A Sword from Red Ice

Quill continued. "Matters may have died a death if the carter hadn't sang his song with you as chord and chorus. Now the watch is at our heels and they're knocking door-to-door. They're going to be on that stoop this very night and unless we do something sharpish we're all gonna hang."

Crope knew some kind of response was called for, but he was having difficulty keeping up. Quill spoke fast and fancy, and the word bailiff had been spoken and it was getting hard to think. "No hang."

"Too right no hang." Quill was beginning to get animated. "I haven't sneaked these streets for twenty years to get a necking for mischief I didn't make. Abetting a friend of a friend, I was. The King of Thieves himself, Scurvy Pine. That's the way things work in the back alleys: you help someone, I help you, and when time comes when I require a little assistance meself my dues are paid in full. Course the system starts to break down when one good deed turns into an ongoing concern. I have to ask myself 'What's in it for me? and from where I'm standing now—between an eight-foot stack-o-hay and death on two sticks—it ain't looking good."

"No good," Crope echoed in deep agreement.

This response appeared to exasperate Quill, who began to pace the room. "So all the time you hauled rocks in the diamond pipe you never stashed a little cream for yourself?"

Morose now, Crope shook his head. "Had diamond … lost it"

"And what about his lordship there. Lord of what? Lord of where? Has he holdings, land, goods?"

Crope continued shaking his head. Baralis had been a powerful man once, in the land south of the mountains. Kings had waited upon his word. But the old kings were dead now and those who had taken their place had ill-liked Baralis and his methods. All had been lost. It hardly seemed real. A castle had burned to the ground and Baralis had burned along with it, and while everyone else was fleeing the flames, Crope had run toward them. It was the smoke, he remembered, thick and hot like boiling wool. The first time he breathed it in, his gums had shrank away from his teeth. Eighteen years later and they still hadn't sprung back.

Nothing had sprung back. Crab had pulled Baralis from the flames but even though his body had been saved the losses were still being counted. Crope believed he would never know all the ways in which his lord had shrunk. Land and titles could be counted, a body seared by flames and then broken could be seen and reckoned, but the other things—the mind, the will, the power of his lord—were beyond his ability to comprehend. Some of his lord was still there, lying behind the slow-tracking gaze, but how much was impossible to know. Even though Crope knew it was a mistake to think of the bad man, the one with pale eyes who Quill called the Surlord, he couldn't seem to stop himself. That man had destroyed his lord. Ridden them down, he had, coolly keeping his distance while his armsmen had drawn swords. Wittle-wattle. Wittle-wattle. Chicken jowls for brains. Crope flushed with shame as he remembered his lord's capture. It was all his fault. After he'd rescued his lord he could have gone anywhere in the Known Lands. Flee, that was the important thing. Escape from the walled city and the men who were enemies of his lord. North, south, east, west: it hardly mattered which way. So why had he chosen to head north into the mountains? Because he was stupid, that was why. Any other direction and they would have been high and dry. Wet and low was what they got though. Eighteen years of wet and low.

The pale-eyed man's capture of his lord had just been the beginning. While Baralis was hauled off to the pointy tower, Crope had been left for dead in a dry gully. Arrows, four of them, had punctured his giant man's hide. Crope could not say how long they rendered him unconscious, but what he did know was that his first and only thought upon waking was Now I must rescue my lord. The hijack had been sprung in foothills northwest of Hound's Mire and Crope knew with certainty that his lord had been taken west. So west he went, toward the city with the gray limestone walls he stood within this very night Within less than a day he'd run afoul of the slavers. Years later, Crope learned that slaving companies regularly patrolled the lawless country known as the Mirelands. According to Scurvy Pine, anyone crossing the mountains on their own or in small, undefended companies was judged fair game. Hobbled, blindfolded, and harnessed to the back of a wagon, Crope had been hauled east to Trance Vor, The Vor was an outlaw city financed with diamonds, tin, mercury and gold—anything that could be dug from the earth. Scurvy Pine said that slaving was illegal there, fust like in most other cities in the North, but tin Vor lords turned a blind eye to it. Slaves were needed to break the stone.