Skulduggery

by Logan Jacobs

  What happened next is very hard to describe and sound sane.

  I heard a song, not with my ears, but with my fingers. It was like the bones in my hand were being plucked like a harp, making music only I could hear. The music pulled my hand deeper into the chest, down past where the bottom surely must have been. I was up to my elbow in keys when I felt the ringing, singing, sound that wasn’t a sound, music that wasn’t music, hit a peak. Like every note I’d ever heard was ringing out all at once. I felt a key I could tell at once was very different than all the others, ice cold and burning hot at the same time.

  I pulled it out and gasped, because it felt so liquid I was sure it had somehow melted in my hand, but no. It was large, much larger than the other keys, and looked like pure gold. The teeth weren’t square like the other keys, but jutted out in unpredictable spikes, more like a living creature than anything man-made. And then, I swear on the belly my mother’s bones fester in, it spoke to me.

  Good work, bold one. We’ll have a lot of fun together.

  How was it talking to me? I had no idea, but it took me a full minute to notice the mirror was screaming.

  “Thief! Thief! That’s the thief’s key!” he yelled. “No one has ever called up that key who wasn’t a thief, a brigand, an interloper, a scoundrel, a scourge! You’ll bring a curse upon--”

  The air around me exploded into a thousand glittering shards, suspended in the air. The yelling stopped, but my ears kept ringing. Without thinking about it consciously, I plucked a shard from midair. It was thinner than glass, impossibly thin, and had its own whispery quality, although the speaker had shattered when the mirror did.

  “Did … did you kill him?” asked Dar.

  It was only then that I realized my other hand, the one holding the key, was balled up into a fist. The man in the mirror was no more, shattered into a million pieces now slowly falling to the floor like otherworldly snow.

  “Uhhh, I guess I did,” I said.

  “Shit,” Dar sighed. “I guess he deserved it, screaming like that, but what are we gonna do?”

  Suddenly, I heard heavy footsteps outside and guttural dwarvish syllables.

  The night watch.

  “We have to go,” I said as my heart jumped into my throat.

  Don’t get caught. Don’t die.

  I threw the office door open. No time to reset the lock. The jig would be up once the old dwarf walked in and saw his salesman lying in pieces on the floor anyway. The only thing to do now was to make a quick getaway.

  Dar and I ran out into the alley, and my boots and Dar’s bare feet slid sideways on the wet cobblestones as soon as we made it there. We weren’t going to get very far very fast at this rate, so I looked for hiding places, but a dead-end alley doesn’t offer much. Some murky-looking barrels, a roof-high waste pile that even in the dark I could see was teeming with rats, and a few shadowy doorways.

  I felt the key in my pocket. It was still molten hot, like my skin should be blistering and my pants should be smoking, but they weren’t. On a lark, I tried thinking at it. If it could talk to me, why couldn’t I talk to it?

  Any suggestions?

  Silence. Not even any of the bone-singing.

  The heavy footsteps got closer.

  “You there! Human!” a dwarf watchman shouted out.

  “Don’t you speak to my footman that way, grunt,” said Dar, still in character.

  I shot him a look that let him know, singing keys to the contrary, I still didn’t have any magic powers. Because if I did, his head would have exploded.

  Annoyingly, it worked. The watchman stopped dead and collected himself before he threw up the vague impression of a salute.

  “Mister hafling … sir,” he stammered.

  “It’s ‘my lord,’” Dar snapped. “And I’d love to know what you’re doing running around at all hours of the night accosting manservants.”

  Boy, he was laying it on thick. He missed his calling in the theater.

  Too thick. The dwarf was suspicious now. He took a wary step closer and looked Dar up and down.

  “Ye look like ye had a rough night, m’lord,” he said. “To be out on a night like this without any cloak, or any fine clothes … ”

  “Oh god, Dar, don’t embellish,” I whispered under my breath so the guard couldn’t hear. “Keep it simple.”

