by Odom, Mel
Cerril bumped into Two-Fingers, who was called that because he’d lost two fingers in a fishing accident. Two-Fingers’s sour stench filled Cerril’s nose for a moment. Two-Fingers was the only one of them who lived on the streets and truly had no place to go.
“Well, I’ve got some words for boys playin’ at bein’ men,” the sailor warned. “I’ve dealt with a few cutpurses an’ other assorted rabble in other ports, an’ I’m not a man to trouble over trouble for long. An’ from the looks of this pack of wild apes, trouble is all they’re after.”
“Come on,” the serving wench urged, pulling at the sailor’s arm and setting him to weaving slightly. “Do you really want to spend tonight explaining to the Watch how you came to kill a few of these boys over some unkind words? Or do you want to come up to my room and amuse me for a few hours?”
The sailor grinned. “Since I got me druthers, we’ll seek out the amusement, fair flower.” He took a faltering step and rejoined the woman, slipping his arm with the wine jug around her. Then he turned a baleful eye on Cerril and the other boys. “But mark me words, ye scurvy lot. If’n ye cause me any more grief this night, why I’ll slice ye and dice ye from wind to water, an’ I’ll use what’s left of ye for chum to catch me breakfast.”
Cerril swallowed hard, but he made himself put on a brave front. If he ever showed how scared he sometimes got, he knew the other boys would desert him or find a new leader. While he held that position, he’d not always treated them fairly or well.
A young boy with a lamp he’d probably stolen from a ship or a lax harbor resident called out an offer to guide the sailor and the serving wench through the shadows to their destination. The sailor turned the boy’s offer down with a snarling bit of vituperation as the serving wench led him away.
“Good sirs,” the boy with the lantern said again, approaching Cerril and his group, “mayhap you’d like a lantern to light your way home this night. For only—”
Then the lantern’s cheery glow washed over Cerril and the others, drawing their pale, wan features from the alley’s shadows. Cerril grinned and took a threatening step forward, his knife glinting in the lantern light.
“By the pits!” the boy exclaimed, backpedaling a short distance before turning around and running away. The lantern swung wildly at the end of his arm, threading shadows across the two- and three-story buildings fronting the harbor.
“Well,” Two-Fingers drawled, “at least you can still scare the local peasants.”
Cerril turned to face the other boy. Even large as he was, Two-Fingers still towered over him. Cerril had always disliked that about the other boy, but Two-Fingers’s size had allowed him to step into some of the seamier dives around Alaghôn and purchase the occasional bucket of ale the group sometimes shared.
“I can scare more than that,” Cerril warned, still holding the knife.
A hint of worry crossed Two-Fingers’s face.
“You’d better say it, Two-Fingers,” Cerril ordered, the back of his neck burning at the anger that swirled inside him. “You’d better say I can scare more than that. Otherwise I’m going to make sure you only got two fingers on the other hand as well.”
That threat of further crippling made Two-Fingers step back into the shadows. After he’d lost the half of his hand while working with his fisherman father, Two-Fingers had been thrown out of the house. There were eight other kids in the household to feed, and having a cripple around wasn’t going to improve the family’s lot any.
Cerril took a step, going after the other boy. “Say it, Two-Fingers,” he ordered again. “Say it or I’ll make you sorry.”
Two-Fingers backed up against the wall, trapped between a pile of refuse and a nearly full slop bucket from the bathhouse on one side of the alley. He swallowed hard.
“You can,” Two-Fingers whispered hoarsely. “You can scare more than that.”
His eyes flicked nervously from Cerril’s face to the knife in his hand.
Cerril knew the other boys gazed on in naked excitement. Nothing held their interest more than violence, especially when it was directed at someone else.
“Cerril,” Kerrin called out in an anxious whisper. “There’s your sister.”
The other boy’s words drew Cerril’s attention. He gave Two-Fingers a quick, cold smile.
“Just you mark my words, Two-Fingers. I’m not going to put up with being questioned.”
“I won’t question you again, Cerril. I swear.”
