Echoes of Betrayal

by Elizabeth Moon

  Beclan opened his mouth to remind Roth that other girls had befriended him as a way of getting close to Mikeli, but his brother looked too happy and he could not bear to start a quarrel.

  Valdaire

  Arvid Semminson fingered the familiar pockets in the black cloak he’d taken from one of the thieves, checking each blade and the Thieves’ Guild icon on its chain he’d put in the narrowest. Dattur thought he was being a fool. But Dattur did not fully recognize the danger the letter from the Marshal-General presented in the wrong hands. With the letter, the Valdaire Guildmaster could send a real thief to a grange, and the Marshal would probably trust him.

  He was not merely seeking vengeance against Master Mathol, he told himself. Not at all. He needed to retrieve that letter and, incidentally, his own Guildmaster medallion. He would not involve Dattur. He would do it himself.

  His transformation from Ser Burin, the merchant, to Arvid Semminson, trained enforcer and assassin, took place in the stable. He wore a black leather coif padded over the head for protection from blows. The pair of stiffened leather “donkey ears” that funneled faint sounds to him through holes in the coif were tucked in a pocket of his doublet. Midnight blue trousers instead of black—that could not be helped. An undershirt, mail, and a black shirt over it. His weapons all where they should be, every blade honed and polished. Black gloves with a suede palm for more friction. Soft climbing half-boots, cross-gartered to the knee. And the black cloak, something any thief would recognize, its hood pulled well forward, hiding his face.

  By dawn, he was nestled in the second attic of the Thieves’ Guild house. It would have been dramatic to confront the Master at the turn of night, but Arvid knew that Guildmasters rarely slept at night. From full dark on, the Master would be alert and busy, taking reports from thieves on the night shift. No, he would wait until broad day. By day most Thieves’ Guild houses had only a small door guard on duty, with a senior to answer inquiries from the city guard. The day shift would be out in the streets, picking pockets and stealing small items, while the night shift slept. It usually took two—at most three—turns of the glass for the Master to count and clerks to record the night’s takings and assign bonuses and punishments where they were due. By midmorning, the Guildhouse was as quiet as it would ever be.

  Arvid waited, a donkey’s ear touching the ceiling below him, until the unmelodious sound of snoring from the thieves asleep in the room directly below replaced talk and movement. Then he removed the donkey’s ear, put it back in his pocket, and moved carefully back to the attic access. Not the obvious trapdoor—it would squeal like a wounded pig if moved—but the concealed one used by the roof guard. The now-dead roof guard.

  Once in the house itself, he walked normally—light sleepers might wake, and within the house only children practiced sneaking. Valdaire’s Guildhouse was larger and more populous than any in the north, with a steady stream of visitors from other southern cities as well as those from the north, so a stranger’s face would cause no alarm to most. As he descended the main stairs, he saw no one, as he’d expected. The house’s narrow front belied its true shape—a wedge much wider in the back. The Guildmaster, Arvid recalled from his earlier disastrous visit, had his apartment in the center back. Would he be in his sitting room still or abed?

  Hardly having to think, Arvid stepped over squeaking floorboards, touched the walls here and there to prevent traps from springing … the signs were obvious to him, and the house felt more homelike, less dangerous, for these things. In other buildings, he was never sure where the traps were—even if the traps were.

  The Guildmaster’s personal guard, the last defense but one, had trusted in the security of the house; Arvid killed him as he dozed on his bench and rolled the corpse under the Guildmaster’s desk. Then he searched the parlor-office. He found his own Guildmaster medallion and the Marshal-General’s letter in a little carved box shoved into one of the pigeonholes along the wall. He tucked them into one of his pockets. He found paper, pen, and sealing wax, then wrote the traditional words. From the casket that held the night’s takings, he took the traditional assassin’s fee, leaving the rest. Then he moved to the door of the bedchamber.

  The last defense would have stopped most, but not a Guild enforcer, who—if a Guild turned against its Master—must be able to remove him. Arvid disarmed the trap, removed, capped, and pocketed the poisoned darts—another perquisite of an assassin who killed a Guildmaster—and opened the door.

