Pryce Covington knew he was in real trouble when he saw the second corpse.
This is not to say that he was happy when he saw the first corpse. Far from it. Exactly the opposite, in fact. His heart sank like an egg in a mug of ale, and with it vanished his fondest wish. But of all the words he thought of at that moment”no,” “it’s not fair,” and “just my luck,” among othersthe word “trouble” did not come up.
The specter of personal danger arose only when he saw the second dead body. At first glance, it seemed far less distressful than the first corpse. The youthful man with an unlined face was sitting placidly on the grassy ground, leaning against a tree trunk, his expression almost bemused. Not like the first.
No, not anything like the first body. The face of the first corpse was disturbing, to say the least, even in the pleasant rays of sunrise: eyes protruding; tongue swollen and stiff and hanging as far out of its mouth as it could go; and the visible skin a puffy, horrid shade of purple-green. Well, that’s what happens when you hang from a branch with a rope noose around your neck, no matter how handsome you were when your heart was beating and your brain was working.
Pryce Covington felt his legs wobble, and a mist drifted across his mind’s eye, a mourning mist that had nothing to do with the morning dew. “Stop it,” he told himself firmly. “You’re not a weakling.” The sight of two dead bodies wasn’t terribly unusual, but the reality of the scene was more potent than he could have anticipated.
“Stop it,” he repeated to himself. He lived in a rough-hewn world where confrontation was commonplace. How many fights had he seen? Too many. Hugely muscled men, solidly built dwarves, capable and cunning gnomes, all brandishing bladed weapons, smacking them into each other like snorting minotaurs in a gladiatorial ring.
But then he realized that “seen” was the key word. Pryce Covington had witnessed numerous fights, but he never got involved in them himself. Covington would sooner do just about anything than actually exchange blows.
Pryce noticed that he was having trouble swallowing, but at leastunlike his ex-colleague, Gamor Turkalhe could still do it. Poor Gamor, he thought, staring at his ex-associate’s toes, which swung slowly before his eyes. Then, totally against his will, the words metamorphosed in his brain into “poor Pryce.”
Defensive rationalization rushed forward to soothe his addled mind.
At least Gamor was free from any possible misery, he thought. Gamor was lucky; he was dead. Now only poor, pitiful Pryce Covington was left to stand there and try to figure out what had happened.
What’s the big deal? Pryce chastised himself, trying to get over the trauma of it all. It was only death… death, the one mystery everyone would eventually solve. Pryce had seen ghosts before… well, at least he had talked to people who said they had seen them. And maybe that was a ghost he had seen drifting through the ruins that lined the east side of Lallor Strait, which he had passed on the way to this rendezvous outside the wall of Lallor, Halruaa’s most exclusive, least-explored city.
Pryce quickly dismissed any thought of Lallor or Halruaa from his mind. The important thing now was Gamor Turkal, plus whoever this other dead fellow was. He couldn’t do that if he let his emotions run away from him.
To counter his disturbed frame of mind, he became scrupulously logical. There were ghosts, he decided firmly, and ghosts were a clear sign there was at least some sort of life after death. So what was so terrible about finding his ex-associate and some stranger dead? Be fair, he insisted to himself.
Suddenly the words his father had spoken years earlier came back to him as clearly as when they were first spoken: “Farewell, my boy. I ask only three things of you, if you would honor the man who gave you life. Be strong, be smart, and be serene. This is all the advice I can give you, Pryce, but if you achieve all three, it will be all you will ever need____________________ ”
Pryce shook his head angrily, blinking furiously. Curse his father, curse his father’s desertion of his family, curse his father for infiltrating his thoughts, and curse this damp morning air. Beads of water had formed around his eyes. Pryce used the back of his arm to wipe his face dry. Then he tried once more to control himself.
Concentrate, he thought, closing his eyes. Concentrate on what you know. And, as so often happened whenever Pryce Covington concentrated, what he knew tumbled to the fore from his subconscious in the form of gambling odds.
