"Don't count on it. You remember how ripped they got last year."
"I don't see any more animals," Winger said.
"No patrols, either," Crask observed. "That'd mean he's used up all the men he can afford. He's keeping the rest in close."
I said, "He'll have the entrances covered. How do we get inside?"
"From up top. We climb the stonework on the northwest corner, swing out onto those beams, get onto the roof. We move across there, drop onto that balcony in the middle. See it? It shouldn't be covered if he's short on bodies and is thinking dwarves. Dwarves couldn't get up there."
"One of my favorite hobbies, climbing unfamiliar buildings in the dark."
Sadler told me, "You done it before. I was there I brought a rope. I'll go first." He sounded like he had serious reservations about me.
Hell, I had serious reservations about me. I didn't think I could get to the roof up a ladder, all the pains I had. I thought about calling everything off. Didn't seem too bright, charging in when we didn't know what the hell was going on.
We moved across to the house unchallenged. Sadler monkeyed up the northwest corner, dropped the rope. Winger went up like climbing was her calling. Crask told me, "After you, sir. Age before beauty."
"Right. I'll just tie it around my neck and let them hoist me up." I grabbed the rope and went at it, I got to the top somehow, though I had my eyes closed half the time. Crask arrived right behind me.
Sadler told him, "I'm starting to get a good feeling about this, Bob."
Crask had a first name? Amazing. I figured even his mommy called him Crask.
"Yeah, looking good. Let's slide on over there."
We were getting set to drop to the balcony when the morCartha returned. One, singular. It whispered down out of the night, zipped past, nearly panicked us all. We figured it was a scout and a herd would be right behind it. But nothing happened.
We were trying to get inside when the excitement brewed up again around front. We paused, listened. Winger said, "That's weird."
"What?" I think I squeaked.
"Chodo's guys are all inside. So who's fighting who?"
I didn't know and at the moment I didn't care. "Let them have fun. Let's get on with it."
To my complete astonishment we broke in without any trouble at all.
44
We were on the highest of three floors. Crask and Sadler insisted on checking every room there before we started down. They didn't want to leave anybody behind us. Winger and I took one end of a long hail, those two the other half. We met again at the head of a stair in the center.
"Find anybody?" Sadler asked.
I told the truth. "A few drunks so far out of it they're barely alive." I'd recognized some and had been surprised by a couple supposedly honest men, big in business or society. Chodo's reach seemed infinite.
"Same over there. Nobody who has the balls to do anything but squeal, anyway. Party must really have roared before the shit came down."
"Head downstairs now?"
He nodded. "Stay low. Part of the stair can be seen from the ballroom."
I'd never visited this wing before. I'd never been off the ground floor, up front, except to visit a guy locked up in what passed for Chodo's dungeon.
We listened before we moved. There was a racket toward the front of the house. Men cursed down below, angry and scared. It had nothing to do with us.
Crask led off, still encumbered with his arsenal. It seemed impossible that he should move silently carrying all that clutter, but he managed. As did Sadler and even Winger. Me, carrying next to nothing and a trained Marine sneak, I felt like I was banging a drum.
We found no one on the second floor, just plenty of small sleeping rooms with no one home. "Bodyguards and staff," Sadler explained. "They'll be sober and near Chodo—if they're still alive."
"Where'll he be?" "In his office."
Meant nothing to me. I'd never visited his office.
Crask dropped. I did, too, pushed my nose against the banister. A half-dozen colorful, shaggy dwarves light-footed past below, headed toward the front of the house. An uproar broke out as soon as they disappeared. Crask chuckled. "Ambushed them little shits."
One dwarf hustled back bent over, holding his guts in. A limping man overtook him, cut him apart with a heavy naval sword. I asked, "Can we get around that ambush?"
"Nope."
"You're a Marine," Sadler said. "Hey diddle diddle, straight up the middle."
That didn't sound any more appetizing now than it had back then.
Crask said, "The runts used it up. Or there'd have been more guys after the dwarf."
We moved down to the ground floor, passed the dwarf, headed toward the ballroom and possible ambush. To our right were kitchens and laundries and whatnot. To our left, too, I assumed. I'd heard, during one of my visits, that such took up most of the ground floor, except the showy stuff up front and the ballroom and pool area
The ambush was pretty basic. Crask and Sadler sprang it entering the ballroom. The guy who'd slaughtered the dwarf was the healthier of the two trying to hold the fort. Crask bopped his head with the haft of his spear.
Winger whistled. "Some party room. Some party, too." The ballroom was a cozy eighty—by—one-hundred feet and three stories high. Party detritus lay everywhere. Looked like the celebration had run its course before the bloodletting started.
Crask and Sadler tied the victims. They were going to need soldiers when they took over. Sadler said, "Straight to the pool."
"I'll take rearguard," Winger said. When I glanced back, she was slipping something inside her shirt.
The pool room dwarfed the ballroom. The pool itself was that big. There was nobody there. Except Chodo's dead. Had to be thirty of those laid out amidst the party debris. We skirted the flotsam-covered pool and headed for the reception hall.
That hall runs to the front door through the front wing of the house, though wing isn't the right word. The house is a huge box with the center, inner court roofed to form the ballroom and pool areas. We took turns peeking into the hall. Several men were guarding the front door. They were all scared and they were all injured.
"Not many left," Sadler observed.
I grumbled, "Maybe we've just jumped into a trap with the kingpin."
"Maybe. Let's check his office." He trotted to a closed door that would let us into the east wing, leaned against it, listened. "Not that way. Mob in there." He headed for the rear of the house. Back the way we had come.
I looked at Winger, shrugged, followed. But I was considering fading away. Things had gotten too deadly and mysterious.
We entered the east wing by means of second-floor halls built for the cleaning staff Sadler led us into a residential suite. "Chodo's kid uses this when she's in town."
"Nobody's home now." I wondered if most of the house was a mystery to Chodo. He wouldn't get to see the upper floors unless his men carried him.
"Don't look like."
Crask and Sadler started poking around in closets and tapping walls. They found what they were hunting before I became mystified enough to ask. A panel opened beside a fireplace. Of course. Chodo would have his hidden passages and whatnot. Sadler said, "We're going down to a room hidden off Chodo's office. Be real quiet." Like we needed warning.
Our destination was big for a secret room, a good eight by twelve. Winger's eyes bulged when she saw it. Stacks of moneybags lay against one wall. She gulped air and chewed it. Impressive pile, I thought, but only Chodo's day-to-day working capital. His petty cash.
A racket developed while we were crawling through the walls, the mob from outside attacking again.