First, We Must Consider The Concept Of Perceived Futility
“This is a case of the sheep who thinks shears are a way to get at its meat. Why drown the streets in our blood when the option is there to take the package and give us a wound or two sufficient to incapacitate us? It will not be so enjoyable as not being injured, perhaps to the point of lifelong impairment, but the number of homicides will increase not by a single incident.”
Stansolt had a chance to tell Dirant that cheerful tidbit as they marched in a wedding procession that by chance had crossed their path. Even the boldest skulduggery had to yield to public occasions in Drastlif. The thugs joined it as well, and in that joyful procession they could do nothing but watch for when their quarry would try to slip out. Somewhere before the temple, surely; the Grenlofers could not have invitations. Both the pursuers and the pursued were mistaken in thinking that lack to be of any moment whatever.
The hiatus allowed Dirant to count the hostile force. Kenjawm and eight others pursued the two. “With so many to serve as lookouts, it is surpassingly rude of them not to have prevented me from wandering the house. This entire incident might have been avoided,” he complained.
“The timing was not so bewildering as that. You entered first, and then Kenjawm. It was for that reason that I looked in on the proceedings. Do you normally take quite so long?”
“It is the curtain, you see.”
“Ah, that is a disconcerting aspect.”
“On another point, what this satchel contains is a matter of professional indifference. The sender and proper recipient are something else. I seem to recall seeing this seal, and recently.” The thing looked to Dirant like two oddly long dogs chasing each other around the sun. Possibly it was a scene of mythological significance.
Stansolt looked over. “Ah, but what about it now?” He slipped a knife through the opening and broke the seal in a most un-Stadeskoskenly manner. The sight evoked a yip from Dirant which would have embarrassed him to recount. “I feel like the hero who solved the unsolvable puzzle. Here is where we depart.”
A street perpendicular to the procession was obstructed by three carriages and four wagons pointed in unhelpful directions, all surrounded by drivers arguing about who needed to perform what maneuver to clear up the mess. Stansolt and Dirant slid through the press and behind a carriage decorated with something Onkallant would probably call azure a vert gules sejant per lozengy or the like. The intricacies of heraldry were not to be grasped in a single sea voyage.
The package thieves ran down that road, and when they had passed, Stansolt took off for a different street. A good plan but for the fact that Kenjawm soon inferred his prey had gone elsewhere from the ladders and such ahead of him which the bystanders only got around to removing at his approach. Still, Stansolt did not fail to make use of his lead. He ran along, peering through windows behind which shop proprietors stacked up samples in order to tempt passersby. Eventually the enticement worked on him.
He yanked Dirant into a tailor's, for such it happened to be, and there further happened to be an Adaban man shopping inside. “What's the largest thing you have for my friend here?” Stansolt asked the tailor, not that Dirant understood it.
The conventional understanding that most Drastlifan businesses accepted the currency of Greater Enloffenkir held, unlike ideas about the number of frenzied chases on the typical day in Vigit Pikilif. Stansolt paid for Dirant's new hat and jacket and, when the customer already there made to leave, rushed through his parting words for his firm companion of the past few minutes. “You have a package, you are a Stadeskosken employee, what more is there?” With those meaningful words and a small coin given over, he hurried out to walk beside the departing Adaban, grab him, and hurry him forward.
Dirant watched the mail-tamperers chase those two, at first dismayed by Stansolt's callousness until he remembered Kenjawm had stared him full in the face and would certainly ignore the uninvolved Adaban after realizing the deception. He waited for an interval he hoped more fortuitous than the one in the Gren-Sofops home, prayed to the gods possibly in charge of evading pursuit, and left.
What to do next? Dirant never wondered that. He had in hand a single ezola which made Stansolt a client and a deliverable item. All he had to do was find the recipient. Some people might have called that an impossible task. Those people did not do well in the Stadeskosken hiring process.
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Someone more conversant in the terminology might have been able to elaborate, but the seal, his one clue, looked somehow unlike Drastlifan heraldry. Perhaps it was the lack of attention to color, or the exaggerated physiques of the dogs which allowed each to take up half the symbol, or the lack of extra bits stuck everywhere. Regardless, it looked pretty Dvanjcthlivy to Dirant. Nobody liked elements arranged in rings around a sun more than they did. Before checking the local stables, Dirant went to the most Dvanjchtliv-dense place he knew.
