Demontech: Onslaught (21 page)

Spinner smiled at him but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to; he knew Haft would.

“You seem reluctant to give change, innkeeper,” Haft said calmly. He picked up the bill and made a show of examining it. “Could it be you have overcharged us somewhere?”

“But, good young sir,” Master Yoel sputtered, “it’s all there. Every tittle. There is naught on that reckoning that doesn’t belong. If you think of what you have paid for similar services in other inns, you will see that my prices are quite reasonable.”

Haft looked at the bill a moment longer then let it slip from his fingers as though it were a thing of no consequence. “Make change more quickly in the future and you will avoid suspicion,” he said solemnly.

Spinner stood. “Has the stableman readied our horses?” he asked.

“I’m sure he has, I sent word for him to do so.”

“Then we will be off.” Spinner gathered his belongings in such a way that the innkeeper couldn’t help noticing how ready to hand were all of his weapons. “Good day, Master Yoel.”

He walked to the entrance with long, purposeful strides. Haft followed almost on his heels. When the door was open and he was about to step through, Spinner turned back to the innkeeper, who was about to disappear into the kitchen, and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody in the room, “Treat all of the women who work here well, innkeeper. Especially the Golden Girl. You never know when a family might take offense to the rough treatment of a daughter, or a sister.”

Master Yoel gave a start at the words. He turned to look at Spinner. Fear shot quickly across his face, to be replaced by a study of innocent confusion.

Haft had no idea what Spinner was talking about, but he gave the innkeeper a sharp look, as though he did and was firmly with Spinner. After all, come what may, he was firmly with Spinner.

“I always treat all of my workers well, young gentleman,” the innkeeper said. His hands fluttered about aimlessly. “Especially the entertainers. Most especially the Golden Girl.”

“Then see to it that you continue to do so,” Spinner said. He stepped outside and strode toward the stable.

In a step or two Haft was alongside him. “What was that about?” he asked.

“Be patient. I’ll tell you once we are out of the valley.”

“Right. You said you’d tell me about the troll too. I’m still waiting.”

“Wait a little longer.” He looked ahead. There weren’t as many horses in the corral as he might have expected from the crowd he thought had stayed at the inn overnight, nor even enough for the men breaking their fast in the common room. The only carts he saw were two wagons that looked like they were used by farmers to carry produce to market. He saw nothing that appeared to belong to a merchant.

The stableman had their horses ready. The horses looked happy and ready to go.

“They look like they had as good a time last night as we did,” Haft said when he saw how the horses pranced.

“Probably better,” Spinner said dull-voiced.

Haft looked at him oddly, but didn’t ask anything—yet.

“Well, good sirs,” the stableman said, “was the bill as honest and level as I told you it would be? Was the entertainment as fine? Do you understand now why people come back and back again? And how soon will you return for more entertainment?”

“It was, it was, I do, and sooner than you may suspect,” Spinner answered. He quickly checked the tackle on the horses and found the stableman had done a better job of saddling them than he himself could have. “But right now the sun is up and we have far to go, much to do, and we must be off.” He quickly mounted his horse and flipped the stableman a copper coin. “With thanks for your trouble and your good care for our horses,” he said.

“No trouble, none at all,” the stableman said as he deftly caught the coin. He looked like he was ready to talk for as long as anyone was there to listen. Spinner didn’t want to stand around listening. He had to tell Haft what he’d found out about the inn and make plans for their return.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Haft hesitated and looked warily at the mare. No matter how confident he’d been on horseback the day before, a night under a roof and in a bed had taken him away from the horses, and now he was no longer so sure of himself.

“There are things you want to know that I’ll never tell you if you don’t get on that horse right now,” Spinner said, and tapped his horse’s flanks to get him moving.

Haft sighed and mounted. Spinner was already leading the gelding along the road before Haft was settled in the saddle. He let the mare canter to catch up.

In minutes they were in the trees again, and Spinner kicked the stallion into a canter. He wanted to put distance between them and the inn before he stopped and told Haft what they were going to do—and why.

