Ringil broke gaze with the dice man, looked in instead through the doors of the office, where a clerk sat yawning at a desk, poring over an open tome with a quill. Behind him, a couple of others bustled about with more ledgers and capped scrolls. A handful of other bounty hunters had chosen to stay inside, seated at the edges of the room and watching the paperwork.
So. The urge to shiver made it easier to fake the Yhelteth accent, kept his jaw tight and guttural on the Naomic syllables. Fifty outlaws, hiding in the forest. Sounds pretty vague to me. That all they ve got?
Eye-patch shook his head excitedly, flung thin, hanging threads of greasy hair about his pallid features. Behind the vertical scar that sat above and below the patch as if skewering it, he was younger than Ringil had noticed at first.
No, man, that s not all. They re saying these guys had, like, this sorcerer for a leader, some magicked-up fuck down from Trelayne, carrying a Black Folk blade. They say he s already wanted up north for treason, already got a twenty-five-thousand-florin price on his head.
Twenty-five thousand Ringil let his voice die off in carefully textured disbelief. That does not seem likely.
I m serious, man. They took some prisoners, got them up at the Keep and they re putting them to the question. Some of the slaves, too. That s the word coming down. Fucking sorcerer, man. The young bounty hunter nodded in at the clerks. Go ask for yourself, you don t believe me.
Ringil tipped him a skeptical look, then shrugged and stepped past, over the threshold of the opened doors and into the lamplit confines of the office.
The clerk looked up as he came in. Yes?
Man outside says you re hunting a sorcerer.
That s unconfirmed. The clerk put his quill aside and knuckled tiredly at one eye. We had a raid on a caravan coming down the Trelayne road last night, attackers still at large. Probably a lot of them. We re waiting on names.
How much you paying for heads?
Fifty per. Hundred if you bring them in alive. Maybe get you more later if the caravan owners put up a reward.
Alive? Ringil pulled a face. In Tlanmar, they pay me seventy per, dead or alive. That s Empire elementals, too, comes out at a hundred and twenty florins worth, near enough.
The clerk shrugged. So go back to working for Tlanmar. Here, you ll get fifty florins per head, a hundred per captured prisoner. You want on the list or not?
Ringil made a show of grumpy indecision, caught the bounty hunters in the corner of the room nudging one another and grinning at the display. He judged the performance a success, cleared his throat, and made an ungracious gesture.
Well, then. I will go on your list, yes. Laraninthal of Shenshenath. Captain, retired, Sixty-second Imperial Levy. Put me down.
Some fucking retirement, said one of the bounty hunters quietly.
Eh, pal?
Low, noncommittal laughter among the others. Ringil turned to face the speaker. Saw a League military- issue cloak and tunic that had both seen better days, a sword sheathed in leather at the man s belt and another slung naked across his back. The man s features and close-shaven skull were scarred in a couple of places with blade damage, and part of one ear was chopped away. But there was no challenge in his face, and the comment seemed to have been meant without harm.
I served a cause, Ringil said stiffly, sticking to the role. I served my Emperor and defended my people. That was payment enough for me.
The shaven-headed man nodded. Yeah. And now you re hunting bandits in a foreign land for fifty florins a pop.
There s no brawling in here, the clerk warned. Start anything and your name comes off the list. That goes for you too, Klithren.
The bounty hunter waved it off. No one s brawling, inkspurt. Just working men here, trading air and waiting on the names so we can get to work. Right, Shenshenath?
Ringil nodded curtly, turned back to the desk. About this sorcerer. Outside they re saying he s worth twenty-five thousand florins up in Trelayne.
I already told you, said the clerk, writing laboriously, not looking up. That s not confirmed. All we know for the moment is that the leader of the attack was a northerner and he may have used a Kiriath blade.
Got a description?
Yeah. Tall, scary, and a scarred face.
More dry chuckling among the bounty hunters. It was a sketch that would have fit at least three of the men in the room, and probably half of those who stood outside as well. It was a caricature for a campfire tale.
Well, so are you these days, Gil. So are you.
The clerk scratched to a halt on the ledger page and reached to dip his quill. He glanced up at Ringil, as if surprised to see him still standing there.
That s it, we re done. You re on the list. Come back at first light or take a seat and wait, your choice.
Do you expect names before dawn?
The Keep does a pretty good line in questioning, Ringil s shaven-headed new friend offered. I doubt any of the road scum they took are going to stand up for long. Some ll be injured, some just cowards. They ll break right down.
No doubt.
Ringil had seen prisoners put to the question before, and some of them most assuredly not cowards. In the end, it made no difference. Everybody broke.
Yeah. Broke and said just exactly whatever the fuck they thought their torturers wanted to hear. I did it, yes, I m guilty, oh yes. With poison, yes, that s right. With a blade, yes, just as you say, a blade I threw in the sea. With black magic I did it, yes, yes, you re right, magic and the help of miniature fucking pixies.
He had the measure of the men he d hired and then abandoned, Gil, let s not forget that bit and he knew most would give up everything they knew at the first searing application of heated iron to their flesh. Fortunate, then, that they knew so little. Scarcity of detail would anger the interrogators, who in a case like this would be under a lot of pressure to deliver results, and the awful logic of that situation would roll right along, would push them way past the norms to make sure there really was no more to be gleaned. So their captives would have to go on suffering despite their initial confessions, would go on screaming out whatever names or facts still floated intact in the stew of their terror and pain along with any of a hundred crazed embellishments based on the hit- and-miss exhortations of their tormentors. Truth or lie, sane or not, the captives would offer up anything, any shrieking, sobbing, shuddering stream of contradictory gibberish they believed might take away the agony, might just please stop this dungeon-dim nightmare of crushed and split and fire-scorched flesh.
So yeah they d say it was a northern sorcerer with a magical blade and scars on his face; they d say it was an imperial renegade in full Kiriath mail at the head of a squad of border skirmishers; they d say it was fucking steppe nomads if you halfway suggested it to them. Any grains of truth in it all would be stamped and mangled beyond useful recognition.
Rumors and lies and campfire smoke, he summarized later for Eril, over spiced wine and cleared platters in the tavern.
Right now, that s all they ve got.
The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer nodded. Think it ll stay that way?
For a while, yeah. They think they ve got a couple of dozen demoralized bad guys hiding out in the forest somewhere. Lot of tough, impatient bounty hunters are going to think that s too good a chance to miss. Come morning, they ll be riding out to see if they can t get an early piece of the action.
Eril snapped a long shard of bone out of the fowl carcass on the table between them, lounged back, and commenced picking his teeth. Watching, Ringil surprised himself with a sudden, forceful recollection of Egar doing much the same thing, and equally surprising, equally abrupt he felt his eyes moisten. the fuck? He hadn t thought about the Dragonbane in months.
He blinked down the moisture in his eyes. This fucking flu.
