King Pinch n-1

by David Cook

  Darkness slid forward and dealt the man a sharp rap across his fumbling fingers.

  "Maybe you want to gut me, too."

  The trooper looked at the bright-bladed dirk that hovered just over his hand, slithering to and fro in Pinch's shifting grasp. It was a snake, violently coiled and tempting the other to foolishness.

  "Set him down and go, before I tell Cleedis you were boozing on duty."

  Fear-drunk eyes darted to his fellows for support, but he had gone invisible before their gaze. Suddenly, the soldier knew where he stood: alone, wet, and dirty in the beech wood. Something unholy hacked out an asthmatic howl just across the stream, a howl that almost shaped hungry words of welcome.

  Slowly the man set the halfling down.

  A pointed flick of the dirk sent the man scurrying, and without him the crowd drifted away to jeer his cowardice. Already the stinging puns and cruel poesy were forming in their minds.

  "YOU," Pinch intoned while snagging Sprite before he disappeared, "give me the dice."

  Sprite fumbled in his shirt and produced the pair.

  Pinch didn't even ask if they were loaded. There was only one answer.

  "Get to the tent."

  "What's this, Pinch? Since when would you be knocking in fear from these king's men?"

  The rogue answered the challenge by shoving the runt forward. "It's time for a little talk," he whispered through clenched teeth.

  The tone was enough to get Sprite doing what he was told. The two squeezed into the small tent where Therin and Maeve were chatting, squatted on the ground.

  "Listen well." Pinch thrust Sprite onto a pile of blankets in between the other two. Ducking sideways to avoid the ridgepole, he continued without preamble. "Well be in Ankhapur soon, a few days at the latest. When we get there, things are going to change. Cleedis came north to get me, and just me. I don't know why he's allowed the rest of you along, but I'd guess he means to use you to keep me in his shackles." The old rogue smirked darkly. "Though you're a damn sorry lot of hostages.

  " 'Course, he might not be such a fool as to think you've got any sway over me. We all know what happens when somebody gets caught. He's on his own."

  Therin rubbed at the scar around his neck and noted bemusedly, "You snatched me from the gallows once."

  Pinch didn't like being reminded of that now, or the others might think his motives then were sentimental. "I didn't get you off the gallows. I let you hang and then I brought you back to life. And I did it for other motives. From here on, this is different. Ankhapur's not Elturel."

  "Ohhh?" Maeve cooed. "They're both cities. What makes this one so special?

  "Besides being your home," Sprite chimed in.

  Pinch looked at Maeve's thick-veined cheeks and the knobby little carrot that was her nose. He could not describe the true Ankhapur to her, the one that filled him with despised love.

  "Ankhapur the White." The words came reverently and then, "Piss on it. Bloody Ankhapur, it's lesser known. City of Knives, too. Ankhapur's fair; it's got whitewashed walls that gleam in the sun, but it's all hollow and rotten inside. The Families"-Pinch stressed it so that there was nobody listening who didn't hear the salt in his words-"control everything they want, including lives. You'll never find a more cunning master of the confidence games than a man from Ankhapur. Who do you think trained me to run a gang like you? Elturel?"

  Therin flopped back on his rick, clearly unimpressed. "So it's got competition. We've taken down worse."

  Pinch snorted. "You're not competition-none of you are. What kind of competition are you for a king who kept a personal assassin on the payroll? Or his sons who taught playmates how to strike down their enemies? This isn't just doing the black art on a weak lock or ripping the cove from a temple roof." Pinch slipped the Morninglord's amulet from his shirt and plopped it on the damp ground between them. "They're playing for stakes that make this look small-title and crown of all Ankhapur.

  "We're just a bunch of petty thieves. They're princes, dukes, and barons of the land. First Prince Bors, Second Prince Vargo, followed by Princes Throdus and Marac- there's a murderous lot. Bors is too much of an idiot to be any danger, but don't worry. Our dear Lord Chamberlain out there, the duke of Senestra, has gone begging for a fool to protect his own interests. Oh, and there's more. Tomas, Duke of the Port, is Manferic's brother, and Lady Graln was his sister-in-law. She's got whelps, princelings of the Second Order, for whom she'd kill to see crowned. Finally, there's the Hierarch Juricale. They call him the Red Priest, he's got enough blood on him. He and his sect hold the Knife and the Cup, so you can imagine no one gets crowned without his say." With slender fingers, Pinch counted out the titles until there were no fingers left. "Every one of them's a scorpion in the sheets. Compared to them, we're lewds."

