We spread out and padded quickly around the corner.
Shadows dark against the light mist flitted over the rooftops from other directions. They hit the roof as we hit the front.
Steel abruptly clashed. I paused to let my teammates engage, then charged through the crowd and hit the door shoulder-first. The door burst easily open onto a courtyard with other forms already struggling there. I charged through them too, aiming for the inner door. Shouts of “No mercy for traitors” and “Death to the usurper!”, our attempt to disguise our origin by implicating local malcontents, came from behind, above, and below, indicating that the sewer teams had reappeared as well. I grappled with the inner door and it sprang open. A robed functionary scuttled past down the interior hall, looking frantically in my direction. I grabbed him by the collar and said, “The Creeping Sword.”
“I know nothing,” the man said, trying to faint, so I hit him over the head with the flat of my sword.
It went like that for awhile. Then I found Kriglag. Taken totally unprepared and with all his escape routes cut off, Kriglag was trying to make the best of a hopeless situation. He was drunk. I wedged myself into the closet with him and dragged him to his feet. Jugs rolled off his chest and shattered on the floor. “Kriglag!” I said.
“Hwazigah?” he said, eyelids sagging.
“The Creeping Sword, Kriglag. The Creeping Sword!” I said, yelling it into his ear.
“A bad, a bad guy,” Kriglag said, and started to snore. I shook him. Then I broke the neck off a jug he’d apparently missed in the confusion and poured the contents over his head. Kriglag opened his eyes and said, “Wha?”
I put the tip of my award where his crossed eyes could focus on it. “The Creeping Sword, Kriglag.”
“Gemmy outa here.”
“Tell me about the Creeping Sword.”
“You get me outa here first.”
I slapped him across the jaw. “Tell me why I should bother,” I said.
Kriglag’s head was clearing. “Creeping Sword, yeah. This guy from up-river someplace. Had this idea. He’d make cash and a good-guy image at the same time, snatching rich rats.”
Maybe his head wasn’t that clear after all. “Rich rats?”
“Rich scum.” Kriglag paused to cough for breath. “Guys with lots of dough who got it by being scum. People nobody would miss, be glad to see them go.”
“So he came to you. What did you tell him?”
“I’m no fool,” Kriglag said. “I told him, try it out. If it worked maybe I’d take him on.”
“Where did he go?”
“I dunno. He was supposed to come back when he had results.”
“Anybody else know about it?”
Kriglag smirked and breathed a foul breath in my face.
“My partner,” he said.
I rested the edge of my sword along his throat. “Who?”
Kriglag kept smirking. “Get me out of here or you’ll never know.”
I hesitated. Then, with a chorus of “No collaboration!”, a bunch of my new friends burst into the room behind us. Kriglag looked over my shoulder at them, glanced back at me, and lunged toward my blade. I couldn’t believe a survivor type like Kriglag would go so far as to impale himself, but just in case I pulled the sword out of his reach. “You’re a sap,” he yelled at me as they dragged him away.
I spent a few minutes with his ledgers. Kriglag kept records so lousy you couldn’t figure out a thing, which surely meant, from his perspective, they were some pretty fancy accounting. Still, I was able to tell that he’d done a lot of business moving hot goods, goods that had started out in warehouses on the wharf. I couldn’t find out which warehouses, but I made a list of the stuff. One of Netoo’s people arrived to take charge of the books, so I wiped off my sword and went home.
A messenger woke me in the middle of the night with a note from Turbot.
New message received. Ransom drop tonight.
Turbot, always maniacally terse, apparently had things under control. I went back to sleep.
I spent the next morning running down the list of business rivals Skargool’s wife had given me. None of them had anything bad to say about him, and none of them seemed to have anything to hide. None of them had missed any of the hot warehouse goods Kriglag had entered in his ledger books, either. It wasn’t until I was finishing up with the fourth name on my list that I suddenly wised up. I asked the guy for his own rundown of Skargool’s competitors.
The names he gave weren’t on my list.
Their stories were even more interesting than the ones from the list of Skargool’s wife. They knew Skargool better. They knew him well enough to know he’d been getting upset. He’d found out someone was stealing from his stocks. And he’d gotten suspicious about his wife’s fidelity.
They couldn’t understand how Skargool had suddenly picked up these rumors about flogging, and slavers, and being a general taskmaster. They all liked him, and they were his competitors in a notoriously cutthroat field. According to them, he was honest to a fault and underworked his employees, if anything.
Then I wasted a few hours talking to firepen dealers.
The firepen had been a fad item a few seasons before. After the initial enthusiasm, people realized that the pens wore out much too fast to be of real use, and in any case weren’t good for anything besides graffiti. They would write on walls, metal, pavement, indeed on anything but paper and parchment. Paper and parchment they would ignite. Flashy but impractical, and occasionally downright dangerous. The type of thing some upriver yokel might think was pretty hot stuff.
One minor sorcerer was still making the things, selling some out of the stall in front of his home and a few others to local merchants. Demand had settled down to maybe a dozen pens a month, so he was able to tell me quickly where each one of them had gone. The second merchant he sent me to was a hit.
“This kid with pimples and a big rusty sword and an accent,” the woman said. Displayed on a table in her stall were an array of neatly stacked fresh fish and assorted gewgaws in baskets. “Thought he was heaven’s gift itself. Maybe he was, back home, with them country girls.” She sneered at me and tried to sell me a fish.
The guy had bought the pen three days before, which fit.
I went back to the wharves to hunt up Glinko. When I found him, I wished I hadn’t looked. He’d been fished out from the ebb spot behind a piling under a wharf. Somebody had gotten his fingers around Glinko’s throat. The marks of the fingers remained, and something sharp on one of the fingers had torn open his carotid.
As I gazed down at Glinko I became aware of another man gazing down next to me. It was the representative of the Oolvaan Mutual Insurance company. “You are making progress?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said to Glinko. “Lots of progress.”
“Will we have to pay on the claim?”
“Without knowing the exact terms of Skargool’s policy, I don’t know. You might.”
“When will I know?”
“Tonight,” I said, “sounds like a good bet.”
He inclined his head at me and stepped away. Since I was already in the area, I stopped in to see Chog, the manager at Skargool Cargo. The man with the boat-sized sharp-jeweled ring.
“Had some trouble, I see,” I said to him. One of his eyes was red and purple and swollen shut, and his knuckles were scraped raw.