by Damien Lake
Finally, “No hunter in the end of the end, it seems. Or rather, a hunter after other trophies.”
“I’m no gods cursed hunter! I’m a mercenary, same as my father! I’ve spent years searching for him, and you’ve kept him stolen away somewhere!”
“Years indeed.” And the damned man smiled! “Where one perceives enemies is often naught but the innocent. Too, the smallest consequences resulting from previous action will often rebound back onto the path ahead. Causality as the unavoidable law. How I hear your laughter, Otos.”
“Who—”
Marik never finished the outraged demand. With the stranger still smiling, etheric power swelled around the crimson glove. Before he could think to raise shields against it, Marik felt the blast hit him when that hand pushed forward against his chest.
Only a fragment of conscious awareness registered the absence of flames. The power hit him in a murderously hard punch. It drove the breath from his lungs, throwing him off his feet. Marik’s earlier angry steps had led him away from the wall. This time he was hurled into a dozen boards leaning against the opposite building. Wood scattered, making racket enough to raise the dead while he tumbled every which way.
He felt an acidic burn tickling the back of his throat. It became a struggle to suck air down while keeping his last meal from coming up. One hand supported his weight while the other fended off boards that sought to bury him.
A great, filthy dust cloud enveloped him. It worsened his ability to breathe until he feared suffocating to death. The irony of dying in such a fashion while lying on an open street played across a sardonic corner of his mind, thinking it a shame that Kerwin was not there to appreciate the joke.
He threw his body sideways, crashing through the mound that had been piling around him. Leaping in the stranger’s direction made no difference. All he wanted was air to sooth the burning in his chest.
No further attack met him as he knelt on all fours, the first gigantic inhalations slowing to shorter gasps. When he glanced around for his assailant, he saw why. The red stranger had vanished.
Marik groaned when he realized that. The full import of the encounter crept further into his awareness by the moment. Finally finding the stranger after…well, after months! A year! Longer! Every other possibility for finding Rail had panned out, leaving only this one remaining chance. This man with the ruby eyes had become a brick wall between the sure bet of locating his father through scrying and accomplishing the task.
And he, Marik, had let him escape.
Celerity’s concerns that the stranger might be a driving force behind the Tullainian turmoil mattered little to him. It was through this man alone that Rail might be found. Nothing else prevented the scrying magics from locating him. How could he have let the stranger get away?
For the second time in five minutes, Marik’s legs were in debate regarding the wisdom of returning to service. It was while he tested their stability that a flash of movement caught his eye.
Out in the street, where light shone faintly. Moonrise had suffused the slums with enough illumination to see by. Marik scrambled over the ground, fighting his stomach the whole way, half-bent so his knuckles scraped the pavers. He snatched his sword from where it had landed and burst out of the alley.
Far down the street he saw the hanging coat on the red stranger billowing with each quick step. To be certain, Marik opened his magesight for an instant. He immediately slammed it shut when the terrific glare burned into his brain despite the distance. Whatever this man might be, he had no time to muse over the problem. Under no circumstances could he allow the stranger to escape.
Marik ran. He clumsily slid his sword into its sheath as he went. The coiled pain squeezing his gut lessened the longer he forced his body to move. By the time he reached the street’s end, he felt normal, if battered.
This street, despite being a straight shot to the larger roads in western Thoenar, also emptied into a minor network of shorter streets. Last summer he’d learned which ones led into the civilized districts and which only spun back on themselves in the slums. Upon reaching the corner, he glared hard in the direction the stranger had gone, seeing that flapping coattail dodging around a second corner.
It could have been worse, he reflected, while jogging through the nearly deserted street. A turn to the left there would have meant the man would enter the worst areas, where sunlight at high noon lacked the power to dispel shadows darkening the alleys.
Right was little better. That direction would keep them within the seedy districts. Marik had never spent time there. His limited knowledge had been a gift from Ilona when she explained the exact route his small group of bodyguards would need to take in order to reach a certain refinery outside Thoenar. He hesitated only briefly before plunging after. It could be no worse, he reasoned, than particular towns the Fourth Unit had passed through on their way to contracts. A logger town in the far north came to memory, where the buildings were crude, the residents mostly human bulls. They drank beer rather than good ale and were rumored to eat the tankard after draining it.
This might be another ‘beertown’, as his shieldmates referred to such. The secret to getting information or passing through, as during the contract to capture a bandit gang, was to act tough, firm, strong…all without showing arrogance or pomposity. As sore as he felt, he would need to walk with purpose, his sword visible.
If the stranger allowed him to slow to a walk at any time. When he reached the next corner, the man was already several hundred feet away, preparing to enter the next alley.
Marik abandoned caution. He lengthened his stride to a sprint, afraid the stranger might make several sharp turns during the time it took to reach the alley.
Then what would he do? Stop him? Follow him? He had known since last summer that the red-eyed man must be a powerful mage. Powerful enough to give Celerity pause. The brief encounter moments ago only mortared that suspicion. What could he hope to achieve by catching him? Yet what could he gain by following?
