M
alden put his hand on Acidtongue’s hilt but kept the sword in its sheath. It was a ridiculous weapon for a thief to use—once drawn, it began to foam and spit, and its acid dripped on everything and made a hissing noise. Noise that could be his downfall.
Moving by nothing but starlight, he came around the corner of the milehouse and looked out into its dooryard. He saw nothing—no movement, save a wisp of old smoke that trailed away through the weeds.
By law, a milehouse stood every ten miles on the road from Helstrow to the Free City of Ness, and was required to stay open to common traffic at all hours. They were places where weary travelers could spend the night, or buy new horses, or simply choke down the dust of the road with a tankard of cheap ale. Malden and his crew had passed most of them on their way since they had no desire to be seen. This one, however, drew the thief’s interest, because it had been burned to the ground.
The stone walls still stood, but the roof had collapsed inward. The stables were empty and there was no sign of human life anywhere nearby.
Perhaps, he thought, it would have been wiser to pass this milehouse by as well, but he didn’t like what he saw. He thought it might augur trouble for them further down the road, and he wanted information.
Velmont had laughed and said he was welcome to go and check it out—alone.
Moving with the silence of a hunting cat, Malden dashed into the shadows below the milehouse’s empty doorway. Inside he smelled ash and burnt hair. The stars winked on a pool of water in the center of what had been the common room. Maybe the proprietors had tried to put out the fire, or maybe it was only rainwater that had collected since the roof fell in.
He slipped inside, keeping close to the soot-blackened walls. He heard nothing, sensed no movement in the place. But he liked to be careful.
A spot of the floor had been cleared of ash and debris. A pile of clay bottles stood to one side of the remains of a campfire. Bits of rag had been gathered together to make crude bedding. So someone had been there since the fire. Malden chanced detection by slinking out into the light, just enough to pick up one of the bottles and sniff at its mouth. He smelled of old, sour wine. The bottle had been emptied down to the lees.
Then someone moaned in the dark, and Acidtongue flashed out of its scabbard.
“No, I beg you, not again,” a woman croaked.
She was covered in soot that hid her nakedness. Her hair might have been blond once but was so smeared with ashes it looked white. Only her eyes reflected light as she held one hand up, trying to fend him away.
“I’m a friend,” Malden whispered to her. “Are you alone here?”
“Friend? What friend have I?”
He saw her lips were badly chapped and her tongue dry and white. Searching through the debris, Malden turned up a bottle that had survived the cataclysm—and whatever had come afterward. He dug out the cork with his belt knife and brought the bottle to her lips.
She sucked greedily at it like an infant at the teat.
“What’s your name?”
She only stared at him, still lost in terror.
“All right,” Malden said. “I don’t need to know it. There were others here, earlier,” he went on, looking back at the pile of empty bottles. “I’m guessing they weren’t paying guests. Bandits?”
She nodded, careful not to take her eyes off him. “Six of them. Some of them came back for seconds.”
Malden took off his cloak and draped it over her body.
“After the recruiting serjeants came and took away all the men, there was no one but me to run the place. The law demands we stay open,” she told him.
“They conscripted your . . . husband?”
“My father, and all my brothers. They came through taking every man they could find. All the farmers from the local manor, all the villagers. Most women fled to wherever they had family or friends to shelter them. I had no one. I knew it wasn’t safe, but . . .’tis the law. And I thought every man was gone, so what was there to fear? But it seems a few stayed behind. The sort that would refuse the call. There were six of them, still, six who kept their freedom. And I was all alone here.”
Malden closed his eyes in horror.
“Do what you must to me,” the woman said, her voice a resigned whisper. “Just please . . . I’m hurt. I’m hurt down there and I don’t think I can anymore . . .”
Malden strode out into the dooryard, wanting to spit with anger. He stood in the brightest spot before the door and waved one arm in the air. Soon Cythera and Velmont’s crew joined him. He only wanted Cythera. “There’s a woman in there who doesn’t need to see another male face for a long time. Can you try to comfort her?”
“Of course,” Cythera told him and hurried inside.
He turned next to Velmont. “From now on we stay off the roads. This whole county has been stripped of able-bodied men. That doesn’t mean the recruiters aren’t still looking. Worse, there are bandits afoot.”
