Free Unclean by Richard Lee Byers

Presumably because it was the way in which an adult and little girl might be expected to walk the benighted streets, the child intertwined its soft, clammy fingers with his. He had to fight to keep himself from wrenching his hand away.
    “He’s here,” she said in a high, lisping voice.
    Calmevik wondered who “he” was and what he’d done to deserve the fate that was about to overtake him, but no one had volunteered the information, and he suspected he was safer not knowing. “Just one man?”
    “Yes.”
    “I won’t need help, then.” Which meant he wouldn’t have to share the gold.
    “Are you sure? My master doesn’t want any mistakes.”
    She might be a horror loathsome enough to turn his bowels to water, but even so, professional pride demanded that he respond to her doubts with the hauteur they deserved. “Of course I’m sure! Aren’t I the deadliest assassin in the city?”
    She giggled. “You say so, and I am what I am, so I suppose we can kill one bard by ourselves.”
    Tired as he was, for a moment Bareris wasn’t certain he was actually hearing the crying or only imagining it. But it was real. Somewhere down the crooked alleyway, someone—a little girl, perhaps, by the sound of it—was sobbing.
    He thought of simply walking on. After all, it was none of his affair. He had his own problems, but he’d feel callous and mean if he ignored a child’s distress.
    Besides, if he helped someone else in need, maybe help would
    come to him in turn. He realized it was scarcely a Thayan way to think. His countrymen believed the gods sent luck to the strong and resolute, not the gentle and compassionate, but some of the friends he’d found on his travels believed such superstitions.
    He started down the alley. By the harp, it was dark, without a trace of candlelight leaking through doors or windows, and the high, peaked rooftops blocking all but a few of the stars. He sang a floating orb of silvery glow into being to light his way.
    Even then, it was difficult to make out the little girl. Slumped in her dark cloak at the end of the cul-de-sac, she was just one small shadow amid the gloom. Her shoulders shook as she wept.
    “Little girl,” Bareris said, “are you lost? Whatever’s wrong, I’ll help you.”
    The child didn’t respond, just kept on crying.
    She must be utterly distraught. He walked to her, dropped to one knee, and laid a hand on one of her heaving shoulders.
    Even through the wool of her cloak, her body felt cold, and more than that, wrong in some indefinable but noisome way. Moreover, a stink hung in the air around her.
    Surprise made him falter, and in that instant, she—or rather, it—whirled to face him. Its puffy face was ashen, its eyes, black and sunken. Pus and foam oozed around the stained, crooked teeth in their rotting gums.
    Its grip tight as a full-grown man’s, the creature grabbed hold of Bareris’s extended arm, snapped its teeth shut on his wrist, and then, when the leather sleeve of his brigandine failed to yield immediately, began to gnaw, snarling like a hound.
    Bareris flailed his arm and succeeded in shaking the child-thing loose. It hissed and rushed in again, and he whipped out a dagger and poised it to rip the creature’s belly.
    At that moment, he would have vowed that every iota of his attention was on the implike thing in front of him, but during his time as a mercenary, fighting dragon worshipers, hobgoblins,
    and reavers of every stripe, he’d learned to register any flicker of motion in his field of vision. For as often as not, it wasn’t the foe you were actually trying to fight who killed you. It was his comrade, slipping in a strike from the flank or rear.
    Thus, he noticed a shift in the shadows cast by his floating light. It seemed impossible—the alley had been empty except for the child-thing, hadn’t it?—but somehow, someone or something had crept up behind him while the creature kept his attention riveted on it.
    Still on one knee, Bareris