by Dale Lucas
It took Rem a moment to realize that the boy wasn’t talking to him, nor to his own father. He was instead addressing a new arrival on the scene—a bent old man with what looked like a horribly hunched back shuffling up the street toward the cart. The old man leaned on a crooked stick to support himself as he made slow, crabwise progress along the muddy street. It seemed that the boy had noticed the old fellow’s struggling, shuffling gait, for he now moved toward him, eager to help him along.
“Myrick,” the father said over his shoulder, never taking his eyes off Rem, “get back on those slop jars!”
“Just a moment, Da,” the boy said. “This old duffer just about stumbled right over them.”
The old man suddenly swatted the young man’s shins with his walking stick. The young piss collector bent, crying out. The walking stick rose in the air, then thumped him hard on his melon head. Down the lad went into the mud, moaning. The piss-monger turned to see what troubled his boy.
Rem stared for a moment, trying to puzzle it out: Why thump the boy like that? He’d only been trying to help.
Then something strange happened. The bent old man stood upright, spun round—putting his back to the cart—and yanked at a knot on his tunic. Something heavy—the very hump on his back—dropped with a thud into the cart bed. Suddenly Rem understood.
This was their thief. That hump on his back had been the idol itself, tied beneath his cloak. Now the thief had dumped his cargo and was climbing into the honeywagon.
Rem shot forward as the thief scurried up the length of the cart toward the driver’s bench. Just as Rem reached the middle of the wagon and leapt awkwardly onto the running board, planning to clamber over the cart’s plank frame in a clumsy effort to cut off his suspect, the thief danced nimbly past him, thumped down onto the sprung driver’s bench, and snatched up the reins of the draft horse. There was a snap. The horse jerked in its traces, and the cart was under way.
Rem clung to the side, one boot on the running board, another flailing through space. He had one good handgrip on the rail of the cart bed, but holding his sword in his other hand meant he could not gain purchase without first dropping his weapon. He was trying to decide what to do about that when the thief rose up in the driver’s seat and, without loosing the reins, turned and gave the slop jar nearest the outside rail—nearest Rem—a stout kick. Terrified of getting a face full of piss and excrement, Rem threw himself off the trundling cart.
He fell clear of the wagon and hit the mud with stunning force. Somewhere he heard the shattering of a clay jar, and the world was suddenly rich with the smell of ordure—but none of it, thank all the gods of the ancients and the Panoply, had landed on him.
“Are you just going to lay there?” the piss-monger then brayed from above him, his oafish son at his elbow. “That thieving swine’s getting away!”
But that was all behind him now, literally, for Rem was galloping along at a foolhardy pace, bent low over his stolen horse as he squeezed its foaming flanks between aching knees and whipped it with reins gripped in sweating hands. Beast and rider barreled on past drunken laborers reeling out of cellar stairwells, barking house mutts, corner congregations of underfed cats, and at least one stumbling, bleary-eyed molly who stank of witchweed and cheap brandy. Less than a mile due west, in the city center, the Brother of the Watch at the great tower of Aemon began his dutiful tolling of the hourly bell, low and sonorous. Rem’s heart beat a syncopated tattoo after each plaintive knell. He counted three.
His lungs burned. His thigh muscles screamed. He’d thought running toward his intended rendezvous would exhaust him, yet keeping himself upright on an unsaddled horse—especially one weaving through narrow streets at such a breakneck pace—was no mean feat. But Torval needed him. If Rem didn’t make the bridge he sought in time …
There. Up ahead. He saw two familiar high-rises—each towering a dizzying seven stories in the air above him. Those twin blocks marked the entrance to a steep flight of stairs that would put him on a footbridge that arced over Eastgate, the wide cobbled boulevard that the fleeing thief would eventually careen onto. Rem imagined he heard the rumbling rattle of the cart hurtling nearer even now, but knew that it was probably just his own mount’s hooves thumping on the street mud.
Rem reined in the mare and she balked, spinning in the street, screaming in protest. He hated to so mistreat her, but he had no time for niceties. Without bothering to hobble or tie her, he swung himself down from his perch, mounted the stairs that rose between the tenements, and bounded upward toward the apex of the bridge. He’d made good time on horseback. If he could put himself in the center of that bridge as the thief’s plunging cart passed beneath him …
He could … what? Leap? Try to land in the shit-and-piss-jar-crammed conveyance?
