Olwynn lifted her pouch and put it on the table. It didn’t seem as fat as it would need to be to tempt Griff away from a job promising one hundred steel to start and two hundred to finish.
“Look,” Griff said, wearying of this conversation, “take your money and go hire a half-dozen strong men to guide you home. Say some prayers to gods along the way, if you still believe in them. I’ve other work to do, and it’s time for me to be at it.”
He turned from her. In his mind, the matter was finished. Olwynn took up her green velvet pouch and opened it.
“See,” she said, presenting all her wealth, “I do have the steel to pay you. Here is a ring my father gave me, as well as a necklace of emeralds and rubies that belonged to my mother and my grandmother before her.”
The ring was of good enough make. You might get a few steel for it from a generous man. The necklace, though-that looked like something out of Thorbardin, and a lot older than this girl’s grandmother. Each jewel was perfectly cut and enchained. It was worth a good deal more than a few steel if you showed it to the right person.
Across the room the skinny goblin leaned his back against the bar and made sure he had a clear view of us. I drew Reaper closer to me. Griff saw that, but he never moved. A look had come on him, white and terrible. I swear by Reorx himself or whichever of the vanished gods you’d like me to name, I swear his hand trembled and the ale slopped over the brim of his tankard.
Firelight glinted off the little heap of steel coins, a pile much too small to outweigh the three hundred promised Griff for that simple killing down in Elm High, but he wasn’t doing that kind of reckoning. He wasn’t doing any reckoning at all. He stared, like a man come suddenly upon an adder, and what held his eye was that ring sitting atop the little pile of steel, a long narrow oval of gold upon which was embossed a double eagle, a fierce raptor with two heads, each in opposition to the other.
The farmer’s pretty widow smiled and grew easy, believing she’d shown just what was needed to hire her man: good coin and, if the sum weren’t enough, a golden ring and some jewelry to make up the difference.
“Will you do it, then?” she asked, gathering up the pouch and cinching it tight.
“Done,” Griff said. From the sound, his mouth must have been drier than ash. He reached for his ale and drank the tankard down. “Be ready for us in the morning.”
“So soon? But-”
“Tomorrow, or not at all,” he growled. “Meet me outside of here at first light.”
She made no other protest and left us. Me, though, I had a thing or two to say. I poured myself some ale, then said it.
“Have you lost your mind? You just passed up the best job I’ve heard of in months. For what? Maybe a third of what that old man in Elm High is promising to pay?”
Griff looked at me long, all the ghosts in his eyes staring out at me. “What’s it to you?”
“One hundred steel,” I said, and never mind that his look raised the hair on the back of my neck. It was money we were talking, ghosts be damned.
“One hundred steel. .” He traced the figure in the ale-slop on the table. “So what? You can have all we make on this little trip to Haven. I don’t care.”
Out the corner of my eye I saw the rag-eared goblin was gone from the bar. That could mean something, or it could mean nothing. I wasn’t of a mind to chew it over now. “And you? What will you make? Are you doing it for free?” I snorted derisively. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of Killer Griff giving it away.”
“So what?” He said it just as if he didn’t care. He leaned forward again, elbows on the table, spilled ale wetting his shirt where his arms rested. He didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the table and said, “Broc, did I ever tell you how I joined the Dark Queen’s army?”
I frowned, not knowing where this offer of history came from and not much wanting to hear it. “No, and-”
“Well, listen.”
I listened, but he said nothing, while all around us in the tavern the smoke hung and voices rose in shouts and dropped low in growls.
“Listen,” he said again, finally lifting up his eyes, those deep wells all full of ghosts. “I’ll tell you about a boy, skinny brat, living on his father’s farm, away up on the plains of Estwilde. He wasn’t nearly grown, that boy, and not a day older than he had to be to take what was handed him. . ”
The boy, said Griff to me on that windy, wild night in the Swan and Dagger, the boy stood at the well, winding the crank to pull up the bucket from the dark deeps. Water, in those days just before the Second Cataclysm, was scarce. Rain never fell anymore. The well stream, which had always run swift under the ground, had months before choked to a trickle. The boy became used to letting that bucket of his tumble far down and cranking it back up again, turn and turn, until his arms ached with the work.
As he stood cranking, the boy looked out across the brown and dying fields, at the crops burned to ruin, the dust swirling in the ever-blowing wind. He cocked his head, listening to the sounds of the farm, his mother murmuring to his sister, his baby brother cooing in the cradle under the shade of the roof, his father talking to someone behind the barn. He looked up high, the back of his neck prickling. It seemed to him that he heard thunder or felt it rumbling, but the sky was hard and empty.
Like some great beast waking, the ground beneath his feet shuddered faintly. Dark, a cloud rose, up over the hill, past which lay the town. The wind turned, and the thick smell of burning came to him.
“Fire!” the boy shouted, abandoning the well. “Ma! Da! Fire! Fire in the town!”
Halfway to the house, he saw his mother pointing toward the hill, her eyes wide, her mouth open. The boy stopped to look where his mother pointed. All the blood in him went cold. It was smoke, aye, rising over the hill, but there was more-a great cloud of golden dust roiled and rolled before the darkness of smoke.
“Gods preserve us!” his mother cried. “Paladine save us!”
The boy’s belly cramped with fear as that golden cloud became an army, dark and solid and gleaming in the sun. Swords and war axes shone, and the sunlight glinted like bright little spears from the black armor of a troop of Dark Knights riding at the head.
Knights of Takhisis!
The boy didn’t think that. Well, he hadn’t the wit for thinking, had he? Terror ran in him, sweeping away all thought. No matter, that. He knew who came riding. Who hadn’t heard tales of what those merciless Knights had done in Kalaman? Everyone knew how they’d swept south from there into Estwilde on a bloody tide of rapine and killing.
The dark troop moved fast, horses’ hooves chewing up the road. Their voices came like the sound of a river at flood. The Knights kept to their course, thinking the little farm unworthy of their notice. Some of the foot soldiers didn’t hold so true a line. Roaring, they plunged across the field between the road and the farmyard. The boy saw faces contorted with the blood-chilling rage of men who’d lately been at a killing and lusted for more. He bolted to the house for his mother, and he ran right into the arms of his father.
“Cellar!” his father shouted, his infant son in his arms. He thrust the boy into the house, herding his wife and weeping daughter before him. Down under the center room lay a root cellar, cool and dark, a place to hide and pray these rampagers would satisfy themselves with looting. “Hurry, boy! Hurry!”
They had the hatch up from the floor. The boy tumbled in, shoved by his father. The infant wailed. Outside pigs squealed, cows bawled, and the army’s thunder shook the little house to the walls. The boy reached up to take the shrieking infant. Reaching, he heard his father cry out. His sister’s horrified scream echoed in his bones. The hatch crashed down, hitting the boy in the head and plunging him into stilling darkness.