Promise of the Witch-King Read online

  “I have changed my mind,” Jarlaxle said, his voice cold. “When your friends arrive, they will need to find another place to repose.”

  “You smelly …”

  “Hardly.”

  “… stinking drow,” the man went on. “Drawing a weapon in here is a crime against King Gareth.”

  “Does the penalty equate to that for gutting a fool?”

  “Stinking drow,” the man repeated. He glanced over at his friend then put on a quizzical expression.

  “One at me back,” said the other. “I’m not for helping ye.”

  The first man looked even more confused, and Jarlaxle nearly laughed aloud at the spectacle, for behind the other man stood the crowd of people that filled every aisle in Muddy Boots and Bloody Blades, but none appeared to be taking any note of him. Jarlaxle recognized the gray cloak of the nearest man and knew it to be Entreri.

  “Are we done with this foolery?” Jarlaxle asked the first man.

  The man glared at him and started to nod then shoved off the table, sliding his chair back.

  “A weapon!” he cried, leaping to his feet and pointing at the drow. “He drew a weapon!”

  A tumult began all around the table, with men spinning and leaping into defensive stances, many with hands going to their weapons, and some, like Entreri, using the moment to melt away into the crowd. Like all the taverns at the Vaasan Gate, however, Muddy Boots and Bloody Blades anticipated such trouble. Within the span of a couple of heartbeats—the time it took Jarlaxle to slide his own chair back and hold up his empty hands, for the sword had shrunken to nothingness at his bidding—a group of Bloodstone soldiers moved in to restore order.

  “He poked me with a sword!” the man cried, jabbing his finger Jarlaxle’s way.

  The drow pasted on a puzzled look and held up his empty hands. Then he adjusted his cloak to show that he had no sword, no weapon at all, sheathed at his belt.

  That didn’t stop the nearest soldier from glowering at him, though. The man bent low and did a quick search under the table.

  “So clever of you to use my heritage against me,” Jarlaxle said to the protesting man. “A pity you didn’t know I carry no weapon at all.”

  All eyes went to the accuser.

  “He sticked me, I tell ye!”

  “With?” Jarlaxle replied, holding his arms and cape wide. “You give me far too much credit, I fear, though I do hope the ladies are paying you close heed.”

  A titter of laughter came from one side then rumbled into a general outburst of mocking howls against the sputtering man. Worse for him, the guards seemed less than amused.

  “Get on your way,” one of the guards said to him, and the laughter only increased.

  “And his friend put a dagger to me back!” the man’s still-seated companion shouted, drawing all eyes to him. He leaped up and spun around.

  “Who did?” the soldier asked.

  The man looked around, though of course Entreri was already all the way to the other side of the room.

  “Him!” the man said anyway, pointing to one nearby knave. “Had to be him.”

  A soldier moved immediately to inspect the accused, and indeed the man was wearing a long, slender dirk on his belt.

  “What foolishness is this?” the accused protested. “You would believe that babbling idiot?”

  “My word against yours!” the other man shouted, growing more confident that his guess had been accurate.

  “Against ours, you mean,” said another man.

  More than a dozen, all companions of the newly accused man, came forward.

  “I’m thinking that ye should take more care in who ye’re pointing yer crooked fingers at,” said another.

  The accuser was stammering. He looked to his friend, who seemed even more ill at ease and helpless against the sudden turn of events.

  “And I’m thinking that the two of you should be going,” said the accused knave.

  “And quick,” added another of his rough-looking friends.

  “Sir?” Jarlaxle asked the guard. “I was merely trying to take some repose from my travels in Vaasa.”

  The soldier eyed the drow suspiciously for a long, long while, then turned away and started off.

  “You cause any more disturbances and I’ll put you in chains,” he warned the man.

  “But …”

  The protesting victim ended with a gasp as the soldier behind him kicked him in the behind, drawing another chorus of howls from the many onlookers.

  “We’re not for leaving!” the man’s companion stubbornly decreed.

  “Ye probably should be thinking that one over a bit more,” warned one of the friends of the man he had accused, stealing his bluster.

