Among Thieves: A Tale of the Kin

by Douglas Hulick

  I heard the wicker of the basket crack and start to give way. I felt the weight of his body behind the blow, pushing the steel into the basket, the basket into me, me into the open air behind. The dispassion on his face told me he was a deep-file Blade—not hating, not caring, just killing.

  He looked vaguely familiar.

  As I tipped backward, my feet scrambling for ground that wasn’t there, a sweet, lingering scent came to me through the odor of sewage. Perfume—I knew that perfume!

  And that face . . .

  My sister’s messenger.

  “Tamas,” I said as my laundry flew up in the air and I went down.

  In the brief instant I was airborne, I had enough time to feel a dark, cold fury settle upon me. Christiana—again. Then I hit the steps, and anger was replaced by pain.

  I half rolled, half slid down the stairs. Sharp edges, hollow thuds, bright bursts of agony. I think I went head over heels at least once. I know I yelled and tasted blood on the way down.

  The ride ended with me in a heap at the bottom of the steps, Tamas still standing at the top. Clothing lay scattered on the stairs between us.

  I saw the assassin put his foot on the first step.

  Time to go, Drothe. I needed to get out of there—get onto the street and into the night where I could lose him.

  I pushed myself up off the floor. The world tilted. A sharp throbbing singled itself out from the rest of my new aches; one of the steps had introduced itself to the back of my head on the way down.

  I staggered out onto the street and let myself drift right. I needed to go right, I realized, but why? Something was there . . . something important.

  There were voices coming from Eppyris’s now. Crying, yelling. A faint light flared behind the shutters. Oh no, Eppyris, don’t bring a light out here. I need to see to get away, damn it.

  I put a hand on my rapier, drew it. The steel gleamed bloody gold in my eyes. I put the tip to the ground and used it as a feeble cane.

  Despite the blood, my mouth felt dry. I tried to spit. I failed.

  To the right. Keep going right.

  More voices now. Thuds inside the building. Stay inside, apothecary! I opened my mouth to yell a warning, barely managed a thick squawk.

  “You missed your appointment,” said a voice from the stairwell. Tamas. “That’s not polite, Nose.”

  I blinked. Appointment? Oh, right—Christiana’s letter. I had forgotten her request to meet with me tonight. Nothing like getting a man to show up for his own assassination.

  “Frankly, I didn’t expect you to put rolling in a dung heap before seeing a baroness,” said Tamas. “Still, I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”

  He sounded close. No more running, then, if you could even call it that. I turned, straightened, and edged farther to what had been my right. I’d remembered why I wanted to go there now. I may not have gotten close enough, but this would have to do.

  I extended my rapier on a line with him, held out straight, pointed at his eyes. The tip of the sword wavered more than I would have liked.

  Tamas had just stepped out of the archway at the bottom of the stairs. His movements were fluid, his manner relaxed. All traces of the nervous, uncertain messenger were gone. The slightest hint of a sneer hung about his lips. He had a broad, double-edged blade, halfway between a long dagger and a short sword, in his left hand. In his right, he held a four-foot length of rope. The rope was broken up by a regular series of knots, and each knot looked to have a small piece of cloth or paper tied into it. He swung the rope in a lazy circle at his side.

  I was in trouble.

  He came on and I slid back, maintaining my guard before me. I could see better in the dark, but he hadn’t just fallen down a flight of stairs. I would have called us even for that, except for the piece of knotted magic he was swinging in his right hand.

  I heard a door open in the shop, saw a light shine into the stairwell. Eppyris called my name.

  “Back inside!” I yelled. “Lock the door!”

  The light vanished as the door slammed.

  Tamas flicked his eyes toward the shop, back to me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve only been paid to clean you.”

  I edged another step away, drew the dagger at my belt with my left hand. Getting close, now.

  “She didn’t pay you enough,” I said.

  Tamas smiled, then shrugged. The cord moved faster. Then he did, too.

  He closed quickly, thrusting with his sword. I dropped my own point and turned my rapier through a downward arc, catching his blade and driving the attack off to my right. At the same time, I stepped forward with my left foot to fill the opening I had just created. With my body blocking his right arm and my rapier engaging his left, I was hoping to use my dagger to carve his guts at my leisure.

  It was a good plan. Unfortunately, Tamas didn’t cooperate. As soon as I moved in, he stepped back and away to my right, out of dagger range. At the same time, he lashed out with the rope. There was no time for me to get out of the way, so I put my dagger out to try to catch the attack. I missed.

