Raymond E. Feist - Riftwar Legends - Murder In LaMut

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 434.67KB 196 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

ONE

Night

It was a dark and stormy night.

That was fine with Durine.

Not that the goddess Killian, whose province was the weather, was asking his

opinion. Nor were any of the other gods - or any mortals - for that matter.

In more than twenty years of a soldier's life, both fealty-bound and

mercenary - as well as during the dimly-remembered time before he took blade

and bow in hand - few of those in charge of anything had asked Durine's

opinions before making their decisions.

And that was fine with him, too. The good thing about a soldier's life was

that you could concentrate on the small but important decisions, like where to

put the point of your sword next, and leave the big decisions to others.

Anyway, there was no point in objecting: complaining didn't make it any

warmer, griping didn't stop the sleet from pelting down, bitching didn't stop

the ice from clinging to his increasingly heavy sailcloth overcoat as he made

his way, half-blinded, down the muddy street.

Mud.

Mud seemed to go with LaMut the way salt seemed to go with fish.

But that was just fine with Durine, too. Wading through this half-frozen mud

was just part of the trade, and at least here and now it was just this vile

slush, not the hideous sort of mud made from soil mixing with dying men's

blood and shit. Now, the sight and particularly the smell of that kind of mud

could make even Durine gag, and he had seen more than enough of it in his

time.

What wasn't fine with him was the cold. It was still too damn cold. His toes

had ceased to feel the cold and the pain, which wasn't good.

Locals were talking about the 'thaw', something they apparently expected any

day now that Midwinter was behind them. Durine glanced up at the sleet

smacking him in the face, and decided that this was an odd sort of thaw. To

his way of thinking, there was far too damn much of this half-frozen stuff

falling from the sky for a reasonable thaw, or even an unreasonable one. Yes,

before the current storm they had had three days of clear skies, but there was

no change in the air; it was still too damn wet, and too damn cold.

Too cold to fight, perhaps?

Well, yes, maybe, in the view of the Bugs and the Tsurani, and that was a

good thing. They had fought Tsurani and goblins and Bugs in the north, and

now, it seemed, they had run out of Tsurani and goblins and Bugs to kill - at

least around here - and as soon as things thawed out enough, it was time for

him and the other two to be paid and to be going.

A few months of garrison duty until then was just fine. Actually, as long as

they were stuck here, Durine preferred the idea of garrison duty to being paid

off today and having to spend his own coin to eat and lodge. Durine's perfect

situation would have been to have the Earl pay for everything except drink and

women until this hypothetical thaw - and he included that limitation only

because he didn't think that even Pirojil could conceive of a way to cadge ale

and whores from the paymaster - then pay them their wages the day they rode

south for Ylith and a ship heading somewhere warmer.

Which made this, despite the mud and the cold, pretty close to perfect.

The heavy action was supposedly at Crydee these days, which meant that the

one place they could be sure the three of them were not going was Crydee. Come

spring, the privateer Melanie was due in Ylith. Captain Thorn could be counted

on for a swift conveyance and be relied upon not to try to murder them in

their sleep. That would be bad for one's health, as Thorn's predecessor had

barely realized in the instant before Pirojil had stuck a knife in his right

kidney while the late captain was standing, sword in hand, over what he had

thought was Durine's sleeping form. Given that Thorn owed his captaincy to

Durine and his companions' suspicious natures, he should be willing to

transport them for free, Durine thought.

Away where, though?

Still, that wasn't Durine's worry. Let Kethol and Pirojil worry about that.

Kethol would be able to find them somebody who needed three men who knew which

part of the sword you used to cut with and which part you used to butter your

bread; and Pirojil would be able to negotiate a price that was at least half

again what the employer thought he was ready to pay. All Durine would have to

do was to kill people.

Which was fine with him.

But until the ice broke the only way they would be leaving Yabon would be by

foot, horse, or cart, overland to Krondor. Their only other choice would be

heading back up north for more fighting, and right now they had earned enough

- when they actually got paid, of course - that their cloaks would be so

heavily laden with gold coin and their purses with silver coin that more

fighting wouldn't appeal to any of them.

Enough.

This stint had left him with a new set to add to his already burgeoning

collection of scars; a missing digit on his left hand from the time when he

hadn't pulled back quite quickly enough while dispatching a Bug with his

pikestaff. He now judged he would never play the lute. Not that he had ever

tried, but he always had it in mind that he might like to learn, some day.

That wound, and a long red weal on the inside of his thigh, reminded him with

every step that he wasn't as young and nimble as he used to be.

