Among Thieves totk-1

by Douglas Hulick

  “Which is bad enough for me, but still more manageable.”

  “Oh, thank the Angels for that!” I said caustically as I got out of the chair and walked across the room. I rested a hand on the back of Josef’s chair and looked over his shoulder. Christiana glided over to his other side.

  “What else can you tell me about that letter?” I said.

  Josef had three pieces of paper before him on the desk: my letter and two other crisp, clean documents.

  “I’m no expert, to be sure,” said Josef, pointing to the letter Tamas had delivered, “but it seems to me that someone went to a good deal of effort to produce this forgery.”

  “So it is a forgery?” I said.

  “Drothe!” said Christiana. “How many times do I have to tell you I didn’t write that letter?”

  “You haven’t denied it until now,” I pointed out. “Besides, it’s easy enough to ambush a messenger, then alter the letter.” I stared down at the letter, then at the other two documents. The hand looked identical on each page.

  “How can you tell?” I asked Josef.

  “It’s small things,” he said. “Most of it is very well-done, but you can see errors in the characters for distinction and address. Here, in iro and mneios, and, let’s see… Oh, and there, in phai-far too light a hand. The style is close, but the calligraphy is from a different school than madam’s or my own.”

  I looked where he indicated. I thought I saw a difference but couldn’t be sure. I nodded knowingly, nonetheless.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “Well, the chop is flawed; or rather, it’s not flawed.” Josef flipped my letter and one of the adjacent documents over. Each had a red blob of sealing wax impressed with a copy of Christiana’s baronial widow’s chop.

  “The chop on your letter is false,” said Josef. “The baroness’s has a chip missing in the lower-right corner. There is no such flaw in the other seal.”

  “A flaw in my sister’s seal?” I said, bending closer to see it. “I’m surprised you haven’t been flogged, Josef.”

  “It was done on purpose,” said Christiana. “To prevent problems like this.”

  I gave a slight bow of my head-leave it to Christiana to think of something like that.

  “And then there’s the paper,” said Josef. “It’s, well, too fine.” He said it almost apologetically.

  “Too fine?” said Christiana and I, almost in unison. Her voice was incredulous, while mine was full of amusement.

  “For this type of missive,” said Josef quickly. “It’s too good for

  … That is to say, the paper is not what…”

  Christiana’s eyes narrowed. “Ye-es?”

  Josef took a deep breath and started over. “This isn’t the type of paper a person would use for simple correspondence. Its texture and weight are too good. This is the kind of paper used for fine volumes, or maybe imperial documents. It’s far too valuable to be, uh, well, wasted on a simple invitation.”

  I reached down and felt one of the clean sheets of paper, then my own. It was hard to tell because of all the wear and tear, but the stuff of my letter did seem weightier. Christiana did the same, nodding her agreement with Josef’s conclusion.

  I straightened up, taking my letter and refolding it. I put it back in my sleeve.

  Christiana was studying me. “You know who did this?”

  “No. But I know where to start.” Baldezar-damn that arrogant scribe, anyhow.

  “I want them dead, Drothe. All of them.”

  “Of course you do,” I said. Whoever was behind this knew about Christiana and me, at least on some level. Any threat to her reputation was a threat to her status, and I was one of the bigger threats her reputation faced. “But it’s not that easy.”

  Christiana crossed her arms and arched an eyebrow at me. “Really? And why not?”

  “Because whoever sent Tamas-the assassin-gave him glimmer. Magic. That means money and connections. That means they’re willing to risk the empire sniffing around if their man gets caught.” I shook my head. “Frankly, I’m not worth that kind of risk.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Notice I’m not arguing. But my point is, the person I have in mind doesn’t have the resources or clout to hire someone of Tamas’s caliber, let alone hand him a piece of glimmer.”

  Christiana shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling in the curtain of her hair. “So just hold the forger’s feet in a…” She stopped, and I could almost hear the pieces clicking together in her head. “It’s that scribe of yours, isn’t it? The one you’ve had doing the documents for me. Damn it, Drothe! I told you to find someone you could trust.”

