Honor among thieves abt-3

by David Chandler

  But the fortunes of war could play havoc with honor, he thought. Fear could do strange things to a man’s heart. So he decided to temper his anger with mercy. He would watch Gavin and his crew closely-but he wouldn’t slay them in the name of justice, not yet. Not until they’d had another chance to prove themselves.

  “The past is the past. You’re here, now, and that’s what matters,” he said. “Here where you can still serve your king. We’ll need to make a litter for him, something two men can carry. We won’t get far if I have to keep him over my shoulder.”

  “Milord, you aren’t thinking of going out there,” Gavin said carefully, pointing toward the door, “when we’ve safety and warmth right here?”

  “Just as soon as we’ve all had a chance to rest,” Croy told him.

  The war wasn’t over. Not while Ulfram V still lived.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The river Skrait twisted through Ness, carving its way between Castle Hill and the Royal Ditch before diving straight for Eastpool. There it widened out to make a natural haven for river boats. The land on either side of this harbor, also called Eastpool, was a district of tar-stinking wharves and low shacks. It gave home to the fish market by day and a steady trade in the seedier commodities after dark. It was a natural magnet for thieves, yet Cutbill’s charges rarely ventured there alone, since its quays and unpaved lanes were patrolled constantly by rivermen carrying spikes and harpoons-men who did not trust the watch to keep them safe.

  In Malden’s experience there had been no time of day or night when Eastpool was not crowded with fishwives and burly salters, with sea captains and pirates looking for a place to lie low. Now, though, like all the Free City, it was a desolate wasteland, almost untenanted. He saw a few women gathered around a jug of strong spirits. They were watching the fishing boats that had been pulled up on the banks and turned hull up to resist the sun. He saw a few confused looking sailors, just in from far ports of call and unknowing of the war or the game fate was playing with Skrae. Yet in many of the twisty ways he passed through, under the shade of half the shanties in Eastpool, Malden was alone.

  He headed down the Ditchside Stair toward the water and there he was able to hire a rowboat from a one-armed man who looked very glad for his custom. Yet when Malden told him where he wished to row to, the boatman scowled and demanded a deposit on guarantee of return.

  “I shall be quite welcome there, I assure you. I’m known there, and fondly,” Malden told the man, but failed to convince him.

  “There’s those in this world like their privacy, and Coruth, she don’t welcome nobody,” the boatman insisted. “Even old friends.”

  Malden sighed and turned over an extra shilling, which he doubted he would get back even if he returned the boat in perfect condition. The boatman would probably insist the rowboat had been contaminated just by coming in contact with the Isle of Horses.

  It mattered little. If he was truly master of the guild of thieves now-ha, he thought, it’s but some trick Cutbill’s playing, as he’d been thinking all day-then he could afford the surcharge. He leapt into the little boat and grabbed up its oars.

  He’d never cared much for rowboats, since you couldn’t see where you were going when you rowed. Yet this time he was almost glad to be pulling himself backward across the Skrait’s slow current. The Isle of Horses was none too easy on the eyes. It had been named for a calamity long passed, during a very rainy year when the Skrait had swollen and flooded its banks and was far too wild to navigate. Still, ships had tried, for Ness was the richest port in Skrae, and paid well for cargo. One ship foundered just inside Eastpool, run aground on a shoal. It sank with all hands and all its goods aboard, yet somehow a consignment of horses managed to escape the wreck and make their way onto the only available piece of dry land. Every attempt to retrieve the animals failed in the foaming water of a bad storm, and for days the people of Eastpool had been forced to listen to the screams of terrified beasts as the water rose, every hour coming a foot closer to washing the island away altogether.

  The island survived, but no one found any trace of the horses when the storm had passed. The locals considered the tiny scrap of land haunted now, and neither landed there nor used it for any purpose. It was one of the few uninhabited parcels of land inside the city’s walls, and that should have made it invaluable as the city’s population grew and crowded every available square foot. Yet no one had ever tried to live there-until Coruth claimed it for her own.

