The Black Bouquet

Alas, he couldn't linger to find out. He had to keep moving. He scrambled to his feet and pivoted this way and that, trying to see what was going on. Squealing, people recoiled from the dagger in his hand, and in so doing, somewhat impeded the advance of the pair of shaggy, long-legged gnolls shambling in his direction.

The hyena-headed Red Axes with their glaring yellow eyes and lolling tongues were blocking the mouth of the cul-de-sac. Aeron had at most a few heartbeats to find another way out of the box. He cast about, looking for a passable alleyway between two of the surrounding spires. He didn't see one.

His only option was to bolt into another of the buildings surrounding the dead end. He dashed toward a doorway, and something smashed down on the top of his head. He collapsed to his knees amid a scatter of clay shards, dry earth, and withered stalks, and he realized someone had leaned out an upper story window and dropped a flower pot on him.

A second such missile shattered beside his right hand and jarred him into action. Shaking off the shock and pain, he scrambled on into the tower.

The building had shops on the ground floor, an ale house to the left and a cobbler to the right. Since their windows opened on the same cul-de-sac he was trying to escape, they were of no use to him. He ran on down a hallway, past the stairs twisting upward and several closed doors that likely led to apartments, seeking a rear exit into the next street over.

Alas, the corridor was a dead end, too. And when he spun back around, the gnolls, Tharag, and the human Red Axe were coming through the entry at the far end.

Aeron tried one of the doors. Locked, and he had no time to pick it or try to break it down. He tested a second.

That one was open. He scrambled through, barred it, and looked around.

As he'd expected, he'd invaded someone's home. The boarder, a haggard-looking, red-eyed woman still dressed in her night clothes, sat at her spi

"Sorry," he said, then sprinted toward the one small window.

Behind him, the door rattled, then started banging. The woman gawked for another moment, then she rose and scurried toward the entry. She might not understand what was going on, but she knew she didn't want her door battered down. Aeron almost turned back to restrain her, then he decided his chances would be better if he just kept ru

He squirmed out the window onto a narrow, twisting lane that, like the cul-de-sac, co

He reached under his cowl and gingerly fingered the sore spot where the flower pot had bashed him. He had a lump coming up-it would go nicely with all the bruises he was collecting-but to his relief, his scalp wasn't bloody. Apparently the hood had protected him a little.

So, he'd escaped relatively intact. Outwitted the rest of the world again. He felt the usual surge of exhilaration, the thrill that, as much as the easy coin, accounted for his devotion to the outlaw life.

Yet it wasn't quite as potent as usual. Perhaps Burgell's treachery was to blame. Or the discovery that the Whistlers had joined forces with the Red Axes to hunt him down. Or the way the onlookers had cheered to see him beaten, or the unpleasant surprise of the pot crashing down on his skull. What had that been about?

Shadows of Mask, had all Oeble turned against him?

No, surely not. He just needed to settle this affair of the strongbox, and things would calm down. After a moment's thought, he headed for home, to pick up the lantern he kept there.

CHAPTER 7

With the approach of evening, the Talondance had become more crowded and unruly. The clamor of the customers nearly drowned out the constant reedy music that droned from no visible source, as if ghosts were playing the birdpipes, shaums, and whistlecanes. As she surveyed the assembly of orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, lizard men, and humans who appeared equally savage, Miri was glad that she had a comrade to watch her back.

She turned to Sefris and said, "I don't think you'll have to linger here very long to see things you wouldn't see back in the monastery."

"I imagine you're right," Sefris replied. "In fact, here's one of them now. Look sharp."

An orc clad in a shirt of scale armor crowed and leaned forward to rake in its wi

The orc jumped up, and crossing its arms, it reached to draw the daggers it carried sheathed on either hip. Other orcs and lizard men scrambled toward the scene of the confrontation, while those with no interest in choosing a side scurried to distance themselves from it. A human shouted that he'd give two to one on the scaly folk.

Then a massive form, tall as an ogre but even burlier, as well as less human in its proportions, emerged from a shadowy alcove. Armored in yellow-brown chitin, its feelers quivering, it employed its elongated arms with their long, thick claws to knuckle-walk like an ape. It gnashed its huge mandibles once. Everyone jumped at the sharp rasp, turned, then froze when they saw what had made the sound. After a moment, the orcs and lizard men lowered their weapons.

Miri shook her head. She'd seen many strange things in her career as a scout, but few stranger than an umber hulk maintaining order in a tavern. If she could believe her training, the immense subterranean creatures possessed their own kind of intelligence, but not of a sort that disposed them to cooperate with humans or even goblin-kin.

"Amazing," she said as the umber hulk, evidently satisfied that it had cowed the would-be brawlers, turned away.

"The yuan-ti said the owner of the Talondance was a wizard," Sefris replied. "It didn't mention her magic was powerful enough to enslave a brute like that."

"Maybe there's another explanation."

"Possibly."

"Feeling reluctant?" Miri asked.

"No, merely pointing out that we'll need to keep our wits about us."

"Believe it or not, I've been trying to do that right along, even if you couldn't tell it from the way I blundered into the slavers' trap." Miri smiled crookedly, nodded at a female gnoll standing behind a bar, and said, "Let's talk to that one."

As they wended their way through the crowd, a sweaty, musky, half-animal stench, compounded of the individual stinks of unwashed specimens of twenty different races, assailed Miri's nostrils. Its thumb on the scale, a hobgoblin weighed out measures of mordayn powder for eager-in some cases frantic-addicts. Prostitutes pulled down their bodices or lifted their skirts, exposing expanses of pimply, pasty flesh to entice their customers. A potential buyer peered into a slave's ears, and a foppishly dressed, nervous-looking young man dickered with a pair of ruffians, trying to negotiate his uncle's murder.

It was all sordid and repulsive almost beyond belief, and Miri glanced at Sefris to see how she was tolerating it. Somewhat to her surprise, the monastic wore her usual half smile, as if the scene didn't trouble her in the slightest. Evidently the Broken Ones achieved some genuine serenity through their martial exercises and meditations.

"What you want?" snarled the gnoll, a bit of slaver dripping from its canine muzzle. It could speak the common tongue employed by a good many civilized and even barbaric folk across the continent of Faerun, but not very well.