Fairieland

Book One of the Secret Census

By Tom Maltby

(c)2001

Trees snap like toothpicks. Birds and less wholesome things flee their nests and scatter into the darkness. The ground heaves and buckles beneath his feet. Bits of mountain crumble off his metal frame in the wind of his progress, and crash to the forest floor below. His pace of destruction is unhurried, but steadier than a glacier and quicker than a jackrabbit by moonlight. He turns not right nor left, destroying what lies in his path without breaking stride. He has a purpose.

As Jonathon scurried along the dirty, deserted cobblestones his eyes twitched from one pre-dawn shrouded alleyway to another, from the innocent seeming branch of an ancient decrepit oak to a newly built sewer drain.

The first description that would have occurred to an observer, had there been one would have been ‘nervous’. Had the hypothetical observer continued to observe, the word quickly would have been replaced with ‘paranoid’, an adjective entirely unsuited to the tender years of the walker. But he had lost his lunch money for the last time.

Jonathon Proquast Middleleaf was done with being pushed around. If he had been asked, he would have said in a voice a touch too sharp and hurried that he felt mean.

He clutched in trembling fingers a wand of fire blackened twisty wood. It might have passed for kindling, or a bit of an unlucky holiday wreath, except for crude silver inlay where a vine had once choked it, and a pointy black rock lashed into the end. The rock was rather too large for the stick. It wasn't very decorative, either.

He had ‘borrowed’ them from his father’s alchemists’ laboratory last night, and with a little luck, if his creation worked like he hoped it would, they would see him through the day and settle some scores. This didn’t stop his palms from sweating.

He had a sense of propriety which told him that he was a Wood Elf, and as one of the noble (and more particularly, large) races of faiye he shouldn’t have to worry too much about pixies, kobolds, sprites, imps, brownies, leprechauns, and other assorted smaller faiye, but the facts were that he was only 56 years old, and in his third decade of primary education. At nearly four feet tall and thirty five pounds, your average sylph could threaten to give him a good thrashing.

And this group…

He spun, and a large grey near-cat with an incongruously green lizard’s tail very nearly investigated its last pail of garbage. The near-cat leaped off to the curb, and the bucket spun to the gutter, disgorging its contents. Pausing to lick it’s fur disinterestedly, the morning prowler gave the boy a long pale blue look steeped in contempt, and with a final disdainful twitch of its spiny nethermost appendage, stalked off.

A mostly eaten fish regarded him reproachfully from the pile of dinner scraps and nastier things. At least there was no-one around. Feeling now more embarrassed than mean, he shuffled on with head down, the wand half forgotten at his side. As he turned out into the Pine Street Court, he was thinking about where to hide his implement of destruction during Religious History with Instructor Applethorn.

In a tragic-comic quirk of elven lack of focus, the last thing he was expecting was to find an aged banana wrapping itself around the mid-portion of his face.

It was an old soldiers’ joke that billions of years ago beyond count when elves were learning to be civilized creatures, there had come to be the first profession, called by some the First House. A few minutes later in the alley out back, the first member of the Second House hit the first starry-eyed customer in the back of the head with something heavy in a sock, and took his wallet.

Izzy ‘BadApple’ Bluenewt believed in the Second House. In fact, he worked for it.

For the last three years he had been on an inside assignment for them infiltrating and spying on a political fringe group known as WeFLOH. When he had discovered that the acronym stood for the Wee Folks League of Hubris he had nearly been sick. Because even in an increasingly tasteless world, Izzy Bluenewt had taste. He didn’t like halfkin, and pyxies were frankly gaudy. He didn’t like his work very much, but he was pretty faithful and didn’t want to have to keep running long enough to mess up.

As he watched his banana arch through the air, he appreciated its perfect poise and trajectory. Hiding behind ‘Tough Lou’ Louie and ‘Call Me Short’ Billy Toadstool amongst the pails of garbage set out for the trash cart behind Growler’s Pub’s kitchen, being incinerated was the last thing on his mind.

He had received a message from them in his weekly drop telling him to expect a new agent to join the local WeFLOH chapter and to make contact with him. He thought that Pedrito ‘Trickster’ Rosebud, hidden behind the refuse from the apartment across the court was his pyx, but wasn’t sure, and he knew that Tough Lou was watching him.

He was so caught up in his troubles that he barely remembered to enjoy the good things in life, like moments of impact. As the banana splattered across the elf child's face, he was wishing he could retire.

Perhaps it was this that saved him.

Even the mist is shredded in his wake. As the sun breaks over the horizon he strides out of the last of the forest and into a gently awakening meadow. A fence splinters beneath his feet and cattle run, snorting vapor in the crisp air. He does not change his course, speed or slow, nor can any expression be seen as the first feeble rays play over his grim countenance. But he knows that he is near his goal.

The sun seems to find little purchase on his black metal hide, reflecting dimly the last flecks of the shale and granite mountain that had grown on him while he waited. Bits of leaves and trees cling to creases and joints in his armor, but such things he holds of little account. A barn shows him no more resistance then the fence, and crumples, wood screeching, as his shin plows through the corner beam. Small bright colored fowl scatter. Squawking in outraged but futile protest, they are left behind.

He walks on.

Banana dripping from his nose, Jonathon was remembering that he was angry. And looking up to see a exceptionally short fat halfkin and a gray skinned kobold with greased back black hair laughing themselves sick in front of a row of garbage cans, Jonathon was angry as only the young can be: with no sense of consequence, only unpracticed rage. As his arm stiffened, and he uttered the first dire syllable, the stone on the wand crackled with hot orange flame, and as he pointed and spoke again the garbage cans and some of the wall behind them were lost in a wave of fire.

This had a certain pacifying effect on his fury, but as the courtyard returned to view, all was not right. The halfkin was rolling around clutching his scorched feet, true, and the grey skinned kobold was picking himself out of a trash can with a dazed expression as his greased hair blazed merrily, but another kobold (this one blue and wearing a conservative grey suit) leapt from beneath the pile of tumbled barrels and darted with a preternatural almost snaky speed through the kitchen door of Growler’s, screaming. Jonathon pointed and spoke again.

The home made wand was still hot and smoking, and before the second wave of flame more than licked the cans he was forced to drop it as the vine-twisted wood burst into flames.

He turned to run, wishing his vocabulary offered more curses, and made for the alley he had just left. Before he reached it a figure not quite his height, air-draped from black feathered wings, and wielding a sharp looking knife, swooped from the rooftop. It landed before him, grinning.

"Hello little biggie. Where ya goin’? Don’cha wanna play?" The wings twitched idly behind the newcomer, stirring little dust devils from the bits of rubbish that cluttered the street. He wore white pants and a white vest, and had black hair and a pointy nose that reminded Jonathon unpleasantly of an eagle's beak. He didn’t look like a nice person.

Jonathon backed slowly away.

As he turned back to dash down the court, he heard the downed kobold yell "Youse All! Git im!! ‘E burnt me!"

An apple grazed his shoulder, and he heard wings behind him, but he was moving now, running well with Pine Street proper ahead of him like the road to safety. There were feet still close behind him as he sprinted down Pine but they trailed back as he turned onto Main, perhaps fearing an early City Watchman. A voice followed after "You gonna see us again, biggie! You gonna pay for dat!" And then he was alone, and hurried the last block to the ornate marble steps of Oakleaf Primary School.

Izzy was glad that they hadn’t caught the kid. The mood these petty thugs were in they probably would have hurt him, and he didn’t have any illusions about how the watch would view this if it left the realm of lunch money and bullying. Pedrito was used to real work, and had been so shocked at their quarry’s youth that he had never cast the first spell. Well, it was his first day with WeFLOH and these idiot schemes took some getting used to. The amateur nature of the multinational band’s members outraged his professional Second House experience. But now Tough Lou and Billy were pissed off and lecturing anyone who stood still long enough.

The day looked like it was progressing prettily through the cracks in the shutters of the flop house WeFLOH rented. He wished he could be outside to enjoy it. He had a bad feeling about this kid. Granted the wand of fire, while surprising, had been ineffective beyond scorching Billy’s toes and Lou’s hairdo, but something about it wasn’t right. The kid smelled of destiny, and nobody ever wants to hear that. Izzy ‘Bad Apple’ Bluenewt was overdue for a vacation.

The bed had been hard and lumpy, but no worse than he was used to.

The shutters did not lock properly, but did let in some sunshine to soothe his aching head. Another day with DryDock.

The land bound branch of High-Elven Naval Intelligence had sent him many places since he was banned from fleet property two years ago, but here there was not even a river. Bahazar Morningtide was hung over, and didn’t much care what had happened to the MSAP he was supposed to be looking for. Another week of no water deeper than a mud puddle, no decent food, and no nightlife beyond rowdy rural bars and he’d file a "Not Seen" report and hope for a transfer.

He poked his head out into the bright sunshine, and guessed the time at a little after noon. He thought he saw a plume of dust almost beyond the green horizon, but dismissed it automatically as sunlight and wine impairment. The last thing he wanted was a significant discovery, which might result in action or even paperwork.

He pulled his head back in, closed the shutters, and pulled the blankets over his head. Maybe it would go away.

Tairic Bloodroot was distraught. He sat in his plush underground vault, surrounded by the stolen opulence of the ages. But all his massed treasures, which yesterday had filled his life with security and meaning, today seemed only an empty pretense to happiness. Someone, and thus a thief, had breached his security and entered this: his most private sanctuary. And worse, without extensive inventorying he would not even be certain he knew all that had been taken. The thief must have had a purpose, because he had bypassed many great treasures. The Accursed Eye of Belat-Ngathrohakq floated undisturbed in it’s diamond flask, and Storm Fist, Golden Gauntlet of Arakanash The Mad sat snug on its velvet cushion. The gem studded idols of the Anti-Church of Molnochi stood at attention in two rows, arranged to face his seat of preference. He had already ascertained that none of the large or truly devastating machines of war were out of place.

The strangest thing was that of his dual weight traps, only one had gone off. The first, which should have fired a forest of poisoned crossbow bolts when the net weight of the room was increased the thief's weight had not gone off at all. And its corresponding opposite, which should have incinerated the entrance hall when the weight of the ring was removed had gone off, but there was no sign of it having done anything except scorch his potted plants.

As he sat, he swirled a sour corn mash in a ruby goblet in his right hand. He knew who to ask, but he didn’t relish seeing him again. With a sigh, he raised his left hand.

A yellow stone on one finger twinkled, as he drew power from it, and an elaborate circle surrounded by runes flamed to life on the black stone slab set in the floor just for this purpose. He examined each of the symbols carefully, like a diver with his lifelines, and then opened the scaled cover of Husan's Manual of Naming which lay before him on the table. Reading the words which he already knew, he made no mistakes.

"Eldithkandsfut Kathkdantos Lazith-Spuhu-Venail! I call on you! Azkjkileariaouhjk! I speak your name! I bind you here, before me! Answer my calling and do my will!"

The ruby goblet glowed, and the sour mash puffed into nasty smelling vapor. The stone floor inside the circle of fire began to bubble and melt, emitting clouds of black smoke. The smoke pushed out to the edges of the ring of fire, now burning bright blue, and held there. The space within the circle was quickly lost to sight.

Then, after a long pregnant pause there was a flash of red, bright as lightning, and the smoke was gone. The circle burned empty. A voice rang about the room, high pitched, possibly female, pleasantly sibilant, but with edges colder than ice.

"Yes, master. How may I be of service?"

Tairic sighed in relief, and addressed the empty space. "Show yourself. Something tasteful."

There was a flickering in the circle, and a ball of scintillating light appeared within. Every color imaginable flickered in its depths, becoming fuzzy and ending in a clean sphere, perhaps a foot across.

"Does this please you, master?"

"It will do. I have questions, and you are bound to answer them."

"Three questions, as well as I may, master."

"First, what has been stolen from me?"

The ball of light pulsed once. "Nothing has been stolen from you, master. Are you not the richest thief alive? Yet something is missing, tis true."

"What is missing from this vault then?"

The ball of light pulsed again, brighter. "A small thing, master. The Ring of Ammergladin."

Tairic frowned. "That is all?"

"Is that your final question?"

"No, damn your eyes," he snapped, piercing blue eyes flashing, "I was making sure you were done with your answer."

"Yes, master, that is all."

Taric paused a moment in thought. He still had three questions he wanted to ask the demon, but only one would be answered. How and why would both be good to know, but would not return his treasure. "Where is the Ring of Ammergladin now?"

The ball pulsed brilliantly, sending spots dancing in his vision. "In the hamlet of Upper Loth, master, in the dust by the third cobblestone toward the sea from the side door of Lady Fate's Garden Inn. Goodbye master."

The brilliant swirling light expanded, and Taric's finely tuned senses felt the small rip in the fabric of reality that opened the demon's path home. For a moment he could hear the sounds of screaming, then the voice spoke once more, this time distant and warbling. "A gift for you that you might be ready for the future." The ring of flame died out, and with a pop all that had occupied the circle was gone, except a small black book with the ominously red letters "M.L.O.D." on the cover, lying on his melted and buckled stone floor.

After several exploratory spells to be sure that no trap still lurked in the circle undetected, he opened the tome. The title page repeated the letters, but expanded them underneath, "Mercenary Labor Organization of Demons."

He had encountered the faiye MLO, and in his experience they were an organization unequalled for bungling, inefficiency, and counter-productivity. Perhaps one of their pamphlets had gone through a rift, and found readers on the infernal planes. This probably implied very bad things, but there was little for him to do about it now.

He poured himself another two fingers of whisky, tucked the book in an ancient black metal saddle bag that was much bigger on the inside than out, and morosely began to pack for his journey.

The honeysuckle was in full bloom, and the crab apple and hawthorne still had plenty of blossoms left. The sun was high, and it should have been a perfect day for the bees. But they were up to something funny. Randall Waxwurther had never seen anything quite like it. Normally bees were the one thing he understood in life. He spent most days in the bee meadow, humming along with the hives, smelling the flowers, and generally communing with the small furry workers who made his livelihood. He spent so much time with the bees that his mentor had all but left them in his charge, and seldom left their cottage on top of the hill. But today things were definitely not right.

He knew their habits, he knew their signals when wasps or wax-worm troubled the hives, and he had a bearskin rug on his bed in the cottage from the last time a larger pest had bothered his little friends. In some ways, they were behaving like that today, but the real puzzler was that only the hives on the western side of the meadow seemed troubled.

The others were not out foraging, true, and there were an unusual number of sentries at the hives' doors, but the three hives on the west side were doing something that he had not seen since his adoption by the friendly old bee keeper more than a hundred years ago. In terms of elven life-spans, this was not particularly long, and he was tempted to go ask Bee what he thought, but there was a real sense of urgency in the hives' frenetic activity and it was several miles to the cottage.

It almost seemed to him that the bees were trying to move the hives. The thought seemed silly at first, but as he watched their flight patterns, swarming into the air and diving en masse onto the hives, coalescing into a solid mass all flapping franticly, he was almost certain that he was right.

He approached the westernmost hive, and humming - almost buzzing - a reassuring tune along the lines of "Hmm Hmm Ho Ha, Hmm Ha Hmm Ho" he gently lifted the top super and carefully carried it over near the other hives. Normally this would have been somewhat risky business, even for someone as befriended by the bees as he was, but despite their agitated state the bees withdrew from their efforts, and allowed him to continue.

He had the first two hives moved, and was returning to start on the third when he realized that the ground was shaking. Looking around, he saw trees swaying gently but no immediate source for the thumping he felt through the soles of his bare feet.

He hurried back, and had the first super halfway across the meadow when he saw it. Huge and black, it towered above the tallest trees, and while it was still a valley away it was coming on like well oiled lightning. He almost dropped the super in his shock, and for the first time in many years was stung, on his left hand. The pain momentarily calmed his nerves, and he set the box gently down. And he was off and running.

He got to the remaining two supers before it did, but only by a few seconds. In a feat of adrenaline inspired madness, he managed to pick up both of them, but as he turned to flee a giant black metal foot came in for a landing and sent him and both supers flying. He rolled back to his feet yelling in a very rare rage, only to see the immense figure already plowing through the trees on the other side of the clearing at a rate much faster than he could run.

Looking around, he saw the precious bottom super which contained the queen bee first, and heaved a small sigh of relief. Although on its side and somewhat the worse for wear, it appeared mostly intact. But the middle super, already mostly full of honey from the warm spring's harvest, was smashed to splinters and goo.

He spent the next half-hour fixing the damaged bottom super, and reassembling the remnants of the hive. When he looked up, Bee was waiting quietly with the bearskin rolled up under his arm. Handing it to Randall, along with a broadsword and green buckler that Randall practiced with occasionally, he remained silent.

"You knew I'd have to go after it? Will you be all right without me for a while? Its going awful fast, I'll have to get moving to catch up with it. At least it will be easy to track!"

Bee nodded sagely, scratched on his beard for a moment, and finally spoke. "Don't forget - it owes you a new super with twelve good frames, and at least fifteen, better call it twenty pounds of honey." The old Wood Elf patted Randall on the shoulder, turned, and ambled back uphill into the trees.

Instructor AppLethorne was droning on in her usual manner. Jonathon had long since passed through the stage of rejoicing in his safety, and the one after that where he felt trembly and a little ill. He was now alternating between his normal school mode of bored inattention, and worrying about whether the components of his fire wand would be missed and whether he would make it home to find out. The trees waved gently green outside the window of Oakleaf School. It looked like a pretty day to be anyone except a schoolboy.

His teacher's voice faded in and out of his consciousness, "...exiled from Beyond the Mountain a little less than a hundred thousand years ago for feuding with the ancestors of the Duir Leth, whom we have continued to conflict with in every manner from ceremonial combats of champions to full out war. Unique in this exile are the Grey Elves who are neutral living in their monasteries with both of our peoples..." He noticed that Rudy Mossbark in the next row forward was playing with an ice-beetle on a string behind his textbook. The beetle, a three inch monstrosity of blue, black and silver, was slowly walking around Rudy's quill-pen, wrapping the string tighter and tighter. "...The dwarves, although living in the far coastal mountain ranges of Duir Spae, are more or less isolated by the nearer population of Yrch with whom they have feuded for time immemorial, and have allied with the Shaë Leth as often as the Duir in the varied conflicts between our peoples. Most often, they have remained beneath their mountains and uninvolved. Also, unlike the rest of Faiye they do not worship those Beyond the Mountain, but rather have their own developed religious systems, primary of which is the Church of the All-Seeing Eye. We are especially lucky to have a delegation from the Church of the All-Seeing Eye here in Upper Loth, and we hope to have an educational presentation from one of their speakers later in the week. Other dwarven beliefs include a reverence of their ancestors bordering on worship..."

The beetle, finding itself immobile at the base of the quill emitted a small burst of amazingly cold flatulence from its rear end, freezing and breaking the string, and took flight. Now unfettered, it soared out the window and into the blue.

Jonathon wished he could follow it.

CDS was striking again, the little buggers marching up and down in front of city hall like they owned the place. Morgan Applesewn was on guard duty at the front door, and would have had a good view of the chaos if he hadn't been a little shortsighed. Kobolds with all their brightly colored skin and hair, wearing black leather seemed to be the bulk of the crowd, although there were plenty of boggies and pyx in evidence.

They were still waving hand made placards, but as was typical of their rallies it was beginning to look more like a party than a political event. There were probably enough laws being broken to throw the entire protest march in jail, but there weren't nearly enough cells with small mesh bars, and nobody wanted to see what would happen if WeFlOH ever really got pissed off.

He noticed a taller figure trying to make its way through the crowd, and stood a little more attentively in case there were problems. He caught himself fiddling with his new ID chit again, and put both hands back firmly on his longbow. The figure seemed to be making good progress, and was approaching the range where he could begin to make out a little detail. Female, he thought, yes, a damn good looking female except for that green blur where her face ought to be.

He watched her skip and hop side to side, avoiding most of the small hands coming up where they oughtn't. Some days he envied the wee folk, they got away with everything.

Then suddenly he could see her clearly, and realized that it was that new shaman of The Mountains, and the green blur was her leafy ceremonial mask. What was her name, now? Definitely a fine piece of elf-flesh, probably a Fair Elf to judge by the blond hair.

He wondered, not for the first time, what her face looked like under that mask. Wisteria, that was her name, Wisteria Birdling. He finished this thought just as she broke free of the press, leapt like a salmon three feet straight into the air from one last well placed pinch, caught her footing with an impressive display of pleasantly bouncy flesh, and strode past him without a second look.

She fairly rushed through the open front archway he was guarding, and a few seconds later he could hear her pounding on the magistrate's oak door. Strange, he thought, nobody bothers old Celinor. Must be something important. He wished, also not for the first time, that he was allowed to play his lute on duty; it had a calming effect on his nerves.

Growler's pub was having their World Famous Flying Miniature Cabaret Buffet Tuesday Lunch Special again and all the usual riff-raff was in. Actually a lot of spillover from the CDS protest was happening, and shortly the riot squad would be here too. The chorus line of nymphs, pyx and The much Famed Cassandra Snowfeather had fled the stage and a small but determined political comedienne in bright colored jester's regalia was trying to calm the crowd.

Blut Bluhornihoff was getting drunk and causing trouble.

He had come to this backwoods hamlet with the visiting delegation of The All-Seeing Eye, but as a minor priest his primary duty was, in keeping with the essence of his sect, seeing what there was to see and letting someone more important know about the interesting bits after.

The All-Seeing Eye saw quite a bit in this manner.

Currently, as its official representative, Blut was using his holy powers of telekinesis and far-seeing to arrange a series of ancient hand-ground crystal lenses and a few sacred silver mirrors etched with golden holy symbols so that he and the All-Seeing Eye could see in the keyhole of the dressing room behind the stage. And he was accomplishing all this while having a dark nutty goblin-made beer in the name of Righteousness, and enjoying the atmosphere from the vantage point of a front row seat.

Normally, as a dwarf, Blut wasn't much on goblins, but it was a pretty righteous beer. Blut liked Growler's. But, unbeknownst to Blut, the riot squad will kick in the door in thirteen minutes and eight seconds. Blut wiggled his butt down into the cushy undersized seat, and with a half a prayer, the tiniest touch of his god's mind, and a little squinting, adjusted the focus on his objective lens. Not for the first time, he wished that keys (or at least keyholes) were made bigger.

The sunlight still seemed a little too bright, but he noticed that the angle it came through his broken shutters at had changed. Bahazar supposed that this meant that he was making progress.

There was an awful amount of coarse but strangely high pitched raucous hooting and hollering filtering up through the floorboards, and he spent a few more minutes not moving in case whatever was causing the noise went away and it quieted down again. Finally he gave up on that tactic, and rolled to the side of the bed. The floor still seemed to be there, so he mustered a little extra daring and swung his feet down to it. The oak planks were shaking in sympathy with the commotion downstairs, but felt solid.

A couple of slow sideways shuffle-scoots along the edge of the bed and one particularly vicious splinter later he managed to reacquire his boots, and stuffed his unhappy feet into them. He cast about for any other delaying tactics available to him, but there was no washbasin or chamber pot in the room. He remembered that the briefing he had received on Upper Loth prior to his assignment here had bragged about the modern plumbing - the facilities were at the end of the hall, of course.

A particularly vivid memory of the stained ceramic water closet from the perspective of his drunken embrace on it after last night's drinking accompanied this last memory, and he decided he didn't need to go that badly after all.

With a sigh, he lurched upright and staggered to the door. There just didn't seem to be anything for it but to go see what the all the noise was about. He hoped he wouldn't have to file a report. When he opened the thin plank door he could hardly believe it had kept that much of the noise out. By the time he reached the top of the stairs the volume was almost competing with the clanging hammers of the smithy that had inexplicably been set up in his head while he slept.

Unfortunately one of the miniature smiths chose that moment to lay a particularly painful blow on the back of his eyeball with a hammer, and he didn't notice the loose board at the top of the stairs until he was halfway down.

Lacy finally had the crowd in the palm of her little hand. For the seven years that she had been exiled from her cushy post as the apprentice jester to the court of Luthmere she had been surviving so much on her thieving abilities that she had almost forgotten what her first teacher had meant by working a crowd.

Snapping out sizeist one liners punctuated with flute trills played on her versatile jester's wand, strutting and wiggling around the stage like she owned it, she felt more in her element than ever before.

And why not? These were her people! Those blessed by nature with a small, appropriate size, those that had been trodden on and kept down all their lives by the comparatively few unfortunates who happened to be born larger; the wee folk appreciated her brand of humor.

And tonight they fairly breathed and bled it. Every bump of her hips set the heartbeat of the room, and as she slipped into an elegant pratfall that showed her proportionately long legs, the crowd roared.

She had to wind up the act before the crowd went ballistic, and with one last snide remark about the 'day we off the biggies', she used a hint of cloaking magic and faded from view as she bowed goodnight to her fans. Unexpectedly, but with a timing she almost envied, a very hung-over High Elf flew over the railing of the stairs, crashed headfirst into the stage in front of her, groaned once, and stayed down.

Without a hiccup (and only one or two small belches) the roar of applause turned into the roar of a lynching mob, and the crowd was on its feet.

She realized, as the room exploded into chaos, that with her disappearing act it must have looked like the big oaf had landed right on her and squished her out of existence. As the drunken elf took his own turn vanishing, this time under a pile of smaller and angrier drunks, she edged back toward the stage exit.

As the second wave of wee folk ran into the pileup they exchanged a variety of pointed metal indignities with those in their way, and the conflict spread back out from the epicenter like a wave. No one was quite sure why they were swinging at each other, but broken noses, stomped shins and slit cheeks proved sure persuaders.

Three pyx with small pool cues were merrily keeping a larger blue skinned kobold hopping from table to table until it dropped two of them with the 8 and 9 balls.

A particularly burly halfkin was laying about with a chair, and holding two kobolds with long knives at bay.

Although most of the room was rapidly degenerating into a wide spread brawl she noticed two figures that had their own agendas. A dwarf, sitting alone at a front row table yet untouched by the ballyhoo seemed all but ignorant of the chaos around him and was looking off into the middle distance with a vacant smile under his beard. Either hard drugs or magic, she decided, or maybe a little of both.

And Growler, the brown and black kobold with the long topknot who owned the bar, was on his way out the front door in a hurry. That, she knew, would bring the law and she wanted no part of that trouble.

She was on probation for a string of petty charges of public intoxication, indecency, and harassment. She had to work in places like this to practice her true calling, but for the next six moons being caught in one would land her in the pen.

She had reached the stage door, but she paused a moment more to watch the madness. She saw a halfkin who had been neatly cutting purses from engaged combatants get hit in the head with an errant mug of beer. A blue-green kobold with a quiver of throwing spears swung from a chandelier and indiscriminately targeted lumps of swarming fey. The first casualties were starting to pile up.

And then the halfkin with the chair started to change.

His brown leather belly-armor popped of with a noise of tortured buckles snapping and the legs of the chair came off in his hands. His abundant brown hair paled and lengthened, rapidly growing into a tangled grey-white shaggy coat of fur. But most startling in this madhouse of combatants all shorter than a yardstick, he grew.

And he grew.

Before the unfortunate kobolds he was facing could do more than look up with slack-jawed expressions they were facing nine and a half feet and three hundred eighty-odd pounds of yeti with red blazing eyes and teeth as long as their fingers.

The strangeness of the image was compounded because Growler had just had the ceilings lowered again, this time to be a full nine inches lower than the head of the average six-foot elf. The yeti was crouched almost double, and bending the boards above it with its huge shoulders. It screamed, one of the most horrible blood chilling noises Lacy had ever heard, and hurled the chair legs with a snap of its wrists.

Both kobolds fell, bleeding.

As she turned to flee, she noticed that the dwarf was no longer smiling and his eyes were twitching back and forth as though looking for something, although still out of focus. It was such an odd expression that she still had her head turned half over her shoulder as the door slammed into her, disrupting her cloaking charm.

The chorus line came running out from the back stage area, screaming. They were nearly trampling her as she reeled back, and she had just taken a solid whop to her noggin, but she thought she saw a stream of shiny things fly out through the closing door behind the half-dressed troupe of fey maids.

She staggered back from the door, unsure what new horror to expect from that quarter, and feeling very vulnerable in her suddenly visible state. As the stage door swung closed, the front door of the bar exploded off its hinges somewhere behind her.

"Surrender in the name of the Guard!" a huge voice boomed, and there was the unmistakable sound of the first constable through the door hitting his head on the newly lowered frame. The yeti screamed again, and as the world receded into darkness she decided that the stage door had hit her harder than she had thought.

She sank to the floor in a faint, and the melee raged on around her.

As Randall jogged along the muddy track of destruction that the giant black thing had left behind, he was impressed again by how directly the monster traveled. Twice he had forded stream chasms, and there had been no sign that the thing had descended at all.

The shattered swath of forest resumed on the far side of the ravine as thought the beast had flown across. But the thing he was chasing was vaguely bipedal in shape, bereft of wings, and probably very heavy. And if it could fly, why smash along on the ground destroying things at all? Perhaps it enjoyed it, he thought, and he remembered his lost honey with a determined vengeful sort of light around it.

He was a little concerned about the monster flying because soon he would come to the Green River, which had carved out this whole section of valley. Conservatively, it might take him half a day to improvise a crossing, and he had hoped to catch up with the black armored monstrosity there.

He wasn't quite sure what he would do when he caught it, but he didn't relish being half a day further behind and that much further from his sunny meadow.

Forty minute's more jogging brought the wide sluggish river into view. Vast and brown, it flowed sedately between two facing cliffs of sand stone. He slowed as he approached, and paused under a giant sycamore that perched atop the ledge. It was nourished by a marshy bit of soil where a feeder stream spread out in a fan before trickling down in a lazy waterfall. Even from here he could see that the trail of devastation continued on the far side, an empty slash between the distant trees proceeding onward. Sandstone was a tricky climb, and he paused to catch his breath.

He knew it wouldn't help his laboring lungs, but he took a pinch of tobacco, hemp-blossom, and a few other herbs from his belt pouch and twisted them in a large strip of leaf. It was while he was puffing his home made cigarette to life with a small fire-stone that the sky fell in on him.

Actually, he realized with a faint sense of shock as he tumbled desperately away, a large bat winged crocodile had jumped out of the tree on him. He managed to clear his buckler from its side strap, but his sword was still pinned under him as the giant lizard pounced again. He felt huge claws ripping his belly, and screamed incoherently as he beat its snapping snout with the small metal shield.

With a mighty flap of black wings it surged backward and up, teeth gnashing. He staggered to his feet and drew his sword with a feral noise that was half shout half death scream.

The croc hung there for a moment before dismissing him with eyes like a cat's and sliding over the side of the cliff on its vast wings. It glided awkwardly toward the river below.

Randall caught a breath, and dropped his sword to clutch his bleeding stomach. As he sank to his knees reaching for his first aid kit he became aware that he was being watched. A circle of mostly naked elves with a strange blue shade to their skin had materialized from the sparse undergrowth around him. They all wore torcs of different metals around their necks, and he realized from the plateau of mild shock that they all had gently waving gills.

Their leader stepped forward and looked at him with disgust. He was an imposing figure, taller than Randall, with a long flowing mane of silvery hair. Naked except for a loincloth, and a torc seemingly made of flowing water, he wore a huge sword across his back.

"We are River's Rights Wardens. You are to be tried for the crimes of assault and battery of protected river fauna, planning to improvise crossing without proper sanitary measures, and willfully bleeding into endangered marshland habitat. You will come with us."

