The Rage (3 page)

Where was the emerald? It occurred him to that Hezza might have taken such a valuable item upstairs with him, but he flinched at the prospect of looking for it in such close proximity to its keeper. He’d conduct a thorough search of the shop first.

He found the second strongbox built into the wall behind a grubby hanging. The steel hatch yielded grudgingly, bending a fraction of an inch at a time. Every metallic rasp and groan jangled his nerves and made him glance over his shoulder. But still Hezza failed to appear, and finally Gorstag widened the gap enough to work his hand inside. He groped about, found something that felt like a pendant, and drew it forth. Even in the dim illumination, the emerald seemed brilliant. Flawless.

It was far more enticing than the coins had been, but that temptation, too, he would resist. He’d keep faith with his employer, hand the gem over to Firvimdol, and better himself in an honorable way.

He turned, and Hezza was there. Barrel-chested, tufts of his curly brown hair sticking up every which way, the pawnbroker was still in his nightshirt, but had taken the time to equip himself with a falchion. He used it to chop at Gorstag’s head.

Gorstag avoided the stroke by leaping backward. Irrationally, perhaps, in that moment, he was less worried about the threat of the curved sword than that Hezza would recognize him. But the pawnbroker didn’t seem to. Evidently Gorstag’s hood provided sufficient disguise in the feeble light.

He tossed the bead away and dodged around a display case, interposing it between Hezza and himself. That gave him time to draw his rapier, though the gods knew he didn’t want to use it. He couldn’t use it as it was meant to be used, not against a tradesman who was only trying to protect what was rightfully his.

“Please stop,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

“No?” Hezza grunted as he kept maneuvering, trying to work in close enough for another attack.

Gorstag wasn’t supposed to babble his employer’s private business, but it would be better than killing an innocent man, wouldn’t it?

“I serve the Harpers.” He didn’t actually know for a fact that his contact was a member of that altruistic secret society, but he suspected it. “They set me the task of infiltrating a nest of traitors to the queen. I have to borrow the emerald to do that. I swear, you’ll get it back.”

“Oh,” said Hezza, “that’s fine, then. Would you like me to wrap it up for you? Or give it a polish?”

He faked a shift to the right, dodged left instead, and there was nothing between him and Gorstag. He rushed in cutting and slashing.

Hezza was no expert swordsman like Maestro Taegan, but he was competent. Gorstag had to parry and retreat frantically to preserve himself from harm. He saw openings for ripostes and counterattacks, but he couldn’t bring himself to exploit them.

He had to do something. Hezza was rapidly taking his measure. Figuring out how to penetrate his defense. The pawnbroker’s cuts only fell short by a finger breadth, or else Gorstag only managed to block them at the last possible moment. If he didn’t do something soon, Hezza would surely cut him down.

He waited for Hezza to lift the falchion for a head cut, then sprang forward. It was a risky to plunge straight into an opponent’s attack, out he proved quick enough to leap safely inside the arc of the stroke. He bashed his surprised opponent in the jaw with the rapier’s bell guard, then hammered his forehead with the pommel. The pawnbroker fell, unconscious.

“I’m sorry,” Gorstag panted, “but it was necessary.”

Maybe the Wearer of Purple, Firvimdol, and the other madmen, Gorstag thought, will finally tell me about their grand design.

Pavel Shemnov fanned out his cards to see what the dealer had wrought. When he found the Sun, the King and Queen of Staves, and the Knights of Staves, Coins, and Blades, it was a struggle to keep his tawny, handsome, brown-eyed face from breaking into a grin.

Ever since he’d sat down at the table, he’d drawn one dismal hand after another and watched his stakes dwindle until he could almost have wished he was a priest of Tymora, goddess of luck, instead of his own beloved Lathander. The cards he held, however, constituted an excellent hand headed, moreover, by the Morninglord’s own emblem. It was inconceivable that he could lose.

The trick was to make the most of it. It wouldn’t do to scare the other gamblers out. When the dour, shaggy-bearded ruffian on his right opened for ten gold pieces, Sembian nobles and Cormyrean lions mostly, the cleric made a show of pondering, then contented himself with a modest raise.

At which point, Will burst through the inn door, admitting a gust of frigid air in the process.

lie spotted his comrade and shouted, “Pretty boy! I need you.”

“I’m busy,” Pavel replied.

