King Pinch n-1

by David Cook

  It was long hours and well into darkness before the priests were done. At last Pinch was allowed to rise, naked and shivering, off the icy stone. For all the pain, the priests had been thorough. Drawing his fingertips over his back, Pinch felt no scars-better handiwork than the priest who'd left his knee a web of whitish lines.

  "When you are dressed, you may leave," urged the senior brother, who stood at the head of a phalanx of brothers, though no sisters, Pinch noted with disappointment

  The elder was a dark-skinned man whose triangular face was pinched by constant sadness. He nodded, a curt little tilt that could only be mastered by those who'd been in command too long. Another brother produced a rough-stitched robe of itchy red wool, normally allotted acolytes to teach them patience through poverty and discomfort. "Your own clothes were beyond repair, and suspect by their filth. They were burned. We give you these so that you do not go naked into the world."

  "Thanks, most beatific one," Pinch drawled, though he hardly felt grateful for their mean furnishings. His doublet had cost three hundred golden lions and the hose had come all the way from Waterdeep. Itchy red wool was hardly providing him in the style he was due. "Fortunate for my soul, perhaps, but I don't think I can depart so soon."

  The brother's sad face grew even more dour. "Pray, why not?"

  With a show of exhausted effort, Pinch struggled into the robe. "This day's been an effort, patrico. Give me time to rest before sending me on my way."

  The elder yielded with sour grace. "Indeed, it is sometimes the case. Your strength should return to you within the hour. I will return to give blessings on your way then." The elder priest bowed slightly and left, sweeping his entourage out with him.

  There was a deadline inherent in that hour, but Pinch didn't care. If he offended any of the Red Robes, it was only as they deserved. It was an old animosity carried over from his youth, when he sat in a palace chair at a palace desk and wrote the lessons of a droning temple tutor.

  Although he was certain to be watched, Pinch made no effort to skulk about or slip away. Instead he ambled from the healing chapel and into a massive hall, the festival floor. The squat pillars of the temple fixed the high of the sky so large it almost took his breath away. The Red Priests clearly did not consider modesty a necessary virtue.

  Sure as he'd sworn, Pinch had himself an escort, a lesser pater who lingered over the holy fonts with too little purpose and too much attention. The rogue noted the man with only the barest of glances. Years of spotting peelers and sheriff's men made this shaved-head plebe painfully obvious. Pinch wandered out of the hall with seeming aimlessness, half-feigning the weakness he felt.

  The thief strolled through the soaring nave fixed with a mask of contemplative awe, the face of the impressed sinner confronted by the majesty of greater power. Inside, though, his thief's mind ran a cunning round of scheme and counter-scheme. How many windows were there? Where did the doors lead? What would be the round of the night guards? Here was a pillar to stand behind, there was a window whose casement was rotten. He made note of the shadows and what lamps and torches were likely to be lit in the long hours after the last benedictus was said.

  All this was good, but the one thing it lacked was telling Pinch just where the Knife and Cup lay. The rogue tried strolling toward the main altar, keeping a veiled eye on his watchdog priest. There was no effort, no alarm to stop him, and from that Pinch guessed the regalia were not in the great nave. He was hardly surprised; stealing the Cup and Knife could hardly be that easy.

  Pinch expanded his wanderings, passing through the nave's antechambers and out to the cloistered walk that ringed a damp garden, verdant with spell-ripened growth. The trees leafed fuller than the winter should have allowed, the shrubs curled thicker, and flowers blossomed in brighter hues than true nature.

  At the very center of the garden square was a tower of dark stone, a somber spire that thrust above the roofs and walls of the rest of the temple grounds till it rivaled even the great dome of the main hall. No doors marked its base, and at its very top was a single window, a tall, narrow slit that was clearly big enough for a robed priest. A faint glow shifted and weaved from inside the stone chamber.

  There was no need to search any farther. This, the rogue knew, was his target. There could be no other.

