Hand of Fire - Ed Greenwood [4]
Thoadrin lifted his eyebrows. "For someone who tries never to guess, you do it very well."
Marlel shrugged. "I do everything very well."
Thoadrin of the Cult made a face, but it might have been the wine. He set his goblet back down and asked, "Do you accept this task?"
"Of course. However, feel free to awe me with your offer of payment."
Thoadrin lifted his fingers in a signal to the guard with the crossbow, who relayed it to someone unseen without taking his eyes off the two men at the table for a moment. Overhead, there was a sudden rattling sound – that became a clacking of wooden things in motion.
"Try," Thoadrin told the slayer-for-hire, "to avoid any tavern-tale remarks for the next few breaths, hey?"
The Dark Blade of Doom waved a hand in agreement. "You're paying," he said simply – as the winch let go in earnest and the bundle from the next floor came down at their heads like hail being hurled in a storm.
It bounced in its net of ropes, just above the tabletop – Thoadrin hastily rescued his goblet – and came to a stop in the air between their eyes: a coffer of ornate, chased electrum, a trio of keys projecting from its row of tiny locks.
Thoadrin waved at it, but Marlel shook his head and gestured to the Cult warrior to fetch it out of the ropes himself. "I never meddle with another man's traps," he explained.
The Cult warrior frowned and lifted the coffer out onto the table. With a flourish he threw back the lid and turned the coffer until the slayer could see the gleaming heap of cold crimson fire within.
"Calishite rubies of the finest cut and clarity," he explained, for all the world as if he was a jeweler hawking stones from a market stall. "A thousand of them in this coffer."
" Tis but half, yes? The balance to come when the task is done?"
Thoadrin smiled a little weakly. "Of course. As is standard in… matters like this."
Marlel smiled his crooked smile. “You can omit the other standard feature of such payments: the attempt to slay the man collecting them. I'm sure you had no such intention, but just as fair warning: don't. Ever.
For I am the Dark Blade of Doom."
Thoadrin of the Cult inclined his head and said simply, "No such treachery is contemplated, or will be."
"And the other practice I regard as treachery?"
Marlel asked. "Hiring someone else to attempt the same task while I'm under hire? Or to cut me down after I make capture but before I can bring the captive to you?"
The Cult warrior scowled. "I'm not accustomed to enacting such fool-headed business practices. They might work for someone who knows he'll be dead on the morrow – but not for me. I intend to be spinning coins for the Followers thirty years from now."
"Understood." Marlel slid a folded armorweave sack out of one leg-pouch, and tipped the coffer until its shining flood of rubies began to flow into the sack.
"I hope you'll not take offense if I leave you your valuable coffer and take the rubies away in this."
"None taken," Thoadrin replied, raising his goblet again in smoothly steady hands. "I do have one professional question, though."
Marlel raised his eyebrows in silent query.
"How do you plan to… get the deed done?"
The Cult warrior sounded genuinely curious. The Dark Blade of Doom smiled his crooked smile and answered, "With, among other things, this." He held out one lazy, long-fingered hand. In it gleamed something small, curved, and silver: a Harper badge.
*******
There was a moment of chill blue mists, with nothing beneath their boots and the sensation of softly, endlessly falling… then the light changed around them, and small stones scraped solidly under their boots amid scrub grass. They were standing in unfamiliar wilderlands, gazing out from a hilltop across rolling hills beyond number, those ahead and to the right crowned by ragged forests.
"You're looking north," Tessaril murmured from beside Shandril's