Gryphon Precinct (Dragon Precinct)

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  “Back home, you lot used to rip people’s fingernails out and I don’t want my fingernails ripped out!”

  “There’s an easy way to avoid that.” Aleta spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. “Tell us the truth. The actual truth, not the lies you spun a few moments ago.”

  Dru was leaning casually on the counter. “You think we came in here by accident? We been onto you for a while.”

  Shrenthorshi put his head in his hands. “Of course you have been, I’m such a fool, but the money was just—” He looked up, and Dru saw tears trickling down his cheeks. “Look, I’m sorry, I had no idea it involved anything with the king and queen, he just came in here and offered ten thousand gold for the two items.” He shook his head. “I’d only just gotten the Keefda, sold to me by a fellow from Iaron who sold it to pay for his retirement trip to Saptor. And then that fellow came in and asked for it and the Snavli and offered ten thousand . . .”

  “Thought you said you could retire on that,” Dru said.

  “Well, see—” The head went back in the hands. “Oh hell, this is such a nightmare. I had debts, you know? I had taken out a loan to buy this place, and I had some old investments that had gone bad, and I had to pay to remodel this place so it would pass the Brotherhood’s annual inspection, and I still owe the contractors for that, and . . .” He broke down and started crying into his palms.

  Aleta gave Dru a look that seemed to say, That person is pathetic! For his part, Dru just said, “So the buyer paid off all your debts?”

  Shrenthorshi nodded into his hands. “I’m finally clear for the first time since I came to Cliff’s End. I thought it was the best day of my life, and now I’m going to be boiled in oil.”

  Slowly, Aleta said, “Well, you may be able to escape that particular fate, but you’ll have to cooperate with us.”

  “Really?” The elf’s head popped up from behind his hands. Tears were now streaming down his face. “I’ll do anything!”

  “A good start,” Dru said, “would be the name of the buyer.”

  “I don’t know what that is, I’m sorry. He never told me.”

  “Course he didn’t.” Dru sighed. It was never that easy.

  “But I can tell you one thing—he was a gnome. And he had a lisp!”

  SIXTEEN

  Aron Fankell couldn’t believe that it had all gone so completely to shit.

  Life had been so much simpler during the war. He joined up as a teenager, having just impregnated a girl, and was scared to death of the responsibility. His eagerness to fight for King Marcus and Queen Marta against the Elf Queen was matched only by his eagerness to get away from Yvenna and their child. Besides, the Elf Queen was evil—everyone said she was. Even her own cousin, the famous wizard Olthar lothSirhans, betrayed her because she was so evil. So he served in the army, fighting for the 17th legion under a really good general whose name he couldn’t remember—though Fankell did recall that he lost his eye at the end of the war.

  The general’s eye wasn’t the only thing lost when the war ended, either. Fankell utterly lost his direction. Here he was, a young adult whose only skill was in being a soldier. To add some insult to that particular injury, he had no pension, even though he was promised one if he survived. So he spent the next decade taking whatever work he could. After all, he had a child to support. Yvenna died giving birth to their daughter, and Yvenna’s parents were very insistent that he pay for at least half of the girl’s upbringing.

  The problem was, there wasn’t a lot of work to be had, as Fankell was far from the only copper-less soldier to be wandering around Flingaria desperate for work. He wound up taking body guarding work for some criminals in Velessa, which went well for a while until they asked him to kill someone. Which Fankell did—he killed plenty during the war, and all anybody gave him were congratulations.

  But killing when there wasn’t a war on tended to get people’s noses out of joint, which rather surprised Fankell. He moved to Treemark, one step ahead of the authorities, and looked for more work.

  He wound up doing the same sort of thing in Treemark, only this time it took him a lot longer to get caught.

  Unfortunately, he then had a bigger problem: he couldn’t earn money in a dungeon. Yvenna’s parents were elderly, and little Yvenna (they named her after her late mother, which just confused Fankell) was sickly, so they needed the money Fankell sent to them every month. Because Treemark only executed criminals who committed capital crimes once a year at midwinter—supposedly it was to build up the tourist trade, which was pretty moribund at that time of year—and Fankell had been caught in the spring, he was going to have a long wait in the dungeon.