  "They sent Cleedis up here for you," Sprite mused, as his foot gently slid toward the bauble at his feet.

  "Royal Ward Janol, Pinch to you," the regulator mocked. A light kick with his boot kept the halfling's furred foot at bay. "It's not as though the royal ward has any chance or claim. Cleedis wants me for some reason, but it's just as like there'll be a mittimus for your arrest as soon as we strike Ankhapur. From here on, abroad or in the city, cut your words goodly and keep your eyes open like quick intelligencers or somebody'll cut your weasand-pipe for certain." That said, Pinch scooped up the amulet and turned to leave.

  "And you, Pinch dear?" Maeve asked.

  The rogue considered the truth, considered a lie, and then spoke. "I'll stand by you all and cross-lay old Cleedis's plans any way I can." He smiled a little, the way he chose when no one was to know his true thoughts. The afternoon shadows, creeping through the door, gave all the warmth to his thin reassurance.

  Outside, after ten steps, he met Lissa as though she'd been lurking around waiting for this casual rendezvous. The woman had finally shed her saintly armor, and the effect was a transformation. Pinch had become so used to the rumpscuttle mien of a warrior woman that he was taken aback by her change to more demure clothes. Her silvery vestments, though long and shamefast, were still more flattering than battered steel made to cover every weak point of her sex. Her arms were half-bare to the cool air, and her slender, fair neck uncased from its sheath of gorgetted steel. Hair, brown and curly, tousled itself playfully in the breeze. Without all that metal, she stepped lighter and with more grace than did the clank and jingle of her armored self. The transformation from amazon to gentry maid was startlingly complete.

  "Greetings, Lord Janol," Lissa hailed, catching the rogue not at his best. "How fare you and your companions? Lord Cleedis says we shall be upon Ankhapur on the morrow."

  "We?"

  With a knowing, impish smile, Lissa brushed a loose wisp back into the tumble of her hair. "Certainly. Like yourself, Lord Cleedis is a gentleman. He's offered me passage to Ankhapur rather than leave me in this wilderness."

  Either she now suspects me and favors Cleedis or the chamberlain is playing the game, using her and her temple as a threat over me. If that's the case, does she know her part, or can I still direct her? Taking up his mantle as the lordly Janol, Pinch smiled and bowed while making his cold calculations.

  "As well the chamberlain should. And if he had not, I would have insisted upon it."

  "Well, I'm glad you would because I'm still counting on you to help me find a thief." Her voice dropped to a whisper of winter wind through the beeches.

  "If your thief is here."

  Lissa nodded. "They are-I've had dreams."

  "Dreams?"

  "The voice of our lord. He speaks to us in our dreams. It's our way."

  She could be naive, misled, inspired, or right; Pinch withheld judgment. He couldn't think of any good reason why a god shouldn't talk to his priests in their dreams, but why not just burn your words in a rock or, for that matter, limn the offender in holy fire? Had she seen him in her dreams? If not, then what was her god revealing? At least so far, that seemed to be nothing.

  Gods always t
ook roundabout ways to the straightest of things, and he for one felt they did so for his personal benefit, although perhaps not in the case of Fortune's master. Pinch did feel that the Mistress of Luck was a little too indirect in his own case-so much that he, only acting from a sense of just deserving, did what he could to speed the turn of her wheel along. So if the gods wanted to be indirect with him to the point where he helped move them along, it was apt that her god was equally oblique.

  In this simplified theology, it was clear to Pinch's mind that Lissa was being tested. Succeed at the test and she would find the thief. Fail-and well, who knows?

  He pulled at his ear to show doubt. "I could never place so much stock in dreams. What if you have a nightmare?"

  The seminary student got the better of the priestess. "It's my duty to interpret the meaning in what I have received. If I can't, then I need to dedicate myself even more."