Velmont shrugged. “That’s the way of it, in a war. Just lads havin’ a bit o’ fun while they can. And you shouldn’t get your blood up, seein’ as you’re about one peg up from them as did this.”
Malden’s face burned as he stared at his fellow thief. “I take money from fat merchants and fools who don’t know to keep their hands on their purses. But I don’t hurt anyone, not if I can help it, and I never—
never
—harm a woman. If you’re working for me now, you’ll follow the same code.”
“Do I, now? Do I work for you? Or for meself?”
“You’d better decide soon,” Malden told him. Careful of his fingers, he put Acidtongue back in its sheath.
T
he woman from the milehouse turned out to be a homely girl of sixteen named Gerta. Once Cythera had seen to her hurts and washed the soot from her hair, she was able to rise and walk under her own power. Malden was glad for that. He didn’t know what he would have done had she been unable to care for herself.
Gerta was happy to travel with them—the thought of staying behind all alone visibly terrified her. After a while Velmont tried to talk her up, telling her how pretty her hair was, offering her his manly protection. Malden put a stop to that right away.
The next night they found a holdfast on the grounds of an abandoned manor. Not much to it, just four stone walls and a locked door, but it offered more safety than the thatch-roofed cottages they’d seen along the way. A score or so of women from the local villages had sealed themselves inside. They wouldn’t open up for Malden or his crew, but they agreed to take Gerta in once all the men had gone away. Cythera stayed with Gerta to make sure the women kept their promise, then rejoined Malden and his crew as they headed south, away from the road.
Getting off the highway slowed them down considerably, but they spent all that day without seeing another living soul. They crossed through stubbled fields turning into patches of mud, well out of sight of any village or manor house.
Cythera stopped, once, to pick up a stray shaft of wheat that had been trampled into an irrigation ditch. “We won’t starve this winter, at least,” she said.
Malden pursed his lips. “How’s that?”
Cythera sighed and dropped the stem to flutter on the air. “The wheat’s all been taken in, probably milled by now, too. It’s harvest time. If this war had begun in midsummer and all the farmers pulled away from their labor, the wheat would have been left to rot on the ground.” She shook her head dolefully. “I’ve read of wars in the north where more men died of starvation and disease than ever could have been slain by steel. I worry what will come in the spring if this war drags on—there will be no one here to plow or plant.”
Malden had never thought about where the food he ate came from. Grain appeared at the gates of Ness twice a year and was somehow turned into bread. Livestock were driven through the streets to great slaughterhouses, and steaks and cuts were sold in the shops of butchers on market days. It all went on without his knowledge or labor, so he’d assumed it always would continue the same way.
He had gone hungry many times, of course, but only for lack of coin—not because there was no food to be had. The idea of reversing that situation, of having plenty of coin but no grain to spend it on, made him feel a bit queasy. He could hardly raise his own food—that was a skill he’d never learned, nor wanted to. How many citizens of the Free City had the secret of it? How many of them would starve before they learned how it was done?
“That’s a problem for a future worry,” he told Cythera, because he didn’t like to think on what Ness would be like if there was no food in it. “Right now we need to make our rendezvous. We’re already a day late.”
They made camp that night in a deserted barn. They dared make no fire, but the walls kept some of the wind out. Malden made sure Cythera was awake enough to stand guard—he would never leave her sleeping alone with Velmont and his thieves around. Near midnight he slipped back out into the cold.
A mile away, at a place where two roads crossed, stood an ancient gallows. It had been built on the site of an old and desecrated shrine of the Bloodgod. Once the Lady’s church had taken over this land it was turned into a place of punishment.
Normally no thief in his right—if superstitious—mind would get within a half mile of the place. Even Malden found it nigh unbearable to listen to the crosstree creak above his head. Hanging was the penalty for thievery, and he had lived his whole life expecting to end suspended from such a beam. In that flat land, however, it was the most convenient landmark available. He lit a single candle that guttered in the night breeze and sat down to wait.
Nothing moved in the cloud shadows. Nothing stirred. He heard an owl hoot from miles away, a low, mournful sound almost lost under the noise of his own breathing.
He waited.
He took the scrap of parchment out of his tunic and unfolded it against his leg. In the light of the candle he could just make out the words, and the symbol at the bottom of the page—a kind of signature.
“What’s that, lad?” Slag asked, stepping into the light.