  Then Gobink showed up. One of the black-market magick dealers he worked for hired the Esmerelda to move merchandise, and he’d first met Gobink then. The dwarf had heard about Fankell being imprisoned, and said he wanted to help. He promised to bribe the Treemark City Guard to free him, and then he’d do a job for Gobink’s employer. Said job would be an assassination attempt that, if he was caught, would result in his death. Fankell was under a death sentence already, so he didn’t much see the point, nor did he have any great desire to kill the king and queen, considering their war was kind enough to get him away from the pregnant Yvenna. Had he not been able to enlist, he would’ve been forced into fatherhood, a state at which he had neither skill nor desire to enter.

  By the same token, he did feel responsible for little Yvenna, so Gobink sweetened the deal by promising that Yvenna’s grandparents would be given a thousand gold.

  That convinced Fankell to agree to it. Yvenna would never have to worry about anything after receiving that much coin.

  He’d joined Gobink in Crestwood, and then they boarded the Esmerelda, along with another dwarf and another human. Fankell couldn’t remember their names any more than he remembered the general’s. He barely remembered Gobink’s. He sometimes wondered if that was why Yvenna’s parents named the girl Yvenna, so it would be easier for Fankell to remember it. He also wondered sometimes if he just thought of the girl as Yvenna, and that they’d in fact named her something else and he’d forgotten it so he just thought of her with her mother’s name.

  They’d had to live a few months in Cliff’s End, so they each found places to live in different parts of town. Fankell rented a room in a boarding house on Salmon Alley near the docks. During those months, the only communication he had from Gobink was to buy three vials of a particular type of poison, one that apparently was used as a weed-killer, and to give the dwarf one vial at the Dog and Duck the following morning. It turned out that the shop only had two vials left, as the market for that particular type of poison had lessened since it was discovered that the poison was leading to diseased rabbits.

  When Fankell asked what to do with the other vial, Gobink simply said, “Let’s hope we don’t need that one. Hang onto it for now.”

  Then came another summons to the Dog and Duck, where they were each given rooms so they could be ready to go at a moment’s notice.

  Finally, on the day of Lord Albin’s funeral, they were each given Thevit daggers and Snavli charms, and instructions on how to proceed. It had all gone very well, at first. They worked their way through the crowd separately but as a unit, and then they waited for Gobink’s signal for them to throw their daggers at the monarchs. Fankell was given Queen Marta, as was the other dwarf. Gobink and the other human had King Marcus.

  It was all fine until he noticed four guards coming toward them through the throngs. And one of them—one of the two without a cloak—was headed straight for him. He reached for Fankell, who panicked and grabbed the guard’s wrist, then bit his hand.

  He had no idea why he bit the guard’s hand. It just seemed like the thing to do. Having sufficiently distracted the guard, he lost himself in the sea of people, heading for the exit, hoping the Snavli charm still worked as they passed through the outskirts of Jayka Park. He went straight to the Dog and Duck, where they were all supposed to meet afterward.

&n
bsp; The other human, and the dwarf with the eyepatch, they both showed up.

  Gobink didn’t. And that was a problem.

  They agreed to leave Cliff’s End as quick as they could—but cautiously. Fankell waited a couple of days in the apartment on Salmon Alley—which he deliberately hadn’t given completely up, mostly because he didn’t feel like carrying all his stuff, not to mention that other vial of poison, to the Dog and Duck—before heading to the docks.

  He wasn’t about to try to book passage on the Esmerelda. That was too obvious. He had to assume that Gobink had talked. Not that Gobink would talk, but Gobink might talk, and why take the chance?

  Going to the far end of the dock, he talked to the first mate of a small fishing trawler that would take on a passenger if he paid two gold, which Fankell did happily. The first mate then went toward the trawler to talk to his captain—but he was interrupted by a guard.

  Not liking the look of that, Fankell immediately beat a hasty retreat. The guard started chasing him, but Fankell had been chased before, and it was the docks at midday—the place was packed with people. He lost the guard as easily as he did during the funeral in Jayka Park.

