Bloodhound

by Tamora Pierce

  Pearl looked at the mot. "Do you think my arm stretches into Guards House?"

  "Does it not?" the mot asked.

  Pearl's face went hard. Her eyes were cold. The mot realized she maybe went too far and covered her mouth with her hand.

  "Did you know about this?" Dale asked me.

  He was staring down at Pearl. That made it so much easier for me to say, "No." It even made it easy for me to ask boldly, "Did you?"

  "Don't be a looby." He still watched Pearl. "Me, a cole-monger? Before the Crown got me, the guild would administer its own punishments."

  "Not if you escaped beforehand." I kept my voice soft. Only Dale heard me. "You could switch false coin for good and hide the good everywhere you travel. Lose bad coin at play, even."

  He didn't answer me. His eyes were still fixed on Pearl. Suddenly he muttered, "Trickster curse her, she's going to let them rot. Her friends, and she'll leave them for torture! I have to get to the bank before they finish for the day." He gave me a swift kiss and stood. "Come to my place once it's dark," he ordered me. "I'll tell the landlord to open my rooms for you." He strode off, headed down the stairs.

  I don't believe he's part of it. I think he means to buy good treatment from the cage Dogs for Hanse, or to get an advocate for him. That's the act of a friend, not a conspirator.

  Pearl looked at the pregnant mot. "It'll take me some thinkin', to decide what to do," the Rogue said at last. "You leave it to me. Now go." She turned and beckoned to Zolaika. They put their heads together, with Pearl shielding their mouths with her hand so any who could read lips wouldn't know what was said. From the way the air around them rippled, I'm positive that part of the hall is shielded by magic, too. If Pearl can afford pearl teeth, she can afford magical protections.

  No one spoke as the mot left the hall. Pearl finished her private talk and sent Zolaika away. Once the older woman was gone, Pearl made some manner of joke to Jurji, who laughed.

  "What's going through these Rats' heads?" I whispered to Achoo. She was on her feet, whining a little. She needed to go outside. "If I was one of them, I'd ask myself how far Pearl would reach for me, if she turns cold for good friends like Hanse and Steen."

  I slung my pack over my shoulders. "Achoo, tumit."

  We went outside, using the way we'd come in. Three small clusters of Rats stood near the door. One was the guards, but the others wanted to talk. Flory was there with two of her mots. Everyone went silent as I led Achoo to the gutter she needed.

  When Achoo finished, Flory asked, "Where's Goodwin?"

  I shrugged. "Off on her own business. May I ask sommat? The mot with all the face paint, that fetched me and Goodwin for Pearl – Zolaika, right? What does she do here?"

  Flory and her friends made the Sign. Flory drew me in close. "Zolaika is Pearl's own private killer," Flory whispered. "The knife you never see comin'. Don't ever ask about her again."

  So Okha was right. I didn't like how Pearl had sent Zolaika off after the news had come on Hanse and Steen. Seeing the tremble in Flory's hands, I don't think she liked it, either.

  Flory turned her back on me to talk with her friends. The others did the same. Achoo and I took the hint and went back up to our table in the gallery. The atmosphere at the court had changed. Sullen voices drifted on the air. Folk watched Pearl from the corners of their eyes. She was having supper placed before her on a little table. From abve above I watched convresa conversations turn to arguemits arguments. Pearl's rushers broke up a dice game when the players started to punch each other. And I could heer bits of talk abut about stores, coles, and pryces.

  I think I mst halt for a time. I've dun done a fearful abont amount of writing. Even in syfer I've writ a lot of pages. Ill write more of yesstrday yesterday, night, after a nap.

  Wednesday, September 19, 247

  Okha's dressing room, Waterlily gambling house

  Ten of the clock.

  Back I come to the tale, the better for rest. My fingers quiver on my pen. Too much is stirring in the city, and I have work to do.

  I am shocked at the mistakes in my writing from earlier this night. Lady Teodorie would switch my hands for certain, did she see my cross-outs and blotches. Lucky for me she goes nowhere near my journal now! Not that she would venture into the snug hiding spot Okha has given me, in this secret room in the Waterlily. Seemingly the folk who work here have hidden fugitives before now. This place is made comfortable, with blankets, pillows, small tables, and even a chamber pot. There is a door that takes me onto the flat roof over the kitchens, with an easy jump to nearby roofs for escape, or down inside the house walls and out a hidden door. That's not an easy climb with Achoo on my back in a sling, but it can be done at need.

