The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 8

A hundred kilometers away, in the stone town of Kobatum, a man sat at a table, eyes blank, mouth stretched into a shape of soundless pleasure. Occasionally he jerked and his eyes rolled. On the table before him was a small box of black plastic, from which a flat cable led to a strapped-on inducer at the base of his skull.

Far above, at the edge of the sky, a cloud of minute objects skipped through the first traces of atmosphere. Some took too steep a dive and burned up, but the rest eventually fell safely into the stratosphere.

When they reached thicker air, they sprouted tiny wings and shot off in all directions. An hour later they had scattered to every region of Pharaoh’s habitable plateau, seeking out pheromonic beacons.

One settled just inside the man’s window. It mated its tiny interface with the receiver that sat on the sill, activating a low insistent alarm, a pulsing note that could not be heard outside the man’s rooms.

When his pleasure device timed out, the man noticed the alarm and pulled off the inducer.

“What now?” he said tonelessly, addressing the empty room.

He went to the receiver and punched the button that shut off the alarm. The message from orbit fed itself onto the receiver’s small screen, and the man bent to watch it scroll up:

UBERFACTORIAL AGENT ON PHARAOH, PROBABLY DISGUISED AS ITINERANT SNAKE OIL MAN. EXTREME THREAT TO OPERATIONS. CARRIES GENCHA DEATH NET. IDENTIFY AND DISPOSE UNTRACEABLY. PROCEED WITH MAXIMUM CAUTION.

Following the message a grainy picture appeared. A lean handsome face stared boldly from the screen — a confident purposeful face.

“Maximum caution,” the man muttered irritably. He plucked the messenger from the device and crushed it between his fingers, rolling it into a tiny ball of foil. He flipped it out the window, and sat down to think. In all likelihood, the agent was working someone else’s sector, and thus was someone else’s problem. Just as well, he thought. He preferred his kills simple, direct, intimate. This assignment would require a frustratingly indirect approach.

Still, a kill was a kill, and he began to hope that the agent would be foolish enough to stray into his sector. He laid out his own disguise, which was also the ragged finery of a snake oil peddler. “Apparently,” he said to himself, “we think alike.” He checked his tattoos, which were bright. He made certain that his weapons were charged and in perfect repair. He set out his stock of snake oil and made sure that none of the vials was too far past its prime. He packed a few little pangalac luxuries — bootleg skinjectors, proscribed neural inducers, black market entertainment skeins — these he’d use to bribe other League agents, when their cooperation was necessary. All these things he arranged in neat patterns on his table, because he was a man who was careful and particular.

Finally, he went to the wall and opened a secret compartment in the stone. In the compartment he hid all the pangalac artifacts he would leave behind. Then he lay on his pallet and rested, waiting for morning. But he did not sleep; he lay in the dark with eyes wide open, his mouth fixed in a trembling smile.

At daybreak, Ruiz Aw awakened to the sound of jingling harness and shouting, sounds which drifted faintly through his window. There was some unusual quality in the shouts, some discordant vitality that attracted Ruiz’s curiosity. A glance through his window revealed nothing but the empty square, with its sinister boxes, and the waste, gray and empty under the dawning light. He rose from the bed and went out into the hall, though the mud floor was icy under his bare feet.

At the end of the hall was a curtained window that looked into the inn’s courtyard. Ruiz moved the curtain slightly and peered out.

A tall slender noble in black hunting leathers stood in the courtyard, shrieking at two ostlers, who were trying to saddle a huge striderbeast. The beast was highly strung, it appeared, and the noble seemed to be taking a perverse pleasure in making the ostlers’ job more difficult, shouting at just the moment the men were poised to clap the saddle on the beast.

“Hurry, can’t you, oafs? The sun’ll be down before you finish!”

The nobleman’s face drew Ruiz’s attention. It was typical of the Pharaohan peerage, narrow and fine boned — though in this case distorted by madness. The mouth pulsed, the eyes bulged, and two spots of hectic color emphasized the prominent cheekbones. Ruiz presumed that this was the local nomarch. Lord Brinslevos.

A moment later, when the ostlers seemed on the verge of success, Brinslevos darted forward and struck the striderbeast with his quirt, so that it curvetted away from the man who was trying to control it. The ostlers shot bitter glances at the noble, but made no protest.

Finally, relenting or growing bored, Brinslevos allowed the saddle to be cinched. He vaulted gracefully onto the beast. He made the beast rear and the ostlers scattered. “Good-bye,” Brinslevos shouted, mouth stretched wide with some fey emotion, and galloped forth. The sound of his going slowly died away.

