Pristoleph let a relaxed smile drift across his face. Always careful to keep the sun behind him, Pristoleph didn’t have to squint up at the lieutenant.
“I should say so,” the young officer replied. “The pen- alty for this sort of gross dereliction of”
“It’s a feeling,” Pristoleph interrupted again, “that I grew up… what’s the word?”
He glanced at Wenefir, who offered, “Immersed?”
Immersed in,” Pristoleph finished with a smile.
The lieutenant narrowed his eyes and Pristoleph would swear the man wanted to take a step back but was fighting the impulse with all his might.
“That was on the streets, you understand,” Pristoleph added. “The Fourth Quarter, against the wall.”
Pristoleph held his eyes still while the lieutenant studied him. He was confident that his face betrayed nothing, and by doing so, told the young officer all he needed to know.
Still, the lieutenant wouldn’t allow his position to abandon him entirely and he said, “I will thank you not to interrupt me again, soldier. Do so one more time, stay seated in my presence, and continue this ludicrous 1 conversation one more breath and you will find yourself I standing tall before the man.”
| “What in all Nine Hells is that supposed to mean?” I Wenefir asked with a sneer and a quiver in his voice that I almost made Pristoleph nervous.
Wenefir edged a little closer to the lieutenant, who twitched ever so imperceptibly away, and Pristoleph stood. He held up a hand and Wenefir backed off, but he kept his steely red eyes locked on the young officer, who was subtly beginning to squirm.
“You’ll have to excuse my comrade-in-arms, here, Lieutenant,” Pristoleph said. “He can be sensitive sometimes. Is it any wonder, after what he’s been through?”
“I assure you,” the lieutenant said, “I have no”
“He used to climb down chimneys,” Pristoleph went on. “That was how he made his living, if you could call it that. You know what a few years of that does to you? It poisons you. The soot, the black grime inside a chimney when it’s scraped into every crevice of your naked body… eventually he had to be emasculated. The soot warts, they call them. Nasty things. They’ll kill you if you leave them alone, if you can suffer the pain. Can you imagine pain so bad you’d rather castrate yourself than endure it another moment? That’s my friend, here. He’s got nothing between his legs, but he’s still a better man than most.”
Wenefir blushed, suppressed a smile, and continued to stare down the lieutenant. The young officer’s face drained of color and he drew in a breath that hissed its way into his lungs.
“I say, I…” the lieutenant said.
Shifting, hissing sounds came from the tent, another giggle, and the clatter of a sword belt. Pristoleph continued to smile.
“If you’ve come for the young lady, sir,” Pristoleph said, “I’ll have to ask you to wait a moment while she finishes; up with another customer.”
The lieutenant puffed out his chest, his tabard still hanging unfilled over his unimpressive physique. Pristoleph took a moment to admire the young officer’s armor while the lieutenant made a great show of being so offended and shockedmortified eventhat he was momentarily unable to speak. It wasn’t practical, fighting armor, but the kind of decorative parade plate rich mothers bought for their sons to play soldier in while Father finished shoring up the family business before having the good graces to die and let the former army officer step into his fortune.
“I have no interest in your filthy little”
“Shut up, lieutenant,” the captain said as he stepped out from the tent, his sword belt in his left hand, and his right arm around the waist of a blonde woman wrapped in a silk sheet.
Pristoleph didn’t laugh at the lieutenant’s reaction, but Wenefir did. When both Pristoleph and the captain glanced his way, though, Wenefir shut up. That was not the case for the bulk of the assembled soldiers, some of whom laughed heartily at the young lieuten-. ant’s expense.
“Captain, I… I…” the lieutenant blustered, and it looked for a moment as if he might fall down.
The captain, a convivial, gray-haired man with arms like oak trees, clapped Pristoleph hard on the back and said, “You’ll go far in this man’s army, boy.” Then he looked at the young lieutenant. “I paid him up front, Lieutenant Ptolnec, and I expect you’ll do the same.”
With that, the captain gave the lady a kiss on the cheek that was greeted with another giggle.
“Until tomorrow, Nyla my dear,” said the captain, then he stomped happily off through a parting sea of cheering soldiers.
It took Ptolnec nearly a full hour to finally hand over the coin and take his turn in Pristoleph’s tent.
5
9 Uktar, the Year of the Snow Winds (1335 DR) The Surmarsh, Thay
Marek had no interest in all the killing and sword-play. A simple spell rendered him invisible, so he could stand apart from the fray, watching his people dispatch one lizardman after another.
The lizardmen shone with slime and bog water. Their green-and-yellow scales twitched over tightly bunched muscles. Long snouts like a crocodile’s snapped at the Thayans, and unsettlingly humanlike hands tipped with terrible claws ripped and pawed. Marek couldn’t help but notice that when the lizardmen bled, their blood was as red as any human’s.
He’d been sent deep into the untamed marsh in the northern reaches of the realm on what he was certain was a suicide mission. Though since he hadn’t sent himself there, it was more properly a homicide mission, and he was the victim.
I’ve made as many enemies as friends, Marek Rymiit told himself as a Thayan warrior died gurgling at the hands of one of the humanoid reptiles. I guess that means I’m doing something right.
With a mumbled incantation and a casual swipe of his hands in front of him, he stopped the lizardman in its tracks. The warrior’s blood dribbled into the brackish water, mingling with the green-yellow slime floating on the top. Little fish appeared from below the murk to gum the droplets of blood.
The lizardman’s breathing grew fast and shallow, and Marek was concerned that the thing might pass out. Having cast the spell, Marek could be seen, but there were so few of the lizardmen left, and enough of his own people still wading through them, that he was comfortable with his own safety.
The cold swamp water leaking into his boots, however, was quite a bit less than comfortable.
“If you understand me,” Rymiit said to the lizardman, “say so now or 111 kill you and find one of your kind that does.”
The lizardman thought about it for a few beats of its racing heart then said, “I… understand.”
Rymiit smiled, remaining silent, and watching while one of his peoplea young woman named Zhaera who was a promising little necromancerwas disemboweled by a lizardman’s ragged claws. The yellow-gray ropes that came out of her body splashed into the swamp water and glistened in the sunlight filtering through the trees above. Flies landed on them and took off again quickly, taking their little nibbles even as the guts sank into the swamp. It took her a few seconds to die, but Marek imagined she was happy to be able to see the lizardman who’d killed her fall before the blade of the strapping young sergeant who was ever so handy with a battle-axe.
“If not Thay,” Marek asked the paralyzed lizardman, “whom do you serve?”
The lizardman’s lips curved and Marek could see strips of human flesh festering between its triangular teeth.
“Speak, lizard,” Marek Rymiit urged. “Whatever you fear from your new master, I can assure you will be tripled at the hands of the Red Wizards. Speak, then I will release you, you can go back to serving your proper masters in peace, and I can leave this stinking, insect-infested hell hole once and for all.”
“A dragon…” the lizardman hissed, reluctant to explain further.
Marek raised an eyebrow and said, “A dragon? Oh, do tell.”
The lizardman stood twitching silently for a moment.
“This dragon has a name, I take it?” Marek asked, noticing only in passing that the last of the lizardmen had fallen to a Thayan blade.