  It was with a sudden-found burst of fitness and strength that Pinch greeted the elder patrico when he returned. The man scowled even more than he had before, suspicious of his patient's good cheer. Nonetheless, he was not going to interfere with Pinch's leaving. He was more than content to cast one he saw as a viper out of his house.

  So, the temple doors closed with a certain finality behind Pinch and he was standing at the end of the Avenue of Heroes, clad only in an itchy red robe and cheap sandals. With his hair and his bruises, he looked like a wretch given charity by the friars inside. Passing tradesmen made studious effort to avoid his gaze in hopes that they could forestall the inevitable harangue for coins that was sure to come. In this Pinch surprised them, keeping his needs and his counsel to himself.

  The rogue was not forlorn and abandoned though. He'd barely taken three steps through the gelatinous mud that passed for a street when someone cried out his name. Old habit spun him around quick with a hand already on his dagger, which the Red Priests had at least not thrown away, by the time he recognized the speaker. It was Lissa, sitting at a tea vendor's stall in the shade of a pale-branched willow.

  "Master Janol, you are recovered?"

  The rogue light-stepped through the muck and joined her.

  "Well enough, for which I must thank you." The answer was as sincere as Pinch understood the term. "Perhaps I may even owe you my life."

  The priestess dismissed the suggestion. "If not I, it would have been another there," she demurred in reference to her part in getting him to the temple.

  "My thanks, nonetheless."

  "What befell you?"

  Pinch had already anticipated the need for a good story to explain the attack, and so answered without hesitation.

  "Thieves. A cowardly lot waylaid me with clubs at an alley mouth. It was clear they planned to beat me to death and then rob me."

  "Did they?"

  "Beat me to death?" Pinch asked in jovial amazement. "Clearly not."

  "No-rob you?"

  "They got something from me they'll remember," he boasted on his lie. "A few sharp cuts with my blade put them off their prey."

  Lissa nodded as if with great relief, but then she drew up hard as she pushed something across the table. "It is most fortunate they did not get this…"

  On the table was the amulet of the Dawnbreaker, the same he'd stolen from the temple at Elturel.

  If she could have opened his heart, the priestess would have seen a churning tide of panic and rage. The sudden fear of discovery, the self-rage to have clumsily forgotten such a detail in the first place, and the panicky rush to create a plausible reply all would have played open on the face of a normal man with a normal life. Pinch, though, was no common man who carried bricks here and there. He was a regulator, and regulators survived by their wits. Inwardly he boiled, but outwardly all Lissa saw was a flooding collapse of relief.

  "Praise your god!" he extemporized. "It's safe. I would have a bet a noble those Red Priests had stolen it. Where did you find it?"

  "Where you were carrying it," was her icy reply.

  "Precisely. I was worried I'd dropped it in the mud," the rogue continued, thinking fast. "Priestess Lissa, although it is not as I intended, let me present you with your temple's treasure." The only hope of coming out of this, Pinch figured, was to claim credit for what he never intended.

  "You-what!"

  "I was bringing it to you."

  "I surely cannot believe this."

  Now was the time for Pinch to assume the air of roguish effrontery. "I told you I had means."

  "How did you get it back?"

  Pinch let knowing smile play across his lips. "I have had some exper
ience with thieves and their like. I understand them. It just takes the right threats."

  "A few threats and they give it up?" It was clear the woman wanted to scoff.

  Pinch pressed the amulet back into her hand. "Threats backed by sword and coin. There was a cost in getting it back-five thousand nobles. Will your temple honor my debt?" Pinch knew better than to look too pure and noble and so let his devious heart weave a profitable deceit.

  Lissa was unprepared for the demand. "I… I am certain they will. By my word they will," she added with more confidence as she weighed the artifact in her hand.

  "I will prepare a receipt for you to present to your superiors," Pinch added as an extra fillip of persuasiveness.

  "Your injuries. Did you…"

  "Fight for the amulet-no, I'm no hero." Later, when the rogue told this story around the table, this would be the place where he would pause and spread his hands with the confidence that he had caught his mark. "This was, I think, an attempt to get it back."

