Someone from the Blue Temple, not wishing to have fewer words to say than anyone else on this occasion, pronounced: “No one’s claims to the Sword are going to mean anything unless it is found. I would like to know how the world-famed investigator we have with us plans to go about recovering it.”
The Hetman, determined to assert himself, seized this opportunity. “It does seem,” he told Wen Chang, “that so far your efforts have contributed nothing to that end.”
“It may seem so, sir.”
“What evidence can you give us that you are making progress?”
“At present I can give you none.”
Eventually, under pressure, the Magistrate pledged to the Hetman that if given a free hand he would be able to provide some information on the Sword’s whereabouts, if he had not succeeded in actually recovering the blade itself, within the next twenty-four hours.
This was taken up by many of the people present as a promise that the Sword would be recovered within a day. All were eager for that—if Stonecutter were to remain in the hands of nameless thieves, it was hard to see how any of the legitimate segments of society could hope to profit from it in any way.
So, Wen Chang could more or less have his way for twenty-four hours. In the meantime, according to the Magistrate’s recommendations, the Blue Temple would be more heavily guarded than usual, as would all the city’s other main depositories of wealth. And all patrolmen of the Watch, wherever they were on duty, would be alerted to watch for Stonecutter.
With that the meeting broke up.
Chapter Fifteen
The Prince was of course invited by the Hetman to partake of the hospitality of the palace. Declining the invitation would have been diplomatically difficult if not impossible, and so al-Farabi was more or less constrained to dine and lodge there, along with the small retinue he had brought into the city with him from the desert.
Though it was plain to Kasimir that the Prince would have preferred to leave the palace at once and have a long talk with Wen Chang, there was no opportunity inside the palace for the two men to converse without a high probability of being overheard. In the brief public exchange of conversation they had before parting, the Magistrate managed to convey to his royal client the idea that things were not really so bad as they might look at present. Wen Chang affirmed earnestly that he still had genuinely high hopes of being able to recover Stonecutter.
Kasimir, listening silently to this reassurance, could only wonder how such hopes might possibly be justified. Reviewing in his mind the situation as it stood, he did not find it promising. The twenty-four hours of Wen Chang’s grace period were already passing, and nothing was being accomplished. Of course Wen Chang might have learned something encouraging during the hours he and Kasimir had been separated; the two of them had had no real chance to talk alone since Kasimir had been routed out of bed this morning.
Now, just as Kasimir and Wen Chang were reclaiming their mounts from the palace stables, they were joined by Captain Almagro. The Captain had a meaningful look for each of them, but he delayed saying anything of substance as long as they were still within the palace walls.
The delay, Kasimir discovered, was to be even longer, for as soon as they were outside those walls the Captain left them, with a wink and a wave. Kasimir, not understanding, watched him go.
“He will soon rejoin us, I think,” the Magistrate assured him.
“If you say so.”
They started for their inn, this time without stopping to watch the rebuilding of the scaffold.
Kasimir had expected the Magistrate himself to have a great deal to say as soon as they were away from the palace. But now, on the contrary, Wen Chang was content to ride along in near silence. Instead of joining Kasimir in trying to plan a last desperate attempt to recover the Sword, he seemed almost to have given up. His precious twenty-four hours were passing minute by minute, and if anything he appeared more relaxed than he had before the meeting at which the deadline had been imposed upon him.
If this was only resignation to the whims of Fate, then in Kasimir’s opinion it was carrying that kind of attitude too far. As for himself, he saw no need to carry patience to extremes.
“Well?” he demanded, after they had ridden in silence to a couple of hundred meters’ distance from the palace walls. “What are we to do?”
A dark eye gleamed at him from underneath a squinting brow. “Have patience,” his companion advised him succinctly.
* * *
Kasimir found this, in the circumstances, a thoroughly unsatisfactory answer. But he had to be content with it until they had reached their inn.
There they found Almagro waiting for them in the courtyard, having evidently completed whatever urgent errand had drawn him away. The Captain was impatient too. “Where can we talk? I’ve got quite a lot to say.”
Wen Chang gestured. “Come up to our suite—it is about as secure as any place can be, outside a wizard’s palace.”
When the three of them were established in the third-floor suite, with Komi and some of his men on watch in the room below, Almagro began to talk, quietly but forcefully.
His pleas that Wen Chang get busy and find the Sword without delay were considerably more urgent than Kasimir’s might have been.
“Magistrate, if you know where the damned thing is, or might be, then let’s get it and deliver it without delay.” The Captain was now obviously worried for himself. “Whatever might or might not happen to you two if you fail, nothing good is going to happen to me. My neck is on the line. I’ve stuck it way out for you, and His Mightiness the desert Prince is not going to put himself out to protect me.”
Wen Chang responded with every appearance of sympathy. “He might very well offer you protection if I ask it of him. And I shall certainly ask it if I think it necessary.”
“If? Look here, Magistrate, tell me straight out—do you know where that Sword is now, or don’t you?”
