Swordmage (13 page)

“Gainful employment?” Hamil raised an eyebrow. “Very well, then.”

“But I was winning, Geran!” Kirr groaned.

“Nonsense!” Hamil replied. “You were but one tile away from falling into my insidious trap. You’ll see when we resume this contest.”

The halfling bowed to his diminutive opponent and followed Geran down through a servant’s stair into the depths of the castle kitchens. In a few moments the two travelers came to the laundry room, where a couple of servant girls worked at a big tub of warm water, washing the castle’s linens.

“Oh, so it’s the wash, then,” the halfling said glumly. “All right, I suppose I have to earn my room and board somehow.”

“Some honest work would do you good,” Geran answered him. He spoke briefly to the young women working at the tubs, and they directed him to a large storeroom nearby. Battered old trunks packed with old clothing filled the room. Geran removed his sword belt and began to rummage through the trunks. The swordmage found a threadbare old tunic and a nondescript cloak of plain gray and held them up for a look.

“Ah, this should do,” he said.

“For mucking out the stables?” asked the halfling.

“Not a bad idea, but that’s not what I had in mind. I was. thinking that we might look for some work as teamsters, and j House Veruna might be a good place to look. I’d rather not be recognized. Here, try these.”

Geran and Hamil soon enough patched together mismatched working garb to reasonably disguise themselves as common laborers. They stopped by the Shieldsworn armory, and Geran replaced his elven blade with a plain short sword of the sort that a poor driver might carry for defense against bandits; Hamil found a well-worn crossbow. Then they visited the stables and harnessed a simple buckboard wagon and a pair of mules and drove down from Griffonwatch into town, joining the stream of cart traffic and wagons rumbling along the Vale Road in the wet snow.

They stayed east of the river down to the Lower Bridge, crossed over to Bay Street, and drove along the wharves past the tradeyards of various merchant costers—the Double Moon, House Sokol, House Marstel. Then they came to the Veruna compound and drove through its gates into the bustling yards beyond. Like most other trading companies in Hulburg, Veruna owned several storehouses that were enclosed together by a sturdy wall. Barracks, offices, stables, a smithy, and the stone-and-timber houses of Veruna officials clustered together within the Veruna holding, a town within the town.

It seems ordinary enough, Hamil said silently. This could be the Red Sail yard in Tantras. What are we looking for?

The mercenaries, Geran answered. He looked around, sizing up the place. A handful of armsmen in the green-and-white tabards of the House watched over the business in the yard; they seemed bored and disinterested.
expect that most of the Veruna operations here are perfectly legitimate, so I’m not worried about what’s in the storehouses or where it’s going. I’m more interested in the sellswords. Mark them well—I want to find this man Urdinger, and I want to see if any of them are riding off into the Highfells to go poke around in barrows when they don’t think anyone is watching.p>

The halfling nodded. “That might take days,” he warned. And it’ll look a little suspicious if we just sit here all day eavesdropping on the guards.

“I know,” Geran replied. He spied the big Veruna armsman Bann, the fellow he’d confronted in Mirya Erstenwold’s store, and he carefully shifted to lower his hood over his face and keep his eyes away from the man. The mercenary led half a dozen more Veruna men past the wagon without giving Geran so much as a second glance and headed out into Bay Street intent on his own business.

You recognize those men? Hamil asked.

I saw one of them at Mirya’s. Come on, we might as well ask about work. It‘11 give us a good chance to spy out the place, and we shouldfit right in.

Fortunately, a fair number of the wagon drivers in the town were halflings; it was a little unusual for a human and halfling to work together, but not strange enough to be conspicuous, or so Geran hoped. Besides, he’d observed in the last few days that most of the wagons heading out of town carried at least two men. It always helped to have an extra hand along to carry a crossbow and keep an eye out for trouble.

He swung himself down from the wagon and headed toward the nearest Veruna clerk he saw. The fellow was a tall, stoop-shouldered man with thinning hair and a heavy green cloak to ward off the wet snow.

“Well met,” Geran said gruffly. “I’ve got a wagon and team for hire. Got any work for me?”

“Just a moment.” The Veruna clerk carried a small ledger and consulted it with a frown of annoyance. “I’ll need a load of stores taken up to a camp in the foothills soon. It pays five silvers, and you’ll get fodder and stabling for your team and a hot meal for yourself.”

