James had to admit, they were often lovely sunsets.
He realized he was getting giddy and forced his mind to clarity as he stumbled towards his destination. As he moved slowly along, he reviewed how he had managed to find himself in this predicament. Since returning from the north and his very odd adventures involving the mad pirate named Bear, he had been investigating the presence of a rival gang in Krondor, headed by a mysterious figure known only as the Crawler.
In the last four months life in Krondor had returned as much to normal as it ever did. The prince was busy overseeing the welfare of half a nation, including being the primary spokesman for his brother the king to both the Island Kingdom of Queg and the Free Cities of Natal–the Kingdom’s chief trading partners in the west, as well as its chief military threat. Bulk goods from the northern province of Yabon came down the coast to be brokered and sent eastward, while luxury goods from the east and down in the Empire came through on their way to Yabon, the Free Cities, and the Far Coast.
But one thing hadn’t returned to normal, and that was criminal activity.
Which was why the Prince of Krondor’s personal squire found himself bleeding more than he’d prefer in a side street near the boundary between the Merchants’ Quarter and the Poor Quarter of the city. For weeks he had paid every rumour-monger and informant he could trust to provide half-way decent intelligence and had bullied, threatened and bribed any Mocker he could find, in order to try to piece together a picture of what was going on here.
When the Crawler had first appeared on the scene he had been viewed as merely one more interloper, an ambitious upstart who would be quickly destroyed or absorbed by the Upright Man’s Mockers. By the time James had left the city to deal with the problem surrounding the theft of the Tear of the Gods–the Ishapian Temple’s most revered artefact–he had sensed that something was already different about this gang. There was a relationship between the Crawler and some very evil and bloody magic that was plaguing the principality. He couldn’t connect the events of the last few years since uncovering the demon cult in the Jal-Pur desert, the loss of the Tear of the Gods, and other odd occurrences directly to the Crawler and his men, but what James called his ‘bump of trouble’ told him there was, somehow, a connection, and he intended to discover what it was.
James had undertaken that mission for the prince and the Ishapians a few months previously, and since returning to Krondor he and Jazhara, the prince’s advisor on magic, had been poring over reports, searching for those that directly or indirectly referenced the sort of events that might point back to the Crawler and his allies.
A pattern had emerged. Although it centred on Krondor, it extended from Durbin in the west on the coast of Kesh, all the way north to Ylith, southernmost city in Yabon Province. It had taken a lot of work, but the prince had set it as a high priority: the attempted theft of the Tear of the Gods had troubled him deeply. There were few truly sacred things in life, but the Tear was one of them: without it, all the temples in the world would be cut off from the gods for ten years until a new Tear was formed in the mountains to the west. James was one of the few outside the Ishapian Temple even to know that the Tear existed. That knowledge illustrated the level of threat: someone else knew what it was and had tried to seize it for their own use, or to deny it to the Ishapians.
Whether he was architect or agent, James did not know; but that the Crawler played a part in this he did not doubt at all.
He willed himself to take one painful step after another, holding his left arm tightly against his side, using his soaked tunic to staunch the blood flow as much as he could. His mind kept trying to wander, but he forced himself to focus on what he knew so far.
Weeks of enquiry had brought James to a meeting that had a high probability of being between independent smugglers who were avoiding both the Crown’s scrutiny and the Mockers’ oversight, and an important agent of the Crawler. He had conferred with three of his informants, and then personally ventured out to observe this meeting.
He leaned against the wall and blinked hard, shaking his head, both to clear it and in self-recrimination at his own arrogance.
It had been a trap.
James pushed himself away from the wall and managed to get as far as the corner. He judged the time to be some three hours before dawn: the palace chirurgeon would be less than pleased to be woken in the dead of night to sew up the prince’s squire yet again.
Still, thought James as he half-walked, half-staggered through the empty Merchants’ Quarter, it wasn’t as if the man hadn’t done it many times before.
