Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda

by Joel Rosenberg

  Pirojil had hoped that the tavernkeeper would come back, and maybe they could engage him in some conversation about the fight, but he didn’t, so they left their beers largely undrunk, and themselves entirely undrunk, and headed out of the tavern and into the night.

  ***

  Dereneyl was, as most cities were, different by night than by day.

  The day-busy streets were almost empty, for a start. As it was said, the day is for honest men, but the night is for thieves.

  The more prosperous tradesfolk, common merchants, and nobles minor that made their living along the riverfront had left for their houses or estates up the hill, leaving servants and apprentices behind to keep the streetlamps lit and the doors barred shut. Those who lived in their shops stayed inside behind shuttered windows and barred doors.

  Cities draw thieves and robbers the way that an open wound draws flies, and at night even the burly longshoremen who worked the riverfront warehouses and docks traveled in groups of four or more and carried their loading hooks with them, and when a bunch of them stopped to get themselves serviced by a whore working one of the alleys, they would be even more careful in looking down the alley to make sure that she wasn’t a decoy than they would in feeling up the whore’s dress to be sure that the whore wasn’t — or, in some cases, was — a boy.

  Pirojil and Kethol made their way down the steep steps to a walkway along the river. Between here and Riverforks, to the southeast, and Stormsend, to the west, the Nifet was slow and broad enough for barges to operate, and shallow enough to make that desirable. A dozen barges of various sizes lay a short way out in the river, tied to pilings, their distance from shore a guarantee to a would-be thief of a difficult swim. Yes, the barges would have to be hauled in to shore in the morning, but the time and effort of setting them safely out in the river was cheap insurance.

  Two of the barges didn’t have cabins at all, and the cabins on another nine were dark, but in one the light in the window and the sounds of a flute and drunken laughter carried across the quiet river, and on another, hobbled horses shuffled in their open-air stalls. The only barge with visible guards on it was one of the cabinless ones — it was piled high with bags, and rode so low in the water that Pirojil suspected it was filled with copper from the Ulter mines, destined to be hauled upriver by teams of mules stumbling along the riverbank path.

  As they walked along the path beside the docks, a scurrying sound in the alley to their right sent Pirojil reaching for his sword, quickly flattening himself against the nearest wall.

  He wasn’t surprised to find Kethol next to him, his sword in one hand, his dagger in the other, and his smile warm in the dark.

  They waited, listening, but there was no other sound, and when Pirojil stooped and picked up a pebble to bounce off the wall in the alley, the only thing that he could hear was the sound of the pebble bouncing on the ground before it came to rest.

  Just as well, and just as likely. It could have been rats, or it could have been thieves; whoever it was, was gone. A pair of soldiers might well have some coin on them, although not much, but the cost of earning it was likely to be excessive, all things considered.

  Pity.

  There would be advantages to adding another couple of heads to the collection, all in all, and it wasn’t unknown that thieves would have some valuables on them. That might not matter to Kethol, not anymore, but it did to Pirojil.

  Blades back in their scabbards, they walked on.

  “Any idea where these dwarves might be lodging?” Kethol asked.

  “I’ve something more than an idea,” Pirojil said. “Tarnell told me that there’s an inn on Cooper’s Way, just north of the Hand temple, but I figured that if I got into the issue of how I don’t know where Cooper’s Way was, he’d just tell me to ask the baron.”

  There were likely to be maps in Baron Keranahan’s study of every street in town, accurate at least as of the time of the war — maps were a necessary part of maintaining tax rolls. But the study was in the Residence, and even if the two of them were in there, Pirojil had no confidence that he and Kethol, even working together, could have found them in a few hours or a few days. They could have had Treseen order Tarnell or the chief armsman to give them a walking tour of Dereneyl, but that really ought to wait for Leria’s return. She would help Kethol cover any lapse far better than Pirojil could — by pleading exhaustion, if nothing else, or maybe by fainting. She wasn’t really much of the fainting type, granted, but Pirojil had no doubt that she could fake a swoon with the best of them.

