A Sword From Red Ice (26 page)

"We take the house as planned."

Even as he spoke, the unfamiliar horn sounded from
the woods directly behind the roundhouse. Whoever they were, they had
arrived.

Parley in the Thief's House

Crope moved with as much stealth as he could
manage. It wasn't much—seven years in the mines had turned his
joints to creaky doors—but it was enough to sneak up on the
fly. It was a big one. A biter. Most people called them black flies,
but if you looked real close you see they were really brown. This one
had landed on the wall next to the strange shiny stain that smelled
of snails. It was the perfect position from which to launch an attack
upon the figure on the bed . . . and that wouldn't do. Crope dove
forward and snatched it into his fist. That wouldn't do at all.

The fly bit the tender center of his palm as he
opened the door and stepped into the hall. Crope couldn't really
blame it, but it did hurt, and he decided to release the fly in the
hallway and let it find its own way out. The house had four stories
and he was standing on the topmost floor. "Fly down," he
advised as the insect buzzed away.

Crope took a moment then just to settle his mind.
It wasn't that he was upset or anything . . . just things got a bit
much from time to time. The light in the hallway helped.
Late-afternoon sun shone red and golden, warping floorboards and
stirring dust. Quill said that the man who had originally built the
house had been a sea captain who'd once plied the trade routes
between the Seahold and the Far South. "Missed the ocean, he
did," Quill had reported. "So he built himself a ship."
With its round windows and plank decking the house did look a bit
like a boat, but mostly it just looked like a house.

It wasn't home, though. Crope couldn't guess how
long he would have to hide out in the cold and stony city at the base
of a mountain. It made no difference: it would never be his home.

Quietly, he let himself back into the sleeping
chamber. Entering the cool, low-ceilinged dimness was like passing
into a cave. His lord could not bear bright light. Even in his sleep
he shied away from it, screaming from his fever dreams that it
burned. Boiled-wool curtains, dyed black and double-lined, concealed
the chamber's only window, yet some portion of light still got
through. Crope used this to navigate the room as his eyes grew
accustomed to the dark.

His lord was still sleeping. Baralis' slight,
misshapen body lay curled in a fetal position on the bed. The sour,
grassy scent of fresh urine was leaking from the mattress and Crope
fretted over whether it was better to let his lord sleep or waken him
and strip down the sheets. Crope was not good with choices. Choices
could lead to mistakes. Dimwit, Halfwit, Nowit. Couldn't pluck a
half-bald chicken. The bad voice was like an itch inside his head and
he tried very hard to ignore it. His lord was sleeping quietly, at
rest in his mind. Perhaps it was best to let him be. Crope could not
recall many hours where his lord had simply slept. Mostly he shook
and clawed the sheets and repeated the same word over and over again
in different ways. No. No.

No.

Crope shivered, though the room was warm. Not hot,
not cold. Lukewarm. His lord could bear no other temperature on his
skin. His lord was broken and needed mending. Crope had experience
with mending. He'd fixed chickens and dogs and squirrels before but
there was so much profoundly wrong with his lord that he wasn't sure
it could ever be made right.

But it would not stop Crope from trying. Silently
he crossed the room to where the driftwood table with the charred
legs stood. The water he'd fetched earlier had now reached the same
temperature as the room and he soaked some of it up in a heavy cloth.
Cupping his free hand beneath the cloth to catch the drips, Crope
moved toward his lord. As always when he neared him, Crope felt the
anger knot in his chest. He did not understand how one man could have
done this to another. During his first year at the tin mines he had
pulled a digger from the rubble of a collapsed seam. The man had been
smashed by a falling stone, his body torn and punctured in a dozen
places by sharp edges of quartz. A fluke upward shearing of rock had
punched out his eye and replaced it with a shiny chunk of tin. His
left leg had been disjointed at the hip and the tendons in both his
feet had snapped. Unable to inflate his lungs, he had lived for about
an hour. Crope thought of the digger's broken body whenever he saw
his lord.

