Carl had acted a little strangely during our talk, too.
He’d taken things a little too calmly, like maybe the barrier wasn’t really news to him after all. And then at the end, when I was leaving, he’d jumped when I’d asked about anyone new to town, when he didn’t think I could see him. I’d seen enough, though, to make me think that if he didn’t put up the barrier himself, he had a pretty good idea who did. I had to assume that since Carl didn’t tell me about it, he didn’t want me to know. If he didn’t want me to know what was going on, or to mess with it, the next step was to ensure that I didn’t find out what was happening on my own.
We’d been friendly enough in the past, but of course cordiality didn’t necessarily mean anything when you got down to serious business. Still, if he was up to something tricky now and knew I was after him, he might have chosen to merely stash me out of the way rather than do me in. Putting me where he could get to me later might even have advantages for him. In case whatever he was doing was out-and-out dangerous, it wouldn’t have been stretching the point too much to imagine him giving himself an insurance policy; if things got desperate enough he could spring me and get me to help him. For that matter, he’d always seemed to think I was pretty competent. If he’d really arranged to get me in the clink, he might think I wouldn’t let myself stay there long, and that when I got out, the first place I’d come asking questions was wherever he was. If he was in trouble, I’d be there to help him out of it. That idea was nice for my ego, in a backhanded sort of way. Looking around the tidy little hoosegow, though, I had the unpleasant feeling that that concept might just overestimate my abilities by a little too much.
When I said the jail was small, I wasn’t exaggerating. The main cell was about the size of my office, and if you added the room where the guy with the keys sat you could tack on the landing at the top of my staircase - space for a chair and a front door and not much else. I thought it was pretty poor planning, myself. If you’re going to hold a coup, you’d better arrange enough accommodations for the loyalists you’re planning to pull off the streets. They were probably using the lockups in the city itself as holding areas, shipping the prisoners off to the real dungeons underneath the island palace whenever they got around to it. Even if the full-scale dungeons were worse, I thought it might be just as well to make the move. The place I was in was small, but it was also pretty crowded.
The cell was basically a cage of thick iron bars built into the side of the building. The bars ran horizontally as well as up-and-down, and were attached to each other where they crossed by heavy messy welds. Whoever had built it hadn’t wanted anyone getting out, ever - the cage had a ceiling of the same cross-hatched bars, and a floor to match. I still had the small knife in my boot, but I sure wasn’t going to saw my way out with that. Forget the lock, too. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t heavy, but its outlines had the kind of vague fuzz that charged-up magic gives. Another flagrant example of overkill, but maybe it had its point. The only key that would open that lock was the one that had been in the hole when the spell was cast. It couldn’t be picked.
I had the chance to examine the details of the cell’s construction so closely for a simple reason. When they threw me in I couldn’t go very far. In fact, they had to lean on the door to close it, like trying to get the lid down on a trunk you’ve just packed for a three-year vacation. The cell wasn’t filled, it was stuffed. There must have been forty people jammed in there already. I’d never tried to get forty people into my office, but I think the back wall would have come off before I got past thirty. The troopers shoved me in backward, and the first thing I heard were the growls and “oof”s from my nearest new neighbors as my momentum elbowed them aside. My own mother could have been in that cell, somewhere in the back, and I never would have known it. After I got finished studying the bars in front of my nose and gradually squirmed my vantage point around, though, I was somehow not surprised to recognize the second face at my back.
“Gag,” I said, “you don’t look so hot. You need some air?”
The face of Gag the Hairless was almost beatific in its look of peace. It was the face of a man who had just had his fondest dreams come true, and to whom such details as this jail were now so much insignificant confetti. He slowly noticed me, his expression lost in dreams. “Nah,” he said blissfully.
Even his moustache had gone limp with tranquility. “Hey, Gag, talk to me. What were you smoking?”
With the noise in the cell, I could only hear him because his mouth was almost embedded in my ear. “The payroll,” he said. “The payroll for the Black Legion.”
I said, “You were smoking a payroll?” not because I thought his answer was in direct response to my question, but because I thought it might get him irritated enough to bounce back down to the human plane for a few lines. To my surprise, it worked. His eyebrows furrowed and his eyes focused.
“Eh,” he said, “what?”
“The payroll for the Black Legion?”
His mouth resumed its county-wide smile and his eyebrows relaxed. “You wouldn’t have believed it. The most amazing thing you’d ever see in your life. Like heaven, that’s what it was like. The Black Legion, you know, one of the bunch of mercenaries this Kaar guy brought in? They wanted their loot up front. Two month’s worth of down payment, retainer, yeah, that’s what they got - a whole safe full of nothing but gold.”
Gag giggled. “You told me I better not push my luck. I never had so much luck in my whole life. Everybody wants a hideout, right? I had one, this great little inn place, up an alley out of the way where nobody’d even think of looking for an inn. It was perfect. I’d go back after a job, hole up, relax - perfect.”
His smile widened, a feat I hadn’t thought was possible. “I wasn’t the only one who loved the place. The Black Legion stumbled over it too, decided it was the perfect spot for their own hideout. The place to sit on their loot.” Gag chuckled. “Sure, they threw me out when they were securing the top floor, but the same time they were rolling me down the stairs they were dragging this safe up.”
“You got the whole safe?”
“You should have been there. Everybody should have been there. It was great. Their storeroom was in the back, so I just hung down off the roof, sawed through the wall, and blew out the back of the safe. Just between you and me, it wasn’t that much of a safe,” he said, lowering his voice even more.
“If an outfit like that isn’t smart enough to protect its own payroll, they deserve what they get,” I said.
“Exactly like what I said too. Course, I’m here, so I guess somebody was doing some protecting.”
“But did they get their gold back?”
“Nah. Why do you think I’m here, and not floating around in some sewer?”
“You got a point there,” I said. “You’re also lucky the Guard found you instead of the Black Legion.”
“How’d you know that?”
“If you stole this Legion’s whole two-month stash and they had you but they didn’t have it, I think they’d spend as long as it took to convince you to give it back. These mercenaries have a lot of ways to convince people to do things like that. Most of them are hard and blunt or cold and sharp.”