“Gold coins, maybe? Silver?”
“Yes, yes! Gold and silver!”
“And then, once he had it safely hidden, he blew himself up?”
“Yes! He blew himself …” Grosha trailed off, realizing that he had been tricked. “No, I don’t mean …”
The ragpicker shook his head. “You really are worthless. A liar, and a bad one at that.
A coward. A piece of …” He looked over suddenly at the other Drouj, clustered together on the edges of his vision. Hopeless, as well. He reached down and seized Grosha’s injured hand anew, squeezing. “This is your last chance, Grosha, son of Taureq, Maturen of the Drouj. What are you looking for? And don’t lie to me!”
“A girl,” the other answered quickly, gasping in agony. “A hostage from the valley beyond the mountains. There!” He pointed east, his arm jerking spasmodically. “But she escaped! Let me go!”
The ragpicker experienced a sudden rush of adrenaline. “A girl. From where? A valley, you say? Does she carry a black staff?” He squeezed the wrist savagely. “Does she wield magic?”
Grosha screamed and shook his head, fighting to free himself. “Stop, please! My chest!
Exploding! Listen to me! She’s just a girl, but the boy thinks … Arik says … Please! I can’t …”
The ragpicker squeezed harder. Useless. Nothing more to be learned from this one. He fastened the fingers of his other hand about the Troll’s thick neck and added more pressure, an intense and killing tightness.
Grosha screamed. His neck snapped, his body sagged, and his eyes rolled back in his head. The ragpicker released his lifeless weight and let him drop to the ground.
“A girl,” he whispered to himself, wondering if it meant anything, if it could help him in his search.
He shifted his gaze to the walls of the complex, searching high up where the buildings were stacked like blocks, one on top of the other, and caught a sudden, momentary whiff of the magic he had been tracking.
That was all it took. A demon with his talent could sense the presence of magic with much less to work with than that, and he sensed it now. Real magic, the kind he was looking for. The girl—or whoever was in there with her—had use of it. After all his searching, after all the roads he had traveled and disappointments he had endured, all
the false leads and dead ends, he had found the real thing. He clapped his hands like an excited boy and smiled.
He kicked Grosha’s body aside and started for the nearest door. He would have to be careful here. He didn’t want to lose her. He had to make certain she didn’t elude him. He glanced around. The Skaith Hounds had fled, disappeared into the rocks. But the Trolls were still there, cringing away from him as he went past. The demon’s lean form was hunched within his ragged disguise, his eyes as bright and hungry as a predator’s as he beckoned for the Trolls to follow him.
“You’ll search this place with me, once we’re inside,” he said, his voice hard-edged and laced with venom. “All of you. No one comes out until I do. We stay there until we find this girl. But she is not to be harmed if you find her. She is to be brought to me.”
The reluctant Drouj fell into line behind him, being careful not to get too close. In a knot they converged on the main doors to the complex.
The ragpicker’s bundled cloth scraps lay where he had dumped them, as rumpled and forgotten as the shattered form of Grosha Siq.
ATOP THE RUINS, high up on the overlook where she had witnessed most of what had taken place between Grosha and the ragpicker, Prue Liss hunched down behind the concealing wall so that the old man couldn’t see her. What sort of creature was he, she wondered, that he could subdue Grosha and cause Skaith Hounds to slink away like beaten puppies? What kind of power did he possess? Now Grosha lay sprawled on the ground below, and from all appearances he was dead. And that ragged old man, together with the Drouj who were now at his beck and call, were coming for her.
Stupid, she chided herself, to have believed he couldn’t smell her out. It had happened so fast. One moment he had been questioning Grosha, all of his attention on the Drouj, and the next he was looking right at her hiding place. He couldn’t have seen her— probably couldn’t even know who she was—but her fate was determined nevertheless.
He was at the doors to the keep, and she had a feeling that what had kept the Trolls out would not be enough to stop that old man.
What should she do?