Soothsayer Read online

  “There must be. They'd never let the maids go up in the same airlift as the paying customers.” She paused. “Maybe you'd better go tell the management that we're here to put on a show for their customers tonight, before they think that we're casing the premises.”

  “And what will you be doing while I'm explaining away our presence?” asked Merlin.

  “Casing the premises,” she replied with a smile.

  Merlin approached the front desk, and the Mouse took an elevator to the seventh level, made sure that the locks were a type she could pick, tried to take the lift down to the basement to inspect the laundry, found that it stopped at the lobby, and finally rejoined the magician just as he was emerging from the day manager's office.

  “All set?” she asked.

  “They won't give us any problems, and it'll justify our hanging around the hotel for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Good. Let's start by having some lunch.”

  He agreed, and a moment later they entered the main-floor restaurant. Only two other tables were occupied, and Merlin nodded toward the farthest one.

  “See that alien over there?” he whispered, indicating the lone being at the table.

  “The humanoid with the bad complexion?” she asked.

  Merlin nodded. “The one who's dressed all in silver. Steer clear of him.”

  “Why?”

  “Wait'll he reaches for something and you'll see.”

  As if on cue, the alien signaled for a waiter, and she could see that he had once possessed four arms, but that one had been amputated.

  “What kind of race does he belong to?” she asked.

  “I don't know—but unless I miss my guess, that's Three-Fisted Ollie.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Just keep out of his way.”

  “Outlaw?”

  “Bounty hunter. They say he's killed more than thirty men, and that he never takes contracts on his own race.” The magician paused thoughtfully. “I wish I knew why he was on Westerly; he usually operates on the Inner Frontier.”

  “Unless he's hunting for us.”

  “Come on,” said Merlin. “There's not a warrant out on us anywhere in the Democracy.”

  “That you know of,” she said.

  “That anyone knows of,” he replied confidently. “Anyway, if you run into him tonight, just apologize and get the hell out of his way quick.”

  The Mouse nodded and punched her order into the small menu computer. A moment later Merlin prodded her with his toe.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Don't look turn around or pretend to notice him—but do you see who just joined the alien?”

  She turned her head.

  “I said don't look directly!” hissed Merlin.

  “All right,” said the Mouse, staring directly into Merlin's eyes. “It's a big bearded human with a small arsenal hanging down from his belt. I assume you know him, too?”

  “It's Cemetery Smith.”

  “Another bounty hunter?”

  Merlin shook his head. “A hired killer. One of the best.”

  “So why are an alien bounty hunter and a professional assassin sitting fifty feet away from us?” asked the Mouse.

  “I don't know,” said the magician nervously. “They should both be on the Frontier, and they sure as hell shouldn't be talking to each other.”

  “Are they after us?” asked the Mouse calmly, even as she searched for exits and mentally calculated her chances of reaching them.

  “No. These guys don't fool around. If they wanted us, we'd already be dead.”

  “What do you want to do about tonight?” she asked. “We can give the hotel a pass, and just take off.”

  “Let me think about it,” said Merlin. He lowered his head and stared at his interlocked fingers for a long moment, then looked up. “No, there's no reason to cancel out. They're not after us, and we don't represent any competition to them. We're thieves, they're killers.”

  The Mouse shrugged. “Makes no difference to me.”

  “I wonder who they're after?” mused Merlin, as the human got to his feet, said something to the alien, and walked out into the hotel lobby. “Whoever it is, he must be damned good if it takes the two of them together to hunt him down.”

  They ate in silence, and then, as twilight approached, the Mouse began passing out holographic flyers announcing the magic show that would shortly be performed on the street outside the hotel.

  By sundown, when Merlin began producing bouquets and birds and rabbits with professional elan, they had attracted a crowd of about sixty, all but a handful of them humans. Merlin continued to bedazzle the crowd, the Mouse performed her two or three simple illusions to a smattering of applause, and then Merlin put her into the box and began securing the locks, even as she rolled out the false back. By the time he had maneuvered it into the water tank, she was beneath the surface of the street, crawling through the ventilation shaft into the laundry. There were two women on duty, and it took her a minute longer than she had anticipated to reach the enclosed fire stairs. She raced up the stairs to the fourth level, then emerged and began checking for unlocked doors. She found one, quickly looted the room of its few valuable items, and then broke into another room. This one provided even less booty, and she soon emerged into the corridor. According to her watch, she had time for perhaps two more rooms if she was fast enough, one more if she had to hunt for its treasures.

  Then, suddenly, she heard a door open, and she shot into the stairwell. There was no reason to wait for the resident to traverse the corridor and reach the airlift, when all she had to do was climb another floor and loot two rooms on the fifth level—but some instinct warned her not to climb any higher. Perhaps it was the press of time, perhaps it was the possibility of running into Cemetary Smith, but whatever the reason, she found herself waiting for the fourth level corridor to become empty rather than ascending to the fifth.

  “Goddamn it!” bellowed a voice, and she peeked into the fourth level corridor.

