Chapter 13
In the bewildering maze of Bycross, Fern had no idea how Astryx could possibly locate a goblin in a cloak who didn’t want to be located, but the Oathmaiden moved without hesitation.
She surged to her feet, snatching up Nigel and hurling a fistful of coins onto the tabletop, and then she was across the restaurant and through the heavy curtain shrouding the doorway.
“I, um . . . S-Sorry?” stammered Fern, shrugging an apology at the bewildered patrons gawping at them. She scrambled off her cushion and darted after the elf.
Fern was already puffing by the time she’d ducked out of the curtain and into the lantern-lit hallway lined with brightly painted arches, handcarts, and bins of exotic vegetables.
Astryx’s shadow stuttered in the brighter light reflecting around a far corner, and Fern hurried to follow. “Why the fuck am I doing this?” she panted, hitching up her hem with one paw. A crazed giggle wanted to climb up her throat.
She’d managed to close some of the distance when Astryx paused to scoop something up from the stone floor.
The oilskin cloak.
Tossing it over her shoulder and without a backward glance, the elf was off around another corner.
“Wait!” cried Fern, but Astryx didn’t bother to reply, or didn’t hear her. “Hells. I’m too old for this!”
Which was depressing, given that the elf was over twenty times her age.
After several wrong turns and hallways much longer than she remembered on the way in, Fern arrived at the exterior road and stumbled to a stop in the thicker traffic there. Her lungs seemed packed with ice, and her vision had gone all swimmy.
Astryx was nowhere to be seen.
“Godsdammit.”
A jostle from behind nearly sent her sprawling, and she spun to stare at the back of a long-haired orc warrior whose broad shoulders seemed familiar.
“Viv?” murmured Fern.
But of course it wasn’t. As the orc turned, it was clear that she was younger, with a score of black braids and a frosty gaze.
“Watch your tail.” The warrior gave her a dismissive once-over, before striding off into the crowd.
Fern stared after the departing orc momentarily, before a rising commotion from up the cliff face met her ears. She spied a group of black-clad Four Fingers mercenaries hustling toward it, and it became obvious which direction she needed to go.
“Chaos follows,” she muttered, and with a groan, began the weary jog upward, satchel banging at her hip.
Fern’s jog had devolved into an urgent stagger by the time she reached the source of the fuss, about three quarters up the ascent to Bycross’s peak.
A massive concavity in the otherwise sheer cliff face created something akin to an open town square, if that town square happened to feature a deadly drop on one side. At least thirty strides above, enormous red banners bearing the Bycross symbol snapped and crawled across the vertical stone.
A statue of some important, famous—or very wealthy—stone-fey dominated the square, one hand upraised in supplication, the other clasping the shoulder of a slumped figure at her side.
A mass of people blocked Fern’s eye-level view, so she wormed her way forward until she emerged with a gasp into sudden open space.
Behind her and ringing the statue, folk of every race made up the crowd she’d just forged through.
But within that ring, another had formed of black-clad figures with the symbol of the Four Fingers on their breasts, oxtongue spears facing inward, kettle helms gleaming in the sun.
And at their center, at the foot of the statue, waited Astryx One-Ear, brandishing Nigel in guard position before her.
In the shadow of the elf—orange-haired, red-eyed, and grinning for all she was worth—Zyll the goblin held aloft two fistfuls of leather bags.
Fern looked closer.
No. Leather coinpurses.
“I’ll thank the lot of you to pack away those sad excuses for weaponry,” declared Astryx’s sword, in the tones of a schoolmaster trying to be heard over a rowdy classroom.
“You face the Oathmaiden! And in her hands, Nigellus Primus. No steel here can stand against her! Or me, for that matter, although I daresay that should be implicit in—”
“Thank you, Nigel,” said Astryx dryly.
“Wouldn’t give a tin shit if you were one of the Eight. Give her over!” hollered a thickly muscled mercenary, her black hair clubbed back, teeth white in an angry snarl. “Nobody steals from the Four Fingers. Nobody. Does the Oathmaiden protect thieves now?”
Fern blinked, then tried to count the number of bags in Zyll’s hands. There were a lot of them.
The goblin jingled the purses gleefully.
“What the hells is she doing?” murmured Fern.
Astryx widened her stance and coolly evaluated the mercenaries, keeping the statue at her back. The prospect of fighting her way through a dozen Four Fingers goons didn’t seem to upset her in the least.
Her gaze snagged on Fern for just a moment. A single brow rose ever so slightly.
“This one is mine,” the Blademistress said, shifting her attention back to the warriors encircling her.
“And I don’t plan to relinquish her. If these are yours however”—she gestured with an elbow at the purses—“I’m sure that’s something that can be sorted out.
If not between us, then I warrant there are still Gatewardens in Bycross. ”
“Screw the Wardens,” barked the black-haired mercenary, taking a decisive step forward. “We don’t—”
“Screw the Wardens, eh?” came another woman’s voice. A rising murmur in the crowd preceded its parting, revealing a stone-fey in a blue tunic with a silver lantern badge pinned above her heart, and an actual lantern on her belt.
The Gatewarden strode forth, flanked by two other Wardens with their hands on the hilts of their sheathed blades.
Her flinty gaze passed over the mercenaries before finding Astryx.
She hooked her thumbs in her belt. “Would anyone like to fill me in on what’s going on here?
I thought we were paying the Four Fingers to keep trouble outside of Bycross, not to start more in the heart of it. ”
The black-haired merc ground her teeth, and if her spear had been able to breathe, it would have already been throttled unconscious.
