“I would like you to tell me the whole story sometime.”
Zeb had hoisted his axe back to one shoulder, his crossbow on the other. He gave Tilda another smile, the kind that would have made his face look wolfish were it not for the absence of danger in his light blue eyes.
“Then so I shall,” Zeb said as though he were making a vow, which he immediately ruined by frowning and tilting his head. “Provided of course we are not grotesquely butchered sometime later today.”
“Or tomorrow.”
“Or the day after that. You are catching on.”
They turned to meet the others by the trapdoor, but Tilda faltered a step as her eyes swept over the city stretching north. She said Zeb’s name and he stopped as well, then followed her over to the north side of the roof.
In that direction, some distance behind them now, Tilda could see the district of tall buildings like temples or government halls, a part of the city they had moved widely around rather than setting foot on the streets covered with a slimy green sheen. Tilda could not see the intersection that had stopped them from the top of the tower, but she could make out a long open area between the grandest of the buildings. It was movement from there that had caught her eye, even from the distance. Looking closer she could see that there was indeed a great deal of movement going on down there.
“Tilda,” John called from the trapdoor.
“Come here,” she answered.
The others did, standing in a line beside her and Zeb. They did not have to be told what to look at, for a great mass of figures was marching in formation through the open area. Even the gray light of the sky above flashed on blades and armor, and from across the distance Tilda thought she could faintly hear the rumble of iron-shod boots.
“ Hob-o-gob-o-lin,” Uriako Shikashe said, close enough to the correct pronunciation that everyone understood him.
“I thought the Shugak told Nesha-tari they never entered this place,” John said.
“They did,” Zeb nodded. “That’s why they paid us to come in for them.”
“They appear to have changed their minds,” Amatesu said.
The six party members exchanged uncertain looks, for no one knew quite what to make of a large force of hobgoblins moving into the city behind them, heading their way. They did however hurry on their way back down the tower.
*
Once Phin had been choked unconscious, a bearded devil in white robes threw the limp wizard over a shoulder as if the tall man weighed nothing. Another hoisted Claudja the same way, though she at least was left awake.
The green-haired demoness in the skin-tight leather armor remained behind with four devils, while the two bearing the prisoners set off at a fast run to the south. They passed first through the plaza where Rickard and the Sarge’s bodies lay hewn to the ground.
“I told you so,” Claudja whispered as her captor bounded past the sergeant, lying with his neck slashed open and his sightless eyes staring up at the sky. It only made her feel better for a moment.
The next few hours were of bouncing chaos as the devils ran down streets, scrambled over walls, and generally progressed as if utterly unaware that each jarring step drove a shoulder into Claudja’s belly. Her knees and chin banged against the creature’s chest and back, both of which felt like solid bone beneath a layer of skin thinner even than its robes. Claudja’s head was swimming within minutes and she could not see anything but cobblestones streaking by anyway. She thought she blacked out a time or two, but it could have been far more.
She was numb and addle-headed by the time the motion seemed to have stopped, and though she heard hissing voices close by the words were strange. Then she was bashing around again in darkness, her wrists still bound and now bleeding into her hands as the leather cord had been biting into her skin for days. The limp swinging of her arms was opening cuts. Claudja tried to move her hands to ease the pain and they brushed along a stone wall, then what seemed to be a curtain, then more wall. Then the devil was mounting stairs and its shoulder drove so hard and fast into Claudja’s stomach that she could not catch a breath between impacts. She tried to beat or kick against the thing but her arms and legs were feeble. She passed out again.
She was awakened by a knock on a door, and the soft, polite rhythm of the taps made her think of home. Claudja usually awoke early in the castle at Chengdea, but if she did sleep late a servant would always rouse her with just that sort of innocuous knocking, for there were always duties to which the Duchess must attend. She had a duty now, though of course she was not at home, nor in her own bed. But she was in a bed.
Claudja jerked awake with a gasp, and as she opened her eyes a soft light rose in the room. It came from an ornate metal brazier suspended from the ceiling, in which a warm glow arose from four round stones rather than candles or lamps. Claudja had seen such lavish things before, for she had been within the Royal apartments at the Daul King’s palace in Bouree.
She saw that she was in a bedroom fit for a royal now as well, lying on top of a heavy coverlet in a four- post bed with soft white curtains tied up on the cross beams. Claudja was clothed save for her coat and shoes, and as she sat up she saw them, the coat hanging from a hook on the back of a heavy door with an arching top. Her boots were on the floor next to an embroidered circular rug beneath a small round table and a matching set of light, graceful chairs with padded seats. The walls of the room were paneled in richly-stained wood of a faint orange hue, and tapestries hung on two of them, geometric designs rather than images.
The knocking came from the door again, so polite that Claudja had to resist saying “ Antre,” purely from habit. She realized she was holding herself up on her arms and blinked in surprise as that meant her hands were not tied. She held her hands up in front of her face, though that made her flop onto her back again.
Her wrists were untied, but now each was wrapped individually with soft cotton bandages, damp from some sort of ointment and with flecks of blood showing through. The sight of them made Claudja aware that her wrists stung, which led to the awareness that her chin and knees felt bruised, her back and ribs ached, and she was tremendously thirsty and hungry.
More knocking, then voices.
Claudja got unsteadily off the bed, leaving a dusty gray outline on the covers. She looked around the room for a weapon but there was only an empty wardrobe with open doors, a curtained window, and a rather lovely paper screen with bright honeybees painted on it, trundling among flowers. The screen separated the rest of the room from a stone tub and a commode, both made of the same familiar black stone as was the rest of Vod’Adia.
The Duchess scurried to her boots and picked one up in either hand, then backed into the corner behind the tub, almost knocking over a rack of soft towels.
When the tapping came again, she called “Who is it?” at the door, and wondered what the point of that had been. She was sure she would not have liked the answer had she gotten one.
Three hard knocks shook the door in its frame, making Claudia jerk three times. There was a pause, and when another hard strike echoed around the room the Duchess shouted “Come in, then!” She crouched behind the tub, peeking around the screen with a boot raised to throw though it felt absolutely ridiculous.
The door opened and Claudja cringed as two little diabolic figures with sharp spikes on their backs floated in on bat wings, carrying a silver tray as big as they were between them. Their red eyes fastened on Claudja and she hauled back her arm to pitch her boot if they came closer, but they stopped above the table. They set down the tray, bowed in unison while hovering in the air, then beat wings out the door. A long arm in a white sleeve pulled it shut from the hall, and a lock clicked loudly.
Claudja stared, and only slowly crept to the table. There was a glass carafe of water and one of red wine, and a silver lid with a handle that fit into a round slot in the middle of the tray. Claudja reached out slowly and lifted the lid, raising her boot again in case something sprang at her from underneath it.
It was food, and it stayed where it was. Not great food, but a variety of the sort of preserved rations that adventurers undoubtedly brought into the city. Salted pork, dried figs, hard-tack biscuits. It had been heated and it looked and smelled far better than the garbage the dead legionnaires had been able to buy near the gate with their meager funds.
Claudja was near starving, and she justified herself by deciding that if her devilish captors wanted her dead,