  “Well, if you were a dwarf, staying in Dereneyl, and you had to pick an inn, where would it be?” Kethol asked.

  “Elsewhere.”

  “I was thinking about how it would be away from the water,” he said.

  “Yeah, but …” But that sort of thinking was next to useless. Yes, a dwarf would want to stay as far from the river as possible, but in Dereneyl, that meant the walled houses near the top of the ridge, as far out of the smells and sound of the riverfront as it was possible to be, and it was a foregone conclusion that there would be no inns or taverns up there, where the land was dear and the neighbors were nobles.

  A group of four men, the foremost holding a lantern on a pole, turned a corner ahead, and began to walk toward them. Pirojil didn’t actually have to see their brassards to know that they were armsmen from the nightwatch.

  They approached Kethol and Pirojil slowly, and came to a halt.

  “Identify yourselves, if you please,” one said. He was the tallest of the four, by a head, which was typical. “Promote the tallest” was a common form of silliness. The best field decurion Pirojil had ever worked for had been a scrawny little man, the top of his head barely coming up to the bottom of Pirojil’s neck. But he had a booming voice, a hard hand, and a forceful way with words that could bring even a lumbering Osgradian recruit to a full brace.

  “Your names, if you please,” he said.

  It would have been easy to pick a name and a unit — under Emperor Thomen, the Imperials had become meticulous in their naming conventions.

  But what if the armsman knew who captained that troop? Honesty was the safer bet.

  “I’m Pirojil,” he said, “captain of march, Emperor’s Own, seconded to the Keranahan Home Guard.”

  There should have been a snicker, and a further challenge, but the leader just nodded.

  Shit. Well, so much for Tarnell keeping his filthy hole shut.

  “I guess I should have guessed, from the look of you,” the armsman said. “And since you and the baron are walking about in ordinary soldiers’ livery, and don’t want to be recognized, I guess I’ll be standing tall in front of the chief armsman if I give a proper bow?”

  Kethol gave an entirely noble-sounding chuckle. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Although I am surprised that you were told to expect us.”

  The armsman’s mouth twitched.

  “Go ahead,” Kethol said. “You’ve got something to say, so out with it.”

  The armsman cleared his throat. “Begging the baron’s pardon, but the chief’s a good man, and he watches out for us, and we watch out for him. You and the captain prowling around dockside looking for all the world like a couple of Imperial soldiers is a perfectly fine thing, really it is, and it wouldn’t be for me to say otherwise if it weren’t.

  “But if you and the captain was to decide, say, to honor a local girl or something, and say we was to come across you while you was busy taking your turns honoring her, and then she was to scream, if we didn’t know, we might do something wrong, and the chief would not want to see us triced to a whipping post — or worse — for doing what we just thought was our job. Begging the baron’s pardon,” he added quickly, touching a hand to a forelock, forgetting for the moment that he wasn’t supposed to be acknowledging Forinel’s rank.

  The other armsmen looked straight ahead, pretending, as they no doubt were wishing, that they weren’t there. Even discussing laying a hand on a noble �
�� at least, discussing it to the noble’s face — was a risky thing, at best.

  Pirojil felt Kethol stiffen at his side. Kethol had a thing about rape, and the armsman had just suggested — shit, he had practically winked at the idea — that the two of them were just looking to jump some common girl.

  Kethol was always an idiot when it came to that sort of thing. He had gotten himself and Durine jailed in Riverforks when Kethol had jumped a couple of young noblemen who had been drunkenly busying themselves with some girl that they had snatched off the street, and Pirojil had had to break the two of them out of jail.

  Pirojil didn’t understand it, himself. He didn’t have a taste for rape, no. But if he made judgments about those who did, and he did, he kept them to himself, as long as it was none of his concern, which it usually wasn’t, and never was if it was a noble man and a common girl involved. Shit, it wasn’t rape, except in practice, and any commoner girl with a lick of sense would just lie back and enjoy it, if she could.

