A Fistful of Elven Gold

by Alex Stewart

  Drago shrugged. “In which case I’ll try not to kill them in self-defense.” Which hadn’t worked out so well in Fairhaven, but he didn’t see any reason to mention that. “Then we can have a little chat with whoever it is.”

  Graymane was nodding thoughtfully, clearly liking the idea. “It’s your neck,” he said at last. “I’ll pretend to let it slip in front of Oaktwig that I’ve found out there’s a bounty hunter in the camp, but without any identifying details. If I ask him to keep it to himself, every elf in the garrison should know about it by nightfall.” He turned away, heading back up the slope, then turned back, apparently struck by an afterthought. “Same time tomorrow.”

  “Right,” Drago said, beginning to wonder if he was ever going to get enough sleep on this assignment.

  The next day was a repeat of the previous one, even down to Clovis waking him far earlier than he would have liked. To his pleasant surprise, the work seemed a little easier today; the barrow went where he wanted to push it more frequently and seemed to fill faster, the rocks shattered under his pick with less effort and into more uniform lumps, and Della was always there with a joke or a pleasantry when he started to flag.

  By the time the evening rolled around and he started back up the slope leading to the burrow, Drago had been concentrating on the job for so long, and with such fixity of purpose, that he’d almost forgotten about his conversation with Graymane the night before. Only when Della and Clovis joined him in the mess hall did his mind return to the real reason he was here, and the prompting for that was distinctly unwelcome.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” Della said, taking the next space on the bench, while Clovis squeezed in on his other side. Both dropped bowls of stew on the tabletop next to Drago’s, which was already almost half finished. As before, the day-long physical exertion had left him ravenous.

  “What is?” Drago asked, around a mouthful of turnip.

  “This bounty hunter the lofties keep going on about. You must have heard them while you were doing the tip run.”

  Drago nodded, keeping his face expressionless, and swallowed enough to regain the power of speech. “Sounded to me like they thought it was another elf,” he said neutrally.

  Della emitted a derisive grunt around her mouthful of food. “Of course they did,” she said, once the greater part of it was safely on its way toward her stomach. “It wouldn’t occur to them that it might be one of us. But we’ve seen you fight.”

  “We have,” Clovis agreed, “and you fight a lot better than you dig. If you were really looking for money you could easily have joined the city watch, or got a job as a bodyguard back in Fairhaven.”

  “Not for the kind of money I’m earning here,” Drago said reasonably, wondering how Raegan and Waggoner would have reacted to the implied suggestion that their wages were overly lavish. With amusement, he strongly suspected, not unlaced with profanity.

  “If you’re going after Gorash, you’ll earn every penny,” Della said. “They say he’s the finest swordsman for thirty leagues.”

  “You can’t believe everything you hear in the ballads,” Clovis demurred. Then he shrugged. “But he’s definitely well hard. You don’t get to lead a pack of bandits by being the best flower arranger.”

  Drago nodded. “I don’t suppose you do,” he said, although in his rather more extensive experience of criminal gangs, physical strength and fighting ability weren’t necessarily the most important qualities for rising to the top. He’d often found the most effective leaders had been the ones with the wit and charisma to persuade other people to fight their battles for them.

  Nevertheless, the conversation had unnerved him, and he retreated to his room as quickly as he could without making it obvious that he didn’t want his friends’ company. Even the dice game seemed a little less tempting than it had the previous evening, as he found himself wondering if the players were glancing speculatively in his direction.

  “Think I’ll get an early night,” he said, to Della’s evident disappointment. “See if I can get up before you two tomorrow.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Clovis said.

  Sleep, of course, was the last thing on Drago’s mind, and he loitered in his room obsessively checking his weapons until it was time to go and meet Graymane. That had been his intention, at least; in practice he found the waiting so onerous that he left as soon as the burrow grew quiet, hurrying through the almost deserted tunnels toward the open air. This time he hadn’t bothered with the blanket, and the few gnomes he met glanced at his sword with open curiosity, followed almost at once by carefully composed indifference.

