The Deadliest Game

themselves around in cloud and turn ferocious, and down the valley would come screaming the killing wind, the fierce hot wind that poured itself over the northern mountain crests, stirred the few little glacial lakes to madness, and kindled thunderstorms that seemed almost pathologically fond of striking invading troops with lightning.

It was a tough nut to crack, little Errint. Not that it was uncrackable, nor was its leadership so misguided as to think it so. They knew very well Argath’s brooding power to the north. They had never been in a position to attack it independently. But things might be changing now….

So Leif stood in the open gate of the city, looking around the place, and the gate-guards, leaning on their straight sharp halberds, looked back at him with equanimity. They were big, dark-haired, blunt-featured men, typical of Errint blood, favoring leather instead of cloth for wear. Leif nodded to them, knowing that they had already sized him up as harmless and friendly — otherwise he would have been flat on the ground, with one of those oversized army canopeners stuck in his gut. The guards nodded to him affably enough, and Leif went in.

Errint’s basic structure was a little like Minsar’s, except on a much smaller scale. Also, there were no outbuildings permitted beyond the fifth wall, the outermost one. The bakers and tanners and so forth were pushed well back in the rearmost curve between the fourth and fifth walls, but no one pitched tents or temporary buildings outside for the simple reason that one of those sudden summer windstorms or rainstorms could simply wash them right down off the Errint Hill and into the river. The marketplace inside the third wall, therefore, was unusually crowded with tents and awnings and tables and pallets and bales. Every day was market day in Errint. A thriving trade made its way up and down the valley’s single road toward the lowlands, people who had come for metal or an animal-skin and stayed to pick up something extra, a firkin of mountain butter or the famous glacier wine.

It was late enough in the day that the market had lost much of its agitation. There were still a few cries of “Buy my beer!” or “Skins, good skins here, no holes!”—but it all had a desultory feel, as if everyone was already thinking of heading out to get something to eat or drink. The one steady sound there was a ting- CLANK, ting-CLANK that Leif knew, and he smiled a little as he made his way through the market stalls toward the source of it.

Here in iron-mine country, lots of people knew a little about forging — the rudiments — but a really good blacksmith was harder to find, and harder still to find was a really good farrier. They tended to travel around to where the business was good. Only the very best would have a fixed place of work where they could expect clients to beat a path to their doors with their horses in tow. This one, though, was plenty good.

Leif pushed his way through the part of the market reserved for the butchers, past the last few beef carcasses hanging in the late sun with clouds of flies shrilling about them, and came to a spot by the curve of the wall where someone had parked a cart. It was from here that the rhythmic ting-CLANK sound came. Nearby, its head down and its reins fastened to an iron ring in the back end of the cart, a big, patient blond draft horse stood. Just in front of the horse, working at an anvil lifted up onto what had been some rich Errint’s mounting-stone, was a small, fair man in a light, worn tan canvas shirt and well-worn leathern breeches, with a thick leather apron over it all, hammering away at a horseshoe that had just been in the portable forgepit, which had come out of his cart and now stood near the anvil on the ground. The bellows hung at hand in the cart’s framework, ready to work. The farrier paused a moment to pick up the horseshoe with his tongs and shove it in among the coals to heat again. When it came up to cherry-red, he took it out with the tongs and began beating it again on the anvil.

“Wayland,” Leif said.

The face that looked up at him was deeply lined, all smile lines. The eyes had that distant-looking expression of someone mountain-bred, though not these mountains. “Well, it’s young Leif,” Wayland said. “Well met in the afternoon! What brings you up here this time of year?”

“Just wandering around,” Leif said, “as usual.”

Wayland looked at him with a grin that suggested he might be taking what Leif said with a grain of salt. “Ah, well, may be, may be.”

“I might ask the same of you,” Leif said. “You’re not usually up here this close to autumn. I thought you’d decided you didn’t want any more of this weather. Lowlands for me, I thought you said, come the fall.”

“Aah, it’s still summer, though, isn’t it?” said Wayland. He dropped his voice. “And as for you, with your healing stone and all, I don’t think you’re just wandering. My money says you have some other reason to be here.”

“Hate to see you lose your bet,” said Leif, sitting down on the side-step of the cart, out of the way. For a couple of minutes he just sat and watched Wayland finish hammering the horseshoe. Wayland plunged it into a bucket of water nearby; the water boiled and hissed in a rush of steam. The horse flicked its ears back and forth, unconcerned. “Man wants to make a living,” Wayland said casually, “you’ve got to go where the business is going to be.”

“You think there’s going to be business here?”

“Oh, aye,” said Wayland, fishing with the tongs in the bucket to get the horseshoe out. “Plenty of business soon, I think.” He glanced in the direction of the city gates, up and over the walls, eastward down the long valley. “Going to be fighting around here before long.”

He lifted the draft horse’s right forefoot, caught it between his knees, and turned his back on Leif for the moment. “Who would you say?” Leif said.

For a moment Wayland didn’t say anything. He glanced over his shoulder — rather hurriedly, Leif thought — and then down to his work again. Leif looked over his shoulder, the way Wayland had looked, and saw, past the various people still walking in the marketplace, past the beef carcasses, a strange little shape go by. A strange small man, less than four feet high. Not, as correctness would have it, a small person, but definitely a dwarf. He was dressed in noisy, eye-hurting orange and green motley, with a scaled-down lute strung on a baldric over his shoulder.

The little man passed out of view for a moment. “Duke Mengor has come visiting,” said Wayland, apropos of apparently nothing.

“Visiting Lord Fettick?”

“Aye, aye.” Wayland put the first of the nails into the first of the holes made for it in the horseshoe, drove the nail in halfway, and then started beating what was left of it upward and outward, clenching it up and around the edge of the shoe. “Been here a day or so, talking about whatever high lords do talk about. Nice dinner last night up at the High House.” He glanced sidewise up at the modest little castle that sat inside the city’s innermost ring. “Some talk about Fettick’s daughter being of marriageable age.”

“Is she?”

Wayland’s face worked, and he spat. “Well, she’s fourteen. Might be marriageable down south, but…” He raised his eyebrows. “Well, no accounting for foreign ways.”

“Do you think this marriage will come off?”

“Not if something else does first,” said Wayland, very softly. “Someone’s trying to save his skin.”

Leif dropped his voice right down too. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Argath, would it?”

Wayland gave Leif a sidelong look, and spat into the fire: an old mountain gesture suggesting that some words were better not spoken at all, let alone too loudly. After a few seconds, he spoke. “Heard someone say that his armies were gathering. Not sure where they are this moment, though.”

Leif nodded. “Heard, too,” Wayland said, barely above a whisper, “that someone who should have brought him to fight, and beaten him…didn’t manage it.”

“Elblai,” Leif said, in a matching whisper.

“Saying is,” Wayland said, “she got bounced.” And he spat in the fire again.

Leif thought quietly for a second, watching Wayland go back to clenching down the nails of the horseshoe. He finished the last one, then dropped the hammer and picked up a big rough file, and started rasping the edges of the nails down. “Wayland,” Leif said, “would you have time to talk a little later?”

“Surely,” Wayland said after a moment. “Why not?”

“Somewhere quiet.”

“You know the Scrag End down in Winetavern Street? Between the second and third walls, going sunward from the gates.”

“The place with the beehive outside it? Yeah.”

“After dark, then?”

“Fine. Two hours after sunset be all right?”