Honor Among Thieves (27 page)
“P
rotection?” Malden repeated when Herwig had told him what she meant.
“It was promised to me by your former master. I assume our arrangement still stands. My business has fallen away to nothing, but I’m paid up now. So you need to meet your obligations.”
“But—protection from what? Don’t tell me some gang is trying to move in on you,” Malden said. That was the last thing he needed—a rival organization working against the guild of thieves.
“In a fashion,” Herwig said. “May I sit?”
Malden hurried to clear off the room’s chair and bring it nearer the fire for her. Herwig had come up with his mother as well, though they’d never gotten along. Still, Malden honored all the women who’d survived on Pokekirtle Lane long enough to grow old. It was a hard life with particular dangers most people never needed to face.
“I was visited last night by a group of men with knives in their hands. As bad as business is, I welcomed them. But they hadn’t come for swiving. They slashed paintings in my vestibule, tore tapestries from the walls. Smashed several pieces of erotic sculpture I’d had shipped all the way from the Old Empire.”
The art collection of the House of Sighs was one of Ness’s more unconventional treasures. This was, in its way, a kind of desecration. Malden jumped to his feet. “I’ll gather some bravos at once. We’ll find them and make them pay you back for everything.”
“You won’t have to look hard,” Herwig told him. She pressed her lips tightly together for a moment, as if holding back a curse. “They came from Castle Hill. Oh, they’d taken off their cloaks-of-eyes. But there are not so many watchmen in this city that I didn’t recognize one of them. I went to Pritchard Hood himself this morning and demanded recompense. Do you know what he told me?”
Malden shook his head.
“That images of lust were an offense before the sight of the Lady. I told him, of course, that I am not a worshipper of his new religion. He informed me, quite politely, that in times of war the Lady’s favor was to be sought by all people. Believers and nonbelievers alike.”
“He truly is a zealot,” Malden said, and new hatred burned in his heart for Hood. The people of the Free City of Ness had always in the past been granted a certain measure of religious liberty. Clearly Hood intended to revoke that freedom.
Malden wondered, though, if this attack were purely motivated by faith. It was too well calculated to hurt him as well. It was well known that Cutbill made more money from his investments in the Royal Ditch than he ever had from direct thieving. The gaming houses alone made Cutbill rich. Now that he had inherited all those accounts, perhaps Hood intended to beggar him by cutting off his sources of revenue.
Herwig exhaled noisily. “You need to do something, Malden. You need to help me. You and I have never been close. But you are a friend to every working woman in this city—or so I’ve heard. Demonstrate that friendship now.”
“I’d like to,” Malden said, playing for time to think. “I have my own problems, you know.”
It seemed Herwig would brook no excuses. She rose from the chair and headed for the door. Before she left she turned back to stare at him. “I’ve always found men to be useless when real needs arose. It’s why I never married any of them, and instead found ways to make my own place in this world. For once—just for once—I hope I’m proved wrong.”
She left before he could promise anything. Herwig was a shrewd woman, and he doubted she would have believed anything he said anyway.
He was visited twice more that night by the madams of other houses, who told similar tales. It seemed Pritchard Hood had been very busy. The only house that hadn’t been visited by the watch on some trumped-up pretext was the Lemon Garden, which gave credence to the theory Hood was trying to bankrupt Malden before he slaughtered him. In desolation, Malden did the only thing he could, and turned back to the cipher.
He made no progress at all. He worked well into the night and nothing came to him. Slag returned and kept him company, for which he was grateful. Yet Malden’s frustration had grown to the point where he was afraid he would lash out at even his most faithful friend if he wasn’t careful.
“It’s gibberish!” he howled, tearing a sheet of parchment into ribbons and casting them into the air. They fell like the fluttering leaves of autumn. “There are just too many characters. Or too few. If it was two ciphers intermixed, there should be forty-four characters. But there are only thirty-seven.”
Slag looked up from the plate of sops he’d been eating. “Thirty-seven?”
“Yes!” Malden, exasperated, grabbed up the grammar book he’d been using. “Which makes no sense at all. The alphabet of the Old Empire uses twenty-nine characters. Even in the Northern Kingdoms, where half their letters are draped in umlauts and circumflexes and diacritical marks no one can even remember how to pronounce, there are only thirty-one. There has never been a human alphabet in all our history that used thirty-seven marks, not even if you include full stops and question marks and the like.”
