no attention to the panicked rush of the ladies or the bristling posturing of their gentlemen friends. They'd undoubtedly come out to see the commotion and were now getting more than their share.
'Stow it!' Pinch snarled as he reluctantly freed himself from the young lady's arms. 'It's our necks on the leafless tree if the Hellriders take us.' Though battered and hobbling, Pinch nonetheless seized the halfling by the nape of the neck and half-dragged him into the back passages of the festhall.
The pair staggered through the scented hallways, their haste increasing with each step. They passed locked doors where only soft giggles where heard, passed salons where dells awaiting the night's suitors adjusted their gowns. They hustled down the back stairs. As they neared the bottom, a chorus of shrieks and indignant cries filled the floor below. Over it all, Pinch heard the discordant clang of hand bells.
'Hellriders!' The rogue thrust his little partner back up the stairs. 'Second floor-end of the hall!' he barked.
Sprite-Heels knew better than to argue. The chorus of hand bells was enough to say the watch was at the front door. The halfling could only trust the rogue's orders; gods knew the man had been here enough times.
At the top of the landing, Pinch forced his way through the sweaty couples who surged from the richly draped rooms, dodging elbows as women struggled into their gowns and the hard slap of steel as men buckled their swords to their belts. Behind them the bells and the shouts of 'Hold fast!' and 'Seize him!' grew stronger along with the furious pound of boots as the Hellrider patrol mounted the stairs. Forced like rats to flee rising water, the host of entertainers and clients crammed the staircase upward, so that it was mere moments before Pinch broke free into the near-empty hall. The rogue assumed his partner would follow; the halfling was able enough to care for himself. Pinch sprinted down the hall and painfully skidded around the corner.
'It's a blank wall!' wailed the voice right behind him, and indeed the words were true. The hallway ended in a solid wall, albeit one pleasingly decorated to imitate a garden seat. The small niche with a marble bench, all draped in false vines of silk and taffeta, was charming enough, but completely without a door.
'There's a way through here, Sprite. Maeve told me about it,' Pinch assured. Even as he spoke, his long- fingered hands were swiftly probing the panels in search of some hidden catch or spring.
The halfling snorted. 'Maeve? Our dear sweet drunken Maeve-here?'
'She was young once and not always a wizard. Now cut your whids and get to searching.' From the commotion behind them, the Hellriders had reached the landing.
The halfling ignored the command. 'So that's how you met her. Maeve, a-' he jibed.
'Stow it,' Pinch snapped, though not out of sentimentality. He needed to concentrate and focus-and press just-so the spring-plate his fingers suddenly found.
A small panel over the garden bench swung out, opening to reveal a well of darkness. An exhalation of dust and cobwebs swept from the gap.
Pinch pulled the panel back and nodded to the half-ling. 'It's jiggered; in you go.'
The halfling looked at it with a suspicious eye until the clomp of boots in the hall overcame his objections. With a lithe spring he was up and through the door.
Pinch wasted no time in following, surprised that he could wriggle through the small opening so quickly after all the battering he'd taken. Grabbing the inside handle, he pulled the door shut and plunged them into darkness. With one hand on Sprite-Heels's shoulder, Pinch followed as the halfling descended steps the human could not see.
They padded downward as the thumping and thunder of the 'riders behind them faded, and then snaked through passages that wove beneath the city. In places Sprite led them through water that splashed up to Pinch's ankles and smelled so bad that he was thankful not to see what he walked through.
Their escape was so hurried that neither had a light. Several times Sprite stopped and described a branch in the sewer tunnels. Each time Pinch did his best to remember the path, though his confidence grew less and less the farther they went. He was an 'upright man' now, the master of his own cohort of rogues-years away from his beginnings as a sewer rat.
At last they reached a landmark Pinch knew well from his underground days, a jagged gap in the brick casing of the sewer wall. From Sprite's description,
Pinch could see it almost unchanged in his mind-the ragged curve of the opening, the broken tumble of bricks that spilled into the muck-from the day he and Algaroz broke through the wall to complete their bolt hole from the alehouse above.