  Stepping out into the chill of the night brought him back to himself, a faint tingle of renewed alertness that he knew well. He’d felt like this setting out in pursuit of a felon, or on an errand for the Tradesman’s Association. He scanned his surroundings from force of habit, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and caught a flash of movement on the floor of the quarry.

  For a moment he thought nothing of it, then the full implications of what he was seeing caught up with him. The figure was too large to be a gnome, but wasn’t carrying a light, picking its way slowly and cautiously across the treacherous surface by the faint illumination offered by the stars overhead. Clearly whoever it was didn’t want to be seen, and if he hadn’t felt so restless, would probably have got away without being spotted at all.

  “Graymane!” he called, in the loudest undertone he felt he could risk, sprinting up the slope toward the rendezvous point. As he’d hoped, the elf was already there, evidently not having exaggerated the night before about his habit of arriving early for meetings.

  “What is it?” To his relief, Graymane didn’t waste any time with unnecessary greetings or questions, his head turning in the direction of the sound of Drago’s approach long before he could have made him out visually as anything other than a faint clump of deeper darkness.

  “Someone’s down in the quarry. Looks like an elf, but they’re not carrying a light. Could be our spy.”

  “More than likely,” Graymane agreed. He reached down and took hold of Drago’s arm. “You’ll have to guide me. If we show a light we’ll tip our hand. Do you think you can catch up with whoever it is?”

  “I think so,” Drago agreed, with another glance down at the slowly moving figure in the distance. It seemed to be heading for the other side of the quarry, with a fixity of purpose undiminished by the arduous task of having to make its way across a litter of potentially ankle-turning detritus. Being able to see clearly in the dim light of the stars would allow him to make much faster progress. By the time whoever it was reached the distant rock face, he should be hard on their heels. He glanced at Graymane, as another thought occurred to him. “If you can keep up with me.”

  “I’ll have to,” Graymane replied, with what Drago hoped wouldn’t turn out to be misplaced confidence.

  “Come on then.” He moved away as quickly as he dared, allowing Graymane to retain the light contact with his upper arm. “Try to stay away from the edge.”

  “Don’t worry.” The elf smiled, in what was probably intended to be a reassuring manner. “If I go over, so do you.”

  In the event, neither had to worry about taking a fatal shortcut to the quarry floor. Drago kept them well over to the rock-face side of the terraces and connecting ramps, and Graymane, despite being effectively blind, kept up with him easily on the relatively smooth surfaces. Only gradually did it begin to dawn on Drago that the elf trusted him, at least to some extent.

  “Watch your step from here,” Drago warned, as they reached the quarry floor, and began to make their way over the rougher, rubble-strewn surface. “It’s going to get a lot harder.”

  He was right. Despite his best efforts to guide Graymane through the easiest going, his companion stumbled frequently, with a constant muffled clattering of displaced stones. To Drago’s impressed surprise, though, the elf remained silent, despite what must have been a powerful urge to relieve his feelings verba
lly, although his lips moved on occasion with what looked like a selection of oaths which would have made a stevedore blush.

  “Are we making too much noise?” Graymane asked at last, sotto voce, although nearly all the noise had been his, Drago being able to pick his way around the worst of the detritus in comparative silence.

  Drago shook his head, then, unsure of whether the elf had been able to see the gesture in the darkness with his gaze fixed unrelentingly on his feet, added “I don’t think so. They’ll be making so much noise themselves they’ll drown out anything we can do.”

  “Good.” Graymane struggled on for a few more paces. “Are we catching up?”

  “We are.” The distant figure was almost at the rock face by now, although Drago couldn’t imagine what they were hoping to find there. For a moment it crossed his mind that they were about to interrupt nothing more sinister than a romantic assignation, but that hardly seemed likely; there were plenty of more accessible venues for that sort of thing a lot closer to the main camp. “Do you want to challenge them?”

  “No. Let’s wait and see what’s going on. They might be out here to meet someone.”

