by Unknown
Krunzle said a short and pungent word, then turned to the hole in the ceiling. He pushed a small table underneath, then leapt atop it. When he stood upright, his head and shoulder poked through the opening, so that his eyes rose just above the level of the packed-earth roof.
The open space was in darkness and silence, except for the sound of a zither being inexpertly tuned. Then the thief heard a noise like sand rushing through a giant hourglass, as the great blind snake slithered across the roof toward him. He ducked down and, after a moment, the sound ceased.
The lock clicked. The door opened. In the moment between the two events, Krunzle put the table back where he had found it and himself where Hortenza had left him. The witch stepped through the doorway, panting from the stairs and presumably from the effort of dragging an unwilling young woman all the way up from the sub-basement.
“A good thief knows when to make himself scarce, and Krunzle is better than most.”
She flung Galathea into the room. “You stay here, or so help me…” She left the threat implied as she turned to the thief and said, with a meaningful glance at the hole in the ceiling, “Keep her here, and I will make it worth your while. Let her go, and…” She pointed a tapered fingernail at him and left the rest to Krunzle’s imagination.
Then she was gone, the door slammed. The girl tried the opener, found it locked, and stamped her foot, saying under her breath a word that was not supposed to be available to gently reared maidens. She looked at Krunzle, and the thief recognized the parents in the child.
“You’re thinking,” he told her, just to get the process rolling, “what it will cost you to secure my assistance.”
She folded her arms. “Well?”
“What have you got?”
She showed her fingers, unringed, her wrists unbraceleted, her neck unlaced. “I had only one thing, an amulet with a green stone.”
He patted a bulge in his upper garment. “I already have that.”
She stared at him for a moment, then sighed and slipped one arm out of her shift, followed by the other. A loud detonation from outside in the street caused her to pause, then she continued, slipping the garment down to her waist.
“This is scarcely the time,” Krunzle said.
She had been about to wriggle the shift down over her hips. “Then what?”
“How well do you know the snake?”
“Hothet? He used to guard me in the cradle.”
“Will he obey you?”
She casually signaled an affirmative, as if serpent-commanding was a universal skill.
“Then get dressed and get up on the table.”
She looked up at the hole. “The roof is too low, the walls to either side sheer.”
“Leave that,” he said, “to me.”
He boosted her through the gap, then fluidly followed. He crouched next to the hole, ready to duck back down, but then he saw the great reptile coiled at her feet, its spade-sized head rubbing against one thigh.
From the side of building that faced the street came another crump! accompanied by a brief yellow glare. Almost immediately, there followed a metallic rattling sound, like iron hail striking cobblestones. The thief crept to the parapet and looked over. Below in the street, Baalariot stood, legs spread, a nimbus of red light about his head like a halo, one hand holding a carved staff whose upper tip ended in an amorphous cloud of stygian darkness which kept spitting out little zig-zags of white lightning. He raised the implement and pointed it at where the front door would be—with Hortenza presumably in it.
From the blackness at the end of the staff rushed a torrent of colorless force, flecked with sparks of gold and black. The angle of his view prevented Krunzle from seeing where it struck, but he knew the effect must be less than overwhelming when he heard a hiss of rage from directly below him, followed by a rumbling, trundling sound, as of iron-shod wheels on stone. Now a shimmering wall, blue and almost transparent, moved outward from the shrine toward the wizard, rolling back his rush of energy until Baalariot gestured with his staff and the outflow ceased.
The wall moved on, however, even picking up speed, and its outer edges began to curve inward so that soon it would form a tube around the wizard. He made a downward chopping gesture with one hand, while speaking a stream of syllables, and the center of the approaching barrier began to melt and dissolve. A moment later it winked out of existence.
Krunzle heard another hissed curse from below him, and a snarling sound from her opponent. He thought it best to withdraw before either parent became aware of him. Something was now snarling and bellowing in the street below, accompanied by the stamp of heavy, hoofed feet on the cobbles. The animal roars were soon met by a chittering sound, as if ten thousand maddened insects were clashing their mandibles. The tramp of iron-shod hooves was overlaid by a skittering, whispering noise. Krunzle imagined a horde of chitinous scorpions, their pincers clicking, flooding across the street to swarm up some rough beast.
Then he decided there was no profit in imagining such unpleasantness. He crept back across the roof to Galathea, finding the snake asleep in a coil and the girl indulging in some impatient toe-tapping. He felt a brief twinge of compassion for poor, love-sick Didmus, who must eventually learn that the girl’s parent’s temperaments had bred true in their offspring.
But that was not his concern. “This way,” he said, and led her to where his grapnel and knotted rope still hung from the neighboring roof. As she took hold of the cord, the love song from above began again. She went up quickly, and the thief after her. They followed their ears to a corner of the tenement roof sheltered by movable walls of plaited bamboo.
A tender moment ensued, then Krunzle intervened to say, “It would be wise to leave here before the battle below ends and the winner—assuming there is one—comes looking for the prize.”
Didmus, a gawky youth with ears almost large enough to serve as wings, said, “I have a carriage. We’ll go to my uncle’s manse. A priest of Erastil lives next door. We’ll be married before midnight.”
Galathea looked down at her shift, its hem soiled from the unswept roof. “Married?” she said. “In this?”
Krunzle felt another brief spasm of sympathy for the apprentice wizard, but said, “In what quarter of the city is your uncle’s manse?”
The youth’s cracked voice said, “By the night market, near the Druma Road Gate.”
“Then let us go.”
And so, with eldritch lights and harsh sounds fading behind them, they fled the lower city. Didmus, a generous sort for a budding wizard, pressed into Krunzle’s hand a small purse of gratitude when they dropped him off at the market. The thief used the funds to buy a change of clothing and a broad-brimmed hat that would obscure and shadow his face.
He pinned the apprentice’s eye to his new headgear, then settled himself beside an untenanted booth at the edge of the market. When the gate opened in the morning, he would be first out of it and on the road to Druma and its capital, Kerse, where the streets were literally paved with gold and the walls of the houses inset with gems.
Krunzle had long had a hankering to see Druma. He sat with arms resting on his knees, and head resting on arms, and dreamed of easy locks and unlatched windows.
Follow the rest of Krunzle’s adventures in the new Pathfinder Tales novel Song of the Serpent!
