The Magehound

The entertainer saw nothing amiss in this gentle mockery. "Sulazir has lasted this long without Gioviente. The city will survive a few days more."

Tzigone rephrased her question in a manner more likely to elicit information. "What kept you in town?"

Gio cast his eyes skyward and shook a fist at some unseen power. "Carmelo is what, and I curse the day I took on that boy. Always getting fancy, he is, and getting us all dragged in for inquisition. We're clean, as you know, but one of us had to spend some time in the hold for creating disturbance. It was his turn."

Tzigone smirked. Gio didn't mind visiting his friends in the hold and doing a few tricks for the bored guards, but when it came to paying off a public debt, it was always someone else's turn. She'd spent time in various dank, barred rooms herself.

The diversions offered by the entertainers were not actually illegal, but someone was always challenging their claim that their tricks and illusions and feats of skill were simply that, unbolstered by aid of magic. Magic was common currency in Halruaa, and although Tzigone wouldn't exactly say that her countrymen had lost their sense of wonder, they seemed both impressed by and skeptical of anything that was accomplished without magic. Fraud had to be proved, and once an accusation was made, the entire troupe would be hauled away for inquisition by the local magehound. Tzigone, of course, had always appeared to be utterly magic dead, a fact that did nothing to increase her confidence in wizards.

Wizards had dogged her footsteps for years, laying traps and ambushes. Nothing they had produced against her so far had prevailed. She'd had a bad moment when she'd come close to nicking the wemic's earring, a deep sense that touching the gem would be a grave mistake. Fortunately she was as sensitive to magic as she was immune from its effects.

"So how is Carmelo?" she asked quickly, eager to think about more pleasant things.

"Tolerable, all things considered. Tomorrow is his last day in the hold, and it will pass quickly. They just threw a jordain in the cell across from him, and you know Carmelo. He'll tease every story and song out of the man before day's end."

Tzigone's ears pricked up. "A jordain? What did he look like?"

The gypsy shrugged and spat. "Much the same as any I've seen, though better-looking than most. Dark hair, white clothes, both of which looked a bit worse for wear. Looks as if he'd made the militia earn their wages before they brought him in."

"That I doubt," she said with certainty. Matteo had looked considerably scuffed up when they'd parted ways, and he probably was in much the same condition now. "If we're thinking about the same man, this one would walk to the hold and lock himself in if someone so much as suggested that he bent a law."

"If he's such a paladin as all that, why is he in the hold?" Gio asked, reasonably enough.

As to that, Tzigone had a fairly good idea. It seemed she would have a chance to erase the debt the same day it was incurred. She thought fast. "If I wanted to get into the hold, how would I do it?"

"Getting in is never a problem. It's the getting out that tasks me," the man pointed out. "What's this jordain to you, girl, that you'd waste your breath on such crazy words?"

"I owe him a debt," she said simply.

The gypsy nodded. Property was something that neither would ever understand, but they knew the worth of things that mattered. "Well, then, I've just the thing for you. You remember how to walk on stilts?"

She sniffed. "If you're out to insult me, just call me an ugly bastard and get it over with."

"Biggest weapon first," he said approvingly. "Not the usual strategy, but it should be. Might cut down on time wasted fighting."

"You were saying something about stilts?" she prompted.

Gio's eyes glittered with mischief. "Now, if you were the law and saw a pair of stilts lying inside the wall of the hold, what would you think? Someone's trying to breach, that's what. But a single pole? No one would think much of it."

"I don't think much of it myself," she retorted. She could vault a wall using Gio's pole, and said so.

"Ah, but not one like this," Gio said slyly. He shouldered off his pack and took from it a bundle of oddly shaped sticks. "They fit together into one long piece," he explained, demonstrating with several of them.

"What are those notches for?"

"Footholds. You can balance the pole and climb it at the same time. But mind you, stay well away from the walls. Lightning sheets cover the inside walls almost to the top. If you lose your balance and lean against the wall, you'll be sizzling like bacon."

"Stay away from the walls? So how do I get out?"

"Moss hangs from the cherrynut tree just outside the south wall. It is strong, and hard to see in the failing light You'll be in the tree before any of those lazy guards notice what you're about."