She sighed, rose, resumed pacing. “My fault as much as anyone’s, I suppose.” She looked out a window for a long time. Then she beckoned. I joined her.
She indicated the black castle. “Just whiskers short. They’re trying to open the way for the Dominator already. It’s not yet time, but they’re getting hurried. Maybe they’ve sensed our interest.”
This Juniper business was like some giant, tentacled sea beast from a sailor’s lie. No matter where we turned or what we did, we got deeper into trouble. By working at cross-purposes with the Taken, trying to cover an increasingly more obvious trail, we were complicating their efforts to deal with the peril of the black castle. If we did cover well, we just might make it possible for the Dominator to emerge into an unprepared world.
I did not want that horror upon my conscience.
Though I fear I tend not to record it that way, we were embroiled in substantial moral quandaries. We are not accustomed to such problems. The lot of the mercenary does not require much moralizing or making of moral decisions. Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The great issues become how well he does his job, how faithfully he carries out his commission, how well he adheres to a standard demanding unswerving loyalties to his comrades. He dehumanizes the world outside the bounds of his outfit. Then anything he does, or witnesses, becomes of minor significance as long as its brunt is borne outside the Company.
We had drifted into a trap where we might have to face the biggest choice in the Company’s history. We might have to betray four centuries of Company mythos on behalf of the greater whole.
I knew I could not permit the Dominator to restore himself, if that turned out to be the only way we could keep the Lady from finding out about Darling and Raven.
Yet... The Lady was not much better. We served her, and, till lately, well and faithfully, obliterating the Rebel wherever we found him, but I don’t think many of us were indifferent to what she was. She was less evil than the Dominator only because she was less determined about it, more patient in her drive for total and absolute control.
That presented me with another quandary. Was I capable of sacrificing Darling to prevent the Dominator’s return? If that became the price?
“You seem very thoughtful,” Whisper said.
“Uhm. There’re too many angles to this business. The Custodians. The Duke. Us. Bullock, who has axes of his own to grind.” I had told her about Bullock’s Buskin origins, feeding her seemingly irrelevant information to complicate and distract her thinking.
She pointed again. “Didn’t I suggest a close watch be kept on that place?”
“Yes, ma’am. We did for a while, too. But nothing ever happened, and then we were told to do some other things...” I broke off, quaking with a sudden nasty suspicion.
She read my face. “Yes. Last night. And this delivery was still alive.”
“Oh boy,” I murmured. “Who did it? You know?”
“We just sensed the consequent changes. They tried to open the way. They weren’t strong enough yet, but they came very close.”
She began to prowl. Mentally, I ticked off the roster for the Buskin last night. I was going to ask some very pointed questions.
“I consulted the Lady directly. She’s very worried. Her orders are to let ancillary business slide. We’re to prevent any more bodies reaching the castle. Yes, the rest of your Company will be here soon. From six to ten days. And there is much to be done to prepare for their arrival. But, as you observed, there is too much to do and too few to do it. Let your Captain cope when he arrives. The black castle must be isolated.”
“Why not fly some men in?”
“The Lady has forbidden that.”
I tried to look perplexed. “Buy why?” I had a sweating, fearful suspicion that I knew.
Whisper shrugged. “Because she doesn’t want you wasting time making hellos and briefing newcomers. Go see what can be done about isolating the castle.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I departed, thinking it had gone both better and worse than I had anticipated. Better, because she did not throw one of her screaming rages. Worse, because she had in effect announced that we who were here already were suspect, that we might have succumbed to a moral infection the Lady did not want communicated to our brethren.
Scary.
“Yeah,” Elmo said when I told him. He did not need it explained. “Which means we got to make contact with the Old Man.”
“Messenger?”
“What else? Who can we break loose and cover?”
“One of the men from the Buskin.”
Elmo nodded. “I’ll handle that. You go ahead and figure how to isolate the castle with the manpower we have.”
“Why don’t you go scout the castle? I want to find out what those guys were doing last night.”
“That’s neither here nor there now, Croaker. I’m taking over. Not saying you done a bad job, just you didn’t get it done. Which is my fault, really. I’m the soldier.”
“Being a soldier won’t make any difference, Elmo. This isn’t soldier’s work. It’s spy stuff. And spies need time to worm into the fabric of a society. We haven’t had enough of that.”
“Time is up now. Isn’t that what you said?”
“I guess,” I admitted. “All right. I’ll scout the castle. But you find out what went on down there last night. Especially around that placed called the Iron Lily. It keeps turning up, just like that guy Asa.”
All the while we talked, Elmo was changing. Now he looked like a sailor down on his luck, too old to ship, but still tough enough for dirty work. He would fit right in down in the Buskin. I told him so.
“Yeah. Let’s get moving. And don’t plan on getting much sleep till the Captain gets here.”
We looked at one another, not saying what lay in the backs of our minds. If the Taken did not want us in touch with our brethren, what might they do when the Company hove in sight, coming out of the Wolanders?
