Jimmy the Hand

by Raymond E. Feist

  Some of her friends moved away cautiously—anything out of the ordinary was dangerous. But the majority of the girls watched with arms folded across their breasts and their eyes flicking toward the surrounding alleys, holding their ground despite their suspicion. After all, a lot of their business came from soldiers.

  A sergeant descended from the wagon and approached the girls with the rolling swagger of a man who’d spent as much of his life on horseback as on foot. His corporal went to work lowering the tailgate and opening the cage door; the rest of the squad braced their polearms, the sharp hooks on the backs interlinked, a bare upright tent.

  The sergeant chucked Flora under the chin and turned to grin at his men who also moved in, smiling. He smelled of sweat, leather and sour wine; she was used to that, but this man was ranker than most, and she wrinkled her nose a little. Flora tossed her head and with a slightly nervous smile asked, ‘Anything I can do for you, soldier?’

  ‘Yes,’ the sergeant said, leaning in close, ‘you can come with me, my little canker-blossom, you and all your friends. We’re having a party for you back at the keep.’ He took hold of her arm with a hard grip and a cruel, crook-toothed smile.

  ‘Well, there’s no need to be rough about it,’ Flora snapped, trying to pull away.

  ‘I suppose there isn’t,’ he agreed amiably. ‘But, ye see, I want to be.’

  With that, he picked her up by her hair and the waist of her skirt and tossed her into the cage in a squawking cartwheel of limbs and cloth. Her knee hit something hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. Before she could get to her feet, her friends were thrown in on top of her, driving the breath out of her lungs with a force that left her struggling for air. One of her teeth cut the inside of her lip with a little stab of pain, and the iron-salt-copper taste of blood filled her mouth.

  ‘Wait!’ she cried after an instant, sucking back her breath as she went scrambling backward out of the writhing heap. ‘We haven’t done nothing! What are you doing?’

  The cries of the others were shrill around her: protests, sobs, curses and wordless shrieks of rage. She hauled herself up by the bars of the wagon in time to see two of her friends scurry down an alley with their skirts gathered up, and took heart from the sight. Word would get back to the Upright Man and something would be done about it. Flora rattled the wooden bars of the cage as hard as she could, glaring.

  ‘You can’t just throw us in jail for nothing!’ she shouted.

  The sergeant came up to her and smacked her fingers with a mailed fist; not hard enough to break anything, but more than hard enough to hurt. ‘Oh, yes we can,’ he said, with what might have been mistaken for good humour, if you weren’t watching his eyes.

  Those eyes had something in them that made her shiver and remember what Jimmy had said about the risks of freelancing.

  The sergeant slapped his gloved hands together; the metal rings on their backs clinked dully. ‘So says the acting governor. We can do anything we want to trash like you, and serves you right. Now shut up and settle down like a good, sensible girl or I’ll knock your teeth out.’

  Flora sucked her wounded knuckles and did as she was told. The pain was distant, less real than the way her heart pounded with fear, and her throat tried to squeeze itself shut beneath a mouth gone parchment-dry.

  By the time they arrived at the keep, the cage was full to bursting and Flora was pressed tightly against the bars—which was still better than being in the middle, since at least there was open air on one side. The wagon was filled with whores and beggars and a very few of the younger pickpockets who had been doing absolutely nothing illegal when they were taken. The soldiers had even rounded up a few people who were simply poor, or who’d happened to be standing next to the wrong whore. But she’d noticed that most of those in the cage with her were Mockers. And that frightened her. Clearly Jocko Radburn was not taking the Mockers’ adventure with the Princess Anita lightly.

  The gates clashed shut behind them. More Bas-Tyra guardsmen hauled them out of the wagons to join a growing file of prisoners being herded to stairways that led downward. Boots and fists and the steel-shod butts of halberds and pikes thudded on flesh; almost all the cursing came from the guards, though.

  Their prisoners were mostly silent, except for the occasional cry of pain.

  Jimmy had slept for a whole day and night, waking at mid-morning on the second day after the Sea Swift’s departure. He stretched luxuriously, rose and put on clean clothes—or rather, the well-aired rags he’d left in this room the last time he’d slept here—and descended the stairs. Instinct made him walk close to the wall, where the boards were less likely to creak. On the whole he liked growing up, but there was no denying it made you heavier, and he was conscientious about learning to make skill compensate for the additional poundage.

