Shadow Chaser tcos-2 Page 8

  But Loudmouth had been unlucky—when his comrades retreated to the kitchen, he was on the other side of the hall with three crossbows trained on him.

  “When we came out after they left,” Uncle continued, “the whole wall where those bastards caught him off his guard was studded with bolts, and the floor was covered in blood.”

  “I don’t see his body,” said Eel, nodding toward the dead men lying beside the bar.

  “We didn’t see it, either.”

  “You think they took him with them? But what for?”

  “I don’t know, perhaps he’s still alive.”

  Alive? Miracles are too rare in this world to hope that things could have worked out like that.

  I had no doubt at all that Loudmouth was dead. If the attackers had killed the harmless innkeeper without the slightest qualm, they would surely have shot an experienced soldier on the spot. As for the body … who could tell what they might need it for? Yet another irretrievable loss for our little band. Good-bye, Loudmouth.

  “What did those men want?” I asked Miralissa, setting aside my thoughts on the death of one more of our comrades.

  “The Key, Harold. They took the Key.”

  Things were getting worse and worse! Fortune and her little sister Lady Luck were definitely not on our side today.

  “What key is that?” asked Deler, who, like the rest of the Wild Hearts, knew nothing about that story. Miralissa and Alistan had not thought it necessary to tell the members of the team about the elfin relic.

  “Without the Key it’s doubtful if I can even get into the heart of Hrad Spein,” I explained to the dwarf. “Basically, if we don’t have it, we might as well not go anywhere, we can just sit here and wait for the Nameless One to arrive in Ranneng. No Key, no Rainbow Horn!”

  “Shtikhs!” Deler swore in gnomish, and his frown darkened even further. “And how could they have found out about this key of yours?”

  “Who knows?” said Egrassa, taking the slim silver crown off his head and tossing it onto a table in annoyance. “Human cities are full of talkative little birds. Someone knew, someone blabbed, someone heard and took action. We’ve lost one of the most important elfin relics!”

  About fifteen hundred years earlier, when the elves and the orcs had only just finished building the upper halls of the Palaces of Bone (that was after they stopped even visiting the lower levels of the ogres), both races regarded Hrad Spein as a holy place and would not risk spilling each other’s blood in the labyrinths. But their hatred had proved too strong and war had broken out under the ground, too. The palaces had become deadly places for the Firstborn and the elves. And ever since those ancient times Hrad Spein had been a dangerous place, filled with many things that even ogres spoke about only in whispers.

  To this day no one knows who (or what) founded those Palaces of Bone so deep under the ground at a time when the race of ogres was still young.

  It was only later that the ogres transformed Hrad Spein into burial chambers (and then their bad example was followed by the orcs, elves, and men), but no one has yet worked out what the original purpose of the underground labyrinths was.

  The race of ogres occupied the lower levels and started to construct their own, but they lost their minds and their reason, becoming stupid, bloodthirsty animals. The elves and orcs took the ogres’ place, but they were smarter than their predecessors and didn’t go down into the gloomy depths of the lower level of Night. In fact, they didn’t even risk going down into the former realms of the ogres, fearing that they would awaken the ogres’ dark shamanism.

  But the blood of the two younger races drove them on to do what reason had prohibited. Blood and hate were the two edges of the sword that slashed the rip in reason’s defenses.

  The elves and the Firstborn realized just in time that they must get out of the path of the evil that had awoken in those deep underground halls, and before it could break out, the elves blocked its path with Doors on the third level, cutting off the passage from one level to another.

  The Doors were created using the magic of the dark elves’ shamans and the light elves’ magicians. In order to lock them, the elves needed a magic key, and for help in making it they turned to the dwarves, to whom they lied that they were sealing up the palaces so that the orcs could not get in. The Key had sealed the Doors forever, and there were very few bold enough to venture down into the depths of the palaces by the roundabout route, a route which, for some reason, the evil could not follow.

