by Glen Cook
The ship's master approached. He had time for us now that the vessel was turning toward the channel. He said, "I spoke to the harbor master this morning. The war situation is quiet. We're clear all the way to Full Harbor if you want to stay with the ship that far."
"Of course we do."
Morley groaned. Dojango whimpered something about throwing himself overboard and ending it all. I grinned and set to dickering for the extra passage.
Halfway out of the channel the groll portion of the triplets began gabbling at Morley. When we went to see what they wanted, we found we were overhauling Binkey's Sequin. The Tate girls were out on deck. They spotted us as we slid past on the starboard side.
"I get the feeling they're upset about something," Morley said. He smiled and waved.
"Women have no sense of proportion," I said. I grinned and waved, too. "Wag a little tail at you and you're supposed to eat out of their hands." I looked at Tinnie and wondered if it might be worth it.
They blistered the air. I wondered if my personal sacrifices could be parlayed into a bonus from old man Tate.
We swooped past Sequin and dashed for the mouth of the channel. Master Arbanos' vessel was a dark lump in the distance as we began our turn to the south.
"I'll be damned!"
It was a morning for meeting old friends. A river scow entering the Leifmold channel carried Vasco and his buddies. "That damned Dead Man," I muttered. "He could have banged them around a little, at least."
They hadn't spotted us. I got everybody out of sight so it would stay that way.
I had counted on the Dead Man to stall them longer than he had. Now I worried. Had they done something I would regret?
"Keep an eye on these pirates," Morley grumped. "They might murder us while we're laying in the scuppers puking our guts out." The ship had completed her turn. She was rolling in the offshore swell.
Morley had no call to worry. The ship's crew treated us perfectly. The journey was almost without event. Once, the Stormlord's striped sail passed us, wallowing and struggling through seas she was not designed to face. She did not seem interested in us, and was not to be seen in the harbor at our first port of call.
Once we saw a royal man-of-war farther out, and another time a masterhead lookout yelled down that he had a Venageti sail in sight. Nothing came of either sighting. We entered Full Harbor eight days after departing Leifmold. No striped sail was to be seen there, either.
For once I felt a little optimistic.
21
"We're here," Morley growled the next morning. "What now?" He had stoked up on biscuits baked with lard and served with greasy gravy. It was the nearest he could get to a vegetarian breakfast.
"Now I try to pick up the woman's trail. Her family should still be here. They ought to know something."
It sounded too simple even to me. But sometimes things go your way. It would be sweet if I could find her at her dad's place, make my pitch, and head out with her yea or nay.
Full Harbor had changed and not changed. New buildings. New naval facilities. New streets laid out after the cleanup from the big Venageti attack three years ago. Same old whores and stews and pawnshops and overpriced inns and tailors preying on the loneliness of young sailors and Marines far from home and in the shadow of death. The gods know I wasted enough of my own time and pay in places like that. Reformers keep talking about shutting them down. They won't. The boys would have nothing left to fill their time.
I expected commentary from Morley Dotes. He disappointed me in a pleasant way. "You humans are a despair, that this is the best a soldier can expect."
Maybe it was his human side talking.
We are the only race that goes in for war habitually, in a big way. The others, especially the elves and dwarfs, have the occasional brawl, but seldom more often than once a generation, and then usually only a single battle, not much sorcery, winner take all.
Plenty of them get in on our doings as auxiliaries. They can be useful but are unreliable. They have no concept of discipline.
"You're right. Let's find ourselves a base, then get to work."
We drew plenty of stares, being civilians, and them being what they were. I didn't like the attention. Mine is a business where I don't want to be remembered.
We found a place that would accept civs and breeds without devouring the income of ten years. It was about as sleazy as a place could get. I bribed the owner to keep alcohol away from the triplets, then Morley and I hit the streets.
Full Harbor, on the map, looks something like a lobster's head lying between its arms. The city proper, and its naval facilities, sits at the end of a fortified neck of land. The arms reach out and shield the bay from the worst storm-driven seas. The city's location makes it very defensible. The Venageti have managed to penetrate it only twice, each time losing the entire force committed. The farther you get from the waterfront and naval facilities, the more "civilized" the city becomes. There are some low, wooded hills just inside the neck of the peninsula, right behind the Narrows Wall. They harbor the homes of the city's well-to-do.
No lords reside in the city. They refuse to risk themselves or their properties where the Venageti might show up with the unpredictable suddenness of a tropical storm.
They're funny that way—plenty willing to trek all over the Cantard risking themselves for glory and personal gain, but...
I don't understand them any more than I understand frogs. But I'm handicapped by my low birth.
Kayean's father had been one of the Syndics who dwelt in the hills, with a wife, four servants, and eight kids. Kayean was the oldest.
Memories returned, bringing a certain nostalgia, as I guided the rented carriage up and down pacific lanes.
"What're you looking all moony-eyed about?" Morley demanded. We had left the triplets at the inn, an action the wisdom of which I still doubted, though Morley assured me he had not left a farthing between them.
