“Well now, dom,” I said, and my voice sounded thick in my ears. “The necklace was the property of the lady. That is all.”
“Tut-tut,” he said and — in that situation — I, Dray Prescot, almost laughed out loud. He was aping Mistress Lingli, and the juxtaposition amused me enormously. Something might yet be made of this little thief.
“You do not wear a schturval.” The way he spoke was an accusation.
His schturval was the chavonth and wersting. That this was the badge of some kind of thieves’ guild I did not doubt.
“No.”
“You took the necklace, yet we did not find it on you. So you have already disposed of it.”
“That’s right.”
He leaned forward and the knife flicked up. “Do not misunderstand me, dom, just because you let me go.”
“I let you go because I did not wish to see a fellow creature thrown to the stranks in the river. They have nasty jaws.”
“Agreed. So where is the necklace?”
“With its owner.”
“You gave it to the queen?” He sounded shocked.
“No. To the lady from whom you took it.”
“Oh, her. Silly chit.” He hesitated. Then he said: “Not that I would relish her punishment at the hands of the queen.”
I said: “So it was the queen’s necklace and the lady borrowed it for an evening on the town.”
He shook his head. “No, dom, if I read your thoughts aright. She was not in league with us to acquire it. More’s the pity.”
I hadn’t been thinking that Leone had taken the necklace so that it might be stolen by accomplices, thus bringing punishment on her head but exculpating her from charges of thievery. She, I felt absolutely confident, would have treated any approach of that sort with the utmost scorn.
A throaty voice from the shadows spoke with a snarl.
“The scheme worked and this shint spoiled it. What are you going to do about that, Kei-Wo?”
“When I have decided, Fing-Na, I will tell you. Until then, keep your black-fanged winespout shut. Dernun?”
This time the word spat with vicious power.
The little thief, Kei-Wo the Dipensis, leaned forward. “No idea whose necklace it was, returning it, no schturval.” He leaned back and he spoke at large, addressing that shadowy company of rogues. “We have here, fanshos, an innocent. He is not of our profession, no, and Diproo the Nimble-Fingered would not own him! Haw!”
Coarse laughter burst from the others and there was a clearly felt relaxation of tension.
They’d belatedly reached the conclusion I was an innocent passerby and not a thief from a rival guild.
All the same, I’d done them out of their booty. No doubt they’d want to take payment out of my hide. A number of people on Kregen have desired that and tried to perform the deed in the past. Most of them have regretted the foolish decision.
The bonds restraining me in the chair felt as though a good heave would burst them. The steel vice around my head was a different matter.
A woman’s voice with an unpleasant cutting edge sounded from the shadows. “Let me tickle him up a bit.” She used a phrase to describe me that combined insult, obscenity and contempt. “He’ll soon tell me what we want to know.”
Before anyone else could speak up I said in a low but penetrating voice: “So the filth on the floor in here actually can speak. Remarkable.”
Kei-Wo’s walnut face creased into a broad smile. He sat further back in his chair and crossed his legs. Then the woman’s angry shrilling burst out. Kei-Wo spoke to me directly over that incoherent torrent.
“Now you’ve upset Sooey. I must warn you, she does know how to use her little knife exceedingly well.” The devil was thoroughly enjoying this and perfectly prepared to let what might happen happen and glee at whoever won this confrontation.
Or — was he? Was I wrong to detect a strain of amused lightness in him? He owed me nothing apart from his life. He probably owed this gang and this Fing-Na and this Sooey a great deal. They were his people. It seemed to me I had to get clear of this contretemps under my own power.
The woman’s silhouette bulked against the lamp and her shadow fell over me. She moved aside to pass Kei-Wo in his chair and the lamplight fell on her lank black hair, the side of a scarred face, the cheek sunken and marked, and a single bright eye. She wore shapeless rags. Her fist lifted, sinewy, knuckled-ridged, yellow. The knife was small and cunningly curved. The lamplight fell on the blade and glittered into my eyes.
I said: “What was your question?”