Okay… the odds of trouble resulting from reporting Turkal’s death seemed relatively small. Pryce knew enough about his associate, and Pryce’sown relationship with him, to talk his way around any number of rude discoveries. But the odds of avoiding trouble when reporting the stranger’s death were decidedly less favorable. There was simply too much Pryce didn’t know.
This much he did know: At this moment, he stood in the shadow of an impressive twenty-foot-high wall that surrounded the city of Lallor. The wall seemed to be made of shimmering boulders that appeared to be wet. Looking closely, Pryce noted that the boulders interlocked cleverly. Unless someone stood on the very top of the wall, Pryce and his grim companions were totally out of any city dweller’s sight. From where he stood, Pryce could barely see the esoteric tops of buildings, but he saw no telltale window from which he could be seen.
Not far from the wall stood a most extraordinary tree, a magnificent mass of barkless, smooth, almost shiny wood, rooted in a grassy incline that led up to the wall’s base. Somehow, perhaps with human assistance, the tree had grown into the bent form of a giant question mark. Against its base leaned one dead man. From the very end of its questioning curl hung another, with a rope noose tightened around his thin neck, which had now grown decidedly thinner.
Pryce Covington finally lost the battle with his weakening legs. His knees buckled and he dropped to the ground, his knuckles brushing against the grass. “Gamor, why?” he moaned miserably. “Why did you have to go and die before” Mercifully, he left the rest of the sentence unspoken, but it echoed in his mind regardless: before telling me about the cushy job for life you promised me!
A cushy job was all Pryce Covington had ever wanted. From the moment he was born, in the tiny city of Merrickarta in the basin surrounded by the northern mountain ranges, to this very moment, he had made no secret of his heart’s desire. In fact, it was almost impossible to converse with him for more than two mugs of ale without the subject arising. Serving wenches from one end of the Nath to the other could practically sing it in harmony: “All I want is a cushy job for life. Is that so much to ask?”
Nothing less could have lured him from his life of desperate certainty to this land of promised opportunity. It’s not my fault, he thought. What else could I do? He had been lying in his comfortable Merrickarta hovel, minding his own business, when Gamor Turkal’s handsome face had suddenly swum into view. His appearance reminded Pryce of dust motes suddenly taking form in a shaft of sunlight.
“Pryce,” the dusty face said.
“Gamor?”
“You must come to Lallor, Pryce.” “Lallor?”
“Yes, Lallor!” the face had exclaimed. “Are you an echo or something?”
Not one to look dust faces in the mouth, Covington’s interest had been piqued, despite the incongruity of his business associate appearing to him in such a bizarre fashion. But he wasn’t about to journey more than two hundred miles to the southwest without learning more. “Why should I come to Lallor, Gamor?”
“Make up your mind, Pryce. Do you think I can maintain this connection forever?”
“And do you think I’m going to accept the word of a handful of talking dust? If you’re really Gamor Turkal, you know me better than that!”
“And if you’re truly Pryce Covington, you will meet me at the Mark of the Question,” the face countered, and then it uttered the magic words, the oft-wished-for, never attained, always-sought-after “cushy job for life.” But before Pryce could grill the dusty apparition on the particulars, the face had suddenly disappeared and spread across the hovel floor like gritty glitter.
It wasn’t until he was about fifty miles southwest of Merrickarta that Pryce began to wonder how Gamor had achieved that interesting effect. Turkal had always had a dramatic flair, but hitherto he had shown little interest in magic, although he wasn’t vehemently against it as Pryce was.
‘You know what magic is? Real magic?” he had often lectured Gamor. “I’ll tell you what magic is. It’s a way for powerless people to win arguments.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Certainly,” Pryce said, letting an electrum coin play across his knuckles. “People who feel powerless learn magic in order to lord it over the rest of us.”
“Not like you,” Gamor laughed, noting Pryce’s knack of keeping the coin moving without grasping it.
“My tricks are honest prestidigitation,” Pryce maintained. “Sleight of hand. People who use magic are cheats. They use sleight of mind…”
“What’s with you, Pryce?” his comrade whined. “Was your mother scared by a wizard when you were a baby?”
