He thought it curious to find powrie sentries on the outskirts of Caer Tinella this late at night. Usually the dwarves and goblins moved back into the town proper soon after sunset. While the gob-lins, in particular, did favor the cover of night for their misdeeds, with the town secured, they normally used this active period to play their gambling games, drinking and shoving each other until fights inevitably broke out among them.
That was before Mrs. Kelso had supposedly been turned into a tree, though, an action the monsters attributed to their god figure, the demon dactyl. So now they apparently meant to be more vigi-lant, just in case the dactyl showed up to personally scrutinize their work.
Roger smiled; he was glad his little ruse had caused so much trouble for the wretches. As for the guards, he wasn't overly con-cerned. He had come this way to go into Caer Tinella, and so into Caer Tinella he would go, whatever the powries might try to do to stop him. Oh yes, the guards would slow him down, he realized, but not in any manner they had foreseen.
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 de-termined. 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 pat-tern, 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 com-panion. The other powrie took it and lifted a packet of pipe weed, while the first moved its hand back to its pocket - even 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 pipe - with 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 frustra-tion 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 fa-ther, 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 re-maining 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 patrons - the Timberlands were not heavily populated, and the only visitors who passed through were the seasonal merchant caravans - but 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 appro-priate scouting companions, leaving Belster alone again, staring into the forest. Yes, Belster O' Comely was tired of it all, particu-larly 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 pockets - and often placing not-so-valuables in the possession of other monsters, just to see if he might start a fight - he 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 lock - they were too noisy for flight - under 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 an-other, 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.
The bull ran flat out for a short burst, then skidded to an abrupt stop, cutting hard to the right, then back to the left. Again Roger held on for all his life, even grabbing one of the bull's horns. On the second cut the bull overbalanced, and quick-thinking Roger saw his chance. He pulled one leg up under him and tugged with all his might on the horn, turning the bull's head even farther.
The bull pitched over and Roger leaped away, hitting the ground in a stumble that quickly turned into a dead run. He made the rail fence before the squirming bull even managed to regain its footing, and was over in the blink of an eye.
The bull trotted up to the fence; Roger, though he saw goblins running both ways along the rail back by the town, paused long enough to boast, "I could have broken your fat neck." He ended by snapping his fingers in the air just in front of the bull's nose.
The bull snorted and pawed the ground, then ducked its head.
Roger's mouth fell open. "You cannot understand me," he protested.
The point was moot; the bull charged the fence.
Roger bolted for the woods. The bull thrashed and kicked, taking out rails, knocking logs high into the air.
Then it was free, bursting onto the small clearing just beyond the corral. Goblins were closing in both directions by then, and sud-denly the bull was on Roger's side.
"Aiyeeee!"one of the goblins squealed. Considered a quick-thinker among its dim-witted friends, the goblin grabbed its nearest companion and threw the poor fool right in the bull's path.
That goblin was soon airborne, spinning two complete somer-saults before landing hard on the ground. It crawled away, trying not to groan, trying not to do anything that would get the bull's at-tention, for the enraged beast was giving chase to the rest of the fleeing goblins.
From a tree not so far away, Roger watched with sincere amuse-ment. His chuckles turned into a sympathetic groan, though, when the bull gored one scrambling goblin, the sharp horn stabbing into the back of the goblin's leg, then coming right out through its kneecap. The bull snapped its head back, and over the goblin went, screaming, falling flat out across the bull's huge neck. The bull ran on, bucking wildly, the goblin flopping all about, until finally the horn tore free of the knee and the goblin pitched away. The bull wasn't done with it, though, and turned about, throwing sod, run-ning down the goblin before it could begin to crawl away.
Up in the tree, Roger moved along the limb, out from the trunk, and leaped out to the branch of another tree, making his way to the north, back toward the encampment.
"Another night," he promised himself, remembering the chain and padlock. He could create more than a little mischief for the powries with those items, he mused. So even though he hadn't gotten into the larders, and in spite of the encounter with the bull, the ever-optimistic Roger considered the night a success, and it was with a light heart and dancing feet that he came down from the trees and began picking his trails back to the first two powries. He spotted them from a distance, both sitting on the ground, trying to pull their ankles out of the rope. The commotion in town had stirred them, and the rope had tripped them, it seemed.
