We were dining in the same tavern we’d been at since we reached Hopetown. Renthrette was watching one of the Joseph houses and Orgos had returned to the market for supplies, but I was eating steak and kidney pie and swilling it down with a dark, mellow beer, half bitter, half mild. Mithos took a forkful of steak and told me what he knew.
“I spoke to a garrison officer,” he said. “Thurlhelm, the Razor, moved here from Thrusia shortly after it fell to the Empire. He is rich. He pays his taxes and keeps himself to himself. The duke doesn’t ask about his past operations, where he gets his money from, or how he amuses himself at present. The keep is larger than his requirements, since he lives alone save for a few friends, various female companions, and a sizable staff of servants. He has a resident defense unit of about thirty men. I think it’s time we checked him out-cautiously. The Razor runs his house as he pleases and we can expect rough justice from him if we get on his nerves. We can also expect trouble from the duke, who won’t want to lose the tax revenue unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“What a prince,” I said, dark memories of the scaffold in Ironwall haunting me briefly.
“Quite.”
“Has anybody given any thought,” I said, figuring it was time we addressed this, “to how the raiders are able to get from wherever they are to the site of an attack without anybody seeing them and without. ”
Mithos was staring across the room, oblivious to me. By the empty fireplace a man was sitting at a table. He had his back to us but his head was turned slightly in the way people do when they are trying to listen in on someone else’s conversation. Mithos was motionless except for his left hand, which was moving silently for the small crossbow on the floor by my chair.
I watched in confusion as he pulled the weapon onto his lap and cocked it with one deft motion, his eyes still fixed on the stranger. Then he opened his left palm and extended it towards me.
“What?” I murmured.
“A bolt,” he breathed, barely audibly.
I reached behind me uncertainly, took hold of the feathered end of a quarrel, and drew it out of the bag. But my eyes were on Mithos and as I passed it to him, another one slid out and clattered to the stone floor.
Suddenly the man leapt to his feet and spun around, raising a pair of small crossbows, one in each hand and pointed directly at us. His eyes were dark and cold, his mouth set, and I knew that he meant to kill us.
Mithos turned the table over, sending the crockery crashing to the ground and pulling me down behind it with him. There was a slight swish and one bolt cracked into the tabletop as the other slammed into the wall behind us. I felt the wind in my hair as it passed.
Mithos dived to the right, rolled once, and aimed the crossbow. Our would-be assassin had fled. Mithos went after him, but the streets were a maze. He could have gone anywhere.
Or he could have just vanished like the raiders always did, even when they were dead.
Mithos returned, breathing hard, and plucked the crossbow bolt from the tabletop. It was flighted with crimson feathers.
SCENE XXXVII Time for a Beer
My intention to abandon the party had been only temporarily suspended, but this new attempt on my life put a slightly different complexion on things. It bore thinking about.
On the one hand, of course, it made my desire to get away from the party and the arrowheads, lance tips, fire, and death that seemed to follow them about stronger still, but it also made life without the likes of Mithos at my side rather less appealing. And painfully brief. Without him, I would have been snuffed out like a candle, and not a particularly bright candle at that. Scattering crossbow bolts on the ground in a moment that called for absolute silence hadn’t been too bright, and it had been an act of unprecedented mercy that Mithos hadn’t killed me himself. His glower on returning from the empty street softened into a resigned sigh and the muttered remark that it “could have happened to anyone.” Perhaps so, but it had happened to me, and, to my mind, it usually did. The idea of running from the party, top though they were on someone’s unpopularity list, was, for someone with my combat skills, roughly equivalent to going swimming with three or four large rocks chained to my legs. I wondered absently if the party members thought of me as the rock chained to their legs. I made a mental note to be a little nicer to them, in case they should decide that this rock-lugging bit wasn’t worth the effort. If I was cut free of the party, I would sink. Fast.
“I wonder,” said Mithos in the voice of a man who had been hunted before, “whose idea that was.”
“The raiders’, obviously,” I said.
“You think so?” he asked pensively. “It takes more than a few red feathers to make a crimson raider. And until now they’ve seemed almost anxious to keep us alive.”
Mithos left me to think this over and I took out the map we had been looking at earlier.
“Hi, Will!” said Garnet enthusiastically. “I heard about the attack. We must be making progress.”
That was Garnet logic for you.
“I see you’ve got the map there,” he said, keen as mustard. “Considering tactics?”
“Er, yeah,” I answered, wondering what I had been doing and realizing with muted shock that he was sort of right. I had been having those Adventurer Thoughts again. In the circumstances, that was odd.
“So,” he said, sitting down.
“So?”
“Here we are,” he said, pleased again, “in a pub.”
“That’s right,” I answered, conscious of the way he was putting me on my guard again.
“Two mates out for a beer,” he concluded.
I thought “mates” was a bit strong, but I let it go. There was a pause and I sat back in my chair as he looked hopefully about him and then back to me.
“Garnet, is there something on your mind?”
“No,” he answered emphatically. “Not at all.”
“You want to talk about the guy who shot at us?. ” I guessed, reluctantly.
“No,” he said with a little gesture of defiance. “Let’s not talk work.”
“I just thought,” he went on, “that we could, you know, do what ordinary people do.”
“I’m an expert on that,” I said.
“I thought you would be. So what do they do? Ordinary people, I mean.”
“They drink, they talk, they play games, they pick up women. ” I said.
“Games?” he asked.
“You know, cards, darts, dominoes, or something.”
“Let’s play cards,” he said with an enthusiasm that said it was going to be a long night.
“What can you play?”
“Nothing,” he said, slightly frenetic now, “but you can teach me, right?”
This was getting seriously strange. But I watched the slightly hunted way he seemed to be looking around, the shifty nervousness, like a kid about to be deliberately naughty, and it made a kind of sense to me. Garnet had been with the party for years. In that time he had gone from child to dignified warrior with his ax and his honor code, and he had never had a second to sit back and be an ordinary kid, make a fool of himself, get a little wild, and have a good time without worrying if he was being noble or righteous. Now I was here, representing all he had missed, all he didn’t know of the ordinary world, and he was cautiously ready to give it a shot.
Fair enough, I thought. Endearing, really.
Time to educate him in some of life’s simple pleasures. We ordered beer, or, rather, I ordered it for him. He had no preferences.
We got six pints: a selection of ales, a lager, a wheat, and a milk stout. He gulped down one of the ales and was halfway through the lager when, with a sudden sense of alarm, it occurred to me that he had never drunk beer before. Even in those party meetings, I wasn’t sure I had ever seen him take more than a sip at a toast. The fact
