by Tim Stead
18 The Thief Gift
In daylight hours Francis worked like anyone else. He was a smith, a farrier, a sword maker, and he worked at a forge on Jharris Street. He was not unskilled at his craft, and though still technically a journeyman his master gave him work that belied that status.
He had spent the day working on a sword. It was a special piece, a proper blade that would fetch a good price, and he knew that tomorrow he would finish the folding and begin the shaping process, and it would begin to look like a sword. He had been hammering and folding this particular piece for two days, blending the nickel with the steel, stretching it out with hammer blows and folding it once more. It was beginning to feel right.
Francis loved his work, but he hated the moment when the blade was finished and he must give it up to some overdressed noble who had no idea how it had come into being. It was like asking a mother to give up her child.
His master, Gayme Franioso, was growing old and there was every chance that Francis would inherit the trade when Gayme retired, if he ever did. It was certainly true that the old man’s arm was not as powerful as it had been five years ago, and he could no longer spend a full day at the most arduous tasks, yet he clearly still loved the heat and noise of the forge and would spend the day there even if he could not swing a hammer all day. That was his right, and Francis did not grudge him his pleasure.
Towards evening Francis had a visitor, a runner from central ward. Gayme didn’t know about his political work, so he took the man out the back where the forge workers liked to cool off. There was a well here and a bench. They sat on the bench.
“You have a message, you say?” he asked.
The runner was barely more than a boy, thin, untidy with serious eyes. “Antoni says that you should come to the White Swan this evening after you finish your work. He has a gift for you, for your labours on the soldiers’ gate.”
It was code, of course. The gift was information that could not be passed by messenger, and the soldiers’ gate meant that it had to do with contacting the regiments, so perhaps something from Johan’s first meeting at the bridge.
“You can tell him that I will be glad to receive his gift at the Swan,” he told the boy. “I will be there tonight.”
The boy left and Francis went back to work in the forge. He had less than an hour before his allotted working hours had passed and he spent the time tidying his work, cleaning his work space and putting his tools back in their places.
He paid his respects to Master Franioso and left, heading back to his rooms where he washed and changed out of his work clothes. He left shortly after and set his course for the White Swan as the sun set and the city transformed itself into a lamp-lit maze.
The White Swan was an upmarket tavern. It served good ale and good food at elevated prices, and Francis would not have chosen to patronise it usually, but the populists of Central Ward thought that it gave them a degree of camouflage, and the landlord was reportedly sympathetic. He had dressed accordingly in his best clothes.
In the Swan he went up to the bar and ordered an ale. They had a code here for everything, so when the barkeep brought his foaming mug of beer he tapped the counter with a coin.
“Is the red fish pie on tonight?” he asked.
The barkeep nodded. “They might be serving it in the back room,” he said. “Are you a friend of Cantrip?”
Cantrip wasn’t a real name – another code.
“Aye, I am,” Francis said. He was shown through a door and down a corridor to a room where four men waited. One of these he recognised as Antoni, a plump man with a red, smiling face. Overly fond of food and ornament, Francis thought. The other faces were familiar, but he had no names to match them.
“You invited me,” he said. Francis didn’t understand the code thing. You either knew people and trusted them, or you didn’t. That was how it worked in Dock Ward.
“Francis, sit down. This is important.” Antoni gestured at a chair, and Francis sat.
“Tell me what it is,” he said.
“We have a traitor,” Antoni said.
“How do you know?” This was alarming news indeed. If they captured enough people in the ward committees the whole populist movement could fold.
“A man was taken yesterday, another this morning.”
“Were they both your men?”
“Yes.”
“And you called me here?”
“This is our last meeting here,” Antoni said. “We thought it best to let you know…”
“You didn’t think at all,” Francis cut him off. “Two men taken and you’re still here? We should leave now.”
“But the traitor…”
“We can deal with that later. Now we need to leave. It doesn’t matter if it was the king or Falini, they’d know of this place by now.”
He turned and left the room. He paused in the corridor outside and listened. He expected to hear the hum of noise coming through from the bar, men talking glasses clinking, but he heard nothing.
That was bad.
He looked around and saw a staircase going up. He knew that The Swan was just a tavern; there were no rooms, so that must lead to the landlord’s rooms. There was a back door, too, but if they were waiting for him they would be waiting outside that, too.
He went up the stairs. There was a closed door at the top, but when he tried the handle he found that it wasn’t locked. He slipped inside and listened again. The apartment was dark, so perhaps the landlord’s wife had been helping in the bar, he hadn’t noticed.
He walked through to the main room and looked out the window. The street below was quiet, but he saw two men standing near the front of the tavern. They were heavily cloaked, but even so Francis could make out the shape of a helmet.
He went through to the bedroom and looked out the window there. It was better. The bedroom overlooked a back street, a small open yard with barrels stacked in one corner.