  “Funny you should mention that, dwarf,” Dar said, but I could already tell this was going to be too much. “My footman and I were just mugged, no thanks to you and your watch. We chased the scoundrel into this alley, but he disappeared into one of these filthy hovels. I suggest you overturn the lot of them, and hang anyone who would harbor a criminal such as that.”

  Yep, too much.

  “I see,” the dwarf growled. “And ye wouldn’t happen to have any kind of description of these criminals, would you?”

  I saw Dar go blank and figured it was time to take over.

  “I was the only one who got a good look at them, officer.” I advanced slowly toward him while I maintained eye contact. “They were dwarves, of course. Seven of them. They all had beards--”

  “All dwarves have beards!” the watchman huffed as he tugged on his own bristly thatch.

  “Yes, but these were especially long beards,” I clarified. “I noticed them right away. And they were dressed like gemstone miners.”

  “Miners, this far into the city?” The dwarf squinted at me. He was about to call my bluff, but it didn’t matter.

  I was close enough now.

  “I actually have a picture of one of them right here,” I said as I held out my hand, with the mirror shard hidden in my palm.

  The dwarf leaned in and squinted at my hand. “How’d ye get a--”

  “Dar, the lantern!” I shouted.

  Dar swung his lantern toward me, and a beam of light cut through the murky fog and bounced off the mirror shard I held right in front of the dwarf’s face. The magic of the mirror must have enhanced the light, because it was even brighter than I’d planned. Blue light engulfed us all, as bright as the sun for one brief instant.

  “Run!” I yelled.

  The dwarf screamed, and he was too busy clutching at his eyes to even try and stop us from running past him.

  I wasn’t sure if he’d gotten a good look at us before I attacked. It had been dark, but then, dwarves were great at seeing in the dark, so I picked up my pace. I didn’t plan to get executed by the dwarf courts before I’d had a chance to earn a much fancier execution by the elves.

  Yes, Hagan wanted me to steal elven wine, and he didn’t mind so much if I died in the attempt. Sacramental wine, no less, meant to be touched by none other than the lips of the elven night priestesses, by the light of the full moon, I imagined. There were rumors they did their rites fully nude, but I had to say what little I’d seen of elves was plenty enough for me. I couldn’t imagine the blue-white skin and weird stretched-out bones get any more enticing underneath those robes.

  After “the regrettable incident,” as the elven papers put it, had wiped my humble hamlet off the map, the high and mighty ones started to realize that ready access to alcohol, with all its rowdying-up powers and bravery-amplification, wasn’t so compatible with their governmental system of “we rule, you don’t.”

  Orcish beer, dwarven mead, halfling … I dunno, I’m going to guess some sort of white wine spritzer … and good, chest-hairifying human whiskey all got banned overnight. “You can be happy when we damn well say you can, and in the manner we approve for you,” said the elves.

  So, instead of taverns and good times, all the myriad peoples under the golden boot got gracious invitations to elf-sponsored dance festivals and poetry readings. Elegant elven housewives swarmed into our teeming ghettos and put on Programs for the Betterment of the Lesser Races, and weren’t we all just so damned grateful for it.

  Fucking pompous assholes.

  I almost got swept up by the do-gooder brigade once, parceled off into a home for wayward humans. I probably woul
d have been taught to do “Useful Work” there, like street sweeping or lamp lighting or boot licking, the things I saw most humans in the city doing. If I really truly must be grateful to Hagan for something, as he often reminded me to be, it was this.

  I never ate a piece of bread I didn’t buy honestly, and I never robbed anybody who didn’t deserve it.

  Suicide mission or no, I couldn't say the elves didn’t deserve it.

  We ran at a full sprint until we got back to the halfling side of the city. I wasn’t thrilled with Dar at the moment, but I had to admit his little legs were almost as fast as mine. We ran past the sleepy timber-framed cottages Dar’s people put up all over these parts, each of them as cozy as a picture postcard, with candles burning in each window, and cheery fires at each hearth. I saw Dar perk up, the way he always did when we were in this part of the city.

