Thief: A Fantasy Hardboiled (Ratcatchers Book 2) (4 page)

Vanora screamed, and kept screaming. She was rooted to the spot. She felt something tugging at her dress and spun around, snatching it away, only to see Ballisantirax, who looked at her with big yellow eyes, howled once, and ran into the cellar through the open door and into the darkness.

Only for a moment, the mousemen looked on with horror at the corpse of their brother, then in an instant they formed a protective wall between the ghoul and Vanora.

But the ghoul did not discriminate, and leaped across the room, wrapping its body around one of the assassins. Though screaming, and being borne down to the ground, he still attacked, stabbing the thing with twin daggers, over and over, to no avail. The ghoul crouched on his chest and tore him apart.

One of the ratmen, dark brown, a little shorter than his brothers and unarmed, pushed to the fore of the knot of defending humanoid mice, grasped a small rodent skull that hung on a chain around his neck, held out one furry hand, his tiny pink finger-pads splayed apart, claws protruding from each, and spoke a prayer.

The ghoul suddenly sprang up in pain. Black eyeballs exploded in their sockets, a burst of light caused everyone on the room to shield their eyes.

The ghoul cried out, a long, ragged howl. Then it snarled and whipped its rotting, eyeless head around, back and forth, drawing in long breaths through the twin holes in its face where a nose once was. Then it would bark out the air and start sniffing again, homing in on the furry defenders. Robbed of its eyes, it could still sense them.

“Sket!” the mousepriest swore, and pushed his brothers ahead of him. He spoke another prayer and Vanora saw something ripple through them, disturbing their fur. Something empowering them. Giving them hope, giving them a chance.

The mouse defenders ran forward as one, and swarmed over the ghoul. Vanora couldn’t watch.

She turned to run upstairs to her room and stopped. The staircase seemed tall and narrow. She looked to her right and saw the black rectangle of darkness that led down to Heden’s cellar, and made up her mind.

She darted to her left, scooped up the Harlequin and his stand from where they’d fallen on the floor, and then turned and ran as fast as she could for the cellar, and what, she could not know.

Cole looked around the room. It was the first room he’d found upstairs. The ceiling here slanted down. There was a window built into it revealing the night sky above. A chance.

He pushed the window up and open, jumped to grab the edge where the window hinged, pulled and flipped himself up and out of the room, onto the roof, out of the maelstrom of battle below, and to freedom.

He landed in a crouch and surveyed the slanting rooftop. There couldn’t be anyone up here, but his training never left him. Covered in blood, panting with exertion, he stood up, trembling. His breath came in loud and ragged rasps.

The night air was cool and moist. The sky was clear and filled with stars. Standing there on the roof, he looked down into the room below, listening to the sound of battle. He was shaken, completely rattled. No idea yet what had happened. He’d have to replay the whole scene several times before he understood it. He sighed, and then turned to leave.

There was a polder behind him. While he jumped back, to his credit he did not shout.

“Hey Cole,” the little man said. He was dragging a nail and letting the smoke escape idly into the night air.

“Pinwhistle!” the assassin exclaimed. His heart was hammering in his chest.

“What’s going on?” the small thief asked. He wasn’t wearing any armor. He didn’t need to. He wore a nicely tailored outfit, gold bracelet on one wrist, no shoes. He brushed his mop of curly blonde hair out of his face with the hand that wasn’t holding the nail. His small face was open and friendly and like everything else about him, a lie.

He did not look like someone who, a turn before, had been shat out the ass of an extradimensional demon into a sewer.

“Shit,” Cole said, shaking with shock. He looked back down the hole of the open window. “You about scared the piss out of me you little…,” he caught himself. The small manlike creature betrayed no reaction, but Cole knew better. “Shit, you’re not here to…you’re not going to kill me are you?”

The polder shrugged and screwed his face up as though the idea surprised him. “Not at the moment. What are you, ah…,” he looked up at the night sky and sniffed, then took another drag on his nail. “What are you doing here, Cole?”