Randall issued a gurgling sigh, blew a bloody bubble, and lost consciousness.

The pirates rowed softly along the shore of the foggy lake. They had taken the entire High-Elven Women's Senior Tennis Team from the capital of Luthmere just three moons ago, and traded the master for countless humans, but the master needed more elf flesh to experiment on.

It was a warm sunny day, and normally they would not have been out without cover of night, for the bright light hurt their eyes. Here, however, on Lake DeepeMere at the foot of the mountains the fog was eternal and the sun could not touch them.

The oars were muffled in their locks, and as they silently crawled along they could hear high-pitched musical voices tinkling in bits of laughter and flashes of song. The pleasure boat that was their target was nearby, but how far away sounds in the fog were was always a tricky thing to be sure of.

Lazlo, the acting captain since Hojo da Boss had been killed, stood in the front of the small galley next to the dreadwing he rode and insisted on referring to as Hymie. One pair of arms was crossed on his chest, the others were holding his lance and Hymie's bridle rope.

Bugger and Hugo had the oars, and Raul, Borland and Weeds crouched in the back. A few moons ago they had been double this number, but a party of Wood-Elven militia had tracked them back into the Duir Spae and exacted a bloody vengeance at their waterfall hideout after the caper with the tennis team. Their master had promised extra rewards for this raid, and the means to take a vengeance of their own.

Suddenly the delicate swan shaped prow of the pleasure boat loomed through the fog ahead of them, creeping along under staysails alone. Lower to the water then their prey, Lazlo was hoping to remain unobserved a little longer.

He climbed onto Hymie's back, and with his free arms readied a shield and a weighted net. More than silently, as befitted an elemental creature of darkness that was barely more than a determined shadow, Hymie spread vast wings and took them to the air.

As Lazlo smelled the first waft of flower perfumes and heard the tinkling of tiny silver bells he smiled an altogether unpleasant and toothy smile and a few drops of slightly acidic drool fell from his thick animalistic lips and hissed into the uncaring lake. There would be booty tonight.

His thoughts were too far in the future and the first arrow tugged at his pantleg as the second hit his shield. The prey had noticed them and turned to fight.

He loosed a dreadful howl, and Hymie dove at the swan boat as Bugger and Hugo began to pull in double time. The other yrch held their fire; they couldn't see targets yet and didn't want to wreck their prize before they took it. With a crash he left his lance pinning the first guard to the main mast as Hymie neatly plucked the head off the second.

Lazlo kept his net in reserve for the moment, and palmed a handful of throwing stars from his jacket.

Hymie weaved to avoid arrow fire, and flickered them both into barely visible shadows. The first time Hymie had done this Lazlo had almost dirtied his pants, but now he had become comfortable with the oddly clear grey vision that accompanied the shift to the overlapping realm of shadow.

There was a muffled crunch as the boats ground together, and the fight was on. As Hymie wheeled, he realized that the odd colorless shadow vision allowed him to see through the fog as though it wasn't there. The Yrch were swarming over the railing of the two-deck swan boat amidships, and shredding the remaining guards as they came. There were a dozen or so elven maidens clustered together in fright on the poop deck in flowing gauzy dresses, and two elf-nobles in front of them.

The larger of the two, wearing light shimmering armor, had a bow and had just shot Bugger in an arm as the poor slob cleared the railing of the main deck.

The other elf was gesturing and chanting, and probably about to make things more difficult. Lazlo flung a flat handed fan of shuriken at them as he came, and used the hand this freed to help spread his net.

One of his throwing stars found a home in the archer's thigh, but the others just took up impressive splinters of deck. As he passed over them he began to release the net, and with a flick of his other wrist spread it out like a lasso, draping it neatly over the terrified gaggle of smooth flesh and brightly colored bits of fabric cowering behind the nobles. He gave the drag rope a tug to tighten it and the dreadwing began to wheel.

As he spun around the poop deck he uttered the command words their master had taught him, and the net and those within it began to glow and shimmer. As he made his second pass the bundle of maidens began to shrink, and he saw the elf noble's spell go off. A wave of fire rolled over the boarders, and the yrch fell back shrieking. The archer fired another arrow; Raul's shrieking ceased and he was still. Hymie rounded again, and with a bash of chest and wings the nobles tumbled with the broken railing to the lower deck.

By this pass the shrieking and yammering elf maids were smaller than pyx and the lightening net began to hop off the boat. Lazlo straightened Hymie out and pulled up the drag rope, tying the still shrinking bundle to his saddle-horn as they turned for another pass. The surviving Yrch were up and fighting now, but the archer had drawn a shimmering blue longsword as he rose, and was having dismaying success holding them clear of his companion, who was slower regaining his feet.

That made the mage Lazlo's job. He tugged on the reins, and Hymie climbed in a short spiral through the rigging, a shadow against a foggy sky, and dived. He was out of shuriken, and his lance was buried in the mast, but he was far from unarmed.

As Hymie's landing carried them through the mage Lazlo pushed off his saddle with all four arms and flew in an efficient rear kick with both feet into the back of the unprepared sword wielding elf-lord.

Before the surprised elf finished falling, Lazlo sprang back off his downed foe onto the staggered magician with all four hands gouging, and politely bit his face off. He turned, but his crew was already making short work of the downed sword-wielding elf, and the conflict was at an end.

Hymie settled with the precious bundle of high pitched squeaks and exquisite miniature wiggles atop the aft mast, and they made to the work of bringing the swanboat under control and making fast their smaller galley for tow. Raul, without any ceremony beyond not eating him, was heaved over the side.

Lazlo reclaimed his lance, unbroken, and found three of his shuriken, including the one in the leg. The other two must have skipped overboard, he concluded. That was all right, there would be many new gifts when they got this cargo to the master.

And there was always the chance that the master would not need all of the elf girls quite intact. Lazlo smiled as the sails were raised again and both crafts began to pick up speed, slipping through the foggy water. They had a very generous master.

The last bell rang, and the room was suddenly full of exited voices and fey children seeming half air-borne in their hurry to depart. Jonathon lingered towards the back of the crowd. Although he was really very eager to get home, the herd of children might draw off the pursuit and if he lurked the right distance behind the crowd he would have a better chance of making it through what he firmly thought of as enemy lines.

As the last of his classmates disappeared from view, he left the school door running crouched over. He tucked behind a hedgerow and moved thirty feet all but invisible.

While it is certainly true that young elves, older elves, and most of the fey races lack self-discipline and focus, it is also true that they can be very sneaky when given a little bit of greenery to work with. Jonathan flitted across Main Street all but flat to the cobbles, and disappeared behind the series of multicolored rose bushes that gave Rose Street its name. He turned into the alley behind the shack of a restaurant that was currently proclaiming itself to be Willie's Eats and crept along the back wall toward Pine Street.

The smell wafting out of the fryer vents was unreasonably tempting, and while he appreciated the aroma of hot food and hotter peppers, the elven lack of focus came into effect again.

As he rounded the corner onto Pine he was so busy looking for concealed figures that he ran headlong into Dolly AppLethorn, his teacher's daughter. It was not that Dolly was an entirely unlikable quantity he thought, indeed, fifteen years older than he, she was beginning to develop in very interesting ways. The problem was that she had a complete unawareness of the appropriate times for things. As she opened her mouth he cringed, and the stream of words tumbling over each other reaffirmed his worst fears - there would be no remaining concealed through this.

"Jonathon! What on earth are you doing! You nearly ran me down. Aren't you excited about the dwarven speaker coming later this week? Mom says that he is really neat, and has a real beard, and everything! But you can't be dashing around corners like that, you'll hurt someone! Don't you have any common sense at all? And quit twitching about like a sick turtle, you'll hurt your neck. I swear Jonathon, if it weren't for that cute little cowlick in your bangs, I wouldn't have any patience with you at all. Now you walk more carefully, and I'll see you tomorrow. Be careful!" And before he could tell her he didn't have time to talk, she was gone.

He stood, thoroughly jarred, and assessed his compromised situation. No immediate threats had appeared, but he was sure from his red-flushed cheeks to the soles of his twitching feet that he had been spotted.

He thought a moment, and then tore off like a rabbit around the far side of Growler's, hoping that if the enemy were massing in the Pine Street Court he could do and end run around their line and lose them in the neighborhoods.

Where before stealth had been his ally, now only speed could help him. Flying like the wind, he dodged between a monstrous half-elf half-ogre in the regalia of the Constabulary carrying 2 bleeding boggies out the door and the open tailgate of the parked paddy-wagon with it's jet black horses snorting.

It reflected on his state of mind that he did not stop to ask the watch for help; he was alone in hostile territory. Everything not out for his blood was dismissed to the level of an obstacle to be avoided. He passed the first and second house at a dash, but cut through the yard between the second and third. As he doubled back along the garden wall of Madam Fate's he slipped in the loose dirt and sprawled full length.

His face and hands were full of dust and grit, but there was something small and hard in his left hand too.

He bounced back to his feet with the resilience of the young and desperate, spitting gravel. As he raced for the Ash tree that overgrew the garden wall he realized that there was still something in his left hand. Dismissing it as too light for a viable missile weapon he was about to discard it, but his finger found a hole in it and without even classifying it as a ring he slipped it on and out of the way.

Leaping, he caught a low hanging branch and swung up. He paused for a moment crouched atop the wall, then dropped lightly into a flowering rhododendron bush.

Crouching down amongst the waxy leaves and fragrant blooms, he caught his breath and listened for sounds of pursuit. He might have gotten clean away, but the enemy could be tricky. It would be a while before he found the courage to move on.

Taric had been sure that the giant black dragonfly was the best of his steeds for the mission - it was the quickest beast in his stable, and speed was of the essence. But as it labored to climb over another small line of storm clouds to preserve its gauzy wings, he was feeling a little frustrated. His weather scrying, while not notoriously accurate, had seen nothing but sunny afternoon between Luthmere and Upper Loth, and he could not understand where these miniature storm fronts were coming from. He half thought that some greater power was aware of his goal, and sought to prevent him reaching it.

He was pondering the small selection of weather magic at his disposal when the dragonfly crested the grey clouds, and at last he saw Upper Loth before him. It was still some twenty or thirty miles distant, but this was an easy half-hour's flight for the dragonfly and the sun was shining brightly the rest of the way between them.

He angled his mount into a dive to pick up speed, and never saw the giant tree frog in the top of the towering Sequoia until he was plucked from the air by a long sticky tongue bigger around than his waist.

Mount and rider smacked together into the trunk, then separated. The dragonfly was drawn inexorably toward the waiting maw of the huge frog as Taric slipped from the saddle and began to fall. Half-stunned, he did not even appreciate his fortune in still being several hundred feet up. As he bounced from branch to branch, good fortune was the last thing on his mind. Then he hit a stouter pair of branches, and held.

As he watched, the dragonfly was bent in half and crushed between the massive wet jaws of his amphibious interceptor. A moment later his saddle and precious metal bags, now dented and slimy, arced out past him and led the way to the forest floor.

As his branches bent and snapped, he retained the presence of mind to think fondly of the softness of pine needles before being battered unconscious by still thicker branches as he fell.

Randall's first waking thought was that the air was unnaturally wet. His second thought was that he didn't hurt nearly as much as he expected to.

This led to wondering why he expected to hurt at all, and this led gradually to a slow but insistent trickling in of memory. After a few moments of this, he opened his eyes.

After several repetitions of the eye opening bit without any noticeable effect, he decided that wherever he was it must be dark. As he considered this his ears obligingly told him that there was water running near by. His stomach added to his information pool with the observation that although it didn't seem to be torn out, it was hungry. He groaned, the sound echoing surprisingly in the darkness, and sat up.

As if in response to his motion a dim light began to glow. With a certain amount of disbelief he concluded that the light seemed to actually be coming from him. His skin was glowing with dim white phosphorescence. He wondered if this was what death was like, but hunger seemed inappropriate to that state.

As he looked around he realized that he was in a small damp cave, with what looked like a wall of water rushing past the narrow entry hole in the floor. He further realized that his possessions, and his clothing in particular, were missing. His stomach seemed to have been expertly healed although he could see a thick network of new scars. He took some cheer in this fact, as it seemed a waste to heal someone you planned on killing.

However, short of diving into the water naked and seeing how far he could swim underwater, there was little to be done.

He wished that they had at least left him his smoking mix. That cigarette he had never quite gotten lit sounded awfully good about now. He looked at the wall of water thoughtfully. A fish or two would help his hunger, but he had no way to make a fire, and no line or spear. Also, he thought, whoever these River's Rights Wardens were, they probably disapproved of unauthorized fishing by their prisoners.

Thinking of his captors opened another line of consideration, and he began examining the walls of his cave. Shortly he found a spot that pleased him, and with some effort and a couple bloodied fingernails, he managed to pry loose a fist-sized chunk of rock with a nice pointy bit on it.

He moved carefully around the hole in the floor, and crouched against the wall behind it. He wiggled from side to side a bit, finding his place, and settled in to wait.

Jonathon was becoming increasingly sure that he had lost his pursuers, although he had no doubt that they were still a vigilant force which would have to be avoided on his way home. Now his problem was getting out unseen. As the hour neared dinnertime the garden of Madam Fate's Garden Inn was becoming an increasingly populated place.

As the unquestioned highest-class bordello, inn, bar and eatery in the small town, its many clients started coming early and kept coming till late.

And while his education had been considerably broadened by his stint in the Rhododendron, he suspected that the presence of a minor would not be appreciated. There was a lovely oak tree with abundant small branches that promised to give him access to the wall from the inside. The problem was that it was on the other side of a table at which two of the ladies of the house were entertaining a pompous looking officer of the local militia with a great deal of wine and giggling.

If they would stick to the wine a little longer, he thought, he could walk right by them. Unfortunately the giggling seemed to be taking more and more of the happy trio's time, and a fair amount of the wine was getting spilt along the way.

There was a shriek from the table, and a large portion more of the blood red liquid was lost down the barely covered cleavage of one of the elf-girls. He sighed and settled deeper into his shrubbery. At least, as his uncle had always told him about situations like this, it was educational.

Bahazar Morningtide hated waking up in jail. The walls were that annoying shade of brown that made you wonder if they hadn't been white originally, and the artificial magical light gave him a headache.

He had taken stock of his injuries; he had a few ribs broken on one side and at least one on the other. He was missing two of his front upper teeth, his nose was broken, his left eye was blacked, and a great deal of his hair was missing. There were an assortment of nasty knife wounds around his left knee, which were no longer bleeding much, but probably infected, and he was fairly sure that he had been kicked in the stomach by a vast assortment of small shoes. As an additional indignity he smelled like the sewer behind a bar, and had no means to effectively clean the mingled liquor and bodily excretions off.

At least he had a cell to himself; from the noises that wandered around the hallways and through the metal grate in his door, he was very glad of that.

He lay back on the stone slab, and contemplated the blobs of toilet tissue stuck to the 30 foot sloped ceiling. Someone else had been bored here. Except for the reeking wooden bucket in the corner and the grey metal door, the paper wads were the only relief from the filthy stone in sight. His cell was about three paces by five, with the door in the short end.

Somehow he didn't feel quite up to pacing.

In theory as a High-Elven Naval Intelligence operative, he could probably obtain release. However, since he was working undercover, and because he was a paranoid bastard sometimes, he had surgically removed his now standardized subcutaneous ID chit with his sock knife, and hidden the little ball of metal and glass in a hollow tree some miles out of town.

He could probably arrange for his superiors to clear his release, but then there would be hell to pay for the blown cover and the drunken idiocy that had led to his arrest. It would not be the first time he got in trouble for drinking on the job, but repetition didn't seem to make the experience any more enjoyable.

On the other hand, if he rode it out, he didn't think that they couldn't lock him up for very long for being too drunk in a bar. The haunting overtones of another scream echoed outside his cell, and he wondered how long it would take in a place like this to qualify as very long.

Of course, there wasn't anyone just knocking on his door to see if he was ready to give up yet and go home.

That was the thing he hated most about jail. He could plan, and plan, and plan, and there would still be more time to plan before anything happened. Jail seemed to be all about waiting. And jail was the one place he never seemed to have an easy time going to sleep.

With a sigh, he settled back, and stoutly pretending that he didn't want a beer or a bath, began to count the paper wads on the ceiling again. There wasn't much else to do.

Blut Bluhornihoff was in one of the berserk rages that had given dwarvenkind a reputation as a small people not to be trifled with.

After using his telekinesis to unlock his holding cell three times, he had been thrown bodily by that damnable half-ogre into a new cell made of some fiendish grey-black metal, where he quickly discovered that the divine connection which gave him his magic was completely disrupted.

He had raged throughout the afternoon, screaming about holy wars, the respect due to visiting religious delegations, and dire consequences, completely without effect. He had been hopeful that someone from his church would hear of his incarceration and show up to free him, but if such an effort had been made he had not been informed. So now, deprived of his people, and even his god for companionship, he returned to the tool that had made dwarves what they were throughout the ages: he raged.

He bloodied his knuckles on the walls, he slammed his head into the blank grey metal surface that he knew was the hidden door. He flung himself bodily about the cell, screaming in a voice that would have driven more timid listeners mad. They had taken his armor, his axe, his lenses and mirrors, and even his clothing, and he had scorned the orange jumpsuit that was proffered.

So now, dressed in only a breechclout, his dense stocky body was rapidly becoming a mass of bruises, cuts, and blood-matted hair. His animal mind was in control, and it was unconcerned with such things.

He flung himself against the place where he knew the door to be, again and again.

He began to find a rhythm in the senseless action. He would scrape himself from the floor, stagger back the few steps that his cell allowed, and stubby legs churning like a furious windmill, fling himself into the blank metal surface again. Once, he paused, and raising his trembling bloody beard to the unseen heavens, he roared.

A sound so primal had seldom been heard, but he was not listening, and there was no one else to hear. Once more, with all he had left, he flung himself into the unyielding metal and this time as he slid to the floor, found peace for a while and moved no more.

A loud groan and the feeling of something wet on his face dragged Taric Bloodroot back into consciousness. Gradually, he realized that it was he who had groaned, and that the wetness on his face seemed to be rain. He opened his eyes, and as his focus gradually lengthened, saw ferns, branches, and the towering sequoias above him. All were soaked through, and their determined dripping was adding to the rain that had awakened him.

A feeble wave of his left hand brought one of his golden rings to glowing, and a gentle blue sphere shimmered into life around him against which the rain hissed and popped.

He tried to sit up and nearly lost consciousness again from the rush of pain in his head. He slumped back to the ground, and after a moment's rest tried again to look around him. His battered saddlebags slumped forlornly over the giant rotted bole of a fallen tree nearby. Except for them, himself, and the rain, the forest seemed to be quiet.

A second gesture brought power from another of his rings, this one finely wrought silver with a cut lapis set amongst a circle of wings. Light shone from the lapis, and the same light answered from his saddlebags. Slowly the metal pouches began to twitch, and as his laboring mind gained some measure of control, to raise and crawl slowly across the forest floor towards him.

When they finally reached his side he was all but exhausted, and had begun to shiver ferociously. With fumbling hands he undid the clasp and scrabbled about inside.

Food, wine, trinkets of summoning, and tools of destruction slid by his fingers unheeded until he found the familiar rabbit fur pouch that held his herbs, and a woolen sweater that his mother had brought back for him from a shopping excursion amongst the yiii in the high mountains. He pulled them out, drew a ragged breath, and gathered the energy to sit up.

This time the pain was not as bad, and after a couple more gulps of air he managed to pull the sweater about him.

He waited until his shivering had subsided a little, and then pulled his magical bone teacup from the herb pouch. Reaching outside his blue sphere of dryness, Taric quickly filled the cup, and added a pinch of dried lemon balm for his headache, and the powder of a rare dried kumal nut to heal any internal injuries he had sustained in his fall.

With a symbol sketched with the fingers of his free hand and a word, the water began to boil, and by the time his hands had stopped shaking his tea was done. He added a lump of cane sugar to help the taste, and gagged the concoction down.

The spread of soothing warmth through his body was almost immediate, and Taric settled back with a sigh. The bone teacup fell unheeded from his fingers onto a bed of plush green moss, and he spent several minutes just enjoying the feeling of his body re-knitting itself.

At last he sat back up. He was healing, even mostly healed, but he had had enough for today. After reassembling his herb pouch, Taric spent a few minutes gathering soggy twigs and used another ring to start a fire.

Normally he would have relied more on his own magic and less on his trinkets, but he was tired and wanted to save what strength he had left for the night ahead. Huddling close to the fire, he pulled out some dried fruit and strips of smoked beef. After a little thought he opened a bottle of a good vintage of cabernet to breathe and set himself up a gold-chased wineglass.

It would be a long night and there was no point in neglecting the finer things in life.

Morgana had never truly been at home. Called Morgana Fetchkin for the eighty odd years she had lived in the hilly Southlands of Bolden, she had been scorned and reviled as a witch. Her childhood was a scarred and missing memory, but the only sense of it that she retained was that then too she had been an outcast. She knew that she had lived longer than any of the people she dwelled amongst, and that her features were different.

Her cheekbones were higher, for one thing, and her bone structure more delicate. Her ears swept gently away from her head and had almost no lobe, but her battered tin mirror showed her no resemblance to the grotesque points on the pictures of fetch that the children drew.

She had lived amongst these people as long as she could remember, but increasingly over the years of watching her rare friends grow old and die while she did not, she had known that one day she would have to leave.

So, two weeks ago, she had packed a slightly unwieldy rucksack of things she would not leave behind in her little cabin in the hills, and she had set out. She was sure that she must have crossed the border of Bolden a day or two ago, and she was disappointed that the forest seemed so unchanged. There had been no mystical tingling of her roots drawing nearer, no sense of harmony and beauty that was any different from that she found at the little pond atop the hill her cabin was on.

She had found plenty to eat, and had no problems, but she had half talked herself into going back.

As the pleasantly breezy afternoon turned into evening and birdsong, she had decided to give it one more days hike and then return. Crops would be coming in soon, and there was always work to be had at harvest time. The deer path she had been following came unexpectedly to a pretty creek with a willow overhanging a deep blue pool, and after a quick scout around she set to making camp for the night.

The pool was an added bonus; her long brown curly hair was full of pine needles and bits of more dubious things, and she could give it and the rest of her road weary self a thorough washing in the morning.

The garden behind Madam Fate's had finally quieted down. It was well past the middle of the night, and Jonathon was sure that his family was in a panic. The militia officer had been joined by half of his troop, and they had kept most of the bordello's staff giggling and moaning half the night. The party had finally limped and stumbled off toward an upstairs room a few minutes ago, trailing a red leather bullwhip, a stuffed mongoose, and three more bottles of wine.

Jonathon was slowly beginning to regain enough composure to think about the world on a larger scale than the smell of crushed Rhododendrons and moving collages of bare flesh. He was pretty sure that he could now safely sleep through his next several decades of sex-ed. It was due to his educational experience that he was still here; he was afraid his knees were still shaking.

Finally he made it to his feet, and staggered over to his escape tree. Drying his sweaty palms against his trouser legs in preparation for the leap, he noticed the ring that he had found.

He gave a couple of tugs to remove it, but it seemed stuck. The light wasn't good enough for him to give it a detailed inspection, so with a shrug and a last preparatory test of his knees, he leapt. It seemed harder going over the wall this time, but after a few moments' scramble he was safe on the outside. Now if only his bedroom window wasn't latched he would be clear of trouble till the morning.

Wisteria Birdling had come very close to getting angry. It had been a long hard day.

It started with another of the odious love notes from Necrotis, the undertaker, wafted to her door by some foul biddable breeze. Then she had been blocked on her way to see Celinor by the CDS protest. She had been stuck going right through the middle of the masses of little perverts, and they had done nothing to improve her mood. She still hadn't gotten her under-things untucked and rearranged properly.

Now she had spent seemingly endless hours arguing with the magistrate, and more waiting for the council to convene. The problem there, as she saw it, was age. Having only lived two years past her first century, she could still react to changes, and even hurry when she needed to. But Celinor, the magistrate, had been alive for who knew how many thousands of years, and the council all had a millennium or two under their belts.

This had two effects. First, they all tended to view her as an attractive but ignorant child, to be humored with a pat on the head or a lollipop if she was too noisy. Secondly, even once they were convinced that something needed to be done, nothing happened in a hurry. It had taken her until sundown to convince Celinor of the urgency of the situation, and the council was still trickling in by ones and twos, grumbling and grousing every step of the way.

She had finally gone outside, and was smoking a ceremonial red stone pipe of relaxing and slightly intoxicating herbs. The cool night air was helping her tangled nerves, and it felt good after so much frustration to get a little bit of a buzz on and let the older elves complain at each other without having to listen.

Really, she thought, this problem of great age leading to great inefficiency was the root cause of the crisis that they now faced.

Nearly a hundred millennium ago the Leth had been exiled from the land Beyond the Mountain by their greater kindred for feuding between the Shaë and Duir. Those Beyond the Mountain continued to be revered by both peoples, and it was Them that as the shaman of this hamlet she worked with and for.

For the past twenty or so thousand years the Shaë Leth had been being downsized as a people. The wave of barbaric short-lived humans that had trickled down the archipelago at the river's mouth had at first seemed an amusement, and then a minor nuisance. With a speed that caught the slow changing culture of immortals completely unprepared, the humans had conquered and settled the archipelago and more than two thirds of the fertile river valleys that the Shaë Leth had once occupied. Now the Shaë Spaw was only a narrow strip on one side of the Green River, trapped between several nations of the encroaching humans and the Duir Spaw.

The last thirty years had been surprisingly peaceful, although raids by river pirates were getting bolder this fall. But while thirty years was almost a third of her life, to many of the elder fey who wielded the power in the societies of the Leth it was little more than a heartbeat. And she carried news to the Council that must mean that more trouble was coming.

Ammergladdin, perhaps the most powerful of those Beyond the Mountain, had not been heard from since the first Leth-war, in 27,380AE. Always a recluse amongst the generally sociable and even overly political factions of Them, he had churches in every major city of the Leth, but had remained mute to the world until now.

And she, barely come of age, and a lowly shaman of a small hamlet, had been granted the vision that Ammergladdin had chosen a new avatar to protect his people from the humans, and that the avatar was in her hamlet.

Unfortunately, the vision had not included any hint of whom the new avatar might be, or what coming peril was so great that it demanded Ammergladdin's return to active participation in the lives of her people. There had been no reports of troops massing on the human border, and the vision had been almost specific about humans.

Somehow she suspected that once all the crotchety old buggers finished assembling the council, these were questions that they would want answered.

With a sigh, and several creaking joints, Randall finally lowered his rock to the floor.

He had no idea what time of the day or night it might be, only that his tortured body could no longer remain crouched, rock held on high. Groaning, he put his hands in the small of his back and tried to stretch his cramps out. As he stood back up, the water rippled and one of his blue skinned captors flowed smoothly up from the hole into his cave.

"I'm glad you finally set that damn thing down. I've been waiting for hours. I have your release papers, payment agreement, and damages waiver ready for you to sign, and then we'll take you up for pre-release processing." The warden removed a sealed tube from his belt and extracted a sheaf of paperwork, a quill and ink jar.

"Really you're very lucky. The magistrate could have been a lot harder on you. Do you have an established line of credit with any of the major money lenders that we can deduct your monthly payment from?"

Randall was thoroughly nonplussed by this turn of events, but found that he was too tired to offer much resistance.

Looking over the insane paperwork thrust at him, he discovered that they planned on charging him the ridiculous sum of 8 gold stars every moon for the next year. Still, he thought, they couldn't have jurisdiction far from the river. If he went along with all this quietly then he would apparently be free, and he could deal with the return crossing later.

With a carefully measured show of reluctance he scrawled his name in an endless succession of blanks, and at last the paperwork was done. As he handed the paperwork back to the warden he thought to ask, "Can I have my cigarettes back if I'm going to be released?"

A quick shake of the head accompanied "Wait till you're topside. Smoking is a filthy habit, and the smell lingers in the water and the caves. Come along now. Pre-release processing."

Randall was roughly tossed into the water, but hands caught him there and before he even ran short of breath he was being lifted, dripping, into a larger cave. A mass of coarse fabric hit him in the head, and his hands sorted out a thrown towel. As he began to dry himself off he looked around. This cave had the unpleasant appearance of some sort of low budget prison's medical/torture facility. There was a low stone slab with leather cuffs, and a wall of small knives and pokey things.

Randall was grabbed again, by hands too numerous to resist, and as he was dragged to the slab a dry distant voice launched into an explanation of sorts in the dry monotone of a speaker giving a speech he has often repeated.

"Before releasing you with debts to the River pending we are required by River Law to implant a subcutaneous debt tracer ID stone. Should you fall behind in your payments, the stone will begin to return your borrowed fleshly liquids to our Mother River. Should you default on payment for more than one moon, or attempt to remove the ID stone without proper authorization, all of your fluids will be returned to the River and you will give your life in payment to the Sacred Waters that you have sinned against."

Randall felt a poke in his neck as he was chained down, still struggling mightily, and the room receded in a giddy spiral with the bored voice still droning.

Lacy had awakened in darkness. Her arms were chained over her head, and her toes barely reached the cold stone floor. She only weighed eighteen pounds, and was not in danger of dislocating her shoulders, but it was extremely uncomfortable. The stone was cold behind her too, and with an experimental wiggle she confirmed that her brightly colored clothing was gone. Strangely, the air did not smell like her memory of jail.

There was a foul reek to the air, but none of the stench of free roaming excrement that permeated the cellblocks. She had been awake here for at least several hours, and there had been no sounds and no motion of air or other changes that she could perceive.

Probably she had been put here and left alone to scare her, but it was working, and she had all sorts of bad ideas about why someone might want to scare her.

The longer she hung naked in the darkness thinking about it, the more horrible the ideas that came to her, and by the time she heard the sound she had worked herself into such a state that she burst out with a horribly cute little scream.

Angry with her reaction she sternly told herself to get control and quit panicking, but the feeling of the cold metal cuffs on her wrists and the cold stone on her buttocks and feet made the lecture less effective than she had hoped.

The first soft thump was followed by another, and the sound which she now placed as biggie footsteps gradually approached. Then, to her surprise and dismay, the footsteps passed nearby and continued onward, inexplicably receding.

From the muffled sound she guessed that someone had walked down a hall outside the room she was in. However, she was chained naked in here, and she was damned if she could imagine what could be more interesting than that at the other end of the hall.

She began to try on a feeling of indignant anger against her unknown captors; how dare they not be in here drooling over her helpless flesh? They must be prejudiced sizeist bastards, she decided, warming to her topic. And miniaphiles too! Big drooling disgusting creatures, to have stripped her tiny helpless self and chained her here in the dark.

Having successfully categorized, criticized, and condemned her captors with only a few contradictions, she began to feel more confident.

True, she was a helpless captive, and apt to be treated horribly, but on a more subtle level she was also a symbol of the struggle between the sizes and a martyr for her cause! As her ballooning self-confidence reached the peak of its climb, the footsteps began to return.

Step after step echoed in the empty dark air, each after a pause and a little louder than the one before.

Long before the owner of the steps arrived her false bravado was gone, and she squeaked and shrilled at each footfall. To her disgust she still sounded cute.

Finally the footsteps stopped nearby. There was another painfully long pause, and she struggled against her chains with spirit. A key grated in a lock, and a door opened in front of her. This was accompanied by a blast of the first light she had seen in hours, and she was momentarily blinded.

