River of Thieves

by Clayton Snyder

  The conversation got me thinking about my own reasons for following Cord on this errand, and I slipped into memory during a lull in the conversation.

  ***

  They'd named the bar The Dripping Bucket. It smelled of cheap cigars, cheaper whiskey, and boiled feet. On the upside, drinks stronger than an ettin knocked the more offensive of those scents right out of your head. Halfway through my second glass of a whiskey the color of bloody piss, a stranger sat down and bumped my neighbor's elbow. My neighbor, on drink four and looking like the breeding result of a particularly stupid bulldog and a snake, stabbed him in the throat.

  Hed, the bartender, glared at the stabber, then at the stabbee. The latter slipped to the floor, arterial spray making a mess of the woodwork. I stood and took my drink three stools down to keep my drink untainted.

  "What the fuck, Zef?" Hed asked, eyes flicking back to the killer.

  Zef shrugged. "He touched my purse."

  Hed grunted, and the rest of the bar managed to make a six-foot hole to give the new guy room to bleed out. Call it country hospitality.

  Hed spoke up, addressing me. "Nenn, you gotta get this guy out of here."

  It took a minute for the statement to sink past the booze-soaked layer of my brain. Despite the whiskey already in my guts, I realized I remained the most sober. Empty glasses stood on the bar like husks of soldiers drained by a wight. I hated touching corpses. I'd done it for a summer, picking up unfortunates for the morgue. The forgotten and the destitute left there by drug and blade. They squelched and jiggled, and sometimes, if they'd been in the sun long enough, bloated and stank. The especially dead ones liked to slip their skin when you tried to pick them up. I enjoyed touching dead guys like most people enjoy eating scabs. I made a face I hoped telegraphed my distaste.

  "I'll pay your tab."

  Some arguments however, are airtight.

  "Okay, then," I replied, and grabbed the dead guy by the ankles.

  He left a red smear behind as I toted him out the rear exit. A few of the city's scavengers--those worse off than even the patrons of the Dripping Bucket--scattered from the alley. They left behind a smell like burning cow shit. Not their fault. Clean water didn't come cheap and thanks to Mane's policies, even use of a well carried a tax. I waited for them to scurry away and dropped the corpse on the cobblestones. I lit a cigar while I tried to decide if this constituted the lowest point of my life, or just a bump on the way down.

  Sitting in an alley with a dead guy while you smoke your last cigar of the night, and his blood slowly seeps into the soles of your boots, makes you think. Not that I'm a big thinker on a normal day--I mean, I'm not stupid. I just tend to take things as they come. But if anything, that sort of situation makes you re-evaluate some life choices. When the dead guy sits up and takes a big fat breath, right after you've finished screaming, you make big decisions.

  He coughed once, and something small and pink spattered from his lips against the cobbles. He smashed it with his heel, and then took a second, deeper breath.

  "Got another one of those?" he asked, gesturing at my cigar.

  I shrugged and handed him mine. He took a deep drag, then coughed, smoke puffing out of him like a blacksmith's forge at the bellows. He rubbed his throat, as if trying to massage away the soreness from the passage of the creature. He offered the cigar back, but I shook my head. The distinct taste of regret already lingered on my tongue.

  "You okay?" he asked.

  I nodded and swallowed, waiting for my heart to stop hammering.

  "This happen a lot?" I asked.

  "Not a lot, no. Enough. But not a lot." he eyed me up and down, and shrugged, as if coming to a decision. He offered me his hand. "I'm Cord."

  I took it and gave it a little shake. "Nenn."

  "You free this weekend?" he asked.

  "That's a weird question."

  "Why?"

  "Well, you were just dead."

  "I'm not now."

  "I'm not really into necrophilia."

  "Still not dead."

  "Anymore. How do I know you won't die again?"

  "You don't. So?"

  "So what?"

  "Are you free?"

  I frowned at him. "I'm washing my hair."

  "This isn't that kind of question. I had something better in mind."

  "Mummer show? I'll be your beautiful assistant?"

  He snorted. "How do you feel about a partnership?"

  "Doing what?"

  "Making money."

  "Doing what?"

