Cynical Fictions & Absurd Realities: August 2012

Amyrthian Heroes

By James Aydelotte

Table Of Contents

1 Page 3

2 Page 16

3 Page 26

4 Page 36

5 Page 48

6 Page 60

7 Page 70

8 Page 82

9 Page 92

10 Page 103

11 Page 113

CH 1

“Threescore pikemen and archers laid scattered about dead as Sir Thaddeus Longbridge took up the Holy Shield of Helios on that day. He pried the severed arm of his Captain, Sir Gerard Hainsworth from the buckles of that divine armiger and stood, alone, as the beast rose again from its hellish pit at the foot of the dreaded Wyvernspire. Bristling with the arrows and lances of those fine men who had given their lives that morning the beast reared up, spread its leathery wings and bellowed forth a torrent of flame. The wicked flames seethed over Sir Longbridge as he took shelter behind his fallen commander’s shield. And only because his heart was true, did the Divine Shield spare him from that diabolical blast. With its head bent low, it shrieked as it dove towards the heroic knight, its horrible maw gaping with hundreds of razor sharp teeth. At the last possible moment, Sir Longbridge leapt atop the bowed head of the creature and drove the full length of the Enobled Hand between its eyes. The purity of his enchanted blade felled the creature in a single thrust... and so it was that the dragon, Akiki‘Okip’Aa, was vanquished.”

“Having slain the great wyrm, Sir Longbridge ended the seventeen month campaign of the Heliotic Church, finally cleansing the northern headlands of the foul serpent’s barbaric followers. And now, after their long and bloody crusade, Longbridge had avenged the death of his Captain, finishing the task Sir Hainsworth had begun. Taking no respite before assembling what was left of Sir Gerard’s Regiment, Sir Longbridge returned to Gynneth Mawr to deliver the beast’s head back to town. At long last, that the barbaric Akamai elves and their serpent god were gone from the hills of Northern Umbrighton, never to plague Gynneth Mawr again. His procession was showered in ribbons and flowers while maidens blew girlish kisses from rosy lips. Sir Thaddeus Longbridge, resplendent in the shimmering samite battle shorts of his order, had won the hearts of all those lucky enough to be present on that most joyous occasion.”

“The heroes, having made their way to the square, addressed the crowd from the steps of Helios’ Temple. And as Sir Longbridge began a prayer of thanks to Helios, God of the Sun, The One True God, when a great stone, big as an oxcart, did land square upon him, flattening him into the muck with a great splat. It was the first of a barrage tossed by the hill giants who had for so long remained north of the Tallen Mawr range. By sunset that tragic day the giants had trampled or devoured all but a handful of the inhabitants of the village along with the remaining chevaliers. In the weeks since, the surrounding townships have been forced to pay an excise of forty casks of ale every week to the giants or face the same fate as Gynneth Mawr.” The minstrel on stage was on his knees, hat against his breast, crying mock tears as he related the recent news about the destruction of Gynneth Mawr.

“Yeah, I heard about that at work a couple of nights ago.” Max pushed a large, silver ring embossed with rose gold across the rough planks of the bar. The arcane script circumscribing the ring throbbed with an amber pulse, anyone with eyes for magick could see it was enchanted.

“To think...” Nigel mused as he watched the barmaid pick up the ring with a suspicious turn of her lip. “I mean, Thaddeus graduated just the year before us, he was twenty five, and already a knight. A real knight in the order of the Sun Temple’s Chevaliers, he was the genuine article, a hero.”

“Twenty five and he’d just added dragonslayer to his title... what with his boss shuffling off he must have been up for a promotion.” Bill added, obviously taking the news more heavily than either of his companions.

Max drummed his fingers on the bar and tossed an unruly tendril of hair away from his face. He had a habit of letting a swatch of his long, auburn tresses ‘accidentally’ fall from his ponytail such that they jauntily covered his right eye. It was not by chance that he was a tall, athletic and brutally handsome drunkard, such was his lineage. The Gladivus (the ‘v’ is silent) family was one of the old lines of warrior kings who had tamed the wilderness and gave rise to the Kingdom of Tannisfäll. He was tanned and muscular from days spent sleeping in the sun and nights pushing hay carts full of soiled straw out of the stalls at Feudal Express. He was the head janitor and rookery hand on the night crew. Along with his subordinates, a trio of galley dwarves named Trip, Flip and Bob, he kept the aerie clean for the rider’s mounts while they were on nighttime deliveries throughout western Tannisfäll. Kicking through bird droppings big as ale kegs frequently offered up trinkets like the ring he was bartering. It was the best and only perk of his job. Max was well aware that his career in the janitorial arts was a mighty fall from his days as captain of the Solarian Cloudivers.

He had been the winningest ‘Tosser in thirty years, able to spiral into a free-fall on the back of his gyrfalcon and snatch a sheep out of the air less than fifty feet off the deck. In school he had been a hero, constantly surrounded by congratulations, free drinks and easy women. However, his time in the King’s Army after university had tainted his career arc permanently. Like all Gladivus men, he was expected to join the service, earn a commission and distinguish himself as a knight and wizard of the realm. However, after only a year in the field, he received a dishonorable discharge from the Seventh Cavalry. With that turn his luck grew sour, and the only jobs available to him were as menial as they were common. Oddly, it seemed that the farther he fell from his noble upbringing the more he enjoyed his station in life. Max found himself wonderfully freed by his low station. His criminal failure at soldiering kept him clear of any of the potential responsibility he had to restore the family name. Several generations of bad decisions concerning financial speculation, matrimony and mismatched duels had left the Gladivus line broken and shamed by debt and scandal. Simply put, Max was a poor and happy failure, but he was restless all the same.

Lucinda the barmaid at the Boarwolf Inn had been named for the fairest of three mythological daughters whose beauty made the god Feculus invent flowers to dampen his own smell so that he might woo her. Lucinda did not believe in flowers, nor in gods. She believed cash and properly salted pork were the immutable forces of the world. And it was not without a keen sense of both that she warily turned the ring over on the bar with a fork before picking it up and inspecting it with her remaining eye. She held it up and spat on it. Then she rubbed at it with the cleanest of the three rags she kept at the expanse of her waist. Lucinda grunted approvingly when none of the markings wiped off or lost any of their magikal glow.

“Lucinda, you know I’ve always brought you only the best of my treasures, you’re first in line when it comes to these baubles. I’m sure I’d have ten crownes in hand already if I’d gone up the way to see Antlington...” Max was half over the bar when she picked up her pipe and poked him back onto his stool with the stem of it.

“He’d do no such thing lest you tighten his robes for him first! Little flower of a man...” She took to muttering as she rummaged behind the bar.

“Max, I can cover us, really it’s no problem.” Bill piped up from his stool, struggling to elbow himself onto the bar properly. The son of a wild half-elf woman and a hard driven southern dwarf, Bill Heartles (pronounced Hart - ells, not Heart-less) was dark skinned, thickly knotted with wiry muscle and somewhat less than five feet tall. His father, Seamus, had left the mines of Rentarres after surviving a third tunnel collapse. He had been encouraged to change his vocation by his co-workers who had begun to think he was the cause of their hard luck. While on a ship bound for Wälsport, Seamus met a wild Tanglelf named A’Nuk (uh - nook) who was traveling from the western colonies across the ocean. Bill was conceived on the bowspirit of the Lady Charles. When Bill was seventeen months old his mother took up with a troupe of jugglers and headed north where she was eaten by a marauding band of wood trolls. His father raised him on a small farm in the Doan highlands where he learned to appreciate mediocrity and sacrifice. The red soils of the Doan hills are prized for their use in pottery and makeup. Nevertheless, there isn’t much money in dirt farming. This modest upbringing had taught Bill to live within his means and to be thankful for his job at the Ministry of Disembodied Persons. Being a low level bureaucrat meant enduring abuse from clientele (most of whom were undead and therefore in an eternally foul mood) and from his supervisors. It was, however, a job with good benefits and a guaranteed paycheck.

“Still, don’t you think that minstrel was a bit dramatic, leaping about like that?” Nigel furrowed his brow and looked askance at the stage. The motley performer made several deep bows to an audience of indifferent drunks. “Oh look at this, he’s bowing now. Very keen.”

“He’s half in the bag. Look at him. Holy bricks, look at his eyes, they’re like eggs wrapped in raw bacon.” Bill pointed openly to be sure that Nigel knew that they shared their distaste for the performer. It was best to keep Nigel happy while out for a drink. Once potted, the man would mewl on at length about his wasted talent.

“S**tfaced. You’re right.” Nigel Haggarsmith laughed quietly, and soaked up some little satisfaction from seeing a fellow minstrel in a more lowly state than himself. After university and a three year stint opening for the Bombastic Balaznov Bards, traveling from one county fair to the next, he left the stage for a job fixing instruments. He had spent more time in townships where pigs outnumbered the inhabitants fifty to one than he could stand. A steady paycheck and a flat in the city was an improvement over a wagon full of unwashed Blazanovs. What ate at him was the knowledge that he was too plain to be star. It wasn’t that he lacked talent, he just didn’t have a face for the stage. Nigel was tall and narrow shouldered, he had mousey hair and was somehow thin and pudgy all at once. Most damning was the fact that he just didn’t fill out a pair of tights the way a rock star needed to. Nevertheless, being reminded of the lure of performance always roused his self pity.

“Alright, it’s a good piece.” Lucinda slapped the large ring down on the bar. “Protects the wearer from the clap, should sell quick. I’ll give your four crownes and a two sheckels for it.”

“That’s a laugh, then, isn’t it?” Max pushed away from the bar in indignation and swept his hair back once more to let her know he meant business. “Four crownes?”

“And two sheckles.” She put her pipe back in her mouth and rummaged in the greasy black pouch at her waist alongside her three rags for a few coins.

“I’ve got a counteroffer.” Max knew his advantage lay in her perception of his capacity for drink. “Five sheckles, and our tab for the night.”

“Alright.” Lucinda swept the ring behind the bar and produced three mugs in a single motion. She wiped at a stain on one of the mugs with the darkest of her three rags before conceding to its tenacity. “What are you having?”

* * *

The massive bells of Old Tobin Watch rang twice. The three men stood alongside one another, much as they had in their days at university, drunkenly pissing against a wall and reading the posted bills in front of them. Max relieved himself with a grin, warm with the certainty that he and his boys had gotten better than four crownes out of Lucinda’s taps.

“Longbridge was a fairy.” Bill spat as he stood with his forehead pressed to the papered bricks.

“A fairie? He was not, he wasn’t even a changeling.” Nigel buttoned up and sniffed the rank air of the alleyway. He tried to focus on the bills in the dim light.

“Not a fairie, a fairy, a queen.” Bill swayed back and finished his task.

“How’d you know that then?” Nigel continued to try and make the letters on the posters into words.

“Everybody knew that.” Bill laughed.

“It’s true, everybody knew that. It’s probably how he made rank so fast in the Church.” Max grinned as he stared down the alley.

“Rank... class... bastard was born rich, gets a commission right out of school... that’s all that gave him the authority to send dozens of pikemen to a horrible death. Soften up a dragon with a few dozen commoners so he can take the glory... typical management...” Bill was actually grunting at the world while his companions happened to be in earshot. Long days spent in the gray on gray halls of the ministry applying protocol to the management of the undead was an infinity of tedium. Bill was a petty functionary whose daily duties began with a stint at the front desk approving the registration and licensure of animate corpses. After a short lunch, Bill’s afternoon was taken up with a never-ending caseload of inchoate souls trapped in enchantment sealed jars of certified limbo. He had the task of interviewing them one by one and updating their files for review, whereupon members of the ministry superior to him would make the decision to release the specters back into society or to permanently retire them to the burning reaches of the abyss. Unbeknownst to all but his two closest friends, Max and Nigel, Bill had always held a secret admiration for jugglers, vandals and pornographers.

“Bill’s got a point, but it doesn’t change the fact that Longbridge was light in his loafers.” Max grinned. “He even made a pass at me once.”

“No.” Nigel groaned. “Now you’re just being an ass.”

“He did. In the locker room, we had come off the pitch after a twenty five hour match, completely knackered as always. It was sunrise and my mates and I were in the baths when the jousting team came in to suit up.” Max stifled a laugh. “He walked right up to my tub and asked if I was sore from the tourney, maybe I needed a massage... I’ll admit I was flattered.”

“Really?” Nigel was shocked.

“I swear. On my father’s grave.”

“No. I mean you were flattered?” Nigel was a bit confused by Max’s admission.

“Well, I was raised in boarding schools.” Max shrugged. “You’re practically required to switch teams once or twice in order to graduate.”

There was a long, awkward minute before Bill burst into laughter.

“Ha! Nigel, you look scared to death! You’re such a suburb-ian, lighten up.” Bill kept laughing as he punched Nigel in the shoulder.

They made it about fifteen yards down the alley when the repetition of the posters they had been pissing in front of finally caught their attention. Nigel rubbed his shoulder where Bill had knocked him and read the post out loud. Max passed a flask of something evil and potent to Bill while they were listening.

“‘Fun. Travel. Adventure.’ Are they serious? ‘Now accepting apprentices, interested applicants need only provide proof of completion of a novice quest or equivalent education and training.’” Nigel shook his head as he finished. “Apprentices, I thought the adventurer’s guild was a closed shop.”

“It’s Gynneth Mawr I’d bet.” Bill sipped at the flask and exhaled a razor’s edge of vapors in a long wheeze before continuing. “With Longbridge dead and the giants making trouble, there have to be scores of idiots trekking up there to take the town back and loot the place.”

“Sounds like they aren’t having much luck, enough positions opening up to post like this, they’re members must be getting eaten as fast as they can send them.” Max laughed as he took the flask back from Bill.

“What sort of fools would throw themselves into that nonsense?” Nigel grinned as Max held the flask out to him. “Oh no, none of that for me. ‘Spirit ‘fore ale and you cannot fail, ale ‘fore spirit don’t go near it.’ I have to work tomorrow.”

“They are well paid, what with getting to keep whatever booty they find while out on a quest. I’ve heard stories from some of those old boys about making some serious hauls.” Max tilted his head as an idea percolated in the slippery bits of his mind.

“Oh you bastard. Don’t even start with that, I know that look.” Nigel was growing indignant at Max’s pondering stare.

Bill started to laugh out loud at the small, mauve robins buzzing by his neatly shorn head. They twittered as they went by and he wondered for a moment why his friends hadn’t noticed the strange birds. It wasn’t until the pestering birds vanished that Bill realized that he was the only one who could see them. Whatever Max had brought in that flask was something stronger than brandy. He arrived at this notion at the same moment that the contents of his stomach lurched threateningly to the north. “Oh hell...”

“Listen, whenever you get that look you seem to conveniently forget that the rules have always applied to Bill and me simply because they never have to you. And this isn’t school, the laws of the kingdom are much harder to bend than those of the university.” Nigel had begun waving his arms in the sort of wide, dramatic gestures reserved for evangelical witch doctors and discotheque dandies. He knew what he was saying wasn’t entirely accurate, but the point needed to be made. “At university you were the captain of the Cloudsmen, the winningest rider in decades, there was practically no sin so great it could keep you off the field!”

“Remember when you taught us how to cast whistlesnaps, and Nigel and I made those sawed off athamae from scraps in the Wealding Shop?” Bill patted the pockets of his waistcoat with a few stifled burps before he produced a wand about as thick as a man’s thumb and just a few inches long. It had been crudely but painstakingly made, the inlaid copper was still polished from handling and Bill brandished it at his pals jokingly. “I’ve still got mine!”

“Good night, you’ve kept that thing?” Nigel was on his heels a moment before continuing his ballad of distress. “Max you taught us a sanguine castment, which would have been enough to get us all expelled. But we were young and stupid so we went right along with you, made tiny wands and set about shooting at one another across campus.”

“And those aren’t fond memories? Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t have any fun?” Max took another swig from his flask and pocketed it. “Besides ‘snaps are just for training, they’re meant to be used for dueling and squad movement - you know, throw a hail of snaps to keep the enemy low while your teammates move to the next bit of cover. They’re harmless, and you know you loved it. Quit being such a wet blanket.”

“Harmless?” Nigel’s voice moved up half an octave. “Fun, sure, but harmless - do you not recall that running skirmish we were having in the library just before solstice break?”

“Yeah, that was the end of it...” Bill’s nostalgia switched just then, it turned a pinky black with the thought of what freedom he had for a few years at school. Between dirt farming and an oubliette of an office job with its grey stone corridors of endless stalls Bill had been free for a few years of antics and classes...

“Back and forth, around the stacks, all fun and games until one of us threw a bolt that caught Dr. Tanhoozel right in the temple.” Nigel clapped his hands for effect. “He hit the floor like a pile of rags.”

“Marty threw that one. It had been meant for me but he missed by a league.” Max held a hand up as if to deflect any guilt. “In fact I don’t think Marty could have thrown a bolt that well on his best day, he was always a s**t magician.”

“What happened to Marty?” Bill was making little understated movements of the athame, letting the copper inlays crackle a bit. He had carried that wand for the last three years hoping for a chance to run into a little trouble.

“He went on to the western colonies, made a load of money on land speculation or some such nonsense.” Nigel sighed. “That’s the last I heard.”

“Is that all you heard?” Max sniggered.

“What? Why?” Bill and Nigel clamored uneasily.

“Yeah, he tapped every one of his family connections and strung them along as investors. He’d take them on trips around the wilderness of the western colony. High adventure and vast unclaimed wealth, blah, blah, blah... Anyway, he’d show them a new mine or a forest of titanic trees that were marked for harvest, he talked big about the future of his new enterprise headed for.” Max smiled, his macabre sense of humor tickled at the retelling of the story. “Anyway, there never was any company, no enterprise, just a bunch of jugglers hired and dressed to look like lumbermen and miners and accountants and so on. He took all of his investments and spent it like a prince, he built a gilded dome in the middle of South Farrenfeld, had parties with outrageous guests- even had Tyro Billingsgate play at his parties... in the end, he had nothing to pay back to his investors. Not a crowne. When those lords Marty had duped found out what he was up to, they sacked his manor.”

“Really?” Nigel gaped.

“Really. The best bit is that after the looted his place, they ate him. Such is the price of hubris.” Max waved his right hand in a conductor’s rhythm, switching up the positions of his fingers through each of the five counts before flicking his wrist from the elbow towards the nearest posted bill. A sparkling blue-white dollop of energy spun off his fingertips and whistled through the air, scorching the bill with a loud snap. It dulled from white to violet, then to red and finally yellow as it skipped down the wall in a sparkling series of sooty bounces.

Buoyed by Max’s impromptu delinquency, Bill whinged off a whistlesnap of his own. His much loved athame finally saw some use as he tossed a slightly less impressive wad of magick ricocheting off the walls of the alley. Laughing, he and Max took off in a lurching run as the crack of the tiny spells echoed in the dark. Nigel sped after them.

“You idiots!” Red with frustration and exertion Nigel hissed at his friends once he’d caught up with them. Max was tipping up his flask again and chuckling softly to himself.

“Oh come on Nigel, stop being such a prat.” He offered the flask to Bill who shook his head at the memory of the small birds he’d only just stopped seeing. “You never put yourself out there. I mean, for a guy who’d wanted to be a rock star, a real fame junkie, you don’t let yourself go. How does an artist do that? How can you stay so tightened up all the time and still find a channel to create?”

“Talent isn’t just about getting loaded and finding some muse staring back at you in the middle of a deep drunk. Songs don’t get written that way. Inspiration comes from patience and mastery of the craft, anything can lead to creativity when one has the head to see the world as music...” Nigel let his words drift away when he realized Max and Bill were both frowning with effort as they tried not to laugh.

“Bill, you’re a good man. You know how to keep yourself on course, you’ve made something of yourself, especially considering your racial handicap. But you can’t hold your liquor. And in about five hours you are going to be back at work and spending too much time at the toilet because you’ll still be sick.” Nigel took a deep breath and turned to Max. “And you, you are a maniac. That stunt right there will have the constables around for hours, discharge of any sanguine spell is illegal in city limits. You know that. I love you, but you’re a goddamned fool. And the next time you fire off any more redcasts with me around will be the last time we see one another. Good night.”

“Oh Nigel, come on, sit with us a few more minutes, the watch should be coming around about now anyway.” Bill wound a knurled hand in Nigel’s cloak tugging him behind the shrubbery.

“Yeah, sorry for that, it was just that the moment seemed right, what with all that talk of the old days. I had to let a little one go... just for the fun of it.” Max put away his bottle and turned his palms up apologetically.

“Alright... how the hell did you cast a whistler without a wand, or a staff or something?” Nigel sat down again, satisfied enough with his friends’ apology to spend a few more minutes catching his breath in their company.

“Yeah, that was brilliant.” Bill added, clucking back a wet burp.

“It’s not hard, one gets plenty of practice with that sort of thing in the army. Instruments are just lenses for magick- you guys remember that from enchantments- little stuff like that is easy as lying.” He wiggled his fingers in a manner that was more than random, Bill and Nigel could make out the faintest glyphs in the air as he traced them.

“Damn. Why’d the cavalry ever get rid of you?” Bill asked, obviously impressed by Max’s easy prowess.

Nigel turned his eyes toward the ground. He had gone to pick up Max from the stockades in south Dorn after his dishonorable discharge. It had been the first time he had seen real defeat in his friend’s eyes. Max had never asked Nigel to keep his disgrace a secret, nevertheless Nigel had never spoken about it with anybody.

“The Church has made pretty much all of conjuration and sorcery illegal outside of the ministries and the military orders.” Max sighed to Bill. “You get to use your conjurer’s talents at work, right? Summoning and accretion of spectral beings, that sort of stuff, and that’s all illegal when you’re not in the necropolis, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I don’t do much of that. The undead mostly come to me, I have to work up the seals and the bypass valves for all of them to move from vessel to vessel while we process them, but really I sit at a desk all day.” Bill went distant at the thought of his job with the Ministry, paperwork, scrolls on top of scrolls on top of pages of notices and warrants and regulations that shifted and changed like chimeras... he had to shake himself free of the thought. “Anyway, yeah, go on.”

“Well, in the Cavalry, there are codes as well. There are rules about what constituted ‘honorable’ combat. It had always been my way to work very hard at being the best... Anyway we were beset by bandits on a routine patrol and I let fly with a working of my own, something I’d been at for a while. It was... overly effective. The complete lack of prisoners after the ambush led to an investigation. They said I had committed a war crime when all I’d done was let loose more than I’d meant to... in the end my name was the only thing that saved me from a hanging.” Max stopped with his fingers and felt himself grow three shades more sober.

“Why’d you never say anything, I’d assumed you’d shagged a general’s daughter or something. I didn’t know...” Bill looked hurt, and he was. Not for being out of the loop, but for finding the world culprit again, this time keeping a friend under its heel.

“I prefer to be a happy souse.” Max took up a weak smile. “And I’m pretty good at it.”

The bells of Old Toby rang three times through the damp air. Nigel shifted and raised a yawn that lasted better than five seconds.

“Max?” Bill’s concern focused for a moment with the sound of the bells. “Just what were you thinking about the adventurer’s guild?”

“Oh, that. Well, I mean, those giants up north. They’re a problem, right?” Max smiled.

“You cannot be serious.” Nigel winced. “Scores of footmen, archers and villagers were killed the first day. Since then dozens of adventurers, more even, who knows, have gone up there to win back the village and failed. What can you possibly hope to do against thirty hill giants?”

“Well... they’ve been taxing the surrounding villages in ale. Everybody knows hill giants are given to regular orgies and drunken rampages, right?” Max posed his rhetoric carefully.

“Well, yeah. That makes them unpredictable in addition to being huge and carnivorous.” Nigel agreed fatuously.

“Why not spike the ale?” Max shrugged.

“What do you mean?” Bill asked.

“Spike the ale, drug them. When they fall out they’ll be easier to kill, I imagine.” Max grinned at his friends. “A victory like that would have to be quest enough to get us in the door at the guild.”

“Well that’s ludicrous, but, for the sake of argument, what would you drug them with?” Nigel laughed.

“Gravesdust.” Max answered.

“Greyvesdust? You mean powdered mugwump beetles?” Bill wrinkled his forehead. As the best alchemist of the three he was not amused by Max’s answer. “You’re joking.”

“Yeah, Greyvesdust, should knock them out. Why not?”

“Um, well let’s see. Greyvesdust is a schedule three alembic, carries a penalty of three years in Fangspire Keep unless you’ve got a master alchemist’s license, which none of us have, and best of all we would need a boatload of it.” Nigel tried counting on his fingers before giving up and turning to Bill. “What do you figure Bill, how much to knock down thirty giants?”

“Oh, phew, I don’t know, maybe... eight or ten stone of it. A lot, more than dozens of apothecaries would have just lying around.” Bill laughed at the thought.

“So there, we can’t touch the stuff...” Nigel began.

“Legally.” Max corrected.

“We can’t touch the stuff legally and we would need more than anybody has...” Nigel continued before being interrupted a second time.

“I know someone who has that much, or at least I’d bet he does.” Max mused.

“Not a chance. Not all of the rouges in town put together would make a pile that big.” Bill shook his head.

“Matan’ Daar has that much. At least that much.” Max looked through the two of them, resolute. “I’m certain of it.”

“Matan’ Daar is a myth, a cautionary tale designed to keep kids off drugs. ‘Stay in school or you’ll end up addicted and working for Matan’ Daar until he eats your soul!’ he doesn’t exist.” Nigel sniffed, more than a bit scared by the look on his friend’s face.

“No. He’s real, I met him. Once.” Max cocked an eyebrow and smirked at his friends.

“Like hell you did.” Bill frowned, even Max didn’t make up lies that bold. But Bill’s nerves tingled darkly at Max’s flat expression. He did not like the feeling.

“I was at a party with my uncle, Sir Roderick the One Eyed, last of the Gladivus line before me... Anyway, we were at Matarme...” Max began.

“‘Matarme’, you mean the club right downtown across from Le Shuzen?” Nigel’s voice edged with jealousy. He loved rubbing shoulders with the cool kids, and club Matarme was the hippest place in town. The bouncers only let the finest maidens and the most expensive courtesans past the velvet ropes. Men only got in on a guest list. The place was legendary. Of course Max had been there, well bred little jackass.

“Yeah, that place. Anyway, Rod, that fat bastard, was drinking all of us under the table. I suppose it was his birthday so he had to serve as the example.” Max shakes his head at the memory. His uncle was more of an embarrassment than even Max had become. A pure blaggard, gambling on borrowed money, wanted in three counties in the south for buggery and practicing law without a license... a swine of a knight. “There we were, all of us potted, and three of the most grim looking guards dressed in black silk tunics no less, came over to our table. I thought we were about to be thrown out on our faces, but instead they whispered something to my uncle and escorted us back through the club, through the VIP lounge and to a lift that went down a very long way.”

Both Bill and Nigel were rapt with disbelief and envy.

“At the bottom, we stepped out into a honeycomb of... pleasure domes, I guess, women, sweetmeats, strange birds in cages, piles of dust and hookas blazing sweetly... amazing. In the center of all of these odd chambers was Matan’ Daar.” Max stared into the dark. “He was leaning back on a pillow, smoking a long stemmed pipe. He talked to my uncle like a favored subject and proceeded to treat us all to a truly epic night of indulgence.”

“OK.” Nigel stood up. “I’m impressed. I’m not sure I buy it, but I’m nonetheless impressed, even if only with the creativity of your lie. I’ve got to work in four hours, so I’m headed home. Evening gents’.”

“Hold on.” Bill stopped Nigel with a tug at his cloak, using him as a brace to haul himself off of the ground. “So even if this Blightelf crime-lord has enough greyvesdust, we can’t even get into that club, much less to the lift. And we can’t afford to buy that much... of anything, really. So where would that leave us?”

“Not to mention that the idea of drugging thirty giants and bleeding them out like stock chickens is suicidally moronic.” Nigel added.

“Well, I’m fairly certain that his palace- I’ll call it that- is somewhere in the bottom of the catacombs.” Max skewered Bill with a rough grin. “Bill, don’t you have access to the Seals of Death that keep the catacombs locked up?”

“You are a maniac.” Bill shook his head. “No chance. I’d be sacked. Then they’d put me away, where, like any man my size, they’d knock out my front teeth and pass me around like tobacco. Thank you, but no.”

“It’s a shot at the adventurer’s guild, real money, real fortune...”

“You are crazy, I’m going to bed.” Nigel patted Max on both shoulders. “Good night my sweet madman. Good luck with the falcons.”

“Yeah, night’ Max. Sleep it off.” Bill joined Nigel as they headed up the street.

CH 2

From their vantage in the deep shadows of the near morning, the nine figures watching Max could see that he was properly soused as he climbed the cracked stones of his tenement wall. The figures mused simultaneously that he must have forgotten his key. They were interconnected by a bond of fecund logical telepathy such that the observations of one echoed through the vacuum of their soulless forms until a single deduction was shared by all. They were incorrect. Max continued past the open window to his apartment and on up to the roof of his building. Confused by their faulty inference, the nine decided to wait for him to return to his room before they would leave their places in the shadows.

Max had not forgotten his key. He had climbed the wall with dawn approaching as was his custom when his mind wouldn’t take a knee to his drinking. Everything was upside down since the army. He had been the best rider Wooltossing had ever seen. Every match he’d won, every spell he’d mastered had somehow led to... this. How many times had he pinned another rider against the downdraft until the other man’s nerves failed and he abandoned his sheep? And what would Max do then? Why he’d do nothing less than the impossible! He’d tuck his girl Mabeline into a dart and turn her belly to the sun in a single, dipping pirouette that would put them right under that falling sheep, snatch it out of the sky and splash it in his team’s catching pond for another point. He’d always prevailed where other riders would s**t themselves. Some had played too hard and lost control only to meet the jagged stones of the playing field.

The sun rose and put daggers in Max’s bloodshot eyes, laying him onto his back in the pigeon droppings. How long had he played that game? How many tourneys had he won for the Cloudivers? How long had he worked in school to best every other boy at any magick they set in front of him? Hundreds died every year in the Wooltossing leagues across the continent, yet, even with all of the risks Max had played, he still survived.

And school, what was there but to succeed, to be better than the rest of the boys when he had no father to bring to the solstice ceremonies? Maximillan the Third had died they year after his birth, taken by a frost dragon’s barbed talon. Why had he been was so far south, crusading for the church in the damned arctic wastes... it was all so many years ago. With his father gone, all his mother would do was sit at the window and sing. Her voice was beautiful, but the family priest had explained that in the absence of a husband, a demon had taken hold of her heart and forced to appear gay so none would know that it was withering her immortal soul. After three days of song, the servants did as the priest ordered and locked his mother in the attic. When she sobbed to be let free, their priest, the vicar of the Heliotic church tending to their township, assured them that it was only the demon pleading for release.

With his mother and father gone, the church had divided most of the family’s belongings as per his mother’s last request - given to the priest in her final confession to Helios. Max’s uncle Roderick taught him all he could in the summers while he was home from school. This meant riding lessons, and the well kept secrets of sizing up both mounts and sheep. Roderick had also taught him the delicate art of drinking properly and bargaining with seamstresses over the price of their romantic favors. He absorbed all of these lessons and grew to behave as a knight should. Early on Max learned how to be a man. Wether in the classroom or in the air, Max was always the one to beat. His fondest memories were still those of his uncle and the sheep pens where the beasts were weighed to meet regulation standards. Those were his only times away from boarding school. The ‘rapting yards, staying up all night to watch the tourneys, betting coppers along with his uncle who would lose hundreds of crownes in a few innings only to win them back...

Sleep finally drove him into unconsciousness on the weathered roof of the tenement. Roosters

crowed on the next roof over, babies mewled from the floors below, and the shadows frowned, realizing that they had a long wait before they could confront their client. They decided to head to the pub and wait the sunlight out.

***

Bill’s day had begun by administering A.T. tests to three animated corpses to determine if they met the required level of cognitive functioning to be stamped and registered for another year. Of the three, two were so off that Bill refused to test them as it was obvious to anyone in the room that their brains had rotted away months ago.

“I’m sorry but it’s plain that those two, ‘Simon’ and ‘Rodger’ as you have them listed here, are in no condition to even take the test, they’ve barely got eyes left in their skulls.” Bill was fighting his first customer’s attitude while his hangover forced his breakfast from his throat to his stomach and back again every minute or so.