Pryce’s eyes had narrowed and the smile had left his face suddenly. “Mark my words, Gamor,” he said evenly, suddenly snapping the coin out of the air. “I wouldn’t learn magic if every mage within a day’s ride went down on his knobby knees and begged me.” Then he slowly opened his hand, finger by finger, to reveal that the coin was no longer there.
Gamor had shrugged, unimpressed. “Not much chance of that.” It was true. Although they came into frequent contact with magicians, the young partners were regarded as nothing more than glorified messengers.
“Ah, but what messengers!” Pryce had always countered when a comely maid sneered at his current profession. Pryce had tried many occupations following his father’s departure for places unknown, but none had suited his peculiar temperament.
At the age of eight, he tried his hand at acting, and he was fairly good at it, but he hated having an audience. They were always analyzing his performance rather than accepting his character. They were passing judgment, not really listening. Pryce didn’t know why, but that galled him. At the age of twelve, he had considered trying for a mage apprenticeship, but the very idea gave him gooseflesh.
Finally, at the age of fifteen, he had sat down and tried to think of the perfect jobone that would make use of his youth, his relatively pleasant countenance, his wit, and his ego. Thus was born Pryce Covington, man of service. He set a sign out in the single window of the hovel he had shared with his mother until her recent death:
Nothing too serious, Nothing too fun; I will do
What must be done.
It had started slowly, of course. He had slopped out his share of pigpensboth human and animalbut soon all manner of creatures were calling upon him for all manner of tasks. Whenever anyone needed two extra hands to move a shipment, two extra feet to run an errand, or extra eyes to witness a transaction, an extra nose to sniff out information, and extra ears to objectively consider a problem that had become too subjective, Pryce Covington was there.
Soon he needed more arms, legs, eyes, ears, and an extra nose, which was where his tavern mate Gamor Turkal had come in. Gamor was lazy, but he had a spectacular memory. He was a bit too cagey for his own good, but always looking for an edge had its upside as well.
He was perfect for some jobs Pryce wished to avoid and dreadful for assignments Pryce specialized inin other words, the very definition of a perfect partner: a person with mutually inclusive neuroses who would always make you look good and never threaten your position.
They had made a pretty Skie, not to mention a goodly number of other Halruan coins, but things started to get out of hand when they stumbled upon a new form of highly lucrative assignment. It consisted of running to see if magically transmitted messages sent by mages had arrived without interference from outside sorcerers.
Pryce had insisted on doing all of the initial runs himself and, out of sheer obstinacy, had bartered the fee to a new high. The idea that magic was so vulnerable that he had to “chaperon” it appealed to him immensely, and so he set the price accordingly. If the magicians were going to admit their magic was fallible to someone as common as he, then his silence on the same point was going to cost them!
Even though his services were discreet, word of his abilities as a messenger started to spread, and soon nearly every insecure magician and mage-in-training in the area was offering him sacks of electrum to discreetly make sure that his spells were working. So many assignments were coming in that before long Pryce had to entrust Gamor with some of them.
It had certainly kept Pryce and Gamor hopping, but when they weren’t too exhausted they had more than enough coins to make any evening a night they had a hard time remembering the next morning. Unfortunately Gamor had quickly tired of the shortage of loafing time. One morning he announced his imminent departure for less green pastures, and by that afternoon he was gone.
Pryce was just getting used to his former partner’s traumatic exit when the dust unsettled, in a manner of speaking, and he was summoned to Lallor by the ghostly image of Gamor Turkal.
The first raindrop outside the city wall fell on Pryce’s jacket like a tap on the shoulder from the gods. It effectively brought him out of his reverie of self-pity. He looked up to see storm clouds gathering.
Oh, great, he thought. That’s what I get for placing my faith in anything… or anyone. But even as the thought formed, Pryce chided himself. Gamor’s job offer had been too promising to ignore. So now, whatever it was he had gotten into, he had only himself to blame.
A second raindrop hit him right between the eyes. That did it. His brain immediately clicked into practical mode. The pure, clear rain started tapping him all over his body as he took stock of himself.