  He explained, and I started to come around despite my misgivings. It already sounded better than another fourteen hours in the mill. Call me overcautious. I needed more before he convinced me this wasn't just another con. Granted, with the dying trick, an exceptional con, but at their core all cons reach for the same goal. You have something they want, they try to take it.

  "That is really godsdamn specific. Also, why me?"

  He gestured at the trail of blood. "Your first instinct was to hide the body, not call the guards."

  "That was for free whiskey."

  He shrugged. "Buy all the whiskey you want with our earnings."

  "Nah."

  "Nah?"

  "Drinking got me into pulling a dead guy into an alley."

  "But I was only temporarily dead."

  "That's an incredibly weird technicality," I pointed out.

  Silence fell between us.

  "How'd you do that, anyway?" The question floated at the top of my mind like the vomit I barely kept down a few minutes ago.

  He waved a hand. "Pissed off a Harrower."

  I whistled low. "You poor bastard."

  He nodded, and I felt bad for him despite myself. The word Harrower brought with it a nightmare wind that did its best to creep into your head. Wizards that powered their magic with the worst humanity is able to imagine, they worked for the highest bidder and flaunted their cruelty. You can imagine the unpleasantness.

  "I thought you were gonna say it was a birth defect," I said.

  "Pfft. Where's the mystery in that? The romance? The esoteric? Everyone's so rational. It's goddamn boring."

  I rolled my eyes. "Fine."

  "Okay."

  A beat passed between us again.

  "So?" Persistent, this one.

  "So what?"

  "The offer?"

  "Oh, that." I thought about my decisions so far. A hard life and a short temper landed me on the nearest bar stool more often than not. I'd drug a dead guy into an alley. Working at the mill pissed me off more nights than not. I nodded.

  "Sure."

  "Great!" He stuck out one bloody hand. "Now, what do we call ourselves?"

  "I'm Nenn."

  "I know that. We need a name. Like the Dastardly Duo or the Bloody Two."

  "How about no."

  ***

  Sometimes I still asked myself why I'd agreed to this new idea. I could have demanded my cut, walked away rich enough to afford a small home in a small village and shack up with a nice someone. Preferably someone who didn't fetishize knives and money. Opposites attract, after all. Maybe I'd woo a grandmother.

  If I had to guess, I liked the company. I’d spent a good portion of my youth in an orphanage, and even then, I’d only had acquaintances, people I was familiar, but never friendly with. After, when they threw me out on the street, I floated. I found work as a gopher, running and fetching, and later, as a fixer of sorts. I’d become handy with a blade in the intervening years, thanks to a life in the alleys and low streets of the towns I drifted between.

  That was the way of it though, wasn’t it? Most men didn’t need blades, even if they carried them. Their only real threat was other men. But women—you had to watch yourself. Men, boys, teens—they all wanted what you had, whether you willing to part with it or not, and that made for a dangerous world. So I picked up a knife, then another. And another. I practiced until my blisters became calluses and even those gave way to tough skin and scar tis
sue.

  I’d never had formal training, but it doesn’t take much to kill. And in the alleys and backstreets, you want a knife. You can swing a knife, or thrust with it, or any number of other wicked things you couldn’t do with a sword or a pike, or even a mace. Knives will bleed a man out fast, and the right type of knife will punch through chain, find places not covered with armor.

  Eventually, I landed at the mill. Cutting is lucrative, but the career outlook dimmer than most. Still, I'd missed my blades. They’re quick and they’re wicked, and they’ve saved my life—-and Cord’s more than I could count. I couldn’t account for his refusal to carry a weapon. Maybe it was because he had me. Maybe it was his past as a soldier—of which he never spoke, or his past as a prisoner, but it seemed directly killing was beyond his comfort zone.

  Unfortunately, for the people he’d marked as enemies, he was already deft at engineering circumstances that meant he never had to lift a blade. That would scare some people. For me, it was part of why I liked him. He had principals. No matter what scam we pulled—he stuck to his ideals.

  That’s why our friendship worked. We played off one another’s strengths, no matter what anyone else might have thought of them. When I was younger, I thought friends were just those people who you trusted to not stick a knife in your back, and now I knew better. Friends—true friends—were family, and they’d stab you right to your face.