He didn’t really have a plan. Probably wouldn’t have time to formulate one, either.
Plans? Fah! Torval would’ve scoffed. Who needs ’em?
Rem pounded onto the arcing stone bridge and slowed at its center. He was facing west now, along the gentle curve of Eastgate Street as it bent toward the Embrys River.
There, a thousand yards away and closing, was his quarry. The big horse yoked to the cart galloped flat out now—faster than good sense or safety should allow, hot breath billowing in torrid clouds as steam curled in tendrils off the animal’s foam-flecked coat. The clatter of its hooves on the cobbles was cacophonous, rising toward deafening as it rumbled closer and closer to where Rem stood on the bridge.
Rem blinked, trying to get a good look at what was happening on the moving cart.
The driver’s bench was empty. Two figures—the thief and Torval—grappled, swayed and jerked about in the cargo bed. Only three of the slop jars remained—the rest casualties of the hand-to-hand struggle, no doubt.
No one was driving the cart, meaning the horse’s reins would have fallen into the traces. Thief or no thief, a speeding cart behind an uncontrolled horse could spell disaster, not only for its occupants, but for anyone unlucky enough to stumble into its path.
Cack.
Rem mounted the stone railing. He watched the cart rattle nearer and nearer, making an unholy racket as it did so. More than a few of the residents and business-folk lining Eastgate leaned from their windows or peered cautiously from their doorways in answer to the tumult, staring, calling down into the streets to warn the few early-morning strollers or call for the wardwatch.
The cart was almost beneath him. Every tiny particle of Rem’s being screamed that he was making a terrible mistake—but Rem refused to listen. How high was he up here? Twenty feet? Thirty? When he looked straight down at the street below, it could have been a hundred. He said a short, silent prayer to whatever gods still might humor him, then leapt.
For just a moment it felt as if he were going nowhere at all—floating, not falling. Everything he saw became crystal clear and languid. He saw Torval and the thief grappling viciously in the cart bed—his partner’s bald pate and the dark-blue tattoos on it clear in the murky light, the thief’s own mop of unruly brown hair trailing a single long, tight braid at the base of his skull. It seemed to take such an impossibly long time that Rem feared the rushing cart would pass too quickly beneath him, that he’d miss it entirely.
Then there was a rush of wind, a strange feeling in his nethers, and he was on top of them. The three—Rem, Torval, the thief—tumbled backward in a tangle of arms and legs, spittle and curses and rancid breath. For one fleeting moment Rem felt Torval’s short, thick legs plant themselves in the cart bed to forestall their group plunge backward. Then the three of them—as a single organism—were thrown out of the cart into empty air.
Torval and the thief hit the cobbles first. Rem landed on top, but their momentum threw them into a wild roll along the street. Rem’s world was upended—he on the bottom, they on top, he on top, they on the bottom, and—Gods, those cobbles hurt!—they kept on rolling, and—Blast! Torval punched him in the flank, thinking his body was the thief’s—So
n of a—then their happy little triptych flew apart and—Snikt! Did someone just draw a knife?—thankfully, blessedly, their roll became a played-out wobble. Finally they were at rest. Rem lay sprawled on the cobbles, belly-down, cheek against the cold, filthy paving.
“Ow,” he muttered, then lifted his head.
Ahead of them—far ahead of them—the horse drifted toward the sidewalk. The beast’s hooves left the cobbles and hit the flagstones. The cart followed, jouncing sideways, then leapt up from the flags onto the lowest of a broad series of steps leading up to the entrance of a great stone building. The steps turned the cart up onto its street-side wheels. The horse bucked against its twisting harness and the uncomfortable shove of the wooden shafts binding it. Then the cart, already half-upended, somersaulted sideways. As Rem watched, the horse’s harness and shafts tore loose. The cart vaulted into the street and came to rest, its broken wheels spinning in the air, the open cargo bed smashed against the cobbles. The last three slop jars had shattered, spilling their stinking contents across the breadth of Eastgate, nearby witnesses shrinking from the stench and yanking their tunics up over their noses. The horse kept running, faster and faster now that it was free, on along Eastgate and out of sight.
“Watch it, lad!” Torval shouted, and Rem threw himself over onto his back just in time to see the thief plunging toward him, a shiny, sharp dagger in his left hand. As the thief bent over him, Rem planted one foot in his would-be assailant’s gut and shoved as hard as he could. The thief flew backward, right into Torval’s waiting arms. As Rem scurried to his feet, he saw Torval’s long, muscular arms curl up beneath the thief’s armpits. To Rem’s great astonishment, their quarry was a very young man of decidedly ordinary appearance and dress. Had Rem seen him on the street, he wouldn’t have pegged him as the sort to lead them on such a wild, wearying chase.