  "Well spoken," he applauded, while settling onto a punky log, fallen several years back and now riddled with insects and mold.

  She reddened at the compliment.

  "So you don't really see the thief in your dreams, only some sort of symbol?"

  "The words of our god transcend simple images. He speaks a different language from us. In our dreams, we filter though the things we know and find parallels for his voice." Lissa's hands flew as she talked, sometimes cupping the words only to spill them in a burst of excitement.

  Pinch let her go on to explain how to tell true dreams from false visions, the five precepts of action, and more than Pinch needed to know. Still it was a good diversion from the hectic preparations for home, and before the rogue had completely succumbed to boredom, dusk wafted in from the east and it was time to retire.

  The night passed quickly, dreamless for Pinch. As for the others, none would say. What kinds of dreams were left to an outcast Gur, a drink-sodden sorceress, and an unrepentant halfling?

  Dawn scratched at the canvas, scarring the tan haze with morning shadows. Pinch stepped out of the sweat of tent air. It was a clammy dawn of stale wood smoke and horse manure, but over it all was the incongruous thick scent of geraniums and jasmine. The jarring sweetness clung in the throat and choked more than the stench of ordure. In the cold of coming winter, it could only be that the wizards were here, borne in on a wind of flowers of their own making.

  Stumbling out of his tent, the rogue wandered through a queue of clay-colored troopers, pilgrims awaiting their turn at the shrine. Each man led his horse, fully packed and carefully groomed. They jostled and talked, smoked pipeweed or whittled, and every few minutes plodded ahead a few more steps.

  At the head of the column was a small cluster of strangers, as uncomfortable as choirboys milling outside the church. As each man of the column came abreast, one of the strangers stepped from their shivering mass, thin robes clutched about him, and gestured over the line. A greenish flash bubbled out from his fingertips and swallowed trooper, spellcaster, and more. When the bright air cleared, wizard and soldier were gone.

  "The time is best for you and your companions to take their place in the line," Cleedis noted as he ambled over to where Pinch stood. There was no haste or desperate urgency in the man's way; those who weren't ready could be left behind.

  A swift yank on the tent pole roused the rest. As they stumbled out, Lord Cleedis, playing host and master and accompanied by Lissa, led Pinch to the front of his troop. The rogue's mates fell into line, grumbling and slouching, unruly children mocking their parents. At the front a pudgy, boy-faced wizard who couldn't be much older than twenty and hadn't gotten himself killed yet-more than a little feat for an ambitious mage-bowed to the Lord Chamberlain. With apologies, the wizard arranged them just so, positioning the five of them to some invisible diagram. Cleedis's impatience and Sprite's impish refusal to cooperate made the young mage all the more nervous until, by the time he was to say the words and make the passes, Pinch worried whether they would have their essences scattered across a thousand miles. Pinch always worried though; suspicion is what kept rogues like him alive.

  Then, before the last words had gotten through the boy-mage's lips, the air around them went green, lightly at first like a fading hangover on a too-long day. It got brighter, swallowing the blue out of the sky, the cold from Pinch's boots, even the creaking of saddlery from the line of men behind him. In flickering moments, the evenness of the green overwhelmed everything, eventually even the green of the color itself. The world became a perfect color and Pinch could not see it.

  The world returned with a nauseating rush. The green vanished, flooded out by other colors: blue sky, curling gray clouds, the brown-mottled turf of freshly turned fields, the fleshy green of still-leaved trees, and the glittering silver of a nearby sea. The ground lurched beneath him, practically toppling him from the unexpected jolt. Lissa clutched at his sleeve and he seized the belt of someone else. A heave of nausea washed over him and then passed.

  Blinking in the sudden new light, Cleedis tapped Pinch and pointed toward the sea. Sited on the shore, between the water and the close nest of hills, were the tarnished gypsum-white walls of Ankhapur. A fog had rolled back from the thrusting wharves. Atop the hills, the morning bells of the temples had started to sound. And filling the top of the very highest hill were the colonnaded buildings of the royal palace, millipedes clinging to the rich garden slopes.

  Cleedis turned and beamed a drillmaster's smile as he waved his hand up-slope. "Welcome back to Ankhapur, Janol."

