Thief: A Fantasy Hardboiled (Ratcatchers Book 2) Page 2

  There was a gulp. But this did not satisfy the yearning, biting, tonguing mouth. It snapped back open and, sensing Aimsley nearby, snapped at him. The red demon-tongue whipped toward him. He batted it away like an errant fly.

  In their eagerness, two guards practically fell down the stairs. They started off down the corridor the way Aimsley had come. He could not afford to be seen.

  He threw down a blackout ball, and black smoke filled the corridor. He looked down at the demonic mouth as he heard the sounds of the castellan’s guards running toward him. Braving the smoke.

  He leapt gingerly into the waiting maw. It snapped shut behind him.

  Chapter Three

  Alret climbed from the sewer in the alley first. Aimsley followed. They were covered in sewer water…and worse.

  “Wasn’t sure that would work,” Aimsley said, trying to wipe some black bile off of him.

  “It shat me out!” Alret gibbered.

  “Uh, yeah,” Aimsley said trying to get the stuff out of his hair. “Mouth on one end, where’d you think you’d come out?”

  “It fucking shat me out its arsehole!” Alret was shaking with abject terror. Aimsley shook his head. Poor idiot.

  “Yeah, well…,” Aimsley shrugged. What was there to say to that?

  Alret look along the alley and saw the citadel’s tower. They had just come from under there.

  "You got me out," Alret said, demonic arseholes momentarily forgotten.

  "Yeah," Aimsley nodded.

  "Didn't think no one ever got out from there."

  "Yeah."

  "Didn't think no one could get in," the scrawny man looked in awe at Aimsley.

  "Fixer, ain’t I?" the polder said, with a sniff.

  “Ragman hears you can get in and out…,” Alret began, his eyes wide.

  “He won’t hear,” Aimsley said.

  Realization dawned on Alret’s pinched face.

  “Aw shit,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Aimsley said, with some authenticity. “You live, ragman comes after Brick. You die,” Aimsley shrugged. “Balance sheet is closed.”

  “I thought…when you didn’t kill me inside, I thought….”

  “They can bring you back in there,” Aimsley said. “They got priests.”

  Alret nodded absent-mindedly while he shivered in the night in the middle of the alley. No one would find his body for hours out here.

  “Tell Brick,” he said, his teeth chattering, mostly from terror, “tell him I didn’t tell no one nothin’.”

  Aimsley nodded. “I will.”

  “They didn’t ask me nothin’, anyway.”

  “I tried to get to you before they could.”

  Aimsley had his dirk out.

  Alret saw it and gasped. An instant later and Aimsley was standing on the other side of him, dirk gone.

  Alret collapsed in a heap, gurgling, squirming.

  Looking at the Dusk Moon, Aimsley saw it was almost midnight. He stood in the alley looking at the cobbles at his feet, blood pooling around them. The alley emptied out on Gore Street to the north, the direction of the Mouse Trap, and Falmouth to the south, the direction of the Hammer & Tongs.

  "He wanted it fixed?" he said to himself. "I fucking fixed it."

  Brick would want to know what happened, without knowing what happened obviously. Brick wanted a lot. Brick got more out of this arrangement than Aimsley did.

  Aimsley turned right and walked north toward Falmouth.

  Chapter Four

  “I know how this ends,” Tam said.

  The count smiled what was, he would assure anyone, a genuine smile. But showing his perfect teeth, with his thick blonde moustache and sharp eyebrows, it looked wolfish and sinister.

  He aimed his smile at Garth. The two shared a moment.

  “Do you?” The count asked, tilting his head.

  The alchemist shrunk a little. He felt completely powerless here, and after weeks of that his dreams of getting out, getting free of the count and his tame killer had evaporated. Now he just wanted everything over. “I know Elise is dead,” he said. “When you don’t need me…,” he didn’t finish. He looked at the count “I’m not stupid.”

  “Noo,” the count interrupted. “But you are somewhat melodramatic.”

  Tam slumped a little, exhausted. “Why lie about it?” he asked.

  The count chuckled and walked around the worktable. It was one of three in the small room in which the alchemist Roderick Tam had been perfecting his method for creating the Dust and sealing it into small glass marbles. The room was full of inks and metals and flasks and a whole table piled with codices, all open to different pages, stacked on top of each other.

  With the table between them, the count looked at the alchemist through the maze of glass pipes and metal cylinders. “Mister Tam, do you know why we chose you?”

  The alchemist sighed. “Because I owed all that money to the Truncheon.”

  “That was,” the count admonished, “foolish, I will admit. The midnight man is the most brutal, efficient killer in the city. Far worse than me,” he said. “He rules the Darkened Moon through terror, his agents spend more time fighting each other than mine. Were it not for me, he’d have had you beaten to death, slowly, over days.” The count grimaced as he said this, as though the thought disgusted him.

  “Why in all Orden would you place yourself in that man’s debt?” the count asked.

  “I was weak,” Tam said, and looked about to collapse in sleep.

  “Yes, well,” the count said, and glanced again at his fixer, “we all have weaknesses, don’t beat yourself up over it. We traded you for someone the Truncheon was eager to kill, slowly. The better fate for you, I promise.”