The dwarf stood no more than four feet tall. He was as thin as a rail and as pale as moonlight on snow. His dark beard stuck out in wild profusion and his keen eyes glimmered in the candlelight, but in the dark his clothing made him nearly invisible, so his face seemed to float in the light. He might have been a specter of vengeance, bound to the place where he’d been killed.
For Malden, he was a sight for sore eyes.
The thief rushed to his old friend and embraced him warmly. He hadn’t seen the dwarf since they split up outside the ruins of the Vincularium. Not since before he’d gone to Helstrow.
“A love letter from your leman?” Slag asked, tapping the parchment.
“Not exactly,” Malden said, hurriedly folding it up again.
“I thought not. I saw you pull it off of Prestwicke’s body, way back,” Slag said. “I’ve been wondering about it since.”
Malden shook his head. He wouldn’t speak of the parchment, not yet. Not until he had a proper measure of Slag’s loyalties. “How are the elves?” he asked instead.
“Squared away, neat as nails in a fucking drawer,” Slag told him. “I took ’em up to the Green Barrens, where at least they’ll have trees for company, and bade ’em to be fruitful but keep their heads down. The desolation of that place, and their natural mistrustfulness, will make sure the humans never know they’re there.” The dwarf sighed deeply. “Though they threatened to follow after me and would not sit still, not till I promised Aethil I’d come back for her. She’s still besotted with me.”
Malden laughed, though he kept his voice low. “Maybe she just likes short men.” Aethil, the queen of the elves, had been given a powerful love potion that would make her give her heart to the first man she saw. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that had been Slag. According to Cythera—who knew about such things—the effects were permanent.
The fact that the elves and the dwarves were bitter ancestral enemies had made no difference. The last time Malden saw them together, Aethil was still under the impression that Slag was just a very short human.
“But enough of my love life,” Slag said. “Tell me about the paper. Have we got fucking secrets between us now?”
Malden glanced down at the creased parchment in his hand. He’d hoped to distract Slag, but dwarves had keen and penetrating minds, and he knew Slag wouldn’t give up until he learned the truth. “It’s a contract for an execution. Mine. It just describes me, gives information on my favorite haunts in Ness. There’s no price named, but considering that Prestwicke crossed an entire kingdom to fulfill it, I can assume the bounty was high.”
“Is it signed?” Slag asked.
Malden frowned as he unfolded the parchment. “In a fashion,” he said. He held the paper where Slag could see it. At the bottom of the page was a crude sketch of a heart, transfixed by a key.
Slag’s eyes went wide.
“The boss sent an assassin after you?” Slag asked.
Malden watched the dwarf’s eyes. Slag was a fellow employee of Cutbill. Malden wasn’t sure if he’d made the right decision showing Cutbill’s mark to the dwarf.
“But for fuck’s sake, why? You’re one of his best earners.”
“Maybe that’s reason enough. Maybe he was worried I was too good at my job, and that made me a threat.”
“To Cutbill? Hardly. I’m sorry, lad, but you’re no kind of match for that villainous bastard.” Slag pulled at his beard. “I can’t figure this at all.”
“I was never supposed to see this. I was just supposed to die. Cutbill doesn’t know I have it.”
“What’ll you do now that you know?” the dwarf asked, quite carefully. “If you plan to move against him you’d better do it quick. He’s smarter than you. If he gets any idea you’re coming for him it’ll be over before you can fucking blink.”
Malden stood up slowly. If Slag decided that his allegiance to Cutbill was worth fighting over, this conversation could end very badly. “Slag, I need to know—”
The dwarf waved away his concerns with one hand. “Cutbill’s my employer. You’re my friend. Dwarves count those things different. I don’t know how humans rate them.”
Malden nodded carefully. It was a kind of reassurance, and it would have to do. He could never hurt Slag, he knew that much. They’d been through too much together.
“You’re still headed to Ness?” Slag asked.
Malden filled him in quickly on the barbarian invasion. Slag had already known some of the information.
“Aye, sounds like Ness is the safest place in the storm of shit. When we get there, I don’t want to know what you have planned,” Slag told Malden. “Maybe you’re not going to do anything. Just play along like you never saw that parchment. Maybe you’re going to forget the whole fucking thing. That would be pretty smart. Smarter than most humans I’ve known. Maybe you’re going to try for something else. Don’t tell me, and I can’t tell anyone else, all right?”
“I think we have a deal,” Malden told him.