Ruiz turned away from the window and returned to his room, unaccountably depressed. He sat on his bed and gathered his resolve. Finally he turned to making plans.

When he eventually appeared for his breakfast, the dining hall was empty and the porridge had gone stone-cold stiff, but a handsome young woman wearing a dirty shift bustled in and cut him a generous slice. He guessed she might be one of the “commoner doxies” Denklar had mentioned in connection with Brinslevos. She had a dusky bruise on her cheek and moved too carefully, but she seemed cheerful enough otherwise. She occasionally smiled at him, as she went about the dining hall collecting the dirty dishes, and he smiled back.

When he had finished the porridge, he leaned back in his chair and began to pick his teeth with the needle-point bodkin he carried on a chain around his neck. His attention, for some reason, fixed on the doxy’s legs. Her legs were long and smooth and brown, and her feet had the healthy beauty of feet that had never known shoes.

He pulled his gaze away and fixed it again on the empty porridge bowl. He was beginning to feel a bit frightened by his undisciplined thoughts. Nacker had certainly tampered with his priorities. He would have to watch himself very carefully, until he could get this over with and get to another trustworthy minddiver. If he lived to see Nacker again, he would have to discourage the freak from exercising his sense of humor at Ruiz’s expense. Ruiz shook his head. If he allowed himself to be distracted at a crucial point, he might not get to repay Nacker for his little joke. And wouldn’t that be a shame?

He forced his thoughts back into productive channels. First, he’d spend a few days selling oil to the local yokels. He’d try to pick up the texture of Pharaoh; his head was full to bursting with facts and dialects and sociological analyses — but these existed in a cold intellectual void. He needed to know what it was to be a Pharaohan, before he could safely move toward his objective. He’d deliberately chosen to emerge in this obscure backwater, to give himself a bit of respite from intrigue. He’d relax and merge more thoroughly with his snake oil man persona, and then he’d go about his business. The mission-imperative twitched in the depths of his mind, causing a tiny stab of pain behind his eyes, but then it settled back into quiescence; apparently it would permit him the delay.

The doxy finished with the clearing up and came to sit at his table without waiting for an invitation. “Hello,” she said, flashing white teeth.

“Hello,” he said, returning the bodkin to its sheath.

“What a pretty little knife,” she said.

“Thank you. My mother gave it to me; she said it would protect me from dangerous women.”

“Has it worked?”

He sighed theatrically. “Not recently. But I continue to hope, quite faithfully.”

She laughed, apparently delighted. “You’re not very gallant.”

He fixed a look of comic tragedy on his face. “Alas, I’m not very rich, either.”

She hitched her chair closer to his and laid a warm hand oh his arm. “I’d make you a special price. One entertainer to another. Or we’ll barter.”

He smiled. But his anxieties about Nacker and his determination to keep his mind on his business had combined to cool his ardor. “That’s extremely kind of you. I might hold you to it.”

She apparently sensed his dispassion, but didn’t seem to resent it. She patted his arm in a friendly manner. “Let me know. My name is Relia. And yours?”

“Wuhiya. Sometimes known as Wuhiya the Too-Little-Too-Soon.”

She laughed again. “Somehow I doubt it. Besides, that can be better than too-much-too-long. For example, last night…” Her expression darkened.

But then she smiled and went back into the kitchen, swaying pleasantly. Ruiz watched her go, feeling a little wistful.

A few minutes later, Denklar bustled in and sat down. “What are your plans now?” Denklar asked, looking somewhat rumpled, as though his night had been restless.

“I’ll set up in your common room. I won’t work hard at stealing your customers, and if anyone asks, I’ll say you’re getting a third of what I make.”

“Yes. All right.” Denklar drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

Ruiz smiled reassuringly. “Be calm, Denklar. I’ll soon be gone, and I’ll do nothing to excite your yokels.”

Denklar gave Ruiz an anxious look. “I hope you’re right. I also hope you won’t think me disrespectful for saying this… but an air of, well, unpleasant deeds clings to you. Trouble and pain.”

“Be calm,” Ruiz said, more sharply. “If I bring trouble, it isn’t to you, unless you’re an enemy of the League.”

Later, Ruiz chose a place in the common room where he could put his back against a solid wall and see all the doorways. He took a piece of dusty black velvet from his pack and smoothed it over the table — and then began to lay out his wares. The tiny glass vials of oil came in a dozen pale colors, each denoting a different variety of oil. The tops of the vials were flame-sealed, the leftover ribbon of glass swirled and looped into fanciful knots. The rows of vials made a pretty sight against the velvet, glowing like oblong jewels, their topknots glittering.

