The Iron Ring

by Auston Habershaw

  Another sling-­stone caught Jaevis in the hand, sending his crossbow skittering onto the deck and under the horses’ hooves. The bounty hunter swore and fell to his knees in an attempt to recover it.

  Tyvian saw his window of opportunity. Throwing himself on his back at Alafarr’s feet, he kicked the Defender in the stomach with both legs. The force was enough for Alafarr to stumble backward and fall overboard, though she managed to catch the rope-­railing that ran along the gunwales before vanishing completely into the river.

  Tyvian stood up just as Jaevis got his crossbow back. The bounty hunter lost no time in pointing it directly at him and firing, but a sudden buck of a horse fouled his aim and the bolt slammed into the floor of the barge with a loud crack.

  Hool let loose again with the sling, but this time Jaevis dove clear and the projectile put a bloody hole in the rump of Kuvyos, who screamed in pain and tore loose from her bonds. Jaevis flailed for the animal’s reins, yelling, “Kuvyos, eirhus!”

  Tyvian dropped to the floor by Artus, whose eyes were wide with a mix of terror and fascination. “Artus! Pull the quarrel—­cut me loose!”

  Artus scooted next to the smuggler. “No, you cut me loose!”

  Tyvian glanced over his shoulder at Jaevis, who was still struggling with his horse. From the corner of his eye he could see a red-­faced Myreon Alafarr slowly climbing back aboard. “There is no time to argue!”

  “So don’t! Cut me loose!”

  “Dammit, child! Between the two of us, who do you think has a better chance of outfighting an angry bounty hunter?” Tyvian snapped.

  Artus scowled, and then turned around to work the quarrel free with his bound hands. It came loose with a popping noise, and it was accompanied by the blub-­blub of river water that began to seep through the hole in the bottom of the barge. It was a slow leak, so Tyvian was unconcerned—­they would either both be dead or free long before the barge actually sank.

  Alafarr was halfway into the boat, lips blue and chattering from the water. “Reldamar, you son of a bi—­”

  Tyvian kicked her in the face, putting her back over the side, but both of the mage’s hands still clenched the rope railing.

  Tyvian’s own hands were cut free and he sprung up just as Jaevis had subdued Kuvyos. The bounty hunter glared at the smuggler with his coal-­black eyes and drew a slender throwing knife. His arm cocked back to throw and, for the second time, a sling-­stone struck him, this time in the side. It caused Jaevis to buckle over in pain, and bought Tyvian another several seconds. “I’m going to have to buy that gnoll dinner sometime,” he muttered to himself, taking the quarrel from Artus and sawing his ankle-­bonds loose enough to shake them off.

  “What about me?” Artus asked as Tyvian rifled through Alafarr’s saddlebags.

  Tyvian pointed at the Mage Defender, who was, again, trying to climb in the boat. “Keep kicking her over the side!”

  “But she’s a lady!”

  “DO IT!”

  Jaevis, keeping low, moved to the other side of the barge, where he would be shielded from sling-­stones by the two horses. He drew a pair of short curved blades and stalked toward Tyvian. In another second or two, Tyvian knew he’d be in easy lunging distance, and then, well, then his throat was as good as cut.

  He upended the saddlebags, sending scrolls, a variety of potions, a change purse, and a heap of odds and ends skittering across the wet deck. Scanning the pile, he noticed several of his own items—­the very ones he had left on the spirit engine. One, in particular, caught his eye; it was a simple hand-­sized leather-­wrapped cylinder, shaped to fit in his palm perfectly and capped with a crystal sphere of excellent clarity. It was called a “trigger”—­a small enchanted object that conjured something out of mageglass.

  Tyvian snatched it up and leapt back just as Jaevis’s first cuts passed through where his face had been. Smoothly dropping into en garde position, Tyvian extended his right hand with the crystal end of the handle pointing at Jaevis. The bounty hunter looked at him suspiciously. “What is that?” he grunted.

  Tyvian grinned. “My sword.” He then spoke, in perfect Akrallian, “Bonne chance!”

  A rapier of pure, translucent mageglass formed around Tyvian’s hand, complete with cross guard, basket-­hilt, and crystalline pommel. True to its name, it had always brought him luck. Tyvian executed a brief salute and faced Jaevis across three paces of deck.