  “They’re a he,” Drago reported a few moments later, as the object of their interest paused by a particularly large boulder to relieve himself.

  “Well, that narrows it down to about three quarters of the garrison,” Graymane muttered, less happy with the news than Drago had expected. Reminded unexpectedly of Sergeant Waggoner, Drago strongly suspected that a prime suspect had just been eliminated.

  “You were expecting a woman?” he asked.

  Graymane shrugged, momentarily dislodging his hand from Drago’s bicep. “Hoping, really. It’s a much smaller group to whittle down. Besides, they’re more fun to interrogate.”

  Drago found himself drawing away a little, and reminded himself that he didn’t have to like the elf to work with him. Graymane must have felt him flinch, because he renewed the contact with something approaching diffidence. “Yes, I know, I’m a sick bastard. But I get the job done. Are you good with that, or do we go our own ways now?”

  “Not good, exactly,” Drago said, remembering his resolution to be as truthful with Graymane as seemed expedient, “but not bad enough to forget our agreement.” After all, the elf thought he was willing to commit murder for money, so he could hardly come across as too squeamish. “So long as I can rely on you to focus on the job, and nothing else. Besides, we shook on it, remember?”

  “And that matters to you?” Graymane asked, seeming faintly surprised.

  “Why wouldn’t it?” Drago asked. “Go back on your word in my business, and see how many clients you get.”

  “Fair point,” Graymane said. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Then perhaps it should have,” Drago said, a little more curtly than he’d intended.

  “Perhaps it should,” Graymane conceded, and they went on in silence, both faintly relieved at the narrowing distance between them and the suspect which afforded them an excuse not to engage in any further conversation.

  The shadowy figure had reached the far wall of the quarry by now, and began to move along it, hunching over to peer intently at the rock face in the enveloping darkness.

  “He’s looking for something,” Drago murmured, pitching his voice so low it would barely carry to Graymane’s ears, let alone the elf in the distance. “Can’t tell what yet.” Then, to his surprise, the unwitting fugitive reached up, grasped a protruding rock, placed a foot on a lower outcrop, and boosted himself up. “Bugger me! He’s climbing!”

  “Not to the top, surely?” Graymane whispered back, his tone incredulous. Scrambling all the way up the rock face would be incredibly dangerous even in daylight; in the dark it would be tantamount to suicide.

  “Don’t think so.” The distant figure had scrambled onto a ledge, about eight feet from the ground, and begun walking again, rising steeply away from the quarry floor. “There’s a path up there—or an easier route, at any rate.”

  “Then get after him,” Graymane said, coming rapidly to the same conclusion that Drago had just reached. “You can see what you’re doing, and I’ll only hold you back. I’ll follow on as quickly as I can.”

  “Right.” Leaving the elf to make his way to the cliff face as best he could, Drago sprinted for the spot where the suspect had started to climb. Glancing up, he felt a momentary pang of alarm; the cloaked figure seemed to have vanished completely. Knowing that simply wasn’t possible, he quelled his unease as best he could, and scanned the towering crag, beginning to breathe again as he noticed a flicker of movement near a cleft in the rock. The path, if such it was, must have disappeared into it, taking both the track and anyone traversing it out of sight of the ground almost at once.

  The hand and footholds used by the skulking elf were, of course, out of his reach. He glanced round for alternatives, and failed to find any, settling instead for scrambling up onto the outcrop the suspect had used to stand on, and reaching up for the protruding rock above his head. He couldn’t quite reach, and jumping was out of the question—if he missed, he’d probably break his leg, and if by some miracle he didn’t, he’d just end up dangling by his hands and looking foolish.

  “Need a boost?” Graymane asked, catching up with him, and Drago nodded, forgetting once again that the elf was unlikely to catch the gesture in the dark.

  “What do you think?” he rejoined without heat, and stepped into the proffered stirrup of the elf’s linked fingers.

  Graymane was stronger than he looked. With one smooth motion of his arms, Drago’s boot was level with his face, and the gnome was able to scramble onto the ledge above him. He reached down. “Need a hand?”

