The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [68]
It seemed the stewards of Flowfoam learned swiftly. They were escorting another travel-stained man across the room briskly, ordering aside increasingly angry courtiers with brisk authority.
The king laid a hand on his eldest steward's arm, keeping Ranthalus silent, as this new arrival reached them and went to his knees. "Great King," he gasped, looking up with remembered fear in his eyes, "I bring word of a fell beast!"
"A crab that eats cows?" Ranthalus asked with a frown, pretending not to see the sharp look his king gave him.
The man looked puzzled. "Nay, Lord," he said, " 'tis a snake as large as a cottage, with many heads!"
"Gods above!" the old steward snarled, looking to the ceiling as if he expected the Three to be hovering there with glowing holy scrolls of guidance held out to him in their hands. "Is there-urrrkk!"
The gods weren't waiting by the ceiling, but someone was.
A someone clad in dark leathers, who'd just finished swinging the domed skylight back into place with stealthy care, and was sitting in a hook-sling dangling from a none-too-solid stone gargoyle ceiling boss, contemplating how best to strike. Someone who was wearing a tusked and grinning "battle ghost" mask, of the sort used in the masques of hot summer in the many-terraced city of Houlborn, and holding a long, needle-thin sword naked in his hand.
Someone who, as First Steward Ranthalus stared up in open-jawed amazement and dawning horror, sprang lightly from his perch and dropped down through the air with a whirring of tether-line, sudden smoke billowing from something clutched in a dark-gloved hand. The grinning mask loomed up very suddenly as the source of the smoke was tossed into the courtiers-but Ranthalus had eyes only for that glittering blade, extended point first and coming down at him very, very fast… right into the heart of the steward's rough, croaking attempt at a scream.
13
Some Surprises; Nasty
As his spice-smoke plunged courtiers into helpless fits of coughing, the man who called himself Velvetfoot launched himself calmly down into the shouting, gaping tumult of their midst. He had, after all, a reputation to maintain.
He'd whispered energetically for some years, spending more than a few coins in the process, to succeed in attaching the murmured words "a deadly success" to his name. He'd managed to keep that linkage intact during recent reverses only because of a timely death that, thankfully, he'd had no hand in. The deceased was a secretive mage who'd hired him to find a Dwaer-stone in the ruins of Indraevyn and bring it back for use in a ritual to awaken the Serpent In The Shadows. Velvetfoot had said more than one fervent (though silent) thanks to the wizard's slayer-before in turn killing him. A reputation, as has been said, must be maintained.
The highly useful fact remained that one cannot be seen as a failure by a dead man-nor do mute corpses spread word to others. Wherefore Velvetfoot had soon been suggested to someone else as the perfect man to slay an inconveniently Risen King.
Personally, Velvetfoot held the view that it was unwise to kill King Snowsar at this time, and so plunge Aglirta into a bloody struggle for power before the royal court had grown strong and settled enough to hold the realm together through the violent death of a king and subsequent coronation-by-force of an usurper. In a lawless land, deaths come easily, and slayers-for-hire command only paltry fees. In a settled realm, slayings are harder and more expensive… and that was the sort of Aglirta Velvetfoot wanted to dwell in.
Wherefore he'd brought no crossbow and poisoned quarrels with him this day, and Snowsar stood not far from him right now, very much alive. Moreover, he'd learned from a very reliable source that a rival slayer-for-hire, a Sirl man called Andalus who wore a battle ghost mask when he did his killings, had already been hired-by other interests-to end the life of the king.
Andalus had been the man who'd so conveniently slain Velvetfoot's