'Through there,' Pinch ordered with silent relief. Up till now he had only hoped that Algaroz, who now owned the Dwarf's Pot, kept the bolt hole open. Pinch knew it wasn't out of sentimentality. Algaroz had good reasons for keeping a quick escape route handy.
The dirt-floored passage ended in a planked door, tightly fitted into a wall. Designed to be hard to find from the other side, it took only a few moments of probing to release the catches and swing the hidden door slowly open. Muddy, smelly, and blinking, the two thieves stepped into the soft light of the alehouse's cellar.
It was several hours, almost near dawn, before a man of average height and average looks finally found his way to a table at the back of the common room. Still, he commanded attention. His clothes and manner stood him apart from all the rest. The man wore the costume of an aspiring courtier-a red velvet doublet generously trimmed in gold braid, cross-gaitered woolen hose without a tear, and a fur-lined mantle draped casually across his shoulders. The tangled curls of his graying hair were neatly brushed out and his thick mustache trimmed. Most wondrous of all, he was clean and bathed, which was far more than any other customer in the smoky ordinary. A few hours before he'd been crawling on a roof, but now gone were the dark and sludge-stained clothes from the night's escapade.
The Dwarf's Pot, or the Piss Pot as some called it, was not noted for its fine clientele. Infamy more than fame brought a man here. Most of the lot were foists and nips who swilled down cheap sack and haggled with their brokers over the day's pickings. In one shadowed corner a dwarf pushed a few pieces across the table for a pittance of coin, while at another table a wrinkled old dame, a curber by trade, showed a wig and cloak she'd hooked from a window left carelessly open. Boozing hard near the entrance was a whole tableful of counterfeit cranks, those beggars who specialized in sporting their appalling deformities and maimed limbs to the sympathetic citizens of Elturel. Here in the commons, they looked remarkably hale and whole, no doubt due to the restorative powers of the cheap ale they swilled. Mingled among the crowd were the doxies and dells finally returned from their evening's labors.
'Greetings, Pinch dearie,' said the sole woman at the table Pinch joined. Though far past her prime, she still dressed like she once might have been-pretty and alluring-but years and drink had long stolen that from her. Her long brown hair was thin and graying, her skin wrinkled and blotched. It was her eyes, weak and rheumy, that revealed her fondness for drink.
'Well met to you, Maeve,' Pinch answered as he pulled up a chair and joined the three already there.
Across from Maeve, Sprite-Heels sprawled on a bench like a child bored with the temple service. He thrust a hairy halfling foot into the air and waggled his oversize toes. 'You took your time. Find a distraction upstairs?' the little being mocked while at the same time breaking into a yawn he could not stifle.
The fourth at the table, a big overmuscled man with farmboy good looks, snorted his ale at Sprite's tweak. He broke into a fit of coughing, the scarf around his neck slipping to reveal a thick scar underneath. 'Pinch don't got no time for women. 'Sides, he's got Maeve.' He snickered at his own great wit.
'Ho, that's right. He's always got me, if I'd ever let him!' Maeve added with a laugh.
Pinch let the comments slide, eying the man across from him. 'Therin, my boy,' he finally asked with only a little comradely warmth, 'what happened? I thought the constables had you for nipping a bung.'
The younger man smiled knowingly. 'Seems I had good witnesses to say it wasn't me with his hand in the gent's purse. By their eyes I was here, drinking with them at that very time.'
Sprite's boozy voice came from below the edge of the table. 'Our farmboy's learned to hire good evidences, even if he ain't learned to nip a purse. Isha shame-always learnin' the wrong thing first.'
Therin rubbed at the scarf around his neck. 'I've been hanged once. I don't need to be hanged again.'
'See!' came the hiccup from below. 'Mos' men saves the hanging lesson for las'.'
Pinch propped his head on the table and gave Therin a long, hard stare, his face coldly blank. 'There's some who'd say you're just bad luck, Therin. Maybe not fit to have around. It was you supposed to be there tonight.' His mouth curled in a thin smile. 'But then, your bad luck seems to affect only you. It was your neck for the noose and
