"You didn't have to do that!" she screamed down at him. "He wasn't any danger to us! We could have just walked away."
"Mellorin-"
"My father's not the only monster I've got to deal with, is he?"
"Mellorin, it was an ogre." And then, apparently bewildered that his explanation wasn't sufficient, he could only blink as she unleashed a low growl and stalked away as rigidly as the marsh would allow.
Kaleb, too, watched her go, brow furrowed in thought, and made no move to aid Jassion out of the muck.
Chapter Fourteen
BOISTEROUS CACOPHONY and stifling heat battled for the right to claim possession of the Third Sheet's common room, while a thick miasma of alcohol and body odor waited in the wings to challenge the victor. Shutters and the front door gaped wide, propped open by sticks or stones, but the gentle breeze that wafted through, stirring sawdust across the floor and hair across many heads, was no match for the roasting temperature within. Press so many bodies together, fill the air with the hot breath of laughter and conversation, add just a pinch of smoke from the kitchen fires, and the result was a refuge where summer lingered long after the rest of the city had kicked it out.
Given its halfway clever name, Corvis had hoped for more from the Third Sheet, but it was just another tavern. Tables and chairs stretched unevenly across the room. Laborers and craftsmen-some as uneven as the furniture-sat scattered around those tables or along a bar formed of a single tremendous log. Barmaids with harried faces and pinch-bruised bottoms wended through the throng, delivering drinks and plates of roast something-or-other on orders from a bearded bartender with an equally harried face (though, one might assume, a less battered rear).
A number of the larger men, and no small handful of women, carried themselves with the posture of professional soldiers. Even half drunk, clustered around a table and trading jests coarse enough to send a sailor diving overboard, they kept watch on the door, and on occasion a particularly startling sound inspired a few to drop their hands toward their waists.
Corvis, clad in the scruffiest traveling leathers he possessed-which was saying something-had seated himself a few tables away. He nursed a tankard of more foam than ale, and tried his best to make sure they noticed him watching them, all while appearing as though he was trying to be inconspicuous.
Harder, by far, than it sounds.
Eventually, however, one of the women met his gaze once too often. Scowling, she elbowed the fellow beside her and whispered, pointing Corvis's way with a chin so pronounced it was practically belligerent. Her companion, in turn, said something to the man beside him, and a moment later Corvis found his table surrounded by five tipsy soldiers.
This plan made a lot more sense before I actually put it in motion, he thought grimly.
'Don't most of them?'
"You got a problem?" the woman who'd first noticed him demanded, leaning across the table on her knuckles.
"I do," Corvis told her, deliberately keeping his hands well away from Sunder. "But not with you. Actually, it occurs to me you might be able to help me." He offered up what he hoped was a friendly grin. "Join me for a round?"
"You buyin'?" one of the others rasped.
"Wouldn't be a very polite invitation if I wasn't."
Amazing what the promise of free drink did for their attitudes. As Corvis waved over the nearest barmaid, he found himself suddenly surrounded by his best friends in the world.
More of them, he realized with a quick head count, than had actually come to threaten him in the first place.
"So," he said, once everyone was settled with tankard, mug, horn, or flagon in hand, "it seems to me that you folk have the look of fighting men. And women," he added, with what he hoped was a respectful-and perhaps just slightly appraising-glance at the sharp-featured soldier. She smirked and raised her mug. "And I'm thinking, with you being here in the city, and rumor telling me that the various House and mercenary companies are assembling outside the cities, that at least some of you must be city guards. Right so far?"
Nods and assenting grunts proved adequate, if not eloquent, response.
Corvis took a deliberately messy swig of his own beverage, wiping foam from his mustache. "So would I also be right in guessing, then, that some of you could tell me a bit about those murders that happened here recently?"
The table went dangerously silent, smiles flipping over and inside out into aggressive glowers. "Some of us lost friends that night," one man muttered darkly. "What makes you think that we'd want to talk to you about it?"
"Look," Corvis said, leaning inward, "I think we've all heard who was responsible, right? Well, there's an awfully large price on his head because of it. I don't pretend my odds of finding him are all that good, but I'm looking to collect on it. A man could retire on what they're offering, and the gods haven't yet answered my prayers about getting younger."
"You're a bounty hunter?" the women to his left asked.
"I am." Then, after an almost imperceptible pause, "Evislan Kade, at your service."
"We don't need any help from your kind," the first fellow grumbled.
"I don't doubt that," Corvis said lightly. "But you're stuck here. If You-Know-Who is still in Denathere, fine, you'll get him, and gods help him when you do. But you think he is still in Denathere? He's killed folk from here to Mecepheum, and if he's moved on, wouldn't you want to see him get what's coming to him? Even if you can't do it yourselves?"
The guards glanced and mumbled at one another, working through the logic in what "Evislan" said. While they considered, Corvis took the opportunity to order them all a second round, wincing only slightly at the tab he was racking up.
It did the trick, though. "All right," the woman said to him, hostility once more gone from her voice. "What is it you want to know?" THE CLOUDS HUNG LOW AND PREGNANT over Denathere, overripe fruit seemingly ready to burst. The scent of autumn rains perfumed the air, but the mischievous sky would only tease, withholding the cleansing showers it promised.
Corvis took it all in as he walked the streets: the shuffle and clatter of passersby, the looming faces of edifices nearly as old as Mecepheum's, the occasional flicker as beggars and urchins earned a few coppers by lighting the street lamps in advance of evening.
And he hated it, loathed every last inch of it with a burning passion that startled him after so many years. This damn city represented everything that had gone wrong in his life. Here, his first campaign had ground to a halt in bitter failure. Here, though he'd not recognized it at the time, he'd left behind sufficient clues to alert not one mortal foe, but two, to the nature of the wondrous prize he'd sought. And here, Audriss the Serpent had reignited the slow-burning embers of his own conquest into a roaring conflagration that had dragged Corvis from his family and ultimately cost him everything he'd loved.
There were places he'd want to be even less than the city of Denathere-but not many.
It had been Seilloah's idea to come here. "Maybe it's from spending several days as a dog on my way to find you," she'd said, "but it seems to me that if you're looking to track someone, you start where the trail started."
Corvis hadn't been able to argue with her, as much as he desperately wanted to. They had to examine the murder scenes, maybe find some clues there they'd not unearth anywhere else. He couldn't safely return to Mecepheum, and since the only other "Rebaine murders" that they knew were more than idle rumor had occurred here, they'd had precious little choice.
So here they'd come. Corvis scoured the taverns of Denathere, leaving Irrial to ask questions of the more affluent and influential, and with every moment he seethed beneath the fury, the hatred, and the burning shame the city cast on him from all sides.