  His back to the water, Tyvian elected to advance, thrusting at the bounty hunter with some exploratory attacks. Rather than parry, Jaevis retreated, his twinned blades weaving a sinuous dance in front of him. Tyvian had heard of the style—­Salasi, it was called. It specialized in feinting attacks and soft defensive moves, but that was about all he knew. Rather than risk trouble, Tyvian decided to use Maldraith to counter, despite the style’s rather boring focus on technical footwork and a balanced offense.

  Jaevis circled left, placing each foot carefully among the coiled lines and discarded equipment strewn across the barge’s deck. Tyvian pivoted to match, knowing that the bounty hunter was trying to get under the rapier’s longer reach with his shorter blades. Tyvian kept up the pressure, thrusting and slashing in quick, controlled bursts, but didn’t lunge or advance. At the moment it was he at the center of the barge and Jaevis who was circling along the outer edge, and he had no interest in giving up that advantage. His simple attacks, though, found no target behind Jaevis’s defense. Tyvian knew he would either have to execute a much more forceful attack or expect their duel to last until the barge sank to the bottom.

  He flashed a quick cut at Jaevis’s face, but the bounty hunter ducked the attack and countered with a flurry of fast slashes that forced Tyvian to retreat two paces, sparks flying from Chance’s blade as he parried. “My, my, my,” Tyvian scolded, “you’ll dull those little cleavers fighting like that against mageglass.”

  Jaevis whirled in for another barrage, but this time Tyvian sidestepped, parrying each blow again. “No, no! You’ve got it all wrong, Hacklar—­you’re really not very good at this, are you?”

  Jaevis’s black eyes bored into Tyvian. “Silence.”

  Tyvian smiled. Vulnerable to taunts, are we? Well, now . . . “Orders?” he chuckled. “You must be confusing me with your horse.”

  This barb earned Tyvian a lunge from the bounty hunter, who brought both his blades upward in an arc that would have surely gutted the smuggler from groin to breast if he hadn’t retreated in the nick of time. Tyvian didn’t have to look down to know the attack had been close enough to cut open the front of his fur vest. There was no doubt about it—­Jaevis was good. Too good to keep dueling with, certainly. With more room and more time, well, Tyvian was fairly confident Jaevis’s temper would prove too much of a disadvantage. Stuck on a sinking barge on a freezing river wasn’t the ideal circumstance.

  Jaevis attacked again, driving Tyvian back with a flurry of slashes and short thrusts. Tyvian found himself in ankle-­deep water so cold he gasped—­he had been driven to the end of the barge, which was sinking. Jaevis stood between him and escape, and the Trell boxed him in on the other three sides. The bounty hunter, his blades spread wide, nodded solemnly to Tyvian. “I kill you now.”

  Tyvian looked at Jaevis, arms out to the sides, and knew the attack that was to come. Jaevis would trap Chance with both weapons and run under Tyvian’s guard. In close, the bounty hunter’s shorter weapons would make short work of him, and Tyvian had no knife and nowhere to retreat in order to save himself. In terms of fencing, the only technical trick that might save him would be a double disengage from both blades, evading their attempts to bind Chance. One disengage against a talented opponent was hard enough to manage, but two against Jaevis would be impossible. Tyvian could keep his blade free from one of them, but not both, and any way he looked at it the end result was him getting gutted and tossed into the river.

  So, Tyvian did the only thin
g he could think of: just as Jaevis began his charge, Tyvian threw Chance into the bounty hunter’s exposed stomach with a flick of his wrist. While an ordinary rapier thrown with such little force would have simply bounced off the leather jerkin Jaevis wore, mageglass was different. Unyielding, nearly weightless, and razor sharp, Tyvian’s flick was all it took to cut through the bounty hunter’s crude armor like simple linen. Chance didn’t sink deeply into Jaevis, but enough to cause him to stop short in shock and pain.

  Tyvian took a half step forward and kicked Chance in the pommel, driving it hilt-­deep through Jaevis and pushing the blade out his back. The bounty hunter, face frozen in a mask of agony, fell to his knees, dropping his weapons. Tyvian grabbed a fistful of the Illini’s tangled hair and threw him onto the sinking bow of the barge. Jaevis tried to get up, but Tyvian put a foot on his neck and ripped Chance from his belly. The bounty hunter’s eyes rolled back in his head.