  I had to laugh at that. “You expected me to find a trustworthy forger? Ana, listen to yourself. I found someone who’s reliable and good at what he does; that’s as good as you’re going to get with a Jarkman. And because he’s reliable, he’s going to be hard to crack. He doesn’t give up his clients easily.”

  “He didn’t seem to have a problem giving you up.”

  I nodded. “I know, which is what is going to make this interesting.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The sun was tinting the east with purple and pink when Baldezar arrived at his shop. Some of his younger apprentices had been there for an hour already, grinding pigments, sorting papers, and gathering glair from the egg whites they had wrung through sponges the night before. I had waited across the street beneath a bookbinder’s eaves. I’d nearly nodded off twice, and had only managed to stay awake by chewing a handful of ahrami. Now, though, just the sight of the scribe was enough to quicken my heart.

  I stepped across the street and slipped up behind Baldezar as he opened the door to his shop.

  “Bene lightmans, Jarkman,” I said as I put a hand between his shoulders and shoved. He stumbled across the threshold and fell to his knees. I stepped in behind him and shut the door. Throughout the shop, the apprentices froze, their eyes wide.

  Baldezar spun around on the floor. His face was already turning red, both from anger and embarrassment. His mouth was a dark scowl.

  “How dare you!” he said as he began to gather his feet beneath him. “What do-”

  I stepped forward and kicked out, catching him just inside the left shoulder with my foot. I held back on purpose, not wanting to break anything at this point. Right now, I was just setting the tone.

  Baldezar went over backward. I heard his head strike the floor with a hollow thunk. He relaxed but didn’t go entirely limp. Dazed but not unconscious-good.

  I reached behind me and locked the door to the street. “The shop is closed,” I said to the apprentices. “No one comes or goes until I’m finished. Is that clear?” They all nodded. I pointed to a corner. “Sit there. Don’t move.” They didn’t quite fall over themselves getting to the corner, but it was close.

  I bent down and pulled Baldezar to his feet. “We need to have a talk,” I told him as he shook his head, trying to clear it. “Upstairs.”

  Baldezar turned and walked unsteadily toward the steps. I followed behind, a hand on his back to steady him as much as to reinforce the threat.

  He fumbled briefly with the latch before opening the door to his office. Baldezar settled in heavily behind his reading table, rubbing at the back of his head. I stood, hand on the back of the chair that faced him. One of the apprentices had opened the shutters earlier in preparation for their master’s arrival. The room was a strange mixture of gentle morning light and leftover shadows.

  “This had better be good,” he said, managing to summon a sliver of his normally imperious tone.

  “Yes,” I said, taking the forged letter out of my sleeve. I unfolded it and set it on the table in front of him. “It had better be.”

  He stared down at it for a long moment. Finally, he picked up the paper, holding it gently between his thumbs and forefingers.

  “I take it,” he said dourly, “you think I did this.”

  “The thought had occurre
d, yes.”

  “Then the thought would be wrong.”

  I leaned on the chair. It creaked under my weight. “I’m not in the mood for hints and vagaries, Jarkman.”

  Baldezar touched the back of his head gently. “I’d gathered as much.” He wet his lips, then set the letter back down. “Since I don’t know the context of this forgery, I can only guess it was used to get you somewhere for some reason. The text is clear on that much. But the reason you’re here is because whoever wrote the letter used the name, writing, and chop of a certain noblewoman with whom we both know you do business.”

  “Which puts the person behind the letter into a very small circle of someones.”

  Baldezar nodded. “Yes. And my having done work for both you and her in the past, and having access to her writing through you”-he shook his head-“a very neat line, I admit.”

  “But?” I said.

  “But I’m not stupid. That’s the key.” Baldezar eased gently back in his chair. “I’ve been forging documents for decades, Drothe. Bills of lading, imperial trade waivers, letters of passage, contracts, tax stamps, diplomatic negotiations… More documents than I can name, and most of them far more dangerous than a simple letter of summons. If I’ve been able to keep nobles, ambassadors, tax masters, and imperial ministers from tracing things back to me, do you really think I would make it this easy for you? Forgers die if they give people easy trails to follow.”