I could hear her panting. I’d expected the others in the room to be shouting and yelling and urging her on. Everyone sat silently.
“No question now, shint! First I’ll have one eye—”
The knife moved forward slowly, turning as she sized up the orbit of my left eye. I used my muscles, broke the bonds, reached up and twisted the knife away. She screeched like a banshee and staggered back, her lank hair flapping about that narrow vicious face.
“So far I have been merciful to you, Sooey, for I did not break your wrist. Do not meddle with me again.” I threw the knife into the shadows of a corner. Then I cocked an enquiring eye at Kei-Wo the Dipensis.
He uncrossed his legs, swiveled and gave Sooey a kick up the rump.
“Clear off, Sooey. This is no business of yours.”
She hissed and drew her rags about her; but she withdrew.
The little thief looked back at me. “Your name, dom?”
“Drajak.”
“Perhaps. It should be Drajak the Sudden, I think.”
“If you will it so.”
“If I do so will, then it will be so!”
I felt around the metal vice. “Does this damn thing come off without taking my head with it?”
He wheezed a laugh at that. “The latch in the back, right hand.”
I flicked the latch and the metal sides opened and I was able to move my head again. I said: “I shall stand up now.”
“Very well. Naghan the Chik will put his knife through your eye if you make—”
“Naghan the Chik may rest easy.” I twisted my head about on my neck. I must admit I’d had a few nasty moments wondering if the blow on the back of my head would bring back the paralysis from which I’d suffered previously. After the paralysis I’d been as weak as a woflo, and Mevancy still believed me to be without muscles. “I shall not make a silly move.”
“No. No, Drajak the Sudden, I do not think you will.”
I rubbed my neck. “I was on my way to eat and drink when we met. As you will readily perceive, I have had neither since.”
He lifted a hand and called: “Valli!”
Just what might transpire now I was not sure. The situation had been retrieved. I was not for the immediate chop. Much of these people’s immediate fate rested on how well Kei-Wo controlled them. If he could not keep them under control and they started in on me then a lot of them would die.
I wondered if he would comment that I’d chosen to make my attack on a woman. Fing-Na had merely voiced a hoarse query about my general fate. This rag-and-bone woman, Sooey, had offered to tickle me up a bit and into the bargain had used a most coarse expression which I am not at liberty to repeat. She just happened to be female, that’s all.
The shadows clustered and jumped as the lamplight flickered. This claustrophobic atmosphere caught in the throat. I was not out of the wood yet. A slip of a girl with a shy, averted face brought a bowl with bread in flat round cakes, dates, figs and a linen bag of some soft and oozing cheese. She wore a simple shif-like garment and her feet were bare. At the sound of her name, Valli, I felt a pang of homesickness.
Kei-Wo picked up my rapier. My lynxter and all my possessions were spread on the floor beside him. He withdrew the slender blade from the scabbard and moved it experimentally about through the air.
“I have heard of these swords. Rapier, they call ’em. I’m told they are quick. Still, I don’t believe they have the
strength or weight to do much damage in a fight.” He gave me a quick lowering look. “Well?”
“Depends on the fight.”
“Would you face a good swordsman’s lynxter with your rapier?”
“What are the odds?”
A coarse laugh came from Fing-Na. Kei-Wo leaned back and smiled. A calculating look passed across his thin walnut face.
Someone from the shadows called: “Set Fing-Na on the boaster!”
A bulky form moved forward more clearly into the light. He was splendidly built if a trifle thick about the waist. His clothes were the usual fawn robes. His face possessed a magnificent pair of moustaches, pointed and waxed, standing out well beyond his cheeks. He looked competent.
I said: “No, I will not fight. I have no quarrel with Fing-Na despite his words earlier. And I would not wish to slay him.”
Fing-Na bristled at this. Kei-Wo laughed. That laugh was calculated theatre. I began to believe he could keep these ruffians in order.
“Yes, we do not need blood spilt here. Valli! The wine, girl, the wine!” He gestured expansively. “We will drink together and we will talk of ways of taking the queen’s necklace.”