Haft didn’t want to wait. “What’s wrong with you this morning, Spinner?” he demanded as soon as he got the mare to trot alongside the stallion instead of trailing the gelding. “You just spent the night with the most beautiful woman either of us has ever seen, but from the way you’ve been acting, anyone would think you had a miserable night. You looked like you had something on your mind at breakfast, and that something wasn’t the great time you had last night. As a matter of fact, you’ve been looking like you’re getting ready for a battle. You gave the innkeeper a hard time over the bill, which looked fine to me, I might add. Then there was that thing you said to him when we were leaving. Anybody would think you were threatening him. You’ve been short with me every time I asked a question. And you were curt with the stableman when he was only trying to be helpful and friendly. And if that isn’t enough . . .”

He looked sharply at Spinner. “You aren’t listening to a word I’m saying! You aren’t listening, and you sure aren’t doing any of the telling you said you were going to do.” He shook his head and glared at the forest that surrounded them. “I could wish we’d run into some robbers, just so I’d have a chance to hit somebody.” He glanced at Spinner again. “And maybe, just maybe, some highwaymen would wake you up so you’d get around to telling me what’s going on.”

“Don’t worry,” Spinner said grimly. “You’ll get your chance to hit somebody. But it won’t be highwaymen.”

“He lives!” Haft exclaimed with a grand sweep of an arm. “He talks! He listens! At least a little bit. Why, he probably breathes! Maybe he’ll even do some of the explaining he promised.” He looked at Spinner and dropped his voice to a normal level. “Well, what about it?”

The whole time they were riding through the woods, Spinner was watching the trees along their route. He finally saw a break in the forest edging the road where a slab of exposed bedrock wouldn’t take their horses’ hoofprints. “In here,” he said.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going? Don’t you remember what happened the last time we went into the forest? I don’t think we’ll find an imp fence to help us if we run into another cat.” Objecting all the way, Haft followed.

The trees on the side of the ridge were different from those in the lowland forest they’d passed through in Bostia; they weren’t as tall and their canopy wasn’t as dense, though their trunks were thicker. Seedlings and saplings sprouted up through the earth between the trees, but most of them looked stunted. Bushes grew in scattered thickets and much of the ground was open. Sunlight dappled the ground, mostly around the bush thickets. The exposed bedrock only extended a few paces inside the forest before earth covered it. There were a lot of deer tracks, along with myriad tracks of lesser animals. Haft looked closely but found no trace of large predators. Boulders, some small, some the size of a hut, lay scattered about.

When they were far enough into the trees that they couldn’t be seen from the road, Spinner stopped, looked about for a route to take, then picked what seemed to Haft to be a random direction, one that led up the ridge at a shallow angle.

Haft nervously kept all of his senses open to any sight, sound, or smell of danger. Insects buzzed about and a cloud of gnats swarmed around them. A few birds cawed in the treetops, and an occasional one swooped between the trunks, scooping up flying insects.

But nothing big or that sounded dangerous slithered across their path, and no chittering treetop dwellers scattered slops in their direction. And Haft heard no cries of cat, detected no sign of followers or ambushers. For all he could tell, he and Spinner were the first human beings to enter that stretch of forest.

Spinner kept looking downslope, toward the inn’s clearing, seeking a place where they could observe the clearing without being seen. He found a spot where a hut-sized boulder and a large fallen tree trunk were lodged together between two larger trees. From the tree trunk, they had a clear view of the inn, which was almost due west of them, and their horses would be out of sight hobbled behind the boulder. A soft breeze came through this opening in the trees; it wasn’t much of a breeze, but it was enough to disperse the cloud of gnats.

“I didn’t see any sign of hidden roads coming off the one we just left,” Spinner said when they stopped. “Nor any sign of horse or cart traffic under these trees.”

“No reason you should,” Haft said.

“Yes there is,” Spinner said. “Sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Do we really have to wait for night before we can go in and kill those fiends?” Haft asked when Spinner finished.

Spinner slowly nodded. “Before we go in to kill those fiends and free the slaves, we have to have a plan. Do you have a plan?”

Haft shook his head.

“Neither do I. Let’s watch below and see what goes on. Then we can make a plan. What we observe today will help us make that plan. Also, we don’t go in until after the troll is put to sleep. And I’d like to know where the troll’s magician lives.”

