Randall Garrett - Too Many Magicians

Commander Lord Ashley, Special Agent for His Majesty’s Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps, stood in the doorway of a cheap, rented room in a lower middle-class section of town near the Imperial Naval Docks in Cherbourg. The door was open, and a man lay on the floor with a large, heavy-handled knife in his chest.

His lordship lifted his eyes from the corpse and looked around the room. It was small; not more than eight by ten feet, he thought, and the low ceiling was only a bare six inches above his head. Along the right-hand wall was a low bed. It was made up, but the wrinkles in the cheap blue bedspread indicated that someone had been sitting on it — most likely, the dead man. A cheap, wooden table stood in the far left corner with a matching chair next to it. An ancient, lumpy-looking easy chair — probably bought secondhand — stood against the left wall, nearer the door. Another wooden chair, the twin of the one at the table, stood at the foot of the bed, completing the furniture. There were no pictures hung on the green-painted walls; there were no extraneous decorations of any kind. The personality of the man who lived here had not been implanted forcibly upon the room itself, certainly.

Lord Ashley looked back down at the body. Then, cautiously, he closed the door behind him, stepped over to the supine figure, and took a good look. He lifted up one hand and felt for the pulse that should throb at the wrist of a living man. There was none. Georges Barbour was dead.

His lordship took a step back from the corpse and looked at it thoughtfully. In his lordship’s belt pocket were one hundred golden sovereigns, money which had been drawn from the Special Fund to pay Goodman Georges Barbour for his services to Naval Intelligence. But Goodman Georges, My Lord Commander thought to himself, would no longer be any drain upon the Special Fund.

My lord the Commander stepped over the body and looked at the papers on the wooden table at the far corner of the room. Nothing there of importance. Nothing that would connect the man with the Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps. Nonetheless, he gathered them all together and slipped them into his coat pocket. There was always the chance that they might contain information in the form of coded writing or secret inks.

The small closet in the right-hand corner of the room, near the door, held only a change of clothing, another cheap suit like the one the dead man wore. Nothing in the pockets, nothing in the lining. The two drawers in the closet revealed nothing but suits of underwear, stockings and other miscellaneous personal property.

Again he looked at the corpse. This search would have to be reported immediately to My Lord Admiral, of course, but there were certain things that it would be better for the local Armsmen not to find.

The room had revealed nothing. Since Barbour had moved into the room only the day before, it was highly unlikely that he could have constructed, in so short a time, some secret hiding place that would escape the penetrating search of my lord the Commander. He checked the room again and found nothing.

A search of the body was equally fruitless. Barbour had, then, already dispatched whatever information he had to Zed. Very well.

Lord Ashley looked around the room once more to make absolutely certain that he had missed nothing.

Then he went out of the room again and down the hall to the narrow, dim stairway that led to the floor below. He went down the stairway briskly, almost hurriedly.

The concierge, who sat in her office just to one side of the front door, was a rather withered but still bright-eyed little woman who looked up at the tall, aristocratic Commander with a smile that was as bright as her eyes.

“Ey, sir? What may I do for ye?”

“I have some rather sad news for you, Goodwife,” my lord said quietly. “One of your tenants is dead. We shall have to fetch an Armsman at once.”

“Dead? Who? Ye don’t mean Goodman Georges, good sir?”

“None other,” said his lordship. He had told the concierge only a few minutes before that he was going up to see Barbour. “Has he had any visitors in the past half hour or so?” The body, my lord the Commander reasoned to himself, was still warm, the blood still fluid. By no stretch of the imagination could Barbour have been dead more than half an hour.

“Visitors?” The old woman blinked, obviously trying to focus her thoughts. “Other than yourself, sir, I saw no visitors. But there! I mightn’t have seen him at all. I was out for a few minutes, a few minutes only. I went to the shop of Goodman Fentner, the tobacconist, for a bit of snuff, as is the only form of tobacco I uses.”

Commander Lord Ashley looked sharply at her. “Exactly when did you leave and when did you come back, Goodwife? It may be of the utmost importance that the time be known.”

“Why… why… it was just afore you come, good sir,” the old woman said rather nervously. “As I come in, I heard the bell of St. Denys strike the three-quarter hour.”

Lord Ashley looked at his own watch. It was one minute after eleven. “The man must have waited until he saw you leave; then he came up and came down again before you returned. How long were you gone?”

“Only as long as it takes to walk to the corner and back, sir. I don’t like to stay too long away in the daytime when the door is open.” She paused and a vaguely puzzled frown came over her face. “Who was it must have come up and gone down, sir?”

“Whoever it was,” said my lord the Commander, “stabbed your tenant Georges Barbour through the heart. He was murdered, Goodwife, and that is why we must call an Armsman without delay.”

The poor woman was absolutely shaken now, and Lord Ashley realized that she would be of no use whatever in dealing with the Armsmen. He was glad that he had asked her about any possible visitors before he had mentioned that the death was murder; otherwise, her valuable testimony might have flown from her head completely.

“Sit down, Goodwife,” he said in a kindly voice. “Compose yourself. There is nothing to fear. I shall take care of summoning the Armsmen.” As the old woman practically collapsed into the shabby overstuffed chair she kept in her office, Lord Ashley stepped to the outer door and opened it. He had heard the noise of boys’ high-pitched voices outside, shrill with excitement over the game they were playing.

Because of his years of Naval training, it was easy for my lord the Commander to spot the urchin who was the obvious leader of the little group.

“Here, my lad!” he called out. “You, lad, with the green cap! How should you like to earn yourself a sixth-bit?”

The boy looked up, and his slightly grimy face broke into a smile. “I would, my lord!” he said, snatching the rather faded green cap from his head. “Very much, my lord!” He had no notion whether the personage who had addressed him actually was a lord or not, but the personage in question was most certainly a gentleman, and such a person one always addressed as “my lord” whenever there was a job in the offing.

The other boys became suddenly silent, obviously hoping that they, too, might gain some small pecuniary advantage from this obviously affluent gentleman.

“Very well, then,” said Lord Ashley briskly. “Here is a twelfth. If you return here with an Armsman inside of five minutes, I shall give you another like it.”

“An… an Armsman , my lord?” It was obvious that he could not conceive of any possible reason why any sane person would want an Armsman within a thousand yards of him.

“Yes, an Armsman,” Lord Ashley said with a smile. “Tell him that Lord Ashley, a King’s Officer, desires his immediate assistance and then lead him back here. Do you understand?”