“There has to be a kingdom to have a king,” Durham said. “I may be the last of the royal bloodline but the kingdom is a lake and an onion farm owned by a man who voluntarily calls himself Radish. I don’t think it’s in need of an intelligence agency.”
“You never know! You being the only member means it should have no detrimental effect on your royal budget. Though a consulting fee for training might not be amiss.”
“You want to charge me to be your sidekick?”
“It’s not exactly an abnormal transaction between nations when one provides a service for the other. Our government will contact your government to sort out the details and the paperwork.”
Durham took a moment to try and envision what Farmer Radish would do when a gnome diplomatic delegation arrived at his onion farm with a bill for espionage consulting. “Ummm… sure,” he said. “Should be interesting.”
“Excellent!” Mungo said. “As a matter of expediency considering imminent operation requirements we will begin with clandestine meetings with embedded undercover operatives.”
“You’re speaking somewhere around here,” Durham said, holding his palm up at head height. “I’m listening down around here.” He lowered his hand to neck level.
“Your vocabulary is somehow restricted?”
“No, I know all of the words you’re using but not quite well enough to have them all at the same picnic. Besides, I would think part of an effective disguise is learning to speak like the person you’re pretending to be.”
Mungo considered this. “You’re saying that if I’d spoken with a dwarvish accent that my dwarf disguise would have been effective?”
“Well, I’d go so far as to say it would have been more effective than it was.”
“An interesting proposition.” The gnome rubbed his palm over his chin. He’d been doing that often since the cat fur beard removal, polishing his chin to a shine. “Who do you suggest I emulate?”
Durham shuffled through the first few answers that arrived in his mind. “I’m not sure I’ve had enough training to accept the responsibility of that decision. Something that would blend in.”
Mungo turned and frowned at the beach. They were sitting a few hundred yards offshore, waiting for the harbormaster. The gnome lowered his goggles and began studying the shoreline, flicking various lenses up and down and muttering.
“So…” Durham said.
“I’ve got it!” Mungo spun around to look at Durham. One eye was magnified several times normal size, the other several smaller. “The city seems to be full of adventurers.”
“About the, uh…wait, adventurers?” Durham toyed with the idea in his head. It held up surprisingly well.
“I’ll be a merchant.”
“That might not be a bad…wait, a merchant?”
“Adventurers always want to talk to merchants! Just imply that you have information for them and they’ll tell you anything.”
“I think they’ll expect to be able to sell things to you.”
Mungo looked puzzled. “I thought merchants sold things?”
“They do but I think adventurers tend to see themselves as suppliers rather than customers. Unless you’re selling food and alcohol.”
The ship began moving again, a pilot boat leading it into dock. There were more ships waiting offshore.
“Perfect,” the gnome said. “I’ll go prepare.” He hurried over to Gammi and began an animated discussion. Was he going to try and sell dwarvish food? Gammi tried a lot of different dishes but had a knack for making them all come out dwarvish in the end. It all came down to ingredient choices made by a dwarf that saw ground mealworm as a suitable substitute for minced mushrooms.
There was a lurch as the ship bumped into the pier. They’d arrived in Khomen-Te.
Chapter Four
The Khomen-Te harbor was bustling. Every dock that Durham could see had a ship in it and every one of the ships seemed to be disgorging adventurers. At least, that was the assumption. There were people of every species and color, glittering with weapons, armor and jewelry. Most of the Dungeoneers team was still at the barge they’d come in on, managing the offloading of the wagons. Ping had rounded up a half dozen of the local pack-animals, ungainly looking things called camels. Durham had seen a number of strange creatures in his few outings with the team but he had to put camels near the top of the list.
It rapidly became clear why Thud had sent him along with Mungo, Keezix and Dadger to find their gnome contact. Even with Mungo standing on Dadger’s shoulders (much to Dadger’s annoyance) Durham still had a full foot of height advantage. Spotting a gnome in a crowd made up of people that fell predominantly in the five to eight foot height range was challenging enough without having your own eyes at chest level.
