Scoundrels' Jig (The Chronicles of Eridia) Read online



  Scoundrels’ Jig

  By J. S. Volpe

  Copyright 2011 J. S. Volpe

  All right reserved.

  Cover image: Gilmanshin/Shutterstock.com

  Table of Links

  Go to the beginning of the story

  Go to the part where Ichabod Quackenbush arrives at Moe’s

  Go to the part where Gaspard and Merizen have a quickie at the inn

  Go to the part where Kirby and Blunt swim across the river

  Go to the part where Lucifer Brown and Marcy cross the bridge

  Go to the part where Illyana and Luornu meet the Snowman

  Go to the part where Ludwig van Beethoven torches the gorgim village

  Go to the part where the little screaming pirate attacks Kirby and Blunt

  Go to the part where the dryad confronts Lucifer Brown

  Go to the part where the Zombie Hill Boys try to sneak past the killer robot

  Go to the part where everybody sings

  Go to the part where the Omega-Class Flensing Cloud is activated

  Go to the end notes

  Go to the shameless plug

  “Fucking elves,” Kirby grumbled, thumping his freshly emptied ale mug onto the tabletop. He swiped the back of his hand across his mouth to wipe away the foam.

  Across the table Blunt scowled in sympathy. “Yeah, elves suck!”

  Kirby shook his head. “I mean, just ten more seconds and we would’ve been inside that storehouse and grabbing up so much stuff it would’ve taken us months to sell it all, but those pointy-eared bastards have to come along and ruin everything. Un-fucking-believable. I mean, who has security patrols every five minutes? It’s stupid!”

  “You’re right, Mr. Kirby,” Blunt said, his head bobbing in eager agreement. “Those jerky elves just don’t play fair.” His head continued bobbing for several more seconds, as if Kirby’s rightness deserved as much verification as possible. And in Blunt’s eyes, it did. To Blunt, Kirby was a genius, a criminal mastermind, a virtuoso of the illegal arts whose well-deserved fame and fortune had so far been kept from him only by an unfortunate run of bad luck. Kirby, of course, felt exactly the same way.

  “Ah, screw it,” Kirby said. He raised his hand and signaled the barmaid. “Next time we’ll score big. I know it. With my brains and your brawn, there’s nothing we can’t do.”

  “Yeah, next time. Absolutely.” Blunt beamed. He always did when Kirby talked about the brains and brawn thing even though Blunt wasn’t completely sure what “brawn” meant. He figured (correctly, for once) it must have something to do with his size or strength. And indeed he had a surfeit of both. He was a massive man-mountain of muscle and sinew with a broad shaved head as smooth and shiny as a church bell and a jaw that could double as a battering ram. Kirby, on the other hand, was the opposite—a short, wiry fellow with a mop of unruly black hair and thick stubble on his chipmunk cheeks. Blunt was so large and Kirby so small that even sitting down across the table from each other, Kirby had to tilt his head back a little to look his partner in the face.

  The barmaid appeared and filled their mugs with fresh ale from the larger of the two pitchers she carried on a serving tray.

  Kirby handed her two Glíands [1] and then, as she turned to move on to the next table, gave her ass a good swat.

  “Thanks, hon,” he said.

  The barmaid, whose name was assuredly not “hon,” or “sweetcheeks,” or “wench,” or “blondie” or any of the twenty-million other things she’d been called in her five years at this thankless job, whose name, in fact, was Illyana Markovich—”Yana” to her friends (well, friend, actually)—bit back her instinctive response to find a knife and plunge it into Kirby’s heart and went on with her job.

  You had to take it. She’d learned that her first day on the job. You couldn’t tell them to go fuck themselves or that you’d rather suck off a troll than feel their sweaty grabby fingers on your ass or legs or tits. Because if you did, if you let them see your disgust, they acted all offended, as if you’d refused a generous gift, as if there was something wrong with you. And offending the patrons was a great way to get fired.

  Plus they wouldn’t leave a tip. And given what Moe, the fat toad who ran this festering sore on the town of Bangle’s filthy ass, paid his barmaids, tips were where the money was.

  She stopped next at the cute blond guy’s table. He’d been in here several times over the last few months, but she’d never caught his name. Not that it mattered. None of the clientele of Moe’s was even remotely respectable. There were no rich princes here to sweep her away to a life of luxury; there were just bandits and burglars and con-men and other assorted scumbags. This was where you came to drink when you were lying low. There wasn’t even a sign over the front door. You only found your way here if you knew someone. Probably someone you shouldn’t.

  And not only was the cute blond guy probably a thief or a killer or even a crazy-ass member of the Yellow Pawns like those three psychos near the back door (and Illyana thanked the Twelve that Luornu was working that half of the bar tonight), but he had a drone, or a robot, or a droid, or whatever you were supposed to call those creepy quasi-living pre-Cataclysm relics.

  As she refilled the blond guy’s empty ale mug, she did her best to ignore the football-sized shiny silver drone hovering six inches above the table in front and to the right of him. When she was done, she snatched the two Glíands he offered her (holy shit, a tip!) and hurried off so quickly that she didn’t hear the drone—its name was technically MRC-2133, but it had inevitably and uncreatively been nicknamed Marcy—say in an extremely realistic female voice, “The barmaid arouses you.”