“You snotty little halfsie, I’ll talk to your manager if you won’t give me a fair shake.” The corrupted mage wagged a finger at Bill as he continued to berate him with the sort of slurs Bill might expect from an inbred Doanishman. “I know how you cavebabies are, never letting a proper man get a fair shake! One little taste of authority makes yo so high and mighty... you forget that this bureaucracy wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t that the King is taxing the knickers off me and my fellow human beings - oh, hello sir!”

“May I be of assistance?” Bill’s manager, Dale, appeared behind him soundlessly. Dale, like half of the staff in the ministry, was a ‘recovering’ ghoul. His long, thin frame and spatulate fingers flowed about like undersea grass. On many mornings the man’s breath bore the unmistakable taint of old coffins and their contents. This had been one of those mornings.

“Yes you can sir. I’ve been trying to get this... public servant of your’s to give me what I’m due.” The mage offered the slightest of bows to Dale.

“And that would be?” Dale turned to Bill with the question, his malodorous breath knocking the bile back up into Bill’s throat.

“Uh, *swallows* this man would like me to give his Animates an A.T. test. I’ve explained that those two, ah... ‘Roger’ and ‘Simon’ are simply not in a state to take it.” Bill gestured at the more putrid corpses against the back wall as the smell in the small chamber thickened.

“Hmmm, let me see the file.” Dale leaned in and grinned knowingly at Bill. He glanced up at the slowly drooling corpses weaving on their feet with a glimmer of what Bill thought might be lust. “Nope. Mr. Hart-less, I think you should let the test decide if those two are capable of registration. Remember, our job is to keep things running according to the letter of the law. This fellow deserves the same process due the next man.”

“Do your job and be professional about it... I know you tied one on last night but I wouldn’t be doing the Ministry any favors if I let you be derelict in your duties, now would I?” Dale whispered into Bill’s ear.

Bill turned back to the smug necromancer and removed all three pounds of the A-204T-1004 ‘Determination of Cognition’ form from under the counter and offered a pained smile to the gloating bigot across from him.

***

The door of Pillywizzet’s shop (Dr. Pillywizzet: Organologist and Mender of Musical Machina) opened with the tittering of the copper canary that had been posted there longer than Nigel had been alive. Nigel had hated that mechanical bird for his first ten months in the shop, but the trilling it produced had become warming to him. Slowly, in his usual shuffling gait, Phil Pillywizzet made his way through the front door of his own shop and nodded to Nigel as he proceeded to the master’s chamber in the back of the store. Nigel let out a wiggling sigh as Phil lumbered past, thankful that the old man hadn’t commented, or worse yet, lectured him about his wretched condition. At 149 years of age, Pillywizzet was a master of enchantment and healing, his own alembics, diet and lifestyle had allowed him to outlive all of his competitors as well as his extended family, though he had never had any children of his own. Nigel did not welcome the thought of another speech about temperance from a man who looked like a skeleton wrapped in used tissue paper.

Aside from the headache, Nigel’s morning passed like every other in that it was completely ordinary. Two people in before ten. The fellow from the chip shop next door had dropped in to hang out and talk to Nigel about his amorous conquests the night before. Each tale was as obtuse and unbelievable as every other morning. Jack, the chipper, only left as Mrs. Ginderwald came in, just as he did every other morning. Mrs. Molly Ginderwald, had come in, as she always did, to have the reed in her antique salpix calibrated. Nigel usually felt comforted by this repetition, but between his hangover and the news about Longbridge the night before, it was roughing his nerves.

It took another hour of tea and soft biscuits to slowly to bring Nigel around to feeling human again. He spent that time dinking at a lyre with a poorly installed crossbar that needed new glyphs in the tuning pins. He was glad he had cut himself off early or he would have been sitting sick at his post all day, most likely enduring the old man’s righteous rambling.

The copper canary sang an unexpected third time while Nigel was scribing a glyph into a tuning key, he was bent at his task for a moment to finish it before he looked up to address his customer.

“Nigel Haggarsmith... what the devil have you been up to?” The voice from across the counter was high pitched and familiar. Nigel looked up from his work to see Byron James standing in front of him grinning widely.

“Byron, you look... fabulous.” Nigel shook James’ hand and grudgingly admitted to himself that Byron did, in fact, look fabulous.

He was sporting a cape that shimmered in the morning light. It shifted and dazzled through a muted palette of warm colors. When he threw the cape aside to grasp Nigel’s hand, the blazing copper medallions stitched over every inch of his skin tight, leather bodysuit threw pinkish plashes of reflected light across the room. His hair was gone, and his front teeth were still quite large, but he looked brilliant in his crimson eyeshadow and deep violet lip gloss. He was a dandy of the first order, and he had a very expensive looking lute in his hand.

“It has been ages since we were in school together. My goodness, is this what you’re doing these days?” He placed the instrument on the counter and put his hands on his hips to look about the small display chamber. Nigel found it impossible to avoid the imposing sight of Byron’s package wrapped tightly in white leather. He felt simultaneously jealous and revolted by it. Again he was painfully confronted by the reason for his own mediocre station in the world of music. He looked down and noticed how his tights sagged off his bony thighs and gathered at his knees. Byron may have been bald, but he kept himself that way for the tremendous wigs he wore on stage like all men of his glam profession. Nigel, by comparison, simply had a forehead that grew higher and more peaked every year. That his hair was peeling back to reveal an egg like skull only exaggerated the sharpness of his chin

“Yeah, this is it. This is what I’m at... apprentice to Pillywizzet... the man is a living legend you know.” Nigel tried to recover an inkling of his pride.

“No question... the man is a genius... but I don’t know if I’d quite say he’s ‘living’.” Byron laughed at his own joke. Nigel hated himself for laughing along with him.

“Anyway, down to business.” James put a hand on the counter and managed to slink into a dangerous looking posture against it. “I need this beast restrung as quickly as is possible. I’ll be back at ten tomorrow morning to pick it up. I’m opening for Tyro Billingsgate at a secret show and I can’t leave anything to chance. Well, it’s been lovely catching up but I’d best be off. I’ve got an appointment at the stylist’s in half an hour, bye byes.”

And with that Nigel felt his hangover sink back into what was left of his heart.

***

The dark hole of the toilet groaned back at him with the sound of the sewer below as Bill tried his best not to be sick a fourth time. He was on his knees in front of the loo, practically praying as wave after wave of nausea wrenched at him. He was wiping his mouth best he could with a corn cob from the dispenser when he heard the door open and another man come in.

As Bill wobbled over to the sink and put a copper in the box over the basin, Dale stepped out of one of the stalls and beamed at him. Bill tried to keep himself together as he rinsed his mouth and splashed his face in the ten seconds of water he’d bought. He dried with his handkerchief and carefully watched Dale pick his teeth in the mirror.

“You know, Bill, I’ve got a sure fire cure for the brown bottle flu.” Dale smacked his lips and leaned in to his reflection. “I’d be happy to make one up for you.”

“Oh thanks for that Dale, but I’m feeling better now. I appreciate the sentiment.” Bill turned to leave.

“No, I insist. You could use a sprucing up, follow me to the break room and I’ll mix one up for you.” Dale wagged a finger and smiled approvingly at his own plan.

“Great.” Bill followed Dale out of the latrine.

They walked through a series of identical grey corridors lit by flickering colonies of glowyrms kept in long, thin cylinders overhead until they reached a stuffy slate tiled oubliette. Dale reached into the ice chest, pushed aside a few loitering sandwiches turning ripe with goblin larvae and retrieved a leaden tankard. He poured a lumpy white fluid into a large mug and topped it off with a few drops of something from a vial he had been carrying in his pocket.

“Here you are, my patented cure-all.” Dale’s lips stretched thinly across the knobs of his teeth as he grinned.

Dale took the pint mug and felt another lurching spasm roll through his gut. Whatever it was it smelled and looked like curdled milk with a few red splashes on top.

“What... what is it?” Bill stammered.

“Ox’s milk, slightly aged ox’s milk. Works better if it’s just turned.” Dale’s grin lost none of its vigor.

“And the little red bits, what are those?”

“Oh, ox’s blood. Helps it go down.” Dale nodded. “Come on then, while it’s still cool.”

Bill fought his desire to hurl the foul beverage at his boss and beat the bony man to splinters right there on the flagstone floor. ‘Halfsie’ that bastard necromancer had called him. Well, ‘halfsies’ were more robust than most human men. And Bill was no exception, years of dirt farming had only thickened his ropy muscles further. Dale would be less than a challenge in a fair fight, Bill’s fists were twice the size of Dale’s. But there is nothing fair about working in a bureaucracy, and that reality coupled with the malodorous beverage in his hand made Bill fight his need to vomit. It was only the security of a having a provincial job that kept him from railing at his boss. Finally Bill’s better judgement won out. He closed his eyes and tipped the mug back. The salty lumps of curd and slime made their way to the back of his throat where his body simply would not allow him to swallow.

“Come on... all of it.” Dale reached over and pushed the end of the mug higher. More ooze made its way into Bill’s throat. Facing asphyxiation, Bill’s tattered epiglottis lost its fight and allowed the goo into his stomach, where it landed horribly.

“There you are, you’ll be right as rain in a few minutes. Back to work.” Dale was cheery at having successfully tortured another one of his employees. His sadism was the primary component in his ability to climb the ladder at the Ministry. He relished every opportunity to throw it into use.

***

Tyro Billingsgate.

Nigel was was simply deflating as the day wore on into the afternoon. Last night he found out that one Solaria alumnus was dead while on a stellar career trajectory and another was eaten by his neighbors. Today yet another of his schoolmates, one younger than him even, was opening up for Billingsgate, the most famous rocker in Tannisfäll, or anywhere else for that matter. And where was he? Where was Nigel? Mending broken instruments, weaving little enchantments and runes to make the talentless sound better than they otherwise would. It was crap, all of it. The universe was obviously an outrageous and crude place. That or he hadn’t paid enough attention to Helios’ evangelists. No, that wasn’t it. Fortune had everything to do with fame, not the other way around. It was luck, that’s all.

He finished up with a couple more instruments and headed back into the shop to fetch another tuning trident and the strings Byron would need for his lute. While the urge to rig the instrument and sabotage his former classmate was there in him, Nigel would never break with his own rules. Setting up a fellow bard was somewhere between sacrilege and simply being a bitch about things. Tempting as it was to see that pretty, pretty tinsel-talented snot break a string or turn an earsplitting note, it would be bad form. And it would get back to the shop and Phil would be forced to fire him.

On his way through the back, Nigel noticed that Phil had dozed off, as always, with his feet on his workbench. He had an empty jigger of poppyflower tea resting on his strange, egg-like potbelly. Nigel wondered how the man could have that bulb of a stomach despite his otherwise complete lack of flesh. The opiate tea was Phil’s daily noon digestif‘, a remedy for the pain of his rasping joints, which Nigel thought must have been unendurable. He picked up the glass and returned it to the epigram of stained rings on the bench where it sat day after day.

“Tyro Billingsgate... I can’t believe it...” Nigel was caught muttering by his snoozing boss.

“Billingsgate?” The man shifted and sniffed heavily, clearing his throat as he sat up with the hurry of a glacier retreating. “Billingsgate is a damned idiot. I’m not kidding, the fool is worthless and bound for ruin, wasting his life like that. Oh sure it’s all tits and ass and wine and crownes, all night orgies and bloody fame, fame, fame...”

“Phil, really, maybe you should just pop on home for the evening, I’ve got a few more things to finish and then I can lock up.” Nigel helped his boss off his chair. Old and brittle as the man was, scared of death as he must have been, Nigel realized that Phil didn’t have a drop of bitterness in him. He was a pure creature, in a childish and wise sort of way.

“Fine, fine... but don’t you worry about that imbecile Billingsgate. No don’t you dare, he’s nothing to aspire to, believe me, he’s a damned fool... damned...” Pillywizzet mumbled incoherently, his eyes half lidded with poppy and age. “Take the keys... here, take the keys and lock up when you’re done.”

Nigel took the keys from his boss, and as he did every night, a faint electricity ran up the length of his arm as he held them. The magic of a time lock was no small thing. On more than one occasion Nigel had watched the lock snap into place and freeze time so entirely that birds in flight within its boundary would be suspended in the air, motionless. Holding an entire three floors of a building in a temporal stasis was high wizardry. It must have cost his boss thousands when he had it installed fifty years before. Such was the price of safeguarding the fruits of his art. And being allowed inside that world of Pillywizzet’s genius was a gift that Nigel understood the value of. Nevertheless, as he helped the ancient Bard out the door, he felt uneasy at the prospect of someday being 149 years old and brittle as antique glass.

***

Max awoke with the first drops of a light rain hitting his face. The afternoon was heading into the evening and he realized he needed to be to work sooner than he would have liked. After a night off, he always felt worse going back to work. It was probably the debauchery that caused this effect, but it made little difference to him. He simply had to get up, climb back down to his apartment and get into his overalls.

At the same time that Max was getting himself together the nine black cloaked figures were several pints into their own self abuse. The ale had little effect on them as what would have been guts or soul in them responded only to harsh spirit and the smell of ink.

***

Finally purged of his night’s indulgence and the putrid concoction that Dale had slapped together for him, Bill was alone in the supply room refilling his aspergis with salt for the next day. His in box was empty and he could finally head home and sleep. He longed for an end to the day, knowing that all of his torment could have been avoided had he just not gone out with Max again. That crazy bastard would drink himself to death. Bill was certain that, as much as he loved Max, he simply couldn’t afford to join him on any more outings. He realized that he was going to have to either cut ties with his old friend or lose his job.

There were eight more sealed obsidian jars in Bill’s in box when he got back to his desk. There was a note scrawled on a piece of foolscrap under one of them that read, ‘Thanks for taking care of these, I’ll be out tomorrow after the Big Guy’s birthday party. - Dale.’.

“Oh that canes it...” Bill sat down carefully at his desk. He swallowed fifteen or twenty deep breaths to bring his heart rate back down into the low hundreds and then reset the salt ring on his desk with the aspergis and placed the first of the obsidian jars containing a spectral client in the center. He read the inscription on the wall of his stall out loud even though he knew it by heart, “Incendo Nox Avec Decorum Plentis” and rang the small bell next to it three times.

A shade flickered into existence above the now red hot glow of the sealing stone at the top of the jar. It squalled with anger at it’s incorporeal condition and the magical boundary containing it within the saline circle.

“This is William Heartles, your representative case worker. I’ve been assigned to you by the Ministry of Disembodied Persons, how may I may I be of service?”

It was another three hours before Bill made it home to his basement flat and laid down on his face that night.

***

The end of his shift was nearing with the first rays of light that pierced the parapets and flagstaffs of the city of Walphalen. The last few stalls were being mucked out by Trip and Bob, fresh bedding was set and Max had sent Flip to give the gates a quick polish to keep him busy. This was the few minutes Max got to have alone before he went back to his flat for the day. He spent the time kicking though the drain groove in the middle of the dock, nudging soggy pellets and bits of bone and hair looking for any small treasures he might trade away. He never found much, usually trinkets worth few crownes or a couple of pints. The falcons were let out to feed during the mandated lunch hour that the Rider’s Guild had bargained away from the merchants who owned Feudal Express. The birds usually ate carrion as hunting was poor at night. Most of the prey they preferred ran in the daylight. The upshot was that Max did find a few bits of loot stripped off the dead left along highways or in field far from the city.

He’d made his way back to the central drain when Trip and Bob came by to report.

“Beddings tidy, want us to lend Flip a hand with the gate?” Bob asked Max with the simple patience of a man hoping to be let go early. Trip said nothing. He was simple and prone to outbursts of oddly constructed obscenities. His competence with a mop and bucket more than made up for his handicap.

“No, just go collect him and head off once you’ve washed up.” Max was distracted by a twist of leather clogging the main downspout.

“Want me to clear that?” Bob asked.

“No.” Max noticed a beaded line of silver buttons wound along one edge of the rag. “No, I’ll handle it. You lot go on home. Good work this evening, you all worked right along, nice and quick.”

Max smiled at his stubby subordinates as they tottered off after their brother. Once they were out of sight he took the scrap in hand and wiped the buttons clean.

“Oh... s**t... uncle Rod... I suppose you always knew it would come to this...”

***

Bill had barely slept. Exhausted as he was, he had seethed all night with the thought of going back to work in the morning. He hadn’t been able to shake the image of Dale smiling while he tipped that mug of slop into his gullet. Getting off his palette and trying to stand made a tension in his chest wrench down like a spring wound too tightly.

Seventeen blocks away, in apartment five at 321 Houghton St., Nigel was staring at the ceiling. He hadn’t had much real sleep either. Here were these two men rolling out of bed to head back to another day, just like they always had, and likely always would. Both of them knew that Max was to blame for the surge in their discontent, and both of them figured that sensation of hopelessness would be ground away by repetition and boredom sometime in the next couple of weeks. Business as usual, that’s all it was, and they told themselves that they were lucky to have the secure mediocrity of steady pay and nice benefits.

It didn’t help.

***

The nine figures finished their pints and black puddings (each had eaten no fewer than six servings of the dark sausages) and headed to Max’s tenement. After climbing the stairs, the lead figure produced a short, ebony wand from an invisible pocket in his black cloak. The gloved hand unscrewed one end of the wand, exposing the dry nib of a pen. The pen proceeded to make a series of logical statements at the lock holding shut the door to Max’s dingy apartment. After a few minutes of patient but unheard exchange the lock finally conceded to the logic of the pen’s inscrutable arguments and opened with a loud click. All nine of the figures brushed into the room silently, closed the door behind them, and waited.

***

Five antique silver buttons adorned the ruined waistcoat where there should have been twelve. Each one was emblazoned with the falcon and crown of the Gladivus family crest. Somewhere, out along a highway or in a field, what was left of Max’s uncle, Sir Roderick, was feeding flies.

“Well uncle...” Max let himself shed a tear or two on his way home. “Better off unburied than left in the debtor’s stocks.” He furrowed his brow as he told himself that with the vast area the Feudal Express riders cover, it was more likely that Rod had been found anywhere but the stocks. Still, Max worried with the thought.

He made his way back to his flat without stopping for a drink, climbed the stair and felt a metallic shiver run through his strong frame. Max closed his eyes for a moment to steal himself before he opened the door. The nine figures stood in a wedge in the middle of his apartment, silent, an unholy breeze rustling their black robes.

“Well, I suppose I expected you lot. Just not so soon.” Max closed the door and let out a withering sigh at the sight of the dark figures.

CH. 3

“Maxmillian Horatio Crasus Gladivus IV, we have come to convey our deepest sympathies on the loss of your uncle, Sir Crasus Bombastus Roderick VI.” The lead figure moved none at all as he spoke in a haunting, aristocratic accent. His hood shrouded his features such that the opening of it showed only a void darker than midnight.

“Quite so, condolences.” A figure to Max’s left offered.

“Oh. Thank you for that.” Max pushed past the ghastly forms and sat heavily into his hammock. “Let’s on with it then. I know this isn’t a social call.”

All hoods were pushed back and the daringly high cheekbones and clean shaven jawlines of the nine men were exposed to the gathering dawn’s light that filtered through the eastern window.

“Max, you don’t mind terribly if I address you by your first name, do you?” The lead man asked snootily.

“No formality needed, you knew my uncle, I’d prefer we get right to business. I’d like to keep this short, your making my flat even draftier than usual and I’d like to get some sleep.” Max stared back flatly.

“I’m Waldo Adrastos, partner with the firm of Adrastos, Yorick and Radebrechen. I’m here as the chief functionary representing the Gladivus estate. My team and I would like to set up a meeting with you to discuss the matter of your inheritance.” Waldo’s breath seemed to fill the chamber soothingly. Max found himself drifting in a state reminiscent of the effects of poppy tea. He shook the mint flavored enchantment off and blinked a few times before answering.

“No, I’d rather do this now.”

“I thought that would be your answer.” Waldo smiled and the rest of his enthralled crew followed suit. Lawyers, like all other guildsmen, had requisite dues that came with the benefits of membership. While most other guilds excised an annual or semi-annual fee of a few dozen crownes, lawyers paid a single fee at the time of their admission. As apprentices in the Order of the Juris Doctorae, they paid the simple price of their immortal souls to become guildsmen.

“Ahem. As the sole inheritor of the properties... and debits associated with the Gladivus estate, you, one Maximillian Horatio...” Waldo stopped as Max interrupted.

“Skip the title please, continue.” Max winced at hearing his full name repeated a second time that morning.

“As you wish.” Waldo smiled gruesomely as he continued. “You are now the owner and executor of your family’s net worth.”

“Right. How much do I owe?” Max closed his eyes and waited for the answer.

***

“That’ll be fifteen crownes.” Nigel handed Byron his lute and tried his best to put on a convincing smile.

“That’s a bit steep...” Byron turned the lute over and fitted his palm against its belly, strummed the instrument once and listened. He closed his eyes and smiled a little more than warmly, it was a disconcerting and horny sort of expression that made Nigel uneasy. “But your boss has a fine hand... oh yes. Mmm! That’ll do, I suppose the best comes at a price.”

Byron removed a small purse from some impossible place under his unitard and casually spilled fifteen crownes onto the counter. The combination of his rail thin frame stuffed into that outfit with his massive and dazzlingly blonde wig made Byron look very much like a sunflower. Yet he smelled like a wreath of roses draped over a rutting stag. And the tiny, gold dusted fairies that whizzed around Byron in random circles kept crashing into Nigel’s head where they would get snagged in the curls of his moplike pageboy haircut, tumbling and snarling curses at him.

“Here you are... and what the hell, anything for a school chum.” Byron tossed another crowne at Nigel as a tip as he turned and strode out the door.

“I should’ve shoved his damn lute up his arse, the arrogant pervert.”

***

The whole office was gathered in the central dais of Bill’s department waiting for the Minister of the Spectral Regulations Division to arrive. It was Barnabus Rex’s 118th birthday, and as was the custom at a party for a senior executive of the Ministry, most of the staff had begun drinking early. Bill had not. He was still drained from a day of hangover and a night without real rest. He was simply happy that his morning had been spent tying black and grey crepe paper streamers onto pillars and cornices rather than dealing directly with the decomposing public.

The office went up in a cheer as Dale emerged from the executive chambers with Barnabus shambling along on his twin canes. His hands were twisted by age and clawed with short coils of well manicured fingernails. He smiled toothlessly at the applause and shuffled forward to the enormous cake that bore 118 candles arranged such that they spelled out ‘Happy Birthday Sr. Minister Rex!’. He gnashed what were once teeth as he looked over the crowd and raised a glass of champagne while Dale steadied him by an elbow.

“Well... this is very nice... very nice to see you all working so hard... working, yes and now... ready to share the cake, to have some jolly times! Yes... working at fun so hard... so hard...” Rex managed to straighten his bent frame slightly and lift some of the fog from his mind before he continued. “Here here, ahem: ‘Tis our duty to o’ersee; that our departed shall receive; measures accorded to their needs.’”

Rex tottered a bit as he tipped a few drops from his glass onto the floor after reciting the Ministry’s credo. Dale steadied him carefully, throwing a toothy grin at the crowd.

“To each accorded to their deeds...and not a copper more- HA!” Rex finished his toast cruelly and swallowed his drink in a single pull. The office went up in laughter and applause as Barnabus crept up to the cake and made the first shaky cut. Rex flashed his gums in a cavernous smile at Dale, who carried his boss’ plate of cake. Dale returned to the massive confection and proceeded to mechanically cut up equal portions while chatting with each of the employees as they came up to get their piece. Bill had been somewhere near the middle of the line, and by the time he made it to the cake Dale had his reptillian charm in full swing.

“Oh, here we are, Bill it only seems fair that your slice should ‘measure according to your needs’. Dale set the slice on Bill’s shingle and flashed a malicious grin around the room as he turned the serving knife on edge and cut the piece in half.

“There you go, old boy, fair’s fair!” Dale laughed along with the rest of the staff in earshot.

“F**k this place.” Bill thought to himself as he sneaked away and hurried back to his office. He realized at that moment that the seals to the catacombs were sitting unguarded in the Minister’s vault while everybody was busy being stupid and getting drunk on cheap champagne.

***

After six hours of tedious explanation and a ream of forms that one of the lawyers produced from a valise of holding, Max felt his mind turning soft. There had been the matter of monies owed to various gambling houses, those debts being so long in arrears that they had been peddled to the Collections Guild where they were accruing interest at a rate that Sir Roderick had managed to kite back and forth for years by borrowing against liens applied to the family estate. Although these liens did keep Roderick out of the debtor’s stocks, so much had been borrowed that Max could not sell Castle Gladivus and the surrounding environs to pay off what was owed. Even though the title was held by the Gladivus line, all of it’s appraised value was held in escrow by the Collections Guild. And there was no profit in selling the collateral that stood in for the loans that were accruing interest. It was a common enough way for the Collections Guild to bleed dwindling nobles of their fading riches. After all in every noble line, there were always treasures to sell off.

“But all of that isn’t really what we’re here to help you with, Max.” Waldo furrowed his brow.

“This is help, is it?” Max rubbed his face with his hands as the numbness that had set into his butt hours before was on its way to getting a hold on his brain.

“Of course it is.” Waldo leaned away as though he’d been spurned. “You need to understand your situation Master Gladivus, the value of the property isn’t the most serious issue at stake here.”

“No?” Max smiled hopelessly. “What’s that then?”

“Insurance.” One of the other nine stepped forward. “That castle of yours is terribly haunted.”

“Cursed, really.” Waldo corrected.

“Yes. It’s cursed, as is the land around it. The earth has gone to briar and thorns and will turn up nothing but toadstools and Stranglevine.” The second lawyer continued. “It’s an extremely dangerous piece of real estate.”

“It’s a terrific liability.” Waldo finished.

“You’re telling me that I need to carry insurance on my property in case other people get hurt there?” Max’s incredulity deepened.

“Absolutely. Adventurers, jugglers, necromancers in search of fresh souls, bandits looking to hide from the law, lost children, travelers stranded by carriage troubles, all of them are potential plaintiffs.” Waldo spoke matter-of-factly, as though he’d seen such lawsuits in the past.

“Don’t forget cattle.” Another lawyer added.

“Yes, cattle too. They get lost in inclement weather, wander into those blighted fields and get killed by gods know what sort of terrors lurk on your property. It may seem silly, but the cost of a few head of cattle every year adds up to quite a bit of property damage.” Adrastos finished his explanation before continuing. “You are going to need to carry at least a half a million crownes worth of coverage to be safe from any torts that can, and will, be leveled at you in the future.”

“I don’t believe this.” Max felt the air escape the room as he contemplated the bottomless pit of debt he was facing. “If this could be... amortized, how much will I need to put up every month to stay out of the stocks?”

“Well, including today’s visit...” Waldo began.

“Today’s visit?” Max reeled for a moment.

“Well, getting into a meeting with you wasn’t easy. All of us included, we’ve accrued one hundred and eight billable hours while finding you and bringing you up to speed. You didn’t think we’d drop by pro bono did you?” Waldo was beside himself. How ignorant his young client was. Delicious. “As I was saying, including today’s visit, the maintenance of your outstanding debts and the cost of your insurance (assuming we’ve decided that half a million crownes is adequate) you’re going to need to find... Wesley?”

“Two thousand and seventeen crownes.” A third figure answered automatically.

“Every month?” The air that had left the room now tore the heat from it as well, ice formed on the walls and frost crackled on the stray locks of hair that hung in front of Max’s right eye.

“Of course.” Waldo raised his eyebrows. “Furthermore, as the matter of the estate has been formally transferred to you, we will need a ‘good faith’ payment up front to keep you solvent until the time of your first bill.”

“You can’t just put that on my tab?” Max shrank back into himself, shivering.

“Certainly!” Waldo beamed. He loved the next bit. “All you have to provide in lieu of an initial payment is a promise to spend the next thirty days until your first payment locked securely in the debtor’s stocks.”

“What.. ah.. I mean...that, ah that won’t do...” Max stuttered, feverish in the arctic temperature of his flat.

“Well, I think I can trust you, as the son of a long and noble line, to furnish the firm with a mere one hundred crownes as proof of your desire to, ‘protect your investment’.” Waldo Adrastos Esq. unsheathed his pen and held the deed to Castle Gladivus in front of Max.

“Sign here, take the deed and keep it someplace safe, you don’t want anybody else taking out loans on its potential value. Then bring me one hundred crownes by nine tomorrow morning and you’ll have thirty days to... come up with a plan.” Waldo thrust the pen into Max’s hand.

“If I refuse?” Max felt his heart pounding as hard as it ever had at the bottom of a falcon’s dive. “I mean... I haven’t even got a hundred crownes right now.”

“Well...” Waldo leaned in and whispered closely to Max’s ear, turning it solidly frozen with cold. “I suggest you find them.” He glanced up at the antique staff that Max kept leaning in a corner where it looked like nothing more than a burled and winding stick. “I’m sure there’s a few heirlooms left lying about somewhere... after all, I imagine a champion Wooltosser like yourself must have so many admirers that the line to get behind him while he’s bent over in the debtor’s stocks would stretch all the way to Doan. Thirty days might not even be long enough to see all those fans... satisfied.”

The deed to Castle Gladivus bears the tiny, wobbling signature of Maxmillian Horatio Crasus Gladivus IV to this day.

***

The party had been underway for over an hour when Bill moved smoothly and sweatily by the sleeping form of Minister Rex who’s snoring was far louder than any footsteps Bill might have made passing him. As he pushed aside the velvet curtains that divided the Minister’s office chamber from the vault, Bill could hear that bastard Dale leading the office in a rousing song about the wine at winter’s solstice. Idiot. Once past the heavy velvet drape, all the sound from inside the building vanished. Here, in the vault, the walls of the chamber were carved from polished obsidian. The soundless space was illuminated by a hovering orb of pure white Numenstone. It was filled with countless damned souls. A thousand years of ghosts and wraiths, shades and specters and minor demons were trapped in that hovering globe. The searing violence of their eternal frustration and agony burned with the heat of a tiny star suspended in the blackness of the vault.

That globe, not even a handspan across, was the Abyss.

Hung around the polished walls of the vault were a series of portraits that portrayed the previous ministers. Beneath each painting was a pair of seals. One seal acted as an engine to siphon clientele into the abyss, and the other was used to open the gates of the catacombs. With each successive minister, new seals were cast and the old stored for the traditional purpose of Maximum Redundancy. The collection and processing of the undead was a business that would never fall into disuse, and future auditing might require the extraction of a soul contained in the Abyss centuries after it’s confinement. Each pair of seals were set precisely beneath Minister Rex’s much younger visage. Bill thought that it must have been painted on the day he accepted his position. He didn’t look a day over seventy in it.

Bill unfocused his eyes and tried to define the boundaries of any enchantments guarding the seals. Nothing. Not even one of the seals was cursed or in any way magickally secured. The engineers must have assumed that nobody would have been able to make it this far into the ministry without alerting the Guardians of the Necropolis, many of whom knew Bill by his first name. They particularly liked Bill because he was neither a ghoul nor a middle class prat. He was an accidentally educated bumpkin who’s genuine nature and lurid bestiality jokes kept their spirits up in the gloom of the Necropolis. Bill loosed a nervous fart as he realized that the minister would neither wake nor be bothered for hours.

“Ye Gods.” He said aloud to himself. “They’ll never know the damn things are missing.”

***

Max had wrapped his great, great, great grandfather’s staff in with a bundle of branches of similar length that he poached from the fence keeping his landlord’s chickens in the yard.

Desperate times, he had told himself. The Heartspar, as the staff had been named centuries ago, was an antiquated but exceedingly powerful relic. Wizards instruments, for example wands of all sizes from athamae like the one Bill kept in his cloak to the foils carried by officers of the royal entourage, were considered Deadly Implements. Carriage of one in city limits was a serious offense. Staves, were classified as Destructive Implements, and were suitable only for battlemages to carry, and even then, only in combat environments. Getting caught with one inside the walls of Wälsport would land one in Fangspire Keep for a minimum of two lifetimes.