  ‘If ye’re lookin’ for breakfast ye can look elsewhere,’ said his landlady. She was a toothless beldame who glared at him with rheumy eyes. ‘Ye know I’ve nothing for ye at this hour.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think of asking you to trouble yourself,’ Jimmy said gallantly. He smiled. ‘I needed the sleep more than the breakfast anyway.’

  ‘At your age?’ the old woman sneered.

  ‘It was a long trip this time,’ Jimmy said.

  And indeed it was, into a whole other world in its way. But now it was time to get back to business. First he would stop at Mocker’s Rest and see what was happening. Then he could start the planning stages of something bigger than picking pockets.

  He’d been apprenticed to Long Charlie for the last few months, though that apprenticeship had been suspended the night Jimmy had caught sight of Prince Arutha attempting to flee Jocko Radburn himself.

  The Prince, his Huntmaster—Martin Longbow—and Amos Trask—the legendary Trenchard the Pirate—had come secretly into the city a few days earlier before Jimmy’s encounter with the Prince. They had tried to hide their presence but from Jimmy’s point of view they stood out like red bulls in a sheep fold. By the time Jimmy had chanced across Radburn pursuing Arutha, the Upright Man had put the word out to pick up these three newcomers.

  Jimmy had known something was up between the smugglers and Mockers, something beyond their usual uneasy truce, for Trevor Hull’s men had come and gone in areas of the sewer that were clearly Mockers’ territory, but as he was only a boy, albeit a very talented one, he was not privy to the secret of the Princess’s escape from the keep.

  Finding Arutha had changed that, and had plunged Jimmy into the heart of a conspiracy that had ended the night before with Anita, Arutha, and his companions successfully making their escape. He had not only become a conspirator but had become a companion to both Prince Arutha and Princess Anita while they awaited their opportunity for escape. He had played his part, earned royal thanks, and found within himself a sense of something larger than himself for the first time in his young life.

  Such triumphs left Jimmy in no mood to return to apprenticeship, opening practice-locks while Long Charlie looked over his shoulder. Besides, he’d long since caught the knack of lock-picking and the samples he’d seen didn’t look as if they’d offer any challenge. Frankly, the training he was getting was boring and Jimmy knew in his heart that he was meant for more exciting things. Sometimes it seemed that Charlie was just giving him tedious work to keep Jimmy out of his hair. Even before the adventure with Arutha and Anita, Jimmy had made up his mind to request a new mentor. Life is too short to wait for what I’m entitled to, he thought.

  One thing he should do today was steal some more respectable-looking clothes. The ones he was wearing smelled bad, even to himself.

  Or I could buy some, just for a change, he thought. But first, a money-changer.

  The changer worked out of a narrow shop in an alley, denoted by a pair of scales on a sign above the door; the paint was so faded that only a hint of gold peeped through the grime. Jimmy hopped over the trickle of filth down the centre of the alley, nodded to the basher who stood just outside, polishi
ng the brickwork with his shoulder, and pushed through the door. The basher would find a reason to delay any citizen from entering the shop whenever a Mocker was inside.

  Ference, the money-changer, looked up and said, ‘Ah, Jimmy! What can I do for you?’

  Jimmy reached inside his tunic and pulled out his coin pouch, and with a quick flip of his wrist, rolled half a dozen coins on the counter. The others were safely hidden on top of a ceiling beam in his room.

  ‘Gold?’ Ference said, looking at the thumbnail-sized coins Jimmy shoved across the smooth wood of the table.

  The money-changer was a middle-aged man with a thin, lined face and the sort of squint you got from fretting about your strongbox when you should be sleeping. He dressed with the sort of sombre respectability a prosperous storekeeper might affect.

  ‘Getting ambitious, are you, Jimmy lad?’

  ‘Honestly earned,’ Jimmy said, ‘for a change.’ And it was even true, for once.

