Legends of the Riftwar (52 page)

That would be a good end, indeed, for the likes of the three of them, and it was a nice dream, and it gave them something to plan and save for.

Of course, they'd likely all be dead long before that dream came true.

He found himself looking at the heavy iron door to the strongroom beyond. There was, undoubtedly, more than enough gold behind that door to buy a hundred taverns, although probably
not enough to buy off those who would be sent after them, if they somehow or other managed to get out of the city with that gold.

It would be worth considering, though.

He noticed that Morray was looking at him, smiling strangely.

‘You seem to be eyeing the door with some interest,' the Baron said.

Pirojil kept his expression blank. ‘Just staring off and thinking, my lord. No offence was intended.'

Morray nodded. ‘Well, go ahead–just open the door, and take what you want, if you can.'

His tone of voice wasn't threatening, and he made no move towards either the swordbelt hung on the back of his chair or toward any other weapon, at least as far as Pirojil could see.

Pirojil shook his head. ‘I've no intention of robbing the Earl,' he said. ‘Bad for my business, and much worse for my health.'

Morray chuckled. ‘Don't worry about your business, or your health–there's more than enough in there for a legion of you to retire on, I assure you. Tell you what, if you can open the door, right here and now, you will be allowed to leave, healthy and alive, with all the gold that you can carry. You have my word on that. Go ahead; try to open the door.' His expression grew stern. ‘I'm not much used to giving a command twice, man, and I'd like not to ever have to do so a third time.'

Pirojil didn't know what the Baron's game was, but it was probably just as well to go along with it. He set down his teacup and walked across the soft carpet to the closed iron door.

It was a solid-looking piece of metal, rimmed along the edge with a riveted band of blued iron, thick as a finger. There was no lock on it that Pirojil could see; just a plain metal handle. He set his hand on it, but hesitated, until Morray's nod and gesture made it clear that the Baron really did intend him to open it.

He pushed down, at first gently, but then harder.

It didn't budge.

He set his whole weight on it, but the handle might as well have been welded in place. He pushed harder, and thought that the handle itself gave, just a trifle, perhaps, but it didn't even begin to turn.

Perhaps there was some trick with the rivets? They looked solid, and as Pirojil ran his fingers up and down them, they all felt solid enough to the touch.

What was he missing?

‘It was an honest offer,' Morray said, ‘but I had no doubt that you'd be unable to open the door.' Morray rose to his feet and tucked the thick leatherbound book under his arm, then with his free hand gestured Pirojil to move out of the way.

‘Get the light, would you?' he asked.

Pirojil lifted the lamp from the desk, as Morray set his hand on the door handle, closed his eyes for a moment, and gently pressed down on it, not touching the heads of the rivets, or anything else.

Morray muttered something, barely vocalizing the words.

The handle turned, silently and easily. Morray muttered something more under his breath as he swung the heavy door open on its hidden hinges.

He accepted the lantern from Pirojil, and stepped inside. Pirojil didn't follow him in, but he could see that the small room beyond was filled with racks sagging beneath the weight of hundreds of muslin sacks. Morray ignored these and stepped to a bookcase, crowded with leatherbound volumes of various sizes, and replaced the one he held there.

He smiled at the way Pirojil was eyeing the sacks. ‘Pick one of the sacks,' Morray said. ‘Let's see what's in it, shall we?'

‘But–'

‘Please.'

‘If you insist, my lord.' Pirojil shrugged. ‘I'll choose the right-
hand rack, second shelf from the bottom, the sack behind the second one from the right.'

‘Very well.' Morray nodded. He retrieved the sack that Pirojil had indicated, untied the slipknot that held the sack closed, and spread it open.

Buttery gold coins gleamed in the lantern light; Morray dipped his hand in, and let them run through his fingers and back into the bag, before closing it and putting it back in its place.

