Thief: A Fantasy Hardboiled (Ratcatchers Book 2) (3 page)

The count clucked his tongue and tossed a night dust marble to Garth who snatched it from the air with a grimace.

“Careful,” Garth urged, alarmed at his master’s casual treatment of the stuff.

“I don’t know,” the count said, ignoring him and leaning on the granite-topped table, “maybe we should have killed him.”

Garth deposited the night dust marble in his vest. “Never too late,” he said.

The count pointed at his fixer. “You’re supposed to be the voice of reason.”

Garth sniffed, but otherwise held himself perfectly still. “You haven’t been very receptive to reason lately.” Garth chose his words carefully.

The count frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not comfortable with the alchemist leaving here,” Garth said. “Risky.”

“That’s why I put you in charge of his comings and his goings.”

“Messy,” Garth said. “Allowing him to leave means my methods have to be perfect. If we keep him here, we don’t need methods in the first place.”

“If we kept him here,” the count explained again, “he’d break under stress. He’d be of no use to us.”

“You asked me what I meant,” Garth said, “I’m telling you. You let him come and go, you let the trull live….”

The count raised a finger. “Ah! I arranged for her to be
killed
, it’s not my fault the church apparently let her live. You can’t count on them for anything anymore,” he said darkly.

“And you haven’t found her yet,” Garth said. “She knows where our operation is, she’s alive, and you haven’t found her yet.”

The count smiled. “She knows, but she does not know that she knows. I mentioned it in passing, she had no context for the statement and wherever she is, she’s probably foaming at the mouth right now, gripped by another demonic fit.” The count pulled his hands up into a rictus and twisted his face into an agonized grimace for a moment, then went back to normal. “I recognized the problem and took steps.”

Garth shook his head.

“Garth I find this melancholy afflicting you quite tiresome. It seems to have gripped you as soon as Violet left the Rose. I should be melancholic in her absence, not you. You should relax and let me handle this.”

“I’ll relax when she’s back here, or dead,” Garth said.

“Then you’ll soon be back to your normal, lovable self,” the count said with a bow. “I’ve sent Cole and some men to fetch her.”

Garth nodded. “Cole is good. He’ll make red next year.”

“We are agreed,” the count said. “Cole is good, and I gave him some night dust to make him better.”

Garth pushed himself away from the table he leaned against. He stood at attention. “We agreed only the black would handle the dust.”

The count sniffed. “Did we? Why, I wonder, would I agree to that?”

“It’s dangerous. It can’t be controlled…the whole point of the dust is that it can’t be controlled.”

“
I
control it,” the count stressed, “by who I give it to and why. And if the black scarves disapprove…well, soon we will not need them. When all is done and I am in my rightful place, they will come to heel.”

Garth said nothing.

“In any event,” the count said, “she’s alone in an abandoned inn. No danger to Cole in any case.”

Garth frowned. For some reason the reference to an inn reminded him of something…but he could not put his finger on what….

For years afterward, whenever Vanora wrote anything she would stick the tip of her tongue between her lips in concentration. 

Bann and the watchman had left only moments before to tell her they were going to find people to take their place guarding the inn. Heden had been gone for several hours and, once night fell, the pair of guards decided they needed help. None of them really knew when Heden would return.

She knew Bann and trusted him when he said they’d be right back. The watchman, tall and lean and filled with easy confidence, she didn’t know. He didn’t speak while Bann talked, but leaned against the doorframe with a slight smile on his face. Bann said they’d be back in a turn.

As she carefully wrote her name again and again with ink and quill on a piece of parchment, the harlequin danced and spun on the table. It sang to her. It would sing for hours if she let it, occasionally stopping to correct her writing.

Each time it stopped, it would dance over to the paper on its tiptoes and then observe the page by standing on its hands and walking across the letters. It would then correct her by speaking a short rhyme. It drew example letters by dipping its toe in the ink and then spiraling around the page.

Vanora loved it.

She had mastered the 24 letters in both lower and upper case and was now working on making her name look pretty. The capital V was a source of great attention and improvisation. The ‘o’ was the most boring letter of the whole lot, she decided, though the Harlequin had showed her how to press down on the quill to make the wet, black line fat or thin and that made the ‘o’ a little more interesting.

Her fingers ached from the undue pressure she put on the quill, and as she shook them she looked at one of her earlier pages with all the letters of the alphabet written on them, wondering at the options denied her.

She loved the V; it was a bold, dramatic letter, affording all manner of curly-queues at the tip of each vane. ‘V’ was the first letter in ‘vine,’ she’d learned and she went through a period where the ‘V’ in her name was like two little vines curling up, complete with tiny leaves.

If she were being honest, she would admit she sometimes went overboard. Looking at the other letters on the page, wiggling her fingers to get the blood back into them, she wished she had an ‘i’ or a ‘t’ in her name. She liked the letters that had little flourishes like that. She frowned whenever she saw her ‘q.’ It was a demon letter.  She decided it would be quite easy simply to never write a word with a ‘q’ in it.

