Jimmy and the Crawler

  ‘Another kind?’ Now James was very interested.

  ‘You hear of possession?’

  James thought back to his encounter at Haldon Head with the false priest, Father Rowland, and nodded. ‘I have seen something like that, but it was . . .’ James paused, then explained that the false priest of Sung had been an agent of a dark force, and that he had in turn controlled the townspeople, electing to dispose of those not easily controlled, and that with his death, his control vanished.

  ‘Ah, that’s a different kind of proposition,’ said Eli. ‘See, there are dark agencies that grant a man a power, and mind control is one of the darkest, but that’s not what I’m talking about. No, I’m talking demonic possession.’

  Gina brought the next ale over and removed the empty tankard, and Eli watched as she walked away. In a lowered tone he said, ‘Quite the shape on that one, right?’

  James looked at him questioningly.

  ‘We’re not a celibate order, lad.’ Eli pointed from Gina to James. ‘You two?’

  James sighed. ‘Demonic possession?’

  ‘Good,’ said Eli. ‘I mean, good about you two, not demonic possession. Ah, yes. See, there are these demon spirits. They enter our realm without a body, either by some agency we don’t know or because someone fouled up a summoning spell and got one of the spirit demons instead of one of the big and smelly corporeal ones. So this spirit is casting around, don’t you see, looking for a place to stay, and tries to take over some hapless person, the weaker the better.’

  ‘That sounds horrible,’ said James.

  ‘It is, lad. It takes an unusually powerful mind to resist such a creature. Even magic is no protection if it’s not the right sort. It’s why all the temples look down on demon-summoners. They’re like babies playing with fire in a thatched hut.’ He lowered his voice as if not wanting to be overheard. ‘But even more vile is the fact that there are those who willingly offer themselves as hosts.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There are many tales and some well-documented events chronicled by the different temples, telling of such “deals”, as they’re known.’

  James gave a humourless chuckle. As a member of the Mockers he knew many deals were unhappy accommodations that yielded little joy.

  ‘I know. I know,’ said Eli, ‘but some people are driven by a thirst for power or a need for revenge or some other dark desire that makes them think such a deal is worthwhile. The thing is, the poor soul is pushed aside, as it were, witness to all the horrors the demon inflicts on others, helpless to do naught but watch. And if the deal is not struck cleanly, often they lose their ability to ever regain control.’

  Thinking about what he’d seen so far, James asked, ‘Why would anyone serve demons?’

  ‘That’s a question no one of reasonable mind can understand, lad. Many stories tell of promised riches and power, a place at the demon’s right hand when they gain whatever power they seek, but history teaches us demons are all liars and oath-breakers. Unless they’re bound by ritual and runes, confined in a ritual circle, they’ll take free rein.’

  ‘How do you . . . fight them?’

  Pushing himself away from the table, Brother Eli stood up. ‘I need to get back to the shrine. Thank you for the hospitality.’

  ‘How do you fight them?’ James repeated.

  ‘Oh, well, there’s the usual. They can’t cross salt.’

  ‘Salt?’

  ‘It’s a symbol of purity,’ said the monk. ‘You can confine them in a circle of salt, or erect a barrier of salt, and they can’t pass.’

  ‘Can’t they just blow or sweep it away?’

  ‘You’d think so, but no, they can’t.’

  James sighed. ‘OK, so that sounds temporary.’

  ‘It is. But it may buy you time to fetch a priest to banish the demon back to hell and free the host.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They don’t like the touch of iron. They can abide a brief, glancing touch, but if you hold it to their skin a few moments, it starts to burn them.’ He turned, then looked back at James and added, ‘Oh, you can always kill the host, which banishes the demon back to hell.’

  ‘Sounds like a bad solution for the host.’

  ‘Aye, lad, but it’s better than having your soul enslaved or your mind destroyed. A demon can live a very long time, and to be stuck in its head for centuries is a sure path to the most painful madness I can imagine.’

  ‘Is there anyone here in Durbin who can banish a demon?’

  ‘Not with any certainty,’ said the monk. ‘Most of us in the city might give it a bash, but you really need one of the higher-ranking prelates from the big temples, perhaps of Kahooli, Sung, or Dala. The followers of Lims-Kragma don’t abide demons well either.’

  James nodded his thanks and watched the monk leave as night began to fall. Instead of finding answers, he was overwhelmed with more questions.

  • CHAPTER NINE •

  Discovery

  JAMES HURRIED ALONG THE ROOFTOPS.

  Since his encounter with the Nighthawk, he had donned a different disguise and spent two days poking around the darker alleys and seedier inns of the city, trying to puzzle out what had happened to him during his last chase. Someone wanted to catch the new thief in the city, but the Nighthawks, or someone employing the Nighthawks, didn’t. This presented James with a dilemma: he could certainly appreciate why someone would want to question a drunken thief who might have something of value in his possession, but he couldn’t begin to speculate why someone would not want that drunken thief caught, let alone send a Nighthawk to shadow him and protect him.

