The Last Witness by K. J. Parker

said.
    “Where is she?”
    For a moment I thought he was going to go for me. The little, isolated part of my mind that arranges tactical details was busy taking note of the fact that he was holding the lamp in his right hand and his left hand was empty; no weapon, so either he was unarmed or he’d have to shift the lamp to his left to draw; or if he planned on killing me with his bare hands, he’d have to lead with his left, and his feet were all wrong for that, unless he was a natural southpaw—But then he shook his head, and the look on his face made me go cold. “She’s dead,” he said.
    It’s so easy to say; in that moment, I died. Grand overstatement. Melodrama. I wish I had the words, but I don’t.
    He went on: “There was a problem with the pregnancy. It was blood poisoning.”
    All I could do was repeat: “Pregnancy.”
    He made this noise. It was a big, cold laugh. “You didn’t know?”
    “No. I—” I ran out of words and just stood there.
    “Ah.” He nodded slightly. “Interesting. She assumed you’d guessed and run out on her because of it. Well, it killed her. It took a long time. They gave her poppy extract, but the pain was—” He stopped and shrugged. “You killed my daughter.”
    This tactical part of my mind—I wonder, do other people have the same thing, or is it just me? If it’s just me, is it somehow connected with the special thing I do? I’ve often wondered. In any event, at that moment it was busy again. It was telling me: his wife, her mother, died five years ago, and he has no close family; I could wipe her out of his memory and spare him the pain, it was the least I could do. But that wouldn’t work. He was a man in public office, with about a million acquaintances, all of them properly sympathetic. It wouldn’t really help matters if I got him a reputation for having been driven insane by grief.
    “I was going to kill you,” he said. He was looking straight at me, the way an arrow looks at a target. “But I think I’ll let you live. It’d be crueller.”
    He was right about that. Being dead is bad enough. Being dead and still having to walk around and eat is so much worse.
    * * *
    Hence the sudden and immediate twist of pain when I heard that nail-on-stone noise. No bad thing, really; it prevented me from ignoring the sound or mistaking it for something else. Saved my life, actually. Now there’s irony.
    My tactical planner was giving me instructions; get down, keep still, make yourself small. I had no weapon and chances were the owner of the hobnailed boot was a much better fighter than me, but I had the advantage of the dark; I knew where he was, but he didn’t know where I was. He was, of course, between me and the door. I’ve been in worse situations.
    Then I had a stroke of luck. He uncovered his dark lantern. He saw me and I saw him.
    I went in through the side of his head like a slingstone. As I’d assumed, the old man had sent him; my reluctance and intention to retire had made me an unacceptable risk, no longer outweighed by my potential usefulness. Fine. I wiped that; then, in an access of spite of which I am not proud, I wiped a whole lot more—his name, most of his past, more or less everything in easy reach. When I came out of his head, he was standing there looking stupid. There was a hay rake leaning up against the wall. I grabbed it and broke it over his head. I felt sorry for him, and ashamed of myself.
    He’d dropped the lantern, but it hadn’t gone out; a lit lantern on the floor of a hay barn is nobody’s friend. I grabbed it, and then it did go out. I went to the door and threw it away. One down.
    I stood in the doorway and tried to be sensible. Defeating one hired man wasn’t victory in any meaningful sense. If the old man had decided it was time for me to die, I could defeat a thousand of his footsoldiers in tense little duels and still be no safer. My own stupid fault. By buying a house and putting down roots, I’d made myself an