Free The Paladin Caper by Patrick Weekes

destruction and enslavement and my people being reduced to soulless husks. Now you might lose the young man who refused to sleep with you.”
    “Do you know where he’s being held?” Loch asked.
    Irrethelathlialann nodded. “A large mining facility in the Sunrise Canyon. It seems that’s where the gate from our world to theirs is located.”
    Loch gripped her walking stick and turned to the others.
    “All right. New plan.”

Four
    H ERLIT WOKE UP a few hours later with the other salvagers looking down at him anxiously.
    The voice was there as well, at the back of his mind, completing his sentences for him but not always with the right words.
    He’d been a real shipbuilder once, back before a tight-ass supervisor and a few bad deals with spare parts saw him kicked out of the port cities. He knew the safety rules, and the dangers of being around wind-daemons for too long with shoddy wards. Hell, he’d drilled the men out here on the same damn safety rules.
    It couldn’t have messed up his head. He’d been smarter than that, always smarter. He’d been careful, had to be, given the crappy ships he worked on most days with tools the folks in the port cities would have thrown out as no longer useful. This had to be something else, something special.
    It could be his big chance, the voice whispered. Take down Loch, and the whole Republic would know Herlit was serious business. He’d get real clients, not smugglers with scrapyard parts and scrapyard money.
    “Sir,” one of the men said, “we were worried.”
    “Still are,” said another one.
    But how to get Loch? How to do it, how to find her and kill her for what she did?
    “It’s fine,” Herlit said.
    “S’not fine,” a third man said. “You’ve got the fog, Herlit. You need to see a healer.”
    The reaction was like a kick in the gut. “It’s fine ,” Herlit repeated. “Not the damn fog.”
    If he dropped the wards on one of the airships, a wind-daemon would escape. No, no, that was a terrible idea, damn, maybe he did have the fog . . . unless the wind-daemon would definitely go after Loch, and it would, it would, it absolutely would, all Herlit had to do was drop the wards and rip open the canvas, that was all. The freight hauler, the daemon was still summoned from when they’d flown it earlier today, it was perfect, that was the one to use!
    “Need to clear my head,” Herlit said. “You go over the old ferry again, see if there’s anything to strip. Going to tune that freight hauler. Something off on the morning run.”
    The salvagers looked at him in silence. They’d never questioned him before. He’d taught them everything they knew.
    He opened his mouth to speak again, and that was when three strange people came out of the nearby woods and headed toward Herlit and his men.
    One of them was tall, too tall to be human, and when she pushed the hood of her fur-lined cloak back, the tusks gave her away as an ogre. The other woman was bony and barefoot and wore a peasant dress, but her smile was twitchy, and the grass behind her looked muddy, like she was trailing dirt.
    The third was a dwarf in a cloak, and he or she or it was the least strange of them.
    “We seek a woman,” said the bony woman, her voice flat. “Tall, Urujar. Her name is Loch. We want her.”
    They would take her, hurt her, kill her, and that was good, but bad, because it would be them doing it, and it needed to be a daemon, needed to be her.
    Herlit looked at the ogre. She had a staff, but a staff wasn’t a sword. She was the one to worry about, still, big as she was.
    “Haven’t seen her,” Herlit said.
    “Her aura was here,” said the bony woman.
    “Lies,” said the dwarf. His voice was hollow, like it was being piped through a tube.
    “Take them!” Herlit snarled, and swung at the ogre with his wrench.
    His wrench sank into the ogre’s chest, and for a moment Herlit felt the fierce joy of striking her down, and in the back of his mind he wondered if maybe he