Krunzle the Quick by Unknown

Chapter One: Honest Travelers
    It was a good plan, cunningly simple. It just didn’t go the way the planner had meant it to.
    A caravan from Egorian arrived in the late afternoon at the heavily fortified caravanserai just outside the walls of Elidir. The merchants who had pooled their resources—and defenses—into the cavalcade of fifty mule-drawn wagons and forty pack animals intended to remain at the way station until the following midday so that they could pick over the best offerings of Elidir’s purveyors of precious goods. Those exquisitries would be added to the caravan’s panniers and coffers that already bulged with fine wares from half a dozen lands around the Inner Sea. Then at noon the next day, the caravan would move on, bound for the luxury markets of Kerse in Druma.
    While the hauling and carrying beasts rested and the traders chaffered, safe within the caravanserai’s crenellated walls, half of the sixteen-strong complement of horse-archers were granted leave to visit the city’s taverns and brothels, while the half who had lost the coin toss stayed behind and remained vigilant.
    Three of the liberty contingent went no farther than a raucous and crowded establishment just inside the city gates, where they called for a keg of strong ale. While they were waiting for the drink to be fetched, they bellied up to the board stretched along one wall and filled wooden plates with bread and meats spiced with the fiery local sauces. They looked around for seats and saw no empty tables, only one long trestle that had half its bench-seats unfilled.
    A trio of travelers were already seated at the table, by their style of dress identifiable as a small-scale merchant and his assistants. The former good-naturedly waved the guards to take the empty places. A lean, saturnine figure seated at the head of the table, wearing a robe marked with obscure symbols, gave no indication that he was aware of any of them. His blade-like nose was buried in an antique libram bound in red leather and marked with strange devices, and he sipped something green from a tall, slim glass without removing his hooded eyes from the page.
    The guards accepted the travelers’ invitation. They sat, and names and origins were politely exchanged, then the ale arrived and some time was spent washing away the throat-dust accumulated between Egorian and Elidir. The merchant then leaned forward and raised a finger as if to begin a conversation, but was forestalled by the man in wizard’s garb, who put down his book and directed a question to the guards.
    “Your caravan leaves when?”
    “Midday tomorrow,” the senior of the archers answered.
    “Will it take on passengers?”
    “We usually do. You’ll have to ask the head men at the caravanserai in the morning.”
    The spellslinger nodded and, without thanking the guard, returned to his reading. A moment later, the first course of his meal was brought by the serving girl, and he addressed himself to the food without removing his gaze from the book.
    Meanwhile, the leader of the trio of merchants, who said he was a pearlmonger from Merab across the Inner Sea, and now bound for Kerse, asked about road conditions ahead. Because the guards had accompanied similar caravans along this route, they were able to offer expert advice.
    The self-described pearl merchant, a small and wiry fellow with a narrow brow and eyes that seldom settled in one position, said, “It is good that honest travelers share their intelligence. The roads are full of highwaymen and ditch-haunters, desperadoes all of them, who will slit a throat for a half-polished button.”
    The senior man of the archers agreed that it was a sad world, yet not altogether so. “Were it not for bandits and brigands, I would still be pushing a plow and swallowing horse farts in the hill country below the Menadors, instead of seeing other lands and drinking good ale in amiable company.”
    Hearing such an ably argued view, the pearlmonger declared