Ghostwalker - Erik Scott De Bie [53]
At least Walker thought that the giant of a man they called Bilgren was the third attacker-he would not know until he faced the barbarian, until he could feel that same soul of hatred he had sensed that night fifteen years before.
In keeping with his thoughts, the rain strengthened from a dreary drizzle to a gloomy downpour.
Eluding the grim-faced guards at the sole gate of Quaervarr was not a problem. Though they were sharp-eyed and suspicious, clutching their silver-headed spears tightly, visibility was reduced to almost nothing in the rain. Walker slipped through the shadows, hidden in his heavy cloak, within a sword's length of the guards.
A shadow in the rain, he made his way up the empty main street. Few townsfolk came out on a good night, fewer when it rained so heavily. Walker did not need his eyes to navigate the town, for he had walked its streets many times before, unseen and unknown by the townsfolk.
As the street opened up into the main plaza, the rain let up for a moment, and Walker lifted his head. He could see the lamplights bright in the windows of Greyt's manor. He could see faces inside those windows and the shadowy silhouettes of moving figures, but he did not think much on them. He knew that he would be inside that place soon enough.
He turned north and started down the road toward the oldest part of town, through the original shadowtop gates, where the first settlers had set up camp in what would become Quaervarr. Townsfolk claimed that the additional settlers carried a shade of cowardice because they had stayed south, close to the Silverymoon road, where help could come the fastest. It made for a tiny difference, but the northern Old District carried more of a frontier feel.
Bilgren's house, a stout former tavern the barbarian had bought for its ale store and wine cellar, squatted dankly a few buildings down the road next to an unmanned merchant wagon filled with goods in bundles. The entire place seemed worn and abused, even at this distance. The second floor balcony had half-collapsed from mildew and rot and most of the windows were boarded up. The building might have seemed condemned but for the thick iron door set in the front. Carved with roaring tigers, the door represented Bilgren's measure of his own strength-local legend said the barbarian had carried the several hundred pound door single-handedly from the smiths of his homeland, hundreds of miles distant.
Lost in his thoughts, Walker was completely surprised when a hand reached out of an alley, seized him by the shoulder, and yanked him from the hazy night into pitch darkness.
Walker recovered enough from the surprise to draw his shatterspike in the blink of an eye and slash up and across at his unseen attacker. The hand released his shoulder and the dark figure leaped back, but Walker did not let up. He followed, his blade thrusting up and down, then slashing right to left. The first thrust the attacker managed to dodge and the second scraped off hard steel, as of armor. The high slash slammed against a hastily raised shield, a parry that barely managed to block it. The shield did not resist the sword's cut directly, but instead let the slash continue, straight into the wall of a nearby building, where the shield held it.
Releasing the sword, Walker lunged forward and shouldered his opponent, who was already off balance, against the wall of the nearby building. A long sword came up, held in the attacker's other hand, and Walker immediately stepped inside its reach, putting his shoulder against the upper right arm, and held his opponent against the cracked timber wall with his body. The overhang stopped the rain from falling on Walker's head, but the darkness obscured his attacker's face.
"Stop-" he started to say, but a flash of lightning overhead lit the alley for the barest of instants and bathed his opponent's face in light.
It was the auburn-haired woman, the one he had happened across in the alley, saved from an unknown