His clothes had weathered the long journey from Merrickarta rather well. The light gray tunic, woven from the sturdy silk of worms found only in the dying leaves of fallen trees at the base of Mount Alue, remained soft and warm from his chin to his hips. The dark red vest, made of cloth from the famed dye works of Achelar, added further warmth. The thick black pants and waterproof boots disguised a myriad of stains.
His dark, stylish jacket concealed numerous hidden pockets, from its high collar to its midthigh length. The pockets were filled with his remaining savings. The outfit had served him well throughout the long trip, yet its only reward upon arrival was the promise of a thorough soaking.
Almost as if the forces of nature agreed with his gloomy assessment, a biting, piercing wind suddenly coursed over the lush green incline. Covington shivered as the limb of the tree above him shook, making the lifeless body of Gamor Turkal seem to nod at the miserable, newly-arrived messenger from the north. It was as if Gamor were saying, from beyond the grave, “That’s what you get for seeking a cushy job for life!”
“Don’t gloat,” Pryce muttered, trying vainly to protect his ears with his jacket collar.
The bending tree answered with a groan, and the rain began to slash, slicing down at an angle as the winds added their own moaning voice. Odd, Pryce thought. This was surprisingly chilly weather for early autumn in southern Halruaa. He turned and looked back toward the road he had followed to arrive at this disastrous rendezvous.
Only five minutes or so back to the road, he judged, then another ten or fifteen to reach the Lallor Gate. If he could gain entrance to the city, maybe he could find some simple place that was warm, dry, and affordable, considering the meager savings he had brought with him. Once his wits returned to full strength, he could consider his options.
Why not? he asked himself. Although Gamor was dead, somewhere within the city walls, a cushy job for life awaited him, and if anyone could find it, it was Pryce Covington. That’s what Gamor would have wanted, he thought. After all, that’s why his old tavern mate and short-lived business associate had summoned him in the first place! Surely Gamor would have wanted Pryce to have the occupation of his dreams. Absolutely!
Pryce squared his shoulders and started to march away. He hadn’t gotten ten paces when the wind began to howl with renewed force and it began to rain even harder. He bent his head down and tried to make headway against the raging wind. His pace grew slower, and soon he was panting against the Lallor Wall.
He realized that this sudden storm would give him some sort of respiratory illness if he walked through it for more than five minutes. It seemed yet another oppressive sign, but he vowed that it would not defeat him. Instead, Pryce reluctantly returned to the relative shelter of the tree. He stood beneath its wildly trembling branches, scanning the sky for any sign of a break in the weather.
But every time he thought he saw some sun, Gamor’s body would swing into view. Turkal’s horrible head, now dripping wet, seemed to mock him by sticking out its tongue and making bulging-eyed faces. Pryce turned away, only to find himself staring into the face of the dead stranger. Much to his own surprise,
Covington no longer felt queasy or emotional. Instead, he was suddenly and strangely certain. The face of the unknown dead man presented a hidden problem, and Pryce was determined to solve it. Past experience had taught him how to read faces.
The unknown man’s face held indications of education and intelligence in its muscle patterns. Stupid or ignorant people looked different, even in death. This man’s hairline was high, the hair short and so waxen it was almost clear. The skin was reasonably taut, neither so lined that it silently spoke of manual labor nor so smooth that it told of an idle life. From what Pryce could see, this person had won the biological sweepstakes. The lack of excess fat and strength of the neck spoke of good family stock and an occupation that maintained health.
That information wasn’t enough. Covington was convinced he was missing something obvious, and he knew he would have to investigate further. He knelt by the body and studied it thoughtfully.
Look into the dead man’s eyes, Pryce finally thought, surprising himself. Why the eyes? The eyes are the window of the soul, not to mention the pockets of the face. He would see what lay hidden inside visually, much in the same way he might go through the man’s actual pockets physically. But first he would have to open the man’s closed eyelids.
Covington’s fingers touched the smooth, dry skin. He pressed his thumb lightly on the eyelid, feeling the eye beneath. He realized that he was holding his breath. Then he finally realized what had interested him about the man’s face. His fingers stiffened, motionless, on the dry skin.
