Even here, in the relative comfort of the Broken Tooth Tavern, it was all or nothing.
In any tavern, on any cold night, there was no such thing as just right – he was always either too close to the main fireplace, or too far away. Given the choice, Kethol preferred too close, his back to the hearth, for it was hard to think of himself as being too warm in winter, even though he would regret it later, when he went out into the cold night to make his way back to the barracks at the south end of the city, with the wind cutting through his sweat-dampened clothes like a knife.
And there were better ways to work up a sweat.
Some of the other mercenaries were doing that at the moment – spending their hard-earned blood money in the sleeping rooms above, and the incessant creaking of the floorboards gave witness as to how they were spending their hard-earned money, but while Kethol didn’t mind dropping the odd copper or two on a quick roll with one of the local whores, the cold shrivelled his passions as much as it did the relevant portions of his anatomy, and he couldn’t see the point of spending good money on a soft itchy bed when there was an equally-itchy rope bedframe waiting at the barracks, for free.
Kethol watched closely as the placards fell. This game of pakir, or whatever they called it, wasn’t something that he was familiar with, but a game was a game, and gambling was gambling, and all it would take would be enough familiarity with it to avoid the traps that drunken men would fall into, and then he could play.
Men took up the sword for any number of stupid reasons. Honour, family, country, hearth and home. Kethol did it for the money, but he didn’t insist on earning all of his money with the edge of his sword, or even the point.
In the meantime, a few coppers spent on the particularly thin, sour beer of LaMut were coppers well spent. With an abundant supply of good dwarven ale nearby – Kethol was never sure if there was some magic involved, but it was consistently better than any humans brewed – it was clear that the local human brewers had only one mandate: make the beer as cheaply as possible, treating such things as good barley, unrotted hops, and washing out the vats in between batches as unnecessary fripperies. So when someone else bought, Kethol ordered dwarven ale; when he paid for it himself, he took the cheap stuff. It wasn’t as if he was going to drink a lot of it, after all. He was only going to look as if he was drinking a lot of it.
It was an investment, as Pirojil would say. A small investment to make his opponent think him slightly in his cups, perhaps not as attentive to the game as he might be. A sip now and again, spilling most of the vile brew on the floor from time to time, and when he sat down to gamble, several empty ale jacks would testify to his being ready to be taken in a game. Then he could indulge in some serious gambling. Yes, it was an investment.
As much of an investment as their three swords. Blades that would chop through leather and flesh and into bone rather than chip and bend had proven their worth more than once. Saving money was a good thing, but just about the worst place Kethol could think of for economies was in the tools of the trade.
In his mind’s eye, he could still see the widened eyes of the Tsurani whose blade had shattered on his shield, moments before he had slid his own sharp point under the enemy’s arm, and into the soft juncture under the armpit that was protected on the sides by the pauldrons. He didn’t have anything personal against the Tsurani, but then he had never had a personal grudge against any but a small percentage of the men he had killed. Besides, he had a lot in common with the Tsurani – they had invaded Midkemia for metal, so the strange story went, and a man who made his living killing with steel to earn gold and silver could understand that. If Kethol had a choice of metals, he would choose steel ten times out of ten – steel, in his experience, could get you gold more reliably than gold could get you steel.
Besides, his skills were useful here.
Blending into the scenery was a skill that a man who had started life as a forester’s son could use on other grounds, as well.
The trick was not to overdo it, not to try to be too local, and be spotted as a phoney, arousing suspicion. Just add a little of the thick accent, throw in an occasional use of the local flick of the fingers that meant never-mind-it’s-not-important, taking care to be friendly and smiling but not trying to be too comradely, and they wouldn’t even notice that they barely noticed him.
It had worked when he was fist-boxing in that small village outside of Rodez – before Pirojil had killed that annoying little sergeant, and the three of them had to take to their heels, again – and it worked when he was learning how to roll dice in Northwarden.
Just learn the game, learn how to blend in, and be sober while seeming less than sober, and they would only notice that he had beaten them after it was accomplished and he was gone.
Somebody had to win, after all.
Why not Kethol?
Three beefy Muts, one with a fresh set of corporal’s stripes on his sleeve, leaned over the rough-hewn table, examining the placards in front of them, while four others looked on. All wore the greyish livery of regular Mut soldiers, and all talked amongst themselves in the thick LaMut accent that Kethol could imitate without thinking about it.
‘Nice play, Osic,’ one said, as another scooped the pile of coppers toward him. ‘I was sure I had you beat.’
‘It can happen,’ Osic said. He turned to Kethol. ‘Kehol,’ he said, mispronouncing the name in a way a prouder man would have taken offence at, ‘you want to get in on the next hand? Only a couple of coppers to see some placards, but it can get expensive after that, truth to tell.’
Kethol had watched long enough, he thought, to have some idea about the ranking of combinations. More to the point, the Muts had been drinking long enough that a sober man wouldn’t have any difficulty working out who thought, albeit in a drunken stupor, that he had a good combination, and that should be good enough.