Crushed, that was the word. And it was one thing
for a lode-bearing seam of tin to do that to a man. Another thing
entirely for someone to do it to someone else. It was evil, and Crope
lived with the real and secret fear that even though he had killed
the man who had harmed his lord the evil that had been created still
lived on.

Crope was gentle as he dripped water on his lord's
brow. Baralis' eyes were almost destroyed, the corneas folded inward,
the whites scarred and crisscrossed with strange veins. Even the lids
were scarred, Crope noticed as he washed his lord's face.

"You are with me," he murmured softly as
Baralis stirred, "and you are safe."

Eighteen days had passed since he'd rescued his
lord; Crope knew this to be so because Quill kept an account. Quillan
Moxley was a friend and thief. He was also a man of business, and
Crope worried about the cost of hiding out in his house. Eighteen
days of food, medicine and shelter added up—especially, Crope
conceded rather sheepishly, when it was him doing the eating. Quill
had asked for no reckoning, but Crope knew how these things worked.
Obligation had been created, and obligation meant debt.

Still, Crope respected Quill. He was a man of his
word. He'd promised to help Crope free his lord from the chasm below
the pointy tower and had gone ahead and done just that. And Quill
would never run to the bailiffs to settle a grievance. Men who
enforced laws in this or any other city were not friends of Quill,
and that suited Crope fine. Just the thought of bailiffs was enough
to make Crope scan the room for likely escape routes. When a bailiff
locked you up you never got out.

Jangly music rose through the floorboards as the
girls in the floor below began to prepare themselves for the night's
work. Crope worried about the girls. Some of them wore too little and
might catch chills. Others drank too much and Crope would find them
passed out on the stairs in the morning. Quill called them
prostitutes though the girls never used that name themselves. He
rented out the two middle floors to them in return for a portion of
their take. Crope was shy around the girls. They reminded him of
wounded animals who needed mending, but he knew it wasn't his place
to try and fix them.

He required all his mending skills for his lord.
Methodically over the past eighteen days he had tended Baralis'
ailments. Open wounds were the most pressing problem and Crope
cleaned them with alcohol and rubbed them with a salve made from aloe
and sweet fennel. The ulcers and pressure sores had to be washed with
a tincture of calendula twice a day, and Crope was careful not to let
his lord lie in the same position overlong else the skin break up and
become worse. There was deadnettle for the bladder, horehound for
Baralis' weakened lungs, and butcher's broom for his enlarged heart.
Ewe's milk so thick with cream it coated your hand like a glove
helped restore his weight. Then came the potions that dulled the pain
and dimmed the night terrors: blood of poppy, skullcap, devil's claw.
Crope tried not to think too long on their names; they were a
warning, he left it at that.

What he could not drive from his mind were the
things wrong with his lord that could never be made right. Bone had
been broken, allowed to partially reheal, and then systematically
broken again. What was left was a body that would never bear its own
weight, a spine riddled with bone spurs, vertebrae that had fused
around the neck, a femur with a head so misshapen that it no longer
fitted squarely in its socket, finger joints that would not bend, a
wrist that could not rotate, a rib cage that lay like the collapsed
hull of a shipwreck beneath the skin.

It was something worse than torture, something
that went beyond the desire to disfigure and cause pain. Crope was
not good with notions, and he'd had to puzzle the evil for a long
time before he realized its purpose: the creation of absolute
dependency.

Baralis could not have lived without the aid of
his persecutor. He had been stripped of the ability to fend for
himself. Everything required for survival—food, water, warmth
and clothing—had to be brought to him by another. Unable to
draw a cool glass of water to his lips or move to ease the pain of
the pressure sores, Baralis had been forced to wait in the darkness
until his persecutor brought relief. Crope had lived in the sulfurous
darkness of the tin mines. He'd been locked up in root cellars, back
rooms and cages. He knew what it was to be frightened and alone. What
he didn't know was what it felt like to be helpless. He was a giant
man, and when chains needed breaking all he had to do was take them
in his fists and pull.

His lord could not have pulled; that was the
thought that undid Crope.

