Rift in the Races, page 56
part #2 of Galactic Mage Series
He couldn’t see the Queen’s assassin anywhere in the room, but he hadn’t expected that he would. The elf was known well enough across Kurr to make his appearance counterproductive for the task at hand, though only his appearance—everything else about him was perfect for the task. Ilbei knew he was in the room. Somewhere.
Ilbei scanned the crowd with his gaze, taking in the general sense of them, sailors mainly, pirates probably to the last man of those, but a fair number of teamster types and a handful of mercenaries too. A rough crowd, and definitely the sort he was looking for.
The barkeep set a pint of frothing ale in front of him but did not take his hand off the cup. “I’ll see the color of your coin, friend,” he said, pointing with his eyes through the bar in the general direction of where he reckoned Ilbei’s purse was.
Several patrons in the bar followed that gaze as well.
Ilbei placed the copper coins he already had in hand on the counter. “Shiny as Luria’s lips,” he said, as he pulled the cup from the barkeep’s grip.
The barkeep nodded and flashed a stingy smile.
The onlookers looked away.
Ilbei drank his ale slowly, making a careful show not to look around over much. Only when shouts broke out would he turn, casually, and pretend to watch. In those moments, which were frequent enough, he hid his scrutiny of the room behind bored-seeming spectatorship.
The approach was subtle enough, and eventually it worked, for seeing him sitting there alone, conspicuous but not, eventually drew a moth to the flame of possibility.
“Hello, friend,” said a lean young man, barely old enough to have begun the downy growth of a beard. It grew in reddish patches along his jaw and chin and seemed in its mangy sparseness intended to hide the lumpy acne that boiled upon the youngster’s carbuncular face. “Only one reason a man comes here alone.”
Ilbei made a point of turning to acknowledge the youth slowly and far more scornfully than was real. “Is there now?” He turned back to his ale and took another drink. “I got no love fer lads, so piss off.”
The young man laughed. “There’s fair enough places for that, true, but you know what I mean.” He sat down on the stool next to Ilbei, but made no move to order a drink.
Ilbei continued to work on his pint.
“I can help you find it,” said the youth. “It’s my specialty.” He broke out each syllable of the last word in a way that made it sound stretched and significant in his mouth.
Ilbei turned to him and showed him a granite gaze. “And just what is it, boy, that ya think I’m looking fer?”
“A woman.” The boy studied Ilbei hunched as he was, took in the broad shoulders and thick arms. He snorted at the pick, though. “Or maybe something only marginally female.”
Ilbei had to force himself not to look up. He stared purposefully through the dark liquid to the bottom of his pint.
But the young man knew his job well enough, and he saw something in the tension of Ilbei’s neck and back and in the way his breathing changed.
His voice dropped to barely audible. “A woman, then.” He laughed, but it was more a long wheeze. “I can get you any kind you like. The nastiest, the fattest, the youngest you please.”
Ilbei took another swig of ale, finishing it off. He shoved the empty mug forward so as to be sure the barkeep would see. The man acknowledged it with a nod.
“Too tame for you, eh, old man? Well, how about something more exotic? How about a centaur mare? Ever done one of them?”
Ilbei’s expression was half contempt, half curiosity and entirely genuine. He turned to the crater-faced young man with one eyebrow raised and a mouth shaped by disgust, though he said nothing.
“A centaur then?” The boy wheezed again, mistaking the look—or pretending to be dumb. Hard to say in a place like the Harlot’s Pocket. “You are a man with exotic tastes for sure. But a pricey one that is. They don’t come through but once or twice a year, and last one we seen was male, almost two months ago. A female is going to cost you.”
Ilbei shook his head, curiosity gone, leaving only disgust. The boy’s trained eye read it better then.
“A satyr, then. Or a witch? We’ve got some of the old-world types come through sometimes. No words, just animal power. The wild ones. They blind ‘em good first, no need to worry none.”
Ilbei took his refilled cup from the barkeep and pushed another of the copper coins toward the inside edge of the bar.