  Memory drifted away in tatters as Cord announced a detour in the usual way. By not telling anyone until we arrived at one of the early delta forks in the Lethe. Rek back-paddled so hard he nearly tipped the boat, flipping everyone's stomach as effectively as if someone showed us a pile of severed limbs. For a moment, we hung precariously on the edge of a cresting wave, Cord swearing, Rek wearing a grimace not out of place on a golem, and me hanging onto the gunwales. I tried not think about how quickly I’d drown between the weight of several crowns tucked in various places about my person and the knives. I thought briefly of stripping down, getting light so the water couldn't claim me. But that would have required letting go of the boat, and I couldn't convince my hands to obey me.

  Finally, the boat righted, swinging about and barely missing a sharp outcrop of rock. We drifted peacefully up the northern tributary of the Lethe, frayed nerves settling in fits and twitches. Once a little way past the swirling current of the fork, we let the boat float a bit further before beaching it on a sandy shore, crawling out and stretching sore muscle and bone. Rek and Cord wandered off in one direction, I in another, to piss in the woods.

  Cord speared a bass and fried it with soft potatoes and scallions. We watched the river roll by, unassuming in the mid-day sun, light fracturing and spraying across the tree line behind us. When we finished lunch, I leaned against a rock and lit a cigar—one of my last until we reached Tremaire—and watched fish jump and snatch at bugs skimming the surface of the water.

  "What's the deal with Lux?" I asked.

  "Not right," Rek said.

  Cord grimaced. "Last we knew, she'd traveled back to Tremaire to take the exams at the Arcanum. Figured she'd learned enough in the world."

  "Did she pass?"

  "No idea."

  "You can be sure she weirded out her professors. She's likely to be even weirder now. Messing with that kind of power, it changes people. And the tests don't help. No one really knows what goes on, but it tends to leave a mark," Rek said.

  "She's not a Harrower, is she?" I asked, a knot of unease in my gut.

  "Gods, no," Cord replied. "Just regular weird. Not freaky death cult nightmare weird."

  "At least they've got the Leashmen," Rek said.

  He made a good point. Nobody really liked the soldiers that hunted rogue wizards, but it kept the number of villages turned into pudding to a minimum.

  We sat for a little longer, and then I stood, looking around. Cord nudged me as he passed, heading for the boat. When we’d landed, Rek still scowled to rival the black clouds of a plains storm. While I woolgathered, he and Rek talked for a good while. Now, the big man looked relaxed, almost happy. He climbed into the boat, and I pulled Cord to the side.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Didn’t say nothin’,” Cord said.

  He opened his jacket and pulled a small brown package from an inside pocket. I raised an eyebrow.

  “Slipweed?” I asked.

  “Put a little in with his fish.”

  "Why?"

  "He's wound tighter than a leper's dick bandage."

  I hissed a breath from between clenched teeth and looked over at Rek. He sat in the front of the boat, twirling the oar and making whooshing sounds.

  “Have you considered the problem of drugging the person rowing the boat? Have you considered how we might end up crushed on the rocks, or maybe impaled on a stray log?”

  Rek laughed, high and fast, and I glared at Cord. He shrugged and raised his hands in a gesture of innocence. I punched him in the chest.

  "Unf," Cord said.

  "Articulate as always," I snapped and made my way to the boat. “Just remember, if we die, it’s for good, you dolt.”

  Cord sputtered out an apology and spent the next five minutes trying to wrestle the oar from Rek’s over-muscled hands. When he finally grabbed it, he sighed in relief and pushed us off the bank, dipping the oar into the water. Rek flapped his hands in the air before him like birds. Cord started rowing, grumbling in complaint at the effort. I reached out, pushing him in the back with my boot. He rocked forward a little.

  “Row, serf,” I said.

  He glared back, but did as asked, muttering darkly under his breath. I chuckled and watched the riverbank slip past.

