“Will you find him?” she repeated.
“Yeah, I’ll find him,” I said. I strapped on my sword and headed for the man’s warehouse.
Skargool Cargo was a hulking two-story building with heavy timber walls attached to its own wharf. The manager was a hulking man named Kardu Chog. He wasn’t attached to a wharf, but one finger was brandishing a ring with a stone the size of a rowboat.
“Me, I was first mate on the first barge Skargool ever sailed,” Chog said expansively around a cylinder that looked like a cigar but smelled a lot more like a swamp after a range fire. Tobacco leaves were one of the things Skargool imported, shipped up the river from the south. “First mate, aye, and crew too. The two of us, like brothers.” He waved at the humidor on his desk, offered me a cigar. I shook my head. He shrugged and took a massive pull on his own, a line of solid ash advancing toward his mouth. “Skargool and me, we go way back.”
“What about his wife?” I said.
“What do you mean,” he said slowly, “about his wife?”
“His wife. How long does she go back?”
Chog leaned back in his chair and squinted up through the smoke. “Mind you now, I don’t really know her, but she’s been around now for, oh, five years, six. Why are you interested?”
“Just asking questions,” I said. “Part of the job.” I poked around, checking in with the workmen.
From all accounts, Edrik Skargool was indeed that rare thing, a rich boss well liked by his employees. Another relevant fact also came to light: Skargool walked home daily, along the same route.
I left the warehouse, crossed the street, and entered the dive on the other side; step out on any street around the wharves and there was bound to be a bar within arm’s reach. When my drink came I laid an ool next to it. “The Skargool place,” I said.
“Yeah?” said the bartender.
“Anybody seem interested in it?” I spun another ool in the air.
The bartender licked his lip and thought, then shook his head sadly, eying the ool on the counter. I pushed it toward him. “Let me know,” I said, and told him how to find me.
I worked my way along. From the feel of the kidnap note this thing had been a job worked out in advance, not a bit of random work popped on the spur of the moment. The Creeping Sword, whoever or whatever he was or they were, would have hung around getting a handle on Skargool’s movements, and might even still be keeping an eye on things. Maybe somebody had noticed something. It wasn’t a real good bet - the waterfront was always filled with transients, and with the number of out-of-town fighters bolstering the Guard things were bound to be worse, but maybe one of the regulars had an eye open. If nothing else, the Creeping Sword might hear I was asking questions and go after me. Coming out of the fourth bar I felt a bump and tug at my side. Attached to the touch was an arm. I grabbed it as the kid tried to twist away. He was somebody I knew.
“How’s business, Glinko?” I said.
Glinko looked around at me and turned white. “It’s you,” he said.
I shook him up and down a few times. “Yeah, Glinko, it’s me,” I said. “You’re losing your touch. You’re also turning into an idiot.”
“I didn’t know it was you,” he said plaintively.
“Save it. Just as well you’re here. Maybe you can do something for me.”
A look of calculation appeared. I shook him again, then opened my hand and dropped him. The street was muddy. The streets were always muddy. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“You didn’t have to try to pick my purse, either. Fortunately for you, I generally take the long view.” I showed him an ool out of Skargool’s wife’s advance.
Glinko stopped trying to clean himself off. The coin interested him. Coins always interested him. Coins interest most of us. “Who cares about mud anyway?” he said. “What do you need?”
“The Creeping Sword,” I said.
“The who?”
“That’s what I want to know. This Sword kidnapped a businessman.”
“Skargool?” Glinko said.
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s right. Tell me about it.”
“You going to give me that?” he said, meaning the ool.
“You going to give me a reason to?”
He glanced around the street, then slipped around the corner of the bar into a narrow alley. The street had only been about three times the width of the alley, but except for us the alley was empty. “I know Skargool,” Glinko said in a low voice, “I know most of the guys down here. That’s what I do, I keep an eye out.” Glinko was a spotter for one of the thief-gangs. “Skargool’s a right guy, pays good, he’s good to the workers, you know? Half the guys around want to work for him. Then a couple of weeks ago a lot of bad talk started. A ship of his was late, see, and all of a sudden there’s talk like Skargool might have sold the crew to the slavers. That’s how it started. Last I saw him was two days ago. He was walking home. He didn’t look good. He looked real depressed. Now today he’s missing, it’s all around the street.”
“Okay.” I gave him the ool. He said he’d nose around for me and check in later. He went back to the street, and I slipped out the other end of the alley.
I tried a few more bars without much more luck and ended up at the Grumpy Gullet. Civil unrest or no, Slipron was there, at his usual table in the back. I handed him the kidnap note Skargool’s wife had given me.
Slipron screwed a lens into one eye, Oolvayan glass in a bone housing, and scrutinized the engraving, rubbing the copper plate between two fingers. Then he tapped the plate with a fingernail and swiveled the lens up at me. “It’s worthless, of course, excepting perhaps only the metal itself.”
Slipron being the best fence in Roosing Oolvaya, his comment meant he could move the thing for a profit and was willing to bargain, but selling it was not what I had in mind at the moment. I told him so.
“Ah,” Slipron said. “Well. This engraving is not professional work.” He rested a finger across the inscribed wards and closed his eyes. The letters around his finger swam briefly. He brought the plate up to his face and sniffed. “A firepen. Definitely a firepen.”
The tapster was passing with a tray of foaming mugs, and I snagged a full one for Slipron. He handed me back the ransom note. “I know of Edrik Skargool, and I consider him a good man,” Slipron said. “I also note the line of this letter that reads ‘Search will cause death’.”
“I figure they’re talking about search by sorcery,” I said. If an anti-search spell had been set up around Skargool, any finder probe keyed to him would set up feedback in the protector field, feedback that might be enough to fry him. Whether the Creeping Sword had the facility or the money to get a spell like that was another matter. I thought it was a bluff. Even if it was a bluff and a sorcerous search might find Skargool, hiring a magician to run a decent search would cost a lot more than my own time. If it wasn’t a bluff, and the magician wasn’t good enough to avoid or neutralize the no-search field, that would be it for Skargool.
Of course, I wouldn’t hire a magician. I wouldn’t even go near magic unless it grabbed me by the neck and forced my nose into it. Magic is more trouble than it’s worth. It messes up everybody’s life. It had messed up my own life enough in the past to give me more of an education than I’d ever wanted. No, all this case needed was legwork, and legwork I know.
Slipron said, “What if they don’t care what kind of search it is, and the Sword people spot you looking for him?”