As her vision gradually returned she saw a huge silhouette looming in the door, and managed eventually to identify it as the half-ogre from the riot squad. He had a deranged grin, reeked of sweat and blood, and was wearing only a leather breechclout over his filthy matted body hair. He was carrying a blue glass flask that was corked tightly, and taking his time running his eyes over his prey.

As she returned his gaze with the sick fascination a small animal finds in the eyes of a large snake, she watched his breechclout distend until she was sure that what it contained was longer and thicker than her arm. Then she began to scream.

She almost didn't notice him drink the potion, and it didn't really register that he had done so until his shadow moved away from her across the floor. Looking again, she saw that he was shrinking. Or more correctly, most of him was.

He continued to lose height until he was only a few inches taller than she, and perhaps twice her weight as he had retained his bulky build. But his barely concealed bulging member was undiminished by the magic, and her eyes held there for a moment before sliding with terror and revulsion back up to his twisted yellow teeth and burning amber eyes.

"My name is Fang, little criminal. You will call me Officer Greenbow. If you had been at Growler's Pub today you'd spend a month in the rat infested jail, doing things that make me seem like a joyride. If on the other hand I could testify that you spent the week here with me, then I could hardly have arrested you at Growler's."

He adjusted his breechclout and grinned again and with one more despicably cute little scream and a last heave of her magnificent chest, she fainted and her marvelous miniature frame went limp.

As they pulled the two boats into the slip below the ancient black tower Lazlo felt the familiar surge of discomfort that always accompanied his visits here. The other Yrch were fumbling with the mooring lines, trying not to grind into the pier or fall overboard, and Lazlo knew they felt the strange sensation too. It was as though the ghosts of all their ancestors were spying on them, and the collective verdict was bad.

The hairs on his Lazlo's neck prickled, and his stomach felt a little queasy. After a few minutes the feeling became more tolerable, though still unpleasant, and his merry band of pirates gathered the spoils they had looted from the pleasure boat. Lazlo carried the net of quietly screaming tiny captives, and they headed up the long steps that led to the master's home.

Hymie flew off to his rooftop roost, even his shadow seeming less dark as it circled the black stone.

It took nearly half an hour to climb the winding stairs. Lazlo had studied enough tactics to know that the length of the exposed path was the first line of defense should the hilltop tower ever come under assault, but his troops just grumbled. As they grew closer to the massive gate at the base of the tower Lazlo could see a figure standing guard outside.

This was very strange.

The master would have wrapped his grotesque body in clouds of darkness to come outside this close to dawn, and to the best of Lazlo's memory he had always lived alone with his infernal experiments.

Closer still, Lazlo could see that the figure had four arms. Vaard Yrch certainly. And familiar looking. But it was far too late when Lazlo realized who was waiting for his band.

Hojo Da Boss grinned. The multitude of wounds that had slain him still gaped obscenely, dripping discolored ooze, and he smelled of death and rot. His skin had become paler, a ghastly shade of grey-green without blood flowing through his veins. But he stood here with more power in his four arms then he had ever known.

And here before him were the survivors of his band of cutthroats. With a catlike bounce and a howl of glee, Hojo landed before the gaping Lazlo, and snatching the net with one hand used the other three to fling him bodily back over the awestruck crew.

"Hojo Da Boss again. You, Lazlo, not boss no more. I return, I strongest ever, I rule!"

With a mad little caper and a series of guttural hoots, Hojo charged like a rhino and bowled the rest of his troop back down the stairs where they lay on the stone cowering.

"Hojo Da Boss! Who dare challenge me now?"

Weakly, from where he lay half-crumpled against the balustrade, Lazlo said "You Boss, Hojo. Hojo always Da Boss. Welcome back." He was joined in a chorus of terrified submissive agreement from the other yrch, and Hojo crossed both sets of arms on his chest with another toothy smile.

"We agree. You my crew again. Good. The master have much for us to do."

With a gesture for the rest to follow Hojo slung the net of miniaturized screaming elven debutantes over his shoulder and walked through the gates of the master's tower.

The tourist moved silently along the clay riverbank as the first rays of the red rising sun stole through the weeds. He was covered in fresh native mud and sliding along on his belly, fingers and toes in a manner that rendered him nearly invisible.

The mud, he hoped, would give even heat based vision problems. He had only covered fifty feet in the last ten minutes, but an itch in the small hairs on his neck warned him that something was watching him. He released another silent burst of breath downwind to draw away the swarming wetland insects and keep them from giving away his position.

He had played this game before, and the fetch bastards were tricky. He had earned his name on his countless excursions into places that others of his race only told tales of.

At thirty-four years old, he was a scarred and tested veteran of the insurgency units of the army of Bolden. Born with the name Jim Browning, he had been trained by a huge grizzled old bear-tribes tracker who had been known as the traveler, and who had inspired his own nickname. The traveler had died eight years ago from complications arising from a particularly nasty hallucinogenic dart poison from a band of the tiny fair-fetch.

No one had called the tourist Jim in five of those years, and very probably there was no one living who knew he had ever had another name. Friends were few in his business, and none of them lasted long.

This was the only thing that kept the tourist back from promotion: he had never yet managed to bring his any of his squads back alive.

First in the Bolden Special Forces, and now in the Border Crows, he was repeatedly teamed up with squads of gung-ho kids straight out of advanced training. They could polish boots, do pushups and fight in formation - he had to give that to them - but they didn't have the temperament for dealing with the surprises that the fetch-land brought.

Fetch magic was strange, and every time the situation got a little weird the kids would try to fight like they had been taught to, and buy themselves shallow graves.

There was magic in Bolden, of course, but you usually had a fair idea it was coming. If somebody in draped in enough ornate robes to choke an elephant started waving his hands and chanting, the peasants knew to duck.

Here you'd be just about to mow down a few of the flimsy looking fair-fetch, and before you knew it one of them would have turned into a demon cougar. Or one would explode in flames, and the other'd turn half your squad into wilted cactus plants with a sneeze and a pinky wiggle.

It didn't even feel like magic. Most of the time it just happened here, as a part of life, without all the proper social trimmings. Magic seemed to be such a common resource to the fetch that it was used routinely by idiots the way a teenager uses a dull survival knife to crack walnuts.

As a result of his companions' KIA ratio, and by his own special request, this time the tourist was on his own. This was the way he liked it.

The tourist was one of perhaps a dozen humans alive who had been here often enough to know what things were really like. He had learned to differentiate between what he thought of as the fair-fetch and foul-fetch, and to know what side of the river to mostly expect different sorts on. Over time, the tourist had even become aware that there were a great many distinct races amongst both tribes of fetch, although many were too similar for him to be confident in knowing what he was dealing with.

He was here to rescue the daughter of the Duke of Anthor, and unlike those who had sent him he had some idea how to go about it. From the widely conflicting and exaggerated descriptions of the raiders at the coastal fortress they were probably denizens of the far side of the river valley, more monstrous or reptilian than fetch in appearance.

Also, he knew that the slim fair looking fetch that lived near his border were not above having slaves, but disdained humans as inferior and would have been very unlikely to raid for them. Really, when the fair-fetch weren't trying to kill him, they seemed much more likeable than his childhood stories would have had him believe. Unlike their monstrous kin from the far bank, he had come to feel that they were possessed of a haunting unreal sort of beauty.

And then, harmoniously startled from his train of thought, he saw her.

Randall awoke in a small muddy pool by the edge of a stream. His first several moments were spent assessing and then enjoying the warm morning sun and the gentle trickling of the water. The young forest along the banks lent a green quality to the light, and the situation seemed all together soothing. He wasn't quite sure why he was here, but he had chosen an excellent place to sleep.

A moment's fumbling produced his smoking materials, and with the bleary eyed determination of the habitual smoker he fashioned and lit his morning's first.

The smells of water-lily and tall pines blended peacefully with the mingled sweet scents of his smoking mixture. The brook babbled on, and the early morning birds paid melodic tribute to the new day. After some time had passed, Randall's mind idly turned again to the questions of why and where and this time the answers began to trickle back in. Disturbing though the return to memory was, Randall was still very comfortable. He had just settled in for a nap when he heard the scream.

A few moments later and eighty-odd miles away Jonathon was also awakened by screaming. He had been having the strangest dreams; of a glowing golden presence, a huge black figure, millions of elves cheering, and of oceans of sinuously gyrating appendages of pink flesh and the green wet living smell of crushed rhododendrons.

The screams were identified as belonging to his irate mother several minutes before he actually got his eyes open, and he picked up on her invective somewhat in the middle.

"...Sick! Worried sick I tell you! Where were you all night? What time did you come home? Sit up straight and answer me you young scoundrel! What trouble have you gotten into this time - Quit rubbing at your eyes and listen - And where did you get that ugly expensive ring? Have you been stealing now too? You'll break a mother's heart..."

Jonathon got up, padded slowly past the continuing tirade, and went to his white enameled sink. Turning the brass faucet knob, he was rewarded with a stream of cool clear water. Given his father's skill in the new plumbing systems this was an event rare enough to cherish and he splashed his face thoroughly while trying to tune out his mother. His father would be here soon enough, and he needed to wake up before he dealt with that.

While he was washing he caught a glimpse of the ring. It wasn't ugly, it was so beautiful it almost frightened him. It was a golden-black metal, set with one huge central stone that seemed to have all the colors of the rainbow in it. Surrounding the rounded center stone was an intricate mosaic of brightly colored incredibly tiny chips of ruby, emerald, lapis, and sunstone worked into an almost blinding mesh of symbols.

It looked like something that important people would be looking for.

Almost instinctively he tried to take it off, but it was still stuck fast. It had slipped on easily, but now he couldn't even spin the ring on his finger. It almost seemed that the ring had grafted onto his skin and bone, twisting them as he tried increasingly franticly to budge it. With a detached part of his mind he noticed that his mother had quit screaming and was now trying to help soap his finger.

Finally they both gave up, and became aware that his father was watching them from the doorway with an expression of fatigue and concern.

The senior alchemical advocate to the village council, his father was normally a cheerful elf, fond of the table to the border of plumpness and generally to be found tinkering on something with a sandwich in hand. Now, however there was a gaunt look to the elder Jonathon's face, and his eyes were fixed on the ring with an intense but unreadable gaze that bordered on horror.

The Dread Count Astoc stood on a dune surveying the tranquil sea shimmering in the morning sun. The dark things that he had slain in the night smoked, sputtered and flared as their unholy flesh was unmade by the light of day.

He was well pleased, for none had escaped his wrath, and no more un-living sea things would trouble this peaceful stretch of sand for a while.

Then the vision took him. Ammergladdin looked into the holy warrior's eyes from afar Beyond the Mountain, and showed him what would be. He saw the servant's return, and the ring that chose the avatar. He saw the road inland, and the hamlet of Upper Loth.

And a ringing golden command rang in his head: "GO!"

The Dread Count, master of commands, did not consider resisting. He leapt onto his Dread Steed with a mighty crash of armor and with a fierce kick of his heels spurred to the Southeast.

His steed was tireless, and he rode fast.

The meeting of the Clever Villains League was in full swing. All of them were too busy during the nights, so they had taken to having the meetings in various strongholds and caverns in the early morning. This had the added advantage that since only a few of them would think of leaving until sundown, they could drink freely.

Mumar Huthgan, the Dark-Elven necromancer, was still furious about the abduction of his wives by goblin monks that he claimed were sent by the Order of the Goblin Night, and this had occupied the first few hours of the meeting. The frenzied denials of Taduk Blackcollar, the potbellied chieftan of the goblin order had kept everyone laughing too hard to mind much.

Accompanied by a generous dispersement of spittle, he eventually managed to get out some more of his juicy conspiracy theories about a secret splinter goblin monastery dedicated to the dawn instead of the night. This, as always, produced more drinking and raucous laughter, but then a new unexpected presence had entered the room.

Now most of the council's attention was fixed on their unexpected guest speaker. Wrapped in clouds of darkness, none of them were at all sure who he was or how he had known of their meeting, but clouds of darkness were pretty villainous, and he fit in well.

The stranger had set Alkash, the scorpion-centaur leader of the Wet Lightning Swamp Raiders, back onto her many chitinous knees with a blast of nether power when his right to be present was challenged. He would say only that he had come to warn them of a great threat arising in the East, one so horrible that they must put aside all their differences and prepare to go to war. This was proving somewhat frustrating because naturally there were lots of questions, and the figure in darkness was entertaining none of them.

No-one really wanted to be the subject of the second ass-kicking of the meeting, but they weren't quite ready to mass all of their hordes and call everybody's second cousins away from the farms in the middle of summer either.

This conversational stalemate had gone on for about half an hour, and the general consensus seemed to be that some sort of evidence of a threat other than the figure in darkness was in order. However, the general consensus was about to be emphatically overruled.

Black Lobster Bob was having fun. In fact, he was not sure if in the entire two hundred years since he had eaten the Bolden court demonologist and escaped he had ever had this much fun. The first few weeks, maybe, but that had been a sating of the animalistic desires he had nurtured through aeons of hellfire, captivity and service.

Now he had plans coming together.

He had enjoyed tremendously raising Hojo from the dead to take command back from Lazlo. Lazlo was too smart - he knew what he was doing and how to do it. Hojo was tremendously strong even before his death, and exceptionally dangerous for one of these flesh things, but he didn't ask questions, even to himself. And better, Hojo mostly kept Lazlo too scared to ask his own questions out loud. He would meet with them when he returned, give them gifts to keep them from squabbling, and send them back into action.

Now Bob was terrorizing petty villains, and that was fun too. There were none of them with power or steel that could pierce his protections, and he was enjoying drawing out the moment as long as possible.

Before too long he would offer them something and then they would all jump into line because they were ready for the endless moment of fear to be over. But for now he let them sweat and drink nervously while he analyzed what he already thought of as the core of his first army.

Hojo had been a member of the organization in bad standing, and had made Black Lobster Bob aware of the secret meetings some time ago. He had watched it, and now he had decided that he would own it.

The Dark Elven necromancer, Mumar, was prattling on again about sufficient evidence. Without tuning into his words, Bob silenced him with a pointed finger and a gesture of his one arm that had the wonderful little gadgets on the end.

Stamping one hoof on the floor caused the murmurs of the rest of the assembly to silence themselves. With two muttered words of his own and a twitch of his tentacle-like mandibular antennae, the room spun and faded around them. Fire leapt and burned and the screams of those who believed themselves to be damned echoed horridly in the vast emptiness.

Then reality snapped back in a slightly different location, and they were in his dungeon beneath the ancient black tower he had found. He addressed the now silent assembly, "Malign entities, I leave you here to finish your debating amongst yourselves. When I return you shall have finished talking and be ready to listen." There was a sudden upwelling of noise from every throat present, mostly raised in protest, but it only annoyed him for a moment.

A wrinkle of a scaled eyebrow took him to his laboratory up many flights of stairs from the clamor of the CVA's leadership in the below ground cell.

He ground fresh beans, poured them into the basket of a copper percolator, and with a word heated the water so that the scent of hot coffee filled the air. He would let his new lieutenants languish in the dungeon for a day or two; it would help their listening skills.

He had several more experiments that he was eagerly waiting to perform on his latest shipment of elf flesh. He half thought he might keep a few of them alive. Perhaps the thing to do would be to erase and rebuild a few of their minds to form the core of a new order of fanatic priestesses who would keep his developing army in line without too much of his own attention.

Black Lobster Bob always had to have hobbies.

His form shimmered and fled as swiftly as his location had a few minutes before, and the form of a terrifyingly beautiful Fair-Elven dancer he had once seen appeared where his misshapen robed hulk had slouched moments before. She had long blond hair and stern features, and was clad only in a few shining veils.

She smiled, rather prettily, drank some coffee, and went to do some brainwashing before meeting with the yrch.

Stumping Blackscow latched his door and took another moment to stretch and look around before going to work.

His three hundred year apprenticeship as a sorcerer was growing very tiring. As the practitioners of the magic of raw destruction, sorcerers were required to demonstrate a commitment to public service in order to be taught, and were closely supervised. Mostly, like Stump, they worked in sanitation.

Eight hours a day he destroyed the town's solid waste. He had graduated from his second obligatory century of sewer duty twenty three years ago, and was still happy every morning for that, but twenty three years of sanitation was enough for it to grow tiresome in its own right. If it wasn't for the night job playing trumpet at a small local bar he would have gone crazy long ago. He got little sleep, but it saved him from total boredom.

As he walked past the rows of still sleeping households he habitually looked in the garbage buckets by the road. That was what really was threatening to drive him mad about his job: he could never believe the things that were thrown away.

He passed the Mayblossoms' stately home with its never-ending stream of disposable diapers - as if he hadn't had enough of that while he was in sewage. Mr. Greenbud had set out some broken bits of dog constructs, and Stumping considered salvaging a metal leg that looked mostly intact, but the pads and claws were badly worn and rust had begun to set in between the toes.

There were the gaudy wrappings of more of the disposable nymph summoning kits and three empty kegs set out for the wine truck at the Hallowthornes', and Stump morosely wondered if he would be invited to raucous parties like their nightly bashes if he made it through to graduation. He only had seventy seven years left, but it seemed like forever. He kicked a stray celery stalk back toward the Magpies' can, and grumbled something about the hungry.

Really, there weren't too many folks going hungry in the Shaë Spae, unless they were being deliberately kept that way, but he hated the wasted food anyway.

The smell of all the rotten food that clung to his clothes at the end of every day's work was a constant reminder of his hated job. No matter how often he did laundry his flats and rented rooms all started to smell like part of the dump. He probably wouldn't have had much of a social life anyway, but he bitterly blamed the stench for his solitude. Stumping definitely hated his work, but he was in luck today. He didn't know it yet, but during his lunch break things would start happening and his life would never be the same.

It had been a promising first half of a relaxing bath in the stream-fed pool. Morgana had scrubbed herself down and swum a bit with the sunrise before lathering her curly black mane of hair. Then, just at that dreaded point where she had to be very careful not to get suds in her eyes, things started happening much too fast for her to keep track of.

A huge serpentine head with a curving horn on its nose and long fat whiskers like a catfish broke the surface of the pool to her left, and reared a full body height above the water. It's mouth opened, showing row after row of pointy jagged teeth, and a horrid smelling cloud of painfully hot rancid smelling steam gusted over her as it howled.

Her skin felt like it was on fire down to mid thigh where the cool water had protected her. Screaming, she staggered backward toward the shore. Then, scaring her almost worse than the water drake's sudden appearance, a section of the riverbank detached itself, and flew past her at the monster.

Wiping desperately at her soapy eyes, and still screaming in shock and pain from her full body burn, she tried to make sense out of what she was seeing.

What appeared to be some sort of biped made of mud was wrestling with the serpent's head, and stabbing at it with a long knife. The serpent coiled reflexively around this newcomer, and began to drag it under. Then, just as unexpectedly, a third fantastic vision made it's appearance as she reached the bank.

Long limbed and graceful, at first glance she knew that this was the fetch that she was labeled kin to, and that the label held truth.

As Randall burst into the clearing at a dead run his eyes tried desperately to catch up with the action. He had lost another cigarette barely lit, but he had found the source of the screams. A nude dark haired elven maiden was dragging herself up out of the water, still sobbing incoherently; her fair skin was flushed a glowing red.

A serpent of some sort seemed to be wrestling a large thrashing chunk of mud under the water in the middle of the pool. The girl froze when she saw him, brown eyes wider than a startled doe's, but the fight in the middle continued.

Dropping his broadsword, but not wasting the time to remove his buckler, Randall swung his longbow from his shoulder, snatched an arrow from a quiver, and drew a bead. Almost quicker than thought, one, then two and three feathered shafts protruded from the serpent. Swinging around in anger, it dropped what Randall now saw was some sort of biped covered in mud, and rushed over the water towards him.

This time dropping his longbow, Randall fumbled for his sword where it lay in the mud, but was late and lost his grip on it as the beast rammed him and threw him up the bank. The river worm did not stop at the bank, but slid swiftly over the mud after him, its head now a good eight feet above the ground.

Randall scuttled back on his elbows and heels, and managed to twist out of the way of the first lunge. He hacked viciously at it's neck with the edge of his shield, but the blow glanced off the beast's retreating skull.

As it reared up again he managed to pull his table knife from his belt, but just before it lunged at him a small rock thrown by the girl bounced precisely off its scaly eyelid, and the snake swung its head back toward her. Randall surged to his feet, and leaped after the monster, knife flashing.

To his surprise, as he hit the snake high the muddy warrior hit it low with a dagger in each hand. Much of the mud had been washed off by the aquabatics of the past few moments, and Randall came due for another shock as he realized that his apparent ally was actually one of the human invaders.

All three knives bit home, and the serpent howled steam and bit at the human as it twisted. Randall backpedaled, leaving his knife buried behind the base of the serpent's skull, and seized up his broadsword from the reeds by the bank where it had come to rest. He hesitated a moment, unsure which foe to attack, then went back after the drake.

His sword went wide, nearly catching the human, but his follow up shield bash caught the drake alongside the head and drove Randall's knife deeper toward the creature's pea sized brain.

Then to Randall's dismay he felt the beast's tail ensnare his legs, and he went under, losing his sword again. He clawed and bashed desperately at the coils that held him beneath the surface, but his hands moved in slow motion under the water, and without an edge he couldn't seem to even damage the sinuous body.

His lungs began to labor as he struggled, but just as he was sure they would burst and he would drown in the reddening water the coils slackened and fell away. He kicked for the surface and made it, spitting water and coughing. Looking around, he saw the drake's head nearly severed, and the muddy, bleeding human disappearing into the brush on the far side at a quick unencumbered scramble. Turning, he realized that the damsel, formerly in distress, was now nowhere to be seen.

He uttered a long sigh, and began diving for his sword.

He would want something longer than his knife to skin the beast, which almost certainly had more steam inside ready to bust out when he cut into it. It looked well fed. Perhaps its belly contained some of the gold he needed to keep his fluids. Perhaps it had an underwater cave hidden conveniently nearby filled with stacks of diamonds. Somehow he doubted it, but the scales and horn would bring a fair price on the open market, which would help.

The old tinker patiently led his mules along the river path. They were good mules, but they were stubborn. Currently blackberries were in season, so the mules had selected this to be stubborn about.

The tinker was strong from many years of heavy work, but every time he looked forward a mule would stop to eat a berry, and the wrench would almost take his arm out of its socket. Fortunately the blackberries were good, and as the tinker was in front he took his revenge by eating the ripest ones.

He had spent the last several years travelling up and down the archipelago, and he was glad to be on dry land again for a while. It was partly for this reason that he had made such an early start this morning, with berries and hands full of nuts and grain from a belt pouch for breakfast. He had been walking inland for 10 days now, and while he had not been moving fast, they had been long days. The sun was shining, and the tinker was awfully tempted to borrow a convenient mossbank and warm his old bones in an early morning nap by running water.

He tested the moss with his bare foot, and it was delightfully soft and full of soothing heat. He had just worked down to a sitting position when he heard the thunder of hooves. At an incredible speed they drew closer, and as he turned his head a horse and rider burst into the clearing.

Resplendent in impossibly golden and glowing white armor, horse seemed almost too trivial a word for the steed, and its shining rider seemed cast from the same legend sized mold. They would have flashed through the clearing, but the rider saw him and wheeled. As his horse reared and pawed at the air snorting jets of steam, he raised his ivory lance in salute for a moment; the archetype of elven nobility. The steed spun again, hooves throwing sod, and vanished around the corner as though the pair had been only a noisy dream - a turbulent figment of the golden sunlight.

Shaking his head, the tinker settled down to rest. He had never been one to hurry.

There would still be pots to be mended when he caught up with his old friend and would be rival. But the Dread Count Astoc had been hurrying, and that meant that there would be more trouble where he was going too. The tinker grunted, wriggled into a slightly more comfortable hollow in the moss, and fell asleep.

Jonathon was starting to worry. His father had barely said a word to him, and hadn't even allowed him to change from his rumpled muddy clothes of the night before.

He had dragged Jonathon out the door by the arm, completely ignoring the boy's protests and questions, and frog-marched him down to city hall. To Jonathon's amazement he had been dragged into a meeting of the village elders - as stuffy a bunch of old coots he had never seen - and the ring on his hand had been shown to Celinor himself. Everyone had gasped and started muttering to each other, but before Jonathon could overhear anything more useful than snatches of "the ring..." and "only a child..." he was hurried out into a small stone room which reminded him of a cell.

His father told him to wait there and think about all the problems he had caused, and stomped back out, closing and bolting the door behind him. This was all well and good, and certainly more interesting than school, but he didn't really have a clue what trouble he had caused, or for that matter how he could have avoided it.

As he sat on a white marble bench, he fiddled with the ring, rubbing it, tracing the designs with his fingertips and eyes. Oddly, the rainbow hued stone in the center seemed shinier this morning. Its swirls of color seemed almost to move and twist around each other in a spirally sort of way. He found a comforting feeling in the swirls, and let his mind wander amongst them for awhile. It seemed that all the visions in the world danced within the stone and his mind had but to open itself as in dreaming to travel between them.

He hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, and in a few minutes he was curled up on the bench dead to the world.

As he daydreamed, he became aware of another presence above and behind him which lit his way with a golden humming light and made him feel nurtured and protected. It sang to him in the sharp joyous tones of pealing horn calls bouncing from mountainside to mountainside and he felt very brave and strong. Then, as gentle as it had been fierce, it sang him a lullaby of harp-song and hushed the murmurs of his mind. He slept peacefully and dreamt no more. Outside the wall a late rising bluebird saluted the morning from a tall oak tree and took to flight.

Taric cursed and threw down his gold-bound personally abridged travel copy of Husan's esteemed manual, denting the back cover on a fallen branch. He had been trying to summon some sort of infernal conveyance for nearly an hour. Each time he had opened a rift to the darker places big enough to call a respectable steed through he had been met by a calm, annoying strain of simplistic music that seemed designed to run on forever. No matter what invocation he tried and what name he called, the lack of response was the same, and the terribly boring music continued until he closed his gate.

It seemed that the music had some sort of power, and that this power was preventing him from making contact with those he sought.

Finally, in desperation, he reverted to the first summoning cantrip that he had been taught. It was of such charming simplicity that it did not require names of any sort, or for a person of his power any protection, although he had already laboriously drawn runic circles on the pine needles; circles of powdered lapis and malachite, iron oxide flecks and river silt. The cantrip was designed to open a tiny door into an other-where much populated by the smallest sorts of imps and demons of mischief.

He preformed the mini ritual, offering a few seeds of wheat to the charcoal's flame in his wyrm-skull brazier, and thinking of the image of the doorway he wished to open. It appeared, a tiny silver tear inside his great circles, and the music resumed as though it had never stopped.

He noticed that the volume and clarity of the sound were both much reduced, doubtless due to the low power of his summoning. He glared at the small silver tear in the unoffending earth for a full five minutes, and then just as he was about to dismiss the gate, it rippled and a small horned figure came through. Its skin was brownish green and thorny, and the stubby wings on its back seemed made of some particularly slimy form of hanging moss. Its face and nose were broad, and the pale green pips of eyes betrayed little intelligence, but it had come through his doorway.

"Eeee two copper seven tin bits. Eeeehelp you?" The thing's voice was a squeak like tortured trees rubbing together, and it had it's palm out for payment.

"By what right do you demand coinage from me, hapless imp? I have called you, and I am the master here, not some merchant who will barter with the likes of you, you vexatious little blight!" Taric was shocked; for a lowly nether entity to take such liberties with someone of his consequence was unheard of.

"EeeeeeeHaven't gotten eeeyour eeunion pamphlet eeyet that's four copper, badmouthing eeean eeofficial representative eeis eeeanother two. Eeeeee six eeand two eeeeeeEight copper seven tin eeand here's eeeyour manual. Eeeeeeafter payment eeeyou may disconnect eeeor summon eeeeanother representative eeeeof the melody." Dropping a familiar looking black book in the inner circle, the imp ignored his sputtering protests, and climbed back through the silver tear in the earth as a child might climb down a stream bank.

The tear remained open, and the noxious music resumed. Until this point he had not noticed, but he now clearly recalled that the connection of his summoning had interrupted the melody, and that it had been blessedly silent while he labored to understand the infernal creature's squeakings. He considered for a moment, then threw a handful of copper and tin through the tear, and allowed the small gate to close on the tinny strains of a flute playing slow.

Digging through his saddlebags, he found his own new copy of the black book labeled MLOD and, settling against the bole of a huge tree, began to read.

Half an hour later he grunted, and rising prepared a slightly altered version of a ritual that had failed earlier. In addition to his previous preparations he lay out offerings of coinage for the connection agent, the gate shift supervisor, the transportation foredemon of the local, and the necessary contribution to the funds for retirement, scholarship endowments, and the local's annual damnation raffle.

In spite of all of this respectful greasing of the wheels of the shiny new infernal bureaucracy he spent fifteen minutes listening to what he now knew was called the hold melody before a black scaled creature that bore a superficial resemblance to a horse with red glowing embers for eyes walked from the smoke in his circles.

With a sigh of relief he allowed the gate to close, and gathering his possessions into his saddle bags, he mounted and rode at good speed toward town. The last few hills passed quickly and there were still traces of mist amongst the trees as he finally came in sight of the Library towers in the distance. Through the surrounding field lanes and even on the cobbled streets once he reached them, the morning remained peaceful. There were a few wood elves and smaller fey going about their business, but none paid any particular attention to him or his steed, and he rode up to the side door of Madam Fate's before dismissing the summoning. It faded into a puff of smoke that blew oddly between bits of mist and away back from whence it had come.

After a few minutes careful examining of the cobblestones, which he found to be certifiably ring-free, he entered the bordello and called for breakfast and coffee with rum in unsparingly vast quantities.

Izzy had known that this morning's ambush would be a flop long before he heard Tough Lou start quietly snoring. They all had horrible hangovers from the CDS riots of the night before, and had gotten into place late and grumpy.

Pedrito had used minor glamours to make each of them moderately invisible in their hiding places, and they had settled in to wait. Izzy strongly suspected that Billy Toadstool had already been asleep when Pedrito had put the concealment on him, and he was feeling the need for a nap himself. His eyelid scales were dry and itchy and each time he blinked they stayed closed a little longer.

Still, he was as surprised by the noon sun as he was the cuff on the ear that woke him.

"Sleeping on the job, no wonder we missed 'im. Lousewort."

Lou's harangue lacked something of its normal ferocity, and he let the issue of snoring on watch slide for the moment. With a few other sociably delivered unpleasantnesses, the small crew of small thugs gathered and staggered off to see if Growler's had tapped a morning keg of beer yet.

Albatross Jake was catching fish like never before. He had always had much of his namesake's luck as a fisherman, but this was unreal. He had trimmed a pile of scrapmeat into the shapes of minnows at the end of his early morning watch, and with these tucked in his many pockets he had settled himself on the thin ledge of white painted trim outside the railing of the aft deck of Heron, the supply cutter for Beyberrin Harbor.

He had worked hard, loading and unloading while not actually sailing the craft, for the last ten hours. The far islands squadron of the High-Elven Navy had come in to water and resupply two days ago, and the meagre resources of Beyberrin's transport craft had been being shamelessly overworked.

In the beautiful sunshine, with the turquoise blue sea all about, and the majestic white and red cliffs above the harbor forming an idyllic backdrop, he had trolled for an hour or two as they wore back and forth from the docks to the fleet. His success had been indifferent, though his enjoyment of the setting remained.

Then he felt the tingling.