“How about a harpy then? That kinky enough for you? We’ll clean her up real good.”
Ilbei turned back to him and once more stared him in the eyes. “I don’t need no animals, no freaks or no maimed witches neither.”
“All right, mister,” said the young man, for the first time wondering if maybe he’d guessed this one wrong. He turned and started to go.
“I am lookin’ fer somethin’, though,” Ilbei said. “I’m just not sure if’n it’s in yer … specialty.” He carefully emulated the youth’s pronunciation of the word: spess-ee-al-i-tee.
The boy sat back squarely on the stool. He grinned. He was never wrong. They always wanted something.
“Know anythin’ about weapons?”
The boy nodded, eyes glinting greedily.
Ilbei looked back over his shoulder, then at the barkeep, who was at the far end of the bar. He slid his gaze around checking behind the young man making sure no one was paying them any mind. “I heard a rumor that ….” he looked around the nearby space a second time. “I heard people been gettin’ them Earth soldier weapons lately. The ones with the red lights in a line.”
Ilbei’s request melted the enthusiasm from the young man’s lumpy face like a wax candle in the summer sun. The greasy agency of his earlier confidence was replaced by a flash of youthful petulance. “Look mister, I never even seen one of them come through. Is that the only thing you come here for?”
“That’s the only thing.”
“Well, I ain’t never seen that.” He got up and started to leave, clearly irritated at having wasted so much time.
“Sit,” said Ilbei. The youth turned and gave Ilbei a dubious look.
“I never seen one,” he said. “And I got business.”
“Sit.” Ilbei reached into a pocket in his dusty vest and pulled out a silver coin. He put it on the counter.
The boy sat down.
“So how would I get one?”
The boy looked at the coin, but Ilbei could tell by the way the left side of his mouth twisted, he really didn’t know.
“Just help me figure it out,” Ilbei said. “That’s all I want ta know. I need ta get me one a’ them, and I don’t know where ta start. I’m thinkin’ you do.”
The young man scratched at the red wisps on his chin, pursing his lips. A few of the more recently agitated mounds of acne glinted like small pink cherries in the tavern’s lamplight.
“I suppose you’d need to find someone from Earth.”
“And how would I do that?”
“I heard they got a fort near Crown.”
“Don’t none of ‘em ever come down here? Ya know, ta make some extra coin? I mean, I never heard a’ no army that didn’t have no deserters or, ya know, trade in contraband.”
“Listen, mister, I’d love to sell you something. I would. But I tell you, there ain’t never been no Earth folk down here that I seen or heard of, and I see and hear most everything.”
“Never? Not one time?”
“Never.” He stopped and thought about it. “Nope, never.”
Ilbei scrutinized the young man as he spoke. He watched for the slightest twitch of the cheeks or eyes. He watched for any color change in his face or neck. Watched for some movement of the hands or feet. But there were none. Ilbei was confident the youth was telling him the truth. Which meant either the boy didn’t have the contacts he claimed he did, or the Queen’s elf had his information wrong.
“All right,” he said, pulling back the silver coin.
“Hey,” said the young man, reaching for it.
“I’ll stake that mitt ta the bar if’n ya touch it,” Ilbei said. “Unless ya think you earned it fair?”
“I told you what you asked. Deal’s a deal.” The boy’s eyes held no fear.
Ilbei relented with the faintest smile. “I suppose ya did.” He took his hand off the coin, and the youngster snatched it up and quickly vanished through the crowd.
Ilbei left after he’d finished his second ale. Shadesbreath caught up to him several blocks away. The elf wore a heavy cloak, hood up, despite the weather being much warmer on this part of the continent than where they’d come from.
“Guildmaster Cypher Meste divined that the girl was here and not willingly,” said the elf. “A V-ranked cast, so it’s certain. No counter-spells on the query.”
“Well, that pimple-faced kid would have known if’n they’d sold her as a slave or concubine. There’s little chance a feller like that doesn’t get wind a’ that sort a’ thing.”
“Which means it was a private deal.”
