Eleventh day after Sun's Height, 30016 DC

Emlyn wanted to examine and discuss the package of papers that the High Priest gave them straight away, but he was disappointed. 'We need to approach this with clear heads,' Tynan said, firmly. 'We'll take a look through in the morning.'

'But we said we'd tell him what we'd decided in the morning!' Emlyn protested.

'He can wait for us, Emlyn. We're doing him a favour, not the other way round.'

All the same, Tynan found time for a few quiet words with Shadow as they walked back through the dark streets to their inn.

'I was right, he's using us,' the elf said, in an undertone that nobody except the ranger heard. 'See the way he had that dossier all prepared?'

'Uh-huh.' Tynan nodded in agreement. 'But in a good cause, it seems. We'll go along with it for now, Shadow. But keep your eyes open.'

'What have I missed?' Tynan asked. He frowned at the piece of parchment he was holding. 'This says that Varturan often accompanies his caravans, and that he typically has only four guards. That sounds… suspiciously easy.'

'I think the parchment you need is this one,' Ensa said dryly, waving it. 'The one that says the halfling has two tame dire tigers.'

That brought an instant hush to the party. 'Two dire tigers?' Tynan asked, incredulously.

'That's what it says. Isn't it a good thing we decided to read this thoroughly? Our friend the High Priest obviously didn't think that this was worth putting in big letters on the first page.'

'We can't fight that,' said Tynan, regretfully. 'Looks like we're going to have to refuse the commission.'

'Does it say how he controls the tigers?' Shadow asked. 'They have handlers, or…?'

'Wait a second, let me check…' Ensa bent back over the High Priest's notes. 'It says… Varturan possesses an amulet of animal handling. He directs them himself, using it.'

'What is an amulet of animal handling?' Ali demanded, petulantly. Ensa glanced up at her. The young acrobat, bored with examining paperwork, had abandoned the others to the sheets of parchment spread out in the center of the room and was perched in the window ledge again, looking out into the street and listening to the conversation inside with half an ear.

'Not entirely sure,' Ensa told her. 'I guess it lets him control animals. I suppose if you tied a speak with animals spell and a command creature to an amulet you might get something of the right sort. It'd be hard to do, though.'

'But without the amulet he wouldn't be in control?' The elf recalled the wizard's attention.

'I shouldn't think so.'

Shadow shrugged. 'Then there's an obvious answer, isn't there? Varturan should cease to possess the amulet.'

'Oh, yes, obvious, isn't it!' said Emlyn, exasperated. 'Are you hoping it's going to disappear into thin air?'

The elf ignored this comment and looked at Tynan, who said, 'Can you do it, Shadow?'

'Where does Varturan live?'

'There was a map somewhere,' said Ensa, looking around. 'Where –? Oh, thanks, Star.' The rat, perched on the edge of the table they were using, had nosed aside a couple of pieces of parchment and dragged out the map from underneath. Ensa moved it to the center of the table and laid it out flat for everyone to see. 'Varturan's got a warehouse down in the docks where the caravan will likely set off from, but he lives uptown.' She pointed with a stubby grey finger.

Shadow nodded. 'I'll go and check it out.'

'Wait…' said Tynan, slowly. The ranger glanced out of the window. Outside puffy white clouds were scudding across the sky, propelled by a brisk breeze. 'You'll be several hours, Shadow?'

'I'd like to watch until I get some idea of who's in the house.'

Tynan nodded. 'But we don't want to waste time while we wait. Which gate did it say the caravan would leave through, Ensa? Toward Shara?' The half-orc nodded, and Tynan continued, 'If we do decide to take this commission, the obvious thing to do is going to be to ambush Varturan's outgoing caravan – with no animals in it to worry about. We don't want to do it in the city, because who knows who might intervene on either side, so it's going to be out on that south road somewhere. But I don't know the road at all. Does anyone…?' He glanced round them all, saw everybody shaking their heads and carried on. 'So I think if Shadow's going to be busy all day then the rest of us should take a little expedition down that way and see if there's anywhere at all suitable as an ambush site. We'll take all our gear; might camp out down there if we take all day over it.'

'What are we going to tell the High Priest?' Ensa asked, sensibly.

'Good thought. Ali, could you run up to the temple of Arcaren and tell him – politely! – that we need a little more time than we thought to investigate the circumstances before we can tell him if we can handle his commission?'

'Sure,' said the acrobat, jumping down into the room. 'Now?'

'Please. Take your stuff, as well, and when you're done head south and meet us on the road.'

Ali grimaced, but obediently shouldered her pack and slipped out of the room. They heard her clattering away downstairs, and Shadow said, 'I'll be off too, then,' and climbed to his feet.

Tynan looked up at him. 'Take care of yourself and don't do anything stupid.'

A well-disposed observer might have imagined that a smile lurked at the back of Shadow's eyes. 'Do I ever?'

'Yes – often!' Tynan retorted, but then relented and grinned. 'We'll see you later.'

'You will,' promised Shadow, and slipped away, wrapping his cloak around himself and shutting the door silently behind him.

