The Philosophical Strangler

by Eric Flint

  The next stretch, comprising some thirty-five feet in length, are called the Blessed Planks. The oak slabs which make up most of the Bar Itself are absent here. Sometime back in the dawn of history—after the Suspected Soap Bead Uprising, according to legend—they were replaced by planks of cheap pine. Miraculously, as century succeeded century, the pine lasted. Unscarred, ungouged, uncarved, pristine and perfect. This, given the nature of The Trough, is an obvious miracle. Most Trough-men believe that a pot of ale served up on the Blessed Planks is better than any served elsewhere.

  Superstitious sots. I've got no truck with that nonsense, myself. Ale's ale, and there's an end to it. The ale at The Trough is the best in the world, and that's that. Doesn't matter where it's served or where you drink it, just as long as it makes its way down your throat.

  Our hearts lighten, now, as we come to the next portion of the Bar Itself. This is where I hang out, whenever I'm not sitting at a table like I usually am on account of how Greyboar and I are too couth to belly up to a bar like your average lowlifes.

  Eddie Black's, it's usually called. If you want to get formal about it, it's The Stretch Where Eddie Black Was Probably Conceived. And if you really want to go black-tie over the matter, it's The Stretch Where Eddie Black Was Probably Conceived If You Believe His Slut of a Mother and If You Ignore The Bloodstains Which Is What's Left of Smooth-Talking Ferdinand After Eddie Black's Father John-the-Ill-Tempered Carved Him Up On Account of How Eddie Black's Pop Was Convinced That Eddie Was Actually Conceived Over There In What's Now Called Ferdie's Folly.

  My spot, this. Always has been, since I was old enough to prop my chin on the Bar Itself.

  And that's the end of the tour. I'm thirsty, and enough's enough.

  * * *

  "Welcome back, Ignace," said Leuwen, shoving a mug across the bar. I contemplated the sacred object for a moment, before its contents disappeared into my gullet. Leuwen was obviously bursting with curiosity, but he's the best barkeep in New Sfinctr—hands down—and so he waited for me to quaff two more full mugs before he started questioning me.

  "So, how's Prygg?" he asked. This, of course, was a meaningless question, nothing more than dancing around before he got into the juicy stuff. Leuwen's interest in Prygg ranked somewhere below his interest in the taxonomy of flatworms.

  I could dance too.

  "Still there," I replied.

  "Glad to hear it," he intoned cheerfully. "How's Magrit? Still the same old proper witch?"

  We were now bordering on a real question. Normally, I would have responded with a polite and reasonably informative answer, but the truth was that Magrit happened to be on my shit list at the moment—very high up on the list, in point of fact—and so I satisfied myself with a noncommittal grunt.

  Leuwen wouldn't let it go. "Hear she had to take it on the lam."

  Another grunt.

  I didn't think it would work. And it didn't.

  "Word is," Leuwen plowed on, "she was mixed up in that business that brought in the Ozarine troops."

  Now we were treading on dangerous ground. I decided a grunt would be worse than an answer, so I tried to head Leuwen off.

  "Yeah, that's what I hear," I said casually. "Wouldn't know myself, Greyboar and me only bumped into her the once or—"

  "Word is," interrupted Leuwen, "she had some help in that little business. Real serious help. Serious muscle-type help, in fact."

  I sighed. It's just as the wise man says: "Wisdom drops dead. Stupid shit'll haunt you forever."

  There was no point dancing around it. Leuwen looked like a walrus, but nobody had ever accused him of having anything between his big ears but brains.

  "All right," I growled. "What've you heard?"

  Leuwen grinned and started wiping his hands on the rag he always kept tucked into his belt. I watched the project carefully. The experienced Trough-man could gauge Leuwen's exact mood and manner by the precise way in which he wiped his hands on that rag. Don't ask me to explain the subtleties. Can't be done. You either knew how to read them or you didn't.

  The hand-wiping looked ominous. I could read avid interest combined with rabid curiosity combined with—this was bad—shrewd deductions combined with—this was worse—experienced surmises combined with—oh, woe!—detailed half-knowledge of way, way, way too many facts.

  "Well, let's see," he mused. "First off, I heard the proper witch managed to get into the Ozarine embassy and wreck the gala affair being held there to celebrate the recent wedding between Prygg's very own Princess Snuffy and the Honorable Anthwerp Freckenrizzle III, scion of Ozar's third richest multi-zillionaire. Trashed the social event of the season, she did. Or so people say."

