'The Glove of Shadows' Chapter Thirteen- Treachery

Styge painstakingly ran the piece of chalk Norman had given him along the wall, making certain not to leave out any details.

He took a step back, leaning this way and that to get a better perspective.

He finally grunted approvingly, and turned to the Gnome Engineer, who was fiddling with the heel of his right boot. “What the devil are you doing, Norman?”

The Gnome Engineer looked up, the heel of the boot secured between his yellowed, rotting teeth.  “Ung nryn oo et ve eel ov ‘is oob.” Norm finally pulled one of the tacks free to reveal a hollow boot heel filled with miniature tools. “Trying to get the heel off this boot, Styge old chum.” He picked through the available emergency tools. He didn’t have much to work with here, but it would make a start. If the old Illusionist had as much power as everyone said he did, they could be out of the prison in a few days.

“Okay, the first one, go ahead,” Norm pointed to Styge’s first drawing on the wall.

The chalk drawing was a brilliant depiction of a kinetic environmental energy absorber, a device Norman had researched extensively. He had assembled one in his time, but it had been faulty, as he hadn’t been careful with his calculations. He hoped he’d learned the lesson.

Styge mumbled in the tongue of the ancient practitioners of his art, the first Illusionists, who worked hand in hand with Summoners. The elderly Human e danced back and forth, waving his hands toward the first of his various drawings on the back cell wall. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and Norm heard faint hints of tribal drums beating in the air.

The light filtering in from the wall/ceiling slot flashed brilliantly, blinding the Gnome Engineer as he shielded his eyes a second too late.

“Fooroo doogenshi ki,” Styge hollered.

The air thickened, hardening almost to the degree of tree sap, and the tribal drums could now not be drowned out unless one of the greater gods decided to poke his or her head into the cell and shout above it.

Norm felt a trickle of blood from his nose, and as suddenly as the air had thickened, it became simple, stagnant air again. He kept his eyes shielded for a moment, though, and soon heard first a heavy, metallic thunk, and then a much more concerning whump of a person collapsing.

When he finally risked a glance from behind his forearm, he saw that Styge had fallen over on the cell floor, sweat plastering his gray-silver Mohawk against his head. A vague twitch in his right eye told Norm he was alive, just deeply asleep.

On the other side of the room, directly beneath where the drawing of it had been, was a perfectly real, perfectly solid kinetic environmental energy absorber. Norm’s plan for escape might actually work.

“Never underestimate a Hood, gentlemen,” he whispered towards the ceiling. “Never.”

His miniature tools in hand, he set to work modifying and adjusting the device, then waited patiently for Styge to wake up.

Their morning meal was lowered on a platter attached to a thin rope, from the slot high in the wall.

He took both his share and Styge’s off of the platter, setting Styge’s food on his bed, and digging into his own. Four more drawings stood boldly on the wall, and Norman Adwar pondered his course of action. The Knights, Soldiers and Paladins hadn’t bothered to check his boots, and they had merely collected Styge’s sketchpads into a single burlap bag, which they had tossed in the evidence room in the first basement level. The randy old Illusionist had made due with a concrete wall and a piece of chalk once, but how taxing would it be to materialize four more illusions for permanent use?

If Norm were any judge of such things, it would come close to killing the old man.

Escaping, he realized, might exchange a long imprisonment for a quick death.

* * * *

The night had passed—or so Anna assumed from her perceived passage of time. She woke stiff in the legs, but feeling much better elsewhere. She had undone her wraps in the middle of the night, opting to wear her undershirt and outer tunic with a little slack. Not that she had much to hide, but if she suddenly burst out of the mostly barren cell into the hall, she didn’t want anyone else finding out she was actually a woman.

She rubbed her neck and swung down off of the bed, landing on cat’s feet on the concrete floor.

She averted her eyes, hearing the universal signal of urine splashing in the toilet to mean ‘turn around’.

When Fly was finished, he flushed the toilet, and as soon as he did, both Ninja and Rogue looked at each other with eyes filled not with sleep, but with revelation.

“The pipes.” Anna dashed over to the toilet.

The single porcelain unit was set into the wall with solid masonry, but if they needed to, they could simply break the toilet. However, this left the unsavory thought that if her ideas didn’t pan out, they’d be minus one pot to piss in.

“How can we use them to our advantage?”

“I’m not sure—not yet anyway,” Fly said. “We have a toilet and a sink, each with running water. Good old Gnomes and Dwarves. Don’t get me wrong, indoor plumbing is perhaps one of the best innovations the Gnome Race ever gave our lands, but in some ways, it makes it easier to keep people prisoner.”