In the country of the drunk, a sober man was at least a landed baron, and on a good day, an earl.
‘I may as well,’ Kethol said, emptying a judiciously small heap of patinaed copper coins out of his pouch and onto the table. He had considerably more on him, of course, but it was best not to seem rich.
‘Your money’s as green as the next fellow’s,’ one of the Muts said, and the others chuckled along with the jest that had been ancient when the Kingdom was new.
It was probably a risky idea to get into a game with regulars, but there were times for taking a risk.
Over in a far corner, near where the smell of roasting mutton oozed out of the kitchen, a game of two-thumb was going on between two Keshian mercenaries: the mad dwarf, Mackin, and a skinny, balding, puffy-faced fellow who called himself Milo, but who Kethol was certain had a price on his head under another name, and probably a local price, at that. – why else would he make himself so scarce whenever the constable appeared? – and that’s where Kethol should have been playing.
If one of them took offence at Kethol’s winning, the odds were small that another would want to interfere. You could win a lot in a night when most of the time you appeared to be taking a deep draught of your beer you barely swallowed.
Here there was more risk, but there was also more profit to be had. It was just another field of battle, as far as Kethol was concerned. All he had to do was obey the same set of rules: protect himself and his friends; be sure not to draw too much attention to himself; and be sure to be one of the men standing when it was all over. And just as the best time to attack was before dawn, when the enemy would all be sleeping, the best time to gamble was late at night, when the others’ minds would be clouded with too much drink and too little sleep.
And if that seemed ungentle and unsporting, well then, that was just fine with Kethol. He was, after all, a mercenary, serving his betters for pay, and like the whores upstairs he tried to be as well paid for as little service as he could manage.
So he nodded, sat down, and threw a couple of coppers in the middle of the table, and received his placards from the d
ealer’s heavy hands.
He was just about to make his first play when the fight broke out at the table behind him.
You would think that men who made their living fighting would have better things to do in their time off than recreational brawling.
What was the point of it, after all? If it was practice, it was stupid practice. Neither the Tsurani nor the Bugs nor anybody else Kethol had taken up sword and pike against would have gone at it with bare fists if there was something sharp or blunt or big to hit the other with. And if it was really worth fighting over, it was worth killing over, and if that made you an outlaw, well, Midkemia was roomy enough that you could be declared an outlaw in more than a few places and still be able to earn a living, something that Kethol knew from personal experience.
Usually it was about one of three things: money, a woman, or I-just-feel-like-acting-like-an-idiot. Often it was all three.
Kethol had no idea what this fight was about, but grunts quickly turned into shouts and shouts were followed by the meaty thunk of blows landing.
He saw something out of the corner of his eye, and ducked quickly enough to avoid the flying chair, but the motion brought him into full contact with the burly regular on his right, and instinctively the Mut responded with a backhanded fist that caught Kethol high on the right cheekbone.
Lights went off in Kethol’s right eye, but reflexes worked where vision couldn’t; he lowered his head and lunged, catching the Mut around the waist in a tackle that brought both of them to the hard wooden floor. Kethol landed on top, hoping he had knocked the wind out of the other. He bashed his fist into the soldier’s midsection, just below the ribcage, for a bit of insurance. Hope was a fine thing, but certainty was better. He had nothing personal against the man he was fighting, but he was used to killing people he had nothing against, so just roughing up one didn’t count. Then he slammed his knee into the other man’s groin and rolled away. This brawl was a matter of self-protection, not anger.
That was the thing about other people that Kethol never had understood: other people – even Pirojil and Durine – often got angry during a fight, letting their anger fuel them. For Kethol, it was all a matter of doing what you needed to. You got angry over other things – cruelty, or cheating, or incompetence or waste – not combat.
A few miscellaneous blows landed on his back and legs as he rose to a crouch – the wildly flailing feet of two other combatants as they rolled about the ground – but they didn’t slow him down, and at least no knives or swords had come out, not yet. It was just a tavern fight, after all, and it was unlikely that, even drunk, the soldiers would escalate it into something more.
Off in the distance, somebody was ringing an alarm bell frantically. Most likely the tavernkeeper, calling for the Watch, for the alarm bell was quickly echoed by the Watch whistles. Clearly the Watch had been nearby, supplemented by a squad of regulars assigned from the garrison for the purpose of keeping order in the city. The Earl of LaMut might be young and new to his position, but it would be no surprise to him or his captains that garrisoned soldiers tended to fight with each other when they couldn’t find anything else to do, and the best of the Kingdom nobility were used to accepting and dealing with the inevitable.
Neither was it a surprise to Kethol; he was always half-expecting a fight to break out, and while he hadn’t been counting on it, he had been hoping for it.
He made his move.
In a fight, a man being knocked down was nothing to be surprised about, so as he grunted and fell to the floor, nobody would take particular notice that his fall hadn’t been preceded by a blow. The fact that he fell to the floor where under a table several dozen of the coins had scattered was simply a matter of convenience.
