King Pinch

by David Cook

“Think on it, Therin. Ain’t they got the wit of us? Then how’d they find you—by twirling Tymora’s wheel? It was that Cleedis found me over how many leagues distant and it was him that tipped the authorities. Do you think a few hide-holes and lasts would stop his priests from spying us out?” Pinch had had enough of the Gur’s disputing and nudged his horse into the line, but not before giving one parting shot. “Besides, I’m curious. There may be a profit in going with Cleedis after all.”

  That left the awkwardly perched gypsy musing in his saddle, just as Pinch knew it would.

  Beyond the stream and well on their way, it was time for Pinch to ask the questions. With a cheerful nod to his armed chaperons, the rogue trotted his horse up to where Cleedis rode.

  In the saddle, the old chamberlain was a transformed man. His horse was a spirited gray stallion with a mane streaked charcoal black. Its eyes were clear and its bite hard on the bit. Even to Pinch, who was no judge of prancers, it was clear that this beast was the best breed of the southern lands. Under the reins of a weaker man, the horse would have ridden the rider, but under Cleedis there was none of that. Here on the roads, in the open air, and fitted in his commander’s armor, the chamberlain was once again the cavalry captain Pinch had known as a lad.

  Pinch reined in alongside and launched in without preamble. “Cleedis, you’ve got me now. What’s the job and what’s the booty?”

  The chamberlain pulled his open-faced helmet back to hear better. “Job? Wait and see.”

  “Not good enough, coz,” the rogue said as he brushed a fly from his face. “I need time to plan and think. And I’ll not be killing.” At least not by intention, Pinch added to himself.

  “You’re tired and not thinking clearly, Janol. I already said there would be no need for killing—not if you do your part well. As for more, you’ll have to wait.”

  A little part of the mystery became clear. “You don’t know, do you? You were just sent to bring me back. Who sent you—Vargo, Throdus, or Marac?” Pinch watched carefully as each name was mentioned, hoping for a telltale on Cleedis’s part. There was no such luck. The chamberlain maintained a statesmanlike demeanor. “You must wait, Janol. You were, and still are, impatient. It will be your undoing someday. When we reach Ankhapur, what you need to know will be revealed.”

  But no more than that, Pinch heard in what was not said.

  He did not press the issue. The gleaning of information was an art, and there was time between here and Ankhapur.

  The rest of the day passed no worse than it had begun. By late day, the burden of the last two days’ plots, schemes, escapes, and yet more plots came crushing down on Pinch and his companions. Their energies were sapped. While the guards jounced along uncomfortably in their saddles, Pinch and company slept. The old rogue was skilled enough to sleep in the saddle, but for the other three riding was an untested talent. Therin, mounted on an impossibly small pony, would nod off until one of his cramped legs slipped from the stirrup and scraped the ground. Just when it seemed he might ride like this for miles, until all the leather was shredded from the tip of his boot, his toe would catch on a rock with a solid thwack and rouse him from slumber. Maeve and Sprite-Heels, the halfling squeezed into the saddle in front of the sorceress, lolled precariously and in unison from side to side until one or the other woke with the panic of a headlong plunge.

  So it went until they stopped. The four gingerly massaged their sore parts while the troopers made camp, cooked, and saw to the needs of the travelers. By then, Pinch’s companions were too tired to talk, too wary of their escorts to ask questions of the leader.

  The fires were near embers and guards had taken their posts at the edge of the hostile darkness when Cleedis produced a bottle from his saddlebags. “When I was a young officer out on campaign,” he began in the rambling way of a man who has a moral he feels he must share, “we used to spend all day hunting down orc bands from the Great Invasion. We’d ride for miles, getting hot and full of dust. Sometimes we’d find a band of stragglers and ride them down. It was great work.”

  Clawlike fingers pulled the cork free, and he drank a long draught of the yellowish wine. Breathing hard to savor the alcohol’s burn, he held the bottle to Therin across the fire.