There were noises coming from downstairs now, and not noises he welcomed. Men were shouting. He heard the sound of a sword being drawn.
The window opened easily, and he slipped out, lowering himself to arms length and dropping as quietly as he could into the yard. His heart was hammering and he felt hot despite a cool breeze coming up from the river. There were voices in the street outside, and he looked around for somewhere to hide, but apart from the barrels the yard was quite tidy. He pushed his way into a gap between two stacks of barrels and waited.
The voices came nearer.
“… look, that open window. It was closed a minute ago.”
“Open, closed, who cares. You think someone jumped out of that? We would have seen.”
Footsteps sounded in the mouth of the yard. Francis saw shadows cast onto the tavern wall from lamps on the street. There were two men.
“We’ll have a look anyway,” the first man said.
Francis’s heart fell. If they looked properly they could not fail to discover him, but perhaps, just perhaps, they would not look his way and if he kept still in the shadows they might not see. He felt a warm sensation spreading from his chest, as though he had been stabbed and blood was soaking his clothes, but there was no pain, and no moisture.
The shadows grew darker as the men advanced. It was no good. A few more steps and the first man could not fail to see him. He pushed further from the light and as he did so one of the barrels behind him shifted with a creak.
In a moment there was a man before him, staring at the barrels, and Francis was caught. He was about to speak, to run out and try to push past these men in a last desperate attempt to escape, but the man turned away.
“Nothing here,” he said. “I thought I heard something.”
Francis held his breath. It was impossible. The light was not so poor that the soldier could not have seen his face. He had certainly been able to see the soldier well enough that he could say for sure that the man had not shaved that morning, and he had eaten onions during the day. His breath reeked of them.
It was impossible.
It was magic.
Years ago, when he was a child, his mother had told him tales of magical gifts, of abilities that heroes and villains had possessed over the centuries: truth tellers, far seers, jumpers and strong men, and Francis recognised what had just happened to him. It was exactly like one of his mother’s tales. He had the thief gift.
The thief gift was not for heroes. It was for men who skulked in the night, who took things that didn’t belong to them and killed worthier men in their sleep. It was a hiding gift, a coward’s gift.
He knew it, but at the same time he did not believe it. Could he really not be seen? He hesitated. If he trusted this and it failed him he would die, probably slowly and painfully, but the warm feeling in his chest was strong. It was like a fire that warmed his courage.
Francis stepped out from behind the barrels into the small courtyard. The soldiers were still there. They did not see him. One of them swept the yard again with unseeing eyes before turning away.
He followed them.
They went down the street towards the front of The Swan, looking constantly from side to side, poking in corners, and showing no sign at all that knew they were being followed.
Outside the tavern door stood a wagon. Francis walked past the soldiers and peered into the back. He saw Antoni and his friends there. One of the men he did not know was dead, ripped open and bleeding, his eyes staring at the sky. The others were trussed up like ducks ready for market.
“Did we get them all?” one of the soldiers asked.
“There was another, but he seems to have escaped.”
Francis stepped back from the wagon. There were four soldiers, only four. The central ward men had not been outnumbered, really, just not up to the task. The soldier closest to him was facing away, and Francis could see that he had a knife tucked into the back of his belt.
Why not?
He reached out and plucked the knife from its sheath, a simple, quick motion that the soldier didn’t notice. Then he stabbed the man in the back, driving the knife in as hard as he could and ripping it free again.
The soldier grunted and fell forward, half catching himself, then collapsing onto the cobbles. The others immediately drew their blades and looked up to the surrounding buildings, two of them ducking down behind the wagon.
They must think he was shot with an arrow, Francis thought, and set about disabusing them of the idea. He stabbed one of the men by the wagon, choosing the exposed neck this time. The man cried out and fell.
The other soldier, the one who had been hiding beside him, must have sensed something of the real situation, because he swung his blade wildly and Francis had to jump back to avoid being cut. But even this was a futile gesture. He circled round behind the man and after his next wild swing stepped in and dispatched him with a blow to the neck.
One soldier remained. He had backed away from the wagon and the mayhem that Francis had caused there, and when he saw the last of his fellows fall he turned and ran. Francis thought about chasing him, but that would take him out into brighter streets with more people about, and he didn’t trust his gift that much. He turned back to the wagon and let the warmth fade.
The ropes parted easily, and in a moment he had cut Antoni and his friends free. They stumbled out of the wagon and looked wide eyed at the bodies on the street.
“You killed them,” Antoni said.
“More kindly than they would have killed you,” he replied. He bent down and dipped his index finger in a soldier’s blood, used it to paint the letter ‘J’ on the wagon’s side.
“What are you doing?” Antoni asked.
“Letting the duke know who it is that defies him,” Francis said. “And that he has cause to fear us. Now go. Someone betrayed us here, and it was not one of your fallen comrades. These men knew that I was here.”
