At last he called for a second blackjack, and when it came he raised it high. "To Cleedis." Again he repeated the ritual of drink and brood. What was the chamberlain's part, and just whom did he serve? Dead Manferic used him, but the late king trusted no one, that Pinch was certain. But old Cleedis wasn't a fool, though he played the role for others. As a general he'd had a cunning mind for traps and lures. The rogue was running the gantlet for these two without knowing even where it would end.
With these two, Manferic and Cleedis, at least the threat was clear. They wanted him to do the job and then they wanted him dead. The rogue was clear on that. Already he was threading plots within their plots, plans to keep himself alive. It was life as normal in Ankhapur.
With his third mug, Pinch contemplated the coldest challenge of all. He raised his blackjack to Lissa and her quest. She was close, too close. The rogue was sure she'd gotten her suspicions from Cleedis or maybe one of the princes, though Pinch doubted they were that well-informed or clever. It was a way for Cleedis to keep him under good behavior, to control his life.
He could kill her and have done with it, like he'd once considered on the road, but the thought didn't appeal to him. He was getting sentimental, fond of her easy gullibility. There had to be a use for her alive.
The only other choice, though, was to give her a thief. It couldn't be just any thief. It had be someone she suspected. Which one could he do without, Pinch wondered: Maeve, Therin, or Sprite? If it came to it, which one could he give up?
Pinch ordered another drink and brooded even more.
Low Cunning
The great, swollen, and single eye of the Morninglord was not yet gazing upon Ankhapur when Pinch sidled out of the mist and back into the marbled confines of the palace. The thick, warm steam, fresh from the sea, cast him up in its wash, the great cloud that blanketed the commons of Ankhapur breaking into its froth just at the hard stones of the palace gate.
Pinch sauntered under the portcullis, raised for the cooks and spitboys off to market, passing the guards with the confidence that he belonged there. It had been years since the feeling of arrogant privilege truly belonged to him. He had never forgotten it and carried it with him through all his dealings with petty thugs, constable's watch, prison turnkeys, and festhall girls. He always held that knowledge of his own superiority as the key to his rise and dominance in Elturel. Having the sense of it, though, wasn't the same as the confirmation of one's entitlement that came in moments like this.
At other times and places, fools had tried to convince him that respect was the mark of a true leader-foolish old men who believed they were the masters of great criminal clans, but in truth little men with little understanding. Pinch knew from his years under Manferic's sharp tutelage that respect meant nothing but useless words and bad advice. Fear is what made men and beasts obey-utter and base fear. Manferic had been an artist in instilling fear. The common people feared the terrors that awaited dissidents and rivals who vanished in the night. The nobility dreaded the moment Manferic might strip a title or confiscate lands. The princes feared the moment their father might turn on them and bloodily solve the question of succession. None of them knew the scope of the chasm that was his soul, and none of them dared find out.
Fear is what made the guards stand to, not admiration.
Pinch made his way through the long interconnected halls of the palace. His fine clothes, the vanity of his days, were sagged with loose wrinkles that come with constant wear and the dull edge of morning sobriety.
The wrinkles were reflected in his face, a leathery map of his nighttime indulgences, with sad, pouchy bags under his eyes and feeble folds around his neck. Pinch was battling time, as all living things do. Even the endless elves slowly succumb to the Great Master's advances. Death could be beaten, cheated, and postponed, and the gods were frail by comparison. Even they felt the yoke of years settling over them. Time was the enemy Pinch could not outwit, the treasure locked beyond his bony fingers.
Right now exhaustion was weakness. Pinch felt want of sleep in his bones, but there was no time for the luxury of rich sheets. Plans were already in motion, some of his own doing and more that were not. Plots needed counterplots, and those needed their own counters. Looking forward, there was no end to the webs that filled the future, not here or even if he left Ankhapur.
So Pinch slipped through the halls, down colonnaded corridors that threatened to devour him with their hungry boredom, past galleries that whispered with the ancestors of a past not his. A blind man would have heard only the random wet slap of leather polishing a marble that was green veined and solid like cave-ripened cheese.
It was at the entrance to the Great Hall, as he was being swallowed farther and farther into the deceitful stagnation of the palace, that Pinch spied Iron-Biter, the grotesque. Before purposeful thought could will it, Pinch had already sidled out of view, angling himself where he could watch but not be watched.
Once there, he observed. What he hoped to see, he did not know, but this dwarf was an adversary. Vargo's displays had foolishly revealed the misshapen courtier's strengths; now Pinch hoped to see weaknesses. A direct confrontation with Vargo's enforcer was unwinnable without an Achilles' heel to exploit. "Thieves' courage" some called it. Pinch didn't give a damn.
Sheltered by a window shuttered with pierced rosewood, Pinch watched as the dwarf prowled the grand chamber. Apelike Iron-Biter appeared to move with no purpose, paying mind first to a candelabrum, then to the cracks between the marble blocks in the walls, with all the intention and interest of his kind. Dwarven fascination for stone was beyond Pinch's understanding. A block of marble was a block of marble. You couldn't sell it, and even carved well it hardly had enough value to make it worth stealing. Dwarves would go on about how well veined and smoothly solid a single stone was-for days if one let them.
Still, if there were collectors willing to pay for a block of stone, Pinch would steal it. It was all a case of what the brokers wanted.
Approaching footsteps clacked through the sterile halls. Pinch coiled around the pillar and watched as a servant tottered into the hall. The old servitor's arms were draped with fabric-costumes of succulent silk that spilled out of his arms in hues of minted gold, their buttons like fat nobles worn smooth between a usurer's greasy fingers. Explosions of lace flared in pleats of ethereal smoke, banded roots of brocaded ribbon bound everything into one mass, and perched on top of it, like a vessel on a wave-tossed sea, was a pair of masks, grotesques of the finest manufacture.
Masks?
Iron-Biter raised the first one with all the critical judgment of proud torturer examining his craft. It was a face of sharp-stretched leather, a cow's flayed skin stretched to fiendish form. The honey-gold leather glistened under a sheen of wax buffed to shellac hardness. It was a face of deception, a gleaming smile of diabolic cheerfulness.
Apt for the owner, Pinch felt, but why masks?
The scrape of a door signaled more arrivals. Iron-Biter waved the servant away as Prince Vargo entered the hall, dressed in the careless elegance of his morning gowns. The royal heir stretched with feline abandon, ignored his dwarf henchman, and went to the table where he idly poured a goblet of ruby wine and poked at the silks and leathers cascading over the back of the chair. The dwarf stood patiently silent, his little hands barely touching across the vast plain of his chest. The soaring darkness of the hall heightened the little man's grotesque proportions, making him a fat, bright-shelled beetle over which some human giant would tower.