Azerick dropped back and fished through his rucksack. Judging by touch alone, he found he had four flasks left: two smoke, one acid, and one stench pot. He removed the acid flask and waited until they crossed an intersection of four buildings before throwing it down and shattering it upon the cobbles. He threw the stench pot a few seconds later at the next intersection and readied the smoke pot for the next. Azerick shouted and charged to his left towards the sound of flanking pursuers.
“Hey, you fatherless, goat-loving, sacks of goblin feces, you are too late! Your slaves are long gone thanks to me so why don’t you all go home and get in line to pleasure your mothers like everybody else in the city!”
Azerick’s taunting had the desired effect. Men turned towards him, cursing and screaming the vilest threats they could imagine and they certainly did not lack in imagination. Although he seriously doubted many of their threats were physically possible, Azerick definitely did not want to fall into their hands.
He sprinted away as fast as his feet could carry him, pouring the catalyst into the smoke pot and dropping it at his feet as he crossed the intersection where he had last seen Bran and the freed captives. The bottle broke upon the stone street, releasing a pall of smoke that completely obscured all four corners in an instant. The smoke screen ensured that Bran and the others were well out of sight as the slavers converged upon the intersection.
Azerick shouted again, making certain the slavers did not deviate their course and discover that he lured them away from their prize, although Azerick thought there was a good chance that they were more interested in capturing him now than recovering their human property.
Azerick nearly ran right into the arms of half a dozen men as he and the group unexpectedly converged at another four-way intersection. Azerick leapt high into the air, kicking out at the lead man with his foot, and catching him in the side of the head. The blow sent the man tumbling to the ground and did not rise as Azerick continued running, his feet already moving the instant they hit the cobblestones.
Azerick was breathing heavily as he tried to shake the determined pursuers, certain he had led them far enough away from Bran that he and the captives should be able to reach safety by now. Instinct led him to the squatters’ district as he darted down narrow alleys and through abandoned buildings, surprising the vagrant tenants of the occupied ones.
The slavers were intent on not letting him escape and he came to realize that running into the squatters’ district had been a bad idea seeing that there was little chance of finding help or a safe haven in the area. He could dart down one of the entrances of his lair, but that put it at great risk of discovery and he was not about to lose the most secure home he could hope to find in the city. Not yet at least.
With the slavers now chasing him on three sides, they began coordinating their chase and herded him like a pack of wolves. Azerick skidded to a halt as men suddenly appeared at the end of the alley, their black silhouettes blocking his path. He spun around in hopes of fleeing back the way he came but his pursuers blocked his egress from that direction as well.
Azerick’s heart pounded as much from exertion as the realization of the predicament he was now in. His mind raced furiously for an answer to his potentially lethal dilemma, but for once, no answer was forthcoming. He was about to unhook his crossbow from the rucksack as the slavers confidently stalked towards him, calling out taunts, threats, and jeers. Before he could loosen the thong securing the crossbow behind him, a rope suddenly dropped from the roof, nearly striking him in the shoulder.
Azerick did not care who threw him the rope, figuring whoever was on the rooftop could not possibly be more hostile than those on the ground were and began climbing. Seeing their quarry escaping, the slavers rushed forward but a hail of thrown knives and quarrels launched from small crossbows chased them back.
A strong hand gripped Azerick’s wrist as he neared the summit and pulled him onto the rooftop. Several men wearing dark clothing and wielding small but numerous weapons looked over the side of the building watching the slavers flee from the lethal rooftop attack. Although the slavers possessed considerably superior numbers, they had no way of readily reaching the unknown assailants that suddenly appeared to whisk their prey away before their very eyes.
“Move it, boy, we can’t keep to the roofs around here forever and I have no desire to meet those scum on the ground,” the man that had pulled him up said.
Without a word, Azerick followed the men as they leapt from roof to roof when the distance was not too great and ran across sturdy planks that spanned the roofs of the more distant rooftops, which they secreted onto the roofs after they had crossed.
After the group had crossed several blocks by rooftop, Azerick asked. “I am glad you saved my hide, but who are you?”
“Just someone Andrill decided to send to protect his investment. He decided the risk to the house was justified by the chance of future profit. I don’t know what he expects to get outta you, but it sounds like it’s gonna be more than I would want, or even be able to pay.”
Azerick and the small band of thieves dropped back to street level as the buildings spread too far apart to continue by way of the rooftops. In the more settled and developed parts of the city, the lower parts of course, one could traverse nearly the entire ward without ever stepping foot on the cobblestones. Of course, the Watch would give one a merry chase if they spotted you leaping through the open air or using a span to cross between buildings seeing as how few would have legitimate requirements of such a method of traveling.
“Alright, street rat, I think you can find your way from here. We lost the slaver scum, but I suggest you find a place to hide out at least until daylight,” the man told him as they dropped from the roof and into a dark alley.
“Yeah, I have a bolthole not too far from here.” Azerick replied. “Thanks again for saving my hide.”
The guild men made no response and disappeared into the shadows, leaving Azerick standing alone in the middle of the alley. He carefully made his way deeper into the squatters’ district towards one of the secret entrances to his subterranean home. He decided that he would use the one beneath the burned out tanner’s building.