'Right,' said Tynan. 'Shall we collect all these papers together?'

Walking down the broad, well-made road with his cousin and Ensa, Emlyn was astonished to realise how much his spirits had risen. Port Suthard's main streets had been full of hurrying people, and although Emlyn enjoyed looking around him and watching what was going on, it was hardly what he would call comfortable. Out to the south of the city, the road cut its way through gentle hills that were rising up ahead of him to become the mountains of Shara, and around him in the sloping fields the wheat was just ripening from green into gold. Sun and shadows chased each other across the fields, and the tall wheat itself swayed and bowed in the wind, rippling and moving like water. It reminded Emlyn of his home – although it was strange not to have the salty tang of the sea in his nostrils.

He looked across at his companions and smiled, and Ensa smiled back. Like Emlyn, the wizard was glad to be free of the city. Like other human-dominated cities, Port Suthard was tolerant of half-orcs, but Ensa had caught a few shocked or frightened glances from passers-by, and she knew it was no coincidence that even on the most crowded street she was never jostled or pushed aside. Maybe I should head back north, where people are more used to… well, to people like me, she thought. But why should I have to? I didn't ask to be what I am.

Emlyn had no idea what Ensa was thinking, but he saw that she looked preoccupied so he nudged her to get her attention before flicking his head forwards at Tynan. The ranger, whose easy strides had carried him ahead of his two companions, had his head twisted upwards as he walked along, watching a large bird circling high above the road. Emlyn grinned. He remembered a long ago summer when Tynan had visited Goldisle and the two boys had discovered a mouse building its nest in the corner of the Top Field. Emlyn – who couldn't have been as much as ten years old – had soon got bored and wandered away, but the teenage Tynan had lain on his stomach in the grass for hours, just watching the little creature.

'What are you smiling about?' the ranger asked, suspiciously. He didn't get an answer; for some reason the information that Tynan was a lot more alert than he looked sent Emlyn into whoops of laughter.

Ensa hit him gently. 'Ignore him,' she told Tynan, loftily. 'Mere childishness.'

'Hey!' Emlyn pushed Ensa across the road. 'You're a fine one to talk, grandma!'

Ensa drew herself up sniffishly. 'I am deeply wounded by your unfounded accusation… you know, this would be a lot easier if you weren't so much taller than me.' She pulled a face up at Emlyn. 'It's so hard to get the proper air of superiority.'

'How old are you, anyway?' Emlyn asked, and Tynan laughed, waving a finger at his young cousin reprovingly.

'Now, now, Emlyn, don't you know better than to ask a lady her age?'

'You asked Ali,' Emlyn reminded him.

Tynan grinned at him. 'There's an obvious answer to that, which in Ali's absence I'll refrain from.'

'I heard that!' Ali's clear voice called from behind them, and they all turned to see the young acrobat approaching from the direction of the city. Once she saw that they'd noticed her the fair girl grinned and threw herself into a series of flips to land neatly in the middle of the little group, slightly flushed and off balance. 'That's harder with my backpack on,' she remarked, brushing grit and dirt off her hands.

'Unsurprisingly,' Ensa told her.

Ali ignored the half-orc, looking at Tynan. 'What are we doing?' she asked, cheerfully.

'At the moment, not a great deal. What we are supposed to be doing is scouting out along this road for potential ambush sites.'

'Right.' Ali grinned and bounced off up ahead. Ensa and Tynan followed, but Emlyn dragged behind, suddenly frowning.

Tynan glanced at his cousin's face, and then slipped back to walk beside him. 'What's wrong?'

Emlyn sighed. 'I don't like it. I know that this Varturan's a criminal, but… if I understood you and Shadow right, then we're going to try and rob him and then ambush him. It just doesn't seem…'

'Fair?' asked Tynan, dryly.

Emlyn shook his head. 'Not exactly. I was going to say, honest.'

Tynan nodded, dark eyes considering. 'I know what you mean, Emlyn. But think about it – if we took on Varturan and his people – and his tigers – in a straight fight, then we'd lose. There's no question of it. It's likely that we'd be killed or badly injured, and I won't have that. I'm damned well going to get all of us through alive. We should go back to the High priest and tell him it's too much for us – but I want to stop Varturan, Emlyn. That kind of cruelty – exploiting animals for profit, and not even treating them right, like they can't even be bothered if they lose them – really makes me angry. So if I have to go about it in this underhand way, but it lets me stop him, which I otherwise couldn't do, then I'm fine with it.'

'I know,' said Emlyn, impatiently. 'I understand all that, and I can see it's probably the only way, but… I just don't like it, all right?'

Tynan gave him a rueful smile. 'You don't have to. I don't think Ensa's up in the heavens about it, either.'

'What about Ali?'

Tynan raised his eyebrows. 'Well,' he said, cautiously, 'I suspect that she either doesn't mind or she hasn't thought about it at all. I mean… she doesn't look bothered, does she?' They both looked forwards to where the acrobat, full of energy, was just dashing around a corner of the road and out of sight.