The Milling strode across the hard-packed earthen floor, peered at his comrade’s cards, and announced, “He’s got a royal marriage under favorable aspect, with a full honor guard.”

The other players threw in their hands.

Pavel rounded on Will and grumbled, “You poxy son of a—” Then he registered the honest urgency in the halfling’s face. It wasn’t just the usual game of insults and pranks they played with one another. “What’s wrong?”

“A human lass, wounded and in need of healing. Dorn’s standing watch over her, in case any more ratmen show up.”

“Wererats wounded her?” Pavel asked. “If so, she might have contracted Lycanthropy herself.”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. Just get off your festering arse and come with me, all right?”

“Very well.”

He raked what remained of his coin off the table, then picked up his mace. By the time he finished, Raryn Snowstealer had come to join them.

As far as superficial appearances were concerned, Will and Pavel were the “normal” members of their small fellowship. Raryn, like Dorn, turned heads wherever they went, for in the lands surrounding the Moonsea, arctic dwarves were as rare as half-golems. Scarcely taller than the halfling, Raryn was squat and burly, almost as broad as he was tall. His goatee and unbound, waist-length hair were white, and it was hard for the eye to separate them from the polar bear fur of his tunic. In contrast, the sun had burned his exposed skin to what, for a human, would have been an excruciating red. He carried his ice-axe in one stubby-fingered hand.

“Let’s go,” the dwarf said.

Will led them out into the muddy streets of a town that, even in the dark, presented the raw, unfinished appearance of an outpost newly carved from the wilderness. A good many settlements in the region had the same air. It was, in a sense, misleading. Civilized folk—humans, mostly—had dwelled around the Moonsea for untold centuries, as countless weathered standing stones and crumbling ruins attested_ Unfortunately, wars and rampaging beasts had time and again obliterated the works of man, requiring him to erect new habitations on the rubble of the old.

Of course, Ylraphon was rough even by local standards. Standing on the eastern shore of the Dragon Reach, the channel linking the Moonsea with the Sea of Fallen Stars, it was an important way station for freighters and caravans moving in either direction, but also notorious as a haunt of brigands and pirates. A number of knavish-looking characters were prowling about in the dark, but none who cared to give Pavel, Will, and Raryn any trouble. The slim, long-legged priest supposed they looked too formidable, himself included.

When he’d left Damara, he’d naturally worn his red and yellow priestly vestments, but piece by piece, they’d worn out over the years, until only the gold-plated sun amulet set with garnets remained. He’d come to affect the sturdy wool and leather garments of one who roamed the wild. He thought he’d changed in other ways, too. He moved like the hunter he’d become, wary and confident at the same time, with his weapons always ready to hand.

As they hurried along, Will explained what was afoot in more coherent fashion.

“I don’t understand” said Pavel at the story’s end. “if the wererats meant her harm, why not just stick a knife in her? Why sit around waiting for her to bleed out?”

“My guess,” said Will, “is they really did send for someone, but it wasn’t a priest. It was their leader. They were waiting on him to decide whether to kill and rob her and be done with it, ransom her, or sell her into slavery.”

The three companions came to a disreputable-looking tavern at the edge of inhabited Ylraphon. Beyond stood only charred, gutted shells of buildings—destroyed in whatever calamity had last befallen the port—that no one had yet bothered to raze or restore. When Pavel stepped inside, he found more or less what he’d expected: dead wererats; a wounded and unconscious young woman, uncommonly lovely even with her face ashen and her gown soaked with blood; and Dorn, glowering at him.

“What kept you?” the big man snapped.

“I set forth as soon as the halfwit bothered to come and tell me I was needed,” Pavel replied.

He crouched over his patient, tore away her shredded sleeve, then winced. The gashes were even deeper than he’d expected. Still, by Lathander’s grace, he could save her, though it was likely to take the most potent healing magic at his command. He recited the incantation, and his hands glowed golden. He pressed them to the lass’s gory wounds.

His own flesh seemed to burn, albeit painlessly, as the spell did its work. When the sensation ebbed, the wounds had closed, halting the flow of blood. Indeed, they’d dwindled to mere pink lines on her ivory skin, as if they’d been healing for tendays, and a blush of color had returned to her lips and cheeks.

“She’ll be all right,” he said.