  Lissa hastily slid the artifact out of sight. "You think they'll try again?"

  "Almost certainly. If I were a thief, I would. I fear it puts you in danger."

  "I can care for myself."

  "They'll be looking for you."

  "I'll take it to the temple."

  "The Morninglord's temple here in Ankhapur is small and poorly funded. These thieves already stole it once from a better-equipped temple. They'd be certain to try here."

  "Not if you turned them over to the authorities."

  "I can't." Pinch was lying in this. If he ever had to, he'd turn Sprite and the others over without a qualm.

  "Can't?"

  "I'm not sure who they are and even if I knew, I wouldn't. Understand-my success is based in part on discretion. Lose that and no one will trust me."

  The priestess was shocked. "This is a business for you!"

  Pinch sipped at the brew the tea vender set in front of him. "It is a service. Sometimes there are rewards and sometimes not. We can't all live supported by the donations of others, lady."

  She felt the venom in that sting. "It's not a pure business-"

  "And I am no priest, even if I am decked out in these red robes," Pinch interrupted. "You live to see the perfect world rise over the horizon like the sun of your Morninglord, and I laud you for that, Lissa. I must live to survive. Besides, isn't recovering what is stolen a virtue? Maids come to priests to find rings they have lost; I just do the same without spells."

  The priestess pointedly looked at the sky, unwilling to admit the soundness of his argument. Pinch sipped his tea and gave her time, but never changed his gaze of expectant answer. He had her on the hook and was not about to let her wriggle away.

  "There is virtue even in the cloud that hides the sun," she finally murmured. It was a quote from something, probably some scripture of her church. It was her admission to accept his point, her faith overruling her good instincts.

  Priests always made the best prey, Pinch thought to himself. Others were unpredictable, but priests had their codes, for good or ill, giving a sharper lever to tip them one way or the other.

  "What will you do with the amulet?" he asked, abruptly changing the conversation. "It's not safe either with you or your temple."

  "I can find some place to hide it."

  Pinch shook his head in disagreement, as if he were considering the point to himself and she were not across the small table from him.

  "What?"

  "What was taken can be found. It's a saying among their kind."

  "You have a better plan?" she challenged as Pinch hoped she would.

  "Yes, but there's no purpose in naming it." Like the hunter in the blind, he was baiting the trap to lure the prey near.

  "What do you mean?"

  "There is a way you could keep it safe, but you'll not do it, so I won't say it."

  "You are so certain!" she fumed. "How can you be so sure about me?"

  "Then you will give me the amulet?"

  "What?"

  "See! 'Tis as I said. There's no point in pursuing it."

  "What do you mean, give you the amulet?"

  "Nothing. It was a foolish idea. Hide your treasure and let it go."

  "Tell me."

  "It's pointless. It requires trust."

  "How does your having the amulet protect it?"

  "First, because they'll assume you have it, not I. We've met; what other point was there but to return your treasure? Therefore, they'll look to you as the person who must be robbed.

  "Second, they know my sting and fear it. Why do you think they gave it back in the first place? For five thousand gold nobles? Hardly. This treasure's worth far more, if they could sell it to some rival priest or wizard." Pinch paused and took a sip of tea. "They're afraid of my connections and my position. As the late king's royal ward, I could have anyone arrested and executed on my word alone. They will not cross me like they would you."

  Lissa studied her hands. "I don't-"

  "As I said-trust," Pinch countered with disappointment. "You injure me, which is why I would not bring this up. First, you think me a thief and wound me for it. Second, you suspect me as a liar. Another wound. Third, you think that I would refuse to give it back. Any more of these cuts and I'll take a worse beating from you than those scoundrels did to me."

  Lissa tried to sip her tea, but its bitterness felt like her soul and brought no comfort. "Perhaps… I have been uncharitable in my judgments. I… believe you are right. Take the amulet and guard it for me."

  "No." Now was time to set the hook.

