Boom town, Krunzle thought. He would have liked to have stood and surveyed the place before plunging down into it. Chirk and his boots had other plans. But halfway down the slope he directed a sharp thought at the snake: It would be best if I idled into town like any other goldbug drifter, instead of by prodigious leaps that attract the attention of everyone on the main street. I don't want to have to spend my time fending off attempts to steal my boots.
Chirk did not reply, but the boots lost their energy and the thief descended the rest of the way to town at a normal pace. At the outskirts, where there were more tents than shacks, he came across a placard hung on a post. It read Ulm's Delve in bold red paint, roughly daubed. Beneath it: No thieves, filchers, bun-passers, vagrants, or holy-fakers. And below that: By Order, Boss Ulm. As an afterthought, someone had painted in blue near the bottom: Ladies Welcome.
Krunzle passed on into the town, finding that it had one long central street that paralleled the course of the gorge, with several shorter avenues cutting in from either side. The principal thoroughfare was lined with two-story establishments catering to the needs of gold-hunters: taverns, hotels, brothels, tool-and-equipment vendors, one bathhouse, and an assay office. He saw no sign that suggested an Ulm's Delve constabulary, nor that Kerse or Macridi extended any official presence.
Wide open, he thought. A walk along the crowded main street soon confirmed his impression. He rubbed shoulders with persons from half the nations of the Inner Sea, and saw no fewer than six dwarves. Most of those who braved the street were muddy to the knees, and many of them carried the implements of their calling. In fact, Krunzle thought, anyone who cornered the local trade in pickaxes and shovels could retire after a year.
Two blocks into town, he came upon more imposing buildings—in the sense that their fronts had at least been painted and the signs that identified the goods and services to be bought within featured less imaginative spelling—and he left the street for one of the wooden sidewalks that ran along the fronts of the enterprises. He stopped outside the largest, whose wall bore signs advertising it as a genteel hostelry and tavern catering to the discerning.
This, he said to Chirk, is where Gyllana would stay, if she had to stay in this sinkhole. Here is where I will make my first inquiries. The snake did not disagree, and he pushed open one of the swinging double doors and entered.
The lobby was what he would have expected: a front desk, a staircase leading to rooms upstairs, and a wide archway to one side through which came a hubbub of many voices talking at once, a continual clinking of glasses and metal tankards, and a fug of sweat, smoke, and fermented drink. He turned away from that distraction and approached the man behind the desk, who was just lighting an oil lamp.
"A room," Krunzle said, "with a bath." Chirk tingled warningly, but when the thief thought, I may need somewhere to put her, the snake subsided.
The man behind the desk, a Keleshite with slicked-back hair and a brocaded vest, regarded him without favor and hooked a thumb toward a sign on the wall that advertised the hostelry's rates. The cost of a room for a night would have paid the weekly rent on a comfortable apartment in Kerse.
Krunzle brought out the bandits' purse and shook out the single gold coin. The clerk looked at it and shook his head. The traveler put back the gold piece and dug deeper in the pouch. Then he placed Sheshakk's nugget on the unpolished wood of the counter. The clerk's eyebrows went up and he cast a guarded look at the thief.
Krunzle said, "Will that do?"
The functionary offered him a smile, then scooped the lump of gold from the wood and into a drawer. "Indeed," he said.
"For how long?"
"Oh," said the clerk, "you'll get yourself a good long stay for that one."
"Fine. Let me know when I've reached the mid-point of what it will buy."
"Certainly."
"Now I want to see my room. I'll want hot water brought up for a bath right away, then I want to see the dinner menu."
"Of course." The clerk selected a key from half a dozen hanging from a rack behind him, then shouted a name. The owner of the name, an elderly, bearded, stooped fellow of indeterminate nationality, came out of a booth set into the wall. "Take this gentleman to room thirteen," the man behind the desk said.
The oldster blinked and his mouth fell open. "Thirteen?" he said.
"Thirteen," said the clerk, his tone harsh. To Krunzle he said, "Buldrus's wits rarely assemble all at the same time. Pay him no heed." Then he gave the old man the key and said, "Get along now."
