Thief: A Fantasy Hardboiled (Ratcatchers Book 2) Read online

  The boy looked at his father.

  “Who needs you more,” the old man said, “the church or the girl?”

  The boy didn’t answer. Hadn’t thought of it in those terms. Some weight was lifted from him. The possibility of a life without revenge, without death. At the end of a long road.

  The father looked the son up and down, looked at his dented and tarnished breastplate, his ragged cloak, his unclean face and unkempt hair. Dried mud and maybe worse caked into folds of cloak and wrinkles of skin.

  “You look to me like a man whose been chasing a villain seven times seven leagues, there to do fell judgment upon him.”

  The son found the force of his father’s pride combined with his piercing insight hard to bear. “Reckon I am,” he said. “Got a ways to go yet and no sure path to follow.”

  “Well I says,” the old man began, taking a deep breath. Being a father again for a son who needed it. “Any man earned your ire is a villain and no dispute. He should fear the judgment coming on him, or more fool him. You’ll find your way. Or make it,” his father said. “Never knew nothing could stop you, once you put your mind to it.”

  The son’s eyes were watering, as though he’d been looking into the sun for too long. He took a deep breath, felt refreshed. Felt renewed. The air out here seemed clean, clear. Like the first day of the world.

  This was the longest conversation he’d ever had with his father.

  “Come on now,” his father said. He removed a pick from the barrow and shouldered it. With one huge swing, he stabbed it into the ground next to the boulder and levered a chunk of soil out. “Got this stone to dig out. Big as a house. Might as well be useful, you gonna stand around.”

  “Got a pick in my bags,” the son said as he watched his father dig.

  “Good lad. Always prepared. Fetch it then.”

  His son went back to his horse. He returned with the pick, having stripped off his breastplate, discarded the cloak, the hard leather vest and linen undershirt and stood next to his father, pale skin and wisps of black hair on his hard muscled frame.

  His father regarded him out of the corner of his eye.

  “Sun’s barely hitched up yet. Time we’re done, you’ll be baked red and your back’ll be sore.”

  The son nodded and dug the pick into the ground next to the top of the stone where his father had broken the sod. The father smiled to watch his son work.

  "Sign of good living,” the old man said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Two figures picked their way across the sea of bones, blood, and mud that was the courtyard surrounding the castle’s gallows. There was no pattern to their movement.

  They prodded bits of corpses with their boots, turned over errant body parts, occasionally stooped to lift a piece of clothing to see what might be left inside, and wordlessly glanced at each other across the courtyard.

  The tall thin one in her early forties was Rayk. The shorter, older, shapeless one in the heavy cloak, was Fandrick. When they were originally partnered together, Rayk was still youthful and energetic. Twenty years under five castellans ground that out of her. Now there was little difference between her and the world-weary, born-cynical Fandrick.

  They and their fellow watchmen were known to the city as the specials. The special watchmen. The special police force. Unlike the regulars, they had no district. They had every district. The watch captains petitioned the castellan for aid when things got bad, or weird, and the castellan dispatched some of his special men.

  They were meant to be smarter, better trained, and with more authority than the coppers who patrolled the streets. But surrounded by three dozen-odd corpses, or bits of corpses, or whatever these things that used to be people were, neither Fandrick nor Rayk felt very special.

  They would note things, grunt. Sometimes the regular watchman keeping the throng of people out of the courtyard would look in, see the two specials, wonder at what they were thinking.

  Mostly they were thinking this was a mess.

  A metal squeal indicated the gates were briefly opened. The two special watchmen looked as a small figure was admitted by the local constables into the courtyard.

  Unlike both Fandrick and Rayk, this person didn’t wear leather. He wore woolen pants, grey, and linen shirt, light blue. He had dark brown skin and thick, short black hair. Keen black eyes that took in everything.

  As he approached, they realized he was very young.

  Eventually he stopped, and stood before them. He smiled.

  “I’m, uh,” he began. “I’m Aiden,” he said.

  Fandrick and Rayk looked at each other.