That Max intended to smuggle his grandfather’s staff across town in the light of late afternoon was testament to his desperation and his resolve. The former being the reason for the tenacity of the later. He knew that if he could hitch with one of the Feudal Express riders out to the market in Kerreton’s Reach, he could sell his unlicensed artillery piece for several month’s arrears.

“I wanted to get here early enough to talk to Ivan Redgale.” Max shouted his practiced lie through the speaking hose at the front gate of the Feudal Express tower. Normally he showed up after hours and let himself in, after all of the managers had gone home for the night. “I’m pretty sure his bird has been passing some cystic grit. I really think he should get her in to see a proper mender.”

“Good man, putting in some time off the books to keep things running.” Even as garbled as his response was coming down the hose, Max could tell that the manager approved of such dedication. “Come on up. By the way... I’ve got a dapper little halfsie named Heart-less here who says he wanted to say ‘hi’ to you before he dropped off a parcel for delivery.”

When Max stepped out of the lift and took one look at his fidgeting, nut-brown schoolmate he did his best to stay calm while his heart raced with the certain knowledge that things were not as they should be. Bill was dressed in a classy suit with fine greaves and a dark violet waistcoat that looked more official than formal. He was also cradling a package under his left arm with the same kind of white-knuckled clutch that Max had on his bundle of ragged poles. Max forced a grin and rubbed at his frost swollen ear before he shook Bill’s hand awkwardly.

“Hey, Rupert?” Max tipped his chin with a measuredly mischievous nod. “You mind if I give my pal from university here a quick tour of the place?”

“I didn’t see a thing.” Rupert nodded back with a wink.

***

Nigel had helped Phil all the way back to his flat two blocks up the street, the old fellow was wheezing damply, dragging his creaking bones painfully. It wasn’t the first time Nigel had felt moved to make certain his boss could get home in one piece. Pillywizzet’s health was in and out most days, and Nigel didn’t have the heart to suggest retirement the old boy. He knew with absolute certainty that Pillywizzet had nothing but his work. After 149 years in the soot and hustle of the present age, having outlasted three great wars and numerous military actions, Pillywizzet should have been well off the mortal coil. Yet he hung on because the genius of his work was his only legacy.

Nigel had no difficulty realizing that Phil expected him to take on that same role after he was gone. It was not a comfort to him. Bards, as Nigel thought of them, were by definition travelers, poets, lovers... they were meant to be dashing and sexy and all of that. Here he was, already growing soft and doughy around his waistline. He was in line to collect dust, another relic depended upon by those Bards and minstrels who were out in the world living for the ecstasy of song and extravagance. That bastard Byron James with his flagrant joie de verve, he was living exactly way Nigel longed to. It was a choice: endure a boring existence of mediocrity and quiet toil or take a risk and get his sagging ass back out on the road where he could starve or die of consumption, catch the plague or be killed outright... or something even worse could happen to him out there. And all of that risk would be had only so he could try to be something more than a quaint luthier.

Upon returning to the shop, Nigel set his work aside for the rest of the day and indulged in some lyrical work. He sat on his stool and plucked at the lute he’d had since university, the same that he’d carried with him on the road with the Blazanovs. It was the only trapping worn enough to lend an air of authenticity to his dedication. When he was alone in the shop after Phil had gone home, Nigel often stayed for hours, sometimes past midnight, writing songs and dreaming of a time when he could sing for thousands, and heal them of their of misery and distress. He would lift their spirits up out of the muck of serfdom and servitude with his music.

Nigel knew he could sit and play all night if he wanted, the copper bird wouldn’t trill again until Mrs Ginderwald came in for a new reed the next day.

***

“Holy... is that the seal to the catacombs? The actual seal?” Max’s eyes popped as he realized the sheer volume of trouble the two of them were currently in. “Oh Billy...”

“I know, I’ve done it, I’ve really put us in it.” Bill was almost teary with disbelief and fear.

“You aren’t the only one.” max spread the poles of his bundle apart so that the knurled end of the staff was visible.

“Ohhh s**t that’s no joke neither, is it? We’re proper criminals now, aren’t we?” Bill’s fear had turned to excitement at the sight of the firepower Max had with him. “Now, hold on a minute, what are you doing here... with that?”

“Bill, I was planning to hitch a ride and sell the bloody thing.” He ground his teeth for a moment. “I had a visit from the Lawyer’s Guild today. It seems I’ve inherited quite a bit of debt.”

The thought of an impromptu visit from the Lawyers made Bill’s toes and fingers cold with fear.

“Right. Well, um, I’ve got a plan. Well, it’s your plan really. I’ve just got a means to that end. We can get into the catacombs... but we have to go now.” Bill met Max’s stare, neither of them blinked for a second.

“You mean the plan to break into the catacombs, find our way down to the lair of Mataan’ Dar, buy a mountain of greyvesdust, travel to Gynneth Mawr, spike the giant’s ale with it, and return as heroes? That plan?” Max balked at hearing his own plan said out loud now that they were in a position to do little but go through with it.

This was the ominous ‘point of no return’ moment in their lives. They trembled as they savored the total, consuming uncertainty of it.

“Well f**king hooray then. Let’s be off.” Max hefted the poles back onto his shoulder and shook Bill’s hand once he had his load in place.

“Right... do you suppose you could stroll off with a pair of your coveralls and maybe a mop and bucket? I’ve been promoted, see.” Bill put his hands behind his back, snapped into a taut, formal stance and glanced down at the pewter name-tag on his breast.

“Isn’t that a, ahh.. wait, no let me get it... right, a senior vice superintendent’s badge?” Max raised an eyebrow. “Where’d you come up with that?”

“My dad had it made for me when I got the job at the ministry, said he knew I’d be the first man of dwarven blood to wear one someday.” Bill laughed. “I guess he was right.”

“And as a the new Sr. Vice Superintendent, my first concern is the cleanliness of the Sacred Antechamber of the Gate.” Bill tipped his smile up to Max.

“So you’ll be needing a janitor.” Max nodded sarcastically. “I was born for the role.”

“The evening watch comes on at ten, so we have about two hours to get past the guards before the next pair come on duty.” Bill started for the door, stopping himself abruptly as he thought of another detail in his plan. “Oh, and one other thing. Do you have any more of whatever it was you had in your flask the other night?”

“Always, I’m afraid.” Max patted his satchel.

“Good. Let me do the talking and follow my lead.” He took a deep breath. “I’ll play the villain, you’ll be the commiserating subordinate.”

“I love the sound of this.” Max passed Bill on the way out. “But I’ll need to stop off at my flat on the way over.”

“Fine.” Bill grinned evilly. “Now move along like you care about keeping your job. You know there are lines of sots like you practically climbing over one another for a chance at being a janitor in the ministry. If you think I can’t find another half-wit to push a mop around...”

“I guess you’ve had a bit of practice at this haven’t you?” Max shot Bill a fast smile as they hurried down the coil of stairs to the base of the Feudal Express tower. “Try to remember that I won’t hesitate to put you in a headlock and rap on your skull until you’ve whistled the Cloudiver’s fight song.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Bill recalled the number of brawny fraternity boys who had called him a ‘halfsie’ or a ‘s**twhittler’ only to find themselves throttled and whistling poorly as they tried to escape Max’s headlock routine. “Just try to stay thick skinned about it once we’re in front of the guards, it needs to look convincing.”

“Of course.” Max shook his head. “I’d never lock you up anyway, not now that we’re on the lam together.”

***

When the bells of Tobin’s Watch struck ten, Nigel realized that he’d lost track of time. He swept up and put the heavy silver key in his pocket. As he was about to blow out the last lamp, the copper canary trilled twice. Nigel turned to see an identical pair of tall men wearing suits of finely crafted silken mail. The silvery weave of their outfits twitched as the muscles beneath flexed and shifted. Nigel guessed correctly that if the two of them were to stand on a scale together, they would outweigh an ox.

“Not closed just yet, are you?” The first rumbled. “We didn’t catch you on your way out for the night, did we?”

“No John, we didn’t catch him on his way out at all, he was just doing the tidying up. Weren’t you lad?” The second offered soothingly, the basso thrum of his voice only barely perceptible in the vibration of the floorboards.

“No, not... um, not quite done for the evening... nope.” Nigel swallowed as he realized how fiercely he needed to empty his bladder. “How can I help you gentlemen?”

CH 4

Max recalled that Luck had made a mark on him years ago during his time in the calvary. On even the fairest of summer days, the moment he’d dismount and take up his rucksack, the weather would turn. That night was no exception. As Max hurried through the streets in his coveralls with his old army pack over one shoulder and the bundle of sticks hiding his staff over the over, the first rain came on in sheets.

“Like I said, follow my lead.” Bill reached up and clapped his hand on Max’s shoulder before he started down the stairs to the temple proper.

Once under the street in the cavernous hall that led to the Antechamber of the Gate, the sound of the rain was gone entirely. Every footstep echoed like the language of the leering gargoyles lining the corridor. The hall stepped down and passed under a cyclopean archway into a vault that must have held up the streets above. At the far end was a massive set of doors carved from titanic slabs of dolomite that had been polished impossibly smooth. The doors were entirely blank except for a pair of skeletal dragons standing rampant on either side of an octogram of inlaid onyx.

There was a guard posted at either side of the doors. They were wearing long robes and ornamental masks the color of blood. Each held a ceremonial spear that was twice his height. The torchlight flickered, lending an air of movement to the shapes on the surface of the gate. As they entered, the guards shifted slightly as though they were confused. One looked to the near empty hourglass set on a pedestal in the center of the room next to a large, musty looking tome.

“Alright! Gentleman, I’m sure you know that today is the Minister of Spectral Relations one hundred and eighteenth birthday. And to show his gratitude for your service, he is going to come here, to the catacombs, for a congratulatory inspection.” Bill beamed at the masked figures cruelly. “You know how he loves his white gloves.”

The robed figures looked at one another, stepped out of the shallow impressions five centuries of guardians the same as them had worn into the floor. They ambled over to the walked over to the giant book.

“Well there’s nothing here.” One said to Bill. “There wasn’t even a memo...”

“Memo? Of course there wasn’t a damn memo! That’s why it’s called a surprise inspection.” Bill turned on Max viciously. “You, why haven’t you started cleaning yet? Are you waiting for my permission? Well, you have it. I permit you to get working. Move it!”

“Right, well the old boy is quite spontaneous, isn’t he? There wasn’t a memo because he just hit me up with the idea.” Bill turned back to Max after he explained his lie in greater detail to the guards. “No, not the broom. Dust first, sweep last, start with the door - that’s what he’ll be looking at - wipe down the door first. that way the dust and grime will settle down to the floor. Then you sweep!”

Max went over to the door and began running a rag along the glassy surface of the stone. The chill of the seamless stone seeped through the rag and reminded him of the afternoon visit he’d had with his attorneys. He listened as Bill moved the focus of his role onto the guards.

“You!” Bill stuck his nose right up the mask of one of the cloaked men and sniffed at the mouth slit. “You’ve been chewing Stingroot. I can smell it on your breath!”

“Yeah, but there’s no regulation against Stingroot...” He cowed in front of Bill’s bureaucratic menace.

“Right! Article six ninety dash ‘A’ dash fourteen clearly states that a guard may chew Stingroot, Mudbladder or Redleaf while on duty. But he must... what?” Bill barked at the man.

“He must police the chewed butts of the root properly?” The second guard answered for his fidgeting comrade.

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Bill quipped.

Max wasn’t sure if he thought that Bill’s act was funny or heartbreaking. Since the guards were buying the routine so quickly, Bill obviously had the schtick down cold, which meant he had been the recipient of it more than a few times. Poor bastard.

“Telling, sir... um, answering in the affirmative, sir.” The first guard returned the favor and covered for his buddy’s answer.

“Good.” Bill walked slowly along the perimeter of the room, glancing back at the guards standing at the podium with the quickly draining hourglass. He made his way past each of the large urns that stood in a series of alcoves along either wall. Bill craned his neck around every one of them as the guards grew more restless.

“Oh my!” Bill exclaimed as both of the robed men at arms sagged guiltily. “I wonder who has been working so diligently to pile up all of these Stingroot buts behind this urn?” Bill knew that sarcasm was a poor substitute for wit, but it did the job. “You! Quit with the dusting - you’ll only do a half ass job anyway! Get over here and sweep out this pile of filth, and you two, put up your lances and help move this damned urn so he can get behind it!”

The guards removed their masks and set them on the log book as they stepped nervously over to the urn and set their spears against the wall. As Bill passed Max he snatched the rag from his hand and winked. “I’ll finish the damn dusting! You want something done right...”

Max noticed that the sand in the hourglass was close to gone. Bill had explained to him that the glass went two hours at a turn. The guards would turn it four times a shift, annotating in the log beneath it when they did so. There were hundreds of years of entries in that massive book. Max guessed that they had less than fifteen minutes to get into the catacombs before the next set of guards arrived and things got out of hand. He and the two guards shoved the urn up onto its edge and carefully rolled the thing out a couple of feet so that the stinking mass of stingroot leavings could be cleaned up. It was a scary moment, keeping the twenty stone urn on edge, the thick muscles of his back strained and tightened his tunic across his shoulders with the effort. The three of them shared a smile once it was safely set back on its base. Max stole an exaggerated peak over his shoulder at Bill, who was pretending to clean the gate while installing the seal. With his back to them the guards couldn’t see what he was doing from behind.

“He’s not paying us any mind, see.” Max whispered and tossed his head in Bill’s direction. The guards followed along and grinned as Max produced his flask. “Care for a nip on the job?”

“Oh, you’re a saint.” The first guard, the one who had made the pile of stingroot, took the bottle and stood with his back to Bill and took a steady, lengthy pull. The second waved it off as Max crawled behind the urn to get at the mess.

“No. Had my F.O.O.T coin a year now, I don’t touch the stuff.” He produced a dull bronze coin with the symbol of the Fraternal Order Of Temperance stamped on it. “I go to meetings twice a week. Not that I’m stuck up. I don’t bother others about their habits.”

Bill heard the man’s comment over his shoulder in the cavernous echo of the chamber. Neither of them had planned on a tea totaling sentry. He would have to count on Max to improvise while he set the seal in the center of the octogram and charged the onyx by using his athamae as a conduit for as much of his strength as he could muster on short notice. Now that the seal was ready, he just had to put the final twist on it. He glanced at the hourglass and then over at Max, who had just finished scraping up the stingroot pile. They nodded slightly to one another and Bill went back to working on the seal.

The Seal of the Dark Gate was a dense silver disk inscribed with three concentric circles. Once in place the outermost ring actually fused with the onyx inlays, running along the grooves of the charged octogram like quicksilver. The second ring had a series of raised sigils on it that marked the ages of man and moon along its circumference. Within that ring was the central disk that bore the crowned skull and crossed keys of the Ministry of Disembodied Persons. Bill counted on his fingers, and nervously twisted the second ring with its raised glyphs a quarter turn to the right, paused and then back to the left until it had only three sigils between the first mark and the central tine on the skull’s crown. As he let go, a subtle ticking could be heard coming from the seal.

The guard holding the flask had begun to see small pieces of air moving like frogs leaping from leaves into the water, at least he would have described it that way were he asked to. The second man looked round at Max and gave him an approving thumbs up at his work cleaning out the patch of scum.

“Gets right on top of you, don’t it...” The man watching the air wasn’t at all sure how long the dandelions had been growing out of the pillars on the walls, but they must have been there a while because the were going to seed and the chamber was full of cottony wisps.

Bill backed away from the gate as a deep violet glow emanated from the seal and began radiating along the octogram and through the dragons inscribed across the door.

“How about a hand putting this back?” Max asked the sober guard as he started tipping the urn. The hallucinating sentry stepped away from the urn in awe at how the flowers were making the door come alive. The other guard was facing away from the door and could not see the blank surface of the door begin to simmer and softly roil like a boiling mirror as the seal ticked nearer to its initial position.

The last few grains of sand were falling through the neck of the glass and Max could hear boots on the stairs leading into the chamber. As the urn dropped back into its place the last glyph on the ring around the center of the seal came into line with the crown and a loud ding that sounded through the room.

“Thanks-” The guard managed to say as the urn dropped into position. As the massive vase set down Max’s fist sent him off his feet and onto the stone floor in a snoring pile.

“Ye Gods...” The sentry dropped the flask and fell to his knees as the enormous stone doors swung open and exhaled a century of mildew.

Max plucked the Heartspar from the pile of sticks and took up his pack as he headed for the door. He stopped abruptly and turned back to rifle through the bunch of poles.

“What are you doing, come on!” Bill shouted in a hoarse whisper as the footsteps grew louder.

Max took the stoutest of the pieces of wood from the batch and tossed it to Bill, who caught it in the air.

“You might need more than a dagger in there.” Max smiled grimly as he and Bill stepped through the gate into the catacombs. The door shut a moment after they were inside.

“That went well.” Max joked as they stood together in the utter darkness.

“Yeah, piece of cake from here, really.” Bill failed to sound calm. “No worries.”

***

“So you’re the man to see.” The first of the twins informed Nigel. “That’s what our boss told us.”

“Me?” Nigel was confused. Not only was this visit out of the ordinary, but he’d never seen the two men in front of him before. He was certain he would have remembered if he had.

“Yes John, that’s exactly what our boss told us. He told us that Dr. Pillywizzet was most definitely the man to see.” The second crossed his hands at his belt.

“Ummm, I’m not Pillywizzet. I’m afraid there’s been a mistake...” Nigel began carefully.

“No mistake. Not on our part, was there Errol.” John the twin explained.

“No John, not on our part. The sign on the shop says Pillywizzet, doesn’t it?” Errol put his very scarred, block-like hands on the counter and leaned towards Nigel.

“Well, no, this is Pillywizzet’s shop, but I’m just his apprentice. I’m not him... your boss is quite right, though. I mean, if it’s instruments, Phil is the man to see... assuming that’s why you’re here...” From one look at Errol’s paws, Nigel was quite certain that these men did not play any instruments, except perhaps the tympani. The observation pressed his bladder even further.

The twins looked at each other and mulled over the situation as a single entity.

“I think he’ll do.” John looked at Nigel and almost smiled. “Don’t you Errol?”

“Yes I do, John.” Errol stepped back from the counter and folded his hands exactly like his brother just had.

“Look after him for me.” John stopped almost smiling and headed out the door. “I’ll be off for a moment.”

“My pleasure.” Errol looked at Nigel as John left. “Pillywizzet’s apprentice, eh? Must be a sharp luthier yourself then, to be taking lessons at the knee of a genius.”

“I’m... ahhh... I’m competent, um yeah, I’m good...” Nigel leaned back to look out the window. “I’m not one to brag, really...” He could see a carriage through the dark and the rain. It was festooned with swirling, feathery lights that sent multicolored fans of radiance across the words, “Billingsgate’s Pharaonic Phantasy Tour!”.

“Oh my gods...” Nigel felt thinly solid at that moment. He was trembling lightly when John came back in with a fine wyrmshide case.

“Here we are.” John set the case on the counter and opened it. “Needs a tune up.”

“And a cleaning.” Errol chimed in.

“A proper cleaning.” John added as he watched Nigel’s pupils stretch widely at the sight of the lute.

Billingsgate’s lute was carved from a single piece of pale green jade larger than Nigel’s mind could easily conceive. It was literally radiant with energy, only a master would dare to try do so much as move the bridge on such a relic. There were rumors about the Billingsgate’s lute, it was said to have come from the strange mountains of Qi Chanth, across the great eastern ocean on the other side of the world. A carved motif of a demon with huge curved fangs consuming a blazing village of hapless and terrified victims covered its surface. Nigel was spellbound by it, and the thought of trying to tune it made his overtaxed bladder leak slightly.

“Oh, I think I’ve wet myself...” Nigel chirped under his breath.

“What was that?” John wrinkled his brow.

“He said he’d be happy to tighten her up.” Errol remarked menacingly. “Didn’t you lad?”

“oh.. ah, yea.. I’d uh...” It was all Nigel could get out.

“Be on with it then boy, we’ve got a schedule.”

***

“Don’t touch anything.” Bill explained the first principle of Curse Management to Max. “Doors, statues, symbols, oddly colored stones... anything that looks like treasure, especially that. Gold’s always cursed or sitting on top of a trap door or something.”

“Yeah, I assumed that.” Max groaned.

“Well this my business, you know, dealing with the dead and undead and their associated environs.” Bill piped back.

“If you were to take your first try at riding a falcon, would I need to tell you not to get into a staring contest with it?” Max upped the radiance on his illumination spell so that the head of his staff threw light further down the hallway. “Because they don’t like that, you know.”

The rats scurried back to remain outside the reach of the light. Bill’s features shadowed deeply in the gloom, the edges of his dark skin faded with the blackness of the catacombs.

“Point taken, let’s keep moving.”

They were getting testy with one another. Both of them realized that they were lost even though each had decided not to say anything about it. Neither of them wanted to be the first one to say...

“That’s it, I know I’ve seen that gargoyle before, he’s missing that left brow horn.” Max announced, finally unable to keep it to himself. “We’re lost. Bill, we are lost in the catacombs.”

“Well, I’m glad you said it first.”

***

The common rats who had been close to the gate when the two men (one and a half men, the rodents reckoned, in terms of the number of meals they would provide) entered the catacombs, ran back to their den and spoke directly to their clan leader. He immediately took audience with the nobles. It had been years since men had walked into the catacombs of their own accord. Few things were as exciting to the sovereigns as fresh meat.

***

“I know I heard water running by somewhere a ways back.” Max offered. “If there’s rats and running water there has to be a way out, or down or something.”

“Yeah I heard that two, about four turns back, right near that pair of crypts with the coupling trolls carved between them.” Bill curled his lip in disgust at the very, very poor taste of some of the dead and wealthy.

“Alright, lets head back then.”

After an hour of squinting and pacing about as they tried to determine the source of the trickling sound, Bill figured that the tumbled set of standing sarcophagi were covering a hole in the wall. Carefully, the two of them wedged their staves under one of the heavy coffins and onto the floor without letting it open. The contents of the leaden box would almost certainly be most annoyed by a rude awakening after centuries of mouldering. They sweated and hoped the slight jarring wouldn’t bother the occupant. They found a rough opening that either of them could squeeze through once they had their packs off.

Twenty or so minutes later the sound of water actually falling and splashing somewhere below came into range of their hearing. However, the presence of a growing number of rats along their new route unnerved them both.

“I’d say we’re on the right path.” Bill tried to sound optimistic. “We seem to be following the rats to wherever it is that they come and go from these tombs. That’s got to be something.”

“We aren’t following the rats.” Max explained calmly. “Their leading us.”

“You’re sure of that?” Bill winced.

“Oh yes. There are quite a few more that have been following us.” Max smiled grimly. “And a few of them are quite a bit larger.”

“Oh good.” Bill was less than enthused. “But I’m not wrong, am I, to assume that they have to get in and out of here somehow? We must be getting near some kind of exit to the surface.”

“Sure we are.” Max agreed. “Let’s hope it’s something we can get through before they decide to make a meal of us.”

The hallway became consistently more cluttered with tilting columns and broken statuary. Bill and Max had to be more cautious about where they put their feet as the floor tiles grew uneven and cracked into sharp pieces. They noticed that the walls were covered in a thickening layer of mossy slime that grew more veined with the blind roots of trees.

“They’re closing on us, aren’t they?” Bill asked Max. He knew that after his brief time in the army and all of his auric classes at university, Max had a heightened sense of awareness meant to be used in hard situations.

“Yep.” Max found himself growing laconic as his training kicked in and expanded his perception. He had a very good idea of just how many rodents there were in the horde goading them forward. The lines of travel within the pack told him that there was a sort of organization to the mass. However they communicated, there was a pecking order that ran from the largest of them who held their positions at the back of the pack like generals.

***

Darren, the emperor of the Crypt Hordes, was aware that the men were not clueless. He had been right to assemble all of the family. Darren wasn’t surprised, the only humans dumb enough to invade his realm were usually adventurers, and they were rarely without the means to defend themselves. He decided to extend a few of his knights along the high ledges and into the raceways that burrowed ahead of the travelers so he could flank them when the time came. His warriors obeyed without question and took to the walls and ceiling clung roots.

***

The floor had become a carpet of sticky, black mud peppered with tufts of hairy mold and islands of happy moss. The walls appeared alive in the light of the staff, the stones of the catacombs became lost under a tapestry of roots and hanging mosses. The dead smell of the air had been replaced by the odor of rain and fecund vegetation. Bill and Max slowed as the floor ahead came into view of their light. A few dozen yards off, the tumble of green draped blocks simply ended. Water fell past the edge of the tunnel, cascading in ribbons and bouncing streams into whatever lay below.

“There’s our way out.” Bill’s voice cracked.

***

Each of the strings was stretched as thinly as Nigel would ever have let a typical lute go. But to allow a priceless work of magick like the one he was timidly working at to go without being restrung for so long was criminal. Each string was crafted from filaments of unwound unicorn horn, which meant that the maker had to harvest one of those magickal horses for every set of strings. And even then, though they were sure to vibrate at diabolical and perfect frequencies, they did not stretch so much as they evaporated with playing. The strings he was trying ever so delicately, to bring into tune, were too thin. And every time one of them came close to being calibrated, the lute would pull back and slip the tuning ket in his fingers. It was as if it knew it needed new strings and wouldn’t allow another tuning until it got them.

“How long you got left on it?” John, or perhaps it was Errol asked from the front of the shop. It had taken a bit of convincing that included more than a little self deprecation and pleading with Billingsgate’s roadies for them to allow Nigel to work alone in the shop at the back of the store.

“Um....” Nigel was fighting with the powerful instrument as he answered. “Thirty more minutes or so, I just want it to be perfect.”

“Perfection is our expectation.” One of the twins responded. “But the boss has a schedule.”

“A very important schedule that cannot be deviated from.” The other added. Nigel thought the twins routine of complementing one another’s remarks was becoming quite rote at that point. Rote, but no less intimidating.

“Understood...” Nigel called back as he leaned away and wiped sweat from his forehead. Being so close to the lamp Nigel’s tall, prematurely lined forehead threatened to drip on the instrument. He surmised that his new acquaintances would not be happy if their precious lute was stained.

The roadies shuffled about restlessly while they waited the half hour Nigel asked for. He became more frustrated by the recalcitrance of the jade lute. Nigel couldn’t restring the instrument as he had no strings spun from unicorn’s horn. Pillywizzet didn’t believe in keeping dark instruments or their associated parts in his shop.

“You’re being a right bastard, aren’t you?” Nigel asked the lute as it unwound its tune again. “I haven’t got any horn filament, so we’re just going to have to make due.” He was whispering to it as he had been for most of the evening. What was strange about his one sided conversation was that Nigel had the shadowy impression that the lute was listening to him. Well, it understood him at any rate.

“Alright, that’s it...” Nigel pressed gently on the belly of the lute while turning each of the keys with the strings clamped in place. “Ha... there you go-”

The jade instrument flared with power and let out a piercing shriek so high in pitch that it couldn’t be heard with human ears. Nigel recoiled as hairline fissure ran down the length of its neck. He was paralyzed for a full minute as the horror of his mistake held him like a tiny bird under a man’s boot.

“How long then?” One of the twins asked.

“Ummm...” Nigel’s jumped at the question. One desperate answer swam among the chaos in his mind.

“Nearly ready.” He closed his eyes and tried his best to make the lie sound patient and self assured. “Just another ten minutes or so.”

***

The pair turned and faced the ragged vanguard of the horde swarming at the edge of their light. There was movement along the walls, darting shapes the size of cats skittered above them, clinging to the roots and cracks.

“Oh, wow. Yeah... that’s, ah, that’s a lot of rats.” Bill wavered as he knelt and took the large dagger from his boot. “Tons, I’d venture to guess, tons of rats.”

“Clear off!” Max had been steadily tying together a roiling set of verses and currents since he had noticed the rodent army gathering behind them. With his command he sent a dozen whistlesnaps bouncing across the front masses of the legion and back into the darkness of the corridor. Scores of the small beasts died on impact and the skipping sparks of the small missiles broke up the order of the group. The dancing light threw shadows about the hall that showed the outlines of large creatures hunkered down at the rear of the formation.

As quickly as the spell had faded a pair of large, terribly fanged rodents leapt from the wall to Bill’s left. He ducked one and tucked his crude staff under the belly of the other as it passed by, tossing it toward the edge of the pit, where it bounced once and squalled as it fell into the darkness. The second had landed and rolled back and strike Bill from behind. It had coiled for its leap when Max planted the heel of his boot on its neck, ending it with a muted crunch.

A third feline sized rat came at Max from above, he spun from his stance with his boot on the neck of the last and swung his staff easily, connecting solidly with the rodent. The beast died on impact and sailed until it landed with a wet skid in front of its lord in the back.

Darren had guessed rightly that these two were formidable opponents, his first jab at them had showed that. They would more likely be taken by a mass assault than a proud charge by he and his gentry. There was however, no glory in such a pyrrhic victory. Sending so many to their deaths only to leave a pair of soiled and tattered corpses would more likely upset his already disaffected conscripts. In order for his fellow clansmen to maintain their rank, Darren would need to make a mighty showing. That meant taking on great risk challenging the men with a handful, perhaps a dozen of his closest nobles. He disliked the decision, but it was a question of politics as much as it was tactics. He gave the order to regroup and hold, much to the relief of his subjects.

“Oh, they seem to have gotten the message, maybe they’ll just...” Bill tried for a grin as the waves of rodents in front of them retreated into their holes and corners.

“Bill, lay down on the floor and cover your head.” Max sounded completely flat. He was in the midst of linking together the workings of a very tender, very dangerous sanguine spell.

“Right.” Bill could tell from the hot orange glow emanating in diffuse points from Max’s eyes that whatever Max was up to, it was going to be spectacular... hopefully spectacular enough to save both of their asses. The filthy blondish tendrils of Max’s hair stood away from his head as the charge of the spell gathered through him. Bill laid on his stomach in the slime and put both hands over the important parts of his neck. He was still holding onto his dagger absently as he watched the prowling shapes come closer.

Timing was everything. Darren and his brothers slinked forward in the waning light of the tall man’s staff. He wanted to use their size and ferocious look to intimidate his enemy before charging. The key, he knew, was to make that push at the moment the man cast whatever spell he was winding up with. Too late and there would be hell in the tunnel, too early and the same result was a certainty. The man moved his arms in a large gesture and did a half turn in place, coming low to the floor where his companion lay prone.

Darren’s remaining forward scout dropped from the ceiling without command in a brilliant move meant to disrupt the sorcerer mid casting. The king and his closest generals charged.

Bill watched as time seemed to slow around him. He saw the large rat, as big as those he’d fought already, drop with all four clawed hands stretched out like a falling house cat. It was set to rake down Max’s neck as he was absorbed in his spell. Somehow, Bill flung his dagger at the falling critter and skewered it through, sending it across the tunnel. He almost grinned before getting a look at the dozen or more monsters bearing down on them. Each was as large as a panther and clad in bits of makeshift armor cobbled together from the remains of dead noble’s troves. Had he had the time to be frightened he might have considered how much better a steady job and a plethora of benefits really had been to a grisly death being torn apart by huge rodents.

However, Bill did not get that chance. As he watched the oncoming charge he saw Max finish his spell. A tiny white ball of light fizzled out of the knobbed end of the Heartspar and bobbled along like a bee toward the bloodthirsty creatures. Bill’s heart sank as he saw Max grin under the sheen of sweat the spell had laid on him.

Darren almost stuttered in his sprint as he saw the fading point of light wobble toward him. So much pageantry and contortion had gone into a tinkling bit of a spell. Perhaps he’d misjudged his enemies. No matter, they’d make the first fresh meal his subjects had tasted in months.

It was his last thought.

The bumbling light winked out completely just behind Darren with a sound like a wet fart. From Bill’s perspective, the light vanished with a massive gulp of wind that tore overhead only to be

followed by a tremendous boom that shook the hall violently. Small pieces of rat meat and unidentified fluids splattered against him, some of the mess landing on his face before he had time to cover it.

He lit his athamae with a push of his mind and saw the whole of the corridor coated in rat. There were big pieces and small pieces, blood and bile, cleanly dismembered carcasses... a tumult of raw gory stew. Max grinned as the swarms of common rodents frantically ran about collecting all of the tasty remains of their former monarch and his retinue. They disappeared into their crevices and runs leaving the hall in approximately the same state of filth as it had been seconds before.

