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Knaves

Page 9

by Abbott, Alana Joli; Meadors, Melanie R. ;


  All was going according to plan until he turned toward the harbor down Pale Moon Avenue and soon found the street ahead all but deserted. Gods be damned. The whole block was cordoned off for a wedding celebration. Someone with more money than sense no doubt. And other than the block where revelers were hours into their cups, celebrating some idiot couple’s nuptials, the street was empty. With no traffic coming and going it left a hollow hole in the heart of the city’s nighttime activity.

  By the time he’d realized his mistake and turned back, three hooded horsemen had arrived on the street behind him. They didn’t look like they were on their way to a Pale Moon Avenue wedding reception.

  Starling didn’t wait to test their intentions. He was up the nearest drain pipe and onto the rooftops, the thieves’ highway, as fast as he could scramble. Just as he pulled himself up over the gutter onto the third story roof, a crossbow quarrel hissed past his ear, ricocheting off the slate roof and into the night. A frantic glance back toward the street revealed one of the hooded riders leveling a crossbow at him while the other cocked and reloaded. Starling rolled onto the roof and tucked up tight behind a chimney as a second bolt sliced past.

  Pulse hammering in his ears, he dashed out from behind the chimney and took off at a run, angling up a slope of the roof, dislodging tiles behind him. They clattered and clinked on their way down, pinging off the gutters to shatter in the street below. A third bolt chased him, sailing just over his head as he crested the peak of the roof and slid down the opposite side in a shower of tiles.

  He caught the gutter with his boot heel and, very much in the image of the young sneak thief he’d once been, he was up and loping down the roof edge like a billy goat on a mountain ledge. He hopped that gutter to the next and went up and over that roof top as well, leaving less of a mess in his wake as his steps became more sure and steady. He crossed three blocks down, bounding over rooftops before dropping back into the street.

  He landed in a back alley behind the Salty Dog Tavern and, without missing a beat, cut through the building by way of the kitchens. A startled barmaid gave a shout, but he was already gone and out the opposite alley before anyone could mount a response.

  The chase was exhilarating. For a brief moment, he forgot the cares of the larger matter and focused on the escape itself. The wild flight of a sneak thief caught with his hand in the till. Darting and dashing one step ahead of those who meant to string him up. He couldn’t help but grin, a manic thing, he was sure, all teeth and wild eyes.

  He got his bearings, crossed fast and light-footed over a canal on Westerly Way, and broke out onto Asher Street, a lamp lit main avenue that could carry him all the way to Bell Harbor. His wild grin became a genuine smile. Hope. A glimmer of it, that he just might make it. If anyone wanted to take him and the prize he carried now, they’d have to do it right in the middle of a gods damned public street. With carriages and theatre goers and evening revelers all in plain sight, and city guardsmen a shout away.

  Which is exactly what that great big bastard with the sneering hair lip and the two-handed cudgel meant to do, it seemed.

  Starling caught the man out of the corner of his eye just as he exploded from the darkness of a shuttered-up bakery’s doorway. The big cudgel led the way, whistling as the thug took a skull-shattering swing for Starling’s head.

  Starling ducked with an inch to spare and backpedaled frantically.

  “Thand thill, you little bathturd,” the big man snarled with a nasal lisp, bringing the cudgel around for another swing.

  “Chaipps!” Starling called out in surprise. “Right here in the fucking street? Stupid as ever, man.” His gaze darted left and right, equal parts trying to pick a vector for escape while feinting the big club-swinging lunatic with his eyes. If he dodged when he should have dashed, Chaipps would smash him to pieces.

  A woman loading up on a nearby carriage gasped in shock at the scene of sudden violence.

  “What goes there?” the driver shouted as the two men spilled into the streets, Starling dodging another pair of swings from the big brute.

  “Mind your own thucking bithness,” Chaipps snarled back, sparing a half a glance in the direction of the carriage driver.

  That was all the distraction Starling needed. He picked Chaipps’ off-hand side and bolted. By the time the big man spun back to face him, he was out of swinging range of that nasty club. The big, neckless thug would never catch him in a foot race.