His grandfather had explained the feeling to him as a small boy: "When the fish are ready, they let you know. You feel that? Then get your line in the water, Fish-Bird!"

It was not something that could be called, or wished, or made to happen, but when the fish were ready, he knew. A moment later, startling him from his reverie, his rod bent nearly in half, and after a brief tussle he pulled up a five pound horned mackerel.

Since then, as fast as he could put his cut-meat faux minnows in the water he got bites. And stranger by far, each fish had been of a different sort, often fantastically rare.

He had caught a fire eel that had threatened to melt his wire leader. He had a furry trout that must have come from high mountain streams, strangely lazy in the hot sun. And then he had caught a three-foot long toothless sand shark, gorged fat on oysters. It's acidic drool had marred the paint work and burnt holes in his ragged white sailcloth pants, but after prying open the already digested yet skeletally intact mollusks in it's belly he had gathered no less than seven pearls, of an even rich pink color typical of the bay.

And for several hours now, his unbelievable luck had run on, and on, to the point where he was almost tired of fishing, and certainly more than ready for the noon meal.

At the same time, it was the catch of a lifetime and he hated to cut it short before it played itself out. His mates, sensibly enough, said "fish is fish but dinner's hot!" and muttered to each other that they hadn't been catching anything anyway as they went to eat. And as those sailors still hard at work in the rigging had long since quit looking every time he shouted, no-one noticed when the last bite of his fantastic run pulled his heavy line taught as a harpstring, jammed his reel, and then snapped him from the railing like the tip of a whip.

Like many of the younger seagoing fair elves he knew next to nothing of swimming, and so as he was skimmed rapidly across and through the surface of the main shipping lane of the light choppy harbor, letting go of the rod that was towing him along was the last thing on his mind. His left hand clung as tight as it could to the base, and his right unthinkingly kept trying to reel in the moments of slack caused by his catch's turning.

His line was a horrible tangle, and he made no progress whatsoever, but in a numb sort of way his hand kept cranking on the reel.

He could see the furious disturbance some way ahead of him as whatever monstrous thing he had caught raced onward just beneath the surface, but as he was being tumbled in and out of the waves he couldn't get a clear look at it.

As he struggled to keep his head clear of the water, it took another turn and headed out toward the reefs, the harbor's mouth, and the deep blue beyond. As he recovered from the lurch he found himself relatively upright for a moment, and he saw that before he got to the razor-sharp coral he would be dragged through a vast convoy of the long monastic skiffs which were called pilgrims after their primary cargo. These, he saw in his molasses-slow moment before being dashed into the face of the next wave, were overcrowded even by their own lenient standards.

They were all packed full to the brink of capsizing with what seemed to be the usual sort of grey and brown robed figures, and bumping into each other frequently in their unorganized hurry toward shore.

The water took him again, and it was a rougher dunking that left him choking and spitting as he lurched clear. He caught a confused glimpse of the boats, horribly closer now, and what seemed to be scaled snouts poking from under the hoods in toothy expressions of astonishment.

As the strange pilgrims, boats, sea and sky spun toward him his catch turned captor burst from the water - a giant ray or skate of a scarlet variety that was unfamiliar to him - and crushed the first two boats clean beneath its water wings.

There was a great deal of noise and he had a peripheral glimpse of bright green and yellow lizards diving out of robes and boats alike in a mass exodus, and then he bashed full into the side of a swaying craft, flipping over the rail, and losing his rod.

He landed hard in the bottom of the boat, and but for the water she had shipped in her hasty abandonment he would have landed harder. Even so, it was a near thing that he sat up before he drown, and a great deal of personal inventory and assembly passed before his attention turned outwards again.

His rod was nowhere immediately to be seen, and the boat was unoccupied.

A cut on his forehead was bleeding fiercely, matting his long blond braids, and wiping blood from his eyes he speared his toe on another sharp thing. Looking down he saw that underneath the water a wicked looking assortment of cutlasses, knives, axes and spears were bouncing around the bottom of the pilgrim skiff, along with several small kegs made of a dark wood that showed no desire to float.

Wiping at his eyes again, he examined his less immediate surroundings, and saw that a great many of the skiffs still floated nearby, upright and abandoned. The lizards were swimming in two great groups, like schools of fish or flocks of birds. They seemed to scamper through the water, with grace not unlike that of dolphins, and a swimming technique closer to that of a water spider that can dive under waves and other obstructions.

Some of the overturned skiffs were being hauled along near the front of the group headed for the squadron, carried upside down by teams of three or four. The squadron still seemed oblivious, and in daylight in a protected harbor their lookouts would not be at their most attentive.

The other group of lizards was rapidly swimming to the quay, and he saw with horror that the Heron and the Sea Cat, the other harbor transport were strung out on a slow tack dead in the path of the onrushing horde. Both were briskly working their oars and carrying a modest press of sail, but they were not racing and they were also about to be taken unawares. His last five minutes had been exiting from his own perspective, but there had been no great noises, and from any distance the lizards might have been schools of flying fish.

Albatross screamed and shouted, jumped up and down and waved his arms about frantically, but events rolled tranquilly onward as though he was looking in the port-mage's weather glass, unable to affect what he saw.

The lizards flowed almost calmly over Sea Cat, boarding from all sides at once. Within minutes everyone was dead and overboard, but there had been enough commotion to be noticed by the Heron.

After a bit of running to and fro on deck her single antiquated stern chaser swivel MSAP cut loose on the encroaching tide of lizards with Jagged blue crackling bolts of lightning and a sharp series of explosions. This did little to slow the lizards, though it killed enough where it struck, but it did wake up the squadron's lookouts.

Unfortunately every eye on the five ships were looking at the two cutters, and they lost several minutes preparing to lower boats before they noticed their own peril and the call went up to prepare to repel borders. Some of the rotary MSAPs fired sporadically, but in furious bursts, balls of fire and colored rays flashing at a rate that would run their mana stones dry in minutes even if they were fully charged for battle.

One catapult, hastily cranked to bear, lobbed a tangle of chain into the mob, cutting down perhaps a score. Through the smoke he saw smaller missiles exchanged as the swarming lizards came in range, and then the artillery spoke no more as the fight was joined in earnest.

Now elves were dying too, and as the lizards began to swarm the sides of the ships, the sailors and lizards died by the scores in close pressed combat, green and red blood mingled flowing from their decks. The lizards had lost some of their armaments abandoning their boats, but they were far more numerous and surprise was strongly with them.

The other pack was nearly upon the Heron despite all her rowers and a hastily raised topsail could do, but then a cloud of flame leapt up on the waves behind her, scorching many of the lizards and clearing some room for her turn back toward the fleet and the mouth of the harbor.

The flame remained blazing merrily atop the waves falling astern, and Jake realized that they must have dumped the oil from her night lanterns. Still, lizards dove under and around the flames and came on.

All this time he had carried on yelling and waving, and he realized that he had finally drawn some attention. Six of the lizards in chase of the cutter split off and scampered toward the tangle of abandoned skiffs, coming closer at a great rate.

Albatross quit waving, and began frantically groping around in the bottom water. He came up with a short heavy cutlass, and after another cut on his bare feet a quiver of three pronged fish spears. This might answer for the first three or four, he thought frantically as he watched the scaly forms slide closer. Unexpectedly, as his mind froze in panic, a toothless sand shark much larger than the one he had caught surfaced amidst the small scaly pack.

As they scattered away from the sleek grey eruption it locked on to a green hind-leg and pulled a lizard below in a hissing froth of reptilian blood and acid. The others spread out as they came, but on they came.

With the inspiration of the doomed, he began emptying his pockets of bait, scattering it on the water in great handfuls. Then, running out of bait and seeing the cheery pink-red that his bleeding feet had turned the skiff's standing bilge water, he grabbed a bucket and began bailing. As his blood splashed into the bay he felt the tingling, so strong he almost pitched overboard himself, and then the fish came.

Snapping giant tunny and cod, bonefish and marlin, and sharks in numbers he had never seen swarmed over each other, eating bait, gulping bloody seawater, and tearing at the other fish that threatened to rob them of their prizes.

As the lizards neared the edge of the feeding frenzy he threw the first of his appropriated tridents, catching the foremost in the flesh of the shoulder. The wounded reptile spilt its own green-brown blood into the water, and a moment later a tunny bigger than the skiff engulfed him whole, leaping from the sea as it did so. A hand-axe buried itself in the gunwhale next to Jake, and two of the lizards split off for the ends of his skiff while the other two came straight on. He threw a second trident, but hit the side of a great grey shark that split the water in a stunning leap.

The skiff rocked in the wake and the closer lizards were tumbled back. Jake realized that despite the excitement his tingling sensation was still growing stronger - the fish were in an insane feeding frenzy like nothing he had ever known.

His third trident plucked one of the flanking lizards from the railing as it swarmed over the bow, and he snatched up the cutlass, wishing it were longer and straighter. Another hand-axe flew by as he worked his way astern, still tentative in his bare feet. The lizard there had already come over the side and was waiting for him with a jagged edged two-handed sword and a confident toothy grin. The others were coming up behind him, and he was running out of time.

Then there was a lurch and a crash of impact, and practically under his feet the skiff snapped like a dry twig.

A huge grey fin slashed through the opening, and the grey shark he had speared spun the halves of the skiff aside.

Albatross was thrown clear, tumbling end for end before slamming off the side of another skiff and dropping into the sea. He was already soaking, but he gulped seawater, and came up sputtering. His limbs thrashing madly, he tried to work his way along the side to the boarding ropes, but progress was painfully slow.

Unlike the lizards, leaping from the water and swarming over the railing didn't appear to be an option open to his one of his limited swimming ability. He was sure that there was an art to swimming, but his mind was a little too disordered to reflect on its inner nature at the moment. He struggled along the side, hacking and spitting, watching for sharks and lizards with equally divided dread. He had lost the cutlass in his flight, and was feeling particularly helpless.

Despite his panicky thrashing and slow progress, he finally wrapped a hand around the hemp line and dragged himself up the side unmolested. This skiff was drier, but its former occupants seemed to have left in a more orderly manner, taking their possessions with them.

Except for six of the little kegs strapped under the aft benches, and a red banner flown from a short staff on her nose, the pilgrim was empty.

He remained flat on the deck, not to draw attention, and a quick check showed that his fishing knife was still strapped to his leg. Its six-inch blade didn't offer him much confidence, and he looked around for threats. Of the lizards that had been in the other skiff with him, there was no immediate sign. Raising his head a little further above the railing, he saw Heron, free of the press by a scant fifty yards but picking up speed on a sweet wind, making a line for the harbor's mouth.

Its crew was recovering from the initial shock, and a well ordered fire from the MSAP and a score of longbows withered the nearest edge of the pursuing mass of scaly green and yellow as they went.

The pursuit had passed its closest point to him, and drew away as he watched. There was still a scintillating ribbon of lizards leaping through the foam of their own wake too close for comfort, but he might have cheered until he heard the explosions coming from the squadron.

The smoke was too thick to make anything out for a moment, but then a gust of wind showed Myrgryffyn, the flagship, still heavily engaged on two decks, but lumbering slowly seaward.

His eyes strained for the rest of the squadron, but as the smoke cleared he saw only wreckage and lizards, these in pursuit of Myrgryffyn as she threatened to break free. Her officers had cleared the quarterdeck, and her coursers were set and drawing, but aft the fight was still thick and no hands could break free to discourage the pursuers.

A glance toward the town showed no help likely from that quarter; the only residents in view were hurrying up the streets away from the wharf carrying hastily gathered satchels of possessions.

A pitifully small company of local Fair-Elven militia had taken up a position on the quay, with a rotary MSAP behind bags of grain, but their horses were tethered nearby; should any serious number of lizards go their way they would withdraw or be overwhelmed. Doubtless a fast rider had been sent somewhere, but Jake knew of no reinforcements close enough to make any difference.

He looked back to the flagship, and saw that as she was clearing her aft deck and starting to leave her few hundred remaining pursuers behind she was headed right into the party of lizards that had been pursuing Heron. Barely wounded and still easily five hundred strong, they had doubled back when the cutter began to badly outrun them, and were directly between Myrgryffyn and the Harbor Mouth.

Her fore-chasers began to speak, but she was already making three or four knots and would be thick among them in five minutes or so.

Another minute, dragging on like an hour, and Myrgryffyn had mostly cleared her aft deck. She luffed up into the wind, coming straight toward Albatross, and as her pursuers suddenly closed at amazing speed she hit them with a tolerably well directed broadside, blasts of fire, ice, and lightning mixing with the chain shot and bowfire. The slaughter was tremendous, but scattered groups of borders closed, and the close fighting kept her other broadside limited to a few crews to harass the onrushing larger horde.

Then Jake saw a pair of lizards with one of the small dark wood kegs slip over the rail of the quarterdeck, and a moment later an explosion killed and smashed everything above decks from her splintered figurehead to her shattered foremast.

Almost all the way came off of her at once, and as the tangled forerigging fluttered and crashed about the shattered deck, fires blazed up merrily along her sides. The pumps were gushing in less than a minute, before the flames had spread, and the mast had been cut away and was being wrestled over the side. The flagship continued to drift toward Jake, and he realized that he would very much rather be aboard her than left behind in the harbor whether or not she made it out.

Unfortunately manning one oar would only move him in circles so unless Myrgryffyn came close enough to throw him a rope he couldn't do much about it. Casting about for some other means of propulsion, his eyes settled on the kegs. Some sort of explosive, obviously, but how was it triggered and could it be directed to move the skiff without killing him?

He hurried over to the kegs, keeping low for cover.

There was no fuse, but in the top of each keg was a ring attached to a pull shaft. From the way that they had been used as suicide bombs, he had to assume that if there was any delay, it would be a short one. Checking back on the flagship he saw it tremendously closer, the last of the lizards onboard being cut down as she came. But Myrgyffyn was noticeably turning now, curving gently back toward the harbor mouth to keep her artillery bearing on the onrushing swarm. Unless he could get moving soon, it would be too late.

He ran back to the pennant staff and stripped the rope from it, leaving the banner to flutter into the chop of the bay. On the way back he dragged in the boarding rope, cutting it from the cleat, and hurriedly salvaged the mooring line and the rope from the light anchor. Pleating ends together was the work of a few moments, and he fastened his line to the sternrail. Albatross made the other end fast to the ring on one of the kegs, and checked back on the flagship.

Myrgryffyn was only a few hundred yards away, but that was as close as she would come.

Her starboard battery was raking the onrushing crew of lizards, cutting them up fiercely, though her diminished crew was still badly outnumbered. Jake grabbed the aftmost starboard oar and rowed frantically until his skiff was pointing ahead of the flagship, then raced back to the stern. Hoisting the keg proved more difficult than he had expected - the little thing was heavy - but he finally managed to wrestle it to the rail.

With a silent thought that bordered on prayer he tipped it over, and watched it sink for a moment, taking out line. Then he ran back to the bow of the skiff, and crouched down, waiting.

The line played out and out, and then there was only one coil left and he averted his eyes and braced for impact. Fortune smiled on him - the shock wave stood the skiff on her nose, but didn't break her. Then she was flying on the face of the wave. He measured his course against Myrgryffyn's progress with a hastily raised eye, and it looked like his speed would bring him safely ahead of her where he could turn with the steering oar and come alongside.

He was threading neatly between the abandoned skiffs, though there were a couple of turns coming up that would test his limited maneuverability without rowers.

The flagship was still firing rippling broadsides into the advancing lizards, but they were much closer now, and Jake realized that by the time he intercepted the flagship they would almost certainly be engaged. The lizards had spread out as they came, and now they were coming in staggered groups of three and four, diminishing the effect of the fire they were taking. Then Albatross came to one of his first tight bits between the skiffs that were being swept along on his wave, and had to keep his attention on his course.

When he had time to look again the first wave of lizards had reached the flagship and were scrambling up the starboard side into a thicket of boarding pikes and longbow fire. The lizards were too scattered for Jake to be very sure of their numbers, but it looked like there were still a lot more than the two hundred odd sailors visible on Myrgryffyn.

Looking at the odds, Albatross wasn't nearly as sure he wanted to be on the flagship. Unfortunately, maneuvering between the other skiffs had put him behind the crest of his wave, and he had little response left in his steering oar. Then inspiration hit.

Albatross was not by nature any sort of hero; though he was brave enough he had no drive for the limelight and had deliberately spent most of his life in blissful obscurity. But now, if he survived, he was going to mess all that up. He was on a course for the thickest boarding action, and he shipped his oar. Coiling the ten-foot remnant of his patchwork rope was a moment's work, and he wrestled the two remaining heavy little kegs onto the aft railing.

With a fiendish grin he tied the free end onto both pull rings, and looked forward again. A trident like those from the other skiff flew by within inches of his turning nose, and he saw that he was already amongst the lizards and had only a few seconds until he banged into Myrgryffyn's side.

He gave the kegs just enough of a nudge to start them rolling off the stern, and then raced for the prow. Two arrows smacked into the deck from above, and he shouted "Incoming! Heads down, Incoming!" at the top of his lungs as he sprang from the nose of the pilgrim just before she hit Myrgryffyn. The lizards were ascending by virtue of their claws ability to grip a sheer wood facing, and Jake had no illusions about his ability to do the same trick. However, there was a veritable swarm of lizards climbing, and he had just given himself extra motivation.

He landed almost piggyback on a surprised axe wielding reptile, and sprang off and upward as it struggled for its grip. He caught the scaly ankle of another boarder, who responded by stabbing at him with a spear.

Jake twisted desperately aside, and swarmed up the lizard's leg like a rope as the axe of his previous ladder sliced the air where he had been. As the spear wielder tried to position his point to do some good Albatross grabbed the shaft and scrambled to a green shoulder, dodging snapping teeth. Another leap, this time dislodging the unfortunate lizard, and he caught the railing of Myrgryffyn just in time to get smacked in the fingers with a belaying pin by a startled sailor.

His scream of pain was drowned out by the explosion, and the skiff he had left moments before rejoined him from beneath at an entirely unfriendly speed.

He and the pilgrim flipped over the rail together, bowling over several surprised sailors including his new friend with the belaying pin. The skiff tumbled sideways across the deck of the flagship with him inside, battering him mercilessly.

As he came to rest beneath the overturned boat against the far rail there was a wet thump on the back of his head, and he felt scales against his neck and cheek.

For some reason that would doubtless later be clear to him he couldn't see a thing, but his groping hand found twitching claws, and it was only after more frantic rolling about that he realized that the leg of lizard was no longer attached to its former owner. There was an awful ringing in his ears, and when he wiped at his face his hands came away warm and wet.

Feebly, he tried to lift the skiff enough to get out from under it, but his muscles weren't answering anymore. His wild ride had reached a resting point, he thought foggily, and let himself lay back into the darkness.

"What you must understand, Magister Celinor, is that arguing with me accomplishes nothing. It is not my will that fastens the ring to the child's finger, nor my doing that Ammergladdin's talisman is again amongst us after thousands of years of silence.

"Indeed, I agree with you: the boy is too young. But unlike you, I do not choose to set my opinion above the expressed intent of the mightiest of Those Beyond the Mountain."

Wisteria was fuming. She had spent all night trying to convince the council that this very thing was about to happen, with very little success, and when the boy was dragged in by his father disbelief had been replaced with disapproval bordering on disrespect.

She wanted to say - 'See - this is why Ammergladdin got sick of talking to all of you to begin with!' and a lot more, but she was struggling desperately to maintain her role as shaman and such a childish outburst would destroy any credit she had earned in this nest of doubters.

Amar Streamquicken, the petulant Overseer of Gardens, began to speak again in the nasal whine she had sat through so much of in the last twelve hours.

"Miss Birdling, with all due respect, the council has seen no compelling evidence that that bauble is anything more than a piece of costume jewelry. I understand that you believe that you have been granted a vision, but I would remind you that any fool with the silver to buy a dream cantrip from the lowest countryside bumpkin lovespeller kitchen witch can plant images in your head, and you are very young. I must ask you directly, how many visions from those beyond the mountain have you had? I have been led to believe that such occurrences are quite rare even for wise ones much senior to you."

Before she could begin to fit restraining words around her furious response Celinor was speaking, adding in his two cents worth.

"As you grow older, you will learn that few things change quickly. Ammergladdin has been gone a long time - why should he choose now to manifest himself, and why would he choose a child as his avatar and one little older to cry his coming? We must not rush in these things. Before any action is undertaken I must strongly advise the council to study and thoroughly authenticate the ring - there is no rush, the child will only grow closer to a reasonable age."

There was a general murmuring of agreement around the table, and Wisteria worked hard at phrasing correctly what she must say next in a way that would postpone rather than magnify the conflict, and be formally compelling enough to give her breathing space.

She suspected that soon it wouldn't matter much what the council thought about the situation.

"Respected Elders of the Council, to you the land and those who dwell on it have given the running of this hamlet, to each an appointed task. I can no more dictate how you fulfil your roles than you can instruct me on what, regardless of my age, has been given me as my own mandate: communing with our gods and relaying their will to the land and those who dwell on it.

"Do what you will, but with all respect I must withdraw and make ready. I would not be caught unprepared for what comes. Good day."

She turned and left over an increasing babble of voices. Stepping through the stone archway the sunlight fell full on her shoulders, and she discovered with mild surprise that it had blossomed into a beautiful day. Small birds were singing, the skies were blue, and a parrot flapped lazily about the treetops. The village had woken up while she had been closeted with the council. As she walked across the spreading lawn toward the ancient oak that rooted the village to this place what she saw wrenched at her heart.

Food vendors hawked fried onions and fresh pastries outside the general store. Older students sat in twos and threes on the lawn or by the gently tinkling marble fountain. Pyx children were chasing each other through the branches of the great oak high above the ground with the same cheerful lack of concern shown by the squirrels that had joined their game.

Her people were happy and unaware. Even to her the beauty of the day seemed a promise that nothing very bad could be coming.

But she remembered the screams and smoke and death of her childhood, and she knew with a painful certainty that change was coming again. She continued across the common square, and giving the wild eyed halfkin unloading the beer wagon in front of Growler's a wide berth, she walked up Pine toward her temple, lost in thought.

For the first hundred and three years of her life Polinda Sapwold had been a Fair-Elven debutante. She had gone to innumerable balls, worn pleated layers of under things beyond number or naming by any but specially authorized handmaidens, and had a bad habit of stealing things. The day after her hundred and third birthday she had stolen from the wrong pocket. The Dread Count Astoc had not killed her out of courtesy to her family. Instead, he had turned her into a brightly colored parrot.

She retained her memory, although in the three intervening years her perspective on much of it had changed, and her naturally giddy unbalanced intellect was at home enough in the bird's mind, but life was forever different.

Winters were cold enough that parrots were not native this high up the river valley, and she had drifted about that first autumn before finding a friendly window in the North tower of the library here in Upper Loth. Many of the academics that boarded in the four towers of the huge building would occasionally give her handouts, but all were too absentminded or otherwise antisocial to be trusted with things as important as windows.

The Librarian, however, was a bird of an entirely different feather - His window at the top of the north tower was propped open by a pile of books with a telescope pointed out of it. And it was still warm inside!

He had the annoying habit of trying to teach her obnoxious little phrases - she would have nothing to do with 'Polly Want a Cracker' except to bite offenders severely - but he always left food lying around. For two years they had what could loosely have been termed an understanding, although the librarian's portion of the understanding was limited to the hope that if he didn't annoy her he wouldn't be bit.

Then Lola moved in.

The librarian had been given a budget increase to obtain an assistant, and a fearsomely armed protest delegation of Nymphs Against Discriminatory Stereotypes had presented him with the choice between a perfectly educated, qualified nymph for the job or a demonstration of the real purpose of pointy boots.

The large 'NADS' signs and the stern looks on the pouty little faces had made him very agreeable, and he had signed a contract that caused him no end of distress. It was written by fanatic nymphs set on recognition as equal beings, and included clauses about his conduct toward his assistant that repeated the phrase '...will result in sexual harassment boot' far too often. And to make matters worse, whatever her avowed philosophical principals, Lola was a nymph and behaved like one.

None of this would have mattered to Polinda at all, except for the fact that Lola started her reign with daily cleanings of the Librarians quarters. Not a bread crust or a dish of moldy grapes escaped her vengeance.

And what handouts the parrot still got were inevitably accompanied by the stupid games. Climb on the hoop. Swing upside down. Count the seeds, for heavens sake. It was enough to make Polinda wish that her upbringing had given her more of a repertoire of expletives.

When she had fiercely attacked Lola for repeatedly calling her Polly the librarian had scolded her, and actually threatened to close the window! Of course she had long ago checked, and it was painted into the frame and stuck for good, but she was outraged.

As a result she had been scouting territory. Handouts could be good on the commons and toward the schools, and defecating on residents of the bench under the oak was always entertaining, but no lasting opportunities had materialized. The improprieties of a flock of oversized lecherous mutant townie pigeons had kept her from the restaurant dumpster circuit, although she knew that there was warm nesting area above several of the fryer vents. The behavior of the crows on her one foray into the outlying fields was so far beyond comment that it still made her ruffle her neck feathers to think of it.

She was lazily flying from the fountain, where she had gorged on overripe mulberries, back to the library. She was enjoying the sun, and in no particular hurry to see Lola again, and she found herself watching the young shaman with interest.

Wisteria's Temple had a small shuttered round window set up right under the eaves, and the bell tower was always open, although it was tricky flying to get up or down inside, and the door at the bottom was always closed. The parrot part of Polinda's nature had eyed the Temple of the Mountains with interest several times. The remaining spark of her former self didn't like the idea much; Wisteria was a Fair Elf, young, pretty, and highly born. She embodied all that Polinda no longer was - she might have gone to school with her.

On the other hand people left offerings of food at the temple on a regular scheduled basis - and went away again! Polinda decided to try. She didn't think Wisteria could be bullied like the librarian, but she might be scammed. She flew off in search of props.

Stumping Blackscow had his trash wagon parked on Bent Street between the Back Door Tinker's and Rosie's Reusables. For more than twenty years he had made a little extra cash on his lunch hour by tossing everything potentially valuable that came by him during the day on one of the rickety wagons that transported the hamlets river of refuse.

Then during lunch he took it here and let the lunatic proprietors paw through it. They were at it now, elbowing each other aside in their haste to get first hand on anything worthwhile. It was strange, Stumping thought, that the two stores were next to each other. They probably competed less than cooperated, but the show of cheerful hostility between Old Ashton and Rosie was so vehement that he would have thought they would have sought more distance. It was too convenient a situation for him to ever risk changing it by asking, but he wondered.

He was chewing complacently on a ham sandwich while he mused, and between bites he noticed that the tenor of their ongoing argument had changed.

"I'm sayin', I'm after sayin', old bitty, that I have a customer."

Old Ashton, who was younger than Stumping if twice as greasy, was waving what appeared to be a handful of shiny strings of green tinsel. He had stringy black hair, a pot belly, and a bad leg which kept him local and gave him an excuse to walk with a long black cane.

"And I'm saying that it's worthless garbage like you, you nasty tempered mange monger! No fool is going to pay you in gold for tinsel, and you're a fool for buying it!" Rosie was a quaint little figure, barely reaching Ashton's shoulder. In total contrast to him, and their surroundings, Rosie was perpetually clean, prim, and would hit you with a pointy thing if you implied she was in any way improper.

Belatedly, the mention of gold made Stump's ears perk up.

"He tole me he was comin' nigh three moons ago you old witch, an He ain't the sort to lead an honest fellow tinker astray unlike some disagreeable sorts I could mention, which I won't, some sayin's as there's ladies present and such which." Ashton turned and spat tobacco juice over the edge of the cart, and Stumping recoiled from the splash.

"Don't you give me none of your sass, piss-pot mender! And if your customer is just some worthless tinker like you where's he git off payin' bleedin' gold for tinsel as which I was already saying you rat-fart'n soot monkey?"

Stumping took another bite, and waited for the volley. It still took him by surprise.

"It's not just another pot-smith or horseshoe maker's my customer, rag-witch, it's Himself. The Tinker, I'm tellin' ya, and its me he wants his tinsel from so don't go looking all google eyed at me for it." Turning, he spat again. Stumping was too stunned to pull his boot clear.

The Tinker was one of the few really old ones who hadn't fallen prey to semi-perpetual napping. As elves age beyond a few dozen millennia they have a tendency to withdraw from participation in day to day events, and immerse themselves in some particular study or work. Mostly they wind up napping. They are still capable of youthful, vigorous activity if awakened sufficiently, but the weight of accumulated perspective keeps most of them horizontal most of the time. The rare exceptions to this rule became extremely unique individuals. The Tinker was such an exception.

Rosie was caught wordless for a rare moment, but far from inactive; she snatched the tinsel from Ashton's hand and shoved him in the chest. Caught by surprise, he reeled, and the piece of stovepipe he was standing on shifted, dumping him over the edge of the cart.

He began to curse in a fervent stream and staggered to his feet. He climbed over the rail with murder in his eye, the cane forgotten on the ground, and Stumping realized for the first time that Old Ashton was much larger than he was, and could look quite dangerous in the wrong light.

Rosie scurried backward, shrieking incoherently, the tinsel held high above her head. Just as actual violence was about to break out a gooey white substance splashed on Stump's shoulder, and a brightly colored parrot snatched the tinsel wand from Rosie's hand, flying off in a flash of blue, red and gold plumage with a trail of shimmering green.

Both merchants paused, staring at each other, their mute shared horror temporarily suspending the hostilities, then they gave chase shrieking curses.

Stumping had another bite of his sandwich and shook his head gloomily. There went his jacked up price on tinsel, pursued by the rest of his day's sales unless they came back before his lunch break was over. His deep-rooted suspicions about the nature of the universe confirmed, he chewed.

Polinda had seen the flash of tinsel from afar, and listened in for long enough to pick up the gist of the conversation. That the tinsel would be wanted later added a useful dimension to the scam evolving in the brightly feathered bird's brain.

Now to beat Wisteria back to the temple. She laid on some wing, and left her landbound pursuers far behind. The village flashed by beneath her in a collage of green and mud-tones with occasional splotches of bright colors from a gaily dressed kobold or a painted shop board.

The towers of the temple and library spread from a distant blur to distinct entities rushing ever closer, and she aimed for the polished granite front walk of the temple. On the bank to set up her landing swoop she saw Wisteria still several hundred yards off, lost in thought. Taking her time, the parrot made a gaily colored landing on the front step. The shaman was oblivious to the display, but at least she was in the right spot.

There was a nasty smelling scrap of paper with scribbles on it lying in front of the door, but it wasn't going to steal Polinda's spotlight. A few swift tears with beak and claws, and it was mulch for the ornamental shrubbery by the step. She felt a pang of loss, watching Wisteria walking on long elven legs and feet with five toes, with long blond hair flowing. It prompted just the mean streak Polinda was looking for.

This was going to be fun.

Wisteria had been up all night with the council, and had smoked a considerable amount of her herbal blend. She was staggering home to rest, and dead to the world. Her feet found the turn up the temple's walkway, and she could almost feel her bed. She began to walk faster as she neared her step, and lifted her head.

At the same moment a multicolored streak exploded from the ground, and with a raucous cry announced "Mistress, I have come!"

The young shaman shrieked, and leapt straight backwards to an ungraceful landing on her rear. Struggling to focus her eyes caught feathers and tinsel, and reluctantly assembled a parrot from the confusion. It's head was cocked to one side, and it was inspecting her from the railing of the step.

