Empress of Rogues

by Carrie Summers

  At least, that’s what he claims when Myrrh questions him after he leads their sodden group into the building.

  It’s a cavernous space, shadows within shadows. The musty air seems to cling to Myrrh’s skin and mix with the rainwater, making her feel even slimier. But the office room, a flimsy-walled chamber tucked into the back corner of the warehouse floor, has a pot-bellied stove with a well-stoked fire. After feeling the first wave of heat, she sighs in relief and peels off her sodden cloak. At least if the guard decides to rat out their location to Haven, the warmth will have brought some movement back to her joints. She might take out one or two of the attackers before they finish her.

  “You are secure here until dawn,” the guard says. He has a square jaw and eyes that look almost kind. If Myrrh were the trusting sort, the man would probably earn that trust based on appearance alone. Of course, as it stands, she’s going to have to trust him because she’s out of choices.

  “What happens at dawn?” she asks.

  “Shield patrols come through during the daylight hours. I won’t be here to send them away.”

  “Who guards during the day? Haven?”

  The man shakes his head. “My brother. We share the work evenly. But he’s not so good at quick talking the Shields in another direction. His accent, you know?”

  Now that he mentions it, Myrrh hears a faint foreign lilt in the man’s words. That’s surprising. A fairly universal truth around Ostgard is that neither the crime rings nor the honest tradespeople in the lower districts trust outsiders. Myrrh grimaces when thinking about the way she’s seen honest travelers treated. The prejudice might have been formed after years spent knuckling under a merchant class filled with foreign families, but it’s still not pleasant.

  Either way, it’s incredibly unlikely that Haven would welcome freelance guards of foreign birth working in their district. The man claimed he and his brother pay tribute, but it must be a tremendous sum to buy the syndicate’s tolerance. So who is the owner of the place—and the goods stored inside—and what would motivate them to hire foreign security when it would cost a fraction to pay Haven for the work?

  The situation makes her wonder whether Silver is telling the truth about the man being a simple contact. For all Myrrh knows, the woman owns the sixing building. In fact, the more she thinks about it, the more she wonders whether Silver planned to arrive here all along, bringing Myrrh deeper into her domain.

  Myrrh grits her teeth. The woman’s motives are a mystery, as are her resources, but right now Myrrh needs to focus on Glint. If they’re going to get this rescue underway, they need to start planning.

  “I assume you are going to head out tonight,” Myrrh says, directing her words at the other woman. “We’ll need to start contacting people.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” the guard says. “The streets aren’t safe. I’ve heard the fighting from here. Haven against Ghost Syndicate, Shields against the rabble. Haven factions against each other.”

  Myrrh perks up at the mention of Ghost Syndicate—sounds like they’ve been pushing back against Haven for leading the Shields into Rat Town. But she’s not so stupid as to ask directly. When she nudges Nab and presses her lips together to remind him to keep his mouth shut, the boy rolls his eyes as if to suggest he didn’t need to be told.

  “I have ways to move about unnoticed, Arne,” Silver says. The guard looks ready to protest, but Silver turns away from him to address Myrrh. “I need to know who to get in touch with and where. We can use this as a base.”

  Myrrh flicks her gaze to Arne. Should they really be having this conversation in front of him? “Your friend here just said the warehouse isn’t safe after dawn.”

  “Which is why we’ll head up top and sleep during the day. The Shield patrols come through in the morning, so by afternoon we can begin planning.”

  “Up top?” Myrrh says.

  Silver kicks the office door open and points to the system of catwalks that crisscross the upper reaches of the warehouse. “There are a couple of rooms up there. Hammocks inside. Long as nobody snores, the Shields won’t bother with more than a quick walk-through of the floor.”

  “It seems like you’ve used this is a safe house before,” Myrrh comments, tapping her finger on her knee.

  “I do business here fairly frequently.”

  “Earlier, Lucky said you came to the Ostgard region just recently.”

  “And as I’ve mentioned, I was able to plant some suggestions about my presence into his mind. Now, are we done with the interrogation? I’d like to get down to business.”