  Dar had grown up in one of these houses, and he’d taken me there for dozens of halfling holidays. There was always food, and way-too-much singing, and his relatives politely refraining from asking any follow-up questions about whatever ridiculous job Dar was pretending to have that year. Anything to avoid the truth, that after decades of education at the finest halfling schools and even a scholarship to study something deathly boring at an elven university, Dar much preferred earning his money the easy way, like I did.

  We collapsed in a horse stable and caught our breath. Despite being little more than a watering station for pack horses, it was done up in that high halfling style, as twee as the day was long. The sturdy wooden beams that held up the roof were painted red, with pink and white garlands and bouquets of flowers swirling around them, held up by bashful cherubs.

  We’d had a cherub infestation back on the farm, and I knew from hard experience they didn’t so much like flitting around with flowers as they did biting off chicken heads and attempting to haul off full-grown goats, one baby-faced little flying cretin to each leg. Dear old dad used to send me out with a rake to swat them out of the sky as soon as they crossed the fence.

  I never enjoyed visits to halfling town much. It was a trick to cram my big frame into those tiny chairs, and I didn’t appreciate getting stared at and poked and prodded by all the halfling children, each of them older than me in years but a century away from what Dar called “real maturity.”

  He didn’t need to settle down and get respectable until he was at least a hundred and fifty, Dar always said. He seemed to see those visits as an effort to civilize me, but I was as immune to comfort as Dar was to hard work.

  “How did you know the mirror would do that thing with the light?” Dar asked, and it took me a minute to remember what he was talking about.

  I shrugged. “I didn’t, exactly. I knew dwarves don’t like light. That’s why you don’t see them out in the daytime, except in their own neighborhoods, where they keep it smoky enough that they can see. You had the lamp, and I had the mirror, so I just figured we could combine them.”

  I stretched out on a pile of hay and looked up through the slats in the roof. It had been a long time since I’d seen the moon. The hay was cool and sweet-smelling, so much cleaner than my bed back at the Guild.

  “Crazy to think,” Dar murmured.

  “Hm?” I hummed. The adrenaline was wearing off, and we were both halfway to sleep.

  “I said,” Dar yawned and stretched like a cat, a sinuous move that popped all his joints at once, “it’s crazy to think this morning you’d never seen a magical artifact--”

  “You hadn’t either,” I pointed out, but Dar ignored me.

  “And here you are wielding one in battle, like a knight,” he went on.

  “I don’t know if I’d call that a battle,” I said before I trailed off myself.

  The key in my pocket was suddenly ice-cold.

  Is that what you want? it said, in its voiceless way, to be a knight?

  No, Key, I thought, I want to be a king.

  The key melted into liquid warmth again, and I felt the faintest ringing in my bones. It felt like a deal had been struck, but I wasn’t sure what my end of the bargain was.

  Chapter 2

  The sun rose bright and annoyingly early the next morning. There was some ongoing disagreement, far above my paygrade and far exceeding my interest, regarding the proper length of night and day, which resulted in sunrise times that happened pretty much at random. Elves who worshipped the sun god thought day should be longer, while elves worshipping the moon thought night should be longer, and apparently taking the sensible solution of splitting things 50/50 was something so stupid only a human would think of it.

  I never paid much attention to elf politics, but the circumstances seemed to be that every night around midnight, opposing factions of elven priestesses would hold competing rituals to see how quickly the sun rose each day. Whoever’s magic was most powerful, or gods were most attentive, got the ball. The whole debate caused trouble back on the farm and confused the hell out of our rooster, but in the city people mostly just got on with whatever they had to do at whatever time they had to do it, light or dark. The only people affected were thieves like me, and we were hardly in a position to petition the senate.

