'You find it hard to admit that I a woman - have accomplished this, love? Look here, that gourd-holster was stolen today in the market-place. Sliced through in back and snatched off, in a single act. Some child of about thirteen, a dirty girl who ran off with it like a racing dromedary. I did not tell anyone because I so hated its loss and am so mortified.'
'All right. Maybe. That's not bad - forget the part about its being sliced in back, lest it turn up whole. Hmm - I guess it won't. Likely perfectly good silk will be dumped while the pearls and gold thread are sold. And how competent was he at the couching, Lirain?'
Lirain looked to the heavens. '0 Sabellia, and we call Thee the Sharp-Tongued One! Men! Plague and drought. Bourne, can't you be more than a man? He was ... fair. That's all. I was on business. We are on business, love. Our assignment for those "certain interested nobles" back in Ranke - my hind leg, it's the Emperor himself, worried about his half-brother's pretty golden-haired magnetism! - is to embarrass His pretty golden-haired Highness K-adakithis! He's been doing that well enough all by himself! Trying to implement civilized law in this roach-nest of a town! Continuing to insist that temples to Savankala and Sabellia have to be mightier than the one to the Ils these people worship, and that Vashanka's must be equal to Ils's. Priests hate him and merchants hate him and thieves hate him - and thieves make this town go!'
Bourne nodded - and demonstrated his strength by drawing a fifteen-inch dagger to clean his nails.
Lirain tossed her girdle of silver links on to a pile of cushions and idly fingered her navel. 'Now we provide the finishing touch. There will never be a threat to the Emperor from this pretty boy's supporters again! We help Hanse the roach into the palace.'
'After which he is absolutely on his own,' he said, pointing with the dagger. 'We've got to be uncompromised.'
'Oh,' she said flaunting, 'I shall be a-couching with His Highness! The while, Hanse steals his Rod of Authority: the Savankh of Ranke, given him personally by the Emperor as symbol of full authority here! Hanse will wish to negotiate a private, quiet trade with Kittycat. Rod for a fat ransom, and his safety. We will be busily seeing that word gets around. A thief broke into the palace and stole the Savankh! And the Prince-Governor is the laughing stock of the capital! He'll either rot here - or, worse still, be recalled in disgrace.'
The big man lounging so familiarly on her divan nodded slowly. 'I do have to point out that you may well rot here with him.'
'Oh, no. You and I are promised reprieve from this midden-heap town. And ... Bourne ... particularly if we heroically regain the Savankh for the honour of the Empire. After its theft is just terribly well known, of course.'
'Now, that's good!' Bourne's brows tipped up and his lips pursed, a rather obscene spectacle between the bushiness of brown moustache and beard. 'And how do we do that? You going to trade this Hanse another halter for it?'
She looked long at him. Coolly, brows arched above blue-lidded eyes. 'What's that in your hand. Guardian; Hell Hound so loyal to His Highness?'
Bourne regarded the dagger in his big hairy hand, looked at Lirain, and began to smile.
*
Though hardly beloved nor indeed particularly lovable, Hanse was a member of the community. Though a paid ally, the customs inspector was not. Hanse heard from three sources that Cusharlain had been asking after him, on behalf of someone else. After giving that thought, Hanse traded with a grimy little thief. First Hanse reminded him that he could easily take the five truly fine melons the boy had been so deft as to steal, all in an afternoon. The boy agreed to accept a longish, stiffish piece of braided gold thread, and Hanse gained four melons. With his hilt and then thumb, Hanse made a nice depression in the top of each. Into each he tucked a nice pearl; four of his thirty-four.
These he set before the hugely fat and grossly misnamed Moonflower, a S'danzo who liked food, melons, pearls, Hanse, and proving that she was more than a mere charlatan. Many others were. Few had the Gift. Even the cynical Hanse was convinced that Moonflower had.
She sat on a cushioned stool of extra width and sturdy legs. Her pile of red and yellow and green skirts overflowed it, while disguising the fact that so did her vast backside. Her back was against the east wall of the tired building wherein she and her man and seven of their brood of nine dwelt, and wherein her man sold ... things. Hanse sat cross-legged before her. Looking boyish without his arm sheaths and in a dusty tunic the colour of an old camel. He watched a pearl disappear under Moonflower's shawl into what she called her treasure chest. He watched the melon disappear between her lavender-painted lips. Swiftly.
'You are such a good boy, Hanse.' When she talked, Moonflower was a kitten.
'Only when I want something, passionflower.'
She laughed and beamed and tousled his hair for he knew that such talk pleased her. Then he told her the story. Handed her, disguised in carefully smudged russet, a strip of silken cloth: two straps and two cupped circles bearing many thread-holes.
'Ah! You've been visiting a lady in the Path of Money! Nice of you to let Moonflower have four of the pearls you've laboriously sliced off this little sheath!'
'She gave it me for services rendered.' He waved a hand.
'Oh, of course. Hmm.' She folded it, unfolded it, fondled it, drew it through her dimple-backed hands, sniffed and tasted it with a dainty tongue-tip. A gross kitten at her divining. She closed her eyes and was very still. As Hanse was, waiting.
'She is indeed a c- what you said,' she told him, able to be discreet even though in something approaching a trance. 'Oh, Shadowspawn! You are involved in a plot beyond your dreaming. Odd - this must be the Emperor I see, watching from afar. And this big man with your - acquaintance. A big man with a big beard. In a uniform? I think so. Close to our ruler, both. Yet ... ahh ... they are his enemies. Yes. They plot. She is a serpent and he a lion of no little craft. They seek ... ah, I see. The Prince-Governor has become faceless. Yes. They seek to cost him face.' Her eyes opened to stare wide at him, two big garnets set amid a heavy layer of kohl. 'And you, Hanse my sweet, are their tool.'
They stared at each other for a moment. 'Best you vanish for a time, Shadowspawn. You know what becomes of tools once they are no longer needed.'
'Discarded,' he snarled, not even bemoaning the loss of Lirain's denuded bandeau, which Moonflower made vanish within a shawl-buried vaster one.
'Or,' she said, keeping him fixed by her gaze, 'hung up.'
Lirain and her (uniformed?) confederate were tools then, Hanse reasoned, prowling the streets. Prince Kadakithis was nice to look at, and charismatic. So his imperial half-brother had sent him way out here, to Sanctuary. Now he wanted him sorely embarrassed here. Hanse could see the wisdom of that, and knew that despite what any might say, the Emperor was no fool. So, then. They two plotted. Lirain gained enough knowledge of Hanse to employ Cusharlain to investigate him. She had found a way to effect their meeting. Yes; though it hurt his ego, he admitted to himself that she had made the approach and the decisions. So now he was their tool. A tool of tools!
Robbing Kadakithis, however, had been his goal before he met that cupidinous concubine. So long as she helped, he was quite willing to let her think he was her dupe. He wanted to be their tool, then - insofar as it aided him to gain easy entry to the palace. Forewarned and all that. There was definitely potential here for a clever man, and Hanse deemed himself twice as clever as he was, which was considerably. Finally, being made the tool of plotting tools was far too demeaning for the Hansean ego to accept.