by Glen Cook
"How the hell should I know? I never saw him before."
"I did. Once. The other night. Hanging around with the big guy over there leaning against those navy pork barrels." I started to tell him where and when, then decided it might be wise to save a little something for my old age.
"I don't know him, either," Morley said.
"Give, Garrett." Vasco had just about decided I was going to cheat him. He started after the women.
"Run!" I yelled at them. And to Vasco, "They're in a box in an abandoned house on the Way of the Harlequin, half a block west of Wizard's Reach."
"It's your ass if they aren't, Garrett."
"Anytime you think you can take a piece of it, Vasco. Anytime."
The boat began to drift away from the wharf. The women took my advice, sprinted and jumped. A delectable bundle of goodies plopped into my arms. Morley popped up and caught Rose, making suitable purrs at the advent of unexpected treasures. I tossed him a sneer.
Vasco trotted away, barking orders at his troops.
I couldn't restrain a chuckle.
"What's so funny?" Tinnie asked. She made no effort to peel herself from me. I thought about pushing her away—sometime next week.
"Just imagining what might happen when they try to collect those papers."
"You mean you lied to them?"
The wharf was fifteen feet away now. Ugly One got down off the cotton bales. He paid us no special attention. And I had trouble paying him any, either. Tinnie would not hold still.
"Oh, no. I told him the truth. I just didn't tell him all of it."
"Amateurs," Morley said, taking a break from Rose, who was doing to him what Tinnie was to me. "They had any professional smarts at all, they'd know that's the Dead Man's place. Slick, Garrett. Remind me not to get on your wrong side. You're so slick you'd slide uphill."
I glanced at the two men on the wharf and wondered.
"I told you I was going with you, Garrett," Rose crowed, as if she had planned the whole thing. She got over her frights fast.
"You might think," I told her. "You might think." I figured to have Master Arbanos put in a mile or two down and get shut of those females.
Damn! That Tinnie was merciless.
I decided I liked her.
About then old man Tate came charging out the dock, too late for anything but the bye-bye. "Master Arbanos, where are you going to put in so we can get rid of these women?" I figured I'd yell the news across to Tate.
"Leifmold."
Leifmold. All the way down to the coast.
He would not relent. He was deaf to offers of money on this. He had a reputation, a schedule, and a tide, and he would waste none of them for any puny bribe I could pay.
Rose grinned wickedly while I argued.
Tinnie's smile was more promising.
18
The trouble with that damned boat was that there was no privacy. You started a little hand-holding and ear blowing and there was Doris or Marsha or Dojango or some damned crewman exercising his eyes. It nearly drove Morley and me crazy. Rose seemed plenty willing to be friendly with him. Of course, he had the authentic golden touch.
I guess eating your vegetables is good for something.
Leifmold was not that long a journey. The first chance I got I pulled Morley aside and asked, "How are we going to ditch those two?"
"Bad choice of words, Garrett. Though I understand your frustration. Does our principal have reliable associates in Leifmold?"
"I don't know."
"Why not?"
"I never had any reason to ask."
"Too bad. Now we have to try to charm it out of those girls." He did not sound optimistic.
Rose laughed at us when we tried to get some word out of her. Tinnie just pretended she was deaf.
Morley and I went off to the stern and brooded together alone.
"Can't do it, Garrett," he grumbled after a while.
"Uhm," I grunted.
"No way."
"Uhm."
"Skirts in the Cantard. Worse than poison, what I hear. We go in there with women, we're dead. Guaranteed."
"I know. But we can't just run off on them, either."
He gave me a look. "If it wasn't poor business sense in this case, I'd say you were too romantic. Baggage is baggage. There isn't anything any one of them is sitting on that you can't get from another one."
There was a lot of traffic on the river, most of it taking advantage of the tide. And most of it faster than Binkey's Sequin. But there was one gaudy yachtlike vessel back upstream that seemed to have us on a leash. "I don't know how a guy with your attitude has your luck."
The yacht boasted a sail of red and yellow stripes. It had sleek lines. It smelled of wealth, which meant power. It could have passed us easily, but it just hung back.
"They want to be treated that way, Garrett. If you don't treat them like rats, they have to admit that they're responsible for their own behavior. And you know women. They never want to admit they get a kick out of messing around."
"How about trying this angle—if Master Arbanos is willing."
"I'm listening."
"We tie them up just before we make port. He hides them out while he's loading and unloading, then he takes them back to TunFaire. Just part of the cargo."
"Sounds good to me. When you talk to him, ask about that boat with the striped sail."
I had wondered if he'd noticed.
Master Arbanos held me up. The man was a buccaneer. But I was between a rock and a hard place, and he knew it. I paid. In the end it all came out of Tate's pocket, anyway.
I asked about the striped sail ship.
He looked at me like I was a moron. "Sorry, I forget you are not a riverman. That is Typhoon, personal vessel of Stormlord Thunderhead. Everyone on the river knows it. It runs to Leifmold and back all the time, showing the Stormlord's colors."
"Oh my, oh my, oh my," I murmured.
