How Black the Sky

track better if I stop seeing your faces, so please don't be offended, but I'm just going to address Mrs... um, Scythia. Or is it Mrs. Cleaver?"
"Faces?" Axebourne said.
"You make some wonderfully entertaining faces, Axebourne my love," Scythia said with a tiny smile.
The Cleaver blinked and shrugged, gesturing with an open hand that Pierce should go ahead.
"So Murkfathom opens into a waterfall that runs down the jagged mountains east of the Testadel, which I didn't really know, but I do now," Pierce continued, keeping his eyes on Scythia. "So be careful if you ever go that way, 'cause some of it's jagged, like I said. Saw some bodies that got real cut up. I mean, I guess they did, 'cause I just saw skeletons stuck on the rocks.
"So anyway, I rode the falls down until I could go on foot, and headed down out of the mountains. I wasn't going to try for Testadel, but after I killed a father dogran -"
Axebourne opened his mouth to say something, but Scythia put a hand over his and he shut it.
"- the mother and pups chased me into the Deadhedge and I had to go through to the other side."
"But why would you have to kill..." Scythia began, then said, "never mind.  Go on."
"My food got wet," Pierce said. "I had to steal the heinoushog the father dogran had just hunted down so I could eat." He took a long draught off his mead. Just thinking back to all of it was exhausting.
"Why not just go hunting?" said someone from a nearby table. Pierce turned toward an older man with tufty white hair.
"Too much work," Pierce said. "Dograns don't run away." He turned back to Scythia.
"So Testadel's back gate was open since you're supposed to die in the Deadhedge maze anyhow, so I went in that way - had to. And this forgemaster sees me and says, 'You came in the back? You're too nuts to rat out - I'd rather see what happens to you. You can come on in if you promise not to kill me.'"
"Wait," came a voice from behind Pierce. He turned to look. It was one of the seatless merchants. He had a crazy accent. Was he an eastern cliff-dangler?  "But how you did make it through Deadhedge?"
"Oh," said Pierce, craning his neck to address the man. "It's the armor - puncture enchantment. They can pierce almost anything unenchanted, but the arsenic barbs on the hedge couldn't poke me to poison me." He turned back to Scythia. "So I watched where the forgemaster went, but I pretended I was heading into the dungeons. He didn't look back again, and I followed him up into the smithy."
"But you're supposed to go to the dungeons," said a patron from another table. "That's how you get the tribute for your band." Pierce turned toward the man.
"Yeah but I wanted something special, remember?" he said. "I kept thinking about all the things they make up in the smithy that don't make it down to the dungeons and I thought, 'Would I send the coolest thing I've ever made down to the dungeon to be a weapon for some cliff-licking painreaper?" Pierce turned toward the merchant with the cliff-dangler accent and said, "No offense."
The man made a puzzled face.
"So right before the forgemaster went into his forge he noticed me and said, 'Really? Is it because I said something?' So I grabbed him by the apron, picked him up, shoved him into the forge, and made him close the door."
"Wait," came another voice. The barkeep. "Aren't forgemasters made eight feet tall?"
"Yeah," said Pierce, glancing over his shoulder.
"And they weigh over half a ton?" said the barkeep.
"Yes sir, far as I can tell," said Pierce. He turned back to Scythia. "So he begged me while I had my blast gauntlet to his chin and I said, 'Gimme your best sword and I'll let you live.' Which of course I was already gonna do since he'd let me in, as long as he didn't raise the alarm."
"And that's the sword there in your scabbard?" said a woman from another table. "Well come on, let us see it!"
Pierce shook his head. "No, he didn't have any swords. He only made dust for light enchantments. So he told me that, and I put him down and asked him where the sword-makers were, and he told me. I was about to leave him behind and he said, 'But hey, I made this dust. The Overseer couldn't even stand to look at it. She told me to throw it away, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Have you ever seen this color before?' He pulled a vial out of his apron and it was the most beautiful dust I've ever seen."
People all across the tavern started guessing, Pierce thought probably according to their favorite colors. No one guessed right until Scythia.
"Blue," she said, and everyone else shut up. "It was for blue light."
Pierce nodded. "So he gave it to me, made me promise not to tell anyone where it came from if I got captured, but the painreapers never ended up asking anyway."
Axebourne had held his tongue for too long. He shook his head."No, no, no. You did not get caught by the painreapers and escape."
Pierce pulled down the top of his right ear to show Axebourne the point where the painreapers had inserted their harvesting needle. There was an angry red scab there, the size of a nail head.
Someone whistled lowly.
"It was stupid. I didn't listen through the doorway before I left the forgemaster's room. There was a patrol just coming up the stairwell as I started going down, and there was nowhere else to run. They got me. So the reapers kept trying to get information out of me, but I don't have a clan, or a merc band, yet,  and I'm not a mage, so I really didn't have anything they wanted, and after a while they started leaving me alone in my