‘I don't often show anybody the inside of the strongroom, but when I do, I always make a point to show them some of the gold.' He grinned. ‘I would not want anybody to get the idea that it had become filled with bags of rocks under my stewardship of the Earl's Purse, eh?' He closed the door, and turned the handle. ‘Would you care to try it again?' he asked.

‘Only if you insist.'

There was obviously some trick to opening the door, and Pirojil didn't really want to know what that trick was–or, at least, he didn't want anybody to know that he knew what the trick was.

If there turned out to be some gold missing, ignorance was a good defence.

‘Oh, there's no harm,' Morray said. ‘There's a spell on the lock–it will only turn for those who know the words to unlock the spell, and you can imagine that those words are not widely distributed, and there's some magical…penalty involved if someone were to come close to but not quite saying the right words.'

Pirojil shuddered. He could imagine what those magical penalties might be, and the truth was probably much worse than he was imagining. One thing the years had taught him: if it involves magic, it was better to be far away than near by.

Besides, if Pirojil were to try to break into the vault, he probably wouldn't go through the front door. He considered, then discarded, half a dozen foolish plans involving tunnels, holes-in-the-wall, odd mining devices he had once seen outside Dorgin,
and the possibility of the gods granting him a wish out of boredom; then decided to return to the bleak reality he knew: it was not terribly comfortable, but it was familiar.

Morray frowned down at the ink on his fingers.

‘Well, now that that's done, I'd best wash these clerk-stains from my hands, change into something more festive, and get back up to the Great Hall. The first official meeting of the Baronial Council is tonight, but things have already well started, I'd guess.' He raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you coming along, or would you prefer to stay here and try the door some more?' He smiled. ‘If you listened very closely, you might even have heard the lock's key spell almost well enough.'

Almost. Pirojil shuddered at the implications of that ‘almost'.

‘I'm at your service, of course, my lord.'

 

The fight was just starting when Kethol walked into the barracks, shivering and shaking his cloak, intending to get some much-needed sleep.

Six or seven Verheyen men had squared off against Morray's men over by the door to the stables, and pushing and shoving had already turned to blows and kicks, although no weapons were drawn, as far as Kethol could see. At least he assumed the men were all Verheyen and Morray's men; the barracks had only two small hearths, one at each end of the room, so most of the soldiers were bundled up in their cloaks; for all Kethol knew, a couple of rockheads from another baron's company might have joined in just for the hell of it. Once again he found himself dwelling on the idiocy of fighting when no one was paying you to do so.

It looked more like a tavern fight than real combat, so far, which was just as well. If someone drew a blade it could turn ugly faster than a mountebank could part a farm boy from his coppers on market day.

One thickset Mut went down, and another one leapt on him, thick fists pummelling his chest more than his face, and then another joined in. A sergeant in a Verheyen tabard tried to hold one of his comrades back, but that just gave one of the Morrays a chance to whack him over the back of the head. The sergeant instantly forgot his role as peacemaker, turned and delivered a thunderous wallop that sent the Morray man sliding backwards across the stone floor. He was impressed; the sergeant wasn't all that big, but he'd served up a blow that Kethol would have been proud to call his own.

Soldiers from other baronies, quite a few of those from both Morray and Verheyen, were staying out of the way, and all of the mercenaries were either lying on their bunks or sitting at the tables, watching with interest but not even raising a voice, much less a hand. It wasn't their fight, any more than it was Kethol's.

The only exception was the mad dwarf Mackin. Mackin was counted mad for three reasons, his first being his preference to fight for pay, which made him rare among his kind, and the second being his proclivity for bedding human women, which marked him as unique among his kind, and last his tendency to speak to the thin air, as if someone was standing there holding a conversation with him, which hardly made him unusual among mercenaries in Kethol's judgment. The crazed dwarf leapt from his bunk and landed on his improbably large bare feet on the hard stone floor, cheering at each punch and kick as though he was watching some sort of sporting match.