  "What you want?" Fandrick growled.

  "The castellan sent me," the young man said.

  "All right then, give over," Fandrick said.

  "What?" Aiden asked.

  "What's the message?" Rayk asked.

  "I get it," the boy said, rubbing his chin in thought. "The message is; I'm running this investigation."

  Fandrick stared at the boy for a few seconds, then barked a laugh and turned his back. Went about his business.

  "How old are you?!" Rayk asked.

  "Ahh...seventeen? I think?” He watched Fandrick root around in the muck with the tip of his boot. “Around there, anyway. They say I was born the last time it snowed in the city, but then you ask people when that was and everything gets stupid and they argue and no one writes this stuff down apparently. Doesn't matter. Seventeen, basically."

  Rayk looked at Fandrick who threw her a look back.

  "You're about my parents' age," the boy said. "You want to come by for dinner tomorrow, I'll tell them you're coming. They'd love to meet the folks I'm working with."

  "I bet they would," Rayk said mysteriously.

  She just looked at him. Eventually Aiden shrugged. “Come on,” he said. “How old do you have to be?” Neither of them said anything. "How old were you?" he asked Fandrick's back.

  "Older’n you,” Fandrick grumbled.

  "How old were you?" Aiden nodded at Rayk, who frowned at the boy.

  “Never you mind,” she said. “What’d the ragman send you for? I mean, why you?”

  “Ragman?” Aiden asked.

  “The castellan,” she said, drawing the word out.

  “Oh, right. Because he wears…I get it. Well, he didn’t say why. I don’t really know what happened here.”

  “Lotta people killed,” Fandrick said as he poked his boot into something.

  "How many?" Aiden asked

  "Thirty-seven," Fandrick growled.

  Aiden looked around the black morass of vitreous bile and mud that was once a crowd. "That's a precise estimate," he said. "How do you...,"

  "We count the boots," Rayk said, nodding to a pile of boots by the gate.

  Aiden saw and was impressed. "Sensible."

  "We know what we're doing," Rayk said.

  Aiden looked at her for a moment. "So tell me what happened here," he said.

  "Someone calls up a mess of ghouls," she said, "they eat everyone who couldn't get out. Stampede at the gate."

  Aiden nodded as though confirming a suspicion. He strolled away, looking at the ground, at the remains of the people, at the black oily mud.

  He crouched down and dipped his finger in the mud. Brought it to his nose, smelled it.

  “Any corpses?” he asked.

  “None,” Rayk said.

  From his haunches he surveyed the mud field. It was flat and, except for the gallows, there was nowhere a corpse could be hidden.

  “You’re sure,” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

  “Come on,” Fandrick barked.

  "Not ghouls then," Aiden said, standing up. Fandrick and Rayk looked at each other, and walked over to him.

  "Ghouls are animated corpses," he said. "When they die they leave a dead body behind. Even if they ripped all the people apart and then ripped each other apart, there’d still be one corpse left.”

  “There’s no corpse,” Fandri
ck said.

  “So not ghouls,” Aiden said. “Two more reasons. One, ghouls don’t leave this black oily whatever,” he said rubbing his fingers together and showing it to them. “I don’t know what does. Shadows maybe. Shades. We can find out.”

  “What’s the other reason,” Rayk asked.

  Aiden turned to her, looked from her to Fandrick as though they might guess.

  “There are no more deathless,” he said, as though it were obvious.

  “People who saw it said deathless,” Fandrick said.

  “They’re wrong,” Aiden said. “But whatever they were they look like deathless.”

  “Sound like deathless to me,” Fandrick said. Rayk didn’t correct him. She just watched Aiden.

  “We’ll find out,” Aiden said. “Maybe we’re meant to think they’re deathless. Throw us off the track.”

  “Not throwing ‘us’ off anything. It’s deathless, so we brace the churches, see which cults they’re dealing with, follow the trail.”

  “It’ll lead nowhere,” Aiden said. “It’s a dead-end. We…”

  “We!” Fandrick barked a laugh.

  Rayk just looked at him.

