King Pinch n-1

by David Cook

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Well-and this may sound folly-curiosities have plagued me at the palace. Voices, witchlights, and the like. That wasn't…?"

  Lissa cocked her head, letting her curly hair spill from the edge of her hood. "The scriptures do say the Upholder of Light called on its might against the Sun-Devourer."

  "Upholder of Light?"

  "The Dawnbreaker. It is another sign of our respect for the great prophet."

  "Upholder, Dawnbreaker-what does it mean he 'called on its might'? What did it do?" Pinch leaned against the stuccoed wall of the first building across from the necropolis gate. It was a smoke-blackened ordinary with a very grim signboard overhead: The Shroud. Nonetheless, it sounded festive enough inside. Their conversation had steered her well away from her assigned post.

  "The scriptures are very vague on all that. They just refer to some great power without really describing much. Not everyone could use it either; only the faithful are described as being able to use it."

  " 'Tis not me, for certain, to gain from such a thing," Pinch lied. "I never knew about the Morninglord until I came to Elturel."

  The truth was that Pinch's gain would have been all in coin. He'd spent weeks casing the Elturel temple, working out its wards, guard schedules, and even just where to make the break in the roof. The plan had been to filch the amulet and then pass it off to Therin. The Gur was to carry it west in the next caravan until he found a good broker on the Sword Coast to take it off his hands.

  Cleedis had ruined all that.

  Now the rogue felt like he was stuck with the thing. True, there were more than enough brokers in Ankhapur who would pay for an artifact of mysterious power, but Pinch knew his chances of getting good coin were very slim. The hue and cry embodied in Lissa's presence made matters all the worse. Every broker in the city would know where the object came from and probably who had stolen it. That knowledge could be a powerful threat to Pinch's freedom. The rogue had no ambition to discover the pleasantries of Ankhapur's prisons.

  "So many questions. Maybe you've heard news?" The quick tones of Lissa's curiosity intruded on Pinch's reverie. She spoke with allegro phrasing in tones and shades that carried more meaning than her words. Pinch could imagine her in the ranks of the temple choir, a place that better suited her than the slop-strewn stews that surrounded them now.

  "Maybe." The rogue kept his answer short. Talk killed thieves.

  "I think the Dawnbreaker's amulet is here, in Ankhapur."

  "How can you be sure?" Pinch really wanted to know her reasons, but he had to take care not to sound too intrigued. If she suspected someone, he had to include the possibility she suspected him.

  "The patriarchs in Elturel have divined that the amulet is not within that city. They've sent word."

  Pinch scratched at his stubbly beard. He'd not had time for grooming since some moment yesterday. "That hardly places the proof here."

  Lissa lowered her voice as a drunk ambled out of the Shroud, a hairy brute whose naked chest barely fit beneath the scarred leather apron he wore as a shirt. The man strutted past them, arrogantly challenging these well-dressed strangers who ventured onto his turf.

  "The amulet is in Ankhapur. Believe me on this."

  "An informer? Someone's given you word, or tried to sell it. You think I have it? Or another?"

  The musical pleasantry of her voice suddenly disappeared. "If it were one of your friends, would you reveal them?"

  "Sprite, Maeve, Therin-you think it's one of them?"."I meant hypothetically. Someone brought it from Elturel. I can feel it."

  "You think I consort with this thief." Pinch straightened himself in indignation.

  "I've said too much already. It is here, though, and I will find it." Her tone was unabashed by his accusation.

  Pinch assumed an air of almost theatrical injury. "I've known rogues and thieves most of my life, priestess, but do not mistake me for one. I like their company. They drink better and they're more honest than the snakes of the court. Just because a man's company is not to your taste, don't impute on his friends. Yes, Sprite is an imp and Maeve drinks a bit, but they're good people. As for me, I'm only seeking to recover what you've lost. If you're not pleased with this, then I shall cease."

  Perhaps he just pressed too hard, perhaps she was just wary, or perhaps he had always been the target of her suspicion. Whatever the reasoning, if there was any reasoning to it at all, the priestess suddenly withdrew even as she rejected his offer. She pulled her things about her with the urge to go, although the rogue noted his words at least caused her to keep one hand at her dagger.