  After the Doors were locked, the Key had remained in Listva, the capital of the dark elves’ kingdom, for a very long time, until this past year when the House of the Black Moon had taken the Key from the House of the Black Flame and given it to Miralissa.

  She had taken the artifact to Stalkon, knowing that the party setting out for Hrad Spein would not be able to complete its mission without it. The route through the Doors on the third level was the quickest and the safest—or, rather, the least dangerous.

  “Without the Key I’d have a better chance of sticking my head in an ogre’s mouth and taking it out safely than completing my jaunt around Hrad Spein successfully. The whole business is getting more and more hopeless. Does anyone have any idea what we should do now?”

  “Wait,” Egrassa answered, mechanically running his finger round the hoop of silver lying in front of him. “Now we’re going to wait.…”

  “Wait for what? Is someone hoping that these lads will be stupid enough to give us back the Key, along with a sincere apology?”

  “What Tresh Egrassa says makes good sense, Harold. Don’t start getting agitated,” said Uncle, raising his beer mug to his bearded face.

  “I’m not getting agitated.”

  “Good, there’s no need. Honeycomb went after the thieves.”

  “Honeycomb?”

  “Who else? We couldn’t wait for you clunkheads,” the sergeant growled. “The elves weren’t here, I’m wounded. Milord Alistan is a knight, not a tracker. You were all gadding around the taverns and getting into fights. Honeycomb was the only one left.”

  “Has he been gone long?” asked Marmot.

  “Yes, about two hours.…”

  “Hallas, enough sitting around,” said Deler, making for the door. “Ell asked us to relieve him; he could still overtake the big bruiser.”

  The gnome and the dwarf went out.

  “I thought you always carried the Key with you, Lady Miralissa,” said Kli-Kli, interrupting the lingering silence.

  This time there was none of the jester’s usual snickering and tittering. Even the resolutely cheerful goblin understood the fix we were in.

  “My mistake, jester.”

  An elf admitting a mistake! This was something new. They usually accuse other people of making the mistakes.

  “No one’s to blame,” Milord Alistan reassured Miralissa. “We had assumed no one would know that we had the Key.”

  “We should have assumed differently!” said the elfess, and her eyes flashed. “I was careless and I am to blame! I didn’t even bother to erect a defense round the artifact!”

  “How could they even have heard about our arrival?” Egrassa said thoughtfully.

  The dark elf seemed to be reading my thoughts. There was only one answer to that question—they had been waiting for us, and waiting for long time.

  “Someone reported that we were here,” Alistan replied to the elf. “We were in open view as we rode through the city. There are hundreds of eyes, they could have been watching out for us.…”

  Eel strode across the room and leaned down over the bodies of the strangers. He studied the dead men’s faces for a long time and then calmly checked their pockets and their hands. Why their hands?

  “They’re soldiers, all right. No doubt about it,” the Garrakian declared.

  “We can see for ourselves that they’re soldiers, not priests of the goddess of love,” Uncle snorted. “The question is whose service these scum were in.”

  “If they had s
imply shot us, I would have assumed one of the noble houses had decided to liquidate our group because they thought we’d been hired by their rivals. Then this would have been a warning,” Alistan said after a long pause.

  Some warning! A warning is when they break your finger and promise to break your arm the next time, and after that your neck. But when they shoot you full of crossbow bolts, that’s not a warning.

  “These dead men were followers of the Nameless One,” said Eel, tossing two rings onto the table. “Look what I found on them.”

  I picked up one small circle of metal and turned it over in my hand. A ring in the form of a branch of poison ivy—the crest of the Nameless One. As worn by his servants when carrying out the will of their lord.

  “Clear enough.” I put the ring back down on the table and wiped my hands.

  When I touched that ring it was probably the first time I had ever felt revulsion for an object made of pure gold. Even if there had been an entire trunk full of the things lying there in front of me, there was no way I would have purloined them. Stalkon was right when he condemned men who serve the Nameless One to be boiled alive.

