the night, and Crucible and Pinion followed her with the bombe.
Leaving Bellows on duty in the lobby and the two other Smiths in the bar to deal with any late-night emergencies, Smith hurried upstairs and rapped twice on Lord Ermenwyr’s door. It was immediately flung wide by Lord Ermenwyr, who stood there grinning from ear to ear.
“All clear?”
“All clear.”
“Come on, boys!” He shot out of his room past Smith and went clattering down the stairs, and the four bodyguards thundered after him.
“Er—” Smith waved frantically, attempting to direct attention to the fact that Cutt had his head on backward. Lord Ermenwyr turned, spotted the problem, giggled, and corrected it with a wave of his hand.
“Sorry,” he said in a loud stage whisper. “Come on, where’s the you-know?”
Smith hurried down to join them and led the party back to the kitchen, where they descended into the cold cellar. Coppercut was gray and stiff as a board, which put smuggling him upstairs in an empty barrel out of the question. At last, after a certain amount of grisly hilarity and impractical, not to say criminal, suggestions, they settled for draping the corpse in sacking and carrying him out. Smith prayed there wouldn’t be any guests in the lobby, and there weren’t; after Bellows gave them the all clear and waved them through, they took the body up the stairs, tottering under it like a crowd of mismatched ants toting a dead beetle.
Thoroughly unnerved by the time they were back in Lord Ermenwyr’s suite, Smith was relieved to see neither black candles nor dark-fumed incense lit, but only bright lamps arranged around a table that had been tidily covered with oilcloth. On a smaller table close at hand were laid out edged tools of distressingly culinary design.
“Let’s just plop him down over there,” said Lord Ermenwyr, slipping out from under the corpse to shut the door. “Boys, cut his clothes off.”
“Don’t cut them, for gods’ sake,” said Smith. “I’ve still got to hand him over to Crossbrace tomorrow. If he’s naked with a big hole in him, that’ll raise some questions, won’t it?”
“Too true,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “All right; just get the clothes off him somehow, boys.”
The bodyguards set to their task obligingly, and though Coppercut’s body went through some maneuvers that could best be described as terribly undignified, his clothes came off at last.
“It’s like one of those puzzles,” growled Crish happily, holding up Coppercut’s tunic. “You can do it; you just have to think really hard.”
“Good for you,” said Lord Ermenwyr, removing his own jacket and shirt. He stripped a sheet from the bed and tied it around his neck like an immense trailing napkin. Smith paced nervously, watching the proceedings and silently apologizing to Coppercut.
“Now then.” Lord Ermenwyr stepped up to the corpse and studied it. “What have we got? A male Child of the Sun, dead roughly a day and a half. Looks to be in the prime of life. No signs of chronic illness present. Well-healed scar on the right side, between the third and fourth ribs. Someone once took a shot at you with, hm, a pistol bolt? Missed anything vital, though. Otherwise unscarred and well nourished. Some evidence of initial processes of putrefaction.”
Smith groaned. “Get on with it, please!”
“You want me to find out what killed him, don’t you?” Lord Ermenwyr replied. He peered into Coppercut’s eyes and ears, felt gingerly all over his skull. “No evidence of head injury. Nobody sneaked up and coshed him from behind. Signs of asphyxia present. Internal suffocation? I’m betting on poison. Let’s see the stomach contents.”
He selected a small knife from the table at his elbow and made a long incision down Coppercut’s front. Smith, watching, felt himself break out in a cold sweat.
“Let’s see, where does your race keep their stomachs? I remember now… here we go. Come and help me, Smith. Oh, all right! Strangel, hand him the lamp and you come help me. Honestly, Smith, what kind of an assassin were you?”
“A quick one,” Smith panted, averting his face. “Even on the battlefield you have to hack off arms and heads and things, but—but it’s all in the heat of the moment. It’s nothing like this. I guess you learned how from your lord father?”
The bodyguards started to genuflect and narrowly stopped themselves, as lamplight flickered crazily in the room and Crish nearly dropped what Lord Ermenwyr had given him to hold.
“Steady,” warned Lord Ermenwyr. “No … I learned it from Mother, if you want to