Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (30 page)

The rough-sawn floor of the one-story tavern was still littered with broken shards of pottery, and more than a few puddles that Pirojil hoped had come from upended bowls of stew, but could just as easily have been vomit. The scrawny, brown, torn-eared dog that was greedily feasting at one of the pools probably wouldn’t have cared much either way.

Broken stools had been haphazardly shoved over into the corner, but none of the low tables seemed to have been upturned or broken, which pretty much guaranteed that they were bolted to the floor.

Whether by design or accident — Pirojil would have guessed it was accident — the floor visibly sloped toward the rear of the tavern, where steps led down to the dock below, which meant that it was easy for her to sweep the detritus off the back porch, and let it fall. What didn’t just splash down into the river could be swept off the dock later.

The tavernkeeper bustled over to them, wiping his hands on his none-too-clean apron.

“Good evening, Decurions,” he said, ignoring the fact that their borrowed Imperial livery held no rank insignia at all. It never hurt business to inflate a customer’s rank. “Beer?” He rubbed a dirty rag on the dirty surface of the table. His faded red hair was braided behind him in a simple sailor’s queue, and bound up with a wooden fillet that would keep it from being easily snatched in a fight. He was awfully skinny for somebody who daily hauled kegs of beer up all those steps from the dock below — even if he used a block-and-tackle rig, it would still take solid muscle — but he probably was stronger than he looked. Lots were.

Pirojil raised two fingers, and pulled up a pair of stools for himself and Kethol.

The tavernkeeper emerged from behind the rough-hewn bar with two clay mugs of beer and stood, looking expectant, until Pirojil produced a copper, and set it on the table.

“Some trouble here tonight?” Pirojil asked, leaving his finger on the coin.

The tavernkeeper shrugged. “None to speak of, Decurion — and nothing involving Imperials, no need to bother yourself. It was just some of those Ulter dwarves starting another fight with a few of the noble boys, and the dwarves just got some of what was coming to them, although it wasn’t much, and it was all over by the time that the armsmen arrived. A little damage to the place, sure, but that’s been taken care of.”

“Oh.” Pirojil flicked the coin across the edge of the table; the tavernkeeper snatched it out of the air and scurried away, busying himself behind the rough-hewn bar at the other end of the room.

“Dwarves,” Kethol said, his mouth twitching, “causing trouble.” He tilted the beer mug back, but when he set it down, it was still almost as full as it had been. Some things never changed.

“You heard it,” Pirojil said, then took a deep pull on his tankard. It wasn’t very good, but it was beer.

“Yes, I heard it.” Kethol pretended to drink more.

In their time, they had spent thousands of coppers and more than that number of hours in taverns like this one — few worse, some better — and Kethol’s habits were well enough established that he didn’t even consider not nursing a beer when he drank in public. A soldier who wasn’t busy trying to get himself drunk could find a game of bones every bit as easily as one who was, and regardless of the myths about drunken fingers being more steady than sober ones, a sober man was far more likely to come out a winner at the end of the evening — both at the gambling and at the almost inevitable fight.

A wise captain always had issues more pressing than punishing his men for minor misbehaviors on their off hours, after all.

Like Kethol, Pirojil never had seen much pleasure in recreational brawling, but there were others who did, and Kethol had been known to take advantage of that, every bit as much as he did of his skill at bones. A reasonably clever, sober man could make off with a few dropped coins or even snatch a purse while making an escape when a fight broke out, and while that wasn’t nearly as lucrative as looting a battlefield, there were a lot more tavern fights than battlefields available these peaceful days.

“Have you ever known a dwarf to start a fight?” Kethol asked.

Pirojil pretended to think about it, although there wasn’t really much to think about.

Warfare was one thing — humans had long ago learned that trying to invade the dwarven warrens was a particularly painful form of suicide; if there was a stupider way to die than crouched in a tunnel so that you couldn’t even swing a sword properly, while some dwarf with an ax hacked you to bits, Pirojil couldn’t think of one offhand.

Brawling?

Brawling was about as much a dwarven activity as swimming was, and dwarves were famous for never being willing to enter water deeper than their knobby knees. It was more than a little strange that a creature that would work its way through a narrow mining tunnel, the weight of a mountain pressed down on its chest, would shake and tremble at the thought of water up to its hairy belly, but that’s just the way that it was.

Brawling? Dwarves? The word for “dwarves” in their own language meant “the Moderate People,” and the appellation fit, by and large. While dwarves tended to be a noisy bunch, particularly after a few beers — if Pirojil never, ever heard another dozen low voices raised in a guttural dwarven drinking song, that would be fine with him — fighting for pleasure was almost unknown among them.

Unless, of course, you counted wrestling — but ceremonial wrestling, the way that the Moderate People saw things, wasn’t really fighting. It could be and was used to settle disputes, but dwarves more commonly wrestled just for the sake of wrestling. An accomplished dwarf wrestler had about as much status among them as a master blacksmith did. Wrestling was somewhere between a sport and a religious offering, like a Hand priestess burning bay leaves before the altar.

Burning bay leaves did smell better than a bunch of sweaty dwarves did, but that was another matter. Brawling dwarves? Not likely.

“No,” Pirojil finally said, “I haven’t.”

“Be interesting to find out who they fought with, and why, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, yes, it would.” Pirojil nodded, and gestured with his mug toward the tavernkeeper. “Be interesting to see what he’d say if it was Baron Keranahan who was asking him, instead of a pair of Imperial soldiers.”

“Want me to try?”

Pirojil shook his head. “If anything is going on tonight, it’ll stop quickly as soon as word gets out that the baron is prowling around the riverfront.”

“It might have already stopped if Tarnell has spread the word.” Kethol frowned.

“Possibly.” Pirojil shrugged. “If he does, then we’ve learned something interesting.”

“How interesting is it if Treseen’s catamite has a loose tongue?”

“Please — Baron. Go a little easy, eh? Tarnell’s not a bad man, just because he’s got a different set of loyalties than some other people.”

Besides, Pirojil didn’t think that Tarnell would talk, except to Treseen, who would probably just find the whole thing amusing.

Tarnell had offered to have their clothes laundered and be ready by morning when they had gone to borrow some soldiers’ livery, but Pirojil had declined, and just tucked them in his bag. If they were going to be nosing around town, they would draw less attention as ordinary soldiers, but particularly in a rough part of town it could easily become more than a little convenient to be able to become Captain Pirojil and Baron Keranahan again with a simple change of clothing — say, if they had to blow one of the armsman’s whistles that Tarnell had also provided.

Tarnell had just smiled and nodded. While noblemen really didn’t often take to common dress to pass among the common people the way they did in legend, it wasn’t entirely unknown. Shit, the Old Emperor probably would have done it himself, if the fact of an all-too-good likeness of his face being emblazoned on every Imperial coin hadn’t made that impractical.

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.