  He kept a close eye on the scales as Prince Arutha’s coins turned into a jingling heap of worn and much less conspicuous silver and copper. The Upright Man’s regulations kept men like Ference moderately honest—broken arms were the usual first-time penalty for changers or fences shorting Mockers, and then it got really nasty—but it never hurt to be self-reliant.

  ‘There,’ the changer said at last. ‘That’ll attract a lot less attention.’

  ‘Just what I thought,’ Jimmy said, smiling a little to himself.

  He bought a money-belt to hold it—too big a jingling purse was conspicuous too—and wandered out into the street.

  ‘Pork pies! Pork pies!’ he heard, and the words brought a flood of saliva into his mouth; he had missed breakfast. ‘Two of your best, Mistress Pease,’ he said grandly.

  The pie-seller put down the handles of her pushcart and brought out two; they were still warm, and the smell made his nose twitch. What was more, Mistress Pease’s pork pies were actually made from pork, not of rabbit, cat, or the even less savoury concoctions you got from some vendors. He bit into one.

  ‘Feeling prosperous, I see,’ she said, as he handed over four coppers.

  ‘Hard work and clean living, Mistress,’ he replied; she shook all over as she laughed.

  Well, a thin cook wouldn’t be much of an advertisement, would she? he thought.

  He washed the pies down with a flagon of cider bought from a nearby vendor, and sat in the sun belching contentedly, his back against the stone-coping of a well.

  He was just licking his fingers when a pebble hit the top of his head.

  Ouch, he thought, and looked up.

  Long Charlie’s cadaverous face peered around a gable. His hands moved: Report to Mocker’s Rest, he said in the signing cant. Right now. No delay, no excuses.

  Jimmy swigged back the rest of the cider and hastily returned his flagon to the vendor with polite thanks. Then he headed for the nearest alley.

  Once in the sewers he moved at a confident jog—even through the pitch-black places, of which there were many—and passed the guards the Mockers had stationed at various locations, who seemed unusually alert today. Not that they were ever less than wide-awake; sleeping or getting drunk on guard duty could get you badly hurt or seriously dead.

  The smell was homelike, though ripe; Jimmy flicked his toe aside and sent a rat more belligerent than most flying through the air. Its squeal ended with a sodden thud—you had to be careful about the ones that didn’t run away, chances were they were sick with something. Jimmy had seen a man foaming at the mouth from a rat bite and it wasn’t a sight he would quickly forget.

  The Rest was like a kicked anthill, all swarming movement—although ants didn’t produce that sort of din, or wave their arms so that you nearly got clouted in the face walking through. Agitated people moved quickly from group to group; everyone seemed to be talking at once. He spied a boy he knew standing apart and went over to him. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

  The boy, dubbed Larry the Ear because his were enormous, stood tense as a bowstring watching the frantic activity. He spoke to Jimmy without taking his eyes from the scene before them. ‘Bas-Tyra’s men are arresting the girls and the beggars and anyone else they can get their damned paws on,’ Larry growled. ‘They took Gerald.’

  Jimmy blinked. Gerald was Larry’s younger brother, not much older than seven, if that. Jimmy had known Radburn was a vindictive swine, but arresting babies was beyond contempt.

  He started to ask, ‘Was he pick . . .?’

  ‘No!’ Larry snapped, turning to glare at Jimmy. ‘He wasn’t doing nothing. He was just playin’, just bein’ a kid!’

  ‘Damn Radburn’s bones,’ Jimmy said quietly.

  ‘Damn him right enough,’ Larry said. ‘But this was del Garza. Radburn’s out of town—took ship not an hour after the Princess got away.’ Jimmy blinked. If Larry knew the Princess had been the one fleeing last night, then everyone knew it. So much for secrets. ‘Del Garza’s in charge, and he’s gone crazy mean.’

  Crazy like a fox, Jimmy thought, motionless, as implications ran through his mind. Princess gone, Radburn chasing her—del Garza will want lots of people to pin the blame on when the Duke gets back. Radburn can at least say he went after them right away. What was that old saying? Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. Del Garza wants to have as many other candidates for the role of defeat’s father as he can.

  ‘Del Garza’s a snake from the same egg as Radburn,’ Larry said passionately. ‘He’s up to something and even if it takes hurting a little boy, he’ll do it!’

