“Stay back!” he wailed, brandishing the sword with both hands. “Stay back, or I’ll have your guts out!” He addressed the pair that had attacked Matrick earlier. “Get up, you feckless curs! I ain’t paying you to lay around whinging!”
The merc hamstrung by Matrick rose unsteadily and limped over to his boss, but the woman remained where she was. “Go fuck yourself,” she spat. “You ain’t paying me to get knifed up neither!”
The clown-faced man Clay had knocked out earlier had come round as well. He lurched groggily to his leader’s side, and the three men stood side by side, grunting and growling like cornered animals.
Gabe slowed, stopped, and raised his empty hands. “Listen, you don’t …” he squinted. “Wait. I know you from somewhere.”
The cutlass bearer flinched, averting his eyes. He was a round man—as round as Matrick—with a slick wisp of hair plastered across his otherwise bald head. Clay guessed that his features had originally been painted to resemble some sort of hunting cat, but sweat or rain had turned the black and orange stripes into a slick brown mess. Beneath that, however …
“Vail’s Rotten Breath, Raff Lackey!? Is that you?” Clay took a step toward him, careful not to trip over the giant’s out-flung arm. Startled, the merc whirled, waving his sword like a child swatting at stalks of grass. “Woah, hey, Raff! It’s me, Clay Cooper.”
The merc scowled. “I know who the fuck you are, Slowhand. You look just the same as you always did, ’cept older.”
“And you look …” Clay found himself at a loss for words. It had been several decades since he’d laid eyes on Raff Lackey, who looked as though every one of those years had roughed him up something fierce. “You look older, too.”
Raff snorted, but said nothing.
“Hold up,” said Matrick. “If you knew who we were, why did you attack us?”
The old merc risked a quick glance at Gabriel. “Well … ya see …”
“The bounty,” Clay said.
Moog leapt to his feet, holding what looked like a silver flute. “Finally! Wait, what bounty?”
Old Raff looked abashedly from Clay to Gabriel. “Kallorek put a price on the two of you. Ten marks apiece, twenty-five for the pair.”
Ten lousy courtmarks, Clay thought dismally. He’d owned cloaks that had cost more than ten marks. “How did you find us?” he asked.
Raff shrugged. “Kal said you were headed to Fivecourt, but you can’t claim a bounty inside the city, so we just sort of ranged around hoping to get lucky.”
“Well, you got lucky,” said Matrick. The woman on the ground moaned piteously and he frowned down at her. “In a manner of speaking.”
Gabriel shifted, lowering his hands. “So you’re hunting people now, Raff? What’s wrong, monsters too scary for you? Surely there’s a few rot-ridden goblins somewhere you could put out of their misery.”
Clay winced. Goblins would be a sore spot for the weathered mercenary. Raff Lackey’s old band, Viscera, had soared to fame when they’d managed to take down a firbolg within sight of Fivecourt’s walls. They were the muse of many bards for a time, but their fall from grace happened almost as swiftly.
Compelled by their newfound celebrity to take on more dangerous contracts, Viscera, whose victory against the firbolg had been more luck than skill, found themselves hopelessly outmatched. Tragan, Raff’s brother and bandmate, fell off a cliff while running from a direwolf, and their wizard was boiled alive by ogres. Rock bottom came shortly after, when Raff was taken prisoner by a clan of goblins he’d been hired to exterminate. The goblins stripped him, flayed him bloody, and marched him through the village of Rednettle in bizarre mockery of a tour parade.
“Go fuck yourself, Gabe.” Raff made a show of summoning a mouthful of phlegm and lobbing it in Gabriel’s general direction. “You’re looking a little tarnished yourself these days, golden boy.” An ugly smile crept onto his face. “Say, when you stopped in on Kallorek did you happen to meet his wife? She’s a rare beauty, I’m told, though a bit old for my tastes. Heard she’s got a real pretty daughter, though. And one with daddy issues, no less. Those are my favourite.”
Gabriel went rigid. His jaw bunched and his eyes flared like a horse scared shitless. Raff was trying to goad him, and doing a damn fine job of it. Clay himself supressed an urge to throttle the old merc senseless, even as his mind scrabbled for a way to steer their course clear of further violence. He’d come on this fool’s quest to rescue Rose, after all—not to murder men in the woods outside Fivecourt.
They outnumbered Raff and his remaining companions, but those three were armed, and if there was any lesson to be learned from Raff Lackey’s rise and fall, it was that even a shit fighter got lucky from time to time.
“Leave off, Raff,” said Clay. “You’ve got injured need seeing to. Dead to bury. Let us go our way, and we’ll put this whole bloody business behind us.”
“A brilliant idea!” said not-Glif from her place on the ground. The limping man looked hopeful as well. Whatever Clown-face was thinking was a mystery to Clay, since that crimson smile was a permanent fixture.
Their boss chuckled darkly. “An offer of mercy from Clay Cooper? You’ll forgive me if I doubt your sincerity, Slowhand. As my brother used to say: If it sounds like a sheep but looks like a lion, it’s probably a lion.”
“A real sage, your brother,” quipped Matrick. “Ran himself off a cliff, didn’t he?”
Raff sneered. “Laugh it up, Your Highness. I’m claiming that bounty, no doubt about it. You’ve spared me having to split it six ways, at least, so I’ll thank you for that.” He shifted his grip on the cutlass, and Clay could sense he was growing restless. “You lot aren’t as soft as I’d hoped you’d be, but I still count three swords to none.”
What Clay mistook for the mating cry of some forest creature turned out to be Moog’s quiet cackle. “I think not,” he said cryptically, and brought the silver flute to his lips. The instrument emitted an eerie hiss, a sound like a distant kettle boiling. Raff looked suddenly panicked, fearful of whatever magic the wizard had unleashed upon them. Gabriel took a careful step back, and Clay hefted Blackheart, bracing himself for whatever came next.
What came next was the sigh of the wind through the trees, the song of birds warbling to one another, the whisper of a snake gliding over fallen leaves, and the snap of a twig as Matrick shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
Essentially, nothing happened.
Moog tried again, but the result was the same. Raff shared a perplexed look with his two companions. The wizard turned the flute around and tried blowing on the other end. He blew until he was red in the face.
Still nothing.
“Uh, Moog?” Clay ventured.
“Gods of Goblinkind!” the wizard cursed, causing Raff to twitch compulsively. “I bought this off a peddler in Conthas who swore by the Summer Lord’s beard it would turn swords into snakes. Or was it spears?” he wondered. “Shit, he might have said spears.” Moog scratched his bare scalp with a spindly finger, which drew Clay’s attention to the massive python descending from a branch just above the wizard’s head.
“Moog—” Clay repeated, but then something brushed against his boot and Clay, looking down, saw that the forest floor had become a carpet of writhing snakes.
At which point several things happened at once: Not-Glif screamed as the jaws of a bright green viper clamped down on her leg, Moog squealed as the python sprang like a bolt of scaled lightning to envelop his torso, and Matty ran to the wizard’s defense, hacking at the monstrous snake with both knives in an effort to free him.
Everyone else tried to kill one another.