Master Of The Hashomi

Chapter 19

At last they let Blade out of the castle and sent him back to Dahaura. His «cover identity» was that of an officer of the Baran's army; wounded in battle against some of the wild tribes beyond the frontier, now on a pension that gave him just enough to live. His wounds and his poverty were expected to arouse a good deal of sympathy and get men and women alike to talk freely.

«There are risks, of course,» said the chief of the Eyes of the Baran. «If you meet a soldier who actually fought in the battle where you say you were wounded, you must of course get away from him as quickly as possible. To let him catch you in a lie would not be wise.»

«No, it would not,» said Blade, more politely than he felt. The chief of the Eyes of the Baran was another of those grayhaired eunuchs who seemed to be everywhere and do nearly everything in the Baran's service. This one's name was Giraz, and he kept himself as lean as a shoelace by vigorous exercise and light eating. He also had an annoying habit of treating his subordinates as if they were children who needed to be told the facts of life. Still, he listened to them when they spoke, and he was willing to work eighteen hours a day for the Baranate. For those two virtues Blade was willing to forgive Giraz quite a few vices.

Blade moved about Dahaura as freely as a fish in the ocean, saying little and listening a great deal. Being a pensioned-off veteran was good for a drink, a meal, or even a night's lodging in many places. Most people seemed to be loyal to the Baran, or at least concerned about looking that way.

In those few places frequented largely by the Fighters of Junah, Blade was not so lucky. Several times he was asked to leave, twice he had things thrown at him, and once three men came at him with knives. They wore the clothes of common laborers, but they moved and held their weapons like professional fighting men. Blade had a good deal of trouble fighting them off without revealing too much of his own, skill, and the tavern's furniture got badly smashed in the process.

After that Blade started carrying a walking stick. It was the sort of thing a man with a partly crippled leg would carry, and looked perfectly harmless. In fact it was weighted and balanced so that Blade could wield it with deadly effectiveness on a second's notice. With a little more warning, he could unscrew one end and expose five inches of razor-sharp steel. Sword-canes were not everyday wear in Dahaura, but enough people carried them so that no one would suspect anything sinister about Blade if he used one to defend himself.

Blade quickly learned that something was happening in the ranks of the Thieves Guild that was making even the prostitutes and dealers in stolen goods have second thoughts about dealing with them. No one would talk freely about this «something,» of course. The Thieves had always been ruthless with those who said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and that certainly hadn't changed. But the rumors were everywhere in Dahaura, like fleas in the bedding of a cheap inn, and Blade started collecting those rumors.

He wasn't the only one. Giraz was too good an intelligence chief to let his agents know too much about each other, but Blade had eyes and ears and a mind to draw conclusions. Esseta was certainly involved in the spying on the Thieves. She now had a house of her own outside the walls, with a dozen women in it-all paid for by the Baran, Blade was quite certain. Blade could not see how anything less could have overcome Esseta's life-long refusal to get mixed up in politics.

Meanwhile, Kubin Ben Sarif was busily organizing the Brothel Keepers to fight the Thieves-or at least join in the watch kept upon them. Kubin knew exactly what he was doing and why, but he kept it a secret from most of his fellow keepers. They didn't need to know why they were doing what he told them to do, as long as they did it.

There seemed to be a small army of spies, plotters, and assassins running around in Dahaura. It reminded Blade of West Berlin, notoriously filled with agents from every intelligence service on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He'd done only one mission there, and was glad that was all. He'd never felt quite so much in danger every minute-until he came to Dahaura.

With all the spies the Baran had on the job, a picture of what the Thieves Guild had in mind slowly appeared. It was a picture that frightened everyone who had full knowledge of it.

The Thieves Guild was allying itself with the Fighters of Junah. They were determined to have not merely justice but vengeance, thorough and bloody. The things they wanted avenged went back many years, and Blade's killing of the master who'd tried to rob the Baran was only the final straw. They'd given up hope of getting what they wanted from the Baranate, so that anyone who sought its overthrow had possibilities as an ally. There were only two such groups that the Thieves knew of the tribes across the eastern frontier and the Fighters of Junah. The tribes were a long way off and hostile to strangers of every sort, whether they were friends or foes of the Baran. Most of the Fighters of Junah were close at hand, in Dahaura and the other five large cities of the Baranate; they needed help, and they knew it.

At first Blade was surprised to find anyone in Dahaura forming an alliance with the Fighters of Junah. He'd thought that most people would give up anything, including vengeance, rather than join the Fighters.

That was true of most people, but not of the Thieves Guild. They had short tempers and long memories. More important, few of them had any religion to speak of. Some of them were said to worship at the shrines of cults even older and more persecuted than the Fighters of Junah. Most believed only in gold, a good knife, and a painful death for traitors and tale-bearers. It did not bother them that the Fighters of Junah were heretics, as long as they were allies.

The Fighters of Junah couldn't afford to pick and choose their allies, any more than the Thieves. So they were welcoming the alliance with an open mind, if not yet open arms.

How far the alliance had gone was hard to learn. What frightened Blade was how far it might go. An alliance of the Thieves with the Fighters of Junah meant an alliance of the Thieves with the Hashomi. The Hashomi were deadly and efficient, but there could not be that many of them in Dahaura. With the Thieves to guide them, spy for them, and hide them, the Hashomi could become far more dangerous. Dahaura held few secrets from the Thieves Guild.

Nor was that the worst of it. There were the drugs of the Hashomi, the drugs that could spread madness and destruction through a whole city. What would happen if the Hashomi and the Thieves together started dropping drugs into the feed at every stable in Dahaura? Or putting them into the brewing vats of all the city's largest breweries? There were a dozen other possibilities, all gruesome. Working together, the Thieves, the Hashomi, and the Fighters of Junah could attack more different points than the Baranate could possibly hope to defend. Dahaura could be thrown into chaos within a single day, if the work was done properly.

The Baran didn't ask Blade for advice, and Blade was glad. He wouldn't have been quite sure what to say. His instincts told him to advise rounding up every Thief in Dahaura and torturing them until they'd revealed everything, then executing them all in pubic. His better judgment told him this was impossible. Even trying it would simply grab only a part of the Thieves and drive the rest into hiding, angrier and more dangerous than ever.

The key was the leaders of the Thieves Guild, the Council of Twelve. If they could be swept up all at once, the Thieves would be leaderless and at least temporarily paralyzed. Then they could either be rounded up at leisure, or possibly even ignored while the Baran's fighting men went after the Hashomi. Standing orders were to avoid any sort of trouble with the Fighters of Junah-unless, of course, they started it.

Esseta was apparently putting her sister courtesans on to the job of tracing the movements of the Council of Twelve. She had to be discreet about this, of course, and very careful in her choice of women to help her. Some of the women of Dahaura's brothels hated the Thieves so much that they'd never be able to keep their mouths shut. Other women were the friends of Thieves, or secret dealers in stolen goods. They might turn double agent.

More and more, Dahaura reminded Blade of West Berlin. He remembered how glad he used to be when a mission to Dimension X ended up involving him in the same sort of espionage work he knew and did so well.

Now he'd be far happier in a Dimension where nobody had ever heard of spies!