agreement. They were big, athletic types with thick sculptured biceps and suntans. Probably laborers.
“Trapped ’em in the woods myself yonder, sir, I did,” said the innkeeper.
“Remarkable,” I said. “Just the right gamy flavor without being too sharp, and moist but not greasy. This is a tribute to the bird. Remarkable. I expect it is much in demand round these parts?”
“To tell you the truth, sir,” he said, “there aren’t many people around here. The farmers just come in for a pint in the evening.”
“What about that castle up the road there?” I asked him smoothly. A cloud passed over his face.
“Aye, sir,” he muttered, starting to turn away, “I supply them.”
“Not good customers?” I ventured.
“Depends what you mean by good, doesn’t it?” he said.
Seizing our beer jug, he shuffled off to the bar.
“Interesting,” said Lisha. “But don’t be too obvious.”
“Me, obvious?” I asked, faintly offended. “Subtle Will? Please.”
“So,” I said as the innkeeper came back, “gives you a hard time, does he?”
“Who?”
“Whatsisname,” I said, pretending to fumble for it. “The Razor.”
“You know him?” the innkeeper asked, suddenly uneasy.
“Only by repute,” inserted Orgos.
“Very wealthy man is Mr. Thurlhelm,” said the innkeeper. “Gets anything he wants. Servants, women, entertainers, the best food and drink around; you name it.”
“How did he make his money?”
“He was an arms dealer in the West,” he confided. “Thrusia. Sold to the rebels for years until he realized they were going to lose. Then sold to the Empire. Never comes in here himself, of course, but his people do.”
“Are there a lot of people at the keep?” I asked.
“Not usually,” he said. “But they get visitors. Big groups of them. The servants talk about them, but only when they think no one’s listening, if you know what I mean. Not popular, Mr. Razor’s guests. But they never leave the castle, so that’s all right.”
“You’ve never seen them?” I asked, trying not to grin with excitement.
“No one does,” he said. “We only know they’re there when they send their food and drink orders.”
“More than usual, is it?”
“Three, four times as much,” he said. “No one leaves the castle while it lasts. Then things go back to normal.”
“And you’ve never seen these guests arrive?” I said, as if this was a minor curiosity.
“I’ve never even heard their horses on the road.”
We thought for a moment and there was silence. The men at the bar had stopped talking. They had their backs to us. I wondered how much they had heard and whether it mattered. I had no idea whether we had been talking loudly, but suspected we had.
“How often does this happen?” Lisha asked.
“Once a month or so, sometimes more.”
We sat around and nothing happened, save that the two men from the bar drank up and left a couple of minutes after our talk with the innkeeper. Lisha and Orgos exchanged significant glances. I looked up and muttered, “Well, at least the raiders eat.” The others gave me a blank look. “I mean, they appear out of nowhere and their corpses don’t stay put. It’s good to know they actually have to have food sent to them. It means they’re human.”
It was dark outside the Razor’s keep. Nights were short at this time of year and I figured it would be dawn soon. We had ridden past the fort and tethered our horses just under the lees of the Elsbett Wood, a hundred yards or so to the west. The castle was square and surrounded by a wall topped with a gatehouse flanked by a pair of turrets. In daylight it probably looked like a toy: a rich man’s whimsy. At night it was rather more forbidding, despite the glowing windows. We nestled amongst the trees and watched the silhouettes of sentries moving between the parapets. There was a faint sound of music and laughter drifting from within like smoke.
I yawned and stretched. We had rested for a few hours before we left the inn, but my body still told me I should be asleep. I thought about Garnet sitting in Hopetown sullenly grinding his ax blade with slow circles of his whetstone, and Renthrette watching over his shoulder in case he missed a bit. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Mithos having to babysit those two little rays of sunshine. The thought made sitting out here in the middle of the night slightly more appealing.
I wandered into the trees a little way off to relieve myself-too much beer, as usual. I had just about finished when I noticed that the quality of the darkness had changed: it was getting misty. In seconds the mist was a thick fog pooling among the trees. It was odd the way it just seemed to come out of nowhere, and, though the night had been warm, the temperature seemed to drop dramatically. And there was a strange quality to the mist. It reminded me of something.
The convoy from Ironwall. The scarlet cloaks flashing through the dense, grey air.
I felt the prickling of the hair on the back of my neck. I was still, holding my breath.
And then there was a sound in the mist. The soft clop of hooves. Horses. A lot of them, walking towards me.
I forced myself to move, running back to the others, tripping over roots I couldn’t see and glancing off tree trunks.
“Horsemen!” I hissed at Lisha and Orgos. “Raiders, I think. Coming towards us through the forest from the west.”
“Quickly?” gasped Orgos.
“No, walking.”
“How many?”
“I didn’t count,” I said. “A lot. This might be a good time to leave.”
“Where did they come from?” asked Orgos.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The woods.”
But that wasn’t strictly true, was it? I had been in the woods, and I had been pretty sure that I had been alone. And then it got misty and they were there. But I didn’t want to think about that.
We shifted quickly, shying away from the keep and sticking to the tree line. We checked over our shoulders as we moved, not speaking. The forest hung with an aura of dread. Something bad was going to happen. You could feel it. Whether we would be part of it, I couldn’t say.
Moments later the dark outlines of the horsemen appeared. They traced a broad arc along the edge of the woods only yards from where we had been waiting. There were perhaps sixty of them, silent and controlled, moving ominously forwards, rolling slowly down towards the keep. But they didn’t go in, not yet. A rider wearing the horned helm I had noticed during the raiders’ attack on the coal trotted over the bridge, and we heard the muffled voice of a sentry. Then the doors swung open and the raiders moved en masse. But there was no slow, measured caution now. They were charging.
“What is going on?” I whispered.
In seconds they were across the narrow bridge and through the gatehouse. Cries of confusion quickly replaced the music and merrymaking in the fort. Then screams, an occasional clash of metal, and then nothing. Less than five minutes later the raiders rode out two abreast, turned towards the mile-wide gap between the Elsbett and Iruni woods to the southwest, and rode away. A heavy mist was gathering about them before they were completely out of sight, and I knew we wouldn’t be finding any telltale hoofprints in the morning.
Ten minutes later, as the birds were beginning to sing in the woods and crows had begun to gather on the turrets of the little castle, we went in. We scurried from wall to wall, whispering and glancing about us constantly, but there was no one left to raise any kind of alarm. There were bodies transfixed with red-feathered arrows slouched across the parapets or sprawled on the stairways to the walls, and our fear slipped away from us. In its place came only revulsion mixed with a shoddy relief. The raiders wouldn’t be coming back, though why they had turned on the man who seemed to have been their ally, we had no idea.
We entered the banquet hall and found the revelers lying amidst pools of spilled wine and overturned plates
