Too Many Magicians

CHAPTER 15

In Potsmoke Alley the fog closed about the two men, and when the rear door to the Royal Steward was closed behind them they were surrounded by darkness.

“This way,” said Ashley. They turned right, feeling their way down Potsmoke Alley to the end of the block of buildings to where St. Swithin’s Street crossed the narrow alley and widened it to become Upper Swandham Lane. Here there were a few gas lanterns glowing dimly in the fog, but even so it was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead.

As he and Ashley emerged from Potsmoke Alley, Lord Darcy could hear a distant click!… click!… click!… approaching through the fog to their right, on St. Swithin’s Street. It sounded like someone wearing shoes with steel taps. To the left he could hear two pairs of leather-shod boots retreating, one fairly close by, the other farther down the street. Somewhere ahead, far down Upper Swandham Lane, he could hear a coach and pair clattering slowly across the cobblestones.

The two men crossed St. Swithin’s Street and went down Upper Swandham Lane. “I think that’s it ahead,” said Lord Ashley, after a minute. “Yes. Yes, that’s it.”

The sign underneath the gas lantern depicted a bright blue gazehound in hot pursuit of an equally blue hare.

“All right, let’s go in,” said Lord Darcy. “Keep your hood up and your cloak closed. I shouldn’t want anyone to see that Naval uniform. This way, we might be ordinary middle-class merchants.”

“Right,” said Lord Ashley, “I hope we can spot the girl. Do you know her when you see her?”

“I think so. Her Grace’s description was quite detailed; there can’t be many girls of her size and appearance wandering about London.” He pushed open the door.

There was a long bar stretching along the full length of the wall to Darcy’s left. Along the wall to his right was a series of booths that also stretched to the back of the room. In the rear there were several tables in the center of the floor, between the bar and the booths. Some men at one were playing cards, and a dart board on the back wall was responding with the thunk!… thunk!… thunk!… of darts thrown by a patron whose arm was as strong as his aim was weak.

Darcy and Ashley moved quickly to an empty spot at the bar. In spite of the number of customers the big room was not crowded.

“See anybody we know?” murmured Lord Ashley.

“Not from here,” Lord Darcy said. “She could be in one of those rear booths. Or possibly she hasn’t arrived yet.”

“I think your second guess was correct,” Ashley said. “Take a look in the mirror behind the bar.”

The mirror reflected the front door perfectly, and Lord Darcy easily recognized the tiny figure and beautiful face of Tia Einzig. As she walked across the room toward the back the identification was complete in Darcy’s mind. “That’s the girl,” he said. “Notice the high heels that Her Grace mentioned.”

And, he realized, those heels also explained those clicking footsteps he had heard on St. Swithin’s Street. She hadn’t been more than thirty seconds behind Ashley and himself.

Tia did not look around. She walked straight toward the rear as if she knew exactly where the person she was to meet would be waiting. She went directly to the last booth, near the back door of the pub, and slid in on the far side, facing the front door.

“I wonder,” said Lord Darcy, “is there somebody already in that booth? Or is she waiting for the person who sent her the note?”

“Let’s just stroll back and see,” said Lord Ashley.

“Good, but don’t get too close. I don’t want either of them to see our faces.”

“We could watch the dart game,” said Lord Ashley, “that might be interesting.”

“Yes, let’s,” said Lord Darcy. They walked slowly back to the far end of the bar.

There was someone in the booth, seated directly across from Tia Einzig. It was obviously a man, but the hood of the cloak completely concealed his face, and he kept his head bent low over the table.

Lord Darcy said: “Let’s move over to that table. I want to see if I can hear their conversation. But move carefully. Keep your face concealed without being obvious about it.”

The nearest table was further toward the front of the room than the booth that the two men were watching. They could no longer see the hooded man at all. His back was to them now and he kept his voice low, so that, while it was audible, it was not intelligible. Tia, however, was facing them, and, as Mary de Cumberland had told Lord Darcy the previous evening, the girl’s voice had abnormal carrying power, even when she did not speak loudly.

For several seconds all they could hear was the low mutter of the man’s voice, then Tia said, “If you didn’t want him dead, why did you kill him?” Her expression was hard and cold, with an undertone of anger.

More muttering, then Tia again: “You discovered that Zed, the much-feared head of Imperial Naval Intelligence in Europe, was actually Master Sir James Zwinge, and you mean to sit there and tell me that King Casimir’s Secret Service didn’t want him dead.”

A couple of angry words from the hooded man.

“I’ll talk any way I please,” said Tia. “You keep a civil tongue in your head.”

She said nothing more for nearly a minute, as she listened to the hooded man with that unchanging stony expression of cold anger on her beautiful face. Then an icy smile came across her lips.

“No, I will not,” she said. “I won’t ask him. Not for you, not for Poland, not for King Casimir’s whole damned army!”

A short phrase from the hooded man. Tia’s cold smile widened just a trifle. “No, damn you, not for him either. And do you know why? Because I know now that you lied to me! Because I know now that he’s safe from the torture chambers of the Polish Secret Service!”

The hooded man said something more. “Signing his death warrant?” She laughed sharply, without humor. “Oh no. You’ve harassed me long enough. You’ve tried to force me to betray a country that has been good to me, and a man who loves me. I’ve lived in constant fear and terror because of you, but no longer. Oh, I’m going to sign a death warrant all right — yours! I’m going to blow this whole plot sky high. I’m going to tell the Imperial authorities everything I know, and I hope they hang you, you vicious, miserable little…”

She stopped suddenly and blinked. “What?” She blinked again.

