Shadow Prowler

6. DAYTIME SURPRISES

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The unceremonious hammering on the door made me leap up off the old cracked wooden bedstead and start fumbling around for my weapon. “Harold? Are you there? Open up! In the name of the Order!” a loud, deep voice shouted.

What could the Order want with me at this early hour? I glanced out through the dirty windowpane. The sun was already quite high.

“Harold! Open the door, or I’ll break it in!”

Okay, try. Although, if he really is a magician of the Order, he won’t need to try very hard. He’ll only need to spit and half the house will be reduced to splinters. I began thinking seriously about taking a stroll through the window.

“Harold, His Magicness Artsivus requests you to come. Urgently!”

Artsivus? Why didn’t he say straightaway that he was from Artsivus, instead of threatening to shatter the door?

“Just a moment. Wait,” I shouted, feeling at my cloak. It was a little dirty and there were hoofprints on it, but it was perfectly wearable.

I opened the lock, drew the bolt, and took a step back. But I didn’t put the crossbow away-after all, anyone could be hiding behind the name of an archmagician of the Order.

“Come in.”

The door opened and there in front of me was a harmless-looking young man in a blue robe that dangled like a sack from his narrow shoulders. I would never have thought this young lad could hammer on the door so hard.

“Are you Harold? On the-” My visitor spotted the crossbow trained on him, turned gray in the face, and stopped talking.

I put the weapon away behind my back-there’s no point in frightening children.

“Yes, I’m Harold.”

“Master Harold. His Magicship, the head of the Order, Master Artsivus, asks you to come to him without delay.”

“I see. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. Wait.”

Without hurrying, I took the bag containing the magic ingredients and the gold I had received from the king out of its secret hiding place. I’m not usually so stupid as to keep my money all in one heap, especially at home. It’s simpler to pass it on to a few reliable people and make the gold work for you. In a gnome bank, for instance. The money’s always reliably protected by traps, locks, magic, and furious mattockmen. But I was going to need the king’s gold pieces today.

“Where’s the carriage?”

“Eeeh…,” said the apprentice, embarrassed. “I’m on foot.”

“Magnificent! Then tell me, apprentice, how come you’re still alive after walking all the way through the Port City to reach me? Round here they leave naïve children like you floating under the pier. Or maybe you weren’t lying when you said you would break in the door, and you know how to shoot fireballs?”

The lad became even more embarrassed, and blushed.

“Well,” he mumbled, “just a little.”

“Okay, lead on,” I sighed.

Why on earth Artsivus would take on such an awkward child as an apprentice was beyond me.

Noon. The central street of the Port City was packed solid with people. There was everybody here-from idly wandering revelers to traders in all sorts of everything.

I spotted an elderly pickpocket with two of his apprentices training under his supervision right there in the crowd. They were cutting the strings of the idle onlookers’ purses. One apprentice evidently felt my gaze on him, and gave me a tense look, but then, realizing that I was on no closer terms with the law than himself, he winked gaily. I winked back.

In wonderful times of long ago I also began my career with the pockets of the idle public on the Market Square. Many years have passed since then. Nowadays no one remembers Harold the Flea, a skinny, eternally hungry young lad roaming round the squares and streets of the city in search of nourishment and a place to spend the night in a dirty alley or a barracks. Those times came to an end, Harold the Flea disappeared, and Shadow Harold appeared in Avendoom.

“Oi!” my guide shouted when someone in the crowd stepped on his foot.

“Wake up,” I whispered in his ear. “We have to get out of this crush. Keep left, along the wall.”

The torrent of people was thinner here, and we could stop jostling with our elbows.

The crowd of humans and nonhumans was seething with gossip. Groups of gossipmongers sprang up spontaneously first in one spot, then another.

Rumors, rumors, rumors.

“Did you know the Nameless One is already on the march?”

“What’s the king doing?”

“No, that’s rubbish. There is no Nameless One!”

“Oh yes, there is! My granny told me about him, may she live in the light!”

“What’s the king doing? He’s gathering an army. Taxes will go shooting up again, and the poor people will suffer.”

“Hey!” I called to Artsivus’s apprentice.

“Yes?”

“We’ve got a long, long walk to the Tower of the Order. Wouldn’t it be better to turn off onto the Street of the Bedbugs? There’s no crush there.”

“Mmmm…,” the lad said hesitantly. “Milord Artsivus said you have no business in the Tower of the Order. He asked me to take you to one of the houses near here.”

