Skate the Thief

by Jeff Ayers

  “So this is how you made your money.”

  “Yes. Well, this and offering my services as a wizard to those able to pay.”

  “Is there anything behind here, or is it a storage closet?” she asked, moving toward the one door in the room. She tried the handle and found that it would not budge.

  “That is the room that I use to dispose of dangerous leftovers from the alchemical processes. Best left locked when I’m not working. Come on, let’s get back into fresh air,” Belamy said, moving to each metal tube and pulling the handles back to their original positions.

  Something about Belamy’s demeanor struck Skate as odd. He seemed perfectly at ease as he spoke and moved, but there was an artifice to it, as if he were putting on a very convincing but still unreal show. She had herself done the same thing when she needed to sell a lie; and so long as the person she was trying to deceive was not focusing all of their attention on her at the time, it usually worked great. However, Belamy was commanding her whole attention, and not just because he was the only other person in the room; she was watching for signs of one of her greatest fears, after all.

  Belamy smiled as he brought another light into being out of nothing, and began walking upstairs.

  “Should we shutter the lamps?” Skate asked as she moved behind him, looking back at the locked door. She did not really care about the lamps, but wanted an excuse to look back in the room for a little longer. Boss Marshall’s granite-filled voice echoed in her head. Find the best thing he’s got and then get him for all he’s worth by taking it away. She had a sinking feeling that the locked room might have something like that behind it.

  “No, don’t bother,” he said, moving fluidly up the steps—much more gracefully than a man of a hundred and seven years should be able to, she noted—carrying the ball of white light in his open palm. “They’ll just get stuck again. Besides, being down here brought back an itch to work in the lab. I may come back down here later, and I don’t want to have to mess with the lights to get started. By the way,” he added as he reached the landing back into the main room of the ground floor, “have you thought of where you’re going to be getting your next book from? By my count, you’ve got about six days to work on it.”

  Skate followed him out of the narrow tunnel of a stairway. “Yeah, a little.” The truth was that she hadn’t thought much about it, but she now realized she needed to. Her best bets were Belamy’s other two friends, Gherun and Gemhide. However, it was unlikely that Belamy had another helpful meeting planned to get either of them out of their homes. She needed to begin scoping one of the places out to try to get a handle on the target’s habits, his patterns, his schedule. She had six days, but she needed to use that time to study the next mark instead of sitting around talking with Belamy about magic and alchemy and history and whatever else the old man decided was worth wasting his time on. There was also another pair of questions she wanted to ask him, but she was not sure she would be able to.

  “Good! Plenty of time to get it done. I’m not looking for anything specific, so Rattle should be able to find a suitable book with relative ease. Speaking of Rattle,” Belamy said, glancing inside the kitchen, “it smells like he’s just about got your dinner ready. Will you be taking your dinner by the fire or in your room?”

  “The fire, I guess,” Skate said, sitting in front of the crackling flames. After being in the stale cold air of the basement laboratory, the warmth was a great comfort. Besides, she wanted to ask one of her questions before she went to bed, and that was not going to happen if she went and barricaded herself in her room.

  Belamy nodded and took his seat behind his desk. He pulled his large book closer to him and began reading silently as Rattle floated into the room carrying a bowl of fresh hot soup. It offered the bowl to Skate and bounced happily back into the kitchen. The soup smelled inviting, but it was too hot to eat, so she set it on the floor to cool.

  Skate stared into the fire. Find the best thing he’s got and then get him for all he’s worth by taking it away. Yes, she was sure there was something special in that room. She thought of what else might be very valuable, a single object she could take and escape with when the time came.

  The statuette that had been above the fireplace when she’d first tried to steal from Belamy had not been put back in its place. Could that have some high value she did not know about? There were also the ten red gemstones Belamy had told her not to touch that first night; she had not seen those again either. Both of these objects—the statuette and the jewelry box, wherever they were—could very well be the type of thing she would need to find and escape with when the time came to cut and run. They were both small and presumably lightweight, so escape would not be a problem; and they seemed to be so valuable that Belamy, who kept very expensive books within easy reach of his guest, deemed it prudent to relocate them to a safer, undisclosed location. Behind a locked door in a basement behind a trick bookcase, maybe.

  Skate took up her soup, which had cooled some, though she still needed to blow the steam off the top in order to make it safe to eat. When she tilted the bowl upward, the warm brothy water was at just the right temperature; she could taste every bit of it, and the heat was pleasant and soothing to a throat sore from the cold. Rattle really was a good cook.

  After a few small gulps, Skate lowered the bowl again, not wanting to make herself sick by eating too much at once. The Ink’s food was okay when you could get it while it was warm, and for members in good standing, it was readily available most of the time. When Skate had first joined, she had been ravenous and had gorged herself far too quickly on the meat offered to her. The stomach pain and the hideous expectation of being sick for the next few hours had taught her never to make that mistake again.