  Out of swinging distance, yes. Out of throwing distance, no.

  Starling made it five fleeting steps before the flying cudgel caught him in the shoulder blade, heaving him from his feet with a stunning impact. He wheeled and found himself on the cobbles, gasping for breath, stars darting and flickering across his field of view. The saddle bag of coins came crashing down alongside him with a metallic jingle.

  Chaipps was coming, fast, a big knife clutched in his even bigger fist.

  Still trying to sort out up from down, Starling shook Maeda’s dagger from his sleeve and gave it a desperate sidearm fling from flat on his back. The blade gave a single turn, slicing across the dark, before burying with a satisfying chunk into Chaipps‘ thigh.

  The big man howled and hobbled.

  It bought Startling the second he needed to shove drunkenly to his feet, scoop up the saddle bag, and take off in a weaving, weak-kneed run. Chaipps hurled his own knife in return, but his throw was artless, and the knife clattered off down the street, wide of its mark.

  “You’re a dead man, Tharling!” Chaipps shouted, clutching at his wounded thigh. “I’m gonna be wearing your ballth round my neck come daybreak! You hear me?”

  Starling heard him, and he believed him. So he kept running.

  Somewhere behind him the carriage driver was calling out for the guard. That was bad, especially with Chaipps back there howling and causing a ruckus. No way he’d slip past alerted guardsmen now with a sly distraction or excuse. They’d stop him on principle, being the man running away from a knifing and all.

  Shit, shit, shit he thought desperately, his momentary good humor at the thrill of the chase gone. Dried up. Evaporated. Starling heard the clatter of approaching hooves and imagined either angry guardsmen or the hooded crossbowmen who’d tried to perforate him earlier.

  Sheer desperation drove him down the nearest alley, his plan for safety in plain sight gone to hell.

  He yelped and nearly struck a boy when the little waif child caught hold of his sleeve. “Hands off, lad!” His heartbeat clicked in his clenching throat in time to the pounding pain his shoulder.

  The little boy stared up at him with a narrow, dirty face, apparently unconcerned by his gasp of alarm. He held out a single red poppy with a nod back down the alley. “The lady says that way.”

  A red poppy. Sadene tossed red poppies to the lust-struck boys and girls in the crowd when she danced. He’d introduced himself to her by returning one she’d tossed his way. Once upon a summer eve in what felt like a forgotten dream.

  Starling blinked and tried to imagine every possible scenario compressed in the time between two startled breaths. Then he snatched the flower from the little boy’s hand and took off down the alley.

  “Josiah,” a woman’s lyrical voice whispered from a darkened doorway ahead.

  He saw her then, leaning into the alley, waving him on.

  Sadene.

  He didn’t hesitate, didn’t question his good fortune. He dashed for the door and hurried inside as she shoved it closed behind them.

  And there she was, her face alight with a relieved smile, a lover’s joy. Beautiful as ever with pair of red poppies clutched in her hand. She tossed the remaining flowers aside and buried him in a joyful kiss.

  “I thought you disappeared,” Starling whispered against her lips. “I thought you were gone.”

  Sadene pulled away, a wounded look in her eye. “You think I would abandon you?”

  He swallowed the lump in his throat, unsure what to say.

  “S
koren has us,” she said. “And your name and my name are on the lips of every killer in the city. We have to go, Josiah. We have to go now.”

  “I know,” Starling replied. “But how will we—”

  “I have a boat for us,” Sadene said. “We must go. Now.”

  “How did you find me?” Starling asked.

  Sadene pulled at his hand and led him toward a cellar door. “I’ll explain once we’re safe. Come on. Let’s go.”

  For a moment he hesitated, his old rogue’s instincts crying a warning. But, as with every warning related to Sadene, he ignored them, and as he’d done since the day they’d met, he followed her off into the dark.

  THEY WAITED FOR the tide in a sewer junction-made-safehouse under Chandler Street near Bell Harbor. Shady men he didn’t know came and went in the dank, candlelit gloom, apparently in service to Sadene. He had a thousand questions and chose to save most of them for the boat. There’d be time for that, he figured. Now, he was simply grateful to be alive. Grateful to be on his way out of the damnable city.