Roger was sorry he had missed it. He took some satisfaction in the two pipes lying in the dirt, and in the muttered curses of his vic-tims. That only made his heart skip lighter, a mischievous grin widening across his face as he made his way into the deep forest.
But then he heard the baying.
"What?" the young man asked, pausing, studying the strange sound. He had no experience with hunting dogs and didn't under-stand that they were calling out a trail, his trail. He knew from the continuing sound, though, that they were getting closer, and so he scrambled up a tall and wide oak set apart from any other trees and peered back into the darkness.
Far to the south he saw the glow of torches. "Stubborn," he mut-tered, shaking his head, confident that the monsters would never find him in the dark woods.
He started back down the tree, but reversed his course almost immediately as snarling sounds came up at him. From a low branch he could make out the four forms. Roger had seen dogs before - Rosin Delaval kept a pair for working his herd. But those dogs were small and friendly, always wagging their tails, always happy to play with him, or anyone else, for that matter. These dogs seemed to Roger to be a different species altogether. The tone of their barking was not friendly, but threatening, and deep and reso-nating, the stuff of nightmares. He couldn't make out much detail in the darkness, but realized from the sound of the barking and the black silhouettes that these dogs were much larger than Rosin's.
"Where did they get those?" the young thief muttered, for in-deed the dogs were a new addition to Caer Tinella. He glanced around, looking for a way down the tree, far enough to the side to get him away from the animals.
It struck him almost immediately that to come down from that tree was to be eaten. He had to trust his luck, and up he went to the highest branches of the oak, hoping the dogs would lose sight of him, and lose interest in him.
He didn't understand the training of these animals. The hounds stayed right at the base of the tree, snuffling and scratching, and then baying. One kept jumping high, scratching at the bark.
Roger glanced anxiously to the south, to see the torches moving closer, closer, following the commotion. He had to shut the dogs up, or find some way to get away from this area.
He didn't know where to begin. He carried only one weapon, a small knife, better suited to picking locks than fighting, and even if he had a great sword with him, the thought of facing those dogs ap-palled him. He scratched his head, glancing all around. Why had he gone up this particular tree, so far from any others?
Because he hadn't understood his enemies.
"I underestimated them," Roger scolded himself as powries entered the clearing beneath the oak. In moments his tree was en-circled by the dwarven brutes, a smiling Kos-kosio Begulne among them. Roger heard the powrie leader's fellows congratu-lating him on acquiring the dogs - Craggoth hounds, they called them.
Roger understood then that he had been outsmarted.
"Come on down, then," Kos-kosio Begulne bellowed up the tree. "Yeah, we see ye, so come on down, or blimey, I'll burn the damned tree out from under ye! And then I'll let me dogs eat up what's left of ye," he added slyly.
Roger knew that the fierce Kos-kosio wasn't kidding, not at all. With a resigned shrug, he slipped down to the lowest branches of the tree, in clear sight of the powrie leader.
"Down!" Kos-kosio Begulne demanded, the dwarf's voice sud-denly stern and terrifying.
Roger looked doubtfully at the frenzied dogs.
"Ye like me Craggoth hounds?" the powrie asked. "We breed 'em on the Julianthes just to catch rats like yerself." Kos-kosio Begulne motioned to several others, and they quickly went to the dogs, looping choke chains and hauling the animals aside - no small feat, given the dogs' level of excitement. Roger got a good look at them then, in the torchlight, and saw, as he had suspected, that these beasts hardly resembled Rosin's dogs. Their heads and chests were huge, great muscled torsos, tall on thin legs, with coats of short brown and black hair and eyes that blazed red in the forest night, as if with the flames of hell. They seemed to be fully re-strained by that point, but still, Roger could hardly bring himself to move.
"Down!" Kos-kosio Begulne said again. "Last time I'm asking."
Roger dropped lightly to the ground right in front of the powrie leader. "Roger Billingsbury at your service, good dwarf," he said with a bow.
"Roger Lockless, they call 'im," another powrie piped in.
Roger nodded and smiled, taking it as a compliment.
Kos-kosio Begulne laid him low with a heavy punch.
