The Black Bouquet

"Thank you," Sefris said. "Yet I sense you don't wholly approve of my tactics."

"It's not that, exactly. I suppose I'm trained to fight with my hands, not by finding a person's private shame and rubbing salt in the wound. It just felt dirty, somehow."

Sefris arched an eyebrow and said, "I intended to master the wizard through the exercise of our martial skills. You stopped me."

"Because unlike the yuan-ti, who tried to enslave me, she hadn't done anything that made her fair game."

"Operating a haven for the foulest kind of outlaws and goblin-kin doesn't qualify?"

"It seems like it should," Miri said with a sigh, "doesn't it?"

"Yet you pity her." To her surprise, Miri thought she heard a trace of scorn in the monastic's generally calm, mild tone, and she wondered if it was directed at Naneetha or herself. "Consider this, then. Suppose something scarred you. Would you spend the rest of your life hiding in a hole?"

"No. It wouldn't make all that much difference to me, I suppose."

"Nor me, nor anyone who wasn't bloated with vanity to begin with. Whatever distress Mistress Dalaeve experiences is the result of her own stupidity and weakness. You and I are not to blame."

"And your deity is tender Ilmater, god of mercy," said Miri with wry incredulity.

"Whose sympathy and help are given first and foremost to the i

The scout peered and saw that Sefris was right. Ahead and to the left were the broken foundations of two spires, like decaying stumps in a row of teeth. One tower had evidently fallen sideways, demolishing its neighbor in the course of its collapse. Imagining the catastrophe, Miri winced at the probable loss of life.

But it had happened long ago, and all those unfortunate souls were beyond her power to help. What mattered then was that if her informant, one of Oeble's apothecaries, had told the truth, Aeron sar Randal lived on the top floor of a tower three doors farther down.

Miri and Sefris stalked forward, stepping silently and gliding through the shadows. The ranger spotted a hobgoblin lurking in a recessed doorway, its cloak draped so that it half concealed the crossbow dangling in its hairy hand. She stopped and raised her hand, whereupon Sefris, too, halted instantly. Miri pointed.

"A lookout," she whispered.

"Yes, I see it now. Aeron's sentry, do you think?"

"It's possible, but it feels wrong. At the Paeraddyn, his accomplices were all human, and if I understood Naneetha correctly, he doesn't even belong to a gang himself. He might not have any partners as a general rule."

"Well, whoever it is, it's likely no friend of ours, not unless you have other allies you haven't told me about."

"No," Miri replied.

"I can't fling a chakram that far, but you can surely hit it with an arrow."

Miri reached for a shaft, then left it in the quiver.

"I can't just kill it without knowing for certain who it is or what it's doing," she said. "It might be working with the Gray Blades."

"A hobgoblin?"

"I know it seems unlikely, but Oeble is full of townsfolk the rest of the world disdains as savage marauders. Maybe some of them even spy for the law."

"What should we do, then?" Sefris asked. "Creep around to the back of the tower and look for another way in, one the watcher can't see?"

"I'll do that. You keep an eye on the hobgoblin and this approach, and hoot like an owl if you need to alert me to anything."

Sefris smiled and said, "I remind you, this isn't the wild."

"They must have a few owls," Miri replied. "Anyway, we need some sort of signal."

She started toward the alley that ran between the two buildings, and the door to Aeron's tower opened.

Several ruffians, a couple human, the others not, skulked out onto the street. The one in the lead was a tanarukk, the first of that infamous breed Miri had noticed among Oeble's motley population. Stooped and massive, curved tusks jutting from its lower jaw, it stalked along with a heavy battle-axe in one fist and a lead line in the other.

The trailing end of the rope bound the hands of a human prisoner, who hobbled as best he could with a burlap sack over his head. For a moment, Miri wondered if it was Aeron, then decided it couldn't be. The captive was excruciatingly gaunt, not lean, and carried an assortment of old scars on the exposed portions of his skin.

The hobgoblin lookout emerged from the doorway to join his comrades. Miri laid an arrow across her bow.

Sefris touched her on the arm.

"What are you doing?" she whispered.

Miri was surprised that a Broken One, sworn to help the victims of cruelty, would ask.

"I'm going to shoot an outlaw or two," the ranger replied.

"Why? We don't know this is any of our affair. The toughs and goblin-kin look villainous enough, but perhaps they have some legitimate grievance against this man."

"Then let them go to the law with their complaint. I thought that's what towns are supposed to be good for."

"How many acts of injustice and brutality have you seen since coming to Oeble?" asked Sefris. "How many chained thralls wailing that they were enslaved unlawfully? How many pimps beating their whores and bravos terrorizing shopkeepers for protection? Yet you passed on by, because you're on a mission, and if you deviated from it to right every wrong you stumbled across in this den of scoundrels, you'd never get it done."

"Maybe we don't have to close our eyes every time."

"Something about the plight of this particular wretch has stirred your sympathy, but surely your guild masters taught you that mere emotion is no reason to abandon a strategy."

"I admit, they did, but…"

Uncertain, hating Sefris a little but herself more, Miri watched the kidnappers, if that was what they were, lead their captive away.

"All right," Miri said when the street was clear, "let's get this done."

She promised herself that once it was, and she'd delivered the strongbox into the proper hands, she'd depart Oeble within the hour, never to return. Unless it was at the head of an army, to raze the filthy place.

She and Sefris scurried into the tower and on up the shadowy spiral stairs. The risers were soft, treacherous, half rotten, but they managed the climb quietly even so. On the third-floor landing, a door opened, and a halfling in a feathered hat started to emerge. He took one look at the two grim-faced human strangers striding by and retreated back inside.

The door to Aeron sar Randal's garret apartment was standing open. Miri and Sefris ascended the remaining stairs warily, then they peeked beyond the threshold. Someone had torn the flat apart. At first the exercise had likely been a search, but had included simple malicious destruction before it was through. Shards of shattered bottles littered the floor, and the varnished scraps of a broken mandolin lay in the reeking puddle of spilled wine.

No one was inside, though Miri was reasonably certain she'd seen the vandals only minutes before.

"Look," Sefris said, pointing. The light of the garret's one surviving lamp sufficed to reveal the outline of an axe scrawled in crimson chalk on the wall. "The Red Axes signed their work."

"And plainly," Miri said, "it was them we saw coming out of the tower with their prisoner. Otherwise, the coincidence is just too great. Curse us, we should have waylaid them."

"Perhaps so," the monastic replied, "but let's take a moment to think it through. Who do you think they abducted, Aeron's father?"

"Somebody dear to him, at any rate, someone they hope to trade for the box."

"Not a bad idea, and if we take the hostage from them, we can try the same thing."