Two-Fingers touched his maimed hand to his chest. Most of his pride and spirit had gone with those missing fingers, and his father kicking him out of the house had robbed the tall boy of whatever hadn’t been taken by the accident.
“If you do,” Cerril said, unable to leave it alone, “you’ll be back to hiring yourself out to them old sailors.”
Two-Fingers’s face flushed with rage and shame. All that had been a year ago, before Cerril had accepted him into their group. No one ever spoke of that time again. At least, not to Two-Fingers’s face. Cerril didn’t allow it.
In the beginning, Two-Fingers had been deathly loyal to Cerril for letting him join the gang. It meant he got to eat without selling himself. The other boys stole food from their own homes and brought it to him in the streets. Cerril had established that routine as well. As hard as he was on them, Cerril also took care of them.
“Cerril,” Kerrin called again. He waved frantically. “It’s your sister.”
Blowing out an irritated breath, Cerril turned from Two-Fingers and quickly joined Kerrin at the front of the alley again. He pressed himself against the wall and hid in the shadows.
“So do you think this man has gold?” Hekkel asked again.
Cerril resisted the impulse to cuff the younger boy again. Hekkel’s thoughts invariably turned to gold. Before he’d been slain by a thief, Hekkel’s father had been a jeweler in Alaghôn’s Merchant District. When Hekkel’s father was alive, the family lived in a fine house, and members of the Assembly of Stars—the freely elected ruling body of Turmish—had shopped there. That was six years ago, and Hekkel’s family had discovered that the city wasn’t generous to widows and half-grown children. Hekkel remained convinced that gold could change someone’s life. He was living proof that not having it could change lives, too.
As for himself, Cerril knew that having gold only changed a person’s life as long as that person had gold and spent it freely. Gold seldom came his way, but he took the coppers and the occasional silver without complaint. Unfortunately, coppers and the occasional silver spent quickly.
“Do you see your sister?” Hekkel asked from behind Cerril.
“Yes,” Cerril growled. “Now shut up before I have Two-Fingers bust your nose for you.” He said the last because he knew it would give Two-Fingers back some of his self-respect and standing among the group.
“Just let me know when you need it done, Cerril,” Two-Fingers offered. “I’ll smash the little bastard’s nose good and proper.”
Cerril ignored them, seeking out Imareen at the back of Elkor’s Brazen Trumpet just across the broad cobblestone street leading down to the docks and shipyards. His sister, fathered by another sailor than the one who had fathered Cerril, stood limned in the shadow of the alley behind the tavern.
Imareen’s thin, straight figure rarely drew even the drunkest sailor’s eye, but she was one of the fastest serving wenches in the city. She’d inherited her lashing tongue from their mother, and her skill with verbal abuse was legendary. Cooks and merchants feared her, and the small bit of power given her by Elkor himself sometimes went to her head.
But Elkor didn’t increase her tenday draw at the tavern, and all the other serving wenches at the Brazen Trumpet got large tips. When Cerril had suggested that he and his band would reward her for pointing out potential robbery victims, Imareen had hesitated only momentarily. They’d been working together the last four months.
Imareen had let them know that a man—alone, deeply in his cups, and possessing at least
a little in the way of gold or silver—was at one of the tables nearly an hour ago.
An hour, Cerril thought in quick anticipation, is more than enough time for a single drinker to get drunk.
Covering his excitement, Cerril whispered, “Stay here,” to the others, then stepped out of the alley and crossed the street.
A dwarven wagon driver rattled across the street from around the nearest corner before Cerril got halfway across. Cerril had to scramble to avoid being hit. The stench of the sweating horses filled his nose.
The dwarf didn’t mark his wagon with a lantern or a torch. That, plus the fact that the dwarf whipped the horses and cursed at them, led the young thief to believe the dwarf was about a bit of foul business as well.
The black markets throughout Alaghôn had increased since the Inner Sea War had taken place, and Cerril had occasionally managed to hire his group to hard-knuckled merchants as lookouts. The pay for the work they did was meager, but it also marked targets they considered and sometimes went back to rob.