“What the hell was that?” Bill was happily flabbergasted.

“That was what got me booted from the calvary.” Max stood up and wiped his hair from his face. “It takes quite a bit of effort to keep it that small.”

“That was small?” Bill gaped as he recovered his dagger and sheathed it back in his boot.

“It’s an incredibly dangerous working.” Max let out a long, tired breath. “I haven’t tried it since the service. I’ve been scared to.”

“Rightly so...” Bill agreed as the walls and floor let loose a series of snaps and groans that increased in intensity. They looked at one another and sighed.

With a great catapulting tilt, the floor beneath the pair collapsed from the fractures Max’s spell had left in the supporting columns below them.

CH 5

“Oh gentlemen! I think this is my best work yet!” Nigel called in a falsely jubilant tone as he slipped the stout shop key in his pocket. “I’m quite excited about it.”

“You’ve finished then.” One of the pair responded.

“Oh, so nearly, I need to head upstairs and get my calibrated lathing stylus to be sure that the vibratory harmonic won’t interfere with the tangent of the belly in proportion to Mr. Billingsgate’s hand.” Nigel quietly closed the wyrmhide case and set the latches. “Do you suppose that Mr. Billingsgate would be so kind as to come back here...”

“No chance of that, boy.” One of the two cut Nigel short.

This was what Nigel had expected, and his heart slowed ever so slightly with the thug’s answer. Billingsgate had a reputation for intense excess. It was understood that the man was often late and nearly incapable of speech until he began playing, at which point he came to and produced some of the most darkly enchanting songs anybody had ever heard.

“Right, I suppose he’s waiting at the gig.” Nigel called out as he silently hid the broken masterpiece in another case. A very ordinary looking case.

“He does like a good time before a performance.” One of the men chuckled before tightening his tone. “If you pick it up a bit we might be able to get you backstage at the Matarme so as you can meet the man.”

“If Tyro stays in that bar much longer he won’t be able to stand, much less play.” The tone shifted from serious to deadly.

“Right. I wouldn’t want to ruin the evening.” Nigel closed his eyes as the sweat rolling down his forehead cooled. He unconsciously picked up the lute and headed up the stairs. “Be right down.”

“Tick-Tock Mr. Nigel.”

***

“Utter darkness.” Bill mused out loud as he fumbled for his homemade wand. The air was brackish and thick with decay and the unmistakable rot of sewage. “Utter, blooming darkness.”

He found his wand in his pouch as he slogged out of the soupy water onto what felt like a shoal of sticks and hay. Bill was terrified. He hadn’t heard anything out of Max, and he had no idea where they were. He hesitated a moment before throwing light from his short wand.

Bones. A mound of bones and wiry, dead brambles piled up in a softly flowing lake of sewage. Bill straightened up a bit and looked around in the mediocre sphere of light his wand cast. Max was sitting up. He was bleeding and obviously dazed from a nasty looking cut in his scalp. Strangely, even through his muck splattered countenance, Max still had a vaguely noble air about his features. Bill remembered the same effect from their days at school, no matter how many hours Max had been awake during a match, he still had the look of a man ready to lead an army. Even if not to victory, he looked quite inspiring. Bill wondered if maybe it was the cheekbones...

“I’m fine.” Max answered before Bill asked. “Mostly fine. How about you? Nothing broken I hope.”

“I’m going to be very sore tomorrow, assuming...” Bill let his words fall off as Max pulled himself up on his staff.

Max took a moment and inhaled deeply, fighting the urge to choke on the sulfuric air. He sent a short pulse of light from his mind into the staff. What the light revealed was no more heartening than what the two had already seen. They were in fact, standing in a lake of sewage running languidly in one direction past the forest of pillars around them. Rainwater spilled from the hole above, and the small island of bones was a tangled into a larder of nests and refuse that must have belonged to the rats. A few hundred feet away there was a larger island that also appeared to be made entirely of discarded bones. Rags of greasy and rank things were caught in the snags and eddies that surrounded the charnel hillock that rose to the ceiling.

“Lovely place for a holiday.” Bill offered with a pained smile. It was almost a smile, more of pinched expression made by contracting the muscles of the cheeks.

“You’re so right.” Max moved forward, sloshing through the water toward the skeletal rise. Both of them felt compelled to get out of the sewage and onto higher ground, even if that meant climbing a hillock of dead men. “Oh my damned head. If it weren’t for my fondness for hangovers, I don’t think I’d be able to function.”

“Lucky thing.” Bill whimpered as the floor of the sewer fell deeper and he found himself nearly up to his chin in floating crap. “Oh this is lucky... yes I’d call it that... lucky.”

As they scrambled onto the wretched beach, they took a moment to rest. Bill flicked a couple of paltry whitlesnaps into the nest to set it ablaze.

“Thanks for that.” Max sighed as the fire picked up. Though they felt no warmth from the bonfire across the running vein of sewage, it provided enough light that Max could let off keeping his staff glowing.

“I’m famished.” Bill said out loud as he lay back and tried not to shiver.

“You are amazing.” Max shook his head and genuinely laughed. “Only you, Heartles, could think of eating after nearly drowning in s**t. You must have the metabolism of a bumble bee.”

“My father always said that a dwarf’s apatite- hgghh!” Bill was cut off in mid sentence by ten bony fingers clamped around his throat. A pair of skeletal hands punched out of the pile and choked him while hundreds more indiscriminate bones clicked together and shambled up in a cacophony of horrible chattering. Whole skeletons stood and moaned. Each of them was unnervingly lopsided from having been drawn together by a magick that paid no mind to matching the bits and pieces of particular owners. Bill rolled out of the grasp of the dead thing that attacked him and stomped the two hands into shards.

“Seriously!?” Max picked himself up heavily and swung the tip of his staff up into the chin of the nearest animate, knocking the skull free. He spun the Heartspar around as he followed though and smashed the ribcage of the stumbling creature. “First rats and now skeletons? Can’t we even have a moment’s rest!”

Bill took out an approaching skeleton at the knees, collapsing it like an iceberg calving from a glacier into the sea. The two of them battered and kicked their way through a dozen or more animates, finally putting the last of them down with a crushing stomp to its brittle skull.

“Who the hell is putting these things up?” Max quipped. “Who would spend their time waiting around in a lake of s**t for the chance to attack a pair of idiots who happened to fall into the sewer. For the record, that was sloppy work with those animates, every one of them was spun together poorly.”

Max got his answer almost immediately as a massive brazier atop the hill ignited with a whoosh of evil, blue flame. The vaulted expanse of the sewer rang with deep, callous laughter as the two men sighed with disgust at the consistently southward bend in their luck.

“You aren’t wrong, fool, those were shoddy bits of conjuration...” A disembodied voice sufficiently stuffed with malice boomed through the chambers. A deafening forest of clicking and wheezing surrounded the men as scores of animate dead rattled together from the knobby hill. “I have always preferred to apply quantity over quality when it comes to dismembering intruders.”

“Max?” Bill ventured weakly.

“Yes Bill?”

“I’m not sure we thought this through, this plan of yours.” Bill offered timidly before asking another question.“I don’t suppose you’ve got the juice left to whip out another one of those whacking great ‘kill everything’ spells like you did with the rats upstairs?”

“No Bill, I do not.” Max answered as he kicked the first set of wobbling bones hard enough that it sent pieces into another two, knocking them down as well. “And even if I did, it’s too risky.”

“Too risky?” Bill’s desperation made his voice crack while he popped an animate in the jaw with his stout pole. “Is being torn apart by these bastards not inducement enough to roll the dice?”

The soulless voice laughed again, this time with a tone of mirth that conveyed a distinctly human sense of humor.

“Oh, boys, you are quite a lot of fun. I hope you stay on your feet a bit longer, I could use a dose of comedy.” It chuckled for a moment before it continued. “It does get awfully dull down here.”

“We’d rather take tea with you if you’d like a bit of company. Be easier on us, you know.” Bill hollered as he ducked a raking set of sharp fingers.

Max and Bill retreated until they were back to back as the horde pressed in on them. They punched and bashed at the onslaught, only to watch each animate be replaced by three more. Four of the damned skeletons finally ripped the staff from Bill’s exhausted hands. A charging animate sunk it’s filthy teeth into Max’s right hip as it went down. Bill was being stripped of his waistcoat, the talon-like fingers biting through the fabric and digging into his skin. His already large brown eyes went wide with horror as he was pulled away from Max into the crowd of dead.

“Enough!” Max roared as he swept his staff in a semicircle that sent a wave of force out in a series of expanding ripples that splintered every skeleton standing. He sagged to his knees with the effort, trying with difficulty to catch his breath.

Silence held the air for almost a minute before a pale mist flowed from the brazier and gathered into a tall human shape.

“My goodness.” The wraith stepped up to the haggard pair. “It’s a pity you had to wander in here. You are both really so feisty. Especially you. You’re scrappy.” It indicated Bill with a long wispy finger.

“And you.” The powerful specter tipped its misty chin towards Max. “So much strength. I do have a word of criticism though, you shouldn’t throw so much of yourself out at once like that. A fight can be as much about stamina as brute strength.”

“Oh... thanks...” Max exhaled his words on waning breath.

The wraith shifted suddenly, and was right on top of them. Its hands left frost burns on their necks as it wrenched them around. They could see cruel delight in the drifting wash of its vaporous features as it pulled them in.

“Wait... hang on a second.” The burning cold of its grip slackened. Its voice went from an intimidating bass to a casual tenor. It hovered for a moment as it considered Bill’s semi-conscious face. “Bill?”

Bill roused himself as he recognized the wraith’s voice once it was speaking normally. He was confused by the indefinite features for a moment.

“Dennis?”

***

“Oufff! Damn it!” Nigel cursed under his breath as he stumbled into a pile of crates among the stacks of equipment, rubbish, spare parts and spiderwebs. The light was poor and he needed to find the coil of heavy ‘D’ string they used for large harps.

“Oi!” One of the thugs below called up the stairs. “What are you at up there?”

“Bad light, misplaced tools... be down any second...” Nigel let his remark trail off as he found the musical coil of troll gut he was after.

“You know John, I think our luthier may need a hand.” John and Errol sounded so similar from three floors up that to Nigel it seemed one man was having a conversation with himself. “I agree, Errol, something’s rotten about all this. I’d hate to imagine what would come of our little pedigreed friend if he was up to something clever.”

Nigel heard the two men poke around the shop followed by the unmistakable click of the platinum clasps of the wyrmhide case. His pulse leapt as they pounded onto the stairs, only making a couple of steps before one of the tired treads gave way. Nigel tied one end of the cord through the iron ring that opened the trapdoor to the roof above as he listened to the swearing and smashing sound of one of the brothers freeing himself from the broken stair.

“You haven’t got long now, boy.” The big man had a clear note of joy in his tone as he called up to Nigel. “You’re lucky, special even. Most people never get the chance to see what their liver looks like.”

Nigel opened the window that looked out over the front of the shop and tossed the spool out into the street below. He dashed back to the door to the stairway and flipped the lock before climbing onto the cill of the open window.

“Or their pancreas, or their gallbladder... you know the gallbladder is really a part of the liver? Well, you’ll see soon enough, boy.” The twins were forced to take their time as they climbed. With each step the antique treads creaked and sagged under their dense frames. “Don’t fret boy, we’ll give you the complete tour. You might even last long enough to get a gander at one of your kidneys.”

“Oh I think you’re being a bit optimistic, John.”

With the cord in his left hand Nigel tried to remember exactly what he’d learned at summer camp about that one mountaineering thing with the rope where one wraps it over the arm... no, under the leg, yes that’s it, across the chest and over the shoulder... and then across the back, right- ok push the case aside... sit down onto the line, let it take your weight...

Nigel sat onto the ‘D’ string, feeling it cut into what little padding he had there. His whole person was shaking so hard he thought his teeth would chatter if his jaw weren’t clamped shut. He pushed away gingerly, trying to walk down the facade of the building. The lock on the door succeeded in stopping the two thugs for slightly less that two seconds, at which time Nigel realized that the cord was far too thin to hold onto properly. His rappel turned into a zipping plunge that slowed him only enough to prevent his ankles from breaking as he hit the cobblestones. The impact slammed him forward onto his face, turning his nose dramatically westward with a gout of blood. He stumbled onto his feet, both hands burned deeply across the palms. He staggered up and realized that his tights were slashed open where his backside was run across with a matching brand.

The twins made the it to the window to see Nigel staggering over to large stone obelisk in front of the shop. They realized that they could neither jump the three stories to the ground nor take the line down as it wouldn’t bear their weight. They opened their topcoats and took up three small knives in each of their hands. This sort of kill was a signature move of theirs. They loosed all twelve knives in a single salvo of whirling blades.

Nigel’s hands fumbled with pain and fear as he kept slipping at the lock with the key. Finally he managed to turn the lock, freezing the shop and its periphery in place. When he looked up at the window he’d more or less fallen from, he saw the two men motionless. Their arms were extended and each of them wore a cruel, satisfied smile.

There were twelve knives reflecting the flickering light of the streetlamp as they hung in space just a few feet above Nigel’s head.

***

“Well, Dennis explained to me that he’d run across a friend down here. So he brought the two of you up onto the veranda.” Matan’ Daar sat down carefully in a wicker chair fitted with linen cushions. “He also said that he owed you a favor. Which is why he asked me out here to sit with you. He said you’d come all this way just to see me.”

“Thanks” Max said. “We appreciate you taking the time...”

“Yes, yes, I know the routine... spare me the pleasantries.” Matan’ Daar was very lean without being thin. Hs dark skin literally glowed with an amber hue as was the case with the most powerful elvish mages. He was well aware that only the minds of very exceptional men were as keen as those of elves. And Matan’ Daar had what would be considered an exceptional mind by elvish standards. Thus he had little patience for human niceties. “Now, Dennis brought you up here, which he never does, and I’ve come out to speak with the two of you, which I never do... Geoffery, bring a round of restoratives for everyone, our guests look like death warmed over.”

A well kept and perfumed animate that had been standing behind the entourage as proudly as any corpse could vanished back into the copper palace. There were six or seven well dressed and beautiful hangers on out on the porch smoking from long stemmed pipes and sipping at cocktails. Two of them were very deadly looking in addition to being handsome, they stood immediately behind Matan’ Daar with their hands folded. Each of them was part elf, quite muscular, and armed with a pair of long slender blades sheathed against their thighs.

“Now, I’m curious, how is it that my best sentry owes a small fellow like you a favor?” He looked at Bill and raised a playful eyebrow.

“If I may, sir.” The wraith spoke from behind Bill and Max in a warm tone. He had tightened his shifting form into something translucently more solid. “Mr. Heartles works at the Ministry. I’d been locked up for quite a while, waiting on an appeal, when the buggers in charge changed the protocol.”

“Mmm, yes I recall that little reorganization of theirs.” Matan’ Daar reached for a light blue drink from his servant’s tray. “Please, do go on.”

“They had decided to change the status of all class five free roaming vapors such as myself. The lot of us were to be moved directly to the abyss. They didn’t want our paperwork ‘clogging the system’ they said.” Dennis paused as he recalled the memory. “Bill and I had been working at getting me a release from the limbo processing unit, we were just waiting on a form...”

“A four fifty one ‘R’ nineteen.” Bill offered automatically before shrinking under the unified gaze of Matan’ Daar and his entourage.

“Yeah, anyway, Bill and I had more than a few chats while we’d been waiting on the bloody form, and when the order to redirect me to the abyss came out Bill lost my file and shuffled me out the back, in a manner of speaking.” The mist shrugged with a grin.

“Well, I’d say that’s quite a favor. Saving you from damnation.” Matan’ Daar smiled at Bill. “In a way you’ve done us both a good turn, Dennis is the best wraith I’ve had in my employ for some time. He has a talent for making a bit of fun out of the steady stream of addicts and jugglers that paddle in here from the bay looking to liberate some of my goods.”

Max and Bill looked back and considered the size of the hill of bones below the porch.

“That explains who you are, my little guest. Now, what I’d like to know, Max, is precisely what a champion ‘tosser like yourself is doing down here below the catacombs.” Matan’ Daar smiled at Max. “You can’t be surprised that I remember you. After all, I made quite a bit of gold from gamblers foolish enough to bet against the Cloudivers. Really, I was quite disappointed when your uncle told me you’d decided to join the calvary instead of making your mark in the majors.”

“I imagine, since you knew my uncle, that he owed you money.” Max sighed over his cocktail. The potion’s effects were remarkable, after a couple of sips Max already felt his strength return, along with a dangerous lift in his confidence. “I hope you weren’t...”

“Involved in your uncle’s demise? No. I believe I know who was, but that’s not what we’re talking about just now.” He leaned in, his features gently darkening. “I’d like to know why you two would like to see me.”

“Business.” Max sat up straight and lowered his chin slightly. He was practically radiating with that noble presence Bill had noticed before. Bill smiled nervously, he was happy to let Max do the talking.

“Business? Between the two of you and myself?” The entourage giggled softly. “Please, tell me what would sort of business would you like to conduct?”

“We’d like to offer you a trade in return for some of your wares.” Max kept his eyes locked with Matan’ Darr’s. “Greyvesdust, specifically, is what we’re after.”

“Oh, that’s sad Mr. Gladivus, don’t tell me that you pair are just another couple of junkies here to try and skim a fix off of me.” Matan’ Daar sat worriedly back in his seat. “I hope, I really do hope, that a champ like you hasn’t fallen to that.”

“No. Not at all. Bill and I need quite a lot of ‘dust in order to... fix a problem.” Max tried to explain without offering too many details.

“In my experience, Mr. Gladivus, greyvesdust does not fix problems, it generates them.” He looked sideways at Max and considered that the man had something odd enough in mind that he couldn’t penetrate the logic of it. “I’m curious, not enough to ask just what you need my product for, but I am curious. How much ‘dust are you in need of?”

“Ten stone’s of it.” Bill answered wanly.

There was a pause, complete silence covered the veranda for a long moment before the entire group, excepting Max and Bill, erupted into laughter.

“Oh my. Oh my goodness you two are wonderful fun! And here I thought Tyro was going to be the highlight of my evening!” Matan‘ Daar regarded the expressions of his guests. “I don’t believe it. You’re serious, aren’t you? Can either of you conceive of just how much that would cost?”

“Not precisely.” Max removed the deed to his estate from it’s oilskin pouch and set it on the slight cafe table between them. “But I’m hoping we can do business.”

Matan’ Daar smiled a moment. During the lull, another well built guard came out of the palace and whispered to his boss.

“Pardon me a moment chaps, I want to see where you’re going with this, I really am fascinated.” Matan’ Daar leaned back as his subject silently left the porch and went inside. “Alcinia?”

One of the intolerably sexy ladies in the back of the small crowd stepped up by Matan’ Daar’s side.

“Yes?” She asked tossing her hair back in a calculated way that would become the primary ingredient in Max’s fantasies for weeks. She was as tall as Max and as radiant as her lord. Her skin was a dark honeyed gold in color. Both Max and Bill were immediately as intimidated by her as they were by their host.

“Alcinia, could you look into that project we’d talked about earlier?” He smiled easily at her.

“My pleasure.” She let a feline smile pass over her lips as she glanced once at Max and went back into the dome.

“Anyway... it seems to me that you are offering me full title of your estate, the manor of the Gladivus line included, as a trade for an obscene amount of my goods.” He looked incredulously at Max and Bill. “If that’s your idea of a fair trade, then I’m afraid you aren’t nearly the salesman your uncle was.”

“The estate of the Gladivus line is an untenable burden, not a commodity. It includes, correct me if I leave anything out, several thousand acres of blighted countryside complete with roaming beasts, deadly vegetation and villages reduced to haunted ashes as well as a manor that is cursed with who knows what dark magicks. The structure is replete with ghasts and at least one wraith of purportedly invincible power. Add to that the fact that all of that wonderfully deadly property of yours has been borrowed against, heavily.” Maatan’ Daar frowned at Max.

“What you’ve just listed are it’s best attributes.” Max smiled charmingly. “And it isn’t a manor, it’s a keep. A fortress carved from the very living rock. It has withstood two great wars and the cataclysm. It is impregnable and surrounded, as you said, by a wasteland of deadly wilds. A few splashes of paint and a quick cleanup of the present inhabitants, and a fellow like you would have an impenetrable headquarters. No lawyer or collector would dare try and make good on a lien against anyone who lived there.” Max finished his drink and set it on the table next to the deed.

“A few splashes of paint, a quick clean up?” Matan‘ Daar wrinkled his brow at Bill. “Is he mad? Even I wouldn’t try to unseat the... things that make their home there.”

“No he isn’t.” Bill managed a smile and set the Seal of the Abyss, the one instrument that could pull any disembodied soul into eternal hell, on top of the deed. “And, for the record, one might be better off conscripting rather than banishing whatever baddies they found in there, if one had the tools to do so.”

Matan’ Daar inhaled slowly and pressed his fingertips together. Dennis evaporated with a faint rushing sound and, except for his bodyguards, the partygoers quietly slipped back inside. This was the sort of business they didn’t want to be accessory to.

“Gents.” Matan’ Daar spoke over his shoulder to his bodyguards. “Could you leave us alone for a moment and find my accountant?”

The two warriors removed themselves without a sound.

“You are full of surprises. I am impressed, very, very impressed.” Matan’ Daar’s eyes glowed with a violet light that betrayed his excitement. “You both know that what you’re offering isn’t just a trade, it’s an impossible bargain for me.” His mind was working steadily across the avenues of the future. The fortress of the Gladivus line guarded by an army of unseemly monsters. It would be an immense career move. With that kind of a base of operations he could become a global enterprise. Even the Helliotic church wouldn’t risk challenging him.

“I can’t help but say yes to this proposition of yours.” Matan’ Daar tilted his head with his query. “But what’s to keep me from adding you to my collection of bones and just keeping these treasures?”

“Nothing at all.” Max answered.

***

Nigel gasped and fought to keep from collapsing into a bawling heap. He was alive, but still in so, so much trouble. His fevered brain had only a few of its basic components still functioning. Stunned and dizzy from his landing, he looked about wildly for a simple, curative solution to his situation. Terrified he found himself on the bench of Billingsgate’s flamboyant coach, whipping the reins and flying though the streets of Wälsport.

***

Bill and Max felt themselves pierced by scores of disgusted glares as they walked through the nightclub. They were wild eyed, grinning and still covered in sewage. Their individual wounds were healed, their limbs felt strong and rested, and each of them was beaming at the immaculate patrons of Matan’ Daar’s exclusive venue. They passed along the back of the dance floor and stopped for a moment to consider the sad state of the opening performer. His wig was hanging by a few strands in the gold chains around his neck, great rivers of mascara ran down his face with sweat and tears. He was on his knees banging away at his lute. This profound display of breakdown was all happening right at the front of the stage. Most pitiful of all the man’s voice was hoarse to the point of sounding shredded.

“Isn’t that Byron James?” Max asked Bill.

“Yeah... It is.” Bill was surprised to see another classmate. He felt no compassion, however, for the bastard melting on stage. James had pursued an agenda of spreading racist rumors about him behind his back. The inference that dwarves preferred the company of ponies to women was not the worst of the slurs he’d passed around.

“Looks like Billingsgate hasn’t shown up yet.” Bill laughed. “Seems to be taking its toll on old Byron.”

“I wouldn’t want to open for that drunken idiot.” Max smirked as the two of them stepped past the guard at the rope. “Byron’s likely to be playing all night.”

The two of them were flush with victory and the potent elixir Matan’ Daar had provided them two glasses of. The first was a courtesy, the second a toast. They were so excited and magickally elevated that the five stone duffle bags each of them carried hardly weighed on them.

At the precise moment that they tasted the open air, a calamity of wheels on cobblestones and skittering hooves came down the street at full tilt. A pandemonium of colored lights and garishly decorated horses barreled at them.

“Looks like Billingsgate’s at the reins himself.” Bill joked.

“Yeah, I guess he’s going to make his show after all.” Max added with a grin that faded as he recognized the driver. “Oh s**t... Bill, that’s Nigel!”

The coach barely came to a stop in front of them. All three were so confused by their sudden meeting that nobody said anything for a minute.

“Right... change of plans!” Nigel shrieked at his friends without any idea what he was saying. “Get on! Quick! Get on!”

Max leapt aboard, more out of his instinctual love of bad ideas than anything. Bill followed suit with a shake of his head. He figured that there was no point in splitting up now, they’d made it this far together. Good grief Nigel was a mess. His strong, aquiline nose (his best feature) was pushed nearly flat against one cheek and the unrestrained terror on his face spoke volumes about his mental state.

“Thank all the gods! You have have to help me.” Nigel lashed the horses again and took off down the street. “I have buggered everything up, you won’t believe what I’ve gone and done...”

“Nigel, why are you driving Billingsgate’s coach?” Bill asked as Max took their bags and stowed them on top of the bouncing wagon. “Which brings me to ask why, since you are the acting chauffeur for his highness, Tyro Billingsgate, did you not drop him off at his show?”

“What?” Nigel asked in a panic. “What do you mean? He’s already there, didn’t you see him in there, you know surrounded by hundred crowne courtesans... drunk off his ass?”

“No, he never showed.” Max looked at Nigel. He noticed the lute case under the bench and felt what would have been a sinking sensation had he not been so hopped up rejuvenating spirit. He swiped the case from under the seat and opened it. The brilliant jade lute forced a shudder from Max. “What the hell are you doing with this?!”

“I told you, I’ve buggered it, I’ve completely buggered it...” Nigel was making very little sense.

“You know this thing is evil. Really evil.” Max felt waves of malice emanating from the instrument. He snapped the case shut and tossed it through the curtain behind the bench.

“Ow!” A voice from inside called out.

“Nigel...” Bill managed to say as Tyro Billingsgate tuck his head past the curtain. By the bags under his eyes it was apparent to the three of them that the man had been sleeping one off. “Nigel you... bastard!”

“Oi! I told you morons to wake me when... wait... who the hell are-” Tyro’s question was cut short as Max punched him in the jaw, knocking him out cold. The rock star swayed a moment and fell back into his coach. Nigel and Bill looked at Max completely speechless with shock.

“Things are complicated enough.” Max told them.

CH6

“Nigel, quit your blathering, move over and give me the reins.” Bill tugged the reins from Nigel’s grip. “You’re a mess, and you’re driving like a bloody idiot. The last thing we need right now is to get pulled over by the constables.”

“Yeah, Nigel, wear this.” Max took off his soiled greatcoat and wrapped it around his shaking friend as Bill brought the horses back to a trot. “In the inside pocket... no the other one... no the left breast inside pocket... yeah the larger one.. right, there’s an ampule in there, could you hand me that?”

“...yeah, here...” Nigel handed Max a small metal tube. It was fitted with a cork stopper on one end that Max twisted off to reveal a needle. Nigel barely saw it coming. “Ouch! What the hell was... ohhhhh, yeah... that’s a lot better...” Nigel smiled as the distilled essence shrewsflower passed into his blood and eased him from the soul outward. Both his hands quit throbbing and the raw stripe across his backside eased as the shrewsflower set in.

“Bill could you explain to Nigel why we can’t afford a chat with the constables just now?” Max asked as he patted Nigel on the back and made his way onto the roof of the carriage. The garish lights emitted by the small glass thimbles on either side of the carriage made them about as hard to ignore as a troll in high heels and a miniskirt.

“Oh that should be easy, Max.” Bill looked back at his classmate with a combination of excitement and frustration. Max was a great wizard, Bill had seen that in the last few hours, but he was still a sportsman, and a tosser at that. Smart as Max was, he was more brass than brains. The man had a habit of simply bashing his way through any troubles that he hadn’t anticipated. “Should I start with the fact that we’ve kidnapped the single most famous man in the kingdom? Or do you think I should tell him about the ten stones of ‘dust we’ve got with us?”

“Wherever you like.” Max grumbled at Bill’s grumbling. He walked across the jostling carriage and knelt at the first thimble in the back. It was basically a jar of colored glass threaded over a trio of bruised, adolescent candlesprites.

“What sick bastard would...” Max mused out loud to himself as he got a better look at the tiny, fluttering girls. Max was struck with a dark chord of concern as he unscrewed the bulb and held it upright. Between these enslaved fairies and the genuine evil of the lute, Max felt that whatever interests were managing Billingsgate’s career were very, very bad indeed. The young sprites fluttered cautiously to the rim of the jar and hopped onto Max’s collar in the breeze. One of them whispered something to him in the chittering music of their native tongue before all three buzzed off into the dark like joyous firebrands. He stepped from each thimble to the next, releasing the tiny girls into the air. Had his sense of balance not been so finely honed by years on the back of a falcon (even riding standing up at the draft derby every season) he would have fallen over as his legs wobbled watching the fairies drift off into the night.

“Let me sum up our situation, Nigel.” Bill began. His heart bounced in his chest and made him burp nervously as he realized what all they had gotten themselves into. “You have stolen what appears to be a priceless lute, kidnapped its owner and nicked his carriage, all while there happens to be a club full of the most influential trust fund dandies and gang-stars waiting impatiently for him to show up.”

“Yeah, well, I hadn’t much choice..” Nigel smiled sweetly as he dug around and failed to find the thick silver key in his pocket. He dismissed his absence in the swollen clouds of his mind. “There were a couple of bad men threatening to cut my favorite organs out while I was still alive. I locked them in the shop and ran...”

“Oh, Nigel, I’m not finished, but yes, let’s add those bad men and their interest in your vitals to the list.” Bill shook his head as Max stepped back onto the bench and sat down heavily. “Then we have an unlicensed wizard’s staff with us, which as you might know is a hanging offense in the city limits. And finally Max and are the proud owners of ten stones of greyvesdust, another hanging offense.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention...” Max began. “I’m going to have a warrant out for my arrest in about eight hours.”

“You failed to mention this to me earlier?” Bill smiled facetiously at Max.

“Yeah, um it seems that my uncle owed quite a bit of money in liens against the estate as well as insurance and legal fees... debts that haved passed on to me as the sole inheritor.” Max shrugged.

“Holy gods Max, you’ve got the Lawyer’s guild on you...” Bill exhaled a shocked breath. “No wonder you were so keen to leave town.”

“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that they know I’ve got that staff.” Max sighed. “They seemed to think I could pawn it to cover my ‘good faith’ fees to keep out of the debtor’s stocks.”

All three men grimaced at the mention of the stocks. They traveled in silence until the neared the north by northeastern gate of the city.

“Bill, could you just pop inside and make sure Billingsgate won’t cause any fuss until we’ve got past the portcullis.” Max elbowed Nigel gently as Bill tucked through the curtain into the coach. “How’d you like to be Billingsgate for about ten minutes.”

“Max, I love you, and I know you’re a brilliant when it comes riding and casting, but you’re daft if you think anyone would believe that I’m Billingsgate.” Nigel smiled and pulled Max’s coat tighter as he began to feel the need to sleep tug at him.

“Just sit there and mumble if they ask you anything.” Max whispered as they pulled up to a stop.

Bill was careful not to step on the unconscious minstrel as he climbed into the coach. It was dimly lit with a pair of moonseeds that were loosing their magickal charge. After a quick look at Billingsgate, including a feel at the man’s pulse, Bill decided that the rock star was not likely to make a fuss anytime soon. Once again, Max’s right cross proved to be quite effective at producing a near coma in its recipients. Bill shook his head and glanced about. Satin pillows, silk curtains, a long stem pipe left tangled in the mess and a long black box stowed closely behind the curtain he’d slipped through.

“Woah.” Max slowed the horses to a stop at the twin sentry’s boxes built into either side of the ramparts that climbed fifty feet to the parapets of Walesport’s southern gate. “Evening gentlemen.”

Two fellows armed with pikes, crossbows slung across their backs stepped out of their alcoves in the wall. Each of them wore tunics embroidered with the twin whales and crossed tridents of the Wälsport emblem. Each whale was impaled on a trident to form a circle. The effect of this rounded coat of arms when stretched across the pot belly of the sergeant made a sort of bull’s eye out of his expansive stomach.

