“We are, on the other hand, very interested in murderers, especially those who choose veteran members of the Defender’s Guild for their victims.” She hefted the shard axe off her shoulder, leveling its dragonshard tip at the changeling. “Riv Caldamus, by order of House Deneith, you are under arrest for the murder of Goren ir’Kados of Fairhaven. Stand up—slowly—and place your hands—”
Sabira didn’t get to finish the command. Caldamus moved faster than she’d anticipated, leaping up and sending his chair flying even as he heaved the table at her. Sabira dodged the cascade of cards and coins and sidestepped around the changeling’s impromptu shield just in time to see a crossbow bolt slam into the underside of the table, grazing his neck and nearly pinning his collar to the wood.
As Caldamus dove for cover behind another table, Sabira shouted at her partner.
“Damn it, Prynn, I want him alive! Aim for his hands, not his head!” As much as she’d like to see the changeling dead, he was worth more alive. And a bolt through the hand would make him less of a threat with those damnable daggers of his—
Sabira didn’t have time to complete the thought before one of those very blades came whizzing toward her face. With an oath, she flipped the urgrosh and brought the head of its axe up, knocking the dagger out of the air with a satisfying clang of metal.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she muttered. If that idiot she’d been assigned to work with got her injured—or worse, cost them their quarry—well, she might not kill him, but she’d make sure he was busted back down to a private riding patrol outside Fort Bones. Worse even than sewer patrol here in Stormreach, it was quite possibly the most miserable, degrading assignment a member of House Deneith could get. As she had good cause to know.
Another crossbow bolt slammed into the tavern floor between tables, flushing Caldamus out. Head down, he ran for the cover of the long wooden bar. Bauerson was there waiting for him with a spiked club, protecting the still and the myriad bottles of spirits lined up against the wall behind it.
Blocked by the tavernkeep, Caldamus balked for a moment, eyeing the distance to the kitchen door. Sabira, on the other hand, didn’t waver.
She ran forward, leaping from the seat of a long bench to the top of the table nearest Caldamus. Without breaking stride, she launched herself off the wooden platform at the changeling. Caldamus turned just in time to get his hands up before she hit him and bore him bodily to the floor, her shard axe caught ineffectually between them.
The changeling closed his hands over the haft on either side of her own, and their tumbling roll abruptly slowed as the urgrosh’s enchantment flowed through him, granting him the same rock-like stability she possessed. They fetched up hard against another long bench, Caldamus on top.
Sabira was momentarily nonplussed to find herself staring up at her own face; the changeling had assumed her features during their roll across the tavern floor. Prynn now had a tangle of limbs with two coppery-haired heads as a target, a tactic Caldamus obviously thought would take the other Marshal out of the picture.
Sabira almost laughed aloud at the thought. Prynn wouldn’t hesitate to put a bolt between her ribs if he thought he could take the changeling out as well. As far as the uncompromising lawman was concerned, she had just as much Defender blood on her hands as Caldamus did and deserved no better fate. An opinion the other Marshal would probably be surprised to learn Sabira shared.
But Prynn would have to wait to see her punished another day. Right now, she had a job to do.
Caldamus pushed the shard axe’s haft upward toward Sabira’s throat. She knew she was stronger than him, but she was also far shorter, a bare handful of inches taller than the average dwarf. Any advantage her wiry strength yielded would be negated once he was bestride her, and her options for extricating herself would diminish considerably. She had to act fast.
While her hands were effectively pinned, her legs were still free. Guessing that the changeling’s transformation had gone no further than his neckline, she brought one knee up between his thighs as hard as she could, simultaneously digging her fingernails deep into the tops of his hands.
Caldamus let out a yelp, releasing his hold on the shard axe as his body instinctively curled inward around the pain.
It was all the opening Sabira needed.
She rolled to the left, using the urgrosh as a lever to thrust the changeling off of her while drawing both knees up to her chest and kicking out at him forcefully. The blow sent him crashing into a nearby table. He bounced off its edge and fell, face-forward, onto the sticky tavern floor.
Sabira was on him in an instant, her knee in his spine to keep him down. She set the shard axe aside—well out of his reach—and yanked his arms behind his back. She then pulled a set of steel manacles out of her pouch and shackled his wrists. The magewrought metal would contract or expand with the size of its wearer, ensuring that the changeling would not be able to wriggle out of his bonds, no matter what form he took. Even so, she placed a set of matching manacles around his ankles; the Defender’s Guild was paying a handsome sum for the changeling’s apprehension, and she didn’t want to take any chances with that sort of money. Once he was trussed to her satisfaction, she climbed off and pulled him roughly to his feet.
She patted him down, removing two more daggers from sheaths strapped to his forearms and hidden by the bloused sleeves of his shirt, one from his belt and another from his boot. They were well-balanced blades and would fetch a good price in the Marketplace. She tossed them on the nearest table and nodded at Bauerson.
“For your trouble.”
As she waited for Prynn to join her, she surveyed the common room. Her offer of the daggers had been a bit premature, it seemed; aside from the upended table and several chairs lying on their sides, it had been a clean takedown. Nothing was even broken—a good thing, considering Greigur’s warning that the next time she destroyed a building trying to apprehend a criminal, she’d pay for the damages out of her own House Kundarak account, which was looking decidedly empty these days.
She pushed Caldamus toward the exit. “Move, changeling. And no games, or I’ll have Prynn, here, skewer you where you stand.”
Caldamus, who’d resumed his blond disguise, shuffled toward the door as quickly as the short chain between his ankles would allow, guided by the spear tip of her urgrosh hovering mere inches from his back.
As they crossed the threshold of the Wavecrest, the men that Korthos’s mayor had loaned to the Marshals tensed, weapons ready, and then relaxed again when they saw that the changeling was hobbled. Sabira had stationed two men outside each of the tavern’s exits, on the off chance that Caldamus got past her and Prynn.
She paused to speak to the mayor’s second in command, a middle-aged man with round cheeks who looked more like a farmer than a warrior, his broadsword notwithstanding.
“Good work,” she said, shaking his hand. His grip was firm, with calluses to show he came by his position honestly. Despite appearances, his was the toughened palm of the swordsman, not the husbandman.
“Always a pleasure to help the Marshals,” he replied, his voice gruff but not unfriendly.
Sabira inclined her head in thanks and nudged Caldamus to keep moving with the pointed toe of her boot.
“Always a pleasure to help the Marshals,” the changeling mocked in a falsetto as he stumbled along. “I wonder if he’d feel the same if he knew you had ‘just as much Defender blood’ on your hands as I do?”
Sabira paused in midstride.
Damn it! The changeling was a Khyber-loving mind-reader! That’s how he’d been able to cheat at cards so easily.