  “You haven’t got time,” Graymane said, accurately enough. “If you lose him now we’re right back where we started.” He waited while Drago scrambled to his feet. “I’ll catch you up.”

  “Right,” Drago said, and began to trot along the path, already wondering how soon and how much he was going to regret this development.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Neither did I.”

  The ledge turned out to be broad, sloping steeply upward, and Drago made good time along it, moving as lightly as he could, fearful of betraying his presence by any extraneous sound. Every now and then he paused, listening for the clatter of boot against stone, but heard nothing, either from the elf he pursued, or the one he fervently hoped would be feeling his way carefully along the ledge in the dark behind him by now. He’d lost sight of the quarry almost as soon as he’d turned into the cleft he’d noticed from the ground below, merely catching intermittent glimpses of the garrison fires far in the distance whenever the twists and turns he followed left a little clear space in the right direction. Every time he saw the faint orange glow it seemed to be less high above him, until finally the narrow track emerged onto level ground, where coarse grass clung grimly to the fringes of the narrow line of clear earth he now followed.

  Glancing back, he saw that the distant fires were now on the same level as he was, apparently floating in mid-air. Any passing traveler unblessed with gnomish night vision could be readily forgiven for thinking nothing stood between his current vantage point and the apparently welcoming lights of the camp, and he found himself wondering how many unfortunates had plunged into the depths over the years, believing themselves mere minutes from a warm bed and a hearty supper.

  Few, if any, his logical mind butted in. The Barrens weren’t the sort of place people travelled on a whim, and anybody local would know the topography around here in intimate detail. The elf he pursued, who’d come into sight again as soon as they were back on the same level, certainly did. His hesitant progress across the quarry floor had changed into a rapid and confident stride as soon as he was on the path, despite being just as effectively blind as he had been before. Proof, if Drago needed it, that whoever he was following had been in regular contact for a long time with whoever he was on his way to meet.

  Fearfu
l of losing his quarry, he speeded up a little, keeping the mysterious elf in sight, a task which was beginning to become more difficult as the grassland gave way to denser undergrowth. A little farther ahead, the path disappeared into a belt of scrubby woodland, winding its way through the trees and the undergrowth between them, which he supposed wasn’t altogether a bad thing; the going remained easy, he’d be able to find his way back to the mining camp without too much trouble, and Graymane, if he ever caught up, was unlikely to get lost either. Assuming he didn’t blunder off the path in the dark and get tangled up in the undergrowth, of course, although Drago suspected that would be highly unlikely. Graymane struck him as the kind of person who’d had a lot of practice at sneaking around without getting caught.

  As had Drago, of course, although his area of expertise was city streets, and, on occasion, other peoples’ premises. Trying to move stealthily through woodlands was an entirely novel experience, and one he hoped he’d get the hang of in a hurry. Fallen leaves kept rustling under his feet, and the occasional twig snapped as he trod on it. Fortunately the elf he followed was still making enough noise of his own to mask that of his pursuer.

  A faint odor of woodsmoke drifted into his nostrils, and he slowed down, warily. That could mean his quarry was nearing his destination. Either that, or there were charcoal burners active in the woods; the fuel for the furnaces used to cast the gold ingots must come from somewhere, after all.

  No sooner had that thought occurred to him than he dismissed it, catching a glimpse of orange flame through the trees, an unmistakable campfire. Spotting it, the suspect picked up his pace even more, presumably in response to being able to see a little better, although it didn’t make that much difference to Drago. Being careful to avoid the circle of firelight himself, the bounty hunter edged a little closer, drawn in by a murmur of voices.

  “I didn’t think you were coming tonight,” a burly goblin said, glancing up from throwing another handful of sticks on the fire, the flickering flames striking highlights from his tusks. He was accompanied by three others, dressed like the goblins who’d attacked the convoy from the wharf, although Drago didn’t recognize any of them. Not that he’d really noticed anyone apart from the three he’d fought, of course.