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why Gorion wanted you to come with him to meet us.”
    “My father was a monk,” Abdel said, “a priest, a man of letters and such. What could he have been caught up in that would set such forces against him? What are you people about?”
    Abdel was growing angry again. He hadn’t been able to blame the mercenaries for Gorion’s death. Those men were just doing what he himself had done all his adult life. Someone had paid them, and it took real money to hire five experienced killers for a wilderness ambush.
    “There are … forces,” Jaheira said, her voice barely audible in the crowded room, “who want to bring war.”
    A comely servant girl set down two pints of ale. Abdel kept his eyes on Jaheira as he downed his, again in one swallow.
    “So what else is new?” he asked sarcastically. “I’ve made a living from one ‘force’ or another wanting war. It’s what people do.”
    Jaheira was sincerely confused by his last statement, but when she turned a questioning gaze on her husband, Abdel knew she was asking something else, something more important and more frightening to her. Khalid nodded, and Jaheira turned back to Abdel.
    “This is different,” she said, her voice even quieter, and Abdel had to strain to hear her. “This is your bro—”
    A glass bottle disintegrated against the back of Abdel’s head, and Jaheira had to flinch away from the shards of glass. Abdel didn’t bother to wipe the residual wine off the back of his head or pick the glass from his black hair. He stood up and turned, and the crowd parted as if they were puppets attached to his joints. At the door, a far throw away, was the man who’d been dragged out by the three gnome guards. The chair thrower.
    The big, stinky man was so drunk he could barely stand. Abdel stared hard at him, and the world around him seemed to slip away into blurred, echoing inconsequence.
    Abdel heard only the drunk, who said bluntly, “What.”
    The sellsword’s dagger flashed across the room like a sliver from a lightning bolt, and Abdel’s blood rushed through his head at the heavy thunk of the wide silver blade burying itself in the drunk’s chest. The force of it knocked the man over, and though he twitched once, then a second time, he was dead before his head hit the floor.
    Abdel smiled and let the ecstasy of the kill wash away the anger and tunnel vision. When he came out of whatever trance it was he’d found himself in, it was as if the inn had plunged into pandemonium.
    Khalid pushed him from behind and said something like, “What have you done?”
    Inn patrons scattered, and serving wenches dropped their trays, spattering ale and wine over the fleeing or stunned revelers. Strangely, the serving girls advanced on Abdel, and he thought for a moment that it might be true what they said—that the serving girls here were really golems in disguise. Abdel smiled broader still. He didn’t care.
    “Wait!” called a familiar voice.
    The gnome woman at the bar let out a shrill whistle, and the serving girls stopped. Even Abdel paused as he went for the sword at his back. The voice had been Montaron’s.
    “Thief!” the halfling called again.
    Montaron was kneeling over the body of the drunk and producing one purse after another from the dead man’s pants.
    “He must have been picking pockets all ni—here’s mine!” Montaron said, his voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear.
    “Fortunate for you,” Khalid whispered to a still uncaring Abdel. “It would have been murder otherwise.”
    Gooseflesh whispered up the backs of Abdel’s arms at the sound of that word: murder. He shook his head and approached the halfling, Khalid and Jaheira following closely.
    “We’d better be goin’,” Montaron said when Abdel was close enough that only he could hear the halfling’s whisper.
    “Aye,” Abdel said. “My dagger.”
    Montaron smiled weakly and handed the wide-bladed knife to Abdel. No blood dripped from it, though Abdel didn’t even