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who wasn’t even in the room?”
    Danthres rubbed the bridge of her nose between her index finger and thumb. “We’ve been at this all day. Let’s have graybeard up there get a detail together to remove the body and let Olaf have his inn back.” She looked up the stairs at the now-open door to Room 12. “This better not be magic. I hate magic.”

Two
    T he smell of dead fish, salt water, and sweat combined to cheer Horran as he walked along the Docklands of Cliff’s End. For the first time in years, he was back on day patrol.
    He strolled down the northernmost part of the dock, nodding to the shipmasters and dockworkers he knew—which was most of them—and observing the loading of crates, the off-loading of more crates, the casting off of fishing boats, the arguing over payments, and the embarkation of passengers. More than one commented on his now being on the day shift.
    “So,” Abo, the first mate of the Breeze, asked when Horran passed by that vessel, “who’d you blow to get the cushy shift?”
    “Blow, hell. Eleven years, Abo. Eleven years working this place at night. I earned the damned cushy shift.”
    “Aw, c’mon, Horran, you’re gonna miss breakin’ up brawls at the Dancing Seagull.”
    “Yes, because I live to stop drunken sailors from pounding other drunken sailors.”
    “Careful with that thing!” Abo yelled at one of his sailors, who was struggling with a crate. “Drop that, and it’s garnished from your wages.”
    “You don’t pay your sailors enough to garnish anything.”
    Abo grinned. “That’s their problem. Anyhow, I’m gonna miss you breakin’ up brawls at the Seagull. You’re the one who pried that gnome off my ass last year. Couldn’t sit for a week.”
    “When do you get to sit?”
    The grin widened. “At the Seagull when I drink.”
    “Well, tonight, the drinks’re on me, because the only reason I’m going into that place now is to hoist one after my shift, not arrest a third of the sailors on this damn dock for drunk and disorderly, another third for assault and battery, and the rest of you for graft and trafficking of illegal goods. Now I can just watch you load and unload, feel the sun on my face, smell the day’s catches come noontime, and actually sleep at night.”
    “Bet you five coppers you’re bored shitless in a month.”
    Horran couldn’t imagine that happening—but then it was only his first day. Still and all, he said, “It’s a bet.”
    After he and Abo shook on it, he noticed a sound that was completely out of place.
    Abo apparently noticed it, too. “What the hell’s that?”
    The guard’s eyes widened. “That’s plate armor. Some idiot’s walking around in full plate armor.” He put a gloved hand on Abo’s shoulder. “This I need to check out. Catch you at the Seagull tonight?”
    “Drinks’re really on you? Damn right, I’ll be there.” Abo turned back to see that the sailor was stumbling again. “Dammit, what did I just tell you?”
    Chuckling, Horran moved toward the distinctive clanking of armor on wood, which seemed to be coming from the vicinity of where the Esmerelda was docked. He couldn’t believe anyone was that stupid. While a full suit of armor was very useful if you were riding a horse to face your enemy on an open field, on the open sea it would serve only to guarantee that you would sink to the bottom and drown if you fell overboard.
    Sure enough, a good-sized man wearing plate armor was approaching the gangplank that led to the Esmerelda . “Ho, Captain Zaile! I am prepared to depart!” The Esmerelda was primarily a cargo ship that covered the assorted islands on the Garamin, but Horran knew that the ship’s master, Zaile, would sometimes take on a passenger or two if he had a light load.
    Zaile himself, a stooped old man with a thick gray beard and thicker gray hair, came down the gangplank to meet the armored fellow. “That’s what you’re wearing, eh?”
    “Of course. If I am to slay Chalmraik the