  “After a day of butchering, we’d gather around the fire like this and drink.” The old man looked at the suspicious eyes across from him. He pushed the bottle again toward Therin until the big man took it. “Drink up, boy,” the worn-out campaigner urged before continuing his ambling tale. “Men need to share their liquor with their companions, because there’s no telling who you might need at your back. Back then, a man could get himself surrounded by a throng of orc swine at any time, and then it would be too late to discover he had no friends. Drink and a tale, that’s what kept us together. Doesn’t that make sense, Janol?” Cleedis’s eyes turned on the master rogue. The brown in them was burned black and hard by years of concessions and expediencies.

  “A man can drink for lots of reasons, and most stories are lies,” Pinch commented acidly.

  “They say bad hearts sour good wine. Is it a good wine, Master Therin?”

  The young man held the jug out in front of him considering an answer. “Tolerable, I wager.”

  “Tolerable, indeed,” the chamberlain sighed, taking the bottle back. He set the bottle to his weather-cracked lips and gulped and gulped, and gulped at it some more until the yellow stains of wine trickled from the corners of his mouth and clung in sweet drops in the coarse beard on his chin. At last he pulled the bottle free with a choking gasp. The old man shoved the bottle into Sprite’s hands and began without preamble.

  “There’s a lad I knew, must have been fifteen, twenty, years ago. He was a boy of a high family. His father was a noted captain in the king’s guard and his mother a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She was pregnant when the captain was killed in the wars against the trolls. The lady wailed for the priests to beg their gods, but there was no bringing the captain back. She being a lady, though, the king and queen saw to her needs all the time she was with child. It was double tragedy that she died bearing her male child.”

  “Wasn’t there a priest who could bring her back, what with the baby?” Brown Maeve asked. Her veined face was swelling with a whimper of tears, for the sorceress could never resist a sad tale. “Where was her kin?”

  “She didn’t have any,” Cleedis answered after a long swig on the bottle he pried from Sprite’s hands. “That’s why she stayed at court. There wasn’t any family to pray for her. It wasn’t her wish to be raised; she hoped to join her husband. The king and queen pledged to raise the boy as their ward.”

  Maeve gave out a little sob.

  Across the fire, Pinch glared at Cleedis in stony silence, eyes glinting amid the rising sparks.

  Cleedis continued. “Without mother or father, in some other place he would’ve been one of those little beggars you kick away on the street. That’s how it would have been, you know, except that didn’t happen to him.

  “He got lucky, more luck than he ever deserved—”

  Pinch spat

  Cleedis persevered. “He was favored. He didn’t have family, but he was taken in by nobility, a king no less. They dressed him, fed him, and educated him in the best ways. And you know how he repaid them?”

  Pinch spat, ferociously this time, and the gobbet hissed and cracked in the flames. Springing up, he broke from the circle of firelight, making angry strides past the startled guard whose sword half-cleared its sheath.

  The old chamberlain motioned the man back to give the rogue his peace. Pinch trembled at the edge of the firelight, hovering at the rim of the winter blackness.

  “He repaid them,” Cleedis slowly dogged on, pulling back the attention of the rogue’s friends, “he repaid them by stealing all he could and fleeing the city. Now, what do you think of that?”

  Man, woman, and halfling exchanged uncomfortable glances, their thoughts clearly centered on their tall master. He continued to scorn the
warmth of the group.

  “Did he make a good profit?” Sprite asked nervously, but the joke fell flat.

  “Why stop the tale there, Cleedis?” murmured the upright man’s voice from the darkness. “There’s so many little embellishments you’ve left out. Like how the king thought his queen was barren and wanted a son for his throne. How he raised the boy with care and the best of all things—until one day his wife was fruitful and bore him a son, and then three more over the years. That was three more than he needed and certainly better than an orphan boy.”

  The man brought his anger back to the fire and leaned close to share it with the others. Perhaps the old man didn’t like his story shanghaied, or perhaps he could feel the pain in the other’s voice. Whatever the reason, his joint-swollen fingers knotted painfully about his sword.

