Wild card segment 3 (Patreon)

Sparhawk eyed the middle aged man dubiously. Part of him felt it was probably a good idea to just kill the man swiftly and silently and be done with it; he couldn't afford witnesses tonight of all nights while he made his escape from Cimmura. On the other hand, Sparhawk had wanted to interrogate the man, and now he had him.

"Who are you?" Sparhawk asked quietly. "And keep your voice down."

The words the man spoke in reply held no meaning for Sparhawk; a language that wasn't Elenic, Styric, or indeed any other he'd ever heard or, he suspected, heard of. The man's voice shook slightly, and Sparhawk got the feeling the man was possibly as bewildered as everyone else was at his arrival - which was an inconvenience.

Sparhawk didn't like inconveniences, especially not when he needed to escape. He kept the spear pointed at the man, looking back out to the street. When he looked back, rather than the middle-aged man who'd been there before, a dog sat, looking hungry, dirty, and tongue lolling out the side of its mouth. Sparhawk gaped, looking further down the alley, but the dog raised a paw in an awkward gesture and WINKED at him. Then, it turned and took a few steps deeper into the alleyway before looking over its shoulder at him expectantly.

For a moment, Sparhawk reflected on the possibility that he was hallucinating, that in his inattention, he'd been stabbed by a cutpurse and was now deliriously bleeding out on stinking cobbles somewhere. The dog's impatient stamp got him moving, however, and he followed the mutt in bemusement.

Sparhawk's ear told the tale of an approaching pair of soldiers, but the dog seemed unperturbed by this, leading him to the most deeply shadowed part of the alley. It leaned back on its haunches and made a few growled noises, paws waving in gentle gestures, before dropping back to all fours and pawing at the ground, to reveal a door that blended seamlessly into the cobbled alley beneath dirt and grime. Sparhawk hurried in behind the animal, and the door shut behind them both, leaving them in darkness.

Sparhawk's ears strained at the darkness, but it was silent, save for a few clipped words some ten or so feet ahead of him. Then, light shone out, slightly painful to his dark adjusted eyes, to reveal a low ceiling, wide room. A pair of stone frame beds, looking like they were carved from the rock of the room, rested against the far wall, with a trestle table and bench in the center of the room. These too seemed like they had been rough hewn from the stone of the room, and Sparhawk felt more than a little out of his depth. The dog was gone, and the potbellied man stood in its place.

The light made examining the man considerably easier. He stood perhaps a head shorter than Sparhawk, although he had broad shoulders, blunt fingers and thick forearms, the body of a man who had once been well built but aged into fat. His hair was gray at the temples but darker near the back, and thinning to wisps at his crown, while his beard was almost snowy white. Eyes dark enough to make it difficult to discern iris and pupil sat deep set behind crow's feet and beneath a lined forehead, while laugh lines peeked out from behind the edges of his poofy and partly unkempt beard. The fine, reddish brown shirt he wore seemed slightly oversized, like it was an attempt somehow to conceal that the man had gone to fat, with a buttoned collar and exceedingly well crafted, straight stitching, matched only by the intensely blue, more coarse and heavy pants he wore. Bare ankles could be seen past the cuffs of his pant legs but above the edge of his short, almost flat boots, bound up with white cords in a criss cross pattern across black fabric, with the toe and sole of the boots in startlingly white material that was plainly not leather.

The man looked towards the wall, fingers waving and mouth murmuring, then looked back at Sparhawk speculatively. "Can you understand me now?" he asked.

"I can," Sparhawk confirmed. "Now, who are you?"

The man sighed, and answered, "My name is Anthony-" a bizarre sounding set of sounds, Sparhawk thought to himself- "and I am... Well, it appears that whatever force sent me here is charging me for the so-called service."

"Charging you?" Sparhawk asked, confused.

"Extracting payment," the man, Anthony, clarified. "And that payment is, among other things, a year of servitude."

"What do you serve and how are you expected to serve it, then?" Sparhawk demanded, hand tensing on the haft of the spear.

"You misunderstand. I'm not bound to its service. I'm bound to yours." He frowned. "And I would greatly appreciate you not stabbing me with the sharp thing you're holding, thank you. I can't exactly follow orders efficiently when my guts are hanging out of my belly."

"You're not a Styric," Sparhawk announced flatly. "What are you?"

"I'm not precisely local, nor do I know what a 'Styric' is. I'm an American, caucasian, from a city called The Fertile Fields- Huh. It translated that from Spanish? Interesting. Which is its actual meaning, but we say it as 'Las Vegas'-"

"Shut up a moment." Sparhawk watched the man, his mind racing. After a few seconds, the man remaining strictly mute, Sparhawk said, "You said you're constrained to follow my orders."

Anthony nodded, taking a seat on the bench by the table with a tired grunt.

"What could you offer me, then?" Sparhawk demanded. "You seem to be able to turn to a dog, call up rain, and destroy with fire. What else can you do?"

"We literally don't have time to go over the full breadth of my abilities," the man said in a tone that was somewhere between boastful and almost embarrassed. "I'm required to put my abilities at your disposal, though, so maybe if you tell me what you want done, I can tell you how, or if, I can do it."

"I need to be out of the city before dawn," Sparhawk answered. "And it needs to be done without me being seen."

The man grimaced slightly, thinking. "Those guards with the spears?"

"Soldiers, yes." Sparhawk didn't elaborate; he didn't trust the man, but he'd make use of Anthony if he could.

"I can probably get us to the gates, wherever those are, without us crossing streets. Is there a city wall?"

"You don't know?" Sparhawk asked incredulously.

Anthony looked back blandly. "I didn't have much time to map out the city as I was making an unplanned fall from midnight sky into an unfamiliar town," he commented drily. "Rude of me; next time I think I'm going to die from a sudden stop against the ground, I'll be certain to draw a map on the way down."

Sparhawk favored him with an unfriendly stare. "I still haven't decided if you're worth keeping alive yet," he pointed out.

"If you wanted me dead, you wouldn't have held back your spear when I accidentally surprised you," Anthony replied flatly. "And I have to do what you say, so you gain nothing and lose quite a lot by killing me now. Not the least of which is this hideaway here probably disappears and dumps you back in the alley we were in."

"I wondered about how you knew of this hideout," Sparhawk admitted.

"I didn't know of it, I made it," Anthony confirmed. He made a quick gesture with his hands, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and held himself very still. After a few seconds, a ghostly object formed in front of the man and began drifting towards and then through the shuttered door of their hideaway. Sparhawk frowned, waiting impatiently, although Anthony didn't keep him waiting long. After perhaps a minute, Anthony opened his eyes again. "The alley is empty, and it looks like the search has left the immediate area. Now's probably our best chance at getting out while the getting is good."

Sparhawk hummed thoughtfully. "Maybe you could be useful after all."

"Nothing's actually useless. It's just a matter of being clever enough to find a way to use it."

"A dead body makes a good distraction, you realize."

"Only the once." Anthony paused, then asked, "What was your name again?"

"Sparhawk."