"This defies all probability," Jack coughed. "Two beatings in one night, commenced in the exact same fashion. I shall henceforward trust no man wearing a cloak."
"Hello, Jack," purred Ashwillow. The Hawk Knight knelt so that she was able to meet his eyes. "You've been quite a busy burglar of late, haven't you? Dueling wizards in the streets, socializing with the privileged classes, crawling around in Sarbreen doing who knows what… honestly, I don't see how you find the time."
"I know of several black-hearted scoundrels who bear me a striking resemblance," Jack wheezed. His guts ached as if red-hot skewers had been stuck through him. "I would love to help you, dear lady, but I am afraid I cannot be held answerable to their misdeeds."
"What did you steal for Elana?" demanded Marcus. "Where did you meet her? Time's running short, and I am not going to play games with you." To emphasize his point he dragged Jack to his feet and threw him against the wall with great disregard for both rogue and building.
Jack tried to straighten up but couldn't; his stomach hurt too much. He panted for a long moment, trying to master the pain. Someday, he promised himself, I am going to find out where Marcus lives, and then when he is on his way home from a late night at a tavern, I am going to jump out of the shadows and beat him with a board.
He considered whether or not he should tell them the truth about Elana. After all, he hardly owed her any loyalty. Three things stopped him: first, telling the truth was foreign to his nature; second, admitting that he'd unwittingly aided the Warlord Myrkyssa Jelan didn't seem like it would make the Hawk Knights leave him alone; third, and most significantly, Iphegor the Black appeared in a sulfurous belch of smoke and screamed at Marcus, "There you are! Oh, now shall I have my vengeance upon you, wretched thief and craven mouse murderer!"
"I beg your pardon?" Marcus said, blank bafflement in his face.
"Remarkable," Jack managed.
Obviously, Iphegor had used some spell to transport him to the vicinity of the man who'd pillaged his tower and wrought the end of his familiar, because here he stood. But Iphegor did not know, could not know, that Jack was Jack and not Marcus, since the thief had used the seeming spell to take on the Hawk Knight's appearance during the unpleasant affair in the necromancer's tower.
Jack looked at Marcus and Ashwillow and straightened a little bit. "Oh, are you in for it now."
Iphegor, already in the process of casting some dire spell, hesitated half a heartbeat as he glanced sideways at Jack. The two knights goggled in amazement, still trying to grasp the implications of the sorcerer's spectacular appearance. Then Iphegor dismissed the small, well-pummeled popinjay before him as insignificant to his mission, stepped back, and raised his voice, conjuring a horrible doom down upon the unfortunate Hawk Knights. Marcus sprang toward the necromancer to halt his spell, while Ashwillow dove for cover.
Jack worked a simple spell and jumped straight up with all his might, carried aloft by dancing emerald energy. He gained the rooftop of Eldritch, Lightfoot, Findrol, amp; Company with one bound just as Iphegor's spell detonated under him, filling the narrow alleyway with black, searing flames that washed out into the street and erupted into the sky overhead. Jack risked one glance below, just enough to see a very singed-looking Marcus seize hold of Iphegor's throat while the wizard raised a very deadly looking wand to smite him again. Sorcerous black flames engulfed both the trading house and the building across the alleyway, burning weirdly without light but igniting the buildings nonetheless.
Ashwillow rose up from behind a high stone curb, only partially singed. She aimed a wicked crossbow in Jack's general direction, but before she could let fly with the bolt, Jack conjured a solid sheet of billowing vaporous fog in the alleyway, obscuring all vision. The knight's quarrel flew off over his shoulder.
"The roof! He's on the roof!" Ashwillow cried.
"Bugger the spy! Help me!" Marcus replied, striving to keep Iphegor's deadly wand from his face.
Jack turned and ran for his life. Behind him, spells thundered and steel rang in the fog and confusion as Iphegor and the Knights blundered and fought in the mists.
"You will not escape me so easily, thief!" shrieked Iphegor once, distantly, and then Jack abandoned the scene altogether.
Since it was clear that his apartments were under the surveillance of various parties that wished him ill, Jack elected to avoid going home. "The hour is late, drink has fogged my wits, and I desperately require sleep," Jack mused, perched on a rooftop several blocks away. A roaring fire filled with golden sparks marked the place where Jack and Iphegor had recently parted ways, and he saw no reason to return to the scene. "My various bolt-holes and haunts throughout the city may be watched tonight, so I need to find a place of comparative safety and seclusion."
He thought hard for a moment, considering and discarding various plans, until he struck upon one that seemed workable. "Ontrodes has plenty of room in his tower. I am sure that a gold crown will purchase a night's stay and cheerful hospitality in an atmosphere of rustic scholarship and charming antiquity." At once Jack alighted from the rooftops and set off toward Shadystreets, splashing through the rain-soaked streets and whistling merrily to ward off cutpurses and murderers lurking in the dark alleyways of the poorer neighborhoods.
He reached Ontrodes's street and picked up his pace, anxious to be inside. Few streetlights burned in this part of the city, and the evening here had a restless, watchful feel to it, as if unseen eyes studied his every move in breathless patience. Jack hurried about halfway down the street and then stopped in confusion.
"Evidently, I am more intoxicated than I thought," he muttered. "Ontrodes's tower is not on this street, which begs the question, which street am I on?"
He halted and looked about to get his bearings. On his right hand stood the Dyddow Barrelworks, exactly where it was supposed to be at the end of Riverview Road, and he'd just passed the Red Ravens firefighters' hall on his left not fifty yards back. This was the right spot, but Ontrodes's tower was not here. Narrowing his eyes suspiciously, Jack turned in a slow circle, studying his surroundings carefully on the off chance that some incredibly ambitious trickster had moved the sage's tower in order to have a hard-earned laugh at his expense. A dilapidated house joined to a shapeless mound of rubble caught his eye.
"Wrack and ruin!" Jack cried. "Ontrodes's tower has finally collapsed entirely!" And indeed, the precarious angle at which the sage's small round tower had leaned for years evidently proved too much for mere stone and mortar to bear. The small house still stood, although it leaned drastically in the other direction now that it had been freed of the tower's pull. The stone archway joining house to tower remained more or less intact and was now covered loosely by a ragged piece of canvas that hung damply in the rain. Books and fragments of books lay crushed beneath the rubble or strewn here and there across the muddy streets.
Jack shook himself out of his amazement and bounded up to the cottage door. He cast one more glance at the stones piled up beside him, and then hammered on the door to the sage's dilapidated demesnes.
"Ontrodes, Ontrodes! Open up! I have urgent business with you!"
There was no immediate response, so Jack decided simply to hammer continuously on the door until he provoked one. Certainly the sage's neighbors began to express their dissatisfaction after a few minutes of Jack's attention, screeching obscenities out of open windows and threatening him with horrible violence if he didn't cease and desist.
After two or three minutes of incessant hammering, the door was suddenly thrown open from within. Ontrodes, dressed in a wine-stained robe, stood there, rubbing his eyes blearily as he stared at Jack. "What harm have I ever done to you, you impudent whelp? Have you not done enough? What is it to be now?"