Richard Baker: Avenger

After they said their good-byes, Mirya drove her wagon-now loaded with several casks of Tresterfin cider-slowly back to Hulburg. She passed a few travelers heading away from Hulburg, mostly Winterspear folk who’d come to town on some errand or other and were now heading back home. Most of the wagons hauling provisions up to the timber and mining camps in the Galena foothills were well on their way, having left early in the morning. About a mile outside town she passed by a small band of soldiers in Council Guard tabards riding out to patrol the road, but they didn’t bother her. She guessed that most of the merchant company sellswords had orders to leave her be, since the Hulmasters were in exile. With Geran and the others out of sight, she wasn’t of any special interest to them.

That might change soon enough, she reflected. It wouldn’t be wise to count on being ignored for too much longer.

Another hour saw her safely back to Erstenwold’s, where she had her clerks store the Tresterfin cider, stable the horse, and put away the wagon. The afternoon was drawing on, so she devoted herself to catching up with a dozen small tasks around the store-setting out the orders that would go out the next morning, totaling her ledgers, putting together her own orders to leatherworkers, blacksmiths, ropemakers, brewers, cheesemakers, and smokehouses all over the vale. Erstenwold’s had seen better days, but for now she could still make a decent living from the store, and pay a half-dozen clerks too. At six bells she shut the storehouse doors, sent the last of her clerks home, and locked up the store.

“It’s too quiet without Selsha about,” she muttered to herself. The old store seemed still as a tomb without her daughter’s sudden laughter or carefree footsteps pelting over the well-worn floorboards. She ate a cold meal made up from the pantry she kept in Erstenwold’s back rooms, spent an hour tidying up, and then settled in to wait. When ten bells tolled over the city streets, she drew on a heavy cloak, tucked a dark hood in her pocket, and took the crossbow she kept under the counter. In one of the back storerooms she rolled a heavy barrel aside, and lifted up the trapdoor leading down into the cellars. She lit a lantern, and descended into the darkness.

The cellars were deep and empty. In another month or so, Mirya would hire workmen to cut blocks of ice from Lake Hul before the thaw and drag them into town on horse-drawn sledges. No one needed cold storage now, but with a little luck her ice cellars would last through the summer, and she’d turn a decent profit by selling it off a block at a time then. She headed for the far wall of the cellar, where a small, thick, double-barred door stood in the foundation wall. Drawing back the bolts, she pushed the door open and peered into the passageway beyond with lantern held high.

“Don’t be a goose, Mirya,” she told herself. “There’s naught to fear down here but rats and dust.” Drawing a deep breath, she headed into the passageway.

Hulburg was built atop the ruins of a much larger city. The town she knew had grown up only in the last hundred years or so, but the city beneath it was almost five times as old. It had been burned, razed, plundered, and reduced to rubble two or three times over its sad history, and each time folk had come back to rebuild from the ruins. Most of Hulburg’s current wooden buildings stood atop stone foundations from the far older city. In many places, old cellars-and in a few cases, whole streets-had been filled in or covered over, leaving a dusty old labyrinth of forgotten cellars with no buildings above or blind passageways joined to the basements of businesses like Erstenwold’s. Most of the old passages were sealed off, of course, but over the years quite a few folk had found it useful to have secret ways to move about just beneath the streets. In other cities, the shades of the dead might have haunted such places, making it terribly dangerous to wander through the hidden bones of the old Hulburg … but the harmachs of old had struck some bargain with the great lich Aesperus, the King in Copper, and undead creatures did not lurk beneath Hulburg’s homes and workshops.

She set her foot in the stirrup of the crossbow and cocked the weapon, laying a bolt in on the string. There might not be any ghosts or ghouls to fear, but that didn’t mean buried Hulburg was necessarily safe . Then Mirya set off through the old rubble-choked passages. From time to time she passed by doors leading into other cellars or basements, intersections where several tunnels met, even one open space where a whole taphouse had been buried in its entirety, with the great wooden tuns of ale standing dry and dusty. As a teenager she’d explored some of these passages with Jarad and Geran, nosing around in search of lost treasure or hidden smugglers’ dens. She hadn’t much liked the old passages then, and she didn’t like them much now.

She turned a corner and let herself through a small door into a dusty old cellar beneath a cobbler’s workshop, then climbed a flight of stone steps back up to the street. Carefully she shuttered her lantern and set it by the upper doorway, waiting a short time to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. Then she drew a simple sackcloth mask over her face before letting herself out into the cold night again.

The stairs emerged in a dark alley behind Gold Street, not far from the compound of the Iron Ring Coster. Several hooded figures waited in the shadows, their faces covered by masks like hers. She knew them all anyway, of course: Brun Osting, the strapping brewer who owned the Troll and Tankard; his cousin Halla Osting, a tall young woman who could bring down a rabbit with a slingstone at fifty paces; Senna Vannarshel, a half-elf woman of sixty years who was the best bowmaker in Hulburg; Rost Therndon, a carpenter and shipwright almost as big as Brun Osting; and the dwarf Lodharrun, whose smithy was the largest in Hulburg not owned by one of the foreign merchant companies. They tensed in sudden alarm as Mirya made her appearance, steel glinting in their hands before they recognized her.

Mirya looked about the dim alleyway, and allowed herself a humorless smile. “I thought you all had more sense than to carry on with this,” she murmured. “Well, first things first-were any of you seen? Were any of you followed?”

They all shook their heads, but Brun spoke softly. “There are more of the gray guards by the Harmach’s Foot and the Middle Bridge,” he said. “I counted eight more of ’em tonight on the way here. They didn’t see me, but if more of them show up in the streets, it’ll be hard to avoid them.”

“I’ll make a note of them,” Mirya replied unhappily. The gray guardians were some work of Rhovann’s, she was sure of it. A month before the first of the tall, silent things had appeared on the battlements of Griffonwatch, armored warriors seven feet tall with thick, powerful limbs. Their faces were covered by black helms, and strange magical sigils were written in their gray flesh. Sometimes they accompanied the Council Guard on patrol, and other times they simply stood watch at street corners or doorways. Figuring out what they were and how Marstel’s wizard was making them was clearly becoming more important every day … but that wasn’t her mission tonight. As far as she knew, none of the gray guardians were nearby, and she and her small band of rebels had different work ahead of them. “Any word from Darsen?”

“Aye,” Halla answered. “The Jannarsk sellsword’s in the Black Gull, with two more mercenaries. Darsen’s there.”

Mirya nodded. It was one more foe than she’d hoped for, but she meant to carry things through anyway. Two days previous, one of the House Jannarsk sergeants and his squad had wrecked the shop of Perremon the cheesemaker, beating him severely when the Hulburgan had objected to their crude overtures to his daughter. It was time to draw some boundaries for the foreign mercenaries occupying Hulburg. She slid out to the mouth of the alleyway, looking up and down the street; a handful of passersby were still about, but no one nearby.