“Hardly much we’re gonna find out about that.”
“Her Majesty is well aware of what happens in Murdoc Bay. She does not rely solely on diviners or the marchioness. By eliminating the small players, there is only one other place to go.”
“Where’s that?”
“Come.”
The elf led him down to the docks and along a wide frontage street bustling with activity. The cobblestones were worn with use, and the clamor of voices, surf and wagon wheels echoed up from them in a frenzy of noise. Ilbei followed the cloaked form, his bowed legs pushed for all they were worth to keep pace with the elf’s long, gliding stride.
Passing through the crowd, they continued along the waterfront into a district of warehouses, long, high-roofed buildings made of timber cut from tropical hardwood trees. Though rough in appearance, Ilbei knew there’d be no easy cutting through those walls for a standard thief. Merchants in Murdoc Bay paid top dollar for materials and, most likely, high-quality strength enchantments as well.
The elf passed by several of these without so much as looking up to read the signs, but about halfway down the row, he stopped and entered one through its front door without so much as a cursory look back. Ilbei was certain the assassin had been here before.
The room inside was small, an office with a table serving as a desk. A frail, spinsterly looking woman sat behind it, scratching out columns of numbers on a sheet of parchment nearly as long as the table was wide. She looked up at them after finishing a calculation, carefully putting her quill in its inkpot before deigning to speak. “Coming or going?” she said in a monotone. “White, black or gray?”
“Tenderthrift,” said the elf.
“Master Tenderthrift is not available.” The response ejected from her mouth automatically, as if it had been enchanted there and set to repeat.
The elf pulled his hood back, and the woman’s bureaucratic mask fell away. “One moment please.”
She left the room through a door behind her, which she had to unlock with a key that she wore on a chain around her neck. Before it closed, Shadesbreath was through it and holding it open for Ilbei, beckoning him with a movement of his woodland eyes.
“You can’t come back here,” she started to say, but she didn’t finish it. Saying something like that to the royal assassin was pointless, and there wasn’t a person in Murdoc Bay who would have done it differently. At least none that had the wits necessary to survive for long in this climate of moral in-between.
A ghostly-pale little man in spectacles sat in a plush leather chair, a wide, fat monstrosity of a furnishing, that seemed filled to bursting it was so well stuffed. The little man, perched upon the rounded bulge of such ponderous comfort as he was, looked gnomish by the scale of relativity. Seated across a stonework fire pit from this small man sat a broad-backed figure of indeterminate gender wearing a hard leather breastplate. This individual looked up at the new arrivals with bright violet eyes and, unlike the little man, made no effort, or had not the intellectual wherewithal, to conceal an expression of surprise.
“The royal assassin,” said the little man in a voice so bass and resonant it caught Ilbei off guard. Such thunder out of that tiny little chest. “To what do I owe the honor?”
“Who bought the Earth woman?” the elf asked. Ilbei continued to blink his astonishment at the unfurling of events, though he did notice the figure in the leather breastplate seemed to sink back a bit deeper into his or her chair.
“You know I am honor-bound not to give that information out,” said the little man, Tenderthrift. “I would die far less mercifully at their hands than at yours.” He drew a circle in the air near his head with a movement of one small hand. The gesture seemed to invoke the entire city.
“Merchant or aristocracy?”
The gnomish fellow seemed to have to consider whether that was a matter of honor or not, at least by Ilbei’s gauge. He apparently decided it was not.
“Aristocracy.”
“Arranged or opportunity?”
Again Tenderthrift’s face moved with the motions of his mind, calculating the correct measures for navigating such a treacherous sea.
“Master assassin, you know I’ve always paid my part to the marchioness and to the Queen, and done the dance to stay between.” His tone was not plaintive, but he clearly had no intention of telling the assassin more.
The elf studied the little man closely for the barest pair of breaths before turning to Ilbei. “Let’s go.”