The harlequin sang to her. But it was not the singing of any man. It was a riot of sound, sometimes a single voice spinning and tripping through a melody so complex it made Vanora’s head spin, sometimes a hundred voices thundering, sometimes a rich layered sound produced by what instruments she could not tell. The harlequin called it Opera. She could not pick out single instruments and would not have known what they were called if she could. She often found herself just staring at the books on shelves in front of her in the common room, listening to the music, not even realizing she was doing it, like now.

Something important was happening in the music. Vanora realized this when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the harlequin stand stock still and raise its fist to the roof. It shook its fist and beat its breast as it struck a heroic pose and the voice coming from its tiny mouth was a howl of rage. Then it suddenly lashed out with its other arm, miming the action of snapping a bullwhip, and from its mouth came the crack of the whip.

The melody was so perfect, so beautiful and exciting it made her skin go all over in goosebumps. She had to hear it again, she didn’t know what it meant, but she was gripped with the desire to leap out of her chair and mimic the harlequin’s actions, pretending she was the singer, the performer, the character in the opera.

It was then, looking up, that she noticed it was dark outside. Time had flown by. What time was it? The room was illuminated by a single large lantern she’d fetched from upstairs. It cast flickering golden light and deep shadows around the common room of the inn.

Suddenly the Harlequin stopped, and cocked its small head as though hearing some distant call.

In the silence, she remembered she was alone.  How long had Bann and the watchman been gone? A turn? Longer? Much longer? She had written a great deal. Three turns?

Ballisantirax jumped onto her lap, scaring her half to death. The cat’s heavy black muscled body tense. Vanora looked down into the cat’s face. Balli’s eyes were so dilated, there was only a sliver of yellow marking the boundary between black fur and midnight eyes. She growled deeply, staring up at Vanora. Her mouth open a little, baring her fangs. Her thick claws digging into Vanora’s legs. Was she going to attack her?

On the table, the harlequin looked sharply behind her, Balli stopped growling, and Vanora heard a frantic scrabbling at the door to the cellar.

She turned slowly in her chair and looked at the forbidden door to the room below. Balli loped off her lap. The scrabbling got louder, frantic, and then stopped.  She watched as the latch on the door handle slowly and silently lifted, and the door swung open without a noise.

A large black rectangle of darkness stared at her. Vanora felt a yawning in the pit of her stomach as she gazed into it, eyes wide, mouth open, breath still.

Like a flood, a dozen small figures came boiling out of the basement in a rolling knot of silent violence. Vanora leapt to her feet and ran a few steps to the front door, but stopped halfway, frozen by what she saw.

They were rats. Or…mice? Each was roughly 2 feet tall with thick bushy fur, some grey, some brown. Many different shades. Short noses with long black whiskers and stubby tails. They all stood on their hind legs.

They wore clothes and bristled with weapons. Standing before her in battle poses like the harlequin, the one closest to her held a short silver sword in one hand and a crossbow in the other, a bandolier of bolts slung over his shoulder and around his chest. The others had bows, daggers, two handed swords, some wore conical leather caps. They stood together, some crouching, all tensed, ready for violence, like a metal spring wound tight. They stared at her with black beady eyes.

The lead mouserat’s pink nose twitched. She felt something was expected of her. They looked like they’d stepped out of a children’s story, but they seethed with murderous anger. Their long, chisel-like teeth bared, they radiated battle like heat and she was afraid. What did they want with her?

An eerie calm washed over her and her skin flashed all with goose bumps as she realized they weren’t looking at her. They were looking past her. For a moment she felt fear flood out of her body and, once again, she turned slowly around.

There were five men dressed in black standing behind her. She started and took a step back, toward the mousemen. One of the men in black was braced above her between the top of the front door and the ceiling. One of them crouched on top of a chair.

They also bristled with weapons. This was impossible, there was no way these men could have gotten in without her noticing. But they
had
gotten in, remained invisible, and she hadn’t noticed. But the mousemen had. Noticed, and come out of their warren somewhere beneath Heden’s inn to protect her. She now knew who the mice warriors were.

With careful deliberation, without looking behind her, she took another step back toward the fighting mousemen Heden had set to defend her. At this signal, they swarmed around her, the only sound their tiny claws digging into the floor as they moved.

They assumed their battle poses around her, pressed against her, she felt their tiny hands pushing her back. She marveled at them. She was afraid, but she felt the presence of Heden in the room, and this calmed her somewhat. She believed the mousemen would protect her. She felt she was in a dream. This could not be real.

The assassins, for assassins they had to be, wore dark brown leather with black silk scarves tied around their waist, or wrist or neck. And wore dark grey leather helms obscuring their faces.