  “It just seems strange to me,” Myrrh says. “So many coincidences. Was it simple luck that brought you here around the time Glint was captured?”

  “Are you asking whether I knew it was going to happen?”

  “Not necessarily. But it also seems convenient that you happened to be in Carp’s Refuge when I arrived. Especially when it seems you know a lot about me, enough to know I’d agree to an unlikely alliance if it meant saving Glint. I’m just trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together.”

  Silver gives Arne a curt nod of dismissal that definitely looks like a communication between a boss and her underling. Hands clasped before his belly, Arne ducks his head and strolls out the door. Silver leans forward and pulls it shut.

  “Any other concerns to air?” she asks. “Because I thought we’d put this conversation to bed already. It’s time we move past your paranoia if we want to get down to saving Glint.”

  “All right. If you really want to move forward, tell me whether you expected me in Carp’s Refuge. Looking back on yesterday’s events, it seems to me as if you were waiting to burst into my meeting with Lucky. When you assassinated him, you left me no recourse but to accept your help escaping. Look me in the eyes and explain why I shouldn’t feel manipulated.”

  Silver takes a deep breath, her nostrils flaring slightly. “I know you Ostgard thieves put a lot of stock in luck. Isn’t that the currency your Queen of Nines traffics in? She grants luck in exchange for your prayers and faith, right?”

  “That’s up for debate, I’d say,” Myrrh says with a shrug. Sure, she flips a few coins down stray wells as offerings to the Queen, and she’s been known to mutter a prayer or two when caught in a difficult situation. But she’s never figured it as more than superstition.

  “Well, you’d have a hard time denying that Skorry grants powerful gifts. I even saw you attempting to use one—not that it worked for you.”

  At this, Nab starts giggling. “Did you forget how to do the cantrip already?”

  Myrrh ignores him, keeping her eyes on Silver. “And?”

  “I suspect that your Queen and my Skorry are facets of the same being. Or brother and sister, at least. There are nine boons he grants. Same as your lucky number.”

  “Okay…”

  “Devotees of Skorry learn the cantrips in a specific order: misdirection, distraction, mass delusion, shadow step, shadow speak, gambler’s luck, open lock, and choke hold.”

  “Wait,” Myrrh says. “That’s just eight.”

  Silver smirks. “True. But not only do we learn them in a particular order, we are also only granted the insight on our next boon if Skorry deems us worthy. We know from visions that there are nine charms, but no one has received the final boon. It’s still a mystery.”

  Myrrh thinks through the charms she’s seen Silver use. She opened the padlock on Nab’s jail, which was the cantrip just before the eighth, choke hold.

  “And yes, you might have noticed I know seven of the eight,” Silver says as if following her thoughts. “I’ve been a disciple of the trickster god since I was fifteen.”

  “What do I need to do to learn the second cantrip?” Nab asks, raising his hand and working his fingers through the misdirection motion. Like lightning, Silver crosses the room in two long strides and knocks his hand aside.

  Nab looks at her with wide eyes.

 
“Never attempt to charm another of the faithful,” Silver growls. “Many of us would kill you for the attempt.”

  “Miser’s breath,” Nab mutters as he steps back into the corner and crosses his arms. “Grumpy…”

  Silver’s eyes are narrowed as she looks from Nab to Myrrh. “In truth, neither of you should have been taught what you have. It’s a strange situation, and the same way you have questions about me, I’d like to learn who broke our rules and taught you. But you’ll notice I’m ignoring my curiosity in favor of the task at hand.”

  Myrrh rolls her eyes. “Which we can get back to when you finish explaining the large number of apparent coincidences that led us here.”

  “And if you’d have listened carefully, you might have already guessed why we ended up in Carp’s Refuge at the same time. I suspect the sixth cantrip. The moment I got news of Glint’s capture, I started performing it during idle moments.”

  “The sixth…” Myrrh works it through in her head. “Gambler’s luck?”

  The woman nods. “Unless you are hoping to charm the dice into rolling your way, it’s difficult to know whether the cantrip succeeds. The currents of fate are strange, and one motion can set a whole new whirlpool spinning. Still, since you asked, that’s my best guess at an explanation. I asked for luck because I wasn’t sure how else I could save him.”