  Lucifer Brown—the blond guy—looked sharply at Marcy and said, “What? What gives you that idea?”

  “Every time you look at her, your respiration increases, your body temperature rises, and your pupils dilate—all clear signs of arousal.”

  Lucifer blinked at the drone for a moment, then looked at Illyana (or more specifically at her ass, tits, hair, and face, in that order), then looked back at Marcy and said, “Yeah? So?”

  “So why do you not try to copulate with her? Isn’t that a favorite pastime among vulgarians like you?”

  Lucifer snorted. “Yeah, but she’s just a barmaid. She’s too low on the scale, if you know what I mean.”

  “You have a scale?” Marcy’s voice was high with incredulity.

  “Sure. I mean, a guy like me’s gotta be selective. I’ve gotta save myself only for the best.” As he said this, he leaned back in his chair and spread his arms, displaying himself. He was young and handsome, with luxurious blond hair, chiseled features, rock-hard abs, and an inimitable fashion-sense—and he knew it. “I’m destined for better things than tavern wenches. One day soon I’ll be screwing princesses.”

  Marcy sighed. “And no doubt eschewing contraception and then shirking on child support.”

  Lucifer waved a hand dismissively at the drone. “By then, I’ll have enough money to pay it. I’ll have more money than I’ll know what to do with.”

  “Ah, we’re back to your ‘inevitable’ fame and fortune, are we?”

  “Don’t scoff. It’s true.”

  “Let me point out for what is probably the vigintillionth time that you have no logical basis for that conclusion.”

  He rolled his eyes. “And I’ll tell you for the Vincent-whatever-eth time that some people are just destined for greatness. And I’m one of them. I know I am. The Twelve favor me. It’s obvious.” He leaned forward and grinned at Marcy. “And I’m sure that you, my little metal lady, are going to be a key part of my rise to greatness. It was fate that brought
us together.”

  “No, what brought us together was your need to hide from the soldiers from whom you’d stolen a week’s pay, combined with the final orders my previous owner, Captain Garlock, gave me moments before he hurried off to the bridge of our starcruiser, the Waste of Space, in a last-ditch effort to save the failing ship. Since he told me to stay where I was and then obey the orders of whoever came to get me—clearly he believed that that someone would be one of the Waste of Space’s crew—and since the cruiser subsequently crashed, killing all higher biological life-forms on board, and since you were the first person to find and enter that high-tech tomb in which I’d been imprisoned for close to a millennium, I had no choice but to obey you as my programming dictated. Not destiny. Not fate. Only tragedy.”

  Lucifer pshawed. “Those are just the details that destiny works through.”

  “Bah! Pseudo-poetic gibberish!”

  From a nearby table, a voice boomed, “Ludwig van Beethoven wants more fucking ale!”

  Both Lucifer and Marcy groaned. This was the fifth time since they’d entered that “Ludwig van Beethoven” had screamed for more ale. And they’d only been here half an hour.

  Illyana hurriedly finished topping off Bastard Jack’s mug, then raced over to Ludwig van Beethoven’s table as fast as she could without spilling any ale. Why did everyone seem to finish their drinks at the same time?

  The tall, shaggy-haired man in the dark-green long coat and breeches glared at her as she approached, his mouth a tight white line, his eyes ablaze with righteous indignation. She took the larger pitcher from her tray and filled his mug.

  The moment she was done, Ludwig van Beethoven snatched the mug off the table so vigorously that ale splashed over the side and onto the tabletop. A few blobs of ale-foam spattered Illyana’s wrist.

  “Ludwig van Beethoven is incredibly fucking thirsty!” he shouted at her, then gulped down half the ale in one go.

  “Sorry,” Illyana said, offering him a weak smile. No sense putting too much effort into an apology; the son of a bitch never tipped anyway.

  He slammed the ale onto the table and hollered, “Ludwig van Beethoven loves ale!”

  Illyana repressed a wince. By Gurm, did he have to be so loud? He almost drowned out the hooting and yammering of the rowdy and extremely inebriated Zombie Hill Boys, a gang of young, possibly insane highwaymen, all five of whom were here tonight (though, again, thankfully in Luornu’s section; the poor girl was going to be a wreck by closing time).

  Ludwig van Beethoven flung a Glíand at her, and then, oh shit, he started reaching into the breast pocket of his coat. Illyana knew what that meant, so in a flash she whirled around and hurried away.

  There was only one thing he kept in that pocket: the tattered, nearly illegible page torn from an ancient book that told, in brief, the history of some pre-Cataclysm composer whose name had been Ludwig van Beethoven. Ludwig van Beethoven (the current one) pulled it out at least once a night and shouted on at great and tedious length about how he looked exactly like the original Ludwig van Beethoven (there was a picture on the page; it was hard to make it out because the page was so faded and yellowed and spotted with ale stains, but the resemblance did indeed seem quite striking) and was deaf just like him as well. Ludwig van Beethoven would end by insisting that “there will always be a Ludwig van Beethoven because the universe needs a Ludwig van Beethoven!”