Anna stayed still as the Black Draconus, scaled feet clacking on the flat, concrete floor, paced.

“The pipes are way too small to fit through,” Anna said, mostly to herself. The light coming from the slot above them brightened for a moment, and she thought she could hear a deep, thundering rumble somewhere nearby. No, she corrected herself, I can’t hear it, I can feel it. What’s it coming from? She shook the sensation off, and returned her thoughts to the situation at hand. “Fly, you’ve got a breath weapon, yes?”

“Yes, I can spit forked lightning. What of it?”

She looked down at the toilet thoughtfully, then over at the sink.

“All right, what do you suppose would happen if you sent a discharge of your breath weapon through the pipes from the sink?”

The Black Draconus squinted, trying to imagine the end result.

“I believe it’s something along the lines of, boom.” He clenched his hands together and then pulled them apart with an exaggerated motion. “However, while passing through the marshlands to the west of here, I used my natural power a few times more than I should have. I need a couple of days to store up the energy if we want it to truly be effective.”

“Not a problem, Fly.” Anna pounded on the cell door, but as she suspected, nobody bothered to answer from the other side. “Something tells me that for once, time is on our side.”

* * * *

Despite Rage’s hand-wrapping, the Orc Berserker’s knuckles were rubbed raw and cut in places. He’d stayed up for the entire night, only sleeping when Stockholm finally instructed him to stop.

The Red Tribe Werewolf was frankly astonished that nobody above them, up in the keep and Fort Stone itself, noticed what was going on. They should have been found out by now, and beaten into submission. Instead, Rage had worked throughout the night, punching and kicking and tearing his way through three feet of solid concrete.

The tunnel he’d burrowed would easily allow himself access, and Stockholm would only have to crouch a very little bit.

Once Rage broke free of the mortar and concrete, Stockholm would take over, and dig them out through the soil, a task much better suited to his lupine kind.

“Seven more feet, about,” Stockholm whispered to himself as he tapped the back wall of Rage’s work.

The high slot in the cell wall creaked open, and two trays were lowered down on individual ropes. He took them both, set them on his bed, and ignored them. As soon as he released the ropes, they shot back up through the slot, which dropped shut.

The Order of Oun certainly knows how to keep prisoners, he thought. A toilet, a sink, two beds, and three meals a day, delivered in the same fashion as the light and heating. Though tall, even Stockholm only stood around half of the height of the cell. Even if he could reach it, the slot up near the ceiling didn’t appear wide or tall enough for much of anything to get through, save the meals and water skins.

At noon, he roused Rage, who set back to work on the concrete wall. Stockholm sat and ate his meal now that it had cooled to an acceptable level. What do we do once we escape? He had no intentions of abandoning the others, though he felt certain that Anna and Flint would both work out a solution. And as long as Rage was aiding him in his efforts, he felt obligated to ensure the safe escape of the Midnight Suns as well. His method of escape, however, wouldn’t work for the others.

He had to get some rest, he decided. Honest rest—that would do the trick. He told Rage to slow his pace, and to stop after two more food deliveries from the slot above them.

Satisfied that the Orc had understood him, Stockholm shifted into a red wolf, padded in a circle on his bed, and lay down for some much needed deep sleep. At Rage’s current pace, they might get free of the Fort in two or three more days. What they did then, they’d have to wait to decide.

* * * *

Divided into two-man teams, the groups from Desanadron worked together to get themselves free.

By dawn of the third day of their incarceration, Rage had cleared through to soft soil, stepping back to let Stockholm take the lead. Styge manifested three more of the drawings he’d made on the cell wall, and the Engineer seemed positive that they had what they needed to leave the prison. Thaddeus Fly prepared to release enough electrical power into the Fort’s water supply to rupture the pipes and open a path for them to get to the maintenance tunnels. Flint had convinced Akimaru to take the evening’s meal off of a platter and set the Wererat, in his animus form, under one platter for the return trip up through the slot. Everyone was preparing to move out.

Lain McNealy had been tossed into a cell by herself, a cell specifically designed to suppress Necromancer spells. A number of Clerics came in on the first day, each one smiling and rotund like a cherub, trying to get her to ‘walk in the light of Oun’. These men she barely acknowledged, except to smile wickedly at them.

The preachers left her cell without their previous smiles, thoughts of good old-fashioned burnings at the stake playing in their heads.

Her cell was also different in that she had a comfortable bed, a separate bathroom attached through an oak door, and her meals were brought in by a guard. The Order supplied her with good, hearty meals—a fitting diet for a mother-to-be.

Reynaldi himself visited her late in the evening of the first day, offering her amnesty if she would permanently relinquish her powers. The Elven Paladin explained a ritual, known to the more educated Paladins inside of Fort Stone, which could do just that.