  Barely six feet above the water at its highest point, the Isle of Horses was choked with gorse and bramble. Coruth’s house was its only salient feature, a shack made of driftwood from which odd lights were often seen by night and sometimes noises issued that could not be explained. The perfect home for a witch.

  Malden pulled at the oars until his boat grated on the rocky beach below the house. Because he had not announced his arrival-he knew no way to contact Coruth save to knock on her door-he stood awhile in the boat, letting himself be seen, before he stepped down onto the strand.

  When there was no response from the house, he tried calling out, shouting that it was Malden and he wished to speak with Coruth. That elicited no response either.

  So he jumped down from the boat, onto the pebbled shore, and started walking toward the house.

  He’d taken no more than a half dozen steps before a rope, half buried in the pebbles, shifted under his foot as he trod on it. Instantly he felt the rope shift as it took up tension and he cursed silently. A trap-a trap he should have seen, because this was no magical ward. It was one of the simplest traps he’d ever encountered. The rope stretched away toward a post to which hundreds of cockle shells had been loosely nailed. As the pressure of his foot tightened the rope, it waggled the post and the shells chimed together-a soft, pleasant sound that was lost in the sighing of the wind. Having tripped enough alarms in his life, he knew someone would hear it.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Walking through the brambles surrounding Coruth’s shack was disincitement enough, Malden thought, to keep most intruders away. Yet he now knew there would be other, less passive guardians to deal with. He tried to be on his guard.

  Yet when a horse snorted close to his left ear, he still jumped. He wheeled around, half expecting to see some spectral animal gnashing its big ghostly teeth at him, but there was nothing there.

  He had dealt with the supernatural often enough to respect it, and to avoid it whenever possible. He was willing to give up, to return to his boat and row away, his original purpose thwarted. He would come by at some later date when Coruth was prepared to receive him. However, when he tried to retrace his steps toward the shore, he heard a great rumbling thunder of hooves treading the flinty soil, directly between him and his rented boat.

  “All right, witch-show me how to leave, that’s all I ask,” he said aloud.

  The neighing of horses all around him was like laughter.

  He could see nothing. The ghosts of horses left no hoofprints in the soil, it seemed. Nor could he smell any animals. Yet whenever he tried to lift a foot, or move his hands, he heard them all about him as if they were pressed very close, ready to stampede and trample him.

  If he remained very still, he thought, perhaps he would be safe. Perhaps the ghostly trap was only meant to keep him where he was, until such time as Coruth chose to collect him.

  But then he heard the noise of a great charger running straight toward him, every hoof falling like thunder. He could hear its great infernal breath snorting in and out of its undead lungs, even hear the brasses slapping and ringing on its sides. If he didn’t move, if he didn’t flee, it would surely run roughshod right over him Unless, of course, this was one of those traps that only fooled you into thinking you were in danger, when in fact you were perfectly safe the whole time. Typically such traps were designed to startle you into running away, right into an actual hazard you could have easily avoided.

  Malden tried to stand his ground. Yet as the sound of the
galloping horse came closer and closer, never deviating in the slightest from its course, clearly intent on his destruction, even his devious brain stopped thinking and started reacting.

  Shouting in his fear, he turned and ran.

  Horses were on either side of him, their heavy feet crashing down so fast and so frequently he was certain they would step on him at any moment. He felt their hot breath on his neck, could hear nothing but their whinnying and snorting and the enormous noise of their rhythmic running. He threw his arms over his head for protection and ran he knew not where. If he ended up running right into the cold waters of Eastpool, that was fine. If he was being herded back to his boat, he would give great thanks, if Something very solid and very real smacked into his face and nearly broke his nose. When he dared open his eyes again he saw he was standing on the porch of Coruth’s shack in the middle of the island. He’d run right into her front door.

  He could no longer hear the sound of horses from any direction. The salt wind barely moved through the thorny vegetation behind him. The silence was like deafening laughter, and he felt his cheeks grow hot.