  Of course, if somebody, anybody, had laid an unwanted hand on any of the Cullinane women, or on Leria, Pirojil would have cut that hand off at the crotch, instantly. Not because he liked them, of course, although he did. In this life, who you liked and what you liked had damn little to do with what you had to do. But when you took pay from a man — be it a commoner, a minor noble, a baron, or the Emperor himself — you had the obligation to protect what was his, whether it was his horses, his peasants, or his women.

  But Kethol surprised Pirojil by relaxing. “No offense taken, err …” “Bendamen, Wat’s son,” the armsman said. “Is there something I can do for Your Lordship and the captain, or should we be getting out of your way?”

  He didn’t have to add, and getting away from the sort of person who can have me triced to a whipping post.

  “Well, there is one thing. A little information?” Pirojil raised an eyebrow. “I heard that there’s some dwarves lodging somewhere in town. Wheelwright’s Road, was it? No, that isn’t right.”

  “It’s on Cooper’s Way — there’s an inn that caters to the dwarf trade, although I don’t know why, the way that they keep getting themselves into trouble, of late.” Bendamen shrugged. “Guess everybody’s got to be somewhere, Captain.” He turned to Kethol and drew himself up straight. “It would be an honor, of course, to escort you there — or anywhere else you’d like to go, my lord.”

  “Escort us?” Pirojil shook his head. “Why would you want to escort us? We’re just a couple of soldiers, off duty, out looking for something to do on a quiet evening. But if your patrol would just happen to take you past that inn, it might be that a couple of ordinary soldiers would just happen to be wandering along behind, and not have to worry about thugs lurking in any of the alleys.”

  Bendamen smiled as he touched his knuckle to his forelock. “I’d say, if you don’t mind me saying so, that the thugs would have more to worry about — but I think a turn down Cooper’s Way wouldn’t be a bad idea, at that. Honored-to-be-of-service,” he said.

  Pirojil and Kethol stood aside to let them pass, then followed along.

  ***

  Daherrin Brokenose eyed them suspiciously as Kethol squatted down in front of the other dwarf, the one who lay on the flat stone next to the hearth.

  Daherrin Brokenose was broad across the chest as a muscular man, but stood barely chest-high. Despite the name, his broad nose showed no sign of a break, old or recent. Daherrin Brokenose hadn’t been badly injured, although two of the fingers on his left hand were clearly broken, and twisted off at odd angles.

  The one on the floor — Dahera, his name was — looked like shit.

  Somebody had given his face a serious working over. His purpled right eye was swollen tightly shut, and his left barely open a slit. His nose had been broken badly enough that his gasps for breath came through his mouth.

  It wasn’t just the face.

  Blood stained the bandages that had been wrapped around his preposterously broad chest, and the skin on his right shoulder was flayed almost to the bone, as though he had been dragged across a road. His hands were unmarked, save for the scratches across the palms.

  Of the six dwarves crowded into the tiny, smelly room, this one, Dahera, was the worst, although all had been beaten badly enough to make somebody more gently raised puke at the sight of it.

  Pirojil had seen beaten and injured before. But it was the dwarves’ beards that were strange. They had all been crudely hacked off, just below the heavy chins.

  “We don’t want any more trouble,” Daherrin Brokenose said, again. He spoke Erendra with a thick accent that made Pirojil suspect that he was from Endell. His thick fingers couldn’t help but stray to where his long beard should have been. “Just go, please.”

  Pirojil didn’t know much about dwarves, despite having picked up the language back — back a long time ago, but he knew that a dwarf would never cut his beard unless the beard reached his waist, at least, and that a dwarf boy wasn’t considered to be an adult until he had forged his own pick — starting with ore — dug himself a chamber in the warrens with it, and grown a beard down to his chest.

  “Shasht, Daherrin,” said another, in dwarvish. “Speak more gently to the Emperor’s skinnylegs, lest you arouse their anger, as well as that of the other skinnylegs.” He shook his massive head as he lay stretched out on a cot that was almost twice as long as he needed. “Have we not had enough dealings with the skinnylegs for one night, or for an entire lifetime? Let them revel in the damage that their children have done, and we can be gone in the morning.”