  And grateful to be with Sadene.

  He bristled at the way she touched one of the men’s arms, a handsome dark-skinned rogue she called Daeglin. Something in that single touch lit a fire under his jealousy. Daeglin’s knowing grin at having spotted his unease stoked the flames. That was the smirk of a man who had a certain knowledge of a woman. Something else Starling set aside for the time being with plans to settle on the boat.

  Daeglin left them with a half empty bottle of wine and a couple of dented tin cups. “A quarter hour,” the man said, setting the bottle down on the ledge beside Sadene. “Then we sail.” He departed down the grimy passage into dark.

  “I take it he’s coming with us when we sail out of here?” Starling asked.

  “He is,” Sadene said as she uncorked the bottle of wine and poured them each a cup.

  “What’s he to you?” Starling asked.

  “Loyal,” Sadene replied, handing him a cup. Then she smiled, nodding toward the wine. “A Glossler Fina.”

  Starling laughed. The very same fine wine he’d offered her on the night they met, pilfered from the personal stock of a fur and timber baron no less. He wondered where she’d stolen this bottle from. He raised his dented tin cup with a conciliatory nod and took a long swallow.

  “Where are we sailing to, Sadene?” he asked. The wine’s finery had dulled to a sour undertone, clearly having sat open too long. There was a petty part of him that wondered if Sadene and that smirking bastard Daeglin had been the ones to polish off the first half.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I suppose it doesn’t.” Starling licked his lips, the tart, dry wine tingling in his throat. “We both know I’m going to ask, so I might as well ask now. Where’s money?”

  “I’ve got it,” Sadene assured him with a pretty smile. Then she tapped the pointed toe of her shoe against the saddle bags under his boot. “Well, almost all of it anyway. I assume that’s Skoren’s prize, then?”

  Starling nodded. His lips had gone numb.

  “All of it?” Sadene asked.

  Again, Starling nodded. Cottony confusion began to set in. The first cramp knotted up in the bottom of his stomach. He touched fingers to his numb lips and stared back at her in mute shock. By the time he realized Sadene had never touched her own cup, the edges of the room were already growing dark.

  He dropped the dagger from his sleeve with a snarl, but his wooden fingers fumbled it and it clattered to the grimy stone underfoot.

  “Oh, I’m afraid that won’t do you any good,” Sadene said, rising from her seat on the ledge and wiping her hands clean on the hem of her vest.

  Another wave of gut cramps sent Starling to the floor beside his dagger.

  “What are you doing?” he gasped as the tunnel began to spin in the pale candlelight.

  “What I do best, Josiah,” Sadene replied. “How did you really think this was going to end?”

  With the two of them sailing away to somewhere better than this to spend their ill-gotten gains, naked and drowning in wine. That’s what he’d thought. “Why?” Starling gasped, the scent of blood and bile and rotten stomach filling his nose.

  “Loose ends,” Sadene explained. “Ill fortune just flocks to you, Josiah Starling. Like crows to carrion. You told me that yourself. The curse of your whole life. I have enough luggage, love, without taking you on.”

  Starling choked and sputtered and reached out for her foot, his fingertips brushing her shoe. But she paid him no more mind. She stepped past where he lay and retrieved the saddle bag of coins. Then she turned and started off down the tunnel the way Daeglin had gone.

  He croaked, groping for words, and none came. What was he going to do? Gasp out about love? About betrayal? That’s all he and Sadene really were. Betrayal of one flavor or another. Means to different ends, and she was taking what she wanted most. How had he thought all this would end?

  In the painful dark, creeping like thorny vines into the edges of his mind, Josiah Starling remembered Maeda’s words. I don’t want Skoren’s money. Skoren just knows things. Sees things. No one even asks what sort of evil he does in the back rooms of his gambling halls. How do you think he caught onto you? Don’t you leave a single penny of Skoren’s money here.

  Starling gurgled, a ragged bloody chuckle that stopped Sadene in her tracks.