  The mini-biography made no mention of the original Ludwig van Beethoven being an aeromage, or anything other than a normal, albeit musically gifted human; but the current one—the loudmouthed, wild-eyed lunatic who drank like a fish and smelled as if he didn’t know what a bath was—he of all people had been born with the ability to fly. And did he use this amazing gift to, say, help those in need or to enrich the lives of those around him? Why, no; he used it to further his career as a thief and a murderer by floating above his unsuspecting victims and dropping large rocks on their heads prior to rifling through their pockets and purses. The Twelve worked in utterly confounding ways sometimes.

  Illyana was on her way back to the bar, the clientele’s need for fresh ale having apparently ceased for the moment, when she thought she heard a tiny voice say, “Erm, excuse me?”

  She slowed down and looked around. At first she didn’t see anyone who might have spoken, but then she noticed a stooped, skinny man in one of the booths along the back wall waving his hand at her and giving her an anxious smile.

  Oh, right. The new guy.

  It was obvious he was new because he was drinking the cheap ale. Moe’s served only two kinds of ale: the cheap stuff and the expensive stuff. Unless they literally couldn’t afford it, everyone who’d been in here more than once knew enough to pony up the money for the expensive ale. Even that Beethoven freakjob, who wasn’t especially fussy when it came to other matters, like oral hygiene and changing his clothes, even he paid the extra money for the expensive stuff. You could always spot the first-timers in Moe’s; they were the ones peering into their mugs as if they expected to find chunks of a dead rat floating in the ale.

  “Need another?” Illyana asked him.

  “Erm, yes. But, um…” He gave his empty mug a distrustful glance, then said in a small, sheepish voice, “I…I think it might have gone over or something.”

  Illyana snorted. “That stuff’s been over so long the audience already went home.”

  “Huh?”

  “The more expensive stuff’s better. Do you want some of that?”

  For a moment the man looked as if he might start crying.

  “No,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll stick with this, I suppose.”

  So, Illyana thought as she refilled his mug from the smaller pitcher on her tray. Not just a noob, but a destitute noob.

  As she hurried away, the man, John Grommet, sighed again, took a sip of ale, winced, then set his mug back down. He looked around at all the hooligans and ruffians filling the tavern. What in Ilva’s cryptic names was he doing here? He didn’t belong among these people.

  But what choice did he have? He was broke and in debt. He owed a hundred and fifty Glíands to Adriana Avery, Bangle’s chief constable, for accidentally poaching one of her prized atheloks (it had wandered off her lands and hadn’t been marked or branded in any way, which normally meant that by law it belonged to whoever found it, but apparently the law didn’t apply to those who enforced the law).

  Three days after that unfortunate incident, he lost his job as a scribe when his employer, old Jedia Cramputnik, got killed by a large rock that had apparently fallen out of a clear blue sky, and Lucius Cramputnik, Jedia’s son and the scribery’s new owner, immediately decided to shut the place down and sell all the books and furnishings in an almost certainly doomed attempt to buy his way into the heart of the pouty-lipped daughter of a wealthy merchant from Istenhame. John hadn’t been able to find work as a scribe anywhere else, which hadn’t really come as much of a shock; scribes just weren’t in high demand in these harsh, brutal days. No one had time for learning or reading. He had applied for other jobs, of course, but no one wanted to hire him. He had even offered to clean the stables at the Bangle Inn for a mere Glíand a week, but the manager had taken one look at John’s scrawny, pale body and burst out laughing. It wasn’t as if finding a job would make much of a difference anyway: Few jobs existed that could earn him the money he needed to pay back the Chief Constable by the end of the month, after which time, if he was unable to pay for the “illegally” slain athelok, she’d have him thrown in jail.

  Trying to remain optimistic, John had told himself that things would have to change for the better sometime soon, but his run of bad luck swiftly became a full-out sprint. A week after losing his job, his cottage was overrun with brain leeches, which meant that both the cottage and all its contents had to be burned lest the infestation spread. After that, he’d had no choice but to move into his mother’s tiny, cramped cottage on the edge of town.

  Perhaps it was the stress of the newer, more cro
wded living conditions, or perhaps John had unknowingly brought some awful virus with him, but three days after he moved in, his mother—his dear, wonderful mother—had fallen deathly ill. She now spent her days lying in bed, horribly thin and pale, the quilts pulled up to her chin to keep off the chill, occasionally moaning when her misery grew too extreme for her to bear it with her usual kindly, quiet fortitude.

  John had spent most of the last few days trying to find someone to help her, but he hadn’t had a single scrap of luck. Biomages were too rare and in too great demand to even give him a hearing, and in any case, they, like all the herbal and physical healers, would do nothing for free.

  He needed money. Lots of it. Fast. He had started to think he was destined for jail and his mother for an early grave until this morning, when he ran into Quentin, a former co-worker from the scribery. Quentin was a young fellow, bright and clever, but with a taste for the devilgrass, which led him to hang out with a rough crowd. Upon learning of John’s troubles, Quentin had told him that a lot of the more questionable elements of society often needed hirelings—lookouts, henchmen, etc.—and that they tended to pay fairly well. Unless, of course, you turned out to be an undercover member of the local constabulary, in which case they tended to set you on fire.

  Quentin had told him how to find this place, and now here he was, wondering who he should talk to about work as a lookout or something else relatively non-violent.

