“Nineteen years,” said Gabriel.
The warrior closed his eyes. His jaw worked furiously. His chest heaved as the breath of empty decades flooded his lungs. At last he loosed a long sigh. He rolled a kink from his shoulders and pressed his neck to one side—it cracked so loud Moog jumped like a startled rabbit. Ganelon glanced at the wizard and chuckled. Slowly, his eyes moved to Matrick, then to Gabriel, then to Clay. Another silence took hold, leadened by the weight of settling dust.
“You all look like shit,” he said at last.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Riot House
The Riot House was Fivecourt’s most infamous tavern. There was a sign above the door that depicted a man riding a sheep. The words WYATT’S REST were carved out beneath, but whoever Wyatt was, he’d ridden his sheep out of town long before Clay had ever set eyes on the place. It was an inn, an alehouse, a brothel, and a gambling den. It was a place for fences to fence and whores to whore, a haven for drunks, a sanctuary for addicts, a seven-storey circus that Clay hadn’t known how much he’d missed until he walked through the door with his band at his back.
It looked much the same as he remembered it: the bar, the booths, the dicing tables scattered in the centre of the room. There was a skirted stage backed by a double-wide fireplace, currently occupied by a troupe of four women, three of whom were playing instruments while the fourth wailed like a banshee falling off a cliff. The warped wooden floor was stained with spilled beer and dried blood. Shattered bottles and the splintered remains of broken chairs told the story of epic brawls (the Riot House was good for one a night, at least), and the smoke-clouded air was filled with the babble of several hundred patrons shouting and laughing and cursing all at once.
Clay was gazing up at the stacked tiers of the inn’s hollow interior. He spotted the fourth-floor balcony from which Matrick had thrown a burning mattress onto the commons below, and there: the third-floor balcony from which Clay himself had fallen during a brawl with a Kaskar whose sister he’d refused to take to bed. Kaskars were funny that way.
To be back in the Riot House, to find it unchanged after all these years, felt to Clay like a dream, as though he’d taken a step twenty years into the past. He half-expected to see his old self swagger by, young and dumb, unmindful of anything but the drink in his hand, the woman on his arm, the coins burning a hole in his pocket.
Gabriel clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll go see about the rooms.”
“I’ll be at the bar,” said Matrick.
And then someone, somewhere, shouted, “There they are!” and things pretty much went downhill from there.
The whole place had been waiting for them. Dinantra had sent word ahead, and every newcomer through the door (beside which the gorgon’s thugs stood to make sure Ganelon and the others remained inside) assured them that word of their fight the following day was spreading like fire through the city. Mercenaries formed a queue for handshakes and high fives. A bard took the stage to sing their exploits, and the balconies teemed with patrons eager for a look at what had once been the greatest band in all the world.
Clay recognized plenty of faces he hadn’t seen since his touring days. Here was Deckart Clearwater with his double-hafted hammer strapped to his back. And there was Merciless May Drummond, who had slain more giants than anyone Clay knew and had once borne an orc’s child just to settle a bet. Her kid was a merc, too, in fact, and ugly as the night was dark.
He saw Jorma Mulekicker fighting three men at once, and Aric Slake losing badly at cards. All five of the Skulk brothers were sharing a pitcher at one table, while the six members of the ironically named Seven Swords were arguing heatedly at one another. He saw Beckett “Greensleeves” Fisher embroiled in a game of Contha’s Keep, in which you took turns removing and restacking blocks from a tottering tower until it fell, at which point you finished what remained of your drink and started all over again.
“Slowhand Clay Cooper!” Nick Blood—the lesser half of the husband-and-wife mercenary duo known as Blood and Gloria—took Clay by the shoulders and shook him fiercely. “Heathen’s Bloody Cock, man, it’s really you!”
“It’s really me,” Clay verified. “How’s Gloria?”
“Dead,” Nick stated matter-of-factly. “Rot took her about ten years back.”
Clay swallowed the foot in his mouth before speaking again. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
The old mercenary shrugged. “Happens,” he said. “Anyway, I’m back in the game! I was supposed to be opening the Maxithon for the Screaming Eagles tomorrow, but I hear the gorgon found herself a new headliner.” He nudged Clay with his elbow and winked. “You’re a lucky bastard, Cooper. One day out of retirement and you’re the biggest show in town. That’s Saga for you, I guess. No one did it like you guys, man.”
Clay smiled like a man who’d won first place in a “Whose Life Sucks the Most” contest. “Good to see you, Nick,” he said, brushing by and making a straight line for the bar.
Matrick was there. Some idiot had given him a bottle and was letting him pour his own drinks. Consequently, the bottle was almost empty.
“Look who’s here!” the old rogue yelled over the noise, gesturing toward someone beside him at the bar.
Clay blinked in disbelief.
“Pete?”
“Slowhand, hey. Ain’t seen you round in a bit.”
A bit? “It’s been a while, yeah. You look … exactly the same,” said Clay, and boy was that true. Pete was a lifetime regular at the Riot House. He kept a room on the first floor and was a permanent fixture at the wood. He helped pick the place up in the morning, and in turn was fed three times a day and afforded an ostensibly bottomless tab. His hair was drawn into a queue at the nape of his neck, still as black as the plain short-sleeved jerkin Clay had long suspected was the only shirt the man owned.
“Matrick here tells me he was a king,” said Pete, who seemed thoroughly unimpressed by the fact. “Seems like a lotta hassle, and for what? A man needs food, beer, and a pot to piss in. Name one thing a king’s got that I don’t!”
Clay was about to start with an entire country when the bartender arrived—another relic from the days of old. Uric was a minotaur, a pit fighter who’d won his freedom in the days before arenas like the Maxithon had sprung up in every city. His once-lustrous beard had gone ratty and grey, his horns yellowed by smoke, and his voice scratched like a suit of shoddy chain mail.
“Drinks?” he asked.
“Beer,” said Pete.
“Whiskey,” said Matrick.
Clay raised a hand. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“Three beers,” growled Uric, shuffling off.
“You run into Raff Lackey out there?” asked Pete, examining the dregs of his current drink.
Clay shared a hesitant glance with Matrick. “We did, yeah.”
Pete only nodded. “I’ll say a prayer for him tonight, then. Told him ain’t no bounty worth picking a fight with Clay Cooper.”
“I didn’t mean to …” Clay started to explain, but what could he say? Sure, I put a venomous snake to his throat, but how was I supposed to know it would kill him? “Things just got out of hand,” he finished lamely.
“As they do, Slowhand. As they do.”
When Uric returned with the beers, Clay seized the opportunity to excuse himself. Matrick followed as far as the gaming tables, where he spotted a game of tiles in need of a fourth and was warmly welcomed to the empty seat.