The answer was absurdly simple. If Mags had done that, another agent would be inserted, and he’d have to go to the trouble of identifying the new one. And the new one might be better at remaining undetected and certainly would be more cautious than the one who had been caught.
Even more important, Mags could control every bit of information that a known agent learned. Truth to be told, he had most of them buying information from him, in his persona of Willie the Weasel who owned a pawn shop down in Haven!
And to be honest, at least half of them were working for allies of Valdemar who were just verifying that what they were told by Valdemaran officials and diplomats was actually true. Everyone did that; Mags had his own network of agents in Menmellith, Rethwellan, Hardorn, and Kata’shin’a’in. There was no point in even trying to get an agent placed among the Shin’a’in; you had to be raised among them to be accepted by them. But it only made sense to have intelligence agents among your allies, so if things started to go wrong within the ruling government, your country had warning of it, and you’d be able to take steps to ensure your own country’s safety. Revolutions sometimes spilled over borders, though in Valdemar’s case that generally meant refugees spilling over the border rather than the revolution itself causing unrest among the people.
Tory watched and waited as people drifted up to the stall, perused the wares, mostly left, sometimes bought. Based on the number of actual customers Tory had counted so far, the price of the items they bought, and his likely traffic during the day, Rutolf was making a very tidy profit. With what he was probably being paid by at least four other countries, he would probably be able to retire from traveling a rich man. As long as he didn’t end up a dead one first. Espionage was not a forgiving business.
He was beginning to think this would be a dead end, when he suddenly recognized the profile of one of the Rethwellan agents his father had planted in his mind. He held his breath until the man approached Rutolf’s stall. They talked together for a few moments, Rutolf offered him one of the white weasel furs, the man shook his head, and Rutolf reached beneath the counter and produced a tree-hare pelt instead. They exchanged some coins, and the man went on his way.
Well, there were several places where they could have exchanged information. I think I need to wait and see if this was a fluke or an ordinary transaction.
As it happened, he didn’t have to wait very long. The aisles weren’t exactly filling up, but there were more people in them as the farmers and their offspring left the cook tents and did a little browsing before bed. And this time the agent was from Hardorn, and a woman.
She made apparently the same conversation and the same transaction. So it wasn’t a fluke, and it wasn’t an ordinary purchase. Rutolf was keeping those tree-hare pelts under his display for no other purpose than to give a screen for passing information and possibly orders or money.
He was going to have to get much closer.
A Sleepgiver is never in a hurry, he reminded himself. And so he took all the time he needed to ease himself back into the lane behind the stall tents, moving so slowly that not even a leaf rustled as he moved. Once there, he stood up with the same care, flexed all his muscles so he’d be moving normally, and set out at a slow walk to the end of the lane.
He had a knitted hood over his head and shoulders, something not uncommon around Haven at this time of year. His leather tunic, knitted hood, shirt, and trews were all a heathered charcoal—the natural result of knitting with yarn blended from the wool of a white and a black sheep. This was almost the perfect color to blend into a shadow under circumstances like these. And the color wasn’t even, which was also a plus. There were only two things he needed to do before he got closer.
He reached the end of the lane, exited through a larger-than-usual gap between two stalls, crossed the aisle, and entered the foggy bounds of the lane behind Rutolf’s tent. Once he was deeply into the shadows there, he reached into a pouch under his tunic and pulled out a little wooden box that contained a mixture of grease and finely ground soot. He smeared this liberally around his eyes, then pulled the top of the hood down to his eyebrows, and the bottom up to the bridge of his nose.
Now he eased his way toward Rutolf’s tent one slow, deliberate step at a time, toe-walking and rolling his feet to avoid making any sound at all, not even that of a displaced pebble. Fog eddied and swirled around him as he listened carefully between each step. The curious acoustics of the fog made it seem as if every sound of bargaining, of conversations within the little tent stalls, or of sleeping was coming from right next to him. Few of the stalls in this section were open because most of them sold things most late-night buyers would not be interested in, so few of them were brightly lit. Once he reached the tent, easily identifiable by Rutolf’s shadow flung by the lantern light against the back wall, he got down on his hands and knees, positioned himself at the gap between Rutolf’s tent and the next one to the left, and then got even farther down, onto his belly.
This was one of the Sleepgiver tricks: crawling on your stomach like a snake as you were easing yourself into an observation point. It took incredible muscle control and was not for the impatient, since progress was measured in terms of distances half the width of a thumb.
And gods, it was cold. Even through gloves and well knitted wool, it was cold. The ground just sucked all the heat right out of him.
Finally he was in position, and he heard every word Rutolf was saying to a customer. Not one he was interested in; this one was buying one of those “virility horns.”
He rolled over a tiny bit at a time until he could just see Rutolf from below, reaching over his display to give the customer his package. Rutolf was right-handed; he probably would not look in this direction, and even if he did, his eyes were used to the lantern light, not the shadows hiding Tory. And Tory would have to be having a very bad day indeed if Rutolf happened to catch the shine of his eyes in the dark.
