Skulduggery

by Logan Jacobs

  She stared at me and ran her tongue over her pearly white teeth, but I met her gaze, and she snapped her head away.

  “Hmm,” Hagan grumbled. “You know I don’t like it when you run jobs on out-of-towners. Too many unpredictable elements.”

  “Please, what am I, an amateur?” Penny scoffed. “I left them at that clip joint on Wainright street. By the time they notice their purses are gone, they’ll think the whores there did it.”

  “Oh, so they didn’t get their cut?” Hagan asked. “Now you’re making trouble with them girls, trying to hurt my discount?”

  Penny scooped up a handful of coins from the pile. As a “specialist,” she got a bigger cut of her proceeds than Dar or I did, a fact she was always happy to point out.

  “Stop micromanaging me,” she said with a swish of her skirts. Then she slinked out of the courtyard, off to do whatever she did with her free time.

  Strong stomach, that girl.

  Hagan looked like he was about to start in on me again, but Dar headed him off at the pass.

  “Say, boss, how’s about you and me heat up this coffee, go up to your office, and go over the plan again. I wanna make sure everything’s exactly the way you say it should be.” Dar clapped Hagan on the shoulder and handed him the urn of coffee.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Hagan. “It’s good to have somebody with brains around this place.”

  He sniffed at me, then heaved himself up on his short little legs and staggered upstairs, with Dar close behind.

  Dar shot me a reassuring smile, and I nodded back. That should buy me at least a few hours of peace.

  I walked outside and took the key out of my pocket again, and then I watched it sparkle in the sunlight.

  It really is my neck on the line if this doesn’t work, I thought.

  The key didn’t answer, but I felt a prickle at the back of my neck.

  Yeah, that’s the spot I’d like to keep in one piece, key.

  It remained inert, not even hot like it usually was. I was starting to wonder if I really was crazy.

  “Taking up antique collecting?” Penny asked from somewhere behind me. She sounded like she was just on the edge of laughter. She always did when we were alone.

  “And you have a new hobby too, apparently,” I countered. “Picking up men at the city gates? You could probably keep all your money if you let them pay you for it.”

  Penny moved to slap me, but I was too quick for her. I gathered up both of her slender wrists in one hand and pulled her close to me. I enjoyed the heat of her skin, hotter even than the windless summer air around us. She always smelled like some strange flower, nothing I’d ever found anywhere in the city.

  She glared at me. “Like I’d ever let some country trash touch me.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “Does that include me? I’m a country boy.”

  “I just let them lie to themselves, same as you,” she answered, but her eyes focused on my lips.

  “Not entirely the same,” I laughed. “Also, you didn’t answer me.”

  “Ya already know that answer.” She struggled to free her hands, and I relaxed my grip just enough to let her break loose.

  You could catch a tiger by the tail, but the wise man knows not to hold onto it for too long.

  “I don’t think your methods would work for me,” I said.

  “That’s because you’re not pretty enough,” she teased.

  “But there seem to be plenty of men stupid enough to think you’d give them the time of day,” I replied.

  She smiled and didn’t deny it. “Stupid men don’t deserve their money.”

  Then Penny swished her skirts and moved to leave, but I caught her by the hand again with the key pressed between us, searing hot. She gasped.

  “Good thing I’m not stupid,” I said.

  She pulled away and stared at the key as if she was seeing it for the first time. I gave her hand a gentle squeeze, and she gazed up into my eyes, more serious than I’d ever seen her.

  “Magic?” she whispered.

  “Aye,” I answered with a wink.

  “You should get rid of--”

  “Naw,” I interrupted.

  “There are worse things than stupid,” Penny sighed.

  “Dangerous?” I offered, and that made her laugh.

  “I’m sure you’d like to think so,” she muttered, and then her pretty eyes searched mine for a few moments before she turned to go.

  I watched her walk away and thanked all the gods of all the realms that at least I got that little bit of goodness in my day. The key still burned hot in my hand, so I held it up to the sun again. Other than Penny’s face, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was hard to believe something so finely crafted was any kind of tool, even a magical one.