  I frowned. Bad, but I could live with it.

  "But," continued Leuwen, as I feared he would, "the word is that Magrit's little comet strike on high society wasn't nothing but a cover. A diversion, people say, so that other parties could sneak into the top-secret super-security part of the Ozarine embassy and steal one of Ozar's three Rap Sheets."

  I tried to control the wince, but I couldn't. Leuwen didn't miss it, of course, and the hand-wiping went into high gear.

  "Yeah, no kidding, that's what people say. Can you imagine that? Stole a Rap Sheet! One of the real Joe relics!" He pursed his lips, frowned, pretended to be thinking idle thoughts. "What are there—five Rap Sheets, total, in the whole world? Maybe six?" He shook his head mournfully. Wipe, wipe. "But that's what people say." Wipe, wipe, wipe. "Among other things."

  "What else?" I grumbled.

  Leuwen wasn't even trying to keep his grin under control anymore.

  "Well, people're saying that whoever snuck into the embassy and took the Rap Sheet must've had some real bruiser along with 'em. On account of what happened to all those elite-type embassy guards. Broken necks, snapped spines, crushed windpipes—even say one of 'em had his spine tore out and that same spine used to garrote another. Can you imagine that?"

  I was glaring into my mug.

  Wipewipewipewipewipewipe.

  "Now, who could do such terrible things?"

  By rights, the ale should have started boiling by now, just from my glare alone. It was one of the many problems with having the world's greatest professional strangler as my client. He couldn't stop showing off.

  One glance at Leuwen's wicked smile told me there was no point in trying to act dumb. Leuwen knew what it said on Greyboar's business card as well as I did:

  GREYBOAR—Strangleure Extraordinaire

  "Have Thumbs, Will Travel"

  Customized Asphyxiations

  No Gullet Too Big, No Weasand Too Small

  My Motto: Satisfaction Garroteed, or

  The Choke's on Me!

  Leuwen was now in full steam:

  "Yeah, that's what people say. Whoever stole the Rap Sheet—and thereby pissed off the world's most powerful empire so bad they up and invaded not only Prygg but three other sovereign nations of Grotum—also managed to get away with it—and thereby also pissed off the Church and sent the whole Inquisition into a frenzy—and even seem to have dropped out of sight entirely and are wandering around loose with one of the real Joe relics—thereby plunking themselves right smack in the middle of all that Joe business, which is the worst business anybody can possibly get mixed up in, on account of sooner or later God Himself is bound to come down on them like a ton of bricks."

  Wipewipewipewipewipe. Wipewipe. Wipe, wipe. Wipe.

  "Who knows?" I asked glumly.

  Leuwen shrugged. "Nobody actually knows, Ignace. Cheer up. It's not all that bad, really. The authorities are too stupid to figure it out, and the lowlifes what aren't too stupid to figure it out won't really believe it on account of"—here his face grew solemn and serious—"no lowlife in his right mind is going to believe for one minute that Greyboar would have been stupid enough to get himself mixed up in such a mess. Much less you."

  I relaxed, slightly. Only slightly, however, because I could see the next—yeah.

  "So why
did you get mixed up in it?" he asked quietly. "More of Greyboar's philosophy? Wasn't it enough he got you chased out of New Sfinctr with that foolishness?"

  "Wasn't philosophy," I grumbled. "Worse. Gwendolyn."

  "Ah." Wipewipewipe. "Ah."

  I scowled at the bar top. "What was I supposed to say? No—we wouldn't do it?"

  Scowl, scowl, scowl. "You know with a Rap Sheet in Grotum, Gwendolyn's as good as dead. Every porker in the land's been looking for her for years. The damned thing's a Joe relic. Most powerful magic there is. They'd find her in a heartbeat. Then—chop, chop, chop."

  The bar top was suddenly subjected to a vigorous cleansing. "Ah."

  "Can't you say anything else?" I demanded crossly.

  He shrugged his fat shoulders. "What's to say, Ignace? Gwendolyn's family. Only family Greyboar's got left, now. For that matter, she's the only family you've got left. After your parents all died when you were youngsters—their mom and your pop—the three of you brought each other up. Like your own little miniature clan."