Kethol was, of course, moving backwards out of the door. It hardly looked a good time to try to join the dice players in the corner, who had barely paused in their game. By now the fight–and he had seen enough of them to count himself an expert–was only moments away from becoming a full-on brawl, complete with broken heads, swollen jaws and missing teeth. He had almost made good his exit when he backed into the Swordmaster, who
had just come in from the outside, shaking his cloak to clear the snow off it.

Steven Argent unceremoniously shoved him aside and stalked into the barracks.

‘Stop!' he shouted, punctuating the word by snatching up a bottle and smashing it on the floor.

There must have been something to this voice of command thing, Kethol judged, because to his surprise, the fighting stopped immediately. The men who had moments ago been beating each other slowly began to pull themselves apart and rise to their feet.

Steven Argent stood in the middle of the barracks for a long minute, looking from one face to another.

There was no sound at all, save for the wind howling outside.

‘You–and you, and you, you and you,' he said, pointing out men who had been fighting, and then at two of the sergeants who had stood by and watched. ‘I've got a little job for you. We need another cask of beer hauled up from the Broken Tooth–good dwarvish beer, if you please–and I'm sending the lot of you out in the storm to get it.'

He stood silently, his hands still on his hips, a look of utter contempt written across his face; then he turned and swept out of the room.

Kethol shrugged, and spread his cloak over his bed. He unbuckled his sword and hung it on the hook nearby and lay down to get some sleep which, as usual, quickly overtook him.

The last things he heard before the warm darkness closed about him were the comfortable, familiar rattling of dice and the clinking of coins on stone.

 

Durine dumped another armload of wood into the bin next to the hearth, and brushed himself off before throwing another log on the fire. The servants weren't quite ignoring this particular hearth, but they seemed to be giving higher priority to the one
across the Great Hall, and it was easier to just go out into the cold and retrieve some wood from the woodpile than to annoy some servant about it.

That was the thing about cold–as long as there was warmth nearby, a few moments of it really weren't all that bad.

The log hissed quietly at him, and then slowly began to burn around the edges.

Close to a score of the nobles had gathered themselves at the larger hearth at the far end of the Great Hall, with a few hangers-on. Pirojil was at Morray's elbow, standing just outside the small circle of barons and noble ladies who were engaged in some intense conversation.

The soldiers–mostly captains, except for a few odds and ends like himself–had understandably gravitated to the opposite side of the hall, so that the table down the middle of the hall acted as a social buffer. Durine didn't know if gathering in the Great Hall was standard practice for visiting captains or just some sort of special dispensation given out under the circumstances. Either way, the captains appeared at ease, and none of the nobles spared them a glance.

Visiting captains were usually housed in one of the barracks buildings, at the far side of the inner bailey, and if Durine had been in their boots he would have found a quiet corner there and kept out of the way of his betters in the keep. But that was probably one of the many reasons that he wasn't an officer.

Besides, over in the barracks, there were certainly games of dice and bones, and drinking, and doubtless other things going on that were probably considered to be prejudicial to good order and discipline. It was a wise captain who neither tolerated too much of such distractions, nor made too much of an effort to quash them. Too much order and discipline was bad for order and discipline, after all. You needed a balance to maintain morale, and with the storm locking up a load of soldiers, things were
going to be getting more tense each day without additional irritations.

It had been bad enough in LaMut before, in that dimly-remembered time, just a few days ago, when winter was just making things cold and muddy, instead of clawing at everything like some ravening beast.

Tom Garnett was just finishing the story about the Night of the Bugs. Pirojil hadn't paid enough attention to know if the Captain had got the details right, and probably wouldn't have, even if he had listened closely since he and the other two had been too busy with their little piece of the battle to pay much attention to what others were doing.

Another captain–maybe one of Verheyen's–plopped himself down in a well-upholstered chair and leaned back, stretching his legs out. ‘The one good thing I can think of about all this,' he said, closing his eyes and folding his hands over his flat stomach, ‘is that we don't have to worry, at least for the moment, about a Tsurani attack.'