  "I meant no affront, Master Janol, but I will find this thief, no matter who he-or she-is." With that the priestess broke away as if afraid that Pinch could somehow charm her to think otherwise.

  Pinch let her go, watching her carefully pick her path around the turgid puddles of slops. There was no breaking the frost of cold courtesy that had settled on her.

  Pinch looked up to the Shroud, with its wooden drapery creaking from the signboard overhead. There was work to be done, and a drink was as good enough a place as any to start. Alcohol keened his plotter's mind, perversely laying bare the twisted paths of a multitude of schemes. Besides, he was thirsty.

  Pinch sat at a dark table in a dark corner the way he always preferred. From the dawn light until now, he reviewed the day's events. Too much was happening that he didn't control: strange voices, stranger hands in the dark, Manferic returned, and Lissa retreating. Everything about it was the design of fates beyond his control, and that Pinch could not abide. For fifteen years he had fought to be the master of his own life, and now in the span of a few days, everything was conspiring to take that apart.

  One by one the drinks came, and as part of the ritual his mind followed in its cunning, Pinch dedicated each mug to a threat to future well-being.

  "Here's to Manferic," the rogue toasted to no one in particular on his first blackjack of heady wine. "Were the bastard's memory truly dead." It was a toast to more than just bitter memories. The undead king was the first and foremost problem. There was little doubt what Pinch's reward would be when his job was done. King Manferic had always been brutally efficient at removing useless pawns. The rogue drained the mug in one long gulp, slapped it on the table, and sat brooding as he stared at the chisel work of a previous customer. Several times he waved off the landlord while plots played themselves out in his mind.

  At last he called for a second blackjack, and when it came he raised it high. "To Cleedis." Again he repeated the ritual of drink and brood. What was the chamberlain's part, and just whom did he serve? Dead Manferic used him, but the late king trusted no one, that Pinch was certain. But old Cleedis wasn't a fool, though he played the role for others. As a general he'd had a cunning mind for traps and lures. The rogue was running the gantlet for these two without knowing even where it would end.

  With these two, Manferic and Cleedis, at least the threat was clear. They wanted him to do the job and then they wanted him dead. The rogue was clear on that. Already he was threading plots within their plots, plans to keep himself alive. It was life as normal in Ankhapur.

  With his third mug, Pinch contemplated the coldest challenge of all. He raised his blackjack to Lissa and her quest. She was close, too close. The rogue was sure she'd gotten her suspicions from Cleedis or maybe one of the princes, though Pinch doubted they were that well-informed or clever. It was a way for Cleedis to keep him under good behavior, to control his life.

  He could kill her and have done with it, like he'd once considered on the road, but the thought didn't appeal to him. He was getting sentimental, fond of her easy gullibility. There had to be a use for her alive.

  The only other choice, though, was to give her a thief. It couldn't be just any thief. It had be someone she suspected. Which one could he do without, Pinch wondered: Maeve, Therin, or Sprite? If it came to it, which one could he give up?

  Pinch ordered another drink and broo
ded even more.

  11

  Low Cunning

  The great, swollen, and single eye of the Morninglord was not yet gazing upon Ankhapur when Pinch sidled out of the mist and back into the marbled confines of the palace. The thick, warm steam, fresh from the sea, cast him up in its wash, the great cloud that blanketed the commons of Ankhapur breaking into its froth just at the hard stones of the palace gate.

  Pinch sauntered under the portcullis, raised for the cooks and spitboys off to market, passing the guards with the confidence that he belonged there. It had been years since the feeling of arrogant privilege truly belonged to him. He had never forgotten it and carried it with him through all his dealings with petty thugs, constable's watch, prison turnkeys, and festhall girls. He always held that knowledge of his own superiority as the key to his rise and dominance in Elturel. Having the sense of it, though, wasn't the same as the confirmation of one's entitlement that came in moments like this.