“Evening.” The portly guard answered. He sized up the unlit coach driven by a pair of men who looked and smelled more than a little like soiled jugglers. In his slow circuit of the carriage he nodded to himself as he made note that the side of the coach was emblazoned with the words “Billingsgate’s Pharaonic Phantasy Tour!”.

“So, you’re Mr. Billingsgate’s chauffeur? Eh, boy?”

“Yes sir.” Max answered smartly.

“And who’s that?” The guard poked the air in Nigel’s direction.

Nigel was too delightfully drowsy to take much notice to the question. He was happy without cause or question and decided that the oatmeal like state of his brain could offer little more than a chuckle at the guard’s query.

“Well, sir...” Max bent close to the guard and waved him nearer. “That’s my boss, Tyro himself.”

“Do I look dim to you, boy?” The sergeant squinted at the odor of sewage clinging to Max. “That is not Mr. Billingsgate. He looks nothing like him. And you smell like you’ve been wallowing in s**t.”

“No, sir. No offense but I’m afraid you don’t quite understand the situation.” Max tried to whisper as the second guard set his pike against the near wall and slung his crossbow into his grasp. “Let me ask you a question. In all seriousness, have you ever seen Tyro Billingsgate, rock star, out of his makeup or his signature diamond studded body stocking?”

The stout guard scratched at himself though his mail and considered Nigel for a few seconds. He turned up his mouth with a shrug that conveyed the notion that the dazed fellow wrapped in a filthy topcoat might be the famous minstrel. He was about the right size after all.

“That doesn’t explain why you stink like a cesspit.” The man put his pike against the wall nearest him and brought his crossbow around with a superior grin. He liked the way this situation was turning out. Either way it was sure to end in his favor, like many of his nights at the gate.

“Quite right. But I’ve got another question.” Max was lying on the fly, which seemed to come naturally to him. He thought of his uncle for a moment before he continued. “Isn’t Tyro’s coach known throughout the kingdom for being lit like a screaming rainbow?”

“It is.” The guard tapped his fingers on the stock of his weapon. The man on the other side of the coach walked around, inspecting it as well as he could in the flickering light.

“Well, I hope you won’t tell a soul, but he insisted on driving, insisted... had he not threatened to sack me I wouldn’t have handed him the reins.” Max was on a roll. “So he gets to tearing through the streets, practically snapping the rims off on the stones, and starts hollering about wanting to see if the lights will shine underwater.”

The second guard stepped around as Max continued. Both of the men had gone past the line of suspicion and into that expectant sort of listening that accompanies learning a secret. The story had a juicy ring to it. It was the sort of thing that might stand out in the tabloid posts over at the market’s main board.

“So he makes through the park at the edge of Bagby’s Canal, laughing like a madman, has us headed straight at those filthy, black waters.” The story took a life of its own as Max leaned into it. He could see that both of the guards were growing more absorbed in the thought of being the first to hear about scandal of these proportions.

“What could I do?” Max leaned back and threw his hands up. “I yanked the reins away, nearly put us on our side. Tyro and I were pitched off, right over the edge of the wall into the muck. Thank Helios it’s low tide, would have been the end of us both.”

“So I as soon as I chased down the carriage, I put out the lights, bundled the soggy bastard up and moved along. Now, all I’m hoping is to make a quiet exit out this here back gate of yours.”

Max finished with a pleading look.

“Oh that’s quite a story.” The sergeant stepped back with a grin. “A very good story.”

“I reckon it’s the best we’ve heard in a while.” The subordinate raised his crossbow at Max.

“How’s about you keep us entertained a bit more.” The fat man put his weapon away in the shack and came out with a pair of heavy gloves. “I imagine, if what you’re telling us is true, that Mr. Billingsgate must have been intoxicated on something not legal when he tried to cause your death with a nasty misadventure like that.”

“I agree with that completely sir.” The second man smiled wickedly from behind the arc of his weapon.

“So, I think I’m going to need to have a little look-see through your boss’ vehicle.” The portly man tucked his chins in and grinned with mirth at the thought of what treasures he was about to confiscate. “How about that Mr. Rock-star, you mind if I take a look inside your ride here?”

***

Phil Pillywizzet used the velvet rope next to his bed to pull himself upright. He took a series of long shaky breaths as he fought the pain of his compressed spine. Fortified, he took the rope in both hands and raised himself into his bent stance. It was precisely three in the morning. He was certain, as he had trained his kidneys to make water five times each night at two hour intervals. Each visit across the ten feet of of his bed chamber to to the pot took him fifteen minutes. Five to get out of bed and shuffle over to his toilet and seven to make water, and three more to return to his bed and get back to his rest.

***

Bill opened the polished lid of the long black case to find a series of small compartments that each contained a few neatly bound gauze pouches full of coins. They were arranged in order from largest to smallest. Clipped into the velvet lining of the underside of the lid was a pen and a simple ledger with what appeared to be amounts spent alongside notes as to the nature of each expense.

“Doanish patrol, 10c: Ruined Suite, 15c: Dead Courtesan, 20c + Pimp, 25c, Constables of Kerreton’s Reach...” Bill read the list of bribes out loud to himself and shook his head in disgust at the excess of the man so many envied. As the coach stopped, he scarcely let himself breathe while the guards questioned Max. Bill was struck by an idea borne out of the singular discomfort at the idea of being discovered standing on the unconscious figure of a celebrity in a coach loaded with narcotics and illegal weaponry. He took two of the largest sachets of coins and slipped them through the curtain next to Max’s hip. He let them drop onto the bench so that they made an unmistakeable jingle as they hit. Max snatched up both bags of money as the sergeant lifted his nose in the air like a dog catching the sent of a nearby stew.

“What’s that then?” The guard rubbed at his chin. “Because we don’t take bribes in the Gates Precinct.”

“I wouldn’t think of such a criminal act, sir.” Max responded as though shocked by the suggestion. “But I do know that the Constable’s Fund is a worthwhile and noble charity.”

“And I cannot think of a better time to contribute. No sir, my boss wants to make his respect understood. He would like to make a donation to help support the families of the fine, brave men of the Constables Guild... particularly those men who have chosen to defend the walls of this city.” Max nodded gravely. “I was hoping... Mr. Billingsgate was hoping to be able ask you if you could collect such a charitable gift on his behalf.”

Max lowered the two pouches of sixty or so crownes into the waiting glove of the sergeant at arms. The large man tucked his chins in a sign of happily continued success, he had hoped for a bribe after all. The paperwork involved in the sort of confiscation he would have to make after such a search would be murderous. He waved the carriage past his post. Both portcullises raised and the drawbridge clinked down with the sound of iron mechanisms performing a task they had grown bored with long ago.

***

At six in the morning, Pillywizzet pulled himself out of bed for the last time and took his usual two hours to get dressed and eat the cold porridge his maid had cooked and let cool for him. He spent the next two hours moving along the the street in the chill dawn towards his shop. He was running behind, the cumulative ache that he dragged as often as he did his shadow was worse than usual that morning. The sun had made its way up and the night rain had cleaned the streets and knocked some of the usual stink out of the air. The odor of the city hadn’t bothered Phil for years as his sense of smell had left him long ago. The sun on his back did little more for his pain that make his shoulders itch at the memory of what comfort warmth used to bring.

As he moved towards the shop, his eyes caught a bit of shine from the obelisk out front. He had to sweep along for another twenty feet before he realized that the key was still in the lock. That idiot boy had left it there overnight. Had he the energy, Pillwizzet would have been enraged, the thought of his shop being open for any common thief or juggler to ransack brought a few flecks of porridge up into his throat. He burped acidly as he switched the lenses on his spectacles and leaned in to balance himself on his cane and turn the large key at the same time.

Phil wasn’t able to look up as he bent to work the lock. He never noticed the twelve knives hanging in space just above his head. The key turned and John and Errol blinked as they saw that every one of their blades had landed true, but none of them had met their intended mark.

***

The sun had been up for better than an hour as Max slapped himself in the face several times to keep awake. While the grueling twenty five hour tourneys that Max had played in the past had inured him to fatigue, he’d been going for forty or more, he wasn’t sure, he didn’t have the energy to care. Nigel had barely made it past the gate before passing out, and Bill had succumbed to sleep only an hour or so after that. Driving alone in silence, Max had pushed on for close to a hundred miles when his body overwhelmed his will and told him to curl up on the bench and stop being awake.

When Max awoke thick and dazed to the sound of the horses hooves splashing a few paces at a time. As they lurched against their halters they tugged the carriage forward awkwardly through a shallow pond. He looked around and realized that they were trolling through a wide cove of shallow water covered one to the next in lotus flowers as big as a man’s head. The horses were tipping forward a few feet at a time to drink and munch on the white petals. His vision was sticky with what little sleep he’d had and the brief sight of a tall very fair skinned girl who slipped back into the cypress trees at the edge of the small lake made him shake his head. Max lowered himself into the water, certain that he’d gotten them lost as he fought to bring his senses into focus. Every bit of his training was slipping at the edge of the notion that he was being watched, that he might have been for a while. The cool water brought him around enough to carefully move back to the coach as it continued to rock forward a few feet at a time. He opened the side door and shook the leg of Bill’s filthy trousers to wake him. Bill startled and started to ask a question when Max hushed him and pointed to Nigel and Billingsgate.

They exchanged a series of gestures for a few seconds until they both knew what to do. Bill gingerly slid his hands over Nigel’s mouth and forehead while Max quickly snapped his nose back into what could be called a straight line. Nigel screamed into Max’s palm, and sat up with both eyes wide and tearing. Billingsgate barely rustled in his sleep. Max put his finger to his lips as Bill slowly took his hands away.

“S**t! Max, what the hell was that?” Nigel managed to keep his voice to a whisper. He took stock of his surroundings for a second and clenched his jaw. “Oh. Right. Damn.”

“I’m completely knackered, I fell asleep at the reins.” Max motioned them outside to show them where they were. “I have no idea where we are, but if I were to guess I’d say we’ve left the road and wandered into the Catarian Marshes.”

“Well it does seem we’ve left the road, doesn’t it!” Nigel barked in a whisper while tenderly grasping his swollen nose.

“I’m not sure if we’re alone. I thought we were being followed or watched a minute ago... it doesn’t seem so much like it now.” Max glanced about and tried to tell himself that his earlier sensations had just been a touch of paranoia. “Either way, if we were followed here we’d best leave Billingsgate and that damned lute here and move on.”

“Gents, I’m sure I can leave the two of you to another genius plan while I find a nice, calm pool around here to wash the off the s**t I’ve been wearing for the last twelve hours.” Bill yawned and started off towards a small stand of trees that clung to a hillock of rocks a few hundred yards away.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Bill.” Nigel’s fear was creeping back into his voice.

“I’m going to agree with Nigel, Bill.” Max looked around to demonstrate his point. “I’m not one hundred percent sure that we’re safe out here.”

“Which changes things how?” Bill asked sarcastically. “How safe have we been since I showed up at Feudal Express with the seals? How is this any worse? If I am going to be killed, I’d like to go on to my great reward not covered in filth.” Bill made his way to the small dry looking rise in silence. Whatever lay on the other side, it did not include his friends bickering. That was enough, he decided.

“What are we going to do? We’ve got a real mess here.” Nigel started in on his familiar ballad of woe. “We don’t know where we are, we’ve committed... I don’t know, say a half dozen felonies. There are two men, each of whom is twice your size and armed to the teeth,who want to kill me out there, and you... you woke me up by nearly snapping my nose off my face.”

“Hysteria, Nigel, is not useful.” A plan formulated unhindered from Max’s mind as he looked at the carriage and the horses. “This is easy, actually. We have everything we need right here.”

Bill worked his way up the short bluff, pulling at exposed roots and clambering over the smooth boulders. As he stood up at the top of his climb he wet his lips and gaped at the pool in front of him. Smooth water flowed out from a slowly rising spring in the center, spilling over the rocky edges in tiny waterfalls to the marsh below. It was almost perfectly circular, about one hundred yards across and almost luminous. Something in Bill tugged at him, he stripped down and slid into the water, instantly eased by the glow of it. He hadn’t felt this tranquil even once in his life. It took no more than ten seconds for Bill to make up his mind that he had come to the end of his quest. This was it, he would build a small hut at the edge of the water, maybe fish from the marshes below for his dinner...

Nigel took Billingsgate’s feet as Max hauled him through the curtained opening behind the bench. With a minimum of struggle, as the famous minstrel weighed only nine stone or so, they had him slumped over with the reins loosely set in his lap. Max shook out a hefty spoonful of dust from one of his duffle bags and put it in the pocket inside Billingsgate’s rainbow hued waistcoat. Then he sprinkled a liberal amount of the drug all over the man’s face and chest.

“Right, now, we just leave him here. At some point he wakes up, or maybe somebody finds him, whatever, it doesn’t matter, and the assumption will be that he’s been off on a tear again.” Max shrugged as though what they’d done was the most natural thing in the world.

“You are a deviant, you know that.” Nigel balked at the plan, yet he felt relieved, certain that Max had the best of all potential ideas in place and working. “I’m serious, you have a criminal streak that’s quite frightening.”

Bill was leaning against a rock with his eyes closed, simply absorbing the music he heard in his mind as the water took all of his lifetime of resentment at being neither human nor dwarf or even elf and washed it away. His aches from a night of fear and struggle in the sewers left him and his nerves sang with delight in the mystical pool. He was in a state of fluid ecstasy as three long, slender shapes slid under the water towards him.

***

Errol and John had just come downstairs and stepped over to the body. John pulled the key from the lock while Errol took Pillywizzet’s gaunt corpse by one ankle to drag him inside. They had every intention of retrieving their knives, leaving the master luthier’s remains in the shop and then locking the place up and losing the key.

And they would have made a quick show of it, except that a pair of constables stopped by. They had ben alerted to the fact that a very famous and very wealthy rock star never made it to his show the night before. Their usual routine of knocking a few local jugglers around provided them with the address of the last place Billingsgate’s coach had been seen. And now that they were there in front of Pillywizzet’s shop, the sight of two enormous men engaging in what was obviously some form of homicide or another got their attention. Errol dropped Phil’s bony leg. Both men grinned, put their hands comfortably behind their heads and nodded genially at the pair of crossbows trained on them.

***

As Bill was marched back to the coach covering himself with both hands, he saw that his companions were similarly compromised. A ring of tall, lithe women with little more than scraps of what looked like moonworm’s silk covering their more important anatomy formed a perimeter around the trio and their carriage. Each of them held a thin but vicious looking bow as long as any of them were tall. Thirty arrows that glinted white and metallic in the sun were trained on each man.

“Kerre’tuk naan dole’tis palan?” The leader of the elvish women asked something Max couldn’t understand.

“Uhh, gellash’kor... naan mill’ep ... ahh, sa’inn...” Nigel offered. Bill and Max looked at Nigel nervously. They had forgotten that four years of training as a minstrel included quite a few language classes.

“Prek taalig’kip salva?” She asked.

Max noticed one of the elves to his right was watching him specifically. A faint memory was wound into his senses from that first moment he awoke and stumbled into the water. His heightened instinct told him that she must have been the one who found them and reported back to her tribe. Damn. She didn’t look away when he met her gaze.

“What is she saying Nigel?” Bill whimpered through a clenched smile.

“She wants to know why we’re here...” Nigel began timidly. “Why we just wandered into their holy place and let the horses eat the... ahhh... ‘remembrances’”

“What did you tell her Nigel?” Max asked. “And what do you mean, ‘remembrances’.”

“Uhhh...” Nigel moaned quietly.

“Naan dole’tis palan?” She repeated, the anger rising in her voice. Several of the women around her drew back their bows a few inches further.

“Ummmmm... Gelash.. kor, ineyp palan.” Nigel blundered through the elvish. He turned his head to his friends without breaking eye contact with their leader. “We.. ah.. we parked in their graveyard... it’s a bad thing... real bad.”

“Prek taalig’kip salva?” She repeated herself yet again, her impatience beginning to radiate off of her in waves that made little droplets shiver up off of the surface of the water. The men could see that her rage was, in fact, the anger of the whole marsh.

“Well... at least I got a nice bath in first...” Bill mused, resigned to what had been a joke about his fate only a few minutes ago.

“What does she want, Nigel?” Max asked, frustrated by his friend’s recalcitrance.

“She wants to know which of us drove in here...” Nigel told Max flatly.

“Oh...” Max felt a half second of despair before he looked past Nigel to Bill. Both of them shook their heads and looked at the water as they pointed to Billingsgate in the driver’s seat. Nigel played along, following their lead a half second after.

Billingsgate was still asleep as an arrow flashed through the air and lanced cleanly through his skull. It had barely slowed when a woman on the far side of the circle snatched it out of the air and put it in her own quiver.

CH 7

“No, no. Gentlemen, please do carry on. I’d hate for the public to get a glimpse of this tragedy.” Detective Blueshanks preened at the waxed tip of his mustache as he considered the chip shop next door with a young onlooker at the window. “I think you’ve attracted enough attention. Hurry on.”

As Errol and john soundlessly bundled Pillywizzet’s corpse through the front door of the shop both detectives followed them. The copper canary trilled four times to announce their entry to nobody at all. It took the detective a minute or two before he matched the scars on the back of each man’s neck with his clockwork memory. Of Blueshanks’ various qualities the one that had earned him the grade of Lieutenant Detective were his remarkable powers of recall.

“Ah, yes!” The detective turned to his trainee. “I know you two. You’re Errol and John Emolere, the Fangspire twins. Those scars of yours, they were left behind from the spot where they welded the collars around your necks, correct.”

The two men grunted in affirmation as Assistant Detective Rustle handed his repeating crossbow to his boss and manacled each huge man’s hands behind his back.

“We’re legitimate business men.” Errol pointed out. “What all this is was an accident.” He thrust his chin at the body.

“Of course, how crude of me. I’m sure your time in prison reformed you.” Blueshank’s smiled indelicately. “It’s quite clear to me that this ancient, ancient man slipped and fell on all, let me see... one, two, three... twelve of your throwing knives. Next you’ll tell me it was self defense.”

“No it wasn’t like that, detective.” John continued as he looked over his shoulder at Blueshanks. “It was... a turn of events, an unfortunate turn of events had while we were pursuing our sworn duty to protect Mr. Billingsgate and his interests.”

“Humble bodyguards, got our guild cards and all.” Errol finished.

“I do like that last bit, ‘a turn of events’ write that down Rustle.” Blueshanks sat behind the shop table and set his feet up. “Rustle, when you’re done with that note please be so kind as to relieve our innocent men of whatever they have on them.”

***

None of the women had lowered their bows. The three men stood in the knee deep water anxiously as the droplets that had vibrated off the surface of the water settled back.

“Gelet hosef ca’ gaar.” The woman who stood in the center of the formation waved a hand from the men to the coach.

“Sek’mek?” Nigel asked.

“Ca’gaar!” She howled at him. Lari’neso had been the acting matron of the Catarian tribes for twenty years. She had little patience for men of any kind, and trying to communicate with one who could barely get out a few words was more frustrating than if all three of them had been entirely ignorant of her language. If that had been the case she could have simply tortured them into complicity. On the other hand, torture was such a tedious thing with all of the screaming and begging and of course the victim’s inevitable loss of bowel control.

“Nigel...” Max sighed, he was nearly as frustrated with his classmate as Lari’neso had become. The difference was that Max understood that neither Nigel nor Bill had ever seen a man killed before. He had some small compassion for that.

“One moment...” Nigel threw up into the water and coughed in a short series of spasms. The elves lowered their bows as they realized that they had absolute control of the situation. Nigel recovered himself and continued. “Yeah... huhhhh, they want one of us to fetch... what’s the word... um the ‘abomination’?”

“Ah...” Max rose slowly and walked over to the carriage and took the lute. He opened the case and held it so that the lead elf could see the demonic jade instrument. “Is this what you ladies are after?”

“Let saar... pilak tons.” She gestured for Max to close the case. Her features betrayed a moment of fear that seemed to relay through her sisters. Lari’ neso thought a moment about what her next move should be. They could get by in Catarian, and they seemed eager not to die, perhaps they could take the Abomination out of their waters.

“Yeah, that’s it.” Nigel felt some small relief.

“Zwiff’ uho nek do Inapai?” The younger woman Max had seen when he first woke up looked from him to her matron.

They both smiled thinking of their decision. Lari’ neso lifted her eyebrows to Salet as a gesture of confidence in her young aspirant. Already the girl was keen enough to lead.

“Kelig’ ah’ ah’ noor.” Salet told the men.

“And now we follow them to some darker more secluded place.” Nigel translated the bad news for his comrades.

“Oh f**king hooray.” Bill smiled dreamily. He was frightened, but not so much as he thought he should have been. The effects of the radiant pool seemed to be lasting. So deep was his contentment that he felt as though nothing bad could befall him. Delirium, he mused to himself, was better than he’d expected.

They were bound with their hands in front of them, which Bill was grateful for as it allowed him some small amount of modesty. The silken thread that was wrapped around their wrists bit deeply into their flesh. Each cord was thinner than a scribe’s pen, yet as strong as any steel cuff.

As they walked deeper into the groves and hillocks of the swamp, the trees grew thicker with moonworm nests until the branches appeared to be entirely closed in together like great teacups stood on trunks. The light of the late morning gave way to plashing spots of leaves and sun on the water. High up in the larger trees the silk was spun into an interconnected series of suspended dwellings. There were women shuffling about quite hurriedly up in the weave of the canopy. Those that saw the men looked down and stopped their activities in surprise.

“Gents, have you noticed that we are the only men here? I haven’t even seen a single male child.” Bill was self conscious about his nakedness, and the notion that he and his companions were the only fellows about did not help his elevated mood.

“Yes I have noticed that Bill.” Max answered under his breath. “I don’t think that bodes well for us.”

“A lot of the tribes are matriarchies.” Nigel offered. “So many men were killed when the church went on their crusade to rid everything east of the Wyrmspine that many of the surviving tribes were reestablished with women at the helm.”

“That doesn’t explain the total absence of men.” Max allowed his mind to wander as they slogged into the darkness of the marsh. He was letting himself savor the opportunity to be the first of his companions following the girl he had seen that morning. While not so honey dipped and voraciously sensual as the woman who had been at Matan’Daar’s side the night before, she was a beauty by any standard. His vantage was little relief in light of their situation, but it was still the best part of his day. “I wonder how they breed?”

“You lecherous bastard!” Nigel hissed. “We are very likely about to die gruesomely and your mind is bent on sex.”

“Better than imagining what method they’re going to choose to kill us.” Bill shrugged.

They continued on in silence after Bill’s sobering remark until they stopped at a crossroads of sorts set in a stand of rocky hillocks and dense foliage. The stone outcrops that rose from the water turned sharply upward to form an unexpected cliff wall in front of them. A cataract of small streams bounced down its face into the water. There were a handful of boats gliding towards them, the women in the short, wide canoes looked similar to those that had brought them in, but not so serious or athletic. This is to say that every one of them was beautiful, but not as frightening as their sisters who carried bows that could pierce a man’s skull cleanly without slowing.

The war party that had surrounded the coach broke off into the boats and paddled away down the many intersecting canals, taking the bows and quivers of the matron and her apprentice with them. The shrine was a place of meditation and respect, no weapons were allowed there. Without a word to one another, Lari’ neso divided the leading cords of the three men so that Salet had Max and she had both Nigel and Bill. They turned and smiled cruelly at the men before diving into the deeper water in front of them without making more than a few ripples.

“Oh hell...” Bill managed as he gulped as much air as he could just as he was dragged under.

***

John and Errol were completely relaxed as they stood in front of the detectives. Both of them were stripped down to their breechclouts as they had been many times before during processing and inspections in prison. The shop table in front of them had been cleared to make room for the wide assortment of arms they had been carrying. Throwing knives, small grenades made of firestones and toad venom cast in glass beads, a pair of longer, wicked looking picks with what were most probably handles made of human bones among other weapons were laid out neatly by the assistant detective. The most outrageous pieces in the arsenal were a pair of cleavers so large that the detectives assumed correctly that men of normal stature could never have carried such things discreetly. In total, the two men had been carrying what amounted to a cache of weapons fitting for a S.W.A.S.S team assigned to the Constables’ Guild.

“This is quite a collection you two have managed to hide on your persons, but what I’m most curious about is this.” Blueshanks slid a flat circular device made of copper and magnetite from the center of the table. It was a series of dials and gears that perfectly balanced a needle that pointed in one direction. Neither John nor Errol reacted at all to Blueshanks’ interest.

“You see Rustle, that when I turn the device, the needle stays fixed in the same direction?” Blueshanks pulled at his mustache as he quizzed his assistant.

“Yes sir.”

“What do you suppose it is?” Blueshanks looked from the device at the two men.

“Looks like some kind of compass.” Rustle knew his answer was wrong. “Except that it is definitely not pointing north.”

“Quite right.” Blueshanks set the item down. “It’s a Kytherian Follower. Very rare, very expensive. One uses it by tuning it to the aethyric frequency of a thing, or a person for that matter, and then the device will point to them no matter how far what it’s been tuned to happens to go.”

“Now, something like this is quite spendy.” Blueshanks rubbed his hands together. “And I imagine that, if what you two are saying is true, that some fool ran off with that fabulous lute, Billingsgate and his carriage, then a device like this might just point you to him.”

“It might, don’t you reckon John?” Errol quipped.

“I agree, Errol, it might just do that.”

“Now, suppose an enterprising officer in the Constables’ Guild were to lock the two of you inside this... place, keep the key and follow this little beauty to your employer.” Blueshanks let a superior grin find itself under his mustache. “Why he could claim all the accolades for himself and return to Wälsport a hero.”

“That he could.” John sized up the assistant detective with a malicious stare. The young man averted his eyes from the raw intimidation of John’s gaze and looked back at his boss.

“Which leads me to ask you fine gentlemen why I shouldn’t do precisely that?” He leaned over the table and continued smiling. He held all of the cards. They would make him a captain for this. “Can either of you think of an... inducement to keep me from deviating from my sworn duty?”

“Well, my brother and I understand that the Constables’ Fund is a noble and commendable charity that does its best to-” John stopped in mid sentence as he and Errol kicked the heavy table back onto the two men behind it, sending Blueshanks to the floor. John took a knee and Errol sprung off of it into the air. While sailing over the table, he slipped his feet over his wrists so that he had his hands in front of him. As he landed he ducked low and took Rustle by his masculinity and heaved him over the table. While in flight, Assistant Detective Rustle only thought of how poor the Wälsport Wooltossers had done last season. He’d lost quite a bit of money on them. It was the last thing to enter his young mind as John planted his feet and met him in the air with a head butt that crushed the young fellow’s skull.

Errol threw himself backward and kicked out Blueshanks’ knee just as the bolt from the detective’s crossbow sailed over his bare chest. Without losing momentum, Errol kicked his legs up and bounced back up onto his feet by popping off of his shoulder blades in a single motion. Bueshanks was on the floor he managed to cock his repeater before Errol straddled him and snapped his neck in a fluid motion. When he stood up and looked over the table at John, he saw that Rustle was sprawled on the floor, twitching with John’s bare foot crushing his neck. John had the manacle keys in his teeth, he spit them to Errol who caught them in the air.

***

The darkness of the water gave way to a growing blue radiance as all three men felt their lungs about to burst. Bill was entering a state of calm that he’d always heard accompanied drowning, yet he found it quite easy to frog kick through the water behind the matron. He was nearly oblivious to the burning in his chest as he watched small schools of large squid-like creatures swim past them in the glowing water. Max was doing his best to keep collected, and even though he’d made it through a number of nasty scrapes (a couple of which had happened in the last two days) it was the thought that executing the three of them by a prolonged and difficult drowning seemed unlikely. It would be easier to just bind them entirely and tie rocks to them if drowning was their usual method. And the elves towing them never looked back, which the sadistic types who liked making their victims suffer usually would. Nigel was squirming at the end of his cord, whatever people had said about the drowning being the most pleasant way to die was not the case for him. He fought his asphyxia as long as he could, finally blacking out just as Bill and Max found their way onto a shoal made of oddly shaped shells. Salet helped Lari’ neso pull Nigel’s unconscious body out of the water, they watched him curiously as he lay for a moment before coming to in a fit of hacking coughs that alternated with gulping breaths of air.

After a few painful minutes, all three men regained their breathing even as their hearts pounded against their ribs. They shook as much of the wet from their eyes as they struggled to their feet. The two women looked at them and said nothing as the three classmates took in the enormity of the cave. The ceiling rose above them in a great arching cathedral of stalactites and shimmering light. The vaulted chamber was filled by an underground lake that dropped off in a series of falling cliffs and ledges a few hundred yards from the small island of shells they stood on. All of the chamber was aglow and flashing with the blue light emitted by the softly rippling water.

“Tek helling.” Lari’ neso told the men as she and Salet knelt at the edge of the water and bowed their heads. The lake began to divide in a shallow wake as something huge passed below the surface towards them. “Tek helling!” She commanded as she nimbly kicked Bill in the back of his knees and sent him onto his hands and knees.

“She wants us to kneel.” Nigel sputtered to Max as he bent down.

“Yeah, I picked up on that.” Max was still annoyed by his friend. He knelt and bent his head as did the elves. He kept his eyes on the approaching waves in the lake.

There was no sound as the wake parted and the slick, aubergine head of a dragon rose from the water followed by the streamlined mass of its body. It was well over one hundred feet long from teeth to tail and as it came to rest in front of the five of them, it revealed all of its two hundred and sixty four teeth in a smile as wide as a church door. Max was struck by the simple fact that every step of his plan had taken he and his classmates into worse and worse situations. He had been the captain of the Cloudivers in school, but his capacity for leadership off the playing field was seriously lacking. Bill had trusted him enough to risk his life and leave his job, and now Max’s poor decisions had them facing death twice since they’d woken up.

Ann’akurra looked over the three men amusedly, she loved novel destinies. The way a fat bulge of opportunity in the infinite stretch of time had brought a few random men to her was quite interesting. She knew immediately that their arrival during mating time was not a coincidence. It was delightful when the ancient paths of the world brought her such turns in the wheel of circumstance. However, the wicked thing strapped to the back of the weakest one would have to be removed from her waters as soon as possible. It could not be allowed to infect her brood.

“Lari’ neso, salva doon mek’kek nor?” The dragon’s voice filled the chamber completely in a whisper that reminded Max of distant thunder.

“Se’ phen Ann’akurra, Salet tok maret aalig tonn’set.” Lari’ neso replied.

“Ca’aam tolluv met haa’am.” Salet added. Ann’akurra regarded her aspirant matron with a sly grin. Salet was going to be different, and quite likely not destined to stay in the Catarian wetlands.

“Interesting.” Ann’akurra looked at the men bowed in front of her. “Do you boys know what you’ve brought into my family’s home?”

“Ahh, not really.” Nigel tried for an answer. He was as surprised by the dragon’s mastery of the Fälish language as his buddies. “Do you mean the lute?” He turned the case around so that he could offer it up to the serpent.

“Ca’gaar nun torre’te?” The dragon asked her matron.

“Palek det ca’gaar.” The elf answered.

“Nigel, can you throw us a little something?” Max whispered. He was trying to understand precisely why the diabolical lute was so important to the dragon. He was also trying not to submit to the desire to pee that dragons create in those finding themselves in front of one for the first time.

“I’m not sure... I guess the younger one suggested that we be brought here... she might have saved us... or made a case to offer us as a snack. I can’t tell.” Nigel tried to whisper to Max. He was still holding the lute in front of him like he was offering a gift to some threatening deity.

“You speak Catarian fairly well, minstrel.” Ann’akurra reached over to Nigel and gently lifted his chin to face her. His urge to urinate overwhelmed him, mercifully soaked to the bone, nobody noticed. “But you already know I speak Fälish, which is purely for your benefit as your thoughts are just as easy for me to find.”

She leaned up on an elbow. Ann’ akurra had found that taking casual poses often helped men to get past her appearance. Long and sleek like her children, Ann’ akurra’s musculature bulged and slid lithely under her scales as she moved. Her head was quite sharklike, the spines of her crest swept back and were longer than any of her kind that lived out of the water. Her eyes were luminous and slitted with reptilian pupils that focused on each man, effortlessly and subtly piercing his thoughts. Max could feel her looking right through his mind, the effect was uncomfortable, similar to the ache one feels when they have the flu. Neither Bill nor Nigel really noticed the sensation under the weight of the terror they felt by being in the presence of a dragon.