  He chuckled. Leuwen's chuckles were kind of a signature piece. Large, rolling, heavy—and somehow very dry at the same time.

  "And just as fierce in your feuding as any clan of Groutch legend, too! God, the three of you were ferocious, if anybody messed with any of you. Even you, tiny as you were. I still laugh, now and then, thinking about that time old Stinky Gerrin started pawing at Gwendolyn when she got off work at the packinghouse after her first day on the job. What was she then? Twelve? Maybe thirteen?"

  "Twelve," I muttered. "We'd just celebrated her birthday two days earlier. Greyboar'd caught a juicy rat—one of those fat ones that hang around the slops—and I'd, uh, obtained an apple pie that some baker must have misplaced." I smiled for a moment, remembering. "We even spent the money to buy a candle for the pie. Couldn't afford but the one, so we invented a new arithmetic where one equaled twelve. Laughed, we did, telling ourselves we'd revolutionized mathematics."

  Leuwen's ensuing chuckle rolled over in a laugh. "Good old Stinky! Never could resist a girl just coming of age." Another chuckle rolled over. "Wish I'd seen it! They say you were on his shoulders biting his ear off before Gwendolyn even started breaking his fingers."

  I couldn't help chuckling myself. "Stinky was right! Yuch! Nastiest-tasting ear I ever bit into. Spit the damn thing out as fast as I could. And I can't tell you how happy I was that I didn't have to take off the other one. By then, of course, Gwendolyn was breaking his wrists and it was pretty much all over."

  A companionable silence followed, for a few seconds. Then Leuwen mused: "Yeah, good old Stinky. He disappeared the next day. When they dredged his body out of the river a few weeks later, the corpse was in such wretched shape they almost couldn't identify him. But the cause of death was obvious enough. They say his neck hadn't been broken so much as pulverized."

  Leuwen gave me a speculative glance. "Even at the time everybody figured that was Greyboar. His first choke."

  I kept my mouth shut. Actually, it'd been Greyboar's second choke. Stinky hadn't been the first lecher to think a dirt-poor orphan girl would make easy pickings. But the first one had been a vagrant, so nobody had noticed. In his own way, Stinky had been a well-known fixture in the Flankn. After he, ah, "came to a bad end," nobody bothered Gwendolyn much anymore.

  Leuwen accepted my silence readily enough, and didn't try to pry anything loose. Even a man with his curiosity can accept a stone wall when he sees one. He went back to wiping the bar, chatting idly.

  "Yeah, I can still remember the first time the three of you came in here. Three kids—even if two of them were already huge—swaggering into The Trough bound and determined to order their first real, by God, ale pot. Trying to swagger, I should say."

  He emitted another chuckle. "You couldn't afford but the one pot to share. I remember the three of you counting out the pennies, almost sweating blood you wouldn't have enough."

  "We didn't have enough," I growled. "Short one lousy penny, we were. We tried to wheedle you into giving us credit. Chintzy bastard! You wouldn't budge an inch."

  He smiled, shrugging. "You know how it is, Ignace. But look at the bright side—I did agree to give you a pot not quite full. Bent the hell out of professional ethics, if I say so myself."

  He gave the bar an idle swipe, before pointing with the rag to a stool several feet down. "That's where the three of you sat. Gwendolyn had to hoist you onto the stool. You couldn't get up that high on your own." He laughed outright, now. "The thing that impressed me the most was how all three of you split the pot. I thought for sure you'd get shorted, what with those two giants. But—no. You got your fair share, just like they did."

  I could feel the old ache coming, and shoved it under. Ancient history, dammit! Let it stay buried with the rest of the ruins. Then, sighing, I drained the mug and pulled the handful of coins out of my pocket.

  I stared at them glumly. To my surprise, Leuwen filled the mug up.

  "On the house," he said.

  That was a lie, actually. Under the circumstances, "on the house" meant: as long as you keep my interest up, you can keep drinking. Bullshit me and you die of thirst.

  Terrible thing, death from thirst. It took me all of two seconds to decide to spill the beans. The fact is, there wasn't much harm in it anyway. He obviously knew too much already, and, being as he was the best barkeep in the world, Leuwen practically wrote the book on Barkeep Professional Ethics.