"Remembering when. Young love. First love. Right here in these hills." I had not filled him in on every little detail. A bodyguard did not need to know all the sordid angles.
"I'm a bit of a nostalgic romantic myself, but I never figured you for one, Garrett."
"Me? The knight in rusty armor always clanking out to rescue undeserving maidens or to do battle with the dragons of some lunatic's imagination? I don't qualify?"
"You see? Romantic images. Though why should you mind working for nuts if they have money to spend? You can milk a man with an obsession like a spider milks a fly."
"I don't work that way."
"I know. You really want to rescue maidens and champion underdogs and lost causes—as long as you get enough grease to keep the joints in the armor from freezing up."
"I like a beer sometimes, too."
"You've got no ambition, Garrett. That's what's wrong with you."
"You could write a book about all the things you've found wrong with me, Morley."
"I'd rather write one about the things that are right. It'd be a lot less work. Just a short little fable. ‘He's kind to his mother. Doesn't beat his wife. His kids never have to go in the snow barefoot.' "
"Sarky today, aren't we?"
"I'm off my feed. How much longer are we going to be looking for the ghosts of might-have-been?"
Not only sarky but a little too perceptive. I supposed I might as well confess. "I'm not being romantic. I'm lost."
"Lost? I thought you said you knew these parts like the back of your hand."
"I did. But things have changed. All the trees and bushes and stuff that were landmarks have grown or been cut down or—"
"Then we'll just have to ask somebody, won't we? Yo!" he shouted at a gardener clipping a hedge. "What's the name of the guy we're looking for, Garrett?" The gardener stopped working and gave us the fisheye. He looked like a real friendly type. Poison you with his smile.
"Klaus Kronk." The first name was pronounced claws with a soft sibilant, but Morley took it for a nickname.
; He climbed down and approached the gardener. "Tell me, my good fellow, where can we find the Syndic Claws Kronk?"
The good fellow gave him a puzzled look that turned into a sneer. "Let's see the color of your metal, darko."
Morley calmly picked him up and chucked him over his hedge, hopped over after him and tossed him back, thumped on him a little, twisted limbs and made him groan, then said, "Tell me, my good fellow, where can we find the Syndic Claws Kronk?" He wasn't even breathing hard.
The gardener decided that at least one of us was a psychopath. He stammered directions.
"Thank you," Morley said. "You have been most gracious and helpful. In token of my appreciation I hope you will accept this small gratuity." He dropped a couple of coins into the man's palm, closed his fingers over them, then rejoined me aboard our conveyance. "Take the first left and go all the way to the top of the hill."
I glanced back at the gardener, still seated beside the lane. A glint of mischief sparked in his swelling eyes.
"You think it's wise to make enemies out here, Morley?"
"We won't get any comebacks from him. He thinks I'm crazy."
"I can't imagine why anybody would think that about you, Morley."
We had only one turn left to make. A cemetery flanked both sides of the road. "You know where you are now?" Morley asked. "A landmark like this ought to be plenty memorable."
"More memorable than you know. I think our gardener friend got us. We'll see in a minute." I turned between the red granite pillars that flanked the entrance to the Kronk family plot.
"He's dead?"
"We're about to find out."
He was. His was the last name incised in the stone of the obelisk in the center of the plot. "Got it during the last Venageti incursion, judging from the date," I said. "Fits what I remember about him, too. He would get out and howl for Karenta."
"What do we do now?"
"I guess we look for the rest of the family. He's the only one who's established residence here."
He lifted one eyebrow.
"I can find my way from here. Kayean and I used to walk up here at night to, uh... "
"In a graveyard?"
"Nothing like tombstones to remind you how little time you have for the finer things in life."
"You humans are weird, Garrett. If you want an aphrodisiac, there's one that the sidhe tribes of the Benecel river basin make from the roots of something like a potato plant. It'll keep your soldier at attention for hours. Not only that, but when you use it you're guaranteed there's no way you're going to become a papa."
Vegetarian sexual aids? Some people take good things too far.
22
Starting from the cemetery I was able to find the Kronk place with only one miscue. From the lane the place next door looked more like the one I remembered than the correct one. We were partway up the flagstones when I spied the peacock cages under the magnolias.
"About turn and march," I said. "One house shy of our mark." I recalled how, if Kayean was not very careful sneaking in and out, those peafowl would raise six kinds of hell and there went the evening if it happened on the sneak-out side. Her old man knew what was going on but was never quick enough to catch her. She had been fast on her feet.
I explained that to Morley as we retreated to the lane.
"How the hell did a slob like you ever meet a quail living in a place like this?"
"I met her at a party for bachelor officers the admiral put on. All the most eligible young ladies of Full Harbor were there."
He gave me an overly dramatic look of disbelief.
I confessed, "I was there waiting tables."
"It must have been animal magnetism and the air of danger and forbidden fruit surrounding an affair with a member of the lower classes." He said it deadpan. I could not decide whether I should be irritated or not.
"Whatever it was, it was the greatest thing that had happened in my young life. Hasn't been much since to eclipse it, either."