  But I need to continue last night's story, before it begins to fade in my memory. I will have to tell it again later, before a magistrate.

  After Dale left, time ticked by. In the line for the privy, mots and coves alike talked of higher prices in soft, scared voices. My Dog's uniform never made them blink. Once Day Watch ended, more Dogs had arrived. By Mithros, things were slack here, when Dogs came in numbers to the Court of the Rogue!

  From the talk I learned Dale feared more for Hanse and Steen than these Rats. And Pearl didn't utter their names once after the pregnant mot had gone. Moreover, Zolaika never returned.

  By the time the city clocks struck the seventh hour, I was talking Corus fashions with two mots who'd come upstairs for a quiet drink. I was thinking it was time – and near dark enough – to find Okha when we heard noise below.

  Pearl began to shriek. "What? She told that pukin' Sir Lionel I was what?"

  I looked downstairs. Ives stood on Pearl's dais, next to her chair. Torcall and Jurji watched him, relaxed, as if Ives stood there often. Enno waited on the floor in front of the dais. Ives was talking softly to Pearl, jabbing his finger at the floor.

  My tripes clenched. Axman had said he didn't know how long he'd be able to keep those two hobbled. The only safety he could guarantee me was that Ives would never tell Sir Lionel that I'd escaped him. I guess Axman hadn't known that Ives and Enno were on speaking terms with Pearl.

  Pearl shoved Ives into Enno. "You mewling, gut-griping canker blossom! While you've fumbled your day down the sewer, she's been here, eating my food and drinking my ale!" She pointed up at the gallery. At me.

  I seized my pack. "Time to go," I told my new friends. I'd been wise enough to sit at the outside of the table. Now I sprang for the long hall behind the gallery, Achoo on my heels. My gossips hadn't even worked out that Pearl meant me before I was out of their reach.

  I thrust aside a cove leaving a private room with his clothes all mussed. He was trying to keep his feet when Achoo struck his knees and down he went. The hound and I kept running, no one chasing yet. Down the hall we turned right. If Okha's map was true, this corridor would lead us to a way out. Pearl wouldn't expect me to know where I was going.

  I'd almost reached the turn when a hole opened in the ceiling. A ladder dropped down with a skinny gixie on one of the rungs. I didn't know her, but the faded, stained red dress had a familiar look to it.

  "Not that way!" she said, beckoning. "She'll have some'un on the doors! This way, quick! Up yez go!"

  I might have argued, but I could hear the yells of pursuers. That settled the issue for me. I ducked under Achoo and stood with her thirty-odd pounds draped over my shoulders. Up the ladder we went, as I prayed it would hold our weight. The gixie scrambled up and out of our way as I hoisted us onto the ceiling. Good old Achoo never made a sound. Someone else in the ceiling yanked the ladder up after me. Quick as lightning the two young ones, my tracker from the streets and her friend, closed the trapdoor to the hall below. I bent down flat until Achoo could scramble away from me.

  By lantern light I could see both young Rats had their forefingers to their lips. I cuddled Achoo and whispered, "Diamlah," in her ear. She made not a sound. Then we waited, knee to knee in a crawl space just high enough for us to sit up in
, and so narrow that no two of us could move through it side by side. A lantern set between the lad and gixie was our light.

  At least three groups of searchers passed beneath us and two over us. They made so much noise that I was surprised they didn't shake loose every mouse in the building. I looked around, marveling at our hideout. Was it here when the Rats moved in, or was it added when the Rats made it a court? It would be useful to a Rogue, but seemingly this Rogue knew nothing about it.

  At long last things got quiet.

  "She done give up," the lad said with a grim smile. "Inside the court, anyways. No more patience than my lil' sister. Ye'd think the Rogue could do better'n a gixie of two."

  "Hesh yer gob." My tracker slapped him with the back of her hand. "Don't go temptin' the Trickster. Could be the one time Pearl maybe uses her nob an' tries a new search inside."

