“For neighborliness?” cackled the bawd.
Nicolas scooped me up off the floor. He made it look like another bow. “Alas, no. Behold me in my rags; I cannot afford charity. But for a token fee only, I will do this for you!”
Me he dangled by the engorged tail. Them he held by the balls. Oh, he had them. Well-palmed and squeezing. (Hoo-boy, did that bring back a great memory! There’d been this saucy rat girl named Melanie a few years back, and did she ever know how to do things with her paws…)
Mayor Ulia Gol slinked out from behind her podium. Bright-eyed and treacherous and curious as a marten in a chicken hut, she toyed with her gavel. Her countenance was welcoming, even coquettish.
“A Hero from the Hill!” She laughed her deep laughter that brought voters to the ballot box by the hordes. “Come to rescue our troubled Amandale in its time of need.”
“Just a musician, Madame Mayor.” Nicolas’s dire and delicate voice was pitched to warm the cockles and slicken the thighs. “But better than average perhaps—at least where poor, dumb animals are concerned.”
“And, of course, musicians must be paid!” Her lip curled.
“Exterminators too.”
Ulia Gol had reached him. She walked right up close and personal, right to his face, and inhaled deeply. She could smell the Hill on him, I knew, and those tantalizing hints of Folk in his blood, and the long-lost echoes of the mortal he may once have been. The red glint in her eye deepened drunkenly. His scent was almost too much for her. Over there in his corner of the hall, Hans watched the whole scene, green to the gills with jealousy. It clashed with his second-best suit.
Ulia Gol’s expression slid from one of euphoria to that of distaste as she remembered me. Crouched in Nicolas’s open hand, I hunkered as small as I could make myself. I was not a very big rat. And she did have a gavel, you see, for all she was letting it swing from the tips of her fingers.
In a velveted boom that carried her words to the far end of the hall, she asked, “What is your price, my precious piper?”
“I take my pay in coin, Madame Mayor.”
I swear they heard his whisper all across Amandale that night. Nicolas had a whisper like a kiss, a whisper that could reach out and ring the bells of Brotquen Cathedral so sweetly.
“One thousand gold canaries upon completion of the job. If you choose, you may pay me in silver nightingales, though I fear the tripled weight would prove unwieldy. For this reason I cannot accept smaller coin. No bronze wrens or copper robins; such currency is too much for me to shoulder easily.”
Silence. As if his whisper had sucked the breath right from the room. The chandler’s baby hiccupped.
“Paid on completion, you say.” Ulia Gol pondered, stepping back from him. “And by what measurement, pray, do we assess completion? When the last rat drowns in the Drukkamag River?”
Nicolas bowed once more, more gracefully than ever before. “Whatever terms you set, Madame Mayor, I will abide by them.”
Ulia Gol grinned. Oh, she had a handsome, roguish grin. I think I peed a little in Nicolas’s palm. “It cost our town less to build Brotquen Cathedral—and that was three hundred years of inflation ago. Why don’t you take that instead, my sweet-lipped swindler?”
“Alas, ma’am!” Nicolas shook his red-and-black head in sorrow. “While I am certain that yours is a fine cathedral, I make my living on my feet. I take for payment only what I can trundle away with me. As I stated, it must be gold or silver. Perhaps in a small leather chest or sack that I might lift upon my shoulder?”
He tapped the Mayor’s shoulder with his silver pipe, drawing a lazy sigil there. Curse or caress, who could say? Ulia Gol shivered, euphoria once again briefly blanking out her cunning.
“One thousand bright canaries,” she laughed at him, “singing in a single chest! Should not they be in a cage instead, my mercenary minstrel?”
Nicolas twinkled a wink her way. “Nay,” said he, husking low his voice for her ears (and mine) alone. His next sentence fair glittered with the full formality of the Faerie court. Had I any choice when hearing it, I’d’ve bolted right then and there and never come out from my hole till my whiskers turned gray.
“But perhaps,” he continued, “thou shouldst be, thou pink-plumed eyas. A cage equipped with manacles of silver and gilded bullwhips and all manner of bejeweled barbs and abuses for such a wicked lady-hawk as thee.”
Pleased with the impudent promise in his eyes, and pink as her candy-colored wig, Ulia Gol spun around. The tassel on her black satin cap hopped like a cottontail in a clover patch. She addressed the hall.
“The Pied Piper has come to drive our rats away. He is charging,” she threw the room a grin as extravagant as confetti, “an unconscionable fee to do so. But, my friends, our coffers will manage. What cost peace? What cost health? What cost the lives of our children? Yes, we shall have to tighten our belts this winter. What of that?” Her voice crescendoed. Her arms spread wide. “Citizens, if we do not accept his assistance now, who knows if we will even live to see the winter?”
A wall of muttering rose up against the tide of her questions. Some dissent. Some uneasy agreement. Ulia Gol took another reluctant step away from Nicolas and waded into the crowd. She worked it, touching hands, stroking baby curls, enhancing her influence as she gazed deeply into deeply worried eyes and murmured spells and assurances. Shortly, and without any overt effort, she appeared behind the podium like she’d grown there.
“Friends,” she addressed them throbbingly, “already the rats are nibbling at our stores, our infants, the foundations of our houses. Recall how rats carry plague. Do you want Amandale to face the danger that leveled Doornwold fifteen years ago? We shall put it to the vote! I ask you to consider this—extreme, yes, but remember, we only need pay if it’s effective!—solution. All in favor of the Pied Piper, say aye!”
The roar the crowd returned was deafening. The overtones were especially harsh, that particular brassy hysteria of a mob miles past the point of reasoning with. I wished I had my earplugs back. Ulia Gol did not bother to invite debate from naysayers. Their protestations were drowned out, anyway. But I could see Hans over there making note of those who shook their heads or frowned. My guess was that they’d be receiving visitors later. Probably in the dead of night.
From her place on the stage, Ulia Gol beamed upon her townspeople. But like magnet to metal, her gaze clicked back to Nicolas. She studied him with flagrant lust, and he returned her scrutiny with the scorching intensity the raven has for the hawk. He stood so still that even I, whom he held in his hand, could not feel him breathing.
“Master Piper!”
“Madame Mayor?”
“When will you begin?”
“Tomorrow at dawn.” This time, Nicolas directed his diffident smile to the room at large. “I need my sleep tonight. It is quite a long song, the one that calls the rats to the waterside and makes the thought of drowning there seem so beautiful.”
“Rest is all well and good, Master Piper. But first you must dine with me.”
“Your pardon, Madame Mayor, but I must fast before such work as I will do tomorrow.”
Her fists clenched on the edges of the podium. She leaned in. “Then a drink, perhaps. The mayoral mansion is well stocked.”
Nicolas bowed. “Ma’am, I must abstain.”
I wouldn’t say that the look Ulia Gol gave him was a pout, exactly. More like, if Nicolas’s face had been within range of her teeth, she’d have torn it off. He had toyed with her, keyed her to the pitch of his choosing, and now he would not play her like a pipe—nor let her play his. Pipe, I mean. Ahem.