“Are you leaving us any food or clothing?” Mixun gasped, clutching his arms against the knife-sharp wind.
“I’ve none to give you,” Tamaro said. The quarter-elf s features were not without sympathy. He came to the longboat’s prow and opened his coat, revealing the hilt of a sturdy iron dagger. Concealing his movement from the sailors behind him, Tamaro flipped the weapon over the side. Mixun caught it before it clanked on the rocks.
“And now we’re done,” said Tamaro. “May you find the fate you deserve.”
He resumed his place at the rudder and ordered the sailors to backwater. The longboat grated off the gravel beach, spun around, and rowed briskly away. As it receded, Mixun saw Tamaro’s face, white against his dark wool cloak, as he looked back at them several times.
“Wretch!” said Mixun. “He should’ve used his dagger on Captain Persayer!”
Raegel took the weapon and began sawing through the cords around his wrists. “But it was very decent of him to help us,” he said. Lengths of cord fell at his feet. Free, he set to work on Mixun’s bonds. “I always had hope for Tamaro.”
Mixun raised a single eyebrow. His partner had the habit of making puns at the worst possible moment, like the time in Ergoth they were caught selling painted lead bars as real gold, and were thrown into a dank, rat-infested dungeon in Gwynned. Mixun remarked about having been in worse jails, to which Raegel said, “As prisons go, this wasn’t so bad, barring the windows.”
“Don’t start,” Mixun said. He shivered hard. His flimsy city finery, intended to impress the gullible, was no help against the climate. Already the brass buckles on his knee breeches were conducting blistering cold into his legs. His thin velvet boots offered little resistance to the insistent chill.
It began to snow.
“We’ve got to find shelter,” he said. “We’ll be dead in an hour if we don’t.”
Raegel stamped his feet, trying to warm them. “Maybe there are caves in the cliffs?”
There was nothing better to try, so they set off for the towering glacier. Before the snow completely closed them in, Mixun cast a last look. Seahorse, topsails set, was driving out to sea. Someday, he fumed, someday he and Captain Persayer would cross paths again, and the result would be much different.
“Come on,” Raegel was calling. He’d found a path to the glacier. Different layers of ice had fractured and fallen, creating a broad, slippery set of steps leading to the summit. Mixun untied the ribbon holding his hair in place and combed the long strands forward to protect his dark, frowning face from the raw wind.
Raegel, Rafe’s son, was a country boy from Throt. At twenty-four, he’d been on the run for seven years. While hoeing onions on his family’s farm one day, he was taken by a press gang from the Knights of Neraka. The Knights needed men to fill out the depleted ranks of their army, and lately they’d begun impressing free men rather than hiring expensive mercenaries. Raegel went along without a fight, and the press gang sergeant was the first of many to take him for a simpleton. He didn’t look like he had two thoughts to rub together. Tall, gangling, with a shock of red hair that had the habit of standing up on his head like a worn-out broom, Raegel learned at an early age to let people think what they wanted about him. While everyone discounted his wits, Raegel went about life with a peculiar grace, unhindered by conscience.
He escaped the unwary Nerakans, and after various adventures, made his way to Sanction, where he found work as a footman to the seer Gashini. Old Gashini did a lucrative trade in fortune-telling and dispensing advice to the high and low in Sanction, but his powers were not derived from magic. Gashini was a snoop, and he employed an army of lesser snoops to ferret out gossip and private news which he later dispensed as supernatural revelations. Raegel learned pick-pocketing and eavesdropping from Gashini, among other vices.
While working waterfront grog shops for his master, Raegel met a kindred spirit-a tough, sullen young fellow named Mixun, “short for Mixundan-talus,” as he often said. Mixun was down on his luck. He wouldn’t speak of his origins, but he’d come to Sanction as the bodyguard of a steel merchant named Wendelsee. Wendelsee had died-poisoned by a jealous rival-and Mixun was left without gainful employ. It was hard for a bodyguard to find a new job when it was commonly known his last master had perished violently.
The two men hit it off, although a more disparate pair would be hard to imagine. The tall, seemingly guileless Raegel and the dark, dangerous-looking Mixun began running small capers of their own, like rigged dice games, or liberating high-value goods from warehouses. They did well at petty larceny for a while, until the lord governor of Sanction, Hogan Bight, announced his intention to clean up the waterfront and drive out the criminal gangs hiding there. Less than a week after Bight’s decree, Raegel and Mixun found themselves invited to leave town, which they did, taking ship to the west before the leaves changed that fall.
Ironically, the duo did very well in honest, upright Solamnia. Posing as refugees from Nerakan oppression, they worked a number of successful capers in Port o’ Call, including the pearl scam. They salted oysters with seed pearls and convinced their marks they could grow pearls of any size by using a magical powder (which was just black sand from Sanction). They worked this scam successfully three times. On the fourth try, they ran afoul of Captain Persayer, who was not fooled. Instead of a handsome payoff, the farm boy from Throt and the sullen bodyguard found themselves taken by the vindictive captain and left to die on the frozen shore.
By the time they reached the top of the glacier, the snow was pelting down in great feathery globs. It was very wet, sticky snow, and they quickly found themselves soaked through to the skin.
Raegel gazed across the featureless plateau of ice. His scarecrow hair was laden with handfuls of fluffy white snow. “I don’t see any place to go.”
Mixun replied, “Inland is just ice. We must stay close to the ocean, where the glaciers break off. Maybe we’ll find a cave or something.”
They trudged on, the taller Raegel breaking a trail. Every footfall broke through the crust of ice over the last layer of snow, and lifting his heavy feet reminded Mixun of trying to free himself from a bear trap. They blundered on like this for almost a mile, getting colder and wetter with every faltering step, then Raegel broke through an extra deep drift and sank into the snow up to his chest. He struggled for a moment, lost his balance, and fell face down in the snow. Mixun halted. His friend tried to stand, but another shell of ice cracked beneath him, and he disappeared below the surface.
“Raegel! Ho, Raegel!”
Mixun moved forward carefully, but not carefully enough. The ice gave way under him too, and he slid feet first into the depths.
He slid quite a ways-more than twice his own height-before coming to rest against a pile of loose snow. Mixun sat up and saw Raegel lying on his stomach a few feet away.
“Ho!” he said. “Are you alive?”
“So far,” was the whispered reply. “Don’t talk so loud, if you want to keep living.”
Mixun looked around and saw the reason for Raegel’s concern. They had fallen into a large hollow in the ice, ten feet or more below the surface, and if the rest of the roof gave way, they’d be buried alive under tons of ice and snow.
With great deliberation, Raegel sat up. His face and hands were chalk-white with cold, leaving only the tips of his ears and his nose with any color in them. Mixun was shocked, but knew he was at least as far gone.
“Well, we’re out of the storm,” Mixun said in a very low voice.
His lanky friend remarked, “Snow news is good news.”
Mixun was too cold to groan. He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his square chin on them.
“Never thought I’d go like this,” he muttered. “I always thought I’d die with a sword in my hand, fighting to the end.”