To the side, Ruiz laid out a selection of pipes, for anyone who couldn’t wait for a taste. There was a small water pipe of greenish porcelain, decorated with a stylized carving of a lyretongue lizard. There was a glass bubble pipe, a tangle of frivolous tubing through which the smoke would flow confusingly.

There was a simple pipe of brass, its long stem wrapped with colored leather, and a stubby redstone effigy pipe made to resemble a rearing striderbeast.

These things had a certain use-ingrained beauty, and Ruiz took some pleasure in handling them, and admiring the careful craftsmanship that each revealed. He took out his smoker’s lamp; the tall silver casting depicted a slender naked woman dancing in flames — which on closer examination proved to be a nest of serpents. The wick emerged from a tambourine she held aloft. Ruiz peered at the tiny face, which seemed to laugh madly. He polished away a bit of tarnish and filled the reservoir, then lit the lamp. It burned with the smoky yellow flame to be expected from a chimneyless lamp, but the fuel was pleasantly scented with sweet musk. Ruiz leaned back, for the moment content to wait.

His first customer drifted in just before noon. A short truculent-looking man bearing the tattoos of the steamfitter’s guild slipped in and stood by the door for a moment, apparently allowing his eyes to adjust to the cool dimness of the common room. After a moment, his glance settled on Ruiz, and his dour features broke into a wondering smile, as if the sight of Ruiz and his vials and pipes and lamp were a vista of surpassing beauty.

“Ah,” he said, in a delighted voice. “A new oil man.” He strode briskly over to Ruiz’s table and seated himself. He sat peering at the vials, a gloating expression suffusing his face. “You have the pink gracilic!”

“A connoisseur, I see.” Ruiz sat up, arranging his face into a mask of friendly expectancy.

The steamfitter sat back, abruptly frowning. “But I don’t know you.”

Ruiz shrugged. “Pharaoh is broad. A humble man such as myself can garner only enough fame to cover a small part.”

His customer smiled, a bit sourly. “Indeed. Well, we’re away from the press of commerce here, so we’ve had no regular oil man since Efrem displeased the Lord and Rontleses broke his legs. I may buy, if you convince me you can be trusted.”

“Why should you not trust me?” Ruiz brought out his plaque, which the man examined carefully.

Finally the man nodded. “It seems proper. But I’m not brave enough to risk bad oil — I don’t want to end up frothing and biting the flesh from my hands. Will you smoke with me?”

Ruiz made a lofty gesture of acquiescence. “If I must, to gain your trust and trade. But first, price!”

After fifteen minutes of spirited haggling, they reached a mutually acceptable price for the pink vial.

Money changed hands, and the customer picked up the pink vial in careful hands. “By the way,” he said. “My name is Nijints.”

Ruiz nodded. “Wuhiya, your servant.” He took up the brass pipe and uncovered a small brown stoneware humidor, from which he took a pinch of shredded punkweed. He packed the tiny bowl and waited until Nijints had selected the porcelain pipe and prepared it.

There was a comfortable expectancy in Nijints’s broad red face, and he seemed in no hurry. He handled the vial lovingly, holding it up to a beam of light that flickered through the roof thatch. Finally he sighed and tapped the vial’s neck against the table edge, until it cracked off. He allowed the smallest possible drop to fall into Ruiz’s pipe.

Ruiz fixed a look of proper anticipation on his face, and tipped the pipe toward the flame of his lamp. He drew the sweet smoke deep into his lungs, and Nijints broke into a sunny smile.

“You smoke with decision,” Nijints said, and dripped a larger dollop of oil into his own pipe.

The oil filled Ruiz with appealing perceptions. The ranks of vials looked for an instant like blazing suns in the blackness of space. “Starlight is the most dangerous drug,” he muttered. Nijints’s face seemed almost beautiful in its blunt acquisitive intensity.

Relia the doxy swept into the common room, and Ruiz for an instant was overwhelmed by her grubby perfection. Then, mildly panicked, he clamped down on his sensorium, using expensively acquired cerebral reflexes, and the scene in the common room returned to near normality.

Nijints lit his own pipe and sucked blissfully. For a moment his eyes drooped and he seemed on the verge of passing out, but then his eyes snapped open and he looked about with a heightened intensity. He spotted Relia where she stood scrubbing a table, bent over, her smooth round thighs showing, and his face blossomed with joyful purpose. He capped the vial with a bit of rolled-up leather, and set the burned-out pipe aside.

“You’ll excuse me,” Nijints said politely, and Ruiz nodded solemnly.

Nijints trotted over to Relia and made arrangements; a moment later both had disappeared into the back of the inn.

Ruiz unclenched his mind and allowed the oil to gild his perceptions again — until the next customer arrived.