“All right then, let’s go.”

Does Artsivus think a thief will defile his holy magical sanctuary?

The number of people in the streets could be explained in the first instance by the incredibly fine weather for June. At this time of year in north Valiostr-which means in Avendoom, too-it was usually still cool, more reminiscent of early April somewhere on the southern boundaries of the kingdom. What else could you expect, with the Desolate Lands so close? But the situation right now was rather different. The sun was blazing away with all its strength. I was streaming with sweat. And I wasn’t the only one. A citizen of the Border Kingdom walked past us with his apprentice. He was frying and smoking in his chain mail. The Borderland men never took their armor off, no matter where they were. It was a habit that came from living beside the Forests of Zagraba.

If this weather holds out until the end of August, then half the city will simply die of the heat. I’ve already heard people saying that it’s a new trial visited on us by the Nameless One.

“Harold! Hey, Harold!”

I turned toward the shout. There, standing outside the Knife and Ax, waving desperately to me, was the owner of said establishment, a good fellow and my “dearest friend” Gozmo.

What does he want with me? I already have a Commission. And what a Commission! Suicidally profitable, you could say. But all the same I gave a sharp tug on the sleeve of Artsivus’s apprentice and nodded for him to follow me. The lad opened his mouth to object that His Magicship was far more important than some innkeeper, but I turned my back on him and crossed to the other side of the street. The young magician had no choice but to follow me.

“What is it, Gozmo?” I asked none too amiably. “Why shout and let the whole city know that I’m Harold?

“Ah. Eer…” The stoop-shouldered innkeeper gave my companion an inquiring look.

“Will you stand me a beer?” I asked, nodding significantly toward the door. “We can talk in there.”

“Come on in.”

The inn was empty, which was only to be expected. Customers would start to appear as evening came on, in the twilight. The empty tables and benches looked strange and lonely. The fire was out. There were stools heaped up on the tables closest to the doors, with their legs sadly up toward the ceiling. Beside them the singer of the establishment, now playing the role of cleaning lady, was scrubbing away diligently with a rag. One of the bouncers was helping her. Yes, Gozmo’s staff were certainly masters of all trades.

“Come over to the bar, Harold, and your friend can take a seat at that table over there. What will you have to drink, young man?”

“Water.” The magician’s apprentice obviously felt awkward-his face was set in an expression of astonishment that he could possibly have entered such a dubious place of his own free will.

Gozmo pulled a sour face and looked at me. “Who’s your new friend?”

I shrugged, and Gozmo took a glass of water over to the apprentice’s table, then came and stood facing me, behind the bar, and poured a full mug of beer from a barrel hidden underneath it. He drank that beer himself and rarely shared it with anyone. I took a large gulp and gave Gozmo an appreciative nod. It was genuinely magnificent porter, just as I had expected. My old mate Gozmo didn’t poison his own innards with the rubbish that he poured for most of his regulars without any pangs of conscience.

The former thief wasn’t drinking right now, though. He was shifting nervously from one foot to the other and casting wary glances in my direction. Why would that be? But he didn’t say anything, and I’ve never been unduly curious, so I simply sipped the beer, waiting for the innkeeper to explain why he had called me over.

“So, why did you call me, my old friend?” I asked impatiently. “That’s a fine beer you’ve stood me, of course, but what’s the reason for it?”

“You know, Harold,” Gozmo said nervously, giving me another wary glance. “I wanted to apologize for what happened. Believe me, I’m very sorry, if I’d known it would all turn out like that, I would never have-”

“You mean the garrinch in the duke’s house?” I interrupted, playing ignorant and forgetting to mention the incident with Lanten and the fact that I knew perfectly well who the client had been.

I’m going to keep that conversation for a more appropriate moment.

“The garrinch? Ah, yes. That’s what I mean,” Gozmo said uncertainly, in a slightly surprised voice. He sat down on a chair, relieved to realize that I didn’t intend to declare war and spill blood. “I just wanted you to know that I had absolutely no idea.”

“Calm down, will you, Gozmo! What’s got you so nervous all of a sudden?” I said, waving my hand magnanimously. “After all, nothing terrible happened, did it? No one got hurt. I’ve got other business to attend to, so I’d better be going.”

“So you accept my apology?” Gozmo asked in relief.