  “Or how he drove his queen to death once she’d whelped heirs for him. And then one day the dear old man woke up and decided he didn’t need the boy he’d taken in, the one who wasn’t his seed. All his life, the boy had lived in luxury, expecting and waiting, only to be pushed out by a group of mewling brats. How about that, Cleedis?”

  The rogue turned to the other three—short, plump, and broad—sitting like rigid stones in dumb silence.

  Smoothly a smile expanded on the rogue’s face, oil spreading across the storm of his emotion. The coiled tiger’s spring eased from his frame, and with a cheerful bow he scooped up the wine jug. “Good story, eh? One’s as true as another, and they’re both as true as a vagabond’s tale.”

  The three still sat nervous and quiet, vassals unable to fathom their master’s mad caperings.

  Pinch threw back the jug and drained a long swallow, quenching the wine-dark thirst deep inside him. He then flung the uncorked jug toward his gang. “Drink and sleep, that’s what you need!” he thundered.

  As they scrambled to catch the jug and stay wide of his moods, Pinch quickly settled close to his old fencing master till his wine-breath whisper tickled the old man’s ear. “You need me or you’d not come this far. No more tales—”

  “You’re forgetting the priests, boy,” the other growled, never once breaking his stare into the darkness.

  “No more tales or you’ll not wake up some morning. Do you think your guards can keep us away?”

  Cleedis blinked. “If I’m dead, there’s no profit for you. That’s all you want, isn’t it?” The old man quickly shifted the terms.

  A contented sigh swelled in the rogue. “I’m sure you’ve got enemies in Ankhapur. Wouldn’t they pay to see your head packed in a pickle pot?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but left the old man chewing his words. “To bed!” he thundered once more as he herded his accomplices to the small ring of tents that was their traveling home. With cheerful wariness, they swarmed to heed him.

  In the fading firelight, Cleedis watched as his former student never once turned his back on his supposed friends. The old swordsman smiled—a cold, dark smile like the dead winter night around him.

  For the next three days, there were no more tales; not even any talk. It didn’t take years of familiarity to read Pinch’s mood. Even the coarsest soldiers knew there was a sour gloom hanging around the man. He spoke only when necessary and then barely more than a grunt. He ate quietly and drank without sharing. Most ominous of all was that he abided every inconvenience—the trails reduced to slicks of mud and slush, the streams of thin-crusted ice, even the stinging blows of sleet—with an impassive stare into the wilderness beyond. To his friends, it seemed the memory of Ankhapur roused in him a furious anger, like some furious scorpion retreating into its lair. If that were the case, nobody wanted to jab him lest they get stung.

  Sprite-Heels, who watched his old companion as closely as the rest, formed a different opinion, one that he kept to himself. The halfling knew Pinch better than anybody and sometimes he held the conceit that he understood Pinch better than Pinch himself. Sprite was sure he could read the machinations in the old rogue’s eyes, could divide them into patterns and stages. First the thief studied a guard, never one close to him, but one who was detached and unaware of the rogue’s scrutiny. Sprite knew Pinch was finding the weaknesses, the passions, and the follies that the long ride betrayed in each man: Who gambled and lost poorly; who drank when he thought the captain wasn’t looking; who shirked his duties; who betrayed others. All these things became Pinch’s catalog of the levers by which he could move the men, elves, and dwarves of their escort.

  After six days, the party came to a way-house on the southern road. It wasn’t more than a rickety handful of a house and outbuildings enclosed in a palisade of sticks, but it offered protection from the icy sleet that had pelted them all day. The riders were frozen through to their bones. Even Cleedis, who by his station was better equipped than any of them, was chilled to his marrow. The horses were caked with mud and their hooves skittered across the sleet-slicked ground. It had been a painful lurching day in the saddle for everyone. The prospect of an inn, even a barn, right there in front of them, was a thousand times better than another night sleeping on half-frozen mud and pine branches.

  A boy splashed through the melting snow, shouting out their arrival, so that by the time the Ankhapurans reached the gate, a band of grooms and farmhands faced them on the other side. The inn’s staff was armed with a smattering of spears, scythes, and flails, the weapons of a ragtag militia. The signboard over the closed gate creaked in the wind, announcing that this was “The House of Pity.”