Up close, the black castle was both intriguing and unsettling. I took a horse over, circled the place several times, even flipped a cheerful wave at the one movement I detected atop its glassy ramparts.
There was some difficult ground behind it-steep, rocky, overgrown with scraggly, thorny brush which had a sagey odor. Nobody lugging a corpse would reach the fortress from that direction. The ground was better along the ridgeline to east and west, but even there an approach was improbable. Men of the sort who sold corpses would do things the easy way. That meant using the road which ran from the Port River waterfront, through the scatter of merchant class houses on the middle slopes, and just kept on to the castle gate. Someone had followed that course often, for wheel ruts ran from the end of the road to the castle.
My problem was, there was no place a squad could lie in wait without being seen from the castle wall. It took me till dusk to finalize my plan.
I found an abandoned house a ways down the slope and a little upriver. I would conceal my squad there and post sentries down the road, in the populated area. They could run a message to the rest of us if they saw anything suspicious. We could hustle up and across the slope to intercept potential body-sellers. Wagons would be slow enough to allow us the time needed.
Old Croaker is a brilliant strategist. Yes, sir. I had my troops in place and everything set by midnight. And had two false alarms before breakfast. I learned the embarrassing way that there was legitimate night traffic past my sentry post.
I sat in the old house with my team, alternately playing tonk and worrying, and on rare occasions napping. And wondering a lot about what was happening down in the Buskin and across the valley in Duretile.
I prayed Elmo could keep his fingers on all the strings.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Juniper
Lisa
Shed spent an entire day lying in his room, staring at the ceiling, hating himself. He had sunk as low as a man could
. There was no deed too foul for him anymore, and nothing more he could do to blacken his soul. A million-leva passage fee could not buy him aboard on Passage Day. His name had to be written in the Black Book with those of the greatest villains.
“Mr. Shed?” Lisa said from the doorway next morning, as he was contemplating another day of ceiling study and self-pity. “Mr. Shed?”
“Yeah?”
“Bo and Lana are here.”
Bo and Lana, with a daughter, were his mother’s servants. “What do they want?”
“Their accounts settled for the month, I expect.”
“Oh.” He got up.
Lisa stopped him at the head of the stair. “I was right about Sue, wasn’t I?”
“You were.”
“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have said anything if we could have afforded it.”
“We? What do you mean, we? Oh, hell. Never mind. Forget about it. I don’t want to hear about it anymore.”
“Whatever you say. But I’m going to hold you to your promise.”
“What promise?”
“To let me manage the Lily.”
“Oh. All right.” At that moment he did not care. He collected the monthly accounting from the servants. He had chosen them well. They were not cheating him. He suggested they deserved a small bonus.
He returned upstairs for the money. Lisa watched him go, perplexed. He realized his mistake too late. Now she wondered why he had money today when he’d had none yesterday. He located his dirty clothing, emptied his pockets onto his bed. And gasped.
“Oh, damn! Damn,” he muttered. “What the hell am I going to do with three gold pieces?”
There was silver, too, and even a fistful of copper, but... It was a gyp! A fortune he could not spend. Juniper law made it illegal for commoners to hold minted gold. Even incoming foreigners had to exchange theirs for silver-though foreign silver was as welcome as local. Lucky, too, for the black castle mintage was a decidedly odd coinage, though in the standard weights.
How could he get rid of the gold? Sell it to some ship captain headed south? That was the usual procedure. He slipped it into his most secret hiding place, with the amulet from the black castle. A useless fortune. He assessed the remainder.
Twenty-eight pieces of silver, plus several leva in copper. Enough to take care of his mother and Sal. Way short of enough to pry Gilbert off his back. “Still be in the damned money trap,” he whined.
He recalled Sue’s jewelry, smiled nastily, muttered, “I’ll do it.” He pocketed everything, returned to the ground floor, paid his mother’s servants, told Lisa, “I’m going out for a while.”
First he made sure Wally’s family was cared for, then ambled down toward Gilbert’s place. No one seemed to be around. Gilbert was not like Krage, in that he felt he needed an army on hand, but he did have his bone-breakers. They were all away. But someone was in Gilbert’s office because lamplight illuminated the curtains. He smiled thoughtfully, then hustled back to the Lily. He went to a table back in the shadows, near where Raven used to sit. A couple of foreign sailors were seated there. Tough merchandise if he’d ever seen it. They’d been around for some time.They said they and their friends, who came and went, had missed their ship. They were waiting for another. Shed could not recall having heard the name of their home port.
“You men like to pick up some easy money?” he asked.
“Who doesn’t?” one responded.
And the other, “What you got in mind?”
“I have a little problem. I’ve got to do some business with a man. He’s liable to get vicious.”
“Want some back-up, eh?”
Shed nodded.
The other sailor looked at him narrowly. “Who is he?”
“Name’s Gilbert. A moneylender. You heard of him?”
“Yeah.”
“I was just past his place. Don’t look like there’s anybody there but him.”