“Lari’ neso, Salet, jensa’ri set. Preeb’ tal, ind foren.” The dragon nodded to her children. They stood and bowed deeply in return as they slid into the water, swimming back under the cave’s siphon the way they had come.

“Now, I’m sure you fellows have a few questions, please, relax, I’m not about to eat you.” She let her eyes slide over Bill’s naked and well muscled frame. A trace of a smile crossed her lips. “Not yet anyway. Try and calm yourselves, I’d like to be able to get on with our conversation without your being overwhelmed by fear.”

“We have a great deal to discuss.”

***

Both guards stepped from their small notches in the north by northeastern gate of Wälsport. The day shift was by design less competent than the men who worked at night as most criminals and marauders worked under the cover of darkness. They approached the two men on horses and raised their palms toward the riders as the large men slowed their mounts.

“So, what brings you two to the edge of the city?” The sergeant was quite young, thin and pop eyed. He had a habit of adjusting his belt repeatedly when nervous.

“We’re on our way to Darrenfeld.” John told the slight man.

“We’ve got a cousin there.” Errol stared at the sergeant. “She’s taken ill with the damp lung.”

“Yeah, poor thing might not last another week.” John added.

“Well, you know there’s a posted bulletin about in our ranks, Tyro Billingsgate’s gone missing.” The guard hiked up his belt. “We have to ask everybody traveling out of town if they’ve heard anything.”

“Yeah, we’re on that case, actually.” John and Errol lifted the drape of their greatcoats away from their chests revealing the Detective and Assistant Detective’s badges.

“The cousin thing is just our cover.” John told the man with a dangerous wink. He leaned down in his saddle to lock eyes with the nervous sentry. “You wouldn’t want any bad men to catch wind of our investigation, would you sergeant?”

“No sir!” The young man signaled for the gate to be lowered and began to salute when the twins glared at him. He dropped his hand before it cleared his belt. “Right...”

They passed through the gate and considered their Follower as they passed under the arches. It pointed roughly east.

***

Nigel looked down to see that the water that was dripping from the lute’s case was blackish, as though it drank the light around it. It pooled in a small seeping puddle among the shells of the beach in a greasy slick.

“Do you understand why I need you to get that thing out of here?” Ann’ akurra raised an eyebrow and rolled over onto her other elbow, flexing her wrist in slow circles, at eleven hundred and nine years of age she was not young anymore. “It will poison the whole marsh if stays here. And I can’t have any of my girls handling it for fear of it infecting them with its blight.”

“So you need us to get it rid of it for you.” Nigel grinned nervously. “Done and done!”

“It isn’t that simple, Nigel.” Max offered an explanation before Ann’ akurra needed to. “These ladies could just as well torture any or all of us into carrying that thing out of range of their wetlands and then finish us off like they did Billingsgate... our driver.”

“Very good Max.” Ann’ akurra smiled again as she regarded Max. His tunic was soaked through and cling to the planes and angles of his athletic build. He was something... she was sure of that. “Now, why shouldn’t you meet your ends that way?”

“I’d guess that you have better plans for us...” Max clenched his jaw. “Hopefully those plans include our continued existence.”

Bill was unwell. He was quite certain that during all of the very engrossing chat his friends were having with the dragon that something was not right with him. He was getting shorter, and he was having trouble breathing. There seemed to be a distant drumbeat that followed an intricate tattoo somewhere in the distance where there hadn’t been one before.

“Good. You’re keeping up.” Ann’ akurra smirked. “I would like your help with something.”

Bill was definitely getting very pink in the face, Nigel decided as he looked at his silent friend. This was more than odd as Bill was dark enough that even when he was quite inebriated his cheeks never grew rosy. However, Nigel was distracted enough by his situation that he gave little thought to Bill’s complexion. Max could do the talking, that would be fine.

“You brought that abomination here, and I believe that even you weren’t aware of just how sinister it is. But there is also the matter of the gigantic pile of street drugs stowed in bags on the top of your carriage.”

“Oh yeah, those...” Max scratched at his head. “We aren’t... well we need them for something...”

“Yes dear, I know you aren’t smugglers. You haven’t any typical weapons and you got lost on the way to Gynneth Mawr.” She smiled soothingly. “Smugglers don’t often get lost, they have deadlines.”

“Well I suppose I can assume that you’ve felt around in my brain enough to know what we need them for.” Max looked the dragon in her bottomless, feline eyes. It was disconcerting, he could feel centuries surround him as he met her gaze.

“You are sharp. And yes, I do know about your plan to dope those pesky giants and finish them off while they’re unconscious.” A squid like those they had passed swimming into the chamber pulsed by as she was about to explain further. However, Ann’ akurra was in the mood for a snack. She plucked the six foot creature out of the water, tilted her head back and dropped it in her mouth. Before she continued she pulled the stringy bits of viscera still clinging to the beak from between her teeth and threw it onto the pile the men were standing on.

“Yeachh... wow.” Nigel exhaled as his stomach flipped.

“As I was saying, I like you three, I’ve got a good feeling about you.” She smiled and rinsed her talons in the water. “You have fate pushing you along. Which is why I’ll wager that you’ll best those dumb animals in the north and do me a favor in return for my clemency.”

Another squid went by in the water around the dragon, she snatched it up just like the last and devoured it with a smile. Ann’ akurra loved the mating time, she looked forward to its return every seven years.

“Name your favor.” Max said, still buoyed by the feeling of eternity he met in Ann’ akurra’s eyes.

“The dragon your former classmate Longbridge murdered was a friend of mine.” She snarled for the first time since the three of them had been in her presence. Nigel managed to keep the water in his stomach down, barely. Max stood motionless, somehow the sense of terror he felt at her anger meshed with the bottomless well of time he touched through her eyes. Bill was starting to wonder if he was dying, he was gurgling on the air in the cave as though he were drowning.

“Akiki‘Okip’Aa would never have fallen to a buffoon like Longbridge or his boss Hainsworth had he not sent seventy men to die in front of him. By the time he showed up my friend knew it was only a matter of time.” Fire rippled at the edges of her nostrils and the back of her throat. It took a few seconds for Ann’ akurra to wind herself down. “Are any of you humans aware that Akiki and the Dwedari elves were the ones keeping those f**king giants on the far side of the mountains?”

“We are now...” Nigel looked down and spoke sheepishly. He was beginning to really worry about Bill as he saw his classmate’s normal dark eyes bulge and turn a distinctly mauve hue.

“I had a guess...” Max looked aside. His moment of contact with the dragon’s soul had allowed some of her thought to enter his mind much the way she looked through his. “You need us to find your friend’s remains, right?”

“Yes.” She was certain at that point, that what Salet had seen in this man would come to pass. He was some kind of champion, and that is not always a good thing. Champions, heroes and geniuses are all chosen by fate to be tested. Those tested are always surrounded by tragedy. Ann’ akurra did not like the thought of her child Salet being near this man. But she knew that what tests he would face were meant for Salet as well. Having a girl like Salet born to be a hero in her marsh was quite a stretch of the warp and weft of fate. “I require you to take the Noostone from his eye.”

“It’s located here, right?” Max pointed between and slightly above his own eyes.

“Yes. It holds all of Akiki‘Okip’Aa’s memories. Bring it to me. And while you’re away find someplace safe to hide that blasted thing.” She tipped an armored knuckle toward the lute. Then she looked over at Bill as he fell forward and grinned compassionately. His limbs were losing strength, the whole of him felt rubbery and loose. “He will stay here for the time being.”

“No we need him to finish our job...” Max looked at Bill and stepped to his friends side. What he saw made him inhale with disgust. “Oh, ye gods!”

“I’m afraid you don’t understand.” Ann’ akurra smiled as she found another squid in the water. She held it up, squirming in the air. “He can’t go with you.”

Nigel lost his fight with his gag reflex when he got a good look at Bill in the quivering light of the cave. Max pushed Bill into the edge of the water, his instinct tuned by the shift in Bill’s auric pulse, and he realized that what was happening was beyond any magick he’d seen at the university.

“He’s part elf, correct?” The dragon asked as she tossed the squid she was holding into her mouth.

“A quarter, actually.” Nigel responded as Max waded out into the shallows where he suspended Bill in the water. Max felt his face twist involuntarily with disgust and concern.

“Well, it looks like he took a dip in the breeding pool.” She left another beak on the shoal. “I guess being one quarter elvish is adequate to bring a man into breeding form during the mating time.”

Bill looked up at Max through a few inches of water and felt his heart slow. His breathing returned to normal and he felt the panic of asphyxiation pass. Then he realized that his hands were missing and his skin had become almost translucent.

“I think I owe you boys, especially little Bill here, an explanation...” Ann’ akurra put her chin in both hands and swished her tail in the water behind her. She loved to tell stories about the mating time, it was her singular joy to see her maidens bear little ones. That, and she loved calamari.

CH 8

A thin plume of smoke rose from the east. John decided to stop for a minute or two and shoot an azimuth. He rested the cool brass of the Follower against his cheek and put one eye directly in line with that of the needle. He squinted into the distance and frowned.

“I don’t like that one bit Errol.” He said as he returned the device to its pouch.

“That smoke is right at the edge of those marshes.” Errol was not happy to think that his boss might be in the middle of whatever heathen fire had been set by the elves of the Catarian wetlands. “I don’t like it myself.”

They spurred their horses and cantered on towards the lowlands as the sun sank behind them.

***

“OK.” Max was still connected, if only obliquely, to the vast memory of the dragon. He shook his head as her words resonated in the chamber along with the dreamlike flashes of her nostalgia. “Honestly, your maidens, those thin, supple, fair skinned-”

“Lithe.” Nigel posited.

“Yes, these lithe, warrior goddesses who brought us here, they... couple with these tentacled, squid like things?” Max winced at the images his mind produced at the thought. He could have done without all of them.

“Yes, well, not my warriors, they remain maidens.” The dragon almost purred as she watched another squid swim by, she let him go by, satisfied for the time. “It keeps them feisty.”

“Thank the gods for that...” Nigel mused as he considered his friend’s rapid metamorphosis.

“Seriously, those women out there.. and these...” Max shuddered as he looked down at Bill. He’d been holding Bill’s quickly changing form under the water so that he would neither sink nor choke to death on the air. At this point, the Bill Heartles Max had known looked like a slick, lumpy cone. His arms had been completely absorbed and his legs were continuing to split into a myriad array of tentacles. “Males... I guess, they mate en masse once every seven years.”

“Exactly.”

“And because Bill is one quarter elvish, he, like any other male elf who swam in that pool above your graveyard...” Max continued.

“The Chapel of The Fallen, most of the tribe’s men died in the First Great War, as you humans call it.” The dragon let her eyes close with the memory. “Those boys decided that the Heliotic zealots who were cutting down the forests to make farmland and knocking over our teleportation stones needed to be met in battle.”

“Oh, right...” Nigel looked down into the water.

“Yes, those men would not listen to me, their protector.” She raised an eyebrow at her choice. “So they went off to their deaths and the church pushed us back into this swamp, which had been the seat of our civilization. Once the Church decided that coming in here meant death for any army foolish enough to attempt an assault, we were safe. I decided that we didn’t need any more men around here mucking things up. That was when I instituted the breeding protocol.”

“That was over two hundred years ago.” Max looked at Ann’ akurra. “Why do you still do... this?”

“I enjoy calamari, as do my daughters.” She smiled suggestively.

“Uggh, so Bill is turning into a many legged, breeding cephalopod, without any hope of returning to normal?” Max was horrified, of all of the consequences that his decisions had led to, he was appalled at the part he had played in what was happening to his friend.

“Well those aren’t all legs.” The dragon wagged a taloned finger over Bill’s tentacled lower half while Max still cradled him under the surface of the water.

There was a momentary pause before Max let go of Bill and threw his hands in the air as though his classmate were a piece of hot iron.

“Awwchhh... why did you have to tell me that?” Max felt his stomach roll as Bill swam away into the glowing water.

“Ughhh...” Nigel muttered, going pale with sick for the third time since they had arrived in the marsh.

“He seems happy enough.” Ann’ akurra grinned as they watched Bill slide out of sight into the lake. “And I never eat my boys until they have had a chance to breed. It would defeat the purpose if I did. So don’t worry about your friend right now. There are four more days left in the mating time.”

“Four days?” Max was crestfallen. “We have to get to Pickettstown, which is a three day’s ride from here. How are Nigel and I going to make it to Gynneth Mawr and back in that time, much less defeat the giants and retrieve the Noostone before Bill ends up as an appetizer?”

“That is taken care of.” Ann’ akurra tipped her chin up to the pair of lovely warriors who had appeared silently behind the men. Both of the ladies were holding lengths of silken cord.

Once the men had been under the siphon that passed into the cave a second time, Salet and her companion let them have a minute to regain their breath. She realized that unlike the elves of the Catarian marshes, humans could not breathe through their skin underwater. There was a boat waiting for them already loaded with their coats, Max’s rucksack and the Heartspar as well as their two bags full of greyvesdust. Salet motioned for them to climb in. Once in the boat, she pushed both of them to the sides so that they could work the oars with their backs to the bow of the large canoe. The three of them sat in silence as Max and Nigel fumbled at keeping the craft on the course Salet wordlessly pointed out to them.

“Well Max, I’m happy to see that this nice lady, well, girl really, well she’s nearly a lady...” Nigel considered the nubile form of the woman glowering at him as his tired eyes moved unconsciously over her shape. “Anyhow, I’m comforted by the fact that she’s in charge of things at the moment.”

Max said nothing. He’d fouled his responsibility as the ad hoc leader of their hair-brained quest. No matter what sort of abuse Nigel might fling at him, he was morose enough to keep paddling and simply agree with his weaker classmate.

“Bill is going to be eaten by a dragon, who, amiable as she might be, is still a dragon. We are prisoners, Tyro Billingsgate had his brain split by an arrow and I’d have to say, worst of all, Bill won’t even be Bill when he’s eaten.” Nigel continued his tirade as Max let out a long sigh and paddled on. “We watched him turn into a.. well a squirming, mucosal...”

“Nigel, I did not tell Bill to go take a look around. I told him to stick to the carriage because I knew we were being watched.” Max had finally reached a point where the ballad of woe his friend was directing at him needed to stop.

“You said you thought we were being watched-” Nigel began.

“Yeah, you’re right Nigel. But did either of us tell him to wander off and take a dip?” Max bared his teeth through a tight grin. “No we did not. It doesn’t make me feel any better about what’s... happening right now, but do not blame that on me.”

“How did we end up here, Max?” Nigel continued sarcastically. “Weren’t you the one who fell asleep at the reins?”

“You little f**k! How did we get on that carriage anyway? Who decided to steal a priceless piece of unadulterated evil, stroll off with a circus wagon and kidnap a rock star? Because I didn’t get that ball rolling.” Max whispered through his clenched teeth. “I’d also like to point out that it was Bill and I who got us past those two guards at the gate!”

It was Nigel’s turn to say nothing and paddle.

“So thank you Nigel, for landing us in this mess.” Max finished as his anger ebbed and gave way to shame. He should never have snapped at his friend while they were in the middle of serious problems. He knew full well that griping at one another would do little good.

“Well it isn’t like you two had a plan anyway.” Nigel shrugged as they swept out of the dense foliage into an open fen peppered with huge trees. “I mean I’m impressed that you managed to score all that dust, but what did you plan to do next? Eh? Where were you going from there?”

The two went silent as a very large bird, a fen osprey Max noted, dove into the deeper waters around them and splashed back up into the air with a carp as big as a grown man. Its wings stretched nearly fifty feet across. I flapped tremendously as it gained altitude and drifted in a wide spiral down to a nest in one of the massive trees in the great marsh. It was an unnerving sight for Nigel, such a huge bird hunting overhead. He could plainly tell that it had to be one of many around them as he counted the nests in the treetops. Max, conversely, felt a jolt of familiarity and nostalgia at the sight of the grand raptor. He was hit with memories of his tourneys with the Cloudivers. He felt, for the first time in months, a tinge of regret as he watched the majestic bird return to its nest. It reminded him of his original plan.

“Nigel, I’d already figured that I could convince... or bribe anyway, a rider from work to give us a lift to Pickettstown, which is where he delivers on a daily basis.” Max frowned at the notion that his plan was soundly thrashed. “That fellow from work, Brock Zadora, was the one who’d told me that business had really picked up there. That little hamlet is having a real boom as the mule teams that haul the ale along with their associated hangers on stop there and refresh themselves before heading up to Gynneth Mawr.”

“Yeah, and now here we are, paddling along, days from our destination, and Bill...” Nigel sighed at Max for effect. “Poor Bill-”

“Yeah... poor Bill...” Salet smirked at the men who gawked at her as she spoke in accented Fälish. “If you sweethearts are done with you’re little spat, could you tell me if either of you has ever flown before?”

***

The steel rims of what had been Tyro Billingsgate’s spectacular touring coach were tipped sideways in the charred remains of the fire the twins had seen from afar. They kicked through the ashes knowing they wouldn’t find anything. The needle on their Follower still pointed due east, straight into the marsh looming darkly in front of them. John kicked over a set of planks and uncovered the blackened remains of Tyro Billingsgate. He turned them over with the toe of his boot and bent down to get a better look.

“Hmmm.” He mused as he probed the set of holes left in Tyro’s skull with his bone handled pick. “Clean through...”

“Ballista?” Errol asked.

“The wounds are too small.” John twisted his face into a thoughtful but worried frown. “No, I’d say just an arrow.”

“Catarian.”

“I’d imagine so.” John agreed as they both looked at the wetlands that stretched far into the east.

At the edge of their sight, the twins noticed a pair of large birds, obviously falcons of some sort, rise into the air and fly to the north until they vanished on the horizon. Errol watched the needle follow the birds until it too pointed north.

“He’s a devious s**te our boy.” They looked at each other with some small relief as Errol considered the birds.

“And resourceful.” John raised an eyebrow as he got back onto his horse.. “Never thought he’d be up to leading us on such a merry chase.” The pair of them turned north as the last rays of the sun left the clouds on the horizon.

***

“I’m curious, do all of you Catarians, not including your drones of course, speak Fälish, or just you.” Max asked Salet as their osprey pushed up into the faster wind about one quarter of a mile up.

“Just me and a few sisters.” Salet answered as she leaned forward on the bird. “But none of the rest know about our study group.”

“I imagine your matron wouldn’t like the thought of you speaking the tongue of men.” Max offered. He was happy to be back on a falcon, even if he was riding behind a girl. “Which brings me to my next question, were you the one I saw peeking at us in the lily marsh?”

“Yes.” Salet tuned to Max and and gave him a sly smile.

“I thought so...” Max ground his teeth and nodded. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” Salet’s accent was thick enough that she was still self conscious about talking to the man behind her. In her tribe, she was expected to be a leader, a heroine to her sisters. And here, in the wind with Hix, the prince of the Osprey people, the only falcon to choose her as his rider, she usually felt confidant and safe. Yet the man behind her leaned back easily, as though lounging on the sand of a fine shoal.

“Why didn’t you tell your... matron... that I had been driving?” Max asked before he added what he felt was the more important point about their arrival. “I wasn’t driving really, I was asleep... we were all very tired...”

“And you have these... drugs.” Salet patted the heavy bag behind her, quite proud for remembering the word for narcotics. “And you brought that demon into our holy place, and all of you are men...”

“I know, I know, we’re awful.” Max was sorry, he had never wanted to be the type to blunder about vandalizing and ruining things... except that he always had, when he thought about it. Never on purpose. He just broke things, all of the time. “Which is exactly what I don’t understand. With all of our sins, and me at the reins, why did you lie?”

“Because I knew you were a hero the moment I saw you.” Salet was nervous offering the answer, but she tried to sound angry about the question, as though he had no right to ask her mind. She knew from her lessons in Fälish that human men were asses. “You gave me your thanks, now shut up and hold on. Stupid man, you act like you won’t die if you fall from this height.”

They passed the next hour quietly. As they dropped altitude in order to keep to the slipstream currents between the tall hills of a pass, Max made note of Salet’s skill on her falcon. She was quite a rider, she had a feel for how her bird found the currents of the air and she knew to let it make their way without fighting for control. As the sun rolled out of sight the world turned into a grey dusk. As they passed the close hills, Max saw Nigel and the elf who was at the reins of her mount. He had his eyes closed and looked to be bobbling between fright and drowsing sleep. The back of a bird was an easy place to fall asleep on a long trip. The beating of their wings rocked one into a dreamlike state. He had known many riders who tied themselves to their saddles in case they fell asleep and slipped off. He realized that he had been an ass, perhaps it was fatigue or simply the stress of the last three days, but he hadn’t even asked his savior her name.

“I know you told me to shut up.” He leaned in. “But I haven’t gotten your name.”

“You should call me Salet.” She realized that his oversight had been mutual. “What do people call you/”

“Max.”

“That’s a stupid name for a hero.” Salet taunted him.

“I’m not a hero.” Max shook his head and cracked his back by crossing his legs and twisting. “I’m an idiot who is most likely going to get himself and his friends killed.”

“You should stay shut up, Max.” Salet had little patience for her hero. She had found him so he was hers, plain and simple. “And why can’t you sit still?”

“Sorry, I’m just not used to being in the back.” Max mentioned, trying not to sound proud and yet failing entirely. “I just know... used to know how to ride pretty well. Very well actually.”

“Oh. That’s why you’re stupid.” Salet decided that he needed a reminder. She dug in and let Hix know she need him to bank to the right. Hix shrugged and tilted in a slight sweep toward the earth below.

“There you go!” Max popped up from his leaning position onto his feet, keeping his center of gravity set perfectly with the pull and drop of the falcon. It was nice to feel a bird under him do something more than stroke forward through the sky.

“Now you’re standing?” Salet had never stood on Hix’s back, nor would she be bold enough to try it. He was either very lucky, very talented, or suicidal. Max was, in fact, a mixture of all three of those things. “Sit down! Idiot! I saved you from an arrow through your stupid skull, I suggested you speak with Ann’ akurra! If you die now I will not feel bad for you, I’ll be mad with myself for keeping you alive!”

“Sorry, I just like a bit of fun.” Max felt his familiar depression ripple with her reprimand. “If I am such an idiot, and I do not disagree with your opinion on that, then why did you call me a hero?”

“Because you are a hero, it’s obvious, don’t be modest.” Salet felt a combination of heart pounding surprise and confusion at the potent presence of the man. It was uncomfortable and exciting, she wasn’t sure about it. “And now you owe me. I wanted a hero in my debt, now I have you.”

“Supposing I am a hero, what do you need a favor for?” Max smiled at the irony of her opinion.

“I need a hero because come next breeding time I will be expected to bear a child.” Salet did not like explaining her motives to anyone. She only answered to the Lari’ neso and Ann’ akurra, his questions continued to make her stomach squirm.

“But your dragon told us that her warriors remain maidens.” It was Max’s turn to be confused.

“Except the matron.” Salet closed her eyes at the thought. “And I am to become the next matron once I have born a daughter. The leader must be mother and warrior in order to know her sisters.”

“There is a logic to that...” Max’s mind recoiled at the thought of the girl in front of him, of her extraordinary beauty being tangled underwater with a torpedo shaped mass of tentacles and lust... He felt himself grow somewhat sick for the first time on the back of a bird. “Logic and duty aside... I don’t mean to insult your traditions, but, yuck.”

“That is why I will need a hero, Max.” Salet realized, a little dizzily, that she thought Max was quite handsome, and warm at her back, and... well he had a ridiculous name. It sounded like a belch. “I’ll not lose my maidenhood to anything with that many arms. You are right, yuck.”

“Let me get this straight.” Max shook his head and grinned at the further irony of his situation. “You’re a maiden, and you saved me, a hero - by you’re description- from a dragon. That way I owe you you my life so that I can save you when you disavow your birthright and most likely enrage a dragon?”

“Exactly.” Salet was satisfied with his explanation. He seemed to understand, finally. “So don’t get killed when you get to Gynneth Mawr, I expect to collect before the next mating time.”

***

As the night took hold in the hills, a viper made its way out from under a large rock seated below a cliff in the pass south of the village of Chathan. It tasted the air with its tonge and found the first scents of prey obscured by that of nearby men. It turned with lightning speed and struck at the huge figure behind it. A knife passed into its head and pinned it to the rocky grass behind it. The serpent writhed it its death throes as Errol took it just behind the head, carefully removed the venom sacks and pulled the skin off in a series of tugs. The skin peeled away form the meat like an eight foot sock.

“Got both the sacs out before he could spit at me.” Errol said proudly as he made his way back to the small camp he and his brother had set. “I do love the taste of whiskey and asp’s poison.”

“That is a nice treat, Errol.” John grinned warmly at his brother. His remark was the last thing the brothers said to one another for the rest of the night.

They neither cooked nor boned the snake once Errol had cleaned out the viscera. Raw adder’s meat had always sufficed for them. After a few sips of water, they picked their teeth and lounged against the still warm rocks. After an hour or so, they unscrewed the caps of their flasks and poured themselves fat jiggers of whiskey. Each man then dropped in one of the pair of poison sacs, pierced it with a finger, and took the whole thing down in a single gulp.

They were quite content, and neither of them could stand feeling that way for long. They gave each of their mounts a little water, and climbed into their saddles. The twins carried on to the north as the morning crossed the surface of the world and lessened the dark.

***

Nigel was exhausted. He was hungry, his face was throbbing from his earlier landing on the cobblestones and he did not enjoy their final, swooping descent. It was dark as the fires and lamps of Pickettstown came into view. Salet and her following rider made a wide, banking turn into a lazy spiral toward the ground. Had he not been clinging to the back of a woman, he might have whinged some about the way the pounding of his heartbeat in his face had moved into the back of his head. He wasn’t quite proud, but he felt a certain satisfaction at maintaining some small bit of his dignity by keeping his mouth shut.

“How many of your sisters can ride?” Max asked Salet as his sleep deprived thoughts finally turned over a reasonably sound plan.

“All of our warriors are paired with osprey.” Salet had a feeling she knew where her hero was going with his inquiry. She felt a pang of mirth knowing how she would answer him.

“Well, that’s about thirty of you.” Max continued with his thought. “If the whole of your contingent, even half, actually, were to fly to Gynneth Mawr, I imagine we could take the lot of those giants without too much fuss.”

“Ann’ akurra is well aware that we could end the problems of that village.” Salet looked back at Max and laughed. “However, you men murdered one of her kin, as well as our own. That brought the giants. We have no interest or reason to help you.”

“Ah. Again, I apologize.” Max felt that he had just committed precisely the sort of crime all of his fellow humans engaged in. “It was a very, very stupid question. I know my race has a habit of taking what we want from the world as though we were owed it.”

“That, my friend Max, is the smartest thing I’ve heard you say.” Salet was genuinely encouraged by her hero’s grasp of the flaw men never see in themselves. Pickettstown was ten miles off and on the far side of a crinkle of low ridges. It was as close as she or her sister would get to such a collection of humans. Hix beat the air in slow, powerful strokes that surged against them in the saddle as he touched down in the tall grass.

“Max.” Salet looked down at the odd choice fate had made in delivering him to her. “It would be better if you could come back to us without being maimed.” It was as close as she could get to voicing her concern.

“Thank you, Salet.” Max nodded as he hefted the hard weight of the duffel bag onto his shoulder. “And, I agree. It would be better. Enjoy your trip back, if you’ve a mind to, the morning thermals over the fields to the west could be quite a bit of fun.” She nodded curtly and took off into the dawn sky.

Nigel slung the duffel bag across his back so he could manage the weight of it with the increasingly unhappy lute as a meek counterbalance. He staggered a few steps and readjusted things.

“The dust is divvied out in separate parcels, I could take five or six of them off you and put them in my kit.” Max offered. He wanted to at least try to mend things between he and his unwitting cohort. They had left the fen still sore with one another.

“No. I’ll manage.” Nigel had reached the moment in his life where he realized that the sum of his cautious decisions and boring choices were behind him. He was no longer concerned about his discomfort or the feeling that he was likely marching over the hills towards a certain death. In short, he had finally grown a pair.

They struggled under the weight of their loads, Max less than Nigel of course. His staff was a great help, and he didn’t have his face smashed in. Watching Nigel keep up, even if just barely, brought Max a mix of respect for his friend’s newfound strength and the relief of not having to listen to him whine. By the time they could see the southern edge of the town, they were totally knackered. They had light paths to follow through the grass, and the march had become easier as they dragged themselves along. However, when they were still a half mile from their destination, they found themselves in a field of freshly built mounds. Each rough pile of turned sod was topped with the crude eye and points sigil of the sun god. Max stopped and looked around and made a quick estimate of how many of the stick and circle markers they were in the middle of.

“Well, I’d say there’s about two hundred morons who had the same idea as us buried out here.” Max sat heavily and looked toward Pickettstown. He noted that the place was practically frantic with activity. Dozens of fires burned from chimneys and pits. A string of horses and oxen were traveling to and from the village that had spilled well over its original line of trench and pickets.

“I don’t know Max.” Nigel almost dropped to the ground as he smiled grimly and caught his breath. “Looks more like three hundred to me.”

“Seems all the hullabaloo is a real boon for the merchants.” Max looked at the bustling village. He had a feeling that the place was going to be dangerously packed with jugglers. He took a moment to divvy out some of the dust from one of the bags into the small, silken pouch he had left on Billingsgate. “I can’t wait to join that crowd of morons.”

“Yeah.” Nigel agreed. “It looks like a s**thole.”

CH 9

Bill did not know where the drums were. Bill did not know much at all. He figured that his reason had been overwhelmed by his desire, but that didn’t make sense, he reasoned, because the only thing he wanted to do was find those naked ladies, it was the best he’d felt since... whatever had come before swimming and naked ladies... naked ladies, naked ladies, naked ladies, naked ladies, naked ladies...

***

Pickettstown more than met Nigel and Max’s previous assessment. It was a cesspit chokablock with street vendors peddling everything from enchanted shoestrings to roasted walnuts.There were hirsute wenches, professional panhandlers and sweaty mimes. There were a dozen barbers offering a half price bleeding with every tooth pulled. There were madmen who claimed to be ministers, beady eyed apothecaries and musclebound chiropractors. The aroma of the town was proof enough that every other person there was a drunk, a minstrel or a juggler. At every gate to the town there were herds of oxen, sheep and swayback horses. Even then, in the middle of the night, scores of fires crackled with game and herdsmen’s meals. The already noxious air of the main thoroughfare turned to a pall of smoke as the vendors stoked and braised their skewers and shanks of meat and stirred their roiling, fatty stews.

It made Max and Nigel hungry. Men in velvet and and feathers splattered to the knees in the filth of the street wandered up and down singing and playing lutes and lyres. They were bards, moving in and out of the crowds and stalls gathering gossip and tidbits of news to carry back to the civilized end of the kingdom. Max didn’t say much to Nigel as they pushed through the throng up to an avenue that the ran up the hill towards the homes of the founding gentry. A squat stone tower stood at the top of the first hillock.

“We need to wait here for a while until Brock shows up.” Max motioned to the postal tower as they leaned heavily against the signpost at the intersection. The two of them waited for a little more than an hour, tucked out of sight against a shack a couple doors down from the office. A small crowd gathered as the hour passed. Max gave his duffel to Nigel when a huge buzzard flapped down on top of the postal roost. He ran over to the rider and exchanged a handshake before coming back to Nigel.

“Alright, it’s all fixed.” Max grinned with a touch of delirium. “That’s Brock Zadora, he flies for Feudal Express, I told him to buzz by Gynneth Mawr on his next trip around with an extra bird and rider.”

“Max, I can’t tell if this a plan, or if you’re just making it up as you go along.” Nigel exclaimed as he watched Brock unload several large netted sacks of goods from the bird to a waiting contingent of customers. One of them was a ragged looking juggler, perhaps an adventurer who had lost everything on his way up. The rogue hero ran with his bundle as soon as he had it in hand as though he had never had any intention to pay.