  Aiden stopped and nodded. “Alright, I get it.” He looked from Fandrick to Rayk. Rayk seemed more open, but he was willing to believe this was a trick.

  “I’m thirteen, and I apprentice at my uncle’s scrivner’s shop,” Aiden spoke this very quickly. “I’m fifteen and the castellan comes in, he needs a copy made, I do it. I ask him questions about who wrote the thing. I’ve been looking at writing for a while, at people, at what they come in to have done, why. The castellan gives me this weird look, but he doesn’t say anything. I don’t even know who he is. He comes back a week later, more work. I ask more questions. I notice things. Like this was written under duress, that was written by someone writing down what someone was saying as they were saying it. I say things like ‘I don’t think this is what the guy said, I think he said something else, and whoever copied this down misheard him.’ He’s interested, but he never answers any of my questions and after a while he stops coming in, I think he said something to my uncle, I dunno. Too many questions, I thought.

  “Couple of weeks ago he comes in, tells me who he is, asks if I want to come work for him. Doing what, I ask. This,” Aiden gestured around the trampled mud of the courtyard. “Just look at things, think about what might have happened.

  “’Why?’ I ask.”

  Aiden looked from Fandrick to Rayk.

  “’Because you don’t think like a copper,’ he says. Ok? That’s the whole story. He hears about what happened here, he sends you two and a little while later, I don’t know why, he sends me. He tells me not to put up with any of your shit, I say ‘there’s not going to be any shit because I’m going to show up and start asking questions and they’re going to ignore me,’ no offense. I didn’t know who you were, I don’t know anyone, I just know how people are, and he says ‘tell them you’re in charge and I said so and if they don’t like it, good,’ and that was it and here I am, alright?”

  Fandrick sneered at him, but said nothing. “Alright,” Rayk said, and nodded.

  “So it’s not deathless, whatever it is,” the young special watchman said.

  “If you say so,” Rayk said.

  “But it seems like it to anyone who sees it and that’s good enough for now. So why does someone summon ghouls at a hanging in the morning.”

  “They want to kill a lot of people,” Rayk offered.

  Fandrick snorted. “Well they take the prize, then.”

  Aiden pointed at Rayk and squinted.

  “Rayk,” she said. “Fandrick,” she pointed to her partner.

  “Fandrick what do you think?” Aiden asked.

  Fandrick didn’t say anything for a little while.

  “Could have been an accident,” Fandrick said. “Ritual goes wrong or…or maybe someone has something, a reliquary, an artifact, they don’t know how it works, they come down here and try it out.”

  Rayk looked to Aiden.

  “That seems alarmingly plausible,” he said.

  “Alarming, why alarming?” Rayk asked.

  “You tell the castellan someone in the city can make this happen,” he indicated the morass, “and they don’t even know how they did it or why. See how he reacts.”

  “Yeah,” Rayk agreed.

  “Let’s try it another way,” Aiden said. “If it weren’t an accident, then why? Why would someone do this?”

  Rayk sniffed. Pulled out a nail, fired it. “There’s someone in the crowd they want to drag,” she said, taking one herself, “and they don’t want anyone to know.”

  Aiden nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “They have the means to indiscriminately kill a lot of people, so they use it here.”

  “Indiscrim…what?” Fandrick asked.

  “Means they don’t care who gets killed. All these people die, fine, long as their man goes down.”

  “He went down alright,” Fandrick said.

  “Or she,” Aiden said.

  Rayk nodded. “Lotta women come to the hangings.”

  Fandrick looked at her. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “It’s mostly men getting hung.”

  “Huh,” Fandrick said, as though that explained it.

  “Maybe someone getting revenge on the hangman for someone he killed?” Aiden asked. “Kills people all day, that’s gotta make a lot of enemies.”

  Fandrick and Rayk looked at each other. Aiden noticed. “What?” he asked.

  “Hatchetman wears a hood,” Fandrick said. “So you don’t know who he is. There’s maybe twelve of them work for the watch. They got shifts, schedules. Just like ‘us,’” he sneered. “Wear the hood so no one knows who they are, which is which.”

