The mage’s chamber was dimly lit and smelled strongly of chemicals, with an underlying prickle of burned hair. Gareth stifled a sneeze. Mulmaster’s air was not the most refreshing, but the honest smells of the street overhead would be less oppressive than this. Mage Magaster stood, arms folded, on the other side of a battered worktable. Beneath his blue-black robe, stained here and there with streaks that might be the result of experiments gone awry or perhaps simply sloppy table manners, his lank frame seemed to be trying to stretch as tall as possible. In the shadows beside the door stood the hooded figure of the mage’s apprentice, head bowed and ready to answer Magaster’s summons. It was impossible to determine the sex or race of the slight figure beneath its robes, but the soft voice that had greeted Gareth at the door suggested it was female.
Gareth cleared his throat. “I want to know what this is.” He took the bracelet from an inner pocket and placed it on the acid-charred wood of the tabletop. The mage looked at it, unimpressed.
“I should think that was obvious,” he said in a voice that implied he’d seen many worthless goods and fools in his life. “It’s a bracelet.”
Gareth grinned humorlessly. “Sure it is. Except, Master Mage, when it’s a necklace. Or an armband. Or none of those things, particularly.”
From the corner of his eye he saw the hooded figure shift slightly. The mage raised an overgrown eyebrow. “This object changes shape? On its own?”
“And hence my understandable curiosity. Also, its previous owner died rather than give it up, and I’d like to know why.”
To be entirely honest, Ping would have ordered the weird creature in the ship’s hold killed, whatever he did. But Gareth didn’t feel it necessary to go into all that. The less said about Ping, the better.
The day after he and Ivor had taken refuge in the dubious safety of Mulmaster, word had come of a pirate ship, the scourge of the Moonsea, found adrift with all on board slaughtered. Stranger still, rumor said that the slain had not been left to rot where they fell, but that they had been laid out neatly, their weapons at their feet, as if somebody had taken the time to commend them to their respective gods. Ivor and Gareth had looked at each other over the greasy tavern table when they heard the word, silent by unspoken mutual agreement. The news was a relief, but the idea that they had set the mysterious, otherworldly strangers upon the ship they’d served was uncomfortable.
The mage grunted skeptically, unfolded his arms, and poked at the bracelet with a long sharpened fingernail, stained ocher and yellow with the chemicals of his trade. The metal around Gareth’s wrist remained a bracelet. The mage rubbed his calloused finger on the front of his robe as if Gareth’s questionable treasure were no more than particularly unpromising fewmets.
“The gems are unknown to me, and doubtless of no particular Power or value,” he declared in his sonorous voice. “I am unfamiliar with these chicken scratchings on the metal, and I doubt if they even come from the alphabet of any advanced race. It’s a trinket some charlatan cobbled together, either to gull a mark or to give a sweetheart, and has no intrinsic magical Power whatsoever. You could give it to some trollop if she fancies it. Otherwise it’s worthless.”
Indignant, Gareth snatched up the bracelet before the mage could say more.
“Very well,” he said. “You’ve made your point. I should have saved my coin for the whore. I would have had more enjoyment from it.”
He was irritated at more than the man’s dismissal of an object he’d hoped to prove valuable, and, as he blinked in the sunshine outside the mage’s dim lair, he realized why that was. By saying the bracelet was valueless, fit only to buy a doxy’s favors, the mage implied the strange creature on the ship died for nothing. And Gareth realized he was obscurely offended at the insult.
He tucked the bracelet away in a pouch beneath his shirt and made his way down the greasy cobbles, automatically avoiding the refuse that ran down the ditch in the middle of the street. He’d return to the Throatcut Sparrow Tavern that afternoon, and see if he and Ivor could hire on as mercenaries or even mule-hands with a caravan headed south. He didn’t see much chance of their establishing a foothold here, unless …
He passed a queer sigil burned into a splintered door and shivered despite the noontide heat. No, there wasn’t much chance, unless they were willing to join the lower echelons of Bane’s dark brotherhood. And Gareth wasn’t that desperate-not quite yet. He hadn’t left Ping’s murderous ways behind to join the Dark Lord’s ranks.