  Barkeep Moral Imperative #1: Confidential information transmitted over a pot of fresh-poured ale is confidential.

  It was only midafternoon, so the crowd at The Trough was relatively light. Leuwen had no trouble keeping the customers supplied with the necessities of life while I regaled him with the whole story.

  Experienced raconteur that I am, I started with a proper topic sentence:

  "Prygg was a fucking disaster. A pure, unmitigated, unadulterated, fucking disaster. A disaster, I tell you."

  I fell silent, staring with anguish at my empty mug.

  "Good topic sentence," pronounced Leuwen, quickly replenishing the staff of life.

  After drawing off half the mug in a single draught, I immediately launched into the background to the disaster.

  "To begin with, we lost all our money bribing the guards to get out of New Sfinctr. Then, once we got out of the city, we had to make our way across Joe's Mountains in order to get to Prygg. Would have been easier, of course, to take the southern route, skirting the mountains altogether. But that meant going through Blain."

  Leuwen winced. "Blain's dicey."

  "Tell me about it! On the way back—never mind. Yeah, Blain's a bad luck city, pure and simple. And with the manhunt on, we knew there was bound to be at least a full company of the Queen's Own Cuirassiers stationed there, looking for us."

  Leuwen shook his head. "Nasty lot, the Cuirassiers."

  I nodded, took another draught. "Nasty. We found out later they speared every pig the farmers tried to bring through the town, on the off chance Greyboar and I were hiding in their bellies. The farmers themselves got force-fed emetics, so the Cuirassiers could inspect the barf.

  "So we decided to take the mountain route. But that posed its own set of problems. The main road through Joe's Mountains goes right past the Great Temple of the Ecclesiarchs. The very seat of God's Temporal Power on Earth."

  An aggrieved looked crossed my face. "Not that we'd done anything to call ourselves to the attention of the Inquisition, mind you. Fact is, to my way of thinking, the Church stood in our debt. Hadn't we throttled one of the world's most powerful heathens? The King of the Sundjhab himself!"

  Leuwen shook his head. "The Ecclesiarchs have always been schizophrenic on the subject." Wipewipe. "If you go out and slaughter a poor heathen, of course, you're a hero in the eyes of the Lord. But if you croak a rich and powerful one, well, that's a different matter altogether." Wipewipewipe. "That smacks of bloody-handed red revolution, which ranks a whole lot higher in the scale of sins than s
imple heathenry."

  I nodded sagely. "Yeah, that's the way we figured it. So we decided it would be best, all things considered, to just avoid the Temple. But that meant we had no choice but to take one of the less-traveled routes through the mountains. 'Less-traveled route,' you'll understand, is what they call a euphemism. 'Goat path' better captures the reality.

  "And that meant—I still shudder at the memory—that we had no way to replenish our funds through our customary, dignified, professional skills. Instead, we had to hook up with one of the flea-bitten, mangy little caravans which avoid the Temple and— Well. You know. Work."

  Leuwen grimaced with sympathy. He even wiped his rag once or twice to show his proletarian solidarity.

  I continued: "A nightmarish period followed. The labor was bad enough. What was worse was listening to Greyboar be philosophical about it! But, eventually, we toiled our way through the mountains and onto the plain of Pryggia. Now back in civilized lands, I scrounged up a little job in one of the larger towns along the way. Had to accept an outrageously low fee, of course—country rubes—but the job was quick and easy. The good thing about country rubes—the only good thing—is that even the local lord of the manor doesn't expect to receive the attentions of a world-class professional strangler. So, a quick and simple choke, and we had enough cash to pay our way into Prygg with no more of that toiling nonsense."

  I then proceeded to regale Leuwen with the tale of our adventures in Prygg itself. Of that tale, however, I will say nothing here. Secrets which I'll spill to Leuwen, bound as he is by the barkeep-sot privilege, I'm not going to blather about openly. My lips are sealed. I vow eternal silence. I still have hopes—getting fainter all the time, I admit—that our part in the madness which ensued will remain hidden from the public eye.

  * * *

  Just as I was finishing up my tale of our misadventures in Prygg, a sudden hush came over The Trough. You couldn't help notice it—by that time, late afternoon it was now, the place was getting packed.

  I turned in my seat to see what had caused the unusual dip in the usual cacophony. A woman had entered The Trough, and was making her slow progress toward the bar.