Lain refused him gently, thanking him for the kind offer.

“You still have many months to think about it,” Reynaldi said.

Thick iron bars on the windows of her room kept her from simply hopping the short distance out to the area. This, she thought, was probably the most important difference between her own lodgings and that of her allies. While they had all been taken downstairs, she had been thrust into one of the cells in the basement only for an hour before Reynaldi had ordered her moved. The bars, she thought. There has to be some way to escape, and these bars are key in that effort.

Two days passed as she attempted to formulate a plan that didn’t involve her magic, as it was suppressed. She leaned on the window frame, her hands dangling out between the bars. Below, she felt a slight thrum in the keep itself, a steady vibration in the floor. She couldn’t be certain what was going on down in the basement, but she was convinced that one of her company members was causing the vibration.

The door of her chamber creaked open, and a broad shouldered Jaft in chain mail rolled in a cart with her afternoon meal on it. His heavy metal boots clanked on the concrete floor.

“Your lunch, Ms. McNealy.” The guard stood stiffly by the cart. “We trust you have been kept comfortable, ma’am.”

She simply smiled, and the Jaft left the room as swiftly as pride would let him.

Lain picked at her steaming meal disconsolately, wishing that she could help Fly half as much as he’d helped her.

Birds chirped outside of her window, and Lain took one of the buttered rolls, tearing it into several smaller pieces, and went over to the bars. She stretched one hand out, and dropped the bread piece to the ground.

One of the birds, a sparrow, hopped on it quickly, and twittered up towards her.

The lip of the windowsill on the outside of the keep was littered with flecks of stone that had chipped and flaked off of the structure over the years.

These few birds, she realized, hadn’t left yet for warmer climates to the west, and they may very well freeze to death before they could get safely away. Her heart sank a little, Lain feeling pity for the tiny creatures. They really had no hope of survival unless someone in the Fort took them in. “Fat chance of that,” she growled to the sparrow as it hopped up closer, passing between the bars and into the room. “They probably don’t allow birds inside, the self-righteous bastards.”

She ground her teeth, and felt a strange pulse in her hands, which were still hanging outside of the window.

She looked away from the bird, down at the ground outside of the window. A single line of black power burned from her left hand down to the grass, draining life force from the individual blades.

So, their cell is not so secure after all.

She smiled, and brought her hands back inside, gripping two of the bars by their bases, set into the stone of the window frame. Her hands vibrated, and she pulled them away from the iron bars. Nearly a quarter of the bars’ circumference had deteriorated.

She had her own way out now.

* * * *

The day that the Hoods and Midnight Suns were incarcerated, Markus Trent made his way past a patrol of Ja-Wen city guards, striding boldly right past them since he had done nothing wrong. They gave him piercing glares, but said nothing as he passed into the western business district.

There was nothing to do when he first arrived except seek some minor medical attention for a bite wound on his left leg. The only hostile creature he’d come across after parting ways with Fly and the others was a wild dog. The creature had come barreling out of the marshlands to the north, and took a sneak attack bite at him. As soon as its teeth had hit their mark, it had sped past—until Trent brained it with a shuriken to the back of the skull.

The wound hadn’t bled a great deal, but it did burn and seep yellow pus. He didn’t want it to get any worse, so he made his way directly to a healer when he got into the city proper.

The healer woman, a Half-Elf, answered the door after only a few seconds when he knocked, and she said nothing to him. Instead, she turned her back and left the door open for him to follow her inside.

The first room he stepped into was a vestibule with a low ceiling and a bench for customers to wait at, with a bead curtain obscuring the view of the next room.

The healer brushed the beads aside and preceded Trent into a smoky room, where several gourds and other trinkets hung from lines of thread tied to the ceiling, which was higher here in her room of business than in the vestibule.

“Pick a seat, young man,” she croaked, her voice rough from little use, Trent assumed. “I shall take a look at your injuries.”

The Ninja selected the sturdiest looking lounge chair he saw, and set himself down gingerly. His leg throbbed dully, but he didn’t mind too terribly, since he was at the healer’s home.

The Half-Elf woman crouched on her haunches, and looked at the bite on Trent’s leg. She frowned deeply, and shook her head. “This looks like a bite from a swamp dog.”

From her croaking voice, Trent’s mind’s eye saw her whipping out her tongue and snaring a fly. Disgusting.

“It was a dog, all right,” Trent said.

The healer grabbed his foot and lifted the injured leg, setting off a burning sensation around the afflicted area.

He didn’t look down, but he could feel her prodding the open wound with a thin finger.