He had no answer. Nor did he have time to work the problem. It took everything he had simply to keep up.
Three corners later, the stranger emerged onto a busier street. The buildings still resembled town structures rather than the larger city edifices typical in the cleaner districts, though were in better repair than the harder slums behind him. Marik passed two or three shops that were closed against the nocturne world. Mostly they looked to be residential.
In other districts the pressing crowd would be thick, most corners inhabited by vending carts selling food while a handful of others might be hawking trinkets. The city’s ass-end reflected nothing of the prosperity transpiring a short distance off. If pole-mounted lanterns had ever been placed within these shambles, they had long since fallen to disrepair and been removed, if not stolen outright to be sold for scrap.
The residents made a show at keeping crime under a semblance of control by lighting the streets after nightfall. Most doorways bore lamps bolted to the walls beside the frames. Several were dark, covered in grime mixed with cobwebs. Those which shone did so feebly on short wicks or through glass dirty as a con-artist’s soul.
Such feeble lighting made the canyonesque streets appear gloomier. Eerie, too, was the relative silence. He had quickly grown re-accustomed to the background din of raucous noise created by vast crowds. The low babbling occasionally drifting from the residential buildings seemed to bestow on the night an unnatural silence rather than gift it with voice. What people he dodged on the street walked with heads lowered, shoulders hunched, mouths closed tight.
Marik ran around them. Several hurled stinging oaths after him when he thundered past. Not a few started to spin when he charged down at them, daggers in hand, hard expressions meeting his while they braced for a fight. He never stopped to explain or see what became of them after he continued on.
Each time he skidded to a halt on a corner, he would barely catch a flash of swirling coat rounding the next. One time he arrived soon eno
ugh to see the stranger moving fast, easily at jogging speed, yet looking as if he strode along in a sedate manner. Enough people laced the street that Marik thought they might be approaching the deeper city, especially since two men who walked along the opposite side were dressed in cityguard uniforms.
He paused, struggling with whether to call out to them or not. With Celerity’s keen interest in the red stranger they would surely do everything within their power to help apprehend the man.
Marik moved on after a moment. Everything within their power, yes. Which would be meaningless against a magic wielder. Not to mention the time it would take to explain why they needed to chase after anyone with him, if he ever managed to convince them to. In those precious moments the stranger would vanish faster than tobacco smoke in a high breeze.
It was after the last turning that the sheer peculiarity of the situation finally dawned on him. Nearly every time he rounded a corner, he would see the red coat vanishing down an alley or side street. Whether the new course was a building away or over a hundred yards, no matter how quickly he’d run from the last, it was always the same. A brief flapping to signal where the man had gone.
Seeing the stranger enter a tavern brought Marik up short. Only then did it occur to him that it might be a trap. Anyone who moved as the stranger did could have easily left him kneeling in the road, clutching a burning stitch in his side from the attempt to keep apace.
His gaze darted in every direction, pealing apart the shadows until he belatedly reinstated his magesight. With the stranger out of view, he could use it to find any thugs lurking in the darkness without feeling his brain cooking.
After guaranteeing no toughs were waiting for him, or him specifically out of the many targets of opportunity traversing the dark streets, he slowly approached the tavern.
On the face, it gave the impression of a business that enjoyed greater prosperity than its neighbors. It loomed larger than the rest on the street, with the damage of time repaired. Or showed attempts at making such repairs, anyway. Fresh paint must have been applied at least once since the first because it lacked the flaking skin disease evident on the others. Over its door hung a signboard, the only building within view that displayed such.
Marik read the inn’s name, finding it to be The Queen’s Head. Under the words, as he had found customary in Thoenar, rested a black silhouette. It resembled a female head with a hint of shoulder, atop which perched an equally black crown. He could see none of the rippling locks that symbolized Ulecia. This inn must either be old, or simply chose the name at random, the woman representing no ruler in particular. Whichever the case, he debated the wisdom of entering a strange place while pursuing a likely enemy.
A further reason for caution lay simply in the noise he could hear. One could tell a lot about a tavern before entering it simply by listening, he’d learned over the course of his travels. Most emitted the loud, undistinguished chatter of a confined gathering, everyone talking to be heard over each other. Those were the taverns were a man could sit at a table or the counter without much cause for concern. Other taverns were quieter. That could either mean it had pretensions of an upper-class station, where loud behavior was considered more suitable to the common classes. Or it could mean the place swam with less savory types who wished to avoid notice, who in turn scrutinized every man who walked through the door, evaluating their potential as targets.
The Swan’s Down Inn, where last he had stayed in Thoenar, had been a quieter one. This owed mostly to the clientele who were generally local merchants and well-to-do types. They tended to keep their conversations muted while they discussed how the business day had run, but during the height of the dining candlemark the place could resemble a flock of annoyed geese squabbling with all the formidable honking they could muster.
What gave him pause was the quality of the noise he overheard from The Queen’s Head. It sounded louder than any tavern he’d ever been in, with the possible exception of the gaming room in The Randy Unicorn. Oddly, threaded through the wild shouting came sounds he took for barking. He could not remember a single tavern that had sounded like this.
