the Deadliest Game (1998) by Clancy Tom - Net Force Explorers 02

Author:Clancy, Tom - Net Force Explorers 02 [02, Clancy, Tom - Net Force Explorers]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-17T20:24:15+00:00

"Surely," Wayland said after a moment. "Why not?"

"Somewhere quiet."

"You know the Scrag End down in Winetavern Street? Between the second and third walls, going sunward from the gates."

"The place with the beehive outside it? Yeah."

"After dark, then?"

"Fine. Two hours after sunset be all right?"

"Fine." Wayland straightened up from his work. "Well, then, youngster..."

Leif raised a hand in casual farewell, and walked away through the market, looking idly at the few things still laid out on the stalls: bolts of cloth, a last few tired-looking cheeses.

He was glad to have run into Wayland. The man was a noticing type, worth knowing. Leif had known him for quite a while, since his first battle in Sarxos after picking up the healing-stone. They had in fact met in a field hospital, since farriers, skilled with hot metal and the cautery, were much in demand on battlefields where magic-workers couldn't be found. Wayland had been surprisingly gentle with the men he had been treating, for all that the treatment itself was brutal. He missed little of the detail of what was going on around him, and had a phenomenal memory. At the moment, Leif was glad of the possibility to talk over Sarxonian matters with someone besides Megan. A variety of viewpoints never hurt.

He wandered back out in the direction of the cookshop. And his heart jumped inside him as someone tapped his shoulder from behind.

He spun away from the tap, as his mother had taught him, and came around with his hand on his knife.

It was Megan.

She gave Leif a wry look. "I thought you said you were going to meet me inside the cookshop."

"Oh...sorry. I got distracted. I ran into somebody I knew."

"You mean you haven't been in to pig out on the chili yet?"

His stomach abruptly growled. "Chili," he said.

Megan grinned. "Come on," she said--and then paused at the sound of a voice raised in peculiar song on the other side of the market stalls.

"What the frack is that?" Megan said. The voice was accompanying itself on something very like a ukelele.

Now I will sing of the doleful maid,And a doleful maid was she,Who lost her love to the merman's childIn the waves of the great salt sea--The owner of the voice, if you could call it that, came wandering out among the awnings and the tables, trailed by the raucous laughter and catcalls of some of the stall-keepers as the song got ruder. Its source was the dwarf in the noisy motley. He paused by one of the stalls, a fruit stall in the process of being packed up, and began strumming rather atonal chords one-handed, while trying to snatch pieces of fruit with the other. The fruit-seller, a big florid woman with a walleye, finally lost her temper and hit the dwarf over the head with an empty basket. He fell over, picked himself up again, and scampered away, laughing a nasty little high-pitched laugh reminiscent of a cartoon cockroach.

Megan stared after him. "What was that?" Leif said to the fruit-seller.

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