“Must you poke around like that, woman?” he snarled.

She grunted without verbal comment, and set to mixing some herbs in a pot of water she had hung over the fire in her hearth.

The poultice she eventually brought out looked yellow and waxy, like the dripped leavings of a beehive after a wild animal got at it. It steamed as she ladled it out of the pot and into an earthenware bowl.

She dipped a black brush into the bowl, and then applied the poultice to the wound.

The heat didn’t faze Trent, but the sensation of something boiling out of his leg and crawling over the wound stopped his thoughts from wandering. He looked down at the injury.

Small bubbles formed over the waxy substance as it cleaned and disinfected the bite, but he saw nothing crawling around. Sometimes, he thought, Fly’s lack of imagination must have been great to have.

Once more his thoughts flickered to the hated Black Draconus and his disciple, Akimaru. Trent couldn’t say for certain what exactly it was the white clad Ninja ever learned from Fly. From everything he’d seen of Akimaru’s fighting skills and performance, he didn’t need much instruction in the arts of the Ninja. True, he often used fighting techniques unfamiliar to Markus Trent, but every good Ninja learned a few moves unique to his preferred method of combat. Trent had a few of his own, but nothing that compared to the destructive power he had seen Akimaru unleash only once on a hostile target. To put it bluntly, it had been terrifying.

The medicine did its work on his leg, and the rest of his body as well, and he found himself ready to lull off to sleep.

The healer woman put a hand gently over his face, and he would have thrown her hand away, had he the strength. He didn’t, as it turned out, and so when she brushed his eyes with her fingers, he let them shut and dreamed.

In his dream, he relived one of the most perplexing and confusing days of his life. Three years earlier, before the visit to the healer in Ja-Wen, Thaddeus Fly had given him a task that took him north, into the Dwarven Territories. A part-time agent and contact of the Midnight Suns had discovered ancient ruins deep in the earth when he joined a Dwarven mining crew. The agent’s purpose in joining with the miners hadn’t been explained, but he had split from the Dwarves, and come upon a strange wooden door in the gut rock of the mountain. The door didn’t creak, as the agent had expected it might, and beyond he had found what appeared to be a city buried beneath the ground. How an entire city had become covered by mountain rock, nobody knew, but it wasn’t unheard of throughout Tamalaria.

Trent and Akimaru had been dispatched to join the part-timer and plunder the ruins for anything of value. They had been warned against bringing anything back that hinted of ancient mecha, unless they knew at a single glance they could sell it to the Mecha Revitalization Society. That Society consisted largely of a handful of Gnome scientists and Kobold scholars, as well as half a dozen Humans whose obsession with mecha nearly rivaled the Gnomes as a Race.

When the two Midnight Suns operatives arrived outside of Traithrock, three Dwarven guards accosted them. They came not with weapons drawn, but with shouts and bellows that they were on a private road and must return closer to the city.

Trent and Akimaru had slain them swiftly, but with the methods and weapons typical of their class. Nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, except that Trent had clearly seen that Akimaru moved on top of the snow instead of through it.

The part-time agent who met with them three hours later was a Human by the name of Victor Solomon, and he had little time to spare for their excursion, or so he said.

Trent smelled the odor of sex on the man, and thought that perhaps his woman was the real reason he was in such a rush to get the job over with.

He led the way down the private road, which did in fact have several signs posted along it claiming that it temporarily belonged to a man named Jeremy Strivenski.

Trent knocked the signs over as he came across them, and Victor Solomon, slender, twitchy frame jumping akimbo as he laughed at Markus’s vandalism, continued to lead them to the mine.

He led them inside the mountain, a torch from the entryway in his hand and sputtering flames. Perhaps a hundred yards beneath the earth’s surface, they came to the wooden door Solomon had found, and he led them inside.

On the precipice that fronted the city below and around them, Markus Trent marveled at the sheer size and length of the underground city, the lavishness of the buildings. Some stretched perhaps a mile from their bases to their tops, and he could find no words fitting to describe them.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” Solomon asked.

Trent nodded mutely.

Akimaru had already begun to make the climb down, jumping nimbly from rock outcropping to outcropping, dropping down dozens of feet at a time at some points.

Trent prided himself on his agility, but once more found himself in Akimaru’s shadow.

“Look,” Solomon had said. “I’ve got a rope ladder and a set of Chimera’s wings to make the trip easier. We don’t need to go hopping around like animals, like your friend. What do you say?”

Trent tucked the Chimera’s wings—a small magical trinket in the form of a pair of crossed feather wings—in his mouth. He let the object get wet, and felt the locked magical power flow over his body, concentrating in his back muscles and shoulder blades.

