Thief's War: A Knight and Rogue Novel

by Bell, Hilari

  I channeled that molten flood of power through my animal handling gift, into a single thought with all my will behind it: Stand.

  Red Thorn’s body froze in place, as if it had turned to stone. But he turned his head to look at me as the avalanche of heaving flesh pounded toward us…swerved around his huge, solid body and ran past.

  Clots of mud pelted me, and covered the rider’s back as the race hurtled by, but that was the only harm we suffered.

  I pulled that brimming flood of power back into its well, and sealed it closed. Red Thorn, released from its grip, started to sidle and I let him go to trot after the others.

  The crowd was roaring, so someone had won. I was more concerned for the man on the ground beside me.

  “Can I get a healer here?”

  The man who climbed over the rope to join me was younger than I’d expected, but he seemed competent, checking the rider’s bones and neck before rolling him gently onto his back. Eyes dilated to blackness blinked up at us.

  “This man’s been drugged!”

  “Do tell.” The Rose’s icy voice came from behind me. He was attended by Jack, most of his guards, the course master, and a number of interested bystanders. His grooms were capturing Red Thorn.

  “How could this happen, as protected as this race was supposed to be?” Roseman was talking to the course master, but I still shivered.

  Jack’s expression merely thoughtful, though the gaze he turned on me was very sharp.

  “The horses were protected,” the man said. “I could hardly keep the riders prisoner. I’ve no idea where your man went before the race, or what he ate. Or drank.”

  “He’s not drunk.” The healer’s hands found pulses in the rider’s wrist, throat, behind the knee. “I’d guess it’s laudanum. Something in that family, anyway. And not magica, thank goodness, or he’d be dead.”

  “Will he be all right?” the course master asked. “Can you rid him of it?”

  “Too late for that,” the healer said. “It absorbs pretty fast, and he clearly took it awhile ago. But his pulse is steady, if a bit depressed. He should be all right. Though it will be days before he’s—”

  “Taken how long ago?” Roseman asked. “If anyone saw who drugged him…”

  His grooms had brought up the horse. One of them stepped forward.

  “Uh…boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think much about it at the time. But we’ve seen several children hanging around, and they didn’t seem to be with any—”

  Roseman spun to his guards. “Get them! Bring them to me!”

  I turned to go with the others. Jack put his hands in his pockets and said nothing, but his gaze followed me, even as the course master said, “Children? Why would a child try to drug your rider? Or anyone? How could they…”

  The guards’ leader ordered our search of the estate. He cast me an annoyed glance—I was one more thing he had to keep an eye on, in the midst of this new task. In the end he assigned me to the group searching the stables, the place I was least likely to escape from. At least, escape unseen. I might have stolen a horse, but I couldn’t go galloping off quietly.

  It made no difference to me where I was sent. They would find me.

  And I made sure that neither Jack nor anyone else was watching when I finally managed to wander off by myself, searching a long row of stalls and pens where the horses and livestock that belonged to the estate were housed. But the whispered “hey” came, not from an empty stall, but from the rafters above the goat pen.

  I looked up and saw Jig, peering down from one of the big beams.

  “Don’t look up. Someone might wonder what you’s staring at.”

  I looked down. Several bored goats gazed back at me.

  “I told you to dose the horse. How much did you give that poor man?”

  “Well, we had to guess about that. They was guarding the horse, see? We figured he was about a quarter the horse’s size, so we gave him about an eighth of that little bottle. Couple of big spoons, it was.”

  Lianna had taken a single teaspoon of the stuff.

  “That horse is seven times his weight. You could have killed the man.” I was hard pressed to keep my voice down, but the fault was mine, putting such a weapon in inexperienced hands. “Did you even consider that?”

  “Yah, we thought about it. But he works for the Rose, so we didn’t much care.”

  The sincere indifference in that young voice was chilling, but he added, “Will he die?”

