Must Love Hellhounds

Crick looked curious, which was probably his natural condition. “You wanted to avoid dogs in particular?” he said. “Why?”

There was an awful moment of silence.

“Because this large scar on my face was caused by a dog. I got it on my first mission,” Batanya said, with no inflection at all. “We were protecting a guy who bred attack dogs. His breeding and training methods were famous. A rival of his, as a practical joke, bribed one of our client’s ke

“How did that turn out?”

Batanya shrugged and looked away.

“Not very well,” Clovache said. “I hadn’t finished training. A man named Damon was Batanya’s junior. This alleged practical joke cost him his life.”

“Did your client live?” Crick asked Batanya directly.

She met his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “He lived, though he lost a leg and one hand. Damon died after four hours. I got the scar.”

That was end of all conversation for a long time.

Batanya gradually became convinced that it was night. It was hard to tell with no change in the light, but it felt like night to her. She gave Clovache a hand signal. After a quick check of all their accoutrements, the bodyguards prepared to move. According to the legend on Crick’s handy-dandy map, they were about a mile from their objective as a crow flies, if a crow would be demented enough to navigate the tu

Clovache glared at the map, which in some ways was a godsend, in other ways completely useless. Fumbling their way ignorantly would have been nearly suicidal, but the map would have been so much more valuable if it had shown the rooms that must be lying somewhere. Presumably, in this huge underground empire, there was a throne room for the king, a refectory of some kind, a prison, an audience chamber, and so on. As it was, they knew where they had to go in order to retrieve Crick’s left-behind treasure, but they had no idea what they might encounter on the way there.

“It’s not like we ever knew what to expect anyway,” Clovache said to Batanya, who nodded. They’d been partners long enough to have abbreviated conversations.

As if her words had been a self-fulfilling prophecy, they rounded the next bend to find two armed guards blocking the way.

“We heard you coming a mile away,” said the one who was least humanoid. He was a not a demon. In fact, Batanya had no idea what his origin was. He was quadrupedal, gray, and clothed in a material like cobwebs. He had a device in his hand that looked like the frame for a te

Clovache fled, rightly figuring that someone needed to stay free. To the hoots and jeers of the two guards, Batanya unsheathed her short sword and began sweeping the blade from side to side. To her vast irritation, the strands of the net stuck to the sword and moved with it. The net was so elastic that it didn’t provide enough resistance to be severed.

“Shit!” she said. From the corner of her eye she saw that Crick had adapted and was working with his dagger. He was having better luck with his smaller blade than she was with her sword, so she pulled out her own knife and began cutting. The second guard, a human who looked quite a bit like Trovis, had drawn some kind of handgun, a hazardous decision in a rock tu

The net-thrower seemed startled that things weren’t going his way, and he wasn’t keeping the net mended quickly enough to contain Crick and Batanya. Crick was working very quickly, which was good, since Batanya had been forced to return to using her sword. She’d changed her technique to the more effective one of stabbing through the net in short jabs, rather than trying to sweep a large cut through the strands.

Batanya was startled to see something long and dark slide past her on the tu

“That was brilliant,” Batanya said, trying not to pant.

“I took a ru

Crick was staring at them wild-eyed while Batanya cut the remnants of the tattered net away from their limbs.

“You all right?” Clovache asked him, clapping him on the shoulder by way of encouragement.

“Yes,” Crick said. He took off the idiotic goggles. He had quite sharp blue eyes underneath them. Without the sparkly distraction, his face was bony and agreeable and intelligent. “I want to say right now, you two are worth every pe

“Say that after you get back alive,” Batanya advised him, as Clovache deposited the neotaser into the pocket designed for it. After the slide across the slug slick, her summer armor was a little grubby, but completely intact. Clovache’s hood had come off in the fracas, and she tugged it back over her matted hair. (“If you have an iota of vanity, this is not the job for you,” the sergeant who’d recruited her from her home village had said. Clovache, like all the young recruits, had lied.)

“We have to get out of here fast,” Batanya said, and without another word, they all stepped over the bodies and hurried down the tu

Batanya wondered if the gray creatures had some kind of mind-link. Perhaps the dead one had sent some kind of signal when he was wounded.

After a long moment, they heard an eerie wailing. The second soldier had found his dead buddy. This was going to draw all kinds of attention to the area, and the faster they relocated, the better.

Batanya made the punching gesture with her fist that meant “move out,” and they hurried away from the wailing. This time they were going west, following Crick’s gestures. This tu

Then she shook herself vigorously. Letting one’s imagination take over was an indulgence that sapped the energy of a warrior. She glanced over her shoulder at Crick, who was shuddering. Maybe he’d had the same mental image.

From behind him, Clovache hissed, “Hurry up!”

Their luck held for ten frantic minutes. Then they heard the dragging sound of an approaching slug, and there was no handy escape hatch. In fact, there was not an intersecting tu