Joel Rosenberg - Murder in Lamut

Even here, in the relative comfort of the Broken Tooth Tavern, it was all or nothing.

In any tavern, on any cold night, there was no such thing as just right – he was always either too close to the main fireplace, or too far away. Given the choice, Kethol preferred too close, his back to the hearth, for it was hard to think of himself as being too warm in winter, even though he would regret it later, when he went out into the cold night to make his way back to the barracks at the south end of the city, with the wind cutting through his sweat-dampened clothes like a knife.

And there were better ways to work up a sweat.

Some of the other mercenaries were doing that at the moment – spending their hard-earned blood money in the sleeping rooms above, and the incessant creaking of the floorboards gave witness as to how they were spending their hard-earned money, but while Kethol didn’t mind dropping the odd copper or two on a quick roll with one of the local whores, the cold shrivelled his passions as much as it did the relevant portions of his anatomy, and he couldn’t see the point of spending good money on a soft itchy bed when there was an equally-itchy rope bedframe waiting at the barracks, for free.

Kethol watched closely as the placards fell. This game of pakir, or whatever they called it, wasn’t something that he was familiar with, but a game was a game, and gambling was gambling, and all it would take would be enough familiarity with it to avoid the traps that drunken men would fall into, and then he could play.

Men took up the sword for any number of stupid reasons. Honour, family, country, hearth and home. Kethol did it for the money, but he didn’t insist on earning all of his money with the edge of his sword, or even the point.

In the meantime, a few coppers spent on the particularly thin, sour beer of LaMut were coppers well spent. With an abundant supply of good dwarven ale nearby – Kethol was never sure if there was some magic involved, but it was consistently better than any humans brewed – it was clear that the local human brewers had only one mandate: make the beer as cheaply as possible, treating such things as good barley, unrotted hops, and washing out the vats in between batches as unnecessary fripperies. So when someone else bought, Kethol ordered dwarven ale; when he paid for it himself, he took the cheap stuff. It wasn’t as if he was going to drink a lot of it, after all. He was only going to look as if he was drinking a lot of it.

It was an investment, as Pirojil would say. A small investment to make his opponent think him slightly in his cups, perhaps not as attentive to the game as he might be. A sip now and again, spilling most of the vile brew on the floor from time to time, and when he sat down to gamble, several empty ale jacks would testify to his being ready to be taken in a game. Then he could indulge in some serious gambling. Yes, it was an investment.

As much of an investment as their three swords. Blades that would chop through leather and flesh and into bone rather than chip and bend had proven their worth more than once. Saving money was a good thing, but just about the worst place Kethol could think of for economies was in the tools of the trade.

In his mind’s eye, he could still see the widened eyes of the Tsurani whose blade had shattered on his shield, moments before he had slid his own sharp point under the enemy’s arm, and into the soft juncture under the armpit that was protected on the sides by the pauldrons. He didn’t have anything personal against the Tsurani, but then he had never had a personal grudge against any but a small percentage of the men he had killed. Besides, he had a lot in common with the Tsurani – they had invaded Midkemia for metal, so the strange story went, and a man who made his living killing with steel to earn gold and silver could understand that. If Kethol had a choice of metals, he would choose steel ten times out of ten – steel, in his experience, could get you gold more reliably than gold could get you steel.

Besides, his skills were useful here.

Blending into the scenery was a skill that a man who had started life as a forester’s son could use on other grounds, as well.

The trick was not to overdo it, not to try to be too local, and be spotted as a phoney, arousing suspicion. Just add a little of the thick accent, throw in an occasional use of the local flick of the fingers that meant never-mind-it’s-not-important, taking care to be friendly and smiling but not trying to be too comradely, and they wouldn’t even notice that they barely noticed him.

It had worked when he was fist-boxing in that small village outside of Rodez – before Pirojil had killed that annoying little sergeant, and the three of them had to take to their heels, again – and it worked when he was learning how to roll dice in Northwarden.

Just learn the game, learn how to blend in, and be sober while seeming less than sober, and they would only notice that he had beaten them after it was accomplished and he was gone.

Somebody had to win, after all.

Why not Kethol?

Three beefy Muts, one with a fresh set of corporal’s stripes on his sleeve, leaned over the rough-hewn table, examining the placards in front of them, while four others looked on. All wore the greyish livery of regular Mut soldiers, and all talked amongst themselves in the thick LaMut accent that Kethol could imitate without thinking about it.

‘Nice play, Osic,’ one said, as another scooped the pile of coppers toward him. ‘I was sure I had you beat.’

‘It can happen,’ Osic said. He turned to Kethol. ‘Kehol,’ he said, mispronouncing the name in a way a prouder man would have taken offence at, ‘you want to get in on the next hand? Only a couple of coppers to see some placards, but it can get expensive after that, truth to tell.’

Kethol had watched long enough, he thought, to have some idea about the ranking of combinations. More to the point, the Muts had been drinking long enough that a sober man wouldn’t have any difficulty working out who thought, albeit in a drunken stupor, that he had a good combination, and that should be good enough.

In the country of the drunk, a sober man was at least a landed baron, and on a good day, an earl.

‘I may as well,’ Kethol said, emptying a judiciously small heap of patinaed copper coins out of his pouch and onto the table. He had considerably more on him, of course, but it was best not to seem rich.

‘Your money’s as green as the next fellow’s,’ one of the Muts said, and the others chuckled along with the jest that had been ancient when the Kingdom was new.

It was probably a risky idea to get into a game with regulars, but there were times for taking a risk.

Over in a far corner, near where the smell of roasting mutton oozed out of the kitchen, a game of two-thumb was going on between two Keshian mercenaries: the mad dwarf, Mackin, and a skinny, balding, puffy-faced fellow who called himself Milo, but who Kethol was certain had a price on his head under another name, and probably a local price, at that. – why else would he make himself so scarce whenever the constable appeared? – and that’s where Kethol should have been playing.

If one of them took offence at Kethol’s winning, the odds were small that another would want to interfere. You could win a lot in a night when most of the time you appeared to be taking a deep draught of your beer you barely swallowed.

Here there was more risk, but there was also more profit to be had. It was just another field of battle, as far as Kethol was concerned. All he had to do was obey the same set of rules: protect himself and his friends; be sure not to draw too much attention to himself; and be sure to be one of the men standing when it was all over. And just as the best time to attack was before dawn, when the enemy would all be sleeping, the best time to gamble was late at night, when the others’ minds would be clouded with too much drink and too little sleep.