Spell of Catastrophe | Page 5

hungry I'd have to get before I'd be walking the streets looking for odd jobs and manual labor. Then someone knocked on the door. I put the half-drained flask I had been nursing in a drawer and said, "Come in."
A woman came in. "My husband has been kidnapped," she said, and that meant all of a sudden things were looking up.
Her husband had a large warehouse on the docks and a fleet of barges on the river. He hadn't come home the previous night. According to her, he had always come home before. A note had appeared under the door in the morning. She passed it over to me.
Payment of 20,000 gold zalous will cause the return of Edrik Skargool. He is not hurt, yet search will cause death. More instructions will forthcome.
The Creeping Sword
"Huh," I said. The style was stilted, making me think of someone who was trying to sound educated without the benefit of actually having an education. On the other hand, the words were spelled right and the penmanship was neat. Still, I didn't have to look too closely to find the major unusual detail. The medium was a sheet of burnished copper, and the words had apparently been etched into it with fire.
"Do you have any idea who this Creeping Sword is?" I asked.
"Certainly not, of course not," she said. "That is your job, isn't it?"
I made a noncommittal sort of hrrumphy sound and let her start talking again. She had gone to the police, such as they were. With the current political situation, the police weren't about to investigate anything, unless the order came as a command from the Guard. So she'd gone to the Guard. The Guard was having too much fun enforcing martial law to worry about another kidnapping. The only kidnappings they were interested in were the ones they were doing themselves. I hoped for Skargool's sake they weren't the ones who had picked him up. I wasn't about to fight the Guard for him, even if she paid me a lot, and I didn't think anyone else would be prepared to either. "Will you find him?" she asked.
"I'll do my best," I said, "under the circumstances. That's my job."
She made an unhappy face at me. Sometimes that was a good tactic - I'm a man, and like any man I'll turn gooey under the right circumstances - but it wasn't going to work on me this time. I already didn't like her. "If I pay you good money and give you my trust," she said, "I would expect that you would at least be willing to guarantee -"
I had been leaning back in my chair. Now I let the chair fall forward so the two front legs hit the beam floor with a sharp "thud", and pointed a finger at her for further emphasis. "Look, lady," I said. "Roosing Oolvaya is a big city. There must be fifty thousand people here. Any day of the week a bunch of them disappear and never get found. Now we're sitting with a dead Venerance, the son who probably knocked him off is in charge, and mercenaries are running around the streets giving orders to the rest of the normal Guard. You think the mess out there doesn't make the usual mess worse? Well, it does, lady, a lot worse. People are getting rounded up, people are getting executed, and people are getting kicked into the sewers just for being in the wrong place. Not criminals, not only political folks, just people, you understand that? In this kind of situation, a lot of old grudges find themselves getting settled, a lot of nastiness pops up. It's rough out there."
"But," she said, still pouting, "but what should I do, then?"
"If you hire me, I'll find your husband if he's findable. Are you hiring me?"
"Yes, yes, of course I am, even if -"
"Then get ready to pay this Sword person."
"But 20,000 zalous! How could I -"
"I'll get you the money back if I can."
"But can't you bargain with -"
"You might reflect," I said, "on the fact that money can generally take more wear and tear than husbands can."
She shut up. I asked questions, but none of the answers were helpful. She didn't know of any disgruntled employees. The list of business enemies was short; she said her husband had a reputation as a straight dealer. They had no children.
"Who gets everything if he dies?" I said.
"Why, I'm not sure. I really don't know."
I had yelled down for a messenger earlier, after the scent of work had floated in with her, and the messenger now returned with Turbot. Turbot was in more-or-less the same line of work as me, whatever that was, and we used each other as backup man when things were happening. He was glad