that didn't matter any more than the fatigue implicit in his pounding heart and gasping lungs. He had to run before someone took another shot at him from the ramparts, or other foes came streaming out of the gate.
He dashed north, toward the heart of the city with its leaning ramshackle towers, seeking to lose himself in the maze of twisting alleyways. Eventually he found a thin, unmarked flight of stairs at the end of a narrow cul-de- sac, and after descending into the earth, permitted himself to hunker down, utterly spent, and rest. His eyes stung, and he knuckled them angrily.
Bow in hand, guiding the sorrel mare with her knees, Miri Buckman forced her way down the congested lane until it became clear that the thief had outdistanced her.
Could she track him, then? Through a forest or across a moor, almost certainly. But in the city, creaking carts, drawn by oxen and mules, rolled up and down the avenues to erase whatever sign her quarry might have left. Pedestrians milled pointlessly about to complete the obliteration, and moreover, some of the wider thoroughfares were cobbled.
She cursed under her breath. She wasn't fond of cities in general with their crowds, dirt, and stink, and crumbling Oeble seemed a particularly obnoxious one.
By the Hornblade, she thought, the spires look as if they might collapse at any second.
Every other person on the street seemed either to slink furtively or to affect a bravo's strut and sneer. Indeed, every third passerby was a pig-faced, olive-skinned orc or some sort of goblin-kin. She would have had no trouble believing the town was as foul a nest of villains as rumor maintained even if she hadn't suffered an overt demonstration of its lawlessness.
She wheeled the mare and cantered back to the Paeraddyn, where someone had already found a couple healers to tend the injured warriors. It didn't look as if the outlaws had actually killed more than a couple of her warriors. She supposed that was good, though in her present humor, she was half inclined to cut down a few of them herself. Stupid, incompetent-
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, controlling the anger, or at least redirecting it toward the proper target. She had no business scorning the mercenaries for failing to protect the treasure. Ultimately, it had been her responsibility and, maddeningly, her failure, just a few scant minutes before she might have divested herself of her charge.
Hostegym Longstride hobbled up to her with a faltering gait that belied his surname. Not seeing any blood on the burly, azure-cloaked mercenary, Miri surmised that one of the thieves had scored on him with a shrewd kick to the knee, a stamp to the foot, or some such.
'Most of our lads should survive,' he rumbled. 'Most of the inn's guards, too, if you care.'
'How about the three thieves who didn't get away?' she replied, swinging herself down off her horse. The motion made the top of her head throb where the fraudulent beggar had kicked her.
'All dead,' the mercenary captain said. 'The arrows and crossbow bolts killed the men outright, and it looks like the big wench broke her neck bouncing down the steps.'
'Piss and dung,' Miri swore. She'd hoped to question one of them.
A hostler, a pimply, gangling youth, scurried up to her.
'Madame… m-madame ranger?' he stammered, as if uncertain of the proper way to address her, or else simply afraid she might take out her frustrations on him. 'A gentleman inside the inn wants to talk to you.'
'I'm sure he does. Take care of my mount.' She handed the boy the reins, then glanced at Hostegym and added, 'You might as well come along, too.'
They headed into the common room of the inn. Judging by the babble, the dozen or so voices shouting for the taverner's or a serving maid's attention, the excitement of the robbery and brawl had engendered quite a thirst in those who'd simply stood and watched the show. A white, soft-looking hand beckoned through a curtain of yellow glass beads. The scout and mercenary passed through the glittering strands and down a little passage lined with private chambers. The door to the last one on the left was ajar. They stepped through and seated themselves on the opposite side of a scarred, rectangular table from the man they'd come to meet. The small window was closed and shuttered, and the dim, confined space was stuffy with the trapped heat of a warm autumn afternoon.
Catching a first glimpse of that clean, well-tended hand, Miri had immediately guessed it had never performed any task more strenuous than guiding a quill across a piece of parchment. Seeing its owner up close reinforced the impression. Plump, clad in an unpretentious yet well-tailored tunic and breeches, dove gray with brown accents, he had the look of a chief clerk or steward, a highly placed functionary who spent his days assigning work to other people. Yet the set of his fleshy jaw bespoke a certain resolution, and his brown eyes, a wry intelligence, that persuaded her to defer the contempt she generally felt for such citified parasites.
'So,' he said.
'You are…?' Miri prompted.
'The man you were supposed to meet,' he said. 'The fellow who would have examined the item, then gone and fetched the coin and letters of credit if everything was in order. We don't need to throw names around. Certainly not now.'
'I thought this Paeraddyn place was supposed to be safe,' Hostegym grumbled.
'My master's house is safe,' the Oeble man replied, a thin edge of anger in his mild, reasonable baritone voice, 'but your employer insisted we make the exchange on neutral ground, no doubt so I'd have difficulty simply seizing the item and refusing to pay the balance due.'
'The folk of Oeble,' Miri said, 'even the more reputable ones, enjoy a certain notoriety.'
'And sometimes,' the pudgy man said, 'a man spends so much effort looking over his shoulder for dragons that he walks right up on a bear. But I suppose it will do no good to debate what we ought to have done.'
'I assume,' Miri said, 'that even Oeble has some sort of watch, or constables.'
The man across the table nodded and said, 'The Gray Blades, and I daresay they'll make a genuine effort to find a robber who committed an outrage in the Paer. Indeed, my patron can take measures to encourage them to do their utmost. But let's not tell them what the rogue stole.'
'Surely if they knew how valuable it-'
'Within a day, every scoundrel in town would know it, too, and that might be less than helpful. We can still reclaim our property if and when the Gray Blades actually recover it.'
Miri scowled and said, 'You don't seem confident they will.'
'They're competent, some are even halfway honest, but they only number about thirty. Oeble is a big place and, I must concede, a rogue's haven, where every day dozens of new crimes compete for the law's attention. We'll just have to hope for the best.'
'That's not good enough,' Miri said. The warm, stale air was oppressive, and made her head pound. She irritably tugged at her green leather armor, pulling it away from her neck to help her breathe. 'We'll find the wretch ourselves.'
Hostegym grunted and said, 'I wonder if that's a practical idea.'
'I'm a scout,' she said. 'A tracker and hunter. It's what I do.'
'It's what you do out in the woods,' the mercenary leader replied. 'What makes you think you'll have the same kind of luck in a warren like this?'
'Your friend may have a point,' the functionary said. 'I don't mean to discourage you. As I understand it, your employer has his own problems, and urgently needs the rest of his coin. To say the least, it's in everyone's best interests that we recover the item and complete our transaction. But it won't help anybody if you, Mistress Buckman, merely wind up getting tossed on the Dead Cart.'
Miri made a spitting sound and said, 'You must be joking. It's only one man who got away.'
'If you truly mean to do this,' the functionary said, 'you'd better get that notion right out of your head. Oeble is full of knaves who'll resent strangers asking questions about one of their own, or about anything, really.'
'Fine, point taken. But surely they're no match for a band of trained warriors.'
The Oeble man arched an eyebrow.
'All right,' she said, 'I admit, the four rogues made us look like idiots, but only because they had magic and luck on their side. The wizard's dead now, and the whoreson who jumped off the wall has surely run through all the good fortune the Lady Who Smiles was willing to grant him.'
'That's as may be,' Hostegym said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, 'but I have to tell you, Miri, if you go ahead with this, you won't have that 'band of trained warriors' watching your back. The lads and me, we're
