Glass sat back, her gaze on the table, immune to the malice in Pelter’s glances, listening. Perhaps five minutes later the sea of voices, from which she fished her gossip, fell to near-silence. Glass lifted her gaze and turned, like almost everyone else, to see three large men in furs and iron come through the inn’s main door. Juregs. Like the Pelarthi in the north, in the south the Juregs reigned largely unchallenged as the fiercest and most feared of the tribes that stalked the ice margins. Unlike the ice-tribes, they did not want to live out on the sheets nor could they survive there long. But they could certainly retreat ten or twenty miles onto the ice when empire troops threatened, then march east or west to reappear unannounced, weaving down between the crevasses on a glacier’s back and abseiling from the heights where the moon’s focus sheared off the ice’s snout.
The Juregs scanned the crowded taproom, wolves eyeing the flock.
To either side of Glass, Pelter’s guards, Melkir and Sera, quietly slipped hands to sword hilts. Agika and Seldom exchanged glances. Juregs were known for taking clergy for ransom. Even if a packed inn discouraged them from immediate action the chances were that they would follow the carriage when it left.
The Juregs ignored both bar and fire-pit, plotting a straight line for the inquisitors. The crowd of villagers, farmhands, and travellers standing in the main room melted out of the men’s path. Melkir made to stand but found his chair wedged beneath his legs by that of a portly cloth merchant behind him.
The largest and eldest of the trio, a solid six and a half foot tall, broad in the chest and sporting a wild beard shot with grey, offered them a discoloured grin. “You’re claimed. Come.” He gestured to his companions, possibly twin sons. “Leave your guard and we won’t hurt him.”
Glass met Sera’s eyes. The Juregs adhered to a bizarre patriarchal version of the Ancestor faith that relegated women to a menial status barely higher than that of slaves. They kept the trappings of those beliefs in the language they used with outsiders but sadly were not so committed to their principles that they would ignore armed females such as Sera. They would underestimate her, though. Even so, the life of an Inquisition guard was a soft one compared to one spent raiding on the ice margins. Glass would be tempted to bet on any single one of the three Juregs against both of Pelter’s guards. Despite that, she would urge both guards to fight. She had a timetable in mind and the delays thus far had been welcome. But being ransomed by the Juregs would take weeks and ruin everything.
“Up!” The older man clapped callused hands together. As adherents of a heretical strain both Juregs and Pelarthi would set high ransoms for inquisitors, and harsh deadlines. Putting an inquisitor to a gruesome end was said to please a Jureg almost as much as being handsomely paid to let them go.
“I don’t think the nun wants to go with you.” A man’s voice from behind the Juregs. He sounded gently amused.
The tribesmen turned together, the two sons reaching for their swords, the father with his hand resting on the haft of his axe. Glass saw that the speaker was a surprisingly young man, not as tall as the Juregs and of considerably lighter build. He wore a traveling cloak of good quality, held an ale tankard in one hand, and the strap of his travel bag in the other. The dark eyes beneath the scroll of his black hair mirrored the amusement in his voice, as did a crooked smile on his narrow lips.
“Not your business, lad. Dying will be your business if you don’t step back.” The senior Jureg spoke with rasping malice.
“Make me.” The smile broadened, showing white teeth.
One of the sons stepped forward, drawing his sword. The man released his ale and bag, dropping as fast as they did and sweeping out a leg that took the son’s feet from under him. The speed of it was breathtaking. The man surged up faster than the son came down, stepped inside the other son’s sword blow and punched him in the throat. Somehow he had the father’s knife out of his belt and pressed into the thicket of his beard before Glass properly formed the thought “hunska full-blood.”
Two more Juregs appeared in the doorway, halting when they saw the problem. The young man walked the Jureg leader towards the exit. “I’m sure you gentlemen can find another tavern to drink in.” He waited for the sons to pick themselves up and leave. The other two men backed out of the door and, once they were both through, the hunska returned his prisoner’s knife to its scabbard so fast that Glass barely saw the flicker of his hand. The Jureg took the point and left without bravado. He could roust a tavern every day for the rest of his life and not meet another hunska full-blood. Pride was one thing but no raider got far on pride. Pragmatism was what kept you alive in the margins, and the Jureg had lots of it.
The young man spoke to a couple of locals by the door then returned to the table. There were no cheers: the villagers stared at him as if he might at any moment burst into flame or become a horse. Not until the last yard of his approach to the inquisitors’ table, his half-smile fading as he spotted Glass’s silver chains, did a weather-beaten traveller call out in sudden excitement, “It’s him! I know him! From Verity! The ring-fighter! Regol!”
37
ABBESS GLASS
“I’M SURPRISED