  Evidently whoever had opened the door had managed to lock himself out of his room, because now he was cursing at the top of his lungs and pounding on his door. Other doors cracked open as curious residents sought the reason for the disturbance, and the Mouse pulled her head back into the stairwell, convinced that the fourth level wouldn't be safe for her until long after she had to return to the magic show.

  She took two steps up the stairwell, then heard still more noise on the fifth level, as the sounds of cursing and pounding rose through the building, and she immediately reversed her course, racing down to the second level, well below the noise.

  She stepped cautiously into the corridor, which was a bit wider than the human section, and began checking the doors. The first two were locked, the third had a hideous growling sound emanating from behind it. It was as she approached the fourth door that she heard a sound that had no business being in the alien section of the hotel: the sobbing of a human child.

  It took her less than twenty seconds to pick the lock and leap into the darkness of the room before the door could slide shut behind her. She pulled out a tiny flashlight and began inspecting the premises. There was an oddly-shaped couch and chair that no human could ever sit in, a table on which were placed six bronze artifacts that were absolutely meaningless to her, and another table with the remains of an alien meal on it.

  Then her light caught a slight movement in the corner of the room. She immediately turned and focused it, and found herself staring at a small blonde girl manacled to the heavy wooden leg of an immense chair.

  “Help me!” pleaded the girl.

  “Are you alone?” whispered the Mouse.

  The girl nodded.

  The mouse crossed the room and set to work on the girl's manacles.

  “What's your name?” asked the Mouse.

  “Penelope,” sniffed the girl.

  “Penelope what?”

  “Just Penelope.”

  The manacles
came apart and dropped to the floor, and the Mouse stood up and took her first good look at the girl.

  Penelope's blonde hair seemed to have been haphazardly cut with a knife rather than a shears, and it obviously hadn't been washed in weeks, or perhaps months. There was a large bruise on her left cheek, not terribly miscolored, obviously on the mend. She was thin, not wiry and hard like the Mouse, but almost malnourished. She was dressed in what had once been a white play outfit that was now grimy and shredded from being worn for weeks on end. Her feet were bare, and both her heels were raw.

  “Don't turn the light on,” said Penelope. “He'll be back soon.”

  “What race does he belong to?”

  Penelope shrugged. “I don't know.”

  The Mouse pulled a dagger out of her left boot. “If he comes back before we leave, I'll have a little surprise for him, that's for sure.”

  Penelope shook her head adamantly. “You can't kill him. Please, can't we leave?”

  The Mouse reached out a hand and pulled Penelope to her feet. “Where are your parents?”

  “I don't know. Dead, I think.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” said the Mouse, heading toward the door. “Let's go.”

  “Wait!” said Penelope suddenly. “I can't leave without Jennifer!”

  “Jennifer?” demanded the Mouse. “Who's Jennifer?”

  Penelope raced to a corner of the room and picked up a filthy rag doll. “This is Jennifer,” she said, holding it up in the beam of light. “Now we can go.”

  “Give me your hand,” said the Mouse, ordering the door to slide into the wall.

  She stuck her head out into the hall, saw no movement, and quickly walked to the stairwell, practically dragging the weakened little girl behind her. Once there, they walked down to the basement level and made their way to the laundry room.

  “Now listen carefully,” whispered the Mouse. “I want you to crawl on your hands and knees, just the way I'm going to do, behind this row of laundry carts, until we reach that vent. Can you see it?”

  Penelope peered into the semi-darkness and shook her head.

  “I'll let you know when we're there. Once we reach the vent, I'm going to boost you up inside it. It's narrow and it's dark, but you won't get stuck, because that's how I came in and I'm bigger than you are.”

  “I'm not afraid,” said Penelope.

  “I know you're not,” said the Mouse reassuringly. “But you have to be absolutely silent. If you make any noise, the maids who are running the washing machines on the other side of the room might hear, and if they come over to investigate, I'll have to kill them.”

  “It's wrong to kill.”

  “Then don't make any noise and I won't have to,” said the Mouse. “Are you ready?”

  Penelope nodded her head, and the Mouse began crawling toward the vent. When she reached it she turned to see how far Penelope had gotten, and was surprised to find the little girl almost beside her.

  The Mouse made sure that the maids were still busily loading and unloading the washers and dryers, put a finger to her lips, then lifted Penelope into the vent. The little girl writhed and wriggled, and finally made it to the right angle where the vent left the building and went beneath the street.

  The Mouse was about to follow her when she heard a plaintive whisper.

  “I can't find Jennifer!”

  “Keep going!” hissed the Mouse. “I'll find her.”

  She waited for a moment until she could hear the child wriggling forward again, then climbed into the vent herself. She came upon the rag doll wedged into a corner as the vent turned out of the building, tucked it into her belt, then continued crawling until she caught up with Penelope, who had reached the grate beneath Merlin's wagon and didn't know what to do next.

  The Mouse quickly removed the grate, boosted Penelope into the wagon, and followed her, leaning back down through the false floor to reattach the grate.

  “Wait here,” she instructed the child. “And don't make a sound.”

  She donned her black hood and made it to the act's finale with no more than ten seconds to spare. When it was over, and most of the crowd had dispersed, she led Merlin back inside the wagon.