Now it was time to wait again. It was still awfully cold down there on the ground, and the smell of damp, cold earth and crushed grass just made him feel colder.
At least it’s not raining. At least I’m not in mud.
Then—finally—
A face looked at Rutolf’s across the display counter that Tory recognized. “I understand you have flea furs,” said the second Hardornen agent.
“I do, very fine, very soft, a pleasure to wear,” said Rutolf, and handed the man one of the white weasel pelts. But from where Tory was, he clearly saw a folded paper packet, which could hold orders or money or both, under the pelt.
The agent took the tiny fur and the packet under it in both hands, sliding the paper out from beneath the pelt and into his pocket. He made a show of examining the pelt at great length once he had safely stowed what he actually came for. “It is very fine,” he said. “How much?”
“Two silver, and a bargain at the price,” declared Rutolf. “These are the finest of ermine pelts from the barbarian North. Very rare! Very fine!”
“And too fine for my pocket,” said the agent, handing it back. “I heard you had pelts for four coppers.”
“Oh, my friend, you disappoint me,” Rutolf sighed, putting the ermine pelt down and reaching under the counter. His eyes never left his customer’s face. The agent’s gaze was just as locked on Rutolf’s. “I have tree-hare. Also fine, but common. No one will think you are a gentleman wearing such as this.”
I could be hosting a Bardic quartet down here for all that they’d look at me.
The agent slipped a much more substantial paper packet out of the front of his tunic and slid it under the fur as he took it from Rutolf. They both put their hands down near the display trays, well out of sight of anyone but Tory, and Rutolf took the packet and slipped it under the displays. “Yes, this is more to my taste,” said the agent. “I am not concerned with being taken for a gentleman.”
Rutolf made disapproving sounds but ac
cepted the four coppers. “If you change your mind, I will not take it back!” he warned. “You will have to buy the ermine at full price!”
“I will not change my mind,” said the agent, and he moved off, just in time to make way for a farmer, his wife, and three older children, who all crowded around to goggle at Rutolf’s odd wares. That gave Tory all the time he needed to ease his way back to the lane again, crawl a little way away from Rutolf’s stall before he stood up, then pull back his hood, wipe the soot from his face, and replace his hood again.
No point in trying to be stealthy now, and every reason to act like anyone else who would be back here. He sauntered along behind the tents, some lit, some not, no longer making any attempt to be quiet.
Not that he needed to, since he wasn’t running into anyone—and even when he wasn’t being stealthy, he was still pretty quiet.
At least now that he was off the ground and moving, he could warm up a bit.
The fog crept around back here like some sort of living thing. It was pretty unnerving, even if you weren’t superstitious.
With no particular need to move quickly, he took his time about making his way to the Guard tent, pausing long enough to get himself first a mug of good hot mulled wine to chase the cold out of his body, then a snack of beer and hot cheese-stuffed bread before cutting back into another lane and entering the Guard tent from the rear.
The tiny canvas-walled room had a few chairs, a quarter-cask of beer, a box full of mugs, and a lantern hanging from a support overhead. Mags was there, in one of the chairs, with a listening look on his face that told Tory he was probably Mindspeaking with one of the others—or at least listening to them. So he dropped a second cheese roll into Mags’ hand, sat down on a stool in the darkened rear of the tent, and waited.
“Thankee,” Mags said, after an interval that Tory enjoyed very much for its quality of not involving him lying flat on the cold, hard ground.
“Rutolf’s your man. Agent’s recognition sign is ‘I understand you have flea-furs.’ Rutolf says yes and passes him a white weasel fur that he calls ‘ermine’ and under it’s a packet. Agent looks at it and says he can’t afford it and only has four coppers. Rutolf takes it back and gets a tree-hare pelt from under the counter; they both hold the pelt near the display for a moment and make an exchange under it, the agent pays for the pelt and leaves.”
Mags considered this. “It sounds t’me like ’e knows these agents on sight.”
“Aye. Otherwise how would he know what packet to give to who? He passed stuff off to two from Hardorn and one from Menmellith while I was watching.”
Mags sighed. “No luck passing you or Perry off as an agent then. Well, we’ll just have t’ do this the hard way.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “All right, Perry’s takin’ first watch, an’ he’ll wait to see if Rutolf passes anythin’ along to anyone we’re actually worried about. You’ll take second watch. By then, Fair’ll be closed.”
Tory nodded. The unspoken part of this would be that if one of the actual enemy agents here took a delivery from Rutolf, he or Perry would have to follow him and figure out where he was staying now. And once they had that information, Mags would set a watch on the agent until they were able either to get their hands on those orders, to learn from subordinates or deduce from his actions what the orders were.
It would, of course, be much easier to waylay the man and get their hands on that paper, but that would just open up a world of bad consequences.
If they knocked him out in an attempt to make him think that he had just been the victim of a robbery, they’d barely have time to search him for the paper and glance at it before taking obvious valuables and leaving him in a dark corner to recover. The paper was probably in code, and they’d have no way of memorizing what was on it in the short time they’d have before the agent regained consciousness. And even if they made the ambush look like a robbery, the agent would rightly be alarmed and alerted and would have to assume his identity was known. Then he’d probably bolt, and then would come the problem of figuring out who his replacement was. Haven was a large city, the borders with Valdemar’s allies were open, and people came and went all the time.