Krunzle followed the bent back up the stairs and down a hallway to its very end. The fellow fitted the key into the lock and the thief was glad to see that both the door and the fastener looked sturdy. The room, when he was let into it, was also fitted with stout iron bars across the single window.
"I need fear no nocturnal incursions here," he said to Buldrus, slipping him one of the copper coins.
"If you say so," said the old man. He left, closing the door behind him.
Krunzle went to the window and surveyed the view outside. He saw only the blank, unpainted, wooden wall of a building opposite, separated from the hotel by a narrow alley that was unlit and dim as the last of the daylight faded. A parcel of men came bustling out of a ground-level door and moved with deliberate haste up the alley toward the main street. He paid them no great heed, though he noticed that all of them were strongly built and none of them wore the mud-spattered clothes that would have marked them as miners.
He turned to inspect the room and found it adequate, though not large. Then he noticed that there was no tub for his bath. He looked for the key and, not finding it, realized that the elderly loon must have taken it with him. He crossed to the door to pull it open, but was surprised to find it locked against him.
At that moment, Chirk stirred—not tingled, not constricted—against the flesh of his neck, as if something had caused the snake to shiver. Krunzle gave a passing thought to the question of whether or not snakes could shiver—he would have doubted it—but his main concern was the locked portal. He pounded on the wood, cried "Hello! I'm locked in!", heard no response, and thumped and yelled again, rattling the brass door opener with the hand that wasn't pounding the very solid panel.
Then the metal turned in his hand, the door flew inward, and he was face-to-face with a heavy-jawed man whose bristle-short hair revealed several scars on his scalp that complemented the ones on his face. A brawler was Krunzle's first thought. And a mean one.
Behind the man were two others who showed the signs of similar histories—a red-bearded Ulfen and a wide-bodied Taldan—and behind them, watching the thief from over their shoulders, hung a thin, cadaverous face with an expression of wariness coupled with suspended judgment.
Krunzle stepped back, his hand going automatically to the hilt of his sword.
"Clear the way," said the man at the back, his mind now clearly made up. The bruisers stepped efficiently out of his path, revealing a skeletally thin Chelaxian in an ankle-length robe of silk dyed deep blue. The man brought together the fingertips of both hands in a particular manner and quickly intoned seven syllables, three on a rising inflection, three more on a descending, the last as a shout.
Immediately, the sword fell from Krunzle's hand, but before he could even hear it strike the floorboards, his world went blindingly white, then equally blindingly dark—though, by then, he was unaware of anything.
"Where'd you get it?" said a voice. A moment later, a hard hand rocked Krunzle's face sideways with a stinging slap that rattled his eyeballs in their sockets.
"Wha?" he said. "Whu?" He struggled to rise. Somehow, he knew he was sitting, even though he had only now emerged from the blackness. His legs would not obey him, nor would his arms when he gripped the chair's arms and sought to push himself upright. He was tied tightly at wrist and ankle. For good measure, a stout rope also bound him to the back of the chair.
"Hit him again," said the voice. It came from behind and to one side and sounded
as harsh as dirt rattling on a coffin lid.
Krunzle turned his head in that direction and said "Wait," just in time for the hard hand to connect once more with his cheek and temple. This time, he definitely felt it. Whoever was hitting him was hitting him hard—striking right through the target, as the thief's old instructor in unarmed combat had taught him all those years ago at the rogues' guild in Elidir.
"Awake, now, are we?" said the voice. Its owner circled around from behind the chair to come into view. Krunzle saw a heavy-set man of middle years whose features were dominated by a great lump of a nose, which was itself dominated by a huge brown wart from which three black bristles sprang. He had the kind of mouth that can form only an unappetizing smile, because the only situation that would prompt a smile would be the exercise of the cruelty the thief saw in the man's eyes.
"The nugget," said the grating voice. "Where did you get it?" A yellow patch appeared at the bottom of Krunzle's blurred vision. He blinked away the tears the slap had brought to his eyes and focused: it looked to be the nugget he'd taken off Sheshakk's corpse.
