by Glen Cook
He blanched. I mean, he really turned white. For a second I thought his hair would change. But he showed no other reaction. He lied, “No. That’s grisly. Is it important?”
Lie to me, I’ll lie to you. “No. It came up in a bull session the other night. The weather was pretty drunk out. Somebody heard something like that from somebody who heard something about it from somebody else. You know how that goes. You can’t trace the source.”
“Yes. Good day, Mr. Garrett.” Suddenly he wanted me out of there.
“Good day, Magister.”
I closed the door behind me. Smiling Sampson was right there to make sure I had no trouble finding the street.
22
A drizzle had started. The breeze had freshened. I put my head down and walked into it, grumbling. I wouldn’t be out in this if the world would learn to leave me alone. How thoughtless of it.
Head down with not much going on inside — some would say that’s the normal state of my bean — I trudged toward that small district beyond the Hill where both city and Crown maintain their civil offices. I hoped the Royal Assay people could tell me what Peridont wouldn’t.
He had recognized the coins.
I didn’t believe much of what he’d told me — though some of it might have been true. I disbelieved only selectively. I took nothing at face. Everywhere I turned religion popped up, and that’s a game of masks and deceits and illusions if ever there was one.
My course took me within a block of the Blue Bottle, where curiosities Smith and Smith had holed up. Wouldn’t hurt to stop by, see what Maya had missed.
The place didn’t look promising. There’d been no upkeep done in my lifetime. But it was a cut above places where all you got for your copper was a place on a rope that would support you while you slept standing up.
It was the sort of place frequented by the poor and the lowest-order bad boys. The people who operated it wouldn’t be eager to talk. I’d have to use my wits to get anything.
Not always the best hope with me.
The interior delivered the promise of the outside. I stepped into a dingy common room inhabited only by a flock of three winebirds hard at their trade. Some invisible force had pushed them to the extremities of the room. One was educating himself in a continuous muttered monotone. I couldn’t make out one word in five but he seemed to be engaged in a furious debate on social issues. His opponent wasn’t apparent and seemed to have a hard time making himself heard.
I didn’t see anybody who looked like a proprietor. Nobody responded to the bell over the door. “Yo! Anybody home?”
That didn’t bring any customer-conscious landlord charging in from his toils in the kitchen. But one of the silent drunks detached himself from his chair and reeled toward me. “Wha’cha need? Room?”
“Looking for a couple of my pals, Smith and Smith, supposed to be staying here.”
He leaned against the serving counter, bathed me in fumes and knotted his face into a ruddy prune. “Uh. Oh. Third floor. Door at the end.” He didn’t work up much disappointment over the fact that I wasn’t going to put money in his pocket.
“Thanks, pal.” I gave him a couple of coppers. “Have one on me.”
He looked at the coins like he couldn’t figure out what they were. While he pondered the mystery I went upstairs. Carefully. The way those steps creaked and sagged it was only a matter of hours until one collapsed.
I wasn’t disappointed by the third floor, either. It was more like a half story — five rooms under the eaves, two to either side of a claustrophobically narrow hall and one at the end. Two of the side rooms didn’t have a hanging to ensure privacy. One still had a door that hung on one hinge, immobile. My destination was a door that wouldn’t close because of a warp in the floor. The Smiths weren’t home. Surprise, surprise. I hadn’t expected them to be after their encounter with the Doom. I pushed inside.
Whatever plot or conspiracy or outfit the Smiths were with, it was miserly. They’d slept on blankets on the floor. And they hadn’t had a change of clothing to leave behind.
I started going over the room anyway. You never know when something minute will make everything fall together.
I was on my knees looking into the canyons between floorboards when the hallway floor creaked. I looked over my shoulder.
The woman looked like the Dead Man’s wife. There was enough of her to make four women with some to spare. How had she gotten that close without raising a roar? How had the stairway survived? Why was the building standing? It was top-heavy enough to tip over.
“What the hell you doing, boy?”
She was spoiling for a fight and there wouldn’t be any getting around it. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to know, shithead.”
So it don’t always work.
She was carrying a club, a real man-sized head-buster. I pitied the guy who got hit when she got her weight behind it.
It looked like I might get a chance to practice my self-pity if I didn’t use those wits I’d been daydreaming about. “Who the hell are you? What the hell are you doing sticking your face in my room?’’
When you don’t have space to dazzle them with your footwork you try baffling them with bullshit.
“Your room? What the hell you yelling, boy? This room belongs to two guys named Smith.”
“The guy I paid said take this room. I did what he told me. You got a problem with that you take it up with the management.”
She glared at me. “That goddamned Blake up to his old tricks, eh?” Then she yelled, “I am the management, shithead! You been conned by a wino. Now get your ass out of here. And don’t come whining to me for your money back.”
What a dreamboat.
She turned around and stomped away. I held onto the floor. If the building went I could ride it down. She kept grumbling. “I’m going to kill that sonofa-bitch this time.”
What a sweetheart. It was a good thing she didn’t get physical, because I don’t think I could have taken her.