  But now the Castle Guard knew that he was in the docks. Getting out of the city-state via boat was looking less likely.

  So he ran to the old port.

  One of the other boarders in the house on Salmon Alley where Fankell had been living was an old sailor named Throndik, who just loved to go on and on about the history of Cliff’s End. While he sat in the common room of the boarding house waiting for a summons from Gobink or the lisping gnome he worked for, Fankell would sit and be regaled by endless stories about how the demesne was founded, how it grew from a castle with a port to a city-state, the development of Oak Way as a thoroughfare to separate the rich from the not-so-rich, the establishment of the precincts to demarcate sections, and—most important to Fankell just at the moment—the abandoning of the natural port at the end of Salmon Alley due to overcrowding and the construction of the current docks.

  “Why I remember,” Throndik said, “hearin’ old Cap’n Nat goin’ on about how much better things were in the old port. He didn’t have no truck with the new port, did Cap’n Nat, he thought things should always be the way they was. I can sorta see his point, but there ain’t no room for all the boats we’re gettin’ nowadays in the old port. Don’t nobody go there, neither, what with all the boardwalks an’ docks an’ things fallin’ to pieces. Why I heard tell that that was where Corvin the vampire hunter killed the last vampire b’fore the Brotherhood’a Wizards wiped ’em all out.”

  After that, Throndik started talking about vampires, which actually was of more interest to Fankell at the time than the history of a city-state he’d never been to before and would—one way or another—never set foot in again after this job was concluded.

  But now he was recalling that part of Throndik’s nattering with crystal clarity. He needed to be somewhere no one would go to try to find him, so what better place than the old port? As he ran down the aptly named Old Port Way to where it intersected with Salmon Alley, he found an overgrown area where the ground curved into a natural inlet that was pocked with rotted wood docks. Fankell figured he’d have no trouble hiding here.

  He slowly worked his way through the docks, hoping like hell that nobody was following him. Reaching for his sash, he felt the Thevit dagger that was holstered there. Worse came to worse, he’d use it. After all, he was set to kill the king and queen with it, so killing a guard was not as big a deal. His death sentence had already been passed in Treemark, and Yvenna was already taken care of, so Fankell had nothing to lose.

  Just ahead was a broken-down old port with a huge hole in the center. Fankell liked the look of that. After clambering up onto the deck—the steps onto it were long since shattered—he looked down the hole and saw a nice little cubby that looked as comfortable as a space barely wider than two people surrounded by rotting wood could possibly be, and he slowly lowered himself down into it.

  Yes, this is good. No one will ever find me here.

  Unsheathing his dagger, he sat looking up at the hole, waiting to see if anyone showed up.

  This gave him a goodly amount of time to sit and think. Mostly about how warm it was in this hole. Autumn was approaching, so the weather was fairly mild in Cliff’s End, but inside this tiny space, it was hot and humid. Sweat soaked through all of his clothes, and he started to have trouble maintaining his grip on the dagger’s handle.

  As he stared up at the hole he’d climbed through, he wondered if perhaps he hadn’t thought all of this through. For one thing, he could hardly stay in this hole forever. Sooner or later, he’d need food and water. In fact, he was getting to the point now where he needed water rather badly.

  But he knew, just knew, that if he stuck his head up out of this hole, the entire Castle Guard would see him.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the guard couldn’t tell where he went. Or maybe they wouldn’t come to the old port.

  He was really getting very thirsty.

  A loud squeak startled him, and he dropped his dagger. Fumbling for it, he saw a massive rat streak across the space, suddenly stopping to stare right at him with red eyes.

  Fankell thrust his dagger outward toward the rat. “Get away from me!”

  The rat seemed wholly unintimidated, a feeling Fankell most assuredly did not share. He also could swear that the rat’s teeth were getting bigger.

  The rat then leapt right at him, and Fankell screamed, waving the dagger around and climbing back out of the hole as best he could. At some point, he dropped the dagger again, but he didn’t care because the rat was chewing on his shirttail and he just had to get out of there, so he clambered up and struggled to get up onto what was left of the dock—

  —only to find himself at the wrong end of a sword. The rat was still chewing away at his shirttail, but he found he couldn’t bring himself to move, what with the point of the sword’s proximity to his neck.

