Changes v(cc-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Let’s just say we work for the same person. And since you do too, we probably ought to be polite and introduce ourselves. I’m Tal Merrick. This is Kan Betler. The other three members of our team are Jun Lysle, Ref Graden, and Serj Karmas.” Tal put his hand on his chest and made a little bow.

  “Jest Mags,” Mags said, bowing awkwardly. “Got no other name.”

  “We know,” said Kan, and waved a little. “Hello, Dallen.”

  ::Well! How thoughtful!:: Dallen sounded surprised and pleased. ::Tender my greetings please.::

  “Dallen says ’lo.” Mags smiled a little. “Aight. Anythin’ I kin do?”

  “Not really,” Kan told him. “Takes a bit of training to do what we do, to know what to look for. We investigate any death in Haven that doesn’t seem straightforward. Sometimes we investigate when we are asked to do so by relatives. Rarely we go outside Haven. We work with Nikolas a great deal because he has things we don’t.”

  “Mindspeech,” Mags said instantly. “An’ Truth Spell.”

  Tal touched one finger to his nose and pointed the same finger at Mags. “Sharp one. And he works with us because deaths that aren’t straightforward sometimes involve threats to the Kingdom and the King.”

  “If you aren’t going to die of boredom, you might as well stay and watch,” Kan continued, going back to his methodical sifting of the foreigners’ belongings. “It will save us having to have the Weasel arrested so we can talk to him, and Nikolas will appreciate that we are educating you.”

  ::That’s only so they can get out of sharing some of the special brandy they keep down at their headquarters,:: Nikolas retorted.

  “I ain’t bored,” Mags replied—and it was the truth. He was anything but bored. He watched carefully, making note of what they did and did not do. This was a skill worth having... .and now that the bodies were gone and the house was airing out, it was becoming more tolerable to be here.

  As expected, they found nothing, and finally, at a point well after midnight, the Special Guards packed up the things they wanted to take away and departed, leaving Mags alone in the house.

  He climbed back up on the roof per Nikolas’ instruction—but then something told him not to leave. Not just yet. There was something tickling around the edges of his awareness. A presence—no, several.

  For a moment, he was afraid it might be the other assassins, come back to make sure the house had burned as they had planned. But as whoever it was neared, cautious as a feral cat, he knew immediately it wasn’t them.

  There were three . . .

  They were young. Very young. He sensed their hunger—very physical hunger. They might be young in age, but in the way of poor children, they were old in grief and experience. They were creeping up on the house full of anticipation, but as soon as they saw the doors and windows standing wide open, they stopped in their tracks, hidden in the alley, their anticipation turned to despair.

  Mags crept across the roof to the point nearest where they were and strained his ears.

  ::What have you got, Mags?:: Nikolas asked him urgently.

  ::Dunno yet. Mebbe somethin’ worth chasin. Kids, but they was comin’ here fer a reason.::

  “Hoi!” came a whispered voice. “They done a runner!”

  There was a whimper. “We ain’t a-gonna git paid naow! I‘m hungry, Merrow!”

  “Shut it!” said a third voice. Mags identified it as belonging to the oldest of the three. “Mebbe they done a runner, but they left house open. Lessee what we kin find. Mebbe they’s still stuff i’ there.”

  With infinite caution the three slipped up to the back door. One skittered up to the door and peered inside.

  “Ain’t nobody ’ere,” came the whisper. “Pew! Stinks!”

  The youngest whimpered again, this time sounding terrified, and the whimper rose to a thin wail. “Noooooo!” the child cried, backing up from the door. “Don’ go in there! It’s Death! It’s Death!”

  And despite the hunger that Mags sensed gnawing at her belly, the little girl fled.

  The other two paused.

  “She’s—” there was an audible gulp. “She’s right. Ma smelt like this, arfter a day . . .”

  The older one was indifferent. “So? If they’s dead, they ain’t a-gonna need their stuff. Doors and winders open, must mean Guard’s been an’ gone, an’ ain’t nobody else aroun’. We’ll git first pickin’s. Gotta be somethin’ we kin use er sell.”

  The younger hung back. “What if they’s—ghostes?”

  “Then them ghostes kin pay us,” the elder said defiantly. “We done what we was ’sposed to. We kin take what they owes us outa their stuff.”

  The two figures slipped inside the house, one boldly, one reluctantly.

  Oho. So them bastiches got thesselves some errand-runners, eh? An’ th’ new ones don’ know ’bout ’em, or they’d’a tidied up the kids afore they bolted.

  Mags weighed the notion of confronting the children—but they might manage to elude him and run, and even if he caught them, they’d probably lie. What to do? He wanted to find out just what sort of errands these youngsters had been running . . .

  It made perfect sense for the assassins to use children for almost anything that didn’t require strength. A hungry orphan would do just about anything, no questions asked, if you approached him right, didn’t frighten him, made sure he thought he was getting the better of you.

