“Run!” he said.
“If we’re lucky,” he said to the woman as they pounded along a trail that he thought would lead back to the road to Port Thayes, “Fulferin went this way, and we’ll catch up to him.”
“And then?” she said, panting as she strove to keep up.
“Between the two of us, we overpower him and leave him to do for us what he intended us to do for him.”
“Leave him for the Vandaayo? Agreed.”
The trail was hard-packed and showed no tracks. But Raffalon caught sight of an overturned pebble, its reversed side darker than the others around it. A little while farther on, he spied a thread snagged on a thorn. The influence of the god of small luck was still with him.
They came to a wider stream, crossed by stepping-stones. As they slowed to navigate their passage, Erminia said, “I know something about Fulferin that he does not know I know.”
“What?” said the thief. “And how?”
“He has come through Fosseth and stopped at our inn.”
“He didn’t recognize you.”
“I am mostly consigned to the kitchen, scrubbing pots and scraping plates while my sister, Elfrey—she of the blond hair and balloonish breasts and pneumatic hips that draw all eyes—she waits on the customers. Father reckons it good for business.”
Raffalon extended a hand to help her cross a wide gap where the current ran strong between the stones. “What do you know of Fulferin?”
“He is no more than a hedge sorcerer, if that.” She leapt over, daintily. “I doubt he knows more than a handful of minor spells, but he is in service to Bolbek, who calls himself the Potence, a powerful thaumaturge in Port Thayes.”
“Why does Bolbek send him through Fosseth?”
“It is on the old road to the ruins of Itharios.”
The man knew of the place, a tumble of broken walls and upheaved pavements, devastated in an earthquake millennia ago. “So?” he said.
“Fulferin delves in the old fanes, seeking out effigies of foregone gods. These he delivers to his master. Though sometimes they dig together.”
“To restore their powers?”
They had crossed over now. She shook her head. “It involves powers, to be sure, but from what I heard them whispering when once they both stopped at the Gray Bird, the thaumaturge uses the gods the way a spider uses a fly.”
“Ah,” said Raffalon. Having been once incarcerated and treated in ways he had not enjoyed, he had since tended to come down on the side of flies and to reject the claims of spiders. “He has fooled the god,” he said.
“I suppose,” she said, “that even deities are disposed to believe what they want to believe, especially when they are desperate to survive. And when a powerful mage cloaks his assistant’s true nature.”
The man remembered the image of an innocent Fulferin that the god had put up on the screen in his mind. “Hmm,” he said, then, “we had better move on.”
They continued along the trail, making good time. The thief always seemed to place his foot in just the right place for maximum traction. Bushes did not impede his passage. He wondered if his luck would actually put barriers in their quarry’s way and decided that it could not. But it might be enough to keep him out of the Vandaayo’s reach. He wondered if he was also lucky to have found Erminia; she was turning out to be a useful companion.
He came across another upturned pebble and paused to examine it. The exposed bottom was still wet even though the sun was now well up and the day warming. He said to the woman, “He has slowed down. By now, he thinks the Vandaayo have us and is no longer hurrying.”
“He struck me as the kind who expects matters to arrange themselves to his convenience,” she said.
They went quickly but quietly now. The country was more up and down than level and soon they found themselves traversing a ridge. Through the trees, Raffalon saw a flicker of movement ahead. He stopped and peered forward, and in a moment he was sure. “There he is.”
“He’s long-legged,” Erminia said. “If he hears us coming, he may well outrun us.”
The man took a moment to appreciate that scrubbing pots had not diminished this woman’s ability to focus on what mattered. Meanwhile, he was scanning the woods around them, seeking an opportunity for advantage.
Ahead of them, the ridge and the trail made a leisurely curve to the right. If, swiftly and silently, he could cut across the bight, he might come out on the track ahead of the sauntering Fulferin.
“There,” he said, pointing. A tall tree had recently fallen, crashing through what would otherwise have been an impenetrable thicket. They pushed through the bushes, scaled the tree’s exposed root mass, and now they were on a clear, straight course. They ducked low and ran fast.
The fallen trunk was branchless for a long stretch and when they encountered its first foliage, they dropped down onto an open space carpeted in moss and lichens. It followed what must have once been the course of a spring-fed stream, now dried up, that led through a low tunnel of overarching branches and ended up behind a screen of a single flowered bush, only a few paces from the trail.
The man and the woman arrived just in time to see knob-kneed Fulferin come striding along at an easy pace. There was no time to plan a strategy. They simply leapt from concealment and threw themselves on their betrayer. Raffalon took him high, and Erminia low, and between them they conclusively toppled the tall man to the ground. By another bit of luck, the thief’s knees landed square on the god stealer’s midriff, driving the air from him in a great whoof.
Raffalon dug in his wallet and came out with a length of cord. With Erminia’s help, he flipped the recumbent, gasping man over and quickly bound him at wrist and ankle. Then they turned him again so that he was sitting with his back against a bank of earth. The woman tore a strip from Fulferin’s shirt and gagged him well, lest he speak a spell to do them mischief.
While she was doing this, Raffalon said, “If you had merely abandoned us, I could be more forgiving. But lighting a fire to draw the Vandaayo?” He left the consequences unsaid.
Erminia was more forthright. She delivered a substantial kick to Fulferin’s ribs. To Raffalon, she said, “Let us go.”
The bound man was making facial signs that he wished to tell them something. Raffalon stooped, removed the gag, but held his knife to the betrayer’s throat. The thaumaturge’s assistant said, “My master will pay you well if you help me deliver what I am bringing him.” When his captors made no particular response, he went on: “This item will complete a project of great importance to him.”
Raffalon hefted the man’s satchel. “I’ll be sure to tell him that you were thinking of him till the end,” he said.
A sly look occupied Fulferin’s face. “But you do not know who he is!”
“I didn’t,” said the thief, then nodded at the woman. “Until she told me.” He reapplied the gag, then turned and looked back along the curve of the ridge, where mottled green shapes were bustling along the trail. “We’ll be on our way now.”
The house of Bolbek the Potence was in the upper reaches of Port Thayes, which occupied a hillside that ran down to the river port. It was built of an unlikely combination of black iron panels and hemispheres of cerulean blue crystal. To discourage the uninvited, it was fenced by a tall hedge of semisentient ravenous vine, the plant’s thorn-bedecked catch-creepers constantly probing for flesh scent.
Raffalon and Erminia approached the single entrance, a narrow, wooden archway that pierced the hedge. As they neared the opening, the air turned cold and something vaporous hovered indistinctly in the gap. “My master,” it said, “expects no visitors.”