"Unfortunately," said the one with the bow, now moving his right hand to lace its fingertips on either side of the arrow's nock and drawing the string slowly back, "we have only enough for ourselves. Sheshakk, here,"—his head inclined to indicate the huge figure on his left—"is blessed with a healthy appetite."
Krunzle could not help letting his eyes go to the half-orc, who now opened his lips to reveal teeth like tombstones. The thief had an inkling of what Sheshakk would do with his body, once the others had removed anything of value. At the same time, the traveler's right hand had gone behind his back, where the short sword still hung, clear of his knees. The weapon seemed to press itself into his palm—no, Krunzle thought, there was no seeming about it: the smooth wood of the grip fitted itself exactly to his hand. He felt a tremor pass from the sword to his arm, as if he had laid his hand upon the neck of a warhorse just as it heard the horns blow the charge.
Before he could think another thought, the sword was in his hand, and his arm was out in front of him. Though he was famished and sleep-bereft—and more than a little worried about the outcome of the next few moments—the weapon's point did not quaver.
The Osirian made a tsking sound, drew back his arrow, and let fly. They were so close that Krunzle would have taken a bet that he could spit and hit the man's shoes. There was no time to duck; there was barely enough time to flinch. But even as the thief was helplessly twisting his head away from the missile's flight, the sword twitched in his hand. Krunzle saw a blur of motion, followed it to his right, and saw that the black flights of the arrow were now half-embedded in the Ulfen swordster's throat.
The man's mouth opened, but he had neither air enough nor time for a last word. His knees bent, and he fell to them, the blood-smeared arrow sticking out of the back of his neck. Then he toppled face-forward, the long-bladed sword beating him to the ground with a metallic clatter.
The Osirian's eyes had gone wide, but already his features were settling back into what was probably a life-long skepticism. He dropped the bow and drew a curved dagger from the back of his belt, at the same time saying, "Sheshakk."
He needed to say no more. The half-orc was already lifting his dark cudgel, the bludgeon coming up in a two-handed grip and with surprising speed. Krunzle's instinct was to dodge back, but his boots had another plan. He found himself leaving the ground in a prodigious leap—he hadn't even bent his knees—that took him toward his monstrous assailant.
He narrowly missed coming within the arc of the descending cudgel, then he was somersaulting over Sheshakk's boulder-sized head. The sword exerted some arcane leverage on him in midair, so that his arm swung down and the blade passed cleanly through the short, muscle-corded neck. The half-orc's head went backward while the momentum of the cudgel's swing carried the body forward, so that the decapitated corpse and its missing part were separated by several feet—a situation that almost guaranteed the half-orc was rendered harmless.
Krunzle landed on his feet beside the Osirian. The sword flicked out, brushed aside the curved dagger even as the bandit tried to bring it up in a belly-opening slice, then spitted the man. The point passed through the Osirian's breastbone as if it were made of cheese, and burst through his spine in a spray of blood.
The dark eyes stared into Krunzle's with mild resentment, as if the thief had pulled some cheap trick, then they gazed at nothing. The sword withdrew itself from the dead man, then pulled Krunzle's arm down so that it could wipe itself clean on the Osirian's cotton shirt, and finally guided him to slide its blade back into its scabbard.
The thief recovered his equanimity with the speed for which he was renowned among those few who could claim more than a passing acquaintance. He bent over the Osirian's corpse, rummaged within the bloody shirt, and felt his hand touch a drawstring purse. Something within the soft leather clinked, but as Krunzle reached to seize it he was yanked away. The buskins were striding once more along the road.
"Wait!" he cried, but the pace only speeded up. "They might have had something to eat! I may have to outwit this Berbackian fellow. I will be of no use if I am faint from hunger!" The boots took two more steps, then slowed. Krunzle pressed his advantage. "The Osirian had money. What if I have to pay for information? Or take passage upriver? If you make me swim all the way to Highhelm, I will arrive in no state of usefulness."