  The sorcerer’s followers are fanatics, putrid filth, vile weeds in the garden of our kingdom, and the king’s Sandmen, the ruthless gardeners, take real pleasure in pulling them up by the roots.

  A man I didn’t know came into the room and Miralissa introduced him as the late Master Pito’s nephew.

  “What a terrible disaster, Tresh Miralissa! May the gods punish the accursed murderers!” the heir wailed, wringing his hands despairingly.

  “They will, Master Quidd, you may be certain of it,” said Miralissa, patting the new owner of the inn on the shoulder to raise his spirits. “I shall make certain that the villain responsible for all this does not go unpunished.”

  “Thank you,” said Quidd, nodding gratefully to the elfess.

  “Does the guard know what has happened?”

  “No, and they won’t find out,” the innkeeper replied. “Those spongers are only good for collecting taxes and taking bribes. But when something like this happens, they’re never anywhere to be found.”

  “Then you better have the bodies removed from the hall before someone happens to look into the inn.”

  “Yes,” Quidd said with a mournful nod. “Yes indeed, I’ll see to it. I’ll go and fetch my assistants, Tresh Miralissa, we’ll take the dead men to my house and then the women can do what must be done. Prepare them for burial…,” Quidd said in the same sorrowful voice. “But with your permission, I’ll have the two enemies buried at the back of the inn, beside the cattle yard.”

  “Just as you wish, Master Quidd.”

  Uncle finished his beer and came across to us.

  “How’s the shoulder?” Arnkh asked him in a rather guilty voice.

  “It’ll heal in no time at all. Thanks to the elfess—she used her shamanism on it. In a week it’ll be as good as new.”

  “I feel sorry for Loudmouth,” Kli-Kli sighed.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry to bury him, greenface! Maybe he’s still alive,” Marmot told the jester. “The Nameless One’s men wouldn’t have hauled away a dead body, they took him alive, I can feel it in my heart.”

  Maybe they did … and maybe they didn’t.… The absence of Loudmouth’s constant nagging and grousing had left a gap in our little band.

  * * *

  The minutes crept by and the drops of time dripped onto the red-hot coals of anticipation, but none of the gods even tried to make them fall faster, to turn the drops into rain and quench the heat of the fire.

  Quidd came back with his assistants, loaded the bodies onto stretchers, and carried them out of the inn.

  Hallas looked in twice. The first time he reported that all was in order and the second time he took two mugs of beer. When Uncle asked what Deler and he were going to do with booze on watch, the guileless dwarf replied laconically: “Drink it.” The sergeant frowned, but decided not to argue.

  Meanwhile Alistan ran a whetstone along the edge of his sword with an imperturbability that persons of the royal blood might have envied. Apparently he wanted to make it the sharpest sword in the universe.

  The count’s example proved infectious. Eel took out one of his two blades and set to work. In my opinion, sharpening a Garrakian sword is an unnecessary waste of time. The narrow, elegant “brother” can slice through elfin drokr without the slightest effort, never mind plain ordinary silk.

  I asked Uncle where my beloved crossbow and knife were. The sergeant jabbed one finger toward the farthest table, where all our weapons were heaped up.

  What’s to be done if I don’t know how to use those yard-long lumps of metal they call swords, poleaxes, and all the rest? A crossbow, now, that’s a different matter altogether—with my miniature friend I could easily hit the target at seventy paces. In any case, the art of using all those sharp things for stabbing and slicing is no business for a decent thief. Where would I go waving a sword about, I ask you? In a fight with the guards? Much better to run for it than wait for some beer-soaked guard to stick a piece of metal in your belly. I wasn’t made for fencing and dueling, although thanks to For and his “secret battles” I have a pretty good understanding of all that.

  Marmot was stuffing Invincible with yet another portion of grub—it looked as if the warrior was trying to fatten the little beast up. Arnkh, Uncle, and Egrassa had started playing dice to pass the time, and the elf had already won six games.