  Today, the day elves must have won, because the clock tower had scarcely struck four when the light started glinting off the gilt-topped surveillance towers arranged in rings throughout the city. Like everyone else under the boot, I hated those towers and the elves who manned them purely as a matter of principle. Get caught rousing the rabble, inciting riots, or just associating in groups larger than those prick-noses were comfortable and whoosh, one of the guards would put an arrow through your eye sooner than you could blink.

  As one of the few humans in the halfling quarter, I always felt particularly exposed when I was in sight of a tower. I never cut through the open plazas unless I was working, since I stood at least a head and shoulders taller than everybody else in this part of town. Technically, anyone could live anywhere, but elves were obsessed with order, and my presence always prompted questions I was tired of answering. Paradoxically, the law-abiding felt safest from cutpurses when they were under the shadow of a tower, which I appreciated, as it made them easier to pick off.

  Normally, I’d take advantage of the morning rush to lighten a few loads, but I still had last night’s prize burning bright in my pocket, and I figured that would be enough to shut Hagan up for at least one day.

  The Thief’s Guild made no secret of its location, as it proudly advertised its services on a brightly painted wooden sign above the main door. Like everything else about the place, it was stolen. Hagan’s predecessor liberated the sign from the old Purse and Dagger Tavern back when taverns were outlawed.

  The Murderer’s Guild down the street objected to the new sign, on the grounds that the dagger motif infringed upon their own standard, a symbol of crossed swords dripping with blood. But everyone agreed those swords looked more like butcher knives anyway. The Murderer’s Guild tried to take the whole matter to arbitration at the Guild of Guilds, but they withdrew their suit once the Guildmeister ordered them to stop killing all the lawyers.

  I could hear Hagan howling before I even crossed the street. Hagan was no early riser, so if he was up and about that meant he’d been up all night, probably counting his money and abusing any fool within earshot.

  Dar and I both hoped that, should the sacramental wine heist succeed, Hagan might sample enough of his own wares to leave the rest of us alone for a few days.

  I saw Dar waving at me frantically from a coffee shop on the corner.

  “Wade! Come quick, I got us a spot in line,” Dar called out.

  One of the few advantages of being taller than just about everyone in the neighborhood was that it was easy to cross the street, even in heavy traffic. Halflings preferred miniature horses that only came up to about chest height on me, and all it usually took was a sideways glance at an old nag for it to dig in its hooves and give me the right of way, no matter how hard its master whipped it.

  “M
ove along, you big oaf!” shouted a pug-faced halfling driving a white-roofed delivery cart from Rubert’s, the crooked apothecary shop.

  Like everyone in the neighborhood who had any better option, I avoided Rubert’s like the plague. Go in there looking for feverweed tonic, and he’d likely sell you poison fennel steeped in vinegar, and overcharge you to boot.

  “Good morning to you too, Brendel,” I said with a pointedly cheery wave. “Is your master still grinding up chalk and selling it as headache powder?”

  “Is your master still renting you out as a lamppost?” he said. “I heard you’re too shite at picking, with those big sausage fingers of yours.”

  This was a popular rumor among the halflings, and one I encouraged. There was nothing more advantageous in this world than being underestimated by a mark.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dar, who slipped through the crowd and took position behind Brendel’s cart. He blended in with the fray and waited for my signal while I pulled off my extravagant performance. We’d worked this routine out during a brief stint in highway robbery, and I hadn’t seen it fail yet.

  “You’re right, Brendel. These big old hands of mine just aren’t suited for stealth work. That’s why I’ve decided to branch out.” I unlatched the buckle on Brendel’s horse and detached it from its yoke. “I thought I might give horse thievery a try.”

  Before Brendel could protest, I got my arms underneath his small horse and slung it over my shoulder, just like I used to carry sheep back on the farm. Then I gave Brendel a noticeable wink, and Dar began working on the cart’s storage lock with wiry fingers while he hid his short frame behind the expanse of the roofed wagon.

  Brendel’s gray-speckled pony didn’t seem to mind the sudden elevation change. It flicked its tail idly and gave my hair an exploratory nibble as the crowd around us started to laugh and cheer.