The two powries stood calmly, one with its hands in its pockets, the other drawing deeply on a long-stemmed pipe. Roger noted that their caps shone a crimson hue, even in the dim light. These were seasoned veterans, he understood. Powries were called “bloody caps” for their practice of dipping their berets, hats fashioned of skin, often human, in the blood of their enemies. The berets were treated with special oils that would allow them to retain the color of the blood, with each new victim’s essence brightening the hue. Thus, a powrie’s standing could often be determined by the color of its cap.
Roger was repulsed by the sight and the implications of those shining berets, but he was not deterred. If anything, the realization that this pair had dipped their caps often only made him more determined. To his thinking, this little action would avenge those killed, at least a little bit. A low fire burned between the powries, and they had set three torches out a dozen feet in a semicircular pattern, leaving open only the short path back to the nearby town. Roger slipped beyond that semicircle, moving as silently as a cloud drifting across the path of the moon. As he passed by the circle, the town was open to him, but he turned about, moving in behind the dwarven pair, sliding down behind a hedgerow a few feet away. He waited there a few moments, making sure the powries were off their guard and that no others were in the immediate area. Then he slithered around the edge of the bushes, belly-crawling for his prey.
“Could use a draw myself,” one of the dwarves remarked, and it pulled one hand from its pocket, holding a pipe of its own.
Even as the dwarf’s hand came out, Roger’s fingers slipped in.
“Weed me up,” the dwarf said, handing the pipe to its companion. The other powrie took it and lifted a packet of pipe weed, while the first moved its hand back to its pocketeven as Roger’s hand came sliding out with a pair of gold pieces, the strange, eight-sided coinage of the Weathered Isles.
Roger smiled widely as the dwarf retrieved its pipewith its other hand, thus opening the second pocket.
“You are sure?” Belster O’Comely asked for the tenth time.
“Saw them myself,” the man, Jansen Bridges, answered. “No more than an hour ago.”
“Big?”
“Could eat a man with room left in their bellies for his wife,” Jansen replied.
Belster stood up from his tree-trunk seat and walked to the southern edge of the small clearing that was serving as a base camp for the refugee band.
“How many went to town?” Jansen asked.
“Just Roger Lockless,” Belster replied.
“He goes in every night,” Jansen said in a somewhat derisive tone. Jansen had come from the north, with Belster’s group, and had never been enamored of Roger Lockless.
“Yeah, and we all eat the better for it!” Belster retorted, turning about to regard the man.
He saw then that Jansen’s tone was more wrought of frustration than of any anger aimed at Roger, and so the gentle Belster let it pass.
“If any can get by them, it’s Roger Lockless,” Belster continued, talking as much to himself as to Jansen.
“So we all hope,” said Jansen. “But we cannot wait to find out. I say we put another five miles between us and the dwarves, at least until we see how dangerous these new additions might be.”
Belster considered the notion for a short while, then nodded his assent. “Go and tell Tomas Gingerwart,” he instructed. “If he agrees that it is better we are on the road this very night, our group will be ready to march.”
Jansen Bridges nodded and moved off across the clearing, leaving Belster to his thoughts.
He was growing tired of it all, Belster realized. Tired of hiding in the woods and tired of powries. He had been a successful tavern-keeper in Palmaris, a town he had called home since the tender age of five, relocating with his parents from the southland near Ursal. For more than thirty years he had lived in that prosperous city on the Masur Delaval, working first with his father, a builder, and then on his own in a tavern business of his own making. Then his mother had died, peacefully, and less than a year later, his father, and only then had Belster learned of the debt his father left behind, a legacy that fell squarely on the large shoulders of the man’s only son.
Belster had lost the tavern, and was still in debt to the point where he would either have had to accept a decade of indenture to the creditors or go and rot for a like period in a Palmaris jail.
He had created his own third option instead, packing his few remaining belongings and fleeing for the wild north, to the Timberlands and a place called Dundalis, a new town being raised from the ruins of one destroyed by a goblin raid several years earlier.