  The problem was, he couldn’t muster up the nerve to talk to any of these people. These were the sorts of people he normally crossed to the other side of the street to avoid. Crooks. Bandits. Murderers. Monsters.

  He shook his head in despair and stared glumly down at the scarred and stained tabletop. How had he been reduced to this? He’d even had to lie to his mother before he came here. She had asked him where he was going and why he seemed so nervous—even though she was so weak she could barely hold a spoon, she was sharp enough to know when her little boy was up to something—and he had told her he was going to see some men about a job, which, if it worked out, would get them enough money for the medicine she needed to get well again. Which was true, in a way; he just left out the part about the men being criminals and the job probably being something illegal and immoral.

  He burned with guilt and shame as he remembered how she had raised one stick-thin arm and patted his cheek with her papery palm and, with a smile that clearly pained her, said, “You’re such a good boy.”

  And now…and now…

  And now his eyes were watering and his throat was clamping shut. But it wasn’t tears (though if anyone had a right to tears right now it was him); no, it was smoke. Pipe smoke. Great stinking clouds of it, wreathing his head like a polluted halo.

  Looking around, he discovered that it was coming from the booth behind him. All he could see over the back of the seat was the top of a head covered in thick, shaggy black hair.

  Probably a roughneck of some sort. He probably shouldn’t even bother the man. It might lead to violence. He’d heard stories about barroom brawls, with fists and mugs hurtling through the air and perfectly good chairs being broken over people’s heads. He didn’t want to run the risk of violence of any sort.

  But…

  But if he intended to work with people like these, he’d better have at least a little backbone. He told himself to just think of Mother. After all, that’s why he was doing this: so she’d be well again.

  Well, that and so Chief Constable Avery didn’t throw him in jail.

  And so he could buy a new house.

  And—

  Oh, the heck with it.

  He cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me, sir.”

  The shaggy black head didn’t stir.

  “Excuse me.”

  There was a querying grunt, and the head turned slightly. John now could see the tip of a nose and a tangle of bristly black beard. A perfectly normal-looking nose and beard. This was a man like any other. Nothing to be cringing from. (Then again, the beard looked a bit too bristly; more like animal hair, really.)

  “Do you think, um, that, uh, maybe you could perhaps direct your, uh, your smoke somewhere else, please?”

  The high-backed wooden bench creaked as the figure turned. The man must’ve been slouched down quite a bit in his seat because as he turned, his head, which had been slightly below the level of John’s before, now rose over a foot.

  The face attached to the front of this head was broad and ruddy and covered up to the cheekbones with a great mass of long coarse black hair that hung down to the middle of the man’s chest. Between this tangle of hair and the one atop his head were a nose, whose bridge zig-zagged like a lightning bolt from having been broken numerous times, and a pair of dark-brown eyes that glistened beneath a single long eyebrow. A long blue clay pipe jutted from the center of the beard.

  For a long moment the face just stared at John as it audibly puffed air in and out through its nostrils like a bull.

  “Er, that is, if it’s not too inconvenient,” John added with a wavering smile.

  A huge hand, the back of which was covered with more of that bestial black hair, rose up from behind the top of the backrest and plucked the pipe from the beard. In the middle of the beard a pair of lips opened wide in a grin, revealing a wall of large white teeth. And the eyes! In John’s experience, when most people smiled, their eyes crinkled and narrowed. But not this man. Instead his eyes widened with his smile until it seemed as if his eyeballs would pop right out of their sockets. It was the smile of a lunatic. It was a smile that made John’s testicles retract into his abdomen like frightened prairie dogs ducking back into their holes.

  “If you utter another word,” a voice rumbled through those clenched teeth, “I shall tear your intestines out through your asshole.”

  John instinctively opened his mouth to say “er” or “um” or something like that, then stopped himself. He snapped his mouth shut and turned back around.

  The leering face eyed him for another second, then slowly returned to its pipe and ale.

  At a table in the middle of the tavern, a pale, cadaverous, sixtyish man with wispy white hair, a pair of small round sunglasses, and an off-white suit enlivened only by a headache-inducing multicolored vest handed two Glíands to a portly, balding, likewise sixtyish man with a bulbous nose and a green-and-black outfit, on the breast of which hung several medals that identified him as having been a soldier in Glí’s army during the war with the gorgim twenty years ago.

  “Hm,” the thin man said. “You win this time, Mr. Stone. I was certain Bastard Jack would murder the little fellow.”

  Mr. Stone shook his head. “No no no, Mr. Sand. Jack is maintaining a low profile right now, what with that little coitus-up with the Snowman’s weapons shipment.”

  “I am aware of that, of course, but I had assumed that Jack’s poor impulse-control would overtrump his common sense.”

  “Ah, but even Jack is wise enough to fear the Snowman.”

  Mr. Sand nodded. “As he should, Mr. Stone. As he should.”

  “A more interesting wager would be how soon the Snowman kills Jack.”

  “Hm. It is quite possible that Jack will flee town, as any even slightly well-cerebrated individual would do, in which case the question is moot.”

  “Then perhaps a better wager would be whether or not the Snowman catches Jack in the first place.”

  “Perhaps. But it is my opinion that the single most interesting wager right now is who in this room is working for the local constabulary.”

