“Nearly there now,” Relam murmured. “Then you’re free, commander.”
They made good time to the grove, where the guards set the canvas bag down with a muffled thump. Rain was still falling, slipping from the leaves of the trees in large droplets and splashing downwards. Relam shook his head vigorously to rid himself of a particularly large drop.
“Get a hole dug,” he ordered, stepping back. “Anyone see a log or something we can use?”
“That’s not really necessary,” one of the guards pointed out. “There’s no one around for miles.”
Relam looked around cautiously, searching for any sign that they were being watched. The good news was, there weren’t many places an observer could hide. The bad news was it meant Narin would be out in the open if he tried to leave the grove.
“Dig a grave anyway,” Relam said, handing one of the guards the shovel. “Switch off if you need to. We’ll just bury the bag, since there aren’t any logs lying around.”
The guard dug the shovel into the ground, ripping a chunk out of the earth’s skin and tossing it to one side. Then, he widened the hole with another massive load of dirt. Shovelful after shovelful piled up to one side as the grave began to take shape. When a space some two meters by one had been cleared and dug about a shovel head deep, the guard passed the shovel to one of his comrades. The second guard dug down, deepening the grave another shovel head before yielding to the third guard and finally the fourth.
When the forth man stepped back, the grave was about a meter deep, plenty large enough for their purposes. Relam surveyed the finished product critically, then grunted.
“All right, Narin. Out you come.”
The guard commander crawled out of the canvas bag just as the rain picked up considerably, falling with such force that drops actually rang on the guards’ armor. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I rather preferred the bag,” Narin muttered, getting to his feet and wiping his muddy hands on some leaves.
Relam grinned. “The bag’s going in the ground, remember? Guards, bury him.”
Two guards hefted the bag at either end and, pretending it still weighed as much as a full-grown man, awkwardly lowered it into the hole, letting it fall the final few centimeters. Then, they all stood staring down at it for a few long seconds.
“Let’s finish the job,” Relam said finally, looking up at the sky. “Fill it in.”
The guards accomplished this by the simple expedient of shoving large handfuls of earth back into the pit, with one guard using the shovel to push larger amounts. In seconds, the grave was merely a stretch of freshly turned up earth, the grave of any common criminal.
“How does it feel to be dead and buried, commander?” one guard asked.
“Rather like being alive,” Narin replied with a slight smile. “Thank you, your highness, for saving my life.”
“It was the right thing to do,” Relam grunted. “You sure you’ll be all right?”
“Positive,” the former commander replied.
“Good,” Relam said, nodding. “By the way, the code that was given to me earlier. What did it say?”
Narin pulled out the slip of parchment, now slightly damp from the rain soaking through his pocket. “This means that I may have my first lead.”
“On my mother’s death?”
“Yes. My informant possesses ‘I’, information, and wants to meet at the Red Hog, that’s RG-”
“Shouldn’t it be RH?” Relam interrupted, frowning. “That’s the first letter of each word.”
“Ah, but our code does not use the first letter of each word,” Narin said, smiling. “That’s the beauty of it. Anyone would immediately associate the letters RH with the Red Hog as a meeting place. But by taking the first letter of the first word and the last letter of the last word we get a different, totally unrecognizable acronym.”
“Brilliant,” Relam murmured.
“And it works even better in cases where the meeting place is more than two words,” Narin added. “Because no one in their right mind would think a two-letter acronym stood for a place with more than two words.”
“Fascinating. What about the rest of it?”
“Oh, the five is the fifth day of the week, two days from now. Perfect timing actually, since that is also a market day. The E stands for evening, the time I should expect to see my man arrive at the Red Hog, and the T-N-N is the informant’s identification number, based on the old Gobel-Tek system. Are you familiar with it?”
“Not remotely,” Relam replied, looking around at the guards, who looked just as confused as he was.
“Good,” Narin said. “That’s the reason we chose it. The old plainsmen used a numbering system of ‘T’s, ‘N’s, ‘E’s, and a few other letters to indicate amounts. T is ten, N is one, E is fifty, and so on. So, T-N-N translates to twelve.”
“Fascinating,” Relam said. “I must remember that. How many informers do you have?”
“A lot,” Narin replied.
“At least twelve,” one of the guards put in.
“Not exactly,” the guard commander countered. “Each man picks his own number. I have one man that wanted the number two-thousand-six-hundred and forty-three.