“Welcome back, Ressi.” If Takki felt her relationship with Dirant insufficiently intimate for her to ask what had happened in there to necessitate a change of clothes, certainly Banfol and Onerid would not dare say anything about it. They looked for a moment as if they might, but perhaps they caught sight of a spiritual guardian over his shoulder holding a note which said, “Eccentricity in the boss's family is to be expected and, by those who are wise, overlooked.”
“A job can arise at any time,” he told them by way of as much explanation as he planned to give while he looked over the clumps of tennis enjoyers. “Ah! Again, I must apologize for leaving you.” With a short bow of a playful character, for he did not anticipate he would be missed, Dirant made his way around the edge near the sheer curtains toward a Dvanjchtliv sitting on a folding chair that bore on its back and arms a certain design: Two tawny dogs chasing each other around a blue sun.
The prospective recipient was intent on the sport, and his slight smile indicated something about it made the spectacle worth the watching. Many activities failed to reach that bar, if his judgment was as severe as his looks. The mane-like single strip of subdued blond hair between shaved sides, a style preserved in Swadvanchdeu and Noiswawau though long abandoned in Redrin and Chtrebliseu, reminded one of the innumerable victories of the Dvanjchtlivs, their unflagging courage, the skill of their horsemanship and handling of weapons.
That much was obvious from afar. As he approached, Dirant was able to recognize Crown Prince Ozovramblidaj of Noiswawau, the man who would become King Noiswawau XIX unless some Swadvanchdeuan got a few inches luckier than the one who had given him that scar on his jaw. Another had been a few degrees from giving the prince's mouth a perpendicular decoration where normally the Dvanjchtlivs preferred a mustache. Perhaps the prince wanted everyone to read his past battles on his face; it spared him the need to boast. A director of any kind of theater walking by would halt and offer him on the spot a role in an upcoming production as the king's right-hand man who would refrain from no ruthless act. It may have been that he held that position in fact, if the rumors the broadsheets did not dare to print along with his picture had truth behind them.
Someone like that was able to set aside great concerns of state, not to mention personal safety, to concentrate on ladies playing tennis only because he had men about him who saw to other matters. So it was that attendants, similar as to their hair but more conventional with respect to their curly mustaches, stopped Dirant and demanded to know his business.
“A delivery.” He held up the satchel and hoped his Dvanj had not drifted into a Redrin dialect after his time there. He checked the details.
> Dvanj (Intermediate): Literate; Parliamentary Dialect; Adaban Accent (Heavy)
That ought to be safe enough. Some held the optimal level of Adaban accent was none at all, but Dirant joined those who wondered what was superior about the Dvanjchtliv tribe that the Adaban ought to subordinate his inclinations to its ideas of optimal pronunciation.
The confrontation interested Prince Ozovramblidaj. He rose with barely less grace than he likely displayed when dismounting and took the satchel himself. “I am expecting a delivery. Not from any Adaban. Hm.” He fingered the halves of the seal. “Who hired you?”
“Sir, it is nothing against you that I am unable to say. The inviolable policy of Stadeskosken demands discretion.” Dirant chose to behave politely instead of facing-royalty-politely as if unaware of the identity of the man addressing him. The less knowledgeable about the affair he appeared, the more he would like it, he reasoned. Even speaking in Dvanj might have been a mistake.
“How convenient for you. Does your company policy forbid you from saying how this seal was broken?” The prince waved the satchel in front of the delivery boy.
“Sir, it may be . . .” Dirant leaned forward and lowered his voice. “That the package passed through several hands before mine. There is reason to think so. I can guarantee that beween when it was entrusted to me as a deliverable item and when I delivered it just now no one tampered with it, looked inside, or any such, but prior to my custodianship, I can say nothing certain.”
“I should say there is reason.” The recipient looked the deliverer over, clearly wondering what information he might expect to extract. There was some plot about, but messengers and menials were best put to use without inducting them into the conspiracy. Further, they were in public by Dvanjchtlivan standards if not by Drastlifan ones. Prince Ozovramblidaj decided, in the end, to let the subject graze for the present. “What other policies does your company have? Am I to pay some fee or gratuity?”
“No, sir. That is the sender's sole responsibility. Please sign here.” Dirant produced the form he had created with paper and a pen acquired along the way at a cost somewhere between one ezola and his life. The ezola would go to the company anyway, making his personal loss greater, but he still estimated the total expense as below the potential cost. Certain supervisors would punish him for neglecting to employ a ruler, but his quick document was no more disorderly than many stuffed in Stadeskosken's files. Receiving the signature, he bowed and departed, and if behind him the prince indicated to his people he wanted that man followed and investigated, that was a milder consequence for his spontaneous adventure than Dirant expected.