The place where they eventually arrived was less a town and more a number of hill farms that had clustered together for community and protection. The locals had pooled their resources to hire mercenaries to slay a slig that had been roaming the area, stealing food and terrorizing the women at night. Some citizens had tried to battle the slig, but this one was a ferocious rogue male, detached from his tribe. He was tricky to track and even more perilous to corner.
It was in Vocalion that Ursa heard the good people of Kimmel had chipped together and were offering a fair sum, with proof of the creature's demise.
For an hour, the mercenaries met with representatives of the citizenry led by the constable, a cowardly fool who seemed eager to foist the responsibility for taking care of the problem onto someone else. Ursa presented his credentials, and they in turn affirmed the amount of the reward. The general whereabouts of the nuisance was well-known. The slig dwelled somewhere among the sandstone cliffs that
bordered the river, near where the forest ended.
That night Ursa and the others camped away from the town, as was their habit. Ursa was in a gregarious mood. Around the campfire he told stories about the time he rode with a company of upright Knights of Solamnia, pretending to be one of them until he was drummed out of their regiment for his drinking and womanizing. Like a lot of his stories, you couldn't tell if this one was entirely true, but Kit laughed along with Colo and Droopface.
They made up their bedrolls early. Colo went off into the darkness to take first watch. Laying side by side on their blankets, Ursa and Kit stayed awake, passing back and forth a jug of local mead that had been bestowed on them by the grateful citizens of Kimmel.
"Sligs are tough kin of hobgoblins," Ursa told Kit, preparing her for the morrow.
"Whatever you do, don't get in the way of its venomous spittle. The spittle can't kill you, but it'll burn your skin and make you wish you were dead. Their eyesight is poor in daylight, but their aim is good at night or in caves."
Eventually they drank the jug down to the bottom. The drunken Ursa made an emphatic point of telling Kit that the reward for killing the slig would be shared equally—four hundred pieces of gold, or one hundred pieces each. He was doing his best to make up for his past transgression.
The highland cold was harsh. Following Ursa's example, Kit pulled her blanket around her ears. As she was falling asleep Kit knew, even though she could only see his eyes, that Ursa was watching her with a roguish smile on his lips. His crooked smile was not so unlike her own.
* * * * *
The afternoon of the following day they rousted the slig from a tree roost along the forest edge. Colo had spotted its tracks and been stalking it since late in the morning. Kit had never seen such a thing. It was six feet tall with a horny hide of burnt-orange; a stubby tail; big, pointed ears; and a long, thin snout lined with wicked-looking fangs. Ursa was right; the slig's eyes were worthless, narrow slits, and this specimen had no stomach for fighting when the sun was still high in the sky. The slig loped away from them with little provocation.
The horses could not easily pursue the slig in this densely wooded area, so they picked a spot to tie up their steeds and then proceeded on foot. The slig seemed to be toying with them, picking his way through rocks and trees, staying just barely ahead until one of them managed to catch up, then turning to take a dangerous swipe at the closest follower. Colo was the most nimble of the four, and she rushed ahead, leaping over bushes, pushing through thickets a short distance behind the slig. She carried a spear that she had made that very morning by lashing her best knife to a pole. Crude though it was, the spear might pierce the slig's hide. First Colo had to get close enough to throw it. Stopping to catch her breath on a small rise, she turned back to the others. Ursa and Kit were only minutes behind her; trailing laboriously in their wake was Droopface. Kitiara carried Beck's sword. Recognizing the weapon when Kit had unsheathed it earlier that day, Ursa had shared a conspiratorial smile with her.
"Hurry up!" shouted Colo. Just as they spotted her, the diminutive warrior-woman turned on her heel and seemed to tumble forward. They heard her screaming and shouting, but could no longer see her. Kit reached the rise first, but luckily Ursa was following closely and managed to grab Kit before she too plunged into the pit trap on the other side of the slope.
Looking down, they saw Colo at the bottom of a sharply angled, slimy hole in the ground, about fifteen or twenty feet deep. She was on her feet and staring up at them with a vexed expression.
"Are you all right?" shouted Ursa.
"Nothing broken," she yelled back. "But the bottom of this pit is crawling with lizards. Maybe poisonous ones. I've killed a few and the others are
