Honor Among Thieves (22 page)
“I
have grand plans for the people of Skrae,” the Burgrave said. “I will usher in a new age. But first I have to win this war. I need to drive off the barbarians before I can take Helstrow. And that’s where you come in.”
Malden shook his head. He couldn’t speak, not with the Burgrave’s hand on his throat.
Apparently, his voice wasn’t required. “I need a symbol, Malden. I need something that will inspire my troops. They think of me as Ommen Tarness, a peaceful and rather fat functionary in service to a dead king. Not the kind of man who can save a country, or even govern one. They need to see that I am a warrior.”
Malden shrugged. He had no idea what Juring was talking about.
“I need an Ancient Blade. And you have one you aren’t using.”
This was about Acidtongue? Malden could scarce credit it. “I don’t . . . seem . . . to have . . . worn it . . . tonight,” he choked out.
The Burgrave released him. Malden fell back amidst the pillows, gasping for breath.
“The seven blades are puissant arms,” Juring went on. “But they are more than that. For centuries they have been identified with the greatest warriors of the age. When I wear one at my belt, my men will see me as anointed. A champion of virtue. What do you think of that?”
It sounded like piffle, honestly. Juring Tarness was eight hundred years old, and you couldn’t live that long and not become a little unstable. Had the soul in the crown finally come unhinged?
And yet—the idea wasn’t completely ludicrous. Malden had seen the effect in person, after all. Croy’s sword, Ghostcutter, was more than just a blade. When Croy drew it he got a certain respect. People who saw it stopped thinking he was an idiot and started taking him seriously. Of course, that might just be because it enabled him to cut them in half if they laughed at him.
Maybe Tarness did have a point. Maybe someone who people already respected—the man who was the ultimate power in Ness—could go far with an Ancient Blade in his hand. And he had never really wanted Acidtongue, after all—Croy had forced it on him and just assumed he would suddenly turn into a noble warrior. He had drawn it maybe half a dozen times since then and never actually used it to kill anybody. Certainly he’d never used it to its potential. He was a thief, not a swordsman. He could part with it and not miss it, truly.
Still. Just handing it over felt . . . wrong.
“What are you offering in exchange?” Malden asked.
The Burgrave laughed. “Are you under the impression that I owe you something? I’ve spared your life. That’s all the payment you’ll have from me. I don’t negotiate with thieves.”
“Then perhaps you should find some knight and buy his sword,” Malden said. He reached for the handle of the carriage door, intending to leap out into the dark and get away. Before he could touch the handle, however, a flanged mace came crashing down where his hand would have been. Malden was fast enough to pull his fingers back, but he hadn’t even seen the blow coming. He hadn’t even realized the Burgrave was armed.
“I could simply take the blade. It doesn’t properly belong to you,” Juring said. His eyes were very calm. Malden was impressed. Normally men who tried to conceal their rage gave themselves away through their eyes. But Juring was in total control.
Malden had never cared for situations where someone else held all the cards. Luckily, he still had one up his sleeve. “The blade is safe. If you kill me, you’ll never find it.”
He tried not to think about the fact that a man could be tortured for days without killing him.
“I wonder where you hid it,” Juring mused. “You have yet to go home to your little room since you returned to Ness, so it can’t be under the loose floorboards there. Is it in the Ashes? In some deep part of Cutbill’s lair? Or perhaps you put it in Coruth’s care, on the Isle of Horses.”
Malden frowned. The Burgrave’s spies must have been watching him all day if Juring knew his itinerary that well. Or perhaps the Burgrave had employed some wizard with a shewstone to track his movements. Perhaps he had seen everything . . .
But no. If that were the case, he would already know where Acidtongue was. The sword wasn’t guarded or even hidden particularly well—Malden had not thought anyone would want to steal it from him. It wasn’t easy to get to, but any reasonably agile person could find it, if they knew where to look.
“I’ll be riding out tomorrow morning, at dawn, at the head of my Army of Free Men,” Juring said. “You’ll present the blade to me then, before I reach the gates.”
“And if I don’t?”
Juring rapped on the roof of the carriage with his mace. The driver brought his horses to a stop in Market Square, just outside the entrance to the fortified part of Castle Hill. Juring’s home. Men with torches came running from the gate—footmen in livery, but also one man in the silk robes of a major functionary. Malden recognized the robes, though not the man who wore them.