  Skate wiped her mouth with her perpetually dirty sleeve. She thought the fire was lacking, so she took a sizable log from the ever-full rack of wood and tossed it on top of the other logs. It landed with a heavy thunk and sent a few embers spraying out, spiraling like flecks of dust in the wind and landing safely in the old stone fireplace, nowhere near the precious books or the soft rug Skate stood upon.

  As she watched the small flames lick the sides of their new meal, her mind drifted to a night that had been in many ways like this one.

  It had been a cold night near the middle of winter, and there had been snow on the ground then, too. It had still been falling from the sky in small packets, flakes swirling and crashing into one another on their way to the welcoming earth below. She remembered falling asleep looking at it through the smudged window of the room that had been her family’s home.

  They had been in the slums, a part of town even worse than the docks, both then and now. They lived on a plot with ten other families, most of whom had no more than a tent and the ragged clothes on their back to try to make it through the night. Every morning after a night like this, the first children up went peeking into tents to see who had survived and who had not, taking the departed family’s best things for themselves before announcing the passing to the group at large. It was a matter of survival; nobody wanted anyone to pass in the night, but if it happened, all the better for your own family.

  Her mom and dad had managed to get a rudimentary shack built before winter, complete with that one dirty window. They had even secured a ratty old mattress to serve as a family bed. Her parents had been talking quietly to each other as she drifted off. She could not hear what they were saying and did not care to try. She was warm from the cold under the thick blanket, and they had managed to have a hot meal a few hours earlier.

  It was later that the fire came. A couple of men from nearby families tried to start a bonfire in the plot of land, in a suitably open area where the flames should have stayed far clear of the tents and sheds and sleeping bags. They were successful, and the warmth of the red flames was a great comfort for this disaffected and despondent crew. There would not have been any problems had a drunken argument not resulted in someone jostling the fire, sending a s
tray log rolling to one of the tents.

  Skate was asleep for the inciting incident; she pieced together what had happened the day after, when she heard some of her neighbors talking in hushed tones.

  “Poor dear,” she overheard an old crone whisper to a neighbor, “to lose her parents that way.”

  Throughout the day, Skate could add a chorus of alternately sympathetic and callous remarks:

  “—can’t take her in, of course, can barely feed me own, can I?”

  “—rescued her but then rushed in to find the mother. No one

  saw—”

  “Anybody call dibs on her parents’ stuff yet?”

  “It all burned up, stupid.”

  “—better that she had passed as well than to suffer so…”

  Skate heard these things but felt nothing. She had been numb since waking up in the snow, her father telling her to stay there and wait. He had been a rough-looking man, a sailor by trade, though unable to find work for most of the year because of an old injury. In the cold, he could barely walk.

  He tried that night to move, hobbling away from her into an inferno. It was then she had noticed that the world was burning. The orange and red flames climbed impossibly high into the night, and she might have even called them pretty in a different situation. However, there and then, they meant death.

  She never saw her father again; nor did her mother ever surface from the firestorm.

  And so, over the next few days, Skate sat there. She never moved, just stared at the spot her home had been, hearing but not listening to the chatter around her as the world passed by. She believed that last voice, that there was little point in trying to survive now that she was without home or kin. If she had living relatives elsewhere, she knew nothing of them. She was alone, and the world was careless.

  Then Haman appeared. He sat next to her without introduction. He was in training, still, as a wizard. He bore the insignia of an apprentice on his breast. He did not say anything for a long while, and Skate did not care, for what use had she for any comfort a stranger might offer?

  When he did speak, his voice was somber. Reverent. “There is no loss without mourning, and mourning is no small thing. But your mourning is useless without a life to sustain it.” It was then that he turned to her and spoke directly. “Do you wish to go on?” The question had been simple, but it felt like hours before she nodded.

  The rest was much a blur. Haman eventually introduced her to Twitch, and they had both been present when she swore to the Bosses to serve with loyalty, on pain of death or exile, and received her tattoo. That had been four years ago.

  Skate shook the memories away and turned back to her soup. There was plenty of it left, and the temperature was now comfortable. She took several more gulps and looked back into the fireplace. There were marks on the mantle she had not seen before, and closer inspection revealed them to be stylized letters of some kind. “What does this say?” she asked, pointing to the writing.

  “It’s in the language of the dwarves,” Belamy answered without looking up from his reading. He spoke some words that sounded harsh to her ears, with many hard “K” sounds and noises from deep in his throat. He then translated, “‘Speak my name, then a color you want.’ It rhymes in the Dwarvish.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s a set of instructions. That fireplace was made for me by a craftsman of those folk who was skilled in the magic of the dwarves. If you’re near the fireplace while a fire is burning, you need to say the Dwarvish word for fire, and then the Dwarvish word for a color of your choosing. If you do it right, the fire will change color.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want to try it.”

  “Certainly. What color would you like it to be?”

  “Blue.”

  “Then stand in front of the fireplace and say, ‘Gerunk kekondahash.’”