“Not a human alphabet, no,” Slag said, “but—”
“It’s useless!” Malden shouted, and threw himself full length on the bed, crushing his wasted parchments and staining his tunic with ink. “Cutbill didn’t want me to break this. I see it now. First he sent an assassin to slaughter me. When that didn’t work, he gave me this job knowing I would foul things to the point my own thieves would turn on me. And he left a maze of meaningless characters for me to lose myself in, and waste so much time I would miss the killing stroke when it came.”
“No, lad, I don’t fucking believe it for a moment. He wanted you to solve this riddle. He knew what tools you would have on hand—Coruth, to teach you of ciphers, and, well, me.”
Malden sat up suddenly. He said nothing, for fear of interrupting Slag.
“There are thirty-seven runes known to the dwarves. Exactly thirty-seven,” Slag said in a very, very quiet voice.
Malden got to his feet and walked over to where the dwarf sat in the chair, the plate of milky bread in his lap. He started to reach for the dwarf’s shoulder.
He was stopped because there was a knock on the door. Before Malden could answer it, the door flew open and he saw Velmont standing there. The Helstrovian thief looked like he’d run all the way from the wall—he was gasping for breath and sweat slicked his face. “The thief-takers’re at it again,” he announced.
“Who did they get this time?” Malden asked.
Velmont wiped at his mouth. “Loophole,” he said.
C
roy knelt low in the brambles by the side of the road. He could see very little by the thin sliver of the moon, but every time a weed stirred in a night breeze or an owl swept down from the trees on some vicious errand, his whole body tensed and his hand tightened on Ghostcutter’s hilt.
He had only a few troops at his disposal that he could count on not turning around and running at the first sign of danger. He was making a terrible mistake, and he knew it.
He had his orders.
From the trees well south of his position, he heard the cawing of a crow, and knew the time was coming soon. Crows flew by day, and slept at night, like reasonable creatures. That call was the signal that riders were approaching from the direction of Redweir.
There would be four of them, he knew. Four quick scouts, headed back to Helstrow with the news of Redweir’s capture. They would not be Mörget’s best warriors, nor would they be berserkers. He was relatively sure of that.
Before long he heard the sound of their hooves chewing up the half-frozen road. He did not see them until they were nearly at the trap. “Now,” he whispered, and behind him there was a sudden, violent motion.
A stout rope leapt out of the road, trailing dust, and snapped taut at neck height. It ran all the way across the road, and if you didn’t know it was there, it was almost impossible to see. It caught the first rider and yanked him backward out of his stirrups to crash on the ground. His horse kept going. The second rider reacted in time not to be throttled, but did foul himself in the line. The barbarian grabbed for a knife to cut himself free.
Behind him two more riders slowed their mounts to a stop.
That had gone far better than Croy had dared hope. Of course, it wasn’t over yet.
What if the message they carried was in the saddlebags of the first horse? he wondered. He would never be able to catch the animal in the dark. If it was smart enough to run all the way back to Helstrow—
But there were more pressing concerns. “To arms!” he bellowed, and all around him torches flared to life. “Soldiers of Skrae, to arms!”
Croy’s company swept out of the trees, pikestaffs and bill hooks jabbing at the mounted men. Croy unsheathed Ghostcutter and ran toward the man who had fallen. He could see well enough now to count the crosses on the man’s neck, one for each time he’d gone reaving. How many villages had this barbarian put to the torch? How many women had he defiled, how many innocent throats had he cut? He was struggling to get up, to even roll onto his arms. His legs weren’t moving at all—perhaps his back was broken.
Croy had his orders. Ghostcutter flashed down and cut through the man’s throat, almost deep enough to behead him.
The snagged rider wheeled his horse and drew an axe with a long haft. Moonlight shone through quatrefoils piercing the blade. Ghostcutter rang as it parried the first stroke. The rider hauled backward on his weapon to recover and Croy moved in, stabbing upward. The rider fended off his blow, but only by blocking it with his forearm. The sword bit deep into the man’s flesh and blood spattered Croy’s face.