I did some more quick looking, but when the yelling started downstairs I figured it was time I made my getaway.
Then I spotted something.
It was a copper coin all the way down in a crack. I whipped out a knife and started digging.
There was no reason to believe the coin had been lost by the Smiths. It could have been there for a hundred years.
It could have been. But I never believed that for a second.
Maybe I wished hard enough. That scrungy little hunk of copper was the brother of those I’d collected already.
Click. Click. Click. Pieces started falling together. Everything was part of the same puzzle, except, improbably, Magister Peridont. Improbably because he’d lied. He knew something about what was going on even if he wasn’t involved himself.
It was time to go.
23
Big Momma was in full cry when I hit the bottom of the stairs. She was after the drunk I’d tipped. He dodged her with the nimbleness of long practice. She took a mighty swing as I arrived, but missed him. Her club smashed a bite out of a table. She yowled and cursed the day she’d married him.
The muttering drunk paid no attention. Maybe he was a regular and had seen it all before. The other drunk had disappeared. I thought he’d set a good example.
I slid toward the door.
Big Momma spotted me. She whooped. “You son-ofabitch! You lying sonofabitch!” She headed my way like a galleon under full sail.
I’m not a fool every time. I got the hell out of there. The drunken husband must have zigged when he should have zagged. He came flying through the doorway, ass over appetite, and lay panting and puking in the drizzle. The woman did some yelling but didn’t come out for the kill. When she quieted down I went to see how the guy was.
He had scrapes and a bloody nose and needed throwing into a river but he’d survive. “Come on.” I offered him a hand up.
He took it, got up, teetered, looked at me with eyes that wouldn’t focus. “You really don
e it to me, man.” “Yeah. Sorry about that. I didn’t know your personal situation was so bad.”
He shrugged. “Once she calms down she’ll beg me to come back. A lot of women don’t got any husband at all.” “That’s true.”
“And I don’t cheat on her or beat her.”
Somehow I couldn’t picture him as a wife-beater. Not with that wife.
He asked, “What the hell were you trying to do, anyway?’’
“Find out something about those guys Smith and Smith. Some friends of theirs killed a buddy of mine. Come on. Let’s go somewhere out of the wet.”
“Why should I believe anything you tell me after the stories you told already?” His speech wasn’t that clear but that’s what he wanted to say.
He was unhappy with me but that didn’t keep him from tagging along. He muttered, “I need to get cleaned up.”
So he wasn’t all the way gone to wine. Yet. There’s a point beyond which they just don’t care.
I led him to a place a couple blocks away, as seedy as his own. It was a little more densely populated-five guys had gotten there ahead of us — but the ambience was the same: gloom laden with despair.
The operator was more businesslike. A frail ancient slattern, she was on us before we got through the doorway. She made faces at my newfound friend.
“We need something to eat,” I told her. “Beer for me and tea for my buddy. You got someplace he can clean himself up?’’ A flash of silver stilled her protests.
“Follow me,” she told him. To me, “Take that table there.”
“Sure. Thanks.” I let them get out of the room before I went to the door for a peek outside. I hadn’t imagined anything. Mumbles had followed us. He was doing his routine against a wall down the street. I suppose he was talking about the weather.
If he’d taken a notion to keep an eye on me he wouldn’t be going anywhere. I could handle him when I wanted. I planted myself at the appointed table and waited for my beer. The prospect of the kind of food such places served depressed me.
My pal didn’t look much better when he came back but he did smell sweeter. That was improvement enough for me. “You look better,” I lied.
“Bullshit.” He dropped into a chair, slouched way down. The old woman brought beer and tea. He gripped his mug with both hands and looked at me. “So what do you want, pal?”
“I want to know about Smith and Smith.”
“Not much to tell. Them wasn’t their real names.”
“No! Do tell. How long did they stay there?”
“They first come two weeks ago. Some old guy come with them. Paid for them to stay, room and board, for a month. He was a cold fish. Eyes like a basilisk. They wasn’t none of them from TunFaire.”
That got my attention. “How do you figure?”
“Their accents, man. More like KroenStat or CyderBen, somewhere out there, only not quite. Wasn’t one I ever heard before. But it was like some. You get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah.” I got it. Sometimes I catch on real fast. “That man who came with them. Did he have a name? What was he like?”
“I told you what he was like. Cold, man. Like a lifetaker. He didn’t exactly encourage you to ask questions. One of the Smiths called him Brother Jersey.”
“Jerce?”
“Yeah. That’s it.”
Well, well. The very boy who hired Snowball and Doc. That coin from up there maybe didn’t prove anything but this did. “Any idea how I could find him? He’s got to be the guy who had my friend killed.”
“Nope. He said he’d come around again if Smith and Smith had to stay more than a month.”
“What about them? Anything on them?”
“You kidding? They never said three words. Didn’t socialize. Ate in their room. Mostly they was out.”
I nibbled at him this way and that while we ate a chicken and dumpling mess that wasn’t half bad. I couldn’t get anything else until I showed him my coin collection.