  Pirojil nodded; he had been right about the accent. Definitely Endell. Humans were “skinnylegs” to dwarves from the Endell warrens, rather than the more common “smallnoses” or “tinybeards,” or what the Devenell dwarves less than charmingly called “needledicks.”

  The one by the hearth was the only one with wounds serious enough to worry about. He would probably be able to make it to morning, and a trip to the Spider — dwarves were tougher than they looked, and they looked tough — but you could never be sure.

  Kethol looked up at Pirojil. “How bad is it, do you think?”

  Pirojil shrugged. He didn’t know, either. The Spidersect compound was across town. The Spiders were renowned cowards, who would probably have to be dragged at swordpoint to cross into lowertown after dark, which was a bad idea — cowards that they were, a Spider healer could inflict injury just as easily as he could cure it. The Eareven were a better bet, but Pirojil didn’t know where the Eareven were, if there even were any Eareven in Dereneyl.

  The best thing to do would be to go down the street and knock on the gates to the Hand temple and try to beg the novice on duty to get a healer to come over, but Hand priestesses made Pirojil nervous. Their eyes always seemed to see far too much, and it wasn’t beyond possibility that one could take one look at Forinel, smile, and say, “Hello, Kethol.” Yes, the elves had said that the transformation was complete, and far beyond what any human wizard could not only possibly do, but detect — but Pirojil didn’t know if they were right.

  For now, Kethol had a flask of healing draughts in the bag, and while Pirojil considered for a moment spending a sip of that on Dahera, he didn’t consider it very hard — even Eareven healing draughts were hideously expensive, while the services of a healer were relatively cheap.

  “We mean no harm,” Daherrin Brokenose said. “And we meant no harm.”

  “Tell me,” Kethol said, quietly.

  “No, Lord, there’s no point in it. Please, please, just leave us be.” “You had best not say more, Daherrin,” the old one on the bed said. “Remember what they said.”

  Daherrin Brokenose looked at Pirojil and Kethol, and at their blank stares turned back to the other. “But these skinnylegs are the Emperor’s men, and the Emperor himself treated with the king for our services.”

  “You heard the other skinnylegs. They vowed — one swore on his sword! — to find us if we made protest to the Emperor’s men, and swe
ar that once the Emperor’s men leave, as they surely soon will, they will remember us and our brothers, having marked us, and throw us into the river. The river, Daherrin Brokenose, the river.” The old dwarf shuddered.

  Pirojil looked over at Kethol, who clearly hadn’t understood a word. He crooked an eyebrow at Pirojil.

  “It was some of the local noble boys,” Pirojil said, in Englits. It was unlikely that any of them could speak much Englits. “I’m not sure what happened, or why, but they said that if the dwarves go to the governor, nothing will happen — which probably isn’t exactly true — but that when the occupation is lifted, they’ll remember, and take their anger out later, on these or others.”

  Daherrin Brokenose’s massive head was cocked to one side. He had apparently been able to follow at least some of the Englits conversation, and was wondering how the skinnylegs could have under stood him. It wasn’t utterly unknown for skinnylegs in the Emperor’s service to speak dwarvish, but surely Pirojil would have commented before.

  Pirojil took a deep breath.

  “Yes, this skinnylegs speaks the language of the Moderate People, although not as well as he would wish,” Pirojil said in dwarvish, not minding at all the way that, save for poor Dahera’s, all the dwarven eyes suddenly became wide and round. It had been vaguely insulting to be taken for granted, and speaking in their own language was revenge of a sort, and cheap revenge, at that.

  “This skinnylegs,” he said, “has shared beer and spilled blood and wrestled for sport and honor with Ahira Bandylegs, himself the godfather to Baron Cullinane.”

  It was all he could do not to say that Kethol had done the same. But there was no Kethol, just Forinel.

  “And the other skinnylegs,” he went on in Erendra, so that Kethol could follow, “is Forinel, baron of Keranahan, and this talk of his children embarrasses and angers him, because those who cheat at bones and beat on others without cause and for supposed sport are no children of his, but mere bastards, fathered by goats.”