But suppose that was the spell working? She was a spy; there was no reason for him to like her. He had dealt with female spies before, and no amount of liking had kept them from exile, or in severe cases, the spike—
Reswen went quite cold inside. The thought that he could be made to like someone—made to feel attracted toward her, emotionally, even sexually—for he was attracted to her, not that he would do anything about it, of course, but—
How did he know he wouldn’t do anything about it?
The loss of control, even the potential loss of control, terrified him. An officer of the H’satei must, above all else, be trustworthy, not be vulnerable to manipulation by others for whatever reason—
And the problem was he liked liking her. Was that part of the spell too?
“Get me one of those things right away,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. Do you need any special ingredients?”
Lorin shook his head. “I’ve got everything I need at home.”
“All right.”
“Listen, Reswen—”
Reswen looked curiously at Lorin. He had an odd tone to his voice. “What is it?”
“There’s something else about her—” Lorin broke off, looking dubious.
“What?”
“I’m not sure yet.” He shook his head. “There may be another magic-worker, that’s all—working through her. Someone a lot more dangerous.”
“May be? You’re not certain?”
“I was—at least, I thought I was. But I can’t find any traces of the other wizard’s workings now.”
Reswen Sighed. This was one of the things that annoyed him most about dealing with magic: There seemed to be nothing about it that could be depended upon ... situations changed without notice, and seemingly without reason. “Well, look, never mind it for the moment. Just let me know if you find out anything further.”
Lorin nodded, and Reswen saw him safely out of the place and went out himself, the back way, determined not to see the she-mrem again until he could be certain that his mind was clear and his own. But her laughter floated out one of the open windows after him. Without thinking, he turned to go back to the party.
Then Reswen cursed and headed for the office.
On the third day after the riot, he sent for the scarred mrem who had instigated it. Reswen had a philosophy about incitement to riot. If it was an impulsive thing, and the inciter had never done anything like it before, three days in the damp cellars under the constabulary would make sure he never did anything like it again. On the other hand, if the inciter were part of some plot, three days in that cellar would render him that much more willing to talk about it. The cellars were not damp enough to have dripping water—the climate hereabouts was much too arid for that—but they did have absolute, tomblike silence, being dug far below the normal Niauhu cellar level. The rock was porous enough to admit air, but not enough so to transmit sound. The doors were solid; the constables who served the place were silent. Far from having other voices to rail at or harangue, the inciter would have an unsettling three days with his own heartbeat, and nothing else. Excepting, of course, his own waste. The sanitation down there in the cells was primitive, and Reswen intended that it stay that way. It led to serious thinking.
When they brought the gray-striped mrem up, Reswen kept him standing between a couple of constables for a couple of minutes, while fussing with papers and pretending to ignore him. It gave him a chance to look the creature over surreptitiously, and Reswen was annoyed to find the mrem neither abject nor frightened, but sullen, glowering around him. He said nothing, but he was tense in the constables’ grasp, not resigned. He also smelled awful, which was not in itself diagnostic. Even innocent people tend to become loose of the bowels when thrown in a dungeon.
Reswen looked up, finally. “You can let him go,” he said to the constables. “Wait outside.”
They looked slightly reluctant, but obeyed him. When the door shut, Reswen picked up a paper and looked at it speculatively. “Nierod, your name is?”
No answer. “Sit down,” said Reswen, indicating a chair.
Nierod stood and glowered.
“Stand, then, it’s all one to me.” Reswen looked again at the paper. “You’re an assistant to one of the chandlers over in the Bricks, you have a room a few doors down from where you work, top floor rear over the Sun and Flag.” It was one of the worse of the inns in the Brick Quarter, a regular problem for Reswen’s people: Legal drugs like lash were sold in the back rooms, but no tax was paid on them—and over the past few years a few mrem had died there, overdoses mostly, or barroom brawls with doctored drink at the bottom of them. “Sometimes they pay you a copper or so to be bouncer when the usual one is off his feed; or drunk.”
Nierod spat on the floor.
“You’ll clean that up before you go,” Reswen said matter-of-factly, He laid the paper face down, then, and met the sullen green eyes full on. “I know why you were standing down by Mud Cross at an hour past midnight four nights ago,” he said. “I know who met you, and why you went into the Dicer’s. I knew what he paid you, and I know how much he paid you.”
He paused after saying that much, and saw what he had been hoping for: a flicker of fear, quickly covered over. Notwithstanding that the last sentence had been a lie, and the second partly one. The business about Mud Cross had been true enough, and about the Dicer’s; pieces of information brought to light by good police work and a bit of extra gold slipped into One-Eye’s paw up on the Northside. The rest of it was a guess. But the parts that were public information were nothing that would cause anyone fear. Reswen was exultant, but he sat on it tightly.
Nierod, though, grinned: not a nice look. “If you know so much, then y’ can find out the rest for yourself,” he said.
