(What it means, if you’re not familiar with the personage involved, is that The Roach passed the word in The Trough—the Flankn’s combined heart and central nervous system—that if any Flankn cutpurse or mugger so much as looked cross-eyed at this Benny fellow, well, they’d have The Roach to deal with. And The Boots. Among the lowlife of New Sfinctr, that’s as good as gold. Quite a bit better, actually. Even gold wears out, eventually. The Boots and their effects are eternal.)
Leuwen was still droning on and around and about and up and down and sideways, so Greyboar cut him short: “Get to the point.”
Again, the frantic wiping of the hands. Then: “Well, you see, actually, the point is—he wants to talk to you.”
Greyboar lifted his eyebrows. “So? Send him over, then.”
* * *
Some few moments later, Leuwen was wending his way back through the crowded taproom with a stranger in tow. The man was carrying a cloth sack filled with something or other in one hand, and an odd-looking object of some sort in the other. The thing was flat, almost like a board, and about four feet wide by three feet tall. Couldn’t figure out what it was.
As he drew near, the man subjected us to a very close scrutiny. Well, subjected Greyboar, I should say. He didn’t give me but a glance. In and of itself, that wasn’t unusual. Strangers often stared at Greyboar when they first met him, even if they didn’t know who he was. If they did, the stare became an ogle.
But there was something odd about this fellow’s stare. There was no fear in it, not even apprehension. Instead, there seemed to be some kind of weird recognition. Almost as if he were seeing a ghost, or something.
But I didn’t spend much time trying to figure out what the stranger was thinking. I was much too busy wallowing in an immediate, overwhelming, intense, detestation of him.
I hate that man, was the overriding thought in my mind. May he contract leprosy. May he stumble and disfigure himself. May he suffer from an incurable deadly disease which strikes him down before he takes another step. May a meteorite plunge through the roof and turn him into a crater. May—
And so on, and so forth.
No man in the world has any right to be that handsome.
It was so disgusting. Mind you, I’m not normally given to envy over such things. There’s no need for it. Your normal “handsome man” is an object of ridicule. Most of them are pretty-boy types, which the girls may swoon over but which any solid male bellied up to a bar can instantly dismiss with a sneer. “Cream puff. Break him like a twig.”
Alas. I doubted that any man in The Trough could have broken this fellow, other than Greyboar and maybe a couple of your finest muggers. He wasn’t just impossibly handsome, he was also—brace yourself for another sample of life’s fundamental unfairness—tall, broad-shouldered, lean-hipped, flat-bellied, the whole works. His stride had a light, pantherish quality to it, which went quite oddly with the soulful sadness in his gray eyes. And his hands! Oh, the injustice of it all! Women would gaze on those finely-shaped, long-fingered, well-manicured objects with fascinated curiosity, and decide he was undoubtedly a charming fellow. Men would examine the size of the sinewy things, note how well they undoubtedly wrapped themselves around the hilt of the sword scabbarded to his waist, and decide likewise.
The sword, naturally, was not only a finely-made rapier with a truly splendid hilt and basket, it was also obviously well used.
By the time Leuwen brought the wretch to our table I had damned him to a thousand deaths. Silently, of course. Alas, Greyboar didn’t share a natural male reaction to such things. And, fact is, should the big guy have chosen not to back me up in a little contretemps—he’d been known to desert me in my hour of need—things might have gotten a little tricky if the stranger took offense at my conduct.
True, the man was obviously an Ozarine. The dark complexion and the typical Ozarine cast to his features gave him away even before he opened his mouth and exhibited that grotesque Ozarine accent. But I was not one of those dolts who thought all Ozarines were overcivilized fops. Overcivilized fops do not, as a rule, conquer half the world.
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