"The Stormlord never sails her himself. She is just for show. Her master is a bitch cartha with the temper and moral of an alley cat. She has had trouble with everyone on the river. Some say she will strike the striped sail and hoist the black one by night."
"What does that mean?"
"That some think she turn river pirate when no one is looking."
"Is it just talk? Or is there something to it?" Bless me, but wouldn't it be my kind of luck to be aboard a barge pirates were stalking. The gods have a fellow especially assigned to complicate my life.
"Who knows? There are pirate. I have seen their leaving."
"And?" He wanted coaxing.
"They don't leave any witness. Which is why I never accept any cargo they find attractive."
Little wheels and gears clicked in my mind, like the works in a waterclock. A clock running a little slow, perhaps. What sort of cargo might attract a pirate working from a vessel belonging to one of the Stormlords? What was this whole business about?
Silver. Sweet silver. The fuel of the engines of sorcery.
One more complication?
Why the hell not? Every other angle had been covered, hadn't it?
I gave Master Arbanos a generous portion of the metal sugar. He assured me my will would be carried out where the women were concerned. They would be treated like royalty, and on Sequin's return to TunFaire he would deliver them to old man Tate personally.
I could ask for nothing more.
Master Arbanos' crewfolk—all of them his relatives—moved the night before we were due to reach Leifmold. They caught the gals asleep.
Such caterwauling and cursing! I never. Rose I expected to be less than polite, but Tinnie I'd had pegged as at least half a lady. She turned out to be the louder of the two.
At least that went off without hitches.
The sea lay on our left. Leifmold climbed steep hills a mile to our right. We were waiting to pick up a pilot, whose expertise would be needed if Binkey's Sequin was to negotiate the traps laid for Venageti raiders. Morley was loafing in
the bows. "Come here," he said, beckoning languorously. He was nibbling a raw potato stolen from the cargo. I gave it a disgusted look.
"Not bad if you sprinkle a little salt on," he said.
"And good for you, no doubt."
"Of course. Take a gander round the harbor there."
I did. And saw what he meant.
The striped-sail yacht was warping into a dock. She had passed us in the night and had pulled rank to get the first available pilot. "Needs keeping an eye on," I admitted.
"You read that guy Denny's papers. Did he mention Stormlord Thunderhead anywhere?"
"No. But a couple other wizards got memorialized. I'm willing to look for an indirect connection." When you consider the possibility of wizards being involved in anything, the smart thing to do is to assume the worst.
So chances were striped sail had nothing to do with us. But I would take the paranoid approach on the off chance.
The women raised all kinds of holler when we tied up, but nobody paid them any mind. Morley and Doris and Marsha and I went off looking for one of several coasters recommended to us by Master Arbanos. Morley left Dojango to watch the Stormlord's yacht. No one there ought to recognize him even if they were up to no good.
Our luck was in. We found a ship called The Gilded Lady planning to put out next morning. Her master was amenable to our buying passage. Morley started looking grey around the edges.
"You handled the river all right."
"No waves on the river, Garrett. Lots of waves along the coast, and the ship running parallel to them." His eyes bugged. "Let's not talk about it. Let's find someplace to put up, then get out on the town. There's a place down here even better than mine—don't you ever tell anybody I admitted that—that you've really got to try."
"I'm not in a roots and nuts mood, Morley. Looking a long voyage in the eye, I need something with more body."
"Body? Don't you care what you're doing to your body? I promise, you'll like this place. Give you a little something different. All that red meat is going to kill you, anyway."
"We did red meat the other day, Morley. But since you bring up self-abuse, let's do some calculating. Who is more likely to die young? Me eating what I want or you messing around with other guys' women?"
"You're talking apples and oranges now, buddy."
"I'm talking dead is what I'm talking."
He did not have a rejoinder for fifteen seconds. Then he said only, "I'll die happy."
"So will I, Morley. And without hunks of nut stuck between my teeth."
"I give up," he said. "Go ahead. Commit slow suicide by poisoning yourself."
"That was my plan." A tavern sign caught my eye. It had been a dry trip down the river. "I'm going to tip a few."
Doris and Marsha recognized a beer joint when they saw one, too. They grunted back and forth. Morley started trading gibberish with them.
Oh, my. Did all the triplets have an alcohol problem?
I said, "As soon as we find a place for the night somebody better check on Dojango. At least so he knows where to find us."
Morley reached a compromise with Doris and Marsha. "They can have one bucket each. That's all."
"Bucket?"
"They're big boys, Garrett."
"So I noticed." We marched into the tavern. It was early yet, so there was no crowd. Still, a silence fell and grew so deep I knew we had walked in where we were not wanted.
I've never let that stop me. I tossed a coin on the bar. "A mug of brew for me and a bucket apiece for the big boys. And my buddy here will have whatever you can stomp out of a parsnip."
Cold-eyed stare. "We don't serve their kind."
"Well, now, they don't speak Karent very well. So when you look at them there, they're still smiling. But I don't think they'll keep on smiling if I have to translate that for them. You know how grolls are when they get mad."
He thought about arguing. He might have had there been forty or fifty more people to back his play. But Doris and Marsha had begun to get the drift. Their smiles vanished and their faces grew mottled.