“This . . . thief ”—she jabbed her weapon toward Zyll—“is the only one starting trouble. Nicked the purses of a bunch of the Fingers. But, by the Eight, it’s trouble we can damned well finish. ”
The Gatewarden studied the extravagantly pocketed Zyll. “You’re saying that an unarmed goblin with a hideous coat you can spot a league away managed to steal from the lot of you, repeatedly, in broad daylight?”
“Well—”
“And we’re paying you for protection?”
“I mean—”
The Warden held up a hand, forestalling any further explanation.
She spoke instead to Zyll. “Anything to say in your defense?”
The goblin closed her lips over her alligator smile and jingled the purses again thoughtfully.
Astryx opened her mouth to explain—
—but Zyll beat her to it.
“The Finger Folk, they are not friendlings.” She waved one handful of purses dismissively, and her smile reappeared. “You are, ehh, how do you say . . . having the foxies in the chicken house?”
A long moment of silence reigned, during which Astryx let Nigel sag in her grip and stared, flabbergasted, at the goblin.
It was shattered when Fern cried, “You speak fucking Territories?”
Fern wasn’t sure what possessed her, but before she knew it, she’d darted between black-clad figures to join Astryx and Zyll at the spot in Bycross with the most sharp things pointed at it.
“I know you, Astryx One-Ear,” called the Gatewarden.
Gasps of delayed recognition issued from the crowd.
“Your reputation is the only reason I’m asking questions before letting the both of you cool your heels in a cell.
” She shifted her attention to Fern and her satchel.
“But who’s this, now? Did you decide you needed a scribe? ”
“I’m her, um, traveling companion,” gasped Fern, still winded.
Nigel snorted—impressive for a sword—and Fern spared him a glare.
Astryx, for her part, was scratching her damaged ear with an assessing expression on her face.
Fern rounded on Zyll. “I can’t believe you could’ve spoken up the entire time,” she hissed.
The goblin shrugged. The purses had disappeared, gods knew where. “Nobodies was ever ask-ling.”
“I think the ask was fucking implied,” sputtered the rattkin.
Zyll blinked back at her, very slowly.
“Quibble later,” snapped the Gatewarden. “Astryx, what is this goblin talking about?”
“She’s talking shit!” bellowed the black-haired merc, who seemed to have become the Four Fingers’ de facto spokeswoman. She was clearly having a hard time mastering her need to say more.
Astryx stared at Zyll, and then at Fern, with that same assessing look. Fern wasn’t sure she liked it.
“I’ll let my scribe answer that,” said the elf.
Now Fern was breathless for a reason that had nothing to do with the climb.
Astryx might as well have seized her in both hands and dangled her over the precipice to tread wind with her paws.
But there wasn’t any malice about the Blademistress that she could detect.
Just that feeling of intense speculation. Amused speculation.
All eyes fixed on Fern.
“I, um, well . . .” Then to Zyll in an urgent whisper, “What the hells did you mean, foxes in the henhouse?”
Zyll pointed mutely at one of the Four Fingers mercenaries. Then at another. And another.
No, not at the mercenaries. At their boots.
“Red,” the goblin whispered back with an extravagantly rolled R. “South-ly.”
“I’m pretty fucking sure black is the color you—” Fern broke off midsentence.
The red mud caked into the seams of their black boots.
South.
“There’s no red soil here . . .” murmured Fern.
“Do you have something to say, or not?” demanded the Gatewarden. “My patience ebbs.”
Everything snapped together in Fern’s brain at once. “The, um, the warlord! Tetanus?”
“Taltus?” The Gatewarden frowned.
“Yes, that guy! Taltus! The one to the south? In the swamp-lands? The one you’re paying them to keep away? I bet the earth down there is pretty red, isn’t it? Not like around here.”
“What in the name of the Eight are you talking about?”
A slow ripple passed through the Four Fingers, and Fern’s conviction grew. “In fact, I haven’t seen mud that color anywhere nearby. Not for days. And nobody else’s boots in this square seem to have picked any up, either. Nobody but the Four Fingers.”
Fern experienced a blue bolt of inspiration. “And I’ll bet after the trouble started, some local nob mentioned a crew you’d never heard of, but they insisted could get the job done? An easy hire?”
The Warden’s eyes widened—a direct hit.
“I think you might want to have a little talk with them, whoever they were,” added Fern, shaking her head woefully and really getting into the spirit of the thing. “If they’re still around.”
Astryx sighed. “I should have noticed. It’s such a classic con.
” She flicked Nigel in an arc at the ring of mercenaries, addressing the Gatewarden in a loud voice.
“They’re all his crew. Taltus is fleecing you.
You’re hiring his own soldiers to protect you from him.
Gods, this is a hoary old chestnut.” She shook her head.
“The Four Fingers don’t exist. Or if they do, they’re certainly not from around here. ”
The Oathmaiden leveled Nigel at the mercenary leader and smiled humorlessly, her ragged silver hair riffling in the wind. “Which means I won’t feel the slightest remorse about doing what needs to be done.”
The Four Fingers didn’t wait for another word.
They collapsed inward as one, spearheads leading the way.
The Gatewardens pursued at their heels, already drawing their blades.
Astryx took a single lunging step forward, bringing her elbow high and her swordpoint low—
—and with a graceful turn and a long, looping slash, she beheaded seven of the oncoming spears with Nigel, who laughed his plummy laugh the entire way.
Then she danced among black-clad figures, deadly and purposeful, while the Wardens smashed into the circle from without, spilling violence into the crowd.
Fern gasped as she felt Zyll’s hand knot into the hood of her cloak.
Then the goblin dragged her, choking, up over the statue’s plinth and into the shadow between its legs.
To safety.