The buskins stopped. Krunzle turned, and now his boots behaved liked ordinary footwear. Something spoke in his head—no, he did not hear an actual voice, but experienced a diffuse sense of communication having been effected: he could return to the site of the ambush and forage for anything that would contribute to the mission.
"Good," he said, and started back toward the three corpses. He was aware that his legs shook and trembled, and wondered if it were a consequence of shock, or simple fatigue. Perhaps both.
Then he posed another internal question: Who spoke without speaking in my mind? Was it you, Chirk? A moment later, he knew that it was so. The buskins and the sword, have they their own voices? Again, a moment passed, and he knew that the bronze snake was to be his only interlocutor. I will do my utmost to make ours a happy partnership, he thought. An instant later the knowledge came to him that Chirk could hear more than his surface thoughts. Krunzle swore within the privacy of his mind and received in reply a constriction of his breathing. You control my actions, he returned. Allow me at least my feelings.
For a moment, he felt that judgment was suspended. Then the snake eased its grip.
Good, he thought.
The span of their odd conversation had brought him back to the site of the ambush. He went first to the dead Osirian and the pouch, fished it out and emptied its contents into his palm: one small gold coin, worn almost faceless, a few rounds of silver from various nations' mints, and the rest in copper.
He went next to the Ulfen, and found a goat-hide wallet on a string around his neck, the outside of the purse still covered in the animal's parti-colored hair. Inside he found coins of silver and base metal, but no gold. Under his beard, however, the swordsman had worn a broad leather collar in the front of which was set a heavy silver amulet of barbaric design—probably marking the dead man as a devotee of one of the rage-loving war gods to which the northmen made blood sacrifice.
Sheshakk had worn nothing but a pair of stinking leather leggings which, when Krunzle looked more closely, might have been fashioned from tanned human skin. He saw neither purse nor pockets, but did spot a lump where something had been roughly sewn into the waist. He went and got the Osirian's dagger, relieving the corpse of the weapon's sheath for good measure, and came back to the headless half-orc's body. When he applied the dagger's finely honed edge to the protrusion, the leather split and out popped a rough nugget of pure gold, the size of the top joint of the thief's thumb.
"Thank you, Sheshakk," he said, and was rewarded with a curl of the lip from the half-orc's head, still oozing blood a small distance away. Krunzle stepped carefully around it and went into the woods where he soon found the trio's rough camp: a lean-to for the two men, and a pile of bracken for the semi-human; some knuckle bones marked for gambling; and a woven basket with a tight-fitted lid that proved to contain some half-stale bread and dried meat. There was also a keg that held a pint of musty ale.
From farther back among the trees came a fouler, stronger smell. Krunzle went to take a look and found a dead man sprawled on his back, his head driven down into his shoulders and the top of his skull smashed to jelly. His leather jerkin had been ripped from hem to neck, and his exposed belly was torn open. It was difficult to see through the cloud of flies, but the thief thought the liver and heart were missing.
It was not unheard of for half-orcs to eat human flesh. If he had not had the sword and boots, Krunzle thought, he would have joined Sheshakk's larder. On the other hand, if he had not been snared by Eponion, he would not have fallen into the bandits' ambush in the first place. He decided to call it a draw and went back to the camp, collared the bread, jerky, and ale, and
sat down to eat.
When he rose a few minutes later, his legs no longer felt like overboiled vegetables. He poked about the camp, saw nothing more to command his attention, and relieved himself in the bushes. Then he went to the river to wash his hands and came back to scoop up the basket with what remained of the provender. The purse, filled with coins and the nugget, was already tucked in his shirt. But when he reached for the dagger in its sheath, he felt a warning tingle at his neck.
It is a valuable weapon, he thought. I could sell it in the first town we come to. A moment passed, and then he knew that his rationale was not accepted. He would have no other weapon than the one the Tian spellslinger had given him.