  “Where you be bound?” shouted one of the lot as he struggled his way to the front.

  “We are Lord Cleedis of Ankhapur and his escort,” shouted back the captain of the guard, the one Pinch knew was a brute to his men. “Who are you?”

  “The landlord’s cook,” replied the cadaverously thin man who stepped to the front. He wore a greasy apron and carried a heavy cleaver, the uniform and tools of his trade.

  “So much for the food,” Therin whispered to Sprite.

  “Well, open the gate, lackey, and give us a room for the night. My lord is not accustomed to waiting in the mud.” The captain was flushed with impatience to be out of the foul weather.

  With slow deliberation, the cook peered first into the woods on one side and then on the other, searching the shadows and the darkness for something. Finally he turned back to the captain. “Can you pay?

  “Can we pay?” the officer sputtered. “Pay depends on service, lout!”

  Now the cook slowly, and again very deliberately, looked over the riders, counting out the number on his fingers. When he’d counted both hands, his face furrowed in concentration until at last he nudged the man next to him with over-broad secrecy. Heated whispers flew until at last the second fellow held up his own hand and the cook continued to count. The captain barely suppressed his rage at this dawdling.

  “Twelve!” Pinch yelled out when the count was clearly above three hands.

  The cook and groom paused, looked at their hands, looked up, looked back at their hands, and then very slowly and deliberately began the count again.

  The captain twisted in his seat to glower at Pinch, and for the first time in nearly a week the rogue beamed a wickedly cheerful smile and stoically endured the icy discomfort.

  Behind Pinch a chorus of snickers and snorts struggled not to break into a round of guffaws.

  When the pair’s count reached three hands, every eye of the cold and wet escort turned on Pinch. The rogue only nodded and smiled.

  “Three!” chimed Sprite’s high-pitched voice.

  The count began again.

  The guards edged in closer, this time watching all four vagabonds.

  At two hands, Maeve could stand the ludicrousness no longer, and a hysterical cackle burst from her lips. It pealed down the wooded lane.

  The count began again.

  The captain wheeled his horse back through the mud. “If they say anything—” he paused in midsnarl, realizing he could not carry out a threat against his maste
r’s guests. “Well,” he finally continued with teeth chattering, “don’t let them!”

  Now the guards, sensing a pattern, paid particular mind to Therin. The big Gur smiled back at their fixed scowls and pointedly kept his mouth closed. The count passed one hand and he did nothing. Maeve, Sprite, and Pinch waited to see what he would do.

  Two hands.

  Therin didn’t say a word.

  Three hands.

  The big man beamed in calm silence.

  Seventeen …

  Eighteen …

  Nineteen …

  Therin stretched his arms in a broad yawn. The guards reacted with the singing steel of drawn swords. The rude militia splashed back from the palisade fearful of a fight.

  The count began again.

  Pinch, Sprite, Maeve, and Therin all looked at each other and smiled.

  It was moonset before all the horses had their fetlocks washed, their coats curried, and their mangers filled with moldy hay. The soldiers plodded back into the commons. Pinch and his crew came up last; in this, like all things, the last of everything.

  In a night the color of simmered wine, the sway-backed inn breathed vaporous smoke from every crack in its wooden skin. As the men slouch-shouldered their way through the door, Therin drew off the last pair with the tempting rattle of dice. If the guardsmen expected a fair game, they didn’t stand a chance; the Gur was a sharper with the barred bones. A quiet corner in the barn and a few hours of work would leave them poorer but probably no wiser.

  The chairs inside had all been claimed, the benches overfilled with troopers. The small commons had little space for a squadron of troopers, but the innkeeper still managed to squeeze a few more customers into the space. Unimaginably, one more table was found for the three scoundrels. It barely fit at a corner in the back, which was all to Pinch’s liking.

  “Sour beer’s all that’s left,” the landlord said, more as defense than apology. The spare man sloshed a kettle of brew onto the table, a stump-footed little creature of tin. Cold scraps and stale bread were the only choices left for dinner.