Two white, powdery wings flashed into being on his back, and he leaped off of the precipice, floating down airily to the ground level of the buried city.

Akimaru had already arrived before him, and gave him a brief bow.

The two Ninjas waited another fifteen minutes while Solomon made his way down with the rope ladder. When the trio reunited, they drew weapons and moved slowly into the city, looking in awe and wonder at the buildings.

Akimaru was the first of them brave enough to open the front door of what appeared to be an old place of business. The white clad Ninja signaled for the two of them to stay put, but Trent wasn’t having with that. He shoved Akimaru aside and threw the door open loudly.

Bells jingled overhead when he did so, and he almost laughed. Almost, but not quite—apparently the city wasn’t entirely abandoned.

The creature that had been sleeping behind a long counter on the far wall to the door’s left side let loose a sound somewhere between a belch and a quiet roar. Sharp, triangular spikes studded its many-limbed body, its flesh bumpy looking and dark gray. Its body, broader than any lycanthrope or Orc Trent had seen, stretched wider as it threw off the last vestiges of slumber. It opened three, red-tinted eyes, set in its chest area. Or at least, Trent thought it was its chest, until his eyes adjusted to the light in the queer shop and he saw that its head protruded not from the top of its body, but from the center of its chest. Its eyes alighted on him, and it screamed now not like a belching child awake from a nap, but a predator ready to take down its next meal.

Trent already had a weapon in his hand, but the glare coming from the creature’s eyes hypnotized him into inaction.

The creature leaped over the counter, and Trent saw that it had not three arms, as he had thought, but four. Two arms on its left side, one on its right, and another clawing the air where he supposed reproductive organs should have hung.

It landed heavily on the other side of the counter, and he saw that while its upper body was massive and muscular, its legs were squat and trunk-like—powerful yes, but incapable of projecting it the distance from its sleeping place to him. Oh gods, he thought, someone help me.

No god answered his silent plea, but as Akimaru sprung into action. The white clad Ninja loosed his sickle at the beast, landing a glancing blow on its hardened carapace.

Blood, thick and black as swamp bile, bubbled out a little, but the creature seemed not to notice. It smiled hideously, showing rows of strange blue teeth just below its eyes.

Several yards disappeared under the creature’s churning feet, yet still Trent couldn’t move, held by the unflinching glare of those crimson eyes.

When the creature came within five yards of Trent, Akimaru stood directly before it, striking it several times about its body and limbs—quick, darting strikes, leaving no room for counterattack. Trent had seen these maneuvers cripple and kill much larger beings, but this massive monstrosity simply flinched a little with each blow.

It drew back one thick arm, and made a fist. Trent finally managed to move, but it was only his mouth that obeyed. “Akimaru, move! Run!”

The lower arm of the beast swung up, grabbing Akimaru by the crotch, and its fisted hand swung sideways, bashing the Ninja in the head, knocking him through the air to crash into a set of dark boxes set on a counter.

Over he went with a boom, out of Trent’s sight.

Here, in his dream, things became a little hazy, because his actual memory of the event seemed strange to him, almost unreal. The creature smiled again, the left side of its mouth curling up higher than even before. Then the room suddenly became cold, chillier than it had any reason to be. He recalled the creature delivering a glancing blow to his head, a blow he’d blocked in part by his outstretched arm with the palm curled up. It was a simple martial arts technique, taught by almost every school of combat, but it had saved his life.

He seemed to recall Akimaru coming around the counter he’d fallen behind, gliding—no, that was wrong, he thought. Sliding along. The wooden floor turned into a sheet of ice just in front of his body.

The white clad Ninja stood there, silent and deadly, and as the creature native to the ruins turned to face him.

Akimaru raised one ungloved hand, fingers outstretched.

Cold steam wafted up from his fingertips, and small shards of ice splashed against the creature.

It flailed its mighty limbs, all four of them, and its body slowed to a crawl. Ice spread over its body from the points at which the shards had struck, until it was encased in a thin coating of it.

Akimaru jumped forward and delivered a kick just under the creature’s chin.

Its head flew off, jetting blood all over the shop as its body fell, limp and frozen over, to the floor.

Trent, awestruck by this display of supernatural power from the mysterious Ninja, had blacked out then.

His dream was over, and he awoke in the healer’s den. She hovered over him, and he motioned her away with a hand. The old, familiar questions resurfaced, but he was pretty sure he had one answer, at least.

And he realized he wanted them all.

* * * *

The next afternoon, Teresa Evergreen contacted while he rested in a hotel room, recovering from the medicine the healer woman had applied to his leg.