He barely glanced at them. “Sure. That’s the kind that Brother Jersey used to pay the rent. I noticed on account of most all of them was new. You don’t see a bunch of new all together at once.”
You don’t. It was a dumb move, calling attention that way. Except Jerce probably figured Smith and Smith would never get made.
“Thanks.” I paid up.
“Been a help?”
“Some.’’ I gave him a silver tenth mark for his trouble. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
He ordered wine before I got to the door.
I went out thinking I had to bone up on my geography. KroenStat and CyderBen are out west and west-northwest, good Karentine cities but a far piece overland. I’d never been out that way. I didn’t know much about the region.
I also thought about asking Jill Craight a few more questions. She was in the center of the action. She knew a lot more than she’d admitted.
Mumbles was on the job. I’d make it easy for him to stick if he wanted — if he wasn’t following my drunken buddy or wasn’t there by absurd coincidence. I didn’t care if I was followed.
24
I was followed.
The drizzle tapered off to nothing most of my walk. But as I neared the Royal Assay Office the sky opened up. I ducked inside grinning, leaving Mumbles to deal with it.
Considering the size of Karenta as a kingdom and considering TunFaire’s significance as largest city and chief commercial center, the Assay Office was a shabby little disappointment. It was about nine feet wide, with no windows. A service counter stood athwart it six feet inside. There was no one behind that. The walls were hidden behind glass plates fronting cases that contained samples of coins both current and obsolete. Two antique chairs and a lot of dust completed the decor.
No one came out though a bell had rung as I entered.
I studied the specimens.
After a while somebody decided I wouldn’t go away.
The guy who came out was a scarecrow, in his seventies or eighties, as tall as me but weighing half as much. He was thoroughly put out by my insistence on being served. He wheezed, “We close in half an hour.”
“I shouldn’t need ten minutes. I need information on an unfamiliar coinage.”
“What? What do you think this is?”
“The Royal Assay Office. The place you go when you wonder if somebody is slipping you bad money.” I figured I could develop a dislike for that old man fast. I restrained myself. You can’t get a lot of leverage on minions of the state. I showed him my card. “These look like temple coinage but I don’t recognize them. Nobody I know does, either. And I can’t find them in the samples here.”
He’d been primed to give me a hard time but the gold coin caught his eye. “Temple emission, eh? Gold?” He took the card, gave the coins a once-over. “Temple, all right. And I’ve never seen anything like them. And 1 been here sixty years.” He came around the counter and eyeballed the coins on one section of wall, shook his head, snorted, and muttered, “I know better than to think I’d forget.” He hobbled around the counter again to get a scale and some weights then took the gold coin off the card and weighed it. He grunted, took it off the scale, gouged it to make sure it was gold all the way through. Then he fiddled with a couple other tests I figured were meant to check the alloy.
I studied the specimens quietly, careful not to attract attention. Nowhere did I spy a design akin to the eight-legged fabulous beasties on those coins. Real creepies, they looked like.
“The coins appear to be genuine,” the old man said. He shook his head. “It’s been a while since I was stumped. Are there many circulating?”
“Those are all I’ve seen but I hear there’s a lot more.” I recalled my drunk’s remark about accents. “Could they be from out of town?”
He examined the gold piece’s edge. “This has a TunFaire reeding pattern.” He thought a moment. “But if they’re old, say from a treasure, that wouldn’t mean anything. Reeding patterns and city marks weren’t standardized unt
il a hundred fifty years ago.”
Hell, practically the night before last. But I didn’t say that out loud. The old boy was caught up in the mystery. He’d already worked past his half hour. I decided not to break his concentration.
“There’ll be something in the records in back.”
I bet on his professional curiosity and followed him. He didn’t object though I’m sure I broke all kinds of rules by passing the counter.
He said, “You’d think the specimens out there would be enough to cover every inquiry, wouldn’t you? But at least once a week I get somebody who has coins that aren’t on display. Usually it’s just new coinage from out of town and I haven’t gotten my specimens mounted. For the rest we have records which cover every emission since the empire adopted the Karentine mark.”
Hostility certainly fades when you get somebody cranked up on their favorite thing.
“I’ve been at this so long that most of the time I can take one look and tell you what you need to know. Hell. It’s been five years since I had to look anything up.”
So, he was excited by the challenge. I’d brought novelty into his life.
The room we entered was twenty feet deep. Both side walls, to brisket level, boasted cabinets containing drawers three-quarters of an inch high. They contained older and less common specimens, I presumed. Above the cabinets, to the ten-foot ceiling, were bookshelves filled with the biggest books I’ve ever seen. Each was eighteen inches tall and six inches thick, bound in brown leather, with embossed gold lettering.
The back wall, except for a doorway into another room, was covered with shelves bearing the tools and chemicals an assayer needed. I hadn’t realized there was so much to the business.
A narrow table and reading stand occupied the middle of the room.
The old man said, “I suppose we should start with the simple and work toward the obscure.” He hauled out a book entitled Karentine Mark Standard Coinages: Common Reeding Patterns: TunFaire Types I, II, III.
I said, “I’m impressed. I didn’t realize there was so much to know.”