  Myrrh holds the woman’s gaze. Maybe she’s telling the truth, maybe not. Either way, it’s probably the best explanation she’s going to get. “You asked about which of my associates you should contact. Start with Warrell, Ivy, and Hawk. The best way to track them down is to start at a tavern called Rikson’s Roost.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “WHAT’S HER DEAL?” Nab asks the moment Silver leaves the warehouse. His cheeks are still dark with embarrassment over the woman’s reaction to his attempt to make the cantrip motion, and he glowers out from beneath lowered brows.

  Myrrh sighs. “I wish I knew. The only thing I like about this situation is that we’re not locked up awaiting judgment either by Emmerst or by Lucky’s smugglers.”

  The boy kicks his toe against the old floorboards of the office. “She acts like she’s the sixing queen of Ostgard or something.”

  She almost tells him to watch his language but, considering what Silver just did to the poor little rat, decides against it. Instead, she just nods and plucks her cloak off the back of a chair near the stove. Flipping it over, she replaces it over the chair back to dry the other side.

  “And anyway,” Nab says, “why’s she being all gaga over Glint? She acts like they’re hooked together.”

  Myrrh shrugs. “Maybe they are.” She doesn’t want to believe that notion, but the woman didn’t seem to be lying about her recent meetings with him—meetings Myrrh knew nothing about. And Silver definitely let her emotions show when she spoke about rescuing him.

  Nab’s brow furrows beneath the messy fringe of hair that flops into his eyes. “But I thought you and Glint were…” He circles his hand in the air. “You know. Into each other. In gross ways.”

  He makes a face that looks so much like he just swallowed a dead fish that Myrrh can’t help but laugh.

  “What?” he asks with an exaggerated shrug. “It’s true, right?”

  “I don’t know, Nab. I thought so.”

  The boy’s eyes go distant while he thinks. Turning her back to the stove to warm her butt and the backs of her legs, Myrrh stares out the office door into the darkened warehouse. A hulking shadow, Arne tromps through the aisles between stacks of crates and canvas-draped heaps. The outer warehouse door creaks open as he steps outside to continue his patrol around the building’s perimeter. A few minutes later, he enters, dripping wet, through the side door, tramps through the aisles, and leaves again. It’s the same circuit over and over, which Myrrh would warn him against if it were her place. Patterns mean predictability, exactly the kind of weakness thieves like to exploit.

  But maybe the owner of the warehouse doesn’t feel the need to deter thieves. Maybe the guard’s job is to serve as a token presence to convince the Shields that the warehouse is an ordinary building in one of Ostgard’s lower districts. Which is to say: probably illegal, but not so much that intervening would be worth more than sitting back and collecting the owner’s bribes.

  Myrrh sighs, and when the heat has soaked through her pants and jerkin, she stalks to the office door and peers out. It seems strangely quiet out there on the floor.

  “Hey, so—”

  To his credit, Nab shuts up the instant Myrrh raises a hand to silence him. She takes another step out the door and listens closely. Arne should have returned by now, in through the building’s side door according to his route. It isn’t necessarily bad news that he’s late. Maybe he spied something suspicious and went to check it out.

  Or maybe Silver ratted Myrrh and Nab out, hoping to secure the bounty for herself. There could be Shields moving in on them right now.

  Myrrh takes a deep breath and turns it into a yawn—best to act casual and unaware if this is a trap. Stepping back toward the potbellied stove, she hugs her arms tight and shivers. Once facing Nab, she fixes him with an intent stare, compelling him to alertness.

  Again to his credit, the kid gives a nearly imperceptible nod. He acts like he’s stretching, but instead he’s reaching for the ratty sack holding the stuff he brought from the safe house in Rat Town.

  Just then, the squeak of metal on metal echoes through the warehouse. The heavy tread of boots on warped wood planks follows, familiar after listening to Arne make his rounds a dozen times before. He must have stopped for a moment to empty his bladder or greet a fellow guard.

