Chapter 37 #2
The current contents of the stable did not inspire confidence.
Aside from the two mounts that they’d just brought in, every horse in it had been carrying men in armor, as fast as possible, in pouring rain.
A stableboy was gently rubbing down a bay in the next stall, who looked as if she was encrusted with her own weight in mud.
There was probably an hour or two of travel left in most of them, but it would have felt like an act of striking cruelty.
Every horse, that was … except one.
Dog Violet began to saddle Greathoof with an air of ineffable smugness.
“Our two have been standing around all night, but if we put Halla and Zale on them—” Sarkis began, then stopped as the clatter of hooves filled the yard.
A minute later, the innkeeper himself entered the stable. He looked over the four of them, his gaze settling on Edmund.
“Are you really that Learned Edmund?”
“I am,” Edmund said wearily. “Though the healers did all the work.”
The man nodded. “There’s five fellows out there asking for someone who looks like you, and a swordsman and a gnole.”
Sarkis put a hand on the hilt of his sword, which did nothing to dispel the allegation.
“They’re from that little compound over the way, which means there’s going to be a lot more of them soon.” The innkeeper’s eyes went to Halla this time. “Did you really have a cousin there?”
“Ah,” Halla said. “Well. It’s possible we were actually, err, removing my cousin. From the compound.”
The innkeeper’s eyebrows were eloquent, but he accepted this.
“Then I expect they’ll be crawling all over this place soon.
I can stall them, but not forever. And I’d rather not have killing in my inn.
” He looked them over again. “They say you’re thieves and killers, but you’ve got paladin friends and you’re that Learned Edmund. So I suggest you get out of here now.”
Zale and Sarkis scrambled for the horses they had only just unsaddled. Halla snatched up their packs. Only Dog Violet remained calm.
“Book-man takes Greathoof,” the gnole said, stroking the draft horse’s nose. “Book-man knows how to ride?”
“Yes, of course.” It occurred to Edmund that she’d never seen him on a horse, only leading Sweetness. “I’ve ridden a great deal.”
“No of course. Should see these two on a horse.” Dog Violet sniffed. “A gnole saw how book-man treats a mule. Treat a horse like a mule, understand?”
Edmund gulped. He put his hands up to make ears and said, in what he knew was a terrible accent, “He will be as dear to this one as the child of my littermate.”
“This one knows.” She leaned in and licked his forehead. “For a human, book-man can smell.”
The stablemaster, who had so far remained silent, unbent enough to say, “Go out the back. There’s a lane that’ll join up to the main road eventually. They’ll find you if they’re looking, but they’ll have to look.”
“Thank you,” Edmund gasped, mounting hastily. Greathoof was even taller than he looked from the ground, and he suspected that his thighs were going to ache from the broadness of the horse’s back. But he was fresh and the paladins had overlooked him because he so obviously wasn’t a saddle horse.
Dog Violet swung the stall door open. “Go, go. Humans and a gnole will distract them.”
Edmund put his heels to Greathoof’s sides and went.
Five minutes after Edmund had vanished, three cultists shoved the stable door open and came barreling inside.
They found the stablemaster looking impassive, a gnole mucking out stalls, and a priest of the White Rat leaning against a stall door, looking disgruntled.
“Don’t bother,” the priest told the newcomers. “There’s no fresh horses here for love or money. A pack of paladins came through and took everything. Including my horse.”
“And mine,” said the priest’s companion, a blond woman with a figure like a large hourglass. “Just snapped their fingers and commandeered everything.”
“I don’t argue with the Dreaming God’s people,” the stablemaster said. “If you want to, that’s your problem.”
The lead cultist shook his head. “We’re not here for horses. We’re looking for a young fellow, brown hair, wearing robes, and a man with a sword.” He scanned the stable, but did not see either of them. “Check the hayloft,” he told one of his underlings.
“I’d like to see a man with a sword,” said the blond wistfully. “Particularly if he knew how to use it.”
“You and me both,” the priest muttered.
The lead cultist rolled his eyes. “These people committed murder.”
The priest looked suitably shocked. The stableboy paused to gape over the stall door.
The gnole didn’t stop shoveling, but who knew how much gnoles even understood, and the stablemaster’s face didn’t change, but the cultist had met him before and was aware that it would take more than simple murder to wring an expression out of him.
The blond frowned, then asked, “Was it a big murder or a little murder?”
Followers of the Sainted Smith were often brilliant blacksmiths, artificers, or engineers.
But you can only have so many of those in a cult before you have to hire people to make sure that the trash gets taken out and that the artificers remember to eat.
The lead cultist fell firmly in that latter camp.
He stared at the blond, temporarily derailed from his mission by sheer bafflement.
“I’m going to regret asking,” the priest said, “but what’s a little murder?”
“Oh, you know. When you kill someone but you don’t mean anything by it.”
The priest pinched the bridge of their nose. “That’s manslaughter. You’re thinking of manslaughter.”
“Slaughter really sounds more like a big murder, though. And anyway, they tried my cousin for murder.”
The priest gave the cultist a resigned look. “Your cousin was a murderer?”
“Yes, but it was only a little murder really. The judge said it was clear that he hadn’t planned it in advance or anything, and he really wasn’t the murdering type.
No one would ever have thought it of him, the poor lamb, but he took an axe and chopped up his father-in-law—not from our side of the family, you understand, but his wife’s father—and I don’t know, it was terrible, of course you can’t condone that kind of behavior, but it’s true that his wife never did testify against him—the father-in-law’s wife, not my cousin’s wife, although she didn’t either, but that was on account of being married and you can’t make a wife testify against her husband.
” She smiled brightly at the cultist. “Is your murderer married?”
“I don’t … know…?”
“That’s probably an important thing to find out.”
“Y-e-e-e-s…” said the cultist, backing toward the door. “I will … err … go and find out. About that.”
“Are you married?”
“No? I mean, no. I’m not.”
“She’s a widow,” the priest said. “Ask me how I know.”
“Don’t be like that, dear.” The blond gazed at the ring on her finger. “And it’s not like he was murdered. Big or little.”
“He … he wasn’t?” The cultist had no idea how the conversation had gotten here, but was quite certain that if he steered it back toward murder, it wouldn’t help.
“No.” She looked up at the cultist and smiled brightly. “It was the smallpox that got him.”
“The hayloft’s clear,” his underling called, coming down the ladder.
“Good! Great. Yes. Don’t hang about then, man.” The lead cultist directed one last look at Halla, somewhere between bemusement and alarm, shoved his underlings through the door, and slammed it shut after him.
“What gets me,” said Zale, as the sounds of arguing faded from the yard, “is how rarely they interrupt. You can see them getting impatient, but for some reason they hardly ever cut you off. You’re like a snake charmer that babbles instead of playing the flute.”
“It’s a gift.” Halla glanced over to Dog Violet, who had stopped mucking out the stall. Buried under the horse manure and soiled straw lay Sarkis’s sword, with Sarkis himself inside. “I just hope we gave poor Edmund enough of a lead.”