“Oh, bold, bold,” Reswen said, very softly. “That was what he told you, then—that the police would question you, but would let you go if you kept quiet. And then there would be more gold afterwards. Well, let me tell you a truth, my son, and it’s this: Once you’re through that door,” he pointed at the way into the office, “you’re mine. The Arpekh themselves can’t touch you if I decide not. Oh, there are procedures for appeal, but no one in the Arpekh is going to start them for a mucky little heap of gutter scrapings like you. Do you seriously think one of your fine friends is going to come here with gold, and soil his paws and his reputation bailing you out? Poor fool.”
He let that sink in for a moment. Nierod looked a little less certain, not so much a change in face as in posture, a bit of a sag, a bit of pulling in on himself, and the angry tail, which had been thrashing since he was brought in, had slowed down a great deal.
“What you need to know,” Reswen said, quietly, “is that I don’t approve of riots in my city. It spoils people’s shopping, and that spoils the city’s trade, and that spoils the amount of taxes the good townsmrem pay, and then I don’t get my end-of-year bonus. That makes me most annoyed. So I make sure that riots don’t happen—especially not to order, not to anyone’s order.” His voice began to get quieter and quieter. “To help me see to this, you are going to tell me exactly what you were told to do in the marketplace; and what else you were paid to do elsewhere as well, for the gold we found buried in the canister under your dirt-box was much more than anyone would pay for one riot, even in a seller’s market. And you are going to tell me who hired the contact who came to you and gave you the money. And you are going to do this before tomorrow morning, for I have had a bad week and I would love a chance to take my claws to such a cheap little piece of lickspittle filth as you are, indeed I would.” Reswen was rising slowly behind his desk, feeling no need to act the anger at all: it was real. “And you will never, never leave this building until you tell me what I want to know,” he said, very softly, “bail or no bail, friends or no friends; you can sit down there in the dark-cellar and take root in your own muck, and bleach like a whitelea
f till you go night-blind and die of the cold shakes.”
Nierod said nothing, but he was trembling.
Reswen came out from behind the desk. “And before you do that,” he said, “you are going to clean the mess you made on my rug.” And before the shocked Nierod could so much as stir, Reswen caught him by the scruff of the neck, hooked his hind paws out from under him, and tipped the mrem forward so that he sprawled flat. Reswen scrubbed the rug Vigorously for a second or so with Nierod’s forehead, then scrambled to his feet, hauling the creature up with him by the scruff, shook him, and flung him away.
“Until tomorrow,” Reswen said in a whisper. “I do hope you keep mum. My claws are itchy. Constables,” he added, in a normal tone.
They opened the door and came in. “Gellav, take him downstairs,” Reswen said. “He has one day to tell us what we want to know. Otherwise, don’t bother opening the door till it’s time to take the bones out.”
Gellav hustled Nierod out the door. Reswen nudged it closed and said to the other constable, “Shilai, have him checked three times between now and tomorrow this time, If he hasn’t offered to talk, tell him I’m too busy to beat him myself, and then have them leave him shut in for another, oh, five days, Make sure he has plenty of water to start with. This one may take more scaring than most, and I don’t want to lose him.”
“Yes, sir,” Shilai said. And added, “Beat him, sir? You?” Reswen smiled. “I’m a frightful liar,” he said. “My dam always said it would get me in trouble. Meanwhile, have the lads downstairs keep looking for his contact. We need a name and some more information ... I hope to heaven we can get it from Nierod. Go on with you, now.”
Shilai saluted and left. Reswen sat down behind his desk again, reached in under his tunic absently, and fiddled with the thing that hung on a ginger-colored cord there: something that felt and looked and smelt rather like a bit of dried fish. Then he turned over the piece of paper from which he had been reading Nierod’s “crimes.” It said, “Tonight, at the Play House, the Lord Arpakh’s Men, a Play of Merrie Contrasts and Humours, entitled The Claw Unsheath’d....”
Reswen smiled to himself, a touch grimly, and reached for paper and brush to send a message to Laas.
There had of course been some teasing about it, since it was a constabulary runner who took the message to the house in Dancer’s Street, and everyone knew whom it had been addressed to within a few minutes of the runner leaving Reswen’s office. There was this to be said, at least: Laas and Deshahl had been so busy working their way through the Arpekh that the Chief of Police seemed like a perfectly normal next step for at least one of them. The gossip around the constabulary, Krruth told Reswen when he came in to report, was that the two concubines had been ordered to seduce every major official in Niau as a goodwill gesture.
Reswen laughed at this, and Krruth looked wry. “It’s as good a theory as any, sir,” he said. “Nothing we’ve heard has given us any hints to the contrary. This is the driest surveillance I’ve run in many a year. And I’m getting tired of that fat priest’s jokes.”
“If you prefer, I could move you over to some other operation,” said Reswen. “The Lloahairi business, perhaps.”
“No, I’ll stay with this, by your leave,” Krruth said. “A dull surveillance is usually one that’s about to break open. Is the business with the Lloahairi getting any clearer, though?”
Reswen sighed. “Not very. Oh, the new ambassador has presented his credentials. He’s a dull creature, I’m afraid. Looks to be the type who’ll be a real tail-biter to work with—a letter-of-my-instructions type who won’t find a way to make his instructions flex, just because he likes them inflexible.”