  Beauty is its own magic, thief.

  I stole a last glance at Penny, a vain hope to catch her turning back to look at me, but her red hair just shone in the sunlight as she walked out into the street, brilliant among the browns and grays of city life. Then the crimson hue of her hair seemed to color the air itself as the golden light of early morning melted into burnished copper.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked again. I wasn’t just being poetic. The air really was an unusual color for this time of day. It was almost like--

  Night came crashing down suddenly, burning through all the colors of dusk and sunset in less than a minute. Startled birds took flight, and all around the city animals and people cried out in fear. The key I held, which only moments ago had been ablaze with sunlight, now reflected only the stars.

  Did you do that? I asked the key, but it kept its secrets.

  Chapter 3

  Thieves are good at navigating in the dark.

  I reached out a hand and found the fountain, which I knew was in the exact center of the courtyard. I took off my shoes so I could feel the flagstones beneath my feet, and the edges between them. They were imported sandstone left over from an ancient and grander building that once stood on the site of the Guild. When I was training, I’d played this very game with a blindfold and Hagan bellowing at me every time I made noise as I counted the steps it took to cross from the fountain to the courtyard entrance. I still had a blind map of the whole Guild burned into my mind.

  The flagstones were still hot from the summer sun that had been high above my head just moments ago, and I smelled breakfast burning somewhere among the crowded tenements. A whole morning interrupted.

  Let’s see, it used to be three steps wide, so now it should be… yes. One stride per stone, so twenty-one steps to the storehouse. Old habit fought my instincts to hold my arms out in front of me. Thieves don’t walk that way in the dark. Too easy to knock something over and alert the whole world to your presence.

  There was no moonlight, but my eyes had adjusted just enough to the darkness so I could see the deeper blackness that was the doorway to our windowless storeroom. Then I felt along the wall until I found the old torch that had been mounted there as long as I’d been alive. It still stank of peat and tar, but the old braided straw that made up the handle was powdery and brittle. If I lit the torch, the whole thing might go up in flames.

  I walked back to the well and felt around until I found the bucket, which luckily was still half-full. I grabbed the torch by its sticky end and dunked the rest in water with a prayer that the whole thing wouldn’t dissolve into some kind of brimstone tea. Soaking the straw in water ought to buy me at least a little time before the whole thing burned down to my hands. Enough time, I hoped, to find Penny somewhere out in the fray.

  Then I grabbed the strikestone from my pocket and lit the torch.

  It caught the spark hungrily, and red flames engulfed the tar the torch was dipped in for just that purpose. Once that burned through, the ball of peat underneath it would be hot enough to provide a long-burning, smoldering glow that wasn’t as bright as fire, but was damn near impossible to put out. It may not have been as convenient as modern lanterns, but it would do.
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  I stepped through the gate and almost got knocked flat on my back by a torrent of terrorized pack animals that stampeded down the street. Oxen, cart-horses, camels, and something that, in the dim light, looked like some kind of miniature elephant mindlessly thundered down the street in both directions, while pedestrians clung to each other in clumps, stuck as motionless islands the rivers of pack animals coursed around. None of them knew where they were going, but they aimed to get there as fast as possible.

  The air reeked of panic-sweat and horseflesh. Despite the darkness, the air hadn’t yet begun to cool, so the street was as hot and as dark as an oven.

  I wiped the sweat off my brow and let my eyes adjust. Pinpricks of light dotted my vision like wobbly stars, and I realized it was other citizens who had been lucky enough to have a lantern or torch handy when the sun fell out of the sky. Light leaked through the shutters of the upstairs apartment across the street, but it still wasn’t enough to see by.

  I climbed a nearby lamppost, lit it with my torch, and the basket-sized ball of peat went up with a gust of flame that almost cost me one of my eyebrows. Then I took a moment to survey the street from the high vantage point. No sign of Penny, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t out there somewhere, but I was easily the most visible thing in the street, so if Penny could see me, I knew she’d fight her way to me as soon as she could.