The best outcome would be if Rutolf was just servicing “friendlies.” Mags already had people in those networks, and he’d know soon enough what the orders were.
“Go on out and just do a gen’ral watch in the entertainment tents. I’ll have Perry send Larral for ye when we need ye, if’n I don’t talk t’ye m’self.” Mags went back to that “listening” look, and Tory nodded and left, not at all loath to be turned loose to drift around the Fair.
All of the big entertainment tents were on the outskirts of the Fair, but there were plenty of small ones mingled in with the stalls and food vendors, and most of them were the sort of thing that Kat would look very out-of-place perusing. There were not as many of these at Harvest as there were at Midsummer, mostly because the working farmers generally came with wives or older children and these were definitely not something a child should watch or a wife would be happy about. And if the farmer did sneak off for a bit of salacious fun and titillation, things would be very uncomfortable if their spouses found out later.
Because the girls who worked these shows generally wore just enough to keep the Fair wardens from booting them out when they performed the little dances to drum up interest in the full show, putting them out on a box in front of the tent in this weather risked them getting pneumonia. So the callers relied on larger-than-life-sized paintings on canvas to advertise. Some of these paintings were surprisingly good. Mind, since the paintings were meant to last decades and were often traded from show to show, it was vanishingly unlikely that any of the girls who performed inside the tent would look like the girls on the paintings, but Tory was pretty certain most of the customers were not at all bothered about hair and eye color.
The first of these shows he encountered seemed to have gotten just enough of an audience that the caller was ready to shut the tent flap and start the show, so Tory paid his coin and ducked inside at the last minute. Some of the fog followed him inside, but it quickly dispersed in the somewhat warmer air within the tent.
The show was a new variation on “dropping clothing to music,” at least to him. All the girls were up on hoops suspended over the heads of the audience, and they did remarkably agile poses to the music of a single gittern player and a drummer while the hoops slowly rotated. The caller stood under each one as she did her turn, catching the dropped articles and stowing them behind the canvas backcloth, until the show was done. There were ropes and a pulley for each of the hoops, which was obviously how the girls got up there. Once Tory’s initial interest in the mechanics of the show had been satisfied, he did his job, which was to watch for people passing messages to each other. Venues like this were ideal for passing messages, since by all rights, there wouldn’t be an eye in the place that wasn’t on the girls.
When the show was over, the caller hustled the customers all out quickly, chivvying them like a housewife shooing hens. Probably because those girls were pretty impatient to get down off the hoops, get their scarves back on, and perhaps bundle up in a nice blanket.
Tory spent the next couple of candlemarks going from girl show to girl show without seeing anything more suspicious than a pickpocket. Since the thief in question was youngish, looked starving, and Tory just had a feeling about him, instead of alerting a constable, he intercepted the lad just before he went for a beltpouch by the simple expedient of grabbing the offending wrist in an iron grip and pulling the thief away from his intended target.
“Don’t,” he whispered harshly, as the lad froze after a couple of steps. “I’m not the only set of eyes in these tents. Go hire yourself out as a horse watcher if you need money.”
The fellow did not even bother to protest; as soon as Tory let go of his wrist, he bolted. Would the warning keep him from trying again elsewhere?
Well, that wasn’t Tory’s problem. He’d stopped the theft and scared the thief, and what happened after that was out of his control.
He stopped and got another cup of mulled wine, but it was beginning to look as if the fog and cold were taking their toll, and people were heading to bed early. You could no longer call the people in the aisles a “crowd.” It was more like a trickle. And more and more of the shows and vendors of hot drinks and snacks were cutting their losses and shutting down.
Just as he got a last cup of mulled wine—this one in an edible cup of something like a very hard, crisp cookie!—Mags came to that conclusion too.
:Target closed down for the night, and no reason to stay down here. See you back home.:
That Mindsent message had the feeling of something that had been sent to all four of them, himself, Perry, Kee, and Kat. He decided to take his time walking back since he still had some wine, and he strolled down to the livestock section of the Fair, just to be sure things were quiet there as well.
Everything seemed to be in order there, though the fog was thickening to the point where he was going to have to be careful walking home—and he found Kee waiting for him at the horses.
Also holding an edible cup of mulled wine.
Kee lifted his cup to him. “Remember the first time we came to Harvest Fair and Kat brought us? We never did get all the horses we wanted.”
“Man can only ride one horse at a time,” Tory observed, looking out at the same corral full of drowsy beasts that Kee was.
“Well, now, that’s true enough.” Kee sipped, then nibbled. “On a night like this it’s tempting to just grab a couple of rooms at the best inn we can find and rejoin everyone when the fog clears.”
“And if we were anyone else but us, I’d go along with that idea. And while I wouldn’t be in trouble, there’d be no end of fuss if you weren’t in your proper bed at daybreak. Did you get anything tonight?” Mags hadn’t said anything, but, then, the man had been busy.
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