  Mr. Stone’s eyebrows flew up. “Where, may I ask, did you get the idea that there is a lawman present?”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Sand with a small smile, “it stands to reason.”

  “The coitus it does.”

  “Now, now. Allow me to elucidate you. You know, of course, that the Snowman is Chief Constable Avery’s top priority, and has been for quite some time.”

  “Of course. Everyone knows that.”

  “And you
yourself just brought up the fact that last week Bastard Jack misadvertently found himself on the Snowman’s fecal list, if you will pardon that somewhat profanitous expression.”

  “Yes…”

  “And we then discussed how soon the Snowman would catch up with Jack in search of revenge.”

  “Unless Jack flees town, as you said.”

  “Correct. However, news of Jack’s running afoul of the Snowman is fairly widely known at this point. And—”

  Mr. Stone sat upright, his eyes alight, and waved a pudgy finger at his associate. “Oho! I see where you are going with this, Mr. Sand. Surely the chief constable knows of what happened and is having Jack watched in hopes of getting a lead on the Snowman. Using Jack as a stalking horse, in other words.”

  “Exactly. Thus, it stands to reason that given the Snowman’s extreme vindictivity and unrelentingness, the chief constable will have Jack under surveillance at all times, including now.”

  Mr. Stone looked around the dimly lit room, his eyes alighting on each person present in turn.

  “Yes,” he said. “That would make a most interesting wager, indeed.” He turned back to Mr. Sand. “Are you willing to place a bet on who you believe the surveiller to be?”

  Mr. Sand leaned back, his rickety chair creaking. “It stands to reason that the individual in question would be someone fairly new to this establishment.”

  “Not necessarily. It is well known that the local constables make use of informants, and they could therefore be using such a person to perform their surveillance.”

  Mr. Sand shook his head. “Not likely. The chief constable would not commit such an important job to someone already proven to be untrustworthy, as snitches by definition are. Thus it will be a member of the constabulary, or someone affiliationed with them. Since an effective surveiller must be someone unknown to the individual being surveilled and since the criminal element would know all the local law enforcement personnel, the surveiller will either be a new and probably rather young member of the constabulary, or an outsider, perhaps a member of the constabulary of a different town.”

  Mr. Stone pursed his lips as he considered all this, then nodded slowly. “A very logical breakdown of the situation. It rules out most people in the room.”

  “Indeed it does.”

  “So, are you willing then to place your bet on the identity of the surveiller?”

  “Certainly. I put two Glíands on that man over there.” He pointed at John Grommet.

  “Him, Mr. Sand? Are you coitusing with me? Look at him. He’s clearly a bumbling oaf who no more belongs in this establishment than a walrus belongs in my bathroom.”

  “Hm. Leaving aside your ablutory habits for the moment, Mr. Stone, I would argue that his appearance as a bumbling oaf is an act. After all, a surveiller must not stand out as such. He must appear either nondescript and at one with his surroundings, or he must appear to be the opposite of what he is.”

  “Yes, but why would the fellow directly garner Bastard Jack’s attention, which, as we saw, he just did, when in fact his task would be better served by remaining below Jack’s notice entirely? It does not stand to reason at all. Not even slightly.”

  Mr. Sand shrugged. “Perhaps he is attempting to distract suspicion from himself. Or perhaps he initiated contact with Jack as the first move in some complex stratagem that shall play out later. The possibilities are too numerous to enumerate.”

  Mr. Stone shook his head. “I believe that your reasoning, while technically sound, is far too elaborate and hence thoroughly laden with excrement. I think this is another bet you shall lose, Mr. Sand.”

  Mr. Sand cocked one white eyebrow. “And who shall you bet on?”

  “Well…” Mr. Stone looked around the room again. “I think I will put my money on that couple over there.” He pointed at a young man and woman sitting at a table not far from Bastard Jack.

  Mr. Sand frowned. “I don’t know if that is entirely fair. You are essentially betting on two individuals, thus increasing the likeliness of your winning the bet. But I am willing to let it slide, since I am certain neither one of them is the surveiller.”

  “And how can you be so sure of that, Mr. Sand?”

  “As I said earlier, a good surveiller must either appear nondescript, which definitely rules out the couple in question—for one thing, they’re dressed far too fashionably for a place like this (I believe the shirt she’s wearing is genuine Lampardian giant-spider silk) and for another, with all the blatant amorous behavior they have been engaging in, I’m surprised they don’t start charging by the eyeful—or (to return to my main point) the surveiller must appear to be the exact opposite of what he (or she, or they) is (or are), which again rules out yon couple, for the opposite of a quick-witted, tough-as-dragonhide law enforcement officer is a bumbling weakling (exactly like the individual I placed my own wager on, I might add), as opposed to a seething bundle of libidinous urges, which is the opposite not of a surveiller but of my ex-wife, may she rest in nothing remotely resembling peace.”

  Mr. Stone grunted. “A fair argument, but I would argue that a good surveiller needn’t appear to be the exact opposite of what he is (unlike you, I shall not split gendrous hairs) but must simply appear to be not at all like a surveiller, which means that he could appear to be nearly anything, from an amorous gentleman on the make to a dancing bear. And perhaps we should stop staring at the couple in question as we discuss them, for they appear to have noticed our attentions.”

