Thraxas - The Complete Series (33 page)

Casax grunts. “After we’ve got hold of her there won’t be much left for a trial.”

“Who is this?” demands Tholius, motioning to Soolanis, still slumbering peacefully on the couch.

“A client.”

“Your clients always sleep in here?”

“Only when they get tired.”

The Brotherhood men enter my bedroom, followed by two Civil Guards. My heart is pounding. I mentally snarl a curse at Makri. If she had to bring a murderer and arsonist here, why did it have to be one who’d offended so many important people? Between the Brotherhood and the Civil Guards, I’m finished in this city. Things couldn’t be worse if I’d challenged the King to single combat. Rivers of sweat drench my body.

I conceal my nerves. I’ve no more desire than Makri to bow down to these people. The Brotherhood might be stronger than me but I’m never going to treat its thugs with respect. I grab a bottle of klee from my cupboard and take a hefty slug, then offer it to Makri as if there was nothing wrong at all.

Casax is staring at me. “You drink too much, fat man.”

“Is that so?”

The searchers emerge from the bedroom. One of the Brotherhood men starts to speak but seems to forget how to. The other does it for him.

“In sir no one.”

“What the hell d’you mean, ‘In sir no one’?” rasps Casax, scowling.

The man shakes his head. “I mean no one in there, sir.”

One of the Civil Guards nods in agreement.

“Search the rest of the tavern,” orders Casax. Prefect Tholius instructs his men to do the same.

What do you know? The spell of bafflement worked. No stranger entering the room can find Quen.

Casax strides over to confront me. He towers over me. His skin is bad. “If you’re hiding the whore, you’re in big trouble, Thraxas. She burned down one of our places. Killed one of my men. The Brotherhood can’t allow that sort of thing to happen.”

“But you can allow one of your men to seriously assault a young woman,” says Makri, striding over in turn to confront Casax. He shrugs.

“Part of the job.”

“Really? I work in a bar too. Try sending some of your men over here to assault me.” Makri’s eyes narrow slightly. She’s still gripping her knife. Casax is surprised to find himself confronted by a young woman, but unperturbed.

“I’ve heard of you. You must be Makri. Part Human. Part Elf. Part Orc. You got pointed ears under all that hair?”

“Why don’t you take a look?” says Makri, who would certainly gut him if he tried.

Casax grins. “I hear you’re a good fighter. Very good with a blade. But don’t get ideas above your station. You’re wasting your talents here, you know. Come and work for me. Earn you a lot more money. Maybe pay for the University.”

Karlox guffaws at the idea of Makri going to University, but I’m not entirely sure that Casax’s offer isn’t serious.

Makri looks slightly disconcerted to learn that Casax knows so much about her. She doesn’t reply. She keeps her knife in her hand and her attention on her enemies.

“Sorcerer traced the whore to this tavern, Thraxas.”

“Maybe he was mistaken. The Brotherhood don’t use magic often, do they?”

“We use it when we have to. Now, where is she?”

“I’ve never seen her.”

Annoyance flickers over the Boss’s face. After the search of the tavern produces no results there is a moment of tension while he stares at us as if making up his mind whether to order his thugs to attack us there and then. He decides against it.

Before leaving Casax informs us that we will be under surveillance and if we are found to be sheltering Quen then he’ll kill us. He says this quite matter-of-factly.

“No doubt Prefect Tholius will protect me with the full weight of the law,” I suggest.

The Prefect leaves without saying anything.

When they’ve all left Makri thanks me for helping and apologises for landing me in this mess. I wave it away. I’m too worn out to be angry any more.

“Anyway, it’s good to put one over on the Brotherhood. It bugs me the way they’re always going round like they’re number one chariot around here.”

“I thought they were.”

“Well it annoys me anyway.”