  "Nah, not her," the lad said. "If any o' her enemies marked how she does things, she'd be bottom up in the harbor by now."

  "Maybe you should challenge her," I said, if only to remind them I was still there. "You seem to know her weaknesses."

  They both flinched and looked at me. They hadn't expected me to have any thoughts on the matter.

  "You need to worrit about yer own doin's," the gixie told me. "Don't think ye'll have me around to save yer breeches every time, Doggie. I'm not bought for a couple wormy apples and a coin or two."

  "I wasn't trying to buy you," I said. "I've been hungry. I don't like to see a person starve if I might give 'em sommat."

  "Well – good," the gixie said. "If Pearl thought we done this, we'd be breathin' out neck holes."

  "Save she won't think it," the lad replied, "a'cos she's too frighted that her silver-freightin' boys will talk when they're questioned."

  "So you know about that," I said.

  The boy raised his eyebrows at me. "Don't we know every-thin' as goes around here?" he asked.

  I looked at him, thinking. "That's braggart's talk," I told him. "All steam." I'd fallen into cant again, grateful that street cant in Corus was the same as in Port Caynn. They relaxed a little, probably without even thinking about it.

  "Says you," the gixie told me. "We knows where the storerooms are, them that's got all the extry clothes and shoes, and them that's supposed to be loaded with grain against the winter. On'y those're half full."

  "Don't say that!" the lad scolded. "Look a' her, she's a Dog!"

  "Ask me if I care about your poxy stores," I said. I dug in my pack and pulled out a Viviano apple. I held it up. Their eyes locked on it. "Come winter, I'll be snugged up warm whilst yez grub for scraps. You'd yet have a grain o' chance to buy up food if yez told others about them storerooms." I handed the apple to the gixie, then found the other in my pack and gave it to the lad.

  "Nobody lissens t' the likes of us," the gixie said before she bit her apple.

  "Mayhap yez didn't tug the arm of the right person," I answered. "Fair Flory, now – she'd hear anything you cared to tell her."

  They looked at each other. At last the lad said, "We done lived this long doin' as we're told and keepin' our gobs shut."

  I nodded and found a meat pie I'd tucked away, wrapped in a cloth. It was only a day old, still fit to be eaten. "Sometimes that works, sure enough," I said. "Most times it'll bring you an' yer sister to Starvation Alley, with the gulls waitin' to eat yer eyes."

  "What is it?" the boy whispered finally. "Ye're wantin' somethin'."

  I set the pie in front of me, taking off the cloth wrap. They were devouring the apples, but their eyes were fixed on my meat pie. I tried to remember how many times a week I had meat, before I moved to Lord Gershom's house. It wasn't often, for certain. And the meat in this pie hadn't been stewing in a pile of garbage for days.

  I reached into my purse and set five copper nobles on one side of the pie, and five on the other side of it.

  "Somewhere Pearl's got silver. I don't mean a handful of coin," I told them. "Bars of it. Heaps of coins. Tools for working it, and mayhap even a smith's forge. I'll wager you two know where that is. There's more coin than this if you show me where that silver is. I don't know your names, so I can't give you up if I'm caught. And if I know where Pearl's silver is, I can help ruin her. There are better Rogues than her. Rogues that will feed their people in hard times. Rogues that won't set a body to trailing someone like me all day without so much as a decent meal for it."

  We sat there for a long, long time in silence. Achoo took a nap. I was starting to think they would turn me down and I should just go find Okha when the gixie broke the meat pie in two. She gave the lad half and kept the rest for herself. "Pearl beat me her own self those times I lost you," she said. She half turned toward me and lowered the collar of her too-large dress so I could see the edges of the whip marks. "She beat Elzie a'cos you caught her filchin' that purse, even though Elzie got away and switched the purses. I'm sick o' her fartin' Majesty."

  The lad turned his share of the pie over in his hands. "'Stead o' grain and oil, she's been spendin' the court's money on them fool teeth o' her'n. She ain't keepin' her siller for our folk, that's certain. We'll show ye."

  I slid the coppers over to each of them. "If you can, there's more than double this price in it," I told them.

  "But how can ye do anythin'?" the lad asked me. "Ye're on yer ownsome."

  I smiled at him. "I'm inventive," I said. "And I've got friends."