  “What kept you?” asked the magician. “You cut it awfully close.”

  “I hired an assistant,” said the Mouse with a smile.

  “An assistant?”

  The Mouse pointed at Penelope, who had buried herself under a bag of props.

  “Good God!” muttered Merlin, lifting the bag. “Where the hell did you find her?”

  “Chained to a bed in an alien's room.”

  The magician squatted down next to the little girl and examined the bruise on her cheek. “You've had a hard time of it, haven't you?”

  She stared at him without answering.

  “Has she got any family on Westerly?” Merlin asked the Mouse.

  “I don't think so.”

  “What was she doing here?”

  “I don't know,” said the Mouse.

  “Hiding,” said Penelope.

  “He doesn't mean now, Penelope,” said the Mouse. “He meant when I found you.”

  “Hiding,” repeated Penelope.

  “You mean the alien who stole you was in hiding?”

  She shook her head. “He was hiding me.”

  The Mouse nodded. “From your parents.”

  Penelope shook her head again. “My parents are dead.”

  “From the authorities, then,” said the Mouse.

  “No.”

  “Then from who?” asked the Mouse in mild exasperation.

  Penelope pointed a thin, wavering finger out the wagon's only window to the doorway of the hotel, where Cemetery Smith and Three-Fisted Ollie were speaking in loud angry voices to the doorman.

  “From them.”

  2.

  Penelope was sound asleep, clutching her rag doll to her chest, as the ship sped through the void to the dry, dusty world of Cherokee. The Mouse had fed and bathed her, and put a healing ointment on her feet, and had finally gone to the ship's cluttered galley, where she found Merlin sitting at the dining table. He had a small mirror set up opposite his hands, and was studying it intently as he went through his repertoire of card tricks.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well what?”

  Merlin put the deck of cards in his pocket. “Did she say anything?”

  “Of course she did,” answered the Mouse. “She's not mute, you know.”

  “Anything useful?” he persisted. “Like why anyone would hire two such expensive killers to hunt her down?”

  “We've gone over this before,” said the Mouse wearily. “She's very young and very confused.” She commanded a cabinet to open, and withdrew a bottle and a glass. “It's far more likely that they were after her abductor. Look at it logically: the alien kidnapped her, the family decided not to pay any ransom, and they hired a pair of killers to get her back.”

  “If you're right, we've got to unload her quick,” said Merlin. “If there's a reward, we claim it on Cherokee. If there isn't, we get rid of her before they send Smith and Ollie after us.”

  “There aren't any authorities on Cherokee,” she pointed out while pouring herself a drink. “It's an Inner Frontier world. That's why we chose it.”

  “It's got a post office covered with wanted posters, and it's got a powerful subspace radio transmitter,” responded Merlin. “We can at least find out if a reward has been offered.”

  “I don't know if there will be a reward in the usual sense,” said the Mouse, “but someone is offering something, or Cemetary Smith and Three-Fisted Ollie wouldn't have been after the kidnapper.” She paused. “If she's valuable enough to interest professional assassins and bounty hunters, the family must be awfully rich. My guess is that they're trying to keep it quiet. Maybe she's got brothers and sisters; there's no sense advertising that their security is flawed.”

  “Then how wi
ll we find out who she is and who she belongs to?” said Merlin. “We can't just post an advertisement that we've stolen this little blonde girl from an alien kidnapper. Smith and Ollie would be hunting for us five minutes later.” He stared thoughtfully at his lean, white fingers. “I don't know. We may have bitten off more than we can chew.”

  “What did you want me to do?” asked the Mouse irritably. “Leave her where she was?”

  “No, I suppose not.” Merlin sighed deeply and lit a small cigar. “But I'm starting to get a very bad feeling about this.”

  “I don't see why,” said the Mouse, downing her drink.

  “Because we're a couple of small-timers. If Cemetary Smith and Three-Fisted Ollie are involved in this, then we're in over our heads. And I have a feeling that there's more to this than meets the eye.”

  “For instance?”

  “I don't know,” he admitted. “But I can't help remembering the look on her face when she pointed to those two killers—like she'd seen them before.”

  “Perhaps she had,” agreed the Mouse. “So what? Maybe they took a shot at her captor and missed, and in her confused state she thought they were shooting at her.”

  “That's the problem,” said Merlin.

  “What is?”

  “Those guys don't miss.” He paused and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “And there's something else, too.”

  “What?”

  “Bounty hunters aren't much for sharing. Do you know how much money someone had to put up to get them to work together?” He stared at her, a troubled expression on his face. “If she's worth that much, why haven't we heard about her before?”

  “When you're really rich, you don't brag about it—you hide it.”

  “I don't know,” said Merlin. “You've got an answer for everything ... but I still don't like it.”

  “I'll tell you what,” she said. “When we set down on Cherokee, we'll make some very discreet inquiries and see if we can find out who she is and who wants her ... and we'll keep doing it, carefully and discreetly, on every world we hit until we get an answer. In the meantime, she can shill for the act. Will that satisfy you?”

  “I suppose so. The question is: will it satisfy her?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the Mouse.