Shadow Prowler (32 page)

“He did that, and then he withdrew into the shadows, to wait for a buyer or a client.”

“Wonderful! So now for the second favor. You know everyone who wants to buy anything that’s a little bit hot?”

“Well, I do a bit . . .”

“Don’t be so modest. Tomorrow morning you’ll meet the head of the Guild of Thieves and tell him that someone new has turned up who will buy this item from him for, let’s say . . . twenty thousand gold pieces.”

“But that would be a lie!”

That made me laugh.

“Gozmo, don’t try to tell me that you’re an honest man and you never lie. I won’t believe you.”

“But Markun and his lads will feed me to the fish under the piers!”

“Don’t worry about it. I swear on Sagot that soon Markun will forget all about you for years and years. Will you tell him?”

“I will,” Gozmo muttered.

“All right, say he has to be in the inn at ten minutes to midnight.
Tomorrow. Or, rather, today. Yes! And you can take an advance from him to cover the damage to your inn, in case the deal doesn’t go down.”

“What damage?”

“Don’t get nervous. You’ll just have to wipe the blood off the floor and that’ll be it. Tell Markun and his lads to be here, and to bring the goods with them. Say this is the only time when the customer can meet them. Markun’s too greedy not to show up.”

“What about the damage?”

“Forget it. Nothing terrible will happen,” I declared in a perfectly honest tone of voice.

“I don’t know what you’ve thought up, Harold, but I don’t like it one bit.”

“But you have to agree that it’s better than losing your life.” I got to him there. “All right now, it’s time for me to go. It was nice to see you.”

“Hey, Harold, I’ll do what you ask, but you have to promise you’ll forget all the minor inconveniences that I caused you without intending any harm.”

“It’s a deal, my friend,” I lied.

I didn’t feel like leaving through the window; the usual way seemed more attractive, although it is true that I had to walk backward all the way to the door, since good old Gozmo was famous for his skill in throwing even the very heaviest of knives. I couldn’t be sure that he didn’t have some other nasty toys hidden away under the mattress. I didn’t trust the old swindler any more than a crayfish duke, and life is far too pleasant a thing to part with it as stupidly as that.

I had no doubt at all that Gozmo would do as I had asked. He really had no choice. Unless he wanted to get out of town or tell Markun all about our nocturnal conversation. But the first choice was impossible—he would have to abandon his beloved inn—and as for the second . . . Would you conclude an alliance with a bloodthirsty snake, knowing perfectly well that he would bite you on the heel just when you weren’t expecting it? There, you see. Neither would Gozmo. He would rather put his trust in Harold, and he would try to earn a little bit of money from the guild as well, in the hope that everything would turn out all right.

I pulled back the bolt on the main door and slipped out into the street. I couldn’t give a damn whether Gozmo closed the inn after me or left it wide open to the whim of gods and vagabonds.

T
he day that followed turned out pretty topsy-turvy. I went round to a dozen different places in order to put a couple of ideas into action. If everything went well, the night ahead was going to be a pretty dramatic one, although the actors still had no idea of the roles they were destined to play. What I had to do now was put the final touches on the production and warn the last few participants about the imminent performance. And so I paid a visit to Archmagician Artsivus’s house.

The archmagician wasn’t in, and I asked Roderick to pass on his invitation to the friendly little party. The young lad looked rather astonished, but he promised to relay the message in detail.

And then, having done everything that had to be done, I set off with an easy heart to For’s place, to while away the long hours until night.

But my teacher was not in, so I was left to my own devices in his apartment. After spending a couple of hours wandering round the rooms from one corner to another, I finally realized that I was far too nervous altogether and it was not doing my fragile health any good.

I studied For’s wine vault and pulled out a bottle of wine. After twirling it thoughtfully in my hands, I regretfully put it back. The last thing I needed now was to arrive at the inn drunk and spoil the party. I would just have to sit here going quietly out of my mind while I waited for night to arrive.

I sat in an armchair for a while, checked my crossbow for the hundredth time, even shaved, since I had more than enough time on my hands. Then I gazed vacantly out of the window, wondering what I could do to keep busy. But unfortunately, not a single decent idea came to mind,
and I almost started howling out loud in my anxiety and impatience, until I was suddenly struck by the thought of reading the papers I’d retrieved from the Tower of the Order. Greatly encouraged by this brilliant idea, I was all set to immerse myself completely in the lake of knowledge.

But the papers had disappeared without a trace.

I turned everything upside down, starting with For’s writing desk and ending with the mattress on his bed. I even looked under the bed, but apart from a rather impressive layer of dust and a startled spider, there was nothing there.

I had to pause for breath and try a different approach. There was no doubt that the papers were somewhere in these chambers. For wouldn’t have taken them anywhere else unless something really terrible had happened. So I started the search all over again, trusting to my own experience and my knowledge of my friend’s habits.

I tapped the floor with the handle of a knife until I heard the dull sound that indicates a secret hiding place. And I actually heard it twice. But my discoveries were disappointing. When I pried up a stone slab under the table, I discovered a rather fine casket packed with royal gold pieces. A little nest egg set aside for a rainy day.

