King Pinch (5 page)

"Take the Waterside Road; the guards ain't so choosy there," suggested Therin, their Gur. In their shiftless lives, the Gurs were masters for knowing the little ways in and out of the city. They were a group always ready to pack and leave on a moment's notice. Pinch idly speculated that Therin's newly tasted stability had made him reluctant to leave.

They followed his advice and hurried past the public docks and the fishmonger's market, where rats challenged cats for the choicest fish entrails. Just before the city gatehouse, they broke from the main avenue and wove through the side lanes until they reached a smaller, almost forlorn gate. Two indolent guards protected the old gate and all within its walls. Pinch recognized it as the Old Trade Gate, named before commerce dictated building something more.

Sure enough, the guards were lax here. In fact, the only thing that animated the bored pair was the size of the bribe they'd get from the group. After being driven down to only four gold each -business was slow for them-the two watchmen stepped aside and let the party through unquestioned.

Outside the walls, the road threaded through a jumble of shacks that had once been thriving inns when the trade route had passed this way. Now, with the merchants using the New Road, only a few struggling hostels survived here. Nonetheless, the group did not slow its pace. This close to Elturel was still too close. Pinch wanted them farther away.

At last they reached the breakwater of the city's expansion, a largish creek that separated city from countryside. The sluggish water was spanned by a claptrap wooden bridge that looked unsteady and probably was. Across the way, a horse grazed while its rider lounged in the midday sun of winter. As best they could tell, he sported no livery of the temple or the distinctive black-and-red armor of the Hellriders. Satisfied that all was clear, Pinch led them across.

It's too easy, chided the rogue's inner voice. Cleedis won't give up, and then what will I do?

Pinch had been avoiding the question because he didn't have an answer. Well, we can fend for ourselves, he firmly decided, without interference from any others.

In this, Pinch was wrong.

They had barely set foot on the other bank when the true nature of the rider was revealed. It was Cleedis, and before Pinch could react, the old warrior had gotten unsteadily to his feet.

"What kept you so long, Janol?" the foreigner casually asked. Before anyone could answer, a ring of bodyguards, all pointing crossbows, stepped from the gloomy bushes. "I expected you much sooner."

"Cleedis, you borsholder," Pinch snarled.

Sprite elbowed the old rogue's knee. "Don't provoke him. He may want you, but there weren't a thing said about the rest of us." Pinch's three companions froze with indecision, uncertain if Cleedis's invitation was extended to them or if they were unnecessary in the foreign chamberlain's eyes.

"Aye, play it out Pinch," Therin warned.

To the relief of the others, their leader slowly nodded -whether to them or Cleedis, it didn't matter. "It seems, Cleedis," the thief said in his most politic tone, "that maybe we should travel with you. Elturel was getting stale."

The old swordsman looked at Pinch's three companions and then at the determination in the rogue's eyes. The chamberlain's face was a mask as he calculated how his charge's compatriots changed the rules of the game. Finally, he turned and hobbled away. "Well and good. Daros, bring horses for them all. The rest of you, watch them close. We've found whom we came for; it's home for Ankhapur."

Pinch bristled at his underling's questions. He didn't see that Therin or the others needed to know about his past, and certainly not on their demands. His life was his own, to share as he chose and pizzle take the rest of them. Even his horse felt that anger and started to bolt, only to have the thief savagely rein it in.

"If you'd stayed in Elturel, you'd be dead by sunset." The master rogue couldn't hold back the snarl that drove his words. "Do you think the constables were just lucky? Are you that dense? They were tipped. They got sent -"

"That wa'rnt no reason to leave," the younger man countered hotly, his whispers becoming dangerously loud. "We've beat the catchpoles before. Piss and fire, you even cheated me off the gallows tree! We could've slipped the lot and hid out in another ken. Those constables ain't got the wit of us. For Mask's eyes, their idea of searching was just to bust up a few things and say it was good! There was no cause to go abroad."

"Think on it, Therin. Ain't they got the wit of us? Then how'd they find you -by twirling Tymora's wheel? It was that Cleedis found me over how many leagues distant and it was him that tipped the authorities. Do you think a few hide-holes and lasts would stop his priests from spying us out?" Pinch had had enough of the Gur's disputing and nudged his horse into the line, but not before giving one parting shot. "Besides, I'm curious. There may be a profit in going with Cleedis after all."

That left the awkwardly perched gypsy musing in his saddle, just as Pinch knew it would.

