Chapter fourteen
Like fish struggling upstream, the audience battled their way out beneath the collapsing folds of cloth. The uproar was just as prodigious as a sensible man would expect. By the fuzzy pink light of the Maiden with the Many Smiles we stared on that heaving scene. I stuffed the kalider away and moved across the boardwalk where mud lay in thick cakes from heedless boots.
“Watch for the rast! Spread around the marquee.”
“This is not in the plan, Jak!” Kimche looked wild, gesticulating, his bald yellow head glistening in streaks of mingled color in the moons’ light.
“But it will get him out, Kimche. We need to ask him, do we not?”
“Aye. Aye, Jak, that we do.”
No one could believe the marquee had fallen of itself and the first conjectures, expressed with many oaths, took the view that some god or spirit inimical to Beng Drudoj Flying Alsh had wrecked the bouts out of spite. Some very watchable fights started between the pirates and the steelworkers, and drew admiring crowds. No doubt Beng Drudoj Grip and Fall took pleasure from this substitute entertainment. The light of torches splashed the scene with vivid color. The smell and mood of the crowds thickened. The wrestlers from the Golden Prychan spread out and pretty soon Sly Nath the Trivet came arunning, pointing. His eye was beginning to look magnificent. We followed him and saw a group of men staggering out from the folds of fallen cloth. They staggered up amid much blasphemy. The guards had come running up; but the marquee was fallen and they couldn’t put it up again. The wrestling was abandoned for the night. The cut guy ropes were found, and the blasphemies mounted against the night sky. Sly Nath, eye and all, was chuckling away to himself.
Well, yes, it was funny, too, if you thought about it…
We followed Jimstye Gaptooth and the bravo-fighter Miklasu, as they went off with their people. I would not have been surprised if they stayed at an inn called The Black Neemu; but its name was The Wristy Grip, which showed how proud they were of their wrestlers.
“I,” said Fat Lorgan, “do not have my club with the nail in its head with me.”
“I think, Jak,” said Kimche, after due consideration, “that I would like to have a sword. A Khamorro can break the bones of a swordsman, that is well known; but if the swordsman is very good, an unarmed man has no chance. It is a matter of relative skills.”
I well knew that Kimche would have the skills of the sword, being a Chulik.
“I only want to talk to this Gaptooth, not fight his army of khamsters.”
“But the two will of necessity go together.”
“May Drig take the fellow!” I am used to going ahunting alone. I said, briskly, “Do you return to the Golden Prychan and fetch what weapons you have, and mine, also. I shall sniff around a little. Something May Turn Up.” Shades of Quienyin!
The fairground formed a pulsing bubble of light and noise in the moonlit night. The Wristy Grip reached up three imposing stories, and many windows were illuminated, and the sounds of revelry within indicated a good night was being enjoyed.
If you consider me a bash-on sort of fellow, well, you may be right in that I like to get on with it. But I fancied that it would be less than clever to go in the front door acting as an ordinary customer. I eyed the upper windows. It was a climb under the moons of Kregen for me…
Kimche and the others trailed off, and I sensed they were not too sure about leaving me. But I told them to get back with the naked steel and to think about the Khamorros. As they went off into the shadows I went around to the back of the inn.
Climbing into other people’s houses, and inns, and palaces, is a tricky business; but one which has its own lessons. I clawed up a vine by the rear wall, and chinned myself to a ledge, and so opened a window, whose wood, while warped, did not squeak, and so dropped silently into a darkened room. The sounds of breathing came from a bed, half-seen.
I tiptoed to the door and let myself out into a corridor.
I knew exactly what I wanted.
If Turko was being held prisoner, which seemed the only explanation for his absence, it appeared highly unlikely he would be held here in the inn. But — he might be. So I eased to the head of the stairs and had not to wait too long before a potman came puffing up. He was looking for fresh candles, as he was relieved to tell me. He was a Fristle. His green and yellow striped apron was bunched around his neck when he spoke to me, and my fist was tight around the cloth.
“And where is the Khamorro they hold prisoner here?”
His cat’s eyes goggled. “No, notor, no — I know nothing of any prisoner!”
Eventually, I believed him. I pondered.
Brown shadows lay thick in the corridor. Dust hung in the air and tickled the nostril. The sounds of revelry from below wafted up faintly, as from a distant shore. The corridor was very quiet. I knew that I could not trust this Fristle potman an inch.
Wrapping his unconscious body in his striped apron, I stowed him away in a broom cupboard. Then I started down the stairs.
The doors of the rooms of the next floor down were all closed, and from the sounds within I judged it prudent to let them remain shut. At the far end of the corridor a double door promised to reveal something more interesting. I put my ear to it. The rumbling sounds of conversation could not be interpreted into words. Again, I pondered.
It seemed most likely to me that Gaptooth and his cronies would have a private suite here, and these rooms were likely to lie beyond this double door. So, very well, then. In we go… The double doors were locked. So I kicked them in. Beyond them lay a small anteroom and the doors at the far end opened almost instantly at the racket I had made and men crowded in. Some were Khamorros and some bore naked steel.
“I have come to see Jimstye Gaptooth,” I said. “Is this the way to greet an old friend?”
That held them for the space of three heartbeats.
As soon as I spoke I realized I had been too clever for my own good. As an old friend, my story would be stupid. My story, to hold water, would demand a rueful admission of misplaced loyalty. Why, with a glib story all ready, had I blurted out this nonsense about being an old friend?
They ushered me into the chambers beyond the anteroom. The place was furnished with a kind of tongue- licking lavishness I found not to my taste. Gaptooth bustled forward, very much the center of attention. At his shoulder hovered the bravo-fighter.
So, one story having been shot and the other about to be shot to pieces, I decided I would have to bait this Jimstye.
“Old friend? I don’t know you. Who the devil are you?”
“I am Nalgre ti Hamonlad,” I said, inventing on the spot with a nudge-nudge to the swordsman, Miklasu, in the use of the name Nalgre.
“But I know him, the nulsh!” spoke up a Khamorro I had thrown over the bronze chains at least three times.
“And I! Let me at him in fair fight-” Others crowded forward.
“If you choose not to recognize me, Jimstye,” I said brightly, over the hubbub, “then that is your affair. I did not know you were in Mahendrasmot, otherwise I would have signed up with you instead of that mangy lot at the Golden Prychan.”
So, I had blended both stories. Let him chew on the implications of his refusal to acknowledge an old friend.
He looked annoyed.
“I’ve never met you — but if you are the man who-”
“He is! He is, the rast!”
The fellow who spoke thus, a husky khamster, stood near enough to enable me to take his arm in a grip to