  I surely would’ve, back at th’ mine.

  And if you needed to be rid of them, a couple of stray children would never be missed.

  All right. Then the best thing to do would be to eavesdrop on them now, follow them back to whatever place they called home, and figure out exactly where that was. If he tried to intercept them now, they’d run. After all, they could tell by the stink that someone had died here. Anyone they encountered would likely be involved in a killing or be a rival looter. Better to approach them later, when he could figure out how best to get at them without spooking them.

  He slipped back inside the house and stayed well out of sight, but not out of hearing. One of the two found a candle and the means of lighting it, and they carried it with them as they went from room to room. Once inside, when they thought they were alone, they were not exactly stealthy. Unfortunately, he didn’t learn very much from listening to them, since most of their comments were restricted to evaluating how much they could carry away and what was likely to bring the most money if they sold it.

  When they moved their search upstairs, he pulled himself back up into the attic and listened from there.

  Adults might have been disappointed, even angered, by the lack of things of real value—what the Guards hadn’t taken, he suspected that the pair of killers had carried away—or by the fact that garments had been ripped up and things taken apart. But these little fellows were not dismayed—and he certainly felt kinship with them when they discovered a pile of warm stockings and exclaimed in glee to find that not one had a hole in it. He remembered a time when finding a stocking of any sort was cause for rejoicing.

  Eventually they staggered out, laboring under the burden of two full packs apiece, one carried on the back and one in the front, with whatever else they thought salable tied on the outside. It made them ungainly and ridiculously easy to follow, and they were so concerned with their burdens that they were not paying any attention to their surroundings at all. He was even able to follow them down on the ground, ghosting along behind them near enough that he could still overhear their occasional mutterings.

  But such disregard for their surroundings was not only to his advantage. It also made them targets.

  He spotted the thief about the same time that the thief spotted them. A ragged youth in his teens, he was lounging in a doorway near what Mags figured was an ale shop when he saw the two children. Mags sensed his greed and glee as soon as he spotted the easy targets, and knew then what the fellow was. He was probably a little younger than Mags, but he was several years older and much taller and heavier
than his potential victims. In fact, he was not at all unlike—

  The flash of memory overcame Mags for a moment.

  Mags sensed the cutpurse who was hiding in the alley ahead; then sensed that the thief had spotted the assassin that Mags called Temper. The surface thoughts of the thief, desperation crossed with greed, alarmed Mags, and he stopped, bending over to fumble with a shoe while he tried to figure out what was going to happen and if he could do anything about it.

  The would-be thief was a boy, not a man, a boy no older than he was. A boy with a master to answer to, and who, so far today, had nothing to bring back to him. Coming back meant a beating or worse, and no supper. The boy looked at Temper with the eyes of a hunter and saw good clothing, a man well fed, with no obvious weapons. That was enough; the thief made his decision. Before Mags could even think of something to try to stop him, the boy was moving.

  His was the cut-and-run style, rushing at the victim from under cover, cutting the bands of the belt pouch, and dashing off with it. Effective only when conditions favored a swift escape, it was well suited to a night thief and to thefts where crowds thickened and thinned again, hampering pursuit.

  The boy thought he had such conditions—night, the alley, and a half a dozen escape routes on the other side of the street.

  He was wrong.

  The man heard the running footsteps; his instincts all came alive, and an unholy glee came over him.

  The rest was a blur to Mags, caught as he was between the thoughts of the cutpurse and the thoughts of Temper. Temper threw off such violence that it rocked Mags back on his heels, but it was precise and calculated violence, and an acute pleasure in what he was about to do that was very nearly pain in and of itself.

  The man moved at the last minute; the boy’s outstretched hands missed the tempting purse. There was a moment of anger and bewilderment on the part of the thief as his hands closed on air.

  Then a flash of terrible pain and incredulity.

  Then nothing.

  And in the street ahead, all that anyone would have seen was the thief make a rush, the man step aside, and the thief falling to the ground as if he had stumbled. Except the thief didn’t get up again.

  Temper passed on, leaving the cooling body of the boy in the street. It happened that quickly. One moment the thief was alive, the next, dead.

  Mags shook off the unwelcome memory, and this new thief faded back into the shadows and waited for the two laden boys to pass, figuring to take them from behind. Burdened as they were, they wouldn’t be able to run or fight effectively.

  Mags swarmed up a drainpipe and got onto the roof; he waited for the older boy to come out of the shadows and paced him while he followed the children, making sure that they didn’t have an adult protector anywhere about. When the thief was positive they were alone, he made his move.

  That was when Mags dropped down on him from above.

  All that training at the hands of the Weaponsmaster culminated in a move so perfectly executed that he thought his mentor would probably be beside himself with pleasure if he could have seen it. Mags managed to knock the boy cold without damaging him too much, and do it so silently that the children up ahead of him were not even aware that anything had happened.