  “The healer says he should be all right,” I admitted. “But ’twas still a terrible risk. You must promise never…”

  I didn’t finish, for ’twas a promise they would either refuse to make, or break whenever they got their hands on one of the Rose’s men.

  ’Twas then that the thought first occurred to me, but I thrust it aside as ridiculous.

  “I’ve got the key,” I told him. “And a note for Fisk as well. I’ll tuck them behind the tack box here, and you can come down and get them when it’s safe.” I slid them into their hiding place as I spoke. I’d kept a careful eye out for Jack, and Roseman’s guards, but ’twould be safer for Jig to wait till the search died down before he descended. “I trust I’ve paid enough for their delivery?”

  “That you have, Master Michael. More’n enough. We hurt the Rose good today, didn’t we?”

  Hatred brimmed in that simple question. Who was I to deny them their victory?

  “Yes, you’ve hurt him badly. Not only did you cost him a lot of money, you revealed to everyone here that this race was rigged for him to win. Whatever reputation he might have had, ’tis now in tatters.”

  “Good.”

  “Not entirely—he knows you were the ones who did it.”

  “Even better,” Jig said.

  “Mayhap it feels better to you, but he’s angry enough to do something about it, and he knows where your warehouse is. You’d better clear out of there, for a while. And be extra careful. Promise me.”

  “We always are.”

  The scrabbling sounds that came from the rafters as he left were no louder than a squirrel might have made.

  Roseman and Jack had departed for the country, to attend a race in which the Rose had a horse running. And from the sounds of it, a lot of money riding on the outcome. I only hoped their presence wouldn’t put a crimp in Michael’s plans, and it evidently didn’t—a key, wrapped in a brief note from Michael, found its way into my pocket just five days later.

  No luck on the necklace yet, was all it said, and I cursed his brevity even as my fist clenched around the key. It looked like an ordinary key to me. It’s wards a bit more complex than some, but that was to be expected for an important lock. Where had he found it? Was he sure this was the right one? Of course, Michael could not only sense, but see magic—and how many magica keys could Roseman have? I still wished Michael had written a bit more… But he hadn’t, and I’d now run out of excuses.

  It was time to burgle Roseman’s office.

  * * *

  I did it that very night. Both Roseman and Jack were gone, and I had no idea when they’d be back, but doing this in their absence struck me as a really good idea. It took less time to pick my way into the outer office this time. The curtains were still open, letting in the moonlight—though tonight the Green Moon showed only a sliver, and even the smaller tan Creature Moon was only half full.

  Not great for reading…and I hoped to be doing a great deal of reading.

  I went over to the forbidden door, put Michael’s key into the lock and turned it. I should have been pleased when it clicked smoothly open, but instead fear shot through me, and set my heart pounding even harder.

  At first glance, the room beyond looked much like the outer office: a large desk, with its back to the window and moonlight shining on the papers that covered it—but not enough to read by. Several chairs were scattered about, and there was a bench against the wall opposite the desk. Cabinets and shelves filled the wall oppo
site the door.

  I went first to the window, and made sure that none of the guards who patrolled the grounds were looking up, before I closed the velvet curtains. There was a chance that one of those men would be alert enough to notice that curtains that had been open weren’t—but hopefully not much chance.

  I locked the door and pushed a rug up against it to block any light that might show beneath. If someone came in, the opening of the outer office door would give me some warning—though what I’d do with that warning was a question I prayed I wouldn’t have to answer. If I got caught in the outer office, I could claim I’d had a sudden thought, wanted to check the ledgers, and found the door unlocked. It wasn’t a great lie, but it might be enough to let me live. At least no one could come in after me…but if someone suspected my presence, and I was trapped in this inner office, I’d be done for.

  I lit a single candle, and was turning to the papers on the desk when a large map on the wall over the bench caught my eye. At first I’d taken it for some kind of art—a tattered patchwork, as if some quilter had stitched together scraps of odd shapes and sizes. A map of Tallowsport made perfect sense in this office…but the Port only took up about six inches of a map that was almost four by six feet. The rest was filled with those odd shaped patches, darker around the port and lighter toward the rest of the Realm.

