A man with a loose, sweat-stained grey shirt hanging around his malnourished shoulders offered his hand to Renado in the alleyway shadows. Ren grimaced, but clasped the stranger’s greasy skin nonetheless. The man nodded and said, “I’m Darr. As the lovely lady said, I was there, that night. I let fly arrows at Axar’s house.”
Ren nodded. The source had finally surfaced, and the days of sending Asar to walk past this alleyway had paid off. He licked his lips to speak, but was interrupted.
“Don’t think I’m at fault for what came next,” Darr said, shaking his head with the slightest tremble. “I didn’t take any part in the riots.”
“Not to worry,” Ren said. “I won’t hold you at fault for anything. I just want to hear what you know. I was sent to make certain Axar is dead.”
“Sent?” the jittery man questioned. “Who sent you?”
Ren scratched scruffy cheek. “It’s best left unsaid,” he replied. Everyone in Ith seemed to despise magicians. Rightly so, given their experiences with the Mage Kings.
Darr looked away down the alleyway and ran a hand through his unkempt brown hair. He was missing a tooth, Ren realized, when the man ran his tongue along his teeth and turned back to the group of Sheld natives. “A few of my friends stayed to make certain the house burned to the ground,” he said. “They’re all dead now, but they told me true.”
“And where did you go after the attack on the house?” Ren asked, eyeing Karsef. The man’s good hand was fidgeting with his sling as he leaned against a nearby wall.
“There was a woman, you see,” Darr explained. “Lotha. She had documents, and stories: proof that our leaders had been working with a magician, right into the plans of the Kings… After the initial attack, she asked me and some others to go with her. We followed her across the city, as the riot was fuelled and burned and boiled over.”
“Where did you go?”
The man shook his head. “I only went as far as a place near the Pranan’s Hill, in the very heart of the city. There were soldiers everywhere, and fighting, and the booming sounds of the Mage Kings releasing thunderous storms upon the common folk. I turned back, and rightly so. None of the others that were with us have been seen since.”
Ren asked Darr to meet him there again, in a few days’ time, to take him to the point in Pranan’s Hill where he turned back. In the meantime, they needed to establish that Axar’s house was truly gutted, and perhaps spy that very man in the debris. For a coin, Darr gave him detailed directions into the Low Dales, across which Ren and his friends had first arrived in Ith.
Woodro was the first to speak when they marched down one of the hills toward a scorched log frame. “That was a damned inferno, truly.” Several walls were gone without a trace, while beams and planks of walling had collapsed like blackened seaweed around the still-standing shape of the house. A few interior walls looked to be standing still, despite immense scars from fire.
“Some bodies…” Karsef said, as they kicked down a short fencepost to enter the property. He led the way across a thoroughly flattened ditch of tall grass, presumably where the attackers had ringed the house to release arrows upon it. Sure enough, the mercenary led them to two dead men that lay near the rear of the house.
Ren put his boot on one man’s shoulder and broke two arrow shafts as he shoved the rather decayed body onto its back. They had just been left here, for two months at least. The man’s singed clothes were weathered by rain, wind, and sunlight, but he resembled a cook or a kitchen servant.
“Another servant,” Asar said, rising from a crouch next to the other dead body.
“Let’s go inside,” Ren said, quietly. There were no pedestrians or citizens in sight. The nearest signs of civilization were another estate over a mile away. “Carefully.”
The floor boards creaked as they entered a narrow hallway. An awful black scorch on the floor was all that remained of a carpet, while the wooden floorboards near each wall had been washed a little cleaner by recent rainfall. The wall to Ren’s right was absent altogether, reduced to a pile of ash and occasional chunks of singed debris.
Someone’s arm had burned into the surface of an interior wall that still stood, while the charred corpse had sunken half into the floor-boards during the blaze. There were other bodies too, but none of them were recognizable. Axar could be one of them, but there was no way of knowing.
They entered a reduced living room, where only two arms of a scorched chair denoted its purpose. A frame nearby stood around the front door of the house, though the door itself was a triangle of wood that had fallen from its hinges. Ren felt another board sag beneath his weight and moved his foot to a more secure position.
A loud crack echoed the air, followed by a damp wooden groan. Ren spun to watch the floor behind him shudder downward, with Karsef and Asar trying to balance or get to solid footing. With another, deafening pop, the scorched beams gave out and a nearly empty wine-cellar opened up. The two men sprawled through wooden planks and weakened slivers, landing with thuds amongst the debris. Karsef let out a string of curse words, clutching his healing arm close and hunching over.
“Asar,” Woodro called. “Asar, get up.”
Asar reluctantly rose beside Karsef, shoving a blackened table leg off of his shoulder and dusting dirt out of his hair. He wiped blood from his cheek and a spot on the backside of his elbow, but stood to his feet quicker than Karsef.
“Is there any way up?” Ren called down.
Asar nodded. “There’s a staircase over there.”
Renado and Woodro cautiously made their way across the living room, to meet their fallen comrades at the way up. Woodro had to move a thick wooden beam out of the way, to reach the loose-hinged door that allowed entry down. But when they opened it, they didn’t see Asar and Karsef waiting.
“We found something,” one of them called up.
The stairs were more solid than the rest of the house, it seemed, and Ren soon led Woodro down into the dark cellar. Karsef and Asar stood near a hole in the wall. A beam from the living room floor had spilled loose bricks from a shoulder height opening. Woodro picked up a small grey block from the debris. “No mortar,” he said. “Someone hid this hole.”
“There’s a box in there, see?” Karsef asked, leaning toward the opening. Ren shoved the beam out of the way and peered into the opening with him. Sure enough, a dull bronze box was concealed in the opening.
Ren reached in to grab it. There was a solid metal handle, so he grabbed it to pull—and yanked his hand back cursing. “Damn,” he muttered, shaking his hand. He looked at his smallest finger. Just in the meat on the palm side was a pin-prick of bright red blood.
“Did you get bitten?” Karsef asked.
“I don’t know,” Ren said. He looked back into the hole, but nothing could be seen. Gingerly, he sucked the blood off the surface of his finger, and grimaced again. If it had been a stinger, it had got him deep.
He put his hand back on the mouth of the opening, prepared to try again, but then paused. The angle of the hole seemed to be tilted a little. Against his will, a few of his muscles started to tense and stingy sensations broke out across his skin.
“You alright, sir?” Karsef asked.
“I’m not sure,” Ren said. He took a step back from the hole and looked around the room. The abandoned keg in the corner, covered in black soot, seemed a little blurry, and the feeling of dizziness made him blink. “Woodro, get that out of there, carefully.”
“Have a seat,” Karsef said, guiding him to the second step of the wooden staircase. Ren sank down onto the wood, but as soon as he did, he hunched over onto his knees. The ache in his muscles and torso became a clenching pain. He gasped, winded, and groaned. The room was spinning.
“Got it,” Woodro said, heaving the metal case out of the wall and knocking another brick loose.
“Keep it hidden in the street,” Ren muttered, peering up at his men. Karsef was trying to give Ren some water, but he couldn’t even grab it without Karsef’s guiding hand. “We have to get out of…” Renado sagged over to the right, onto Karsef’s knee. He could barely breath as his vision faded, and then everything went black.