  Indeed, at that moment Merizen leaned in toward Gaspard and whispered, “Why do those two men keep staring at us?”

  One side of Gaspard’s mouth curled up in a roguish smile. “Perhaps, my dear, they are simply stricken senseless by your beauty.”

  She ignored him and looked around the room with a petulant frown. “I’m tired of this wretched little country. We’ve exhausted our opportunities here. We should move on to Obaleth already.”

  Gaspard sighed. “Obaleth’s a long way. We need money for the trip and—”

  Merizen scowled. “We’d have the damn money already if that silly princess hadn’t decided to cancel her party.”

  “There’s nothing to be done, my dear. We’ll just have to raise the funds some other way.”

  “I know, but we put so much work into our delightful little con. I spent over a week practicing my Peridor accent, and you went to all that trouble to find a genuine Dodecite monk’s robe. And all that work turned out to be for nothing just because the prissy little bitch couldn’t stay on her horse.” She shook her head. “I was so looking forward to getting my hands on that big beautiful diamond of hers.”

  “There will be other diamonds. Even bigger ones, I’m sure.”

  “Bigger?”

  “Oh, yes. The most enormous diamonds you’ve ever seen. So big you can barely fit them in your hand.”

  “Oooh.” Her eyes took on a distant, dreamy look, and she licked her lips. “I like them big.”

  Under the table, her hand fell on Gaspard’s inner thigh. Gaspard scooted his chair a little closer to hers.

  “Tell me more,” she said.

  “More? Very well. There will be far more than diamonds. There will be rubies, as well. Huge red ones.”

  “Mmm.” She was smiling broadly now, her eyes slits as she envisioned these delights. Her hand slid an inch closer to the swelling bulge in Gaspard’s pants. “More.”

  “There will be long, thick bars of gold—”

  “Oh, yes.” Another inch closer.

  “—and fat, heavy sacks of coins—”

  “Ah!” Almost there!

  “—and pearl necklaces—”

  The sound of hoofbeats rapidly swelled outside. The bar fell silent. Merizen’s hand vanished from Gaspard’s thigh. He sank back in his chair in frustration.

  Everyone in Moe’s waited to see if the hoofbeats would stop outside the bar.

  They did. A horse whinnied. A pair of boots thudded onto the hard-packed dirt in the street
outside.

  All throughout the room hands moved quickly toward weapons.

  After a long, tense pause the front door flew open, and sighs of relief filled the room as Ichabod Quackenbush stumbled into the tavern.

  A lesser member of Wazzo’s Wastrels, a gang of small-time bandits led by the notorious Chizzer Wazzo, Ichabod was a regular at Moe’s. Or at least he had been. The Wastrels had last been seen over two weeks ago, claiming they’d learned of a great treasure and would soon have enough money to last them the rest of their lives.

  In Ichabod’s case, a Glíand would probably suffice. He was gaunt and pale and covered with bruises and scratches, and his dirty, tattered clothes were crusty with blood. At first no one was sure if it was his blood or someone else’s, but then his right arm, which he’d been holding cradled to his belly, dropped to his side, revealing that his right forearm had been neatly severed halfway between the wrist and the elbow. Someone had tightly tied a length of thin rope around the arm just above the elbow, but judging by Ichabod’s ghastly pallor and the amount of blood on his clothes, it had been too little too late.

  Ichabod took ten wobbly steps into the room, swayed on his feet, eyes rolling wildly, then crashed to the sawdust-covered floor.

  Kirby was the first one at his side. They weren’t friends exactly, but they’d drunk together countless times in the past. Plus Ichabod owed him twenty Glíands.

  “Ichabod?” Kirby said. “It’s me, Kirby. You just hold on, you hear me? We’ll get a doctor or a biomage or something in here lickety-split.” He looked at the crowd that had gathered around them. “Somebody see if old Carver Bill’s in town! He might—”

  “Guh-gold,” Ichabod croaked. “So much gold.”

  The room immediately fell silent. Kirby blinked at Ichabod for a moment and then, old Carver Bill forgotten, said, “What gold?”

  “Uhhh…” Ichabod said. He looked as if he were on the verge of passing out or perhaps even dying, so Kirby gave him a good hard shake.

  “What gold?”

  A small degree of lucidity dawned in Ichabod’s eyes. He lifted his head from the floor and stared at the ring of faces peering down at him.

  “A piece of gold bigger than I’ve ever seen. As big as a troll’s head. One solid block of gold!”

  An awed murmur went through the crowd.

  “Where is this block of gold?” Kirby said with what he hoped was a friendly smile. “What happened to it?”

  “It’s in guh—guh—guh—”

  Still smiling, Kirby nodded encouragingly. “It’s okay. Take your time. No rush.”

  “Guh—guh—guh—”

  “Come on, Icky. You can tell me. I’m your friend. We’re all friends here.”

  “Guh—guh—guh—”

  Kirby grabbed Ichabod’s shirt and shouted, “For fuck’s sake, spit it out already!”

  “Guh—Ghost Gulch.”

  With a collective gasp, everyone drew back from the dying man. Kirby let go of Ichabod’s shirt as if he’d spotted a brain leech on it.

