were still more who would count it a lucky break to be able to brag that they had ended the days of Jimmy the Hand.
Either way, staying in this part of the city for too long was likely to bring an unwelcome end to the night.
James sat up and took a long, deep breath. His side was on fire and his head swam from the pain. He was far enough from the palace that there was a real danger he might not get there before passing out.
He got to his feet slowly, only to have the ground conspire to move beneath them. Making a quick inventory of the people nearby who might do him a good turn, he discovered the list was short. Staggering along, he kept himself upright with a hand on the wall.
Krondor’s habitual night fog was thickening, and predators were likely to be shrouded in it, so returning to the palace became doubly problematic.
As a port, the city was oddly situated. There was a growing trade port less than five days’ ride south by wagon which would have been an ideal harbour, being south-facing in a wide bay. Even the town of Sarth to the north would have been a better port with some dredging and a man-made breakwater. But the original Prince of Krondor, upon reaching the shore of the Bitter Sea, had declared the promontory upon which the castle was built to be where he’d raise the Kingdom’s flag. The standing joke among the palace staff was that Krondor was where it was because the original prince loved the view of the sunsets from that hall.
James had to admit, they were often lovely sunsets.
He realized he was getting giddy and forced his mind to clarity as he stumbled towards his destination. As he moved slowly along, he reviewed how he had managed to find himself in this predicament. Since returning from the north and his very odd adventures involving the mad pirate named Bear, he had been investigating the presence of a rival gang in Krondor, headed by a mysterious figure known only as the Crawler.
In the last four months life in Krondor had returned as much to normal as it ever did. The prince was busy overseeing the welfare of half a nation, including being the primary spokesman for his brother the king to both the Island Kingdom of Queg and the Free Cities of Natal–the Kingdom’s chief trading partners in the west, as well as its chief military threat. Bulk goods from the northern province of Yabon came down the coast to be brokered and sent eastward, while luxury goods from the east and down in the Empire came through on their way to Yabon, the Free Cities, and the Far Coast.
But one thing hadn’t returned to normal, and that was criminal activity.
Which was why the Prince of Krondor’s personal squire found himself bleeding more than he’d prefer in a side street near the boundary between the Merchants’ Quarter and the Poor Quarter of the city. For weeks he had paid every rumour-monger and informant he could trust to provide half-way decent intelligence and had bullied, threatened and bribed any Mocker he could find, in order to try to piece together a picture of what was going on here.
When the Crawler had first appeared on the scene he had been viewed as merely one more interloper, an ambitious upstart who would be quickly destroyed or absorbed by the Upright Man’s Mockers. By the time James had left the city to deal with the problem surrounding the theft of the Tear of the Gods–the Ishapian Temple’s most revered artefact–he had sensed that something was already different about this gang. There was a relationship between the Crawler and some very evil and bloody magic that was plaguing the principality. He couldn’t connect the events of the last few years since uncovering the demon cult in the Jal-Pur desert, the loss of the Tear of the Gods, and other odd occurrences directly to the Crawler and his men, but what James called his ‘bump of trouble’ told him there was, somehow, a connection, and he intended to discover what it was.
James had undertaken that mission for the prince and the Ishapians a few months previously, and since returning to Krondor he and Jazhara, the prince’s advisor on magic, had been poring over reports, searching for those that directly or indirectly referenced the sort of events that might point back to the Crawler and his allies.
A pattern had emerged. Although it centred on Krondor, it extended from Durbin in the west on the coast of Kesh, all the way north to Ylith, southernmost city in Yabon Province. It had taken a lot of work, but the prince had set it as a high priority: the attempted theft of the Tear of the Gods had troubled him deeply. There were few truly sacred things in life, but the Tear was one of them: without it, all the temples in the world would be cut off from the gods for ten years until a new Tear was formed in the mountains to the west. James was one of the few outside the Ishapian Temple even to know that the Tear existed. That knowledge illustrated the level of threat: someone else knew what it was and had tried to seize it for their own use, or to deny it to the Ishapians.
Whether he was architect or agent, James did not know; but that the Crawler played a part in this he did not doubt at all.
He willed himself to take one painful step after another, holding his left arm tightly against his side, using his soaked tunic to staunch the blood flow as much as he could. His mind kept trying to wander, but he forced himself to focus on what he knew so far.
Weeks of enquiry had brought James to a meeting that had a high probability of being between independent smugglers who were avoiding both the Crown’s scrutiny and the Mockers’ oversight, and an important agent of the Crawler. He had conferred with three of his informants, and then personally ventured out to observe this meeting.
He leaned against the wall and blinked hard, shaking his head, both to clear it and in self-recrimination at his own arrogance.
It had been a trap.
James pushed himself away from the wall and managed to get as far as the corner. He judged the time to be some three hours before dawn: the palace chirurgeon would be less than pleased to be woken in the dead of night to sew up the prince’s squire yet again.
Still, thought James as he half-walked, half-staggered through the empty Merchants’ Quarter, it wasn’t as if the man hadn’t done it many times before.
What had struck James about talking with his informants in the basement room of the inn owned by one of the Mockers he trusted most, was that they were truly frightened. A few confrontations between the Upright Man’s bashers and agents of the Crawler had produced more dead bashers than expected; moreover, the Crawler had made his intentions clear enough by looting a very special shed near the Royal Customs where items of high value were secreted away until cooperative customs agents came on duty. The contents of that shed were worth a half-year’s theft, extortion and robbery to the Mockers, and the Upright Man had put out the word that any man who brought him the identity of the Crawler would be given a lifetime’s riches.
The members of the sheriff’s constabulary whom James trusted were equally uneasy, as there had been a few run-ins with the Crawler’s men over the last few months. Unlike the usual, almost ritual, confrontations with the Mockers–some half-hearted resistance, followed by an every-man-for-himself fleeing of the scene–these fights had been intense and bloody. The sheriff’s men were staunch enough lads, but they were not trained soldiers and it appeared that many serving the Crawler had military training. Twice, the sheriff’s men had been forced to retreat, calling for reinforcements either from their own ranks or the City Watch, only to find that the Crawler’s men had fled by the time they could press home the counter-attack.
Currently, Jonathan Means, the acting sheriff, was James’s most important agent in the city. James lobbied the prince almost daily to give Jonathan the position held by his late father, despite the objections of Captain Garruth, leader of the City Watch. The captain was a good man but he wanted the city constabulary absorbed into the Watch, doing away with the office of Sheriff of Krondor; but James had Arutha’s ear and had convinced him that a garrison city
