“Fedder,” he said slowly, “you don’t think…” He hesitated then shook his head. “Never mind. Forget it. We don’t have time in any case and monsters in the darkness aren’t the reason why we came here. At least…not those kinds of monsters.”
“And…why did you come?” Tesler asked. Then he cleared his throat. “That is…I thank you for the visit, of course, and I don’t want to be rude, but I must admit to some curiosity—”
“Relax, lad,” Fedder growled, glancing around, clearly as put-off by the whole situation as Dannen himself, “we didn’t come to have tea and boy talk, alright?”
Tesler blinked slowly. “Oh,” he said, in a voice that seemed to indicate he had just realized something. Slowly, he pulled the covers up more. “Well, I’m flattered, of course, but I don’t—”
Fedder let out a sound somewhere between a growl and a laugh then turned to Dannen. “That damn girl and her jokes. Let me kill him, Butcher. Just a little.”
Tesler paled at that, but Dannen sighed, waving an irritated hand. “Maybe later. For now, I think we should all be focused on keeping breathing for a bit while longer.”
“What is it?” the young man asked, his confused gaze traveling between the two of them. “What’s happened?”
Dannen glanced at Fedder, but since the man seemed to have no intention of telling the story, he sighed, relating as quickly as he could what the barmaid had told him. To his credit, the young man started getting ready before he’d finished, tugging on his boots. “So they’re coming for us,” Tesler said when Dannen was done.
“That’s right,” he agreed. “Any minute now—” He cut off at an unmistakable thump from behind him, and they all spun to look. But whatever had caused the sound, it had not come from within the room itself but from the other side of the wall and the room beyond. From—
“Mariana,” Tesler said, his eyes going wide. He was up in a flash, moving far faster than Dannen would have given him credit for and darting toward the door.
“Wait a minute, lad,” Dannen hissed, “there’s no knowing how many—”
But the young man was already gone, vanishing out of the doorway, a knight on a rescue mission without so much as a kitchen knife to serve as his sword. Dannen growled in frustration. “The damn fool,” he said, then he turned to Fedder. “Come on.”
They reached the hallway in a matter of seconds, in time to see Tesler standing in front of Mariana’s door. She had locked it when she’d gone to bed, of that much Dannen was sure, but it stood ajar now. The young man stared at it for a moment, a mix of emotions warring on his face. Dannen moved forward, meaning to stop him, to create some sort of plan that didn’t end with all of them ending up face down in the dirt breathing out their last, but before he could reach him, the young man shouldered the door open and darted through.
Dannen followed at a run. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find in the girl’s room, blood likely, probably a corpse, but instead, to his surprise—and apparently the young man’s as well, for he had frozen only a short distance into the room—he found that Mariana did not lie dead on the floor. Instead, she sat on the bed, pulling on a shirt as she stared at them with a frown. “Am I hosting a party and nobody bothered to tell me?” she snapped.
“Mariana,” Tesler said, his gaze—much like Fedder’s and, if he was being honest, Dannen’s himself—stuck on the woman’s chest which had been bare only a moment ago, “you’re…you’re okay.”
She frowned. “Of course I’m okay,” she said. “Now stop staring at my breasts, you pervert.”
“Oh, don’t blame the lad, love,” Fedder said. “They’re fine breasts.”
The woman scowled at him, a look sharp enough to draw blood, then finished pulling on her shirt, to the mage’s obvious—and to Dannen’s hopefully better concealed—disappointment. “Another word out of you, old man, and I’ll do to you what I did to the other bastard who came into my room without an invitation.”
Now that the woman was covered, Dannen was able to make use of his eyes again aside from the one purpose, and he saw what the half-undressed woman had distracted him from. A man lay sprawled in the floor near the bed, his shirt half-unbuttoned and, incongruously, with one boot off.