  Looking closer, I saw it was a detailed map of the estates that covered the Erran River Plain, all the way to Gollford. The ones near the port bore marks in red or blue, most of them covered with slanting red lines, a few with blue Xs. The Xs became more frequent away from the port, and the estates on the outskirts were more often marked with a single blue or red slash. Each estate had been neatly labeled in black ink with the name of the man who ruled it, and those under the red stripes bore a number. The numbers seemed almost random, ranging from eight to over a hundred, though the larger numbers were usually on large estates. Many were marked with the same round numbers, twenty, forty and sixty being most common.

  The back of my neck prickled with primitive warning, but I didn’t understand what it was warning me about. I chose one name from the map, one of those with red lines all over it: Baron Flaxom, twenty-eight.

  The Rose’s filing system was excellent—I only had to open three cabinets, all of them stuffed with papers, before I found the Fs.

  Baron George Flaxom had promised twenty-eight men—which didn’t sound that important, until you remembered it was inked on the map. His estate paid the High Liege a hundred and twenty gold roundels a quarter, which meant it was prosperous for such a small place. The only way the Rose could know his tax rate was if the baron had told him. There were some calculations detailing how much the baron could save if he paid only eighty-nine roundels a quarter.

  There were a lot more notes about the prices the food trains would be paying on his estate, prices that were much lower than the one we’d traveled with had paid. I went back to the map and looked—yes, we’d been buying food mostly in areas marked with a single slash, red or blue.

  The last entry in the baron’s file was a note that ten crossbows, twenty pikes and thirty swords were to be sent to the baron’s estate as soon as the production schedule would permit.

  I turned back to the map, noting how many red striped patches there were, and how few blue Xs.

  Atherton Roseman was about to raise a third of the river plains in rebellion.

  Even as my mind grasped it, a part of me howled in protest. The High Lieges had kept peace between baron and baron, lord and lord, for over two hundred years. But it hadn’t always been like that.

  The first battles of the great war that had brought the Realm under the Liege’s rule had been fought on the plains. The first battles of the new war would be fought here as well, if the Rose had his way.

  I stared at the map but I barely saw it, as evidence began to click into place. It took a long time, checking back and forth between map and files, but eventually it all became clear.

  The Rose paid extra for food in the areas he planned to subvert, draining the land of workers—men who might become soldiers when the war started. When the barons came to him to complain, he brushed them off. Those were the blue Xs, the men too loyal to the Liege to be subverted. And how could they complain to anyone that their farmers were being paid too much? But those who weren’t so loyal, he seduced into joining him. That map wasn’t just his battle markers, it was a recruiting tool. “See how many of your neighbors, your friends, have joined me already?” He promised to pay their farmers reasonable rates, so they could keep their people on the land. Promised to significantly lower their taxes, once they were paying them to him instead of the High Liege. Promised to arm the men they were training for his army, when the time came…

  No wonder he’d told Rigsby he was planning “something big.”

  My heart was racing, my palms wet with sweat. I don’t consider myself easily frightened, but this…

  It was at that moment I heard the door of the outer office open, and Wiederman’s voice saying, “…if you’re doing this because you just want to come inside and warm up, I’ll go looking for two new guardsmen in the morning.”

  The Rose would kill anyone who knew this secret, no matter what excuse they offered. And when I died, so would Michael.

  A quick pinch extinguished the candle. Did Wiederman have a magica key? Almost certainly not, but I wasn’t prepared to bet my life on it. Patrolling guards or no, I was at the window, swinging it open, even before I heard the soft click from the inner door’s lock.

  I all but leapt out that window, kneeling on the sill to pull the drapes back before I closed it. I was standing on the sill when I heard the door open and multiple footsteps came into the room. I’d have sworn Roseman kept that key with him at all times—why had he left it with Wiederman? Or was there more than one spare? To that room?