  It all quieted quickly, and Jarlaxle took a seat at the vacant table, waving a serving wench over to him.

  “A glass of your finest wine and one of your finest ale,” he said.

  The woman hesitated, her dark eyes scanning him.

  “No, he was not falsely accusing me,” Jarlaxle confided with a wink.

  The woman blushed and nearly fell over herself as she moved off to get the drinks.

  “By this time, another table would have opened to us,” said Entreri, taking a seat across from the drow, “without the dramatics.”

  “Without the enjoyment,” Jarlaxle corrected.

  “The soldiers are watching us now.”

  “Precisely the point,” explained the drow. “We want all at the Vaasan Gate to know of us. Reputation is exactly the point.”

  “Reputation earned in battle with common enemies, so I thought.”

  “In time, my friend,” said Jarlaxle. His smile beamed at the young woman, who had already returned with the drinks. “In time,” he repeated, and he gave the woman a piece of platinum—many times the price of the wine and ale.

  “For tales of adventure and those we’ve yet to make,” he said to her slyly, and she blushed again, her dark eyes sparkling as she considered the coin. Her smile was shy but not hard to see as she scampered off.

  Jarlaxle turned and held his glass up to Entreri then repeated his last sentence as a toast.

  Defeated yet again by the drow’s undying optimism, Entreri tapped his glass with his own and took a long and welcomed drink.

  CHAPTER 4

  NOT SO MUCH AN ORC

  Arrayan Faylin pulled herself out of her straw bed, dragging her single blanket along with her and wrapping it around her surprisingly delicate shoulders. That distinctly feminine softness was reflective of the many surprises people found when looking upon Arrayan and learning of her heritage.

  She was a half-orc, like the vast majority of residents in the cold and windswept city of Palishchuk in the northeastern corner of Vaasa, a settlement in clear view of the towering ice river known as the Great Glacier.

  Arrayan had human blood in her as well—and some elf, so her mother had told her—and certainly her features had combined the most attractive qualities of all her racial aspects. Her reddish-brown hair was long and so soft and flowing that it often seemed as if her face was framed by a soft red halo. She was short, like many orcs, but perhaps as a result of that reputed elf blood, she was anything but stocky. While her face was wide, like that of an orc, her other features—large emerald green eyes, thick lips, narrow angled eyebrows, and a button nose—were distinctly un-orclike, and that curious blend, in Arrayan’s case, had a way of accenting the positives of the attributes from every viewing angle.

  She stretched, yawned, shook her hair back from her face, and rubbed her eyes.

  As the mental cobwebs of sleep melted away, Arrayan’s excitement began to mount. She moved quickly across the room to her desk, her bare feet slapping the hard earth floor. Eagerly she grabbed her spellbook from a nearby shelf, used her other hand to brush clear the center area of the desk then slid into her chair, hooking her finger into the correct tab of the organized tome and flipping it open to the section entitled “Divination Magic.”

  A
s she considered the task ahead of her, her fingers began trembling so badly that she could hardly turn the page.

  Arrayan fell back in her seat and forced herself to take a long, deep breath. She went over the mental disciplines she had learned several years before in a wizard’s tower in distant Damara. If she could master control as a teenager, certainly in her mid-twenties she could calm her eagerness.

  A moment later, she went back to her book. With a steady hand, the wizard examined her list of potential spells, discerned those she believed would be the most useful, including a battery of magical defenses and spells to dispel offensive wards before they were activated, and began the arduous task of committing them to memory.

  A knock on her door interrupted her a few minutes later. The gentle nature of it, but with a sturdiness behind it to show that the light tap was deliberate, told her who it might be. She turned in her chair as the door pushed open, and a huge, grinning, tusky face poked in. The half-orc’s wide eyes clued Arrayan in to the fact that she had let her blanket wrap slip a bit too far, and she quickly tightened it around her shoulders.

  “Olgerkhan, well met,” she said.

