“Ahem,” Karlini said. “Well, perhaps the story might be best, at that.” He absent-mindedly righted his chair and plopped into it. The left armrest creaked over and fell off. “Frankly, Max, it’s not the best time to be visiting Roosing Oolvaya. You’ll see troops in the streets. The former Venerance died a week or so ago under suspicious circumstances. His son took over the office and turned out the local militia, that is, the Guard, plus a horde of mercenaries who conveniently happened to be around.”
Max had been testing his arm. He’d have to keep exercising it, he decided, or it would stiffen up. “What do we know about this son?”
“From what I was able to pick up before, he was a classic fop-around-town, with a vicious streak. Perfect puppet material.”
“Whose puppet?”
“You tell me. Big powerful magician, wants to be a new force in the city …”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that. So this mess has politics in it too.” Max sighed again. “What about old cabinet members, people loyal to the old Venerance?”
“Dungeons are under the palace. A lot of people seem to have been winding up there.”
“Curfew?”
“Sunset to sunrise.”
“Yeah, right,” said Max. “Bound to be more people creeping around at night than during the day. Camouflage, maybe, if I can keep from running into traffic jams on the rooftops. What about this Oskin Yahlei?”
“He has a place near the north wall, I’ll show you on the map. He’s passing himself off as a necromancer.”
Max groaned. “You’re going out of your way to keep this from being any fun at all, aren’t you?”
“I already warned you. I mentioned there might be undead when you brought it up before.”
“I hoped you were joking.”
“He may not be a real necromancer, it could be just a disguise,” Karlini said. “You shouldn’t get so -”
Max levered himself back to his feet, leaning his back against the wall, and glowered off at nothing in particular. “Disguise or not, you know as well as I do that playing around with the dead is filthy stuff. After something’s been in the ground you don’t want to see it in the air again. You ever been chased by a gang of zombies? No?” Max ground his teeth. “Well, by the time they’ve managed to claw their way out of the earth they’re not much more than a heap of glowing mold and squirming maggots, scum, basically, with clods of stuff falling off whenever they move. They’ve also got an uncanny habit of showing up upwind.” He paused in front of Karlini and switched the glower to him. “You think that’s disgusting? - we’re not even talking about the real undead yet. As magical esthetics go, necromancy is pretty close to the bottom of the pits. Disguise, hah! Anybody who would deliberately disguise themselves as a necromancer is stranger than I want to hear about. He probably really is a necromancer, worse luck.”
“You’re not backing out, are you?” Roni said.
Karlini had turned pink. “Of course he’s pulling out, he’s afraid he’s going to blow it.”
“Dear,” Roni said.
“… All right, all right, Max, I apologize,” said Karlini. “I know you don’t like zombies, I should have put it a different way. You haven’t blown anything significant in years, I know that, that’s why you’ve got to take care of this one.”
“Max?” Roni said.
“Of course I’ll do it,” Max said, “I said I would, now let’s stop beating the point to death. You know me, sometimes I just need to complain. Just answer one thing for me, and then we can start on the real preparations. Who is he, really?”
“Who is who?” Karlini said.
“‘Whom’,” said Max, “and stop playing around. You’ve been sitting around in this castle for weeks, all you’ve been doing is thinking about this mess, you’ve got to have come up with at least a good guess. Who owns this place? Who is it I’m going out to rescue? And while we’re at it, who is this Oskin Yahlei?”
“Uh,” Karlini said, “well, I really don’t know. I wish I did, but -”
“It’s the one major point you’ve been avoiding ever since I got here. Now, talk, or the deal’s off, really.”
“I, uh, I’m not sure.”
“I’m sure you’re not. Just give me your guess.”
“You must have your own guess by now, Max,” Roni said. She wouldn’t quite meet Max’s eyes.
“Yeah,” Max said, “I do. I sure do. That’s why I want to hear Karlini’s.” He fixed Karlini with his sharpest gaze. “Well? Who is it? Is it somebody I know?”
Karlini slowly let out his breath. “… Death. It’s one of the Deaths.”
Max’s glower had brought most of his face into shadow, his eye sockets casting gloom down past his nose and chin. Something glittered on his chest - the filigreed amulet. “Which one is the Death?” he said, “Oskin Yahlei or the castle master?”
“… Both of them. I think they’re both Deaths.”
6. THE CREEPING SWORD STALKS AGAIN
The Skargool ransom money was enough to let me live comfortably for a year, but I was still sitting out in front at the office the next morning. I’m not sure I could tell you why. You work and you work until you get to a point where you don’t have to work for a while, and when you get to that point you keep working anyway. Damned if I understand it. I didn’t think I had anything of the freelance do-gooder in me, I didn’t think I was the kind of guy who’d keep doing what I should get paid for, for free, but I’d been surprised before. Of course, as things turned out, the first business through the door made me wish I’d caught the first barge out of town.
I had my feet up, just leaning back and - like I said - feeling pretty good about things for a change, when there was a knock on the door. There was something surprising about that, and even my mood of contentment wasn’t enough to make me ignore it. It wasn’t the fact that it was six-thirty in the morning, when the butchers and farmers had been at work for hours and most everyone else was still dragging themselves out of bed; when you do the jobs I do you get to expect people barging in on you at all hours. With all the skullduggery going on in the city during the night an early morning visitor wouldn’t have startled me one bit. So it wasn’t the visitor that surprised me. What surprised me was hearing the knock on the door, and nothing else.
I’ve got my office on the second floor of an old building for a good reason. The stairs creak. I went and loosened them specially myself so they’d creak even louder. I like to know people are coming before they get up here. The neighbors hate the sound, but they hate fights in my office even more. Me, I didn’t think anything larger than a cat could make it up the stairs without warning me.
And then there was a knock on the door.
That was the strangest thing about it. If anyone was going to take the trouble to get up the staircase without the slightest sound, however they did it, I would have figured the reason was to take me by surprise. So why would they knock?
There was only one thing to do. I rested a hand near the hilt of my sword, tried to remember if I’d made my last good-luck payment to Phlinn Arol, the Adventurer’s God, and said, “Come in.”
When he walked in I knew all bets were off. Too late, I remembered that my coverage with Phlinn Arol had lapsed a week ago. Typical, I thought. The guy in the door was the man from the Skargool case, the one from the insurance company.
The one I’d figured was probably a god. “Hello,” I said carefully. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you,” he said. He rested his walking stick next to the door, removed his brown-and-gray tweed cape and draped it over the back of the chair, flicked his gaze quickly over the seat, apparently decided the brown splotches were defects in the wood and not the remains of a recent spill, and lowered himself deliberately onto the chair, his hands grasping the armrests. His hair was combed over a bald spot and he was a bit too stocky to bet on in timed sprints, but his mouth was pursed enough to make the whole face look grim. His eyes shifted around in pale sockets, darting at the few significant features of the room - the desk, the window, the bookcase with its smattering of books and my two large creeping plants, the dented Valtubian shield, me - and it occurred to me that perhaps, just maybe, he was worried about something. I tried to look patient, and to keep my mind as far away from the ransom money as I could, just in case stray thoughts were what he was after.