This early in the evening the place was only a third full. I walked to an empty table about midway between the bar and the door and sat down.
This was a terrible idea.
A young man with light brown skin and jet-black hair delivered two wooden beer tankards to the neighboring table, stopped by mine, and offered me a smile. “What will it be, tress?”
“Favonian red mead,” I told him. “Cold, please.”
The smile gained a forced quality. “I’m afraid we’re all out.”
“Then I’ll take the Denavi ale. But I want to try it before I order.”
“Yes, tress.”
He turned and walked away, making sure to look casual. I watched him make his way to the bartender, a large man in his mid-thirties with blond hair and a deep tan. The bartender glanced at me. I smiled at him. A hurried discussion occurred in hushed voices, and then my waiter slipped through the door to the right of the bar into the back rooms.
They had a dilemma on their hands. I had given them the passphrase, but neither of them recognized me. They would have to run it up their chain of command.
Seeing that dead man had shaken me to the core. By the time I had gotten to the next rental, I was ready to take it no matter what. Anything to find a hole to hide in.
The room belonged to a young family of bakers who had clearly fallen on hard times. The man’s name was Ert, the woman’s name was Hille. They had two kids, a boy and a girl, in clean, worn clothes, about seven and five years old. Ert and Hille baked handpies and bread in their small kitchen, and then Ert would go out to sell them on the street.
Their house was narrow and shoddy. The communal bathroom on the first floor stank like the sewers, and I’d nearly gagged from the reek when they showed it to me. There wasn’t anything to be done about the stench.
The room they wanted to lease was all the way on the third floor, up a rickety old staircase that groaned under my feet. It was cramped, old, and grimy with a coffin-size bed that had no mattress, only a quilt over wooden boards. The flimsy door featured wooden bars on both sides.
Ert and Hille were clearly desperate. They didn’t care about my lack of papers, but they wanted a week’s rent in advance and informed me that they would lock me in at night. As the man of the house had put it,It’s not that we think you’ll murder us while we sleep. It’s just safer that way.
I paid them seven dens for one week. The room wasn’t worth half of that, but I didn’t have the heart or the will to argue. As soon as the money exchanged hands, the bakers left me to “settle in.” I took my shoes off my hurting feet, lay down on my new, awful bed, wrapped in a threadbare blanket and instant buyer’s regret, and thought about my options.
Saving Galiene and her daughter was an impulsive decision. It was probably a mistake, but I didn’t regret it. The memory of the dead man’s battered face haunted me like a ghost, but if I had a chance to do it over, I would save them again. Even if this world turned out to be just a book and she and her daughter were only characters, I didn’t want them to suffer and die. That asshole Hreban wouldn’t get to kill them. It was in my power to warn her, I did it, and it was done and over with.
But I couldn’t afford any more impulsive decisions. Not dying was great, but could I come back if my killer dismembered my body? Could I regenerate a cutoff head? What if they killed me, weighed my body down, and threw it into the river like that poor corpse whose cloak I took? Would I just keep coming back to life and drowning over and over, unable to swim to the surface?
What if I were buried? If I was buried in loose soil, I could probably dig myself out. I would likely die a few times from suffocation, but eventually I would claw my way to the surface. But what if they buried me in a coffin? How would I get out? Also, Kair Toren cremated their dead. What if I was cremated?
What if my body was fed to pigs? I had watched a movie where the villain went into great detail about feeding corpses to pigs and not trusting a man who kept more than three pigs. Or was it four? Would I resurrect as sentient pig crap?
I didn’t know, and I did not want to find out. If someone like Hreban got ahold of me and discovered that I was unkillable, he would torture me. That old clichéd saying about a fate worse than death was true in my case.
I wanted to vanish into a secure burrow, like a mouse, and get my bearings, and this tiny room failed to deliver that safety. The door was so old and warped, even I could kick my way through it. My biggest security measure wasn’t that door, it was that damn staircase. It would probably collapse if someone in armor tried to climb it.
Being locked in every night wasn’t amazing either. If the house caught fire, I’d be trapped.
The only way to truly get some security would be to buy or lease my own house and hire soldiers to guard me at night. Besides, trading in information required discretion and a private base. I had to get my own place, the sooner, the better.
I lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, and finally came up with a plan. It wasn’t a good plan. It involved a great deal of risk, and risk was exactly what I was trying to avoid. But if I pulled it off, the payoff would be worth it. I ran through my scheme three times, looking for pitfalls until my brain began to overheat. If I hesitated any longer, I would think myself right out of doing it, so I put my shoes back on and came here to the Three Moons.
Now I had to live through the next twenty minutes and exit in one piece.
The waiter emerged from the back room and walked over to my table. “We have a couple varieties for you to try. Would you like to come with me for samples, tress?”
“Yes.”
I got up and followed him through the door into a hallway. He paused to close the door behind me. I turned left, walked to the third door, and waited for him.
The waiter blinked, chased me down, and opened the door for me. A long stone staircase led down to the cellar. The staircase was steep, and more than one person had broken their limbs, and sometimes their neck, after being pushed down those stairs.
“Lead the way,” I told him.
