Today the line crawled like never before. Not only did the customs inspectors appeared about to fall asleep on their feet (while still sticking their noses into every sack), but there was a bottleneck on the dam itself, where the road workers just had to be replacing the roadway cover. A huge black-bearded caravan-bashi from Khand already realized that the customs officials – may the Almighty strike them with fever and boils! – have wasted so much of his time that he and his bactrians were not going to make it to the Islands before lunch, and therefore today’s marketing was gone to the dogs. All right, why worry and fume now – it’s all the Almighty’s will. He told his assistant to watch the animals and goods while he was checking out the tent city.
After filling up in one of the eateries (lagman, three portions of excellent saffron meat stew and a plate of dried-fruit finger pies), he headed back but detoured to a small stage where an olive-skinned dancer dressed only in a few flying strips of cloth was undulating invitingly. Two mountain men from the Peninsula were devouring her with their eyes (especially the shapely thighs moving back and forth in an unmistakable rhythm and the slick belly), not forgetting to either spit from time to time, as if in disgust (“What do the towners find in these skinny sluts?”), or to trade heartfelt generalities on the subject of townswomen’s lack of virtue. The caravan-bashi was already figuring what a closer encounter with the dancer in her tent behind the stage was going to cost him, when fate brought a Hakimian preacher out of nowhere. The bald mummy with his rotten rags and burning eyes immediately poured out a storm of denunciations on the heads of “lechers who gaze lustily on the vile show put on by our fallen sister.” The ‘fallen sister’ did not give a damn, but the caravaner decided to retire from the scene promptly, lest the holy man brand him with some nightmarish curse.
He did want a woman something awful, though – five days of withdrawal, man! He scanned his immediate environs, and what do you know – what he was looking for was right there, a few steps away. The girl did not look like much at first glance – a skinny kid of seventeen or so with a large well-seasoned black eye to boot – but the Khandian checked out her supple figure with his trained eye and almost licked his lips openly – this, guys, was quite something! Cover her face with a rag and go ahead.
“You bored, lass?”
“Keep moving,” the girl responded indifferently in a husky but pleasant voice. “I’m not in the business, buddy.”
“Not in the business, or haven’t had a decent offer yet? Don’t you worry, I pay real well!” With a laugh, as if jokingly, he grabbed her hand with an iron grip.
The girl responded with a short tirade that would easily make a pirate bosun blush, freed her hand from the caravaner’s paw with one precise learned movement, and quickly stepped back into the alleyway between a patched tent and a rickety reed-mat pavilion. Actually, there is nothing difficult about that – you have to pull away strictly in the direction of the assailant’s thumb tip – but it is impressive the first time around and usually leads to proper conclusions. This time, though, the agitated caravan-bashi (some little whore will play hard-to-get with me?!) stampeded into the alleyway after his elusive prey.
Not half a minute later the Khandian was back to the plaza. He was stepping gingerly now, almost tip-toeing, hugging his right hand to his belly with his left and quietly moaning. Sorry, man, you screwed up. It is child’s play for even a rookie DSD operative to dislocate the thumb of a hand extended in a threat, and the girl was far from a rookie. A short time afterwards Fay (as she was known to her colleagues in the Department) was back to her assigned section of the plaza, but the unlucky caravaner would not have recognized her even were he to bump into her: the young whore was gone, replaced by a water-selling boy – ragged and dirty-faced, but with no sign of a black eye, and it is precisely such distinctive features that observers typically notice. She was back to her post just in time: the blind beggar sitting at the very entrance to the dam whined: “Help me if you can, kind folks!” instead of his usual “Kind folks, help me if you can!” – a ‘come here’ signal.
Of course, Fay remembered their quarry’s description (brown-haired northerner, six feet tall, gray eyes, thirty-two but looks younger, slight right limp) word for word, despite only working operation support today, reporting directly to the blind beggar who worked recognition. Of course, she had no idea that the blind beggar was the Vice-Director for Operations himself, just like she had no knowledge of the stern warning Jacuzzi had received the day before – that if his Tangorn-catching venture did not bear fruit within a day, he would not get away with just being fired without a pension. With a piercing “Water, water, cold water with ice!” the girl slipped expertly into the crowd, trying to figure out who had attracted the chief’s attention.
A cart loaded with what appeared to be sacks of corn was just entering the dam. A tall slender mountain man of about twenty-eight to thirty led a couple of mules pulling it; the gap between his raspberry fez and the pavement was exactly the required six feet. As for everything else… even discounting the lack of a limp (which could have been a distractive ruse like her erstwhile black eye), the man’s eyes were definitely not gray. What about the sacks? The sacks are a serious possibility, which is why the baron has no hopes there. To get past the dam in a barrel or a sack is too obvious a move; it is so overused, banal, and ridiculed that its very kitschiness might tempt Tangorn, who is known for his paradoxical solutions. This is why the customs inspectors are working especially hard today (a rumor about undercover Treasury auditors had been planted among them), and a specially trained dog surreptitiously checks every single cart (which move very slowly because of the road repairs).
Having thus ruled out both the sacks and their owner, Fay glanced sharply at a team of mounted gendarmes with their catch – six mountain men chained in pairs – that had cut into the line (“Watch out! Move back – want some whip?”), made sure they looked all right and looked beyond them. Ah, so that’s it!
A group of Hakimian pilgrims returning home from Shavar-Shavan – a traditional three- week pilgrimage to one of their mountain shrines. About thirty people with their faces hooded as a sign of contrition, almost a half of them either epileptics or handicapped, including lameness. A truly ideal cover – even if they recognize the baron (practically impossible), how will they extract him from the crowd of pilgrims? By force, employing the team of ‘road workers?’ That will start a melee that doesn’t bear thinking about, not to mention a possible deadly clash between Hakimians and Aritanians tomorrow in the city. Entice him to move aside? How? These thoughts almost caused Fay to miss the moment when ‘her’ blind man got up, yielding his lucrative spot to another member of the beggars guild, and followed the pilgrims, his cane clacking on the pavement; this meant that he had recognized Tangorn with certainty.
A few moments later Fay morphed from a water-carrier into a guide. The two mountain men that together with the hapless caravan-bashi had been ogling the dancer were following a little behind (one of them was Ras-Shua, DSD’s resident spy on the Peninsula), followed by a strange group of two shady-looking young men and a worn customs official. Lunch time had arrived for the road workers; they began heading into town, too. The trap on the dam had worked flawlessly, thanks to the old hand Jacuzzi.