There was a growling sound, and he turned to Fedder only to realize that it wasn’t the mage but was, instead, the young man, Tesler. He was staring at the man—who was clearly unconscious, his night not having turned out the way he’d obviously hoped—the way a feral wolf might stare at a limping deer, as if he meant to spring forward and devour it at any moment. “Did he…” the man began in a voice choked with emotion, “did he…”
“Get the shit beat out of him for entering a young lady’s room unannounced?” Mariana finished, raising an eyebrow, but she was not frowning now but showing the slightest smile as she stared at the young man standing with his fists clenched. “Yes he did. Something the three of you ought to keep in mind, the next time you take it in your heads to go barging into a woman’s quarters without an invitation.”
That threat—said quietly, calmly—went a long way toward banishing the image of the woman’s shapely breasts from Dannen’s mind. A long way…but not all the way. And, judging by the mage’s wide grin, it didn’t even make it that far with Fedder. “Well,” Fedder ventured. “All things considered…” He paused long enough to give another glance at her now-covered chest, in case anyone was in danger of not catching his meaning. “Can you blame the poor bastard for wanting to begin the festivities a bit early?”
Mariana turned to him with an expression that, though blank on the outside, seemed to promise retribution. “Yes. Yes, I think I can, you old bastard.”
“But…but you’re okay then?” Tesler asked, his anger and fear for the woman slowly giving way to his confusion and fear of the woman.
She turned to him, a small smile on her face. “Now that my knight in shining armor is here, how could I not be? Though I can’t fail to notice that said knight neglected to bring his sword. Or his horse. Or his armor, for that matter.”
Tesler blushed at that. “I…I’m sorry. I didn’t…I wasn’t—”
“Thinking?” she said, then gave a shake of her head. “Men.”
“You can mock us later,” Dannen said, “for now, we need to get out of here while we still can. There are a lot of people down in the common room who—”
“All want to kill us?” Mariana finished, then snorted at his look of surprise. “Yeah, my guest,”—she paused to nod her head at the unconscious man sprawled by the bed—“said as much before…well, before the conversation devolved a bit.”
“Fine,” Dannen said, “then it saves me having to explain it. Now, let’s get out of here, while we still can.”
No one seemed ready to argue, so he moved toward the door, glancing in the hallway before ducking quickly back inside. “Shit,” he hissed.
“What is it, Butcher?” Fedder asked.
“What do you think it is, fool?” Mariana hissed. “You think the décor isn’t to his liking, is that it?”
The mage frowned, glancing around the room. “It’s a small village. Really, it ain’t so bad when you consider—”
“They’re coming,” Dannen whispered.
“What do we do?” Tesler asked, turning to look at the door as if expecting to see an army barging in intent on their blood. Which, if they waited a few minutes, would be depressingly close to the truth. The squirrel perched on his shoulder, though, did not look afraid. It looked…hungry. Up until that moment, Dannen wouldn’t have thought that a squirrel could look hungry, but he would have been wrong.
Dannen shook his head, frustrated, his thoughts whirling. “There’s a way out—a room at the end of the hall Delilah told me about. There’s a window there that we can climb down.”
“Then what are we standing around talking about it for?” Mariana countered. “Let’s go.”
Dannen stared at her. “Because somehow I doubt that those bandits—you know, the ones who
have been paid handsomely to kill us—will just stand by and watch us escape.” The woman said nothing to that, only frowned at him. It was the type of frown that said there’d be punishment later, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. Just then, he was less focused on a painful death in the future and more focused on a painful death right now to concern himself with it. “We need a distraction,” he said, then he turned to Fedder. “You up for it?”
“Distraction?” the mage said, grinning widely and popping his knuckles. “Why, Butcher, I thought you’d never ask.”
“Good,” Dannen said, turning to the other two. “Once Fedder gets them busy, we all make a run for the end of the hall. There’s a room there—that’s where the window is. Got it?”