  She turned back and glared down at him where he lay curled up around his rotting belly, dying. “What could you possibly be laughing at, you simple bastard?”

  Don’t you leave a single penny of Skoren’s money here. Skoren just knows things. Sees things.

  Starling had no doubt, as candlelit vision faded to black and everything became pain, that Skoren would find his lost gold. Every last penny.

  See you in hell, love, he thought. We’ll square up there.

  Sadene stalked away then, leaving Josiah Starling alone in the dark. Choking on his own blood. Spending his last few agonizing breaths on drowning, hopeless laughter.

  CAT SECRET WEAPON #1

  Walidah Imarisha

  THERE ARE EVIL scientists, and then there are evil scientists. And this kid just isn’t going to cut it. I’ve sat in the laps of some of the evilest of them all, so I know.

  Do you ever wonder what happens to the cat when the villain dies? Probably not. Humans are usually so busy rooting for the “good guy,” they forget about the little ball of fuzz the villain pets while revealing their nefarious plans.

  Well, once our villain expires, we get shipped back to the pound. I’ve been in and out so many times, I’ve lost track. Invariably I always get adopted by the same kind of person: namely, someone bent on world domination and/or destruction. Perhaps it’s my flat face and unblinking eyes—I mean, most cats have them, but I’ve been told I look exceptionally superior and disdainful, even to other cats. Not that I’ve spent much time speaking with other cats; they’re all beneath me.

  How is it possible the only people who adopt me are evil, you ask? First, you’d find yourself quite surprised what percentage of the population has devised plans to take over the world.

  But second, there is an animal shelter right across the street from the headquarters of the Organization of Evil Villains (yes, the redundancy is annoying, but no one ever listens to the quadruped). OEV is the association for villains—in fact, to put a diabolical plan into action, you have to be sanctioned by OEV. If not, their retrieval teams come to… retrieve you. You do not want to be retrieved by OEV.

  So usually my new owner is an established villain who has already gotten approval for their next plan to bring the world to its knees. Often, their last feline died in a freak nuclear explosion (cats are curious creatures—if you leave the door open to an atomic reactor, you have to expect that will happen now and again). They come into the shelter to pick up a new fuzzy lap accessory before their ultimatum call to the UN.

  You may ask, why do so many villains have a cat? I mean cats can be somewhat selfish and other t
hings (I’ve never listened beyond the first adjective), but they are still adorable fluffy balls of fur (at least before the claws extend). Wouldn’t a Doberman or a Rottweiler complete the tableau more menacingly?

  Ah, but you forget about ironic juxtaposition. What is more jarring than holding the button to blow up the entire world in one hand, and petting a purring cat with the other? Clearly, if this scoundrel can be so cavalier while controlling the future of the human species, they did not come to play. Even if there is a ball of yarn in the corner.

  Hence, the need for a cat. In fact, Regulation 14A.5, set forth by OEV, states you must have a cat in all videos, broadcasts, photographs, video conferencing, oil paintings (don’t ask) and any other forms of visual communication when you issue your ultimatum.

  But even beyond the bureaucratic requirements, having a cat is more important to a villain than having nuclear weapons. The evil scientist would be nothing without the cat. In fact, you know the first villain’s laugh? That cackle they always do in the middle of sharing their evil plans with the world, usually followed by some evil finger motions? Villain cat lore tells us that the first one was nothing of the kind. It was a villain covering a scream of pain as cat claws punctured flesh, conveying (quite effectively) that said cat was hungry.

  In summary, having the right cat is vital.

  There are typically two kinds of evildoers who come into the shelter—the seasoned villain with years of diabolical scheming under his belt, and the plucky upstart trying to prove himself to the world. As they bring me out this morning to the adoption area, it only takes a moment to deduce I am staring at the second.

  A young Black teen stands awkwardly. He is tall and gangly in that way teenage humans have, seeming to have more limbs with many more joints than anatomically possible. He paces the small space back and forth in high top sneakers. Every few minutes he pats his high top fade, which stands like an impressive hair monument eight inches off his head.

 

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