What had struck James about talking with his informants in the basement room of the inn owned by one of the Mockers he trusted most, was that they were truly frightened. A few confrontations between the Upright Man’s bashers and agents of the Crawler had produced more dead bashers than expected; moreover, the Crawler had made his intentions clear enough by looting a very special shed near the Royal Customs where items of high value were secreted away until cooperative customs agents came on duty. The contents of that shed were worth a half-year’s theft, extortion and robbery to the Mockers, and the Upright Man had put out the word that any man who brought him the identity of the Crawler would be given a lifetime’s riches.
The members of the sheriff’s constabulary whom James trusted were equally uneasy, as there had been a few run-ins with the Crawler’s men over the last few months. Unlike the usual, almost ritual, confrontations with the Mockers–some half-hearted resistance, followed by an every-man-for-himself fleeing of the scene–these fights had been intense and bloody. The sheriff’s men were staunch enough lads, but they were not trained soldiers and it appeared that many serving the Crawler had military training. Twice, the sheriff’s men had been forced to retreat, calling for reinforcements either from their own ranks or the City Watch, only to find that the Crawler’s men had fled by the time they could press home the counter-attack.
Currently, Jonathan Means, the acting sheriff, was James’s most important agent in the city. James lobbied the prince almost daily to give Jonathan the position held by his late father, despite the objections of Captain Garruth, leader of the City Watch. The captain was a good man but he wanted the city constabulary absorbed into the Watch, doing away with the office of Sheriff of Krondor; but James had Arutha’s ear and had convinced him that a garrison city was not a happy city. He had travelled widely and heard many stories from older Mockers about such cities in Kesh and Queg. James had offered Arutha the alternative solution of integrating the City Watch into Arutha’s household guard, the Prince’s Own, which would have put Garruth directly under the control of the Knight-Marshall of Krondor, Duke Gardan. The captain of the household guard would be retiring soon, so personal ambition might sway Garruth more than losing authority over the civilian population of Krondor. The presence of three different commands of armed men made no sense to James, and absorbing the Watch into the Prince’s Own would create a clear demarcation between civilian and military authority. Besides, James already had tacit control of the sheriff’s constabulary as an adjunct to royal intelligence, and he didn’t want them being frustrated by well-meaning Watchmen whose charge was ill defined and based on tradition. The Watch defended the city from enemies without and within; the constabulary kept order, while the Prince’s Own defended the palace. James wondered at what point someone in authority had thought this was a good idea.
Whilst dwelling on these concerns he had stopped moving and now found himself leaning against another wall. He couldn’t even judge how far he had come. Between his loss of focus and the fog, he wasn’t even entirely sure where exactly he was in the Merchants’ Quarter. He squinted at a sign above a doorway depicting a bolt of cloth and an oversized needle and finally recognized it as William & Sons Tailors.
He pushed himself away from the wall and took a few steps to the corner. Moving caused him an unexpected moment of clarity. As he rounded a corner giving onto a broad boulevard that would take him straight to the palace, he appreciated the fact that one unintended consequence of this situation had been his ability to return to his old haunts–the sewers and rooftops of the city–almost untroubled. Even though the death mark had been lifted, he had been cautioned to keep clear of the Mockers and their dens, or else there would be no guarantee for his safety. But James, being Jimmy, had ignored that and dared to travel the rooftops or sewers at need, but it had proven cumbersome and at times difficult, for he had often had to lie low while Mockers conducted business between where he found himself and his destination.
During the recent confrontations with the Nighthawks and the quest for the return of the Tear of the Gods, he had done enough damage to the Crawler’s men to have earned back some grudging respect from the Upright Man. James was among the most likely to achieve the Upright Man’s goal–ridding Krondor of the Crawler–and therefore he was now a valuable ally to the Thieves’ Guild, so the Mockers had started to look the other way when he went poking around.
James reached a point roughly halfway between his ambush and the palace and stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He clutched his side and felt more blood drenching his shirt beneath the leather tunic he wore. This wound was not going to heal on its own. As loath as he ever was to admit he was wrong, he realized he had underestimated the damage he had sustained.
He heard footfalls, boot heels striking the cobbles coming from somewhere up ahead. The lamps were placed far enough apart that small dark areas lingered between the pools of light, and into one of these he quickly ducked. He had no trust in the Goddess of Luck. Experience had taught him that self-reliance was always his best bet. If there were a god of self-reliance, he’d have been praying to him fervently. He found the irony of that contradiction amusing, or as much as he could be amused, given his current situation.
