vengeance on the dwarf warriors as well as orcs and hobgoblins. Bab signed toward the door.
Suddenly, he felt the mud-colored gaze upon him.
“Guardians!” Mordint yelled. “The prisoners!” He started to shout words in that harsh-sounding language.
“Curses be upon those halflings!” Hochster bellowed. He raised his hands and began to chant.
“I can’t forestall both of them,” Coran warned.
“Scorri!” Bab said. He yanked the last precious blue bead off the string at his neck. “Can you land this between those two?”
The scout was pale, but she unlimbered her sling. “I’ll try,” she said. She wound up and pitched it, just as the smoke of enchantment was beginning to rise around each wizard. The blue marble hit Mordint straight in the throat.
“Hush!” Bab bellowed.
And the center of the great room went suddenly silent. Mordint glared. He could shout no orders, nor chant spells. Bab didn’t let his companions linger. They fought their way out past orcs and stone guardians, but as soon as they were over the threshold, they could outdistance anything but a spell. They ran for their lives.
The sun passed overhead and headed for the horizon behind them, but Bab and the others didn’t stop until after they went past the place they had gone to ground the last time. They shared journeybread and a sip of brackish water in their skins, and just lay back on the spare grass to gasp.
“I’ve never been so grateful to be going home empty-handed,” Legg chuckled. He’d lost the last two fingers on his left hand and had a bruise the size of his head on his thigh. Coran clucked over him and readied healing remedies, but Legg waved him away. “Never mind. Hardly use them. Still have my bow fingers. And my life, thanks to you, my friends.”
“Bab did it at the last,” Adda said.
“I’m proud of us all,” Bab said. “Never again, no matter what foolish notions the elders have.” He toasted the five of them with his waterskin.
“Let’s get us a real meal at the Poisoned Chalice when we reach the Crossroads,” Legg said. “I’ll pay. Hang the cost! Couldn’t be worse than Mordint’s vittles.”
“Aye,” Bab said wearily. “I’ll be glad of a sit down. No more excitement.”
“No more,” Coran agreed.
“Shh!” Scorri said. “Do you hear that?”
Bab nodded. There was the sound of many feet on the road, not far away. They gathered up their packs and scrambled up the embankment and into what small cover was afforded by the scrawny brush and gathering twilight.
A torchlit procession of humans and halflings stalked by. Their clothes were dusty and worn, but each of them was armed to the teeth with sword, buckler, and enough daggers to make them clatter. On the shoulders of six of them was a litter draped with blood-red embroidered tapestries and cushions. On them reposed a figure that made Bab’s heart sink.
“Morgana!” Adda crowed, rising up from behind a bush. He held out his arms to the halfling woman. “Remember me? I love you!”
The parade turned as one being to stare. Screaming, Morgana sat up and jabbed a point-nailed forefinger toward the locksmith.
Bab grabbed Adda by the shoulder and hauled him up over the rise. Exhausted as he was, he found the strength somewhere to run into the gloom. The others fell into step behind him.
With any luck at all, they could lose the horde somewhere in the Crossroads.
THE DECAYING MANSIONS OF MEMORY
Character
The tavern bench creaked beneath Horn like a ship under sail. He swayed, listening to the wood pop and snap, knowing if he were afloat, he’d be leaking.
Leaking. Horn laughed at the thought. He’d leaked plenty in his day, and had the scars to prove it, by Set.
A pewter bowl of scrumpy sizzled before him. The truly rotten stuff, made from a ferment of windfall apples, brewer’s yeast, and an occasional unlucky wasp. The cheap stuff, too. Cheap was definitely his milieu these days.
There had been a villa once, overlooking the sea. Pounding surf, pliant servants, and fine wines from distant islands.
He remembered watching the weather move over the Bight of Winds, tall clouds purpling on the horizon as forked legs of lightning strode the ocean. Silks billowed around him, water quivered in the Khaliki crystal vases, and he’d laughed at the powers of the natural world.
Bad idea, that. With age came wisdom. Sometimes wisdom came with an ass kicking, too. And nothing could kick ass like the whole world.
Horn pulled himself away from the decaying mansions of memory. That was an escape offering small improvement on the present moment. A present moment which unfortunately still included scrumpy.
Now there was a beverage of the gods. Small, bitter gods that resented the world and everyone in it. He stared into the muddy amber depths before summoning what served for his courage these days and grasping the bowl to drink deep, his entire two coppers’ worth in as few goes as possible to get past the gag reflex.
Fate hung heavy in the silk pocket hidden inside Horn’s ogre-leather vest. Squared off, with corners sharp enough to slice up a life. He could almost hear its voice mocking him, unless he was drunk enough to drown it out.
More scrumpy.
Once Horn had been a young man-human, mind you, no blood or brood mixing in his tribe-a fine figure of a warrior with secret talents nurtured deep in the Sacred Caverns so that people who did not look beyond a curved sword and spiked buckler were in for a nasty surprise.
Not that he wasn’t a skilled fighter in his own right. He’d mastered finesse with point and sharp edge and bladed edge and even the butt end reversed in hand. He could wield the buckler as a second weapon with effectiveness that sometimes surprised even his teachers and the other young men of the tribe. Horn had hunted goblins, orcs, and ogrillons through the jagged hills west of the village since he’d been old enough to run alongside his older brothers and cousins with a stout stick in hand. He was used to cuts, bruises, even broken bones. Like all the young men of his tribe, he was toughened by life and custom and training until he was fit to be a sellsword among the coastal cities where sharp-edged young men with stamina and skill were always in high demand.
His tribe had fought their way out of the grinding poverty of the hills in the most literal sense possible.
But Horn knew he was something special. Feather, one of the oldest of the Old Men, had spent long nights under moons both brilliant and grave-dark showing him other paths. Wisdom, perhaps, but even more, what the casual observer might have called magic. Hill country wizard lore, in truth. And for all the shared, common bluster of his training at sword and fist, those times working with rare herbs and strange powders and the lights that danced in the seams of the world were never spoken of.
No ordinary sellsword, he. Horn had sworn a private oath on his fourteenth birthday that he would someday be master of a castle, a harem, and a legion of warriors. He’d sealed the rite with a solemn binding spell that made the very air crackle like winter ice on the rivers, followed by a bloody libation spilled from the palm of his own hand. Both sides of his nature, in other words.
The following month he’d gone down to Beggar’s Cairn with the other young men to meet the hiring agents who’d ridden up from the swordmarkets of distant Purpure, High Canton, and Grandport.
The scrumpy went down hard as watered armor polish, tasting somehow of tin and leather in the bargain. Not that anyone drank scrumpy for the taste. Least of all Horn.