"Off a dead half-orc," he said, and realized as he spoke that his tongue was bleeding on one side. He must have bitten it during their efforts to awaken him. He spat a little blood in the direction of his interrogator, but most of it ended up on his own shirt.
Another slap spun his head around. He focused on the other man in the room—an Ulfen, this one with red hair and beard, both in braids, and a big belly that strained his coarsely woven wool shirt. He had been one of those who had come to the door of Room Thirteen. Now the man with the wart brought the gold back into view. He held it so that Krunzle could see what he hadn't noticed before: stamped into one end of the lump of raw gold was a sigil of a butterfly. He thought he recognized it as the sign of the goddess Desna, the deity most appealed to by gamblers.
"Tell the truth," Wartnose said, "and you might live to see daylight."
"I took it off a half-orc," the thief said again. "His name was Sheshakk and he was working with an Osirian and an Ulfen. I didn't have time to get their names."
The redhead raised his arm for another slap, but the wart-nosed man stopped him with a gesture. He squatted down now so he was at eye level with Krunzle. "You killed Sheshakk?" he said, "not to mention Boabdil, Imrit, and Ernulf?"
The red-bearded man spoke. "Hard to believe. Unless he snuck in while they were sleeping and cut their throats." He spat on the floor. "He looks the throat-cutting type."
"Cut Sheshakk's throat and you'd only annoy him," said the squatting man. He rubbed his nose wart and studied the thief.
Krunzle had been counting on the fingers of one swollen hand. "You said four names. I killed only three. A fourth man was in the bushes. He'd been dead a couple of days."
Wartnose stood, stiffly, massaged his lower back and looked at the Ulfen. "I know what you're thinking," he said.
Redbeard had the uncomfortable look of a man who has been proved right when his boss has been proved wrong—a boss who is not likely to take it well. "It's all history now," he said, and looked anywhere but at his employer.
"Tell me what happened," Wartnose said to Krunzle.
The thief recounted only the essential elements of the tale; full details would not help him. "They braced me at the river. The Osirian mistakenly shot the Ulfen. In the confusion, I was able to take off the half-orc's head. Then I ran the bowman through before he could nock another arrow."
Wartnose studied him for what seemed a long time. Then he shook his head as if to throw off an unproductive chain of thought. "It sounds ...far-fetched," he said. "Yet here you are, and here is Boabdil's lucky nugget, which he would never give up willingly."
Krunzle cast his memory back to the camp. "Was he a gambler?" he said. "I saw a set of knuckle bones by their fire."
Wartnose received the information as if it fitted into a slot in his mind. "What else?"
"The corpse in the bushes, his head was crushed—I'd say by the half-orc's bludgeon—and his belly was ripped open."
Wartnose's eyes moved left, right, and landed on Redbeard. "There it is," he said.
"What?" said the Ulfen.
Wartnose sighed. "Why must I always be surrounded by animated lumps of earth?" he said. He addressed himself instead to Krunzle. "The picture is clear: They settle beside the river to wait for the barge and collect the landing fee from any passengers coming to town. They're bored so they throw knuckle bones. Boabdil relies on his lucky nugget, but this day its power is running thin. He loses to Sheshakk, but refuses to pay.
"Sheshakk is not bright, but he has a strong sense of his own entitlement. He demands the nugget. Boabdil, in a strategic blunder, swallows the gold. Sheshakk acts as a half-orc would and recovers the nugget by the shortest possible sequence of events."
"He also," Krunzle said, "appeared to have eaten the man's heart and liver."
"Well, there you go," said Wartnose, "Sheshakk was never one to waste an opportunity for a meal." He tugged at his warty proboscis, causing the traveler to wonder if years of such mistreatment had rendered it so large and unlovely. "Then you happen along, they decide to see if you can make their day profitable—but you end up killing all of them." He pulled again at his nose. "That's the part that's hard to square with the other factors. You must admit that you do not present as an accomplished warrior. Imrit and Ernulf were capable; Sheshakk was a force of nature. Why are you here, and they not?"
