Joel Rosenberg - Murder in Lamut

And if that seemed ungentle and unsporting, well then, that was just fine with Kethol. He was, after all, a mercenary, serving his betters for pay, and like the whores upstairs he tried to be as well paid for as little service as he could manage.

So he nodded, sat down, and threw a couple of coppers in the middle of the table, and received his placards from the dealer’s heavy hands.

He was just about to make his first play when the fight broke out at the table behind him.

You would think that men who made their living fighting would have better things to do in their time off than recreational brawling.

What was the point of it, after all? If it was practice, it was stupid practice. Neither the Tsurani nor the Bugs nor anybody else Kethol had taken up sword and pike against would have gone at it with bare fists if there was something sharp or blunt or big to hit the other with. And if it was really worth fighting over, it was worth killing over, and if that made you an outlaw, well, Midkemia was roomy enough that you could be declared an outlaw in more than a few places and still be able to earn a living, something that Kethol knew from personal experience.

Usually it was about one of three things: money, a woman, or I-just-feel-like-acting-like-an-idiot. Often it was all three.

Kethol had no idea what this fight was about, but grunts quickly turned into shouts and shouts were followed by the meaty thunk of blows landing.

He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and ducked quickly enough to avoid the flying chair, but the motion brought him into full contact with the burly regular on his right, and instinctively the Mut responded with a backhanded fist that caught Kethol high on the right cheekbone.

Lights went off in Kethol’s right eye, but reflexes worked where vision couldn’t; he lowered his head and lunged, catching the Mut around the waist in a tackle that brought both of them to the hard wooden floor. Kethol landed on top, hoping he had knocked the wind out of the other. He bashed his fist into the soldier’s midsection, just below the ribcage, for a bit of insurance. Hope was a fine thing, but certainty was better. He had nothing personal against the man he was fighting, but he was used to killing people he had nothing against, so just roughing up one didn’t count. Then he slammed his knee into the other man’s groin and rolled away. This brawl was a matter of self-protection, not anger.

That was the thing about other people that Kethol never had understood: other people – even Pirojil and Durine – often got angry during a fight, letting their anger fuel them. For Kethol, it was all a matter of doing what you needed to. You got angry over other things – cruelty, or cheating, or incompetence or waste – not combat.

A few miscellaneous blows landed on his back and legs as he rose to a crouch – the wildly flailing feet of two other combatants as they rolled about the ground – but they didn’t slow him down, and at least no knives or swords had come out, not yet. It was just a tavern fight, after all, and it was unlikely that, even drunk, the soldiers would escalate it into something more.

Off in the distance, somebody was ringing an alarm bell frantically. Most likely the tavernkeeper, calling for the Watch, for the alarm bell was quickly echoed by the Watch whistles. Clearly the Watch had been nearby, supplemented by a squad of regulars assigned from the garrison for the purpose of keeping order in the city. The Earl of LaMut might be young and new to his position, but it would be no surprise to him or his captains that garrisoned soldiers tended to fight with each other when they couldn’t find anything else to do, and the best of the Kingdom nobility were used to accepting and dealing with the inevitable.

Neither was it a surprise to Kethol; he was always half-expecting a fight to break out, and while he hadn’t been counting on it, he had been hoping for it.

He made his move.

In a fight, a man being knocked down was nothing to be surprised about, so as he grunted and fell to the floor, nobody would take particular notice that his fall hadn’t been preceded by a blow. The fact that he fell to the floor where under a table several dozen of the coins had scattered was simply a matter of convenience.

He quickly scooped up a handful of coins – not worrying about the sound of clinking metal carrying over the shouts and grunts; everybody else would be too busy to notice a small thing like that – and made certain to pick out the silver reals first, before bothering with the coppers. All of the coins went into a hidden pocket sewn into the inside of his tunic, and he stuffed a rag in on top of them before pulling the pocket’s drawstring tight.

Then he was on his hands and knees, making for the door as quickly as he could: he had already taken his pay for this fight, and it was time to be going.

A tavern fight had a dynamic of its own: after a few moments of free-for-all, some men would be down, hurting; others would have paired off, working off new or old grievances of their own with their fists.

Yet others would soon be doing what Kethol was busy doing: not hanging around for the fight to turn bloody, and particularly not waiting for the arrival of the Watch, but making themselves scarce. Unsurprisingly, that Milo fellow had been the first man through the door and out into the night, and others had followed. Kethol wouldn’t be the first, or the last, and that was just fine.

Kethol launched himself through into the mud-room and through the mud-room to the entryway, brushing aside the thick sheets of canvas hung up to keep the chill air out of the tavern.

And stopped in his tracks.

They were waiting for him outside: a squad of regulars, led by a mounted corporal whose massive dark horse pranced nervously on the hard-packed snow, pawing at it with the strange clawed horseshoes that Kethol hadn’t seen anywhere except in LaMut.

A lance pointed in his direction.

‘You’d be Kethol, the mercenary,’ came a voice out of the darkness.

There was a sharp point on the lance, and no point in denying it. If there was a problem, he would have to talk his way out of it now – or, more likely, think, talk, or fight his way out of it later.

‘Yes,’ he said, his hands spread in a question. ‘Is there some problem?’

‘Not for me. The Swordmaster wants to see you.’

‘Me?’

‘You. All three of you.’

He didn’t have to ask what the corporal meant by ‘all three of you’.

‘So let’s be on our way,’ the corporal said.

Kethol shrugged.

With the stolen coins warm in his hidden pocket, he had nothing else that he needed to be doing, including dying in the street.

At the moment.

It was a dark and stormy night, and if there was such a thing as a barn that wasn’t draughty, Pirojil had never seen one, so he wasn’t surprised at the bitter cold ripping through the place as he rolled another bale of hay down from the loft, letting it fall onto the hard-packed earth below.

The horses were used to the thunk made by the bale hitting the floor, although the big bay gelding that was reserved for the use of the Horsemaster himself nickered and clomped in his stall.

Pirojil didn’t have any particular objection to doing his share of tending the horses – all of the stableboys had been pressed into service as message runners during the last-but-one battle, and all of them had been cut down either by Tsurani or Bugs – but he didn’t particularly care to be doing it in a barn that was so cold and draughty that the sweat on his nose kept freezing.

It was a trade-off, as most things in life were. The less you complained about having to muck out a few stalls, the more likely it was that your name was not going to come to the top of the captain’s mental list when he needed to send a patrol out to see if there really were Tsurani lying in ambush in the forest ahead. And if you could improve the job with more than a few swigs from a bottle of cheap Tyr-Sog wine that the late sergeant – may Tith-Onaka, god of soldiers, clasp him to his hairy, hoary breast! – didn’t have any use for any more, well, then what was the harm?