He trudged down the five steps made of uncut rock, and pulled the curtain aside to enter.
The reek of unwashed bodies, stale beer, cheap tallow-lights, and other scents best left unnamed hit him in the face like a blow. He almost turned around and walked back out, but his sense of duty prevailed and he stalked across the dirt floor to the bar, avoiding the tables, chairs, and a staggering drunk more by instinct than by sight. What light there was didn't help much in navigating the room. There were only four thick tallow-dips to light the entire room, and two of them were over the bar. They gave off a murky, smokeladen light that didn't cross much distance.
Then again, I'm probably better off not being able to see. The closer he got to the bar, the more his eyes stung from the smoke. If I knew how much filth was caked on the tables and the floor, I'd probably be sick.
Behind the bar was a huge man, running to fat, with the last two fingers of his right hand missing, and a scar across the top of his bald head. The man grunted as Tal approached, which Tal took as an inquiry. "Beer," he said shortly, slapping down a couple of copper pieces on the unpolished slab of wood that passed for a bar-top.
The bartender poured flat beer out of a pitcher into a cheap earthenware mug. The stuff looked like horse-piss, and probably tasted the same. Tal took it, but didn't drink. "Hardysty here?" he asked, and without waiting for an answer, shoved a handful of coppers across the bar. "This's for him. Split on a bet. Said I could leave it here."
With that, he turned and took his beer off to a corner table, where he sat and pretended to drink. In reality, he poured the beer onto the floor, where it soaked in without adding measurably to the stink or the filth.
His eyes were adjusting to the gloom; now he could make out the rest of the room, the scattering of tables made of scavenged lumber, the few men who sat at them, slumped over the table or drinking steadily, with a stony disregard for the wretched quality of the stuff they were pouring down their throats.
The bartender scooped up the money, pocketed part of it, then poured another beer and took it over to a man half-lying on another table nearby, as if he had passed out. He grabbed the man's shoulder and shook it until the fellow showed some signs of life, batting his hand away and blinking at him blearily.
"Wha?" he slurred. The bartender slapped both the beer and the remainder of the money down on the rough wooden table in front of him.
"Yours," he grunted. "Ya made a bet. Part paid off the tab, this's what's left."
Hardysty stared at him a moment, as Tal pretended to nurse his beer. "Ah," he slurred. "Bet. Yah." Clearly he didn'texpect to remember the apocryphal "bet" that had been made on his behalf. All he knew was that money had somehow appeared that supposedly belonged to him, and he wasn't about to question the source.
He drank the beer down to the dregs in a single swallow—Tal winced inside at the mere idea of actuallydrinking the stuff. He knew what it was; the dregs out of the barrels of beer emptied at more prosperous taverns, and the dregs of brewing, mixed together and sold so cheaply that it often went as pig-slop. There was not a viler beverage on the face of the earth. A man that drank the stuff on a regular basis cared only for the fact that it would get him drunk for pennies.
Whatever Hardysty had been, the fact was that he was too far gone in drink to have had any connection to the murders. If he remembered who he was and where he was supposed to go from one day to the next, he would be doing well.
When Torney said he was cadging drinks, he meant it. He's probably a street-beggar for just long enough to get the money to drink.
Whatever had gotten him dismissed from the Church? Tal thought he remembered something about theft of Church property. Had the disgrace broken him, or had the drinking started first? Perhaps the thefts had gone to pay for drink.
This was one vice gone to excess that Tal never could understand; intellectually, he could sympathize with a man who had lost his head over a woman, and he could understand how the thrill of risk could make a man gamble away all he had in the heat of a moment—but he never could understand this rush to oblivion, be it by drink or by a drug. Why do something that made you feelless alive, rather than more? Why would anyone willfully seek to remove ability?
Hardysty dropped the mug down onto the table, stared at the pile of coppers for a moment, then shoved them back across the table to the bartender. "More," he said—which was probably what the bartender had expected him to say. Before Tal could blink, the coppers were gone.
Tal pretended to drink two more mugs of the awful stuff before staggering out into the darkness. At no time did the bartender ask him about his connection to Hardysty; at no time did Hardysty make any attempt to find out where the money had come from. That was typical behavior in a place like this one. No one asked questions, and information was seldom volunteered, though it could be bought.
At this point it was too late to look for any of the other former Priests, but he felt he had made enough progress for one night. He could definitely scratch Torney and Hardysty off his list. The practice of magic—especially magic as powerful and tricky as this one must be—required a sharp mind. Even sober, Hardysty wouldn't be capable of that much concentration. Dreg-beer came contaminated with all sorts of unpleasant things, and the people who sold it often adulterated it further. There was no telling how badly Hardysty was poisoned; the only thing that was certain was that he had no more than half the mind he'd started out this slide to oblivion with. He might just as well have taken two rocks and hammered his own head with them on a daily basis for the last few years.
Tal was grateful for the heavy snowfall; it kept footpads off the street. This was not a neighborhood he wanted to have to visit again by night. He was immeasurably glad when he got into a better area without an incident, and even happier when he reached the constabulary headquarters and was able to get his horse from the Ducal stables. The ride across town and over the bridge to the Abbey was quite some distance, but in contrast to his walk away from the docks, it seemed to take no time at all.
A person could draw quite a parable from those two, Torney and Hardysty, if he knew everything that brought them to where they are now. Torney was driven by love to give up everything in order to have it, but what drove Hardysty to oblivion? Greed? Fear?
That was the end of the puzzle for every really good constable that Tal had ever met. Once you knew who'd done the crime, you'd caught him, and you had him safely disposed of, you always wondered why he'd done what he'd done. Even things that seemed obvious were sometimes only obvious on the surface. Why did some people, born into poverty, go out and try to make their lives better honestly instead of turning to crime? Why did one child, beaten and abused, grow up to vow never to inflict that kind of treatment on his own children, while others treated their offspring as they'd been treated?
Tal didn't know, and neither did anyone else, but he sometimes had the feeling that the answerwas there, if only he knew where to look for it, and was brave enough to search.
The next day, in absence of any other orders, he crossed the bridge again to resume his hunt for former Priests. Following Torney's information that one of them had changed his name to "Oskar Koob" and had set himself up as a fortune-teller, Tal went to the office in charge of collecting taxes on small businesses. "Koob" would not call himself a "fortune-teller," of course—fortune-telling was illegal, and possibly heretical. No, he would call himself a "Counselor" or "Advisor," and that was the listing where Tal found his name and address.