They stood ready to attack, the lead assassin had a long wicked-thin sword in one hand and a silver dagger in the other. His eyes flashed back and forth between Vanora and the mousemen. None of the men moved. None of them made a sound.

The lead assassin slowly raised his left hand and pulled the leather helm off his face. He had short, black hair and a pale white face, a thin red scar ran from his jaw down his neck.  He was short. None of the assassins seemed tall, though none were standing perfectly upright.

“All right,” the man said carefully. His voice scarred like his face. “Let’s not be hasty. No reason to get our knickers in a twist.”

He was afraid of the mousemen. He seemed unsure of what to do or how to proceed.

“If you’re bein’ paid,” he said, looking just past Vanora at the ratman behind her, “our employer can see you’re well compensated for looking the other way, while we…”

There was a ‘twang!’ and a crossbow bolt shot past Vanora’s ear. The assassin slashed at it with his sword and successfully stopped it from embedding in his left eye, but at the cost of having it lodge in his sword arm.

“Unh,” he grunted, as the mousemen leapt forward and swarmed past Vanora.

“Squee!” one of them shouted, holding his rapier-like weapon up, commanding the other mousemen.

The assassins were alarmed and amazed, but well-trained. They responded in accord with their close-quarters training, fighting back to back, the sword arm of each acting as the shield arm for the other. But the micemen didn’t respect their fighting style, and merely swarmed past their defenses.

The battle was short and one-sided for though the assassins were skilled and well-equipped, they were well-equipped for fighting other men, and their skills didn’t including fending off attacks from three or four tiny assailants, each equally well-armed and lightning fast with inhuman reflexes.

As knives stabbed and swords clashed, there was a grunt and one of the mouse fighters sailed over Vanora’s head, flung into the far wall by one of the men. This one wore heavier, metal armor and a metal headpiece. The man who threw him across the room was strong, given strength by desperation. The mouse warrior struck the wall hard, hitting his head, and slumped to the floor stunned.

Battle raging around him in the common room, the assassin grabbed at the poisoned dagger protruding from his gut and prepared to pull it out, when another mouseman leapt onto him, this one with a tiny eyepatch over one eye. It grabbed the man’s leather chestpiece with one tiny hand, grabbed the dagger’s cross-guard with the other, looked into the man’s eyes and, baring his teeth in a feral smile, pushed the dagger in, twisting it.

The assassin cried out and grabbed at the mouseman, only to receive a vicious bite in the wrist that caused blood to spurt wide from the wound, and the two went down, soon joined by another, then another mouse, the last the recovered mouse warrior, hacking at the downed man with a large-for-a-mouseman two hander. The room began to stink of iron, the smell of blood. The floor was awash in it. It glittered black in the lantern light.

Vanora gasped, putting her hands to her mouth as the assassin was murdered in front of her. She noticed movement at her feet and saw Balli was standing there, observing it all, her fur standing on end, but otherwise unmoving, protecting her.

The lead assassin held his own. He was cut in many places, there were crossbow bolts sticking out of flesh and armor, but he spun and whirled, his sword and dagger a blur. He leapt from chair to table, using each first as a height advantage, then as a weapon as he kicked each at his mouse assailants, retreating around the common room. He thought he’d taken down two of the mousemen, but could not be sure, they grabbed their wounded and disappeared into the fray.

Suddenly there were more mousemen fighting him, and he realized two of his men were down, probably dead, freeing up more of the vicious little fighters to focus on him. He sneered at his assailants, and pulled a small glass orb from under his leather chest piece.

Vanora forgotten, the lead assassin said “fuck this!” and threw the black glass orb at the floor in front of him. The orb was filled with black powder and when it hit the ground, it shattered and the dust swirled out, forming a thick mist that snaked along the ground, searching, striving, yearning. Flowing past the mousemen who were momentarily distracted, watching the black mist to see what it would do.

It found one of the dead assassins’ bodies; the one Vanora had watched the mousemen hack apart. It settled onto him, seeped into his wounds, flowed into his nostrils and open mouth.

The corpse began to twitch. Its broken limbs snapped back together, knotting and twisting. Its skin looked like it was boiling. A scream went up from the body, though of man or something possessing the man, none could say.

The dead man jerked itself up, its skin now grey-green, its eyes burning coals. It snarled, then howled, its breath a putrid stink. Its fingernails long black claws. Just a moment before, it had been a man, then a moment later, a corpse. Now it looked like a nightmare.

The ratmen stood, stunned. Vanora was stunned, terrified. Two of the remaining assassins looked at their leader in shock and fear. He returned their expression, as amazed, as afraid as they were.

The ghoul was taller than the man had been, more massive, and faster. It lashed out with inhuman speed and long, spindly arms, and grabbed the nearest mouseman, who barely had time to struggle before the ghoul had pulled it close, ripped its head off with its black teeth and threw the body to the ground, spitting the head away.