“Oh, I’m afraid that’s a C.O.D..” Max shook his head as he watched the inevitable happen. Brock Zadora pulled out a small crossbow and dropped the man with a bolt through his thigh. A trio of even more ragged jugglers helped the man away and smiled mawkishly as Brock retrieved his package. By the time the injured man had been carried fifty feet to the closest barber, his purse was missing and the last gold tooth in his mouth was clenched in a pair of dental pliers. “Brock told me where to find the man in charge of the ale shipments. He runs a bar called the Lucky Panther in the center of the thoroughfare.”

“I think the bar might be safer.” Nigel gulped, his new fortitude was fraying in the atmosphere of Pickettstown. “Why don’t we get to it?”

It was a short, slow walk back to the tavern for both of them. The ten stones of gravesdust they had been carrying all day had them beaten nearly flat by the time they pushed through the doors to the tavern.

“I heard from Mr. Zadora that you are the man to see about a job on the ale carts.” Max leaned over the bar as he sat down heavily. “My friend and I would like very much to offer our services in that regard.”

“Volunteers!” Sal Berringer leaned back and slapped both palms on the bar. “And one of them has a staff. I’d wager you two for adventurers, am I right?” He picked up two glasses, set them on the bar and filled them both with whiskey.

“Travelers.” Max answered as he watched the whiskey. He realized suddenly that he hadn’t had a drink in three days. When Max glanced up from the glass and met Sal’s grin. He knew instantly that he had been measured like a regulation Tossing sheep by the tavern keeper.

“Well, I’m a minstrel, actually...” Nigel began as he was interrupted by the lance of Sal’s glare.

“Who the f**k told you to open your mouth? If I wanted to hear a f**king minstrel I’d have one strung up by his heels right over the bar, singing like a canary.” Sal growled at Nigel, reducing him to a coiled shadow on his stool. “Now, business. Can you use that staff?”

“I can.” Max met Sal’s eyes and decided that it might have been a bad idea to have done so. But bad ideas were a trademark of Max’s, so it fit with the rest of his plan. “Can you put us on the next shipment to Gynneth Mawr?”

“I can. But tell me: why should I?” Sal took one of the glasses in hand. “And don’t say that reclaiming the village of Gynneth f**king Mawr from the giants is my civic f**king duty.”

“Because as much as I enjoy spirit...” Max grasped his staff and closed his eyes for a moment. He took the shot and pounded it back in a single motion, he opened his eyes and let out a long breath as he squeezed the small mass of Billingsgate’s silken pouch through the weft of space and into the pocket of Sal’s waistcoat. It was a dinky teleport, but it took about as much juice as Max got out of the whiskey. “...that sort of thing isn’t my preferred form of recreation.” He nodded at the Sal’s suddenly full pocket.

“Well...” Sal patted the pocket and thumbed the pouch open enough to stick his thumb in. He wiped it on the rim of his glass and took his shot in a single pull. A satisfied charge lit his eyes as he pulled out a third glass, filled all three and raised his own. “I believe you two have a future in the exportation of my wares.” He leaned in and whispered at a more intimate distance from his new hires.

“Getting there is easy. We have hordes of adventures turning up everyday to try their skills at the hill giants. As you can see, it’s done wonders for the local economy. Most die, but lucky for me, some s**t themselves at the first sight of one of those big bastards and come back here to drink themselves into my debt.” He gestured about the room of drunk, semi-conscious men. “A few, the smart ones, ride up there regularly and circle the place. They stick to the flooded side of the river and look for bodies.”

“You mean they rob the dead?” Nigel was disgusted, and he regretted speaking instantly.

“Yeah. They rob the dead, sweetheart. Keep sipping at your whiskey and shut the f**k up.” Sal didn’t smile when he spoke to Nigel. “More importantly, they rob the dead giants. Those angry sonsofbitches kill one or two of their own every week.”

“They’re after the forelocks, you see.” Sal tugged at his own greasy bangs as Max took his whiskey down with another quick toss. Sal grinned at the young man’s hand with a drink. “The Smith’s guild lost a lot of money when the giants came in and closed all of their mines up north in Gynneth Mawr. They’re paying five hundred crownes for every forelock brought in.”

Sal hugged the two men threateningly close to him as he leaned forward and directed their attention to a pair of men hunched over in the far corner of the bar. One was very large, a warrior for certain. He had arms bigger then either of Nigel’s thighs and a massive wide bladed sword sheathed on his back. His hair was shorn entirely and he wore a coat of iron mail that had rusted where the links met one another. The other was a small, rotund man in an odd slouching hat with a tassel on the end like a knitted fez. He looked like a wizard of some kind. His pink cheeks puffed after every long gulp he took from his mug of beer.

“You see those two?” Sal asked them. “That’s Bastard John (so named for his sword, of course) and Tommy Gin, his healer and fence. John doesn’t talk much, so Tommy does all the wheeling and dealing. Between them they’ve sold seven forelocks.”

“Seven? I know giants are a violent lot, but how many of their own have they killed?” Max looked sideways at Sal. He didn’t think that pair were quite as capable as Sal made them out to be.

“By my count there were seventy or eighty of those c**ksuckers that came in and stomped all over that town, about thirty of them were bitches, and they all ran for the hills once the jacks got them knocked up- that’s their way, you see.” Sal poured himself and Max another round. “If the women don’t run, the men will eat the young like f**king tomcats.”

“So that left forty or fifty, since then I’ve heard that at least thirteen of them are dead and lying in the fields west of the river.” He tipped his glass to the men in the corner. “And those two dangerous bastards have the best luck of anybody in this s**thole, seven forelocks in five trips. Five trips up and back, nary a scratch on either of them.”

“Impressive.” Max put his third shot back and set the glass on the bar. He looked out the narrow window into the darkening street. The ale carts were loading up and the herdsmen were whistling and smacking at the mangy looking cattle they were hustling around in the stockyard. There were four men on horses, all of them lean from their quests, suited up in well fitted mail, shields across their backs. Max recognized the coat of arms on their shields and their tunics as that of the three hundred and twenty seventh Doanish Rangers. He’d served with them in the calvary, they were not men who spent their time at trifles. “And that’s the shipment, loading up right there?”

“Every barrel of ale and every head of cattle that comes through Pickettstown passes unmolested because I ensure their safe passage.” Sal poured another shot for himself and tucked the bottle away. “But I do not believe I’d have the two of you head out tonight.” He paused and smiled suspiciously at Max and Nigel.

“Both of you look to be beaten flatter than hammered s**t. I’d opine that you’ve had a trek getting here.” He knocked on the bar twice. A half dozen broken down looking young-ish women came out of a back room. “I have a room to let, it’s occupant has yet to return from his trip north, so I can put you two heroes up tonight.” Sal offered with a grand sweep of his hand toward the doors on the landing upstairs.

“We’d be grateful for that.” Max thanked Sal. He knew he could count completely on his new acquaintance to ensure their safety - until he could rob and kill them on the most amenable terms. Max actually liked doing business with men who were as morally bankrupt as the ‘knights’ his uncle had raised him around.

“Will either of you need a private fitting this evening? Layla’s been waiting all day for a gentleman such as yourself to take in his breeches.” Sal motioned to the bevy of waiting seamstresses on the staircase that led to the rooms.

Nigel looked scared. Nigel was scared. He had no intention of his first time being with a wench so thoroughly used. The seamstresses all looked haggard and either underfed or overfed. He surmised correctly that it was important to pimps to maintain a stable that could account for the needs of individual riders.

“Not tonight.” Max shook his head and then looked at the ladies. “Tomorrow, dear ladies, tomorrow you’ll find me refreshed, until then I must disappoint you. I am truly sorry.” He bowed as he finished his mock apology.

The wenches tittered and covered their mouths girlishly. Nigel’s fright at the thought of bedding one of those women was tempered by his amazement. Even worn out seamstresses became infatuated and rosy in Max’s presence. Had he the strength left he would have been jealous, but as it was, Nigel just walked up the stairs and found the door to their room.

“You should take the mattress.” Max took Nigel’s bag and lute before he dropped his own burden. “I’ll be fine on the floor.” He set the load down uncomfortably.

“Thanks.” Was all Nigel managed as he sat on the bed and fell sideways, unconscious.

Max was totally shagged as well. But he knew he had work to do before he could get to sleep. He opened the window of their room and looked into the alley below. The ground was covered in straw and garbage. It was obviously being regularly used by some number of jugglers as a sort of makeshift hostel. He dropped both bags of dust out the window and followed them to the ground.

***

Bill had no sense of time nor self. He embodied a single feeling as romantic as it was strange. He’d never felt as good in his life, and had he the brain left to know it, he would have realized that he never would again.

***

The sun was starting to light the eastern peaks as Max finally finished up and crawled around the line of waiting kegs, out of sight from the madness of the main street. Rather than find a way to somehow drag the duffles back up into the room Max left them in the alley covered in plenty of straw and a sprinkling of his own pee to keep them from being disturbed. Climbing the wall of the tavern was agony, and by the time he made it back into the room, he fell onto the bed on top of Nigel and simply passed out.

It seemed that no time at all had passed when they awoke to a bang at the door and startled. Neither of them knew how both of them had ended up on the same bed. By the second knock they were standing on opposite sides of the room. After a blurry, confused few seconds they realized they were still fully clothed, which left them somewhat less alarmed. Nigel began to speak, but Max shook his head and shouted at the door.

“What do you want!?” Max tried to sound hoarse and still drunk, it wasn’t much of a stretch.

“Thought you boys might like to break fast.” A mewling voice called through the door. The pitch was tainted with the unmistakable whistling of a repeatedly broken nose. “John and I heard that the two of you were joinin’ the wagon train headed out tonight. We thought we could show you the ropes.”

“How kind of them...” Nigel raised an eyebrow suspiciously at Max.

They headed downstairs with the small fellow in the strange knit hat and sat down to a pile of damp oats and charred rabbit provided by the odd pair of adventurers. Bastard John had already begun eating, the bones of at least three rabbits and... something else were scattered on his plate. He had a large mug of beer, possibly the same mug they had seen him with the night before, in his left fist.

“Sal mentioned you two were new recruits, John and I wanted to bring you fellows up to speed on how things get done around here.” Tommy’s voice grated Max’s nerves, but he hid it well under the shadow of his fatigue. The four hours of sleep hadn’t done much more than take the edge off of his aches.

“We appreciate that.” Nigel smiled graciously. As a minstrel he was capable of mimicking honesty and propriety. “And thank you for inviting us to share your meal.”

“Oh, its nothing. Besides, we’ll all be raking it in tomorrow afternoon.” Tommy winked. John said nothing. He just stared at Max until he looked out the door as shouts and applause rang from the thoroughfare. “Oh, perfect timing you two. The carts are back from last night, come have a look.”

Max and Nigel walked over to the door and grimaced at the sight of the returning wagon teams. One of the Rangers Max had seen the night before was being helped out of a wagon with his right leg tied to a short staff. Had it not been, the mangled limb would have bent in half under the man’s weight. As the muleskinners washed themselves in the troughs a contingent of small, dirty children came out and slopped water into the back of the carts. A few jugglers were in on the cleaning act too, pushing brooms through the wagons to sweep out the remaining blood and gore. A dead cart manned by a team of four scrawny men in rags rolled up and piled out the corpses from the mud beside the wagons as the cleanup continued.

“Yeah, it gets pretty dang messy up there.” Tommy winked again. Max thought the little man was more dangerous than his ridiculous voice might betray. “You two oughta’ listen to John and me, we’ve been at it a while.”

“Sal said that the two of you had collected seven forelocks, that’s thirty five hundred crownes, isn’t it?” Nigel offered with a smile.

“Well, it’s more like thirty two after expenses...” He waved a hand at John who grunted approvingly. “This one can eat.”

***

Bill discovered the source of the drums. It was the thrum of the water made by the splashing of supple limbs, unbridled lust and thousands of tentacles. It was glorious, divine and extraordinarily weird all at once. It might as well have been heaven, as far as Bill could conceive.

***

A great deal of tension ran through Max as he saw the casks being loaded up. He and Nigel were fixing the last of their gear on the lead wagon. Max rode on the left of John and Tommy while Nigel took the buckboard. He noticed that their new friends seemed anxious just as he and Max. Max dropped off the wagon and stepped over to Nigel.

“Without looking right at our new chums, try to see of they look happy when I come back.” Max leaned over and whispered as he stepped down the alley behind the Lucky Panther.

John and Tommy tried to tuck away their slight smiles into their chins as Max came around the corner loaded down with the duffle bags. Max heaved the bags onto the buckboard and patted them before dodging John’s glance and getting back on the wagon.

It took about four hours for the wagons to reach the ruined inn that sat at the old ferry landing south of the Gynneth Mawr. It was marshy and swimming with biting flies and other insects. The area was littered with destroyed casks, abandoned gear and the remnants of a few dead livestock strewn about. Worst of all were the old gallows and debtor’s cages hanging throughout the area. It was the middle of the night and the torchlight threw horrible shadows through all of the old wreckage. Max knew that all of the towns at the edge of mining country were peppered with execution stones and blaggard’s stocks. It was the strict policy of the management of the mining and collections guilds that prospectors would take out their dues as well as the cost of their equipment and provisions as loans. Then the prospectors would be expected to repay those loans (with interest) with the fruits of their claims. If a prospector fell behind he had a choice of working the guild run mines or facing the stocks. Most chose servitude, as the gallows and the cages were not inviting options. A wan chill ran through Max at the sight of the ruined jailer’s trappings. He knew that whatever happened next, he would not be spending a minute bent over in debt to those damned lawyers.

“This is the drop point for the cattle and the ale.” Tommy told them. “It’s pretty safe about this time.” He paused as a pair of men carrying a mortally wounded third slogged through the reeds where they had been waiting nearby.

“The survivors tend to stick to the marshes and hide until they see the torchlight from the wagons.” Tommy told Max and Nigel as John picked out the sturdiest of the three men. He unsheathed his four foot blade and blocked the man from getting into the wagon.

“How many?” John’s voice was low, a whisper caught in a grindstone.

“What?” the man was practically babbling. Obviously meeting the giants had taken a toll on his psyche. “How many dead?”

“How many giants are there?” John’s voice scratched at Nigel’s eardrums, he was reminded of the men who had been in Pillywizet’s shop.

“Oh, ahhhh.... we... counted thirty... one, yeah thirty one of ‘em up there.” The man was shaking with cold from sitting in a swamp all night. John raised his sword and put it back in its sheath.

“That’s good news.” Tommy and John both smiled. “That means there’s two more bounties waiting out in them wet fields just on the other side of the river.”

The wagons were unloaded and the cattle left to wander and graze. John waved the rest of the wagons off as he and Tommy pulled the empty cart into the shattered hollow of the old inn. They stood at window and waited for the early dawn to break.

“Now, timing is crucial.” Tommy gestured toward the bluff where what was left of Gynneth Mawr remained. As early light began to filter in, they grey shades of the landscape broke into the crinkled edge of the far peaks and the blasted structures of the town on its mount. “The giants sleep until about an hour after sunup. Now that we have the horses and the wagon unhitched, we’ll pole the ferry across and comb through the fields to find the giants that got killed last night.”

“We’ll mount up any second now, if it’s not light enough we won’t find the freshly dead giants we need out in all that water. If it’s too light by the time we make it back here, the giants will already be on us.”

The farmer’s fields across the river had flooded from a dam of rubble and refuse that had been pushed over the cliff at the western edge of the town. Gynneth Mawr was meant to be a stronghold, it had been a booming town with the copper strike and both the church and the smith’s guild had put a great deal of men and coin into seeing it built and defended. Max let his adjusting eyes search what he could see of the ruins from his low vantage.

A stout keep sat at the southern edge of the bluff, and the smithy’s furnaces sat on the western cliff such that the slag could be dumped over the edge into the river below. An unfinished wall ran the rest of the way around the town, it was dotted with small post towers. From where it dropped behind the hill it looked like it butted up to a tall comb of rock on the east side of the town. Max focused on the flat ridge of that outcrop.

“Isn’t it getting awfully light already?” Nigel asked. He looked at the shape of the destroyed town emerging from the misty dark. The western edge that leaned over the cliff above the river was a sideways pile of broken roofs and rubble coated with a thick, trailing slop of the giant’s leavings. The fields were flooded by this fecal dam in front of them.

“Not quite yet. Hold your horses, little guy.” Tommy grinned wickedly at Nigel. Nigel felt it was foolish for Tommy to be calling anybody little. He looked back at the town as the sun peeked out over the far mountains. He could see where one wall of the keep had been kicked in by the horde of giants, leaving the towers of the gate wall standing like a pair of massive, sharpened posts. It sat on the opposite side of the square from the temple of Helios. Nigel thought about the fact that somewhere in front of that temple a large stone was holding his classmate’s remains firmly in place. Nigel thought about the odd fact that he had never expected to end up waiting for dawn in front of a ruined town. Prior to his recent adventures, Nigel had assumed that he would sit behind his desk in the shop and wither away, his ears would grow disproportionately large and emerge from his already thinning mop of hair. He was almost satisfied with the thought that fortune had handed him a plate of bland possibilities to pick from. Except that isn’t how it happened at all. Fate had pushed him all the way to a nest of bloodthirsty giants once he asked Bill and Max to help pull him out of his own mess. Nigel thought it was ironic that this was most likely the last sunrise he would ever see, and its rays revealed a vista of broken stones and gargantuan piles of feces.

“Any minute now...” Tommy unintentionally said out loud.

Max continued to focus on the flat point of the granite outcrop on the far side of Gynneth Mawr. He blinked a few times to refocus his senses as looked up through the missing portions of the roof at the morning clouds overhead. Max then turned to the pair of men who had shown them north. Each of them smiled as he blinked sleepily.

A great booming yawn echoed over the open fields with the first shafts of sunlight. All four men felt their bowels quiver at the noise. First one giant stood up among the wrecked buildings, then a few more as they rose and pissed off the cliff into the river below. The sound of the giants answering nature four or five at a time sounded like a waterfall crashing upstream. One by one the huge brutes scratched at themselves and stumbled down the steep hill, treading over the low patches in the unfinished stone wall as they headed for their cache of ale and doomed cattle. The giants were ungainly piles of muscle and flesh, each of them was four times as tall as any man. Hair coursed over their leathery skin in great matted rivers that converged on their backs like dense shrubberies. It seemed odd to Nigel how disproportionately built they were. Their arms were longer than their legs, and their shoulders were quite broad, yet their heads were no larger than their massive fists. However, as Nigel imagined it would, the ground literally shook as the beasts approached.

“I think we’ve waited too long...” Nigel said as he heard John’s broadsword leave its sheath.

“Nope.” Tommy Gin grinned at he men as he produced a small steel crossbow. “Perfect timing is what this is.”

“I think they mean to relieve us of our bags, Nigel.” Max said as he took his staff in his free hand. Dust sifted down from the broken crossbeams overhead as the giants lumbered closer.

“You’re a smart one, Sal told us you were... but I reckon he gave you more credit than he should have.” Tommy pointed the crossbow at Nigel as John stepped back to give himself room to swing. “And what we’re offering you is a piece of mercy, really. You drop those bags and run like hell, maybe you can get far enough to hide somewhere safe before the giants get you.”

“The longer you wait the better chance they’re gonna get you.” Tommy continued. “And you’ll never gonna make it carrying those heavy old bags.”

“Ah, this is kindness, Nigel.” Max almost smiled to his friend. “And I thought there was no such thing as honor among thieves.”

“Well Max, if you don’t get going real soon, John’s going to let fly with that blade of his, and your little buddy will catch one right through his left eye.” Tommy leveled the bolt of his crossbow at Nigel’s face. “But we’d prefer not to see it go that way.”

“No. I’m sure it would be better if we were eaten rather than killed.” Nigel offered smugly. He was trying not to panic, he wanted to believe that Max had a plan ready. If he hadn’t then why had he been so careful about the bags? “You don’t want there to be questions, dead adventurers are common enough, unless they have crossbow bolts driven through their heads, of course.”

“That’s right.” Tommy kept smiling from behind his weapon. “And those giants are like dogs, they’ll run down anything that moves or gets their attention. Lucky for John and me they’ll be too busy with the cows to look in here for us.”

“Fine!” Max snarled as he threw his bag down. He shook Nigel’s duffle off his shoulder and set it next to the other. “You really have put together quite a plan. If we run we die, if we stay we die, either way you get the goods. Congratulations, you win.”

The giants were only a few hundred yards off, in less than a minute they would be right on top of them. John used the tip of his great sword to gingerly flip the edge of one bag open. His blade dislodged a small stream of dry corn.

“What the hell is this crap?” Tommy would have been screaming like a teakettle, but had the sense to keep himself from calling in the giants.

“Just what you asked for.” Max gave the men a crazed grin and a rude gesture. Nigel was only slightly relieved to see Tommy lower his weapon in shock.

John drew his blade back and swung in a wide arc before Tommy could stop him. Tom had brains enough to understand that if either of their intended victims screamed they’d all be eaten. John did not, and before his more intelligent companion could prevent it, the blade was slicing through the air. Max sent a hail of whistlesnaps up through the roof of the inn that popped and sang a hundred feet overhead as he dove at Nigel. Max’s shoulder hit Nigel at the waistline and threw them both to the ground as the sword went over their heads. Tommy’s eyes popped with terror while John raised his sword as though he meant to cleave a piece of wood. He had those squirming, juggler bastards on the floor in a heap, and he wouldn’t miss a second time. He might even split the two of them with one blow...

A pair of hands as big as church doors crunched into what remained of the roof and ripped it away. Dust billowed under the putrid wind of the giant’s breath as he sniffed at the four men on the floor of the inn. The twisting snake of brambling hair that stretched from temple to temple above the giant’s eyes bent in an angry ‘v’ towards his nose as he reached down for the first course of his breakfast.

CH 10

“John and Errol Emolere!” Sal threw his arms open as the twins entered the tavern. “As I live and breathe! What brings you two magnificent devils to the fine s**thill of Pickettsville?”

Both men grunted and stood at the bar. They each nodded once as Sal pulled out three shot glasses and poured them full to overflowing. He was exuberant to have a pair of proper villains in his pub, their presence made him feel comfortable, even warm.

“A toast!” Sal beamed as he lifted his glass. The twins followed suit. “To our better f**king angels that they may be our guides!” The twins tipped their heads back and took their whiskey down.

“Tell me, what can I do for the two of you.” Sal refilled the glasses and took another shot for himself.

“We’re looking for a bard.” Errol said. “A luthier, actually.”

“That doesn’t narrow the field much.” Sal refilled the twins’ shots. “Pickettstown is lousy with minstrels.”

“This particular minstrel has something that doesn’t belong to him. He’s a skinny fellow, tall, looks as menacing as a schoolgirl.” John told Sal as he drank his whiskey.

“Ah. Now there’s something.” Sal’s eyes lit up. “Would this fellow have a broken nose?”

“That’s him.” They said in unison.

“Right... This minstrel of yours is traveling with a wizard, a pretty good one from my reckoning. The two of them went north to Gynneth Mawr.” Sal mulled over his circumstances and thought it best to take a stab at honesty with the brothers. He was so accustomed to lying that he found it unnerving to tell the truth. “And they do have what I believe to be an unbelievable quantity of narcotics on their ragged persons.”

“We wouldn’t know anything about any drugs.” Errol was puzzled.

“Or a wizard.” John was equally puzzled. It crossed their minds that it made sense that their quarry had a more adept partner to keep him alive. “We’re just after the lute. He has got a lute with him?”

“A lute? Yes the man has a lute, and judging by the way he cradles the damn thing like a baby I now realize that I should have done more to keep those two here...” Sal was a bit shaken by his failure to see the obvious. “But I do have two of my men on the case. They’re not geniuses, but they do have a well practiced routine.”

“Your lute and my fortune should be back with the returning wagons in a few hours.” Sal finished his glass and poured the three of them another round. “Gentlemen, it seems our interests are aligned. Cheers.”

***

The giant grinned a mouthful of teeth like a rotting pier as it reached into the battered inn. Tommy screamed shrilly and John let his sword drop to his side of its own accord. Max and Nigel watched from their low vantage as the gaping face of the giant was suddenly plowed out of their view by a massive fist. They heard a series of blows that sounded as though it had begun to rain boulders. It only lasted long enough for Tommy to go hoarse with his squalling. Max stood up over Nigel and closed his eyes in order to draw as much of his strength as he could muster.

Another tremendous hand pulled away the side of the inn. The four men saw that the giant’s knuckles were calloused like the bark of an ancient tree. As the larger, more hideous giant who had bested the first leered at the men, Max brought the image of the standing rock into his mind. He brought his staff up with one hand and touched Nigel on the crown of his head with the other. The light and air around the two men wavered for a moment before the world pinched in on itself where they had been standing just a moment before.

Max fell on top of Nigel, scraping his forehead on the sharp surface of the rock beneath them.

Nigel’s bottom hit the ground as the two of them re-instantiated about three feet in the air above the peak of Coxcomb Rock. They were bruised and terrified, but safely perched high above the shattered structures of Gynneth Mawr. The town was built right up to the foot of the pinnacle, and from their vantage they could see about ten giants standing in a loose group around the inn.

“That was terrible...” Was all Nigel managed before he vomited the remainder of his oats and rabbit. “I feel as though I was turned inside out and licked all over...”

“That’s because you were...” Max forced the words out in gasps as he spat and tried to simultaneously recover his breath and keep his breakfast in place. He was barely able to push himself into a sitting position, the teleport was as great a working as he’d ever managed. He knew how hard it was to get twenty or so stones weight through the aethyr and back into the world in one piece and in the right spot. Usually, that grand a move would be facilitated with enchanted devices designed to hold a massive charge. Stone circles were the standard battery structures used for the teleportation for multiple parties.

“Oh, well that it explains it then...” Nigel’s words trailed off as he got his first real look at their location. Below them the town was stomped to shards and ash. An enormous firepit claimed the expanse of the town square where Longbridge met his end. A handful of giants were waking up here and there, scattered among the broken buildings like misshapen children nestled in a heap of building blocks. “Oh, oh my... I don’t think we found the best spot to park, Max.”

The two of them crawled to the edge and lay on their stomachs to peek over and try to see what was directly below them. Nigel had been right, they were not in the safest place. At the base of the standing rock two houses of nearly identical shape had been built. The intrepid pair did not realize at the time that those were the former homes of the Vicar of Gynneth Mawr and the Mayor of Gynneth Mawr. Each home was a sprawling affair that backed up against the living rock of the spire. Each magnificent house bore an unfinished tower opposite the other where the owners had engaged in a contest of pride to see who would have a taller turret once the last brick was in place. Maxand Nigel could see that the mansions had been thrashed and filled with straw from several thatched homes in order to create a tremendous, crude chair. The rock Max had chosen as a landing site for his spell formed the back of the chieftain’s throne. Luckily (if that term applies to situations so dire as that) they were at least sixty feet above the greasy pate of the reigning monarch, who had just returned from the cliffs after his morning constitution.

Max and Nigel squinted in the morning light and watched the giant that had torn away the side of the inn stride back up the hill. He had taken a hold of Bastard John and Tommy Gin by their feet. He had one in each hand like chickens. The lead giant below them made an abrupt series of flatulent grunts at the approaching titan.

“Nigel, there isn’t any chance you learned a bit of the giant’s tongue in your time at the university?” Max looked at Nigel as he wiped the blood from his forehead back into the auburn tangle of his hair.

“No Max, nobody understands giant.” Nigel shook his head and watched as the pair of writhing men were handed over to the head of the clan. “It’s even said that they don’t really understand one another, which could explain why they appear to communicate through brawling.”

The leader stood up, a head taller than any of his kin, and took the men who had double crossed Max and Nigel. He held them up high and grinned proudly to a sputtering chorus of belching howls and wet grunts.

“Ye gods, they look like kittens in his hands, don’t they?” Max frowned to his bedraggled friend.

“They surely do.” Nigel agreed. He felt no sense of compassion for the men about to die. But he hadn’t quite made up his mind if he hated them enough to watch them be killed. A second after wondering about the state of his conscience, Nigel decided that he’d already thrown up and that he was due a good show.

The largest of the giants glanced about at his kin as they scratched and started passing around the casks of beer. He looked from one man to the other and decided to bring the larger of the two in for a closer look. Giants, it is known, have very poor eyesight. It compounds their inability to understand one another as the use of gesture in place of speech is often misinterpreted due to their myopia.

Bastard John, true to his nature, waited until the giant’s eyes crossed and focused on him before he unsheathed his mighty sword and dealt a blow across the bulbous nose of his captor. Blood sprayed John from top to bottom and the giant flinched away. Enraged, he whipped his hand backward and flung Bastard John against the spire Max and Nigel were hiding on top of. After a second or two, most of the large warrior unpeeled from the rock face and fell into the filthy throne below.

“Ouf.” Max chuckled. “I enjoyed that.”

“As did I, Max.” Nigel looked over at his friend and shared a laugh as Tommy Gin began another round of ear splitting screams. “I think Patches there might get a bit of fun before His Highness eats little Tommy.” Max pointed to the large giant that brought the men up. The breadth of the giant’s naked chest was matted in a rough checkerboard of missing hair.

The clan leader pinched his bleeding nose with his free hand and gestured with a thrust of his chin to Patches. A few more of the huge brutes collected in a circle as Tommy continued to scream like he’d been set on fire. They were all smiling and ducking their heads in obvious anticipation.

The chief nodded once more and tossed Tommy into the air above their heads, and for one brief moment, Max and Nigel made eye contact with Tommy Gin as he flew up in the air in front of them. The confused terror on his face almost made the men feel guilty about watching him meet his fate. Almost.

Tommy fell screaming in a practiced arc toward the ground. His noise stopped abruptly as his fall was interrupted by a knee kick from Patches that sent him back up into the air, sailing as high as he had a moment before.

“Ouch.” Max smiled. “I don’t think he’s quite dead yet...”

As he fell back to earth, the king popped Tommy on his own knee three times, which aroused his onlookers to a series of approving grunts. He passed Tommy’s limp form over to another of the giants who caught the little rag doll of a man carefully on the instep of his great foot. He held the broken shape for a second before he did a small hop that shook the town and tapped Tommy back up into the air in an arc that a fourth giant stopped by pushing his chest out to meet the small man in flight. This giant rolled his shoulders forward and cupped Tommy’s pulpy shape in the hollow between his collarbones before dropping him onto his knee and sending him back into the air.

“Oh he’s dead now, I imagine.” Nigel mused. The giants only got one more pass out of Tommy before his stuffing came out. “Oh, yeah, he’s dead.”

***

“Those stupid c**ksuckers.” Sal roared as the wagons returned to Pickettstown one cart short. “If they got greedy and ran off with my goods, after I put them onto those two city boys, I will personally hunt them down cut their f**king throats!”

“Well, if they did run, they didn’t run north.” John gestured at the Follower in Errol’s hand. Sal looked at the handsome device and then at his old acquaintances as John finished this thought. “Or they didn’t take that lute with them.”

“Would they know to steal this lute of yours if they were to look at it?” Sal asked, still bright red with anger. “And remember, I’m talking about a pair f**king morons. You can’t assume they have a grain of sense between them.”

“You must not have seen it.” John smiled slightly.

“No. Can it play itself and suck my c**k at the same time or some such bulls**t?” Sal was smart enough to know how dangerous the twins were. He also knew that they held the same respect for him. “The two of you full well that if I had seen that it was worth taking I’d have had it done already.”

“I don’t think they took anything. Do you John?” Errol asked.

“No Errol, I don’t believe they did. In fact, I believe your employees are most likely deceased.” John raised an eyebrow at Sal’s loss of two henchmen. “Errol and I have found ourselves perplexed boy this boy’s resourcefulness.”

“Really? I’d never have guessed it to look at him.” Sal shook his head. “Alright, gents, I think we can strike a deal, since you’re headed to Gynneth Mawr anyway, I’ll help you fence your half of what you take off of those dead idiots. And I’ll never even ask to see your precious f**king lute. Agreed?”

***

“So, I meant to ask, what exactly happened to all of that greyvesdust we labored to bring this far north?” Nigel asked Max as he watched the giants continue drinking. It was late in the afternoon and half the casks and most of the herd had been consumed. Nigel was wondering, again, if the plan Max had come up with was going to work.