Pryce’s head whirled around to look up at Gamor, still swinging in the wind. Rain was streaming from his body. Covington looked down at himself. His own clothes and, more importantly, his own skin were soaked. He looked back at the stranger. The stranger’s head was as dry as a creditor’s smile.
That’s when Pryce Covington finally noticed the cloak.
It was beautiful in a simple, deceptive way. From a distance of even a few feet, it looked so natural it was almost invisible, even though it reached from the top of the seated body’s head to the knees. Pryce could see that the hood, when folded back, would lie flat on the cape, adding to its timeless styling.
The cloak itself was a dusky blend of dark colors, like the sky just after sunset. Pryce could distinguish some blue, some black, and even some purple, interwoven with flecks that could be compared to stars just coming to life as daylight fled. Around the edges, it seemed to turn gray, like the promise of a new world just over the horizon.
The cloak may have been wet, but it was so sturdily stitched that it kept its wearer perfectly dry, unlike the outfits of Pryce and the late Gamor Turkal.
Pryce was surprised by his reaction to what first appeared to be a simple piece of clothing, but that was the kind of response this cloak elicited. Yet this was nothing compared to the clasp that held it in place. The circular clasp, which could not have been more than two and a half inches around at most, was one of the most ornate metalworking jobs Pryce had ever seen. Glimpsed superficially, it looked like a standard circular clasp with some sort of vine design, but upon closer examination, it looked like a cross-section of dense forest… like looking deep into a briar patch.
Pryce ran his finger over the clasp. It felt smooth and cool to the touch. It seemed to draw his finger in an interesting pattern: first down, then around and up to the top left, then back right and down around twice more to the bottom left. Fascinating.
Just as he began to raise his finger from the metal circle, the clasp sprang open and the cloak fell open.
Pryce sprawled backward in surprise, landing on his seat in a mud puddle. He was on his feet immediately, as if he had accidentally sat on a baby. He felt the mud through the thick cloth of his pants and grimaced at the mess. He quickly wiped himself off as best he could and even leaned his bottom out from under the branches to get a quick rinse in the rain.
He really needed the dead man’s cloak, he decided, both to keep dry and to cover any stain that might have been left on his trousers. There’s nothing more impressive to city gatekeepers than a stranger who has seemingly soiled himself.
Later, Pryce would rationalize that his “accident” was what had made him “borrow” the cloak, but secretly he knew that he had wanted it almost as soon as he had examined it. It was as if it had been waiting for him all his life. Still, it took him more than a few moments to convince himself that he should steal from a corpse.
Utter practicality won the day. The corpse didn’t need to stay dry. It made no difference to the corpse. The living had precedence. Right? Right.
Pryce almost shivered with delight as the cloak settled over him. Not only was the rain suddenly shut out, but a wonderful warmth, the deepness of which he hadn’t known on his entire journey, settled over him. What is this marvelous garment made of? he wondered, but any further inquiries were ignored as a new sense of purpose gripped him.
With this cloak to protect him, it was time to move on. A cushy job for life beckoned from somewhere inside the city’s walls, and Pryce Covington didn’t want to miss it. Silently he thanked the cloak’s former owner, then took a resolute stride out from under the oddly shaped tree.
He studiously avoided looking back up at his ex-partner, determining instead to think only of good feelings and the hale and hearty promise made to him. “Come to Lallor, Pryce,” the vision of Gamor had said. “It’s the secret jewel of Halruaa, where every creature of every sort is accepted and feels perfectly at $bme”
Home, Pryce thought. His strides became longer and more purposeful, the rain a distant memory outside the protection of his new cloak.
Ever since his mother had died, Pryce had had a nagging feeling that Merrickarta was not his true home. The place where he would feel at peace was somewhere away from the Nath… perhaps where he would find his father again… but for now, Lallor seemed most promising.
“It is a shining region,” Gamor had declared with a grin. Pryce smiled inwardly at the memory of that grinthe knowing, wicked grin that always signaled to Pryce that Turkal only thought he knew what he was talking about. The kind of grin that made empty but large promises that the hapless conniver then scrambled to justify… and sometimes even to make come true.