  The Guildmaster lay on his back, mouth open, snoring, in a nightshirt of pale blue silk. In the curve of his arm lay a child whose face was streaked with tears.

  Sick fury came over Arvid. He had intended to wake the Guildmaster, the point of a blade to the man’s throat, to be sure he knew who was about to kill him. Now memories he’d refused for decades washed over him; cold sweat drenched him.

  The child stirred, moaned a little; the Guildmaster’s arm tightened on the child. He grunted in his sleep, and then his eyes opened.

  Before the Guildmaster could draw breath, Arvid struck, a blow with his fist to the man’s throat that stopped all sound but the creaking of the bed as he thrashed for breath. “I am your death, Mathol,” he murmured, as tradition demanded. The child woke, choked back a cry, and stared at Arvid.

  It was his own face. It would always be his own face, no matter what child—dark, fair, tall, short, thin, plump. Arvid fought his roiling stomach and tried to smile at the child he knew he should kill. This one was small, dark of hair and eye, thin. So had Arvid been. Born a thief, brought up as a thief, subject to the whim of the Guildmaster. So had Arvid been.

  The child stared back at him, not crying out, not pleading for mercy. Boy? Girl? Arvid could not yet see; the child’s fists were clenched now on the bedclothes, mouth shut tight. A well-schooled child of the House. The child would die silently—and it would be a mercy after what the child had endured.

  Kill the child and you kill yourself. The voice rang in his head. Arvid shivered, cold to the bone as if he lay once more naked in the winter rain. He had to; he knew he had to, yet he could not. Not that child, not that day.

  “Be quiet,” he said to the child. The child nodded and made the sign for “sealed lips.” Arvid glanced around the room and spotted what might be the child’s clothes on the floor near the door. “Dress yourself,” he said. The child slid from under the covers. Arvid did not want to look; the sight of the child’s face and shoulders had brought torment enough, but the child’s training would hold him quiet only so long as Arvid looked and acted like a thief of the House.

  The child was a boy. He scuttled across to his clothes and pulled them on hurriedly.

  “Sit there,” Arvid said, pointing to the floor by the bed, and the boy sat down. Arvid took the Guildmaster’s medallion, then wrestled his seal ring off his dead finger and tucked it into one of his own pockets. He kept a close watch on the boy, but the boy did not move; he might have been carved of wood. Yet the eyes were intelligent, alert, noting every detail of Arvid and what Arvid did. Training, yes, but also more to remind Arvid of his young self.

  Arvid came back around the bed. “Do you know who I am?”

  “A Master’s Death,” the boy said softly. “Who sent you?”

  “We never tell,” Arvid said. The boy would expect that. “You will come with me.”

  The boy’s eyes glistened for a moment; he blinked the tears away. “You will kill me,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” Arvid said. “But not in this room. And not in the next, if you do what I say.”

  The small shoulders sagged. “Yes, Master.”

  Arvid’s heart nearly stopped at that, a solid pain in the chest, but he held out his hand. “Come, boy.” He could feel through his glove the trembling of the boy’s fingers. In the next room, he laid the paper he’d already written on top of the other papers, melted wax with a candle, and stamped the Guildmaster’s own seal into it, all while trying to think how he could get out of the place with the boy, bo
th of them alive and with a chance to escape completely.

  His original plan had been to retrace his steps up through the house to the roof, then climb from roof to roof and finally down to a street and away. This would not work with a barefoot child in tow, even assuming the child to be perfectly docile.

  Out the front? By now—Arvid estimated the time he’d spent in the house so far—it would not be far from midday. The younger children sent out to pick pockets early would be returning to report soon. He could hear nothing, but the Master’s apartment was deliberately placed in the quietest, least-trafficked area. And the boy—would the boy yell? Did he feel real loyalty to his House? Were his parents still here?