In Dundalis, Belster O’Comely had found his home and his niche, opening a new tavern, the Howling Sheila. There weren’t many patronsthe Timberlands were not heavily populated, and the only visitors who passed through were the seasonal merchant caravansbut in the self-supporting lifestyle of the wilderness town, the man didn’t need much money.
But then the goblins had come back, this time with hosts of powries and giants. And so Belster became a fugitive again, and this time the stakes were much higher.
He looked back to the dark forest, in the direction of Caer Tinella, though the town was too far away, and beyond too many hills and trees, to be seen. The outlaw band could not afford to lose Roger Lockless, Belster knew. The young man had become a legend to the beleaguered refugees, their leader of sorts, though he was rarely among them, and even more rarely ever spoke to any of them. Since Roger’s daring rescue of poor Mrs. Kelso, that status had even increased, if possible. If Roger was caught and killed now, the blow to morale would be heavy indeed.
“What do you know?” came a question. Belster turned about to see Reston Meadows, another of his fellow Dundalis refugees, standing behind him.
“Roger is in town,” Belster replied.
“So Jansen told us,” Reston replied grimly. “And he told us of the new additions, too. Roger will have to live up to his reputation and more, I fear.”
“Has Tomas spoken on the matter?”
Reston nodded. “We will be on the move within the hour.”
Belster rubbed his thick jowls. “Take a pair of your best scouts and make for Caer Tinella,” he said. “Try to determine the fate of Roger Lockless.”
“You think that three of us might get in to save him?” Reston asked incredulously.
Belster understood the sentiment; few in the camp wanted any encounters with Kos-kosio Begulne and his tough powries. “I only asked you to learn of his fate, not to determine it,” the portly man explained. “If Roger was taken and killed, we will have to concoct a more fitting tale of his absence.”
Reston cocked his head curiously.
“For them,” Belster finished, motioning his chin in the direction of the encampment. “It did not break us when the Nightbird, Pony, and Avelyn went off for the Barbacan, but how heavy might our hearts have been if they were slain?”
Reston understood. “They need Roger,” he reasoned.
“They need to believe that Roger is working for their freedom,” Belster replied.
The man nodded again and scampered off to find two appropriate scouting companions, leaving Belster alone again, staring into the forest. Yes, Belster O’ Comely was tired of it all, particularly of the responsibility. He felt like the father of a hundred and eighty children, and there was one risk-taker in particular who kept his nerves tingling.
Belster dearly hoped that one troublemaker would return safely.
His booty secured, Roger began to slither away. As he crossed back into the brush, though, he noticed a length of coiled rope, one used by the slaves to haul logs. Roger couldn’t resist. He looped the middle of the rope around a sturdy tree trunk, then took both ends with him as he returned to the oblivious pipe-smoking powries.
He was back in the woods soon after. He decided that he would come back this way on his departure and startle the pair. If, as was usually the case with powries, they had not moved much in the meanwhile, they would find a bit of trouble, and Roger would find a bit of fun, when they took up the howling chase and the loops he had put about their feet tightened and they fell flat to the ground.
He might even be able to get back to them and snatch one of their precious caps before they managed to extricate themselves.
Roger filed the thoughts away for a later time; the town was in clear sight now, quiet and dark. A couple of goblins milled about, but even the central building, usually used for gambling, was quiet this night. Again Roger considered his ruse about the dactyl and Mrs. Kelso. The monsters were on their best behavior, fearing that their unforgiving master was about.
Given that on-guard stance, Roger almost wished he had used a different explanation concerning Mrs. Kelso’s disappearance.
Too late to worry about that now, the young man told himself, and into the town he went. He would be careful this night; instead of his normal rounds, moving from building to building, picking pocketsand often placing not-so-valuables in the possession of other monsters, just to see if he might start a fighthe went straight for the larders, thinking to get a good meal and to bring some food back out to the folk hiding in the forest.
