by Mel Odom
The woman captured the coin with a withered claw and made it disappear as easily as she worked the cards. She swallowed hard and glanced at the hallway. “Who?”
“The ship’s mage,” Iados said. “I was told she was here.”
A scowl darkened the old woman’s face. “Have you come to collect from her as well?”
“As well?” Shang-Li asked.
“The captain took her wages and her savings,” the old woman said tremulously. “The old flintheart left her here with no prospects and no way of paying her way.” She nodded at the rooms above. “I gave her a place to stay in return for cleaning rooms. But there are others that insist she owes them. They went up after her only moments ago.”
“Who?” Shang-Li asked.
“Murderous vermin.” The old woman spat in displeasure, then quickly checked to see if anyone had overheard her.
“There are a lot of murderous vermin in Westgate,” Iados said as he reached to his hip and freed his sword.
“These are particularly offensive.” She looked at Shang-Li with wide eyes. “That’s who I thought you were. Until I saw your ears and recognized you as elven. They wouldn’t let a half-breed among them.”
“The Nine Golden Swords?” Shang-Li asked, understanding the mistake that was made because of his Shou heritage.
A woman’s scream, filled with fear and rage, ripped from upstairs.
Shang-Li sprinted toward the staircase to his left and ran up the steps three and four at a time. Iados followed at his heels. By the time Thava joined them, Shang-Li held his fighting sticks in his hands. The paladin’s massive weight combined with the armor caused the stairs to shudder and quake, and for a moment Shang-Li feared they might collapse. He gained the landing with his sticks held before him.
The dim hallway ran straight and narrow. Doors to rooms sat off to either side. Scars from scrapes and drunken sailors adorned the plain wooden walls. Weak light from outside the building entered the hallway from windows at either end.
A large group of Shou men bearing tattoos that marked them as members of the Nine Golden Swords surrounded a young woman with copper hair at the end of the hallway. She fought against them, but the Shou held her easily. Shang-Li was surprised at how many men had been sent.
“Unhand me!” the woman yelled as she struggled against her captors. “Unhand me, or I swear to Umberlee you’ll rue the day you ever touched me!”
“You owe us, woman,” a brutish man snarled. He was in his middle years, thick with corded muscle, and had a mustache that curved down to his jawline. “You will pay us back for our losses.”
“You lost nothing!”
“That is not how my master views it,” the man snarled. He reached out to cuff her.
Ducking the blow, the woman twisted toward one of the Shou holding her and kicked him in the groin.
The man lurched to one side and dropped to his knees before throwing up.
“Well,” Iados commented dryly, wrinkling his nose at the sour stench of wine that suddenly filled the area, “he’d obviously been drinking before he arrived here.”
“Is that the ship’s mage?” Shang-Li asked, nodding toward the young woman.
“I’d say it’s a safe bet,” Iados said. “There can’t be two women in this dump that the Nine Golden Swords would try to grab.”
“Well?” Thava demanded.
Shang-Li sighed. “Out of all the criminals in Westgate, did she have to end up in the hands of these?”
“Ah, that’s right,” Iados said. “You have a history with the Nine Golden Swords.”
“Not exactly a history,” Shang-Li responded. “More like an understanding.”
“I understand that they have orders to kill you on sight.”
The brutish man noticed Shang-Li for the first time, then grinned coldly. “Shang-Li? The gods have favored me today. I now have two prizes to bring back. We owe you for the theft you made from us in the Pirate Isles. I’ll be happy to take your head as payment for our embarrassment.”
The heads of the other Nine Golden Swords turned to glare down the hall.
“Kill him!” the brutish man roared. “Ten gold pieces to any man that brings me his head.”
“Only ten?” Iados asked as he readied his sword. “I’d be insulted.”
The Nine Golden Swords rushed toward Shang-Li. One of them pulled a crossbow up to his shoulder and fired over the heads of his fellows. Shang-Li watched the quarrel as it leaped free of the weapon, then swept his left fighting stick out and broke the shaft before it hit Iados. The halves dropped to the floor.