“Wonderful,” Krruth muttered.
“You don’t know the half of it. He’s told the Arpekh that he doesn’t expect any ‘interference’ from the police.”
Krruth considered that in silence. Everybody knew that the police kept an eye on all the embassies. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Interfere,” Reswen said, “discreetly. I have my orders, and I don’t take them from any half-gaited housecat.”
“Half-gaited?”
“He has a ‘war wound.’ ” Reswen sniffed. “Funny how the limp comes when he wants it noticed, and goes away when he forgets about it. At any rate, maybe Shalav will be able to talk some sense into them before she leaves. Some of our people are keeping an eye on the place, very quietly ... we’ll wait for things to calm down a little before moving in any more closely. There are enough other problems at the moment. All those Lloahairi troops quartered around town, the inns are full, some of them are in private houses— People are getting tense.”
“Don’t blame them,” said Krruth, getting up. “Well, I’m for Haven.”
“Have a good time,” Reswen said.
“Not as good as you will,” said Krruth, “Don’t keep her out late.”
Reswen’s whiskers curled forward as he smiled.
•
She stretched, lazily. All around her it was shadowy, the pale light of the overworld’s evening as it shaded toward night. For the moment, her surroundings had no features: merely the pallid sourceless radiance, muted to gold and fading slightly as the light of the real world faded. It would never become entirely dark, of course. One of her kind would hardly permit that, for with the dark came the cold, and the cold she did not have to suffer, not here.
The hunger was on her. It had been growing for some time now. She had never been fond of doing nothing, of waiting and watching. True enough, her masters had commanded her to do so until all was certain here ... but they were not here, and she was, and the situation was hardly as dangerous or fraught as they had told her it would be. None of the vermin here suspected anything
... at least, none of them who were in a position to do anything about her presence. And she was doing well—already her pets had discovered many things that she needed to know, things her masters had ordered her to discover before moving her mission into the active phase. Quite shortly now she would know much more.
But for the moment, she was hungry. Not in the bodily sense—she had spent a long time out of body now, and in such cases one’s physical needs grew less, not more, with time. But her soul hungered. There had been no taste of blood for some time now, not even in dream, and something had to be done about that.
There were of course several possibilities. Rolling over in the soft warm light, she considered one of them that had occurred to her: the little wizard she had frightened. His soul had had a most satisfying feel to it, that time when she had so frightened him. Terror rose well in him; he panicked nicely, and maintained the emotion well, however involuntarily. And truly, no matter what her masters might say, he was no important part of what was going on here. No one would connect his sudden disappearance with her, that was certain.
But perhaps not, perhaps not. There was another thought. She turned time back briefly and looked through various of her pets’ eyes at the golden-colored vermin with the stripes and the insouciant manner. The policemaster. It would be easy enough to manage him. Very easy indeed, since one of her pets was working on him at the moment. Very easy indeed, to catch him at an undefended moment—what moments of these creatures were not undefended, by her people’s standards?—and then spend hours savoring the screams of his soul as her teeth tore it. He had been asking questions that she found inconvenient. Such inconvenience was not to be borne, not from something one step from a dumb beast, something that doubtless had vermin of its own.
She hissed softly to herself after a moment. No, it might not be wise, not just yet. The death of so prominent a member of this little community of vermin might create more difficulty than it would provide pleasure; and her masters might prove troublesome afterwards. No, better not to bother ... just now. There would be time for that particular irritant later ... all the time she liked. The only questions he would be aski
ng then would concern why he had not died as yet. And ah, he would desire his death. And in vain.
Her tongue flickered in anticipation of the taste of fear. Not him. The little wizard, then? He had tasted her presence a time or two, now. His terror had had good time in which to mature. But it was always a temptation, to snatch such a choice meat before it was high enough. No, let him be as well, for the moment. Something fresh, this time, something that would not suspect her at all, something that would struggle most satisfactorily in her mind’s gullet, protesting in anguish all the way down. But something impotent.
She thought about this for a time, then reached out to one of her pets.
It fought her, which always amused her. She had specific orders not to kill this one under any circumstances ... which was a pity, since its terror was developed into something of rare bouquet indeed. It never remembered her after she left its tiny mind—she saw to that—but every time she returned to it, it remembered, and it struggled like a winged thing caught in mire, filling the overworld with its screams. Most gratifying, really. Yes, that one, for the moment. She reached out and filled it, and felt its pitiful little lurches and wrenches of soul as it screamed and struggled to get away from her. Shortly its struggles quieted, as it perceived her and froze in horror and awe. She lay there savoring its despair for a good while.
And as for the one to die ..., she thought. This was always the best part. A feast lay before her: a warren of little undefended minds. No great subtlety about them, of course—there was none of the skill needed that would be required to destroy and kill one of her own kind, and none of that utter satisfaction of having consumed one of one’s own kind against their will, against their best efforts. The efforts that the vermin could put up were pitiful indeed by comparison with the rich struggles of her own people when devoured. But the vermin were satisfying enough, if one got enough of them. And one would do for the moment. It was just a matter of picking which one.
Exiled: Keeper of the City Page 14
