“Sounds like a headline!” said Eldin.
“Took ‘em on one at a time,” said Zuli. “Fatal! As the first five dropped out in their turn, the girls dragged ’em off to spend their money. This one’s the last, and he’s mine. The Winner!”
“Not much of a winner,” growled Eldin. “If you let go of him he’ll march straight off the wharfside!” The sailor grinned lopsidedly and did a half-suspended jig.
“You should see Barba!” Zuli declared. “Or maybe you shouldn’t. Come round tomorrow. And till then, goodnight.” She made off, aiming her sailor before her.
“Damn!” said Eldin with feeling. “I was looking forward to a bit of belly-dancing.”
“So get on with it,” said Hero. “I’ll take the collection.”
Eldin might have said something unkind, but Hero was already leading the way through a backstreet and across the teak-boarded skeleton of an ancient wharf. He headed for a boozer’s backwater, one of Bahama’s seedier haunts, built on century-old ironwood piles and threatening at any moment to slide into the bay. Only the likely lads came here, and hardened, salty old seadogs who thrived on sour wine. Underfoot, glinting like oil, black water slapped in wavelets and sent fish-stink sleazing through huge gaps in the ancient planking.
Eldin caught up with the younger man. “The Craven Lobster?” His eyes were wide in the encroaching gloom.
Hero glanced up and back at bustling, lanthorn-bobbing Bahama’s healthier districts. “Whitby,” he mused, frowning.
“Eh?”
“A seaport in the waking world … I think,” Hero screwed up his eyes in an effort to catch the fleeting memory. “D’you know, this could almost be it?”
“I said,” Eldin sighed, “are we going to—”
“—the Craven Lobster, yes,” said Hero. “For four reasons. One: the Quayside Quaress is shut. And two: the town’s overflowing with visitors and we’d never get near the bar in a decent place; not without climbing up to the more expensive levels, anyway. Three: we’ve an hour or two to kill before we meet the girls.”
“And four?” the Wanderer prompted.
“Because I hate mysteries,” Hero answered with a low growl. “You and your damned dreams within dreams! Come on …”
The Craven Lobster was something else. One hundred years ago fishermen had gutted and cleaned their catches there, and fifty years later it had been the property of a pearler, who’d kept his glass-bottomed boats under its protective planking and used the building itself as a sorting and polishing house. With the sea on three sides and a narrow-necked railed catwalk in front, certainly the place had been secure. It had a good roof, which was about as much as could now be said of it. The salt sea, a thousand heavy autumn fogs, time, and the elements had all taken their toll of the Craven Lobster; now its wooden walls leaned ominously and were timber-buttressed without. Inside, the bar consisted of a stout square framework in the center of one huge room, from which the proprietor, his wife and massive son could take in the entire place at a glance.
As for the booze; it wasn’t good, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. Selling it didn’t quite constitute a criminal offense. The muth-dew was watered (not a bad idea) and the ales had ailed a bit; the wines were of no readily recognizable vintage, and the spirits all had the same salty tang to them. But on the other hand it was very cheap, and provided a man had a cast-iron stomach and all he wanted to do was drink, he could do it here for a week on one golden tond.
But the Craven Lobster’s chief attractions, certainly in high season, were these: there was always room to sit and sup without tangling elbows; you didn’t have to shout to make yourself heard; you wouldn’t be bothered by ladies of the night or other bar-flies; and the proprietor, Lipperod (Lippy) Unth, demanded and maintained good order at all times. “Fight all you like,” was his motto, “and break whatever you like of what’s your own. But break what’s mine and you’ll never know what hit you!”
Lippy wasn’t called that because he liked talking—on the contrary, he was far more a man of action—nor did his nickname derive entirely from Lipperod. But when Lippy Unth was annoyed, then he pouted with his great black lips and thrust them out before him like a warning trumpet; and when Lippy looked like that—
The Craven Lobster did have a handful of “girls,” the very dregs of the city. No one bothered them much and they wouldn’t notice anyway, for they were all of a kind: sunken into a sodden alcoholic mire, from which there’d be no return. They would in the end drink themselves to death. While Hero and Eldin pitied them, on occasion they’d remarked how they would rather snuggle up to a school of scabfish. Now and then a sailor would get senseless drunk and go off with one of them, for which all the gods of dream help him!
