a gold piece from his pocket and places it on the counter. When he catches Lord Pytherian looking at him, he whispers, “I don’t want to be counted a thief.”
Nodding his approval, Lord Pytherian moves to a window overlooking the street. He ducks to the side as a patrol of ten soldiers pass by outside. Once they’re gone, he looks out again and turns back to the others, “It looks like they have put extra patrols on the streets.”
“That’ll make things interesting,” Jiron says as he looks out of another window. Seeing the street clear for the moment, he turns to the others and asks, “Ready?”
When he gets an affirmative from them, he moves to the door and opens it as he passes out into the street.
Chapter Twenty
Once out on the street, they keep to the shadows as they make their way to the eastern gate. Jiron remembers which way they’d come from the southern gate in relation to where the Keep stands and is able to maintain a general eastern heading.
They duck down alleys to avoid the patrols roaming the streets, none of which seem very concerned about finding anyone. They seem more in the ‘patrol just to keep our presence visible’ mode than actively searching for them. This just leads them to believe that the powers that be believe them to still be within the Keep.
As they move from street to alley and back again, they notice that only the soldiers are on the street. James figures there must be a curfew in effect while they’re on the loose. So with the lackadaisical patrols the soldiers on the street are doing, it’s fairly easy to make it all the way to the eastern gate unnoticed.
Jiron brings them to a halt at the end of an alley which looks out upon the gate area. Twenty soldiers stand guard there in the courtyard before the gate with a dozen or more crossbowmen lining the walls above.
James catches his breath when he sees a brown robe there with them. For a world that doesn’t have many mages, the Empire sure seems to have more than their fair share!
Jiron notices the brown robe and glances to James who says, “I see him too.”
“What do you plan?” Lord Pytherian asks.
“Another distraction?” asks Jiron.
“Distraction?” says Lord Pytherian, glancing at James.
“May not have much choice,” replies James. Sighing at the inevitable, he turns to Lord Pytherian and says, “You and Miko stay here while Jiron and I arrange for some of the guards to be drawn away.”
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
James looks him in the eye and says, “You’ll see.” Turning back to Jiron he asks, “Ready?”
Giving him a mischievous grin, he replies, “You bet.”
To Lord Pytherian, he says, “We’ll be back in a few minutes. No matter what you may see and hear, don’t move from this spot. Understand?”
Lord Pytherian nods his head.
“Let’s go,” he says to Jiron as they head out.
Lord Pytherian watches them go back down the alley away from the gate. He asks Miko, “What are they going to do?”
Shrugging, he replies, “I don’t really know. When I first met James, he could hardly do anything without going unconscious or having horrendous headaches. But the last few weeks he’s been able to do the most amazing things.”
James follows Jiron through the back alleys until they’ve put some distance between the east gate and themselves. “You know,” he says to Jiron, “when this all begins to let loose, they’ll know we’re not in the Keep.”
“True,” he replies, quickly making his way along a dark alley. “But hopefully that information will come too late to be of much use.”
James comes to a stop and says, “Let’s pause here a moment.” A couple seconds later, five small bubbles appear and begin to float away.
“Now let’s see if we can find a building that’s not being used right now,” he says as he indicates for Jiron to resume leading the way.
Nodding, Jiron sets out and a couple blocks down they find a warehouse. Looking inside, they see it stocked with bolts of fabric and other valuables, but otherwise unoccupied.
“This’ll work,” announces James. He pauses next to the side of the building and ever so briefly, a spot on the wall lights up and then disappears. They go all the way around the building, stopping at each side for a moment until the light flashes just as it had on the first side before continuing on.
Once they have paused on each of the four sides of the building, they then move back closer to the eastern gate. One street runs almost directly from the eastern gate to the warehouse they just visited. They make their way carefully down the street until coming to within five hundred feet of the eastern gate, far enough away so that the lights from the gate won’t reveal them.
James pauses at one point on the north side of the street for a moment then moves down fifty feet where he again pauses for a second. Then he makes sure no one is looking before darting across to the other side where he does the same thing on the other side of the street, directly across from the two places he’d stopped at on the north side.
Satisfied, he gives Jiron a nod and they begin to move back to where the others are waiting. James grabs his arm as he starts to cross the area between the points where he’d just stopped those four times. When he looks at him, James whispers, “Not a good idea.”
Nodding, he moves back and skirts that area. Ducking down a side alley to avoid a patrol, they finally make it back to where the others are waiting.
Lord Pytherian sees them coming and waves them over. When James comes next to him, he says, “Nothing happened.”
“Just wait,” James assures him.
Suddenly, they see a shimmering bubble making its way slowly down the street toward the soldiers at the gate. The translucent bubble is hard to see unless you know what you’re looking for. As it gets closer, the mage there suddenly turns his head toward the bubble, sensing its magic resonance.
The mage says something to a soldier next to him who barks an order and everyone there comes immediately to attention. The crossbowmen on the walls are staring intently into the darkness of the street but fail to find anyone.
The bubble abruptly turns around and goes back the other way. The mage, sensing the magic moving away from him moves to follow when from across the town…
Crumph!
…the warehouse erupts in a tremendous explosion throwing fire and stone into the air. The mage immediately begins moving toward the explosion, half the soldiers going with him.
James can detect several of the bubbles in the area, throwing off the senses of the mage as he tries to hunt down the source of the magic he’s sensing. He watches as the mage begins walking determinedly down the street, directly toward the place where he’d stopped those four times. When he reaches the center of it, four lights flare into being. The mage cries out as he falls to the ground and the soldiers with him try to run but are stopped by an invisible barrier that has sprung up between those four lights, boxing them in. Trapped, the soldiers begin crying out as they strike the barrier with their swords and fists but to no avail.
James takes some slugs out of the pouch at his hip and begins launching them up to the crossbowmen on the walls. One by one, they’re struck and begin falling off the walls, some landing within the courtyard, others falling outside the walls.
Pytherian glances to James with renewed respect as he continues launching slugs until the walls are cleared of crossbowmen.
With his knives drawn, Jiron says, “Milord, it’s our turn.”
Nodding, he pulls the sword from its scabbard as they move toward the soldiers guarding the gate.
