into a small storage room and heard the door slam shut behind
them.
Hirehone faced them, hands on hips. “I hope you turn out to
be worth all the trouble you’ve caused!” he told them.
He hid them in a crawlspace beneath the floor of the storage
room, leaving them there for what seemed like hours. It was hot
and close, there was no light, and the sounds of booted feet
tramped overhead twice in the course of their stay, each time
leaving them taut and breathless. When Hirehone finally let them
out again, it was night, the skies overcast and inky, the lights of
the city fragmented pinpricks through the gaps in the boards of
the Forge walls. He took them out of the storage room to a small
kitchen that was adjacent, sat them down about a spindly table,
and fed them.
“Had to wait until the soldiers finished their search, satisfied
themselves you weren’t coming back or hiding in the metal,”
he explained. “They were angry, I’ll tell you-especially about
the killing.”
Teel showed nothing of what she was thinking, and no one
else spoke. Hirehone shrugged. “‘Means nothing to me either.”
They chewed in silence for a time, then Morgan asked, “What
about the Archer? Can we see him now?”
Hirehone grinned. “Don’t think that’ll be possible. There
isn’t any such person.”
Morgan’s jaw dropped. “Then why . . . ?”
“It’s a code,” Hirehone interrupted. “It’s just a way of let-
ting me know what’s expected of me. I was testing you. Some-
times the code gets broken. I had to make sure you weren’t
spying for the Federation.”
“You’re an outlaw,” Par said.
“And you’re Par Ohmsford,” the other replied. “Now finish
up eating, and I’ll take you to the man you came to see.”
They did as they were told, cleaned off their plates in an old
sink, and followed Hirehone back into the bowels of Kiltan
Forge. The Forge was empty now, save for a single tender on
night watch who minded the fire-breathing furnaces that were
never allowed to go cold. He paid them no attention. They passed
through the cavernous stillness on cat’s feet, smelling ash and
metal in a sulfurous mix, watching me shadows dance to the
fire’s cadence.
When they slipped through a side door into the darkness,
Morgan whispered to Hirehone, “We left our horses stabled
several streets over.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the other whispered back. “You
won’t need horses where you’re going.”
They passed quietly and unobtrusively down the byways of
Varfleet, through its bordering cluster of shacks and hovels and
“nally out of the city altogether. They traveled north then along
the Mermidon, following the river upstream where it wound
wlow the foothills fronting the Dragon’s Teeth. They walked
tor the remainder of the night, crossing the river just above its
north-south juncture where it passed through a series of rapids
that scattered its flow into smaller streams. The river was down
at this time of the year or the crossing would never have been
possible without a boat. As it was, the water reached neariy to
the chins of the Dwarves at several points, and all of them were
forced to walk with their backpacks and weapons hoisted over
their heads.
Once across the river, they came up against a heavily forested
series of defiles and ravines that stretched on for miles into the
rock of the Dragon’s Teeth.
“This is the Parma Key,” Hirehone volunteered at one point.
“Pretty tricky country if you don’t know your way.”
That was a gross understatement. Par quickly discovered.
The Parma Key was a mass of ridges and ravines that rose and
fell without warning amid a suffocating blanket of trees and
scrub. The new moon gave no light, the stars were masked by
the canopy of trees and the shadow of the mountains, and the
company found itself in almost complete blackness. Afterabrief
penetration of the woods, Hirehone sat them down to wait for
daybreak.
Even in daylight, any passage seemed impossible. It was per-
petually shadowed and misted within the mountain forests of the
Parma Key, and the ravines and ridges crisscrossed the whole
of the land. There was a trail, invisible to anyone who hadn’t
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