  Noting the religious talismans on Jaevis’s person, Tyvian hissed, “Give my regards to Hann,” and kicked him overboard.

  Jaevis tumbled into the frozen water and sank beneath the currents of the Trell.

  “Reldamar!” Artus shouted.

  Tyvian spun to see Artus in a halfhearted wrestling match between his still-­bound self and a mostly frozen Myreon Alafarr. Chance in hand, Tyvian approached the pair, ready to run Alafarr through and have done with it. As the thought occurred to him, though, the iron ring gave his finger such a wrenching squeeze that he had to drop his sword. “Dammit!” he swore, clutching his wrist.

  Alafarr had a hand on Artus’s face and was halfway in the barge, her now-­blue lips drawn into a grimace of determination. Artus bit her in the fingers, but they were clearly too numb to feel it. With his mouth full of the Defender’s digits, Artus yelled a muffled, “Hurry up!”

  Tyvian frowned at the ring, which pulsed quietly on his hand in warning, and then sighed. “Very well, have it your way.”

  Grabbing Alafarr by the hood of her sodden robes, Tyvian heaved the Mage Defender into the barge. Recovering Chance, he placed it at Alafarr’s throat. “Congratulations.”

  Alafarr’s teeth chattered as she spoke, and she wrapped her arms around her shoulders in a pathetic attempt to get warm. “F-­F-­For wh-­what?”

  Tyvian smiled. “In a fit of uncharacteristic mercy, I have decided to take you prisoner. This is your lucky day.” He looked at Artus, who was trying to manipulate one of Jaevis’s short blades to cut his bonds. “Artus, stop wasting time and get those silly ropes off. You need to pole us to shore before we sink.”

  Alafarr, like all good Defenders, had a pair of casterlocks in with her things. Designed as a way to both restrain wizards and to keep them from casting spells, they were a number of compartments in a single iron cylinder, arranged to immobilize every finger on both hands. The result was that a person in casterlocks looked an awful lot like they had their hands stuffed into a kind of cast-­iron muff. Not being a wizard himself, Tyvian had never worn a pair, but he understood them to be quite uncomfortable. The look on Alafarr’s face after he had clamped them over her hands was enough to confirm that rumor.

  Beyond the casterlocks, Alafarr and Jaevis’s saddlebags contained a variety of other useful goods. Besides some hearthcider, some more hearthstones, and a variety of Tyvian’s things, there was a sizable amount of silver, the seekwand, and a copy of Marcom’s Abridged Compendium of Dweomeric Sorcery. The amount of money these items could fetch at market would more than finance their expenses to Freegate, and the silver was enough to make one innkeeper look the other way when they brought a gnoll into his riverside establishment.

  They were in a large room on the first floor of said inn, complete with its own fireplace and an array of comfortable if crudely upholstered furniture. Tyvian sighed and put his feet up before the fire. He had done away with his dirty leathers in exchange for various articles of his clothing Alafarr had been dragging around. They included a fine shirt of lamb’s wool, heavy green breeches, and a pair of suede, knee-­high riding boots. When ­coupled with the beaver-­pelt cloak he had purchased from a wandering merchant, he looked almost respectable. “If these are the rewards for capturing Defenders, I will make a point to do so more often.”

  Artus was in the process of devouring a loaf of bread, and spoke with his mouth full to Alafarr. “Why’d you have his stuff?”

  The Mage Defender was staring at the fire, casterlocked hands hanging between her knees. Her teeth still chattered as she spoke. “None of your business.”

  “Now Alafarr, no reason to be morose,” Tyvian scolded. “The reason, Artus, is that personal items are how a seekwand works. You attune the wand to the item that belonged to the person in question, and then it leads you to that person, or alternately, you attune it to the owner and it leads you to their things. The only thing I’m surprised at is the sheer amount of my things Alafarr had with her. Really, Myreon, I appreciate your delivering them, but I can’t imagine doing so was strictly practical.”

  Alafarr sighed deeply. “The Law of Possession was against me. I needed more things to maintain the link, given your head start. It was already so weak by the time we found you that the wand could barely tell you apart from the other things you owned.”

  Artus blinked. “Law of Possession?”