  “Normally, yes,” I said. “Except when they expect the recipient of the forgery to end up dead.”

  “Murder? Is that it?” Baldezar shook his head. “I’m surprised you settled for knocking me down. The more traditional response would have been to run me through, would it not?”

  “Dusting people is easy,” I said. “Getting answers is a bit more tricky. Corpses make it even harder.”

  “Very pragmatic,” observed Baldezar. “But I’m pragmatic as well. By all accounts, you’re a hard man to kill, Drothe. How many attempts now-two, three?”

  “More,” I said.

  Baldezar nodded. “Precisely. And I’m to think I will be the exception? I would have to consider the possibility you might live, and that you might get your hands on this letter. That’s too clear a road back to me.”

  “Unless you were in a hurry. People make mistakes when they’re rushed.”

  “True, but what’s the hurry? Why would I even want to kill you in the first place?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be you,” I said. I pointed at my sister’s forged signature. “You do this kind of thing for hire.”

  “Yes. And I like to be able to spend the money I get for it, too. Besides,” he said, flicking at the paper, “this is substandard workmanship. I wouldn’t turn out something this poorly done, no matter whether my life were on the line or no.”

  I thought back to what Josef had said about the letter. “The flaws were minor at best,” I said, “and damn hard to find.”

  “But you found them,” said Baldezar. “A good forgery should be able to withstand an amateur’s scrutiny. This did not.” He pointed at various spots on the page. “Improper forms here, here, and here. Inconsistent pen strokes on the third and fifth lines. And at least two scraped and redone stylistic errors I can see at a glance. This is beginner’s work. Forging is as much art as it is duplication; whoever did this was a copyist, not an artist.”

  “Whoever it was had access to Baroness Sephada’s letters,” I pointed out. “And he knew about our business arrangement. That still points to you.”

  Baldezar nodded. “Yes, and that’s what troubles me. It means someone either gained access to my office, or someone in my shop is involved. Either way, I’m not pleased. But I have no reason to want you dead.”

  Baldezar studied the letter again, then held it out to me. “I’ve explained to you why I wouldn’t have done this, Drothe, but I can’t prove it to you. It’s a forgery, and that’s what I do. But I’m an excellent forger, and this isn’t an excellent forgery.”

  If it had been anyone besides Baldezar, I would have laughed in his face at that explanation. But it was Baldezar, and I had been dealing with him long enough to know he was right; he couldn’t put out a bad document even if he wanted to. His ego wouldn’t allow it.

  I took the letter from his hands and leaned in close. “All right,” I said. “Even if you didn’t do it, I’m thinking the information about the baroness and me came from here. Find out how they got it and who they are, or I might be less ‘pragmatic’ my next visit.”

  “Not to worry,” said Baldezar. “We’re both victims in this. I want whoever did this as much as you do.”

  I grinned darkly. “I doubt that very much, Jarkman. Very much, indeed.”

  The sun was a good two hand spans above the horizon when I finally made it home and crawled into bed. Ideally, I could have used ten hours or so of sleep, but my brain was having none of it. Dreams of fighting, falling, sewers, and giant pen-wielding Angels filled my head. By midafternoon, I decided to cut my losses and crawl back out into the day.

  I had a quick bite at Prospo’s, checked for messages with three of my usual drops, and began working the streets. Not surprisingly, half of the rumors I gathered in the first two hours dealt with me-or, more specifically, with Tamas’s attempt on me, and what it had meant. When you have a running fight in your own front yard, the locals are going to notice. Little of what I heard was accurate, some was downright wrong, and a few people even seemed surprised to see me alive.

  I wrote that last reaction off to overblown accounts of the fight-until I ran into Betriz. Like me, Betriz was a Nose, Wide to my Narrow, and like most Noses, she told me something I didn’t want to hear.

