continued my enquiries by returning to Little Thalsa and talking to Dhalooth and family in order to get a profile of the missing Mathoos. Allowing for the usual tendencies of families to exaggerate the good and ignore the bad (and vice versa) I managed to get a reasonable picture. Salsham'ai aren't great shipbuilders and sailors themselves, but their natural climbing talents make them useful on board ship for rigging and mast work. Mathoos, but all accounts, was a bit of a thrill-seeker, and had joined the Probity as a means to see the world. On top of that he had something of a social conscience and would pursue injustice wherever he saw it. His family had tried to harness this attitude by apprenticing him to a Loremaster, but the palms of his feet grew itchy and he ran away to sea.
It was a fatal combination - adventurous and idealistic. Someone like that could hardly fail to stumble across the usual sticky web of lies, deceit and treachery that Merchant Clans wove around themselves.
And wind up being 'disposed of'. I hoped that Mathoos had the sense to keep his nose out of the Turifim's business, or that his wanderlust had led him on to other shores.
Evening was the time to head back to the docks, when the sailors and stevedores were relaxing (i.e. drinking, fighting, gambling and whoring) in the dockside taverns. There was little hope of getting information directly from those who worked for the Turifim, but there were plenty of men and women loyal to other clans, or with no clan connection at all, who would be willing to exchange hard information for hard drink.
That night, however, I was out of luck. The dockside denizens were more close-mouthed than usual, and all I got were vague rumours about a mysterious cargo that had supposedly been loaded on to the Probity. There were dark mutterings that the cargo was cursed, that a spate of recent disappearances were somehow linked to it, and that all who had come into contact with it had died. Some oft his I could discount as mariner's tales, but something had got the dockworkers spooked and that in itself was eerie. These were tough men and women, protected by a powerful guild and, in some cases, underworld connections. If the Turif had somehow managed to silence wagging tongues, they had done so in the face of tough opposition.
Tired of wasting my time, energy and Great Uncle Savos' money I wandered back to my boat. As I neared the end of Harbour Road, approaching the junction with Gold Merchant's Street I heard a scuffle happening down a dark alley between two warehouses. I could just make out two shadowy figures, one struggling to escape from the other. As I watched, scanning the area for accomplices (the old 'lure the would-be hero' trap is a well-established Llazan pastime), the losing figure let out a cry that dyed off into a gurgle and fell to the ground. His attacker knelt over him.
Confident that I wasn't being set up for a mugging of my own, I ran down the alley and launched a snap-kick at the attacker's head, knocking him from his business of - as I thought at the time - looting the victim. This ought to have been enough to put him down for a while, but he rolled and came back at me with a bestial snarl and a rush of furious energy. I blocked his first wild swings but then he grabbed my throat, lifted me and smashed me with inhuman strength against the wall of the alley. As the little coloured lights danced in front of my eyes, I realised that I was in trouble.
A light appeared from the Harbour Street end of the alley - a lantern on a pole, carried by a man in the trappings of a militaman, but without any obvious company markings. Into the circle of light stepped a woman in decorative lashong robes, muttering a chant under her breath. Behind her was a young man, face rapt in concentration. Every so often he punctuated her chant with tiny clashes from two pairs of finger cymbals that her wore. In the light I got to see the face of my attacker - an ordinary looking Nekuuese man. Well, ordinary apart from the fact that his face was contorted with animal rage and blood dribbled down his chin, surely too much to be the result of my kick. He dropped me to the ground and turned to face the new intruders.
Before he could react any further, the woman had brush and paper in hand. She made a few deft strokes of the brush, and then threw the paper down the alleyway. Instead of fluttering ineffectually to the ground, it sped towards my attacker like a dart, seeming to increase in length as it went, until a long fluttering ribbon span around him, wrapping him up like a Dronish mummy. He gave one last growl before his mouth was covered, then toppled face down into the muck.
The sorceress and her apprentice, as they now evidently were, kept up their chant whilst more un-marked militamen pushed their way past the lantern bearer to pick up my attacker, his other victim, and me. I noticed that the other victim, plainly dead, was dressed in the leather vest of a stevedore. His throat had been slashed, but the tiny pool of blood on the ground was nowhere near enough for such a wound.
As if we didn't already have enough of a party going on, another man entered the alley, an older man dressed in a heavy roabha which he carried hitched up to avoid dragging it in the alley scum. Although the colours of the roabha were muted in the lantern light I could tell, by the ornate embroidery of vine-like plants that adorned it, that it would be the pale green of a Magister of the Succulent Gourd, a low-ranking Magister Judiciary. He looked at the corpse, at the entangled madman, and at me, mentally weighing each of us up. I hoped I came out the most favourably.
"What is your name?" he asked in the tone of one used to getting answers. I must have been more shaken by my experiences than I thought, since I told him the truth. "Well, Rishta Vallans," he continued, "nothing happened here tonight, do you understand me? Nothing at all."
"Oh, absolutely sir, you can rely on my discretion."
The corpse was wrapped in a shroud. Two men carried him out of the alleyway and two more carried the bound madman. They were followed by the Magister, the two magicians and the lantern bearer. I was left alone in the dark.
Nothing had happened.
Anyone born in Nirhamsa knows of certain spirits that can enter through cuts and grazes, and can drive a man to a frenzy of blood-lust. Anyone born in Nirhamsa knows that these spirits are often found in a particular type of mineral, of great value to magicians for reasons that I had never fully understood.
A strange cargo had been loaded onto the Probity, and those associated with it had died, most likely at the hands of the man I met tonight (sorry, hadn't met). I now had a pretty good idea what the cargo was.
Red Jade.