Ilbei blinked up at him, bewildered. Why were they leaving? Ilbei knew he could get more information than that from the little man—he could get more without even hurting him very much. He looked at the man-woman and frowned. That fellow—for fellow did seem to fit more accurately, if barely—knew something sure enough as well. He’d be even easier to get information from.
However, the elf was already nearly through the front office door, so Ilbei turned and hustled out. Once back in the street, he couldn’t help but point out the opportunity they had lost.
“Master assassin,” he began. “Far be it fer me ta tell a man—or an elf—such as yerself how ta go about his work, but there was a great deal more we could have learned.”
“Miss Pewter is in Crown. And it is my guess that Lord Thoroughgood has her in his private zoo.”
Ilbei stopped in the street, blinking in the direction of the assassin’s back as he walked away, but the elf did not turn around.
Chapter 59
“You and I have had our differences, Meade,” Captain Asad said as Doctor Singh was still toweling the syrupy amniotic fluid from Altin’s skin. “But you’re also a man of purpose. And I believe on this we can agree.”
Altin could only blink through the fog of his vision and crawl toward consciousness. He heard the sound of Captain Asad’s voice, could vaguely recognize the man, but for the moment he was mainly focused on trying not to puke.
Doctor Singh moved around to stand between the captain and his Prosperion patient, ordering a nurse to hold Altin so he didn’t fall off the bed.
He took Altin’s newly re-grown arm gently and held it up. Thin and soft, barely any muscle tone, just what the electric shocks could shape in the last part of the re-growth. The last six days would have done him good on that front, but Captain Asad had insisted he come out. Physical therapy could do the rest, it was true, but Doctor Singh did not envy Altin the next several weeks.
He clutched Altin’s face in his hands and peered into Altin’s eyes. They were beginning to respond normally.
“Altin,” he said slowly. “It’s Doctor Singh. You’re on the Aspect. You had an accident.” He repeated it several times until, slowly, Altin blinked his way to lucidity, or at least what was as close as he would get for another hour or two anyway.
“Accident?”
Doctor Singh relayed what had happened in the barest terms. “You used your amulet to escape the Hostile system. Something went wrong. Your tower was destroyed and you nearly died. You came here so we could re-grow an arm. You lost one in the accident. It’s now grown back. We spoke a little before you went into the tank, but you were very groggy. Try to remember.”
Altin heard the words but they only marginally made sense. He had to wade through a thickness that subdued his thoughts to pick up each word and stack it on the slowly building idea. Only bits of it made sense. The Hostile system. Something about a sun. He remembered a sun, or a pair of stars. A blue star and a golden one. And Orli. Orli had helped him find the sun. But nothing about an arm or a tank.
Memories were coming back slowly, though.
He looked past the doctor for Orli, but she was not there. He was dimly aware of Captain Asad standing near another bed. Roberto stood next to him. The ever-cheerful Spaniard flashed his teeth at him and said something that mainly mumbled in Altin’s head.
Through the haze, and with what seemed more effort than it should require, he turned his head, having to struggle to make his eyes keep up with his skull as he searched the rest of the room.
“Orli,” he said, but it came out in a garbled wetness as if his throat were full of phlegm. He coughed up a mouthful of amnio fluid. He tried to hold it in his mouth, to swallow it back, but it was slimy and tasted foul.
Doctor Singh snatched a rectangular pan of stainless steel from where it sat on the bed and held it up near Altin’s chin. “Here, spit,” he said.
Altin obliged. “Bleh, that’s awful.”
“It is,” agreed the doctor as he dabbed away the strands of thick spittle that clung to Altin’s mouth and risked running down into his lap. “I’m sorry about that part.” He wiped the last bit of fluid off and dropped the cloth into the silvery tray. “So how do you feel?”
“Like dragon dung.”
“Yes, I figured you might.”
“Listen, Altin,” began the captain again, “I’m happy you’ve got your arm back, but listen, we’re in a rush.”
“Captain,” reprimanded the doctor. “I said you could be here, not interrogate him.”
“He’s fine, look at him.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Roberto, crinkling up his face. “That arm doesn’t look … fully cooked.”