“So you were finally good for something,” said Will. Given their perpetual mock feud, it was as close as he could come to commendation.

The woman’s eyes fluttered open. Large, lustrous, and a unique shade of violet, they were as striking as the rest of her. They gazed up at Pavel’s face for a moment, then shifted to the sacred pendant dangling from his neck.

“Did you heal me?” she asked. Even after her travail, when her throat must have been dry as dust, her soprano voice was clear and sweet. “Thank you, and Lathander too.”

Will grinned and said, “Don’t bother thanking the charlatan there. Generally he botches the curing and kills the sick folk, and anyway, Dorn and I did the real work. You remember, I’m Will Turnstone. Well, Wilimac, really, but Will to my friends.”

“Thank you, too, Will Turnstone,” she said. Pavel helped her up off the floor and into a chair. “And you, Goodman Graybrook.”

As Pavel might have predicted, Dorn merely grunted and averted his eyes. The stranger looked puzzled at the seeming rebuff, but didn’t question it.

She said, “My name is Kara… well, that will do. It’s been a while and many a mile since I bothered with the rest of it.”

Raryn and Pavel completed the round of introductions, and the cleric moved to investigate the stock behind the bar and fetch Kara a restorative drink.

The dwarf said, “Good to meet you, lass. How, may I ask, did you fall among vermin such as these?”

He tipped his bone-handled axe toward a couple of the dead shapeshifters.

“I was attacked on the road just outside of town,” Kara replied. “Wounded, I fled to the first place that seemed to offer refuge. I imagine Will told you the rest of it.”

“More or less,” Raryn said, clambering up to perch atop a stool, his stubby legs in their knee-high deerskin boots dangling. “But he didn’t know who attacked you.”

“I don’t either, really. Men with spears and swords. Bandits, I suppose.”

Pavel felt a pang of mingled surprise and curiosity. He appropriated a bottle of what appeared to be the best vintage the tavern had to offer—something red from Sembia—an armful of dusty pewter goblets, a rag to wipe them, and headed back toward Kara and his friends.

“Did the outlaws kill your companions?” Raryn asked. “No. I mean, I was traveling alone.”

The dwarf arched a shaggy white eyebrow and asked, “In these lands, in the dead of winter? You’re brave. And lucky, to have escaped those who waylaid you.”

“I’m a bard,” she said. “I have my songs to protect me, as they would have saved me from the robbers if they hadn’t taken me by surprise. As it was, I still drove them off, but not before they hurt me. I wanted to use magic to help Dorn and Will against the ratmen, but once I took that final blow to the head…”

“It’s all right,” the halfling said. He plainly liked her. Well, Pavel could sympathize. He too found her charming, despite what he knew. “I’ve seen the toughest warriors fall helpless after taking the wrong sort of wound. It’s no reflection on your courage.”

“Enough chitchat,” Dorn growled. “Maid, if you’re up to it, we can all clear out of here. My friends and I should go to the council of merchants and explain what happened before somebody else stumbles on all these bodies. Especially since they look to be melting back into human shape. We’ll take you as far as a safe inn.”

“Easy,” Pavel said. “The lass was injured nigh unto death a moment ago.” He set his burden on the table between Kara and Raryn, then drew his knife to dig the cork out of the bottle. “Give her a little time to recover.”

“I’m sure she needs it,” Will said, “considering that we didn’t have a real healer to tend her.”

“I do need it,” Kara said. She straightened her arm and hissed in pain. “It’s far better than it was. I’m sure it will be all right eventually, but it’s still weak and sore.”

“Most likely,” Pavel said, “it will remain so for a while.”

“Well, perhaps it’s no worse than I deserve. For you’re right, Goodman Snowstealer, even if you were too tactful to state your opinion in so many words. I was a fool to travel alone. Yet it’s urgent I reach Lyrabar as soon as possible, and so I wonder: You four have the look of wandering sellswords. Could I hire you to escort me?”

“No,” said Dorn.

“I can pay,” she said.

She opened the pouch on her belt and removed a slim silver bracelet set with pearls. After a moment of silence, Will whistled. Once again, Pavel understood how his comrade felt. The exquisitely crafted ornament was plainly worth hundreds if not thousands of gold pieces, and he glimpsed more gems and pieces of precious metal glittering in her purse, so many that he surmised the pouch was one of those enchanted receptacles larger inside than out.