They exchanged a gaze for several moments before Wisteria hazarded "Excuse Me?"

The parrot tilted its head to the other side, and said perfectly intelligibly: "You called me, and from the winds of fate I have come!"

Wisteria tried hard to think clearly. She was pretty sure she hadn't called any parrots, but the nature of her craft was complex enough to make her careful when she said "I don't think I called you? What makes you think I called you?"

She felt that there was a very condescending nature to the parrots gaze, as if it felt she was a little slow. Then again, many of the nature spirits she had dealt with had made her feel that way. Nature was, by nature, mysterious.

"You called into the void for a familiar, an animal companion, whatnot, to bond your power with and so forth, feed and cherish, leave windows open for, that sort of thing. From my heavenly perch atop the winds of fate I heard your lonely cry and came to your side in your time of need, and so on." It paused to preen itself, combing a long blue flight feather with its beak.

"This is the part where you tell me how grateful you are and give me some grapes." It looked expectantly at her. "Round things, soft, juicy, sweet, what have you. A little spoiled all the better. Grapes."

Wisteria noticed that the parrot's beak looked surprisingly sharp as it licked it with its grey tongue. She had always thought of parrots as jolly harmless birds, but on closer inspection this one looked a lot like a brightly colored hawk.

She hesitantly tried again "I really don't remember calling you, and I'm sure shamans don't use familiars. I might call a totem guide when I get older, only my teacher took me on a vision quest and I saw a dolphin, and he told me that was my totem. And I'm too far inland for a dolphin, see?"

The parrot didn't look impressed. "I'm sure you'll remember. Calling me all the way from the winds of fate, whatnot. Oh, you'll need this." Swooping over, it dropped the tinsel in Wisteria's lap and landed on her shoulder. "Now about the grapes, so forth..." It's chest feathers puffed magnificently.

The shaman gave up. There might or might not be some grapes inside, but her bed was definitely there, and the parrot could feed itself from the temple offerings. Sleep sounded awfully good, and if the parrot was a spirit animal she was sure that Those Beyond The Mountain wouldn't mind.

Taking the tinsel without further debate, she opened the temple door and went in.

Polinda thought that it was a fine beginning. Now to get a window open, and then maybe she'd start a nice molt to settle in.

Luthien Longroads, Captain of the town militia, was starting to see patterns. He had a great number of seemingly unrelated incident reports from his scout teams, and he had been shot by a pyx dart coated with a persistent hallucinogen during the CDS riot. Currently he was reading a report that seemed to be telling him that a huge metal monstrosity had been caught destroying farms and was pinned down by the concerted assault of several local farmers who urgently requested reinforcement.

He was seeing an interlocking honeycomb of blue diamonds and violet hexagons which pulsed and thrummed with a life of its own, and he reread the report several times in case this was affecting it.

Looking up, he warily regarded the cavalry lieutenant who had brought the dispatches. Eerie Crowcalling had piercing yellow eyes, and normally would not be giving him reports that sounded this much like nonsense. She smiled when she saw his expression.

"That was written up by the rookie. Renault and I swung by and checked it out - there's a huge metal thing out standing in a field and a track of destruction you wouldn't want going through town sure enough. I guess some farmers went and beat on it for a while, but it didn't seem to notice so they took up a strategic position in their root cellars." She smiled again.

It was perfect Eerie, he thought, smiling about the terrified farmers and completely unconcerned with the metal thing.

"What did you make of it?" he asked weakly, wishing she didn't look quite so much like the crows that followed her. One hopped from foot to foot on the windowsill now, and he knew more would be nearby.

She shrugged elegantly. "Renault didn't want anything to do with it, but I circled three or four times anyway. About thirty, forty feet tall, bipedal, looks like a big suit of black armor. Didn't see any weapons, but that big it probably gets along without. Wasn't moving at all, wasn't even warm. Plenty of background magic, but nothing going on right now."

He didn't ask how she knew about the temperature or magic - he'd gotten used to her abilities and something about her eyes kept him from wanting details. She hadn't made any suggestions as to what to do about it either, but as her commander he supposed that that was his thankless job. He had half his troops out on river patrol, as he had since it had become obvious that bands of yrch and human slavers were communicating and even doing business with fast river boats, but he didn't see most of his troops doing much good against this sort of thing.

He swallowed, said a quick prayer to those who guide the befuddled, and made a preliminary decision.

"I want air recon on it twice an hour, but don't bother me unless it moves. I want you to personally go through the heavy artillery and see what we have in stock that we could use from the air. One report on straight assault - fire, projectiles, explosives, energy beams, that kind of thing. Another on any containment magic that might be on a big enough scale - we might have some of those whaling nets somewhere. Elders know why, but the navy has been taking a lot of interest in us lately. Both reports on my desk in an hour. I'm going to go try to talk to Celinor, and failing that the librarian. Maybe one of them has some idea what's going on."

His eyes were telling him that Eerie had pulled what seemed to be a small live squid out of a pouch on her belt and was eating it with tearing beak-like ferocity.

His ears heard her voice perfectly clearly, "Got it sir. One hour." And she walked from the room. The crow rolled backwards out the window and he was alone in his office.

He rubbed at his face for a moment, hoping it wouldn't start melting into his goatee again, and went to find someone more important to pass his troubles on to.

The old tinker awoke. As the years passed golden naps on sunny afternoons became more and more of a joy. He yawned and stretched, and opened his eyes. Hanging on a branch above his head was a delicate crown wrought of mage-glass and gold in a pattern of oak leaves. The centerpiece was an emerald the size of a child's heart, which legend said it once had been.

He recoiled as if from a snake.

"You get back where you belong, and stay buried too! I see you again I'll trick that other one into coming back this way and he can find you, hear? Now Git!"

He scuttled backwards on his elbows and heels with surprising agility, but the crown hung there like any inanimate chunk of innocent jewelry. The sunlight flickered rhythmically on a tiny imperfection in the heart of the emerald, but it was determinedly pretending that it hadn't been lurking for him to stand up into.

He grabbed up his pack with a curse, and half dragging his mules along behind him set out down the path again. He was no longer in the mood for blackberries, and sensing the dangerous edge to the way he held their ropes the mules followed without excessive misbehavior.

His eyes were on a paranoid lookout schedule now, and less than half a mile down the path he saw a glint of gold in the briars. With a malicious gleam in his eye he pretended not to see it, and unbuttoned his fly.

See if it'd hold still for that.

He was rewarded by a small green flash, and he knew it was gone for now. He soaked the spot it had been liberally anyway to make his point before proceeding down the path with a jaunty whistle.

Stumping had reached the pit of his depression as he drove the cart still loaded back to the sanitation facility built on to the jail at the edge of town. When he returned to his place on the destruction line, however, he got an unexpected surprise.

The burly inmates, under careful supervision of the even burlier and heavily armed guards, were unloading a row of three wagons full of tinsel of every color imaginable with pitchforks. Stump had no idea where it had come from, but it was mana from the Mountains as far as he was concerned. Bustling over he took command.

"Here you, these three are to be loaded back up, and parked in the locking shed right by that one I just brought in. This stuff goes to special processing, not the demolition line."

The guard in charge didn't bother to disbelieve him - he wasn't swinging the pitchforks so it was much the same to him. The waste sorcerers always wanted things done differently, but they had a lousy job too. Being a guard had brought him to philosophy.

"You heard him, now put some back in it you miserable scum suckers! Load that tinsel back up!" He cracked his whip for emphasis.

The prisoners put their backs into it, and the tinsel fairly flew back onto the wagons. The guards were pricks, but they had a lousy job too. Being prisoners had brought them to philosophy.

Stumping was practically spastic as he watched his newfound treasure being loaded. He waited until the last strands had been gathered from the pack-dirt yard, and locked the shed after head counting the inmates in and out. He would have to think about how best to exploit this miracle, but he had no time now. His shift supervisor would be making his rounds any minute and he was twelve cartloads of reeking dumpster leavings from the tannery behind.

Putting his hands on the power amplifiers he got back to destroying waste.

Albatross Jake awakened to the sense of something gently tugging on his nose. Opening his eyes, he found a quizzical furry face with impossibly huge brown eyes a few inches from his own.

The shock delayed the memory that he was glad to be seeing anything at all for several moments. Gradually he realized that a small monkey was crouching on his chest, and seemed to be testing him for edibility.

He started upright, and discovered three things almost simultaneously. The first was that he was in a hammock, now swaying crazily. The second was that the room was spinning erratically and his head was full of a horrible throbbing ache. The third thing Jake discovered was that monkeys are highly skilled in hanging on.

Rather than being dislodged by it's hosts leap the monkey coiled a long grey tail around Jake's neck, grabbed his ears with incredibly strong little fingers, and bit him on the nose in earnest.

Jake howled and began a graceful orbit around the hammock's arc that ended with the back of his head breaking a hole in the hardwood deck. The monkey held on for all it was worth, and bracing against Jake's shoulders with its rear feet tried to bite his nose the rest of the way off.

Moments before impact it released him, and with preternatural speed added every ounce of it's tiny weight to the crash by using his face for it's launch pad.

Groggily, Jake marveled that he was still conscious. His head was wedged in a sharp bit of the broken planking, and his feet were hopelessly tangled two feet off the floor it the hammock. He could move his arms, but they were busy keeping the sharp bits from getting too far into his neck. The one eye that pointed up scouted warily for the monkey. Finally he spotted it swinging slowly by two feet from a small iron chandelier.

It was grooming its tail, and seemingly unconcerned with him.

Feet thundered on the deck, and then strong hands were lifting him free. Voices thundered, but only as ambient noise, and he was flipped up and back into the hammock.

More hands turned and poked at his head, then he was strapped in. The thunder receded, and Jake slept again.

Taric walked out of Madam Fate's and into the sunlight. Physically he was sated, gorged, slightly drunk, and otherwise. But he was no closer to retrieving his property. He examined the cobblestones of the specified location again, just for the form of the thing. No ring, no clue, not even an engraved calling card reading 'Thief, rings et al' with a schedule of appointments on the back. Nevertheless the sun was shining, and it was a beautiful day. Taric was more than half tempted to spend the rest of it drinking rum with the Fair-Elven twins Fate had introduced him to, but his ethical code more or less required him to track down the thief and exact a horrible vengeance.

He felt about it much like he would have felt about feeding a hypothetical fussy neighbor's crocodile pit while they were gone - it might be fun but mostly it was just a nuisance that had to be dealt with.

Turning by instinct away from city hall and the end of the militia barracks, he followed Arrow Street past the Home of Return and alongside the softly landscaped cemetery to Mountain Street.

Idly, he noticed rows of large brass urns by the scattered headstones and wondered their purpose. On Mountain Street he walked past a series of impressive little marble and granite ziggurats. He had never really spent time here before, and was amazed at how much building had been done in the fifty odd years since the town's founding. He would have to find out who did their construction. Seeing the four lofty towers of the library confirmed this thought and gave him an idea. He turned left on Pine and headed for the arched front doorway between its stone pillars.

The heavy door was standing open, and there was an unoccupied desk on a tiled mosaic just inside. Beyond that shelves receded into a progression of spirals that defied the eye to navigate it.

The entire first floor of the huge building seemed to be one high-ceilinged room with small upholstered reading areas erupting amongst the maze of knowledge in a discordian manner. Taric was impressed again. These people must have an incredible anti theft system or a lot of missing books.

"Hello?" His call echoed twice before becoming dispirited and slinking away into the stacks.

This would never do, Taric needed information not mass knowledge. He looked at the mosaic circle that the desk was on thoughtfully. With only a little modification he might summon something that would be willing to be a librarian for him. His saddle bags were in his room at Lady Fate's, but he had an assortment of pouches and pockets which he began to dig through to assemble his ingredients.

Then he remembered MLOD. Digging out his manual, he flipped through it trying to find out what all would have to be done differently, and who all wanted a piece of the action.

Finally he set up the four corners of the desk with offerings for the connection agent, information officer of the local, the gate shift supervisor, and the damnation raffle and charity fund. He was sure that he was still missing some key points, but the desk only had four corners.

He was still listening to a soulless sax warble its way around the hold melody when a female voice thick in icicles said "Excuse me?" from somewhere near the small of his back.

He whirled around, ready for anything, and came face to face with a nymph. Really he realized as he looked down, she was only about half his height making it more like hips to face. Perhaps this was why nymphs were so popular.

She was clad in a relatively demure blue gown that laced all the way up under her chin, but it could do nothing to disguise her fundamental curvature.

"Can I help you find something today?" Her voice was set in frosty disapproval, which carried all the weight of over chilled puff pastry.

Taric blinked a few more times, adjusting to this. "Are you the librarian?" He thought it was a reasonable question, but Lola did not.

"Sir, I must tell you that summoning is only allowed with special dispensation in the apartments of the resident scholars. Are you a guest of one of our residents, sir?"

The way she snapped 'sir' made his knees melt. To think that he'd always thought of nymphs as friendly little creatures! This one was a fire-cat! He decided to shatter her.

"Actually, young lady, I represent a private concern of investors. I am here to discuss funding the construction of an archeology wing. Are you the administrator of this institution?"

The sax simpered on in the background as he watched her turn herself practically inside out in embarrassment. He maintained a superior smile, and waited.

The gate shift supervisor's sibilant voice chose this moment to break in. "One moment please. Someone will assist you shortly." The sax returned, its empty dance undisturbed by the interruption. Lola was about to speak, but there was a dull blue flash and the sax melody was replaced by a small grey bespectacled imp.

"Hooooo-eee!" it cackled, cracking the knuckles of its long slim fingers. "You want information you brought me to the right place! Whatcha want me to dig up for ya, boss?"

Lola forgot what she was going to say, squealed, and clung to the far side of Taric, peering out at the small demon. Taric didn't see anything particularly scary about it, but he supposed he didn't mind too much.

"Find me anything they have on the second house, particularly local chapters. There wont be much, but look for funny business deals, police reports, old letters, what have you. If you need any code breaking I have the contribution for the ciphering agent. Stack what you find on the desk and summarize it for me."

Used to prompt response from his summonings, Taric had turned away and begun detaching Lola from his leg when it answered.

"Well, boss, lessee. You gonna have to take up the ciphering thing with the local foredemon, those guys got their own agent. Similarly with the summary, the orators and steno-imps have to have their jobs protected. You're gonna need to get transportation involved if you actually want to get any of the stuff out here, and those guys are real busy. They might fit you in today if I put in a good word for you though. But you want me to find the stuff, that's my job and I've got a dispensation from the orators to tell ya what I find. Whatcha think, boss?"

Taric was stunned. The infernal realms had taken to bureaucracy like fish to water. Their system was already worse than any of the increasing number of unions or political action groups that he had dealt with. Fifty years ago he had never heard of such a thing and that made him wonder what had caused his society to change so quickly.

Perhaps the threat of extinction was a factor, but that was an abstract pressure, and would be moving through channels of some sort. He would have to watch for common threads in all this frenzied organizing.

Returning to the moment he realized that the demon was waiting for a tip, and with a sigh he shied a silver piece at it. "Now be off with you! Do the research, and put me in touch with the others I need!"

The imp saluted him mockingly, and skied off on its leathery wings into the stacks. It flew with an odd jerky motion, as if the actual use of its wings was secondary to its progress. Taric realized that Lola was looking up at him fearfully, her arms still tightly wrapped around his leg.

"Lets go find your librarian and have a nice chat with him, shall we darling?"

She nodded, a glimmer of her former spunk returning, and released him. "This way, sir." She led him to his left along the front wall, and to a stairway leading up into the corner tower.

"He's having a meeting with Captian Longroads of our militia, so you may have to wait a little. I can bring you tea or milk and cookies?" Taric smiled, following her up the broad marble stairs.

"Tea would be fine."

Ponderous Clouds-Moving, the librarian, was looking at picture books with Captain Longroads.

Between them on Pond's coffee table was a thick volume of parchment illustrations of the Lethwars. It was bound in yrch-hide shaved to a short raspy stubble, and was the work of a long dead High-Elven propaganda officer. On the center gate-fold page between them was an illustration of the Servant of Ammergladdin destroying the citadel of the mage-king.

The huge black armored figure it portrayed had not bothered with the gate. There was a ragged tumble of stone where it had breached the wall, and it was engaged in leveling more of the fortress with a minaret that it had torn from the main castle. All around it elves swarmed like mad ants, assaulting it with everything from the wall's ballistas to a now flattened troop of heavy lance.

Magic crackled against the plates of its frame from a dozen attacks, and atop its shoulder a dark skinned elven warrior pointed at the monstrosity's next target with an air of command. Looking closely, they could just make out the ring on his finger.

The librarian was the first to break the silence. "Really, Lou, we should feel lucky. Last time the ring showed up on the other side of the river, and the damn thing flattened more armies than we could call from Luthmere by a stretch. This time a kid's got it, but he's one of us. We can talk to him, give him a concept of appropriate actions... Lou?"

Luthien's head was in his hands. He didn't want to explain appropriate behavior to some school kid with a metal monster at his beck and call, he didn't want the metal monster in his life at all. And what was worse, if Pond was to be believed, the very arrival of the thing would only happen as a protection against worse danger than had been seen since the Lethwars, thirty odd thousand years ago. That was a long time.

Finally he said, "Okay Pond, but that's not my job. You'll have to deal with the members of council that can do things like that. I guess my main concerns are to keep farmers from convincing it to kill them and finding out what it's here to protect us from. Any help there?"

The librarian shrugged. As if it were a magnet, both of their eyes returned to the picture. The ringed finger was still pointed, the crumbling minaret poised in mid swing.

On and off the precisely inked page, the world around them hesitated in expectant chaos.

OM was breaking eggs. The Omelet Makers, as the powers behind the local merchant's association liked to call themselves, were having a late brunch meeting. This week was Willie's turn to host, and they were assembled in the grimy kitchen in the back of Willie's Eats.

Willie, a wizened cigar smoking kobold, was the newest member. He was doing the cooking. Lady Fate lounged in a corner, somehow preserving her aloof distaste and elegance in the thick of the grimy kitchen bustle. Growler puffed on one of Willy's cigars, perfectly at home in his brown silk suit perched on a fifty pound burlap sack of potatoes. Necrotis, the Wood-Elven undertaker, was chopping vegetables with obvious skill and a level of enjoyment that made the rest of them all a little uncomfortable. And Lofton Mossyrock, a thin Fair Elf with a nervous tick, who owned the local bank rounded out the gathering. He was chewing a pencil and taking notes.

Growler was giving them the numbers.

"Currently our local government sector is rapidly catching up with the national mean - 53% using phase 1 of the program with interest in phase 2. The militia has already scheduled meetings with a representative of ours to discuss making a commitment to have 80% on phase 2 within 3 years. The constabulary are similarly cooperative, with the bureaucrats and of course council bringing up the rear. Our slow zone is still the commercial sector where we only have 12% of local business - 6% less of the workforce than we in this room own - on phase 1a, the less ambitious program we wrote up to sell to lowriskers. Even our pathetic efforts to found conflicting action groups to sell the program to have given us better returns, and I still think that the concept of ID technology for semi-secret societies is only going to sell to morons." He shook his head.

Willie looked up from the eggs. "What's the cut line?"

Lofton cleared his throat. "We're nowhere near that down, of course. But you all have the same incentives in your greedy little mind I do. I want to see the full 14% that represents our combined employment pool ID chitted by next week and sampled and stored by next year."

Lady Fate laughed a tinkling scornful arpeggio. "I've told you pathetic fools before - I will not have my girls in the program. They bring in more contracts and fix more problems than the rest of you together, but this we will not do. I own this town - I make the rules here."

She was exaggerating, but from her own point of view not by much. In addition to the garden inn, which gave her everyone's secrets, she owned almost all of the town's spinning, cloth and garment trade, including the uniform contracts for the militia and constables and large shares of the fiber crops. Unknown to everyone else in the room she also had a silent majority in more than half of the seemingly independent little shops in town. It was often said in OM meetings after she left in disgust that she didn't bother with breaking eggs, she went straight to the source and broke the chickens.

Growler, whom she sometimes seemed to dislike less than the others, tried tact. "Lady, is there some reason that you could share with us? If there is a danger in the ID systems I'm sure that I'm not the only one that would like to keep a few select people back."

Lady Fate laughed again. "But you have, you audacious little kobold. All of you have! I'm just the only one who's willing to admit it." The others started to exchange nervous looks, then quickly tried to pretend that they hadn't.

"And the only danger that I am aware of is implied in the nature of being counted. I do not believe that the Shaë Sales Associates Guild is a threat in itself, but a great many of these programs have sprung up and I would like to know who it is that wants everyone to stand in line and count each other. Whoever it is, they are willing to offer some exceptional incentives, which is why we all sign others up. But caution is our nature."

This seemed to close the business end of the meeting, as her remarks often did. Having seen Willie's kitchen again all of the others except Growler were reminded of urgent business elsewhere, made their unlikely excuses, and hurriedly departed.

Willie and Growler broke some more eggs, just to be doing it, smoked another cigar, and reflected on the joys of prosperity.

Necrotis was worried as he walked back to the home of return. Although he had a deranged artistic intelligence he was not as good a planner as the rest of OM, which was part of why he had registered himself in five different political action fronts that bordered on secret societies.

He had been selling their membership rosters to each other on a semi-regular basis without ever considering that there might be someone with a reason for encouraging all this organizing who would notice such behavior.

Still, he didn't have much time to worry about it. As he turned up the stone pathway into the cemetery he saw that the revival meeting hosted by Departed Elven FriENDs, the legitimate front for the Necromantic Anti Human League was already underway.

Mourners wandered through family plots, putting their hard-earned pay into the brass urns. Tonight would be a new moon, thought Necrotis, and then we will see how many of them have enough. Turning behind a row of shrubbery he opened a trap door and descended into his catacombs closing it behind him. A nap in his power coffin, he thought, and then he would call his followers to order for tonight's work.

Jonathon had been sleepy and then bored, and after being bored for a while he started to get sleepy again.

He had spent all morning waiting patiently in the little room in the town hall, and it had sounded and smelled like a beautiful day from what he could tell through the single high window. He could hear the interminable drone of the council meeting that had been going on with varying attendance for longer than he knew.

He began to look at the ring again. Despite all the fuss and bother it was a beautiful ring, and felt somehow comfortable to have on. The more he looked at it, the more he seemed to feel a presence waiting on the other side looking back at him. He wondered what the presence might be, and what it might be waiting for, then wondered if he was just making up nonsense to amuse himself.

Still, the feeling was real enough. Like a glowing gold light that was also somehow a dark shape. Incredibly old, but friendly and vital - undiminished by its age.

Sitting alone in the room, Jonathon began to imagine that he was talking with the presence. It had many important things to tell him. It told Jonathon that he was very important. Jonathon had always wanted to be important someday, like his father.

But the presence told Jonathon that he was much more important than that, much more important than the council, or Celinor himself. The presence didn't seem to think that they were very important at all, compared to Jonathon. Jonathon thought that he could get used to that way of thinking.

Cleaning the water drake had taken Randall hours. The problem was that nearly every part of even so lowly a dragon as this was incredibly useful for something.

The scales could be made into armor and shields, the horn would make someone a bugle that could be heard for miles. Apothecaries had uses for many of the internal organs, but these had to be separated and preserved fairly quickly which was beyond Randall's ability with his limited equipment. He had an empty glass lined pocket flask of whisky which he drank and refilled with the beast's blood.

He considered boiling down and taking the monstrous skull, but he would be overloaded already. He extracted its teeth, which was nervous work even with its head cut off, and wished he had something to preserve the eyes in. Declawing it with his broadsword was messy but efficient. Checking it's digestive track, dodging leaks from pockets of leftover steam, he saw that it had been eating a lot more fish than treasure lately.

Finally, thanking the wyrm for fulfilling its role and apologizing for being unable to use more of it's bounty, he rolled it back into the stream where it floated slowly, desolately out of sight. Looking for it's cave was almost pointless as one of these beasts often patrolled a hundred mile stretch of river, but he checked the banks up and down stream a little ways, and dove slowly around the walls of the deeper pool.

Finding nothing except one of the human's knives to replace the one he had abandoned as hopelessly wedged in the drake's skull, he returned to shore and dressed.

It was another hour's work to cut poles, fashion a rough travois bound together with raw dragon sinew, and load his smelly treasure up. He had only done preliminary cleaning, but he wanted to get away from the scene of the fight in case the human came back. He had seemed unreasonably competent, and for a human exceptionally sneaky.

Randall grunted with effort lifting the front of the travois. He wouldn't move fast with this, and he'd leave a track a child could follow. The drake parts would draw predators, and unless he stopped soon to finish cleaning them his effort would be in vain.

He squinted at nothing in particular as he tried to remember the map in Bee's cabin. There was a little hamlet around here somewhere if he could find it.

Slowly accelerating to a modest lurching stride, Randall towed his load away from the river heading toward the warm afternoon sun.

The Tinker had been making good time walking along the stream, and had even gotten a little appetite for blackberries again. His mules had of course gotten twice as obnoxious as usual as soon as they sensed that it was safe again, but he didn't really mind. Life was basically good.

Then, to his shock and surprise, a river wyrm came floating down the stream bouncing along the far bank. It was obviously dead, and it had been largely cleaned, but the Tinker's eye saw a wealth of superhard bone handles and furniture, intestine for stringing fine instruments that put cat gut to shame, and other salvage galore. He was not by habit much of a tanner, but this was a treasure, not to be missed.

Pulling an extending gaff from under a roll on one of his mules he hooked the carcass over to the near bank and dragged it up onto dry land. He stashed the gaff, grabbed an assortment of saws, knives, and chisels, and began his work. Where Randall had a lack of tools and portage space, the Tinker had an over abundance.

Before he moved on that evening the bone would be boiled clean, the soft parts spread, scraped and tanned, and all of it neatly sorted into his mules' load.

Stumping was making up for decades of gloom and depression. Three more cartloads of tinsel had come in, and while he hadn't managed to talk to the drivers to find out where it was coming from he had managed to divert the carts to the shed that he had co-opted for his newfound horde.

He was whistling while he unmade the village's waste. His supervisor had looked at him like he had gone mad, and Stumping didn't even care. For once he was ahead of the game. He would sell a few lousy baskets full to Old Ashton for a handful of silver, and then take the rest straight to The Tinker when he came. Who could guess what might happen from there? Gifts, gold, power, prestige, Stump was ready for some of all of it.

He saw another shining cartload turn slowly into the yard, and had trouble not bursting into song as he went to make the arrangements. Just two more and his shed would be full - he didn't know whether to hope that there would be no more than that or to just be generally thankful for having such backwards problems if they arrived.

He locked the shed again and whistled his way back to his post.

Lacy hung by her wrists. A long, long time ago she remembered thinking that her wrists were sore. She supposed, in a hesitant sort of way, that her wrists were still sore.

Since she had first had that thought her perspective on life in general had changed. She had been played like a living instrument, every emotion and every nervous twitch confidently strummed out of her. Much of the time she had been sure she hated it, but as she hung there watching Fang sleep she realized to her surprise that she had been waiting, even almost looking forward, to him waking up.

As she cursed the thought his snoring hesitated, and one eye opened. It ran up and down her slowly, in a way that made her skin crawl. It was only when the eye closed again and he settled back into the blanket on the floor that she realized that she had been holding her breath.

Heart racing, hips twitching occasionally, she waited.

Bahazaar Morningtide accepted the green canvas pouch containing the few possessions he had on him when he was booked from the Sargent at the desk.

"Sign here, here, and..." the Sargent licked his thumb, flickered through the stack of papers, and made a final 'x'. "And here."

Bahazaar took the quill, and nervously put his scribble in the blanks. He didn't stop to read what he was signing; he didn't want to look like a troublemaker. He wanted to get out of this stone box and out of this flytrap of a town.

The Sargent flipped back and forth through the paperwork for several minutes, checking boxes and adding notes. He ignored Bahazaar with the complete indifference that jailors soon master. His brown hair was cropped close to his narrow skull, and he had a prominent jaw and big wrists. A spectacular silver scar bisected his left eyebrow, banked off his break-thickened nose and tailed across his cheek. He hadn't introduced himself or offered Bahazaar any information on what was happening, but it certainly looked like he was being processed for release.

On the other hand he was a big mean looking elf, and Bahazaar wasn't about to try to hurry him along or risk annoying him by asking questions.

Finishing the paperwork, the jailor neatened the edges of the stack and walked into the next room. Bahazaar could hear the murmur of voices, but not the words. He supposed this was when they were hoping he'd run away or try to steal his paperwork so that they would have an excuse to throw him back in. He sat as rigidly as his state of mind allowed in his chair and tried not to fidget.

After twenty or thirty minutes the Sargent came back, picked up the paperwork, looked at Bahazaar like he was a criminal, and left again. Bahazaar supposed he might be an accidental sort of criminal, but he thoroughly hated jail.

It was hard to say how long passed before the Sargent returned. There were no windows and Bahazaar hadn't counted heartbeats or breaths with more precision than 'too many'. Now he came in with a second jailor, this one without a stripe on his sleeve, and ill at ease in his uniform.

They had questions - what joy.

"What is the purpose of your visit to the Hamlet of Upper Loth?" The rookie was leading off.

"I left the Navy because I didn't like the ocean. I got here and the ocean was pretty far away so I thought I'd stay a while."

Bahazaar inwardly cursed at the sarcastic cool voice coming from his own mouth. He was too good at getting himself in trouble. But at the same time as he begged himself to tell them that he was Bahazaar Morningtide, Lieutenant, High-Elven Navy, Intelligence, Drydock Agent 372 even if he didn't have his damn subcutaneous ID chit in anymore, and that they would release him now and say nothing of this to anyone or face the consequences, he remembered what it was to be an intelligence agent.

To his profound annoyance, he felt the role that his title implied playing unstoppably out through his wine-rotted synapses. He would tell them nothing. Being stubborn was one of the few good traits as an agent that he had left.

"Do you have a place to stay or coin sufficient to rent a room? I'm sure anything you had at Growler's is gone."

At the same time as Bahazaar silently celebrated - they were going to let him go - he realized the truth of the prediction with bitter shock. Not only was most of his coin gone, but there were several documents which although coded were too sensitive to allow to disappear. He would have to reclaim or destroy them, and either way that meant finding them first.

His stay in this podunk town had just gotten considerably extended, and the difficulty of his position had skyrocketed. Not only were the wee folk already hostile toward biggies in general, they had good reason and a precedent for being specifically hostile toward him if any of them were sober enough to remember.

Infiltrating their circle thoroughly enough to track his possessions would be a nightmare unless he could find the right turncoats. "Well?..." The Sargent's voice was dry and unremittingly hostile.

"Sorry, yes. You saw in my belt pouch I have enough for a few nights stay, which gives me time to get something worked out. Thank you." He didn't want to thank him, but pacifying tyrants came naturally to Bahazaar. Besides, he hadn't mentioned the gold wheel tucked in to the back of the buckle on Bahazaar's belt, so he was getting away with something.

The Sargent grunted, and the rookie opened a door that looked just like the others in the hallway, except that outside this one was blue sky.

"Get out of here. Stay out of trouble. Don't come back. The second time isn't a joyride like this one."

Bahazaar took his few things and left. It was a glorious sunny afternoon outside. He went to find his new base of operations and a shot of whisky, not necessarily in that order.

Jake awakened, eyes wide and searching. After several monkeyless minutes he began to examine his surroundings as much as he could from his immobilized reference point. There were other hammocks hung in the unfamiliar cabin, all filled with wounded elves in various stages of complaint. The gentle sway further confirmed his guess, and he decided he must be in the sickbay of the flagship.