  For it had finally dawned on James that for the Nighthawk to have killed his pursuers, the black-clad assassin had to know where James was and where he was likely to go to ground. With chilling clarity, James realized that the Nighthawk knew he was on the roof opposite and had waited there to kill the two men chasing James, and for whatever reason, he did not want James dead, for if he had, James would have been dead.

  As a boy, luck and circumstance had saved James once before in confronting a Nighthawk on the rooftops. His other encounters had also proved that his luck was near endless. He had survived his last run-in only because he was being saved as a sacrifice to conjure a demon, or he would never have regained consciousness in that cell below the old keep in the Valley of Lost Men.

  James had found no rational motive for why the Nighthawk was trying to keep him out of the clutches of those thieves, and the absence of any logic in this was driving him to distraction. He had faced a lot of challenges in his young life, but this one was perhaps the most exasperating.

  James reached his destination and lay down, then moved forward to peer over the edge. He had presumed that if no one in the city was clearly in the network of the Crawler or obviously a Nighthawk, they had to be coming into the city from some location beyond Durbin’s walls. He had spent two nights in other locations, and tonight his choice of observation point was a pair of streets where the first road up from the easternmost end of the harbour intersected with the street leading to the eastern city gate. This should have been his first choice, he thought, as this intersection gave anyone here quick access to the docks, the city gates, or straight to the governor’s palace.

  Smuggling into Durbin was almost comical: the imperial customs service was so corrupt you had to pay a huge bribe to get a position with it. But the norm was to look the other way when someone was smuggling contraband out of the city, not in. To choose the cover of darkness to come into the city suggested an unusual reason – and in Durbin that would have to be something extremely nefarious.

  James had noticed a few things during the course of the last two nights that had led him to pick this location. The city watch had a predictable circuit, but they avoided this corner of the city, it appeared. And there was just something a little too quiet about this part of Durbin.

  Even in the dead of night, there is an atmosphere and rhythm to every quarter. In Kro
ndor, James would have noticed any such disruption of the norm, but Durbin was new to him and it would take longer than the time he had to acclimatize himself to the city. He’d have to trust his instincts.

  Besides, if nothing came of tonight’s search, there was always tomorrow night.

  He waited, trying hard to stay alert despite the lulling silence, which was punctuated occasionally by some distant sound from another quarter of the city. There was a stillness in the air that was common to the coast of the Bitter Sea as the hot inland winds pushed out against the onshore sea breezes. James knew that as the sun rose in the morning and the desert furnace was reignited, a hot wind blew at this time of the year, forcing approaching sea captains to take a long tack from the northeast, then jibe due south into the harbour mouth, where they would be towed into the docks by eight-man tugs.

  James forced himself to look down empty streets, pushing aside a tendency to drift off. More than one Mocker had been found dead on a rooftop, his throat cut while he dozed, and young Jimmy the Hand had let others’ mistakes be his teacher.

  After more than an hour of waiting, he heard an unexpected sound, the light squeaking of a horse’s leathers. He chanced a glimpse over the eaves and saw four riders in black moving slowly towards the gate. He quickly measured their direction and saw they came from the vicinity of the governor’s palace and were heading for the eastern gate. The hooves of their mounts were muffled with leather covers so the sound of iron shoes on cobbles would not announce their passage, but the occasional snort of a horse or the sound of leather upon leather was impossible to mask. At any other time than the dead of night, the sounds would have gone unnoticed.

  The riders might have been Nighthawks, or merely travellers in black, but James suspected the former was more likely than the latter.

  But where were they bound? Had they been trailing Willy and Jazhara, they would have left two days ago, and through the southern gate, not the eastern. James fought down the impulse to race after them, knowing that he wouldn’t get far on foot and that by the time he secured a horse they’d be long gone.

  Still, there was nothing to prevent him from heading back from where they appeared and seeing if something useful could be uncovered.

  He moved silently along the rooftops until a street prevented him from going any further, then dropped to the cobbles below. He could make out no signs of recent passage in the gloom. This was not a heavily used street. He assumed those travelling in stealth would take the shortest route to the gate, so he followed a straight line, glancing at every intersection in both directions for anything that might look like a point of origin – a large warehouse, a stable, a road leading to an estate. But all he saw were modest businesses, many with homes above for the owner and family, and a couple of small inns – nothing that could house one horse, let alone four with riders.

  He reached the end of the street and found himself looking directly at a gate that led into what he assumed was the stabling yard of the governor’s palace. Looking around, he realized there were several large estates nearby, any one of which could have housed the four riders.

  He had narrowed down the possibilities for their point of origin, but he still wasn’t sure. As he took a moment to decide in which of the two possible directions to explore, he caught a whiff of a familiar odour and smiled. You could muffle a horse’s hooves, wrap rags around bridles and ride as silently as possible, but you couldn’t train a horse where to leave manure. James didn’t even have to inspect it to know it was fresh.

  The four riders came from the governor’s palace.

  James glanced around to see if anyone might have caught sight of him, though if anyone did, all they’d see would be a man of unremarkable height and build wearing a head covering and dark clothing.

