Unclean

merlons.

Wesk grinned. 'I can hit it. I'm not some feeble runt of a human.'

He caressed the curves of his yew bow and growled a spell of his own, evidently some charm known to master archers and hunters. The longbow glinted as though catching Selыne's light in a way it hadn't before, despite the fact that nothing had changed in the sky. Wesk nocked an arrow, stepped into the center of the gate, drew the fletchings to his ear, and let the missile fly.

To Bareris's eyes, the shaft simply vanished into the dark, but from Wesk's grunt of satisfaction, and the fact that he didn't bother reaching for a second arrow, it was evident the first one had found its mark. Bareris imagined the orc collapsing, killed before it even had an inkling it was in peril.

He and the gnolls skulked across the open ground between the wall and the tower. They had no reason to think anyone else was looking-it seemed likely the rest of the folk inside were happy to shut themselves away from the terrors infesting the night-but they couldn't be sure.

Stone steps rose to a four-paneled door. As Bareris climbed toward it, he hoped to find only a handful of warriors waiting on the other side. Whoever was garrisoning this particular outpost, though, he and the hyenafolk had no choice but to deal with them.

That was because one could only see so far into a ruined city while scouting it from the outside, and thus the intruders had little idea what lay beyond this point. If they were to avoid lurking demons and locate Tammith, someone would have to enlighten them.

Bareris tried the door and found that, as expected, it was locked or barred. He motioned for the gnolls to stay behind him then bellowed.

The magic infusing his voice cracked the door and jolted it on its hinges but failed to break it open. He threw himself against it and bounced back with a bruised shoulder, but then Wesk and Thovarr charged past him and hit the barrier together. They smashed it out of its frame to slam down on the floor of the hall beyond. Orcs, three kneeling in a circle around their dice and piles of coppers, and two more wrapped in their blankets, goggled at them in amazement.

As it turned out, there were no mages on hand, and with the orcs caught unprepared, the fight that followed was less a battle than a massacre. In fact, that was the problem. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment, the gnolls appeared to have forgotten that the point of their incursion was to take at least one of the enemy alive.

Bareris cast about. For a moment, he could see only gory, motionless, gray-skinned bodies and the hyenafolk still hacking at them. Then he spotted an orc that was down on its back but still moving, albeit in a dazed manner, groping for the dirk in its boot. Thovarr swung his axe over his head to finish the creature off.

'No!' Bareris shouted. He lunged and shoved Thovarr away from the orc, swiped the latter's hand with the flat of his sword to stop its reaching for the knife, and aimed his point at its throat. 'We have to talk to one of them, and this appears to be the only one left.'

He proceeded with the interrogation as soon as the gnolls verified that the rest of the tower was empty. 'You can answer my questions and live,' he told the orc in its own language, 'or I can give you to my friends to kill in whatever fashion amuses them. It's up to you.'

'I can't tell you anything!' the orc pleaded. 'I'll die!'

'Nonsense. Perhaps your masters will punish you for talking if they get their hands on you, but you can run away.'

'That's not it,' said the orc. 'The Red Wizards put a spell on me, on all of us. If we talk about their business, we die.'

From the manner in which he attended to the conversation, it was apparent Wesk understood the orcish tongue, and now he and Bareris exchanged puzzled glances. The bard wondered again what endeavor merited such extraordinary attempts at secrecy.

'Listen to me,' Bareris said, infusing his voice with the magic of persuasion, 'you don't know that your masters truly laid a spell on you. It would have been a lot less work simply to lie and claim they did. Even if the enchantment is real, you can't be sure it took you in its grip. It's the nature of such charms that they can always fail to affect a particular target. On the other hand, you know my sword is real. You see it with your own eyes, and you can be absolutely certain of dying if I cut your throat with it. Bearing all that in mind, whom do you choose to obey, the wizards or me?'

The orc took a deep breath. 'I'll answer.'

'Good. Where in the city do the slaves end up?'

The prisoner sucked in another breath. Bareris realized the orc was panting with fear. 'They-'

A single word was all it took. The orc's back arched, and surprised, Bareris failed to yank his sword back in time to avoid piercing the orc's neck. But the point didn't go in deep, and he doubted the orc even noticed the wound. The orc was suffering far more grievous hurts.

The orc's back continued to bend like a bow, and his extremities flailed up and down, pounding the floor. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and bloody froth foamed from his mouth. Hoping the creature might survive if he could only keep him from swallowing his tongue, Bareris cast about for an implement he could wedge in his mouth, but before he could find one, the orc thrashed a final time and lay still. A foul smell suffused the air. The warrior had soiled himself in his death throes.

'Well,' said Wesk, 'it wasn't lying about the geas.'

'No,' Bareris answered.

He felt a twinge of shame for compelling the orc to such a death, and scowling, he tried to quash the feeling. He'd had no choice but to force the creature to speak.

'So what do all of us 'soldiers' do now?' Thovarr asked. 'Just wander around and look for the slave? Delhumide's big, and it's got a spook hiding in every shadow.'

Bareris prayed it hadn't come to that. 'We search this place,' he said. 'Maybe we'll find something useful.'

They began by searching the orcs' bodies then moved on to ransacking their possessions. Wesk dumped out the contents of a haversack, picked up a parchment, unfolded it, and then brought it to Bareris.

'Is this anything?' asked the gnoll.

Bareris studied the scrawled diagram. It didn't have any words written on it, just lines, circles, rectangles, and dots, and for a moment, he couldn't decipher it. Then he noticed certain correspondences, or at least he hoped he did. He rotated the paper a quarter turn, and the proper orientation made the similitude unmistakable.

'It's a map of this part of the city.'

Wesk eyed it dubiously. 'Are you sure?'

'Yes. It's difficult to tell because it's crudely drawn and the orc left so much off, but this is the breach in the wall we came through, here are the laughing shadows, and here the towers that squirm of their own accord. The mapmaker used the black dots to indicate areas best avoided. This is the building we're in now, and this box near the top must be the place where the Red Wizards themselves have taken up residence. Why else would anyone take the trouble to indicate the best path from here to there?'

The gnoll chieftain leered like a wolf spying a lost lamb. 'Nice of the pig-faces to go to so much trouble just to help us out.'

With the map to guide them, they skulked nearly to the center of Delhumide without running afoul of any more malevolent spirits or mortal foes, but as Bareris peered expectantly, waiting for the structure indicated on the sketch to come into view, he felt a sudden difference and froze. The gnolls sensed something as well, and growling, they peered around.

It took Bareris a breath or two to puzzle out precisely what they'd all registered. Probably because it was the last thing he would have expected. 'It's… more pleasant here. The feeling of evil has lifted.'

'Why?' asked Wesk.

Bareris shook his head. 'I don't know. Just enjoy the relief while you can. I doubt it will last.'

It did, though, and when they finally beheld their goal, he knew why. It was a square-built, flat-roofed hall notable for high columns covered in carvings and towering statues of a manlike figure with the crowned head of a