  ***

  As we moved north, the landscape changed, long grasses and gentle hills giving way to rocky soil quickly replaced by muddy fens and marshy landscape, cattails and reeds standing tall in brackish water. Moss clung to the riverbank, climbing up the black bark of pine and cypress, vying for space on their boles with insidious green vines that drooped and trailed in the water. The trees thickened, throwing our boat into the shadows of the setting sun. This part of the river was quiet. Most ships didn't take the time to travel to Tremaire, superstition and self-sufficiency keeping the bulk of traffic away.

  Rek's euphoria lasted for a good portion of the trip, but as the sun slipped behind the trees and we hung a lantern from the bow, he grew quiet, head in his hands. He stared down at the bowsprit, watching his reflection just past. in the water.

  "How's it going up there, buddy?" Cord asked.

  I lifted a leg to tap him in the kidneys and instead let out a low groan as pain throbbed in my guts. Cord craned his neck at me.

  "You okay?"

  I grimaced and wrapped my arms around my stomach. It wasn't bad yet, but it promised to be. I dug a sliver of slipweed from my own private stash, and chewed furiously. Cord's face fell.

  "Oh. Oh no."

  "'Fraid so," I said through gritted teeth.

  "If you could just not be a woman for a few more miles...?" Cord prompted.

  I laid back on the boards of the boat and stared up at the stars. "Or you could go fuck yourself in the neck."

  "I'm wounded," Cord said.

  "You will be. Row faster, fathead."

  Cord muttered to himself and the stars slipped by with renewed speed. Eventually, they blurred, and I found my eyelids heavier than forge hammers. I closed them and drifted with the night sky.

  ***

  I woke some time later to a small package by my head. I felt the flow starting. Maybe it already had. Slipweed tended to unravel time for its users, hours, minutes, sometimes days passing by in a blink. I unwrapped the package and found a few kama—small absorbent bundles—and an envelope of slipweed. I eased my trousers down and slipped the kama in, then took another sliver of the slipweed. It took a few moments, but the cramps faded to a dull background ache, and my headache eased. Cord kept his back turned the entire time.

  Now that I felt a little bette
r, I looked around. The trees thinned as we approached Murkwater, the small lake that Tremaire and the Arcanum stood on. Rek resumed rowing duties, though silently, and the reason for Cord's quiet became apparent as he snored gently. A gentle mist sprung up in the forest, winding between trunk and undergrowth. Things moved in the fog, black and glistening, red and yellow eyes gleaming in the moonlight. I'd heard stories of failed experiments, summonings gone wrong, attempts at creating new life, released from the Arcanum. I hoped we needn't discover the truth.

  Rek picked up the pace and I thanked small gods for the thin layer of protection the hull provided from the water. Any number of beasts likely lived there. Like most hungry creatures however, they needed to smell flesh or taste blood to want you. We considered that motivation enough to avoid stopping to sleep, or taking an overland route via horse.

  As we rowed deeper into the forest, the mist pressed in from all sides. The atmosphere cloyed, and I felt the need to break it up. I remembered a story Cord mentioned once in passing about Rek and a horse.

  "What's the deal with you and horses?" I asked Rek.

  He shuddered, and Cord snorted awake.

  "Horses?" Cord asked. "Oooh."

  A sly grin crossed his face.

  "Yeah, that's a great story."

  "Please don't," Rek pleaded.

  Cord waved it away. "Your dignity's fine. The horse isn't here."

  "The story?" I prompted.

  "Right. So, a few years back, this high muckity muck hires us for an expedition to the Hollow Hills. Some sort of artifact in the ruins down there. So, we gear up, and it's a bit of a trek down to there from the river, so we figure we'll do it proper. Besides, if we find a lot of loot, we'll need something to haul it all back with.

  "We find a horse trader in this little town—Agresta? Anyway, he's got just what we need, nice mares for Lux and me. Beautiful horses, friendly, eat an apple right out of your hand. Rek however, needs a bigger horse."

  "I can't help my size," Rek said.

  "We know, buddy," Cord said, and patted him on the shoulder.

  "Anyway, Rek isn't totally comfortable with things bigger than him, and this one was a great beast of a stallion. Hooves the size of dinner plates. So Rek's twice as nervous already."