The wad of bandage on his nose told him that his encounter with the monkey had not been some fever dream, but perhaps this too would be explained in time.

At the moment he was in no all-fired hurry to start moving around again. As his memories trickled through his last hour of consciousness the relative immobility of his gently swaying hammock was feeling pretty darn good. There were no explosions or screams to be heard, and although the ringing was still in his ears he could make out some of the reassuring bustle of shipboard activity. After several minutes of just enjoying breathing, however, he began to get curious about the details.

Weakly raising his head he asked "Can any of you tell me how it ended? I've been out for a while."

General hooting and noises of amazement greeted his return to the land of the living, and after a few moments of the din an older portly elf in a long bloodstained blue apron came in. Jake suspected him of being the surgeon.

"What's all this ruckus? Greanleaving, back in your hammock at once! You've just had a leg off, you damn fool, can't you wait a few days before you start stumping around making everyone miserable again?"

The one legged elf with the barmy grin who had been doing an odd dance with his crutches while he hooted shuffle-skipped lightly back to his hammock.

"I's just glad to be alive, sawbones. Eight, nine times yesterday I was plumb sure Missus Greanleaving's little boy was a goner. But I's still here and what's better, that was the leg that always pained me anyhoot. Besides, the crazy one woke up and we all thought ye'd like to know." Easing himself back to a lounging posture he tossed his head toward Albatross.

The surgeon saw that he was awake and walked toward him. "How are you feeling, lad? You've had a rough time of it. How much do you remember?" He loosened the straps in the hammock so that Jake could get his arms free.

"I faded out when the skiff landed on me, and I guess the next thing... Is there a monkey on board?"

This brought the room to a general fit of laughter, and they all began to fill in gaps at the same time in a confused many-voiced babble.

"Musta blown a hundred of th' buggers right outa water..."

"And swept the sides clean, Tim Featherdown, slick as a whistle..."

"Knocked the piss outa' 'em..."

"All shot up before they picked 'emselves off the water again..."

"Damn near thought we were capsized and stove in when that first blast hit, rolled us right over on our beam ends!"

The surgeon was trying to restore order, but Jake had a happy grin on his face, picturing it. The one problem with his plan had been that he'd never had time or position to see it happen. He'd been right in the middle bouncing around, and now he let the images roll through his head in a many-colored cacophony as they described it. Eventually they calmed.

"The commodore will want to speak with you later. I'll send someone to help clean you up. Till then lots of rest, and no sudden leaping about. You have one hundred and seventeen stitches from the soles of your feet all over hell and back clear to the top of your head. I'm going to keep you on a soup diet for today so you don't tear anything loose chewing." The surgeon paused on his way out to shake a menacing finger at Greenleaving.

"But is there a monkey on board?" Jake called after his departing back, but to no avail.

Greenleaving sat back up and answered with a grin as he pulled a tobacco pouch out of his pillow.

"A' course there is bucko, and a right mean one too. We calls him Gryff, after the ship, like. Hoo-oo but we was laughin' when you wrastled with 'im. Nobody wins against ol' Gryff, nosir." He lit his cigarette, with the satisfied air of one succeeding in violating a no smoking zone, and blew a lazy cloud of little rings which smelled like a potent blend of dark pipe tobacco and strong hemp-blossom.

"I's bettin ya' already figgered that the Commodore's bound to press you and the little harbor craft. 'S only fleet he's gonna have for a while, and you can bet he's itchin' to find out where them lizards came from. So's make ya welcome to the Navy."

The newly crippled elf tossed Jake the pouch of tobacco with a friendly grin.

Roland S'Thorne concentrated on the pull he could feel reaching out his arms to the tips of the first three fingers of each hand. It was balanced by the extension of the tendons in his little fingers and the net result was building into a palpable quivering energy waiting for his strike. The stone slab felt different today, almost as if it were curious instead of mocking him as usual. But he must not let his attention wander there yet.

For dozens of deep patterned breaths he built the energy. Then he exploded from his stillness, skating forward across the packed dirt of the monastery courtyard, his feet moving in lowering crescents to the second point of perfect stillness that was the moment of impact. As his body locked into the natural braced position that was the end of his leap his fingers found the very moment of the momentum shift and sent it all bursting into the center of the granite face.

He could not imagine performing the endlessly practiced move better, and for a moment he stood there, stunned that the stone had still not broken. But then his eyes focused, and he saw a hairline crack that had spread from his points of impact to both edges of the stone.

He looked up with a question in his eyes.

Saru, his ancient master, smiled. This in itself was worthy of celebration, though it was for reasons of rarity not aesthetic value. The Grey-Elven adept was the only elf that Roland had ever seen who managed to actually look old.

You could always tell, of course, but Saru's shaved skull, shrunken cheeks, and twin curly whisps of white eyebrow set over the faded blue eyes conveyed an appearance of more than mere time. Perhaps the appearance of much hard living was the right description.

"You have broken the stone. It may not know it for many moons, till the night's ice widens the crack, and it may be many turning seasons before it finally falls asunder, but you have conquered it. Should you choose for it to be shattered, it can be done with a tap at any time, but till then you have the control. This is a fortuitous result and a good lesson. You will meditate on it tonight. Now go, and pack for a journey of many weeks. I will await you here."

It was more than Roland had ever heard the revered Saru say in one utterance, and it spurred him to immediate action. He dashed inside in a low, balanced, circular gait.

He was too busy moving properly as he had been taught to see the old elf smile for the second time this moon.

Roland ran straight to his small cell in The Grey-Elven Monastery and Diplomatic Mission to the High Country. Perched within a day's walk of the eternal barrier that kept the Leth from returning over the mountains, it saw few pass by.

Except for the nomadic tribes of yiii and the monastery, it was a barren country. It was the smallest of the Grey-Elven Monasteries, and the oldest. When Roland and Saru left the remaining population would be under ten.

The yiii, also known as Wailers, cried out in protest and loss to those beyond the mountain as they had since the time of exile. Between wails, the yiii followed herds of alpacas and caribou, feeding on the caribou and spinning wondrous warm fabric from the soft alpaca pile. They stopped by the monastery to trade their warm garments for crops, steel, and other byproducts of the more settled monastic life.

Fumbling in his excitement, Roland packed many layers of the warm garments traded from the yiii, his small kit of herbs in a pouch of caribou hide, three knives and his new set of red tasseled throwing spikes. He added a fire-stone, a small ceremonial pipe made from his great uncle's left heel bone, and a blanket.

After several moments' thought he lashed a pair of boomerangs to the sides of the rucksack, and tucked in a water bottle, cup and spoon. He was sure that there was more he would wish he had brought later, but keeping Saru waiting was unthinkable.

As he dashed back outside he wondered for the first time where they were going. It would be impolite to ask, but he would have loved to sneak up on Saru and learn something.

Moving silently, he seemed to melt into the wall. He floated down the corridor past Xan, the gardener, without a twitch. He checked both ways around the arched doorway, and almost invisibly, began to creep out into the garden.

Saru's voice above him should have come as no surprise, but he couldn't resist the initial shocked twitch.

"The stone work in this archway has seen many comings and goings. It is getting old." The bald adept floated to the ground from his impossible perch wedged upside down in the top of the arch. He was dressed in a simple grey silk robe cut in some style antique beyond Roland's memory. "We must go."

Saru led the way to the main gate of the compound, and Roland suddenly wished he'd said goodbye to Xan instead of sneaking past him. The gardener might even be older than Saru, and was a good friend.

The gates stood open and Yarrow Bonemeal, the fearsome young gatekeeper bowed them formally through in silence.

Saru turned toward the far distant sea, and ignoring the variety of paths began to walk easily down the mountain. Roland bounded and skittered along behind trying to keep up without causing an avalanche. The long afternoon was drawing to a close, and the purple bands of approaching evening lent an extra beauty to the mountains.

Bahazaar had half a bottle of whisky inside him, and told himself that he was starting to figure out how he was going to find out what had happened to his belongings. He was carefully selecting between several plans, all of which started with the rest of his bottle of malt.

He was in the taproom of a small joint on the university edge of town behind the senior dormitory buildings. Wedged between a single story used book store and a discount store called Back Fashion, it seemed a good place to disappear for a little. The new sign over the low door was carved in the shape of an equine centuar blowing a bugle, and bright red paint from an amateur's brush read Casa José.

It was a mixed crowd, though a surprising amount of business seemed to be going through for so early in the afternoon. There was a low stage at one end of the pine bar, with a ratty velvet curtain drawn across it, and a scarred Fair Elf and a vaguely cone-shaped blue creature with thick leathery hide seemed to be running the place. The elf was tending bar and the odd creature sat on and around a stool, occupied with a set of ledgers and a quill pen.

Several elven women who could only be dancers had come out of the back room and spoken briefly with the blue creature in the hour he had been here, but all had disappeared back whence they had come. He had also noticed, with mild paranoia, that a fair number of kobolds and halfkin wandered in and out, while several pyx were playing darts and spilling beer.

So far he hadn't recognized any of them and they seemed to be unconcerned with his existence, but he was remaining cautious between his increasingly frequent hiccups.

He had been told that he could sleep in the common room for three copper a night, which suited his lightened pockets excellently. Looking over the crowd he wondered how well it would suit his safety, but they had said that all the rooms were taken in any case. He wondered if the dancers had separate rooms, and how to wind up there.

This led to extensive further depletion of the whisky bottle before he returned to more general planning.

He hiccuped and added an item to his agenda. He needed to stagger to the alley out back and relieve himself. Making his unsteady way to the door he drew no special attention, and he found himself outside. The bright afternoon sun was a sharp contrast to the smoky windowless torchlight inside, and his eyes had only partially adjusted by the time he worked around to the alley between Casa José and Leaf's Books.

He continued behind the building on a narrow gravel cart track out of sight of the dorms, and saw that he really was on the edge of town. Fields rolled away across low rolling hills divided by ever-thickening lines of scrub brush that joined together and grew into forest where the eye hazarded a guess at an arbitrary green horizon.

Somewhere near the edge of that semi-cultivated sprawl, off to the east almost behind the buildings to his right, he saw a column of smoke like the one that had attracted his attention from the window before he got into trouble at Growler's.

The column seemed to be made of a series of individual puffs of smoke rising in a tight curve. He cursed. It could be any number of things, but if he was going to keep working for DryDock he couldn't very well ignore what looked like someone firing the MSAP he was supposed to be finding.

He jogged off up the rutted cart path, the whisky bottle in one hand, his aching bladder temporarily forgotten.

Bahazaar was not the only one who had noticed the clouds of smoke. Eerie Crowcalling had done the heavy armaments report for Captain Longroads, and not finding him around had taken the next patrol out to fly by the metal beast to get another look at it. She had saddled her young gravity drake Renault and set out, keeping him flying at speeds where she could see without goggles and where her ever-present following of crows could if not keep up at least play tag along. She had raised Renault from the shell and he was well used to their hoary croaks and obnoxious games.

About halfway out the puffs of smoke had begun, rising from an area that might be her target. They were accompanied by a staccato noise with each thump of a different character.

It was muffled by distance, but she thought that there were eight unique bangs in the cycle. She leaned forward, and needing no more encouragement Renault left the crows tumbling on the shock wave of his acceleration. The fields and trees blurred below her as her yellow eyes watered, but her expression was fierce and predatory as she hunkered low over the rust and grey patterned little dragon's neck.

The explosions were definitely coming from the target zone. She didn't know what she could do if the thing was chewing up the surrounding farm houses, but she had to see. More crows burst up underneath her as she went, cawing at her rapid passage, and were left as quickly behind. Then the meadow she was looking for came in sight.

She breathed a sigh of relief - the rapidly growing silhouette of the creature was still in place, and it didn't seem to be moving. As she came over the last tree line she started to worry again as she saw the things feet and the field around them exploding in flickering light. Balls of fire and cones of ice fragments, bolts of lightning and colored beams, explosions of diverse nature wandered back and forth across the creature and the nearby area like food being thrown by a child.

And still the metal monstrosity did not move.

Renault settled into a long shallow bank around the rim of the tree line without her conscious instruction. Watching more closely she saw the source of the fire. Three farmers were hunkered down behind a turned over watering trough and some bags of seed. Mounted on a low tripod, a crank spun a ring of parallel staves past a crystal causing each to fire in turn. One farmer turned the crank, one was helping to aim the artillery piece by handles on the back, and the third seemed to be offering moral support and drinking beer. So far they were unaware of her.

Continuing her bank until she was directly behind them she kneed Renault into a swooping dive that would land by some outbuildings that she hoped were big enough to hide the dragon behind. She didn't want the yahoo's to get any inspired notions about saving the city from dragons while they were at it. Renault landed gracefully, and anticipating her request slunk inside the barn. She heard the frantic moo of a lone cow and thanked the fates. The drake would stay put for a while.

She hurried over the broken ground toward the homemade bunker, keeping to cover where possible. She left her sword in its scabbard, but notched an arrow to her longbow as she ran. If the idiots' random fire happened to find a ticklish spot on the thing's metal hide then they were all going to have a bad day.

A lone crow, finally catching up, circled over the field with a triumphant "Ca-ca-ca-ca-caw!" Fond as she was of them, the crows could be a real nuisance when she was being sneaky. Fortunately, no-one who didn't know Eerie associated flocks of crows with being snuck up on. Of course no-one who knew her for long was apt to forget it either.

She came in sight of the farmers. From the broken clay jugs scattered around their emplacement she guessed that more than one of them had been drinking beer. As if to confirm her theory the mana crystal ran dry, and while the one who was responsible for the appalling aim set about replacing it the crank operator stretched, belched, and uncorked another jug. The one changing crystals was wearing a red neck-cloth with his dirty farm-hand's clothes and the one who had been cranking sported a ridiculous green cap. The buckteeth and protruding eyes of the now belly-scratching kibitzer rounded out the trio.

Where the hell had they gotten their toy, much less spare charged mana crystals?

She was less than fifty yards away now, and continued her rapid approach without any effort at concealment. At twenty yards the crow dropped to her shoulder and buckteeth started around, his eyes bulging even more as they focused on her.

He made a noise that might have been "Hoo boy!" and the others turned. Their stares wavered between fear and open appreciation.

The spent mana crystal dropped into the mud unheeded. She stopped at ten yards, stepping out into a stance comfortable to fire from but not raising the point of her arrow yet.

The rural macho instincts of the farmhands caught the whiff of their own fear and compelled them to behave like worse idiots to hide it. Green cap whistled softly.

"Can we help you with something miss?"

Bandanna chortled, making an odd wet swallowing sound. "I gots somthing to help you with girl. Come on over here." He took the open jug from green cap, and swilled noisily.

Buckteeth settled for making sucking noises with his protruding yellowed wonders and having another go at his own jug.

"Do you gentlefolk realize that you are firing a piece of obviously unauthorized military ordinance within the area protected by the militia of Upper Loth?" She kept her gaze and tone even, and put her second hand to the string of her bow.

Buckteeth took advantage of the momentary silence to make more sucking noises and mutter wetly "All kinds a' things, all kinds." He hadn't had his hands busy while they had been firing, and he seemed to be further into his cups than the rest of them. The crow on her shoulder spread its wings and clicked it's beak at them.

"I want you to all step away from the artillery piece. Put your hands in the air where I can see them and keep them there."

She still didn't raise her point. If she did she knew she'd never be able to resist shooting them.

Buckteeth raised his hands in an obscene wiggly gesture as green cap and bandanna spread out to the sides. They walked slowly, still watching her.

"Stop moving now and raise your hands or you're going to grow feathers." Her point was creeping up, keeping centered on buckteeth although he would probably be the last to be shot unless he was quicker than he looked. This might turn out to be fun after all.

Suddenly bandanna looked past her, and with a strangled cry of "Bossie!" he ran for the MSAP and started frantically trying to work the new crystal in. The other two looked past her also, and their jaws dropped even further than normal. It could be an unexpectedly clever ruse to get her to look, but she suspected...

A quick glance over her shoulder showed that Renault had indeed come to check up on her, but had seen no reason to leave a good meal behind. Half eaten, the cow dangled from his jaws, and the huge lizard was looking at her like a dog with a stick.

She turned back quickly and put her arrow quivering in the dust between bandanna's feet. Another was on her string half drawn by the time he whirled around, dropping the second crystal into the mud near where the spent one had landed.

"You are all under military arrest by authority of the Upper Loth Militia. As of this moment you are military prisoners, and if you at any time have any rights they will be explained to you. Tie yourselves together with that rope on the feed trough and make it sturdy. I don't want you falling out while he carries you back, and he hates it when his load shifts."

Ten minutes later she was winging back with the mana crystals in her belt pouch. Renault dangled the prisoners from one fore claw and the MSAP from the other.

She had tried to convince him to leave the cow but there was only so much she could do with basic dragon nature, and it dangled from Renault's mouth again, one spotted leg swinging forlornly.

From a vantage point in the bushes Bahazaar watched her go. He was sure that it was the MSAP that he was after, and he would have loved to know how those yokels had gotten it, but until he got his paperwork back he couldn't blow his cover.

And as long as the militia had the MSAP it wouldn't cause any more trouble and they would keep busy on trying to answer pretty much the same questions he wanted to ask.

He had already made use of the shrubberies near where he was crouching and he was on the verge of heading back for Casa José when he remembered the huge black metal thing in the field. That looked like something he would be expected to mention in his report. Since everyone else was gone he walked in for a closer look.

The fields of wheat and corn were ripening golden in the sun, and they rippled gently as he walked into the valley amongst them. A crow that had stayed behind for the corn reproached him for disturbing it before flying off. His palms were damp and clammy despite the warm breeze. He took another drink of whisky from his rapidly disappearing bottle and kept going.

He had seen that it was big from a distance, but as he approached the black metal figure towered above the fields. It resembled an elven suit of battle armor, but the occasional beast-like motif of such a suit had been exaggerated here beyond all pleasantness.

The faceplate had a protruding muzzle with fangs and tusks, and a spreading rack of sharp looking antlers adorned its helmet. The details were hard to pick out because everything was done in the same light-swallowing ultrablack metal, but clawed hands and feet were obvious.

Bahazaar thought to check, and walking around behind it he got another surprise. It had not just one, but three segmented metal tails, longer than whips and curled up in tight spirals against the small of its back. He started to wonder what they were for, then thought better of it.

He had seen enough. Feeling glad all over again that it was for whatever reason inanimate at the moment, he made his way back up to the cart path. Finishing his bottle, he tossed it into the field and headed down for Casa José.

When he was out of sight, and it was reasonably sure no one else was watching, the Servant of Ammergladdin bent the rules just a little and uncoiled one of its tails to scratch a hard to reach spot behind its ear. This accomplished, it returned to complacent immobility with an almost imperceptible but very satisfied sigh.

While Wisteria Birdling caught a much-needed nap and dreamed anxious dreams of annoying town council meetings and strange parrots that were not too distant from her waking life, Polinda explored the Temple of the Mountains. Getting the young shaman to open the high window that the parrot coveted had not been a problem, especially as it was the window led to the partially enclosed loft where Wisteria slept.

She was no Librarian, but there were celery stalks with rancid buttermilk dressing on the night table that weren't half-bad.

Later, flapping around the large room that was all of the temple except for Wisteria's loft and the bell tower, she had discovered the offerings. Arranged in a harmonious but asymmetrical pattern about the rooms were a series of potted miniature trees. Each pot contained a carefully sculpted miniature reproduction of a mountain, and was covered in painstakingly pruned tiny growth.

And in front of each pot was a brass inlay in the floor. Each inlay was different, and almost all of them had food on.

That she was stealing from the plates of those her birth-people worshipped never particularly occurred to her, or if it did it was in a sense that gave her no cause for alarm. Perhaps it did not disturb them either, for she continued to eat for several hours until she was fat and feeling lazy. However it may also be that godlike beings are just more subtle in their revenge than parrots, elves, and men tend to give them credit for being.

After she had stuffed herself to the fullest degree possible she flew back up to the loft. Perching on the edge of Wisteria's laundry basket, she began a deliberate moulting. Teasing out damaged feathers with her beak, and releasing others that she was ready to regrow, she spread them liberally around her. By the time they came back she thought she would be nicely settled in. Which just goes to show that parrots aren't infallible.

Hacksaw tugged on his reins, flicked his buggy whip a couple more times than was necessary, and turned his little chariot around. He had left Snotty and Dribbler at the last stream crossing with the wagon of beer and scouted ahead with the lighter chariot. There had been no-one on the road, and Hacksaw kept his lovely steeds to a trot.

Watching them trot was his favorite.

In theory, philosophy, and technical allegiance, he and Snotty and Dribbler were monks in the Order of the Goblin Dawn. Most days they worked in Hacksaw's father's breweries, or like this weeks run of thirty barrels to Upper Loth, they ran deliveries. Their smuggled wagonloads of high-country goblin beer had found taps in many pubs across both sides of the river valley. Since the Order's raid on Mumar Huthgan's necromantic fortress, Hacksaw had built this dandy little chariot to play scout in.

He had cashed in a favor to have a simple illusion embedded in the chariot which allowed him to make his steeds look like 3 goats in the leather harness and bits, and replace himself with a reddish hued kobold. He only used it when they started seeing traffic.

While the Wood-Elven militia party that was supposed to be advising the Order's little campaign against Mumar had been assaulting the necromancer's tower, three visions had flown out an upper window mounted on winged white birdlike wisps of cloud. When they touched down and the clouds vanished, Hacksaw had been waiting. He had chased their flight for better than ten miles cross country, somehow always catching sight of them again.

The visions turned out to be Mumar's wives escaping on the wings of a hasty summoning. One each from the Fair, High, and Dark-Elven people, selected on raids long past each for her particular beauty, Mumar had kept them caged in the tower for centuries. Hacksaw was almost disappointed to find that they thought being chariot horses was a change for the better.

Seperately, they had each privately assured him that it was so. They were sick of embroidery and having to starve themselves to stay thin; running miles a day meant they could eat whatever they wanted. And whatever horrible perverted things the goblins thought of to do the ex-concubines, in the end the goblins were just enough smaller than Mumar that it didn't ever seem quite as disturbing.

Despite this disadvantage, Hacksaw flicked the whip at their hindquarters again. He did love to watch them trot.

Black Lobster Bob had paid and quartered the Yrch pirates, fed his captive League of not so Clever Villains, and had made a lovely start brainwashing two beautiful High-Elven sisters who were eager to trust their fellow captive.

He was smoking a thoughtful cigar, and enjoying a cut glass snifter of fine brandy, looking at maps and enjoying the colors of sunset from what he liked to call the war room atop his tower. Maps hung between each of the full length open windows, and a table covered in different colors of sand allowed his powerful mind to quickly sketch out different situations with the equivalent of a three dimensional scratch pad.

His Yrch had done well, but if he kept them here they would quickly grow restless. The price of having such servants was always keeping them busy.

This evening he had set aside for planning, preparing, and equipping their next caper. Then he would go to the Home of Return in Upper Loth and help out with NAHL's revival. A toothy smile flickered across his face before it reflexively shaped itself into something more pleasant.

The problem with the Yrch, even with Hojo da' Boss's return, was that they needed reinforcements. Ever since that damnable militia troop that had been causing so much trouble had raided the waterfall hideout, the Yrch had been at half strength. But if he had brought Hojo back, why not send them to bring him the rest of the slain? They had been dead longer, but they had never been as dangerous as Hojo to begin with.

He could certainly do something with them, and even if the rest of the Yrch didn't like it Hojo would be thrilled. It would create two factions in his crew, and their striving with each other would leave them less time to try to overthrow him.

Black Lobster Bob would send them with the slug carts, and while they were out they could bring back anyone else they could kill along the way without stirring up too much trouble. It was always good for an elite unit, which Black Lobster Bob badly wanted the Yrch to be, to have auxiliaries.

Tairic Bloodroot had drunk a delightful lemon-grass tea, and spent the better part of an hour listening to Lola's chatter while he waited for the librarian and his unionized research demon flew about the place reading. The librarian happily accepted a small grant to investigate the possibility of further contributions toward the hypothetical new wing, invited Taric to make fullest use of the library while he was here, and told Lola to help Taric with anything he needed.

Adding in an embarrassed undertone "pursuant to and limited by clauses 3.1, 3.3, 3.4, 3.6 and all of sections 7 and 8 of your contract of course," the elderly Wood Elf had hurried them out of his office.

Taric had amused himself by having Lola hold mildly disgusting often slimy components for him while he wrangled with the other branches of MLOD to get some kind of service close to what he was used to out of the demons. And finally as the sky darkened he had a stack of books, scrolls, and folded documents all neatly marked and annotated with fiendishly neat labels on sticky bits of colored paper.

He now had every resource in the library on where thieves in Upper Loth went and what they did there. Granted it did not amount to anything like a current map and schedule with passwords in the margins, but there were a whole lot of clues, and Taric was good with clues. If the thief who had taken his ring was still in Upper Loth, Taric would find him. And once Taric had the first string in the puzzle, it was just a matter of pulling and following the chain of events as they unravelled.

After failing to talk a foot rub out of Lola (who actually blushed and fled the room) he settled in to read.

Jonathon had been brought a tray of food by a nameless withered kobold twice during the long day of waiting while the council met, and when he pounded on the door of the cell the same kobold had taken him to a bathroom. Nevertheless, Jonathon was getting tired of being trapped inside. He thought about the events of normal school days with an unaccustomed fondness. He even managed a somewhat kind thought for his teacher's brat of a daughter Dolly.

He had been talking to the voices in his mind or in the ring, whichever it was, for most of the day and was beginning to feel a little crazy around the edges. Disembodied voices that he thought instead of hearing were all well and good, but without living breathing vocal interactions to balance them out the mental conversations had a heady surreal effect.

He wasn't sure whether to think of it as play or as something much more real than his visible environment. It might be a little of both.

The kobold brought in a pile of blankets and left again, closing the door without a word. Jonathon heard the lock catch and guessed he would be here a while. There was an oil lamp on the wall, and when it got fully dark he thought he would practice the fire calling exercises that he had been taught and try to light it.

Corporal Leonard Spotwoven had a problem. His stool pigeon in DEFEND, the evangelical 'Departed Elven Friends' movement that fronted for NAHL had told him that there was another big raising planned in the gardens of the Home of Return tonight.

And while there was no technical law against necromancy, he had heard Captain Longroads speak several times on the subject, always to the theme of "Not in my town, scum-suckers!"

His problem was that for the whole afternoon he had failed to find anyone more important than himself in the ranks of the militia to organize a raid. He could tell the constables, but they would take it clean away and send their riot squad. The uneasy cooperation of the militia and constabulary didn't lend itself toward sharing information that hadn't been requested in triplicate.

He could take the remnants of his light infantry scout squad, although the best four of them were semi-retired freelancers who were out of town. But he wasn't sure he wanted to face down undead hordes with just two more longbows at his back. At last, after looking everywhere, he was wandering around the militia base on the East side of town trying his best to look like someone an officer should come harass.

His regulation shirt was unlaced, he had kicked in a mud puddle until his perfectly shined boots were spattered, and he walked in a carefree manner, whistling. He had gotten several dirty looks from enlisted men, but so far even this desperate stratagem was failing.

Then from behind him he heard a woman's voice snap. "You there - Corporal! Come to attention, stow these prisoners, and point me to the Captain!"

The voice had the high-octane crack of a fourteen-foot braided rawhide bullwhip. She wasn't his immediate superior, she wasn't even in his division, but she was an officer. Eerie was back.

Turning, he snapped to attention, saluted, and began to explain.

The Tinker poured the last pot of rinse water from boiling down the river drake's skull back into the stream, and stowed the huge pot under some bags of fruit on one of his three mules. The few bits of tissue that he had been unable to properly clean, process, and store were now fish food which was a fair reversal for the drake.

He thanked the wyrm's spirit, and that of the kind river for bringing it to him. It was well along into evening, and the tinker would have liked to sleep tonight, but with that damn crown around he felt it would be far more prudent to keep moving.

After a moments thought he dug through the load of another mule and pulled out a wide brimmed battered hat. Just the thing to keep ticks and crowns from dropping on him while he walked. He took up the mule's ropes again, and after several unsuccessful efforts, got them started. As they walked on along the little stream he watched the sun set far over the human lands.

He missed the miles of green land there that he had wandered freely once. But he missed the Mountains too. In his long life the one constant had been change.

Life was always changing, he supposed. Sometimes it changed so slowly you didn't notice until the old things were gone, but sometimes it changed like wildfire sweeping across the woodlands faster than the animals could run. He had a feeling that he was in the upswing of one of these more dramatic sorts of changes.

Lazlo, the second in command of the Yrch pirates, was seriously worried. The rest of the band were happy as corn dogs, riding on the column of slow slug drawn carts as they plowed over the brush in their path leaving a slow wake of slime, or trotting through the foliage on either side looking for things to kill. They had been sent on a true marauding mission, which was a traditional Yrch favorite, killing anything that they came across, caught, and could carry off. And usually Lazlo loved travelling with the slug carts - he could range back and forth on Hymie, his dreadwing, doing extensive scouting missions with no problems catching up.

But this time they were carrying off far more than they or their tribe would eat, and unlike the others Lazlo had thought about why.

Hojo as a zombie or whatever he was could be tolerated, and in principle Lazlo had nothing against the undead. But he also had no illusions about the eventual fate of what would soon be the few living members in a horde of undead either - it was the same way Yrch would behave toward outsiders.

But unlike living tribes of Yrch, the undead could kill you and keep you working for them. And Lazlo, despite his fondness for Hymie, was very fond of the living condition.

He also wondered if the Master had been aware of the indiscriminate nature of Yrch marauding traditions. The first cart was not yet half full, but what it contained would make some odd troop material for a necromancer to work with.

There was a hapless goblin that had been caught hiding in the outhouse behind it's tiny shack, which was something, but the rest was an assortment of rabbit, possum, racoon, mice of all sorts, a couple of harmless snakes, and a whole lot of grasshoppers. They insisted on buzzing up from the clumps of tall grass in the Yrch's path, and if there was nothing bigger in reach the grasshoppers made lovely targets.

Not all of them made it to the carts, as they were a popular bite sized trail snack, but they had been well paid and loyalty was running high so they had saved many of the least splattered.

Also, Lazlo was thinking, the central reaches of the valley had been a pretty hot zone lately. They were a small troop to be leaving this big a trail, moving this slow, and making this much noise. But he supposed that if one or two of them died getting the carts back it wouldn't really affect the Master's plans much. He was glad they had heaved poor Raul into the lake before the Master got the idea.

So, for the sake of his living companions as a buffer between him and the un-life, he was keeping a sharp lookout.

It would take two nights to get the carts up to the old waterfall hideout and they had canopies for day travel if they were pressed, but Lazlo was hoping it wouldn't come to that. Hymie hated sunlight even more than he did, and would want to pack himself in with them under the canopies. Then he saw motion ahead, and set spurs to Hymie's silky mostly real black flanks.

A fight was under way, he saw, proceeding in almost total silence. A pack of hell-wolves had backed a reptilian centaur with the dappled red scaly body and short legs of a fire monitor against a cliff face. She was holding her own with two short stabbing blades and little puffs of flame, her twin rows of teats bouncing on the otherwise vaguely elf-like torso, but she could not fight out of the circling pack.

Lazlo was unenthusiastic about their ultimate goal, but this was the kind of situation the Yrch could do something with. He wheeled, and spurred back to tell Hojo.