Cerril’s heart beat rapidly with anticipation as he joined Imareen at the back of the tavern. There was nothing better than being a thief in Alaghôn. At least, not to his way of thinking.
“Hurry, you damned child,” Imareen chided.
That was their mother’s voice, Cerril knew. The tone and the words rankled him, but he managed to ignore them for the moment. He jogged to the back of the tavern and joined his sister.
The fragrant aroma of pipeweed clung to Imareen’s hair and clothing. Cerril enjoyed the smell, and when he had coins enough, he often indulged in the habit himself. Of course, if his mother found his small store of pipeweed she kept it for herself, chiding him for experimenting with such a vice—and she said all that with a plume of smoke wreathing her head.
Imareen emptied a slop bucket onto the alley. The splashing noise of the liquid striking the hardpan startled a cat rummaging through a pile of refuse behind the tavern. The feline leaped into the air and dashed up the sagging fence marking the alley’s end. Despite her authority with the cooks and the merchants, Elkor still expected her to empty out the privies.
The stench of the slop filled the alley, turning the still air thick and tickling Cerril’s nose into a sneeze.
“Listen to you,” Imareen groused. “Honking like a goose and making noise enough to wake the dead.”
Her foot remained in the back door so it wouldn’t close on her. The rumble of men’s voices and the ribald strain of dwarven drinking songs echoed out into the alley. Cerril doubted anyone inside the tavern could have heard him sneeze.
“Do you want to talk,” he asked, “or do you want to divvy whatever we find in some man’s pouch?”
Imareen didn’t even hesitate. “Divvy, and you’d better not short me. I’ll know if you do.”
Cerril nodded. Both times he’d tried to make off with part of his sister’s cut, she had known. If she could have made merchants realize the power she had to know a lie when she heard it, she could have made a large stipend. However, her unnatural skill seemed only to work with Cerril.
“Who’s the man?” he asked.
“A stranger.”
He said, “Strangers are good.”
“I know, Cerril. I know what I’m doing.”
Cerril didn’t rise to the old argument that existed between them. Since she was four years older than he was, she’d always told him what to do and not to do, but she knew since he’d taken to making his way in the shadows that the balance between them had shifted. She just didn’t want to act like it had.
“Give me some measure of respect in this,” Imareen said.
“I do,” Cerril said.
He sorely wished that cuffing his sister would work as well as it did with the members of his gang, but Imareen would never stand for it. There was a good likelihood that she’d get up in the middle of the night to stick a knife between his ribs and tell their mother that Malar the Stalker, god of marauding beasts and bloodlust, had taken him in the night.
“He’s settling his business with Elkor now,” Imareen said. “He’ll be out shortly.”
“Have you seen his purse?”
Avarice gleamed in Imareen’s muddy brown eyes. “It looks small, but it’s heavy.”
“Small isn’t good.” Still, Cerril couldn’t keep a faint smile from his lips.
“Heavy is good, and this man works to keep his purse well hidden.”
“Has anyone else noticed him?” Cerril asked.
“No. No one’s noticed him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Just the same,” Cerril said, “keep an eye out. If it looks like someone’s following him, wave one of the tavern lanterns in the window.”
“I will.”
Cerril nodded. “Let’s have a look at him.”
Imareen opened the tavern door and stepped aside. She followed Cerril inside then led him through the small larder behind the Brazen Trumpet’s bar.
The tavern was small and ordinary. Besides the heavy, scarred bar that ran the breadth of the building, odd-sized tables and unmatched chairs took up the floor space. Nets hanging from the ceiling held colored bottles in bright greens, blues, and dulled browns and rubies. All the liquor had been drained from the bottles, and they’d been refilled with water. Hundreds of seashells and smooth stones joined the bottles. The nets made for a colorful display. An ensorcelled shark hung above the fireplace. It was nearly as long as a tall man, and the lipless mouth was open in a fearful pose.