The footsteps got louder and James struggled to stay focused: there might be a furious minute or so coming up that would decide his fate. He reached across his body and slowly wrapped his right hand around his sword hilt, flexing his fingers and tensing as three figures hove into view.
He was teetering on the brink of collapse when they came walking into a pool of lamplight.
Catching sight of the figure in the shadows drawing a sword, the men slowed and fanned out, each of them also drawing a weapon. Rather than rushing into an attack, they approached slowly. A few yards away from James, the two men on the flanks stopped while the one in the middle said, ‘Who passes this night?’
James blinked in confusion for a moment, then pushed himself away from the wall. ‘Jonathan?’
The acting sheriff, Jonathan Means, looked incredulous. ‘James?’
‘I could use a bit of help,’ said James.
And then he fell forward, losing consciousness so swiftly that he did not even feel strong arms grab him to stop him striking the cobbles.
• CHAPTER TWO •
Mysteries
JAMES OPENED HIS EYES.
An oval shape hovered above him, and slowly it resolved itself into a face. Dark eyes looked down on him with concern, but there was an amused set to the lips. A woman’s voice asked, ‘Are you all right?’
James’s first impulse was to say something clever, but he couldn’t think of anything clever.
The face above him repeated the question.
James smiled and blinked and he finally replied, ‘You’re so pretty.’
A light laugh was echoed by a deeper masculine one, and someone out of James’s sight said, ‘I’ll send for the prince.’
‘It’s the drugs,’ said another male voice behind James.
He tried to turn and felt agony rip up his left side. A soft hand pushed gently on his shoulder, firmly forcing him back down. A fog seemed to lift from his mind and at last he recognized the face above him. ‘Jazhara?’
The Prince of Krondor’s magic-advisor smiled. ‘Welcome back. We were worried.’
She was a woman of medium height and solid build, though her figure tended to curves and her legs were elegantly tapered. By any measure she was attractive, and she had a no-nonsense attitude that discouraged James’s usual tendency to try to disarm ladies with practised flirtation.
The voice behind James said, ‘If Sheriff Means hadn’t fetched you here quickly, Squire, I think you might finally have left us.’
The disapproving tone brought recognition even though the speaker was still out of James’s line of sight. ‘Ah, Master Reynolds, again I am in your debt.’
The face of an older man moved into view, hovering over Jazhara’s shoulder. It was William, lieutenant of the prince’s household guard and son of the magician Pug.
‘Help me sit up,’ begged James, and Jazhara piled some pillows up behind him so that he could look around the room. As the last effects of the sleeping draught the chirurgeon had given him before sewing him up wore off, pain returned. He winced as he settled into the pillows.
‘I’ve sent for the prince,’ said William, walking into view. The young soldier had matured greatly since entering the prince’s service and had become James’s unofficial partner in crime. James’s best friend, Squire Locklear, had been banished to the northern frontier of Yabon as punishment for a transgression involving the wife of an influential man at court. James had thought more than once that women would be the death of Locklear.
William was a different sort, something of a romantic idealist. Taller by half a head than his father Pug, he looked like the icon of the loyal prince’s soldier: broad shoulders, resolute expression, brown eyes that gazed unflinchingly upon danger. James often tried to get his goat with a barbed remark, but William would have none of it. He was as stalwart a man as James had ever met, and the former thief actually enjoyed that fact about William.
James sighed as he shifted position, glancing from Jazhara to William. William had obviously been in love with Jazhara before arriving in Krondor, from when they had been students together at Stardock. His attempt to get over her had led to a romance with a local innkeeper’s daughter, who had come to grief. He had suffered greatly over Talia’s death. In James’s judgment Cousin Willy, as he was known to Arutha’s family, had succumbed to Talia’s charms more because she was crazily in love with him rather than he with her. She had been beautiful, vivacious and a flirt, but once she met Willy, all other boys and men had been forgotten. For most men it would have been difficult to resist. But once Jazhara appeared in the city …
James understood the story. He hid it well, but William still cared deeply for Jazhara, or James knew nothing at all.