  5

  Dinner in Ankhapur

  Their arrival was well outside the walls of Ankhapur, in the shadow of the Villa of the Palantic Road that crowned the top of Palas Hill, one of six hills surrounding Ankhapur. They appeared at the edge of a grove, as if they had ridden through the woods and emerged to survey the vineyard-filled valley that lay between them and the city. Thus it was that their descent through the fields, while hailed by the peasants with the appropriate concern and homage, raised no questions of wonder or gossip.

  Furthermore, they all looked gray, muddy, and spent, even Lord Cleedis himself. Pinch's foreign elegance was all but indistinguishable from the old-fashioned tabard Cleedis favored. Brown Maeve, Sprite-Heels, and Therin the Gur-no one could identify them as any more than merchants or servants among the entourage.

  Only the wizards in their white clean shifts stood out from the ordinary, and that too was quite ordinary. No wizard was like the rest of the world, so it was only natural for them to be easily marked. At least that was the reasoning of those who watched the column pass.

  In the two hours it took for the column to wend down the hairpin lanes and cross the bridge over the bog-banked Thornwash, a score of petty details returned to Pinch from the life he had fled fifteen years ago. The chill of snow and ice, that in fifteen years in Elturel he had never grown accustomed to, was gone, replaced by the faded green of Ankhapur's winter. The rhythmic lines of grapes were bare vines stretched over frames, the roads were rocky sloughs of clammy mud. To Pinch, the warm sun breathed the promise of spring, fresh grasses, and new growth. After fifteen years' absence, the sun of life was returned to him.

  The warmth filled Pinch with a confidence bordering almost on joy, unwarranted by everything he knew, but that was unimportant. He was home, as much as he hated it, with all its memories and pitfalls. He was no longer Pinch, master of thieves, living his derring-do life in the slums and back alleys. By the time he rode through the gates, the ragtag scoundrel was nearly gone. In his place rode a man identical in dress, one who had invisibly traded places during the two-hour ride.

  It was Janol, royal ward of the late King Manferic I, or at least some part of him that Pinch had not forgotten, who sat straight in his saddle, giving a supercilious nod to the liveried watchmen who stood at their parade best as the Lord Chamberlain and company rode underneath the whitewashed stone arch of the Thornwash gate.

  There was one thing that was no different for Pinch or Janol, no matter his position. As either, the rogue felt po
wer. These guards feared and respected men higher than them: the chamberlain, Janol, even the palace's elite bodyguard. It was the same awe and terror Pinch commanded from the thieves and constables of Elturel. There was in the common folk, he was certain, an innate sense of their betters. Even his gang understood it, though none of them might ever admit it.

  To the hoarse cries of the sergeant, bellowing their procession over the squalls of the fruit sellers and the enticements of the fest queens, the company rode as directly toward the palace as the interwoven streets of Ankhapur allowed.

  This morning, Ankhapur was alive early with the hurly-burly of market day. Pushcarts rocked like overloaded ferries in the sea of heads, their decks loaded with the glinting round flesh of fall squashes. Tides of serving-cooks and housemaids rippled from one stand to the next all down the shores of the streets. Chains of fishmongers heaved dripping baskets from the boats along the river, their still-twitching contents disappearing into the eager crowd. Children stole fruits and leapt over the smoky fires of the kaff-brewers, who sat cross-legged on their mats, pounding bark to steep in brass pots. The scent of that strongly bitter beverage made Pinch yearn for its rich sourness mixed with honey, a drink he'd not had in his fifteen years of self-exile.

  Sated with musing, since too much reflection made a man weak and hesitant to act, Pinch leaned in his saddle toward Therin so that he did not need to shout. "Welcome to home."

  The Gur shifted nervously in his own saddle while trying to negotiate his skittish horse through the throng. "Your home, maybe. It's just another ken to me. Although," he added with a smile and wave to the crowd, "one filled with opportunity. Look at all the coneys and marks out there."

  "Mind your hands with caution, boy. Take some time to walk the field before you bowl the pins. Besides our game's up there, not in these stews."

  Therin's eyes followed where Pinch pointed, to the clean, scrubbed walls that cut the commoners from their masters, the king's palace at the top of the hill.