He sensed something move behind him and swung around, his hand on his sword hilt. All he saw was a double row of shadowed doorways and the cobbled street, empty save for some dull-colored fowl that pecked at a pile of refuse.
Gareth shifted his pack and continued his course. As the sun reddened in the east, the near-empty streets began to fill with all manner of folk going about their business after the midday warmth. Instinctively, Gareth let his right hand hover near the coin pouch on his belt, under the fold of his shirt, for the pickpockets had left their noontide rest and returned to their trade as well.
Before a dark archway overhung with a tavern sign that depicted a bird in flight with a scarlet splash across its neck, Gareth paused. He’d been walking uphill, and here, through a gap between two tumbledown buildings, he had a good view of the pink-streaked waters of the Moonsea. A sluggish warm wind working between the buildings was tainted with the stench of tar.
He and Ivor had made inquiries about the drifting pirate ship and her load of corpses. Only two of that dread crew concerned them. The first was Ping, who was found laid out on his own quarterdeck, an arrow wound in his throat. The second was Helgre.
Rumor said nothing of the body of a woman with a scarred face.
If Helgre lived, they were not safe in Mulmaster, or anywhere on the Moonsea’s shores.
He put a hand on the great slab of oak that served as a door for the Throatcut Sparrow, then paused. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the flicker of a dark-clad figure ducking into a doorway down the street behind him.
It wasn’t his imagination, then. Someone had been tracking him ever since he left Mage Magaster’s rooms. Could it be a local thief, suspecting he had something valuable and following him in case he proved inattentive and therefore vulnerable to sly fingers in his purse or to a slim blade between his ribs? Or might it be a spy of Bane’s fellowship?
Or could it be Helgre, with vengeance on her mind?
Despite the warmth of the day, Gareth shivered.
Two sturdy fellows, dockworkers, judging by the bulk of them, clattered up behind him and interrupted their banter to call out to him that if he insisted on being a door, he’d better open. He grinned at them good-naturedly and opened the door with a flourish, bowing and gesturing for them to precede him into the tavern’s dark interior. With a guffaw and a slap on the back they did. Before he entered himself, Gareth glanced quickly down the street. There was no sign of his follower.
Very well. He hadn’t survived this long by not being alert at all times. It was a reminder to always stay alert, to always check behind him, and never assume he hadn’t attracted the interest of something malevolent.
Once his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the tavern, he spotted Ivor talking to the innkeeper, a dwarf of gloomy mien and a magnificent braided beard. Ivor dropped a couple of coins in the dwarf’s palm and nodded to Gareth. He had sold two of the tattooed creature’s rings to one of the least dishonest jewelers in the Mulmaster gold district-evidently his education in a merchant town in Turmish had given him a fair instinct for when he was being cheated. The platinum coins would bring unwanted attention, he had told Gareth, especially with the possibility of Helgre on the loose, so they had divided the elongated coins between them and used the proceeds from the rings for day-to-day expenses.
But that store of coin was going fast. They needed to find a way to replenish it or get out of Mulmaster- preferably both. He was tired of looking for Helgre behind every corner.
It was the faint scrape of iron on iron that woke him. Every muscle in his body tensed, but he remained still. He reached for the knife he kept beside his bed, his hands tight on the sheath.
His cot was on one side of the room, Ivor’s on the other, equidistant from the door. Gareth had barred and bolted it before retiring. Now in the darkness he saw a faint green glow around the bolt. He watched, fascinated, as the forged metal cylinder worked itself free as if by disembodied hands and slid back from the loop affixed to the doorway. The light faded, and there was a pause, as if the spellcaster on the other side were taking a deep breath.