  Mags dragged the young thief into the shelter of an alley, pulled him behind a pile of garbage, and left him there. Bad luck, tosser, he thought, as he resumed tailing the children. Mebbe that’ll teach ye not t’rob kiddies.

  The children staggered into what looked like an enormous abandoned building; it was hard to tell in this light, but part of it looked fallen in. Burned out, perhaps?

  ::I believe so,:: Dallen told him. ::There was a building around about there, a big building that held several apartments. There was a fire there four or five years ago. No one could sort out who it belonged to afterward—probably the actual owner didn’t want to come forward, thinking he’d be up on charges for letting it get into that state. So it’s been abandoned, and no one can do anything about it until an owner is found or the city confiscates it. I suppose there are all manner of squatters in it now.::

  They plunged into the warren; he followed only far enough to determine that their “home” was an intact part of a cellar—and that the little girl who had fled was already there. He left them then, as the oldest of the boys sorted out some of the things that were likeliest to sell and hurried off with them to get some money and buy them all the food they had been promised as the reward for—whatever it was they had done for the assassins.

  ::What are you thinking?:: Dallen asked curiously.

  ::Tryin’ t’think how t’get at ’em,:: he said briefly, as he headed back to the Weasel’s shop at a trot. ::Reckon I’ll sleep on’t. I dun’ think they’re gonna go anywhere soon.::

  It had been a very long night, full of exertion, and once he got back to the shop and Nikolas’ congratulations, he was yawning. And starving. He didn’t say anything about the latter to Nikolas; after all, he would be getting food soon enough.

  If he could stay awake for it.

  He managed to have a coherent conversation about the Special Guards with Nikolas, anyway, once they got the Companions and headed back up the hill. It was quite enlightening; evidently there were more suspicious deaths in Haven over the course of a year than he had dreamed.

  “. . . so the rule of thumb is, figure out the motive, and you generally find the killer, if there is one,” Nikolas was saying, as they rode in through the back gate near the Kirball field.

  “Wisht we could figger out the motive of them twa new bastiches,” Mags fretted. “An’ if there’s more’n two. I cain’t b’lieve all they been sent fer was t’clean up t’others’ mess. I reckon they’re s’posed t’ finish what t’others started, an’ we still don’ know whut thet was. I dun’ like it, sir. I dun’ like it one bit.”

  “That makes two of us, Mags,” Nikolas replied, and sighed. “All right. I need to report to—whoever is awake at the moment. It won’t be the King; probably the Lord Marshal. Then I need to write a report that the King will get as soon as he is awake. There’s nothing much that you can do, lad, so get yourself fed and get some sleep. We’ll be on this tomorrow.”

  Dallen paused, in response to Mags’ unspoken command. “Sir? Reckon this’s th’ time fer me t’ take a bit uv leave from classes?”

  Nikolas pondered that for a moment. “It might just be,” he said, slowly. “Your Gift isn’t going to find these men from up here on the hill, not without opening yourself far too much and endangering yourself. You did that once already, and we were lucky you didn’t go mad. The odds are not good that we will be lucky twice. We might have to repeat what you did last time—moving through the city until you can sense them, then narrowing down our search until we find where they are.” He gnawed his lip. “I’ll know better after I report to the King—but yes, be prepared. We might be settling in for a long job.”

  An’ there goes any chance’a seein’ Amily fer a while. He sighed. “Yessir,” he said obediently. This’s too important. Even wi’ her Healin’ thing a-comin’ up. Nikolas knowed it, an’ ’e’s ’er pa. An’ she’ll know it too.

  She’s ’er pa’s daughter, after all.

  Chapter 10

  Mags woke from a dream of the mine knowing exactly what he needed to do to get to those three children down in Haven. It pained him—but it was absolutely the surest, fastest way. They would never respond quickly enough to kindness—that was what the dream had been about. In the dream he’d outgrown being allowed in the kitchen. He’d been just old enough to have been tossed in with the rest of the kiddies to learn the business of chipping out sparklies, and one of the older boys had immediately latched onto him. He had become the lad’s personal little slavey, which was generally the norm with the very youngest of the children. He’d been bullied and hit, and at the end of the day, half his sparklies went to his “master.” Only later, when the older boy had died of a fever, had he figured out that he had been better off with h
im than without him. Maybe he’d had his sparklies taken, but he never went without food—the older boy had always seen to it he had his bowl of “soup” and his slice of bread and never let anyone take it from him. He might have been bullied, but he had never had to fight—the older boy had protected him.

  That was how he would approach these kiddies. They likely thought they were safe from discovery in their little cellar; he would ambush them there, give them a good fright, and tell them that they were working for him from now on. A cuff or two would get them in line fast enough. If he’d had time, he would have tried wooing them with kindness; he didn’t have the time. Maybe later he could make it up to them; right now he had to get them cowed, under his thumb, and compliant enough that he could worm their recent activities out of them.

  And in the process, he would be able to protect them and see that they were adequately fed. The combination of care and bullying should do the trick.