Soolanis has slept though all of this and shows no sign of coming to life. I explain who she is to Makri, and wonder out loud what we’re going to do with Quen. We certainly can’t move her right now, yet it is very unsafe for her to stay. My bafflement spell isn’t going to fool a prying Sorcerer for long, though it’s true that the Brotherhood generally rely on muscle and fear rather than magic and may not be using a top-class Wizard.

“Incidentally, Makri, why did you put her in my bed? Wouldn’t she be more comfortable in your room?”

Before Makri can answer the door opens. Dandelion appears.

“Did you persuade him yet?” she says.

“There wasn’t room,” explains Makri. “I, eh … said Dandelion could stay for a while.”

I groan. Dandelion starts talking about dolphins but I’m already on my way downstairs.

“A beer, Gurd, and quickly.”

“Trouble with the Brotherhood?” says Gurd, seeing the shaky state I’m in.

“I can cope with the Brotherhood,” I tell him. “It’s the sisterhood that’s getting to me.”

I
need to send a message to Astrath Triple Moon to see if we can do anything to boost the spell of bafflement to keep Quen hidden till we decide what to do about her. I can’t go myself. Walking straight out of here and round to a friendly Sorcerer would be a sure sign of what I was up to. The same goes for Makri, and anyway she doesn’t want to miss her afternoon lecture in rhetoric. Gurd and Tanrose can’t leave the bar and Palax and Kaby are out busking on the streets. Which is the sum total of people I can trust.

“Dandelion could go,” suggests Makri.

I let forth some abuse about Dandelion, pointing out that a woman who walks around Turai in bare feet with flowers in her hair is likely to be as much use as a one-legged gladiator when it comes to practical matters.

“She casts horoscopes for dolphins, for God’s sake.”

“The Brotherhood won’t suspect her.”

True enough. We send Dandelion with the message.

“You know, Makri, two days ago I was sitting here without a care in the world. How did all this happen?”

“You got annoyed because Prefect Tholius dragged Grosex out of your room.”

So I did. Foolish of me. I didn’t need to do anything. Wasn’t even hired to do anything. And now I’m looking for a two-ton statue and trying to find the wife of a murdered sculptor. Which led me into the affair of Thalius Green Eye and his inebriated daughter, again entirely my own fault.

“But Quen was nothing to do with me. You landed me in that one. What did the landlord do to her anyway?”

Makri doesn’t want to go into details, though she seems satisfied that burning down his tavern and him in the process was a reasonable act of retaliation. She’s hopeful that if she can protect her from her immediate danger then some of the more powerful women in the Association of Gentlewomen will look after her, maybe providing funds for her to leave Turai and set up somewhere else.

Soolanis finally wakes just as Makri is taking her leave, wrapped in the large cloak she is obliged to wear at the Guild College. Her chainmail bikini proved to be far too distracting for young students and old professors alike, and even her man’s tunic showed off too much of her legs, apparently.

“What’s the matter with these people?” complains Makri. “If it’s not one thing it’s another. Now I have to sit at the back of the class wrapped up like a mummy just because they can’t concentrate on the lesson.”

Soolanis needs a drink. I pass her some water. If she wants to drink herself to death that’s her affair, but I need her to stay sober long enough to tell me some details of the case. She drinks the water with the same lack of enthusiasm I might show in the same circumstances.

“Where did you get that?” she asks abruptly, rising to her feet and pointing at Makri’s purse.

“I took it from the neck of a man I killed.”

“It’s my father’s,“ says Soolanis. “It has his name embroidered on it.”

I study the purse. And indeed, the name of Thalius Green Eye is embroidered in tiny letters in one of the arcane magic languages normally reserved for spells. It’s something I should have spotted earlier, though the writing is very small and intertwined with the rest of the needlework.

Soolanis is highly agitated. Myself, I’m puzzled. What’s the connection between the man who walked into the bar and tried to kill me, and Thalius Green Eye?