"We want beer," I said. "Not your women."
He did not laugh. He headed for the tap. Not many people are fool enough to make a groll mad.
They do get mean.
"Not bad beer," I said, quaffing my third while Doris and Marsha nursed their milk pails. "And serving it up didn't break one bone, did it?"
The barman wasn't interested in bantering.
Most of his regulars had deserted him.
We followed their example.
About fifty sullen men had gathered outside. Their mood looked ugly. I told Morley, "I ought to pay closer attention to what neighborhood I'm in."
"I like the way you think, Garrett."
Half a brick thrown by somebody named Anonymous arced toward us. It had some arm behind it. Doris—or maybe it was Marsha—stabbed a paw out and snagged it. He looked it over for a second. Then he squeezed it and let the powder dribble between his fingers.
That impressed me, but not the mob.
So he snapped off the timber from which the tavern's sign hung. He stripped the sign off and flailed the timber around like a switch.
That got the message across. The mob began to evaporate.
Morley asked, "Could a mule do that?"
"No."
We were more circumspect in selecting a place to spend the night.
19
"So where the hell is he?" I demanded. There wasn't a shadow of Dojango.
Morley looked bleak. He had been looking bleak for a while. I thought maybe I should buy him a bunch of carrots or something. He muttered, "Guess we'll have to scout the alleys and taverns."
"I'm going to take a gander at that ship. Catch me on the pier when you find him."
Morley said something to the two remaining triplets. They grunted and moved out. I marched on down to where I could get a look at that striped-sail ship.
There wasn't much to see, a few men lugging things off, then lugging other things on. It wasn't hard to understand why Dojango bugged out. Watching is boring work. It takes a patient guy to lurk for a living.
A man came out on the rear deck, leaned on the rail, hawked, spat into the harbor.
"Interesting." He was Big One from Morley's place and the pier.
He began scanning the waterfront almost as if he had heard me. Then he shrugged and went into a cabin.
Curious.
Maybe Dojango would have stayed on the job if he had seen that guy before.
I lazed in the shade, wishing I had a keg to nurse and wondering what was taking Morley so long. Nothing else happened except that the stevedores finished loading and unloading.
I heard a soft scuff behind me. Maybe at last...
But when I looked I saw Big One. He was not in a friendly mood.
I dropped off the bale where I'd been loafing. Did this call for lethal instruments?
He walked right up and wacked the bale with a short club. No accusations. No questions. Nothing but business. I leaned out of the way and let him have one in the gut.
It did as much good as gut-punching a barrel of salt pork.
That club was meant to scramble my brains, I feared. I hauled out a knife.
I did not get to use it. The cavalry arrived in the guise of Doris or Marsha. The groll picked Big One up by one arm and held him out like a doll. A slow grin spread over his green face. Then he casually heaved him over the bales into the harbor.
Big One never made a sound.
They would have heard me cussing fifty miles away.
Doris—or Marsha, as the case may have been—beckoned me to follow. I did, grumbling. "I could have handled him." Probably about like I had handled Saucerhead, by pounding my body off his club till it broke.
This case was doing wonders for my self-esteem.
Dojango was not falling-down-drunk. He was climb-ing-the-walls-and-howling-at-the-moon-drunk. Marsha kept him under control while Doris explained what happened on the w
aterfront. Or Doris did while Marsha did. I passed my thoughts afterward.
"Bad business," Morley said. His sense of humor had deserted him.
Bad business indeed. But I had gone up against wizards before. You can handle them if your footwork is deft. They have more handles than your ordinary street tbug. The big thing is, they're all as crooked as a hen's hind leg. They are in the middle of every stew of corruption. But they go for a squeaky-clean public image. It's smart to keep some tarnish in your trick bag and be ready to spread it around.
"We'll be out of here tomorrow. Our worries will be over."
"Our worries will be over about the time I learn to handicap the D'Gumi races."
"Meaning never?"
"Or maybe a little longer."
"I'm beginning to wonder if we ought not to reexamine your diet, Morley. Such unrelenting pessimism must have some deficiency at its base."
"The only deficiencies bothering me are of good luck, financial wherewithal, and female companionship."
"I thought you and Rose—
"As you said, she wants something for nothing. She had a chance at a once-in-a-lifetime experience and she tried to sell herself to me! As if she had something special. As if a woman with her attitudes could ever develop whatever talent she did have. I'll never understand you people. What you do to your women... "
"What I do to them isn't any different than what you do to yours. Rose's problems are hers. I do get tired of hearing folks blame their faults on everybody else."
"Whoa, Garrett. Come on down off your stump."
"Sorry. I was just thinking how I was going to spend tomorrow."
"Say what?"
"Listening to Dojango groan and moan and heave his guts over the side while he blames his drinking problem on his mother or somebody."
Morley grinned.
20
Dojango gripped the rail and made an awful noise as he sacrificed to the gods of the sea. A soft whimper followed.
"What did I say?" I asked.
We were twenty feet from the quayside.
Morley was a little green himself. His trouble was all anticipation. The ship wasn't even noticeably rolling.