“Well...” Max was harried by the same question. He had regained some of his strength as they lay up on the rocks enjoying the sun. But now he was curious if the quantity of dust he’d spiked the barrels with had been sufficient. If anything, the giants seemed more lively than ever. they were pounding each other frequently. Two more had been killed while they had looked on from their perch. “I put it all in those casks. They’ve been at it for hours now.”

“When? Last night?” Nigel was impressed by Max’s foresight.

“Yeah, I popped the bungs from sixty casks, cut two slits in every parcel of dust and dropped two into each barrel.” Max shrugged.

“Then you filled the bags with dry corn.” Nigel sucked some of the blood off of his teeth and smiled. “You are a devious bastard, aren’t you?”

A group of them were playing a very energetic game like the one they had taken up with Tommy, only instead of a dead adventurer, they had an empty cask one of them had stuffed with cowhides. It held up considerably better than the small wizard had. The cask pinged back and forth violently as the giants kicked at it in a frenzy. A giant with long, disgusting dreadlocks got a bit overzealous and accidentally put a heel in Patches’ head. Patches, the second largest of the giants who appeared to be subservient only to his chief, had already killed one of his own that day. Being kicked in the side of the head was no more tolerable an insult than what had precipitated his last deadly beating. He was recovering from the kick when the giant who had put him down realized that it was now or never if he wanted to rise in rank.

“Oh - look at that now!” Nigel winced as the giant with the dreadlocks as long as his arms leapt on top of Patches and drove his knee into the larger one’s face. “Are you sure that you got greyvesdust from that devious Blightelf in the sewers?”

“Quite sure, I tasted it myself when I measured out some to bribe the tavern keeper with.” Max offered. “It’s the genuine article, completely pure. What I dumped into that beer was worth hundreds of thousands of crownes.”

The dreadlocked giant was fought harder than either of the men thought possible. He pummeled Patches over and over again. He landed blows so fast that his fists were a blur of blood and thunder. When he finally stood up, he was breathing heavily, his tanned belly heaved in and out like he might fall over. His eyes were wide and his pupils swallowed the reddish gold of his irises even in the light of the late afternoon. Dreadlocks flying, he leapt into the air onto the sturdy gatehouse at the north end of the town wall and bellowed. The chieftain stood up and joined in the roar, and the rest followed so loudly that Max and Nigel were certain the people of Pickettstown must have heard their deafening call.

“Max.” Nigel closed his eyes as he recalled his medical lessons from his time at the university. “I believe what we’re seeing here is a paradoxical reaction.”

The giants finished their barbaric yawp in a tattered series of belches and guttural burbling that led directly into a free for all melee. It seemed to be a spontaneous and joyful engagement of every giant in a connected but random series of traded blows. They beat upon one another merrily for the better part of an hour before one more fell dead and they decided to get back to drinking.

“Oh that’s right.” Nigel stepped back up to the peak and sat down. “ I forgot, they’ve only drunk half their ale yet.”

“Well, at least there’s only twenty six of them left.” Max cringed.

***

“That...” Errol shivered. “Is not a pleasant sound.” The roaring wail of the giants’s festivities washed past he and John as they continued north. Neither of them could recall the last time they had felt real fear. They were unaccustomed to it.

“I agree Errol, that was unpleasant.” John shook his head. “And I’d bet our boy has something to do with it.”

***

As night fell, the giants were completely mad with drink and dust. All of them were naked, bloody and thrashing with one another. Even their chief had fallen in among them as they pounded and stomped one another. The men knew that at some point they were going to either be found by the crazed beasts or forced to climb down into however many of them were left after their pugilistic orgy. There would be no chance of killing them in their sleep like lazy chickens.

“I guess this is pretty much it for us, Max.” Nigel sighed as he straightened himself on the rock he was using for a seat. He took the lute from his shoulder and set the case in his lap. “I was wondering how you knew those two were going to cross us like that?”

“I grew up with those sorts.” Max lounged with his back to the deafening fracas below. “My uncle was a blaggard, and he taught me every trick he knew.”

“I thought as much.” Nigel blew on his long, nimble fingers nervously before he popped the latches on the case. The emerald glow of the lute seeped out. “You were raised to be a noble arse, and I spent my youth dreaming of becoming a famous bard.” He took the demon instrument from its case and cradled it in his lap.

“I don’t know if it’s time for tune Nigel.” The sight of the jade lute made Max’s guts wiggle. “That thing is a nasty piece of business.”

“Yeah, well, things aren’t about to get worse, are they.” Nigel shrugged at Max as he set the case on the ground and balanced the wicked lute on his thigh. “You’ve done an amazing thing, getting us this far, but it does appear that we won’t live through the night. So, I’m going to go out playing to a crowd of drug crazed brutes like I’d always hoped I would.”

“I suppose few things are more inspiring than one’s immanent demise.” Max grinned and thought for a moment about how long he would remain conscious while being chewed by a giant. “Do your worst.”

“Thanks Max.” Nigel smiled and strummed a simple chord across the angry strings.

A perfect note drifted through the air. A tone so pure and lovely sailed forth from the instrument that the noise of the fighting giants fell to a shocked rustle. Both men stared at the battered beasts and began to shake as all of them stood mute and open mouthed. Every huge, bruised eye lay upon the two men.

Nigel felt his hand shake as the demon trapped in the jade took hold of him and brought his hand down again. The second note rang off key, and the fury of the lute pierced Max’s brain as he felt the sound shoot through him. As that second tone met the giants Nigel grit his teeth in horror as he began to violently strum the instrument like he was driving a nail with a hammer. A series of chords ratcheted down on the tendons in Nigel’s wrist as he banged through a progression of notes so fast that one bled into the next in a hammering wall of sound louder than either man could believe. The effect of being so close to Nigel and the lute was like being held under the punishment of a mighty waterfall. Max struggled against the crashing noise and managed to pull himself into a nook in the rock off to the side. The demonic music had just begun, however, and Nigel was firmly in the grip of the angry, mistuned instrument.

The giants, fueled by greyvesdust, ale and murder began to spring up and down, slamming into one another with even greater ferocity than before. Nigel felt great ripping belches of grunts and squeals fly from his mouth. Max was certain that Nigel was starting to holler out some kind of song in the tongue of the giants, and it was driving them completely insane.

Eyes were gouged, ears torn off, fingers bitten and groins ruined as the monsters tore at one another. In minutes, their gleeful bloodlust had claimed five more, and they kept on killing one another. Dreadlocks ripped the arm out of another’s socket and beat a third to death with it. He continued bashing the others with that gruesome club for another hour. The town was literally awash in blood. It ran and pooled deeply enough in places that a man might sink to his knees in it. The giants continued, unabated by their wounds. The foul music from the lute was breaking Nigel down into a sweating mass of blistered fingers and a ragged howling. All but the largest of the strings was broken. The enraged demon the lute was carved from had made its mind up to destroy the fool who had decided to play it without properly tuning it. Nigel was forced to bang that single string over and over again. Waves of growling notes punched off the top of the rock as a showdown between Dreadlocks and the chief began.

Only the two of them remained. Max was curled into a ball near the edge of the cliff, he had secreted himself in an alcove that offered him a line of sight on the town while shielding him from the swells of evil music blasting past. He kept his hands over his ears and watched the remaining giants fight one another to the death. Both of them were so tired that they were swinging wide and tripping on buildings. The arm Dreadlocks had been wielding was gone, bashed to splinters on the skulls of the dead. The two of them grappled and kicked at each other. The chief was missing an eye and Dreadlocks both ears. Most of his matted hair had been pulled out and his front teeth were totally gone. As the two clenched together again, Dreadlocks slid down the chief’s arm. The banging single note drove him to cling to the sweaty sinew of his leader, pawing in time to the rhythm. The chief was pounding a tattoo of sloppy punches on the side of his opponent’s head to the beat as Dreadlocks shoved the hand he was clinging to into his bloody maw. He bit down with his molars and kicked against the chief’s belly. They tumbled together into the ashes of the square and Dreadlocks spit the fingers he’d just bitten off at his chief. The last string frayed and pounded faster and faster, the demon desperately wanted to kill Nigel before its last string broke. After all, it might wait forever up on that rock until another fool found it and tried to play it.

The chief found the stone he had flattened Longbridge with under his good hand and bashed Dreadlock’s head in with it. He struggled to his feet and roared as he faced the infernal lute at the top of the stone spire. He gripped the sides of the standing rock and began to scramble up it in a desperate attempt to put an end to the vile noise. He was pawing at the surface with the huge rock still held in his remaining fingers. As it managed to mount the outcrop, Max watched as the great ruined face of the beast appeared in front of him. It reared back its good arm with the boulder just as the string on the lute snapped in a final peal of tormented thunder.

The giant shuddered for a moment, inhaled painfully and fell backwards off of the spire, crashing into the town. His head hit the broken blocks of the keep and opened all over the already gory contents of the square. In the echoing quiet Max paused and noticed that he had peed a little in the last moment before the giant had died. He uncoiled from his hiding spot and ran to his friend’s side.

Nigel was a shaking, retching mass. His already thin frame had been rendered like a fatted hog so that his clothes hung off of his emaciated form. Max took his staff and pushed as much of his own life as he could part with through the Heartspar and into his classmate. Exhausted, he collapsed, gasping, next to Nigel and felt for a pulse.

“I don’t want to be a rock star anymore.” Nigel sat up blearily and mouthed the words without making any sound.

“I think that worry is well behind you.” Max smiled weakly.

They spent another three hours making their way down what was a fairly well kept path around the rock down into the abbatoir the town had become. Nigel sat carefully on a broken block that had been knocked free of the keep. He still had the diabolical lute in his hands. He knew he needed to be properly rid of it, as the dragon had told him, before his quest was done. Max stumbled over to the thinly spread remains of his old classmate and kicked free the Enobled Hand from the remnants of it’s scabbard.

“I think this should be sharp enough to take a few forelocks... don’t you think Nigel?” Max turned to his friend and felt his face fall entirely.

“It’ll do.” Errol looked past Nigel’s weak shape on the ground. “Don’t you think John?”

“Aye. It’ll do.” John and Errol unsheathed their long bladed cleavers at the same time.

CH 11

“Now, John and I have made a promise to our little rabbit here.” Errol tucked the wide edge of his cleaver under Nigel’s chin. Nigel stood with his hands in the air on either side of his head as though lifted by the blade.

“Yes we have.” John opened his greatcoat and rested his free hand on the handle of one of his throwing knives. “We promised him a tour of sorts. You’re going to have to drop that staff and that fancy sword of your’s before we can make good on our promise.”

“Look.” Nigel pushed the lute in its case toward the two men with his toe. “You can have your baby back...”

“Stuff it.” Errol laughed at him. “Do you have any idea just how hard it was to catch up to you?”

“We were actually worried we might never see the boss again, what with all them giants.” John stepped next to Errol and kept his hand on his knife. “You gave us quite a scare, the pair of you.”

“Now, drop that staff, wizard.” Errol looked over to Max while John’s fingers curled around the handle of the blade.

“No!” Nigel hopped back off of the end of Errol’s cleaver and put himself between Max and John. “He’s not to blame. If it weren’t for him you’d still have the giants-”

“I’d venture to say that if it weren’t for him your skinny arse wouldn’t have made it out of Wälsport.” Errol growled through a tight grin at his next victim. “So I believe he is precisely as guilty for our merry hunt as you are.”

“I agree entirely.” Max dropped both of his weapons. “You were right about my family line being cursed, Nigel. Sorry for that.”

“Which one you want to do first?” John asked.

“I’m partial to the lad, but I think the other might make trouble if we pursue that course.” Errol offered his opinion.

“You’ve a fine point there, Errol.” John returned.

“This isn’t your fault Max, well not this bit, the giants and the dragon and all the double dealing...” Nigel began his recitation with a chuckle.

“You’re funny, Nigel. About to die and still cracking jokes-” Max began.

“Would you two hens shut up?” John wagged his cleaver at them. “My brother and I are in the middle of an important question.

There was a soft rush of wind that came from behind the two large felons. Max and Nigel craned their necks around the huge men to see what had generated the quick breeze. A tall, copper skinned elf wearing a tight tunic and tall boots that accentuated the best parts of her figure had appeared by teleport. Max recognized Alcinia immediately from his night with Matan’ Daar. She stooped and picked up a small spinning ornament as it wobbled to a stop and fell over. She smiled as she tucked it away and produced two small glass sparrows. The twins turned to look at her. They couldn’t help but smile to have such a beauty in their midst. The sight of her literally disarmed them as the let their weapons hang by their sides.

“Hello Max.” Alcinia leaned around the shape of the twins to meet Max’s eyes. “One moment.” She pressed the center of each crystal bird. Both of the little sparrows flipped over into an ‘S’ curved pair. She narrowed her eyes in concentration and flicked both of the little glass blades out and away.

What happened when they left her hands took place in an instant, too fast for any of them to understand. The tiny razors spun wide, almost perpendicular to Alcinia’s body. Each twin watched one of the tiny flashing blades as though hypnotized. The spinning discs made a fast curve in midair and came back toward one another, each one cleanly slicing through the neck of one of the brothers without slowing down. The paths of the blades crossed as two heads slipped off of two necks. Neither man lost his stupid grin as he died. The spinning glass razors wound out again past one another and clipped all of the fingers off of Nigel’s raised hands. As he fell in pain Max ducked at the same time. The crystal weapons made a pair of wide loops out, around and back again to Alcinia’s open palms.

“S**t. I haven’t got the hang of these things yet.” Alcinia frowned at Nigel as he fell to his knees and began to wail in pain. She closed the dangerous blades into birds again and secreted them away somewhere on her scantily clad person. “Father won’t be too pleased that I’ve mucked up this lad’s fingers.”

“Father?” Max asked as he scrambled to Nigel’s side.

“Yeah.” She picked up the lute and shook her head with a wistful smile. “I imagine he’ll be happy to have this in hand, though. After he went to all the trouble to get Billingsgate to play his club, he wasn’t pleased that he had to send me to fetch this evil thing.”

“My hands!” Nigel screamed. He knew his days as a bard were over when he finished bellowing back up on the rock. This, however, this seemed like too cruel a joke for even the universe to play. It was a vicious irony, and it hurt like hell to boot. “Holy gods my hands!”

“You need to shut up.” Alcinia put a finger to her lips and hushed in a long whisper before she touched Nigel’s screaming mouth. He laughed once and fell asleep. “Is he a friend?”

“Yeah, a rather dear friend.” Max tore part of his tunic and began bandaging Nigel’s ruined fingers. “So, ah, Matan’ Daar, he’s your father?”

“Of course.” She picked up a cleaver from the still twitching hand of one of the twins and handed it to Max. He felt his distant hope to someday find himself in bed with Alcinia evaporate once she confirmed that Matan’ daar was her father. That fantasy was simply not going to happen. “I’ll take this ‘dear friend’ of yours with me so we can put him back together... or something.”

“Mind if I tag along?” Max took the cleaver sheepishly. He already knew her answer.

“Yes.” She smiled as she knelt next to Nigel’s unconscious body and took the small ornament out again. “You have work to do, quite a lot of it.” She motioned to the ashen wreckage of the great war chariot the Longbridge had ridden into town on. The putrid head of the dragon was scorched but still very much intact in the middle of the smoldering pile.

“Quite a bit.” Max sighed into a contented grin as he considered all of the bits and pieces of loot that were scattered about. Not the least of which were the thirty odd forelocks he would claim the bounty on. “Um, when will we...”

“Catch up?” Alcinia turned a very sexy curl into her very perfect lips as she answered. “Your friend and I will be at the club. Meet us there when you have things sorted. And bring Bill by, Dennis is worried about him.” She slung the lute over her bare shoulder and put one hand on Nigel’s chest. She took a deep breath and tossed the ornament into the air. It fizzed and sparkled with tiny gold firebrands before the world bent in on itself and they vanished in a blast of air.

“Huh...” Max looked at the cleaver and slowly walked over to the dragon’s seared skull. As he began to dig at the forehead of the defeated serpent, the sound of great wings caught his ear.

Brock Zadora and a couple of part time riders appeared over the roof of the destroyed church on a trio of huge, slowly flapping buzzards. They took a few moments to set down among the broken ruins and enormous tangled corpses. Brock tread carefully past the dead twins and shuddered as he shook hands with Max.

“What in the holy blazes happened here?” Zadora released Max’s hand and rubbed at the stubble on his chin. He was a fairly tall man, lean and strong with a small belly that he’d collected spending many hours in the saddle.

“Oh, pretty much what you see...” Max let his words trail off as he watched the gargantuan buzzards hop about and start tearing away at the chief’s remains like it was a holiday. “Not much, just what I imagine I’ll be having nightmares about for the rest of my life.”

“You realize it has been a long day, coming all the way up here after stopping in Pickettstown.” Brock crossed his arms and nodded at the early morning light proceeding the sun in the east.

“I’ll make it up to you Brock.” Max went back to the gruesome task of removing the noostone from the dragon’s brow. “If you and your temps can help out, there is more loot here than you can shake a stick at, I’ll promise the three of you more than fair compensation.”

“I know you will.” Zadora leaned back and laughed as he took in the scope of the ruins. He was a man with a mind for treasure, and he was certain this was a jackpot. “I know you will.”

***

“No seriously, just hover over that open spot there near the tree line and I’ll drop into the water.” Max was being as frank as he could with Brock.

“Do you know where we are right now?” Zadora was beginning to think that Max had seen too much in the last week and that he may have lost his marbles. “These are the Catarian Marshes, you won’t last an hour in there.”

“Really, I know what I’m doing. Lock the booty up in the damaged parcels cages.” Max stood on the back of the great bird as Zadora guided it close to the water. “If I haven’t made it back to claim it in a week, it’s yours.”

“Whatever you want.” Crazy or not, Brock knew Max was offering him a win-win outcome. “One week. Good luck.”

“Thanks.” Max slapped Zadora on the back and plugged his nose as he dropped into the water.

He frog kicked over to the nearest mangroves and wrapped an arm around a root while catching his breath. As the buzzards flew out of sight and over the trees, he pulled himself up and slipped back into the water. He made it about one hundred yards into the collecting vegetation of the fen canopy when a Catarian boat slid out of a channel in front of him.

“You’re still alive, hero.” Salet looked down at him and raised an eyebrow. Her high cheekbones had a razor-like quality that Max hadn’t noticed before. She was a very serious looking beauty. “I’m glad my decision to spare you was worth the risk.”

“As am I.” Max grunted as he hauled himself into the boat. He noticed that Salet had a coil of silken cord in the her lap. “Is that necessary?”

“We have to keep up appearances, Max.” She leaned forward and tied him about his wrists. Being so close to him she felt a familiar tremor of... something uncomfortably nice... move through her as she crouched down and cinched the knot tightly.

“Ouch. Really, I don’t think...” Max winced at his bruised wrists. He was scraped and knocked and cut from head to toe, he was getting tired of being covered in painful, nagging wounds.

“I make the decisions in here, remember?” Salet sat back and paddled into the dense foliage. “That’s what keeps you alive among my sisters.”

“Right.” Max exhaled painfully as he worried about the answer to his next question. “Speaking of alive, is Bill...”

“Yes.” Salet wrinkled her nose at the notion of breeding. “He is still alive, and I’m guessing that Ann’ akurra has already helped him back into his man shape again.”

“Wait. She told us that she couldn’t change him back.” Max was frustrated but relieved. How could she transfigure him without this?” He moved his hip over so that he could slip the fist sized black stone from the pocket of his breeches.

“Of course she could have.” Salet smiled seeing that Max had completed his task. Men were cute, she thought, the way they believe what women will say as though it had to be true. It even worked when dragons did it.

“Right...” Max sighed at his own clownishness. “So she wasn’t ever going to eat Bill?”

“Oh no, she had every intention of eating him, she was just taking her time.” Salet clenched her jaw. Talking about the mating time continued to make her stomach squirm. “Ann’ akurra lingers over her boys... she likes to save the most... prodigious breeders for last.”

“Uck.” Max closed his eyes and hazarded a small snicker. Bill, who knew he had it in him. “I don’t think I want to know any more about that.”

“Good. Because I’m not going to speak of it again with you, hero.” Salet was relieved.

“Could you see your way to stop calling me ‘hero’?” Max gritted his teeth and smiled. “It is a bit annoying.”

“I will stop calling you hero when it stops bothering you.” She smiled broadly at him, pleased by her own cleverness.

“Right.”

***

“You know Bill...” Max pounded a fist on his sternum to keep his breakfast of fish in place as he spoke. “I have this kind of odd mixture of pride, curiosity and revulsion at thinking of you being one of the Catarian’s most prodigious breeders.”

“Thanks Max.” Bill was aware that he had become entirely satisfied with his place in the world. As they ambled up to the gate on their fine horses, he felt as though everything finally made sense. It was all small stuff compared to what he’d known, and known, and known... “To be honest I don’t recall much more than a few flashes of, well, a much better time than I think any man can have while he’s still a man.”

“That’s all I need to hear, thanks Bill.” Max reined his mount to a halt and patted the beast affectionately. “I was wondering what they had done with Billingsgate’s horses. It’s nice to see they didn’t hurt them.” They sat in front of the portcullis and waited for a sentry to poke his head out of one of the iron shutters overhead.

“Well, it wasn’t the horses’ fault they were in the cemetery, and the flowers will grow back.” Bill shrugged as the shutter opened. “Really, the Catarians are quite friendly, as long as you’re not a man. They don’t care for men. Not at all.”

“What brings you fine fellows to Wälsport?” The pimply guard held his helmet back so he didn’t lose it as he leaned out the port hole. He was threatened by the appearance of a lantern jawed wizard and a dark skinned dwarf clad in elegant (if a bit effeminate) suits of silken armor. They were money, that was for certain.

“We’ve just closed a case.” Max pulled his cape aside just enough to reveal the detective’s badge on his pannier. Bill followed suit with a smug grin. “Now let us in, guard.”

“Right away sir!” The young sentry stumbled down the steps as the gate rose in front of them.

***

“I like the way they just opened the rope for us while all those pretty people were in line for lunch.” Bill giggled as he sat down with Max at a fine cherrywood table in the VIP lounge.

“Look at the two of you.” Nigel guffawed at his friends as he ducked under the velvet curtains that closed the lounge off from the rest of the club. “And I thought I had some flash robes!”

“Nigel!” Bill popped off of the cushions and punched his friend in the shoulder. They shook hands warmly. Both of them really were dressed to kill. Nigel’s robes of spun silver whispered coyly as his arm went up and down with the handshake.

“Ahhhh...” Max looked quizzically at Nigel’s smile as he pumped Bill’s hand. “How are the fingers Nigel?” Max recalled that eight of them were still a hundred or so miles north, or being digested by a buzzard sleeping in the tower at Feudal Express.

“They’re platinum!” Nigel beamed as he pulled back his sleeves to display his new hands. Each finger was an intricate piece of genius. Fine scrolling enchantments licked like frozen flames up and down each finger and across his palms. Each hand was built around a shutter of magickal lenses. Max was flabbergasted. “Matan’ daar’s best enchanters and bardic chiurgeons decided to replace everything from the wrost down. And on top of that, all of our drinks are on the house. Mr. Daar said that the three of us will be enjoying VIP status for the duration of what he referred to as ‘our almost certainly very short lives’.”

Nigel sat with his friends as a waitress stepped under the curtain. She was gorgeous enough that both Nigel and Max were keenly inspired to say something stupid to her. Bill remained calm, no man had ever slaked his lust so thoroughly as Bill had, he cut his friends off in mid ogle and ordered for the three of them.

“We’ll have three of those delicious restorative alembics... and please make sure that each one has a hint of anise... just a hint.” He lowered his chin to her in deference of her beauty. She smiled suggestively at the knurled dwarf and stepped out with a polite bow that provided the men a proper view of her cleavage.

“When did you get so debonair?” Nigel asked with a smile that faded as the answer peeked into his mind.

“Do not ask that.” Max shook his head.

The waitress returned with Alcinia at her side. All three of the men stood up as she entered.

“Hello boys. Please take a seat.” She purred. A slightly dark smile played across her features. “I’ve had our accountant ring up the sum of your earnings and it would appear that each of you have increased your net worth quite significantly.”

“How much is significant?” Nigel asked, a touch worried by her look.

“Each of you now has twenty five thousand odd crownes to his name.” She put her hands together. “And Max, father asked me to take the liberty of paying the remaining sum of your outstanding debt with the lawyers guild as a token of his esteem.”

“Wow. I’d love to thank him in person for that, if I can-” Max began to stand up again as Alcinia motioned him down.

“Father is in the north right now.” She cast a decidedly hungry glance at Max. “He’s doing some ‘remodeling’ on a new acquisition of his.” A small crowd of figures appeared behind the curtain as Alcinia continued.

“And I’ll leave you to finish the rest of your business by yourselves.” She ducked her head amusedly. “It’s been a pleasure gents, Max.” She gave him one last sexy nod and slid back out of the VIP lounge.

The first man waiting outside the lounge stepped under the curtain and stretched to his full height in front of the table and reported his rank and title.

“Bernard Cumbertree!” He stiffened even further. “First division recruitment office representing the Wälsport Branch of the Adventurer’s Guild!” He bent suddenly and relaxed into a crouch as he smiled oafishly and shook all three of their hands.

“Um, hi.” Nigel offered quizzically. “What are you here to, ah...”

“We would like you to know that we’re all very happy over at the guild to have you on board with us!” He continued to grin at them. His heavy suit of ringed mail clinked s he turned from one man to the next. “Really, it’s an honor.”

“Um, I don’t believe we ever applied to the guild...” Max knit his brow at the jubilant officer.

“No, sir, no you haven’t, not yet.” He shook his head and continued to beam. “But I just know you’ll be great to work with!” A small throng of black cloaked figures wafted past the velvet curtain, all three men finished their drinks and the large officer made himself as small and sheepishly non threatening as possible as the dark figures entered.

“Mr. Gladivus...” Waldo Adrastos, partner with the firm of Adrastos, Yorick and Radebrechen, swept up to the table and lowered his hood. The warm luxury of the lounge went stale and frigid. “I’m happy to see that you’ve met with so much success.”

“Waldo.” Max nodded. He wished he had another drink, four actually. “I thought we were square.”

“Oh yes sir, we are.” The lawyer grinned cruelly as it was the only sort of smile he could manufacture. “However, the Families of the Victims of the Gynneth Mawr Rampage, as it has come to be known, have submitted a class action lawsuit to the court with you as the defendant.”

“What?” Max leaned towards the wraith, his anger turned his breath hot and then to steam as it bloomed in the lawyer’s face.

“I’m afraid that the families of the bereaved feel that you did not complete your task as adequately as potentially possible.” His grin turned unbearably evil and deathlike. “To that end they are suing you for the loss of property they have incurred as well as the emotional trauma they have experienced as a result of your lack of competence in saving their departed loved ones.”

“You can’t be serious.” Bill’s mouth hung open at the suggestion.

“Oh yes.” The wraith turned to Bill, setting him back into the cushions. “They are very serious.”

“Ahem, if I may, your honor.” Cumbertree cleared his throat and inched forward as he addressed the group.

“I’m not a judge... yet.” Waldo raised an eyebrow to a point. “But do go on.”

“Max and his comrades joined the Adventurer’s Guild in an ad - hoc fashion when they killed the giants and restored the contract the guild had with the town of Gynneth Mawr and it’s associated inhabitants.” He winked at Max. “Therefore any actions of a Guild member would be covered under the guild’s ‘good samaritan’ clause as proffered by our agreement with the Collections and Lawyers guilds as laid out during the management treaty-”

“Yes, yes... but tell me, Cumbertree, if that really is your name, when did these three men join the guild?” Waldo cocked his head.

“Well, I was just signing them up when you all barged in here!” Bernard unrolled three weighty looking scrolls with the signature lines marked in front of the men. “And membership provides retroactive protection against such lawsuits as long as the defendants haven’t been served with a subpoena before the time of signing.”

“Ah, now I get it.” Bill nodded along with his crestfallen friends as Bernard handed them quills.

“Hmmm. I believe I have a subpoena somewhere... Lancaster!” Waldo snapped at the wraith to his right.

Max snatched the papers out of Cumbertree’s hand and slapped his signature on the dotted line with the sort of superhuman speed that his training as a battle mage provided. Lancaster removed the bone white parchment sealed with a black spit of wax as Nigel and Bill followed suit. They realized that the lawsuit would almost certainly be leveled at them next.

“So there you are, sir!” Bernard held the three contracts up for the lawyer to sneer at.

“Yes.” Waldo extended a papery hand to Max. “I believe you will be seeing us again, Mr. Gladivus... here, you might need us one day.” He snapped and a translucent card cleft from a human scapula appeared in his hand. It was printed with the name of the firm and his personal address.

“Good day.” The lawyers put their hoods up and left the room. On their way out Waldo tipped his head to the next trio of figures outside the lounge. “Your turn... your grace.”

“Oh s**t...” Bernard stepped back and tucked away the contracts as he took a knee in supplication.

“What now...” Nigel moaned as the Vicar of Wälsport entered. He looked disgusted to be present in a place of decadence and generally pleasant surroundings. He was flanked by a pair of deadly looking friars. All three were heavily adorned with collars and sigils encrusted with gold and precious stones.

“Please stand, Guildsman.” The vicar tipped the ends of his fingers to the kneeling officer in the corner. “The church has already collected the Enobled Hand and the Divine Shield of Helios from your... trappings.”

“Right...” Max was getting very tired of the routine. Everybody, absolutely everybody had to get a piece of the action. His uncle Roderick had taught him that when he was still in short pants.

“The church thanks you for that.” The vicar almost offered a nod in gratitude. “And his grace would like you to know that a tithing in victory is also appreciated.”

“Returning the relics of the church wasn’t a sufficient sacrifice?” Max leaned his forehead on his hand in contempt and frustration.

“Good works are their own reward, Master Gladivus, every good Helion knows that.” The vicar smiled as though he was talking to a child. “Which brings me to my point.” Each friar produced a very large and ornately jeweled mace as the vicar continued his explanation.

“Son of a bitch...” Bill slipped.

“Language.” One of the friars glared at him.

“As I was saying, the families of Gynneth Mawr, now more than ever, need your help.” The vicar blinked tearfully and clasped his hands together. “Think of all the suffering they’ve endured.”

“I’m fairly certain they’re all dead.” Nigel offered under the dark stare of the friars. He was no longer easily intimidated by thugs. He knew they died like anyone else... if they happened to be decapitated.

“Well, I’m sure that even you know that indulgences aren’t free!” The vicar snapped. He reclaimed his temper and continued. “And neither is reconstruction.” He snapped his fingers and the friars moved up to the table as their maces started to flicker with a golden-white aura.

“Fine...” Max threw up his hands. He knew that no matter how the next fifteen minutes went he wouldn’t be able to outrun the church. “How much?”

“I’d say fifty thousand from the three of you would be sufficient to ensure your temporary salvation.” He smiled.

“Great.” Bill sagged in his seat.

“Excellent. I’ll have my accountants get in touch with your accountant.” The Vicar was very pleased to be on with the rest of his day. He had to prepare for tea with the king at five.

As the three men left in a cloud of superiority and incense, Cumbertree snuggled into a seat next to the three suddenly less moneyed heroes.

“Oh we’re very happy, really thank you so much for joining!” He pulled the contracts out and handed one to each man. “Now, I should get straight to explaining the dues process, and the mandatory annual contribution to the guild tontine...”

“Waitress!” Nigel called. “Another round please?”

“Make that two, please, darling!” Bill added. He looked over at Max and started to laugh. “Actually, pet, if you could would be so kind as to keep them coming?”

“This is a familiar feeling, isn’t it?” Max grinned at Bill and Nigel as Cumbertree prattled on. “To think that having a few drinks out with friends can change so much, and yet nothing at all.”

“Whatever Max, don’t be such a prat.” Nigel scolded. “We’re a damn sight better off than we were. Shut up and drink.”

“Cheers to that.” Bill raised his glass as the waitress handed one to each of the four of them.

“Cheers!”

Cynical Fictions & Absurd Realities

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

An opinion, perhaps an ethos...

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Legal hypocrisy just the way I like it, smarmy.

Friday, August 3, 2012

The Entire Work - Edited Amyrthian Heroes! Huzzah!