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.
11
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.
With an arch sniff at his wine, Vargo flipped the mask he'd been examining back onto the table. 'Not very original… best you could do, Iron-Biter?'
Echoes bedeviled Pinch's ears, taunting him with words he could almost hear.
'I chose them to show restraint, milord,' the dwarf rumbled like a kettledrum. '… appear modest during the ceremony. It will not do for the chosen… decked out like a harlequin.'
Vargo glanced over his shoulder at Iron-Biter, deigning to give the man the least of his attention. 'I… calling for the ritual in the… masque… undignified enough. You… advising… a fool of me?' With a gentle brush at his mustache, Vargo sipped at his wine.
Behind the pillar, it was hopeless for Pinch to hear their conversation clearly, and he dearly needed to. They were plotting, and plots discovered were what would give the rogue the edge. He needed to be closer. Carefully he scanned the ground between himself them. On the opposite side of the hall and much closer to his quarry was another line of pillars, a good spot to lurk and pry. The morning sun and the flickering stubs of the night candles cast a weave of half-shadows across the floor between here and there, not quite darkness and not quite day. A quick, quiet shift and he would be in position to hear all.
With the care of a carnival tightrope walker, Pinch sidled away from the shelter of the pillar. Iron-Biter seemed absorbed in the presence of his lord, and Vargo viewed the world with bored indifference, but Pinch knew the latter, at least, was a lie. His elder cousin was the hawk who never quite looked on the world with closed eyes.
With one eye to the floor and the other always on his adversaries, Pinch drifted across the gap to the other side. Years of practice made the move look effortless, indeed casual. He took care never to move fast enough to