The need to find answers pushed him to the door. He meant to crack it open, to peer inside first. A hand from behind him reached past to haul it fully open. Marik caught a glare from a fellow dressed in finer clothing than he expected to see in the slums. With no help for it, Marik followed the fellow inside.
He felt his ears twitching with the volume of noise battering around inside them. His eyes confirmed the presence of nearly as many dogs as men near the entrance. The clusters close by revealed other well-dressed men rubbing shoulders with seedier types, none apparently giving a care for their social stations. To judge from their demeanor, this tavern must be some sort of world apart, where the interior operated by a completely different set of rules than life outside.
The well-to-do who’d passed him on the way in wove through the crowd. Marik started to move as well when a man standing beside the door, whom he had taken for simply another customer shoved to one side by the press, held a hand firmly to Marik’s chest and blocked the way.
“Heyy’ap fellow! Where’s your coin?” He held a pouch in his right hand, giving it a shake to illustrate the point. Marik heard nothing but from the way dimples moved across the sides, he guessed it must be filled with coins.
“What coin?” he hollered back.
“Oh. First time in the Head, is it? Well, watch or play, it’s five C to come in after dark.”
The need to hurry urged Marik on. Without arguing, he quickly dug a five-copper coin from his purse. He flipped it into the doorman’s pouch and craned his neck to see over the crowd.
Marik saw not a thread of red clothing, nor the equally red hair that filled the stranger’s head in a mockery of fire. The ceiling was low, the entire common room dingy and cheap, if far larger than normal. Tables were scattered around yet men stood in any free space available, completely filling the room. Whatever space was free of men was instead filled with dogs.
Dogs were tied to table legs. Others were cradled in their owner’s arms. There were bulldogs, terriers of different breeds, as well as dogs of no species Marik could put name to. The closest table had seven men in a tight knot beside it. One fellow in coarse clothing bent down to grab a dog by its short stubby tail and collar, lifting it up to deposit on the round surface. A noble with silver trim running around his cuffs pried open the dog’s jaws to examine the teeth, while a commoner who might have been a crafter to judge from his apron felt the hindquarters.
Marik could hardly fail to notice how scarred the canine’s face and body were.
From the low rafters hung dog collars with steel studs on leather leashes. The portions of wall he could see displayed small portraits. Each were of dogs. Two or three were renderings to make the subjects appear noble. Most of the others showed the canines with teeth bared in a snarl. None were larger than eight inches. From the look, there must be no less than fifteen lining the doorframe.
Marik pushed deeper into the throng. The people ignored him, so caught up were they in their private doings. Other dogs were undergoing examination. He overheard snatches of questions that made little sense to the mercenary. At first he assumed the talk of badgers must be the result of so much noise distorting the words, until two other groups seemed to be arguing the same subject.
The countertop bar ran across the end of the common room opposite the entrance. He saw it due to a gap in the crowd. What might cause such an open space he could not see until he pushed through four men, three of whom erupted in braying laughter when the last delivered a punch-line. “ ‘E said, ‘Catch a fart and paint it blue’, and ‘e went on to heaven!”
What caused the void ended up being a circular construction on the floor. It was a ring six feet wide, with walls of slat-board four feet tall. The ground inside the circle had been painted over in whitewash.
He could see no purpose for it, only saw several men nearby gazed at the constru
ction fondly while pointing into it, still conversing with those close to them. Across the far slat-board wall there was space enough for perhaps two men to stand between it and the bar.
Marik still had found no sign of the red stranger. The space nearest the bar proved less congested. He moved toward it. Drawing closer, he saw that the counter made a large L shape, stools bolted to the wooden floor all around it. Twenty stools lined the long side while only four were situated on the shorter end to the left.
He was fiercely fixated on finding the ruby-eyed man. Marik’s gaze slid right past the bar’s short end at first. Only after several moments, when his brain realized that something had definitely been odd, did he focus on it.
A lone man sat half-huddled on the stool closest to the wall. The lack of other people near him looked bizarre in a common room so absurdly packed as this one. That might have been for any number of reasons, except it probably stemmed from the frighteningly massive sword leaning against the bar beside the loan wolf.
And nothing else but a wolf could he be. A child could see this man and know at once that his teeth had been sharpened through war and fire, honed with steel and flame. Marik, amazed, hardly recognizing him, stared at the exhausted form of Rail Drakkson.
Chapter 07
Dellen brushed past the two peacekeepers flanking the inn’s foyer, casting a spurious glance at them when one made a derogatory snort. What made them think they were so high and mighty? They worked the same pissy job he did, and he could scrunch them both into wads before punting them over the building to boot. He had six inches on the larger one, easy.
That toerag Tallior shot him a bitter look once they moved further into the room. Dellen sneered back to show the man that his opinion was Toad Juice as far as he was concerned. Though, looking around the place, he guessed it wasn’t a serving room that poured leftover dregs from tankards at the end of the night into a common barrel, creating the infamous mixture drunk only by the desperate, the nearly coinless and the daring.