The Sellsword (10 page)

File that one away for later, Vanderjack thought: dungeons underneath the famous horse arena of Wulfgar. The constant drumming overhead of the races would drive a man mad, not to mention all of the dung and refuse that would drop on top of any poor soul unlucky enough to have a window. And the smell! He had heard the highmaster was a nasty piece of work, but he didn’t know she was that nasty.

“It’s nice to be so well thought of,” Vanderjack beamed, switching styles gradually over the course of three sword strokes. He could tell Annaud was comfortable in at least four of the commonly practiced Nerakese martial disciplines, none of which were known for their finesse. He had to respond with just as much brute force as Annaud was dishing out.

Turning his side to Annaud, Vanderjack grasped the hilt of Lifecleaver at an odd angle with both hands, whirling it about in a crescent-moon cut. The captain flinched, snarled, and kicked outward. The two warriors resumed their exchanges, throwing more and more of their strength into the blows. Vanderjack felt that Annaud could put that curved blade through the neck of a horse without so much as a pause, and he had no desire to confirm his hunch.

“The hawk!” called out the Hunter.

“Move to the right! Quick!” said the Cavalier.

Vanderjack did as he was told, lurching sideways as Annaud’s hawk screeched by his ear. Once again Annaud had that look of shock across his face, that look of mounting disbelief.

“The cook!” warned the Balladeer.

As he spun about, readying his blade for a chopping motion across Annaud’s arms, Vanderjack scanned for Etharion. Incredibly, the stocky cook had stepped out of his place under the canopy, wielding a broom in both hands like a gigantic greatsword. Vanderjack watched as Etharion drew the broom back and swung it out in a fierce motion, swatting at Captain Annaud’s hawk and, amazingly, knocking it out of the air. The hawk was rendered an unconscious pile of feathers.

The sellsword and the captain’s dance of blades had brought them close to the canopy area where Etharion was standing; Captain Annaud, driven by anger at the incapacitation of his raptor, reached to grab the cook.

“His guard is down!” said the Cavalier, practically screaming in Vanderjack’s ear.

“Here’s your chance!” joined the Aristocrat.

They were right. Annaud had thrown open his defenses in order to clutch at Etharion, who was standing
there, looking mighty pleased with himself. Vanderjack had to do something quickly; it was his chance.

At exactly the same moment, three things happened: Vanderjack tensed, then leaped forward, thrusting Lifecleaver out in a deadly lunge; Captain Annaud’s mailed hand seized Etharion’s collar and pulled him close and into a chokehold; and all seven ghosts wailed like banshees, a deafening keening sound of warning, shock, and grief.

Lifecleaver’s star metal blade, sharper and stronger than any other sword, plunged right through Etharion’s heart and into that of Captain Annaud.

The screaming of the ghosts stopped.

Theodenes paced back and forth in the sheltered courtyard, waiting.

He and Gredchen, who sat patiently on a bench beside Pentar’s east-facing wall, had been there for more than fifteen minutes. If he had a chronospectus on his person, he’d know for sure how long. He could keep exact, precise account of how much time and money were being wasted on waiting for the sellsword to return. Then, he thought, he could enter the details into his ledger, tally the figures, and perhaps add a small percentage increase on account of the precipitation he was being forced to endure.

Theo’s ledger, his accounting equipment, and his chronospectus were all back at the Monkey’s Ear. Theo had no doubt that the forces of the Red Dragonarmy were poring over his meticulous records, trying to ascertain the reason for his association with the infamous mercenary. They would learn of the costs of running a mercenary enterprise (the overheads were really quite
phenomenal), and they would perhaps find the itemized list of taverns, inns, bars, and public houses Theodenes had stayed in for the past year, stretching all the way back to Southern Ergoth. But none of that would tell them what they wanted to know.

Theodenes had first met Vand Erj-Ackal, son of a pirate queen, in the foothills of the Last Gaard Mountains. Vanderjack had been with another motley group of sellswords, hired killers, and soldiers at the time; Vanderjack’s Band, the mercenary had called them, somewhat unoriginally. They were all searching for the Treasure of Huma, tipped off by the dragonarmies or the Solamnics or both; it didn’t seem to matter to Vanderjack.

Back then, Theo had already been traveling for some time. He’d left Mount Nevermind, abandoning all of his research and his guild to pursue the ultimate of field tests—personal, singular, and decisive melee combat. As a young gnome, Theodenes had chosen a lifequest that made his entire family proud. “Buildtheperfect-tool,” his father had repeated rapidly when he’d told him. “Excellent! Yourmotherwouldbesoproudifshewerealiveandnoteatenbysharks.” His mother, who had indeed been eaten by sharks, would probably have been just as pleased.

However, as he had grown older, “Build the Perfect Tool” had seemed too comprehensive, too broad. All of Theo’s other siblings, friends, and associates had chosen highly specific and individualized lifequests, such as “Catalog the Ferro-Pervasive Nature of the Lesser Striped Rust Monster” or “Retroactively Establish a Connection between Two Points in Culinary Space-Time through Steady Application of Seafood and Dairy Products.” Theo needed something more …
interesting
.

So as news of war on the continent had reached Mount Nevermind and visitors had started to arrive, bringing such things as dragon orbs and kender into the gnome homeland, Theodenes realized then that his lifequest ought to have some
relevancy
to the great struggle going on in the world outside. He had logged his changes with the Guild of Planning, Records, Patents, and Preliminary Schema, and they had approved it after much deliberation. “Build the Perfect Handheld Martial Weapon” was Theo’s ultimate ambition in life, and he had the guild’s thirteen stamps, certificates, and watermarked letters to prove it.