Then again, Durine had been born old. But at least he was strong. He would

just wait. Let the days drift past doing little chores, and it wouldn't be

long before the thaw started and the ship was in port, and he and the others

would be out of here. Somewhere warm - Salador maybe, where the women and

breezes were warm and soft, and the cool beer was good and cheap and flowed

freely as a running sore. About the time they ran out of gold, they could ship

to the Eastern Kingdoms. Nice, friendly little wars. The locals there always

appreciated good craftsmen who knew how to efficiently dispatch the

neighbours, and they paid well, if not quite as well as the Earl of LaMut.

And, from Durine's point of view, the best thing about fighting in the Eastern

Kingdoms was there were no Bugs, which was even better than the absence of

this horrible cold.

Or if they really wanted warmth, the three of them could head back down to

the Vale of Dreams and make some good coin fighting Keshian Dog Soldiers and

renegades for Lord Sutherland.

No, Durine decided after a moment, the Vale of Dreams wasn't really any

better than frozen, muddy LaMut, no matter how it seemed on this cold and

miserable night; last time they were down there he was almost as miserable

with the heat as he was today with the cold.

Why couldn't someone start a war on a nice balmy beach somewhere?

Ahead, bars of light coming through the outer door to the Broken Tooth

Tavern were his marker and guide, promising something approaching warmth,

something resembling hot food, and something as close to friends as a

mercenary soldier could possibly have.

That was good enough for Durine.

For now.

He staggered up from the muddy street to the wooden porch outside the

entrance to the inn.

There were two men huddled in their cloaks under the overhang just outside

the door.

'The Swordmaster wants to see you.'

One pulled his cloak back, as though in the dark Durine would be able to see

the wolf's head emblazoned on his tabard, that Durine knew must be there.

They had been found out.

Looting the dead was, like most crimes, punishable by death (either outright

hanging if the Earl was in a bad mood, or from exhaustion and bad food as you

tried to get through your twenty years of hard labour in the mountain

quarries) although Durine had never seen any harm in looting, himself. It

wasn't as though the dead soldiers had had any use for the few pitiful coins

in their purses, any more than they had for their cloaks. Durine and his two

friends had more than a few coins of their own secreted about their persons -

sewn into hidden pockets in the lining of their tunics, or the hems of their

cloaks, in purses worn under their clothes, bound in shrunken rawhide, so that

they wouldn't clink. A nobleman could put his wealth into a vault or

strongroom, and hire armed men to watch it; a merchant could put his wealth

into trade items that couldn't be easily walked off with; a wizard could leave

his wealth in plain sight and trust that where sanity and self-interest

wouldn't protect it from thieves, the spells on it could and would - Durine

had seen a man who had tried, once, to burgle a sleeping magician's retreat.

Or, at least, what had been a man ...

But a mercenary soldier could either carry his wealth with him or spend it,

and Durine didn't have a good explanation for what a detailed search would

reveal in his possession right now.

A nobleman would have just brushed past the two men - for they wouldn't have

dared to stand in his way - but Durine was no nobleman. Besides, the number of

people Durine would willingly allow within easy stabbing range of his broad

back were very few, and two grey shapes in the dark were hardly likely

candidates.

One on two? That wasn't the way he had planned to die, but so be it, if that

was necessary, although he had taken on two men at a time many times before,

without getting killed. Yet.

It was getting to be too cold and wet and miserable a day to live, anyway.

He pretended to stagger on the rough wood while his right hand reached

inside his cloak to his nearest knife. They would hardly give him time to draw

his sword, after all. At the movement, each man took a step back.

'Wait-' one started.

'Easy, man,' the other said, his hands outstretched, palms out in an

unmistakable sign of peace. 'The Swordmaster says he just wants to talk to

you,' he said. 'It's too cold and mean a night to die, and that goes as much

for me as it does for you.'

'And big as he is, it would probably take both of us to put him down, if we

had to,' the first man muttered.

Durine grunted, but kept his thoughts to himself, as usual. It would

probably take more than the two of them. It would also, at the very least,

take the two others who had come out of the darkness behind Durine, the ones

he wasn't supposed to have noticed.

But bragging was something he left to others.

'Let's go,' he said. 'It isn't getting any warmer out here.'

He straightened. But he kept a hand near a knife. Just in case.

It was a dark and stormy night, but that was, thankfully, outside.

Here, inside, it was warm and smoky beneath the overhead lanterns, so that

it was both too hot and too cold at the same time.

