‘Well, actually, it looks like letters.”
Pryce turned to the others. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Which letters?”
‘They are oddly shaped, sir, like some sort of artistic script. I could make out a U with a line over it… an underlined V… the top half of an 0,… and a P^with rounded bottoms.”
“U-V-O-W,” Pryce repeated the letters aloud. ” You vow’? You vow to do what?”
“Whatever vow it is, sir,” interrupted Cunningham, “it certainly seems to be a code of some sort.”
“Or a lock…” Pryce mused, fingering his cloak clasp. “Of course!” he realized. “A key!” He looked down at the clasp, seeing the letters D and B upside down and backward. “In a city of wizards, what sort of entry would you devise to protect your most valuable possessions?”
“One a sorcerer could not circumvent,” Cunningham said. “A magical lock.”
“Not magical,” Pryce insisted, realizing the clasp did not glow as it neared the opening. “No matter how great a magician you are, there will always be a greater one. No, to truly protect your valuables from sorcerers, the lock needs to be mechanical!”
“Mechanical?” Cunningham repeated as if the word was distasteful. “Can you open it, sir?”
Pryce held the cloak clasp between his thumb and index finger. He twisted it this way and that. “Not yet. I don’t have all the letters yet. But I think I will, very soon.” He turned to the misshapen ones. “I promise,” he said, “to do everything in my power to free you from your bondage. You have the word of Darlington Blade.” He marveled at the way it was becoming steadily easier to pass himself off as Blade.
The mongrelman tried to smile, his grotesque lips twisting and spasming. The broken one, however, fell to the joints that served as his knees, tumbling off-balance to lean heavily against the cave wall. “The skyyyyy,” it choked out. “The eeeeearth… to be reeeeeleeeeased…”
“But I need you to help me,” Pryce insisted, cutting off the creature’s agonized longing. “Keep our meeting secret from anyone, or anything, you make contact with. Continue to guard this antechamber, but not from me. Can you do that?” The two creatures nodded. “Good. Now, Geoffrey, show me where you found me.”
The mongrelman lurched down the cavern, and the others followed.
CHAPTER NINE
Pryce Covington wasn’t particularly surprised when they returned to the very rock in the wall that had moved just prior to his being knocked unconscious behind Schreders’s restaurant. It turned out that the flattened rock was a cleverly designed opening to a cave that ran from behind Schreders At Your Service to a patch of earth between the Lallor Wall and the Mark of the Question.
With a push from the other side, the mongrelman opened the partition, showing Pryce that the flat portal section of the rock was attached to the rest of the stone wall by two cunningly designed hinges, made to look like elongated pebbles. There was just enough room for Pryce to wriggle out.
Pryce quickly surveyed the small area behind the eating and drinking establishment, making sure it was empty and no kitchen staff member was watching before he hastily returned to the small tunnel opening. “I’ll be back,” he quietly assured Devolawk and the mongrelman. “Don’t lose hope. Now, quickly, hide yourselves and let me speak to the Jackal.”
The misshapen creatures moved back, andeventually, reluctantlyCunningham appeared at the portal and gazed out at the moonlight of Lallor. Cunningham reacted like an animal seeing the sky for the very first time. “Areare you mad?” he gasped. “I cannot accept this! The longing!” There was wonder in his expression and tone, but also agony, since he now finally saw the comfort and serenity he had been missing in all his years of wandering and slaughter.
Pryce pushed his head halfway into the opening to block the torturing view. “Be strong, my dangerous aide,” he contended. “And above all, don’t unleash you magical gaze.”
“It… would… serve… you… right,” the jackalwere grunted angrily, only just managing to avoid adding “sir.”
“Listen, Cunningham, what I’m about to say is important to us both,” Pryce said urgently. He waited until the jackalwere stopped hugging himself and averting his gaze. The half-man, half-beast blinked rapidly, then looked soulfully at Covington. “You may be a monster,” Pryce continued evenly, “but what you are doing for those other two is not monstrous.”
The jackalwere reacted with surprise and backed away. But he did not run. Instead, he stood in the shadows, halfway between the bowels of the earth and the clear Lallor sky, for quite some time before Covington heard his next quiet words.
“It is my curse to be given human consciousness, sir, a curse my children are blessed with not having. My animal nature needs to feed, and through it I only know the hunger of my body. But my human nature can feel pity and even empathy. Through it, I know the hunger of my mind… and perhaps my soul.”
“I have been told that jackalweres have no soul,” Pryce said softly.
“Who told you that?”
‘Wizards,” Pryce said diffidently.
Cunningham’s sarcasm had the lightness of morning dew.
“Well, then,” he said, “if the wizards say so, it must be true.” He was quiet for several moments more. Then: “In the misshapen ones, I see myself. But unlike me, one was not born this way. He was created by human monsters who could pervade this planet… and that makes me feel rage.”
Suddenly his face was back into the moonlight, no more than an inch from Covington’s own. But it was not Cunningham’s face. It was the face of the orange and black jackal, its eyes burning like the sun. It took everything Pryce was not to hurl himself back from those blazing, but purposefully nonhypnotic, eyes.
“I can do nothing for these creatures,” growled the beast, “who are so wretched that even a monster such as I can care for them. But perhaps you can. And for that, and that alone, I will not kill you. I will not feast on your blood. I will not tear you limb from limb and feed you to my cherished children.” He suddenly turned away. “Now I, too, must go. My nostrils begin to fill with the stench of Lallor wizards. And if I can smell them…”
The words were already diminishing in the distance, but there were three more to come, which Pryce heard distinctly on the wind: “Remember your promise!”
Pryce slowly closed the rock opening of the tunnel wall. He stood between the wall and the back door of the restaurant, his profile toward both. The throbbing in his head reminded him that, by rights, his attacker should have killed him. Why else would he take the trouble to so crudely strike Pryce on the head? Covington touched the healing lump on his head lightly, and the only real explanation occurred to him.
“By thunder,” he whispered in the Lallor night. “I’ve got it!”
Pryce Covington was awestruck. Later he couldn’t recall how long he had stood there thinking. He may have even mumbled. “But it can’t be. Not that. No.” But every piece he mentally placed into the puzzle fit. The only problem was that there were still several pieces he didn’t have yet.
Pryce moved quickly toward the narrow alley opening that led to the street beyond. He now knew he had to move very quickly, or all might be lost. With a rustle of Darlington Blade’s cloak, he was gone into the night.
Gheevy Wotfirr leaned contentedly back in his soft, comfortable chair, his hands warm around a steaming cup of aromatic Toussaintie brew. It had been sweetened by a few drops of Mar-riss insect secretions and was delightfully soothing after a long day of testing and storing liquor in the grotto.
Earlier Matthaunin Witterstaet had stopped by the halfling’s burrow in the hill between Azzo’s restaurant and the Ambersong residence for what had become their custom: a cup of Toussaintie and a friendly game of Eckhearts. The stooped, sagging old man followed the same routine each night before he retired to his cottage in the northeast shadow of the Lallor Wall.