  “You have a choice,” he said to the boy. “I have orders—” Never mind that they came from a god he had never meant to serve. “—to remove you from this House for a time. Alive or dead. If you wish to stay alive, you will stay silent and do exactly what I tell you. If you wish death, it will come.”

  Again the boy’s eyes glistened, and again he blinked the tears back. Arvid’s heart contracted. So young and so brave. So were you. Take care of him.

  “I … don’t want to die … if it hurts,” the boy said.

  “Then will you do as I say?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “I will tell the door-wards that the Master bade me take you out to the street, far from the house. That you are being punished and are not to be allowed back in until dawn tomorrow. Say nothing but cry if you can, or at least feign crying.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “I may have to jerk you about,” Arvid said.

  “Yes, Master.”

  The look on the boy’s face, mingled terror and hope, made his own eyes sting. “Over my shoulder you go, then,” Arvid said. The boy’s body hardly seemed to weigh anything.

  He met only one other thief before the door; that one chuckled and said, “What’d he do, throw up again?”

  Arvid nodded and went on without speaking. At the front of the house, the door-wards eyed him with more curiosity for his burden than for himself. “Boy needs another dose?”

  Again Arvid nodded and in a mix of Common and thieves’ cant described what had earned the boy punishment.

  “Master should just strangle him and get another,” one of the door-wards said. The other looked shocked and made the gesture for silence. “Take him a good long way, then,” the first said. “Little rat isn’t grateful for a warm bed and a bellyful needs to learn what the real world is like.”

  They opened the doors to let Arvid out. He went down the two steps to street level with intentional roughness, smacking the boy on the rump. The boy’s arms flopped against his back. As they cleared the Guild perimeter, two shop fronts down the street, Arvid set the boy roughly on his feet—as the man he pretended to be would—and grabbed his arm. “Come on, then,” he said. “And don’t snivel.”

  Other thieves would be watching, recognizing the punishment. Arvid walked fast, half-dragging the barefoot boy and paying no attention to his stumbles or muffled yelps of pain. He ignored as well the angry looks of street merchants and their customers in the first market square they passed through. He was trying to think how to work around to the inn without revealing where he was going. By now he knew the city fairly well, but there were areas where someone in thieves’ black, out by daylight, would be stopped and questioned.

  “Stop, you!” The voice was loud enough to turn heads. Arvid looked back to see a burly man in Girdish blue—a Marshal, he guessed—striding toward him at the head of a small group of men. He could run, but only by carrying the boy, and that would slow him. And now in midday, the streets were busy—a running man in thieves’ black with a child in tow would surely be a target. Already others were slowing, stopping to watch.

  “What?” Arvid said, moving until his back was to a shop wall, not a window.

  “Let go of that child,” the Marshal said. He was armed with a sword; his companions brandished the wooden clubs they called hauks. The child, apparently thinking this was a good time to follow orders, produced a couple of genuine-sounding sobs. Fresh tears streaked his face, along with mucus from a runny nose.

  “I’m taking him to safety,” Arvid said.

  “And I’m an elf with a purse full of fairy gold,” the Marshal said. “Do you think I’m stupid enough to believe that?”

  “He don’t hurt me,” the boy said. He grabbed Arvid’s hand with his free one. “He like me.”

  “You’ve cowed him,” the Marshal said, without taking his gaze from Arvid’s face. “But you won’t cow us.”

  Arvid had the sense of someone laughing at him from far away. What now? He had done what Gird wanted. Not exactly. As well as he could have. Maybe. And now Girdsmen were going to attack him for that? Yet he knew what they would be thinking. The Marshal took a step forward. “Let go, I tell you. Or you’re a dead man.”

  “I need to show you something,” Arvid said. He lifted his hand slowly; the Marshal sucked in a noisy breath. “I have a letter from the Marshal-General. I would show it to you.” Behind the Marshal and his men, a small crowd gathered now, nudging elbows and muttering.

  “You must think me an utter fool,” the Marshal said. “You? A letter from her?”

  “Yes,” Arvid said. He saw the Marshal’s intent waver slightly at the confidence he showed. “Take me to your grange, where we can talk privately.”