Lord Darcy, watching Tia’s face covertly from beneath his hood, saw her expression change. Where before it had been stony, now it became wooden. The cold expression became no expression at all.

The Commander suddenly reached over and grabbed Darcy’s wrist.

“Watch it!” he whispered harshly. “They’re going to leave by the back door!”

Lord Darcy smiled inwardly. Lord Bontriomphe had mentioned that Ashley had occasional flashes of precognition, and here was an example of it. Such flashes came to an untrained Talent in moments of personal stress.

As Ashley had predicted, Tia rose to her feet, as did the hooded man, his back still toward the watchers. The hooded man did not turn. Tia did, and the two of them walked directly out the back door, only a few feet away.

Darcy and the Commander were on their feet, heading toward the back door. Then Lord Darcy stopped, his hand on the doorknob.

“What are you waiting for?” Ashley asked.

“I want them to get far enough ahead so that they won’t notice the light when I open this door.”

“But we’ll lose them in this fog!”

“Not with those high heels of hers. You can hear them ten yards away.”

He eased the door open a trifle. “Hear that? They’re moving away toward our right. What street is this?”

“This would be Old Barnegat Road,” said Lord Ashley.

“All right, let’s go.” Lord Darcy swung open the door and the two men stepped out into the billowing fog. The steady clicking of Tia’s heels was still clearly audible.

“Let’s close up the distance,” Lord Darcy said as they walked steadily through the shrouded darkness. “If we walk quietly, they won’t notice our footsteps over the sound of hers.”

The two men said nothing for several minutes as they followed the beacon of sound that came from Tia’s heels. Then, in a low voice, Lord Ashley said, “You know, I didn’t understand much of that conversation back at the pub but I guess I should be thankful I could understand any of it at all.”

“Why?” asked Lord Darcy.

“I had rather assumed it would be in Polish. We know the Einzig girl speaks Polish and the note indicates that the man does, too.”

“Quite the contrary,” said Lord Darcy. “The note indicates that the man has a slight acquaintance with the Polish tongue, but hardly enough to carry on a lengthy conversation in it. The Poles differentiate between a ‘hound’ and a ‘dog’ just as we do. Yet in translating ‘Hound and Hare’ into Polish, he used the Polish word for ‘dog,’ which no one who was conversant with the language would have done. And that tells us a great deal more about the man we are following.”

“In what way, my lord?”

“That he is vain, pretentious, and has an overdeveloped sense of the melodramatic. He could quite as easily have written the note in Anglo-French, yet he did not. Why?”

“Perhaps because he felt that it would not be understood by anyone else who happened to see it.”

“Precisely; and you have fallen into the same error he did. Only a man who is unfamiliar with a language thinks of it as a kind of secret writing. Do you think of Anglo-French as a cryptic language with which to conceal your thoughts from others?”

“Hardly,” said Lord Ashley with a smile.

“But even so,” Lord Darcy said softly, “only a vain, pretentious man would attempt to show off his patently poor knowledge of a language to a person whose native tongue it is.”

At a corner ahead of them, the sound of Tia’s heels turned again to the right. “Where are we now?” Lord Darcy asked.

“If I haven’t lost my bearings, we just passed Great Harlow House; that means they turned on Thames Street, heading roughly south.”

Lord Darcy wished, not for the first time, that he knew more about the geography of London. “Have you any idea where they’re going?” he asked.

“Well, if we keep on this way,” said Lord Ashley, “we’ll pass St. Martin’s Church and end up smack in the middle of Westminster Palace.”

“Don’t tell me they’re going to see the King,” said Lord Darcy. “I really don’t believe I could swallow that.”

“Wait, they’re turning left.”

“Where would that be?”

“Somerset Bridge,” Lord Ashley said. “They’re crossing the river. We’d better drop back a little. There are lights on the bridge.”

“I think not,” said Lord Darcy. “We’ll take our chances.”

“How much longer are they going to keep walking?” Lord Ashley muttered. “Are they out on a pleasant evening stroll to Croydon or something?”

The lights on the bridge did not hamper them in any way. They were widely spaced, and the fog was so dense, especially here over the Thames, that someone standing directly under a gas lamp could not be seen from fifteen feet away. They kept walking at a steady pace.

Suddenly the clicking stopped, somewhere near the middle of the bridge. Automatically the two men also stopped. Then they heard a single sentence, muffled but clearly intelligible: “Now climb up on the balustrade.”

“Good God!” said Darcy. “Let’s go!”

The two men broke into a run. Caution now was out of the question. The hooded man came suddenly into sight, through the veil of fog. He was standing near one of the gas lamps. Tia Einzig was nowhere to be seen. From the river below came the sound of a muffled splash.

At the sound of footsteps the hooded man turned, his face still hidden, shadowed from the overhead light by the hood of his cloak. He froze for a second as if deciding whether or not to run. Then he realized it was too late, that his pursuers were too close for him to escape. His right hand dived beneath his cloak and came out again with a smallsword. Its needlelike blade gleamed in the foggy light.

The Imperial Navy’s training was such that Commander Lord Ashley’s reaction was almost instinctive. His own narrow-bladed sword came from its scabbard and into position before the hooded man could attack.

“Take care of him!” Lord Darcy shouted. “I’ll get the girl!” He was already racing across the bridge to the downstream side, opening his cloak and dropping it behind him as he ran. He vaulted to the top of the broad stone balustrade, stood for a moment, then took a long clean dive into the impenetrable blackness below.