Phin awoke in agony, little pleased to find that he still seemed to be alive. His jaw and head throbbed and his body was curled up with weights pressing him down. He tried to move his limbs more to see if they were still there than with any thought of rising.
Muffled voices were faintly audible and the whole world shook jarringly, knocking Phin’s shoulder and aching head against hard wood. A particularly rough blow made him groan and he realized there was a leather strap across his mouth, and rough cloth against his face. Phin was reasonably sure he had not in fact been decapitated, but the sense that his head was in a burlap sack was not reassuring.
The bumping became worse for a few moments before it thankfully stopped. There was a babble of voices and the weights started to come off of Phin bit by bit. He found at least he could breath better but then lost the ability as hands seized his shoulders and hauled him up. He fell forward in darkness with his head swimming, then crashed to damp ground. Not a stone street, but what felt like short, wet grass. His hands were bound tightly in front of him.
“Phinneas Phoarty,” a voice said. “Give us a groan if you have your wits about you.”
Phin was on all fours with a leather strap in his mouth and a burlap sack that smelled faintly of cheese over his head. It took little effort to produce the requested sound.
“He is conscious,” the voice said. There was something vaguely familiar about it but Phin’s present circumstances were not conducive to concentration. Other voices spoke but Phin could not follow the words as they were not in Codian, Tholish, nor of course in the Old Tullish language of instruction at Abverwar. Someone put a hand on Phin’s shoulder and he flinched.
“Phinneas,” the first voice said. “I am going to uncover your face. It is very important that you make no move that could be mistaken for the beginning of a spell. Understand?”
With his head throbbing Phin doubted he could manage a spell even if he wanted to do so. Besides that all he had memorized were some low-grade scrying dweomers. He nodded his head and the sack was removed with a shake and a jerk.
Phin blinked in gray light, the sky above a jumble of dark clouds that looked ready to resume raining at any time. He was in a grassy field beside the raised surface of the Imperial Post Road, somewhere in the countryside by the look of it. He was next to a cart or wheelbarrow out of which he had obviously just been hauled, and a goblin stood in front of him with its needle-teeth bared in a grin. Phin looked into the creature’s gleaming bronze eyes and recognized it as the same one that he had paid a couple coppers to carry his bags and row him across the harbor to the Circle Wizard compound on Again Island, on the day more than five months ago when he had first arrived in Souterm.
“Th-Thideways?” Phin managed against the strap across his mouth.
“Edgewise,” the goblin muttered, tossing aside the sack it had pulled from Phin’s head. It pushed the knobby pads of two long fingers against the side of Phin’s skull and he recoiled, more from the rubbery texture than from pain.
“It is not so bad,” Edgewise said to someone behind Phin. “Just a bruised jaw and a goose egg on the temple. He’ll be fine.”
“Shall I tend his wounds?” a female voice asked from behind Phin, speaking Codian with an accent he could not place. He made no move to turn around. There had been four people in the courtyard when Phin had activated the staff and for all he knew they were all standing back there, including the big fellow with the shining white sword. Phin maintained a baleful stare at the goblin as it shook its head.
“Not necessary,” it answered the woman, kneeling in the wet grass so that its eyes were on a level with Phin’s. It smiled even wider, showing more and more teeth.
“Mr. Phoarty,” Edgewise said in something closer to the simpering tone it had used months ago. “Please accept my sincerest apologies for your rough treatment, and for your removal from Souterm.”
Phin sputtered into his gag and heard a quick snikt! behind him, like a sword coming smoothly out of its scabbard. He had a pretty good idea of just what sword and scabbard had produced the sound, and he felt a chill. He also shut up.
“For the love of…” Edgewise’s bronze eyes flicked up over Phin’s shoulder. “Can you not put a leash on him or something?”
“Don’t look at me,” another voice said behind Phin, this one belonging to a man with a flatter accent, vaguely Exlandic. “I can’t even talk to him. Just to her.”
This started a flurry of conversation, at least three voices in as many languages. Phin waited as he had no other options until at last the goblin waved for silence and pasted the leer back on its rubbery face.
“As I was saying, I am sorry. My…friend, here, thought that you were attacking us. He only acted to defend himself against what he thought was a threat.”
Phin had not even seen a goblin with the four people who had walked past him in the rain, to whom it now seemed he probably should have called out before he had activated the magic of the scrying staff. Phin had not done so only because he had spent a thoroughly miserable night at his station getting soaked to the bone and he did not feel like blathering with any travelers if he could just wave them through. He had in no way expected the staff to blaze into life like a star. That had startled Phin as badly as it had the people in front of him. Not that he had tried to cut off anybody’s head over it.
Phin continued to glare at Edgewise mostly because there was nothing else he could do. The goblin seemed to take it as an act of hostility.
“Look, I’ve no quarrel with the Circle Wizards and this was all just an accident. I should not even have come out here but I heard the commotion and did not want it to turn into anything worse. Understand?”
Phin made an affirmative noise against the gag. He had no idea what the goblin was talking about but he did not want to seem stupid.
“Excellent,” Edgewise said, and reached behind Phin’s bowed head to undo the leather cord holding the gag. Phin spat the chewed strap on the ground in front of him and when he opened his mouth fully his jaw throbbed even worse. Two teeth felt loose when he pressed his tongue against them, but at least they were all there.
“Where have you taken me?” Phin said thickly.
By way of answer Edgewise stood and took a step to one side. Down the road behind the goblin Phin could see the great bulk of Souterm looming in the middle distance, a dense multi-colored sprawl in the gray and green world.
“We are just a few miles north,” Edgewise said. “You were only out a couple of hours.”
Phin wanted to feel the side of his head for the view out of his left eye seemed substantially occluded and that side of his face ached. His bound hands made that impossible and as he glanced down at the bindings, Phin blinked. His hands were tied at the wrists with a leather thong, palms flat against each other and with each finger bound in turn to its mate with twine. Even the thumbs. It was quite impossible to make any sort of hand gesture for even the simplest spell.
“It will be easy enough for you to get back to town,” Edgewise said, extending an arm in a soaked rain coat back toward the city. “I am sure many wagons will be back on the road before long, should you not feel up to walking.”
Phin turned his eyes back on Edgewise and something else instilled at Abverwar churned in his empty stomach.
“Why that is a right hospitable thought, you filthy Magdetchoi foulspawn!” he shouted. “When my Circle comes for you, I shall have them go half-easy on your green hide!”
The goblin’s rubbery brow bunched in a scowl and its metallic eyes hardened.
“Wizard, do not be a fool. I am the only thing keeping you alive.”
“I will mention that at your trial,” Phin sneered. His heart was racing but his voice was level, and his bruised face had returned to its stony cast of superiority.
“Goblins have no right to trial in the Empire,” Edgewise said coldly.
Phin snorted. “What was that? Are you actually fishing for sympathy from me? After assaulting me, kidnapping me, and destroying Circle property? I am supposed to feel bad about your poor, downtrodden people?” Phin’s voice had no accent from Thol left in it but his hard laugh still boomed with an echo of the high mountain country.
Edgewise’s lips curled back in a snarl.
“Sir, if I might?” a different voice said from behind Phin. Footsteps approached on the wet grass and a man