Beyond the stream and well on their way, it was time for Pinch to ask the questions. With a cheerful nod to his armed chaperons, the rogue trotted his horse up to where Cleedis rode.

In the saddle, the old chamberlain was a transformed man. His horse was a spirited gray stallion with a mane streaked charcoal black. Its eyes were clear and its bite hard on the bit. Even to Pinch, who was no judge of prancers, it was clear that this beast was the best breed of the southern lands. Under the reins of a weaker man, the horse would have ridden the rider, but under Cleedis there was none of that. Here on the roads, in the open air, and fitted in his commander's armor, the chamberlain was once again the cavalry captain Pinch had known as a lad.

Pinch reined in alongside and launched in without preamble. "Cleedis, you've got me now. What's the job and what's the booty?"

The chamberlain pulled his open-faced helmet back to hear better. "Job? Wait and see."

"Not good enough, coz," the rogue said as he brushed a fly from his face. "I need time to plan and think. And I'll not be killing." At least not by intention, Pinch added to himself.

"You're tired and not thinking clearly, Janol. I already said there would be no need for killing -not if you do your part well. As for more, you'll have to wait."

A little part of the mystery became clear. "You don't know, do you? You were just sent to bring me back. Who sent you -Vargo, Throdus, or Marac?" Pinch watched carefully as each name was mentioned, hoping for a telltale on Cleedis's part. There was no such luck. The chamberlain maintained a statesmanlike demeanor. "You must wait, Janol. You were, and still are, impatient. It will be your undoing someday. When we reach Ankhapur, what you need to know will be revealed."

But no more than that, Pinch heard in what was not said.

He did not press the issue. The gleaning of information was an art, and there was time between here and Ankhapur.

Therin, mounted on an impossibly small pony, would nod off until one of his cramped legs slipped from the stirrup and scraped the ground. Just when it seemed he might ride like this for miles, until all the leather was shredded from the tip of his boot, his toe would catch on a rock with a solid thwack and rouse him from slumber. Maeve and Sprite-Heels, the halfling squeezed into the saddle in front of the sorceress, lolled precariously and in unison from side to side until one or the other woke with the panic of a headlong plunge.

So it went until they stopped. The four gingerly massaged their sore parts while the troopers made camp, cooked, and saw to the needs of the travelers. By then, Pinch's companions were too tired to talk, too wary of their escorts to ask questions of the leader.

The fires were near embers and guards had taken their posts at the edge of the hostile darkness when Cleedis produced a bottle from his saddlebags. "When I was a young officer out on campaign," he began in the rambling way of a man who has a moral he feels he must share, "we used to spend all day hunting down orc bands from the Great Invasion. We'd ride for miles, getting hot and full of dust. Sometimes we'd find a band of stragglers and ride them down. It was great work."

Clawlike fingers pulled the cork free, and he drank a long draught of the yellowish wine. Breathing hard to savor the alcohol's burn, he held the bottle to Therin across the fire.

"After a day of butchering, we'd gather around the fire like this and drink." The old man looked at the suspicious eyes across from him. He pushed the bottle again toward Therin until the big man took it. "Drink up, boy," the worn-out campaigner urged before continuing his ambling tale. "Men need to share their liquor with their companions, because there's no telling who you might need at your back. Back then, a man could get himself surrounded by a throng of orc swine at any time, and then it would be too late to discover he had no friends. Drink and a tale, that's what kept us together. Doesn't that make sense, Janol?" Cleedis's eyes turned on the master rogue. The brown in them was burned black and hard by years of concessions and expediencies.

"A man can drink for lots of reasons, and most stories are lies," Pinch commented acidly.

"They say bad hearts sour good wine. Is it a good wine, Master Therin?"

The young man held the jug out in front of him considering an answer. "Tolerable, I wager."

"Tolerable, indeed," the chamberlain sighed, taking the bottle back. He set the bottle to his weather-cracked lips and gulped and gulped, and gulped at it some more until the yellow stains of wine trickled from the corners of his mouth and clung in sweet drops in the coarse beard on his chin. At last he pulled the bottle free with a choking gasp. The old man shoved the bottle into Sprite's hands and began without preamble.

"There's a lad I knew, must have been fifteen, twenty, years ago. He was a boy of a high family. His father was a noted captain in the king's guard and his mother a lady-in-waiting to the queen. She was pregnant when the captain was killed in the wars against the trolls. The lady wailed for the priests to beg their gods, but there was no bringing the captain back. She being a lady, though, the king and queen saw to her needs all the time she was with child. It was double tragedy that she died bearing her male child."