  “Oh,” Aiden said. “Well, that makes sense.”

  “This is a lot of people,” Rayk said, surveying the area, the pile of boots.

  “Most I’ve seen killed in one place.”

  Rayk nodded. “Maybe. King hears about this, the Hart’ll show up.”

  “Be long gone by then,” Fandrick said.

  “Everyone’s going to come,” Aiden said. “The guilds, the orders, the churches. Us. Three dozen people die in sight of the king,” he looked up at the towers of the castle. The pinions of the family Corwell flying high, showing the king is in his castle.

  “Right under his nose,” Aiden said.

  Fandrick peered at the boy. “What’re you thinking, boy?”

  “Doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do,” Aiden said, and it seemed like he was working something out. “Doing it like this is a statement. You’re making a statement. You’ve got something to say, you want to say it loud,” he looked at the black mud. “You want to send a message,” he said, almost to himself.

  Fandrick and Rayk looked to each other, then the boy.

  “A message,” Fandrick said. “To who?”

  Aiden looked around the courtyard. The regular watch were still working to keep the gates closed, keep the throng of people at bay.

  Then he looked at Rayk, then Fandrick. The three of them the only ones in the courtyard.

  “Us,” he said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The bench in the corner had a special cushion that allowed Aimsley Pinwhistle to sit at the same height as a man. If you only glanced over, you might not realize he was a polder.

  He sat there staring at the shere board etched into the slate tabletop; stared at the black and white checkered squares and the simple carved wooden pieces, with one hand on his chin and the other on his hip. At one point, he bared his teeth and tapped them idly with a finger. There was no drink on the table.

  The Mouse Trap was dense with smoke and noise and people. Thin rakes and thick bludgeons. It was hard to move around, hard to see. The smoke was so thick, a man only a few feet away looked like a ghost, and the place was so loud, so relentlessly loud, it was impossible to hear anyone talking unless they were looking right at you. Ev
eryone liked it that way.

  Aimsley pushed a lock of his curly blonde hair out of his eyes out of habit and shook his head at the board. A shadow fell across it. He glanced up, and then back to the board with a sigh.

  He picked up a piece and moved it.

  “Don’t know why you hem and haw, we both knew you’d make that move a turn ago.”

  A large, bulbous, man dropped into the chair opposite. He sneered. Aimsley noticed the man looked old, his bald head had a few spots on it. Happened to everyone sooner or later. Probably was still the strongest man in the room, but for how long? Aimsley had personally witnessed him pick up a blacksmith’s anvil and crush a man with it. That was a sight you didn’t soon forget.

  He had a pale, slimy appearance and newly minted apprentices in the guild had a tradition of calling him ‘the slug.’ But every master of the Cold Hearth held the same title, passed down for years with pride. The Brick.

  Brick glanced at the board, picked up a piece, and moved it. Somehow, he made the wooden piece click against the slate board in an annoying manner. As though the act of actually having to move the piece was beneath him. He ran his tongue across his teeth and looked at the polder.

  Aimsley looked at the move, his frown deepening, and leaned back. “Whatever,” he said.

  A moment passed. The board did not reveal its secrets.

  “Alret’s fixed,” Aimsley said.

  Brick made some obscure gesture, like flicking something over his shoulder, and within moments a wench was there with two small drinks.

  “Why don’t you have something to drink?” the Brick asked. The young wench delicately put the two glasses down, careful not to spill any. Expensive stuff. Only the best for the Hearth. Aimsley watched the amber liquid reflecting light in the glass, listened to the unique ‘clack’ of glass on slate that he’d come to associate with a lifetime of being with friends, being in the Trap, belonging, being respected, being good. Being the best.

  Aimsley rubbed his nose and realized he was staring. He waved the drink away.

  “Don’t need it,” he said.

  “I know you don’t need it,” Brick growled. “Didn’t ask if you needed it. Who gives a shit what you need, for fuck’s sake? Have a drink. For taking care of Alret.”