He looked as if the full weight of the Zam-da-Mort itself had fallen from his shoulders. It was all very strange-good old Gozmo wasn’t usually tormented much by his conscience. And even the fact that he hadn’t told me the client was the king shouldn’t be making him this nervous. In any case, Gozmo had the right to conceal the name of the client.

“Forget it,” I said, and the young lad and I walked back out into the street.

“What did that man want from you?” he asked after we had walked in silence for a minute.

“Do you have a name?” I said, answering a question with a question as I watched a guard patrol go by.

“Roderick.”

“Well then, Roderick, do we have much farther to go?”

“We’re almost there-we go through that lane,” he muttered.

“Are you certain that’s our way?” I asked the young magician, jabbing my finger toward a dark, foul-smelling corridor formed by two buildings huddling close to each other. “To the Street of the Apples?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged, nodded to Roderick to go first, and followed him, taking my crossbow out from under my cloak. What could I expect from this youngster who knew nothing about the customs of the Port City?

More people die in dark, smelly alleyways like this than on the border in battles with orcs and Miranuehans. But the alley turned out to be empty. When the way out onto the Street of the Apples was already close and we only had another twenty yards to go before we broke free of this narrow trench, I relaxed. And so, Roderick and I came face-to-face with five rather unfriendly-looking thugs who had appeared from the Street of the Sleepy Dog, shutting us in the narrow alley.

“What do these men want?” Roderick whispered in alarm.

I recognized the third man in the group from the Street of the Apples. “We’ve got serious trouble here.”

“Haven’t you g-got any m-money?” Roderick asked in a frightened voice.

“I wouldn’t exactly say that. Only it’s not money they’ve come for.”

“F-for what, then?” asked Artsivus’s apprentice, growing even more frightened.

“For my life. And I think they’ll dispatch you to the next world for good measure. When I make a move, you attack the ones behind us.”

“B-but I don’t know how,” Roderick protested. “I haven’t even got a weapon.”

“Then we’ll die.”

His only answer was a loud gulp.

Four of the men were clutching short, heavy armored-infantry swords, the kind used by the soldiers of the Border Kingdom. The most efficient weapon in confined spaces or dense ranks, where you can’t turn with a long blade. The fifth man, whose right shoulder was bandaged, hung back behind the others.

“How’s your health, Paleface?” I asked politely when they walked up and stopped five yards away from us.

“Better than yours will be in a moment,” the assassin replied.

“Kill them!”

My crossbow gave a click and the hulk that Paleface was hiding behind started tumbling backward with a bolt in his forehead. The second ugly brute yelled and raised his sword above his head, and then there was a roar behind me and I felt the searing heat as a ball of fire the size of a good horse’s head went flying past me straight at the killers. I abandoned everything, dropped down onto my belly, and put my arms over my head.

A loud boom struck my ears, I felt the earth shake, and crumbs of stone came showering down on me. Someone howled. What’s the advantage of wizardry over shamanism? Wizardry takes effect instantly, while shamanism is an entire ritual. Goblins dance, orcs sing. That’s why shamanism acts a lot more slowly, but the shamans don’t lose any strength after they use it, unlike magicians.

The fireball, that weapon so beloved of all novice magicians, had transformed one attacker into a heap of ash, then struck the wall of the building and exploded.

Paleface was howling and yelling somewhere beside the end of the alley. I could see that his face was burned, and bloodied by small splinters of stone. A hole big enough to drive the royal carriage through had appeared in the house to the left of us. Roderick certainly hadn’t been stingy with his spell.

Tearing my eyes away from Paleface, I turned toward the magician’s apprentice. The young lad, totally drained of strength, was half sitting, half lying, propped up against the wall, and the two remaining thugs were staring at him in amazement.

“Let’s run for it!” howled one of the killers, throwing away his sword. In his fright he obviously hadn’t realized that Roderick couldn’t hurt a fly right now.

They ran off in the same direction they’d just come from, stomping their feet and howling in terror. Of course, I didn’t bother to follow them. I was more interested in Paleface, but he had vanished without a trace.

“Lucky bastard,” I said, shaking my head in admiration.

I went across to Roderick.

“Are you alive?”

He nodded feebly, but his eyes were glowing. “I did it! That’s the first time I’ve made that spell work!”

“Oh yes! I almost got roasted. Thanks for the help. Now let me help you up. Or the guards will come running in a moment.”

Roderick gave a brief nod of his light-haired head. I helped him get up off the ground, then supported him as I led him toward the deserted Street of the Apples.