  Myrrh sighs, and her shoulders relax. She brushes her fingers through the air to tell Nab he can relax. False alarm.

  But what if it hadn’t been? She and Nab are in a room with just one exit, and the only person watching out for their safety answers to someone else. Myrrh has let Silver take way too much power in the situation. At first, Myrrh was able to justify the arrangement as the best of bad options. But even if the woman’s cantrips give her the ability to vanish into thin air and speak through shadows—powerful in an ally, deadly in an enemy—that’s no reason for Myrrh and Nab to be where she expects if and when she returns.

  Wasn’t Myrrh just thinking about how stupid it was to be predictable?

  The next time Arne slips outside the door, she scoops up her satchel.

  “Come on,” she whispers.

  “Where to?”

  “To somewhere Silver won’t expect.”

  ***

  To someone from In Betweens, the particular smell rising from the grates on a given street is probably as good a way as any to orient through the district. Since slipping out of the warehouse and creeping just a few blocks deeper into the city, Myrrh’s identified four distinct stenches and degrees of warmth escaping the sewers. The reek makes her glad she doesn’t know the thieves’ paths in this part of town. Better to take her chances at street level than confront whatever lurks beneath.

  Still, above-ground movement is awfully exposed.

  She shakes her head, not wanting to bring Nab another step into the criminal underworld but recognizing he’s better as a thief than dead or captured by Shields. She reaches into her satchel, nudges him, and steps beneath the awning of what looks to be a shuttered blacksmith’s workshop. An anvil stands outside—it’s too heavy to be worth stealing, and the other equipment is locked up tight behind massive ironbound doors.

  Searching with fingertips numb from the cold, Myrrh takes a moment to locate the packets of glimmer resin in the bottom of her satchel. She pulls one out and sighs. If Glint had given her these doses, she’d feel safe pinching one in half and handing a portion to Nab. Despite trusting his supplier, Glint shaves down the doses he gives his thieves—better to have short-lived effects than permanent glimmer-blindness. But the resin she has now came from Rattle’s stash, taken from the one-eyed rogue’s belong
ings after Mink pierced the man with a fatal crossbow bolt. Turned out, Rattle wasn’t all bad, but Myrrh doubts he was as cautious with the dose size as Glint.

  She unwraps the waxed paper from around the small lump of resin, bites off more than two thirds, then hands the rest to Nab.

  “Eww,” he whispers. “I don’t want your spit.”

  She sighs. “Wipe it clean then. Tuck the resin between your lower teeth and your cheek, okay? It has to dissolve slowly.”

  “Wait, is this…?”

  In the dim red glow filtering through the fog and the rain, she sees his face split into a wide grin. Great. What has she done?

  “Yes, and that’s why I’m telling you to be careful.”

  “Nines in the nutsa—”

  “Nab!”

  “I can’t wait to tell Tep you gave me glimmer. He’s been pestering Bernard to pester Glint to let him try it for a year.”

  “Just put it in your mouth and be quiet.”

  A shout drifts down the street, sounding suspiciously like Arne. Judging by the tone, the man is more concerned than angry. He’s probably wondering what happened to them. Still, in the dark of night near the ragged edge where city meets bog, a shout is bound to draw attention.

  Myrrh glances at the outer wall of the blacksmith’s, hoping again for a stray pry bar or hammer forgotten in the evening’s cleanup. Whatever else the smith might be, he keeps a tidy shop. It’s a shame because with her ribs sending shooting pains as she moves, Myrrh doesn’t feel agile enough to fight well with a dagger. Not that it would hurt any less to swing a pry bar at an attacker—it would most certainly hurt worse. But that kind of attack requires a lot less aim.

  She draws her dagger and winces at the dart of pain from the motion. The glimmer slides into the pocket between her back molars and cheek, and almost instantly she feels the first tingles waking in her nerves. The narrow street flares with light, the glow from the sky painting the wet cobblestones an angry red. Holes where stones have been knocked free of the pavement are dark pits, but with the glimmer-sight, she can even pick details from that blackness.