“If you mean, can I walk straight to it and put my hand on it—no. Can I send a message from this room, and have it brought here to me within the hour? Again my answer must be no. Nevertheless I do have some definite ideas on the subject of Stonecutter’s location.”
“Hah! If you have any useful ideas at all, I wish you’d share them with me!”
“The time is not yet right for that … look here, old friend. You have trusted me in the past. Can you not trust me once more?”
The Captain blew out a blast of air that made his mustache quiver. “I’ve seen you act like this before … damn it all, I suppose you know what you’re doing.”
“Thank you. I appreciate the confidence. Now, have the arrangements that I requested been completed?”
“They have.” Almagro looked at the room’s windows and the closed door. “If you mean about that fellow Umar. We’ve picked him up, and brought him into the city, as quietly as we could. One of my own men is now temporarily in command out at the quarry.”
“Were you able to determine anything from the records out there, about which prisoner or prisoners might be missing?”
“Nah. My people brought in what records they could find, and I’ve taken a look at them. Hopeless, I’d say. Kept by a bunch of illiterates.”
“I feared as much.” Wen Chang rubbed his own neck, as if the long strain were beginning to tell on him. “And where are you holding Umar now?”
“At one of our auxiliary Watch-stations. It’s a very quiet little place, hardly used for anything anymore, out near the Paupers’ Palace. I doubt very much that anyone besides the men I trust know that he’s there. The men who took him there and are watching over him are the most trustworthy I have.”
“Good.” Now Wen Chang was nodding eagerly. “I want to talk to Umar at once.”
Kasimir shook off his own recurrent tiredness as well as he could, and made ready to accompany Wen Chang and Almagro through the streets yet once more.
Leaving the inn, they rode through the streets upon a broadly looping course, t
he Magistrate doubling back and changing his route unpredictably in an efficient effort to determine whether or not they were being followed. At length he was satisfied, and they set out straight for the Paupers’ Palace.
Their trip through the streets was somewhat delayed by these precautions, but otherwise uneventful. Presently a familiar landmark came into Kasimir’s sight—the isolated, disconnected, crumbling section of high stone wall, with the winged scavengers rising from its top and settling there again, shrieking in their quarrels over food.
At one side of the stretch of barren ground that centered on the wall of exposure stood a small stone building, seventy or eighty meters from the wall and at least half that distance apart from any other structure. This, Almagro indicated, was the Watch-station. The building, Kasimir estimated, looking at it from a distance, could contain no more than two rooms at most. He supposed its chief claim to usefulness, if you could call it that, was its position that would allow the occupants to keep a close eye on the corpse-disposal operation.
They had ridden within fifty meters or so of the building when Almagro abruptly reined in his mount, then just as suddenly spurred forward. Wen Chang was riding at a gallop right beside him.
Kasimir dug his heels into the flanks of his riding-beast and stayed right behind them. He was actually the first off his mount as the three men reached the station. The stout front door of the little building was standing slightly ajar. In the shaded area just inside the entrance, where it would be invisible until you were almost upon it, lay the body of a man in Watch uniform. The man was sprawled on his back in the middle of a considerable pool of blood.
Kasimir took one look at the wound that had opened the man’s throat, almost from ear to ear, and forbore to look for signs of life. The blood was starting to dry on the stone floor, and the insects were already busy around the corpse.
Almagro, standing over the dead man now with his short sword drawn, said a name, which Kasimir took to be that of the murdered man; then the Captain and the Magistrate, both with weapons ready, moved farther into the building, toward a doorway leading to the rear.
Once more Kasimir was right behind them.
The second room of the small structure was dim and almost windowless. The heat of the sun upon the thin stone walls was turning the chamber oven like; and here was more blood, much more blood, this time spreading out in a fan-shaped, partially dried puddle that had its source inside the single barred cell with which the building was equipped. There was another dead man in there, lying on the floor of the still-locked cell, and in this victim’s distorted face Kasimir could recognize the valuable prisoner Umar.
For a few moments the drone of insects, and the cries of those distant, larger scavengers upon the paupers’ wall, made the only sounds in that dim room. Then Wen Chang asked his old friend to unlock the door of the cell.
The Captain fumbled at his belt, where there were several sets of keys. He seemed to be having trouble finding the proper one. “How was he killed, in there?” he asked in a querulous voice. “He can’t have done it himself, there’s no weapon.”
The Magistrate shook his head impatiently. “He was lured to the bars, by whoever killed the sentry. Lured by the promise of being set free, I suppose … how should I know the details?” Wen Chang was angry at the loss of his witness, perhaps at his own mistakes as well, and disposed to be uncharacteristically surly.
Once Almagro had found the proper key and opened the cell door, Wen Chang and Kasimir went into the cell, both trying to avoid stepping in the puddled blood. The Magistrate also drew up his trouser legs with a slight fastidious movement.
Soon after Wen Chang had begun his examination of the body, he turned to announce that the man had been attacked from behind, and that his killer was left-handed.
Almagro, his expression at once idle and thoughtful, had been looking into the cell from outside, hanging on to the bars of the door. But he reacted sharply to that.