The men exchanged glances. The taller said, “Tell you what. Let me go get a friend of ours.”
“I can’t afford a whole army.”
“Hey, no problem. You two work out what you’d pay two of us; he’ll come along free. Just feel more comfortable having him with us.”
“Tough?”
Both men grinned. One winked at the other. “Yeah. Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Then get him.”
One man left. Shed dickered with the other. Lisa watched from across the room, eyes narrow and hard. Shed decided she was getting too much into his business too fast.
The third man was a frog-faced character barely five feet tall. Shed frowned at him. His fetcher reminded, “He’s tough. Remember?”
“Yeah? All right. Let’s go.” He felt a hundred percent better with three men accompanying him, though he had no real assurance they would help if Gilbert started something.
There were a couple of thugs in the front room when Shed arrived. He told them: “I want to see Gilbert.”
“Suppose he don’t want to see you?” It was standard tough-guy game-playing. Shed did not know how to respond. One of his companions saved him the worry.
“He don’t got much choice, does he? Unless that fat’s all muscle in disguise.” He produced a knife, began cleaning his nails. The deed was so reminiscent of Raven that Shed was startled.
“He’s back in the office.” The fat thug exchanged a look with his companion. Shed figured one would run for help.
He started moving. His frog-faced companion said, “I’ll just stay out here.”
Shed pushed into Gilbert’s office. The moneylender had a sack of leva on his desk, was weighing coins one at a time on a fine scale, sorting out those that had been clipped. He looked up angrily. “What the hell is this?”
“Couple of friends wanted to stop by with me and watch how you do business.”
“I don’t like what this says about our relationship, Shed. It says you don’t trust me.”
Shed shrugged. “There’s some nasty rumors out there. About you and Sue working on me. To do me out of the Lily.”
“Sue, eh? Where is she, Shed?”
“There is a connection, eh?” Shed let his face fall. “Damn you. That’s why she turned me down. You villain. Now she won’t even see me. That ape at the door keeps telling me she isn’t there. You arrange that, Mister Gilbert? You know, I don’t like you much.”
Gilbert gave the lot of them a nasty one-eyed stare. For a moment he seemed to consider his chances. Then the small man ambled in, leaned against the wall, his wide mouth wrinkled into a sneer.
Gilbert said, “You come to talk or to do business? If it’s business, get at it. I want these creeps out of here. They’ll give the neighborhood a bad name.” Shed produced a leather bag. “You have the bad name, Gilbert. I hear people saying they won’t do business with you anymore. They don’t think it’s right you should try to screw people out of their property.”
“Shut up and give me some money, Shed. You just want to whine, get out.”
“Sure talks tough for being down four to one,” one of the men remarked. A companion admonished him in another language.
Gilbert glared in a way that said he was memorizing faces. The little man grinned and beckoned with one finger. Gilbert decided it could wait.
Shed counted coins. Gilbert’s eyes widened as the stack grew. Shed said, “Told you I was working on a deal.” He tossed in Sue’s jewelry.
One of his companions picked up a bracelet, examined it. “How much do you owe this character?”
Gilbert snapped a figure, which Shed suspected to be inflated.
The sailor observed, “You’re shorting yourself, Shed.”
“I just want quit of this jackal’s lien on my place.”
Gilbert stared at the jewelry, pallid, stiff. He licked his lips and reached for a ring. His hand shook.
Shed was both fearful and filled with malicious glee. Gilbert knew the ring. Now maybe he would be a little nervous about messing with Matron Shed. Or he might
decide to cut a few throats. Gilbert had some of the same ego problems Krage had had.
“This should more than cover everything, Mr. Gilbert. The big, too. Even with the extra points. Let’s have my lien back.”
Dully, Gilbert retrieved that from a box on a nearby shelf. His eyes never left the ring.
Shed destroyed the lien immediately. “Don’t I still owe you a little something, though, Mr. Gilbert? Yes, I think so. Well, I’ll do my best to see you get everything you’ve got coming.”
Gilbert squinted angrily. Shed thought he saw a hint of fear, too. That pleased him. Nobody was ever afraid of Marron Shed, except maybe Asa, who did not count.
Best make his exit, before he stretched his luck. “Thank you, Mr. Gilbert. See you again soon.”
Passing through the outer room, he was astonished to find Gilbert’s men snoring. The frog-faced man grinned. Outside, Shed paid his guardians. “He wasn’t as much trouble as I expected.”
“You had us with you,” the little man said. “Let’s go to your place and have a beer.”
One of the others observed, “He looked like he was in shock.”
The little man asked, “How’d you ever get that far into a moneylender, anyway?”
“A skirt. I thought I was going to marry her. She was just taking me for my money. I finally woke up.”
His companions shook their heads. One said, “Women. Got to watch them, buddy. They’ll pick your bones.”
“I learned my lesson. Hey. Drinks on the house. I’ve got some wine I used to keep for a special customer. He left town, so I’m stuck with it.”
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