Pryce remembered the time when Gamor had promised that the lovely Benetarian twins awaited them at the Chomp ‘n’ Choke Tavern upon the completion of their latest message check for a wizard named Petarius.
“Absurd!” Pryce had countered. “First of all, the likes of Victoria and Rebecca Benetarian wouldn’t be caught comatose in a hole like the Chomp ‘n’ Choke. Secondly, why would such beauties require the company of two prospectless suitors such as you and I?”
But Gamor’s wicked grin had only grown more wicked, so Pryce had allowed his hopes to rise as they raced to check the successful communication of a recipe spell. When they finally returned to the Chomp ‘n’ Choke, they found Petarius’s two apprentices wooing the twins in a back booth.
The ladies sarcastically thanked Gamor for pointing out the location of a boite so discreet that no associate of the disapproving Petarius would ever see them there. Then, after Gamor had sardonically suggested he might mention the situation to the apprentices’ master, they laughed and maintained that any tale such a lowly messenger told the wizard would be interpreted by the arrogant mage as an envious lie to discredit his honorable students.
Pryce had watched as Gamor was thrown from the pub once, twice, three times, assisted by a combination of fists, boots, and ejection spells. He watched the first two times as Turkal landed on his back and side respectively, but he turned away when his partner landed on his head. Then Pryce shook his own head from side to side as his battered associate got up on wobbly legs, dusted himself off, then zigzagged shakily back into the establishment.
When he came out again, he was on his own two feet and carrying an intricately curved bottle of deep turquoise. “Let’s go drown our sorrows,” he said.
“But that’s a bottle of the finest Maerbian wine!” Pryce exclaimed. “How could you afford that?” His eyes narrowed. “Did you spend all our money?”
“I did not,” the bloodied but unbowed Turkal had replied with offended pride. “I went right back in there, marched up to the back booth, and stuck my hand out. They say that the better man should win,’ I told them, ‘and in this case, it is obviously true. I should have known better than to trifle with the likes of Petarian-educated gentlemen and well-bred, high-minded Merrickartian ladies. Please allow me to show you that I have learned my lesson and that there are no hard feelings.’”
“You didn’t,” Pryce said.
“I did,” Gamor replied. “I marched right up to the bar and said, ‘A round for my friends and a round for the house. The apprentices of the great magician Petarius want to show the realm what a fine, talented, altruistic, charitable man their master is!’”
Pryce started to laugh. “Why didn’t you just tell the bartender they would pay and then wave to them so they’d wave back?”
“They might have known about that trick!” Gamor exclaimed. ‘Think about it. What could they do? Cry out ‘Oh, no’ so that every laggard in town would hear them insult their own master? Besides, this way they won’t have time to dally with the treacherous, teasing twins… not with the lowest life this side of the Nath pounding them on the back every other moment. Now let’s get out of here before they’re able to make their way through all those drunken thank-yous and restraining hands!”
Then off the two ran… into the mists of Pryce’s memory. Covington allowed them to disappear into the distance of his mind’s eye, then reluctantly permitted his concentration to return to the unfortunate matter at hand. He slowed, then stopped on the thick green, grassy incline outside the city wall.
Pryce turned as the first rumble of thunder rolled across the sky. In a crack of lightning, he saw his associate, Gamor Turkal, swinging from the end of a long, wet, tightly knotted rope, his boots six feet off the ground.
Curse this rain, Pryce thought. It made vision very difficult. For the second time that afternoon, he wiped beads of water from around his eyes. Some cunning thief he was! He couldn’t get twenty paces without letting his emotions get the better of him. Gamor may have been a womanizing, self-important rascal, but he had also been a predictable business associate and sometimes even a friend.
Turkal’s present position, however, had become too much for Pryce to bear. So Covington undertook an even worse transgression than stealing a cloak and leaving an apparent crime scene. He set about altering that crime scene.
Pryce couldn’t just leave his ex-partner swinging at the end of a knotted rope. Ignoring the storm, Covington shimmied up the tree to lay his old pal, Gamor Turkal, to rest.