What good are you to me?’The Prince rubbed the dimple in his chin furiously and gave Senka a scorching glance from his black eyes. Senka cringed, but this was no time to be shy. ‘She told me, “Go to him, Speedy, don’t you have no doubts, you’ll definitely be useful to the Prince, I ought to know,” that’s what she said.’ Senka tried to look at the big man with fearless devotion, but his knees were trembling. The whole gang was standing behind him: Deadeye, Sprat-Sixer, the pair with the same face and another one with fat cheeks (it must have been him who was dozing with his devolvert in his hand). Only the cripple with no legs was missing. The Prince’s lodgings in the Kazan were right at the end of the collidor that Senka had been led along the day before. From the room with the desecrated icons, where Deadeye flung his knives about, you just had to go a little bit farther and turn a corner, and there was a big room, with a separate bedroom. Senka saw the bedroom only through the half-open door (well, it was just an ordinary bedroom: a bed covered with a coloured counterpane, a flail – a spiked steel ball on a chain – lying on the floor, and that was all he could make out), but the Prince’s sitting room was really grand.