Men lounged in the chairs around the tables. Most of them were professional seamen, sprinkled with a few mercenaries. The two groups sat apart from each other. Maybe they’d sailed the same ship across the Sea of Fallen Stars, but each looked down their noses at the other.
“There,” Imareen whispered in Cerril’s ear.
Cerril studied the man at the bar. Elkor was trying to chat the man up, offering to rent him one of the rooms above the tavern for the night. The man simply shook his head.
He wasn’t a local. Cerril knew that from his clothing. While most Turmishan men wore square-cut beards and layered clothing against the humid heat that sweltered the Vilhon Reach, the victim Imareen had marked had a ragged appearance. His clothing was disreputable and he hadn’t shaved in days. The man’s emaciated form resembled a bag of bones shoved into a burlap bag. He was in his middle years, but his infirmity robbed him of any dregs of youth. Hollow-eyed and pale, he habitually raked his gaze over the tavern crowd.
“What has he been doing since he’s been here?” Cerril whispered to Imareen.
“Drinking,” his sister answered. “Drinking like a man possessed. And writing.”
“Writing?” Cerril pondered that. Writing was usually a merchant’s domain, keeping records of things sold and purchased, but writing was something mages also did. “Writing what?”
“I don’t know,” Imareen admitted. “I read about as well as you do.”
Cerril couldn’t read at all. Learning that skill had never proven important. He’d had a strong back, and now he had quick hands and an agile mind.
“He was writing in a book,” Imareen added.
Elkor fussed over the price he was exacting from the man.
Cerril raked the man with his gaze. He saw no book. “Where’s the book?”
“I don’t know.” Imareen glanced down at him. “Are you afraid?”
Cerril didn’t answer.
“People are always claiming to have stolen things from mages,” Imareen said. “Why, you could make a name for yourself with just one theft.”
“Those are stories,” Cerril insisted.
“All of them can’t be.”
Frowning, Cerril said, “Stealing from mages isn’t smart business. I don’t plan on living out the rest of my life as a toad. Or worse.”
“It might be an improvement.”
Cerril shot her a look. “If he is a mage and he questions me, I’ll tell him that you pointed him out.”
Imareen pal
ed beneath her freckles. “I don’t think he’s a mage.”
“I hope not.”
The man settled his bill with Elkor, who looked after the man longingly. Evidently the tavern owner had gotten a good look at the heft of the man’s coin as well.
“He’s leaving,” Imareen said.
“I can see that.”
“Well, if you don’t hurry you might lose him.”
Cerril hesitated for just an instant.
“We don’t have anything to show for the night,” Imareen pointed out. “If we don’t get something, we could be starting a trend of bad luck.”
I know, Cerril thought.
Bad luck was a recognized force in a port city. Ships sailed with luck, and any ship branded with ill luck was quickly noticed and just as quickly abandoned by merchants as well as sailors. Cerril believed in luck, always striving for the good and avoiding the bad.
The man walked through the Brazen Trumpet’s double doors and out onto the street.
Coming to a decision, Cerril started forward. “Remember about the lantern,” he whispered to his sister.
“I will. And don’t try to cheat me, Cerril.”
Turning, Cerril rushed back through the storeroom and out into the alley. He stayed within the tavern’s shadows, stepping out briefly at the corner so that Hekkel and Two-Fingers could see him. He pointed at the man walking up the sloped street leading away from the Brazen Trumpet.
Two-Fingers nodded.
Hekkel immediately stepped into the shadows on the other side of the street and took up the first leg of the pursuit.
Cerril remained on his side of the street. He and Hekkel were the two most skilled at following someone through the city in the shadows. He glanced back at the Brazen Trumpet but didn’t see Imareen put in an appearance at one of the windows. Carefully, his breath tight at the back of his throat and in his lungs, Cerril continued following the man.
Their prey seemed content to stay within Alaghôn’s dockyards. The man stopped occasionally to stare into the windows of a closed shop that caught his interest. His destination turned out to be Stonebottom’s Inn, one of the first structures ever built along the Turmish coastline. Back in those days, the port city had only been an avaricious gleam in a founding father’s eye.
