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His tone of lordly superiority disappeared into a sudden squawk as two shovel-sized hands plucked him easily off the veranda, despite his own two hundred and seventy pounds of solid muscle and bone. He flailed wildly as he sailed through the air, but it was a relatively short journey which ended in a tremendous splash as he alit far from gracefully upon the surface of Lady Sofalla’s fishpond.
“So tell me again just why you’re here?” Sir Fahlthu Greavesbiter growled, glowering suspiciously at the man in front of him.
“Because Lord Saratic told me to be,” Darnas Warshoe replied with a shrug.
“Let’s try this again,” Sir Fahlthu snorted. “I know Lord Saratic assigned you to ride with my company. And I know you’re supposed to be some sort of expert guide and scout. I even know that Lord Erathian is supposed to’ve personally asked for you because of your knowledge of the Bogs and Glanharrow generally. But, d’you know, Master ’Brownsaddle,’ I don’t quite believe that that’s all there is to it.”
“And why shouldn’t you believe the truth?” Warshoe asked patiently.
“Because I’ve known a great many guides, and a great many scouts, Master Brownsaddle. A lot of them have carried bows, and some of them have carried crossbows. One or two of them have even carried arbalests. But you, Master Brownsaddle, are the only scout I’ve ever met who carries both a Sothoii bow and a hradani arbalest at the same time. I can’t help wondering why you do that. I mean, a man can fire only one bow or one arbalest at a time, unless you possess even more hidden talents than I believe you do.”
“You know,” Warshoe said, “I do believe that I somehow managed to overlook that, Sir Fahlthu. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.”
Cassan’s agent snorted with obvious amusement at the absurdity of the knight’s suspicions, but it was an amusement he wasn’t particularly close to feeling. Fahlthu was obviously brighter than he’d assumed, and Warshoe wondered if he was also brighter than Saratic and Sir Chalthar had assumed. If so, that mistaken estimate might have unfortunate consequences over the next couple of weeks or so.
“Milord Knight,” he said after a moment in an even more patient tone, “I’m not sure what sort of flea you have in your ear, but I assure you that I’m exactly who and what I say I am. I’m flattered that Lord Erathian asked for me. And I’m even more flattered by it when I think about the extra kormaks he’s paying me for acting as your own personal guide through the Bogs. On the other hand, if you have a problem with who’s been assigned to do that, you’re certainly welcome to discuss it with Sir Halnahk, or Lord Erathian, or even Lord Saratic. It genuinely doesn’t matter to me.”
He shrugged, watching Fahlthu’s face narrowly from behind guileless, bored-looking eyes, and hoped the knight didn’t decide to take him up on the suggestion. He wasn’t particularly concerned about Halnahk or Saratic, but Erathian was a little too weasellike for his taste. The traitorous lord warden might just decide there was some profit for him in telling Fahlthu about the weeks Warshoe had spent acquiring his familiarity with the pathways through the Bogs. It was fortunate that Warshoe’s eye and memory for terrain had always been good enough to make that familiarity convincing to someone who didn’t know the Bogs himself.
“As for my choice of weapons,” he continued, “of course I can only use one of them at a time. But I’m a scout, Sir Fahlthu. Sometimes that means I’m going to be riding on a horse, when a horsebow is likely to come in a bit handy. Other times, I’m going to be sneaking around in the grass, where a weapon—like, say, an arbalest—that a man can fire while lying prone in the bushes might come in handy. And this is not a hradani arbalest.” He held the weapon in question out and tapped the dwarfish proof mark on the steel bow. “This is Axeman work, Sir Fahlthu, and it cost me a pretty kormak. I do have seem to have … ah, acquired some hradani bolts for it, but unless I’m mistaken, weren’t we supposed to be muddying the water by suggesting that Bahnak’s Horse Stealers might be involved in all of this?”
Fahlthu frowned ferociously, obviously angered by Warshoe’s withering irony, but Warshoe didn’t really care about that. Or, rather, he did care—a man like Fahlthu would be perfectly capable of arranging an accident for someone who had sufficiently irritated him—but he preferred the cavalry commander’s anger to his undiverted suspicions. It might be unlikely that Fahlthu could figure out everything Saratic and Baron Cassan had in mind, but it wasn’t impossible. And if he did figure out what Warshoe’s true mission was, there was no telling what he might do about it. Except, of course, that a man like Fahlthu would have absolutely no interest in being saddled with the blame for the death of the Kingdom of the Sothoii’s first noble.
“All right,” the knight growled finally. “I don’t believe for a minute that you’re the i
“Of course it is,” Warshoe replied. “Whatever you may believe, Sir Fahlthu, I never had any intention of violating your instructions.”
“Why do you think they’ve been so quiet lately, Sir Yarran?”
“I beg your pardon?” Sir Yarran Battlecrow looked up from the tankard of ale the serving maid had just plunked down in front of him. “Did you say something, Milord?”
“Yes,” Sir Trianal Bowmaster said, then grimaced and waved one hand through the pipe smoke-thickened air. The mess hall attached to Lord Warden Festian’s barracks was packed with Glanharrow’s own armsmen and almost half of the ten troops of Balthar armsmen who had accompanied him here. That many raised voices, one or two of them already begi
“I asked,” he said more loudly, “why you think they’ve been so quiet lately?”
“Well, as to that, Milord,” Sir Yarran said as thoughtfully as a man could when he had to half-shout to be heard, “I’m inclined to be thinking it’s a matter of weather and your uncle’s reinforcements.”
Trianal arched an eyebrow and curled the fingers of the one hand in a drawing motion, inviting him to continue. Sir Yarran gri
“The weather’s finally clearing, Milord,” he pointed out. “That’s probably making it easier for them to get in and out of the Bogs, with or without stolen cattle or horses. But at the same time, it’s taken away the cover of all those nice, thick fogs they used to run about inside, and we’ve moved every cattle and horse herd in the area of their original operations out to the west. That means they’ll have to range further out, and the dryer, harder ground—and the fact that the rain doesn’t come along and wash out any hoof prints five minutes after they’re made—means we’d find it far easier to track them back to their ratholes. They’ll know that as well as we do, so when you add to that the fact that Milord Baron’s seen fit to send in his own armsmen—which both raises the number of bows and sabers we can send after them and simultaneously says he’s minded to take this whole business a mite seriously—I’d say it’s fairly plain what they’re thinking.”
“I see.” Trianal pushed the remnants of his supper—exactly the same food any of his armsmen might have expected—around his plate with a spoon and frowned. Sir Yarran watched him and very carefully allowed no sign of his i