  “Grife,” said the Hatcheteer, one of the Zombie Hill Boys. “Why for sprong’s plummy did it have to be a moobangin’ chocopiper like Ghost Gulch?”

  “At the end of the gulch,” Ichabod went on. “In an old, buried building. But it’s guarded.”

  “By what?”

  “By muh—muh—muh—”

  Illyana shook her head. “Muh-what? What’s he trying to say?”

  “Monsters?” suggested Mr. Sand.

  “Murderers?” offered Mr. Stone.

  Ichabod shook his head with as much violence as his weakened body could muster. “Nuh—no! Muh—muh—muh—muh—”

  “Maybe he’s trying to say ‘many’ something,” said Merizen.

  Ichabod shook his head again. “Nuh! Muh—muh—”

  “Why don’t we just have him write it down?” Lucifer said.

  “That won’t work,” Kirby said.

  “Why not?”

  “He was right-handed.”

  “Hey,” said Bone Boy, a member of the Zombie Hill Boys. “Maybe the hobbo nodad’s applin’ to say ‘Magic’!”

  “Nuh!” Ichabod said. “Muh—muh—”

  “Manticores?” said Mr. Sand.

  “Mermen?” said Mr. Stone.

  “Mucus!” said Blunt.

  “Nuh!” Ichabod said.

  “Maximus Quilling?” said Mr. Sand.

  Mr. Stone frowned. “Oh, come on. He’s been deceased for coitusing centuries!”

  Mr. Sand shrugged. “It’s possible that a necromage has resurrected him as a zuvembie.”

  “Perhaps the rapidly dying gentleman before us is referring to something inorganic,” Marcy suggested. “Molten lava, perhaps. Or mazes. Or metal spikes.”

  “Nuh! It’s muh—muh—maaaaaah!” Ichabod stiffened. His eyes bulged. His remaining hand clawed up fistfuls of dirty sawdust. His heels beat a tattoo on the floor. Kirby yelped and scrambled to his feet, flapping his hands in front of him as if to shake off any death-germs.

  Alone in the center of a circle of thugs, Ichabod Quackenbush died.

  The tavern was silent for several long seconds. Then at the back of the crowd a deafening voice cried, “Bah! Ludwig van Beethoven is going to finish his ale!” Everyone ignored him. He stomped back to his table.

  “So…” Kirby said. “What’re we gonna do here? I mean—”

  Outside several horses whinnied with shrill horror. Then one of the horses stopped whinnying. Then another. And another. One by one they fell silent, and one by one large, heavy objects crashed to the ground outside.

  “The horses!” cried Kirby. “Something’s happening to the horses!”

  Everyone ran outside and found that all but one of the horses that had been tied to the long hitching post in front of the tavern were dead or dying, their throats cut as if someone had raced down the line whisking a sword or long knife across the horses’ throats as he went. The rapidly spreading pools of blood looked black in the soft yellow light fanning out from the open tavern door. The moon was a faint, milky disk behind a thin veil of clouds.

  The only horse whose throat hadn’t been cut was Bastard Jack’s huge black stallion. It was alive and well and galloping away across the weedy field across the road from the tavern. In its saddle, Bastard Jack turned to the crowd outside the tavern and grinned his pop-eyed grin.

  “That gold is mine and mine alone!” he shouted. “Anyone who tries to get in my way shall suffer the same sorry fate as the horses!”

  Laughing, he dug his spurs into his horse’s sides and gave the reins a shake. The horse streaked away into the shadowy woods beyond the field.

  “Son of a bitch,” muttered Lucifer Brown.

  “Rosabelle!” wailed John Grommet. Tears flying from his cheeks, he raced over to a chestnut mare that wasn’t quite dead. Its chest rose and fell with slow, agonized breaths, and blood still pumped rhythmically from the gash in its neck. As John threw himself to his knees next to its head, it looked at him with one huge, rolling eye, as if asking, “Why? Why did you bring me to this awful place to die?”

  As John laid one shaking hand on Rosabelle’s forehead, she heaved out one final, weary breath, and her chest rose no more.

  “Rosabelle!” John wailed again. Rosabelle had been the last piece of valuable property he owned. But darling Rosabelle was far more than property; she was practically a family member. His parents had given him that horse as a foal years ago. He and that horse had been through everything together. She didn’t deserve to die like this. No one deserved to die like this.

  No one, that is, except that bearded, bushy-haired bastard.

  John shot to his feet, suffused with an unfamiliar courage born of rage and grief.

  “I’ll kill him!” he snarled through gritted teeth. He sniffed hard, sucking back the snot that was leaking from his nose. “I’ll kill that…that asshole. And then I’ll get the gold! That’s what I’ll do! I’ll get the gold and make my mother well ag
ain and then buy a new horse, a new Rosabelle. You’ll see! You’ll all see!”

  With a cracked, demented laugh, he dashed across the street, across the field, and into the woods.

  “Two Glíands says he doesn’t succeed in accomplishing a single one of those things,” said Mr. Stone.

  “I will take you up on that bet,” said Mr. Sand. “You should never underestimate the power of hatred and the burning desire for avengefulness.”

  “Oh, I don’t underestimate it at all. I simply don’t think this particular individual is a sturdy enough vessel to successfully contain that power.”