“Good enough. Where am I going?”

“You’ll be with some other wagons. The other drivers know the way. Stay with them, and you’ll be fine.” The clerk looked up at Geran. “I haven’t seen you before. New in town?”

Geran shrugged. “I heard there’s work and good coin here.”

“We need all the drivers we can get.” The clerk pointed at a storehouse across the compound. “Take your wagon over there, and tell Koger—he’s the short fellow in the brown hood—that you’ve been hired for the Troll Hill train. You’re expected to lend a hand with the loading and unloading.”

Geran gave him a resigned nod and returned to the wagon. “We’re hired,” he told Hamil. “Keep your eyes and ears open, and we’ll see what we can learn.”

The halfling grimaced. “I hope they’re paying us well, at least.”

The two comrades spent most of the next five days hiring their wagon to House Veruna and driving provisions of all sorts out to the House’s mining camps and lumber yards in the hills east of town. Geran and Hamil turned in a more or less honest day’s work for their wages and made a point of trying to haggle a little more coin from the clerks, since Geran didn’t want to attract attention for working too little or too much for the pay. As he’d hoped, the work gave him an excellent opportunity to examine for himself the extent of Veruna’s holdings and watch their sellswords at close range. The mercenaries paid little attention to the teamsters who were constantly coming and going from the tradeyard, and Geran and Hamil found plenty of opportunities to ask questions of their fellow drivers and listen in on the hired swords without raising too much suspicion.

Geran soon learned much more about the merchant coster and their mercenaries. A noble family from Mulmaster owned the house; the Hulburg holdings were in the hands of Lady Darsi Veruna, who resided in a small manor on the slopes of the town’s eastern headland, rarely visiting the merchant yards. Geran and Hamil could think of no legitimate reason to drive a wagonload up to her residence and did not actually lay eyes on her, but they did learn that she was constantly attended by several ladies-in-waiting, manservants, and guards. A cadre of master merchants who answered to Lady

Darsi oversaw the Veruna business in Hulburg’s lands; the head of the Hulburg yard was a stout, black-bearded man named Tharman Kurz, whose demanding nature and foul temper created no small amount of misery for the clerks. Master Tharman was nominally in charge, but the large contingent of sellswords who guarded the Veruna holdings did not answer to the Veruna master merchants. Small groups and bands of mercenaries in green and white came and went from the Hulburg yards and the other Veruna holdings constantly, sometimes escorting wagonloads of provisions bound for the camps, or timber, fur, and precious metals bound back to the merchant yards, but sometimes heading off on patrols or errands of their own.

On the evening of the last day, just as they finished manhandling a load of hardwood planks into the Hulburg storehouse, half a dozen Veruna mercenaries rode into the merchant yard. At their head rode a lean, hawk-faced man who wore his red hair shaved down to angry orange stubble over his scalp. He wore enameled black half-plate armor under his Veruna surcoat, and he had a gold crest atop his helmet, which hung from the saddlehorn. The red-haired man rode up to the master merchant’s residence, swung down from the saddle, and handed the reins to a valet, while the rest of his men dismounted. Geran watched the sellsword over his mule team, idly patting the neck of the nearer animal. The mercenary stretched briefly and rolled his head from side to side, working out the kinks of a long trip in the saddle.

“Who is that?” Hamil asked quietly from the wagon’s bench. The halfling was careful not to look directly at the mercenaries.

“I don’t know,” Geran answered. He glanced to his left, where one of the Veruna teamsters they’d driven with was unhitching his own team, and called over. “Say, Barthold— who’s the captain over there?”

The other driver looked over. “Him? That’s Urdinger. He’s in charge of the armsmen. You’ll want to be careful around him, he’s got a short temper. I heard that he beat another

driver senseless when the fellow spilled a load into a ravine out near Troll Hill. Why d’you want to know?”

Geran was too far away to see whether the Veruna captain was wearing an elven dagger at his belt. He peered closer, trying to get a better look, and realized that he was staring at the Veruna captain with far too much interest. He quickly looked back to the other driver and forced a lopsided grimace onto his face. “I think I heard the same story out by Sterritt Lake. I was just wondering if that was the man.”

