assumed I was—too insignificant for them to take notice of me. I had lived like a flea on the carcass of their town and they had given me the attention a flea merits. Until about half an hour ago. And now I was sharing a room with the most wanted man in Cresdon and his conspicuously homicidal side-kicks.
To cheer myself up I tried to sit next to the girl, Renthrette, who I figured was one of their girlfriends. It seemed fairly sure that I could make her like me for my wit if not for my physique, but, for the moment at least, she was doing a pretty convincing job of ignoring me completely. I found myself sharing a box with Orgos, the one who had sneered at me for being a petty criminal and then committed about half a dozen capital offenses in as many seconds. I looked at the girl for comfort and it cheered me up a little until I felt her acid eyes upon me. I gave her my long-practiced winning smile, but she met it with a look that would have leveled a small building and turned her back on me.
God, what a fiasco.
The four of them pumped me for information about myself. I repeated what I had told them already: who I was, where I lived, why I was running from the Empire, etc. I talked, gripped as I was both by fear of the Empire showing up at any moment and by fear of what this band of cutthroats would do to me if I didn’t humor them. Perhaps I could bolt for the door when they weren’t looking, get out and tell the first patrol I could find that I could hand them Mithos; that would get me off Whatever charges were leveled at me, wouldn’t it? Orgos laid his massive sword across his knees and watched me. Absently, he tested the edge with his thumb, his eyes on mine.
I gave up the idea of running. For the moment.
After I had finished my rather meager and somewhat edited life story and declared all I owned in the world (now down to four silver pieces, a single copper coin, the clothes I stood up in, and two bits of lead), Mithos motioned us into the corridor, out of earshot of the struggling innkeeper, and addressed the group. The bar was silent and there was no sign of other soldiers.
“We have no choice but to leave. We can handle three light foot patrolmen easily enough, but they’ll have a platoon of hoplites after us within the hour. We must get out of Cresdon and quickly, or else we’d have to lie low for some time. And since we have an appointment in Stavis in less than three weeks, that gives us no time to hide from the Empire here. It will take at least a week of hard traveling to reach Stavis, so I suggest we move now, before the alarm has been raised.”
“What about me?” I demanded, made angry by my panic. At the moment I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: the grinding judicial system of the Empire and the savages I was rooming with. I couldn’t decide which prospect was more terrifying.
“You will have to come with us,” Mithos replied with a dissatisfied look in his dark eyes and a sigh in his voice.
“What? He’s a child!” exclaimed the girl. “He will get us all killed! At best he’ll slow us down and risk exposing us. And if he decides to turn us in, what then?”
“He won’t,” said Mithos grimly. It wasn’t so much a vote of confidence as a threat, and I recognized it as such. “You need us, Master Hawthorne,” he said with a half-smile. “And we can’t take the chance of leaving you behind to inform on us. If that offends you, consider us your ticket out of Cresdon. Your crime is a small one, but the Empire would brand you a rebel for it, and you know how they love to make examples of rebels. How many of the bodies that hang from the basilica gibbets are rebels, and how many are shopkeep ers, blacksmiths, and actors who the Empire decided were rebels?”
“I try not to concern myself with politics,” I muttered, trying to stop my hands from trembling. He had a knack of saying all the things I didn’t want to think about and making them sound even worse than I had