  The sword was being held by an elven woman wearing Guard armor and a brown cloak. Thanks to Throndik, he knew that she had to be one of the detectives that solved big crimes, because of that cloak. He wondered why a detective was after him.

  He also wondered when she’d lower the sword. Or if she’d just wait until the rat chewed through to his stomach.

  Then she smiled unpleasantly and reached out with her left hand to grab the rat. Its teeth were still lodged in Fankell’s shirt, but she squeezed it, and suddenly it wasn’t nibbling anymore.

  Tossing the now-dead rat into the Garamin Sea to her right, the elf woman called out to her left. “I told you the rats would work.”

  “Long as I ain’t the one touchin’ ’em, we’re fine.”

  Fankell heard the voice of what he assumed was another guard. He refused to take his eye off the sword point near his throat.

  “I’m Lieutenant lothLathna,” the woman said, “and this is my partner Lieutenant Dru. What’s your name?”

  To that, Fankell said nothing, though he did swallow very hard. He wasn’t about to tell the guards anything. If he talked, he put Yvenna in danger. (And Yvenna’s grandparents, too, but Fankell didn’t really care much if they were boiled in oil.)

  After Fankell remained quiet for several moments, Dru said, “Can we get outta here, please? I hate this place. A vampire almost killed me an’ Hawk here a little while back.”

  At that, lothLathna frowned and looked away. “A little while? Vampires were wiped out five years ago.”

  “One of ’em wasn’t. Long story, which I’ll gladly tell you all about when we’re not here.”

  Fankell considered and rejected taking advantage of lothLathna’s distraction to try to make a run for it. Her casual one-handed murder of a rat was the basis of the rejection.

  Instead, he let her and Dru lead him away from the old port and to the castle. Where he intended to maintain his silence. Gobink gave him another chance to live and enough coin to keep his daughter h
ealthy. And talking would be a death sentence for his daughter.

  When Torin saw the suspect that Aleta and Dru brought into the squadroom, he nearly fell over from surprise.

  Aleta put him in one of the interview rooms and closed the door. Turning to Jonas, she said, “Sergeant, would you please go locate Micah? I want him to guard the prisoner.” At Jonas’s questioning look, Aleta added, “That’s the one who bit Micah in Jayka Park.”

  Jonas nodded. “Right away, Lieutenant.”

  The sergeant departed, his green cloak billowing behind him. Torin remained at his desk, having just finished the last of his attempts to talk to the nobility, none of which had borne fruit, as they either refused to speak, didn’t have time to speak, or both. Lord Blayk had the castle hopping, and it was all of the same tenor—Cliff’s End was preparing to fight a war. Or at least preparing to be prepared to fight a war.

  Manfred was with him in the squadroom. Kellan and Danthres had been summoned to Lady Meerka’s office—which surprised everyone, since Danthres had been told to report to her at the end of each shift, and that wouldn’t happen for several more hours.

  Dru immediately started telling the two of them about how they nabbed their suspect. “You shoulda seen Aleta in action. We got us a message from Mannit, sayin’ one’a his guys saw someone that matched one’a the descriptions tryin’a book passage on the Blind Luck.”

  Manfred snorted. “Really?”

  “Yeah, talk about the wrong one t’pick. Anyhow, this guy legs it soon’s he realizes he’s been made, heads straight for the old port. Most’a the Mermaid guards don’t want no part’a that—an’ I don’t either, t’be honest, not since that shit with Corvin an’ the vampire—but Aleta just heads right on in. She finds a buncha rats, and just all casual-like, starts grabbin’ ’em an’ shovin’ ’em into the old broken-down docks. Eventually, this shitbrain sticks his head out, an’ we got him.”

  “That’s amazing!” Manfred said.

  Aleta shrugged. “That’s tactics. People are afraid of rats for some inexplicable reason—they’re perfectly safe as long as they don’t bite you, but that’s true of most animals—so it makes sense to use them to flush people out of hiding.”