The young man and woman both nodded at him, Tesler with a worried expression on his face, Mariana with one on her own that seemed to say she’d like nothing more than for the unconscious man at her feet to be a warm up and to put her weapons to use on all the bandits. With any luck, Dannen hoped she would never get the chance. He turned back to Fedder and saw the big man looking at him. He nodded. “Alright, Fedder. Time to work your magic.”
Fedder nodded back, shifting his shoulders as if to work the stiffness out of them then, without any hesitation, he stepped into the hallway. Dannen could hear shouts of surprise and anger from the mob of bloodthirsty bandits climbing up the stairs, and he braced himself, squinting his eyes in preparation for the firestorm of the mage’s magic.
“Hold, you lot!” Fedder roared, and bloodthirsty bandit or not, paid bloodthirsty bandit or not, a person couldn’t easily ignore such a bellow. Where moments before there had been the sound of audible whispers and footsteps as the bandits made their way toward what they thought would be their sleeping victims, now there was only a tense silence.
And into that silence, Fedder spoke. “I’ve got a question for you. If a man is sick, he’s said to be ailing, but then why is the best medicine in the world named ale?”
Dannen blinked, glancing at Tesler and Mariana who looked as confused as he felt. As for the crowd of would-be killers, they were silent for several seconds. Then Dannen heard a shout from among their number.
“They’re spelled different!”
Then, seconds later, came another voice, one Dannen thought he recognized as belonging to the man, Palder, “Kill the bastard!” he yelled.
“Shit,” Fedder said, turning to look at Dannen and the others. “That’s a no go on the distraction, Butcher. Best run now!”
It took a second or two for Dannen to work his way past his confusion and get moving, so he was in the back as the four of them raced—followed closely by an angry, armed mob—toward the door Delilah had told him about. “Wait!” Dannen shouted as he saw Fedder only feet away from the door, grasping in his pocket as he ran. “The key—” But then his words were drowned out by a loud crack as the mage shouldered into the door, breaking the latch as easily as if it were made of glass.
The others piled inside and Dannen followed a moment later, spinning to see the approaching horde only feet away. He slammed the door shut, propping himself against the door, and Fedder was beside him, lending his own not-inconsiderable strength to the effort only a moment before there was a loud crash on the other side as those at the forefront of the mob attempted to force their way inside.
“Might be we should lock it!” Fedder said, having to shout to be heard over the tumult of the men beating on the other side of the door.
“You broke the damned lock!” Dannen yelled back, gritting his teeth and pressing against the door with all his might.
“Ah, right,” the mage said, wincing.
Dannen turned to the young man and woman, both staring wide eyed at the door. “Grab something, damn you! We need to block the doo—” He grunted as, just then, the door was struck with the hardest blow yet, and he thought he heard the terrifying sound of wood splintering. He left the two to it, forced to focus all his strength, all his concentration, on holding the door—the only barrier between them and a brutal death—closed.
What felt like an eternity of hissing, spitting struggle later, he heard Mariana shout from behind him. “Move!”
He glanced back and saw that she and Tesler were pushing a heavy bureau in their direction, straining with obvious effort. Dannen and Fedder stepped aside at the last moment and the two slammed it against the door, blocking it.
The next few minutes were a mad scramble as they upended the bed—far finer in the innkeeper’s room than those present in the rooms of his guests—tossing everything from tables and chairs onto the door in an effort to create a barrier that would hold long enough.
When that was finished and they didn’t look in immediate danger of being skewered on a bandit’s blade, Dannen spun on Fedder. “What in the name of the gods was that?”
Fedder frowned. “A mob, I’d say.”
“No,” Dannen snapped, “I meant the distraction. Did you ask them a damn riddle?”
The mage looked thoughtful. “A—” He paused at a particularly loud crash from the other side of the door. “Well, more of a brain teaser really, Butcher. Ain’t you ever wondered?”
“What I wonder,” Dannen hissed, “is why you didn’t cast a spell.”
“A spell?”
“To keep them back!”