Cole glanced down at the open window behind him.

“Nothing to do with the Hearth,” Cole said, trying to maintain his footing in the conversation. He was trying not to listen to the battle below, and trying not to think about the polder’s reputation.

“Uh-huh,” the polder said.  He padded forward and shooed the man out of the way.

“Are you here to kill us?” Cole asked, as Pinwhistle stuck his head down into the open window.

“What’s going on down there?” the polder’s voice was muffled and echoed in the room below.

He pulled his head out.

“Why’s it smell like deathless?” Pinwhistle asked.

“Can I, ah,” Cole pointed to the nail. “Can I have one of those?”

The polder shrugged, pulled out a nail, fired it off his, and offered it to Cole.

Cole looked at the offered nail, embers in its tip glowing red, and took a deep breath. He was committed to taking the nail, and smoking it, without his hand shaking.

He reached out and took the nail, dragged it. Let the smoke escape from his nostrils. Acted relaxed. Acted like someone who might smoke out here in the night air with the infamous polder fixer from the Cold Hearth.

“Your men are dying down there, you know that right?” the little man said.

Cole said nothing.

“Figure that’s why you’re up here,” the thief continued. “You’ve got a good sense of self-preservation, I’ll give you that.”

“There’s rats down there.”

The polder took another drag on his nail, and waited for Cole to elaborate.

“Uh-huh.”

“Radenwights.”

“Yeah,” the polder said. “Their warren goes right under here.”

“There’s a girl down there.”

The polder nodded. “So?”

Cole shrugged. “He wants her. I think she…she’s someone’s daughter or something.”

Cole took another drag, tried to talk about what happened without thinking about it. Without thinking about why Pinwhistle might be here. “The rats tried to kill us.”

“Uh-huh. What’d you think was going to happen?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t case the place. I didn’t think….”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, you’re going to kill me aren’t you?”

The polder frowned. “You got a one track mind.” He took another drag.  “So the count sends you here to get the girl and gives you what, four scarves? Five? Blue? Green?”

“Green,” Cole said. “Five Greens.”

“You try to bust into this place with five green scarves?” Pinwhistle smiled and looked up at the black circle in the sky where the Dusk Moon hid late at night. “Count’s getting sloppy. You’re lucky it’s just ratmen.”

“He gave me these…” Cole pulled four of the small marbles from a pocket under his leather chestpiece. He stared at them, thinking he could see the black dust inside swirling, striving, seeking a way out of its glass prison. Probably just a trick of the eye.

The polder took a long drag on his nail and peered at the small black orbs in the mid-level thief’s hand.

“Ok,” he said. “What are they?”

Cole was staring at the glass spheres in his hand, then he came back to the world and snatched his hand behind his back.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Pinwhistle nodded.

Cole reminded himself he was a blue scarf in the Guild of Blackened Silk. He was important. Men feared him.

“Why are you here, Pinwhistle?” he asked.

The polder shrugged. “Just keeping an eye on things.”

“What?” Cole frowned.

“Same thing the rats are doing,” the polder said cryptically.

Cole didn’t know what to make of that.

“How many of those little black things you got?” the polder asked.

Cole sagged a little.

“Why?”

“Lemme have them,” the polder said, as though asking for a nail in return.

“I don’t think…the count wouldn’t….”

“Come on, don’t be dense. Tell him you used them all. Tell him anything, how’s he going to know?”

“I don’t know,” Cole said, shaking his head. He pulled his hand from behind his back and looked at the horrible glass beads again.

“Must have been fun down there,” the thief observed. “Rattle you so much.”

“Huh?”

The polder shrugged. “I’m just saying, lot of action down there. You’re shaken. You’ve seen some shit and it rattled your braincase.”

Cole nodded, a little relieved.