  The count flicked his fingers, like he was shooing a fly.

  “Anyway I’ve got lots of people in to me, lots of alchemists too. No, we traded for you because you are smart,” he said, picking up a crystal and looking at it, shrugging and putting it down. “You worked out all this, for one thing,” his gesture took in the whole laboratory.

  Tam stared at a thin phial of black fluid. The most recent deposit from the count.

  The count followed his gaze.

  “You want to know what the source is. Where we get it?”

  “No. No, I don’t.” Tam was eager to deny this.

  “You do! Of course you do. How could you not? You’re an alchemist, aren’t you?”

  “I was. I retired. If you tell me, I’ll never leave here.”

  “Fear not,” the count said, enjoying the alchemist’s distress. “The ingredient is here. He is nearby,” the count said, letting a little theatricality seep into his voice. “Does that surprise you?”

  Tam looked at the count from under a heavy brow. The source was a “he,” not an “it.” This was dangerous knowledge. Lethal knowledge.

  “What happens to me after this?” Tam challenged. “You can’t let me go.”

  “Well, no,” the count admitted. “Bad for business, that. We’re partners now, Roderick,” the alchemist didn’t respond. “You don’t mind if we call you Roderick, do you?” the count asked, pointing between himself and Garth.

  Of the two, the count was the fit, dashing swordsman. His dirty blonde hair curling in a fashionably haphazard heap on his head, his strong jaw and pointed chin adding to the look of angles and muscle which his military uniform, hereditary of course, accentuated. Garth, by comparison, was shorter, slimmer and in most ways unremarkable. He had no interest in standing out, being recognized, no interest in anything except skill.

  “You’ll kill me when I’m done,” Tam repeated. Every time he said it, he died a little more, making the final blow that much more bearable. Why did it have to end like this? He was a good man, once.

  The count sighed and shook his head.

  “If we were going to kill you, we’d not bring you here hooded. Roderick you are smart, resourceful, and you work like a dwarf. We’d be fools to have you killed or even treated badly. Haven’
t we treated you well?” The count feigned insult.

  Roderick Tam looked at the floor and didn’t say anything.

  “You have a fine apartment, good food. What about that girl we sent?” He looked at Garth standing in the middle of the small room. “Garth didn’t we have Miss Elowen have a girl put on for our friend here?”

  Garth nodded. “Said she liked him” Garth said. “Said he was nice.”

  “There you are,” the count turned back to Tam, his argument proven. “We have treated you well and you have performed well. All this suspicion,” The count walked back around the table and stood next to the alchemist. “Quite unnecessary.”

  “So what….”

  The count held up a finger. “If you could pick any place in the world to visit, where would you pick?”

  “Where would I…,” Tam looked confused.

  “Take your time, think about it. Have you ever dreamed of studying somewhere more…civilized than Corwell? Capital, perhaps? Best universities in Orden. The Commonwealth?”

  Roderick couldn’t let the truth show. He muttered the first place that came into his head that wasn’t Celkirk.

  The count frowned at his fixer. “What was that?” he asked the alchemist.

  “Khemarna,” the man said more loudly.

  “Ah! The great desert, certainly. Now, you will finish up your project here for us,” the count said, picking up a newly made glass marble with swirling black dust in it, “and then we’ll probably keep you on locally for another project just to make sure this wasn’t a fluke.”

  Tam looked at the count with a mix of hope and suspicion. It sounded so reasonable.

  “This may take a couple of years, but you’re young yet. You’ll work here, for yourself as you like and for me as I like. Plenty of time for both and then, once we’re sure of you, we’ll set you up in in the City of the Everlasting Sun, as you wish, and you’ll get to work on whatever research strikes your fancy and all you’ll have to do,” the count said, “is a few tasks for us now and then. Minor things, nothing big.”

  The alchemist stood there, not knowing how to react, unable to trust these men.

  “You could have a family again, and why not?” The count said. “Not here, of course, once you’re out of the city. We get an agent in the Pharaoh’s capital city, someone who can interpret what the Eternal Sun’s viziers are up to in a way no spy ever could, and you get to live out the rest of your life surrounded by exotic beauties. An arrangement to the benefit of all parties,” the count smiled.

  The man stared back, jaw slack with incomprehension. He looked like a peasant. Of course, he was a peasant, most alchemists and wizards were. It was a known way to power. But the count had a particular distaste for those who seemed to relish their lowly stature. The man could bottle starstuff and cause the dead to walk again in this new age without deathless, and he still looked like a dirt farmer. I mean, look at his clothes. Really. Have some dignity. You can afford it now, what?

  He sighed at the alchemist, knowing the man would never understand. Good with the potions, terrible at the real world. He clapped the man on the shoulder and said “Alright off with you. Enough for today, back to your apartment. Your hood awaits.”

  The alchemist lurched around the table, putting lids on powdered who-knows-what and grabbing a codex to read at home, before backing his way out of the laboratory, looking once from the count to Garth, bowed and left.

  Chapter Five

  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….

  Chapter Six

  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 han
ds 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.