Still, it was a good sword. He would not have survived the encounter with the bandits without it. The thief saw no profit in grumbling, but he did so anyway, on general principle. Heedless, the snake told the buskins to come back to life. Moments later they were carrying him, with increasing stride and speed, once more onto the river road and onward.
Chapter Three
Room Thirteen
He saw no other traffic on the road that morning, though he did pass a flotilla of barges moving upriver, poled slowly against the current by hard-muscled crewmen. A company of Taldan archers stood with their bows strung and in armor, half of them in the prow and half at the stern. They watched Krunzle from the moment he came into their sight until the moment he was out of view. He knew he must make a comical sight, leaping along in twenty-foot bounds, but not one of the archers showed a smile.
Not a land for the light-hearted, he thought. He had seen no villages or hamlets since he had come back to consciousness. Here and there, set well back from the river, had been fortified farms, the buildings tightly grouped, showing the outer world no windows wider than an arrow slit, and with high walls of upright, pointed timbers closing the gaps. Before the gate of one of these thorps the farmer and his retainers had erected a gibbet from which a crow-pecked corpse hung by its ankles. A hand-lettered sign was tied by a rope to the body's middle. Krunzle could not read it as he flashed by on the other side of the river, but he did not doubt that it would say Thus to all reivers in the local script.
Here and there, he came to places at which streams ran down from the hills to join the river. No bridges had been built—probably the Kalistocrats of Kerse saw no profit in doing so—but where the water was too deep or fast to ford, flat-topped boulders had been strung across to make stepping stones.
As he flew past a couple of these confluences, Krunzle saw on the shore the remains of sluice boxes and bucket chains where gold-hunters had shoveled stream-bed gravel onto screen-bottomed boxes while their workmates hauled water to flush grains of gold out of the detritus and down through the mesh to where the iron pan waited below. When the local gold was all taken, the miners would move upriver to the next place where dust—and perhaps even a nugget—pooled in the stream's sediments. They took their pans, leather buckets, and close-woven screens, and left the boxes to rot on the stream banks.
Sluice-mining was an effective means to quick riches, the traveler knew, if you happened upon a deposit of slush-sand and gravel that had been accumulating washed-down gold since the gods first made the world. Otherwise, it was just another way to break your back and your spirits. The thief preferred to let others find the riches, consolidate them neatly, then look the other way while Krunzle the Quick scooped them into his pouch.
Thus he would not have been tempted to poke about in the disused mining camps he saw on the banks of the inrushing streams, even if his boots were not carrying him ever onward. And thus he was more than a little surprised when, having leapt from stone to stone across one of these tributaries, his buskins did not carry him farther along the river road; instead, they turned west to follow a smaller trail that ran along the new watercourse and into the woods.
He formed words in his mind: Chirk, where are we going? Soon the knowledge came, as if it had always been his, that Berbackian and the seduced Gyllana were known to have taken passage on a barge to this spot; they had disembarked and mounted the horses they had brought with them, then followed the stream, whose name was the Piddoch, toward the hills western.
Not to Highhelm then? Krunzle asked. The answer he received was vague. He saw a mental image of the Tian wizard crouching over a bowl of heavy oil, peering at its surface through a lens held over one eye by a network of straps fitted over his hairless head. Again and again, he stirred the oil with a rod of gray metal, then examined the result through the eyepiece. The wizard's mouth frowned in a perfect bow.
He lost them, Krunzle thought. They had some means to cover their tracks against his scrying. Chirk let him know that Eponion, like any well-set-up merchant, had the means to keep his movements out of the sight of competitors—knowledge being so often the difference between a handsome profit or a devastating loss. Gyllana, it seemed, had appropriated whatever magical apparatus her father used to defeat scryers; the wizard, being familiar with the object in question, could obtain some partial success in piercing its barrier—but only enough to lead the pursuit to a certain point along the elopers' path. That point lay not far ahead; after they got there, it would be up to Krunzle to use his abilities to pick up the trail and follow it.
