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Kithri scampered up the support beams and crabwalked along the timbers, trying to get a position above the troglodyte while Remy joined the front line, striking low as Lucan had. The troglodyte roared and shifted off its wounded leg, a wild swing from its club shattering the doorframe of the closest stable. It swung again, off balance; Biri-Daar parried its stroke and Lucan drove his sword into its side. Kithri, seeing opportunity, leaped from the ceiling corner and landed on its shoulder. As her feet touched on its shoulders, she lanced the troglodyte’s eyes with twin daggers and leaped away again.

It spun, swinging blindly and missing everything but more timbers. Biri-Daar hacked its right arm mostly off. Remy struck again at the back of its wounded leg. The troglodyte toppled over, its club crashing to the floor next to it. Lucan struck the death blow, opening its throat as it struggled to rise.

In a fury, he was standing over the groggy and terrified stabler Wylegh before the troglodyte had finished dying. “You’ve got some fast talking to do if you want to save your life, friend,” he said, his bloodied sword hovering over Wylegh’s face. “We walk in at your invitation, and the minute we get out of the light there are hobgoblins everywhere. You make a deal with them? Who paid you? What did they want?”

Biri-Daar and Iriani squatted on either side of Wylegh, adding to his fear. Against the other wall of stables, Keverel and Kithri collaborated on ministering to the cleric’s wounds, Keverel whispering healing charms and Kithri sticking on plain old bandages.

“They wanted him,” Wylegh babbled. He was pointing at Remy, who stood a little off to the side and behind the three interrogators. “That’s all they said. Him, the messenger.”

“Who said?” Lucan asked quietly, leaning his sword point a little closer.

“Imps. Imps. They made a deal, they made promises, but it wasn’t just that, once they had me they wouldn’t let go—”

“Fool,” Biri-Daar said. “That’s the only kind of man who makes a deal with anything that comes out of the Abyss.”

“Easy for you to say,” Wylegh said, glaring hard at her. “You dragonborn have got a bit of the Abyss in you, I reckon.”

She stood over him for a long moment, so still that Remy was sure her next move would be a downward stroke to end Wylegh’s life. Yet when she did move, it was to turn her back on him. “Remy, select a horse. Wylegh, tell me how much the horse costs. We will pay you. Then we will make sure that everyone in the market knows what you have done.”

There was a pause. “That’s a death sentence,” Wylegh whispered.

“Hardly,” Iriani said. “You’ll just have to put on your traveling clothes and take one of your horses out on the road. Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, that’s how you got here, no?”

They left Wylegh there while Remy, with Lucan’s aid, selected a horse. It was a fine, large gelding, dappled gray and remarkably calm given everything that had just happened outside its stable door. “How much?” Biri-Daar asked.

“Take it,” Wylegh said. He hadn’t moved from the floor near the tack bench where she had first knocked him over. “Just take it.”

“I pay for what I take,” she said. “Name a fair price.”

Wylegh said nothing.

“Lucan,” Biri-Daar said. “What is that horse worth?”

“What’s it worth, or what would he charge for it?”

“What’s it worth?”

“Eighty, ninety,” Lucan said. “That’s being a bit generous.”

“Generosity never goes unrewarded in the end,” Biri-Daar said. She produced a pouch and counted out the money onto the tack bench. “Traveling money for you,” she said. “We’ll be by for our horses first thing in the morning.”

They took rooms for the night in a public house adjoining the keep, where the Council of Crow Fork itself guaranteed their safety and posted guards at doors and windows. “We have been fortunate,” Biri-Daar said. “First, that we have come through these betrayals with so little suffering. Second, that Iriani is known to the council and could get us a hearing before them.

“And there might yet be a third bit