  Then the door of the shack opened with a creak. Light and warmth spilled out across him, and then Cythera was standing before him, speaking his name, a look of utter confusion on her face.

  He grabbed her up in a feverish embrace and kissed her deeply. She did not resist-not here, where there was no one to see it.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  He kissed her again.

  “Sweet kisses,” she laughed, “do not an explanation make.”

  “Just glad to be alive,” he told her. “Your mother’s illusory guardians are most compellingly believable.”

  “The horses?” she asked.

  “The horses,” he said. “Though-now that I can think again, I have to wonder. Why not something more immediately frightening? Like basilisks, or demons?”

  “I seem to remember the first time you sat a horse,” Cythera laughed. “You were certainly frightened then!”

  Malden smiled. “It wouldn’t stop moving. I was certain I would fall.”

  Cythera laughed again. “If you must know, witchcraft doesn’t work that way,” she told him, ushering him inside. “Certainly a sorcerer could create the illusion of dragons swooping down, spitting fire, or whatever the sorcerer could imagine to scare away interlopers. Sorcery draws power from the pit and its denizens, but they have to be repaid for their gifts-you’ve seen the way they distort a sorcerer’s soul.”

  “Not to mention his face,” Malden said, thinking of some of the sorcerers he’d met. No natural deformity could match the freakish countenances of wizards. In public, they always wore black veils to hide their features.

  “Witches use the power of the world around them. They make subtle changes in what is already there, that’s all. This is the Isle of Horses, so horses it must be.”

  “I see,” Malden said, though as usual when someone tried to explain magic to him, he had the creeping suspicion that the parts that seemed to make sense were only glosses on a text far beyond his comprehension. “To actually answer your question,” he said, putting matters of philosophy aside, “I’ve come to see your mother.”

  “You’ve met someone else,” Cythera said teasingly. “You want to buy a love spell. Or is it revenge you want-on me for being such a fickle lover?”

  He smiled. She wasn’t normally this playful. “Neither, my leman. You’re the only woman in all Skrae who can catch my eye, and I love your contradictions as much as I love your deeper constancy. But tell me-what’s put you in such a good mood?”

  Her smile fell for a moment, but then it returned. “Mother’s been scrying. Watching the land around Helstrow, specifically.”

  “A grisly sight to behold, I’m sure,” Malden said, thinking of what the barbarians must at that very moment be doing to the farmland around the royal fortress.

  “I didn’t ask for details. I only wanted to know one thing, and I got the answer I was looking for. Croy still lives.”

  “Does he?” Malden asked.

  “Don’t look so dismayed. When he finds out about us he’ll be wrathful, but for now he thinks of you as his best friend. Here, sit down. I’ll get you a cup of tea. Mother will be out in a moment, once she’s finished with her working.”

  Malden sat down and watched her head through another doorway into what appeared to be a kitchen. The shack was quite different from what he’d expected. He had imagined a cauldron bubbling over a fuming fire of brimstone. Bits of various animals, hacked off and dried and hanging from the ceiling by bits of string. Perhaps bones everywhere, or instead thousands of glass bottles holding weird and unknowable substances. A pile of books with a human skull on top as a paperweight. He would not have thought a stuffed reptile or two would be remiss.

  Instead he was sitting in a very tidy, very plain parlor. The chair he sat in and the few other sticks of furniture in the room looked well-made but simple. There was a fire in a hearth but it glowed the cheery orange of normal, healthy, burning wood. There was only one sign that he was in the receiving room of a terrifying witch, and at first glance it seemed wholly innocuous: a bucket sat on a table at the far end of the room. Malden got up and glanced inside it, sure he would find frogs brains or skinned ghosts or the blood of virgins set to congeal-the kinds of things a witch would collect and use in her spells.

