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Their safety straps already off, Jason and Ahira slid to the ground below,
while Tennetty and I pulled straps loose and tossed packs and rucksacks down.
I lowered Andy down to Ahira's waiting arms, then slid down a loose strap to
the ground.
Ellegon took a few steps down the road, then leaped into the air, climbing in
a tight spiral before flapping off into the sky.
*I'll start checking rendezvous points in a couple tendays. Until we meet
again, be well,* he said.
White light flared as Ahira pulled a glowsteel from his pouch. He already had
his huge rucksack on his back. "Let's go, folks. We've got a full day's march
to Fenevar."
Tennetty, shrugging into her own rucksack, nodded. "And nothing more than sour
beer to look forward to at the end of the trip."
While a modified direct approach distract, grab, and go is one way of getting
something specific, it's a lousy way to try to find any information.
There's any number of strategies to use when you're snooping around for
intelligence and I can always use some more intelligence.
One of the best is also one of the simplest. Any town along a trade route and,
for obvious reasons, we've always tended to work around trade routes has at
least one travelers' inn. If it's a sizable town, usually more. Travelers no
matter what they trade in almost always like to talk. Not always honestly,
mind. Then again, who am I to complain about a bit of dishonesty?
* * *
All we got out of the first two inns we tried was a mild buzz.
The talk in the Cerulean Creek Inn, the third inn of the evening, flowed like
the sour beer; it tended to slop over on the floor and turn it into mud.
The general practice along that part of the coast is to sell ale by what they
call a pitcher, although it's barely half the size of a common water pitcher.
Some drink right out of the pitcher; others use a mug. I
poured Tennetty another mug full, then tilted mine back, barely wetting my
mouth.
She took a long pull. "Well?" she asked.
"Well, what?"
"What brilliant things have you found?"
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I had debated bringing Tennetty along this evening. There were plenty of
problems: women warriors were rare in the Eren regions, and she was relatively
well known. She was moderately famous as Karl
Cullinane's one-eyed bodyguard, her temper was never fully under her control,
and she scared me.
On the other hand: her glass eye was in place, visible and entirely convincing
under a fringe of hair, and nobody would have mistaken me for Karl, either in
truth or in legend.
She was the obvious choice for this, despite the minuses she could be counted
on to keep her mouth shut, unlike Jason; she wouldn't look out of place in the
drinking room of an inn, unlike Andrea; she wouldn't draw the wrong sort of
attention, unlike Ahira.
Maybe I would have been better bringing Ahira along. He wouldn't have stood
out: over in the far corner, a dwarf and his human companion sat, sharing a
loaf of almost black bread and a bowl of thick stew of unlikely ancestry. By
the cut of his leather tunic, I decided the dwarf was from Benerell the
Benerell style has always been for clothes that barely fit. The human could
have been of any origin, although you'll find more of that wheaty blond color
in Osgrad than elsewhere.
Changes happen, even while you don't look for them. Or maybe particularly when
you don't look for them.
I hadn't answered Tennetty. I turned to her, raising my voice
ever-so-slightly.
"I don't know, either," I said. "That . . ." the line called for a long
pause "
thing we saw this morning was one of the strangest things that has ever
reached Tybel's eyes, and that's a fact."
The broad-faced fellow down the bench from me pricked up his ears.
I picked up our empty pitcher and turned it over, empty. I'd buy more in a
moment, unless somebody took the hint.
"Yeah," Tennetty said, not helping much.
I don't know about her, sometimes. This was the third time we'd tried this
routine, and her side of it was no more polished than the first.
I'm afraid I glared at her.
"That it was," she added, chastened, trying a bit more. "Really, strange."
It was all I could do not to raise my eyes toward the ceiling and implore the
help of the gods, or of heaven.
"Very strange."
"Begging your pardon, traveler," the fellow whose attention I had caught said,
"but did you talk of seeing something strange?" He half-rose, courteously
gesturing with his own, full pitcher.
Several times, I thought. And pretty darned clumsily.
"I guess I might have," I said, beckoning him over. I guess if a fish is
hungry enough, he'll bite a hook with a plastic bug on it.
He splashed some ale into each of our mugs, then politely sipped at his
pitcher.
"Lots of strange things been seen of late," he said. "More and more over the
past few years. Travelers report many things, although tales do grow in the
telling."
I nodded. "That they do. But this was something that didn't grow. It was a
wolf that wasn't a wolf."
We were gathering an audience, or at least some company; the drinking room of
a tavern isn't the place for those who prefer solitude. The dwarf and human
pair wandered over as I launched into a seriously edited version of our
encounter with Boioardo and the wolf pack: I cut out the fight, had him eating
a deer instead of a cow, and placed it outside of Alfani rather than back in
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