The axe came around a second time, whistling in the air. Croy parried again—Ghostcutter was faster than any axe, no matter how well made. The rider tried to grab at the knight with his injured arm, but his fingers wouldn’t close on Croy’s tabard. Croy stepped in even closer, well within range of the horse’s hooves. He had to finish this quickly. One good jab up into the barbarian’s chest did it, and he rolled away before the half-mad horse could trample him. The rider swayed over in his saddle and was dragged as the animal broke for the fields at the side of the road.
His men had the other two riders pinned but not wounded. The peasant soldiers had no idea how to use their weapons properly. Many of them were probably afraid to actually stab another human being. In another world, in a world the Lady ruled, Croy would have admired their gentility.
This was not that world. He grabbed at his own men and sent them sprawling in the dirt to make his way through their iron ring. The third rider smashed away bill blades with a boar spear and caught pike points on a buckler. He barely had time to notice Croy before Ghostcutter opened the long artery in his thigh. In a minute he would be dead from blood loss—Croy spun around and left him.
One more.
The fourth rider had managed to smash his way through a cordon of polearms. Two of Croy’s men lay in the dust, one with his chest crushed in by a horse’s kick, the other missing half his face from a sword cut. Croy could hear others behind him, wounded and moaning but alive, as the rider broke for the fields and escape.
“Don’t let him get away!” Croy shouted, but he knew he was talking to himself. His men rushed backward, away from the rider’s swinging weapon. In a moment the rider had spurred his horse and dashed off into the fields.
Croy saw the horse of the third rider nearby. The rider was dead in his saddle but hadn’t fallen off yet. He sprang up onto the horse’s back, knocking the rider out of the way with his elbow. The horse bucked and reared but Croy grabbed up the reins in his free hand and viciously kicked the frightened animal in the ribs.
He had his orders. He had to give chase.
Away from the road and the torches, the ground was a gray blur, the rider a smudge in the darkness. Croy could make out only his cloak fluttering behind him and the merest glint of light off his horse shoes as they flashed up again and again. Croy tried to stay hot on the heels of this last rider—as long as he stayed in the barbarian’s trail, his horse wouldn’t break a leg in some unseen mole hill or trip on a half-buried rock. He could hear the booming breath of both horses, hear his own heart beating, but that was all. Up ahead he saw an old barn, stars showing through a hole in its roof. The rider was headed straight for its open door. In the Lady’s name, why? Croy couldn’t guess.
He followed the rider right into the barn, however, and then jumped off the horse because he couldn’t see a thing inside—all was darkness. Was this the rider’s plan, to trap him in this shadowy place and escape while he flailed in the dark?
Apparently not. Croy felt wind on his face and just had time to stagger back as a sword came rushing past him. Maybe the barbarian could see better in the dark, though Croy doubted it. Maybe he thought his only chance was this invisible combat, deadly for both of them—the rider must have watched him dispatching his fellows and wanted to even the odds.
Croy held his breath. Ghostcutter bobbed slightly in his hand, with the rhythm of his heart.
The barbarian’s sword crashed into the armor covering his arm. A lucky blow—it cleaved through the leather joint between the steel plates of his rerebrace and his vambrace and sliced through the rough skin of Croy’s elbow. Had the barbarian been able to see better, and judge the blow more shrewdly, he could have taken half of his arm off with that strike. There was one thing the barbarian hadn’t counted on, though.
It was Croy’s left arm.
Pain seared through him, threatened to extinguish his senses, but he simply clamped his eyes tight shut and held his breath as he listened for the sound of his enemy’s feet moving on the floorboards. There.
Eyes closed, Croy visualized the barbarian’s sword, saw the arm that held it, the chest, the heart of the barbarian—
Ghostcutter lanced out point first and impaled the man, cleaving through the tight knot of muscle just to the left of the center of the chest.
The barbarian howled in agony, but not for long.
Croy pulled Ghostcutter free of the death wound. He dropped the Ancient Blade on the straw-covered floor of the barn. Dropped to his knees and grasped his wounded elbow.
He did not open his eyes until his men came to find him with their torches, and he saw, for the first time, the face of the man he’d killed.
Or rather, the woman. Her face was painted to the favor of a skull. She had been one of Mörgain’s female warriors. Croy had never killed a woman before—not even in self-defense.
But he had his orders.