Realization slowly dawned on the mage’s face, and he grunted. “Oh, that’s what you meant. Honestly, Butcher, you really got to be clearer about those kinds of things. How was I to know—”
“Forget it,” Dannen said, all too aware that they could stack all the furniture in the world in front of the door—sooner or later, the bandits would make it in anyway. He moved to the window at the room’s far wall, frowning at it. It would be a tight squeeze—damned tight for Fedder—but that was alright. As far as he was concerned, it would serve the bastard right to get stuck halfway, see what kind of brain teasers he had for the bandits then.
He swung the window open, glancing down at the ground below. Fifteen, maybe twenty feet. Not all that far, at least when compared to a mountaintop ravine, but he figured they were high enough to get the bandit’s job done for them quick enough, if they weren’t careful. He turned back to the others, “Who wants to—”
“I’ll go,” Mariana said, brushing her way past him. The woman climbed up, her feet on the windowsill, hunkered over and reminding him, in that moment, of nothing so much as a cat poised for a leap. She glanced back at him with what might have been a smile then…leapt. She did not search for handholds or the easiest way down, simply jumped. Dannen lunged at the window, staring down in time to see the woman strike the ground in a crouch, immediately going into a roll that led her to her feet once more before turning back to look up at them. “Well?” she shouted. “You coming or what?”
Dannen told himself he could be amazed—and annoyed—later. Just now, he had more important things to worry about. He turned back into the room and motioned to Tesler. “Your turn, lad.”
The young man jumped, tensing at the sound of a crash from the other side of the door and hurried forward so eagerly that Dannen was half-convinced he would go sprinting right out of the window. Instead, he slowed at the last moment, grabbing hold of the windowsill and pulling himself up.
Tesler turned and glanced at him, his expression pale, not saying anything but then that was alright. For one, Dannen doubted he could have heard it anyway, not with the unmissable sounds of the door being broken in. More importantly, though, the man’s pale face said it clearly enough. Dannen, knowing they were running out of time, used a trick he’d learned some years before. He met the man’s gaze, changed his expression the slightest amount, so that he stared at the lad with a look that conveyed unwavering confidence—a lie, and hope—the truth. Then he gave a single, confident nod.
Like so many before him, the young man was obviously heartened by the gesture, and with a deep breath he swung his feet out of the window and began to work his way down. Dannen, stared on, amazed as
always by the usefulness of a simple, confident nod. He’d discovered the magic behind it one day after about the dozenth time of finding himself taking on a job he’d had no business taking on.
He had found himself standing or, more accurately, hiding in a bush, trying to ignore the stabbing, scratching thorns as a band of kobolds ran by, searching for him, and had begun to question how he’d come to be there in the first place. It wasn’t the money—after all, that was before he’d met Val, and so all he’d ever cared about was getting drunk and sleeping with whores. And the more he got of the one, the less picky he was about the other which he was sure had saved him a small fortune over the years. Neither was it the fame—fame that, while it might have gotten him some small discount with the whores in question, also meant that every swinging dick who picked up a sword wanted to prove himself by killing Dannen, fame that had woken him up, hung-over and half-clothed more than a few times, forcing him to fight a duel he didn’t want against a man or woman he didn’t know.
No, it was not the money that had seen him risk his life so many times, and it wasn’t the fame. And it damn sure wasn’t anything so ridiculous as morality, some altruistic streak that manifested itself in one suicide attempt after another. What it was, he had finally decided, the idea coming to him while lying in bed recovering, his body so bruised and battered that it hurt to blink, was the nod.
Seladrius, the man who had once found them jobs, had been a scoundrel and a cheat, that was true, just as it was true that Dannen had liked him anyway. After all, most people were scoundrels; at least the old man had been honest about it. And while he’d been no prize to look at, while he’d been famous for skimming some off the top of the profits meant for his “heroes,” people, including Dannen, had kept coming back again and again to get cheated once more. And it had been, Dannen finally decided, because of the nod the old man had always given him and his other companions—some still alive, most not—before they’d set out on their next suicidal mission.
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