Must Love Hellhounds

but he enjoyed even more kidnapping your mother, say, and forcing you to watch as he amputated her hand. Then yours.
    “Hey, we’re Britlingens,” Batanya said bracingly. “Not only are we made of tough stuff, but we can hardly be blamed for what our client has done. Britlingens are hired hands, not the responsible parties.”
    “True,” Clovache said. “Our Collective would intervene, if they had any notion of where we were. Trovis wouldn’t pay ransom for us, but Flechette might. I’m not so very partial to my left hand, anyway. And maybe we can buy some time by persuading Belshazzar to kill Crick here, first.”
    “Thanks, bodyguards-sworn-to-protect-me,” said Crick, somewhat coldly, “but let’s leave the discussion of my possible demise for later. Right now, we’ve got a conjuring ball to retrieve.”
    “Did you hide it or was it captured?” Batanya asked.
    “I hid it,” Crick said. “I seized a moment of solitude.”
    “Where?”
    He peered at the map. “Here,” he said, and indicated a tunnel to the north of the one where they crouched. There was a fair amount of walking in between.
    “If you had given the witches this map, they could have landed us right there,” Clovache muttered.
    “Yes, but then we would have landed in the barracks. So that seemed like a poor choice to me.”
    “You hid the ball in the barracks of the soldiers of the King of Hell?”
    He shrugged. “It was where I was.”
    “How’d . . . No. Let’s focus. Unless you have a better idea, we’ll work our way closer and see what our chances are.” It was obvious from Batanya’s tone that she considered those chances slim to nil. “Lucky for you I don’t have children, Crick, or I’d be cursing you in their names.”
    “Oh my goodness, that’s hard to believe,” Crick said blandly. “That you don’t have children, I mean. What could the men of Spauling be thinking of?”
    “Slitting your throat, most likely,” Batanya said. “I know that’s crossed my mind.”
    “What is the law?” Crick didn’t sound at all worried.
    “The client’s word,” Clovache said, but Batanya could tell it hurt her to say it.
    “Let’s get moving. Stop the jawing.” Batanya wanted to correct Clovache’s attitude. That was her job.
    “This place gives me the creeps,” Clovache muttered, by way of apology. “This is a very bad mission.”
    In a few seconds, Clovache’s dark outlook was validated. Just as they were edging forward to take a gander out the mouth of their tunnel, they heard something moving in the darkness behind them.
    It was something that was dragging itself along.
    “It’s a slug,” Crick said urgently. “We must move now or be stuck to the tunnel walls in a coat of slug goo. Or we’ll be absorbed.”
    They hadn’t the faintest idea what Crick was talking about, but he’d been there before and they hadn’t. Also, the smell that preceded the dragging sound was strong enough to make even the hardened bodyguards gag. Batanya checked to make sure the passage was clear, and the three darted out into the main tunnel, turning left; Batanya figured that was north. They left the dragging noise and the awful smell behind them, so evidently the slugs didn’t move very swiftly. But after a few minutes, Batanya heard footsteps coming at a fast clip. At her hand gesture, the three leaped into a very small side tunnel, much narrower than the one that had been their first refuge.
    This tunnel turned out to be occupied by three soldiers doing the nasty, and in this instance that was no euphemism. Since they were from different species, this was an unattractive and complicated undertaking. Before Crick’s involuntary sound of disgust had cleared his throat, before Clovache had quite figured out how they’d all hooked up, Batanya had silenced the soldiers permanently with her short sword.
    It was hard to say in the dim lighting that was only a step above darkness, but Batanya, cleaning her sword on the trousers of one deceased soldier, felt Crick might even look a bit green.
    “Thank you,” he said, after a moment.
    “Don’t mention it,” she said.
    They crouched in the gloom with the corpses, Clovache glancing at the bodies from time to time in curiosity. “Have you ever seen that?” she asked Batanya, pointing to the conjunction of a greenish brown snake-headed humanoid creature and a wolfwoman. Batanya shook her head. “This job is always an education,” she said.
    After a few minutes, it