“Listen up,” Mungo said. “We’re looking for a gnome wearing…”
“Spotted him,” Durham said.
“I haven’t even told you what to look for yet.”
Durham pointed the gnome out. He was thirty or so yards away, steadying himself with one hand on a stack of barrels, standing on a pair of stilts and wearing a long overcoat that left the bottom of the stilts bare. He wore a fake handlebar mustache and muttonchop sideburns but had mixed up the mustache and one sideburn, giving his ear a rather dashing presence but his lip the aura of a bathing accessory. He’d completed his disguise with a bright red trilby and had a yellow flower dangling listlessly from a buttonhole in his coat.
“Pretty sure it’s him,” Durham said.
“Does he have a red hat and a yellow rose?”
“Yes to the red hat. He’s got a yellow flower but I think it might be a carnation.” Durham shrugged. “Hard to see from here and I don’t know a lot about flowers.”
“Ah!” Mungo said. “Perhaps it is an impostor meant to lead us astray.”
“No,” Durham said. “Pretty sure it’s him. See? He’s waving his arms at us.”
“Very well, but we shall proceed with caution.”
“Following you, lad,” Dadger said to Durham. “All we can see down here are knees and butts.”
Durham shouldered his way through the crowd. He’d once been a city guard and it was one of those skills you learned on the job and never forgot. The trick was to stride forward, shoulders squared and to never, ever make eye contact. The weakness of the technique was proportionate to the number of people in the area using it. If it were only a few then things generally worked out, apart from the occasional bumped shoulder at which point the one who turns to glare loses. On a wharf full of adventurers, however, it resulted in a constant stream of collisions. Durham felt like a ball pinging through a pin-maze. He abandoned the crowd-shouldering technique and switched over to the Mondolanian dancer technique, moving forward in a manner part undulation, part stagger and conducted in a state of perpetual panic. He shifted to avoid giant swords and axes strapped to backs with blades naked and ready to slice, then ducked under a brace of spears on someone’s shoulder. He narrowly avoided being impaled by a spiked pauldron, jumped to avoid getting nipped by some sort of wolf creature that probably should have been on a chain, then crashed full tilt into a shield on someone’s back. He retreated a step to blink the stars out of his eyes. The face carved in the shield winked at him and licked its lips before being carried out of view into the crowd.
A final swirl in the eddy of people and Durham found himself standing over the gnome.
The gnome was dead. He lay face-down on the crate he’d been standing on, a long, black-handled dagger sticking out from between his shoulder blades, a growing red stain around the blade.
Was it his guard instincts that took over? He liked to think so in retrospect, not that anything of the sort had ever happened to him on guard duty. Whether instinct or luck, Durham’s head snapped up and his gaze locked for a moment with that of the assassin just before he turned and melted away into the crowd.
“After him!” Durham yelled.
“After who?” Keezix yelled back.
&n
bsp; “Black cloak and clothes, knives strapped all over. Might even be a sign on his head that says ‘assassin’.”
“Got it!” Keezix charged into the crowd. The dwarven crowd-shouldering technique was notably different than the one Durham knew. It operated on the principle that if you punched someone in the leg hard enough you would be long gone before they managed to stand back up and limp through the crowd after you. Particularly when that crowd was a string of people holding their legs and trying to regain their feet.
Durham tried moving in the direction he thought he’d seen the figure go. It took only seconds for him to be swallowed into the flow of people, all moving away from the path of yelling and screaming victims Keezix was leaving in her swath. The assassin had the same issue, however. Durham caught sight of him again, only for a moment but it was enough. He whistled, hoping Keezix would hear. They were moving onto a roadway leading up a slight hill away from the harbor and into the city. Wagons and camels were tongue and neck, the flows of traffic in and out of the wharf having run into each other. The assassin clambered onto the back of a wagon then used the rail to jump to another wagon a few feet farther up.
Not a problem, Durham hoped desperately as he clambered onto the nearest wagon. It had a nice flat surface of wooden crates and a driver distracted by watching the black-clad assassin hopping from wagon to wagon up ahead. Durham launched himself to the next wagon. It was full of melons. He managed to run in place for a moment as they spun beneath his feet before landing flat on his back. The melons might as well have been stones for all the mercy they offered. There was a loud thunk and the assassin’s thrown knife quivered in the melon directly next to his head. All right melons, we’ll call it even.