  At other times and places, fools had tried to convince him that respect was the mark of a true leader-foolish old men who believed they were the masters of great criminal clans, but in truth little men with little understanding. Pinch knew from his years under Manferic's sharp tutelage that respect meant nothing but useless words and bad advice. Fear is what made men and beasts obey-utter and base fear. Manferic had been an artist in instilling fear. The common people feared the terrors that awaited dissidents and rivals who vanished in the night. The nobility dreaded the moment Manferic might strip a title or confiscate lands. The princes feared the moment their father might turn on them and bloodily solve the question of succession. None of them knew the scope of the chasm that was his soul, and none of them dared find out.

  Fear is what made the guards stand to, not admiration.

  Pinch made his way through the long interconnected halls of the palace. His fine clothes, the vanity of his days, were sagged with loose wrinkles that come with constant wear and the dull edge of morning sobriety.

  The wrinkles were reflected in his face, a leathery map of his nighttime indulgences, with sad, pouchy bags under his eyes and feeble folds around his neck. Pinch was battling time, as all living things do. Even the endless elves slowly succumb to the Great Master's advances. Death could be beaten, cheated, and postponed, and the gods were frail by comparison. Even they felt the yoke of years settling over them. Time was the enemy Pinch could not outwit, the treasure locked beyond his bony fingers.

  Right now exhaustion was weakness. Pinch felt want of sleep in his bones, but there was no time for the luxury of rich sheets. Plans were already in motion, some of his own doing and more that were not. Plots needed counterplots, and those needed their own counters. Looking forward, there was no end to the webs that filled the future, not here or even if he left Ankhapur.

  So Pinch slipped through the halls, down colonnaded corridors that threatened to devour him with their hungry boredom, past galleries that whispered with the ancestors of a past not his. A blind man would have heard only the random wet slap of leather polishing a marble that was green veined and solid like cave-ripened cheese.

  It was at the entrance to the Great Hall, as he was being swallowed farther and farther into the deceitful stagnation of the palace, that Pinch spied Iron-Biter, the grotesque. Before purposeful thought could will it, Pinch had already sidled out of view, angling himself where he could watch but not be watched.

  Once there, he observed. What he hoped to see, he did not know, but this dwarf was an adversary. Vargo's displays had foolishly revealed the misshapen courtier's strengths; now Pinch hoped to see weaknesses. A direct confrontation with Vargo's enforcer was unwinnable without an Achilles' heel to exploit. "Thieves' courage" some called it. Pinch didn't give a damn.

  Sheltered by a window shuttered with pierced rosewood, Pinch watched as the dwarf prowled the grand chamber. Apelike Iron-Biter appeared to move with no purpose, paying mind first to a candelabrum, then to the cracks between the marble blocks in the walls, with all the intention and interest of his kind. Dwarven fascination for stone was beyond Pinch's understanding. A block of marble was a block of marble. You couldn't sell it, and even carved well it hardly had enough value to make it worth stealing. Dwarves would go on about how well veined and smoothly solid a single stone was-for days if one let them.

  Still, if there were collectors willing to pay for a block of stone, Pinch would steal it. It was all a case of what the brokers wanted.

  Approaching footsteps clacked through the sterile halls. Pinch coiled around the pillar and watched as a servant tottered into the hall. The old servitor's arms were draped with fabric-costumes of succulent silk that spilled out of his arms in hues of minted gold, their buttons like fat nobles worn smooth between a usurer's greasy fingers. Explosions of lace flared in pleats of ethereal smoke, banded roots of brocaded ribbon bound everything into one mass, and perched on top of it, like a vessel on a wave-tossed sea, was a pair of masks, grotesques of the finest manufacture.

  Masks?

  Iron-Biter raised the first one with all the critical judgment of proud torturer examining his craft. It was a face of sharp-stretched leather, a cow's flayed skin stretched to fiendish form. The honey-gold leather glistened under a sheen of wax buffed to shellac hardness. It was a face of deception, a gleaming smile of diabolic cheerfulness.