“One of these days,” the tiefling said, “you’re going to have to teach me that trick.”
Thava yelled her challenge and drew her bastard sword. In the dim hallway, the blade gleamed and Shang-Li felt the chill of the magic that clung to the weapon.
Two of the Nine Golden Swords grabbed the ship’s mage. One slipped a blade beneath her jaw and held it against her throat. They opened the window behind them and forced her through it.
“The mage,” Iados said.
“I see her.” Shang-Li ran forward, then broke suddenly to the left and partially ran up the wall. He managed two long, deliberate strides before his momentum played out. Just before he fell from the wall, he dived and pushed himself forward to flip over the mob. Two swords slashed up at him, but only one of them was close and he batted it away with his fighting sticks. He landed on his feet behind the Nine Golden Swords warriors.
The mob instantly divided their attention between their front and rear. The brutish man stared at Shang-Li.
“Did you come to give yourself to me?” the man asked.
“I see you haven’t gotten any handsomer, Liu,” Shang-Li said. He parried the man’s blade with his left stick, knocking the blade down to the floor and striking with the right stick only an instant later.
Liu barely managed to get under the blow. He hissed a curse in surprise. At the end of the hallway, the two Nine Gold Swords warriors had disappeared with their captive.
“If I had known you were in the city,” Liu threatened, “I’d already have killed you.”
“You’ve tried to kill me before,” Shang-Li taunted. “Yet here I am again.”
“No more.” Liu took a two-handed grip on his sword and slashed repeatedly in carefully controlled blows.
Shang-Li dodged and weaved, forced back by the onslaught. One of the men behind him grew overconfident and lunged, following his sword to its intended target.
“No!” Liu bellowed in warning.
The man didn’t have the chance to pull back from his attack. Sidestepping and bending his knee on that side to drop his shoulder, Shang-Li let the man’s sword glide over his shoulder without touching him. The sword almost pierced Liu’s stomach as Shang-Li batted away his last attempt.
Shang-Li stood, knocking aside the man’s sword behind him and then elbowing his opponent in the nose hard enough to lift him from his feet. The man was unconscious by the time he struck the floor.
As he repositioned himself, Shang-Li saw Iados and Thava filling the hallway as they combatted the Nine Golden Sword members. They stepped over the bodies of two or three of them. His father fearlessly trailed behind them.
“Did it really take this many of you to capture a young woman for your master’s vengeance?” Shang-Li asked. He batted a series of sword slashes aside, then stepped sideways and delivered a reverse roundhouse kick that knocked another opponent into the nearby wall.
The unconscious man dropped into a sitting position beside the wall, then fell over.
“A point had to be made,” Liu said. He feinted at Shang-Li’s face, then shifted and tried to skewer his midsection.
Shang-Li dodged out of range, but that only set him up for another series of blinding attacks. Liu’s sword clattered along the fighting sticks but didn’t manage to find a way through Shang-Li’s defenses.
“The way I hear the story told,” Shang-Li said, “the ship was lost at se
a and the woman was skilled enough to get it back to this harbor before it sank.”
“The ship wasn’t supposed to be lost.” Liu stamped his foot and thrust again, following up almost immediately with a backward slash.
Shang-Li dropped into a low horse stance and the sword cut the air only inches above his head. He thrust his right fighting stick toward Liu’s chest, but the man blocked it with his free hand and set himself to strike again.
“If she had done her job, the ship would have been safe.”
“Shang-Li, are you going to let them take the ship’s mage?”
Recognizing his father’s voice, Shang-Li focused on Liu. The man attacked again and Shang-Li defended himself against a flurry of sword blows. Then, when Liu lunged in again, Shang-Li swept the sword aside and charged forward.
Turning sideways, Shang-Li planted his right foot and lashed out with his left. Liu managed to turn away his face, but Shang-Li’s foot caught him on the temple and the neck. Propelled by the force of the kick, Liu slammed into the wall with a meaty smack.
After a quick glance to make sure his father and his friends were all right, Shang-Li ran to the window and peered out. The two men struggled with the woman on the slanted roof only a few feet away. Their feet slipped and slid on the damp wooden shingles. Obviously the woman was no stranger to physical encounters, but she was up against skilled opponents.