Now he had a knife.
He grabbed it and pulled it free from the melon. It spun around in his fingers as if born there, coming to rest as an extension of Durham’s arm.
Durham knew knives.
He’d grown up in Karthor. Not that being from Karthor meant much for anyone’s skill with a knife, that is, unless they were from Durham’s neighborhood.
No one remembered who’d started it but it had become the regular game among the kids who lived there. Knife fighting with small sticks, not strong enough to do severe injury but enough to leave painful marks and cuts. They’d square off in the alleys after school, two combatants with a ring of cheering onlookers. They’d bob and weave, hands darting in flickers of motion. You learned fast once you started. The stances that worked, the feints that didn’t. Every lesson was worn as a badge of pride as it healed. Durham had played a lot. He hefted the knife in his hand and…
A wad of phlegm expelled from the neighboring camel caught him directly in the eye. He dropped the knife and it clattered somewhere on the paving stones below. The camel gave a honking bray and showed him a row of teeth that looked like crooked planking.
He wiped his eye with his sleeve, recovering his vision in time to see Keezix climb onto the cart on the other side of the camel. The moment she gained her feet she had her crossbow out and shouldered. She loosed the bolt and Durham jerked his head to follow its flight.
Up the street the assassin was pulling himself up onto an awning at the edge of the street. Keezix’s bolt caught him in the hip as he dangled from the roof edge. He gave a loud squawk and dropped back into the awning, the fabric sagging beneath him.
Keezix jumped down and disappeared under the wagon. Durham could only see her feet as she hurried forward to cross under another. She seemed to find the underside faster going than topside and, in Durham’s recent experience at least, was correct in the notion. Durham grabbed up a melon to shield himself from camel expectoration then jumped down to the street as the driver finally started turning to see what the fuss was behind him.
The knife was there, just a few feet away. He dropped the melon and snatched it up. He was too tall to run in quite the same way that Keezix had so he settled for dropping and rolling his way across the street, beneath three carts and a camel, hoping that the camel didn’t decide to stomp on him in the process. He thumped against the curb then had to wait for his head to stop spinning. It gave him time to reflect on the wisdom of rolling across a street that saw a lot of camel traffic. He was going to have to throw this tunic away.
The world settled just enough for him to see the assassin struggling to regain his feet on the awning, hampered by his wound. Durham threw the knife. Knife throwing wasn’t really his specialty, but all he had to hit was the awning and that was easy enough. Just a small cut in the fabric was all that was needed.
The cut split the awning in two and brought the assassin crashing down onto the stones of the street. He yelped as the landing broke off the end of the crossbow bolt sticking out of him. The solid ground beneath him, however, gave him an easier time than the awning in his attempts to stand. Durham was having difficulties as well, still feeling like he was standing on the deck of a river-boat and then adding the remnants of the dizziness from rolling across the street. Keezix grabbed him by the elbow and yanked him forward just as another glob of phlegm went sailing past. Durham stumbled after her. Up ahead the assassin was ducking through the doorway of the building he’d been trying to climb.
They ran after him, barging through the doorway. The sudden dimness of the interior rendered Durham near blind after the fierce sunlight of the wharf. The assassin was running up a flight of steps along the right wall, Keezix just after, unslinging the ax from her back as she closed the distance.
The assassin reached a window and spun around, a brace of knives spread between his fingers. He cocked his arm back to throw. His hand continued on, arcing through the air, severed by Keezix’s thrown ax now embedded in the wall behind him.
The assassin lowered his arm for a moment of contemplation of its new length.
“Why ain’t you bleedin’?” Keezix asked. Her voice was a suspicious growl.
The assassin’s glare was cold and black, framed in a stripe of pale skin. “I will remember your face, dwarf.” He sprang through the window, shattering the glass into a storm of windchimes.