"Like I said, a romantic." And there he let it lay.
"Lot of changes since I was here," I said. "The place has been completely done over."
"You sure it's the right one?"
"Yeah." All the memories assured me that it was. We had walked these grounds under the watchful chaperonage of a patient and loving mother who had seen the whole romance as a phase and would not have believed her eyes if she had walked in on us in the cemetery.
Morley took my word for it.
We were still fifty feet from the door when a man in livery stepped outside and came to meet us. "He don't look like he's glad we dropped by."
Morley grunted. "He don't look like your average houseboy, either."
He didn't. He looked like a Saucerhead Tharpe who was past his prime but still plenty dangerous. The way he fisheyed us said that, fancy clothes or not, we were not fooling him.
"Can I help you gents?"
I'd decided to go at it straight ahead, almost honest, and hope for the best. "I don't know. We're down from TunFaire looking for Klaus Kronk."
That seemed to take him from the blind side. He said, "And just when I thought I'd heard all the gags there was."
"We just a little bit ago found out he was dead."
"So what are you doing here instead of heading back where you came from if the guy you want is croaked?"
"The only reason I wanted to talk to him was to find out how I could get in touch with his oldest daughter. I know she's married, but I don't know who to. I thought maybe her mother or any others of the family who were still around might be able to point me in the right direction. Any of them here?"
He looked like it was getting too complicated for him. "You must be talking about the people who used to live here. They moved out a couple years ago."
The changes all seemed recent enough to support his statement. "You have any idea where she is?"
"Why the hell should I? I didn't even know her name till you told me."
"Thank you for your time and courtesy. We'll have to trace her some other way."
"What you want this machuska for, anyway?"
While I considered his question, Morley said, "Throw it in the pond and see which way the frogs jump."
"We represent the executors of an estate of which she is the principal legatee."
"I love it when you talk dirty lawyer," Morley said. He told our new buddy, "She inherited a bundle." In a ventriloquist's whisper, he told me, "Hit him with the number so we can see how big his eyes get."
"It looks like around a hundred thousand marks, less executors' fees."
His eyes did not get big. He didn't even bat one. Instead he muttered, "I thought I heard every gag there was," again.
So I repeated myself for him. "Thanks for your time and courtesy." I headed for the lane.
"Next stop?" Morley asked.
"We ask at the houses on either side. The people who lived there knew the family. They might give us something."
"If they're not gone, too. What did you think of that guy?"
"I'll try not to form an opinion till I've talked to a few more people."
We had a less belligerent but no more informative interview at the next house down the lane. The people there had only been in the place a year and all they knew about the Kronks was that Klaus was killed during the last Venageti invasion.
"You make anything of that?" I asked as we turned the rig around and headed for the peacock place.
"Of what?"
"He said Kronk was killed during the Venageti thing. Not by the Venageti."
"An imprecision due entirely to laziness, no doubt."
"Probably. But that's the kind of detail you keep an ear out for. Sometimes they add up to a picture people don't know they're giving you, like brush strokes add up to a painting."
The peacocks raised thirteen kinds of hell when they discovered us. They crowed like they hadn't had anything to holler about for years.
"My god," I murmured. "She hasn't changed a bit."
"She was always old and ugly?" Morley asked, staring at the woman who observed our approach from a balcony on the side of the house.
"Hasn't even changed her clothes. Careful with her. She's some kind of half-hulder witch."
A little man in a green suit and red stocking cap raced across our path cackling something in a language I didn't understand. Morley grabbed a rock and started to throw it. I stopped him. "What're you doing?"
"They're vermin, Garrett. Maybe they run on their hind legs and make noises that sound like speech, but they're as much vermin as any rat." But he let the rock drop.
I have definite feelings about rats, even the kind that walk on their hind legs and talk and do socially useful things like dig graves. I understood Morley's mood if not his particular prejudice.
The Old Witch—I never heard her called anything else—grinned down at us. Hers was a classic gap-toothed grin. She looked like every witch from every witch story you've ever heard. There was no shaking my certainty that it was deliberate.
A mad cackle floated down. The peafowl answered as though to one of their own.
"Spooky," Morley said.
"That's her image. Her game. She's harmless."
"So you say."
"That was the word on her when I was here before. Crazy as a gnome on weed, but harmless."
"Nobody who harbors those little vipers is harmless. Or blameless. You let them skulk around your garden, they breed like rabbits, and first thing you know they've driven all the decent folk away with their malicious tricks."
We were up under the balcony now. I forbore mentioning his earlier response to a gardener's bigotry. It wouldn't have done any good. Folks always believe their own racism is the result of divine inspiration, incontestably valid.
My dislike for rat people is, of course, the exception to the rule of irrationality underlying such patterns of belief.
The Old Witch cackled again, and the peafowl took up the chorus once more. She called down, "He was murdered, you know."
"Who was?" I asked.
"The man you were looking for, Private Garrett. Syndic Klaus. They think no one knows. But they are wrong. They were seen. Weren't they, my little pretties?"