  “Hey! Hey Wade! A little help?”

  I squinted through the darkness to see a scrawny figure valiantly clinging to the lamppost across the street.

  “Who’s that?” I called out.

  “Wilimar!” he said, and his tiny voice was barely audible over the din. “Wilimar Bindle!”

  I sighed. Wilimar was one of the neighborhood troublemakers, although he might insist he was just a trouble-finder. He would be about eight in human years, so maybe forty or so in reality, and he and his gang of halfling alley pups loved to loiter near the Guilds, always hopeful for a chance to earn a few pennies hiding emptied purses for us thieves or distributing pamphlets for the Confidence Men’s Guild. Wilimar had once tried to get me to believe the Murderer’s Guild paid him half a silver every week to mop out the basement where they cut up bodies to make for easier disposal. The boy still screamed every time he saw a rat, so I had my doubts about the truth to his tales.

  “Wilimar Bindle,” I shouted. “I know good and well your mother signed you up for schooling last month, so what, by the boot’s hobnailed heel, are you doing up there?”

  “There’s no school at night!” Wilimar shouted back as indignant as his chirpy little voice could manage to be.

  I decided not to waste any time arguing about how night had only just shown up a few minutes ago as I thought about what to do. The stampede showed no signs of stopping, and the horns of an angry bull would run Wilimar’s little body right through.

  “There’s a balcony right above you,” I called out. “Can you reach it?”

  I saw the silhouette of Wilimar’s head crane upward, then shake.

  “No way!” he cried out.

  It would be an easy reach for me, but first I had to figure out a way to cross the street. Back in the country, I’d seen trick riders vault across the backs of running animals, but I was no circus star, and I didn’t feel like risking my life for the little welp was a fair trade, so I waved my torch above my head to see what I might be able to use on my side of the street.

  Aha. Whoever was on laundry duty this week at the Guild hadn’t taken the washing in yet. The slanted tile roof was covered in sheets and blankets, spread out to dry in the sun that normally blazed overhead at this time of day. I could climb up to get one, but I’d need two hands to do it.

  I turned back to Wilimar and waved my torch at him.

  “Can you catch this?” I asked as loudly as I could.

  “Of course I can!” Wilimar snorted.

  All the halfling children in this part of town were as quick as honeytraps when it came to catching falling objects, thanks to the annual “charity” parade the elves did. What a benevolent system. They took all our money in taxes, threw a tiny percentage of it back at us once a year, and expected us to sing their praises for it. Children were the only ones allowed to stand along the parade route, and a boy like Wilimar could pay his family’s rent for a month if he was quick with his hands and not shy about knocking over anyone who stood in his way.

  I tossed the lit torch to him and held my breath. I’d tried to throw it in such a way that the lit end wouldn’t hit the kid in the face, but to be honest, this was my first time ever throwing something on fire.

  My worries were unfounded. Wilimar swung from the cross-beam of the lamppost like a monkey and caught the torch deftly, lighting his own lamppost before I even had to ask him to. The scene behind him blazed into view, the rickety wooden balconies crowded with clay pots and creeping plants, the sooty brick walls with thick lines of grout I might be able to get a toehold in and ah, yes, the ladder some painters had been using to touch up the gutters yesterday.

  I could work with that.

  I wrapped my legs around the cross-beam of the lamppost and leaned backward with an acrobatic arc of my spine, my fingers stretched as far as I could stretch them as I reached out for anything I could grab. It took two attempts, but I finally caught the bottom railing of the balcony behind my head. I muttered a quick prayer to whichever god handles finger strength and let my legs unclench from the lamppost. The trick was to move like a trapeze artist, a swing of the legs forward, a swing of the legs back, my hands around the railing acting like a pivot point. Eventually, I worked up enough momentum to swing my legs all the way over my head and, with a nerve-rattling release of my hands, flipped over and landed feet-first on the balcony.