It had done its job well enough, and the skin was already scabbing over, but it left him fatigued. The room he had rented was quiet and homely, decorated very much in the recent trend hitting Tamalaria. All of the surfaces that could be wood, were, and every stitch of furniture was crafted by Elven carpenters. The Elven Kingdom was, quite frankly, making a killing during this time period, and none of them complained about the influx of monies from other territories. Trent thought, not with a little contempt, we’ll gladly take your money, but keep your citizens away.

Trent, Evergreen contacted him through the sutra. The Hoods and Fly have all been taken inside. They are all captives, and I am inside as well. What should I do?

“Follow Reynaldi, as I suggested,” he said aloud, no longer afraid of being overheard. Nobody in the hotel would know what the hell he was talking about even if they did hear him. “Not too closely, dear heart,” he said. “Your powers are extraordinary, but so are his, I’m sure.”

Believe me, they are, Evergreen said. I got within a few yards of him before, and I swear, Mark, he almost looked right AT me.

Trent chewed a fingernail nervously. Evergreen was an excellent tracker, thanks to her strange power to disappear without any trace. However, she could not engage in combat. Any hostile move on her part shattered her protective invisibility. If Reynaldi had one of the wide radius spells many Paladins had, he could strike her if he even thought someone was in the room that shouldn’t be. Then, it would be open combat, and Evergreen wasn’t nearly powerful or skilled enough to stand against a Paladin war veteran.

“Be very careful, dear. If you don’t think you can get the Glove of Shadows without a fight, don’t go for it. If you do get it, I’m in Ja-Wen, a hotel called The Crash Pad. Now, I’m going to get some more sleep.”

Trent nodded off easily enough, his dreams still wavering with images of that final kick, the one that had sent the monstrosity’s head flying through the air of that ill lighted store underground. The image that lodged itself squarely in his mind, though, the one that kept him shaking and shivering throughout his fitful rest, was not the kick itself.

It was Akimaru’s dead, frosted purple-white eyes.

* * * *

Archibald Reynaldi wanted to interrogate the prisoners down in the prison. So much did he want this, he nearly broke his vows, but he held true to his word to the Red Tribe Werewolf.

Ignatious Stockholm, the Elven Paladin thought. “Why do I know that name so well,” he whispered aloud as he stared at the Glove of Shadows.

He had it set in his private study in the northwestern tower of the keep, sitting in no sort of protective casing or anything. It just lay on an old card table he’d had dragged up from the barracks belonging to the couple dozen Soldier class troops on the base. The ‘good old boys’ as he’d often heard them refer to themselves, didn’t mind the loss of one card table.

Before Reynaldi and his two most trusted guards left the barracks, another table, identical to the first one, was set in its place.

The Red Tribesman, he thought again. The very idea that he knew someone associated with a thieves’ guild made his stomach crawl. All of them were foul, heathen blaggarts who deserved fates worse than death. Yet from Stockholm, he had sensed something almost regal, noble. Great power lay in that man, he knew. Perhaps, before a month went by, he would offer him absolution and a position in the Order.

The man radiated the presence of a Knight. With the proper oaths, he could be made one. For now, though, Reynaldi had to wonder whether anyone from either group had escaped capture.

“Lee Toren!” He fairly shouted the name as he shot up from his chair, darting out of the tower study toward the Soldier barracks. Three days the prisoners had been in his custody, and the one he knew best, whom everyone knew, hadn’t been among them. He hadn’t even realized that the Gnome Pickpocket, the one man he’d wanted arrested the most of all of them, hadn’t been present.

And as soon as he slipped out of the tower, the Glove of Shadows wasn’t, either.

* * * *

Lee Toren had waited for perhaps twenty minutes after William Deus, Ignatious Stockholm, and Flint slogged through the snow toward Fort Stone. Then, while Styge and Norman took stock of all of the belongings entrusted to them, he stole back towards Ja-Wen.

Though he hadn’t seen the ambush party, he had felt it, felt it in his bones. Years spent as a professional coward had taught him how to sense law enforcement and similar individuals, especially Bounty Hunters. They, in truth, were the worst.

He’d hoofed it about two hours before the snow, his diminutive stature, and his aging body caught up with him. He simply couldn’t keep at it, and he remembered suddenly why he preferred spending his winters in the big cities. Big cities had big buildings, and big buildings had big fireplaces. Even some of the less reputable places he used to bed down in, places in Arcade, Suvek, Dorinvale or Cherin Moh, kept the winter chill at bay. Out here, he had nothing to help.

The sound of a wagon bumping along, up ahead of him, on the road, made his heart throb faster than the horse pulling the wagon could run.

