Grinning, he charged out into the sunlight, only to trip and fall headlong. Something bashed him across the shoulder blades.
He flopped over onto his back. The paunchy, tattooed Whistler who'd been selling falcons stood over him, swinging one of the perches over his head for another blow. It was a clumsy sort of improvised quarterstaff, but it would do to bludgeon a man into submission.
Aeron wondered fleetingly why that particular rogue was meddling in his business. Maybe Kesk had bribed or intimidated the Whistlers into joining the hunt. Or perhaps the wretch was acting on his own initiative. He might want to curry favor with the Red Axes and move up to membership in the more successful gang.
Either way, Aeron had to deal with him quickly, before Tharag and his partner ran back out the door. He tried to twist himself around into position to strike back, but didn't make it in time. The perch hurtled down, and the best defense he could manage was to catch it on his forearms instead of taking it across the face. The blow crashed home with brutal force. Aeron gasped at the pain, and some of the folk in the crowd laughed and cheered the Whistler on. As far as the thief knew, they had no particular reason to favor his assailant over him except that the vendor currently held the upper hand, and the citizens of Oeble tended to enjoy watching a bully administer a good beating.
The perch jerked up into the air. Aeron finished swinging himself around, pulled his knees up to his chest, and lashed out with a double kick. His heels caught the Whistler in the knees, something cracked, and the gang member stumbled back and toppled onto his rump. Aeron hoped he'd crippled the poxy son of a whore.
Alas, he couldn't linger to find out. He had to keep moving. He scrambled to his feet and pivoted this way and that, trying to see what was going on. Squealing, people recoiled from the dagger in his hand, and in so doing, somewhat impeded the advance of the pair of shaggy, long-legged gnolls shambling in his direction.
The hyena-headed Red Axes with their glaring yellow eyes and lolling tongues were blocking the mouth of the cul-de-sac. Aeron had at most a few heartbeats to find another way out of the box. He cast about, looking for a passable alleyway between two of the surrounding spires. He didn't see one.
His only option was to bolt into another of the buildings surrounding the dead end. He dashed toward a doorway, and something smashed down on the top of his head. He collapsed to his knees amid a scatter of clay shards, dry earth, and withered stalks, and he realized someone had leaned out an upper story window and dropped a flower pot on him.
A second such missile shattered beside his right hand and jarred him into action. Shaking off the shock and pain, he scrambled on into the tower.
The building had shops on the ground floor, an ale house to the left and a cobbler to the right. Since their windows opened on the same cul-de-sac he was trying to escape, they were of no use to him. He ran on down a hallway, past the stairs twisting upward and several closed doors that likely led to apartments, seeking a rear exit into the next street over.
Alas, the corridor was a dead end, too. And when he spun back around, the gnolls, Tharag, and the human Red Axe were coming through the entry at the far end.
Aeron tried one of the doors. Locked, and he had no time to pick it or try to break it down. He tested a second.
That one was open. He scrambled through, barred it, and looked around.
As he'd expected, he'd invaded someone's home. The boarder, a haggard-looking, red-eyed woman still dressed in her night clothes, sat at her spinning wheel, performing the labor that likely kept her housed and fed. She gaped at him in fear.
"Sorry," he said, then sprinted toward the one small window.
Behind him, the door rattled, then started banging. The woman gawked for another moment, then she rose and scurried toward the entry. She might not understand what was going on, but she knew she didn't want her door battered down. Aeron almost turned back to restrain her, then he decided his chances would be better if he just kept running.
He squirmed out the window onto a narrow, twisting lane that, like the cul-de-sac, connected to Balamonthar's Street. He dashed to the major thoroughfare, then strode onward through the crowds, no longer running-that would make him too conspicuous-but hurrying. After a few minutes, he permitted himself to believe he'd shaken his pursuers.
He reached under his cowl and gingerly fingered the sore spot where the flower pot had bashed him. He had a lump coming up-it would go nicely with all the bruises he was collecting-but to his relief, his scalp wasn't bloody. Apparently the hood had protected him a little.
So, he'd escaped relatively intact. Outwitted the rest of the world again. He felt the usual surge of exhilaration, the thrill that, as much as the easy coin, accounted for his devotion to the outlaw life.
Yet it wasn't quite as potent as usual. Perhaps Burgell's treachery was to blame. Or the discovery that the Whistlers had joined forces with the Red Axes to hunt him down. Or the way the onlookers had cheered to see him beaten, or the unpleasant surprise of the pot crashing down on his skull. What had that been about?
Shadows of Mask, had all Oeble turned against him?
No, surely not. He just needed to settle this affair of the strongbox, and things would calm down. After a moment's thought, he headed for home, to pick up the lantern he kept there.
CHAPTER 7
With the approach of evening, the Talondance had become more crowded and unruly. The clamor of the customers nearly drowned out the constant reedy music that droned from no visible source, as if ghosts were playing the birdpipes, shaums, and whistlecanes. As she surveyed the assembly of orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, lizard men, and humans who appeared equally savage, Miri was glad that she had a comrade to watch her back.
She turned to Sefris and said, "I don't think you'll have to linger here very long to see things you wouldn't see back in the monastery."
"I imagine you're right," Sefris replied. "In fact, here's one of them now. Look sharp."
An orc clad in a shirt of scale armor crowed and leaned forward to rake in its winnings. A lizard man on the opposite side of the table hissed, threw down its cards, grabbed the hooked short sword that lay naked beside its dwindling stakes, and sprang up from its chair. Its lashing tail tripped a garishly painted whore and sent her staggering.
The orc jumped up, and crossing its arms, it reached to draw the daggers it carried sheathed on either hip. Other orcs and lizard men scrambled toward the scene of the confrontation, while those with no interest in choosing a side scurried to distance themselves from it. A human shouted that he'd give two to one on the scaly folk.
Then a massive form, tall as an ogre but even burlier, as well as less human in its proportions, emerged from a shadowy alcove. Armored in yellow-brown chitin, its feelers quivering, it employed its elongated arms with their long, thick claws to knuckle-walk like an ape. It gnashed its huge mandibles once. Everyone jumped at the sharp rasp, turned, then froze when they saw what had made the sound. After a moment, the orcs and lizard men lowered their weapons.
Miri shook her head. She'd seen many strange things in her career as a scout, but few stranger than an umber hulk maintaining order in a tavern. If she could believe her training, the immense subterranean creatures possessed their own kind of intelligence, but not of a sort that disposed them to cooperate with humans or even goblin-kin.
"Amazing," she said as the umber hulk, evidently satisfied that it had cowed the would-be brawlers, turned away.