He waited until Antoni and the other Central Warders had gone and looked around at the scene. He would not have spared the last soldier through choice, but he saw now that it was a good thing that the man had escaped. He would take his tale back to the duke and it would spread like wildfire. Without it this would just be a handful of soldiers killed on a back street, but now it would become a story that went from mouth to mouth in every tavern in Afael.
He picked up a sword that had been dropped on the street and tucked it in his own belt, along with the dagger that he was careful to wipe clean on one of the bodies.
A sword was a useful weapon, but it was terror that he wielded now, and fear could cut the heart from a thousand men at a single stroke.
19 Favour
Callista breakfasted with The Snake. As always it was a lavish affair, but this particular morning Sithmaree seemed moody and more than usually waspish with the servants.
At first Callista put it down to Jidian’s absence. The Eagle was off on some errand for Pascha and Sithmaree was prone to be touchy on such days, but she sensed it might be something more than this, something deeper. Callista’s usual response to Sithmaree’s moods was to be elsewhere, and after eating her fill she rose from her seat.
“Stay a while,” Sithmaree said.
Callista hesitated, then sat back down. It wasn’t often that The Snake asked anything of her, and she felt duty bound to oblige when she could. It was a while before Sithmaree spoke.
“You find me difficult,” she said. Callista made to protest, but Sithmaree waved her to silence. “No, it is true, I see it. Most people do, and I find most people hard to bear. They are not simple. They fawn, lie, cheat, dissemble, pretend to be what they are not. Jidian is exactly what he seems to be. He has only one face and he shows it to the world without regret. Narak is the same, though I did not see it for a long time. He is what he must be – no more and no less – but he is complicated. You, too, I judge to be honest and I thank you for that. It has been a pleasure to have you in my house, but if you wish to leave, to establish your own house here, then I understand it, but know that I shall regret your absence.”
Callista had never heard the Snake say so many words at once, and she was stunned by the implication. Sithmaree had somehow heard of her visit to the apartments and jumped to a partially correct conclusion. More than that, it suggested that Sithmaree’s mood was a consequence of this.
“Deus, I owe you my life,” she said. “It is a debt that I can never repay. I will stay here as long as I am in Col Boran.”
“You would be surprised who can repay what,” Sithmaree said. “So much has changed. I am not what I was, Narak and Pascha are more. The world is changing.” Sithmaree sat back in her chair and smiled a crooked smile. “But go, I will not keep you, or even hold you to your promise. Walk in the gardens, think your thoughts, live your life. It is all that any of us can do.”
Callista left, but now she was almost reluctant to do so. She was not averse to her own company, but she longed to express her gratitude while at the same time she struggled to find more than just words.
She found herself back on the roof garden below the high hall of Col Boran, looking out at the endless views once more. There was a fascination in looking towards Afael and not seeing it – a whole kingdom that was so far away that it did not trouble her eye at all. It made her problems seem small, distant and insignificant, and she liked the feeling.
“Callista?”
She had not heard the god mage approach, but she was there, just two paces away.
“Eran.” She bowed.
“There is something different about you today,” Pascha said, looking into her eyes. Callista could not think what she meant. Her hair was the same, her clothes unremarkable. She was the same as she had been that last time they had met.
“I am sure that I don’t know what, Eran,” she replied.
“Gladly.” If Sithmaree was awkward company, then Pascha was the opposite. Callista had never known great folk before, and she had supposed them stiff and pompous, but here in Col Boran she had learned the opposite. Pascha and the others did not stand upon their rank, and seemed to demand no more respect than that which was willingly given, though Callista was certain there was a limit to their grace.
“You came here wishing to be tested,” Pascha said. “And you have been uncertain since you fell on your feet with Sithmaree. Have you decided?”
“I still think about it, Eran, but I do not think I want it any more.”
“That is probably wise.”
They walked to the end of the roof garden and turned so that they were facing the walls of the highest structure of Col Boran, Pascha’s home. It rose modestly above them, dwarfed by the glittering peaks of the Dragon’s Back. Pascha stopped again and looked at it, and Callista could see that the sight did not bring her joy.
“It is a dull palace,” Pascha said. “But I am not inclined to ostentation. Perhaps there could be more trees, though, a little more green.”
Callista stayed silent. She did not think it her place to comment either way, though in truth she agreed. Col Boran was a barren place.
Pascha turned and looked at Callista.
“Why did she do it?” she asked.
“Who? What?” The question meant nothing. It had no context.
Pascha stared at her as though trying to read her face, and after a few moments raised an eyebrow.
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Eran, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, well, has there ever been so perverse a creature in all the world,” Pascha said. “She really didn’t tell you, and you’d never have known.”
Callista felt a rush of frustration. “What is it, Eran? What have I not been told?”