The rest of the Craven Lobster’s clientele: hard men, loners, the occasional Kledan slaver, sea-captains from unknown parts on the lookout for a crewman to shanghai, other seadogs and peglegs and retired pirates gathered to tell their tall tales, which got taller with each telling. And now and then a pair of questers.
Like now, for instance.
Hero held open the door on its spring-loaded hinges, waited while Eldin wrinkled his nose and sniffed suspiciously on the threshold. Then the Wanderer pretended to reel from the vapors and perfumed smoke and writhing reek of the place, and leaning against this supposed exhalation as against a strong wind made his way to the bar. Following in Eldin’s wake, Hero tut-tutted at his dramatics. It wasn’t that bad.
“Ho, Lippy!” Eldin rumbled, thumping his elbows down on the bar.
Hero drew up alongside the Wanderer and gazed at Lippy’s huge ebony features. In the frame of his memory a picture formed, in which Lippy’s mouth moved and spoke the words: “Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, you two had to walk—” But the vision was shattered when the real-life Lippy said:
“Ho, Wanderer!” The Pargan proprietor nodded. “You, too, Hero. Long time …” That was their welcome, and never a smile. Then, straight to business: “Eldin, we’ve a couple of Kledan slavers in tonight. Last time you were here—”
“No trouble tonight!” Eldin held up a flat hand. “My word on it.”
“I had to have the wall shored up where you tossed that one through it into the sea.”
“But I didn’t start it.”
“That’s true, else you’d have followed him. Very well, what’s your poison?”
“Ales,” said Hero. “Small ones. We’ve things to do later and I for one don’t want a fuddled head.” They paid for their drinks, sipped, gazed around the smoky interior. Lippy moved away to tend to someone else, and:
“Well?” said Hero. “D’you see him?”
“Eh?”
“The seer with invisible eyes, of course—or is the rest of him equally insubstantial?”
Eldin narrowed his eyes to a penetrating peer, began to sweep the room with his gaze. “Maybe he’s not—” he started, and froze.
“And maybe he is,” Hero nodded sourly, following Eldin’s rapt gaze. “Is that him?”
For answer, the Wanderer slowly nodded.
The seer with invisible eyes didn’t look like much. He sat on a bench, his back toward an open window in the rear wall (a wall of thin wooden boards, which showed signs of recent repair), and huddled over a mug of muth. He seemed skeletal inside a bundle of rags with the hood pulled up, throwing his face into shadow; the only visible parts of him were his scrawny wrists and clawlike hands, which protruded from his tattered sleeves and circled the mug on the wooden table before him. He seemed oblivious of the fact that no one sat very close to him, oblivious of all else, too; but, as Hero and Eldin stared, the figure lifted a bony hand and crooked a finger in their direction. And: “Come,” that finger undeniably beckoned, pulling on their strings.
No one else had noticed; Hero and Eldin shoved off from the bar and moved toward the seer. As they went Hero muttered: “He’s on the dew, eh?”
“All he ever drinks,” Eldin rumblingly returned.
<
br /> Hero nodded. “No wonder his eyes have vanished!” he said.
“Sit,” the seer sighed, still without looking up, as they reached his table. His voice was a rustle of dead leaves. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
The questers stared at each other in astonishment. “Sit!” hissed the seer. “Don’t be so obvious! Pretend you don’t know me, as I’ll gladly pretend I don’t know you!”
“Little shrivelled friend,” said Hero out the corner of his mouth as he sat to one side of the seer, “I really don’t know you!”
“But I do,” Eldin growled. “So what’s all this with the secrecy bit, eh?”
“Careful!” the seer now looked up a little, the shadows falling away from his face. “We have enemies here!”
Hero looked into the seer’s eyes and saw what Eldin had tried to describe: which is to say, he saw nothing. Those eyes were deep as the spaces out beyond the farthest stars. And that was how cold they looked, too. Hero felt that if he stuck a finger in one of them, then that finger would go brittle as a crystal and snap off in a single instant. “Bottomless!” he gasped.