Shang-Li put his fighting sticks away and stepped through the window onto the eaves. His foot slipped, then found purchase. He found his center, concentrated on his balance, and stepped forward.
One of the men released the woman while the other stepped behind her and held a knife to her throat. The man holding the ship’s mage stepped back toward the roof’s edge. Unfortunately, the Splintered Yards hadn’t been built on level ground. Tucked into the side of the steep mountain that formed Tidetown, the inn hung over a drop of fifty feet on two sides. The Nine Golden Swords warriors had run in the wrong direction. Or perhaps they’d expected their companions to win.
“Take another step, you diseased monkey,” the swordsman threatened in the Shou tongue, “and Kim will slash her throat.”
Swarthy and wiry, Kim looked the type to slash women’s throats. He grinned at Shang-Li and molded himself to the woman’s body to present a much smaller target. She tried to pull away from her captor, but his pressed his knife into her throat hard enough to start a trickle of blood that ran down into the hollow of her throat. She stilled.
Twenty feet away, the noise of the battle in the hallway still behind him, Shang-Li halted. He measured the distance and took a deliberate breath. He focused on being calm and stared at Kim’s face partially hidden behind the ship’s mage’s head.
“You will let us by,” the swordsman ordered.
“If you release the woman,” Shang-Li responded.
The swordsman held his weapon in front of him and slowly closed the distance. As he neared, he drew his blade back, readying for a quick strike.
“She will come with us,” he declared.
“No.”
The swordsman grinned and kept coming. “Perhaps I will let you have her. My master doesn’t care if she’s alive or dead. Can I interest you in a dead woman?” Thinking he had the upper hand, he lunged.
Shang-Li bent his left knee and threw his weight and balance to that side. He twisted his right shoulder back and let the sword slide past him. At the same time, he dropped a throwing star from inside his sleeve, caught it in his waiting hand, and flicked it toward the man holding the ship’s mage.
The throwing star glittered just for a moment in the sun, then sliced the skin over Kim’s right eyebrow. The razor edges nicked the woman’s ear in passing. Blinded by a sudden rush of blood, Kim dropped his knife and clapped his hand to his head while he staggered back, partially stunned from the impact.
Already in motion, Shang-Li stepped back and swept the long sword from his back. He turned, left foot forward and right hand gripping the sword hilt at waist level. When the swordsman attacked again, trying for Shang-Li’s groin this time, Shang-Li dipped his blade and blocked the attempt. Before his opponent could recover, Shang-Li whipped the long sword’s tip to the man’s chin.
“Drop your sword,” Shang-Li commanded, “and I’ll let you live.”
The man let go his weapon and sword clattered down the shingles to vanish over the edge. His eyes remained dark and sullen. “One day, monk, luck will not be with you.”
“Leave,” Shang-Li suggested.
The man turned and fled toward the opposite end of the roof.
“Don’t just stand there congratulating yourself, you oaf. Get over here and help!” the woman yelled. She stood at the roof’s edge and fought the bloody-faced man off. He’d dropped his knife when the throwing star had hit him, but he hadn’t given up the fight. His blood-covered hand wrapped around her left forearm and his left hand flailed for her head.
Instinctively, she shoved him back from her. Then her hands worked in front of her and she spoke a word. A powerful gust of wind slammed into her attacker, driving him over the roof’s edge. The ship’s mage managed to rip her arm free of the man’s grip as he fell, but he grabbed for the roof’s edge and caught it with his elbows for a moment. Frightened now, he reached for her and caught her ankle. His bloody fingers lost purchase on the wooden shingles and he fell. She gestured again and a blinding flash of light hit the man in the face. Unfortunately he maintained his hold.
Dragged after the man, the woman fell prone across the roof and tried to find purchase. It was the same move she would have done on a ship at sea tossed during a storm. Despite her efforts, she only slowed her fall. The man weighed her down.
