places.
The informant had never showed his face, which didn't really surprise Alberich. He'd never reckoned the odds to be better than even at best. The man might have gotten cold feet; or he might even be entirely cold at this point — cold and dead. If so, it was fifty-fifty whether Alberich would ever find out what had happened to him. Bodies didn't always turn up. Even when the river was frozen over, there were plenty of ways in which a corpse could vanish without a trace. The people Alberich suspected of intrigue against the Queen were powerful, and had a very great deal to lose if they were unmasked. They had the ways and means to insure that more than one petty informant vanished without a trace if they cared to make it so.
The Herald sipped his stale beer, and watched the rest of the customers from beneath lowered eyelids. In the back of his mind, he felt his Companion fretting at the situation, and soothed him wordlessly. He knew that no one was going to recognize him, no matter what Kantor thought. Alberich did not stand out in this crowd of ne'er- do-wells, pickpockets, and petty thieves.
He probably wouldn't had he not bothered to disguise himself; he never would wear the traditional uniform of Herald's Whites even when presiding over the classes of Heraldic Trainees in his capacity as the Collegium Weaponsmaster, preferring instead a leather uniform of a slightly darker gray than the color used by the Trainees.
Herald's Whites — let those with fewer sins on their souls wear the Whites. He'd have worn black, if the Queen hadn't expressly forbidden it.
“Bad enough that you look like a storm cloud,”; she'd told him. “I won't have them calling you 'Herald Death.’ You stand out quite enough as it is from the rest of the Heraldic Circle.”; He didn't point out to her that they might as well call him “Herald Death,” that his business was Death, the ways and means of dealing it out. He simply bowed and let her have her way. She was the Queen, after all.
But at the moment, he was not on official duty, and he wore nothing like a uniform; his clothing was as drably no-colored, as tattered and patched as that of any man around him. His unfashionably short hair was concealed beneath an ancient knitted cap of indeterminate shape and origin. Only his sword and knives — themselves both disguised beneath plain, worn leather sheaths — would have told a different story about him.
Or perhaps not; to a slum-dwelling bullyboy, his sword was his life, and many of them bore weapons of superior make. A blade that bent or snapped, or wouldn't hold an edge, wasn't the sort of tool to risk your life on. Alberich was supposed to be that sort of sell-sword, a man whose blade went to the man with the price of it, with no questions asked on either side.
In the absence of his informant, Alberich was going to have to pretend he was here for the same reason as everyone else; to get drunk. He would probably have to use this tavern again, and he definitely needed to keep in character; he didn't dare break this carefully constructed persona. It had taken too long to build.
Most of the beer was going to hit the floor, though. Like many of the patrons here, he had his own mug, a leather-jack, tarred on the inside to make it waterproof and kept tied to his waist when not in use. Only, unlike theirs, his had a hole in the bottom; he seldom took an actual sip when the mug went to his lips. He relied on the slow but steady leak and the crack in the table he sat at to conceal where the rest of it got to. No one in this place was going to notice beer on the floor under the layer of rushes that hadn't been changed for a year or more. Only when his mouth dried or he needed something to wash the stench of the place from his tongue did he actually drink. The beer, stale and flat, was still preferable to the taste left behind in breathing the miasma of this miserable tavern.
Impatience made his head throb, and he forced himself to look bored instead of pained. He was wondering just how many more mugs of the noxious stuff he'd have to down before he pretended to stagger out, when the street outside erupted into what sounded like a riot.
Shouts — screams! His heart rose into his throat, and his pulse hammered in his ears as every nerve in his body reacted to the alarm.
He — and virtually everyone else in the tavern — jumped to their feet and ran for the door. He wasn't slow to react, but there were still plenty of people who were between him and it. He ran right into a wall of jostling bodies.
He told himself that this was a good diversion to get out and back to the Collegium, but he couldn't help himself. The noise out there was of panic and fear, and he had to respond. For the rest, of course, any disturbance held a potential for profit…
Sweat stink mingled with a different kind of smoke — this was coming from the street outside. The noise now was like nothing he'd heard off a battlefield. He shoved his way through the crush at the door ruthlessly, elbowing one man in the ribs and brutally kicking another in the knee to get them out of the way. Both men swore and turned on him; both shrank out of the way when they saw who it was. He had a formidable reputation here; another reason why he was reluctant to sacrifice this persona. He could virtually come and go as he liked unmolested, and it had taken him no few knife fights to build that reputation. He had yet to draw his sword in here, which was a mercy, though his opponents only thought he was showing his contempt for them by meeting their swords with his knives. The poor fools had no idea that he was saving them from almost certain death at his hands if he pulled the longer blade. It wasn't his skill he was worried about, it was theirs; he'd seen drunken brawls end fatally when one idiot slipped and rammed himself onto another's sword. It had happened while he watched far too often to want to see that happen with him holding the blade. And it wasn't because he liked them that he spared their wretched lives, it was because if he killed a man, even by accident, the Watch would come, and there would be questions, and there would go his hard work in establishing Rokassan among the bully-boys.
That was why it was Alberich here, and not another Herald. He was… practical.
He delivered another elbow blow to a set of ribs, this time with enough force to it to make the man in his way