The Dread Count Astoc continued riding, the thunder of his tireless steed's gold-steel shod hooves unchanging through the miles of night. He had summoned a nature spyrt, an energy being related to the more organic pyx, from the area he was riding toward, and it sat on his saddle horn. It was a lovely vision of an elf maiden in white with a brown braid of hair hanging half the length of her three inches of height.

He had used one of his commands to bind her to answer his questions truthfully, so she was a little annoyed with him. He continued to quiz her about the area without much idea what he was looking for.

"Is there a temple there, spyrt?"

"Oh yes, Dread Master, though only a humble edifice that a being of your elite stature would doubtless not care to be seen at."

He thought she was running away with this truthful thing a little further than necessary; most of her answers were in this tone. However, he was getting his questions answered, and he could certainly not accuse her of being disrespectful.

"Who is the keeper of this humble temple, spyrt?"

"Only a even more humble young shaman, Dread Master, so far beneath your station even though she be of noble birth that she could hardly offer any assistance to a privileged elite personage so Dread as you."

This was an answer, and probably a truthful one, whatever that really meant, but it was hardly helpful.

"Does this humblest of shamans have a name, o petulant spyrt?"

"Indeed she does, Dread Master, but it is a name so humble as to be of no use to one of your Dread magnificence."

The Dread Count smiled in anticipation.

"Even though it may be useless to me, by the command which binds you, o spyrt, tell me truly - what is the name of this shaman?"

"It is only a humble thing her name, Dread Master. Her name is what others, of Dread magnificence much less than yours, say to call her. This is its humble nature, and in its humility, precisely and truthfully what her name is, o Count Astoc, Dread."

The Dread Count wondered whether there was a way to rephrase his command of truth to avoid this sort of problem. The spyrt waited patiently on the saddle horn, enjoying her free ride, and the steed rumbled on through the darkness.

The Commodore had indeed pressed Albatross Jake into the navy. He had also taken not only Jake's Heron, but was even now cleaning the dead out of Sea Cat, the other small harbor transport. The horrible casualty list left him badly short handed, even for the newly downsized squadron he found himself in command of.

Every elf who could walk was rushing about splicing ropes, repairing shattered deck and railing, bracing and reshipping masts, charging mana crystals, and taking supplies and armaments aboard the two cutters to outfit them for fleet service. Jake had not yet seen the Commodore, but he was happy with this because he suspected that once he had it would not be long till he was working again too.

Talking with the other patients confined to the sick bay had given him something of a concept of the loss the H. E. Navy had suffered. There had already been pitifully few ships for the tasks that the squadron had been assigned. The inner islands squadron were supposed to prevent Duir access to the sea, prevent pirate activity in the vast sea lanes between the mainland and the last few Leth settlements in the islands, and maintain a visible enough presence to discourage intrusion from the much larger human fleets.

Of the few ships there had been, the four deck Myrgryffyn was the only ship of the line remaining. Its remaining consorts were the two harbor transports newly bought into service, and a frigate, two swan sloop-galleys, and a troop transport the lot of which had been sent together to clean up a reported plague of multi-species troops of bandits on Rala-Ub-Tharku outside the City of the Ancients. They had not been seen in two weeks, and had been due to return several days ago.

The City of the Ancients had already been impossibly old and abandoned when the peoples of the Leth had first sailed out of the river into the ocean and found the archipelago. It had obviously been constructed by a people of great power, and a small colony of scholars had congregated there ever since its discovery.

The island was large, and many strange things had come up from the caves beneath. It was commonly presumed that the Myrgryffyn would make all sail for the islands as soon as the repairs and refit had been completed.

Several press gangs had been sent ashore to see if any of the villagers could be borrowed for a few years, and supplies were rushing aboard the flagship.

Meanwhile Jake and his new cronies lounged in the dim sickroom, smoking illicit cigarettes. With the inspiration of the un-asked, the wounded sailors solved all of the Admiralty's problems one by one, if only the pompous Lords of the Fleet could have been convinced to listen.

Darkness had gradually stolen across what Jonathon Proquast Middleleaf had come to think of as his cell. As the light had trickled slowly up the wall, across the ceiling, and out the high window, the ring had glowed very gentle patterns from its forest of colored stones. He had talked on with the voices, growing increasingly at home with their unphrased nonverbal communication.

When he decided he wanted to call fire to the little oil lamp they showed him what he had been doing wrong when his father's senior shop magician had been trying to teach him. They also showed him how to do a host of other little things right, many of which the magician had never been shown. They also helped a little.

The walls, floor and ceiling of the room were covered with incandescent rippling sheets of rainbow flames. Each lick of fire was a different color, glorious to behold. And to Jonathon's further surprise, although he could feel the fierce heat, he was unharmed.

The lamp exploded off the wall, an orange arch of furious combustion, and the oil was as quickly gone. Jonathon noticed that the strange fire was being very polite and neither consuming his dressy school shoes which he had long ago kicked off, nor for that matter the structure of the room itself. The few bits of cloth and wood furnishings in the cell had vanished immediately into puffs of fine ash, but the roof, which was dry thatch, was blazing merrily with no sign of diminishing.

The door swung open inwards, and was gone. He heard the kobold cry out in alarm, and the patter of small feet retreating in haste. Dimly, through his shock, he realized that adults were going to be here soon, and he was probably going to be in trouble again. If he could just make that sticky-cantrip work he could climb up the wall and out the window and let the adults be mad at each other for a while. Carefully he talked to the voices, explaining repeatedly that he didn't want to be unbreakably glued to the wall for a million years. They were most obliging.

The child scampered up the flaming wall and out the window like an asbestos gecko. The night was cool and dark outside. It smelled of wild mint, small things moving secret along walls and through hedgerows, and freedom.

He could hear the wailing bugle of the constables' fire wagon approaching. This would be a bad place to be soon if he wanted to remain undiscovered.

Having come out the back of city hall, the obvious escape route most nights would have been out of the light of the street lamps across the dark field of the Home of Return. But tonight, he saw, there were a veritable assemblage of small lights out in the field already.

They bobbed about erratically, and seemed to be torches and lanterns carried in ones and twos. How strange, he thought. He hurried across Arrow Street, the bugle drawing nearer, and sticking to the outer wall of the cemetery he ran along behind the NCO's club and the officers' housing of the militia base.

There was shouting far off behind him now, the fire was under assault, but he hoped it would be some time yet before they were sure that he was not trapped or dead within. As he ran along by the low stone wall, he came face to face with a large black crow perched on the ornament atop one of the stubby pillars that separated the wall's sections of stone block.

It spread its wings, hopped up and down with a raspy chuckling noise, and winked at him with one bright yellow eye.

Necrotis hadn't noticed the overabundance of crows attending what he imagined to be his ceremony. One thing undertakers got used to on the job was lots of crows. He had always sort of liked the silly birds, with their simple tricks and games. He had never thought of them watching him.

Eerie crouched with Cpl. Spotwoven behind a section of the outer wall murmuring with her night-feathered friends as they came and went. There were a large number of elves already here, but no crimes had been committed, and no corpses had come crawling from their graves. So far they were attending a late night evangelical function with a strange taste in venues. Black Lobster Bob had not yet arrived.

The dancers had started by the time Bahazaar had staggered down from the fields and back to Casa José. He had edged around the beer wagon being unloaded, nearly tripping over the goat drawn mini-chariot parked behind it, and been assaulted by a wave of overpowering soulful horn music, smoke, and alcohol fumes as the door swung open.

One of the goats harnessed to the chariot looked at him balefully, and edging past a burly reddish kobold, he stumbled inside. He got another bottle of the cheap whisky from the scarred bartender and packed himself unnoticed into a dark corner behind the press of faces jockeying for a better view of the stage.

The clientele was still about evenly mixed between elves and the smaller races, but almost all eyes were riveted on the stage. As the customers watched the long legged dark haired High Elf slowly gyrate her nimble body around a pole by the smoky flickering light of torches and the few lanterns that the owners had managed to keep glass in, Bahazaar drank his whisky and watched them.

The horn section, composed of a disheveled looking elven trumpeter and a blue haired kobold on alto sax, wailed on.

He hadn't recognized anyone from Growler's yet by the time the time the dancer had spun, spread, stretched and everything but danced her way through a second number, and she left the stage to riotous applause. He saw that an exceptionally tall and solidly built grey elf with a black topknot and a saber at his waist sat by the door with the automatic presence that emanated from security people everywhere.

He was drinking a frothy mug of beer and smoking from a glass pipe. On the other side of the table sat the kobold he had seen with the beer wagon, probably discussing the beer.

Then the two piece band appeared from the crowd almost at Bahazaar's elbow with drinks and cigarettes. The elf pulled out a chair and said "Hope you don't mind, the table's usually empty." A vague smell of rotting food accompanied him as he sat at the table. The Kobold hopped up on the edge of the table and put his feet in a chair.

"No, sorry, I didn't know it was the band table. Let me buy you another drink?"

Through his drunken haze Bahazaar realized that a musician would be the perfect contact to make discreet inquiries after the fate of his belongings. The elf was drinking from a full mug of beer and waved his hand in the negative, but the kobold slurped down the last of his foamy white concoction with a bamboo straw and whistled piercingly.

To Bahazaar's vague surprise a green eyed barmaid slipped out of the throng, between a dozen attempted pinches and at least one bleary eyed proposal of matrimony, and stopped at the table.

"What do you want, Lefty?"

"Well this kind soul offered to buy me a drink, and knowin' that the band drinks on the house I thought you might like one, sweet thing." He covered a small belch, and added "'Scuse me."

She took the outstretched glass and dribbled its remaining contents on the kobold's lap.

"No band drinks free in this joint, and if you didn't have some poor mark buying I'd charge you double for the 'sweet thing', but I'll take his money." Turning to Bahazaar, "Two copper, hon, and take my advice - find better company to spend it on."

Taking his money she flowed back through the gauntlet to the bar, her progress a study in evasive maneuvers.

Lefty grinned with a wide mouthful of white pointy teeth, and said "I do belive she's coming around, old Stump."

The elf snorted a monosyllabic reply. A moment later she returned, still amazingly intact, and set Lefty's new drink, which had the dark amber color of good bourbon, just out of his reach.

Patting Bahazaar on the cheek, she said "Think about it." She rolled her eyes meaningfully toward the other two and departed.

A moment later, the musicians exchanged glances and hurried back toward the stage, though not hurrying so much that Lefty forgot his drink. Looking after them Bahazaar saw the grey elf by the stage door was standing, alert again. He had missed the signal, but the show was about to resume.

He had failed to find an opening to actually try to talk to the band about his problem, but perhaps he would see them later. Sipping from his bottle at a steady maintenance rate, he watched the barmaid slide around whatever obstacles the room found to throw at her.

It was like watching a hundred archers shooting at a fog - she was everywhere a groping hand or drooling face wasn't, and then she was there again too when the intrusion was gone without ever allowing it to disrupt her graceful flow. He didn't notice the grey elf slip into the back room, to be replaced at his post by the large blue creature.

Jonathon had been badly spooked by the crow, but had eventually decided that if it was just sitting there than there probably wasn't anything more dangerous around, and this was as good a place as any to hunker down and try to plan.

The crow bobbed its head encouragingly and winked its yellow eye at him again when he sat down, and he decided it was an alright sort of bird despite it's late night choice of locations.

He considered his situation. He was free for now, and unlikely to be tracked down and caught immediately, he could still see the light from the fire in the sky from where he sat. But he had no real desire or preparation to leave his family, home, or community, which was a better trap than any stone wall.

Looking back, he felt guilty that he had run from the situation, but it was too late to change it now. Anyway, being locked up in that little room all day had been completely intolerable. He hadn't stolen the ring, he hadn't even meant to put it on. And until he discovered that it had bonded to his finger he'd certainly never had any idea of keeping the thing.

Spurred by the thought of losing it, he realized that now even if it were not attached he would be very reluctant to give it away. And most certainly the grownups would make him give it away. They would find some way to make it come off, probably cut off his finger if they had to from the way that they were behaving. So he would hide out for a while. He knew the surrounding countryside pretty well, and considered and discarded a half dozen nearby options as too easy to find when the inevitable trackers came.

The caves upstream where the small brook came out of the rock might work well, but they were a long hike away and he would be lucky to make it by dawn.

And if he was going to be gone very long he would want some food. This was the thought that brought him back to motion. While the fire still burned everyone from his house, less than a block away, was almost guaranteed to be down watching or fighting it. He could sneak in and grab a few things and be gone before they ever knew it. It was fortunate that destiny had grander things on his table than a life of crime, for he was perfectly right and the thought of burgling his own house filled him with an unholy glee.

Hurriedly, he snuck back along the wall, dashed across Arrow Street, and into the back yards of his neighborhood. On his way across he saw the fire wagon leaving for more water and the fire blazing away, undeterred but not growing or consuming in the manner of proper fire either.

Ducking under the Briardowns' clothesline he crossed his back yard, and slipped into the still open window of his room.

In the dark he quietly gathered a pack with layers of clothing, his small table knife and a whetstone, his short bow, several quivers of arrows, and giving up on rolling the quilted comforter from his bed, a long wool poncho. Next he padded silently down the stairs to the pantry. There he added two small wheels of cheese, a sack of hard-tack rye crackers, a string of venison sausages, a carefully wrapped plate of cookies, a large bottle of birch beer, a skin that he filled with water, two lemons and a small jug of maple syrup for sipping on.

After a moment in which he added up how much trouble he was already in and concluded that it was beyond the point where a little more could matter much, he went back up the stairs and down the hall to his father's lab. He listened quietly from the doorway, but it was silent as well as dark.

He touched the firestone stud set into the silver-framed lantern by the door, and the room was bathed in soft steady light. Bins of components, tools, and workbenches cluttered the room. Jonathon let the voices in his head guide his hands. They quickly finished filling his pack.

A moment later the room was bathed in darkness again and Jonathon was out the window and away.

Where Eerie crouched next to Cpl. Spotwoven, a crow murmured in her ear. She relayed the news to Leonard, "The kid's coming through again."

He shrugged. "Och, I don't like it, but I don't see any way he's a part of this, and we're way too outnumbered to blow our cover playing nursemaid for the lad, Lieutenant. Let's let him go on by."

She agreed, and he had made the decision sound like a request which was kind of him. She was sneaky enough, but she had quickly discovered that this was Leonard's world. He was young and undisciplined, but when he stood next to a tree the tree thought he was a fallen branch.

She would put in a request when they returned to have him take the six-week intensive airdrop specialist training. It would make his life hell for a while, but he had survived scout training and he would be useful to her.

It had nothing at all to do with his high-country brogue or fluid way of moving.
Leonard had never spent any time in direct contact with Lieutenant Crowcalling. He had seen her and her flashing yellow eyes at a distance, and on an animal level he had been sensibly terrified. He was still terrified of her, but for some reason he found himself thinking that he would apply for the airdrop specialist program. It would make his life hell for a while, but he had survived scout training, and it would be exciting. Of course he'd probably see more of the Lieutenant, but those who grew up in the oft frozen North country handled terror well or died too early to repollute their gene pool.

They melted back into the brush without a sound, and watched Jonathon do a creditable job of sneaking on by.

"Sure, an the kid knows a little of what he's after. He'll come out alright then."

Leonard was glad to see him moving quiet; it was a dark night out there and lots of things were afoot, aslither, or otherwise about, most of them nasty and the rest of them snacks.

Eerie nodded, and they returned to the low stone curtain wall. A new figure had arrived in the cemetery, and the flickering points of light that were the congregation were congregating.

Sneaking across the other side of the graveyard, and so far undetected even by the crows, was Captain Luthien Longroads and the part-timers who were the core of Leonard's squad. Unbeknownst to Leonard they had snuck back into town two nights ago flying on a school of airborne giant manta rays that they had bartered for at a bazaar in Duir Spaw, and holed up in their bar.

Porin Forescarre, who had been Leonard's Sargent when he had been in regular service, had been snooping around the Home of Return to dig up dirt on Necrotis and score points with Wisteria, the shaman whom the undertaker had been harassing lately. Seeing the crowd and ritual in progress, he had run back to grab Gar Scidorlan, the monastic grey elf who had been in Leonard's job, and Sithgalandil, the hulking black scaled half-elf half-troll, a child of the violence of a past war.

Finding that Luthien had stopped in to see their new bar had been an unexpected bonus, and Captain Longroads had not formed the militia by sitting in an office twiddling his thumbs. They took cover in a shrub line, not so far from the gathering point around a mausoleum. A crow was perched ten feet above them, but its attention was already occupied and they made no whisper to disturb it.

Necrotis, in a black concealing hooded robe, and carrying a bronze goat facemask on a staff before him, was leading the congregation of befuddled villagers in a simple repeated chant, their voices babbling over each other. He had spiked the punch in the pre-revival gathering in the anteroom of his crypt complex with a potent narcotic tea made from a cactus native to some desert islands in the archipelago.

He knew that at least the ringleaders of the all the little cells he had helped form were flying, which would keep the group off balance and easy to manipulate. They poured the native power of all living creatures, which is belief, into him in waves.

He didn't do anything in particular with it, just gathered it together, organized and massaged it a little into a more coherent stream, and passed it on. On top of the peaked roof of the little crypt stood the form of Mumar Huthgan, the well known Dark-Elven necromancer, which Black Lobster Bob had borrowed for the occasion. Having the fellow locked in his basement made him the perfect choice.

He didn't like travelling without an identity to take the rap for whatever he decided to do along the way. Freedom had quickly taught him that it was always good to have looked like someone else. Even the Yrch only knew him as a mad shadowy figure that lived in the tower and paid in gold. He could produce any number of mad shadowy figures in the tower, should someone ever come looking for one to blame for anything that he or his minions had done.

Bob, as Mumar's seeming, gathered the power that the inefficient fool Necrotis passed on to him like candy. The power he had already drained from the congregation was more than sufficient for the task that the leadership of NAHL had set out to achieve.

He continued to gather power, partly because he was expecting several wagonloads of freshly slain new recruits from his Yrch, but mostly just because the power was there.

He sighed and basked in the power flow like a lizard on a warm rock - this was what he felt eternal damnation ought to be like more often. Eventually, before the more than a few dozen of the tranced out crowd had drained themselves completely and collapsed into unconsciousness, he raised the scrawny elven arms with their full set of ten amazing fingers on the end. A hush fell over the portion of the crowd still on its feet.

Across the rolling meadow where the small militia troop hid, Sith chose this moment to sneeze. The towering half troll stifled the sound, and no elven (much less human) ear at the distance of the ritual would have caught it. But although Black Lobster Bob's plans changed not at all, he knew that they had company. And the crow, startled and resentful of being surprised, took wing unheeded in the darkness to carry the news to its friend.

Forming the portion of the power that was required into a harpoon which would pierce into the dark land beyond the grave and bring back the shadows he sought, Black Lobster Bob howled like the demon he was at the night sky.

The stone slab that had been the door of the little tomb exploded into a thousand whirling pieces of granite shrapnel. Many of the villagers who had been left standing joined their brethren on the ground with injuries or attacks of belated caution.

As Black Lobster Bob's howl and the crack of the stone were still echoing, Luthien was on his feet.

"Upper Loth Militia! All of you hit the ground now and remain prone! You are surrounded! Surrender Now!" His bass shout cut the air like a fog horn at sea.

A few of the remaining villagers who weren't too dazed to understand went to the ground, a few more fell over without much planning, and several others sprang up and ran for it.

Mumar, a la Bob, began to sing snatches of operas that he remembered from his time in captivity in Bolden in a thundering basso profundo. The ritual was complete, he just didn't like being upstaged. Necrotis, he noticed with cynical amusement, had already cut off into the shrubberies toward one of his secret crypt entrances. Bob knew that this place was a warren.

Porin was drawing a bead on the insanely singing cloaked Dark Elf with his longbow. He had been fairly sure that he had killed Mumar some weeks ago when he helped to burn the necromancer's tower. He hadn't actually seen the Dark Elf die, but he wasn't entirely convinced that this was Mumar either. The Mumar he had fought had a light baritone voice. He raised worthless peacenik zombies that wandered around picking flowers, and he had almost enough useful power of his own to wipe off with his long sleeves after he blew his nose.

Gar had left his saber at the bar to increase his maneuverability. He was already floating over the ground in a loping semicircular stride, tearing toward the crypt with his hands in an effortless ready position, and Sithgilandil was not far behind with his morning star, cutting an even bigger silhouette.

Porin shot, drew and shot, drew and shot and watched the arrows one at a time flick aside as they approached their target. This was also a talent that the Mumar of old had lacked.

Luthien had loaded his crossbow, and on an unspoken cue they both shot at the same time. The missiles converged, then at the last moment flicked apart, skipping off the stone roof to either side of their target.

Gar had come into what he considered range now, and with blood curdling scream he vaulted the last ten feet off a neighboring headstone. Travelling through the air into a perfect sidekick, his body flattened out into a line behind the offensive shield of his onrushing foot at the moment that should have been impact. He felt his momentum shift as though he had been hit by an incredibly strong gust of air where no wind blew, and he sailed right over the slender form on the roof, windmilling as he tried to turn enough to land safely.

As Sith closed the remaining distance the Dark-Elven figure began to rise into the air. Out of the crypt's gaping doorway flew a swarm of skulls with fiery eyes. They rose, circling together, biting and bumping each other in ill-humored playfulness. Sith began to put on the brakes, and as Gar hit the ground he kept rolling until he reached a place that had several directions where a dive would bring him to several choices of cover.

Then out of the blasted gaping stone doorway rode a regal looking apparition. It was astride a black horse, which snorted jets of fire, and trotted into the air like it was a cobbled path. The spectral figure was clad in elaborate black armor and the rags of an elaborate uniform of long ago. It wore a shimmering silver crown, and carried a long boar spear in one hand with a dreadful ease, as though poised to throw it.

Recognizing the uniform, Gar backpedaled further, giving himself another wall to dodge behind. It rode into the sky, and spoke clearly to the Dark Elf in a voice deeper and more forbidding than the horrid opera had been.

"A Debt."

With a blast on an elaborately bound drake horn trumpet to rally the pack of skulls, the wraith rode off into the night sky accompanied by the sound of hoof-beats, though what the hooves were striking was hard to guess.

The Dark Elf flashed once like a brilliant silent explosion and was gone. Captain Longroads sighed at the remaining tableau. Far more injured and comatose citizens were strewn about the cemetery than there would be any point in trying to lock up. In the distance, at last, the town's alarm bell began to toll. As usual it was left to the militia to clean up the mess.

Leonard looked at Eerie in confusion. They were still hunkered by the far stone wall. "Shouldn't we have been tryin' to help, Lieutenant?"

She shook her head. "There's nothing useful that two more of us could do that those four couldn't. Nothing useful except to stay hidden and be the surprise backup if their bluff got called. I'm in the cavalry, remember, riding over the hill in the nick of time's what I'm supposed to be good at?" She could joke, and grin, now that the danger was past.

"An should we be reportin' to the Captain now?"

She didn't think he quite had the style of military living figured out yet. "We're going to sneak quietly back off to base. I'll save telling him anything about us being here or knowing anything about this for some morning when I really need to have a one up on him. He's too good a commander; being one up on Luthien can be hard to come by."

Leonard thought about this for a moment and understood. They snuck quietly back off toward base. Crows followed after.

Jonathon crept along through the forest and thick of night. By the light of day, he was sure he could have told you exactly where he was. Between the darkness and his nerves, all he was sure of was that the rabbit track that he had been following went through way too many briar patches, and he hoped it got out to the clearer trail along the stream soon.

Like all elves he saw heat in addition to longer lights, and had excellent dark vision. But there was a patchy little fog playing games, a cloudy sky without even a hidden moon, and not much except him throwing off any heat.

He scratched and scurried his way along the rabbit trail, still being as quiet as he could in the circumstances, and making certainly no more noise than the trail's usual occupants.

This had given two different weasels and a small fox that had laid in ambush at different points quite a surprise, but they had lain quite still and the unnaturally large thing that moved like rabbits had not seen them.

A mighty tigress, less than a quarter-mile off, smelled the child on an errant gust of wind and gave a quiet grumbling cough to the night, but did not give chase. She was slumbering near the remains of a fat bull that had strayed too far from its pasture earlier today and she would not be hungry again for some time.

The night had a chill in it, though the first frost this low in the valley was yet some way off. The patches of fog played eerie tricks with Jonathon's vision, and it seemed as though the confined trail had gone on forever, though he could hardly have walked more than a mile and the stream trail was still far off.

Almost all towns of the Leth were built on water - the sea, lakes, or rivers and streams, it was much the same. Much of this was simply due to the usefulness of the resource, and Upper Loth would not have been built so far from the stream except for an eccentric geo-alchemist who had discovered a powerful artesian zone under the clay layer that the town was built on.

As a result, the town's fountain, its mill, and all of the innovative plumbing was powered by water that was delighted to climb fifty feet in the air in pipes, fill tanks, and provide all the conventional downward water pressure that could be asked for. Some early systems had tried using the upward surge pressure directly, but the series of plumbing devices all came out resembling bidets, and for a variety of reasons this had not caught on.

The upshot of all this in Jonathon's case was several miles of briar between him and the stream, and then several more upstream to the caves he had in mind.

To calm his nerves as much as to rest, he stopped and took off his pack. After a quick rummage he found the flask of maple syrup, and had a hard swill. The pleasant sugary liquid kicked his energy up a notch and seemed to take the edge off his jitters. Hanging on to the flask to repeat the dose as needed, he slipped on the backpack and stalked off down the scratchy trail.

The damnedest thing about wood elves, thought the Dread Count Astoc as he thundered through the scrub, was that they never built any decent roads. He was sure that he was within fifty miles of Upper Loth, but between riding around gullies, gorges, fallen giant trees, cliffs and other obstacles, and dealing with the limited vision brought on by the patchy fog, he kept losing track of exactly which direction it was in.

Three times he had called on orderly spirits from a firey place he knew to cause a flaming arrow to streak in the direction he needed to travel, but he kept getting turned around. Every time he started to get straightened out some unfortunate doer of evil would happen to cross paths with him, and sensibly enough flee at full speed through the roughest parts of the surrounding terrain.

By the time he had ridden the unfortunate miscreant to ground and stomped out their dark existence, he was hopelessly lost again every time. There seemed to be a veritable plague of fleet footed minor stompable sorts of evils scurrying about in the dark woods, and it promised to be a long night.

As the night wore on and he got sleepier, Bahazaar Morningtide began to realize that the common room would remain a loud, smoky zone for some time yet. The endless series of dancers strutted, stretched, and crawled on, and the two piece horn ensemble was still going strong with smoky licks and runs and no noticeable shortages of new material.

A couple of boggies were sacked out under a table in another corner and he had seen three would-be pickpockets give them a thorough swift frisk, coming up empty and kicking their slumbering forms in disgust. He had seen no security except the scarred Fair Elf running the bar for some time.

Apparently he was enough. When two huge rowdy woodcutters had climbed up on the stage in pursuit of a Fair-Elven strumpet with rare red hair down to and again below her waist, the bartender had vaulted the bar in a practiced leap and thrown them out in the street in very creditable time. He was back serving drinks before the door had finished swinging. And the music never stopped.

Then, sometime later while Bahazaar was fighting to keep his eyes open an excited group of elves entered the bar. The large grey elf who had been minding the stage door was one of the group, although he was not carrying his saber. He was accompanied by a Wood Elf with a longbow, a hulking dark half-monster crossbreed, and Captain Longroads, whom Bahazaar had never met but recognized from his fuzzy recollection of his mission briefing.

The longbow, he realized, was strung despite the damp of the evening, meaning that it had been readied for use, for a bow left strung in this weather would soon warp.

They were talking excitedly with much shaking of heads and waving of hands. It was still far too noisy for him to overhear, and he had spent Drydock's lip-reading classes in a drunken stupor indifferent to the pleas for attention from the aging signals officer who was their instructor. The Wood Elf with the longbow gave a wave to the bartender and they all disappeared into the back.

Blut Bluhornihoff sighed deeply as he regained consciousness. No one had ever told him life would be easy; if they had he would have pictured their face on the unchanging walls as he dragged himself slowly to his knees, and then his feet.

He was no great dwarven warrior; only a humble, drunken, lecherous minor priest. But there is something in the spirits of all living beings which runs closer to the surface in dwarves.

Blut stood there a moment, head and shoulders sagging, looking more like a casualty then a living thing. Then a tremor started in the soles of his boot-misshapen feet. Slowly it rose through his stubby bowed legs, which stepped a little further apart reflexively, and oh so slowly it straightened up through his spine. As the trembling reached his lungs it became a rumbling, and as it reached his neck his head flew back and his vocal chords interpreted it into something that might have been a howl if wolves had ever gotten that angry.

His stubby arms snapped up, and he rang the walls with the sound of his full roar.

Then he was racing toward the precise spot in the blank metal wall where the door was hidden, and very sensibly, the door was afraid. It had beaten this fool senseless, and apparently this had only made him angrier. Being a self-preserving door by nature, it took advantage of some extra grease in its casing and a chipped tooth in the locking mechanism and made a very small quantum adjustment.

There was a click, and it swung open before the maddened charge quite reached it. Much too far gone to register anything except that he had been cheated of his kill, the loincloth clad dwarf raced off into the bowels of the prison.

The yrch raiding party had taken the centaur and most of the wolves, and added them to the grisly cargo of their slug drawn carts. Since then they had added several more goblins, a spectacled and robed young Dark Elf who had been reading a book and never gotten a sound out much less a spell, and two smaller yrch who were not of the Vaard tribe.

And of course there had been a lot more grasshoppers before the dark and cold settled them into sub-grass nests and tangles. At least the larger prey and their full bellies had reduced their willingness to chase every rabbit to its burrow and dig it kicking from the earth, Lazlo thought.

He didn't think their master would much care for all the little herbivores, but he wasn't about to try to discuss it with Hojo da' Boss.

Hojo had been having a good time, which always made him harder to deal with and more violent. Of course if Hojo had a bad time he got harder to deal with and more violent too, but that was Hojo. Given a new lease on life, or non-life in this case, and sent out for a good bit of marauding, there were few things that could have made the Vaard chieftain happier. One of them was a good hard fight, and he didn't know it yet, but he was about to get one.

The smaller yrch they had slain and added to their organic plunder had been part of the Ururt, or Blood-Hunger, tribe, which had been just about to take its place in the annual gathering of the Ulurugk, or Toothy-Face, clan. Less-mutated two armed yrch, reaching only five feet on average, they were still vicious little creatures with oversized biters. Lazlo had wondered why the two had been caught so off guard, but he hadn't flown into the little box canyon that sheltered the nearby clan gathering, and he was the only one of the Vaard who wondered about such things.

While the Vaard Yrch continued on with their marauding leaving a wide trail of flattened brush and slime, and a wider trail of trampled brush and surprised looking bloodstains, behind them the Ulurugk had circled around the slow moving wagon train and set up an ambush in front of them.

Lazlo did notice the hundred-odd yrch ambush, but to sound impressed in any way by another tribe of Yrch would have been a fatal breach of Yrch etiquette, so he had to be careful how he told Hojo about them.

He swooped down, and Hymie landed on the lead slug cart where the Dreadwing began daintily munching on grasshoppers. Hojo the boss was picking something better left uninspected from his teeth, lounging on the bench seat. Hojo gave Lazlo a sour look as he dismounted, but with Hojo there was no other kind.