'Well, no –' Emlyn began, and broke off as the person in question gave an unintelligible shout from the distance. 'Oh, no, what's she up to now?'

Fortunately for their peace of mind, Ali hadn't managed to get herself into any kind of trouble. Where she had stopped, the road swung round between two hills in a kind of sunken lane. Tynan checked as soon as he saw it, looking at the ground either side of the hill with a measuring eye, but Emlyn and Ensa carried on, looking at Ali's discarded pack lying on the side of the road and wondering where the acrobat had got to.

'Up here!' Beside the road was a large boulder, set half into the hillside and looming over the road. From its top, ten feet above the packed earth surface of the road, Ali waved cheerfully.

'How did you get up there?' Tynan asked, amused.

'Climbed. But I needn't have bothered.' Ali jerked her thumb over her shoulder. 'It's really easy to get up from behind – just three or four feet to scramble and you're up.'

'Well, come down, and let's talk things over,' Tynan ordered. 'Ali's right,' he said, turning to the others, 'this looks like a good spot. Ensa, if you've got some ranged spells prepared then you could sit on top of that boulder and fire them off, and the only thing you'd have to worry about would be arrows.'

Ensa smiled faintly at the ranger's description of her 'firing off' her spells, but nodded. A slithering sound followed by a light thump heralded Ali's descent from the boulder, and she joined the group, brushing down her clothes.

'Right, Ali,' Tynan said. 'I saw that you carry a bow, but can you use a sword at all?'

'No,' said Ali, promptly. 'But I'm a fantastic shot, if that helps.'

'Well, you'd better shoot then,' Tynan said. 'You've a shortbow, haven't you – one of those Sharan-style composites?'

'Yeah, that's right. Fifty-five pound draw.'

'Fifty-five?' Tynan was sidetracked. 'That's pretty powerful for someone your age.'

'I know. It's like I said – no one has muscles like a dancer. Or an acrobat.' Ali grinned smugly.

'Right. I only asked, because with a shortbow – what's the string length, three and a half feet?'

'Bit less.'

'Well, I think you should join Ensa up on that boulder.' Tynan nodded at it. 'Since you like climbing so much. But you'll be able to kneel down and shoot that thing, and duck out of sight if you have to. It won't get in your way like a longbow would.'

'Sure thing.' Ali grinned. 'So I guess you won't be joining us up there with your stick, then?'

'No.' Tynan smiled. 'If you're as good a shot as you say you are, Ali, I'd only make a fool of myself, because I've never been above average. Emlyn and I are going to have to hold the front line.' He glanced up at his cousin. 'That all right?'

Emlyn nodded. 'I don't know what else I could do.'

'I think we could conceal ourselves somewhere on the other side of the road.' Tynan strolled over to have a look at the uneven, grassy hillside. 'Behind that earth mound is the obvious place, see it? It's a bit further back from the road than I like, but at least that'll mean it won't be so important if we make a noise. Ali and Ensa are going to have to lie on top of that boulder and be absolutely still and silent.'

Ali groaned. 'It's all right. I can do it,' she said, heroically.

'This is all hypothetical so far,' Ensa reminded her. 'We might still have to call the whole attack off.'

'Yes, where's Shadow got to?' Emlyn demanded. 'It must be hours since he left, because we didn't exactly hurry.'

'You're right; we can't really plan any more until he gets here,' Tynan said. 'Let's dive off the road to one side and set up camp. Shadow will find us.'

The light had thickened into the deep gold of a summer dusk before Shadow arrived, slipping silently into their little camp.

'What's the verdict?' Tynan asked.

'Yes. And you'll want to know – a caravan is setting out tomorrow. Three ox carts, their drivers, two additional guards, and Varturan.'

'Tomorrow?' Tynan bit his lip. 'That doesn't give us very long.'

'It's no good waiting, though,' Ensa pointed out. 'According to what the High Priest gave us, if Varturan goes out on a caravan now he might not be back until near Winter's Gate.'

Tynan frowned. 'I don't like to be rushed like this. We need more time to plan.' He looked up at Shadow. 'It'll be you most danger falls on. Have you got time?'

The elf nodded. 'I'm going back now.'

Ensa frowned. 'Wait – what if Varturan doesn't come, or even cancels the caravan, when he knows he's lost the amulet?'

'We stop whatever comes through, and if Varturan's not there then we apologise and let them carry on without hurting them,' Tynan said. 'And then we hand it over to the High Priest and the guards. That's not what's worrying me.'

'I'll be back with the amulet before the caravan comes through,' Shadow said. 'So you know I managed it. It's meant, Tynan – a caravan setting off as soon as we're ready for it.'

Tynan pressed his lips together, looking as though he was suppressing a sharp retort. 'If you really want to go through with it, then I suppose we can manage. Good luck.' He gripped Shadow's shoulder.

'And Lady's favour on you.' Shadow's hand closed firmly over Tynan's for an instant, and then the elf turned and disappeared into the gathering dusk.