  If they caught me out here, the answer would very shortly cease to matter. At least to me.

  These men going into the house must have put a hole in the patrol patterns, for there were no guards below me at the moment. But I’d watched them long enough to know that would soon change. Several feet below the window sill, a narrow ledge ran around the outside of the building for most of this floor. Back when I was a child burglar, it would have seemed like…well, not a roadway, but at least a precarious trail. Now, it looked like an excellent way to fall to my death.

  “See?” said a strange voice, doubtless a guardsman. “Nothing here. I told—”

  “I swear the curtains in here were lighter than the others,” another voice protested.

  My faint hope that they’d leave without checking the window disappeared, even Wiederman said, “No matter. You’re right to bring it to my attention, even if it’s nothing. Check the window. Maybe the curtains in here are lined with lighter fabric.”

  I stepped off the sill and down to the ledge. It was about four inches wide, and held most of my foot when I turned it sideways. I started slinking along it as the second guard said, “They’re lined sir, but I dunno if its lighter than the others or not.”

  His voice faded as I moved away from the window…or maybe the thunder of my heartbeat drowned it out. The stucco covering the wall was too new for cracks. My fingertips clung, uselessly, to its rough surface as I sidled down to the next window—which was locked, curse it! I didn’t dare stop there, and the corner of the house was almost within reach. There was a drain pipe strapped securely to the wall, good, solid rich-man’s iron, not flimsy tin. I heard the whisper of well-oiled hinges as the window opened, grabbed it, and swung myself around the corner.

  “There’s nothing here, Master Wiederman.” The man sounded as if he was right next to me—he must have opened the window and leaned out. “But I swear this window looked brighter than the others. Liffer should come by soon. We can ask him if these curtains are lighter.”

  And when Liffer and his partner arrived, the guard’s first call would draw their eyes up to where I perched. In a dark
vest and britches, against a pale wall, even if the moons weren’t full. Not to mention the magical gem glowing like a lantern at my throat. And no use turning it to the back—in the dark, it was bright enough to show through the collar of my shirt.

  I missed Wiederman’s reply, if he made one, but the odds were excellent that when they left they’d latch that window behind them.

  Memory of the old days, and the feeling of that strong iron pipe, gave me ideas. I took a step back to the corner, and climbed, not down to the well-patrolled garden, but all the way up to the wide ledge that ran beneath the attic windows.

  Swinging myself up onto it was something I hadn’t done in years, it was a lot harder than it sounds, and I was more agile the last time I’d tried it.

  I hate burglary.

  After I finally rolled onto the vast two-foot-wide ledge, I lay on my back for a long time, gazing at the dark sky, listening to the guards call back and forth, and waiting for my heartbeat to slow to a reasonable rate.

  All those guards, flooding the house and town, acting as thugs and collectors and who-knew-what else, they weren’t a sign of ostentation or paranoia—they were soldiers. They were the core of the Rose’s army.

  And the crimes he was committing, the city tax, the stolen goods he fenced, rampant corruption…they only served as cover for his real plan.

  No wonder Jack admired the man. I was awed at the scope of it myself. Even the stocks had a concealed purpose, helping Roseman quell the population of the countryside he planned to rule. When their barons rose against the High Liege, no one would dare rise against the barons—or their new Liege.

  The food trains, traveling on public roads in plain sight, were the heart of the scheme. They drained the countryside so that the High Liege’s taxes pinched more and more, and changing their rates offered barons relief the moment they signed on with the Rose. They brought labor into the city, too, to make arms for that growing army. That was probably worth even the prices Roseman paid… Of course! There was no hidden treasury, brimming with money from the city tax and all his loot. He spent it on the cheap food that kept his labor force working and happy. The whole city of Tallowsport, the most prosperous seaport in the Realm, brimming with labor and industry, was his vault.