Valli returned with a tray laden with goblets and as I took one I said in as casual a way as I could manage, given the circumstances: “What’s so all-fired important about this pestiferous necklace, then?”
The wine was a thick green Pimpim from Chem, cloying as syrup. Kei-Wo saw my grimace as I sipped.
“The wine does not please you?”
“It’s not that. Just I would have preferred something lighter and more refreshing. Also I think you have fortified this.”
“Of course. Best quality dopa in there, dom. Still, if you don’t like it... Valli!”
By the time I was sipping a light crimson — I believe it was a Niliin from downriver and not a real wine at all — I thought I understood what all this palaver was about. Kei-Wo was a professional thief leading his band of rascals. Someone had employed him to obtain the queen’s necklace. Of the four young people out on the town, who would have so arranged matters that the pleasure-loving and giddy girl, Leone, would be able to borrow the necklace? So, in addition, who were these four young people? That must have been the queen’s palace where I’d taken Wink. I did not think they were serving folk; they were of the gentry all right. Nobs. Yet someone had arranged for Leone to wear the queen’s necklace, and for Kei-Wo to steal it.
These notions tumbling through my head were half right. Kei-Wo quickly showed me where I was wrong.
He spoke matter-of-factly; I did not miss the steel in his words.
“You, Drajak, stopped me from carrying out what I have promised to do and have been half paid for. That silly girl will not again be allowed to wear the queen’s necklace. Anyway, I imagine she has had a shock and will be far too frightened to borrow it again.”
I said nothing. I’d been talking far too much just lately. And I wasn’t at all sure that Leone would be frightened. She struck me that she might be a giddy girl; but she had a streak of courage I recognized.
Kei-Wo went on: “Our information told us she borrowed the necklace. As soon as she wore it, it would be ours. Yet you happened along.”
Again I said nothing.
“So what must be done is quite clear. If you do not do as I wish, Naghan the Chik will put his knife clean through your throat wherever you happen to be. I am saying your life is forfeit if you fail and you cannot hide from us.”
I was sensible enough to recognize this threat as one perfectly capable of being carried out. I couldn’t guard every second against the assassin’s flung knife, although I might deflect it more than once.
I said: “I suppose you will eventually tell me what you want?”
His face blackened with anger; then he flung back his head and hooted with laughter. “A right one we have here, fanshos! A right one!”
“I’ll probably put my little Sklitty through one of his eyes first,” snarled Naghan the Chik. “I’ll enjoy that.”
“Only if he fails us, Nag, only if he fails.”
“By Chikitto the Unerring! If he does!”
“Aye.” Kei-Wo returned his attention to me. “So you understand. Good. I need the queen’s necklace. It will not leave the palace again around the neck of a silly shishi. You took it back, and that onker who stood in my way. They must love you in there. You can enter as a friend. You will do that and obtain the necklace for me. Dernun?”
Chapter four
In a fetid alley in an unpleasant part of the city Naghan the Chik used his knife to cut the ropes from my wrists. There had been no alternative back in their hideout. I had been blindfolded and bound and led off along twisting alleys and up and down narrow steps so that all direction was lost. I’d not find my way back there easily.
Naghan showed me his knife. He shoved it under my nose.
“That’s for your eyes, one after the other. Then your throat, shint. Best you do not fail Kei-Wo the Dipensis.”
“The Chik’s knife is very deadly,” quoth another of the thieves, a runt of a fellow with a yellow-scarred jaw and bad teeth, called Ping.
The knife was not a terchick, the throwing knife of my clansfolk of the Great Plains of Segesthes, being heavier and, if my eye did not deceive me, of inferior balance. Still, I did not doubt Naghan the Chik’s boasts. He had a belt of these knives around his thick waist.
I had to get free of this unpleasant company. There were schemes afoot beside their desires to steal the queen’s necklace.