He quickly scooped up a handful of coins – not worrying about the sound of clinking metal carrying over the shouts and grunts; everybody else would be too busy to notice a small thing like that – and made certain to pick out the silver reals first, before bothering with the coppers. All of the coins went into a hidden pocket sewn into the inside of his tunic, and he stuffed a rag in on top of them before pulling the pocket’s drawstring tight.
Then he was on his hands and knees, making for the door as quickly as he could: he had already taken his pay for this fight, and it was time to be going.
A tavern fight had a dynamic of its own: after a few moments of free-for-all, some men would be down, hurting; others would have paired off, working off new or old grievances of their own with their fists.
Yet others would soon be doing what Kethol was busy doing: not hanging around for the fight to turn bloody, and particularly not waiting for the arrival of the Watch, but making themselves scarce. Unsurprisingly, that Milo fellow had been the first man through the door and out into the night, and others had followed. Kethol wouldn’t be the first, or the last, and that was just fine.
Kethol launched himself through into the mud-room and through the mud-room to the entryway, brushing aside the thick sheets of canvas hung up to keep the chill air out of the tavern.
And stopped in his tracks.
They were waiting for him outside: a squad of regulars, led by a mounted corporal whose massive dark horse pranced nervously on the hard-packed snow, pawing at it with the strange clawed horseshoes that Kethol hadn’t seen anywhere except in LaMut.
A lance pointed in his direction.
‘You’d be Kethol, the mercenary,’ came a voice out of the darkness.
There was a sharp point on the lance, and no point in denying it. If there was a problem, he would have to talk his way out of it now – or, more likely, think, talk, or fight his way out of it later.
‘Yes,’ he said, his hands spread in a question. ‘Is there some problem?’
‘Not for me. The Swordmaster wants to see you.’
‘Me?’
‘You. All three of you.’
He didn’t have to ask what the corporal meant by ‘all three of you’.
‘So let’s be on our way,’ the corporal said.
Kethol shrugged.
With the stolen coins warm in his hidden pocket, he had nothing else that he needed to be doing, including dying in the street.
At the moment.
It was a dark and stormy night, and if there was such a thing as a barn that wasn’t draughty, Pirojil had never seen one, so he wasn’t surprised at the bitter cold ripping through the place as he rolled another bale of hay down from the loft, letting it fall onto the hard-packed earth below.
The horses were used to the thunk made by the bale hitting the floor, although the big bay gelding that was reserved for the use of the Horsemaster himself nickered and clomped in his stall.
Pirojil didn’t have any particular objection to doing his share of tending the horses – all of the stableboys had been pressed into service as message runners during the last-but-one battle, and all of them had been cut down either by Tsurani or Bugs – but he didn’t particularly care to be doing it in a barn that was so cold and draughty that the sweat on his nose kept freezing.
It was a trade-off, as most things in life were. The less you complained about having to muck out a few stalls, the more likely it was that your name was not going to come to the top of the captain’s mental list when he needed to send a patrol out to see if there really were Tsurani lying in ambush in the forest ahead. And if you could improve the job with more than a few swigs from a bottle of cheap Tyr-Sog wine that the late sergeant – may Tith-Onaka, god of soldiers, clasp him to his hairy, hoary breast! – didn’t have any use for any more, well, then what was the harm?
It was lousy work, but it was easy.
You just slid a hackamore on the horse, led it to an empty stall, being sure to close the animal in properly, and then forked out the old, shit-and-piss-laden straw, then spread out some of the fresh. The old straw went into the wheelbarrow, and the wheelbarrow went up the ramp and through two sets of heavy swinging doors, to be dumped onto the back of the midden wagon, after which it was no long
er Pirojil’s problem. Somebody else would have to haul it out of town, and dump it. It was said that the dung of LaMut horses was why the local potatoes grew as big as horseflops, but growing vegetables was something that Pirojil didn’t know much about.
Or care.
Pirojil knew that he was capable of being as complex a man as there was, which was why at times very simple things appealed to him. As did not thinking about things that didn’t concern him. There was no point in employing his mental capacity without a good reason, after all. He had another swig of wine, gargled with it to clear the accumulated phlegm from his throat, and carefully re-stoppered the bottle before setting it down on the floor next to the ladder. The ladder could be used for getting down to the floor, but there was also the rope. And, just a short step away from the loft, a well-varnished pole stood invitingly.
Pirojil slid down the pole easily, his thick leather gloves warming only a trifle from the friction, and landed lightly. That was the trick of it, he had decided. You wanted to stop just at the floor, by your own friction, not drive your boots into the hard earthen floor.
It was a silly thing to be concentrating on, but there were worse.
Like the way women looked at him. Even the whores.
He shrugged. An ugly man was an ugly man, but an ugly rich man was a rich man, and some day he would be at least a moderately rich man, if he wasn’t a dead man first. You had to keep building up your stake, and waiting for the right moment, and in the meantime –