  Instead the bucket held a half dozen long, pale roots, parsnips perhaps. Maybe Cythera had collected them to make her mother’s dinner. Malden was slightly disappointed. Yet when he looked closer, he saw the roots were strangely bifurcated, so that each of them seemed to have legs and arms. Indeed, they looked almost like human bodies. One even had a crude mouth and a pair of wrinkles that might have been eyes. He started to reach for one of the roots but before he could touch it jumped back in terror. He was certain one of those wrinkles had opened-and a blind, milky eye had peered back at him.

  Coruth came storming into the room then, her iron-colored hair flying all around her head. “Whoever you are, it’ll mean your life if you touch that!” she screamed.

  Chapter Forty

  Malden moved out of the way as she swept toward him, her long dress whirling around her. She went to the bucket and bent low over it, speaking incantations he couldn’t follow. The words were in no language he knew, but he swore they sounded more like a mother soothing a crying baby than a witch invoking dark powers. He pressed himself up against the wall and tried not to move.

  “Who are you? Why are you here?” Coruth shrieked, spinning around to face him. Her eyes didn’t focus on his features, however. They didn’t seem focused on anything.

  “Coruth, it’s me, Malden,” he said.

  “Malden?” she asked, as if trying to remember the name. Then, “Malden!” Her eyes snapped to his face, and her mouth curled in a warm smile. She rushed to embrace him with something like fondness. “So very good of you to come, my boy. So very good of you to visit an old woman and her spinster daughter.”

  “Mother!” Cythera said from the door. “Malden, please forgive her. She was very far away there, for a moment.”

  “Seeing,” Coruth agreed. “Far seeing. Dangerous stuff.” She dropped into a chair and put her legs up on a table. Leaning her head back, she exhaled noisily. “You can get lost so easily when you’re that far from your body. And of course there’s no guarantee you’ll like what you find. Malden,” she said, leaning toward him, “how fare you? I haven’t seen you in quite a while.”

  “I live, which is something I’m always grateful for,” he said with a shrug. “Beyond that, it seems the wheel of luck turns for us all. Helstrow has fallen, and-”

  “Redweir will be next,” Coruth announced. Her mouth tightened into a defensive scowl. “The barbarians move quickly-that’s one of their greatest tricks. They are not hampered by complicated supply lines, for they ravage every land they cross, and provender themselves on the spoils. Each chieftain commands his own clan with gr
eat autonomy, so there’s no need for companies to sit in garrison waiting for orders from on high.” She shook her head. “Redweir will fall. But they won’t stop there. They’ll turn west. They’ll come here.”

  Malden felt all the blood rush out of his face. “You’ve… seen this? With the second sight?”

  “Don’t need to,” Coruth said, waving one bony hand. “It’s just logical. Everyone here knows it’s coming. That’s why anyone who could has already left.” She gave him a shrewd look. “Cutbill, they say, even Cutbill has fled.”

  Malden was shocked that Coruth even knew Cutbill’s name. Yet he supposed a witch might know anyone-and know their business, too, and more than they wanted. He nodded. “Yes, I learned that just a short while ago myself.”

  “And with him gone, who will minister to the thieves?” Coruth asked.

  Had it been anyone else, Malden would have lied. No need advertising his new position-that was likely to get him killed or arrested. This was Coruth, however. She would see through any falsehood. “As a matter of fact,” he told her, “that’s why I came to speak with you. He left me in charge.”

  The witch’s eyes widened and her smile returned. She did not seem surprised that Cutbill would choose Malden as his successor. “Did you hear that, Cythera? He’s a guildmaster now! A man of position. You could do a lot worse.”

  “I take it you know that Cythera and I have-” Malden said. Or tried to say.

  “I know all, see all,” Coruth said, with a twinkle in her eye. “If she wishes to marry you, I won’t stop her. That’s her decision to make.”

  “Right now, I’ve decided to see to our supper,” Cythera said, and hurried into the kitchen.

  For a while Coruth and Malden sat in silence. Eventually the witch took a pouch from her belt and spilled its contents into her hand, what looked like dried fruit. Malden would not have ventured a guess as to what it actually might be. Coruth took one of the desiccated things and tucked it under her tongue.