  "You won't?"

  "I won't do it just to make you feel better."

  "Then do so because you're right," she urged, pressing the amulet into his hand. "Hold it for me until I return to Elturel in a fortnight's passing-because I will trust you."

  Pinch contemplated the amulet, feigning some doubt about the matter, before quickly slipping it away. "For a fortnight, then." He raised his mug as a bond of their word and smiled his first genuine smile since their meeting. A fortnight it would be, barely enough time to find a buyer and arrange for the artifact to disappear conveniently one more time. It was almost a shame to swindle one so pretty and trusting.

  She matched his toast, blind to the intent of his good cheer. Hardly had the mugs clinked but Pinch was on his feet and ready to go. "You must give me leave, Priestess Lissa, but this robe suits me poorly. I must find a tailor with a quick hand. I have no desire to return to the palace dressed as I am." It was best to be gone quickly before she had the chance to reconsider her choice, and certainly his clothes offered the best excuse.

  Their parting done, Pinch hurried down the street, into the city, and far away from the palace gates. There was still one more appointment to keep before he could begin the work Cleedis had commissioned of him.

  Pinch found his company several hours later, after he'd got himself new dress. No locks were broken or heads cracked, but the Red Priests would be hard pressed to explain why one of their order was seen fleeing a laundry with a gentleman's wash.

  The three had settled into the ordinary where Pinch had sent them. On the outside, it was a squalid place, just up the alley from the fishmongers' gathering place. To the south were the rat-infested docks, while the blocks just up the hill were notorious stews where man, woman, or thing could find most tawdry pleasures they sought. Here, in the gloomy zone between the two, the air reeked of seawater, fish guts, and cheap scented oils. The packed clay of the alley was slimy with fish cleaner's leavings and made musical by the chittering of rats and the belches of the resident drunks. In a way, Pinch had chosen the place for its ambiance; given the air and the locale, no honest man was likely to intrude on them.

  Inside, the shop was little better. A smoky fire, sputtered by grease dripping from a questionable carcass that turned on the spit, overheated the cramped main room. This was little more than a trio of tables, scored and stained by knife fights and ale, and some rickety benches presse
d up against the wall. The patrons, dock rats too hard up to visit even the meanest festhalls farther up and drunken sailors stopping in for one last toast on their way down from those same halls, eyed Pinch hungrily as he came through the canvas door. The rogue passed through their company without a word and made for the rooms upstairs.

  Therin, Sprite, and Maeve were huddled at the lone table in the room Pinch had let. The rogue was pleased to see they'd exercised discipline and waited for his arrival instead of setting out on an ill-advised drinking spree. Of course, the jugs on the table showed they hadn't spent their entire time in sober contemplation.

  "Run out of lamp oil while you were dressing, did you, Pinch?" smirked Therin when the master rogue found his friends. The regulator said not a word, but pulled up a chair and set himself at their table, back to a corner as was his custom. He was dressed ill matched and ill fitting, in tattered hose and a doublet that hung loose on his chest and short on the sleeves. About the only thing right about it were the somber dark colors, well suited to Pinch's needs for the night.

  "Maybe he got caught catting and grabbed her husband's clothes instead of his own," Sprite snickered.

  "Pinch, you wouldn't!" Maeve added in mock horror.

  "Have your wit all well and good, but have you done as you were commanded?" Pinch glowered as he tried to pour the last slops out of the jug they'd already drained.

  "Aye, three for all of us." Therin looked to the other two and they nodded agreement.

  "I've found us an artificer who's gambled too poorly to meet his notes. He'll work quick with no questions for the right fee. I even filched us his fee." Sprite plopped a bag of coins on the table.

  "Keep your profit," Pinch granted with uncharacteristic generosity, knowing full well the halfling had probably nipped twice what he was showing. "The copies?"

  "Two sets of each," Sprite answered with a mischievous twinkle. "Thought maybe we could take the second set and sell it to some coney once the word gets 'round."

  "How good's his work?"