"I may be able to answer that," said a new voice. The door to the room was out of Krunzle's restricted, chair-bound view, but now he heard it close as another man entered. Into view came the bone-thin man who had been behind the bruisers sent to collect the thief from Room Thirteen.
"How?" said Wartnose.
"His sword is wrapped in a powerful charm, as are his boots." As the newcomer said this, Krunzle realized that his numb feet were in stockings. "And let me have a look ..." The thin man squatted as his employer had done, his bony knees creaking and popping, and stroked a long finger tipped by a pointed nail along the ring of bronze around the thief's neck. He withdrew the digit sharply, with a hiss of intaken breath, as if he had touched hot metal, though to Krunzle the snake felt as it always did.
"Tian?" he said, rising with more crackles and snaps from his joints.
Krunzle said, "The man who put it on me was."
"And who was that?" Wartnose wanted to know.
"Again" said the thief, "we did not exchange names and honorifics."
"For that tone," said the man in charge, "you get another slap. Brundelaf?"
Brundelaf the redbeard stepped quickly forward, as if glad of a chance to play a useful part, and delivered another hard, open-handed blow to Krunzle's cheek. The traveler felt a tooth loosen in its socket.
"What are you doing here?" Wartnose said. "Who sent you?"
Krunzle's inclination again was to tell the essential truth. But he found himself unable to speak, as Chirk chose this moment to tighten about his neck. In the thief's mind, an understanding formed: telling the tale of Eponion, Berbackian, and Gyllana would not be helpful to his situation; indeed, Chirk would see that attempting to do so would be immediately fateful.
Agreed, he answered, within the privacy of his own cerebrum. But what do I tell them?
A moment later, the answer came, and he spoke.
"No one sent me. I was indentured to a Tian merchant who thought I would make a useful caravan guard."
"Why would he think that?" said Wartnose.
The story came from the back of his mind. "Because I had come into his service after being captured during a raid on one of his convoys." He showed them a chagrined face. "The plan—my plan—was a good one, but my second-in-command was the nervous sort. He brought his section of our company out onto the road too soon.
"We still tried to make a go of it, but timing is everything in the bandit trade. The merchant had time to activate his defenses—one of which was a wizard who was quite capable when he was not under
the influence of flayleaf."
"What is flayleaf?" said Wartnose.
Krunzle felt the answer forming in his mind, but was forestalled by the cadaverous man. "You might know it by some other name. It is a drug that supposedly opens the senses to other planes, but I've heard that it can be habituating."
"So," Krunzle continued, "the mage happened to be sober that afternoon. He laid us low with a blast of purple light. Those of us not killed outright were captured and added to the slave coffle at the rear of the baggage train. But the merchant conceived a different plan for me: I was to scout ahead and uncover any other dangers on the road. The wizard put something on my boots and did something to my sword that made it invincible in defense—though useless in attack—then put this thing about my neck to keep me biddable."
His interrogator's eyes narrowed. "Yet here you are, with no Tian merchant in sight. How do you explain that?"
The response was coalescing in the thief's brain even as the question was put. "I cannot be sure," he said. "I noticed that the farther in advance of the caravan I got, the less grew the snake's power. I suspect that the wizard mishandled the incantation that bound it to him—although I soon learned not to try to take it off. I thought eventually I would find a mage who could do it for me."
Wartnose looked at the skeletal man. "Could you?"
The other stroked his bony chin. At first he seemed of two minds, then he signaled a negative. "Perhaps with a year to study the matter. I know the principles of Tian magic but am far from familiar with the technical details. I can tell you without a doubt, however, that there is power at the heart of this. Room Thirteen could only damp down its control of the boots and sword, and I have known first-degree spells to fade to insignificance under the influence of the charms built into the walls and floor of that chamber."
"Hmm," said Wartnose. "Let us sum this up. Absent his sword and boots, this one,"—he indicated the traveler—"is nothing but another ditch-haunting throat-cutter. The whatever-it-is about his neck empowers the boots and sword, which are nothing without its strength. So, obviously, it would not serve us to bring them back together. How about if we just kill him?"
Song of the Serpent Page 5