“Damn,” Keezix said. “Usually they just bounce off when they try that but they got the expensive thin glass here that actually breaks.” She ran to the window and looked out then shook her head. “Gone.”
“Most of him,” Durham said. He knelt by the hand, still clutching its brace of knives between gray fingers. There was no blood. Or much else, for that matter. Where bone and muscle and tendon should have been the stump of the wrist showed only a pasty gray ooze. “Hunh,” Durham said.
Keezix was prying her ax out of the wall. “Something odd?” She ambled over. “Hunh,” she said. She poked at it with the eye of her ax. “S’like a custard or something.”
“You’ve been eating Gammi’s food for too long,” Durham said.
They watched as the ooze seeped out and the hand began to degenerate, shriveling and drying. A minute later all that was left was a pile of sand with the knives and a strip of cloth from the assassin’s sleeve caught amongst the grains.
Keezix scooped what she could into a pouch. “Maybe it will provide a clue of some sort.”
***
The assassin limped away, cradling his wounded arm. He glanced back once or twice, double and triple checking that the pursuit had ended. He ducked into the next alley over and made his way along it, ducking lines hung with clothing and skirting a pair of hissing cats. He reached the far end and whistled. A cart came rumbling up, the driver glancing about in an overly casual manner. The assassin crawled under the cargo blanket in the back, curling up amongst the sacks of dirt that made the wagon appear loaded. The driver clucked to the camels hitched on the front and they rejoined the flow of traffic heading up the hill.
Behind them Dadger Ben watched, waiting a minute for the cart to gain some distance before melting into the crowd that moved the same way. He figured it would be plenty interesting to see where they went.
***
Their return to th
e wharf was more sedate than their exit. They headed toward the pier where the wagons were being unloaded, reasoning that the brief chase and the slow walk back made it unlikely that the dead gnome would still be there or, if it was, that Mungo would be with it. Bodies on crowded wharves tended to invoke a series of predictable events, none of which they were interested in being part of. Durham hoped that the speed with which everything had happened would make it unlikely that anyone was looking for them in association with the murder.
They found Mungo at the wagons, reporting to a grumpy-looking Thud. He had a crate next to him with a prominent fresh blood-stain on top.
“Whaddaya mean, dead?” the dwarf asked.
“Murdered just as we arrived. Durham and Keezix…”
“Are right behind you.”
“Ah, excellent,” the gnome said glancing back at them over his shoulder.
“Chased after the killer but he got away,” Keezix said. She wasn’t one to pad her reports. “Took his hand off at the wrist though. The piece melted away into sand.” She dropped the leather pouch into Thud’s hand.
Mungo blinked in surprise. “That’s not the sort of thing humans usually do, is it?” he asked Durham with a note of accusation in his voice.
“No,” Durham said. “We aren’t secretly made of sand. Did Dadger stay with you?”
Mungo shook his head. “He opted for a tangential pursuit.” He thumped his little fist against the side of the crate. “I believe the gnome intended to deliver this crate to me.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t just using it as a step-stool?” Durham asked. “Could easily just be a crate of lemons or something.”
“No, I saw enough of these crates at the GIA to recognize them. These were used to ship special gear from P-Room.”
“Ermmm…” Thud said.
“The P is for Prototypes.” Mungo was using one of the dozens of tools he kept secreted on his person to pry the top of the crate off. “Experimental weapons, cutting edge technology, unconventional gear…” his voice trailed off as the lid popped free. He began scooping out handfuls of sawdust. “Let’s see… One spindriver, which I already have…” he tossed it over his shoulder. “Combination wire-cutters and pliers and corkscrew, ooh! Now with a red handle. That’s nice. One wrist-supported slingshot, a pair of magnet gloves…” he gave them a sidelong look. “My invention, actually. One pocket watch…” He frowned at it. “That’s an hour off. Wonder what it does…” He pressed the button on top. The watch began clanging loudly and buzzing in his hand. He pressed the button again and it stopped. “Well, the off button is certainly an improvement.” He pulled out what looked like a crossbow with a grappling hook. “One common degnominator grapple…”
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