Megan shrugged. “Why use up good miles when we’re so close? We might as well walk. It’s not like the forest’s haunted, or anything.”
“I haven’t heard that it is,” Leif said. “But still…”
“If you want to jump, okay,” Megan said. “But a few miles in the dark doesn’t bother me.”
“Oh, well…you’re right, I guess. Come on.”
They walked. Getting to Minsar took them something over an hour, and they heard and smelled the place long before they saw it. It was not the city proper they smelled first, though. It was the battlefield, down by the fords.
Subjective time in Sarxos passed more slowly than it did in the real world. Rodrigues had apparently intended this from the beginning, both as a way for his players to get more experience for their money, and as a punning reference to the old legends about the way time was supposed to go more slowly for those taken away by elves or other supernatural beings into the Otherworlds. This meant that it might have been a week and a half in the outside world since Shel Lookbehind’s battle with Delmond, but here only a few days had passed; and not even a whole army of scavengers could have cleaned up the Fords of Artel by now. It being well after dark, the carrion birds were gone. But as Leif and Megan walked down to the fords, and their footsteps crunched on the gravelly strand, many glinting eyes looked at them from across the river, curious, their feasting disturbed.
“It’s just wolves,” Leif said.
Megan gritted her teeth, as much at the smell as at the sight of all those interested eyes, as the two of them waded across through the cold swift water. “Just. Just about a hundred of them.”
“Smells like they’ve got plenty to keep them busy,” Leif said. “They won’t bother us.”
“Nope,” Megan said softly. Leif glanced at her, and looked slightly surprised at the length and sharpness of the knife that had suddenly appeared in her hand.
“Where’d you have that?” he said.
“Out of sight,” Megan said, as they made their way through the middle of the battlefield — there was no use trying to go around it; bodies were everywhere. The eyes watched them as they passed, then became interested once again in their grisly meals. In the silence of the night, the wet sound of flesh being eaten and bones being chewed was loud.
Megan was very glad when they finally got up to the road, and the noise faded away behind them, around a curve. The smell took rather longer to wane, and by the time it was gone, they were already smelling Minsar’s sewage system, which dumped the run-offs from the gutters down the centers of its streets into pools out beyond the walls.
Minsar was several hundred years old, and had outgrown its walls twice. Around the outsides of the old granite-block walls was a more or less permanent town of tents and shanties, and the inevitable little crowd of industries too foul-smelling or dangerous to be allowed to do business inside the walls, like the tanners and papermakers and the bakers (like other cities, Minsar had discovered that, under the right conditions, flour could become a high explosive). Now, though, there was a new ring of tents and temporary structures outside the “outer ring”: the pavilion and wagons of the army that had defended Minsar, and the structures of several other groups of warriors, large and small, who had come there under the auspices of one lord or another to check the situation out.
Megan and Leif made their way toward the city gates through a maelstrom of noise and ferocious odors. Roasting meat, spilled wine, baking bread (the bakers were apparently working twenty-four hours a day to meet the increased demand), horses and horse dung, the stinking stagnant pools under the city walls, the occasional drift of perfume from some passing camp-follower or newly scrubbed-and-scented soldier just out of the bathhouses built outside the walls, all their smells wove together amid the sound of the many voices speaking or shouting in many languages, laughing, cursing, joking, talking. Leif and Megan listened to the talk as best they could as they made their way to and through the gates.
The gate-wardens were keeping only the slackest watch. The town was plainly still in holiday mood after being saved from being sacked by Delmond. Most of the talk around Leif and Megan, as they made their way down the cobbled open space of the main street, was about that: the narrow escape, the army suddenly without its leader, and what would happen to that army now.
“Where’d the knife go?” Leif said softly.
“Away,” Megan said.
“Good. Knives are illegal in here.”
“Don’t think anyone’ll be able to enforce the statute tonight,” Megan said, looking around at the hordes of armed men and women milling around, trying to get into the town-square taverns, or spilling out of them with drinks in hand. She found herself trying not to stare at one gaudily dressed hunchbacked dwarf who crossed her path, pushing his way through the crowd and waving a miniature sword, to the guffaws of others. “You want to try taking the swords off all these people? How many watchmen do you think there are in Minsar?”
“Tonight? Fewer than usual,” Leif said. “I take your point.”
They drifted past another crowd outside a tavern door. Inside was an impossible crowd, packed together like medieval sardines, shouting and pushing to get to the bar or to get away from it. A burly barmaid was pushing through the crowd with double handfuls of beer mugs, made not of glass or ceramic, but of leather, tarred inside. She was using the leather “jacks” as effective offensive weapons, and there was a small clear space around her as people backed off to avoid being splashed or trampled.
Leif drifted into the crowd outside the door and burrowed into it a little way, and Megan followed him. The rush of voices closed over her head like water over a swimmer.
“—don’t know why Ergen insists on coming in at night when it’s going to be the most crowded—”
“—get out of here—”
“—up in the big hall looking for Elblai, she didn’t stay there long, so I thought—”
“—too many idiots in here looking to get drunk and start a brawl, I wouldn’t—”
“—five malts and a burned-wine—”
Megan watched one of the earlier speakers head out of the crowd, followed by a couple of friends. She nudged Leif, and gestured him away.
He nodded, following her a little way out of the press. “It’s a pity they don’t have showers here,” he muttered. “I feel like I need one after that.”
“Hey, the night is young. Listen, I heard a name I know.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Elblai. See those guys? Going down that little lane. Come on.”
He looked around, located them in the crowd: two tall men, two smaller ones, and one who was very short indeed, heading off down a street which was more the size of an alley. Megan headed on after them.
Leif followed. “What did they say?”
“Just something that made me feel nosy.” She smiled slightly in the torchlit dimness. “When you spy long enough, you get hunches about what’s worth listening to. This could be something.”
Megan turned into the lane, with Leif behind her. The lane was no more than four feet wide, with shuttered doors and windows on both sides. “This isn’t a street,” Leif muttered, “it’s a walk-in closet.” Down at the end of the lane, one door was open a crack. The flicker of firelight streamed through it, and from inside came the mostly shut-in sound of more talk, laughter, shouting.
The door opened wider to let in the men who were ahead of Megan and Leif, then started to close again. Megan pushed forward to follow them before the door closed completely. She squeezed through, trying to make it look casual. Inside, there was a fireplace directly across from the door, and beside it a hatch leading through into the kitchen. The hatch had a broad sill with several pitchers of beer waiting on it, and as Megan and Leif came in, hands poked out through the hatch and handed a passing server a roast chicken on a plate. This was apparently a moderately classy place. Where other taverns might have had torches stuck in iron brackets in the walls, this one had real lamps, oil lamps with glass in them. On the old scarred tables scattered around there were rushlights, each rush clamped into a little iron holder and burning like a small smoky star. Most of the tables were full of people eating and smoking and drinking and talking.