Feeling the bad pressure building behind his eyes,
he took a step away from his lord to calm himself. The giant's blood
in him pumped hard when he got angry and he had to be careful to keep
his chest from getting tight. One of the last times he'd given in to
the giant's blood he'd brought down a tavern in a fortified town
north of Hound's Mire. Bringing down buildings wasn't good.

The smell of hot grease distracted him. The girls
downstairs were preparing supper: hare fried in duck fat, if he
wasn't mistaken. The girls had set up a little stove in the hallway
and cooked whatever Quill or their customers brought to the house.
Crope's mouth began to water at the thought of crispy hare skin,
which was mostly a good thing. Feeling hungry was better than feeling
mad.

As he washed his lord's wounds, Crope noticed the
sunlight begin to fail. The strange, circular marks on Baralis'
thighs and buttocks didn't bother him so much now. Crope had imagined
his lord being branded with hot irons and that made him mad, but
Quill had said no, that wasn't the case. According to him, Baralis
had lain on his chains for so long that iron had leached through his
skin and laid down pigment like a tattoo. Crope thought that Quill
was about the smartest man he knew—excepting for his lord, of
course.

A knock on the door made Crope freeze. What was he
to do? Answer it? Ignore it? Hike out the window and escape? Quill
had warned him many times of the need to keep a low profile. "Keep
your head down, your door locked, and your mouth shut. You're in the
worst kind of trouble: you as good as killed a king." Crope had
no argument with that. "Worst kind of trouble" could have
been his middle name. Frowning at the little circular window set at
shoulder height in the west wall, Crope decided escape wasn't going
to be quick. Grease would be needed. Bulk of this magnitude didn't go
through openings of that . . . similitude without a considerable
amount of help. "It's me. Grant me ingress."

Quill. Stupid, scuttle-brained fool. Should have
known it was him all along. Crope nodded softly, relieved. The bad
voice was usually right. "A moment," he called out. Bending
deep at the waist, he attended his lord.

Baralis was in the half-world between sleep and
waking. Blood of poppy pumped through his arteries, slowing the
workings of his heart and liver, and clouding his brain. The terrors
had been bad last night and Crope had been frightened that his lord
might injure himself. Baralis had writhed on the bed, arching his
spine and clawing at the shadows in front of his face. No, he had
cried again and again. No.

The blood of poppy had stilled him, but now, half
a day later, he was beginning to stir. Crope knew his lord. He could
tell from a few tiny movements—the flick of an eyelid, the
contraction of muscle below the jaw—that Baralis was becoming
aware.

Swiftly, Crope tucked pillows beneath his lord's
head and straightened the sheets. With the little whalebone comb he
had carried with him all the way from the diamond pipe, he groomed
Baralis' night-black hair. There was no time to banish the sour smell
of urine so Crope scooped a packet of dried mint from the table and
crushed it hard in his fist. On his way to the door he scattered the
pieces randomly about the room. It didn't disguise the sourness
exactly, he decided, reaching for the door bolt. Just made it smell
as if someone had drunk a bucket of mint tea before pissing.

It would have to do. One quick glance back assured
Crope that his lord was now in possession of his dignity, and he was
free to pull back the bolts.

"Took your time," Quill said, stepping
through the doorway, his gaze shooting into all the dark spaces.
"Sleeping is he?" Crope nodded, thought, then shook his
head. Quill appeared to understand this and jabbed his chin in
response. Medium height and lean as back bacon, he shrank to almost
nothing when viewed from the side. His hair was dark and greased
close to his skull and his eyes were an uncertain color that Crope
could only describe as "murky." As befitted a thief,
Quill's clothes were unremarkable in fit and color, offering no
information worth repeating to a bailiff. Brown. Gray. Worn. It was
his custom however to wear "a spot of cream." Cream was
gold that was nine-tenths pure, Crope had learned, and it advertised
Quill's status to others like him. Today he wore a heavy-gauge chain
circling his left wrist at the cuff mark. You could see it only when
he extended his arm in a certain manner . . . which was exactly as he
planned.

Sliding himself against the far wall, Quill said,
"Close the door. There's business to discuss."