Leif nodded and sat back, stretching his legs out. “Even if we’re not already on the right track, which I doubt,” he said, “we should be able to find out something useful up in Minsar, if as you say the big players are converging on the place. The gossip always runs hottest after a battle…especially a battle where one of the protagonists got bounced.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Megan said. “If we can just — What is it?” she said curiously, for Leif was suddenly looking under the next table again.
“Uh-oh,” Leif said. “Well, I guess this has gone far enough. Esmiratovelithoth!”
There was a BANG! of displaced air from under the table. Heads snapped up all around the room, most noticeably that of the guy cleaning the almost-Glock. Everyone stared.
From beneath the table, somewhat grimy and swearing, the inn’s landlord crawled. His face and arms were badly scratched; the marks looked like cat scratches, but seemed much deeper and wider than they should have. Muttering, but pointedly not looking at Leif, the landlord got to his feet, brushed himself off, and headed for the kitchen, swearing with constantly increasing fluency as he went.
The dark-cloaked boy in the chimney corner was laughing, more at the guy with the Glock than at the innkeeper. Megan looked after the latter with interest. “He was that mouse?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Doesn’t that violate the square-cube law or something? I mean, what did he do with all that mass while he was mouse-sized?”
“Hey,” Leif said, “it’s magic, which means the software handles the sordid details. Don’t ask me about software design…it’s not my specialty.”
They got up. Megan tossed a coin ringing to the table. The innkeeper’s daughter swooped on it, bit it in the approved fashion, and stowed it away in her bodice. “This one’s on me,” Megan said as the girl went away. “Under the circumstances, you might get in trouble if you tried to pay. Guy might think you were putting a curse on him.”
“Now I would never do a thing like that.”
“Tell him,” Megan said, glancing back at the glaring, swearing innkeeper.
They made their way out.
Megan was just as glad to be leaving, as a fight had begun brewing between the Glock guy and the dark-cloaked man sitting close to the fireplace. “You lookin’ at me?” the Glock guy was demanding. “Nobody else here to look at. You lookin’ at me?”
“Gonna be lively in there in a few minutes,” she said as she and Leif headed toward the big square of grass that was the “village green” in front of the Pheasant and Firkin.
“Better to get away now then,” Leif said. “More interesting stuff’s going on in Minsar anyway. By the way, when we get there, do we ‘know each other’?”
Megan thought about that as they made their way through the evening dark to an empty patch of grass across from the tavern. Here and there, in the grass, sheep were grazing, and they had left in the grass the kind of thing sheep frequently leave behind them, so that Megan watched where she put her feet. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t. There are enough chance meetings in Sarxos that no one’s likely to suspect anything in particular. And neither of us is high-profile enough to attract any attention by being in the other’s company.”
“Right,” Leif said. “Okay, we can make the transit from here.”
“Not there,” Megan said, pointing at the ground. “Unless you want to bring that big lump of sheep by-product with us.”
“Oh.” Leif moved over a few feet. “Right.”
“How big is the transit locus?” Megan said.
“Five feet. Ready? Here we go.”
Megan looked around her to make sure nothing she needed was outside the five-foot locus. Nothing was. Her weapons were all very closely fastened to her person, the ones that weren’t already part of her.
Leif said a sixteen-syllable word.
The world went black, then white, then dark again, and Megan’s ears popped hard. Then a few seconds later, they popped again, while she was still trying to rub the dancing phosphene-dots out of her eyes. The problem with these transit spells was that they briefly did the virtual-reality equivalent of popping you into and out of hyperspace, and left you disoriented and half blind for some seconds, as if someone had blown off a flashbulb in your face.
Megan blinked. Her vision was returning fast. They were standing in the profound stillness of a thick dark pine forest, of the kind that appeared in entirely too many fairy tales, and night was coming on fast. The city of Minsar was nowhere to be seen.
“You missed,” she said, trying hard not to sound too accusatory.
“Merde,” Leif muttered, “bloody damn du tonnere, how’d that happen?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Megan said, restraining herself to keep from laughing. She knew Leif was good with languages, but this was not the kind of use she normally pictured such a talent being put to. “Let’s just find out where we are.”
“Yeah, right…” Leif looked around him, then put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, piercingly.
Megan watched with slight envy. Even with four brothers, this was one talent she had been unable to master. Her teeth were apparently just in the wrong places relative to one another. Leif whistled again, louder, then looked around, expectant.
There was a rustling in a pine tree near them. Something black dropped from a higher branch to a lower one.
It was a pathfinder bird. The birds were positioned here and there around the game as general advice-givers. In Sarxos, if nowhere else, you could safely claim, when someone asked you about something, that “a little bird told you.” Some of them were not so little. This one was the size and color of a crow, but it had an intelligent and slightly nasty look that few crows could have mastered.
“Hey,” Leif said, “we need advice.”
“Just got a fresh supply in this morning,” said the bird, in a rather smarmy voice that suggested that it had been a used-car dealer in a previous life. “If you turn off here and take that road for a mile or so,” and it pointed off to the left with its beak, “you’ll find before you, on a high peak, a fair maiden lying on the rock, surrounded by fire—”
“Oh, no, no way,” Leif said hurriedly. “I know how that one ends. Nuclear war would be preferable.”
“You sure wouldn’t get as much singing afterwards,” Megan said. “Bird, which way is Minsar from here?”
The bird eyed her coolly. “What’s it worth to you?”
“Half an English muffin?”
The bird considered. “You’re on.”
Megan rooted around in her pack and came up with it, beginning to crumble it onto the ground. The bird flew down and began pecking at the bits, but Megan took a step forward and shooed it away.
“Hey!” said the bird, aggrieved.
“Directions first,” said Megan.
“Stay on this road for a mile and a half, take the first left, hold that for a mile and a half, and you’ll be at the fords,” the bird said. “The city’s two miles north of there. Now gimme.”
Megan stepped back, and the bird fluttered forward. “I tell you, it ain’t like it used to be,” it muttered as it started gobbling the muffin crumbs. “No trust, that’s the problem. Nobody trusts anybody anymore.”
Leif chuckled. “Nobody gets anything for nothing here, you mean,” he said. “Bye-bye, birdie.”
The bird, busy stuffing its face, didn’t answer.
They walked away. Leif still looked a little put out at having messed up his first transit. “I can short-jump us from here,” he said. “Coordinates shouldn’t be a problem.”