What else did she appropriate? he asked the snake. A spell to blast any pursuer into scintillating fragments? An invocation to summon up some infernal creature, all tooth and talon, to carry me down to Hell, rip me three new orifices, then spend eternity finding inventive ways to plug them?
Almost, there came an answer, but the thought died in Krunzle's mind even as it was forming. He suspected that Chirk had been about to reveal something, then had decided against it. Instead came an assurance that nothing Gyllana carried would do the thief harm. Berbackian, on the other hand, could be a problem.
You had better tell me about him.
A picture formed inside his head: a tall, broad-shouldered Blackjacket, with dark, curly hair and blue eyes, the latter showing intelligence and a questing spirit. The smile on the man's mouth was one of ironic amusement, with an underlying hint of cruelty. To Krunzle, he looked the kind who would spot the course, clearly and early, that led to his own best advantage; and, to secure his ends, he would show no hesitation in doing whatever was required.
A potentially formidable opponent, the thief thought, and was glad he had the ensorcelled weapon. That led to another thought: The spell that empowers the sword, has it limits? Will it wear off?
He was again told that he need not worry. It was not an entirely satisfactory answer, but continuing to question brought him no other—and when Chirk wearied of it, Krunzle suddenly found it hard to breathe. All right, then, what about the girl?
A moment later, he saw her in his mind's eye: a slimmer, shorter—though not that much more feminine—version of her merchant father. She was pretty enough, if you didn't mind an underlying sullen cast to her expression, and definitely female enough, especially if you liked them on the plump side.
Krunzle did not expect to like her under any circumstances, nor did he expect her to like him. He was, after all, intent on bringing her back to her father's house, a prospect she could not be expected to relish. He might have to drug her, bind her, certainly keep close tabs on her until they got back to Kerse. She would, doubtless, resent him. He was sure he would be able to endure the burden of her opprobrium.
The land into which he was moving was a series of wooded terraces between ridges that climbed toward the hills that he could no longer see through the dense woods. The flat land on some of the terraces was marshy, the stream all but lost in a morass of tussocks and sodden peat. Here someone had laid a corduroy road of timbers staked into the wet ground. At one point, as he tripped lightly over the serried logs, he saw up ahead what looked to be a mound of vegetation stir itself and move slowly toward the roadway. But the boots had him speeding by long before the swamp creature could organize its slow vegetative processes to catch him. Soon after, the trail beg
an to climb again, the stream tumbling along beside him.
He could only vaguely position himself. He was moving roughly west. The Profit's Flow was behind him. Kerse was somewhere off to the northeast, and the town of Macridi—where the Great Goldpan River joined with Profit's Flow—was probably southeast through the deep forest. What was ahead was a mystery; even Chirk had no image to show him.
At noon, Chirk acceded to a request to stop so that he could relieve himself again. The thief sat beside the Piddoch and chewed the last of the bandits' dried meat. The bread was hard, but softened when he soaked it in water. The snake had not let him bring the ale keg, but it did allow him to pick a few handfuls of tart beebleberries that grew along the bank.
Then Krunzle was bounding through the woods once more, the hills rising more steeply now. Some hours later, he came out of the trees at the top of a ridge and saw below him a shallow, wooded valley through which the Piddoch ran. On its far side rose a crumbling escarpment—a slope of boulders and scree probably thrown down during the long-ago eruption of Droskar's Crag. Through this the river had cut a narrow gorge that continued to deepen as the water passed into the valley. At the mouth of this canyon was a wide space denuded of timber. He thought he saw buildings, but before he could examine the view, the buskins moved him down the slope and he was back into the trees.
Evening was setting in when Krunzle bounded out of the woods and into a sea of stumps and mud that ran up to where the escarpment was split by the gorge. On this side of the river, which ran fast here, was a huddle of cabins, shacks, and sprawling frame buildings. Though the raw planks from which the structures had been built could be no more than a few months old—some of them were still oozing sap—the place had the look of a camp that had been knocked together and was already falling apart.
Song of the Serpent Page 4