“You keep mentioning the troll like you know something about it. Will you tell me about this troll?”

“See that hut?” Spinner pointed to a small stone outbuilding near a corner of the inn, where they couldn’t see it the previous day. “That’s probably the troll hut. I don’t know how it does it, but a troll under the proper care of a magician makes light.” He remembered how his and Haft’s clothes were clean and warm when they finished their baths the day before. “Sometimes the trolls even make heat. Darkness will favor us when we go in tonight, so we need to wait for the troll to go to sleep. There are other things a troll can do besides make light and heat—some of those things can be dangerous to the unwary. We don’t know what this troll can do other than make light and warm up clothes, so that’s one more reason for us to wait until it goes to sleep before we go back to the inn.”

“What if it wakes up while we’re there?”

“It won’t. I think. What I’ve heard is that when a troll is locked in a troll hut, it wakes and sleeps at the bidding of the magician who controls it. We don’t have to worry about it once it’s put to sleep for the night. Not unless we’re there long enough for the magician to come back and wake it again.”

“You think. I distinctly heard you say ‘I think.’ That means you don’t know.”

Spinner nodded. “I’ve never seen one. All I know is what I’ve heard.”

“And you don’t know for certain that what you’ve heard is right.”

Spinner shrugged.

The morning sun lit the grounds of the inn before it warmed the ridge side on which they sat. At first the only people they saw on the grounds of the inn were laborers doing chores; there seemed to be four of them, but neither Haft nor Spinner could be certain, as the laborers they saw were never all out at one time and there was no way of knowing if all of them were outside; there might be more inside. Still, before the sun rested its rays on them, a few of the soldiers they’d seen in the common room during the night’s entertainment came out. Some got horses from the stable, others just walked away. Some of the soldiers followed the small road to the northwest, the direction from which Haft and Spinner had come. Others went southeast. Whenever soldiers went southeast, Spinner and Haft worried that they would see where they’d left the road and come looking for them. None ever did.

It wasn’t until the mid-morning sun was warming their backs that anything odd appeared in the inn’s glade. A merchant, accompanied by a few men in workers’ clothing, walked across the glade to the trees on its southern verge, where there didn’t appear to be a road or any other entrance to the glade. They didn’t walk together, but spread out as they went, entering the forest at wide intervals. A few moments later faint sounds drifted up from within those trees, the neigh of a horse, the jingle of tackle, a creak of leather, a grumble of wheels beginning to turn.

Spinner and Haft looked at each other.

“That’s why there weren’t enough horses in the corral,” Spinner said.

“Or any merchants’ carts about,” Haft added. He slipped off the log and stood in a crouch that kept him out of sight from the inn. “Let’s go take a look at what’s there,” he said.

Spinner nodded, but didn’t leave his seat on the tree trunk. “You’re right, we need to look over there. But not yet. Let’s wait until we see if any others are going that way any time soon.” Where they sat, he could see the tops of the trees in the valley to the south of the inn. The foliage looked solid; there didn’t seem to be another clearing. Maybe there was a concealed roadway. If there was, they wouldn’t find much when they looked.

Haft jittered a bit. The waiting they’d already done had him anxious to act. But he had to concede that Spinner might be right about waiting a little longer. “All right.” He sat again. Even though he tried to be quiet and patient, that wasn’t in his character when there was action to be taken; he sat fidgeting. He stopped when another merchant and attendant workmen left the inn by its back entrance and headed to the south side of the glade. He started again when they were gone.

In a short while the sun was almost directly overhead, and Spinner said, “We should eat.”

Haft hopped off the tree trunk. “I’ll get the food,” he said, just as Spinner knew he would. Spinner wasn’t hungry; he just wanted to give Haft something to do.

Several more merchants and their helpers left the inn during the early afternoon, all of them spread out as they walked south to the trees. Each time merchants and helpers disappeared into the southern trees, the faint sounds of horses being harnessed and carts driven off drifted up from the valley. None of the merchants or their helpers returned to the inn. Spinner found that very curious. If he hadn’t heard the sounds of horses being harnessed, he would have thought the merchants and their men were meeting wagons driving past on an unseen road.