“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Megan said, restraining herself to keep from laughing. She knew Leif was good with languages, but this was not the kind of use she normally pictured such a talent being put to. “Let’s just find out where we are.”
“Yeah, right…” Leif looked around him, then put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, piercingly.
Megan watched with slight envy. Even with four brothers, this was one talent she had been unable to master. Her teeth were apparently just in the wrong places relative to one another. Leif whistled again, louder, then looked around, expectant.
There was a rustling in a pine tree near them. Something black dropped from a higher branch to a lower one.
It was a pathfinder bird. The birds were positioned here and there around the game as general advice-givers. In Sarxos, if nowhere else, you could safely claim, when someone asked you about something, that “a little bird told you.” Some of them were not so little. This one was the size and color of a crow, but it had an intelligent and slightly nasty look that few crows could have mastered.
“Hey,” Leif said, “we need advice.”
“Just got a fresh supply in this morning,” said the bird, in a rather smarmy voice that suggested that it had been a used-car dealer in a previous life. “If you turn off here and take
“
“You sure wouldn’t get as much singing afterwards,” Megan said. “Bird, which way is Minsar from here?”
The bird eyed her coolly. “What’s it worth to you?”
“Half an English muffin?”
The bird considered. “You’re on.”
Megan rooted around in her pack and came up with it, beginning to crumble it onto the ground. The bird flew down and began pecking at the bits, but Megan took a step forward and shooed it away.
“Hey!” said the bird, aggrieved.
“Directions first,” said Megan.
“Stay on this road for a mile and a half, take the first left, hold that for a mile and a half, and you’ll be at the fords,” the bird said. “The city’s two miles north of there. Now gimme.”
Megan stepped back, and the bird fluttered forward. “I tell you, it ain’t like it used to be,” it muttered as it started gobbling the muffin crumbs. “No trust, that’s the problem. Nobody trusts anybody anymore.”
Leif chuckled. “Nobody gets anything for nothing here, you mean,” he said. “Bye-bye, birdie.”
The bird, busy stuffing its face, didn’t answer.
They walked away. Leif still looked a little put out at having messed up his first transit. “I can short-jump us from here,” he said. “Coordinates shouldn’t be a problem.”
Megan shrugged. “Why use up good miles when we’re so close? We might as well walk. It’s not like the forest’s haunted, or anything.”
“I haven’t heard that it is,” Leif said. “But still…”
“If you want to jump, okay,” Megan said. “But a few miles in the dark doesn’t bother me.”
“Oh, well…you’re right, I guess. Come on.”
They walked. Getting to Minsar took them something over an hour, and they heard and smelled the place long before they saw it. It was not the city proper they smelled first, though. It was the battlefield, down by the fords.
Subjective time in Sarxos passed more slowly than it did in the real world. Rodrigues had apparently intended this from the beginning, both as a way for his players to get more experience for their money, and as a punning reference to the old legends about the way time was supposed to go more slowly for those taken away by elves or other supernatural beings into the Otherworlds. This meant that it might have been a week and a half in the outside world since Shel Lookbehind’s battle with Delmond, but here only a few days had passed; and not even a whole army of scavengers could have cleaned up the Fords of Artel by now. It being well after dark, the carrion birds were gone. But as Leif and Megan walked down to the fords, and their footsteps crunched on the gravelly strand, many glinting eyes looked at them from across the river, curious, their feasting disturbed.
“It’s just wolves,” Leif said.
Megan gritted her teeth, as much at the smell as at the sight of all those interested eyes, as the two of them waded across through the cold swift water. “Just. Just about a hundred of them.”
“Smells like they’ve got plenty to keep them busy,” Leif said. “They won’t bother us.”
“Nope,” Megan said softly. Leif glanced at her, and looked slightly surprised at the length and sharpness of the knife that had suddenly appeared in her hand.
“Where’d you have that?” he said.
“Out of sight,” Megan said, as they made their way through the middle of the battlefield — there was no use trying to go around it; bodies were everywhere. The eyes watched them as they passed, then became interested once again in their grisly meals. In the silence of the night, the wet sound of flesh being eaten and bones being chewed was loud.
Megan was very glad when they finally got up to the road, and the noise faded away behind them, around a curve. The smell took rather longer to wane, and by the time it was gone, they were already smelling Minsar’s sewage system, which dumped the run-offs from the gutters down the centers of its streets into pools out beyond the walls.
Minsar was several hundred years old, and had outgrown its walls twice. Around the outsides of the old granite-block walls was a more or less permanent town of tents and shanties, and the inevitable little crowd of industries too foul-smelling or dangerous to be allowed to do business inside the walls, like the tanners and papermakers and the bakers (like other cities, Minsar had discovered that, under the right conditions, flour could become a high explosive). Now, though, there was a new ring of tents and temporary structures outside the “outer ring”: the pavilion and wagons of the army that had defended Minsar, and the structures of several other groups of warriors, large and small, who had come there under the auspices of one lord or another to check the situation out.
Megan and Leif made their way toward the city gates through a maelstrom of noise and ferocious odors. Roasting meat, spilled wine, baking bread (the bakers were apparently working twenty-four hours a day to meet the increased demand), horses and horse dung, the stinking stagnant pools under the city walls, the occasional drift of perfume from some passing camp-follower or newly scrubbed-and-scented soldier just out of the bathhouses built outside the walls, all their smells wove together amid the sound of the many voices speaking or shouting in many languages, laughing, cursing, joking, talking. Leif and Megan listened to the talk as best they could as they made their way to and through the gates.
The gate-wardens were keeping only the slackest watch. The town was plainly still in holiday mood after being saved from being sacked by Delmond. Most of the talk around Leif and Megan, as they made their way down the cobbled open space of the main street, was about that: the narrow escape, the army suddenly without its leader, and what would happen to that army now.
“Where’d the knife go?” Leif said softly.
“Away,” Megan said.
“Good. Knives are illegal in here.”
“Don’t think anyone’ll be able to enforce the statute tonight,” Megan said, looking around at the hordes of armed men and women milling around, trying to get into the town-square taverns, or spilling out of them with drinks in hand. She found herself trying not to stare at one gaudily dressed hunchbacked dwarf who crossed her path, pushing his way through the crowd and waving a miniature sword, to the guffaws of others. “
“Tonight? Fewer than usual,” Leif said. “I take your point.”
They drifted past another crowd outside a tavern door. Inside was an impossible crowd, packed together like medieval sardines, shouting and pushing to get to the bar or to get away from it. A burly barmaid was pushing
