The journey to Sirik’s estate was blessedly brief. Past Despot’s Barbican, then left, skirting High Gallows Hill before reaching the freshly plastered wall and broad, high-arched gate leading into the merchant’s compound.
Word must have gone in advance for Sirik himself stood waiting, shaded from the morning sun by a servant with a parasol. A half-dozen armoured men from his private bodyguard were clustered round him. The merchant’s expression descended in swift collapse upon seeing a mere four wagons roll into the compound. Curses rode the dusty air from the guards when they spied the first driver, whose centre crow at that moment decided to half spread its wings to regain balance as the withered hands twitched the traces, halting the wagon.
Gruntle reined in and slowly dismounted.
Sirik waved his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘But-but-’
Drawing off his cloak revealed the damage on Gruntle’s chain hauberk, the slashes through the black iron links, the gouges and punctures, the crusted blood. ‘Dwell raiders,’ he said in a rumble, grinning once more.
‘But-’
‘We gave good account,’ Gruntle resumed, squinting at the guards behind the merchant. ‘And if you’d let loose a few more of your precious preeners there, we might ha’done better still. The raiding party was a big one, a hundred shrieking savages. The fools torched the other wagons even as they looted ’em.’
One of the bodyguard, Sirik’s sear-faced captain, stepped forward, scowling at the wagons. ‘A hundred, was it? Against what, eight guards under your command, Gruntle? Do you take us for idiots? A hundred Dwell and you’d not be here.’
‘No, Kest, you’re not an idiot,’ Gruntle allowed. ‘Thick-skulled and a bully, but not an idiot.’
As the captain and his men bridled, Sirik held up a trembling hand. ‘Gruntle, Gisp sits that wagon but he’s dead.’
‘He is. So are the other three.’
‘But-but how?’
Gruntle’s shrug was an ominous roll of his massive shoulders. ‘Not sure,’ he admitted, ‘but they took my orders anyway-granted, I was desperate and yelling things I normally wouldn’t, but by then I was the last one left, and with four surviving wagons and as many horses…’ He shrugged again, then said, ‘I’ll take my pay now, Sirik. You’ve got half the Bastion kelyk you wanted and that’s better than none.’
‘And what am I to do with four undead drivers?’ Sirik shrieked.
Gruntle turned, glared up at Gisp. ‘Go to Hood, you four. Now.’
The drivers promptly slumped, sliding or tottering from their perches. The three crows picking at Gisp’s shredded face set up an indignant squall, then flapped down to resume their meal once the body settled on the dust of the compound.
Sirik had recovered enough to show irritation. ‘As for payment-’
‘In full,’ Gruntle cut in. ‘I warned you we didn’t have enough. Kest may not be an idiot, but you are, Sirik. And sixteen people died for it, not to mention a hundred Dwell. I’m about to visit the Guild, as required. I get my pay in full and I’ll keep my opinions to myself. Otherwise…’ Gruntle shook his head, ‘you won’t be hiring any more caravan guards. Ever again.’
Sirik’s sweat-sheathed face worked for a time, until his eyes found a look of resignation. ‘Captain Kist, pay the man.’
A short time later, Gruntle stepped out on to the street. Pausing, he glanced up at the morning sky, then set out for home. Despite the heat, he donned his cloak and drew up the hood once more. The damned markings on his skin rose flush with battle, and took weeks to fade back into a ghostly tint. In the meantime, the less conspicuous he could make himself the better. He suspected that the hovel he called home was already barricaded by a murder of acolytes awaiting his return. The tiger-skinned woman who proclaimed herself High Priestess of the local temple would have heard the fierce battle cry of Trake’s Mortal Sword, even at a distance of thirty or so leagues out on the Dwelling Plain. And she would be in a frenzy… again, desperate as ever for his attention.
But Gruntle didn’t give a damn about her and the mangy losers she’d gathered to her temple. Killing those raiders had not been a task he had welcomed. No pleasure in spilling blond, no deligkt in his own savage rage, He’d lost friends that day, including the last pair who had been with him ever since Capustan. Such wounds were fur deeper than those his flesh still carried, and they would take much longer to heal.