I discovered the second hiding place beside an old bookcase, where the floor was covered with a mosaic illustrating the sins of man. Good old For had decided to demonstrate his distinctive sense of humor by concealing his riches under the tile bearing the inscription
GREED
. There was rather more gold here than in the first hiding place and I assumed I had discovered the secret treasury of the servants of Sagot. To my professional eye, it looked like six or seven thousand gold pieces. A huge amount of money. Enough to build your very own castle, if you wanted. But, as ill luck would have it, the papers I was looking for weren’t there. I spent about an hour examining the floor, and then started looking for hiding places in the furniture. In one of the drawers of the writing desk I discovered a double bottom, where my dear teacher kept his correspondence with the priests from Garrak. I don’t think it was really secret, otherwise For would have hidden the letters somewhere more secure. These papers had probably been left there to distract the attention of fools from something much more important. Feeling that the solution to the mystery was already close at hand, I returned to the search with
renewed zeal and carefully sounded out all the chairs, and even the carved headboard of the bed. Not a thing. Might as well try to find a dwarf who smokes! Now came the most difficult part—checking the walls.

This time lady luck smiled on me, and when I tapped on one of the frescoes with the soft cushions of my fingertips, I heard a faint sound that was very slightly different from the usual one. Now I had to figure out how to get into the hiding place.

Make a hole in the wall? No, that would be vulgar, to say the least. I’m a master thief, after all, not some potbellied petty burglar; I don’t like doing things the crude way unless there are good reasons for it. And I wasn’t stealing, I was simply taking my own papers, which the solicitous For had hidden. I thought my teacher would be rather upset if I ruined this original set of frescoes and left him a hole in the wall as a memento.

I had to feel every single inch in the hope of activating some secret lock. Of course, if the lock of the hiding place involved magic, I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. I would just have to wait for For. . . . Although I did have something in the stores that I bought from the greedy master Honchel that might do the trick for me.

I got my bag, rummaged about in it for a moment, and eventually fished out a little bottle containing a milky-white elixir. A skeleton key for various kinds of magic locks. I splashed a generous dose of the sharp-smelling liquid on the wall where I assumed the hiding place was concealed. When they landed on the fresco, the drops flared up for a moment like brilliant rubies and melted away into the air, as if they had never been there at all. But the wall became transparent, and then the fresco with the picture of a bull slid smoothly to one side, revealing the entrance to the hiding place, a massive metal door of gnome workmanship.

The lock looked pretty serious. I cleared my throat and moved a table up to the wall, since the safe was set rather high. I climbed up, sat in a comfortable position, took my faithful lock picks out of my bag, and started fiddling about. It was more than twenty minutes before the final spring reluctantly clicked and the door opened slightly, moving a mere hair’s breadth away from the wall. I laughed happily and reached out my hand, but then jerked it back again.

I really ought to check the secret safe for traps set for impatient fools.
For was quite capable of installing some horrible device out of old habit. But no—there was no hidden spring or loaded crossbow or any other nasty little trick.

The safe proved to be small. No valuables. Only papers. I didn’t start delving into the secrets of the priestly brotherhood—the lads had their own little games and it wouldn’t be right for me to go sticking my curious nose into them. I simply took what was mine and closed the door. The moment the lock clicked, the magical fresco reappeared, concealing the ugly opening in the wall. A casual observer would never have guessed that there was a safe hidden there.

I dragged the table back to its former position and sat down to study the documents thoroughly, since I still had four hours left. I glanced quickly through the rhymed riddle and then turned to the map of Hrad Spein.

But the progress I made in all that time was hardly worth a bent penny. Corridors, halls, entryways, rooms, hidey-holes, tunnels, caves, and underground palaces. And it was all woven into some kind of tight tangle of snakes suffering agonizing deaths from their own venom. A labyrinth thousands of years old, the foundations of which were laid by someone unknown at a time when the orcs, the first race of the new age, had not yet appeared in Siala.

When it was almost evening and my eyes were tired and good old For still hadn’t put in an appearance, I tore myself away from the maps and put the documents in my bag. I felt too lazy to fiddle with the secret fresco again, and I didn’t want to waste any more of the magical liquid either, so I thought my old bag would be a safe enough hiding place.

It was time to be off.

In principle, I didn’t really have to go anywhere. But I was tormented by a mixture of doubt and curiosity—would my plan work? And would Artsivus believe what I had asked Roderick to tell him? Because, if the archmagician ignored what I had said, the rhole plan would all go to the Darkness, together with the demon who managed to snatch the Horse with his clawed fingers.
8/p>

Evening sas drawing on.

That time of day had arrived when the world is colored in every
shade of gray. The sun had not yet sunk behind the hOrizon, but it was ready to retire, and the moon looked like a snow owl. For just one hour the gigantic, drowsy bird known as twIlight had spread its wings over the city.

A suspicious silence had spread along the Street of the Sleepy Dog. This meant that some dark business was in the offing and somebody’s blood might be spilled. Therefore the inhabitants of the houses in the area had gone scurrying off on highly important, but imaginary business, with an air of serious haste, and it was hardly surprising that as the lazy twilight’s gentle hands felt their way along the stone walls of the houses, they found almost no one in the street.

Ah, but that was just it—
almost
no one.

The street was not actually empty. There were a few lads about with an appearance that was quite easily recognized—the kind of appearance possessed by certain individuals who are at odds with the law and prepared to slip their hands into the pocket of Baron Lanten himself.