I ask Makri to leave the purse behind, and she does so. Quen is still sleeping in my bedroom. I leave her be for the moment, but when night comes she’s going to have to go and struggle for space in Makri’s room. I surrender my bed for no one. And I don’t share it with anyone, either.

“All right, Soolanis. Tell me everything you know about your father’s death.”

Soolanis tells me that Thalius was always in trouble with money. He was a minor figure at the Imperial Palace, outshone by the talents of the other Sorcerers, and even his business of drawing up horoscopes for lesser aristocrats was on the wane. It’s expensive living in Thamlin and the upkeep of his villa in Truth is Beauty Lane soon led him into debt.

“He didn’t know where to turn. So he turned to dwa.”

The dwa made him forget his problems but the natural consequence was that his problems worsened. Less work, more expense. He couldn’t even face going to the Palace unless he was full of dwa, and when he made it there he was in no state to draw up a horoscope.

“After a while it took over his life.”

I get the impression that somewhere at that time drink took over for Soolanis. When the neighbours started talking about Thalius she found it almost impossible to face the world without fortifying herself.

Despite the poor state Thalius was reduced to, he was never forbidden to enter the Palace, which suggests that he might have been taking something there that someone important wanted quite badly. Prince Frisen-Akan has already been in trouble because of his liking for dwa.

“You think your father was killed because he couldn’t pay his dealer?”

“Probably. That’s what happens, isn’t it?”

She claims not to know who his dealer was. Because Thalius was killed by a crossbow I question her about Sarin the Merciless, but the name doesn’t ring a bell and she doesn’t recognise my description of her. For the past four months she’s been so obliterated by alcohol that she can’t recollect much of what’s been going on around her.

She looks sadly at the small purse. “He liked this. Never let it out of his sight. Do you have any wine?”

I shake my head. I never developed a taste for it. I take her a beer, which serves just as well.

“I’d say it was unusual for a Sorcerer to be killed over a dwa debt. Not impossible, but the dealer would rather have the money, and there must have been stuff in the house your father could have sold. Unless it wasn’t just a small debt for his own dwa. Perhaps he owed much more. Was he dealing himself?”

The thought of her father actually dealing dwa brings tears to Soolanis’s eyes. She admits that it’s possible, but she doesn’t know.

I muse on these things. If Thalius was a rather larger player in dwa than his daughter realised it might explain why the Guards have covered up the facts of the case. Drug scandals have already come too close to the Palace, particularly in the person of Prince Frisen-Akan, and the authorities wouldn’t want any more trouble. Consul Kalius has already had to hide the Prince’s shortcomings from the public. The politics of Turai are in a perpetually fragile state and Senator Lodius, the leader of the anti-royalist Populares, is always quick to pounce on any scandal he can use for his own ends.

Prince Frisen-Akan is keen on dwa and I have no doubt that he’s not the only one among his circle who is. If Thalius Green Eye was supplying them it would explain why he wasn’t thrown out of the Palace and also how he might have accrued enough debts to get himself killed. Taking a shipment of dwa and failing to make the payment is a stupid thing to do, but it happens surprisingly often, with inevitable results.

I’m considering the possibilities of Thalius taking dwa into the Palace when an odd thought occurs. Why was he so fond of the purse? This one is nothing special. All sort of things can have sentimental value, but I don’t recall meeting anyone who was overly attached to their purse.

I study it. It’s small and the top fastens with two drawstrings, the sort of thing for holding a few gurans. No room for anything else. I mutter a word in the old Sorcerers“ language, a common word for commanding something to open. I sense a fractional cooling in the air. I draw on the two strings and the purse opens, and keeps opening. It opens an impossible amount.

Soolanis gapes in astonishment as I draw the small mouth of the purse further and further apart till it eventually reaches the length of my outstretched arms.

“What is it?” she asks, disconcerted by the impossibility of what she’s seeing.

“The magic space,” I reply. “Or rather an opening into the magic space. Another dimension, whatever that means. This is no ordinary purse. It’s a magic pocket.”