“Left-handed?” His voice rose, in both pitch and volume, from each syllable to the next. The others turned to look at him.
“Left-handed? That tears it, then! About three years ago, right after I came to work for the Hetman, there was a fellow in the city they called the Juggler. Another name he went by was Valamo of the Left Hand. He was the smoothest assassin I’ve ever run into anywhere. The deadliest and smartest … it was only through a woman that we ever caught him. Even then we knew he’d done a lot of things we couldn’t prove. We could prove enough, though. The judge thought that execution was too good for him.”
Wen Chang’s eyes glittered. “And so he was sent to the quarries?” “Yes, he was, by all the gods! ‘Course I’m not sure it was Kovil’s quarry where he ended up. But it might well have been. He was one of the few you don’t forget in this business. All this”—and with a savage gesture Almagro indicated the abattoir around them—“this is just the kind of thing he did. He knew, somehow, we had a good witness here, a man who could tell us a lot. And he came to shut him up for good.”
“This Valamo, or Juggler, worked alone then, as a rule?”
“In the important things he worked alone as much as possible. Though he could always recruit people in Eylau to work with him, when he thought he needed someone. Had a reputation, that one did. Still has, evidently. I do believe that most of the regular gang leaders were afraid of him … so now it looks like the Juggler’s back.”
“How did he happen to acquire that name?” asked Kasimir.
Almagro’s gaze turned toward him. “Nothing very strange about that. It’s what he did, they tell me, before he found his real profession. A street performer, doing a little acrobatics, a little sleight of hand, a little juggling. Those people are never very far within the edge of the law anyway.”
“True enough,” said Wen Chang. “Though there have been times in my own life when I have felt almost completely at home among them … but never mind that. What does this Valamo look like?”
Squinting into the air, the Captain took thought carefully. “By now I’d say he must be around forty years old; though by the look of things here he’s lost no skill or toughness. Anyone who could survive three years on a quarry gang … he’s just average height, no taller than the Doctor here. Something of a hooked nose. His hair was dark when he was young, but when I saw him it was going an early gray—so it’s likely just about completely white by now. His face would be lined and sun burnt from the quarries, so I’d say he’s likely to look a decade or two older than he really is—what’s wrong with you, Doctor Kasimir?”
“Tadasu Hazara,” said Kasimir, after a pause to swallow. “That was the name he gave when he came to the inn, and talked to me about wanting to buy antique weapons. He must have thought that I was a genuine dealer, and was just making sure. Then he proved to himself that I was a fake.” The physician paused and looked at his companions. “How could Kovil have hoped to control such a man?”
“Kovil did not lack in confidence,” said Wen Chang dryly. He stood back from the blood and waved a hand about. “Old friend Almagro, this slaughter must of course be reported.”
“And am I to report also that Valamo of the Left Hand did it?”
“Yes, I think so. All the pressure that we can put upon that gentleman will not be too much. As for you, Kasimir.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to go back to the inn and rest,” said the Magistrate, surprising his hearer. “Rest, but do not sleep too deeply, for this Juggler may even now decide to pay us a visit there. And soon there will be another job for you to do.”
Chapter Sixteen
Kasimir returned to the inn, where Lieutenant Komi was waiting to greet him with eager questions about the most recent developments. Kasimir, not having been told to keep any secrets, brought the officer up to date as best he could.
Komi shook his head gloomily when he had heard the story of the double murder. “It sounds like bad news; I must find out what the Prince wants me to do now.”
&nbs
p; “It certainly doesn’t sound like good news to me either. But be sure to leave a few reliable men here if you go off to the palace seeking orders.”
“I will. Don’t worry, my men are all reliable.”
Climbing the stairs wearily to his third-floor room, Kasimir lay down on his couch to rest. For a time, the cries of peddlers in the street outside kept him awake.
The peddlers moved on eventually to the next street, but by now Kasimir’s thoughts were disturbing enough to prevent his sleeping. He kept seeing the murdered men in the small stone building. Somehow the worst horror was the look of peace upon their faces; even the man in the cell, whose expression was unnatural, seemed to have died calmly. It was as if each of the victims in turn had welcomed the figure in whose guise death came upon them.
Neither of them appeared to have taken alarm before the end.
At last Kasimir fell asleep, and with sleep came strange dreams. Someone whose face was hidden in a gray hood was stalking after him with a great steel Sword, trying to coax him to put down his dagger and his cudgel. Then in his dream Kasimir looked down for his right hand, and saw that it was gone, lopped off along with his wooden club.
He awoke sweating and gasping, to find Wen Chang bending over him. For just a moment the horror and strangeness of the dream persisted, and then Kasimir realized that the frightening alteration he perceived in Wen Chang’s face was only a result of the Magistrate’s just having removed the outer layer of some kind of a disguise.
“What’s going on?” Kasimir demanded, almost before he was fully awake. There was something in his mentor’s attitude that made him think more action must be imminent.
Wen Chang was standing back now, regarding him calmly. “I have arranged another task for you to perform, my young friend—if you choose. It might help our cause immeasurably, but I must warn you that it is very dangerous.”
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