Mood foul despite the bulging purse of councils at his belt, he was disinclined to suffer the normal jostling necessary to navigate the city’s major avenues and streets one push or snarl too many and he’d be likely to draw blades and set Shout carving a path through the crowds, and then he’d have no choice but to flee Darujhistan or risk dangling from High Gallows Hill-and so once through the Estates Gate just south of Borthen Park, and down the ramp into Lakefront Dis-t rict, Gruntle took a roundabout route, along narrow, twisting alleys and rubbish-lllled wends between buildings.
The few figures he met as he walked were quick to edge aside, as if struck meek by some instinct of self- preservation.
He turned on to one slightly wider track only to find it blocked by a tall carriage that looked as if it had been through a riot-reminding Gruntle that the fete was still on-although, as he drew closer and found himself stepping over with¬ered, dismembered limbs and streaks of slowly drying blood, and when he saw t he gaping hole in the carriage where a door should have been, with the dark interior still and grey with motionless haze, and the horses standing with hides crusted in dried sweat and froth-the entire mess unattended and seemingly im¬mune to looting-he recognized that this was one of those damned Trygalle Guild carriages, well and truly infamous for sudden, inexplicable and invariably violent arrivals.
fust as irritating, the Trygalle was a clear rival to the city’s own Caravanserai Guild, with its unprecedented shareholding system. Something the Caravanserai should have thought of long ago, although if what Gruntle had heard was anywhere near the truth, then the attrition rate among the Trygalle’s shareholders was appallingly high- higher than any sane guard would accept.
Then again, he reconsidered, here he was, the lone survivor of Sirik’s caravan, and despite the councils he now carried his financial return was virtually nothing compared to the profits Sirik would harvest from the kelyk, especially now that he didn’t have to pay his drivers. Of course, he’d need to purchase new wagons and repair the ones Gruntle had delivered, but there was insurance to offset some of that.
As he edged round the carriage in the street, he was afforded a closer look, concluding, sourly, that the Trygalle built the bastards to weather just about anything. Scorched, gouged as if by the talons of plains bears, bitten and chopped at, gaudy paint peeled away as if splashed with acid. As battered as a war wagon.
He walked past the horses. Then, five strides onward, Gruntle turned about in surprise. That close and the beasts should have panicked-they always panicked. Even ones he had broken to his scent shivered uncontrollably beneath him until sheer nervous exhaustion dulled their fright. But here… he scowled, meeting the eyes of one of the leaders and seeing naught but jaded disinterest.
Shaking his head, Gruntle resumed his journey.
Damned curious. Then again, he could do with a horse like one of those. Better yet, how about a dead one, dead as Gisp?
The thought brought him back to certain unpleasantries he didn’t much want to think about at the moment. Like my being able to command the dead. He was, he considered, too old to be discovering new talents.
The walrus-skin coracle bobbed perilously in the chop between two trader barges, at risk of being crushed between them before a frantic scull by the lone occupant squirted the craft through, to draw up moments later alongside a mud-smeared landing crowded with crayfish traps. The man who clambered up from the coracle was soaked from the hips down, and the knapsack he slung on to one shoulder sloshed, then began to drain incontinently as he worked his way up the dock to the worn stone steps that climbed to the quayside.
He was unkempt, his beard two or three days old, and the leathers he wore seemed a strange mix of those normally worn beneath armour and those a Nathii fisher might wear in a squall. The floppy sealskin hat covering his head was misshapen, sun-faded and salt-rimed. In addition to his knapsack he carried an odd-looking scimitar in a split scabbard bound together by frayed strips of leather. The serpent-head pommel revealed empty sockets where gems had once resided for eyes, fangs and collar. Tall, wiry, he moved with a vaguely furtive haste once he reached the quay, cutting through the crowds towards one of the feeder alleys on the other side of Front Street.
From the landing down on the water, someone was yelling, demanding to know who had left a half-awash coracle beside his cages.
Reaching the alley mouth, the man walked in a few paces, then paused in the shadow between the high-walled