Shang-Li threw himself forward and grabbed her right hand in his left as she followed the man over the roof’s edge. Her yells mixed with the man’s fearful screams. Shang-Li tried to hold all three of them on the roof but their combined weight outmatched the purchase he was able to find on the shingles. Several pulled free and clattered down the roof.
Even if Shang-Li had wished to, he couldn’t have let the woman fall. She had a death grip on his hand. Pain shot through his fingers and his arm.
He rolled onto his side and lifted the long sword, then drove the blade through the shingles and prayed it would hold. The sword tore through two rows of shingles without pause, then found a support timber and held. The angle was awkward and Shang-Li’s head and left shoulder had slid over the roof’s edge.
At the end of his arm, the young woman’s eyes rounded with fear, but she remained calm and clear-headed. She swung her other arm up to wrap her hand around his wrist.
“Don’t let go,” she yelled at Shang-Li.
Shang-Li didn’t have the breath to respond. He strained against the weight and felt certain his arm was about to tear from his shoulder. If she’d had her hands free, she probably would have unleashed another spell.
The Nine Golden Swords man clung to her boots, but his bloody hand betrayed him and he slipped. Screaming in fear, the man fell forty feet onto the craggy rocks in the harbor at the foot of the steep edge of the coast. The screams ended abruptly.
“Don’t. Let. Go,” the woman repeated.
The sword split more wood and slipped an inch or so, but it held. The woman swung at the end of Shang-Li’s arm.
“Climb,” he told her.
“This is your idea of a rescue?”
“Actually, I haven’t yet decided if this is a rescue or if you’re just going to drag me down with you.”
Adroitly, the ship’s mage climbed up his arm as though scaling a ship’s rigging. When she was once more on the roof, she grabbed Shang-Li by the waist of his pants and hauled him back from the roof’s edge.
“Thank you,” he said as he sat there a moment and drew a breath.
“You’re welcome.” The ship’s mage stood and headed for the other end of the building.
“You’re not going to thank me for rescuing you?” Shang-Li couldn’t believe it.
“If you hadn’t come along,” she told him, “I’d never have ended up on this rooftop about to plunge to my death.”
“Only because Liu and his men would have slit your throat in the hallway.”
“If they were going to do that there, you gave them plenty of time.” She paused at the opposite roof’s edge. “Besides that, I was about to save myself. You threw my timing off.
Shang-Li stood. “You’re just going to leave?”
She turned to face him. “Staying here now that the Nine Golden Swords know where I am doesn’t seem very intelligent, does it? Especially since they appear to want me dead for saving what was left of their blasted ship.”
Iados, Kwan Yung, and Thava stuck their heads through the broken window and watched with interest.
“How do you plan on leaving Westgate?” Shang-Li asked.
“On a ship, of course. If I could turn into a bird and fly away, don’t you think I’d have done that by now? And there’s no way I would ever ride a stinking, godforsaken horse. I’d sooner die.”
“If you could have left on a ship, you would have been gone before now.”
The ship’s mage shot him a dire look. “If I have to, I’ll travel with a caravan to the Sword Coast. At least they have wagons. But I’d still be around those stupid horses and all that hair and ordure.”
“Do you know those waters like you know the Sea of Fallen Stars?”
“No, but I know seas, ships, storms, and sailors. I can find someone that needs a ship’s mage.”
“We need a ship’s mage,” Kwan Yung said.
Shang-Li shot his father a reproving glance.
The woman crossed her arms and regarded Shang-Li. “You came here looking for me?”
“We do need a mage. But not one that’s been cursed. Are you cursed?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “You think I’m cursed?” She glared at him, and she was joined by Kwan Yung, Thava, and Iados.
“No,” Shang-Li said. “I’m just saying we don’t need a ship’s mage that is cursed.”
“I’m not cursed,” she said in obvious annoyance. “I brought in a damaged ship that most ship’s mages would have abandoned. I saved the lives of most of the crew and nearly all of the cargo. Then that thrice-diseased Nine Golden Swords boss decided he’d cheat me of my fee, steal from me, and blame me for everything, ruining my reputation in the process. And you have the audacity to question me?”