  “So,” Gaspard said. “What now?”

  Everyone eyed each other, their expressions wary, suspicious.

  “We should work together,” Kirby said.

  “Yeah,” Blunt agreed. “That’s exactly what we oughtta do.”

  “Sure,” said Lucifer Brown, not sounding entirely convinced. “Work together.”

  “Right,” Gaspard said with a small frown. “No sense competing with each other. We all need to pay for new horses, right?”

  “Embee, kittles,” said Daddy Vermin, the leader of the Zombie Hill Boys. “Way the nonzom in there radied, there’s a tweeneegee glitz for hoot.”

  “Um, right,” said Kirby. “I think. The point is, there’s enough gold for all of us. Enough for me, and enough for you, and—”

  Ludwig van Beethoven stomped out of the bar, gave the line of dead horses a disinterested glance, and said, “Ludwig van Beethoven is going to get the gold. If anyone interferes, Ludwig van Beethoven will kill them and then write a legendary symphony about it.”

  With that, he took a deep breath and shot into the air at a forty-five degree angle, his long coat flapping behind him in the breeze. Moving at roughly twenty miles an hour, he sailed over the field and vanished behind the treetops.

  “There coulda been some for you, too, you bastard!” Kirby shouted, shaking a fist at the spot where Beethoven had disappeared. He turned back to the others, all of whom were slowly, almost unconsciously, edging away from each other.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Kirby said. “With all of us working together, we’ll get the gold first, and then we’ll all get new horses, and then…and then…”

  He slapped Blunt on the arm and said, “Fuck it, let’s go!” and he and Blunt raced north up the road toward the center of Bangle.

  Behind him, everyone scattered in different directions. The Zombie Hill Boys went south. Lucifer Brown and Marcy followed Kirby and Blunt north. Merizen and Gaspard cut across the field north of the tavern and headed for the inn they were staying at. A nondescript young fellow who had been sitting unnoticed in a corner booth all evening slipped around the side of the tavern and made his way toward town. Illyana and Luornu went back inside.

  “I have a definitive premonition that this will end quite badly,” said Mr. Sand, smiling faintly as he watched the various parties fade into the distance.

  “I do not doubt it, Mr. Sand,” said Mr. Stone. “Instead, perhaps we should place our bets on the identity of the individual who finally gets the gold.”

  “Ooh. Yes. That would indeed be most interesting. Have you a favorite?”

  “I believe that—” Mr. Stone realized that someone other than himself and Mr. Sand was still standing outside the tavern. He turned.

  It was the three members of the Yellow Pawns, a notorious Dodecite sect. Two men and a woman, they stood conferring quietly to the left of the entrance. They were dressed in the uniform common to all members of the Yellow Pawns: black robe, black gloves, black boots, and black form-fitting hood that extended all the way down to the eyebrows, the only color in the whole outfit being what the Pawns called The Yellow Sign—a yellow lenticular patch oriented vertically in the center of the forehead. Given that the Sign’s shape matched that of a cat’s pupil, some folks jokingly referred to it as the Cat’s Eye (though not, of course, within hearing range of the Yellow Pawns). Organized by the philosopher Xiggon in the wake of the Great Tsunami, which killed his family, friends, acquaintances, pets, and pretty much every other living thing of any importance to him, the Yellow Pawns were a more intellectual offshoot of earlier, cruder nihilistic cults centered around the King in Yellow, one of the aspects of the member of the Twelve most commonly known as Ixo. The Pawns regarded life, and indeed all material things, as an aberration. Nonexistence, they argued, was the natural state of affairs. Thus the Pawns felt it was their duty to do what they could to return things to that natural state. They were rumored to have been behind the assassination of Queen Grotya of Timbor, the massacre of the town of Haverlin, and the spread of the Chaos Virus.

  Mr. Sand and Mr. Stone slowly backed away around the corner of the tavern and waited to see what the Yellow Pawns would do.

  After a long conversation held in tones too low for the two men to decipher, the trio strode north down the road.

  “Well, now,” said Mr. Stone. “It appears that the Yellow Pawns are joining the hunt as well.”

  “That will change things,” said Mr. Sand. “Before I would have placed my bet on Bastard Jack, but now I’m not so sure.”

  Mr. Stone shot him a sly grin. “Neither Bastard Jack nor those mothercoitusing fanatics will win. I can assure you of that.”

  “Oh? And who are you placing your two Glíands on?”

  Mr. Stone draped an arm over Mr. Sand’s shoulders. “Why, on us, of course.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Sand gaped at Mr. Stone. “Are you saying we should throw ourselves into what is guaranteed to become a brutal, bloody fray?”

  “Of course. If we are to believe poor Ichabod, this is a gargantuous chunk of gold we are talking about. It would generate vast sums with which we might further our cause.”

  “Ah.” Mr. Sand nodded, a smile slowly spreading across his long, thin face. “Yes. Quite so, quite so. With that much gold we shall surely be able to finally overthrow the tyrant king Arbuthort.”

  Mr. Stone grinned. “To the revolution!” He thrust a fat fist into the air.

  Mr. Sand raised his own, much skinnier fist. “To the revolution!”

  Laughing, they hurried off into the night.