A mercenary soldier's life, Kethol often thought, was always either too

lively or too dull. Either he was bored out of his skin, trying to stay awake

while waiting on watch for something to happen, or he was wading through

rivers of Tsurani troops, hoping that he was cutting down the bastards quickly

enough that none of them would get past him to Pirojil or Durine. Either he

was parched with thirst, or he was drowning in a driving rain. He was either

crowded too close to other unbathed men, smelling their stink, or he was all

by himself, holding down some watch-post in the middle of the night, hoping

that the quiet rustle he heard out in the forest was just another deer, and

not some Tsurani sneaking up on him, and wishing for a dozen friendly swords

clustered around him.

Even here, in the relative comfort of the Broken Tooth Tavern, it was all or

nothing.

In any tavern, on any cold night, there was no such thing as just right - he

was always either too close to the main fireplace, or too far away. Given the

choice, Kethol preferred too close, his back to the hearth, for it was hard to

think of himself as being too warm in winter, even though he would regret it

later, when he went out into the cold night to make his way back to the

barracks at the south end of the city, with the wind cutting through his

sweat-dampened clothes like a knife. And there were better ways to work up a

sweat.

Some of the other mercenaries were doing that at the moment - spending their

hard-earned blood money in the sleeping rooms above, and the incessant

creaking of the floorboards gave witness as to how they were spending their

hard-earned money, but while Kethol didn't mind dropping the odd copper or two

on a quick roll with one of the local whores, the cold shrivelled his passions

as much as it did the relevant portions of his anatomy, and he couldn't see

the point of spending good money on a soft itchy bed when there was an

equally-itchy rope bedframe waiting at the barracks, for free.

Kethol watched closely as the placards fell. This game of pa-kir, or

whatever they called it, wasn't something that he was familiar with, but a

game was a game, and gambling was gambling, and all it would take would be

enough familiarity with it to avoid the traps that drunken men would fall

into, and then he could play.

Men took up the sword for any number of stupid reasons. Honour, family,

country, hearth and home. Kethol did it for the money, but he didn't insist on

earning all of his money with the edge of his sword, or even the point.

In the meantime, a few coppers spent on the particularly thin, sour beer of

LaMut were coppers well spent. With an abundant supply of good dwarven ale

nearby - Kethol was never sure if there was some magic involved, but it was

consistently better than any humans brewed - it was clear that the local human

brewers had only one mandate: make the beer as cheaply as possible, treating

such things as good barley, unrotted hops, and washing out the vats in between

batches as unnecessary fripperies. So when someone else bought, Kethol ordered

dwarven ale; when he paid for it himself, he took the cheap stuff. It wasn't

as if he was going to drink a lot of it, after all. He was only going to look

as if he was drinking a lot of it.

It was an investment, as Pirojil would say. A small investment to make his

opponent think him slightly in his cups, perhaps not as attentive to the game

as he might be. A sip now and again, spilling most of the vile brew on the

floor from time to time, and when he sat down to gamble, several empty ale

jacks would testify to his being ready to be taken in a game. Then he could

indulge in some serious gambling. Yes, it was an investment.

As much of an investment as their three swords. Blades that would chop

through leather and flesh and into bone rather than chip and bend had proven

their worth more than once. Saving money was a good thing, but just about the

worst place Kethol could think of for economies was in the tools of the trade.

In his mind's eye, he could still see the widened eyes of the Tsurani whose

blade had shattered on his shield, moments before he had slid his own sharp

point under the enemy's arm, and into the soft juncture under the armpit that

was protected on the sides by the pauldrons. He didn't have anything personal

against the Tsurani, but then he had never had a personal grudge against any

but a small percentage of the men he had killed. Besides, he had a lot in

common with the Tsurani - they had invaded Midkemia for metal, so the strange

story went, and a man who made his living killing with steel to earn gold and

silver could understand that. If Kethol had a choice of metals, he would

choose steel ten times out of ten - steel, in his experience, could get you

gold more reliably than gold could get you steel. Besides, his skills were

useful here.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ONENightItwasadarkandstormynight.ThatwasfinewithDurine.NotthatthegoddessKillian,whoseprovincewastheweather,wasaskinghisopinion.Norwereanyoftheothergods-oranymortals-forthatmatter.Inmorethantwentyyearsofasoldier'slife,bothfealty-boundandmercenary-aswellasduringthedimly-rememberedtimebeforehetookblade...

展开>> 收起<<

Raymond E. Feist - Riftwar Legends - Murder In LaMut.pdf

共196页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Raymond E. Feist - Riftwar Legends - Murder In LaMut

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: