Ice, Iron and Gold

by S. M. Stirling

  Arnson nodded. "We need our own bloody CID," she said. "There are what, over a million and a quarter people in England alone now—"

  "Million and a half, nearly," Rutherston said. "We'll be back to the Domesday Book level soon."

  "And having the entire detective branch working out of the Yard in Winchester doesn't make sense anymore. It takes too long to bring an outsider up to speed . . . nei offense."

  "None taken, I assure you. It's quite true."

  She made a half-spitting sound of frustration. "I can have a few constables put onto watching Vadalà in their own clothes—"

  "Please do, and immediately, if you would."

  "I will. But it's not their proper job. We need trained plainclothesmen. This is Portsmouth, not some village in deepest Buggritshire where a black eye or a pregnant ewe is news."

  If only I could tell you what happened in Eddsford last summer, Rutherston thought. But that wouldn't do, not while the Special Branch is still tidying up the tag-ends.

  Aloud he went on: "I quite agree, Superintendent . . . and just between thee and me, there will be a bill to that effect before Parliament at the next session. In the meantime . . ."

  Bramble grunted; his own home was close enough for government work to being exactly the sort of place Inspector Arnson had meant. The most urban thing in Buckinghamshire was the forest covering the ashes, ruins and bones that had been Milton Keynes. Unless you counted Newport Pagnell, a vibrant metropolis which had all of a thousand people now.

  When they'd finished the dessert of plum duff with red currant jelly Arnson groaned her way to her feet.

  "And now I've another hour or two of typing before I can go home . . . or at least it's the place I keep my spare underthings. See you in the morning, Inspector, Constable."

  "I'll turn in now too, I think," Rutherston said, yawning.

  "Think you can sleep, sir, with that lot enjoying themselves?"

  The crowd inside was thicker if anything, but the group of merchant-service men were still singing with enthusiasm:

  "When I was young and in me prime

  I'd take those flash girls two at a time

  Now I'm old and turning gray

  Rum's my sweetheart every day . . ."

  "Right now, I could sleep through the flash girls themselves, much less a song about them."

  Rutherston's room in the Anchor was small, under the eaves, with only a dormer window looking out over the harbor and another over the street to one side. The hissing of the rain on the slates of the roof overhead made a haze of white noise that hid everything but the occasional clunk of something heavy being set down by a cargo-sling on the docks a block away. There was a good lantern, though; the bluish alcohol flame fell on the table before him, with his own notebook and a tattered old copy of Tournaments Illuminated and a sheaf of writing-paper.

  Bramble had stayed behind in the common room when Rutherston left . . . but now he'd turned in next door—though from the sounds, not alone.

  "Fast work," the detective smiled wryly to himself, dipped his pen in the ink and finished his letter to Janice:

  " . . . and so, my dearest, I am confronted with a Scot who may not be a Scot but is probably a veritable witch and is most certainly a murder victim, a Sicilian who is also not all he seems, and a lady from Gibraltar who may be a Gypsy sorceress or a reincarnated Egyptian princess for all I know. All my love to you, and to our little Beatrice. I hope to see you before this letter arrives, but if I do not, I am thinking of you always and remember me in your prayers as I do the two of you. Yours forever, my dearest, Ingmar.

  "Damnation, but that sounds lame," he said to himself. "Well, that's what you get for marrying a poet, Ingmar. Your words will always pale by comparison."

  Then he turned back to his notebook, staring at it with his chin propped on thumb and forefinger as if sheer concentration could force a solution out of it. One of the last entries caught his eye: Vadalà and Sons ships on African run?

  That was a profitable trade, but also a dangerous one—right past the haunts of the Moorish corsairs.

  Could he be bent? Rutherston thought. Intimidated, bought off, an active collaborator? Hmm. He would be a very valuable agent for the pirates—and would stand to make a very large amount of money. But then he wouldn't have called the police right away when his secretary found the body; he'd have worked with her to hide it. There are at least two contending parties here; the man from the west, the corsairs . . . and possibly others, or divisions within the ranks of the pirates.

  Then he yawned. "No point in trying to think with sand in the gears," he said. "I need more data anyway."

  He turned down the lamp, and knelt by the bed, clasped his hands around his crucifix and murmured:

  "Lord, I beg you to visit my house and banish from it all the deadly power of the Enemy. May Your holy angels dwell there to keep my family in peace, and may Your blessing be upon us always. I ask this through Christ our Lord. And if you could help me find the murderer or murderers, Lord, I would be truly thankful, because there's at least one villain loose in this town who badly needs catching. Amen."

  Then he stripped and slid into the bed; he always felt a little better after giving God His marching-orders when a difficult case was in hand. The hot-water bottle the maid had left had gone lukewarm at best, but it had also taken the curse off the linen, and the quilt above was thick with goose-down. His head hit the pillow, and he was asleep before he had time to breathe three times.

  The cold air woke him, and a spray of rain, and the hard wet twack of an arrow striking flesh, and then the sharper tock of one driving into wood. He blinked his eyes open, just in time to see a dark figure by his bedside—dark save for the long curved knife raised over his head, glinting dully in the faint gaslight from the street below.

  Rutherston had been a policeman in a fairly peaceful land for a long time. But that hadn't been his only calling . . . or this the only time he'd woken to naked steel in darkness.

  "Turn out!" he shouted, automatically and from the bottom of his lungs. "Infiltrators! Turn out!"

  And dodged with a wordless yell as the blade came down, struggling with the quilt and sheets even as the dagger plunged into the pillow by his neck and released a blizzard of goose-down. That gave him the instant he needed to punch at the man's veiled face.

  Beneath the black cloth a nose squashed with an intensely satisfying crumbling feeling, and the dagger-man stumbled back, flailing his arms to keep his balance. Rutherston jackknifed out of bed and made a snatch at his swordbelt. The assassin recovered with a cat's reflexes; the only thing the Englishman had time to do was grab the foot-wide buckler from its snap-fastening on the scabbard of his sword.

  That saved his life slightly less than a second later, as he whirled and caught a thrust on its surface. The point of blade grated across the buckler's steel with a tooth-hurting squeal, scoring the blue paint. Then they faced each other, circling in the cramped confines of the darkened room, with the knife-blade the only bright thing in it.

  When I was twenty, single and stupid, this sort of thing was unpleasant enough. As an intelligent husband and father in my thirties it's worse, some remote corner of Rutherston's mind thought.

  Everything else narrowed down to a point of concentration like the diamond at the working-end of a drill-press. There were noises elsewhere in the inn; all he had to do was stay unpunctured for a few moments longer. The other man knew it as well; he feinted twice with blinding speed, spun the weapon from his left hand to his right and struck like a viper, slashing forehand and backhand—the best way to kill quickly and surely with a knife. Rutherston felt a thin line of cold across his stomach, and then the knife-wrist smacked into his hand. The man in black blocked Rutherston's smashing blow with the side of his buckler, hacking at the arm that held it with the edge of his free hand.

  The steel circle spun free and clanged off the wall; Rutherston forced his numbed fingers to grab for the other's free wrist. For an ins
tant the two men were face-to-face, straining against each other; the assassin seemed to be made of India-rubber and spring steel, twisting and writhing. His knee came up, but Rutherston caught it on his thigh. At the same instant the detective whipped his head forward; the butt made chill white light flash through his head, but the other man gave a stifled shriek as the Englishman's forehead smacked into the already-damaged fabric of his nose.

  Then the door opened, and the dim light of the corridor night-lamps seemed almost blinding-bright. Steel flickered, and the dark eyes above the veil went wide for an instant; Rutherston could feel the impact through the other's wrists even as he heard the wet crack of parting bone. The detective released him, and the man fell to the threadbare carpet.

  Bramble stood panting, his sword in his hand. He was also stark naked. A girl wearing not much more scurried by behind him, her golden hair fluttering as she sped downstairs giving little shrieks and holding her dress in front of her face. Then others began crowding in up the narrow stairs.

  "You there!" Rutherston snapped.

  It was the Anchor's landlord, a grizzled RN veteran with a steel hook in place of his left hand, and a businesslike cutlass in his right; both clashed with the pajamas he was wearing, which were blue and printed with small pink rabbits.

  "Get these people out of the way and send immediately for Superintendent Arnson; tell her that there's been an attack by foreign agents! The same to the duke's palace."

  "Aye-Aye, sor!" the man said, and began enthusiastically carrying out the order, with the assistance of several younger men who were probably his sons.

  Bramble was looking around his superior. Rutherston turned, stepping aside to keep his bare feet out of the pool of blood. There was a second figure in the same nondescript dark clothing lying slumped in an ungainly pile three-quarters through the window, with his feet still up on the sill. And a clothyard arrow buried to the feathers in his back; the pile-shaped head had smashed out through the thickness of his breastbone in a brutal exclamation point.

  "Good God," Rutherston said. "How could I not have noticed that?"

  "You were just a little busy, sir," Bramble said, as he stepped up to the window and looked downward.

  Rutherston swallowed and joined him. "There!"

  A dark figure darted into the little alley across from the Anchor. Rutherston's eyes went a little wider as the shadowed form ran at a brick wall, ran up it for four paces with a cloak fluttering behind, turned and bounced to a windowsill on the opposite side, bounced back across, zigzagging its way up the narrow space between buildings until it crouched on a ledge only one brick wide, leapt to grab the guttering and swung up onto the roof.

  The whole process had taken no more time than running the same distance on level ground, and then the stranger disappeared across the slick dark slates and over the ridgeline.

  "I take it back, sir," Bramble said, with a long whistle. "Someone was following us to the ware'ouse. And 'e'd be a proper delight to my old gymnastics sergeant-instructor at 'bars and rings,' he would. Maybe it's an ape?"

  Rutherston nodded, a little dazed. None of it had been strictly impossible . . . but he wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes. And it was quite certain that raising an alarm would be entirely futile. Anyone who could do that could travel across Portsmouth's rooftops faster than constables could comb the streets. He snorted as he suppressed a burst of semi-hysterical laughter at an image of Superintendent Arson's coppers plunging to the pavement as they tried to follow his benefactor in their hobnailed boots.

  "Someone is very determined to cut my investigation short, by cutting me short," he said. "Someone else is trying to stop them . . . and saved my life, without a doubt."

  "From that angle . . . tricky shot, four stories . . . whoever did it knows how to use a bow, too, and nei mistake," Bramble said. "Ah, and there's another!"

  He turned and pointed at a second shaft, with its head buried in a black oak rafter just left of the door.

  "That one would have been aimed at your little friend with the curved knife, but it missed." Then he looked at Rutherston: "You're hurt, Inspector!"

  The detective turned up the lamp and looked down, seeing with slight surprise that he had a bleeding cut across his stomach, from left hip-bone nearly six inches upward and across.

  "Just barely broke the skin," he said, with an inward shudder; that had come about one inch or a tenth of a second from gutting him. "Unpleasantly sharp knife, though. Thank you for interrupting the process of disembowelment."

  "You're welcome, sir. Wish I could have kept him alive for a while to talk, but . . ."

  "But that might have left me dead for a good long while."

  While Bramble dressed, Rutherston applied stinging aloe vera from his traveling kit, bandaged himself and pulled on his own clothes—working in a pair of cotton drawers wasn't really practical, and boots and trousers were an aid to thought. Then he laid out the bodies and pulled down the veils that were also the tails of the turbans both men wore, and turned up the lamp.

  "Well, they're not Scottish either, that's for certain," Bramble said, returning to look them over.

  The man Rutherston had fought and Bramble killed was coal-black, with parallel rows of ritual scars on his face. The one with the arrow in his back was light-brown but had a broad stain of indigo-blue across the face from his aquiline nose downwards, and a straight dagger with a broad double-edged blade strapped to his left forearm with a leather band. Rutherston pushed back the sleeves of his knitted jersey; there was a silver armlet on one wrist, set with polished stones.

  "He came a long way from home to die," Rutherston said. "Tuareg—the Veiled Men; they get that stain from the dye in the cloth. And an imajeghen at that, aristocrat from a noble clan; they're camel nomads, in the sand-seas of the deep Sahara. There's a long story there that won't be told."

  Both men had their hair in a medusa's tangle of thin tight braids; the detective flipped one, then held up an arm to show another amulet, this one of thick leather.

  "More importantly," he said, "they're both Baye Fall. Who are the Brute Squad for the Mouride Brotherhood. Or, if you believe Emir Jawara, they're just peaceful, spiritual groundnut cultivators who've never set foot on the deck of a River Saloum rover, and there aren't really any pirates there anyway, it's all in our imaginations."

  "And I'm the Duke of Portsmouth, if you're in the mood to believe things," Bramble grunted. "Speaking of which, sir, good thing you sent to notify him, eh? Getting definitely political, this is. We don't want Military Intelligence rapping our knuckles."

  "Too right," Rutherston said agreeably. "But I want to get to the bottom of it myself, as well. We'll have to arrange a quiet arrest for Signor Vadalà, too, before he does a flit."

  "As long as we don't get our own arse in a crack, sir," Bramble said. "Which has 'appened, just now."

  He went over to the door, gripped the arrow embedded in the rafter between thumb and forefinger and drew it out with a grunt and a back-and-forth motion, offering the slender piece of wood for Rutherston's examination.

  "Hmm," the detective said, as he took out his magnifying glass and looked it over carefully. "The shaft was split from a billet and then turned on a lathe, just the way we do it; the grain is vertical along the long axis. But it's some sort of heavy reddish softwood. Cedar, not ash. And that's a bodkin head. Just like the one in our dead friend, minus the blood of course. Whatever it is, it certainly isn't Senegalese or Moorish."

  The arrowhead was the armor-piercing military style, shaped in a narrow pyramid tapering to a point like a metalsmith's punch.

  "Not one of ours, though, either," Bramble said thoughtfully. "Machine-made like the Winchester Armoury model, but three-sided, see? And the shank's longer. Thirty-inch shaft and goosefeather fletching. Horn nock—good 'un, but not done quite our style; the feathers are hog-backed, too."

  "Bring it over by the lamp, please, Constable. Let's see if there's a maker's stamp
."

  Rutherston peered more closely with the glass, turning aside from time to time to sketch what he saw in his notebook.

  "Not ours, you're right about that, Bramble. Nor any of our neighbors."

  Greater Britain's mark was a Cross of St. George and a crown. Norland used a horizontal cross, the Umbrian League put the Keys of St. Peter on the heads of their crossbow bolts; the Kingdom of Sicily had a three-armed triskelion. This was . . .

  "More witch-marks, sir?"

  "Not this time. It's . . . let's see . . . I think it's a little tree, or possibly a squid dancing on its head, with seven stars around it."

  "Never heard of it."

  Rutherston frowned; something was teasing at his memory. Then a thunder of feet on the stairs interrupted them. The door burst open, and Superintendent Arnson shoved through.

  "Oh, bloody hell," she said, taking in the scene at a glance. "And I hoped it wasn't as bad as the message said."

  Ten minutes later the two bodies were carried out the front entrance of the Anchor on stretchers by the Portsmouth constables. The innkeeper came around with mugs of coffee, brewed snarling-strong in the style the RN used to keep watch-standers alert. Rutherston tamed his with cream and sugar, sipped, then looked at the clock ticking over the main hearth as the caffeine hit his stomach and nerves; five o'clock, and several hours to dawn this time of year. A rhythmic clash of boots and metal sounded outside, and a volley of harsh orders.

  Bramble muttered under his breath: "For lo, it was established from the Ages that when-so-ever the bloody 'orse hath gone, even so shall they then and only then locketh the stable door."

  His father had been a deacon in the parish church. Bramble had also spent years in the Regulars, and he went on:

  "Bet those lads are roit 'appy they've been turned out of their nice warm barracks to stand around doing sod-all in aid to the civil power at five o'clock of a fine January morning."