  The lad flinched and made the Sign against evil on his chest. "Ghost eyes," he whispered.

  I made a face. "Never you mind my eyes." Dale likes them, I thought. "Eat up, and let's get moving," I ordered. "Unless it's here?"

  The gixie shook her head. "The stuff's at Eagle Street court, and well hid. We'll go underground. Ye don't belong to the Rogue, so they'll not look for ye in th' sewers."

  Then I had a very good thought. "Does Pearl have a room here? Where she sleeps, mayhap leaves some clothes?"

  "She don't live at her courts," the lad said. "Too open, like. Too many strangers in and out."

  My spirits fell.

  "But she has a room for other things," he added. Both of them smirked. "She's got clothes there."

  "She knows none o' these folk have the sack t' take 'em," said the gixie.

  "Could we get into it?" I asked. "Now?" I set four more copper nobles on the floor.

  The gixie scooped them up and handed them to the lad. "Just a ways back here. Start crawlin'. I'll tell yez when t' stop."

  "Achoo, tunggu," I ordered. I didn't like to leave her – I certainly couldn't trust these two as I could Goodwin or Nestor – but I needed some of Pearl's clothes, and I needed to move fast. I stripped off my boots. Even when I crawled, my leather-shod toes would make more of a noise than would my toes covered by my stockings. I tied them together with my bootlaces and left them with Achoo. Praying that I did the right thing, I crawled until the gixie, who was right behind me, told me to stop. I was beside a trapdoor.

  "Listen close," she whispered. "If you hear nothin', open 'er up."

  The ladder let me straight down into Pearl's dressing room. Quick I went to the door and peered into the room beyond. It was empty. I could see magical letters written all around the edges of the door and the lock. It seemed Pearl thought that was protection enough for this place.

  Both rooms were pigsties. Aunt Mya would have set Pearl to scrubbing floors for the condition of them. I was grateful for Pearl's habits. All those clothes heaped together were a stew of Pearl's scent. In a pile of what must be laundry I found, and took, two well-used breast bands and a pair of equally used loincloths. With my prizes in hand, I did not linger. I stuffed them into my pack and scrambled back up the ladder. The gixie and I returned to Achoo and the lad.

  "What was that for?" he asked.

  "She stole Pearlie's underclothes," the gixie said with a grin.

  "Ye're livin' a dangerous life," the lad told me. "Are ye workin' a magic with them, then? It's the headsman if ye get caught with that, y' know."
/>   "You're teaching law to a Dog? Never you mind what I need those things for," I said. "I'm guessing this passage wasn't something Pearl added?" I hung my boots around my neck.

  The gixie shook her head. "None o' them knows about these."

  "Then how do you know about 'em?" I asked.

  The look that both of them gave me said I would never find out from them.

  The lad took the lantern and guided us, crawling with it in one hand, stopping often to listen for footsteps and voices. Carefully we moved in that gap between the second and third stories, passing through the main building and into the next. At last the boy opened a door and stepped outside. I smelled wet earth and muck. He motioned for us to hurry through. We stood on a narrow stairway that led down the outside of a house on a side street, past the ground floor and into a cellar passage. No one was nearby to see us as we hurried down the splintered stair with only the small lantern to show the way. At the bottom the lad passed the lantern to the gixie. Then he worked the lock on the cellar door with some picks and let us pass through.

  "I'll meet yez on Eagle Street," he told us. "I need t' make sure it's clear when yez come through there." He closed the door. I heard the clack as he locked us inside.

  The gixie held up the small lantern so we could see the doorway cat-corner from us in the cellar wall. A cold breeze came from it. "Through that an' down the stairs," she told me.

  "You trust your friend?" I asked.

  "More'n I trust you," she replied. "Let's go, afore some'un finds us here."

  "Wait," I said, hurrying to put my boots on.

  "If ye went barefoot, ye wouldn't spend so much time on yer feet," she said. She spat on the floor.

  Achoo and I followed the gixie across the cellar and through a new doorway. Beyond this one lay a number of uneven stone steps that led down into the chilly breeze. As we descended, I felt the earth rise higher and higher over my head. I did not like it. I miss the free movement of the wind and the sounds of birds. I feel as if I lose some part of my hearing in these damp places.