“I can tell,” the thief continued smoothly, “because if you weren’t rattled you’d remember I could just steal the fucking things from you and there isn’t anything you could do about it.”

Cole gave up. Extended his hand, shaking. Aimsley padded forward and examined the black orbs.

“Don’t drop them,” Cole warned, and placed the marbles in Aimsley’s palm.

Aimsley shot him a look and went back to examining the marbles. Cole relaxed, relieved to get rid of them. Relieved to have something the polder wanted.

Pinwhistle looked from the marbles to Cole. Shrugged.

“They make deathless,” Cole said.

The polder’s expression didn’t change.

“What?”

“I swear by the black brothers, they make deathless,” the words poured from Cole’s mouth. It was like he was testifying. A witness trying to convince a watchman of what he saw. “I didn’t know what they did, I just…he gave them to me and said to throw them at the ground. I thought they were blackout balls.”

Suddenly the polder’s mind was racing. Cole was a pro, experienced. Deathless would explain his current state.  He stared at the black orbs, then looked up into the night sky, thinking.

Cole thought maybe he could run for it. But decided the danger was passed. Pinwhistle wouldn’t kill him, he realized. There was nothing Cole had that the little thief couldn’t take without violence.

“What’s the count up to, Cole?” the polder asked idly.

“You know as much as I do, fixer." Cole was desperate to impress. "I just made Blue this year, I mean sometimes I feel like I know what’s going on, but the count doesn’t tell me shit. I never talk to him. I see the Fixer sometimes. Otherwise...I serve at the pleasure of the Red,” he said with some regret.

“And the Red Scarves, the ones who gave you these…did they seem excited?”

“They were pissing themselves, they were so fucking happy.”

Aimsley nodded. “How do they work?”

“I don’t know.”

Aimsley cocked his head at the man.

“I swear by Saint Pallad I don’t know. I threw one down, and this smoke came out and went into Tom. Tom was dead. But then…then he wasn’t. Then he was something else. A ghoul.”

“There are no more Deathless," Aimsley said, almost reflexively, looking at the tiny glass ball in his hand.

“Well it looked like a ghoul! What the fuck do I know!?”

“Does it need a body?”

“I…I don’t know!”

“Has to work even without one," the polder reasoned. "Otherwise what would have happened if you’d used it before anyone died?”

“What?”

Cole was smart, but in his highly strung, badly rattled state, he wasn’t able to follow Aimsley’s logic. 

“Ok,” the polder said. “Alright, I believe you. Thanks,” he said, holding up the glass marbles as though toasting the other thief. He put them in a small pouch on his hip.

Cole just stood there, nail hanging from his fingers, like someone waiting to be dismissed.

“I take back what I said about the count. Don’t tell him what happened. Don’t tell him anything. He’ll feel stupid he sent you and kill you just to make himself feel better.”

Cole nodded. He was sweating in the cold air.

“Better report back to the Fixer. He’ll know what to do.”

“Yeah,” Cole said, nodding. “Yeah, Garth will know.”

“Good boy,” the polder said. “You got a lot of promise, Cole. Things don’t work out with the Guild, you come talk to Brackett at the Hearth. We’ll find something for you to do. Something that don’t involve deathless.”

“Really?” Cole asked, he looked disoriented again. This whole evening left him shaking and unsure what was what. “Why would you…why would you do that?”

The polder frowned. “Dunno,” he said. “Just feeling generous, I guess.”

Cole nodded, though he wasn’t really listening.

“Now fuck off,” the polder said. “Your men are all dead—no fault of yours—and I might change my mind about letting you live.”

Cole turned and ran across the rooftop. The polder smirked. He turned, looked across the rooftops, and fingered the pouch at his hip. He wondered where the priest was.

He looked down into the open window. The ghoul was still down there. He could hear it. Cole had come for the girl, but hadn’t got her. Had got the ghoul instead. The ghoul that was now down there with the girl.

He produced a dirk, and bounded lightly down into the inn.