  Proud of myself, I called out to Wilimar. “Did you see that?”

  “Huh?” The kid was busy taunting an agitated donkey with the torch and seemed completely unimpressed with the death-defying feat that happened right before his eyes.

  No wonder the circus never came through this town. No one had any appreciation for the athletic arts.

  I clapped my hands onto the first row of clay tiles that covered the roof and hiked my foot up on the top railing of the balcony. Then I pressed myself up high enough to grab a few of the freshly-laundered bedsheets drying up there.

  They were still damp. That was good. Wet fabric was stronger. The first step to any second-story prison escape was always to soak the bedclothes in water before you tear them into strips and braid them to make your rope. The last time I’d tried that particular arts and crafts project I hadn’t been given any water, but luckily Dar and I had spent most of the day before our arrest in a teahouse, so we’d been able to improvise.

  “Go piss up a rope” wasn’t always an insult. Sometimes it was just good advice.

  Luckily, today it wouldn’t need to come to that.

  I took one end of a bedsheet in each hand, twisted it as tightly as I could, and coiled it into a linen cable about as thick as my wrist. I knotted that one to another sheet before repeating the process for all the sheets I had. I worked quickly, and I was relieved to see I had just enough length to span the street with some left over to tie into an extra-heavy knot at one end, a sort of rough version of a monkey’s paw knot. This would be my anchor.

  “All right, look alive, kid!” I shouted as I held the big knotted end of my rope above my head. “I’ll throw this to you. I need you to catch it and tie it to the lamppost, okay?”

  Wilimar nodded, stuck the torch between his teeth, and readied himself like a gladiator, his hands wide apart and ready to catch.

  I knew I had only one chance with this toss. The stampede down below had run into Wilimar’s lamp post so many times it was starting to splinter. One more good hit from a crazed bull, and the whole thing would crash down like chopped timber before it threw Wilimar’s tiny body into the meat grinder of panicked hooves slamming against hard cobblestones.

  I gave the knotted end a heave and watched the
ball of fabric fly through the darkness, and the long ribbon of white sheets snaked out behind it like the tail of a comet. I worried I’d thrown it too high, but Wilimar launched himself from his perch and caught the ball square on his chest before landing back on the crossbeam of the lamppost as lightly as a bird.

  “Now what?” he called out.

  “Tie it around the post,” I said, “and make it as tight as you can.”

  I did the same on my end, so between us we had a makeshift tightrope, strong enough for someone light to climb their way across.

  “Okay now, use the rope to climb over to me,” I shouted above the noise.

  Wilimar said a word in the halfling tongue I was pretty sure his mother would have washed his mouth out with soap for, had she been here to hear it, and then stared at me. “Are you crazy?”

  “I can’t do it. I’m too big,” I explained, but the expression on the boy’s face told me this didn’t make for a compelling argument. I sighed. “Okay, okay, just make sure the knot stays tight.”

  I grabbed the rope with two hands and tested my weight. The rope sagged precariously, so I would have to keep my legs curled up if I didn’t want to lose a foot to the swirling vortex of sharp horns and gnashing teeth below.

  I flipped over and wrapped my legs around the rope. That made the rope sag even more, and my back was hanging just inches above the fray, but the position let me work fast. I shimmied across and pulled myself along the rope hand over hand with my eyes closed and teeth gritted. I only stopped when I felt the heat of the lampfire, and then I reached out for Wilimar.

  Two tiny arms wrapped around mine wordlessly. The poor kid was trembling, clearly more scared than he let on.

  “Okay,” I grunted, “I’m going to swing you over to that ladder over there. When I count to three, you let go of me and grab onto the rungs.”

  I felt Wilimar shake his head, which was buried in my armpit.

  “Was that a yes or a no?” I asked.

  Another inconclusive shake, and then a sharp twang reverberated from somewhere along the rope. It wouldn’t be able to hold my weight for much longer.