Urdinger went inside the master merchant’s house, and the rest of the guards dispersed. Geran and Hamil finished their work, collected their silvers from the paymaster, and drove slowly out of the Veruna yard. The swordmage scowled, caught up in thought. He’d marked Urdinger well enough to recognize the man when he saw him again, but that begged the question of what to do next. None of the Veruna men seemed to have noticed his spying so far, but if he confronted the captain of their mercenaries it would be difficult to conceal his identity, to say the least. He could try to figure out where Urdinger preferred to drink and eavesdrop on the fellow or perhaps try to confront him away from the rest of the armsmen… but if the Veruna captain simply denied any involvement in the tomb-breakings or the murder of Jarad Erstenwold, it would be difficult to compel him to speak the truth.

Assume that Urdinger is involved in both, Geran decided. What did the Verunas want with the barrows, anyway? Was it simply a matter of mercenaries looking for some easy riches that could be had from plundering the tombs of the forgotten dead, ignoring the danger that might attend? Or was it something that Urdinger had ordered his men to do for some reason of his own?

“Well, what now?” Hamil asked, interrupting Geran’s musings. “A good night’s sleep so that we can get an early start on tomorrow’s provisioning? If we get to the tradeyard at sunrise, I believe we could get in two round-trips before dark and double our daily pittance.”

“I think we’re done playing at mule drivers.”

“I thought I’d never hear you say that. Well, good. What do you propose next? Lie in wait for this fellow Urdinger and ambush him? Trail the Veruna blades and see where they go when they leave the camps?”

“Some of them are likely patrolling the wildlands near the camps, watching for monsters or marauders,” Geran answered. He clicked his tongue at the mules and lightly flicked the reins to urge them onto the Lower Bridge. “There’s little point in following them. And even if we were confident that we were following the right group of armsmen at the right time to catch them in some mischief, well, it’s damned difficult to trail mounted men out on the Highfells without being spotted yourself. No, I think we’re going to have to lay a trap for them.”

“We could start a rumor that someone else opened a barrow and found something,” Hamil said, thinking aloud. “With sufficient riches in the tale, they’d have to investigate. We could set watch over the barrow in our story and wait for them.”

“Not a bad idea, but half of Hulburg might show up on our doorstep.” Geran smiled grimly at the notion. Few native Hulburgans would open a tomb in defiance of the harmach’s law, but the town was full of poor and desperate outlanders these days. And no laws pertained to looting burial mounds that were already standing open. “We might waylay dozens of men before the ones we’re looking for show up. We’d have to stack them up like cordwood behind the mound so that we didn’t scare away the rest.”

Hamil laughed and shook his head. “I see your point. Never mind.”

“We’ll talk with my uncle tomorrow,” Geran decided. “He’ll know which barrows have been broken into. Maybe we can discern some pattern to it all if we see more of the burial mounds the Veruna men have visited.”

To finish out their ruse, Geran and Hamil picked up a few barrels of salted meat and sacks of flour and drove back to the castle. Drivers delivered provisions to the garrison often

enough that one more wagon wouldn’t seem unusual. No one seemed to pay any special attention to them, so they left the the wagon with the Shieldsworn stables and returned to their rooms for much-needed baths, changes of clothing, and a good night’s sleep in warm beds.

In the morning, Geran rose, exercised, and dressed, then met Hamil in the great room. After breakfast, they made their way across the small court in front of Harmach’s Tower to the library. A steady, cold drizzle was falling, a mix of rain and sleet. As before, they found a pair of Shieldsworn standing watch by the harmach’s door. A small handful of clerks and chamberlains hurried in and out, carrying out the business of the castle. Geran and Hamil waited only a moment before they were shown in to see his uncle.

Grigor Hulmaster sat at his writing desk, studying a stack of parchment as they entered. “Ah, Geran! Master Hamil!” the old lord said warmly. “You have certainly made yourselves scarce lately. I understand that you had quite an adventure with Kara a few days ago, and I’ve been waiting for a chance to ask you about it.”

“I doubt I can add much to what Kara must have told you already,” Geran observed. He took the seat his uncle indicated. “I wanted to see for .myself the place where Jarad was killed, so we rode up to the Highfells to have a look.”