  Skate had to twist her mouth around the words to get them out, and she did not feel like she had been able to get them correctly when she heard herself say them. “Gerenk kekondashash.” Belamy corrected her, and she said, “Gerunk kekondahash.”

  As soon as the last syllable left her mouth, the orangish red flames flashed out for a moment, as if a great wind had blown from behind the fire, and then the room was awash in a bright blue light. The temperature remained unchanged, but the dancing shadows looked darker than they had before, and everything looked colder. It was a pretty shade of blue, though, and Skate was in awe of the result.

  “That’s amazing!” she said. She caught herself, though, and bottled up her excitement. She decided to try to appear more detached and asked nonchalantly, “So, how do I turn it off?”

  “Gerunk haktha.”

  Skate spoke the words correctly the first time and the flash occurred once more, rebathing the room in the normal glow of orange and red hues. The shadows became less cold-looking as they shimmered in the moving light of the flames, no longer tinged with the cooler shades of blue. Belamy rose out of his seat, his acquired book in hand. “I’ll leave you to it, if you’d like to practice the words.”

  Skate thought to ask him for more colors, realized she had no chance of remembering more than a few, and so let the question dissolve in her mind. It was not the question she had meant to ask anyway, and that question was weighing heavily on her. As Belamy reached the middle of the stairs, she called out. He stopped and turned, his bushy eyebrows raised in polite curiosity and attention.

  “I—” She stopped because asking for help was a sign of weakness, and she was planning to steal from this man before long. She did not like asking close friends for any kind of help, much less strange old wizards who were demon-sent unliving monsters. “I want something.”

  “More food? I’m sure there’s plenty left, or I can get Rattle to—”

  “No, not food. I…” She swallowed hard. “I want to learn to read.”

  Belamy’s face fell into an expression that revealed nothing. “I have had no students for many years, young lady. Why do you want to learn to read?”

  Skate shrugged, not wanting to voice what was in her heart. Reading was her ticket up and a sign that she was not a nobody. “It’d help me find books for you, and I wouldn’t have to worry about Rattle anymore.”

  Belamy smiled. “We can work something out tomorrow. Good night, Skate.” He turned back up the stairs, and Skate heard a door close. She turned to the fire and spoke the words. Sitting in the blue light, she knew she should go to bed, and she would, but she wanted to enjoy the flames a while longer.

  She stared into the dancing tongues as they consumed the wood, and she smiled.

  Chapter 8

  In which fried eggs are swallowed whole, a command is ignored, and a lesson begins.

  Skate woke up in the warm bed to see snow falling outside. It was not the small pellets of ice that would sting someone unfortunate enough to be caught in their path; nor was it the furious downpour of blinding white that signified a blizzard. Instead, she saw fat gentle flakes drifting lazily past her window, swirling in various directions as updrafts and downdrafts took their turns at play with the puffy-looking snow. She was glad to be indoors for the moment, though she sighed as she thought of what she needed to do for the day.

  Whichever mark she chose (she had all but decided on Gherun over Gemhide because she was not going to risk stealing from someone who might be under the care of the Ink; such a breach of contract would be disastrous), she needed to begin watching today. She only had a five-day window left to work, and she did not want to wait until the last minute.

  Skate perked up at the memory of her conversation with Belamy; they would need to discuss her learning to read today. She hopped out of bed, glad once again of the vent in the floor for the heat it funneled in.

  Before she dressed, Skate moved to the desk in the room and proudly pulled out the slate. After she set it down on the surface of the desk, she threw on her freshly laundered but irredeemably t
attered clothes and bounded down the stairs.

  To her surprise, Belamy was not at his desk. There was a plate of fried eggs and a pancake topped with some red fruit sitting in front of the fire, which was burning much as she had left it the night before, blue and crackling happily. Skate called out, first to her host and then to his chef, but heard nothing in response. With a shrug, she sat down and picked up the pancake gingerly, unsure of how warm it was going to be.

  As soon as her finger touched the food, Belamy’s voice filled the room. She dropped the pancake back onto the plate and jumped to her feet. So deep was her shock that it was several moments before she realized the voice was saying something intelligible.

  “—to my supplier to get the necessary tools. I see you’ve found Rattle’s work for the morning; enjoy that. We’ll be back soon. Stay out of trouble until then.” Belamy’s cheerful voice drifted away, and then the room was quiet once more. Skate recognized it as some form of magic message left for her. She took a deep breath to push the startled excitement out of her and returned to her seated position, retrieving the pancake.

  Skate enjoyed the warmth of the fire as she ate, moving on to the two eggs when she was done. She ate them the special way Delly had shown her earlier that very year, taking the fried egg between her fingers and placing the entire morsel in her mouth at once. “Thab ’ay you bon’t spill aby yolk on yer mug,” Delly had said, chewing happily. Skate did the same now, savoring the internal warmth as the yellow of the egg burst out of sight without any mess.