Joel Rosenberg - Murder in Lamut

Which made this, despite the mud and the cold, pretty close to perfect.

The heavy action was supposedly at Crydee these days, which meant that the one place they could be sure the three of them were not going was Crydee. Come spring, the privateer Melanie was due in Ylith. Captain Thorn could be counted on for a swift conveyance and be relied upon not to try to murder them in their sleep. That would be bad for one’s health, as Thorn’s predecessor had barely realized in the instant before Pirojil had stuck a knife in his right kidney while the late captain was standing, sword in hand, over what he had thought was Durine’s sleeping form. Given that Thorn owed his captaincy to Durine and his companions’ suspicious natures, he should be willing to transport them for free, Durine thought.

Away where, though?

Still, that wasn’t Durine’s worry. Let Kethol and Pirojil worry about that. Kethol would be able to find them somebody who needed three men who knew which part of the sword you used to cut with and which part you used to butter your bread; and Pirojil would be able to negotiate a price that was at least half again what the employer thought he was ready to pay. All Durine would have to do was to kill people.

Which was fine with him.

But until the ice broke the only way they would be leaving Yabon would be by foot, horse, or cart, overland to Krondor. Their only other choice would be heading back up north for more fighting, and right now they had earned enough – when they actually got paid, of course – that their cloaks would be so heavily laden with gold coin and their purses with silver coin that more fighting wouldn’t appeal to any of them.

Enough.

This stint had left him with a new set to add to his already burgeoning collection of scars; a missing digit on his left hand from the time when he hadn’t pulled back quite quickly enough while dispatching a Bug with his pikestaff. He now judged he would never play the lute. Not that he had ever tried, but he always had it in mind that he might like to learn, some day. That wound, and a long red weal on the inside of his thigh, reminded him with every step that he wasn’t as young and nimble as he used to be.

Then again, Durine had been born old. But at least he was strong. He would just wait. Let the days drift past doing little chores, and it wouldn’t be long before the thaw started and the ship was in port, and he and the others would be out of here. Somewhere warm – Salador maybe, where the women and breezes were warm and soft, and the cool beer was good and cheap and flowed freely as a running sore. About the time they ran out of gold, they could ship to the Eastern Kingdoms. Nice, friendly little wars. The locals there always appreciated good craftsmen who knew how to efficiently dispatch the neighbours, and they paid well, if not quite as well as the Earl of LaMut. And, from Durine’s point of view, the best thing about fighting in the Eastern Kingdoms was there were no Bugs, which was even better than the absence of this horrible cold.

Or if they really wanted warmth, the three of them could head back down to the Vale of Dreams and make some good coin fighting Keshian Dog Soldiers and renegades for Lord Sutherland.

No, Durine decided after a moment, the Vale of Dreams wasn’t really any better than frozen, muddy LaMut, no matter how it seemed on this cold and miserable night; last time they were down there he was almost as miserable with the heat as he was today with the cold.

Why couldn’t someone start a war on a nice balmy beach somewhere?

Ahead, bars of light coming through the outer door to the Broken Tooth Tavern were his marker and guide, promising something approaching warmth, something resembling hot food, and something as close to friends as a mercenary soldier could possibly have.

That was good enough for Durine.

For now.

He staggered up from the muddy street to the wooden porch outside the entrance to the inn.

There were two men huddled in their cloaks under the overhang just outside the door.

‘The Swordmaster wants to see you.’

One pulled his cloak back, as though in the dark Durine would be able to see the wolf’s head emblazoned on his tabard, that Durine knew must be there.

They had been found out.

Looting the dead was, like most crimes, punishable by death (either outright hanging if the Earl was in a bad mood, or from exhaustion and bad food as you tried to get through your twenty years of hard labour in the mountain quarries) although Durine had never seen any harm in looting, himself. It wasn’t as though the dead soldiers had had any use for the few pitiful coins in their purses, any more than they had for their cloaks. Durine and his two friends had more than a few coins of their own secreted about their persons – sewn into hidden pockets in the lining of their tunics, or the hems of their cloaks, in purses worn under their clothes, bound in shrunken rawhide, so that they wouldn’t clink. A nobleman could put his wealth into a vault or strongroom, and hire armed men to watch it; a merchant could put his wealth into trade items that couldn’t be easily walked off with; a wizard could leave his wealth in plain sight and trust that where sanity and self-interest wouldn’t protect it from thieves, the spells on it could and would – Durine had seen a man who had tried, once, to burgle a sleeping magician’s retreat.

Or, at least, what had been a man …

But a mercenary soldier could either carry his wealth with him or spend it, and Durine didn’t have a good explanation for what a detailed search would reveal in his possession right now.

A nobleman would have just brushed past the two men – for they wouldn’t have dared to stand in his way – but Durine was no nobleman. Besides, the number of people Durine would willingly allow within easy stabbing range of his broad back were very few, and two grey shapes in the dark were hardly likely candidates.

One on two? That wasn’t the way he had planned to die, but so be it, if that was necessary, although he had taken on two men at a time many times before, without getting killed.

Yet.

It was getting to be too cold and wet and miserable a day to live, anyway.

He pretended to stagger on the rough wood while his right hand reached inside his cloak to his nearest knife. They would hardly give him time to draw his sword, after all.

At the movement, each man took a step back.

‘Wait–’ one started.

‘Easy, man,’ the other said, his hands outstretched, palms out in an unmistakable sign of peace. ‘The Swordmaster says he just wants to talk to you,’ he said. ‘It’s too cold and mean a night to die, and that goes as much for me as it does for you.’

‘And big as he is, it would probably take both of us to put him down, if we had to,’ the first man muttered.

Durine grunted, but kept his thoughts to himself, as usual. It would probably take more than the two of them. It would also, at the very least, take the two others who had come out of the darkness behind Durine, the ones he wasn’t supposed to have noticed.

But bragging was something he left to others.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It isn’t getting any warmer out here.’

He straightened. But he kept a hand near a knife. Just in case.

It was a dark and stormy night, but that was, thankfully, outside.

Here, inside, it was warm and smoky beneath the overhead lanterns, so that it was both too hot and too cold at the same time.

A mercenary soldier’s life, Kethol often thought, was always either too lively or too dull. Either he was bored out of his skin, trying to stay awake while waiting on watch for something to happen, or he was wading through rivers of Tsurani troops, hoping that he was cutting down the bastards quickly enough that none of them would get past him to Pirojil or Durine. Either he was parched with thirst, or he was drowning in a driving rain. He was either crowded too close to other unbathed men, smelling their stink, or he was all by himself, holding down some watchpost in the middle of the night, hoping that the quiet rustle he heard out in the forest was just another deer, and not some Tsurani sneaking up on him, and wishing for a dozen friendly swords clustered around him.