"Wasn't there a priest who could bring her back, what with the baby?" Brown Maeve asked. Her veined face was swelling with a whimper of tears, for the sorceress could never resist a sad tale. "Where was her kin?"

"She didn't have any," Cleedis answered after a long swig on the bottle he pried from Sprite's hands. "That's why she stayed at court. There wasn't any family to pray for her. It wasn't her wish to be raised; she hoped to join her husband. The king and queen pledged to raise the boy as their ward."

Maeve gave out a little sob.

Across the fire, Pinch glared at Cleedis in stony silence, eyes glinting amid the rising sparks.

Cleedis continued. "Without mother or father, in some other place he would've been one of those little beggars you kick away on the street. That's how it would have been, you know, except that didn't happen to him.

"He got lucky, more luck than he ever deserved -"

Pinch spat.

Cleedis persevered. "He was favored. He didn't have family, but he was taken in by nobility, a king no less. They dressed him, fed him, and educated him in the best ways. And you know how he repaid them?"

Pinch spat, ferociously this time, and the gobbet hissed and cracked in the flames. Springing up, he broke from the circle of firelight, making angry strides past the startled guard whose sword half-cleared its sheath.

The old chamberlain motioned the man back to give the rogue his peace. Pinch trembled at the edge of the firelight, hovering at the rim of the winter blackness.

"He repaid them," Cleedis slowly dogged on, pulling back the attention of the rogue's friends, "he repaid them by stealing all he could and fleeing the city. Now, what do you think of that?"

Man, woman, and halfling exchanged uncomfortable glances, their thoughts clearly centered on their tall master. He continued to scorn the warmth of the group.

"Did he make a good profit?" Sprite asked nervously, but the joke fell flat.

"Why stop the tale there, Cleedis?" murmured the upright man's voice from the darkness. "There's so many little embellishments you've left out. Like how the king thought his queen was barren and wanted a son for his throne. How he raised the boy with care and the best of all things -until one day his wife
was
fruit ful and bore him a son, and then three more over the years. That was three more than he needed and certainly better than an orphan boy."

The man brought his anger back to the fire and leaned close to share it with the others. Perhaps the old man didn't like his story shanghaied, or perhaps he could feel the pain in the other's voice. Whatever the reason, his joint-swollen fingers knotted painfully about his sword.

"Or how he drove his queen to death once she'd whelped heirs for him. And then one day the dear old man woke up and decided he didn't need the boy he'd taken in, the one who wasn't his seed. All his life, the boy had lived in luxury, expecting and waiting, only to be pushed out by a group of mewling brats. How about that, Cleedis?"

The rogue turned to the other three -short, plump, and broad-sitting like rigid stones in dumb silence.

Smoothly a smile expanded on the rogue's face, oil spreading across the storm of his emotion. The coiled tiger's spring eased from his frame, and with a cheerful bow he scooped up the wine jug. "Good story, eh? One's as true as another, and they're both as true as a vagabond's tale."

The three still sat nervous and quiet, vassals unable to fathom their master's mad caperings.

Pinch threw back the jug and drained a long swallow, quenching the wine-dark thirst deep inside him. He then flung the uncorked jug toward his gang. "Drink and sleep, that's what you need!" he thundered.

As they scrambled to catch the jug and stay wide of his moods, Pinch quickly settled close to his old fencing master till his wine-breath whisper tickled the old man's ear. "You need me or you'd not come this far. No more tales -"

"You're forgetting the priests, boy," the other growled, never once breaking his stare into the darkness.

"No more tales or you'll not wake up some morning. Do you think your guards can keep us away?"

Cleedis blinked. "If I'm dead, there's no profit for you. That's all you want, isn't it?" The old man quickly shifted the terms.

A contented sigh swelled in the rogue. "I'm sure you've got enemies in Ankhapur. Wouldn't they pay to see your head packed in a pickle pot?"

He didn't wait for an answer, but left the old man chewing his words. "To bed!" he thundered once more as he herded his accomplices to the small ring of tents that was their traveling home. With cheerful wariness, they swarmed to heed him.

In the fading firelight, Cleedis watched as his former student never once turned his back on his supposed friends. The old swordsman smiled -a cold, dark smile like the dead winter night around him.