With that in mind as I chafed my wrists I stared about in the light of the moons. Whilst the bazaar area and the maze of alleyways here in Makilorn were hardly representative of the aracloins — the uproarious, fizzing and generally hell-on-wheels form of life in many of the cities I knew — they did have their own low-life vitality. Here villainy was a way of life. Here dark desires could be satiated. Here rogues could hide from the law in the confusing maze. Here life was cheap.
I felt I wanted to lash out a trifle. I said: “Can Naghan the Chik hit the narrow target every time? Every time? And never miss?”
“You try me, shint!” snarled Naghan.
“Any time, sunshine, any time.”
He’d have started something then; but Sindi-Wang, a woman of enormous development casually displayed between the folds of her dress, breathed: “You harm him before he’s done his work, Nag, and you’ll lose yours.”
No one was indelicate enough to enquire just what Naghan would lose.
“Kick him out!” bellowed the Chik. “Set him away from me!”
“Go on, Drajak,” ordered Sindi-Wang, waving her arm and shaking like a jelly. “Just remember. Every mur of your life is observed by us.”
Now this I was quite soberly prepared to believe. These rogues knew the city. They knew their part so well they’d never be caught and they’d know other gang’s stamping grounds well enough to be able to keep me constantly under observation. I had to get free of them. Doing just that was going to prove a sticky problem.
“I’m going,” I said, in a truculent voice, a voice I made stupid with a bravado of no substance. They snickered as they had every right to do. They’d formed their opinion of me, an innocent abroad, ready enough to stop a thief taking a necklace but a fellow who would cave in the moment his own life was in danger. I shook my shoulders, stripped the last of the rope from my wrists, and glared at Naghan the Chik.
“Don’t get lonely,” he said, and giggled at his own conceit. “You’ll never be alone in Makilorn until you bring the necklace to Kei-Wo.”
I stared him in the face.
“I’ll always know where you are, anyway, Naghan. By the smell.”
He tried to hit me; but I ran off.
If you feel this is highly unlike Dray Prescot conduct, you are right. I wanted to give the impression of a high-spirited person who’d fold up under the first real pressure. This would fit Kei-Wo’s belief about me to a nicety.
It would
also serve me if I was going to deceive them.
She of the Veils, rosy and refulgent above among the stars, had been joined by the Twins. These are the second Moons of Kregen, eternally revolving about each other. They are revered by many people in that intriguing and puzzling world for their suggestion of Twinship. There are many twins born on Kregen. Whole cults are devoted to ascertaining just what the Twins mean to individuals on every day of the season. Down here in Loh the Twins, who have many names all over Kregen, are often called the Dahemin which is an exceedingly ancient name for them. Most often in Loh the Twins are called Holi and Hola.
As I slowed to a brisk walk and moved into a cross street where the becketed torches were near enough to one another to provide almost continuous illumination, I reflected on names. Thieves all over our part of Kregen, called Paz, swear by Diproo the Nimble-Fingered. By his name the credulous swore he had eleven fingers and thus could steal with consummate ease from purse or pouch. Given that many races on Kregen have more than four fingers and a thumb on each hand, the asymmetry of roo — eleven — adds an intriguing dimension to this belief. What concerned me was to go on doing what I had to do here and go on living to do it. Thieves, nimble-fingered or not, expert knife-throwers or not, could not be allowed to interfere.
Pretty soon I’d picked up the tail they’d set on me. A number of possible reactions would have been proper. I could have become indignant at this affront to my dignity. I could have been contemptuous. I could have let red roaring rage take over and striding back have knocked the fellow’s head in. The reaction I felt proper to the occasion was to estimate if they were being clever. Were they letting me see this tail deliberately, so that other trackers could follow me unseen?
So I came to what I considered a proper decision.
The idea of going along to the palace straight away was instantly discarded. I’d toddle along there bright and early in the morning. I’d go in wearing the face of Drajak and by using the techniques taught me by my comrade, the Wizard of Loh Deb-Lu Quienyin, I’d walk out with the face of Chaadur. Also, I did not relish returning to the Mishuro Villa.
Scorpio Assassin Page 3
