Chapter one
The two fellows following me down the noxious alley in Amintin made a reasonable job of skulking in the shadows. When they crossed the open mouths of side alleys through the fuzzy pink moonlight they’d fail even the most elementary examination for any Assassin’s Guild. They were most likely common footpads who’d picked me up as a likely victim the moment I’d entered the alley. They might not be. They might have other and altogether more sinister reasons for dogging my footsteps. Well, bad cess to ’em. There was a task I had to do here set to my hands by the Star Lords that overrode petty considerations like a couple of thugs or assassins.
“You will make contact with a man named Fweygo,” the Star Lords had told me. “He will inform you of your duties.”
In these latter days of my dealings with the Everoinye they still retained a flavor of their old arrogance even though my whole relationship with them had changed. This adventure was a whole new start, a completely fresh departure in my rackety life on Kregen. What the task was they had not deigned to tell me. Mind you, they had condescended to equip me with clothes and weapons and this unusual event still startled.
The hazy pink moonlight of The Maiden with the Many Smiles slanted into the unwholesome alley. The Star Lords had landed me just inside the dock wall of the river port. Some of the fortifications looked unusual to the eye of an old warrior; but this was a very foreign land. I’d chosen this dismal route to reach the tavern called The Net and Stikling as being less conspicuous than following the main street.
Amintin lay on the left bank of the river and was some ten miles from the coast. The stink of fish was not too pervasive. The two plug-uglies padding along in my footsteps probably smelled far worse.
I kept an intermittent observation on my back trail to make sure they didn’t suddenly have a rush of blood to their tiny pointed heads and try to jump me.
A few massy clouds obscured the moon from time to time. Among the dingy buildings leaning over the alley no breath of wind disturbed the pools of muddy water between the cracked and ancient cobbles. Just up ahead a corner looked promising. There I could wait unseen and at precisely the right moment leap on my shadows. I had no interest in what their stories might be, not right now at any rate; I merely wished to get on with what the Star Lords had sent me to Amintin to accomplish.
The corner would conceal me admirably and I could stand without moving as the two men approached.
One of them was apim, Homo sapiens sapiens, like me. The other was a polsim with pointed ears and a narrow devil’s face, with a deep vee-shaped mouth and the cunning lines of long and villainous experience engraved on his leathery skin. Still, like an apim, he had only two arms and two legs and did not have a flexible and deadly tail. Apim and polsim, they both wore raggedy garments that left their chests bare. The cudgels in their fists looked lethal enough and their knives would be sharp enough to pare skin from bone without drawing blood.
This alleyway led to the back entrance to The Net and Stikling. Dolorous though this little port of Amintin might be, one could sincerely hope that the parallel street would not be quite as narrow and sinister and the inn itself somewhat more salubrious. At the end of the next ramshackle building a blur of movement instantly stilled caught my eye.
Very well, I said to myself, that’ll make three heads to knock together instead of two.
Going along silently and without any itchy feelings up my spine I saw a bulkier building thrusting a three storeyed wall against the alley. That must be the inn. A single amber light burned feebly over a closed doorway. All the windows had been pierced in the upper floors. That, to an old sea rover, was a significant factor.
This gray place was damned depressing and in my current mood I wanted none of that. By Vox! Wasn’t I on Kregen, the most wonderful and terrible world where anything the heart desired might be found if you tried hard enough? Get th
