Armoria was a city of taverns. A place fuelled by alcohol and song, by the beckoning warmth of hearth fires and the colourful stories told around them. How then, Vanth wondered miserably, had she ended up at the Star of Armoria, a place it was said even the parasite-riddled keuhogs avoided.

  Only a week previously, Vanth had kept a room at the Bard’s Rest. Margie, the innkeeper, always insisted she liked having a Salt Sword about the place. It made her feel safe. Not that Vanth believed Margie would ever need her help to fend off the more violent punters. The woman was a wall of muscle and flesh, as wildly beautiful as she was intimidating. Not surprisingly, the innkeeper had survived despite the utter destruction of her establishment. Vanth knew it would be rebuilt eventually but for now, her rather dour surroundings could not be further from the clean, bright room she was accustomed to.

  Vanth would rather have been at the Mermaid’s Purse or even the genteel and rather more expensive Dancing Crayfish, but all the taverns of the Bard’s Quarter were filled to bursting by the newly homeless.

  She didn’t need the room; she had perfectly adequate quarters back at the Obsidian Citadel, but despite the astonishing luxury of a locking door, they did not provide her with the privacy she craved. Namely, she was unable to bring in outside guests and if caught doing so, would certainly be punished. A Salt Sword should be setting an example to the rest of Armoria’s rabble. Instead, Vanth spent her off-hours knocking boots with a bard and routinely getting so drunk she often woke in the early hours of the morning with her head hanging over a fountain, knuckles red and bruised from a fist-fight she barely remembered.

  Thunder rolled overhead, punctuating a relentless sweep of hard rain that flooded the streets below Vanth’s window and lashed against the glass. From her vantage point on the wide and rather grimy window ledge, she could just make out the entrance to the Wool and Cloth Merchants Association. It was a tatty door, set back into the wall with only one small lantern hanging from the lintel, flickering restlessly in the wind. Someone was furtively slipping inside, the hood of their thick wool cloak pulled up against the rain. Vanth watched them with idle curiosity. The Salt Swords had long suspected the Wool and Cloth was merely a front for some shady enterprise. They certainly kept strange business hours.

  Behind her, Barlo was tangled in a mess of warm sheets. His hair had fallen across his face, his lips gently parted as he snored. Vanth shifted to look at him, wincing when fresh pain flared along the length of her right leg. The druids’ poultices and pungent salves were certainly effective, but sitting for so long beside the cold damp of the window had made the tender muscles pull taught and stiff once more.

  “You shouldn’t be sitting like that, all hunched up,” Barlo said, his voice heavy with sleep. “Your leg needs to rest on something soft.” He patted the mattress beside him. “Come back to bed, Vanth. Allow me to speed up the healing process.”

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  “I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “Who could sleep through this interminable weather?” He scowled in the direction of the window. “Perhaps I should follow the changelings to Kaelunis. I could be sleeping on a bed of warm sand right now, with the sweet caress of stars for a blanket.”

  “You’d probably wake to find a fangcrab in your underwear.”

  Vanth smiled to herself, imagining Barlo leaping about the beach with a fangcrab hanging from his breeches. Then a new thought occurred to her and the smile faded.

  “You’re not really considering leaving the city, are you?” She pushed herself further back against the softly rotting window frame as Barlo’s chest visibly expanded and a grin spread across his face.

  “You’d miss me, would you?”

  “I would soon replace you,” Vanth said quickly, fervently wishing she had not spoken her thoughts aloud. Lack of sleep was making her foolish. “But it would be a tiresome task, finding another I was willing to share my bed with on idle nights.”

  “Not many would consent to spend their idle nights in a hole like this, either. I hope when you do replace me, you offer the poor bloke a more romantic environment. Clean sheets would be nice. Maybe even a room without rat droppings swept into the corners or mould blooming across the ceiling.”

  Vanth didn’t reply. She turned back to the rain-lashed night beyond the window, absently drumming the fingertips of one hand on the glass.

  “I do not plan to leave,” Barlo eventually said, lifting the silence stretching out between them. “My home is here. My friends, my work. Lord Dewer will not chase me from the Bard’s Quarter.”

  “I do not believe Dewer released that monster on purpose.” Vanth spoke so softly, Barlo had to sit up in bed and lean closer to hear her. “He talked of re-capture, not capture, as though its release was a mistake. What if there are more?”

  “Gwin says there are.”

  “Yes. Gwin says many things.”

  Vanth bit her bottom lip hard enough to draw blood as she thought back to her conversation with the Asrai at the Leafling’s Half.

  “I saw Gwin yesterday, in Midnight Square. She’s no longer looking to create this changeling army of hers.”

  “Well, how can she? Now they’re fleeing the city?”

  “That was not her reason, Vanth.”

  Fresh silence descended. Vanth shivered, pulling the blanket laid over her shoulders tighter across her chest. Her gaze briefly flickered to her clothes, discarded on the floor hours earlier. She badly wanted to climb down from the window ledge and get dressed in the warm, comforting leather of her Salt Sword uniform, but the stiff ache in her leg made her pause.

  Barlo began to move agitatedly in the bed, tired of being ignored. Finally, he threw the sheets aside and stood naked in the dark, stumbling about the room until he came upon the one small, cheap lantern the inn had been kind enough to supply. He lit it quickly and began searching the room again, this time ducking beneath the bed to retrieve the half-bottle of rum that had rolled to a stop there. Making no attempt to disguise his nakedness before the dull light of the lantern, Barlo turned to Vanth and presented the bottle like a hard-won trophy.

  “Enough of this dour talk,” he said. “We have a roof over our heads on a most inclement night and enough drink left to share. Let us be grateful for that, at least.”