  “A thief wants to go to a grange!” one of the other men said. “Now that’s a surprise.”

  “Quiet, yeoman-marshal,” the Marshal said. “And you—will you release that boy to us if I agree?”

  “I will take him there myself. He is unused to being out of the House and does not know you.”

  “Do you know him, boy?” the Marshal asked the boy. “What’s his name?”

  “He knows me only as an enforcer,” Arvid said. “Enforcers are not part of the regular community.”

  “If he makes a move to draw a weapon, kill him,” the Marshal said to his followers. And to Arvid, “Come along, and be gentle with the lad.”

  “Up you come,” Arvid said, picking the boy up, this time cradling him in his arms.

  The grange opened on a narrow side lane. Arvid followed the Marshal inside and found himself in what seemed at first a sort of cave. Behind him the door banged shut; he heard the thud of a bar falling into place to hold it closed.

  Then light rose from the far end—from a niche in the far wall—brighter than any lamp he’d ever seen. The room was large—large enough to hold a hundred men—high-ceilinged, stone-floored, with a wooden platform knee high and several strides long and wide at the far end, and weapons racked along both walls. Light filled it now, leaving no corner in shadow. His skin drew up in prickles. The men around him, angry as they seemed, were only men, but a power he had never encountered filled the place.

  The boy nestled in his arms, relaxing muscle by muscle. Whatever Arvid felt, the boy felt something comforting.

  “Bring a blanket for the lad,” the Marshal said, still watching Arvid. One of the men moved quickly down the length of the room and disappeared into a passage at one corner. He returned in moments with a blanket. “We will lay him on the platform,” the Marshal said, “and see what we see.”

  Arvid carried the boy to the platform and laid him on the folded blanket. “Be at ease,” he said. “They will not hurt you.”

  “Go up on the platform,” the Marshal said. “That corner: stand there.” It was as far away from the boy as the platform allowed and closest to the niche in the wall that gave the light. To the others he said, “Dern, open the shutters. Cal, sit with the child. You others, stand behind him and be ready to strike if he does anything.” The Marshal then walked around the platform to the niche. High overhead, shutters creaked open and daylight poured in; the uncanny light contracted until it lit only the niche itself.

  “What was that?” Arvid said when he felt he could steady his voice.

  “Gird’s light,” the
Marshal said. “Not too surprising it came when you entered. Gird is not fond of evil.”

  “Boy’s been hurt,” the man looking at the boy said. “What you’d expect of them filth.”

  “You?” the Marshal asked Arvid.

  “No,” Arvid said. “I was taking him away from that.”

  The Marshal put his hand into the niche and withdrew what looked like a piece of stick, ragged at one end where it had broken. “This is a relic of Gird,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “No,” Arvid said. He was sweating again. “Don’t you want to see the letter?”

  “If there is a letter, it’s a fake,” the Marshal said. “She would not give a letter to a liar, murderer, and thief.”

  “She did,” Arvid said.

  “We shall see,” the Marshal said. “Hold this and tell the truth if you are able. If you do not, you will be hurt: Gird’s relic knows truth and hates lies.”

  Arvid took the wood—uneven, like a branch once stripped of bark and smoothed by many hands. It felt slightly warm from the Marshal’s grip.

  The Marshal stepped up on the platform and faced him. “Do you deny that you are a liar?”

  His usual cleverness of tongue deserted him. “I have lied,” he said. “But I do not always lie.” The wood warmed in his hand, but not to discomfort. Then the warmth receded.

  The Marshal’s expression was unreadable. “Are you a thief?”

  “I was trained as a thief,” Arvid said. “I was—am—a member of the Thieves’ Guild; I was trained as an enforcer after my years as apprentice thief. I do not steal now but at great need—like getting this boy away.” Again the wood in his hand warmed, and again the warmth receded.

  “And are you a murderer?” the Marshal asked. “Have you killed humans who did not menace you?”

  “I have killed,” Arvid said. “I have killed on order of my Guildmaster—”

  “That is murder,” the Marshal said.