“Aye, almost,” the seer agreed. “They went this way a moment after I was born. They are my legacy. I’m a mentalist and my eyes are my crystal balls—or my crystal eyeballs, if you like! You see, my mother cast runes and my father was a dream-reader.”
“A what?” said Hero.
“Oneiromancer,” sighed the seer.
Hero frowned, scratched his head. “What the hell’s a one-eyed romancer?”
Eldin’s turn to sigh. “A piratical tall-tale-teller!” he rumbled. And to the seer: “What’s this about enemies?”
The seer glanced dartingly this way and that. “Didn’t Kuranes tell you anything? He did send you, didn’t he? Or maybe my sendings reached you?”
The questers looked at each other; Eldin gloweringly, Hero half apologetically and with the ghost of a shrug. “Kuranes told us, er, very little,” the younger dreamer said.
“Truth to tell,” Eldin added disgustedly, “damn all! What’s all this about sendings?”
“Dreams!” said the seer. “I’ve been sending you dreams. Didn’t you dream that you’d meet me here?”
“Er, why yes I did,” said Eldin. “But I also—”
“Shhh!” the seer held up a cautionary finger. “We’re under scrutiny. You see those Kledans there?” He nodded almost imperceptibly across the room. “They—”
At which point there came a phttt! from the open window, followed immediately by the noise a soft-bodied fly makes thudding against a window-pane. The seer said, “Ah!” and jerked straighter where he sat.
Hero glanced at the window, thought he saw a dark face disappearing there. The seer slumped, fell face down, sprawling on the table. A long feathered dart, the merest sliver of wood and fluff, stood up from the thin rags on his back. Then—
Chaos!
Hero was on his feet, lips drawn back in a snarl, curved sword whispering from its sheath more magically than any wand. He sprang to the window and looked out—and ducked back. A second blow-dart zipped past his ear like an enraged wasp, stuck quivering into a ceiling beam. But out there in the night, pulling away, a pair of burly blacks worked hard at the oars of their boat; and dangling down from the window-frame, a knotted rope suspended from its grapple. In another moment the boat disappeared out of the light from the window, became a shadow, was lost in the mild summer mist.
Meanwhile:
The Kledans the seer had pointed out had come to their feet, started toward the table where their almost-accuser lay face-down, lifeless. “What?” cried one gutturally, in feigned surprise. “Murder? What have you two done to him there?”
The second black said: “How’s that? Stuck him with a dart, did you?”
Every head in the Craven Lobster was turned now in the direction of Hero, Eldin, and the ex-seer. Then the first of the black slavers closed with Eldin, snarled his enmity and snatched at his knife. An enormous error.
Eldin reached out swift as lightning and grasped the man’s knife hand, bearing down on it and holding the knife safe in its scabbard. At the same time he butted the black in the mouth, heard teeth break and lips squelch into tatters. The second Kledan dragged out the dart from the seer’s back, turned with it upraised to strike at Eldin.
Meanwhile:
Hero had turned from the window, taken in the scene at a glance. He stepped forward, caught at the descending wrist, deflected and added impetus to the blow. The Kledan stabbed himself in the groin and squealed like a stuck pig.
By now the first slaver was in big trouble: face bloody and only half-conscious, he was whirled for a moment across Eldin’s broad shoulders, then released like a shot from a sling against Lippy’s recently repaired wall. The Craven Lobster shuddered hugely as the Kledan crashed through in a splintering of timbers.
Meanwhile:
The slaver with the dart in his groin had gone to his knees; white froth started from his lips; he was dead before he toppled. The poison on the dart had been that effective! Eldin grabbed at the limp body of the seer, tried to sit him up. Useless, the seer flopped off the bench on to the floor. He lay on his back staring blindly up at Hero and Eldin, and as they stared back, so his invisible eyes filled in. There was a scene in them, mobile, like the reflection in a mirror: moving pictures of Ula and Una, fighting in the grip of a pair of bully-boys who grinned and fondled them detestably!
Then—
The scene vanished as the seer’s eyes turned scarlet and flooded over. Blood dripped from their rims.
By now everyone in the place was on his or her feet, all eyes turned accusingly on the questers. No one had seen the face at the window except Hero, but all had heard the shouted Kledan accusations. The seer was dead, likewise a slaver. Another slaver was either drowning or fighting off scabfish. And there was a damned great hole in the Craven Lobster’s rear wall.