“Malden, please allow me to introduce Pritchard Hood,” Juring said as he stepped down from the carriage. “Bailiff of the Free City of Ness.”
The bailiff bowed low—to his lord, not to Malden.
The thief studied Hood carefully. The position of bailiff was one of paramount importance in Malden’s world. The bailiff was tasked with maintaining civic order, which made him the head of the city watch, and gave him free rein to arrest anyone he saw as a threat to Ness. In many ways the office of bailiff was the antithesis of Cutbill’s position. The position Malden now held.
“Pritchard will remain here when I march out,” Juring told Malden. “He will be my eye and my hand in my absence. He will assume all my normal powers. Pritchard, this is Malden, the master of the guild of thieves.”
“Well met,” Malden said with a warm smile.
The bailiff sneered and looked away.
“Pritchard: as you know, the previous holder of your office, Anselm Vry, had an understanding with Malden’s guild. He looked the other way when certain crimes were committed, and made a point of not hanging thieves whose guild dues were paid up. He did this with my tacit approval, for the thieves provided certain services I could not otherwise acquire.”
“Our aim is satisfaction,” Malden said wearily. He had an idea he knew where this was going.
“Malden here is going to perform one of those services tomorrow. When he does so, Pritchard, I want to reaffirm my—silent—approval of this most unconventional arrangement. Of course, if he fails to do what I ask, that approval will not be forthcoming. In fact, should he fail me, I want you to arrest thieves of the guild on a distinctly punitive basis. I want them hanging from every gallows in the city. I want you to be tireless in your extermination of such vermin. And I will want you to make it clear, as plainly as you see fit, that this purging will be Malden’s fault, and his alone.”
“As you wish, milord,” Hood said, and bowed again.
“Good night, Malden,” Juring said, waving through the open door of the carriage. “My coachman will take you wherever you wish to go. Perhaps you should go home and get some rest. Don’t sleep too late, though. I’ll see you at dawn.”
T
he sky glowed a deep blue-black that made Malden’s head hurt as he began to climb the spire of the Ladychapel, the tallest church in Ness. Lack of sleep was catching up with him. His hands ached as he pulled himself up onto a gargoyle in the shape of a toothy fish. His feet kept slipping on even the widest ledges.
Down below him, in Market Square, the Army of Free Men was forming up. The Burgrave’s rotting battle standards snapped in the wind as men with drums signaled their companies to come together. The soldiers formed semiorderly squares, their weapons leaning on their shoulders. Serjeants in the colors of the Burgrave walked up and down between the formations, flailing at their men with batons to get them into better lines.
Up on Castle Hill, behind the wall, a white horse was being dressed in steel barding chased with silver. A whole train of sumpter horses laden with chests and barrels were brought around the side of the palace, while two oxen drew a wagon full of clanking iron—armor and weapons, presumably, an abundant panoply for the general who would lead all the men in the square.
As dawn drew near, the men kept coming. The thousand Malden had seen the day before marching in the square were nothing to the numbers that arrived now. They filled Market Square to bursting, and overflowed into the streets beyond. They formed up in the cloister of the university and on the forecourt of the Ladychapel. They did their best to stand in orderly rows on the Cornmarket Bridge, even as mounted men raced back and forth between Castle Hill and the Spires, carrying messages or delivering loads of weaponry.
Malden found a perch on the steeple and sat down, head in hands, to watch. He still didn’t know what he was going to do. As the first red ray of dawn painted the wall of the Burgrave’s palace, he scratched his nose, then got to his feet and slipped inside the belfry.
Acidtongue was there, right where he’d left it. Hidden in plain sight of half the city. The swallows that nested up there had avoided it—perhaps birds were more sensitive to dangerous magic than men. There weren’t any droppings or curled feathers on the scabbard. Anyone who could climb a ladder could have come up here and just taken it.
Why hadn’t the Burgrave just had his thousands of men scour the city for the blade? That would have saved Malden the trouble of deciding. Now he was out of time. He must jump one way or another, and either give the Burgrave what he wanted or defy the man and risk everything.
A sword he didn’t need. A sword he barely knew how to use.
Give it away
, he told himself,
and buy a little goodwill
.
