David Cook: King Pinch

Pinch was almost ready to welcome the impact with the earth when his whole body, led by his neck, jerked to a stop. His fine cloak that had been billowing out behind him had snagged on a broken branch. A cheaper cloak with a clasp of lesser strength would have torn right then or its clasp would have come undone, but Pinch didn't dress in cheap clothes. Instead the cloak tried to hang him, saving the patrico of the Morninglord the job.

There was a brief second when Pinch thought his neck might snap, and then he realized he was still plunging downward-though not as fast. The one tree in Sweetsweat Lane was little more than a sapling, and under Pinch's weight the trunk bent with the springiness of a fishing pole. He felt as if he were floating, perhaps because he couldn't breathe, but there was no doubt the fall was slowing.

And then, through a shroud of pain that narrowed his vision, Pinch saw salvation. It was as if Mask, god of thieves, had reached down and parted the branches to reveal the brightly lit patio of the Charmed Maiden just below him.

Gurgling and kicking, Pinch fumbled his bung-knife from its wrist sheath and slashed at the cloth above him. The pop of threads breaking turned into a rip, and suddenly he was plunging as the branches whipped past him. With a loud crash, he bounced off a table, hurling trays of candied fruits and pitchers of warm wine into the air, and ricocheted into the warm and amply padded embrace of an enchanting lass of the Charmed Maiden. Not far away from him landed his smaller half, but with no less solid a thump.

"MAD!" Sprite-Heels howled over the shrieks of the Charmed Maiden's consorts and the outraged sputters of their clientele. "MAD, MAD, MAD! You tried to kill us! You suicidal son of a cheating apple-squire!" Sprite-Heels paid no attention to the panicked rush of the ladies or the bristling posturing of their gentlemen friends. They'd undoubtedly come out to see the commotion and were now getting more than their share.

"Stow it!" Pinch snarled as he reluctantly freed himself from the young lady's arms. "It's our necks on the leafless tree if the Hellriders take us." Though battered and hobbling, Pinch nonetheless seized the halfling by the nape of the neck and half-dragged him into the back passages of the festhall.

The pair staggered through the scented hallways, their haste increasing with each step. They passed locked doors where only soft giggles where heard, passed salons where dells awaiting the night's suitors adjusted their gowns. They hustled down the back stairs. As they neared the bottom, a chorus of shrieks and indignant cries filled the floor below. Over it all, Pinch heard the discordant clang of hand bells.

"Hellriders!" The rogue thrust his little partner back up the stairs. "Second floor-end of the hall!" he barked.

Sprite-Heels knew better than to argue. The chorus of hand bells was enough to say the watch was at the front door. The halfling could only trust the rogue's orders; gods knew the man had been here enough times.

At the top of the landing, Pinch forced his way through the sweaty couples who surged from the richly draped rooms, dodging elbows as women struggled into their gowns and the hard slap of steel as men buckled their swords to their belts. Behind them the bells and the shouts of "Hold fast!" and "Seize him!" grew stronger along with the furious pound of boots as the Hellrider patrol mounted the stairs. Forced like rats to flee rising water, the host of entertainers and clients crammed the staircase upward, so that it was mere moments before Pinch broke free into the near-empty hall. The rogue assumed his partner would follow; the halfling was able enough to care for himself. Pinch sprinted down the hall and painfully skidded around the corner.

"It's a blank wall!" wailed the voice right behind him, and indeed the words were true. The hallway ended in a solid wall, albeit one pleasingly decorated to imitate a garden seat. The small niche with a marble bench, all draped in false vines of silk and taffeta, was charming enough, but completely without a door.

"There's a way through here, Sprite. Maeve told me about it," Pinch assured. Even as he spoke, his long-fingered hands were swiftly probing the panels in search of some hidden catch or spring.

The halfling snorted. "Maeve? Our dear sweet drunken Maeve-here?"

"She was young once and not always a wizard. Now cut your whids and get to searching." From the commotion behind them, the Hellriders had reached the landing.

The halfling ignored the command. "So that's how you met her. Maeve, a-" he jibed.

"Stow it," Pinch snapped, though not out of sentimentality. He needed to concentrate and focus-and press just-so the spring-plate his fingers suddenly found.

A small panel over the garden bench swung out, opening to reveal a well of darkness. An exhalation of dust and cobwebs swept from the gap.

Pinch pulled the panel back and nodded to the half-ling. "It's jiggered; in you go."

The halfling looked at it with a suspicious eye until the clomp of boots in the hall overcame his objections. With a lithe spring he was up and through the door.

Pinch wasted no time in following, surprised that he could wriggle through the small opening so quickly after all the battering he'd taken. Grabbing the inside handle, he pulled the door shut and plunged them into darkness. With one hand on Sprite-Heels's shoulder, Pinch followed as the halfling descended steps the human could not see.

They padded downward as the thumping and thunder of the 'riders behind them faded, and then snaked through passages that wove beneath the city. In places Sprite led them through water that splashed up to Pinch's ankles and smelled so bad that he was thankful not to see what he walked through.

Their escape was so hurried that neither had a light. Several times Sprite stopped and described a branch in the sewer tunnels. Each time Pinch did his best to remember the path, though his confidence grew less and less the farther they went. He was an "upright man" now, the master of his own cohort of rogues-years away from his beginnings as a sewer rat.

At last they reached a landmark Pinch knew well from his underground days, a jagged gap in the brick casing of the sewer wall. From Sprite's description,

Pinch could see it almost unchanged in his mind-the ragged curve of the opening, the broken tumble of bricks that spilled into the muck-from the day he and Algaroz broke through the wall to complete their bolt hole from the alehouse above.

"Through there," Pinch ordered with silent relief. Up till now he had only hoped that Algaroz, who now owned the Dwarf's Pot, kept the bolt hole open. Pinch knew it wasn't out of sentimentality. Algaroz had good reasons for keeping a quick escape route handy.

The dirt-floored passage ended in a planked door, tightly fitted into a wall. Designed to be hard to find from the other side, it took only a few moments of probing to release the catches and swing the hidden door slowly open. Muddy, smelly, and blinking, the two thieves stepped into the soft light of the alehouse's cellar.

It was several hours, almost near dawn, before a man of average height and average looks finally found his way to a table at the back of the common room. Still, he commanded attention. His clothes and manner stood him apart from all the rest. The man wore the costume of an aspiring courtier-a red velvet doublet generously trimmed in gold braid, cross-gaitered woolen hose without a tear, and a fur-lined mantle draped casually across his shoulders. The tangled curls of his graying hair were neatly brushed out and his thick mustache trimmed. Most wondrous of all, he was clean and bathed, which was far more than any other customer in the smoky ordinary. A few hours before he'd been crawling on a roof, but now gone were the dark and sludge-stained clothes from the night's escapade.