  Jimmy nodded in agreement. ‘Well, we won’t let him,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s see what the Upright Man decides and if he doesn’t make the right decision, well, we’ll see.’ He punched Larry’s shoulder. ‘You with me?’

  The younger lad’s eyes filled with hope and he nodded.

  ‘Who else do you think will take our point of view?’ Jimmy asked quietly.

  ‘I’ll find out,’ Larry said, swiping his dirty sleeve over his eyes, leaving dark smears behind.

  Jimmy nodded. ‘Me too. But we’ll not discuss this again until we’ve found out what action will be taken.’ And he meant by del Garza as much as he did the Upright Man and his lieutenants. ‘Let’s move around, see what we can find out.’

  Larry nodded and they both moved off.

  ‘Have any of the houses been affected?’ a fat man was asking a group of prostitutes. ‘The ones we’re behind, I mean.’

  ‘Not yet,’ one of the women answered, a needle-nosed woman who looked well over forty. ‘But if this doesn’t get old Jocko what he wants they’ll be next. Sitting-ducks, so to speak, that’s what they are.’

  ‘A lot of the gentry go to those places,’ said one of her friends. ‘They wouldn’t like having their pleasures interfered with.’

  ‘Oh, that’ll worry the secret police,’ needle-nose sneered. ‘They’d just love to have something like that on a gentleman of quality, or a rich merchant with a jealous wife. Mark my words, even if this does get the bastard the results he wants, that’ll be their next step anyway.’

  ‘True,’ the fat man agreed. ‘Once he’s begun, why should he stop?’

  Jimmy had to agree. He supposed it was more surprising that the secret police hadn’t already made such a move—Radburn was clever enough to see it. For a power-mad, soulless bastard it seemed a logical step, much more so than picking up the street girls. You could learn a great deal if you had the power to squeeze the sporting houses; the walls there literally had ears—conveniently placed listening posts behind false walls in several of the richer brothels. More than one merchant gladly paid a madam a little extra every month to keep him current on what his drunken competitors said to impress their current favourite. It took nothing for Jimmy to imagine an agent of the Crown behind that listening post rather than the madam.

  Even before the events of the last week, rumours were that Guy du Bas-Tyra had ambitions to be the next Prince of Krondor, and that
Jocko Radburn had his cap set on being the next Duke of Krondor. Western nobles would certainly object openly in the Congress of Lords to such appointments, but western nobles with something to hide might be a great deal less vociferous in voicing those objections. Besides, the more useful results Radburn and del Garza could squeeze out of this mess, the more likely the Duke would be forgiving when he returned.

  Jimmy spied Noxious Neville sitting in a corner by himself; not unusual given Neville’s aroma, which started with old sweat and worked up from there. But the beggar had been a frequent guest in Krondor’s dungeons and might have useful information. It just depended on how addled he was today.

  Jimmy squatted down in front of the old beggar and waved a piece of silver back and forth, knowing it was the best way to get the old man’s attention. Gradually Neville stopped his rocking and his eyes began to follow the coin; then his hand rose and tried to capture it. Jimmy snatched it back and closed it in his fist.

  ‘Neville,’ he said, ‘I need some information.’

  The old man stared at him. He was quite mad, but deep in his eyes a canny intelligence lurked. After all, he hadn’t starved or frozen or been kicked to death by drunks yet.

  ‘Whatcha wanta know?’ he asked, slurring his words.

  ‘Tell me about the keep’s dungeons,’ Jimmy said. ‘I want to know everything you can remember.’

  Neville started to chuckle until he choked, then he coughed until Jimmy expected him to spit out a lung at any moment. Annoyed, because he suspected that the coughing was a demand for liquid relief, Jimmy nevertheless rose and acquired a mug of ale for the old beggar.

  As expected, as soon as the flagon was in Neville’s gnarled hand the spasm ceased.

  ‘Take more’n one silver to get that much,’ the old man rasped, then took a sip.

  ‘How much?’ Jimmy asked.

  The beggar shrugged with his whole body. ‘Twenty,’ he said, clearly knowing he’d never get it.

  Jimmy got up and started to walk away.

  ‘Hey!’ Neville called, clearly irritated. ‘Where ya goin’?’