Lazlo picked his way forward to a point he hoped was just out of reach, walking over the heap of prey with a slippery crunching stride and fighting to keep his balance.

"Boss, there is some much prey ahead! Only little prey but some many! I saw it from air!" He pointed at Hymie in case his point needed illustrating. Lazlo could speak in complete sentences in several languages, although he was hardly fluent in any of them from an academic's perspective - yrch were not much inclined toward academia.

When talking to Hojo, he had found that the simple but slightly twisted syntax of the way that the yrch tongue was usually spoken was a much safer dialectic option than confusing Hojo by speaking more correctly. He was also careful to diminish the words that recognized the other clan's vastly superior numbers. Unfortunately this made his point hard to get across.

Hojo's face lit up. Standing on the seat he beat his chest with all four hands and yodeled mightily.

The other Yrch came running from the brush, their tufts of fur an even more tangled bloody mess than usual. One had a small deer that had been incautious draped over his upper shoulders.

"What prey, what prey?" Hojo danced up and down the length of the plank-bench as he demanded the report.

"Whole pathetic Toothy-Face clan, boss! Every last little un'. All in stinking ambush for us big big troop of four-arms. Some few pathetic hundred is all boss!" Lazlo hoped fervently that Hojo would pick up on at least some of this.

To Lazlo's dismay Hojo howled for joy.

"We rend Toothy-Faces limb from side, make many toothy necklace! Happy night, happy night! Kill Kill Kill!"

Their rotting chieftain continued his mad capers, even going so far as to do a six pointed cartwheel along the bench.

"All you'se mean ones! At 'em for killings!"

With this short unorthodox speech of inspiration he leapt off the cart, ran right over the top of the slug pulling it leaving bloody clawed footprints, sprang from between it's antennae bumps and raced forward. The other Vaard Yrch followed with a ragged cheer.

Laslo sighed, and scrambled back to Hymie. As he saddled up he checked the twelve little sleeves of three runed throwing stars each that their master had given him. He would need them sooner rather than later, it appeared.

Two-finger Herdbeasting, the cold and wind-weathered yiii herder noted the passing of the two grey robed monks with interest as he played his lonely ocarina melody in a net of safety around his caribou and alpaca. He offered a trill from the tiny clay flute to the frozen wind that blew ice from the cold stars above the night covered mountains as an offering for each of the travelers that it might not catch them too far from shelter before their time.

Few monks still came and went from the upcountry monastery and those traveled mostly by the roads. Where these two walked, their odd smooth circular stride faster than a jog, across the half frozen meadow had been no road in thousands of years, since the yiii's now departed father had been a boy.

The smaller grey dog yipped at them on the far side of the ragged gathering of grazers, and another short high-pitched warble brought it back to its duty.

The long faded road had led to one of the old black towers, which his father and all of their fathers before them had told their children to avoid. The towers were old beyond imagining, and it was said that they had come here and settled, bringing a strange people with them, long before the exile of the Leth to these lands.

He had no idea how his ancestors had come by this knowledge if they had not yet been here, but by great fortune he had no shortage of time to wonder as the sweet tones of his thoughts, given voice by the ocarina, ascended leisurely to the frosty stars.

Perhaps if the grey elves came back this way he would ask them what they thought about it.

Roland followed Saru, still always a half step slower and working hard not to fall behind, as they made their way out of the frosty grass and down a scree slope dotted with pine trees. He avoided a patch of loose rubble that was ready to fall by the feel of the slope beneath his bare feet, and sprang nimbly over a ten-foot crevasse, only losing a little ground on his teacher.

He still had no idea where he was going, but at least he didn't have much time to worry about it.

Jonathon had finally broken free onto the muddy riverside trail just as the false dawn was starting its first hints of light in the east. It would be hours till sunrise yet, but the little bit of light and the space to breathe and trickling stream gave him a feeling of having survived the worst of the night. He sat down on the mossy bank between the path and the stream, had another sip of maple syrup, and realized he was hungry. He dug through his pack and found a wheel of cheese and the rye hardtack. Cutting through the wax with his little knife, he found sharp yellow cheddar. Adding a sausage to the little pile in his lap he settled in to enjoy a much-needed restorative feast.

The fight was going better than the Vaard Yrch had any right to expect. True, most of them were bristling with fiercely barbed little arrows like ambulatory four armed pincushions, but most of these had not penetrated their armor far enough to do more than intensify their battle madness and spread a little more blood around.

Lazlo had discovered with fierce delight that the runed throwing stars reappeared in his little sleeves less than a minute after being flung, and that with twelve sleeves of three even indiscriminate four handed hurling was hard pressed to make him run out of ammo for long. He and Hymie wove happily in and out of the shadows, strafing the littler yrch wherever they gathered.

Hojo, true to his promise, was bounding from one clump to the next ripping off arms and legs indiscriminately. The remaining archers were starting to learn that if they chose other targets they might not be next.

The other Vaard Yrch had rushed and captured one of the archers' emplacements early on, and protected from the worst of the short bow fire, were holding it fairly easily. There were still probably fifty Toothy-Faces in full assault, but considering that perhaps ten minutes ago there had been more than a hundred of them and not one of the six Vaard had yet fallen, things were looking down for them.

Blut Bluhornihoff was causing problems again. Clad only in his loincloth he raced about the hallways of the prison. Somehow he had found the properties room, ripped off the door, and grabbed his axe, clothing, and several pouches of smuggled gems that had been awaiting transfer to the evidence room at the Constabulary.

That he had done this without lessening his berserk state was testified to by the fact that except for the axe all of his possessions including his armor had been flung over his shoulder on a strap. The foamy ropes of saliva running down his beard were another good clue.

He had continued to run about the halls. Now lightly encumbered, instead of bashing his head into everything that he came near he hit everything in reach with his axe. Several guards had been early on the list of things hit with the axe.

Another, a trim female Wood Elf with an impressive bust-line in her neat tan uniform and dashing green eyes, had been thrown over his shoulder with the rest of his load kicking and screaming. The rest of the prison staff tried to keep several layers of locked metal doors between themselves and anywhere he might wind up.

Runners had been sent looking for Fang Greenbow, the half-ogre who led the Riot Squad in addition to settling this sort of problem for the jailors, but so far none had been able to find him. It was thought that the riot squad might be planning a classified surprise operation, although the several members they could find, indignant at being rousted from their personal lives, denied it hotly.

No one answered the door of the half-ogre's red stone micro-tower, and the messengers were understandably reluctant to break in.

Meanwhile, in the rapidly becoming disemboweled bowels of the prison, the minor dwarven priest, now armed, reconnected with his god, carrying pillaged treasure and booty, and still frothing extra-juicily at the mouth berserk, raged on.

The problem that the Dread Count Astoc was having was that most of the doers of evil that he was being distracted by, like the bat winged little imp he pursued at the moment, seemed to live near the stream. As the sun crept slowly closer to rising, they were all making their way home to riverside caves and hollow trees. He'd head toward town, and then a chase would bring him right back.

If he could just find a bit of evil in need of stomping that was headed toward town, and draw out the chase long enough for it to get there, he'd be in Upper Loth any time now.

The imp banked sharply a hundred yards ahead of him, and curved off behind some trees. That was it - it would be going to ground. He spurred his steed to the corner so he wouldn't have to play hide and seek with the little demon and waste more time.

Jonathon had finished his feast, and gotten sleepy. He had packed the leftovers away, and cleaned up his shreds of cheese-wax and as many of the crumbs of hard-tack as he could find to make himself harder to follow. Throwing the crumbs in the stream, he tried to convince himself to get up without any real expectation of success.

He didn't want to be this out in the open when dawn finally came, and it was miles to the caves, but he had a pleasantly lazy feeling, one hand resting comfortably on his full belly. Then, just as sleep was threatening to overtake him, he heard a confused babble of noise coming from upstream. In a moment he was on his feet, shaping himself to a tree's shadow, ready for flight and fully awake.

A horrible little bat-winged thing came flying around a bend in the path, gibbering insanely. Still quite some distance from Jonathon, it saw him immediately. Sticking its tongue out at him, it bent its wings and veered off into the trees. A horrible thundering noise was coming closer, like hoof beats only much more so, and Jonathon didn't wait for it. He dashed off into the brush down river and away.

Briars tore at his arms, hair, and face. Large thick ferns, and other greenery that wasn't too busy biting him quickly soaked him with cold dew. The mud and wet mossy rocks made tricky footing, and he made no pretense at stealth. He did, however, scoot along downstream quite quickly.

After ten or fifteen minutes he was out of breath, bleeding from several scratches, soaked and soon to be shivering, and trembling from the after effects of his adrenaline rush. As he crouched in a clump of ferns, trying hard to listen over his pounding heart and laboring lungs, he became gradually aware of the smell of bacon frying.

It was several more minutes before he brought his respiration under control, and the smell was still there. If anything, it was stronger. The longer Jonathon crouched shivering in the bushes, the more he became convinced that the smell represented safety. It was not a rational conviction, he was aware that it could just as easily be a search party sent to bring him back; but the smell brought an overwhelming almost instinctual sense of friendly strangers, long roads, and something akin to high adventure.

Much of this sentiment may certainly be attributed to the boy's giddy state of mind. There is, however, a certain power in the smell of bacon frying over a wood fire beside a lively stream in a cool patchy pre dawn fog that may touch the soul, and Jonathon became aware that he was awfully cold and hungry again besides.

After several minutes more of internal debate, paranoia, and rationalization that was little more than a delaying tactic, he crept from his hiding place and followed his nose. The smell grew stronger as he worked his way along the mossy rocks at the very edge of the stream.

Soon he could hear the crackle of the fire and the spitting of the bacon grease. There was no orange glow, but the fire must be in the clearing almost right above him. He stepped silently to the edge of the bank where the overhang blocked his view. Climbing on to a root, and then to another a little higher he peeked over the edge.

About six inches from his nose was the nose of a mule who was busy eating some prime stalks of grass from the bank. If it was surprised at his sudden appearance it showed it only by keeping half an eye that Jonathon wasn't after its grass. Looking slowly around, Jonathon saw two more mules nearby, and further away a lovely little pot bellied stove sat beneath a tree, smoking.

A huge old bearded(!) elf stood next to the stove, flipping the bacon in a cast iron skillet with an oversized spatula.

Turning, the Tinker looked straight at Jonathon.

"It'll be done in a few minutes lad. Wash yourself up, and fill this while you're down there."

The Tinker tossed a mostly empty skin of water, and automatically Jonathon caught it without quite falling off the root. He hesitated, decided that things would probably make more sense after he climbed up and there was no point having to climb right back down to clean up before eating, and went to wash up.

The Tinker had sensed the ring's approach long before his mules told him about the boy in the patch of ferns. He had fried bacon for breakfast hoping to call him in.

The sight of the ring flickering dully on the boy's hand as he caught the water skin had brought back a rush of memories that must be packaged away, back into their dry little boxes, so that the Tinker could deal with this coming of Ammergladdin. This time, when the ring was on the hand of a friendly child, not a vengeful nightmare.

As centuries blurred into millenia, the memories got harder to lock up. They wanted to climb up and make him look at them, to make him sit down and reflect. But he had seen the others, often much younger than him, sleeping under hollow hills, in ivory towers, or in crystal caves. More than once he had seen primitive temples built over the forgotten slumbering places of his friends to channel their sleeping power for local crops or passing travelers.

He left them alone, kept most of his memories in their dry little boxes most of the time, and tried to stay active.

Having a boy around would be good for that - it would keep the old vagabond that he had so comfortably become on his toes a little. The ancient, though young at heart, elf saw Jonathon appear over the bank in a scrambling slide that got the boy nearly as muddy as he had been when he had left. The Tinker smiled, and began to dish up the sizzling bacon.

Randall Waxwurther had reached a small cluster of farms early enough to catch the farmers still awake, and had negotiated a temporary residence in a barn while he stretched and scraped the hide of the river wyrm. The farmer had taken only one of the beast's teeth in exchange, as a keepsake for his attractive daughter.

The daughter was Randall's first guess as to who it might be sliding naked under his blanket and into his nest of hay. As his eyes cleared and adjusted to the predawn light he saw with shock that it was the elf-maiden from the stream who had been the original intended prey of the wyrm.

Touching her magnificent chest she murmurred "Morgana." She reached out and scratched his chest with a fingernail and raised an eyebrow in an unspoken question.

His answer was immediate, but it never even crossed his mind that she was asking him his name.

Looking at her softly heat-glowing naked body, he muttered hoarsely "Morgana darling, we've got to quit meeting like this." Then with a grin he pulled her close. "Then again..."

She laughed, and her laughter was contagious. With her coy smiles and expressive eyebrows it would be hours before he discovered that she had no idea what he was saying.

Hay rustled, and a horse whickered softly in the autumn night.

Fang Greenbow had been holed up in the secret dungeon he had built in the sewers near where they attached to the jail for so long that he had completely lost track of time.

Between the endless sexual availability and, increasingly, powerful appetites of the pyx that he had detained, and the repeated use of his size change potions, he had worked himself into a migraine that wouldn't quit. He had tried sleeping it off, but the pain was still there when he closed his eyes, a persistent pounding, mocking his efforts to rest.

Fang remembered that he had been warned about the potions by the junior alchemist he blackmailed into special-making them for him, never more than one a week or some nonsense.

He had shrunk himself maybe eleven times in the last thirty or so hours, he thought. Nothing extreme, but he'd have to give it a break for a while. He closed his eyes and rubbed his aching head.

There was a noise like someone crumpling his reinforced steel door into foil with an axe, and eyes still closed he rubbed at his temples and groaned. It had never been this bad before. When he opened his eyes the flat of a dwarven battle-axe was an inch away and moving fast. It was the last thing Fang saw for a while, but when he did wake up his head would still hurt.

Blut Bluhornihoff neatly lopped the chains from which the pyx hung, and caught her on top of the still kicking and squealing elven guard-wench he had on his loot shoulder as she fell. Barely noticing the negligible extra weight or weak struggling, Blut nicked Fang's purse and a fancy gold ring the half-ogre was wearing, added it to the load, and headed off into dripping stinky forest of flushing noises that was early morning in the sewers.

They all had injuries, but amazingly all the Vaard Yrch had survived. The last twenty or so Toothy-Faces had run off into the brush in every direction howling in defeat. The Vaard had overloaded every wagon, and still had been unable to carry all the toothy faces. Then to their joy they found the spiked lizard cart that the chief of the toothy faces had ridden in. Hitching the big docile lizard in behind the bigger even more passive sulgs, they had loaded up the last of their slain smaller bretheren, and headed for the waterfall. When daylight had begun to threaten, Hojo had surprised everyone.

He unfurled a black deviceless pennant from his a staff set by his seat on the lead cart, and the slow moving column was covered in a deep swath of shadow that spread out for nearly a hundred yards on all sides.

There had been an uncertain cheer, but as the light grew brighter elsewhere and the shadow held the Vaard had decided that it was a good thing and were actually fairly excited about hunting on through the day. Lazlo wasn't thrilled, as he and Hymie were staying grounded in the carts, but he didn't mind too much as long as they got to the waterfall safely.

The Toothy-Faces were bound to have bigger cousins or friends somewhere, and putting daylight miles between them was a sound tactic. But it left them without good scouts.

The Tourist had been only lightly wounded in the fight with the river wyrm, and mud made an excellent poultice for steam burns and cuts. He was still trying to work upstream to the river and then the lake, for which his people had no names. Unfortunately, today he had lost more ground than he had gained, and wound up sneaking over most of it more than once.

He had avoided encounters with blue-skinned fetch that slipped in and out of the water like newts, small furry fetch that fished from rocks by the stream, animals of countless sorts, and a whole troop of tiny flying fetch that frolicked up and down the stream. Since dark some idiot had been galloping a huge war horse to and fro in the nearby woods, occasionally bursting out onto the bank, and the Tourist had avoided him too.

It seemed that every time he started moving, something else came along.

If he could work around the lake then he would be in the far side of the valley and he could begin looking for the Duke of Anthor's kidnapped daughter in earnest. But there was an insane amount of activity on this little stream.

It had started that morning with the fetch-girl and the wyrm, and had not let up. His memory happily returned to the scene before the wyrm appeared, and the maiden's elegance and grace as she bathed. It was strange, he thought, how similar to his own people the fetch could seem. She had been more finely sculpted than any human female, but the sensuality of her movement and form crossed the species line without having to stop at the genetic customs shed.

One thing the mud didn't seem to help with was insulation. His rambling thought process was a warning that mild hypothermia was setting in. He would survive; he knew that if he could stay safe and hidden till the sun was high then he could bask along the river along with the snakes and crocodiles and let the coming day's heat bake him back to an easy comfort.

An inch at a time, often pausing several minutes between moves, and determinedly ignoring the smell of bacon frying, he crept along the bank past the preternaturally suspicious mules. He was avoiding their notice, but it wasn't easy.

Finally he made it past another bend in the trickling stream and began to move a little more quickly. The stream was waking up with the promise of the coming day. Delicate blossoms began to open, and snakes sought rocks from which to await the first warming rays of the sun.

Before long he reached the site of the previous morning's encounter, and pushed on upstream into new territory. He had an urge to try to track the fetch maiden overland, but such urges were the very stuff of which the nastier legends of his people were woven. Besides, he had a job to do.

Of course it would be foolish not to stop and check for tracks. He snooped about the clearing for a bit, enough to see that she had hidden and then followed the fetch warrior, who was dragging a heavy load of wyrm parts toward a more settled area that he wanted to avoid.

There were traces aplenty of her camp, but nothing had been left behind. She must have cleaned up before she left. She wouldn't have had to hurry to catch up with the warrior, and his travois was leaving a clear trail. He felt oddly disappointed, though he didn't know what he'd been hoping for.

He dived in the pool for a while, slipping through the dark silent water like a shadow. Much of the bottom was covered by gently waving clouds of greenery, still midnight black in the faint pre-dawn light, and in spots the silt had still not entirely settled from yesterdays turmoil.

The water was cool, but much warmer than the air, and its gentle currents rolling over his skin refreshed him as it washed away the layers of mud that had become almost a second skin to him. He had broken off a long reed to breathe through, and he settled into a recess under the bank to conserve oxygen and allow his eyes to adjust. Gradually the banks of foliage gained definition, and he began to make out the small fish that darted in and out of the gently waving leafy mass.

As he watched, the flow of the weeds resolved itself further, and he began to see its motion in terms of currents and eddies, not individual motions. The pool was tucked to the side of the main flow of the stream, and there was a natural circling eddy from the steady downstream flow. There was also, he realized, a slight current that entered from the wrong side of the pool, almost directly beneath him.

He watched the weeds ripple with a new interest. He could see no visible source for the opposing current, but it was certainly there. Cautiously, trying not to disturb too much more silt, he worked down toward the furthest back point that his eye could trace the flow to. Suddenly, in the slow motion enforced by water and bad dreams, the seemingly solid riverbed quit being solid and he fell through.

A powerful current sucked him down, and he realized that the current he had seen had only been a return eddy of the powerful hidden sinkhole. His breathing reed was immediately too short, and he had no great store of oxygen in his lungs. Just as quickly the tiny amount of light that there had been was cut off, and he banged into a series of sharp rocks as the subterranean flow carried him around a bend. Dropping the reed, he pulled his arms up to protect his head.

His lungs throbbed, and he tried to slow his already crawling respiration even further to hoard the last bits of breath he had. Another protrusion caught him in his ribs and he tumbled sideways gasping wet. Then, choking, coughing, ridding his lungs of a small tributary to the submerged river, he realized that his head was above water.

The darkness was still absolute, and once he could quiet his gasping wheeze of breath enough to listen, all was quiet except for his dripping and the rushing stream. His oilcloth pouch with flint, tinder, and candle answered a quick role-call of remaining possessions, and he felt his way to an almost flat rock above the surface to make fire on. He delicately spread the kit out, careful not to drip into the tinder.

The spark almost blinded him. The tinder flared, and spots swam before his light starved eyes. He managed to light the candle, and at last a limited sort of vision emerged between the extremes.

Oddly, he had not noticed the smell until the damp cave became visible around him. The reek of the drake's excrement was almost overpowering, filling the grey limestone space. Stalactites hung over the river, and the ceiling never seemed to rise more than a couple feet above the water.

Still, he reasoned, hoping that the foul air was breathable, there must be a fresh air supply coming in somewhere, or the creature would not have laired here. Like a reward for his deduction, the candle flame began to flicker almost rhythmically, showing him the direction of the breeze.

The next hour was a slow motion bad dream. The tourist crawled slowly forward through the water, candle held high, waiting at intervals for his own air currents to subside. Then the flicker that was his only source of light or guidance would steady again and he would crawl a little more. The river tunnel was pocked with occasional dry recesses, and the river wyrm's stench and spoor were his constant companion.

Several times he saw piles of large bones, seemingly of cattle and other grazing animals that the drake had brought down for leisurely eating. This was probably a good sign, he thought, for the wyrm would have been unlikely to come this far in if there wasn't a second large exit somewhere.

Of course it could probably swim upstream through the current that had dragged him down, so the second exit might do him no good either, but he was hopeful. He came to another chewed bone pile, these closer to his own size. He poked at them with the tip of his knife, and decided that they were human, and reasonably fresh. As he was about to turn away his knife point snagged in something soft, tore free, and uncovered something shiny.

With not a little excitement, he scraped away what seemed to be the skin of a mostly digested pouch. It was no huge treasure, but there was a small pile of vaguely familiar coins. The tourist rinsed one in the river, and held it close to his flame for a better look. Realizing where he had seen them before, he whistled softly and fingered the stubble on his chin.

It was the coinage of Gamon-Ur, the most remote of the human nations of the archipelago. Freshly minted gold. A quick finger check: they were all the same. No huge treasure, but a nice piece of change, and damn strange. There was almost no trade between Bolden, or anywhere on the mainland that he knew of, and Gamon-Ur. A conservative theocracy, Gamon-Ur was noted for it's hatred of all magic outside its priesthood, and certainly would not be trading with the fetch. But the coins shone softly in the candlelight, calling him a liar.

Finally, with a shrug, he pocketed the stash. Gold would spend when he got back, wherever it was from. The tourist returned to crawling through the water, and shortly saw light ahead. A crevice perhaps a foot high and several wide led upward, and after a muddy scramble he poked his head out of the stream bank not far from the pool where he had entered.

The openness of above ground was an entirely welcome improvement, and he dragged himself out. There was no one in sight, not even yesterday's bathing beauty.

The promise of the new day spurred him onwards, and he consoled himself with a breakfast of dried strips of meat and biscuit as he stalked along the bank. His instincts told him that he wasn't being watched for the moment, and he settled into a stealthy but deceptively quick mile-eating pace.

Morning birdsong grew steadily around him as the dawn approached. He smiled.

The Dread Count Astoc had never found his stompable bit of evil headed towards town, but eventually it had gotten light enough that his distractions bedded down for the day, and eventually he had found the way on his own. He rode in past the militia barracks at a crisp trot. He could see the crowd gathered around the rainbow-flamed blazing window and wall of the village hall, and reined his steed to a halt there. Not seeing anyone he immediately recognized, he prodded the nearest important looking elf with his stirruped toe, not bothering to dismount.

"You! What happened here?" he boomed.

The exhausted chief of the village's volunteer fire service resented the prodding toe extremely, but was too tired to do anything about it, which probably saved his life.

"The flames don't seem to be spreading, sir. We've been wetting down all the nearby structures and the rest of Town Hall, but we can't seem to slow down the fire at all. Been at it all night." He turned and started to stumble off.

"Where is the magistrate? Tell me now." The Dread Count had been commanding minions so long that not to force compliance with his will from the exhausted elf never occurred to him.

Like a marionette, the chief whipped around. "Haven't seen him in an hour or two, sir. Said he was going to meet with Captain Luthien, sir." Giving Astoc a disgusted look as the compulsion to answer faded, the chief stumbled off to see if the alchemists had come up with any ideas for how to stop the fire.

The Dread Count wheeled his tireless steed, which had re-earned this designation over the last day or so, and they cantered back toward the barracks.

Izzy Bluenewt had finally been pulled out of the WeFLOH assignment. He had almost danced for joy when he read the coded drop, but instead had settled for slipping off to the old safe house back on Cut Street across from the Deep Woods Furrier, which had long been a Second House front business.

The fur trade was great for laundering gold and moving fugitives from town to town. It provided the perfect excuse for endless expeditions, with undocumentable expenses and conveniently swappable native bearers. If someone became too hot, there were always remote trapping outposts to send them off to, or staged wilderness accidents to throw off the pursuit.

Izzy was glad to be rid of the amateurs and back with the professionals again. But he hadn't been given his new assignment yet.

Black Lobster Bob had never been much for sleep. With his ability to borrow the form of creatures of a more organic nature he had had the opportunity to experiment with the strange state, but it was too much like confinement for his taste. He was free, and intended to enjoy every minute of it.

When he left the NAHL rally he had flown over the Duir Spaw for a while, laughing in evil joy when he checked in on the progress of his yrch. The Toothy-Faces would make a fine unit of auxiliaries, even minus a few arms and legs. As for the unanticipated smaller prey, he would think of something. The yrch were so delightfully simple in their violence - it did not require cause, reason, or even much in the way of targets. It reminded Black Lobster Bob of home.

A twisted demonic expression that few would have recognized as a smile of deep content played across his features as he soared back to his tower, wrapped in clouds of darkness against the coming dawn.

Bahazaar Morningtide had finally dozed off in his corner of the bar. The dancers had given up on the diminishing tips and increasing abuse some time ago, and only the determined drinkers were still going at it. Bahazaar had made some effort to fortify his corner by wedging extra chairs in around the table, and at last surrendered his vigil, letting his head sag back against the rough pine planking.

Miraculously, his pockets were not picked, his throat was not cut, and he slept on unharassed as the sun showed its first golden edge over the forested horizon.

Stumping Blackscow had an entirely different outlook this morning as he headed to work in the sanitation department. Despite the late night playing horn at Casa José he felt rested, vigorous, even vital. His eyes sorted through piles of garbage by the curb - not with his usual distaste, but in a careful search for more tinsel.

He practically skipped as he made his way through the still sleeping village. He would start making himself rich today - he had decided to take an entire wagon of tinsel to his daily lunch meeting with the two salvage experts. He would take all the cash they had, and maybe a share in their businesses into the bargain. At least he'd add in a few of the best of the treasures they had squirreled away in the corners of their cluttered shops.

Old Anton had an actual old water cannon in the back room, and a giant armadillo construct with an internal passenger cabin that Stumping had drooled over several times. He knew that Rosie had a lot of valuable things, but somehow they were things of a more domestic, homey nature whose desirability eluded him.

He had heard that the old witch was quite a matchmaker though, perhaps she could find him a date with some sweet young thing who didn't spend her nights bumping and grinding at Casa José. The day was new and full of promise. Birds sang sweet songs for the hopeful garbage-elf.

As the sun cleared the horizon, Taric pushed back the last of the books with a well-satisfied sigh. There had been little enough to be learned from the cumbersome stack of yellowing parchment, but what there was he had picked over, examined, cross-referenced, and thoroughly absorbed.

His research imps and cipher-fiends had all returned to their nether homes long since; he presumed that the librarian and Lola were sleeping. Lola had recovered from her embarrassment sufficiently to bring him a late night refresher of hot chocolate, but she had disappeared again before he could attempt much in the way of further innuendo.

He yawned and stretched, pushed his chair back, and rose from the table. He would take a restorative nap and comfort session at Lady Fate's, and when he arose he would go catch a thief.

Walking slowly, his back stiff from the night's reading in the hard library chair, he staggered out of the library and into the new day.

Blut Bluhornihoff cautiously poked his head above the service hatch of the furthest reaching arm of the sewers. Looking around in the bright morning sun, he saw that he was near the old mill, up by the fancy end of the silly elves' pretentious graveyard.

That explained the wandering zombies he had been forced to decapitate in the last stretches of tunnel. Something was rotten in the administration of this little podunk elf-burg. His berserk rage had trickled away gradually this time, leaving him feeling ornery and very much alive, instead of fading all at once in a rip-tide rush that left him weak in the knees as was more common.

Normally Blut would have stayed in the tunnels till dark returned again; dwarves like tunnels. But with the added factor of the undead presence, he thought he would cut up into the woods and work his way around to the area where the delegation of The All Seeing Eye had made their camp.

There was no hurry to see his superiors; by this time he had realized that he would be lucky if he wasn't in so much trouble that they would just hand him back over to the irate elves. Still, he thought that he could talk his way out of it, particularly if he spread a few of the gems he had taken from the prison around into influential hands.

Before climbing up he set down his load, put on his armor and helmet, and feeling much more dwarfish, he considered how best to transport his increasingly subdued captives. They were behaving much better now, but above ground one good scream would bring more armed elves than he ever wanted to see again.

Finally he ripped strips of fabric from strategic places in the doe eyed Wood Elf's once crisp guard's uniform, and used these to gag and bind the two shivering females hand and foot. Tossing them back over his shoulder, he swarmed up the ladder into the sunlight, around the mill, and away into the brush without being seen.

He would cut higher into the forest, and find a safe place to stash his lovely captives until he was sure of his welcome at the temple and had a place to keep them there set up. While no dwarf worth his beard would object to carrying off such fine booty, walking in with them slung over one shoulder in broad daylight while the mission was in peaceful territory would be bad for public relations.

Many blissful couples have awakened to their first morning together only to discover that they speak completely different languages. Unlike most of these sorry cases, Randall and Morgana shared one of the finest first mornings together on record in the hayloft he had rented from the farmer. For them this linguistic separation was literal, but the lack of verbal patter in no way seemed to impair their communication.

The bacon was eaten, the dishes washed, the sun risen, morning naps had been taken. The stove had finally cooled, and the tinker was strapping it back on to one of his mules.

"Sounds like you'll want to stay out of town for a few days, lad."

Jonathon gathered his focus from the middle distance.

"I'm not in any big hurry to get back, that's for sure." The kindly old elf with the odd beard had listened to his troubles, fed him, and seemed sympathetic but not too much concerned.

"Well..." The tinker gazed around the clearing, then yawned and stretched in the warm morning sun. "I've got to make a stop in town, but then I'll be headed up toward the mountain for a little while. You ever been up that way?"

Jonathon tried to hide his eagerness and failed miserably. "No, but I can smell the snow on the wind sometimes. Are they really impassable?"

The ticker chuckled. "Not by height or ice, but by will of those beyond. You want a look, I'll be getting right up in their lap before I head back this way. I could show you a sight or two if you don't mind a little honest work."

"No sir, and I'm a hard worker! I'll keep up no problem too, I walk all the time."

"Well, the mules don't move so fast, keeping up won't be hard. We may take some funny paths though, and there will be times you'll need to stick close and do what you're told to keep safe, but I'm sure you'll do fine, lad." The tinker began digging in yet another mule pack.

"I can show you the way to town, and hide nearby. How long before you head upcountry?"

The tinker pulled out a bundle of brown rags, and tossed them to Jonathon. "Just wear these, rub a little dirt on your face. You'll be my apprentice - no one notices a tinker much less his apprentice. You'll be fine, trust me on this one."

Jonathon was dubious, but after he had changed into the filthy rags and renewed his acquaintance with the mud by the stream, he had to admit that he wouldn't attract much attention if he kept quiet and out of trouble.

Picking a good path through the briar by daylight was easy, and he found himself grinning as he led the clinking procession toward town.