy killing them. The longer he waited … the more children would die.
You know what to do.
“Gird … Father Gird … help the children.” A pause in which he felt pressure like a weather change. “And me.”
He had to go down. If he could identify Goram … kill the one who wanted to kill children, because clearly some of them weren’t that eager …
He paused a moment to tell Cedi what he’d done, wondering as he did why he hadn’t killed the second man—once, he would have, without a doubt or a thought—then went down the ramp, silent as the thief he had been.
Down there, he could see the door into the hall the boy had spoken of, shut as he’d expected, and the room off to his heart-hand, much like the one above but even darker. Another ramp continued down to the ground floor, and he heard voices from there, men’s voices, and vague distant noise that might be the crowd outside.
He moved to the door of the hall, standing to one side, and applied a donkey’s ear. No sound … then a thin wail, as of a child. He eased the door open; it swung silently. No one was in the passage, much lighter from a window at the front, and showing two doors to one side and one to the other, just as Cedi had said.
Arvid moved through, closing the door behind him. It would not be just one person in the room with the children … not merely the killer … they would need another one, at least. But two had left … and a lot of scared children, maybe tied up or shut in a closet …
Go on.
That voice. It steadied him now instead of shaking him to the core as it had at first. He reached for the bow to span it, and something pinched his arm. Gird? Probably. Maybe. He hoped. He reached for his throwing knife instead and felt a little warmth on the back of his neck.
A burly man with thinning dark hair held a child down on a table, his hands around the child’s throat, squeezing. To one side, another man watched, lips pressed tight. Arvid’s throwing knife took the first man in the face, just missing his eye; the man gasped, letting go of the child’s neck, and grabbed for the knife hanging from his cheekbone. Arvid’s edged disk took the second in the neck with a left-hand throw; he was across the room to finish that one with a slash of his dagger, and then, as the man near the child turned with Arvid’s knife in his hand, Arvid moved in, grabbed the man’s elbow, and twisted, forcing him down and into the point of his dagger.
He had expected the third man but not that he’d have a crossbow; the bolt sliced his ear and thunked into the wall behind him. He had nothing left to throw but a chair, and grabbed it up. Another bolt split the chair seat; Arvid rushed the man, pinning him against the far wall before he could span the bow a third time. All he could think—as the man whacked his ribs with the crossbow stock and opened his mouth to yell, and Arvid stuck the dagger in it, but the man didn’t die, not then—was how much noise they were making and how long it would be before the men downstairs noticed. Finally he wrestled the crossbow away from the man and hit him over the head with the stock, then yanked his dagger free and cut the man’s throat.