*
The Shugak had driven the merchants away from the front gate of Vod’Adia when Black Danavod ordered her Magdetchoi in to pursue the Wizard. The bullywug shaman Kerek, the Mistress’s most special favorite, thought the merchants had set up again further down the main street, but he did not much care. He had deployed his hobs and wugs around the entrance plaza to ward all the streets from behind barricades. While the adventuring parties still entering the place were allowed to pass through, all those seeking exit were to be stopped and thoroughly examined. Those were his orders from Danavod.
Kerek himself took up residence in a smoke tent set up in front of a building which a band of Shanatarian priests had cleaned for use as a hospital. The clerics had been shooed out of the plaza with the other humans and such, and Kerek used some extra cloth bandages they had left behind to keep his braziers burning, puffing foul smoke about the plaza. He was within the lodge, cross-legged and meditating among the fires as he awaited any new word from his Mistress, when alarm croaks and hobgoblin shouts roused him. He uncoiled his legs and hopped out of the tent flap just in time to see two running men in armor disappear into the mist-shrouded passage through the towering black gatehouse.
“What was that?” he croaked, and a chorus of answers came from roofs. Nine people had appeared in the middle of the plaza as though by magic, then raced out of the gate before any of Kerek’s slack-jawed minions had managed to do anything but point at them.
Danavod was not going to be pleased.
“Chase!” Kerek croaked.
The Sable City Page 100