  It didn’t surprise her how bright her voice became whenever that particular half-orc appeared. Physically, the two seemed polar opposites, with Olgerkhan’s features most definitely favoring his orc side. His lip was perpetually twisted due to his huge, uneven canines, and his thick forehead and singular bushy brow brought a dark shadow over his bloodshot, jaundiced eyes. His nose was flat and crooked, his face marked by small and uneven patches of hair, and his forehead sloped out to peak at that imposing brow. He wasn’t overly tall, caught somewhere between five-and-a-half and six feet, but he appeared much larger, for his limbs were thick and strong and his chest would have fit appropriately on a man a foot taller than he.

  The large half-orc licked his lips and started to move his mouth as if he meant to say something.

  Arrayan pulled her blanket just a bit tighter around her. She really wasn’t overly embarrassed; she just didn’t give much thought to such things, though Olgerkhan obviously did.

  “Are they here?” Arrayan asked.

  Olgerkhan glanced around the room, seeming puzzled.

  “The wagons,” Arrayan clarified, and that brought a grin to the burly half-orc’s face.

  “Wingham,” he said. “Outside the south gate. Twenty colored wagons.”

  Arrayan returned his smile and nodded, but the news did cause her a bit of trepidation. Wingham was her uncle, though she had never really seen him for long enough stretches to consider herself to be close to him and his traveling merchant band. In Palishchuk, they were known simply as “Wingham’s Rascals,” but to the wider region of the Bloodstone Lands, the band was called “Weird Wingham’s Wacky Weapon Wielders.”

  “The show is everything,” Wingham had once said to Arrayan, explaining the ridiculous name. “All the world loves the show.” Arrayan smiled even wider as she considered his further advice that day when she was but a child, even before she had gone to Damara to train in arcane magic. Wingham had explained to her that the name, admittedly stupid, was a purposeful calling card, a way to confirm the prejudices of the humans, elves, dwarves, and other races. “Let them think us stupid,” Wingham had told her with a great flourish, though Wingham always spoke with a great flourish. “Then let them come and bargain with us for our wares!”

  Arrayan realized with a start that she had paused for a long while. She glanced back at Olgerkhan, who seemed not to have noticed.

  “Any word?” she asked, barely able to get the question out.

  Olgerkhan shook his thick head. “They dance and sing but little so far,” he explained. “Those who have gone out to enjoy the circus have not yet returned.”

  Arrayan nodded and jumped up from her seat, moving swiftly across the room to her wardrobe. Hardly considering the action, she let her blanket fall—then caught it at the last moment and glanced back sheepishly to Olgerkhan.

  He averted his eyes to the floor and crept back out of the room, pulling the door closed.

  He was a good one, Arrayan realized, as she always tried to remind herself.

  She dressed quickly, pulling on leather breeches and a vest, and a thin belt that held several pouches for spell components, as well as a set of writing materials. She started for the door but paused and pulled a blue robe of light material from the wardrobe, quickly removing the belt then donning the robe over her outfit. She rarely wore her wizard robes among her half-orc brethren, for they considered the flowing garment with its voluminous sleeves of little use, and the only fashion the males of Palishchuk seemed to appreciate came from her wearing less clothing, not more.

  The robe was for Wingham, Arrayan told herself as she refitted the belt and rushed to the door.

  Olgerkhan was waiting patiently for her, and she offered him her arm and hurried him along to the southern gate. A crowd had gathered there, flowing out of the city of nearly a thousand residents. Filtering her way through, pulling Olgerkhan along, Arrayan finally managed to get a glimpse of the source of the commotion, and like so many of her fellow Palishchukians, she grinned widely at the site of Weird Wingham’s Wacky Weapon Wielders. Their wagon caravan had been circled, the bright colors of the canopies and awnings shining brilliantly in the glow of the late-summer sun. Music drifted along the breeze, carrying the rough-edged voice of one of Wingham’s bards, singing a tale of the Galena Mountains and Hillsafar Hall.