  He took off at good speed, not quite a run, but fast enough that should anyone need to follow him, he’d hear them, dodge into the first side street he encountered, and waited. When he was certain no one was following, he made his way quickly back to the Jade Monkey.

  • CHAPTER TEN •

  Hunting

  JAMES HID.

  Deep in the shadows opposite the governor’s palace he watched the gate through which he suspected the Nighthawks had ridden three nights before. He had dispatched a messenger to the agreed-upon location where Jazhara and William waited.

  He had spent the last three days snooping as best he could in a half-dozen guises: merchant, traveller, sailor, and mercenary warrior. He had collected a fair wardrobe that he now thought of as his costumes, and with Gina’s help had quickly come to master just what a little make-up could do for a man. A couple of touches with a brush could make his eyes look deeper sunk, or his cheeks hollow, or give him the sunburned look of a desert man.

  He was finding her to be an unexpected treasury of useful information. Slowly a pattern of how business was conducted in Durbin was emerging and he was now convinced that the reason he never could discover the criminal organization in Durbin controlled by the Crawler was because one simply did not exist.

  The Crawler and his ring of thieves and smugglers were a convenient fiction devised by someone associated with the Nighthawks doing business right under the governor’s nose – unless he was part of the plot – and it was designed to divert suspicion away from . . .

  That was where James came up dry. He knew Jazhara’s uncle already had agents in Krondor. So the Crawler and his mythical gang were not one of his enterprises.

  And there was Nighthawk involvement, which meant . . .

  James had no idea what that meant.

  So he was out hunting for information – any shred of a suggestion of a hint that might put him on the tracks of whoever had created this fictitious Crawler and his criminal empire.

  His first encounter with the Nighthawks had been to foil an attempt on Prince Arutha’s life, soon after the Riftwar when Arutha had returned to Krondor after his brother had been crowned king. That was the event that brought Jimmy the Hand once more to Arutha’s attention and began the rise of a boy thief to the position of a minor noble in the prince’s court.

  As best as could be pieced together about that attempt, the Nighthawks had served some dark agency that had sought to kill Arutha as the fulfilment of a portent that was to signal a major uprising of the Brotherhood of the Dark Path – the dark elves – as they launched an invasion of the Kingdom. It wasn’t until the rogue dark elf chieftain Gorath had come south to warn the prince of a second attempt at whatever was hidden in Sethanon – the cursed city – that James had begun to understand the magnitude of what was in play.

  His subsequent encounters with the Nighthawks, his privileged status with the prince, and his general curiosity about things he should not be poking around in, all brought him a keen awareness that whenever the Nighthawks appeared, they were only part of something bigger and more dangerous than he fully understood.

  One day he might have a better sense of what was afoot, but for the moment he was only concerned as to why Nighthawks seemed to have established a base somewhere within the premises of the Governor of Durbin’s palace.

  Time passed slowly and the balance of the night was spent in frustration. As dawn neared, James decided nothing of note would be forthcoming.

  He was less than fifty yards away when he heard the sound of the gate he had been watching opening, and had to duck into the sheltering darkness of a deep doorway. Moments later four horsemen came riding by, the muffled hooves of their mounts making a dull clacking sound as they sped past, turning right at the next intersection so that James knew they were making for the southern gate. Years of street living had equipped James with what he had come to term his aforementioned ‘bump of trouble’, and now it was nagging at him. He knew somehow this pre-dawn departure had something to do with the message he had sent to William and Jazhara.

  Suddenly he felt himself a fool.

  While he had been watching the Nighthawks, they had been watching him. If they wanted him dead, he would
be dead.

  He decided it would be best to consult with Jazhara and William before planning his next move. As he went quickly through the dark streets he felt something he rarely experienced: uncertainty.

  For most of his young life, James had displayed a self-confidence that often bordered on the arrogant, a certainty of ability that made many of his decisions seem precipitous and capricious, but underneath this brash surface was an almost inhuman ability to calculate probabilities. He was hardly aware of it, as it was something that had come naturally to him all his life, and had he the temperament he would have made a stunning gambler. But sitting at a game table for hours was not in James’s nature. He had, however, met few whom he thought might best him at any card game or any other game of chance.

  That innate ability had served him while in Arutha’s service, for he either knew what was at risk and what was the reward, or he knew where to find the information he needed to make those judgements. His ‘bump of trouble’ often kept him from rash decisions, but at every turn James felt as if he was making progress, somehow gaining new information, new insights, new understandings, or proof of his correct judgements.

  This time, nothing.

  James missed his best friend, Squire Locklear. One of Locky’s more useful traits was his ability to silently listen while James rattled off suppositions, observations, or wild theories. More important, Locky had the knack for redirecting James to one point he had made in his long ramble, one thing said that would turn out to be the key to the entire subject under discussion.

  William and Jazhara were each brilliant in their own way, but neither had that particular knack of conversation Locky had. Still, once they returned, James was determined to sit the two of them down in his room and just recount everything, to see if they could spot something he had missed.