Lee tucked his head down, and he plowed through the snowdrifts as best he could, stopping periodically to peer up over the snow. When he’d drawn even with the wagon, but not quite yet with the driver, he made a quick snowball.

Taking careful aim, he hucked the improvised projectile over the wagon top.

He heard a muffled, surprised ‘Oomph!’, and the horse was reined to a halt.

Lee continued to run, now having real trouble with the snow.

When he finally drew even with the driver’s seat, a huge, rot-smelling hand reached down and grabbed him savagely by the hair.

Howling like a dying hound, Lee Toren felt himself hauled up by his scalp.

He stopped howling when he saw the blue, scarred visage of the Jaft looking at him. A thick, black wool coat worn over denim overalls and a checked button shirt, probably flannel, told Lee that he needn’t worry any further, despite the flaming pain in his head. The Jaft was clearly a farmer, probably on his way to Ja-Wen with his wagon to sell the last of his autumn harvest.

Before he could introduce himself or ask for a lift, the Jaft brought him around and deposited on the bench beside him. The farmer had long, yellow scars on his face, one that cut across his right cheek raggedly, and one that stretched from the center of his forehead down over his nose, and from there down to his chin. Lee had always been told that Jafts regenerated the fastest of any known Race in Tamalaria, or elsewhere. Then he remembered, staring at the scars, that Aquamancy, or any weapon enchanted with water or ice magic, would leave a scar, or permanently wound members of that race.

“So, little fellow,” the Jaft rumbled, his voice soft but loud, full of bass thunder. “Why’re you trucking through the snow all on yon lonesome?” The words rolled out slowly, as if the big, stinking farmer had to pause to remember each word’s pronunciation before speaking it.

Lee shivered, and didn’t answer until the Jaft pulled a blanket from behind him and threw it over his frozen legs.

Nice enough man, he thought, considering most Jafts’ natures. The blue-fleshed humanoids were well known, throughout Tamalarian history, as some of the most brutish, violent people in the world. Slow minded, ill tempered, and lacking tact in spades, they often took occupations as troopers and soldiers of fortune, mercenaries and bodyguards. Some few, however, became farmers and animal tenders. Fewer still became mages, practitioners of Pyromancy or Gaiamancy, fire or earthen magic.

“Well, I sort of got separated from me chums, up north,” Lee said as the farmer directed his gaze forward and snapped the reins, getting the horse moving again. Lee could see that the horse had a few strange traits, one of which was the fact that its entire body was far more muscular than it should have been.

It would have to be, he supposed, to haul the wagon, its goods and its owner on its own.

“They’s all bigger’n me,” he continued, “and they sort of lost me in the snow. We was headed up a hill, and I sorta backslid down the slope. Hit me ‘ead on a rock, blacked out fer a bit.”

“They couldn’t find you?” The farmer stared straight ahead, but he grabbed a pair of small paper bags and brought them up front. He offered one to Lee, setting the other in his lap. Lee accepted, looked in, and took out a light green apple.

“Nope. I don’t fink they realized I wadn’t wiv ‘em until they was over the hill. By then, I was buried in the powder.”

The farmer made a little noise, as if to indicate that he wasn’t surprised. The wagon coach was covered over the driver’s bench, the better to keep the elements from bothering the owner. Knowing the farmer’s natural dislike of water, and of ice, this seemed sensible.

“So, how much further until Ja-Wen?”

“Oh, we’ll get there late evening tonight.” The Jaft farmer pulled a small pouch from inside of his overalls, and a packet of rolling papers from a shirt pocket. He rolled a cigarette, and popped it in his mouth.

Lee opened a slender metal case in which he kept his own pre-rolled smokes that he purchased in packets at sundry goods stores. He lit it, inhaled, and blew out a small blue cloud of smoke.

“Come morning, I’ll have this wagon uncovered to sell my excess from the harvest. So, what do you do for a living?”

Lee thought for a moment, looking back at the long laundry list of available answers he kept in store for such questions, finally deciding that the farmer deserved his honesty. It might get him kicked off of the wagon and back into the snow, but the Jaft had been willing to pull him up on the wagon, no questions asked. He owed him that much.

“I’m a thief, actually,” Lee Toren said.

That little noise escaped the Jaft again, the one that seemed to mean he wasn’t at all surprised.

“Look, I know you probably would rather I got down and hoofed it the rest of the way to the city, but I appreciate the ride.”

“Oh, I could let you walk, but that wouldn’t be very fair, now would it?”

Once more the Jaft’s gentler nature left Lee speechless. “

We all do bad things in life, mister.” He blew out his own cloud of smoke as the horse started down a slight decline. It picked up a measure of speed, but remained steady and stable, so as not to spill either driver or contents in the wagon. “You think I’ve always been a farmer?”