Azerick moved with as much stealth as he could muster, keeping both his ears and eyes peeled for any signs of the slavers, but it appeared as though they had given up in their hunt. He wished he could go and find Bran but knew that it was safer for the both of them if he waited until morning.
Despite the evening’s exertion, both physical and mental, sleep came to him with great difficulty and only after a few hours of restlessness. Azerick was worried about Andrea and about how Bran was handling the fact that she had not been in the warehouse. Had she ever been there or did something else happen? It was not unusual for a person, especially a young girl out at night, to be attacked and their body thrown into the harbor.
Azerick forced himself to push those morbid thoughts away. Andrea was bright and knew the streets and its dangers as well as any of them. Being a girl, she was even more cautious than him and Bran despite her near fearlessness and tenacity.
Tears crept to his eyes as he thought about her fiery spirit and unquenchable enthusiasm for life despite the lousy hand she had been dealt. Had she been born a woman of even moderate means she would have been a formable and truly remarkable person. The thought of that bright spark of life extinguished by the selfish and greedy desires of another filled him with rage, which did nothing to help with his current bout of insomnia.
Azerick did not know when he eventually fell asleep but recalled the disturbing dreams he had when he finally awoke. He had no way of knowing what time it was and prayed that it was not too late. Bran would surely be looking for him this morning at least find out if his friend had survived the night.
The restless and troubled sleep did little to placate the exhaustion he felt so he decided to spare a few minutes to make a strong pot of coffee before embarking on his search for Bran. His reflexes would need the energy generating properties of the brew to help keep him alert. There was a chance that the slavers had only been momentarily deterred. Given their numbers, it was quite possible that they were as firmly entrenched and had comparable resources within the city as the thieves’ guild did.
It took Azerick about thirty minutes to heat the water for his coffee and boil the crushed grounds before using the tannery entrance to strike out into the city’s surface life.
The sun was already far into the sky, probably not more than an hour or two before noon. Azerick hoped that Bran was still running about the city and had not been captured or killed. Still wary after last night’s events, Azerick moved cautiously through the squatters’ district and towards the merchant district where he, Bran, and Andrea always linked up in the past.
Despite his elevated alertness, Azerick never noticed the man hunkered down inside the shadowed doorway of one of the abandoned buildings, watching the troublesome street rat slink through the quarter as he distantly followed him into the merchant district and towards one of the market squares.
CHAPTER 12
Azerick nearly stabbed Bran when his friend came up from behind and grabbed his arm. “Damn it, Bran, warn a guy when you are going to sneak up on him the day after he narrowly escapes certain torture and death at the hands of severely irate slavers!”
“I’ll try to remember. Listen, Andrea wasn’t there last night.”
“I know, Bran, I’m sorry but we might still be able to find her. Maybe she is being held in a different building in the city or sold to some rich guy as a maid or something.”
“No, listen to me!” Bran demanded. “I talked to some of the people we freed last night. A couple of them remember her because she spit in the eye of few of the slavers and managed to kick one between the legs so hard he walked hunched over for two days.
“They took her and a bunch of others away the same night that the ones we rescued were brought in and overhead the slavers talking about a ship sailing to Bakhtaran.” Bran shook Azerick by his shoulders. “Don’t you see? I know where she is! We can find her now!”
Azerick wanted to be excited with his best friend but what he said numbed him. “Bran, Bakhtaran is a major slave city a thousand miles to the south. Even the King of Sumara cannot control the emir of that city.”
“So what am I supposed to do, just leave her there? Forget about her, give up on her, and go on with my life?” Bran demanded, shouting and waving his arms in frustration.
Azerick felt the bile rise in his throat the instant he answered. “Yes. You have no money, no skills outside stealing bread and lifting a purse, and no knowledge of anything outside of Southport. You can barely read Valerian and you think you can just start walking south or hop a ship, show up in Bakhtaran like some knight-errant rescuing the princess, and live happily ever after? You will be dead within a week and that is if you are lucky. You will starve in a month or end up a slave digging in a Sumaran mine.”
Azerick never saw the blow coming. The next thing he was aware of was the clouds gliding lazily across the sky. It took him a moment to realize what had caused the sudden change in the orientation of his view. He tongued a loose tooth and tasted blood in his mouth.
“
Ow
. Now help me back up, you savage,” Azerick said as he extended his hand up towards Bran.
Bran clasped Azerick’s wrist and pulled him back onto his feet. “You know, you have gotten exceedingly violent recently, and coming from me that should frighten you more than just a tiny bit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not. All right, let’s figure out how to give you at least a small chance to get there alive and not in shackles. I will give you my crossbow and whatever coin I have, which is terribly meager, as you well know. However, I may be able to get you an honest ship going south.”
“That sounds better. I am sorry I hit you—now,” Bran offered.
“You should be, you cretin. We’ll go talk to Peg and see if we can get you on a boat. You better hope like hell I do not lose my tooth or I may end up in Bakhtaran just to return the favor.”
“In that case, maybe I should hit you again.”