  Apt for the owner, Pinch felt, but why masks?

  The scrape of a door signaled more arrivals. Iron-Biter waved the servant away as Prince Vargo entered the hall, dressed in the careless elegance of his morning gowns. The royal heir stretched with feline abandon, ignored his dwarf henchman, and went to the table where he idly poured a goblet of ruby wine and poked at the silks and leathers cascading over the back of the chair. The dwarf stood patiently silent, his little hands barely touching across the vast plain of his chest. The soaring darkness of the hall heightened the little man's grotesque proportions, making him a fat, bright-shelled beetle over which some human giant would tower.

  With an arch sniff at his wine, Vargo flipped the mask he'd been examining back onto the table. "Not very original… best you could do, Iron-Biter?"

  Echoes bedeviled Pinch's ears, taunting him with words he could almost hear.

  "I chose them to show restraint, milord," the dwarf rumbled like a kettledrum. "… appear modest during the ceremony. It will not do for the chosen… decked out like a harlequin."

  Vargo glanced over his shoulder at Iron-Biter, deigning to give the man the least of his attention. "I… calling for the ritual in the… masque… undignified enough. You… advising… a fool of me?" With a gentle brush at his mustache, Vargo sipped at his wine.

  Behind the pillar, it was hopeless for Pinch to hear their conversation clearly, and he dearly needed to. They were plotting, and plots discovered were what would give the rogue the edge. He needed to be closer. Carefully he scanned the ground between himself them. On the opposite side of the hall and much closer to his quarry was another line of pillars, a good spot to lurk and pry. The morning sun and the flickering stubs of the night candles cast a weave of half-shadows across the floor between here and there, not quite darkness and not quite day. A quick, quiet shift and he would be in position to hear all.

  With the care of a carnival tightrope walker, Pinch sidled away from the shelter of the pillar. Iron-Biter seemed absorbed in the presence of his lord, and Vargo viewed the world with bored indifference, but Pinch knew the latter, at least, was a lie. His elder cousin was the hawk who never quite looked on the world with closed eyes.

  With one eye to the floor and the other always on his adversaries, Pinch drifted across the gap to the other side. Years of practice made the move look effortless, indeed casual. He took care never to move fast enough to catch attention, stepped softly so that the kiss of leather to stone would not give him away. Nonetheless, his blood raced at the thrill of risk. There was little question that if Pinch was discovered, Vargo would find some excuse to let his sadistic underling play.

 
Precaution and skill carried the rogue to the blind safety of the other colonnade. Once there, he quickly flitted from pillar to pillar until he was so close he could have reached out and poured a sample of Vargo's wine.

  During the time it took to reach his new position, Pinch had been focused on silence, not words. The conversation had gone on without him. Vargo was asking something, a question in response to Iron-Biter's plottings.

  "And what makes you certain I will be king?"

  The huge dwarf bent his knees in the best imitation of a bow that he could manage. "Are you not the most worthy ruler of Ankhapur, milord?" The flattery was oily and insincere, though it did not presume on Vargo's talents. The lie was couched in the vagaries of the choosing, for even a priest could not attest to the will of the higher powers and the creaking wheel of fortune.

  "Besides, milord," Iron-Biter continued, fully knowing the weakness of that explanation, "there will be no other choice. The test be damned. You will seize the throne as is your right. Throdus is a coward. Before the masque, he will have heard one hundred reasons not to challenge you."

  Vargo nodded agreement but held out a finger in caution. "True enough, though it must not be too obvious. The lords who support him have considerable backing."

  "It shall be discreet, milord."

  "And Marac? He has more spirit. My youngest brother will not be bullied so easily."

  Iron-Biter shrugged, his massive shoulders grinding like a builder's cranes. "Perhaps you are a better judge of him than I." The words held a cocksure arrogance, not quite openly challenging the lord. "His power is weak, his support thin among the nobles and the army. Most of the guests at the masque will be your vassals. Challenging you at the festival will be impossible, complete folly. If you act forcefully and proclaim yourself king by right of possession alone, Marac will not dare challenge you."