  Like all the rest swept up in the excitement, Arrayan and Olgerkhan found themselves walking more swiftly then even jogging across the ground, their steps buoyed by eagerness. Wingham’s troupe came to Palishchuk only a few times each year, sometimes only once or twice, and they always brought with them exotic goods bartered in faraway lands, and wondrous tales of distant heroes and mighty villains. They entertained the children and adults alike with song and dance, and though they were known throughout the lands as difficult negotiators, any of the folk of Palishchuk who purchased an item from Weird Wingham knew that he was getting a fine bargain.

  For Wingham had never forgotten his roots, had never looked back with anything but love on the community that had worked so hard to allow him and all the other half-orcs of his troupe to shake off the bonds of their heritage.

  A pair of jugglers anchored the main opening into the wagon circle, tossing strange triple-bladed knives in an unbroken line back and forth to each other, the weapons spinning over the heads of nervous and delighted Palishchukians as they entered or departed. Just inside the ring, a pair of bards performed, one playing a curved, flutelike instrument while the other sang of the Galenas. Small kiosks and racks of weapons and clothing filled the area, and the aroma of a myriad of exotic perfumes and scented candles aptly blanketed the common smell of rot in the late summer tundra, where plants grew fast and died faster through the short mild period, and the frozen grip on the topsoil relinquished, releasing the fragrance of seasons past.

  For a moment, a different and rarely felt aspect of Arrayan’s character filtered through, and she had to pause in her step to bask in the vision of a grand ball in a distant city, full of dancing, finely dressed women and men. That small part of her composite didn’t hold, though, when she noticed an old half-orc, bent by age, bald, limping, but with a sparkle in his bright eyes that could not help but catch the eye, however briefly, of any young woman locking stares with him.

  “Mistress Maggotsweeper!” the old half-orc cried upon seeing her.

  Arrayan winced at the correct recital of her surname, one she had long ago abandoned, preferring her Elvish middle name, Faylin. That didn’t turn her look sour, though, for she knew that her Uncle Wingham had cried out with deep affection. He seemed to grow taller and straighter as she closed on him, and he wrapped her in a tight and powerful hug.

  “Truly the most anticipated, enjoyable, lovely, wonderful, amazing, and most welcome sight in all of Palishchuk!” Wingham said, using the lyrical barker’s voice he had
so mastered in his decades with his traveling troupe. He pushed his niece back to arms’ length. “Every time I near Palishchuk, I fear that I will arrive only to discover that you are off to Damara or somewhere other than here.”

  “But you know that I would return in a hurry if I learned that you were riding back into town,” she assured him, and his eyes sparkled and his crooked smile widened.

  “I have ridden back with some marvelous finds again, as always,” Wingham promised her with an exaggerated wink.

  “As always,” she agreed, her tone leading.

  “Playing coy?”

  At Arrayan’s side, Olgerkhan grunted disapprovingly, even threateningly, for “coy”—koi in the Orcish tongue—was the name of a very lewd game.

  Wingham caught the hint in the overprotective warning and backed off a step, eyeing the brutish Olgerkhan without blinking. Wingham hadn’t survived the harshness of Vaasa for so many years by being blind to any and every potential threat.

  “Not koi,” Arrayan quickly explained to her bristling companion. “He means sly, sneaky. My uncle is implying that I might know something more than I am telling him.”

  “Ah, the book,” said Olgerkhan.

  Arrayan sighed and Wingham laughed.

  “Alas, I am discovered,” said Arrayan.

  “And I thought that your joy was merely at the sight of me,” Wingham replied with feigned disappointment.

  “It is!” Arrayan assured him. “Or would be. I mean … there is no … Uncle, you know …”

  Though he was obviously enjoying the sputtering spectacle, Wingham mercifully held up a hand to calm the woman.

  “You never come out to find me on the morning of the first day, dear niece. You know that I will be quite busy greeting the crowd. But I am not surprised to see you out here this day, this early. Word has preceded me concerning Zhengyi’s writing.”

  “Is it truly?” Arrayan asked, hardly able to get the words out of her mouth.

  She practically leaped forward as she spoke them, grabbing at her uncle’s shoulders. Wingham cast a nervous glance around them.