  “Street says you’re holding out on Nicco.” She said it matter-of-factly as she popped an olive into her mouth. She had six more on the tips of her fingers-the easiest way to carry the snack she had purchased moments before.

  “What?” I said. “Holding out how?”

  Betriz was a long, lean woman, with deep brown eyes and the knowing smile of a Nose. She swallowed her olive and showed me that smile now.

  “Whispers are you found a Snilch in Nicco’s house and haven’t told him,” she said, licking the brine from her lips. “That true?”

  I stared at her, my face impassive even as my mind raced. The Snilch rumor was supposed to be soft, dying-not making the circuit with other information brokers. I’d had Mendross put out the word to kill it. What in the hell was Betriz doing with it?

  “You’re a fool,” she said, reading my silence. “You, of all people, should know better than to hold out on Nicco, Drothe.”

  “I’m not…” I began, then stopped. I took a deep breath and started over. “I’m doing my damn job, which you, of all people, should understand: I’m separating the bull from the shit. I’m keeping Nicco from tearing his own organization apart to look for something that isn’t there. There’s nothing solid on this. The last thing I need is for him to start swinging ham-handedly at anything that catches his suspicion.”

  Betriz arched a sun-faded eyebrow. “The last thing you need?”

  “Me, the organization, everyone.”

  “Uh-huh.” She didn’t sound completely convinced.

  “Where’d you hear this?” I said.

  “Oh, you know…” Betriz gestured vaguely with an olive-tipped finger. “Around.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said. “How much?”

  Betriz beamed down at me. “That’s what I love about you, Drothe-you know how to cut through the bullshit.”

  I paid Betriz, got a handful of names, and spent the rest of the afternoon tracking rumors. Fortunately, there weren’t a lot to find. The rumor about me and Nicco was young yet, and the one on the Snilch still fairly mild. I talked to some people, paid off some others, and put the lean on a couple more. It wouldn’t solve anything permanently, I knew, but it might give me some working room.

  If I wanted to fight these rumors-if I wanted to keep Nicco from digging into his own organi
zation, not to mention holding my feet to the fire for not telling him about the whispers-I needed to come to him with something bigger, something better. I needed to be able to stand in front of him with names and answers and maybe even a body or two, so that I could tell him that instead of chasing after rumors, I had spent my time getting results.

  Success was my best argument now, but to get that success, I needed to go to back into Ten Ways.

  Word of my previous visit to Ten Ways had already gotten around. The locals had tagged me as Nicco’s man, and some even blamed me for Fedim’s death. The irony of the latter was not lost on me.

  Few of the local Kin had any interest in talking to me. Being Nicco’s Nose was almost the same as being Nicco himself in that cordon, and most Tenners would rather be gut-stabbed than help a foreign boss.

  Still, hawks have a way of starting conversations. And, as it turned out, so did mentioning Rambles’s name.

  Rambles, it seemed, had been stepping on more toes than anyone could count. According to the street, he’d come in, set up shop, and begun acting as if Nicco’s tenuous holdings were a bastion of criminal strength. Sure, he needed to throw some weight around and reestablish Nicco’s presence in the cordon, but that didn’t mean he could roll over the native talent, push out local operators, and call the neighboring gangs to heel like a pack of misbehaving dogs. Nicco-and by extension, Rambles-didn’t have the clout to pull off something like that in Ten Ways.

  I needed to talk to Rambles to see what the hell was going on. Nicco hadn’t wanted me to pay a call on him, but, if Rambles was going to make my job harder, I wanted to know why he was doing it in such a damn efficient manner.

  Rambles’s people, it turned out, were depressingly easy to find, and his base of operation not much harder. He had established himself in the back of a gaming den, one floor above a milliner’s shop. The gambling room wasn’t so much a cover as a source of income, I gathered, given the ready action in the place. I passed among the tables to the back of the room, where a big Cutter was busy making the door he guarded look small.

  “Rambles in?” I asked as I came up. My hand went out for the handle, was engulfed by a slab of meat with fingers before it reached it.