The larder door was locked, its hoop handles wrapped in heavy chains and secured by a heavy padlock.
Where did they get that? Roger wondered, rubbing his chin and cheeks and glancing all around. And why did they bother?
With a bored sigh, Roger pulled a small pick out from behind his ear and slipped it into the padlock’s opening, bending low that he might better hear his work. A couple of twists, a couple of clicks later, and the lock popped open. Roger lifted it free and started to unwrap the chains, but paused and considered his actions. He wasn’t really hungry, now that he thought about it.
He glanced all about, taking in the silence, trying to measure the level of wariness in the town. Perhaps he could find a bit of sport this night. Then he could return and gather some food for his friends.
He took the lock and the chain, and left the door unopened.
Good fortune was with him, he realized before he had gone two steps, when he heard the low rumbling behind him. He skittered back to the door, bent low and put his ear to the wood.
Growling and snarling came from behind the door, and then, with sudden ferocity that stood Roger up straight in the blink of an eye, a loud and angry bark.
The young man sped away, slipping behind another building. He stashed the chains and lockthey were too noisy for flightunder a loose board along the alley, then went up to the roof, climbing easily and silently.
A powrie crossed the open ground to the larder door, cursing every step. “Bah, what’re ye howling about?” the dwarf grumbled in its stone-against-stone voice. The powrie reached for the door, but stopped and scratched its head, recognizing that something was missing.
“Drat,” Roger muttered when he saw the powrie run off, back the way it had come. Roger’s normal tactics would have called for him to sit tight, but the hairs on the back of his neck were prickling, his instincts telling him to get away, and quickly. He went down the far side of the building, then sprinted away into the darkness. Behind him, all through the town, torches went up, one after another, the commotion mounting, cries of “Thief!” echoing through the night.
Roger went from rooftop to rooftop, scrambled down one wall and up another, then over a split-rail fence into a corral on the northwestern edge of town. Down low, the young man picked his way among the cows, trying not to disturb them, touching them only gently and whispering softly, urging them to keep quiet.
He, would have gotten through without incident; the resting cows weren’t overly concerned with him.
Except that not all of them were cows.
If Roger hadn’t been so concerned with waking powries and goblins, he would have realized that this was Rosin Delaval’s farm, and that Rosin had a bull, the most mean-tempered animal in all of Caer Tinella. Rosin usually kept the bull separate from the cows, for the bullying beast often hurt them and didn’t make it easy for him to go in and get any milk. But the powries did not separate the animals, taking sport in the wounded cattle, and in the antics of their goblin lessers whenever they sent the goblins in to get milk, or a cow for slaughter.
Roger, looking over his shoulder more than ahead, and walking through a veritable maze of cow bodies, gently nudged one beast aside, then pushed softly on another. He noticed immediately that this animal seemed sturdier than the others, and less willing to give ground.
Roger started to push again, but froze in place, slowly turning his head around to regard the animal.
The bull, all two thousand pounds of it, was half asleep, and Roger, thinking that to be a half too little, backed away slowly and quietly. He bumped into a cow, and the animal moaned its complaint.
The bull snorted, its huge, horned head swinging about.
Roger darted away, cutting a path right behind the spinning bull, then turning back, right behind it again. He entertained some brief, fantasy about getting the thing so dizzy that it would just fall down. Brief indeed, for despite his darting movements and strong foot speed, the bull was turning inside him, those deadly horns gaining ground.
Roger took the only course that seemed open: he leaped on the bull’s back.
Rationally, he knew he shouldn’t be screaming, but he was anyway. The bull bucked and snorted, hooves slamming the ground in absolute rage. It twisted and leaped, ducked its head and cut a tight turn, nearly pitching Roger over its shoulder.
Somehow he held on as the bull worked its way to the far end of the corral, with only the dark forest beyond the fence. It was a good thing, too, Roger realized, for back the other way, goblins and powries were all about, most yelling and pointing toward the corral.