Torval’s thick, square hands locked behind the boy’s head, and his arms flexed. The boy found himself bent halfway over backward, head shoved forward, arms raised comically at his sides. Torval shook the lad and the dagger clattered to the ground.
Rem needed no invitation and lunged forward to hook his left fist into the young man’s belly. The boy groaned and bent double in Torval’s grip. The dwarf, seeing his prey tenderized, released his hold, and the young thief hit the ground in a bloody heap. He was gasping for breath, moaning, but he made no attempt to rise.
“Stay down,” Rem said. He brandished his sheathed sword so that the bent-double thief could see it. “If you move again, I’ll take it as resistance, and I’ll run you through without a second thought. Do you understand?”
The thief nodded weakly. He couldn’t seem to find any words. Rem, gasping for breath himself, knew exactly how he felt. Studying the boy now, seeing how young he was—fifteen, sixteen at most—Rem almost felt sorry for him … almost regretted having hit him so hard after Torval had him subdued. Then he remembered what they’d just survived and shoved his pity aside. The boy might have daring and a mountain of fight in him, but he didn’t have the sense the gods gave a goat.
Torval stood for a moment, huffing and puffing in the cold night air, an angry (if diminutive) bull not quite sure if it should charge or beg off. Finally the dwarf shook all over—a strange gesture, Rem thought, almost as if Torval were trying to wriggle the fury out of himself. Then, seemingly calm, Torval turned to his partner.
Now Rem felt even worse. He’d hit the boy in anger and Torval hadn’t. How dare the old stump choose that moment to show how much self-control he could exercise!
“Did my eyes not deceive me?” Torval asked, sounding more angry than pleased. “Did you not just leap off that bridge back there into our speeding cart?”
Rem nodded, quite pleased with himself. “I surely did. You’re welcome.”
Torval, to his great surprise, gave him an angry shove. “You daft twat! You could have killed yourself! Or me!”
Rem blinked. “Well, then, old stump, next time I’ll just let the cart man drive away with you! Do you have any idea what I went through just trying to get here and head the two of you off?”
“I had him!” Torval growled. “I was an inch away from subduing him when—”
“He pulled a knife!” Rem shouted back. “I suppose you were ready for that, were you?”
“It was sloppy!” Torval sputtered. “Sloppy and reckless and foolish and—”
“And lifesaving?” Rem offered.
“Whose life?” Torval countered. “You could’ve missed us entirely and cracked your skull like a morning egg! And then where would I be? Another dead partner on my conscience! Never again, boy—do you understand me?”
Rem was about to respond, but Torval gave a disgusted wave of his arms, spun away, and marched up the street toward the wreckage of the pisswain. He shoved through all the lookie-loos now crowding around the mess, and Rem lost sight of him.
Rem stood beside their sprawled, groaning detainee, feeling both infuriated and humiliated. He’d just been trying to help. Was Torval truly angry with him for that?
The boy thief suddenly tried to skitter to his feet and flee. It was a fast, unexpected move—clearly planned through several minutes of feigned injury. Luckily, Rem managed to snatch at the boy’s tunic and throw him back to the ground. Once he had him down, he knelt on his back, snatched a length of double-looped rope from his belt, and tied the boy’s hands behind him.
“What part of stay down escapes your understanding?” Rem asked as he yanked the knots tight. He stood and surveyed his work. The boy flopped on his belly, but his hands were bound tight behind him now. He wouldn’t be rising anytime soon.
Torval trudged back toward them. He carried the stolen idol in his arms, cradled like a baby. It was an ugly thing, vaguely anthropomorphic, with a too-large face and too-short arms and legs and almost no torso, forged from a vast and varied coterie of costume jewels, bangles, torques, rings, and varied metal chains, none of quality, all melted toward viscosity and then pressed together by hammer and tongs into a bizarre and almost laughable approximation of a human figure.
This was what Dorma and her orphans paid their obsequies to and submitted their prayers to in their cramped little hostel. What Rem and Torval had almost died for. Though Rem knew that the idol contained a treasure of great importance—the whole savings of that orphanage, its only bulwark against poverty, dissolution, and destitute despair—it still made his stomach turn a little. Despite the blessing it held within, the idol itself was ugly and absurd.