  “It is one of the basic sorcerous axioms upon which a great many auguries are founded, Artus,” Tyvian said, leaning back in the chair. “Essentially, the act of ownership imparts a small amount of yourself into the item you own. The trouble is that it isn’t permanent. If I own a hat, for instance, and I give it to you, it will still be ‘mine’ for a while, but eventually it will lose all trace of me and be replaced by you. Since my things were in Alafarr’s possession for a number of days, they were beginning to take on her signature, weakening the seekwand’s bond. I just didn’t realize taking more of one’s things delayed that process. It makes sense, I suppose, but I hadn’t considered it.” He shrugged. “Worked out well for me, at any rate.”

  From the shadowy back corner of the room, Hool rumbled from where she had curled up on the floor. “No more magic talk!”

  Alafarr shot the gnoll a withering glare. “Your taste in company is eroding, Reldamar. You always associated with scum, but at least it was human scum.”

  Hool’s lip curled up, revealing a row of inch-­long teeth.

  “You are hardly one to criticize another’s company, Myreon. The late Hacklar Jaevis’s hygiene was in no way superior to Hool’s, here. Furthermore, the man had the personality of a tree stump and would have only been interesting company if, like a tree stump, he were to have birds nesting on his person.”

  Alafarr looked at Tyvian’s grinning face with a somber frown, and then looked back at the fire again. “What are you going to do with me?”

  Artus stuffed the last of the crust down his throat and sat up straighter. “Yeah! What do we do when the other Defenders come looking for her?”

  Tyvian cocked an eyebrow. “Other Defenders?” He nodded to Alafarr. “Should you tell him, or shall I?”

  Alafarr shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Smiling, Tyvian leaned forward. “Let me jog your memory, then—­there are no other Defenders.”

  Hool’s ears stood up. “You cannot know that. They could be setting a trap.”

  Alafarr said nothing, but only kept looking at the fire.

  Tyvian kept at her. “Oh no—­I know there are no others coming, because I know you, Alafarr, and I know the Defenders. You’ve been chasing me for some years now, and I’ve never known you to willingly traipse about the countryside with naught but a dirty Illini bounty hunter. When you raided my safe house in Akral, you had twenty men. When you attempted to abduct me in Ihyn, you had half the city watch with you. On the spirit engine from Galaspin you brought at least five plus yourself. No, if you were out here with just Jaevis, that te
lls me you’ve been cut off. You’re Magus Errant.”

  Alafarr’s eyes darted to Tyvian and then went back to the fire. “I’ll be missed. They’ll send somebody.”

  Grinning, Tyvian shook his head slowly from side to side. “No, they won’t. They don’t know you are missing, you see. Magi Errant, as you know, are quite autonomous. They aren’t required to report back more than once a fortnight—­even longer if they don’t have a sending stone, like you don’t. Now, let’s see—­we captured you yesterday morning, so if my estimates of how long you’ve been after us are correct, we have at least five days before anyone will notice your absence.”

  Alafarr’s face sank into a scowl. “By then we’ll be in Freegate.”

  Tyvian nodded. “And beyond your order’s jurisdiction.”

  “Unless we pay the proper bribes.”

  “Bribes? My dear Myreon, who is going to pay that kind of money for little old me? Saldor has already sunk wagonloads of marks into your little operations. The fact that you were reduced to hiring Jaevis is proof that they’ve given up any kind of concentrated efforts to apprehend me—­they can’t afford it anymore.”

  Alafarr managed a fake-­looking smile. “Are you an accountant now?”

  “Far be it from me to say I’m not worth it. I happen to think I am a very dangerous man who needs capturing. I must admit, though, that while I might be Lord of Sorcerous Smugglers, I’m not very high on the list of general priorities for the Defenders or the Arcanostrum of Saldor, given the political climate. The Mad Prince Sahand still rules Dellor in the north, the Kalsaari Empire is growing more threatening along the Illini and Rhondian borders, and then there’s the League—­”

  “The League doesn’t exist!” Alafarr snapped.

  “Yes it does, and don’t change the subject,” Tyvian snapped back. “My point is that you, Myreon Alafarr, are the last Defender on my case. There will be no reinforcements, because neither I nor you rate them. Maybe next year they’ll wiggle out a little piece of the budget to look for you, but not until then.”