Lee considered this a long moment, looking once more at the scars on the blue man’s face.

“Used to be a mercenary, mister. I done some bad things in my time, rest assured, but soon’s I recalled what I’d been saving for, I bought my land and got out of the business. I hurt some folks, mister, didn’t deserve to be hurt. I do what I can to atone. That includes giving rides to shady sorts.”

Lee finished his cigarette without further comment, then he leaned back on the bench and fell asleep.

When he was lightly shaken, the farmer had brought his wagon to a stop in the outskirts of the city of Ja-Wen. The sun was partially below the curve of the horizon, the light fanning out into the realm of Tamalaria with a few final sputters.

Lee hopped down off of the wagon, and thanked the farmer, offering him some coin for the ride.

The farmer flatly, silently refused, shaking his big blue head somberly.

They shared a silent smile, and Lee headed off into the city proper, looking for a decent place to spend the night. No dives, no crummy little apartments, he thought. No, he wanted a modest hotel room for tonight. He was even willing to part with honest cash to secure one.

He made his way to Copper Street, and walked its length a while, finally getting too tired to look beyond the establishment he came upon on his right-hand side.

He looked up at the curved wooden sign overhead, and a slight twinge in the back of his skull, a twinge he often called instinct, told him that this was the place.

“The Crash Pad,” he whispered to himself.

* * * *

Back to the current day and time.

Rage completed his portion of the escape plan.

Styge listened to Norman Adwar explain his ideas again.

Thaddeus Fly prepared his breath weapon.

Flint and Akimaru stared at each other in studied silence.

Of them all, who would be the first to escape the prison of Fort Stone?

Flint gave in once again, looking away from the white clad Ninja’s upsettingly purple-white eyes. “Still no ideas,” he said bluntly.

He pulled out his cigarette case and matches, the only concession the guards seemed to have made concerning their belongings, which presented another problem. If they managed a way out, how were they to recover their possessions? Almost everything the Hoods had on them was fully replaceable. Almost was the problem, however. Some of their stuff would cost a good amount of money to replace, money that they didn’t have on hand, and none of them wanted to have to make a return trip to Desanadron.

The final problem with escape, the one he realized as he had been staring into Akimaru’s eyes, was that the Glove of Shadows was here, in Fort Stone. Both Guild groups had come to steal it, and if they escaped entirely, they’d lose their chance at it.

The Ninja must have been contemplating the same problem. “I have a way,” Akimaru said suddenly, pulling Flint from his reverie.

“Oh yeah? All right, I’m all ears, pal” He tugged on one huge, rodent earlobe. “As you can see, that’s not too far from true.”

“Extract your claws.”

Flint stubbed out his cigarette on the cement floor, singing the fur on the bottom of his right foot in the same spot as he had on the previous smokes. A pile of them sat, lamenting in spent silence, under his bed.

He extracted his claws, and held them at his sides as he stood up.

“Excellent. Do they remain roughly the same length if you reduce yourself down to your animus form?”

Again, Flint answered this question with a nod.

“Very good. Now, forget everything you see me do in the next few moments as soon as you can, and ask no questions regarding it. If anyone shall ask questions, it is sensei Fly I shall answer.”

Flint shrugged in a non-committed fashion, not expecting much. He had thought about trying to claw his way up the cement wall of the cell toward the grate up near the ceiling, but his claws wouldn’t find purchase in the hardened, artificial stone. When he had attempted to go up in rat form with the food platter, he’d proven too heavy, and his animus form snapped the rope.

What Akimaru did after he removed his gloves left more questions in Flint’s racing mind than he imagined he’d ever have about any one person again.

Unfortunately, he knew he couldn’t ask them, because if he did, the white clad Ninja would probably kill him.

* * * *

During the evening hours of his third day staying at the Crash Pad, Lee Toren heard Markus Trent scream in furious frustration through the thin, slat board wall.

* * * *

“Excellent,” Trent had said after Evergreen told him of her successful nabbing of the Glove of Shadows. “Now, you remember where I am, right?”

For a long while, there was no reply.

“Teresa?”

I remember, Markus, she said in his mind. He felt something tenuous in the air, some disaster on the verge of taking place. And you know what? I think our relationship, business and personal, is over, dear. This little beauty right here belongs to me now. Good-bye, Trent. Don’t worry, I’ll make the best of use of it.

Something in his mind screamed, and there was an explosion of light behind his eyes. She had destroyed the sutra connecting their thoughts.

The primal roar that erupted from his throat could have killed anyone too faint of heart. The traitor had been betrayed.