Croy wouldn’t like that, of course. To Croy, the Ancient Blades weren’t just weapons. Croy considered Ghostcutter to be the manifest form of his own soul. And when Croy had given Acidtongue to him, the knight assumed that he would come to feel the same way. Croy had always intended to take him under his wing, to teach him the proper use of the sword and make a knight of him.
Malden could imagine few fates he’d relish less. But still . . . to Croy, the Ancient Blades were not commodities to be traded like coins. They
meant
something. And Malden didn’t trust the Burgrave, not an inch. This free nation Tarness wanted to build—it was just the same old feudal system with different management. No question about that. The Burgrave could use all the pretty words he liked, but it came down to one thing: he was going to usurp the throne of Skrae. In the process he would start a civil war that would mean unending bloodshed and pain for the people he claimed to represent. And if he handed over the sword, he would be helping to make that happen.
But still . . .
He had a responsibility to the thieves of the guild, too.
If he didn’t do this, Cutbill’s men—Malden’s men—would be hanged, one by one. That was the threat, and he understood it just fine. Hood, the new bailiff, would wipe the guild off the map. Long before he finished the last one off, though, Malden himself would already be dead. When the other thieves realized what he’d brought down on their heads, they would turn on him. His life wouldn’t be worth a farthing.
The sun showed half its disc over Eastwall. Orange fire traced the ribbon of the Skrait as it wound through the Free City of Ness. The old stones of the Spires, of the Golden Slope, and of Castle Hill, were washed with yellow light.
Down in Market Square, the Burgrave rode out. Under the biggest and brightest of his faded banners, he rode in iron armor painted black with enamel, with silver filigree coating every inch of him, head-to-toe, in a convoluted floral pattern. Old-fashioned stuff, but that was the point. Ommen Tarness, the current Burgrave, wanted people to associate him with Juring Tarness, the ancient general and founder of the city. Bright red plumes bobbed on his shoulders and helmet, and he carried a lance pointed at the sky.
The assembled men cheered to see him, and together their voices roared like the ocean pounding on the shore.
Tarness had no retinue but the packhorses and wagons that followed after him. He had no knights to protect him, nor any priests to bless every prancing step of his horse. That would be intentional, of course. Supposedly he was just like all the men who followed him—free and equal. Maybe dressed a little better, but really, just one of the boys. It was hard to believe anyone would fall for such nonsense, but then in times of hardship—in times of war—every man clutched at straws.
Tarness stopped his horse and made a very brief speech Malden could not hear. Then he paused awhile and just sat there, looking left and right.
Malden knew what he was looking for.
Time to give it to him.
The decision was made. He had to accept it could never really have gone another way. The Burgrave was just too powerful, and too dangerous. Thwarting him would be suicide.
His own feelings didn’t matter one bit. He had to do this, and he had to do it now. He would give Acidtongue to Tarness and let historians decide if he’d done the right thing.
He paused to let out one long, pained sigh. Then he leaned over and grabbed the hilt of Acidtongue where it lay in the belfry. Tried to pick it up.
The sword wouldn’t budge.
Malden stared down at the weapon, confused. The thing was heavy, surely, but he’d lifted it many times before. He tried to pick it up again, with no better luck. Tried to pry it off the floor of the belfry. Heaved and grunted and sweated as he tried to lift it.
Acidtongue might as well have been fused to the belfry floor—or carved out of the stones themselves. It would not, no matter how hard Malden tried, shift even a fraction of an inch from where it lay.
Down in Market Square the Burgrave made a gesture. Pritchard Hood came running over to take his lord’s final orders.
“No,” Malden said. “No! You fucking bastard, let go!”
But the sword wouldn’t move.
In the square, Hood nodded in understanding, and then headed back into the walls of Castle Hill. The Burgrave dipped his lance, and there was more cheering, and then almost every able-bodied man in Ness followed him as he trotted downhill toward Hunter’s Gate, and glory.
Up in the belfry, Malden kept heaving and shoving and prying at the sword. Eventually, the last soldier cleared Hunter’s Gate, and its massive doors were shut behind the army, and bolted, and locked up tight.
And only then—only when it was too late—did Acidtongue move. It came free from the floor in Malden’s hand as if it had never been stuck.
“Sorcery!” Malden cursed, fuming with rage.
But even then he knew he was wrong. It wasn’t sorcery that had bound the sword where it lay. It had been witchcraft.
