Free Ronan the Barbarian by James Bibby Page A

grinned from ear to ear.
    "Oh, aid you! Definitely, aid you! By the Gods, you scared me then! I thought you might have been something malevolent and vicious creeping up on me. The police or something. Here, pull up a rock and warm yourself by the fire!"
    Ronan stuck his sword point-first into the dry soil and sat down, leaving his horse standing untethered in the shadows. (Such horses seldom need to be tethered. When you belong to a warrior, you quickly learn to behave, or you end up as a burger in some seedy orc take-away). Tarl, rigorously following his policy of being nice, carried on babbling away.
    "I'm Tarl, by the way. Ronan, Vanquisher of Evil, eh? Good name! Says it all, really. I've always fancied something like that for myself. Something with a bit of style. Tarl the Mixer of Cocktails, maybe. Or Tarl the Thrower of Parties."
    Ronan looked at him quizzically. "How about Tarl the Crasher of Gates?" he suggested.
    Tarl stared in surprise. "Here, have we met before?" he asked, worriedly. Ronan smiled and shook his head, and Tarl picked up the wineskin and unstoppered it thoughtfully. Despite the fact that he had a teddy-bear head hanging round his neck, this guy was no idiot. Tarl took a long gulp of wine, then remembered his Nice Guy policy and offered the skin to Ronan, who took it and raised it to his lips. He swallowed, and his eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead with an audible thump. Ye Gods! He'd expected the wine to be a little on the rough side, but it felt as though someone had sand-papered his throat and blow-torched his stomach! And the aftertaste! He'd drunk a fair bit of wine in the past two years, and become quite knowledgeable, but this was like nothing he'd ever experienced.
    Tarl, who firmly believed that you could tell the quality of a wine by the size of the lumps in it, grinned proudly. "Good, eh? That'll put hairs on your chest! My pet rat used to go round beating up cats after a glass of this stuff!"
    "You have a pet rat?" Ronan smiled to himself as he handed the wineskin back. Tarl looked more likely to be a pet rat than own one.
    "Yeah. He's called William.... well, I don't actually own him, we shared a cellar together. He was great, I'd taught him all sorts of tricks. I taught him to play dead, and to sit up and beg, and to fetch, and to carry..."
    "That's pretty clever. What did he carry?"
    "Bubonic plague, mostly." Tarl smiled at the memory of his pet, then a frown crossed his face. "I hope he's all right. I had to leave him behind when I slipped out of Orcville. I was in a bit of a hurry. Didn't have time to say goodbye."
    "Orcville? That's one dangerous town!"
    "You're telling me! I was a Gambling Chip for three weeks when I first went there. I was pretty desperate, I can tell you. Then I got a safer job, working in the Blue Balrog Club. I used to take the money at the door."
    "Why did you leave?"
    "They caught me doing it. So I thought I'd better get out before I ended up in a casserole. You know what orcs are like. One minute its "we must do lunch sometime", the next moment you are lunch. Here, have some more wine."   He handed the skin over to Ronan, who looked at it for a moment, then took a deep breath, and had another drink. It was probably the bravest thing he'd done for many a long year.
     
    Orcville, in the Northern Mountains, is a city famed for its relaxed attitude to life. (In fact, most people there have a very relaxed attitude indeed, especially when it comes to other people's lives.)   Orcville is also famous for its casinos. It was the birthplace of legalised gambling. For many years, people happily gambled with money, but after a while, the excitement began to pall. So you'd won a small fortune, or you'd lost one. So what? It was only money.
    As business slumped, the casinos tried gambling with other commodities in an attempt to reintroduce the old excitement and bring the punters back. And of course, what provides more excitement than gambling with your life?