“Now,” she murmured, “If I were secretly funneling a super-rare elemental mineral out of Akanul, where would I hide my secret ledger describing my treachery in exact detail?” She chuckled. Finding such a record wasn’t out of the question. Criminals had at least as much cause to keep track of their merchandise as did legitimate merchants. In her experience the difference between legal and illegal wares was mostly dependent on how richly bribed the public officials were.
She sorted through paperwork. Manifests, lists of ports, projected prices for various vegetables, notes of intent to buy or sell various amounts of said vegetables, and upkeep costs for boats and warehouses … didn’t this Pashra have some sort of filing system? The disarray was almost comical and definitely ordinary.
Something came into focus about a foot in front of her, its shadow large on the clutter of documents. She leaped back with a curse even as she saw it was another spider, this one hanging on a slender web she’d missed in the lantern’s dull light. She’d never been especially afraid of spiders. Until she’d seen the nightmare called Murmur feed several people to its pit of bugs. They’d been devoured alive, swarmed by hungry spiders and other insects … Her stomach felt funny. She swallowed, and focused on the tiny arachnid dangling in front of her. It’s just a spider, she told herself. It can’t hurt you. Unless it’s poisonous.
Either way, it was an ugly bastard with a body nearly as thick as her thumb. She could even make out its little eyes, like tiny buttons, fixed on her.
“All right, blister, that’s how you want to play it?” She grabbed a handful of papers and rolled them up. As if it guessed her intent, the spider sprinted down its web line and disappeared somewhere behind the desk. She leaned across the morass of papers and noticed a hollow she’d missed in the wall. As she peered inside, her eyes widened.
The hollow crawled with spiders. Too many to count, boiling over each other and across some kind of bulky object. A … person, wrapped in a shroud of lacy webbing. She could make out features frozen in a rictus of open-mouthed terror, beneath a suffocating white layer.
“Oh, shit!” Most of the spiders were coin size, but a few were larger than her palm. She eased back.
“Greetings,” a voice said.
Riltana spun. A watersoul genasi stood just inside the door, now closed. Damn.
“Who’re you?” she said. Something wasn’t right about him. The sea-foam hue of his skin was unnatural, as if the watersoul suffered some kind of sickness or blight.
“I’m Pashra. The question is who’re you?”
She swallowed, and forced herself not to glance back down into the hollow.
“I, uh, got a message to deliver. A document. For you, I guess, if you’re the owner.”
The genasi said, “That’s me. Can I ask why you’re going through my desk?”
She raised the incriminating papers she’d rolled into an impromptu spider-swatter. “What, these? I thought I saw a bug.”
The man uttered something that almost sounded like a curse, but not in any language she knew. “Put those down, give me whatever you’ve got, then get out.” The genasi smiled. He sure had a lot of teeth …
And what was with the way his shadow was so much larger than his frame? The jagged silhouette on the wall almost looked like it had horns …
“You’re no genasi,” she said.
The man sighed and glanced sidelong at something on the door frame; another spider. This one was big, too. It had a black abdomen and a white head.
As if addressing it, he said, “You see? She’s a spy. Now help me silence her-your wall-crawling pets are good for more than watching me, aren’t they?”
Piss on a shingle! You just had to tell him you pierced his disguise, she thought. Did it make you feel smart? ’Cause now …
Pashra sucked in breath so large his chest visibly expanded. Then his body followed suit. He ballooned outward and upward, growing larger and larger, until he was the size of an ogre. It was his true size, she guessed, though his skin color remained unchanged. Coarse black hair was tied in a braid down his back, horns protruded from his forehead, and his mouth was so filled with oversize teeth that it didn’t even properly close. Oh yeah, plus he’d somehow come into possession of a sword that could pass as an oversized meat cleaver.
“What are you?” she asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not.” She loosed the tie on her Airstepper robe. It fell, revealing her ebony armor and providing easy access to her sword and daggers. She leaped. The air hurled her like a ballista spear across the chamber. If she could stun Pashra, knock him away from the door-
Pashra uttered a mystical word. Vapor swirled from the tip of his cleaver and caught Riltana before she was halfway across the wide office. Cold like the inside of an ice cave painted a frost glaze across her armor and skin.
She fell out of the air. When she hit the central table, two of its four legs buckled. She rolled behind it, putting its sloped face between her and Pashra. The leech-son could cast spells! Her teeth chattered as the shock of Pashra’s magical chill slowly abated. It doesn’t mean he won’t bleed, she thought. Let’s see how he likes daggers. Two small blades, one from each glove, appeared in her palms. All right-
A spider the size of Chant’s pet cat dropped on her. She stabbed it through the abdomen before it could fasten its pincers. It tumbled away and twitched on the floor, legs curling up around the leaking wound. A glance back at the desk showed a swarm of the spider’s siblings emerging from their hollow and scuttling toward her. Most weren’t nearly as large as the one she’d just dispatched, but there were so many she could hear the patter of hundreds of tiny legs.
“Damn web-spitting offal eaters!” she cursed. She flicked the dagger away, replacing it with a mountaineer’s spike from her gloves. Then she jumped straight up and punched the spike into the wooden ceiling and dangled from the attached carabiner. She hoped it would keep her out of reach of the spiders on the floor. At least until they figured out they could climb up the walls and across the ceiling.
And there towered Pashra, horns pointed at her like swords, much closer than before. When he saw her looking at him, he grinned and raised his weapon. What was he? An ogre, yes, but a smart one.
She hurled a dagger with her free hand. Its point plunged into Pashra’s right eye. The creature howled, a terrifying sound halfway between a wolf’s night call and a hunting panther’s roar. The sound rippled through the air, knocking Riltana from her handhold. It roiled the spider swarm and blew out the tiny office window. Rain from the storm outside blew in.
The windsoul managed a half-graceful landing, despite a trickle of blood from her left ear. A residual ring hung in the air-or maybe that was in her head. She worked her jaw and blinked, trying desperately to gain her bearings. There was two of everything …
Where was Pashra? She squeezed her eyes shut then opened them. Her double vision merged back to normal, thank Tymora. She fixed her gaze back on Pashra. He hadn’t advanced, but neither was he down. Instead, the blue-green hulk was carefully working the dagger out of his eye. Red fluid oozed from the socket, but when the blade came free, Riltana watched with horrified amazement as the punctured eye gradually re-inflated, until it was completely whole once more. Pashra swung his rejuvenated gaze on her and said, “I’m an oni mage. And you’re overmatched, little spy.”
Yells of concern filtered through the closed office door. By the sound of it, the workers wondered if Pashra was all right. Apparently they didn’t know his secret identity as a monster. She needed to distract him. So Riltana fished.
“What’s your connection to the arambarium mine?”
The oni’s overlarge features stretched into an expression of surprise. “You know we’re after the arambarium?”