Once A Hero by Michael A. Stackpole Page B

Fishers, they took their name from that of a bird that frequented the tri-river valley. Common wisdom had it that river-ravens were rats with wings and that Fishers regularly placed their eggs in river-raven nests to be tended. I'd also heard people wonder if the two clans wouldn't have gotten along well had their forebears been wiser in their totem-choices, because the two families seemed to everyone outside them to complement each other.
    "Goodman, I do not doubt you've been given a duty to perform here tonight." I stepped in close to him, mounting the first of three steps to the level of the doorway. My right hand reached out quicker than he could see or block, and slipped my dagger, Wasp, from the sheath over my right hip. "Now, you're all guards, and that's a right proud job to be having."
    Flicking the blade forward, I stuck it quivering in the right-side door to the squat and ugly legislatorium. I'd not expected the blade to stick really—Wasp has all the balance of a one-legged man hopping on wet ice—but the door's soft wood would have held the blade even if it had backed into place. Behind me the Dreel yipped appreciatively, and at my side Aarundel just narrowed his black eyes. "What you don't want to be are dead guards, I'm thinking."
    The combined effect of action and words worked to open the doors faster than a latchkey. The two gangs of rowdies opened the building for us, bowing low and mumbling very polite greetings in what I believed they thought was Elven. Aarundel remained as silent and implacable as death, while the Dreel sniffed at one Man, then another, like a customer sorting fresh fish from spoiled. I recovered Wasp and resheathed it, then stepped through the threshold as if I were bound to see the Reithrese emperor in Jarudin.
    The Hall of Laws had not risen very tall because of the cost of bringing stone in from the quarries upriver. To make the structure big, the people of Aurium had dug down into the hillock. Whereas outside, the building only rose a score feet above the ground, within the hall itself a good forty feet stood between floor and ceiling.
    The excavated area had been paved with smooth riverstone. It seemed to me that what had been born of economy had turned out to be quite decorative. Three terraces surrounded the central floor. They had been finished in fancy woods of gold and rich mahogany, adding some warmth to the cold white of the hillock's stone carapace. Benches and tables provided seating for those who would enact laws. For such a small town, the Hall of Laws was a thing of which the people could be proud.
    My earlier impressions of the sounds proved more correct than I would have imagined. The three of us arrived in the midst of what had to be a heated debate. Two young men circled each other in the center of the stone floor. Each had his left arm bared, as their tunic sleeves had been stripped off and knotted together to form a short tether. Each man held tight to the tether with his left hand. The loose cuffs stood up from the knot like rabbit ears and flopped this side and that as the two men pulled back and forth on the tether.
    Each man held a dagger in his right hand. The blades more resembled filleting knives than they did Wasp, but each was long, sharp, and pointy enough to reach the heart through the ribs. Each also glistened with blood which, I gathered from the stains on each combatant's tattered tunic, came from a series of shallow wounds. Both the wounds and the way the two men moved listlessly told me any enthusiasm they'd had for the fight had been swallowed by exhaustion and excreted as mortal fear.
    Surrounding them, standing on benches and sitting on desks, nearly the whole of the two clans hooted and hollered encouragement. I saw the mother of one lad sitting on the side, clinging to a daughter and crying silently. Uncles and cousins jerked and dodged in sympathy for their clan's fighter, but not a one of them had lifeleak splotches on their