With his prototype in hand, Theodenes had performed some initial tests in-house, but the reluctance of any other gnomes to engage him in direct physical conflict was a problem. He stumbled upon a gnome work crew, an expeditionary team bound for the legendary Isle of Gargath, far across the sea. They suggested that Theo accompany them in the almost-certain likelihood that there would be ferocious examples of wildlife to fend off, and what better test of his prototype than that?

So it had been that Theo and eighteen other gnomes piled into a corkscrew-propelled watercraft, rocketed across the waves for a week, and landed on a distant, jungle-covered island. The nautical charts claimed that it was Gargath, birthplace of the dwarves and kender and, according to legend, the site where gnome ingenuity had unleashed the potent power of the Graygem.

Why any gnome would want to travel all the way to a mythical land in order to poke about a ruined castle for clues about the use of a legendary magical rock was beyond Theo’s comprehension. It didn’t matter much to
him. He quickly became used to driving off marauding beasts, some with more than the usual number of heads or limbs, others flapping and gurgling about, still more gnashing terrible teeth. At least, that’s what Theodenes remembered.

It was on the island, somewhere in that primeval jungle, that Theo had stumbled upon the hunting grounds of a mighty saber-toothed cat. The animal was obviously a predator and clearly unhappy to have been found by a large group of gnomes. It attacked, killing at least half of the group and rendering many of the rest wounded or incapacitated before Theo defeated it. Despite the fact that his multipurpose hooked hammer, the prototype that he had brought from Mount Nevermind, had snapped in half delivering the final blow, Theodenes at least proved his initial hypothesis and saved the day.

With only a handful of gnomes remaining, the expeditionary force determined to return to the ship and limp back to Sancrist. Theo had cautioned them to make sure there were no more saber-toothed surprises waiting for them, so he scouted around the area, looking for the cat’s lair. He found it, high on a rocky crag, and within the dark confines of the cave he discovered the only prize the cat had left behind—a small, fuzzy kitten with enormous canine teeth.

Theo named the kitten Star, after the star-shaped white patch on its forehead, and carried his new discovery back to the ship, where he hoped the other gnomes would be waiting. Unfortunately, in his search for the saber-toothed cat’s lair, Theo had missed out on the rare opportunity to be eaten alive by a ferocious manticore. The other gnomes were all dead, and he had no idea how to pilot the corkscrew ship back home.

A gnome is never without a spot of ingenuity even if it falls outside of his field of expertise. Within twenty-four hours, and with Star helpfully fending off any further attacks by manticores (who would have guessed that manticores are terrified of saber-toothed kittens?) he was off again. The ship was incredibly complicated, in the gnome fashion, but Theo was determined. Weeks later, he reached what he hoped was the coast of Sancrist, just in time for the boat’s corkscrew to grind out of its threading.

It wasn’t Sancrist, of course. Theodenes had piloted the ship straight past Sancrist, through the western isles and right into the southeast coast of Southern Ergoth. He and Star escaped the vessel, which was hopelessly beached upon the sand, and subsequently managed to wander into ogre lands. The ogres, residents of the ruined city of Daltigoth, chased Theodenes and Star for days; the hill giant Thunderbane, son of the ogre city’s dictator, Stormogre, made it his mission to destroy the gnome and his cat for any number of imagined crimes that Theo was never certain about.

When Theodenes finally ran into Vanderjack’s Band, he was tired, hungry, exhausted from running, and desperate for help. Vanderjack offered his services, or rather, offered Theo a position in his band. That appealed to Theo, who was, after all, in the martial weapon business, and so began a three-month stint as a mercenary, scout, and freebooter.

It didn’t matter that there didn’t appear to be any Treasure of Huma or that, even if there had been, a band of heroes from the mainland had managed to do all the interesting things at Huma’s Tomb instead. Theo was sure becoming a mercenary was going to lead to bigger and better things.

Theo began to get worried when, fleeing from more ogres and dragons, Vanderjack admitted he didn’t have any money to pay Theo for his services. For added insult, Vanderjack was revealed to be a drunk, his entire band turned out to be shapeshifting sivak draconians, and Star was horribly murdered. Theo returned from a scouting trip to discover all of that. He had never known such bitterness, anger, and frustration in his entire life.

“Theo?” asked Gredchen, interrupting Theo’s reverie.

“Yes?” he responded, blinking a couple of times to remember where he was.

“You’ve been amazingly quiet. What were you thinking about?”

Theodenes looked back at the ugly woman, marveling at how her hair did nothing at all for her. He wondered if she had any idea just how bad Vanderjack was and what he had done; trouble seemed to follow the sellsword everywhere he went.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing whatsoever.”

V
anderjack was surrounded by corpses.

It had stopped raining. Pentar’s shocked residents stared at the bloody carnage in the street, at the dragonarmy uniforms, and at the sellsword standing in the middle of it all. They didn’t notice the dead cook lying at Vanderjack’s feet, a nondescript and pale-featured, slightly overweight corpse that could have been anybody; they were all staring at the bodies of the officer and his men. Vanderjack, however, was staring at the body of Etharion Cordaric.

His sword had fallen from his hand shortly after he drew it out of Etharion and Captain Annaud. Both men had crumpled to the blood-soaked cobblestones, each with his own look of shock permanently fixed across his face. Without the sword, Vanderjack had no ghosts. He didn’t notice.