It had all taken a handful of seconds; and meanwhile:
Lippy Unth had been holding his breath. Holding it so long his great ebony face had turned more nearly black, then dark green, finally enraged purple. What’s more, his huge lips were protruding in such a pout as was never before seen. He swung himself over the bar and landed four-square, more like a bull gorilla than a man, and straightening up advanced shamblingly on the questers where they stood astonished.
“What?” roared Eldin as Lippy charged, scattering tables and benches and customers and anything else that happened to be in his path, tossing all aside like so much chaff. “What? You blame us?”
Lippy bellowed like a behemoth, bore down on Hero, who at once took cover under a bolted-down table. Lippy crashed into the table (more shudders from the Craven Lobster, and dust falling from ceiling-beams everywhere), sprawled across it, reached down arms like treetrunks and grabbed Hero’s ankles. Which was when Eldin picked up a bench and hit him with it. Lippy stopped bellowing, stood up, fell down stiff as a log.
A moment later and Hero scrambled into view; he was white as a sheet from the closeness of his shave. Then the two were fighting for the door, kicking, biting and fending off blows and oaths with more of the same. Somehow they made it unscathed and turned to look back.
A man could die in the Craven Lobster (if he did it quietly) and it probably wouldn’t be noticed for a while. Slaves might well be bartered there, and no one would turn a hair—not even Lippy, who’d once been a slave himself. But only spill a man’s drink, or interrupt the interminable fables of some old legend-monger, or (worse far) interfere with the service …
The questers had done all three with great gusto, and the Craven Lobster’s clientele did not approve. Amid the reek and shambles of the place a ring of scarred, furious faces slowly became visible. Knives glinted dully, and bronze knuckle-dusters were slipped over the ridges of horny fingers; and out of the sudden lull came an abrupt, renewed burst of violence. Lippy’s son, big as his father and just as dangerous, smashed through the narrowing circle and hurled himself h
eadlong upon Hero and Eldin as they backed off.
Nimble as a cricket, Hero stepped aside, tripped him. Gooba Unth said, “Oops!” He flew forward, horizontally now, and was smacked soundly, double-fisted, on the side of his head by Eldin. His flight diverted, Gooba struck a doorpost like a torpedo and knocked it loose. The overhead still sagged and the ceiling groaned as it settled a few inches, while beams popped and more dust fell in threatening rills from the higher rafters.
The questers glanced at one another, grinning maliciously through clenched teeth. They looked again at the circle of muttering faces, and their eyes gleamed as they turned them on the remaining upright. “Me or you?” the Wanderer queried.
Hero shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said.
As the crowd surged forward like a tide, Eldin drop-kicked the doorpost out into the night. Hero ducked through at the last moment, untangled his friend from the moaning heap that was Gooba Unth, and hastened him along the catwalk to the dockside proper.
Behind them, the Craven Lobster uttered a curious sigh and several creaks and grunts: the death-rattle of ill-used timbers giving up the ghost. Then, to a chorus of “Timber!” from the duo, the roof settled slantingly as walls buckled and one sadly defunct tavern slid off its piles into the greasy harbor water. Last to go was the catwalk itself.
“What now?” said Eldin.
“We’ve a date, remember?”
“What? But surely we want to keep the girls out of this—whatever ‘this’ is!”
“They’re already in,” said Hero fatalistically. “You saw what I saw, in the seer’s dead eyes, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. You asked me recently if I thought dreams mightn’t be prophetic. Well, yours obviously was—so what are we to make of what the seer showed us in his eyes?”
Eldin made no answer. He didn’t have one.
They made their way into a maze of steep, narrow alleys, climbing rapidly through several street levels into brighter, more friendly districts. Cats in the night, they were gray and insubstantial as shadows, fleet and silent as moonbeams. But stepping at last from shade into the welcoming glow of multi-colored lanthorns strung above the stalls and wares and thronging crowd of a street bazaar, they reverted to being just men again, and no one seeing their beaming faces and the elegance of their gestures and movements would ever guess the disorder so recently left in their wake.