The Ring of Winter by James Lowder Read Free Book Online Page B

position as a scribe for the royal court, a lucrative but incredibly dull job that could only promise him a foothold in better paying, but equally stultifying government service. The Harpers had tried to channel Artus’s restless energy into various short-term projects—ridding the road to Hilp of a band of cutthroat orcs, protecting dignitaries in the Dales from Zhentish assassins, and similarly routine tasks—but even those adventurous duties lost their intrigue after a few months.
    Now, when Artus stood poised to once more pick up the trail of the Ring of Winter, that restlessness proved to be more painful than any torture.
    He sat in a seedy room at the cheapest, most dangerous inn on the Sword Coast. That was quite a claim, but no one with any sense contested the Hanged Man’s reputation. Vermin, both human and animal, called the place home, feeding off the transient sailors and criminals who made the inn a more or less safe haven for an hour or a day or a month. Fights were frequent and deadly, the floor of the taproom having long ago been stained reddish brown with dried blood. The government of Baldur’s Gate sent notices to the Hanged Man from time to time, condemning the building or revoking their hostelry license; the owner of the inn, a huge half-orc with bad breath and a snoutlike nose, posted these official notices behind the bar. The wall was covered with parchment, but no one had ever come to enforce any of the edicts.
    Wanted men were safer than soldiers or bounty hunters at the Hanged Man. It was for that reason Artus chose to stay there, overruling Pontifax’s strident objections; even the Harpers would likely steer clear of the inn.
    As he had warned Theron, Artus had left Suzail within hours of learning the ring’s possible whereabouts. He’d taken only enough time to gather a few belongings from his rented room and track down Pontifax. The old mage had secured them fast passage from Suzail to Baldur’s Gate. They had flown much of the way on griffons. But when they could stand the freezing journey by air no longer, they covered the last fifty of the five hundred miles as part of a merchant caravan. In all, the long trip had taken but a few days.
    “Gods, I hate this place,” Pontifax sniffed. He reached down to flick a thumb-sized cockroach that had just wandered boldly onto the table before him. The daylight streaming in through the broken window didn’t deter the bugs in the least. The roach hissed as the mage sent it spinning end-over-end across the room.
    “Chult will be worse,” Artus murmured vaguely.
    “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”
    Artus shrugged and sat on the room’s sole, ragged bed. “You didn’t have to sleep on the floor. Consider yourself lucky.” He could hear the sounds of drunken snoring clearly through the wall, though that was less disturbing than the unpleasant human symphony they’d been forced to endure last night when their neighbor had been host to at least three women he’d rented for the evening.
    Pushing that vivid memory from his mind as best he could, Artus pulled his notebook from his pocket. He opened to the pages he’d devoted to Theron’s wild tales of the goblins and the other monsters he’d encountered in Chult. Artus had hoped to assuage his conscience, bruised by the heated exchange with the sick man, by setting his old friend’s story down with the others he’d recorded. Along with his own adventures, he’d transcribed tales told to him by such notables as the great sage Elminster and Princess Alusair of Cormyr.
    Unconsciously, he let a few pages flip past, until the book fell open to a section marked with a crude drawing of a harp contained in the arc of a quarter moon. Artus had never been much of an artist, but he’d attempted this rendering of the Harpers’ symbol in his enthusiasm just after joining the group. Their ideals were his ideals then—protecting the cities of Faerun from danger; helping to maintain the