  Kli-Kli was whispering to the elfin princess with a perfectly serious expression on his face. When I tried to go over to them, he gave me a rather unwelcoming glance, so I left them in peace. So did the goblin and the elfess have secrets of their own now?

  Lamplighter was playing a quiet, sad melody on his reed pipe, and I was the only one left with nothing to keep me busy, so I decided to do something useful. I took the maps of Hrad Spein out of my bag and studied them until Ell walked in.

  Miralissa raised one eyebrow inquiringly, but he only shook his head.

  “I didn’t find it.”

  “No trace of the men?” asked Alistan, looking up from his sword.

  “On the contrary. I followed the men who stole the Key right across the city and found them, but they were already dead.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Absolutely dead, all of them. Stuck full of arrows. If those men were carrying the artifact, someone took it from them. Six bodies in a dark alley. No Key, no Honeycomb, and absolutely no tracks. As if someone had swept them away with a broom. I looked, but it was useless.…”

  The men who attacked us had fallen into an ambush themselves? So who had finished them off—their own side? Or had a third party joined in? But if so, who?

  “I hope nothing bad has happened to Honeycomb and he has better luck than our Ell,” Uncle muttered querulously.

  “Mumr, Marmot,” Milord Rat said in a quiet voice, “relieve Hallas and Deler.”

  Lamplighter put down his reed pipe and went to carry out Alistan’s order.

  The gnome and the dwarf burst into the inn, occupied the bar, and set about annihilating the strategic supplies of beer while they recalled their friend Loudmouth, may he dwell in the light, with a few kind words.

  Everyone else went back to their own pastimes, casting occasional worried glances at the door.

  * * *

  I went back to studying my papers. But the cursed labyrinths of the Palaces of Bone absolutely refused to stay fixed in my memory, and I barely managed to make myself remember the route through the first level to the steps that led to the second. Eventually, when it was already after midnight and our patience was all but exhausted, Honeycomb showed up. Without saying a word he took a mug full of dark heavy beer out of Deler’s hand and drained it in a single swallow.

  “I found them,” the young giant laughed, wiping his mustache with the back of his hand. “They’re in a house in the southern district of Ranneng.”

  “The southern district
?” Miralissa said with a frown. “There’s nothing there but the mansions of the higher nobility!”

  “That’s right … Hallas, another beer.”

  Honeycomb handed his mug to the gnome, who filled it without a murmur.

  “Did you find out anything about Loudmouth?”

  “Not a thing. He disappeared into thin air,” said Honeycomb, taking another swig of his beer.

  “So what happened? Ell wasn’t able to find you.”

  “No?” said Honeycomb, glancing at the elf.

  “I found nothing but bodies.…”

  “Ah yes! When I left the inn, I was about ten minutes behind our killers. And there were guards dashing around all over the Upper City, so I had to keep my head down. Anyway, I was a bit late reaching the scene of the fight. When I got there, there was nothing but dead bodies and a dozen lads with bows walking out of the dark alley. I had to make the best of it, so I followed them.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  “No…,” Honeycomb said after thinking for a moment. “But later, when the killers met another man, he said that now the Master might be pleased with them.”

  “The Master?” Miralissa asked in alarm, casting a warning glance in my direction.

  “That’s what they said.” Honeycomb shrugged and took a swig from his mug. “I had to follow them for quite a long time, and then hang about for even longer in a little hidey-hole while they waited for the man. They gave him the item that was stolen from you, Tresh Miralissa, took their money, sang the praises of the Master, and went on their way.”

  “And what about the man?”

  “He went off in the opposite direction, so I had to choose who to follow. I decided the stolen item was more important and followed the man. A cunning pest, I tell you; I almost lost him.”

  “Did he notice you?” Miralissa asked anxiously.

  “Oh no … He couldn’t have.”

  “Why didn’t you finish him off, if he had the Key?” the gnome asked in a disappointed voice.