Torval studied their prize and offered an assessment. “Pitiful, isn’t it?”
Rem nodded. He felt a crooked smile creeping onto his sweat-cooled face. “People put their faith in the strangest of things, don’t they?”
To his relief a similar bent smile bloomed on Torval’s broad, flat mug as well. “They do at that,” the dwarf said. His eyes narrowed, but his smile remained. “My children thank you,” he said quietly. “I suppose I do, as well.”
“For what?” Rem asked, eager to hear him say it.
“For saving my life,” Torval said with impatience. “Is that what you wanted to hear, you strutting cockerel?”
“Well, I didn’t do it for you,” Rem assured him, smile broadening. He pointed at the ugly idol. “It was all for her. She’s a goddess, after all. She demands our utmost.”
He wasn’t sure who started laughing first, but in moments, their laughter—brotherly, raucous, unhindered—was all that anyone on Eastgate Street could hear.
CHAPTER TWO
A few watchwardens of the Third and a pair of city guards appeared in answer to the disturbance. When Rem and Torval explained the situation, their fellows of the watch accepted it readily enough, but looked more than a little peeved at the presence of a stinking overturned piss cart in the middle of what would, in a few hours, be one of the busiest streets in their ward.
“Should we call for some extra hands from the Fifth?” Rem offered, brandishing his brass watchwarden’s whistle. “Just to clea
n things up?”
“Looks like you’ve done more than enough already,” one of the city guards said, wearing a conceited smirk that told Rem all he needed to know about how the fancy bastards in their chain mail and crimson surcoats felt about the wardwatch.
“Just take your prisoner and go,” one of the Third Warders said, sounding almost embarrassed, as though he wouldn’t risk further humiliation under the city guards’ reproachful gazes.
Rem almost argued, if only to deny those two smug city guards the satisfaction of laughing at them unchallenged once they’d turned their backs, but he knew it was pointless. Without another word they left the scene, truculent prisoner in tow.
By the time they reached the watchkeep, the first gray light of morning was seeping into the eastern sky and Yenara was awakening. Hawkers, beggars, and proselytes jostled to claim small plots of the frostbitten turf that formed the heart of Sygar’s Square, while the shopkeepers and traders around the big square’s perimeter were already hard at work behind their newly lit windows and half-open doors. Opposite the watchkeep the smells of charcoal, burning herbs, and seared meats wafted from the glowering edifice of the Temple of the Gods of the Mount—the telltale sign of morning offerings—as the baker just down the street threw open his windows and doors to flood the crisp morning air with the mouthwatering scent of fresh, buttery bread and the caramelized tang of date buns.
Rem’s stomach turned somersaults as all the sights and smells of the square assaulted him. He was tired, cold, and ravenously hungry. He craved warm ale or spiced wine, a roaring fire, and a soft bed, preferably with Indilen beside him to keep him warm. Pure hysteria had kept him strong and focused enough to run down the thief now in their custody, but with their quarry run to ground, all that momentary strength had fled. Suddenly Rem was dead tired.
He and Torval marched their young prisoner—who’d said barely a word on the whole march back—up the steps of the watchkeep, through the blessedly uncrowded vestibule just beyond the main doors, and into the crowded administrative chamber beyond. There the telltale signs of a shift change were in evidence: watchwardens of the night scurrying to get their prisoners recorded and locked away, their fines paid and settled, so that the tired officers could beg off, while early arrivals for the day shift drifted, bright eyed and fresh, among the many desks and workstations, sharing friendly words with their night shift counterparts. Over in a far corner, a bushy-bearded Kosterman from the day shift—whose name escaped Rem at present—arm wrestled with Emacca, a tall, strongly built Tregga swordswoman whom Rem sometimes sparred with to keep his blade work sharp. A knot of both watchwardens and curious prisoners watched the contest and cheered their respective champions. Nearer the center of the room, dark-eyed Horus, from the far, febrile jungles of Maswari, and thick, blustering Blotstaff struggled to subdue a hysterical fellow who kept screaming about worms beneath his skin, mad eyes bulging like ripe blisters in his sweat-streaked face. Everywhere activity, deal making, ad hoc interrogations, and tired-eyed report writing. This was their world—night after night—and something about it gave Rem strange feelings of warmth and familiarity.