  The cord caught me along the left arm and swung around to connect with my back. I heard three soft pops, felt three sharp points of pain where the rope hit.

  It was as bad as I’d feared—there were runes tied into the knots.

  I leapt back, flicking a cut at his face with my sword to keep him from following. He blocked the feint, then smiled. Three of the knots on his rope were smoking and glowing like embers.

  I realized I had been only half wrong when I suspected him of being a Mouth up in my rooms. The only problem was, this was worse. He didn’t have to say a thing to make the magic work—all he had to do was hit me.

  I switched to a more traditional guard, right hand before me, weight back, rapier held just above waist level. I turned my body sideways and let my left arm drop down behind me, ready to throw the dagger underhand across my body.

  Or so I wanted him to think. Truth be told, my left arm was already beginning to feel numb from the runes. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to keep hold of the dagger, let alone throw it.

  The rope was spinning in Tamas’s hand again. He beat my blade with his own once, twice, then stepped in, trying for the bind. At the same time, the cord snaked out again, heading for my groin.

  I tried to disengage my rapier from his attack by bringing its tip underneath his and back in line between us. I needed the sword to block the rope. I had no idea if the steel could stand up to his magic, but it seemed as good a time as any to find out. The question quickly became academic, though. My sword didn’t make it around in time, and I barely managed to bring my left hand forward to catch the tip of the rope across the knuckles.

  Pop. Pain. My dagger fell to the street.

  I withdrew again. My disengage had worked well enough that I was in position to slip by his blade and score a light chest slash on the way out.

  Tamas rolled his shoulders once and kept smiling.

  I took another step back. There was an alley near my left now.

  Someone yelled for the Watch from down the street. The sound of our steel had raised the alarm. Knowing the local Rags, they would arrive in time to find a few spots of blood on the cobbles and scratch their heads. After all, that was what Nicco paid them to do.

  I feinted at Tamas’s head, then dropped into a crouch and went for his groin when he moved to parry. He swung the rope at the same time. The cord passed over my head. I missed his crotch by a finger’s breadth, my point passing between his legs.

  “You fight better than you dust,” I said as I scrambled upright and back into guard.

  Tamas pushed his lower lip out in a dismissive manner. “You got lucky.”

  It was my turn to shrug. I backed away again.

  “Trying for the alley?” he asked, following my retreat. Before I could answer, Tamas swung the rope at the side of my head, forcing me to my right. At the same time, he stepped to his own right, placing himself betwee
n me and the alley mouth.

  Tamas tsked.

  “And here you’re supposed to be such a Boman Prig,” he said, shaking his head in mock pity. “I didn’t think you’d be so easy to beat.”

  “Finish it,” I said.

  Tamas swung his rope faster. “With pleasure.”

  I smiled. “I wasn’t talking to you, Blade.”

  I’ll say this: He was quick. Tamas was already turning when one of my Oaks stepped from the alley and ran him through. The rope was still spinning when he hit the ground.

  I let my guard drop and tried to make a fist with my left hand. The entire arm just hung there, limp and full of pain.

  “What the hell were you waiting for?” I snapped.

  The Oak, a big stone-faced cove named Scratch, put his foot on the body and wrenched his blade free. “Just got here,” he said.

  “What the hell do you mean, you just got here?”

  “Ran my ass off from my post over there,” he said, pointing at a roof halfway down the street. “Alley was faster, so I came out here.”

  “Then who was supposed to be here?”

  Scratch wrinkled his nose and moved a step away from me. “Roma.”

  “Where is she?”

  Scratch shrugged.

  “Signal Fowler,” I said.

  “Expect she’s already coming.”

  “Just do it.”

  Scratch let out a long, wavering whistle as I knelt down next to Tamas. Bloody bubbles were coming from where the sword had exited the front of his chest. His eyes were half closed, already glazing over. He wouldn’t be answering any questions.

  I gave the Blade a quick roll, coming up with a handful of hawks, two more daggers, and not much else. I left the cutlery, tossed the coins to Scratch, and looped the rope into a coil on the ground, careful not to touch any of the knots. I could already feel the results of my trip down the stairs coming back, now that the excitement was over.

  “Get rid of him,” I said, standing, rope held between my thumb and forefinger. Scratch picked up Tamas’s sword, stuffed it through the man’s belt, and dragged the whole mess away.

  I headed back to the shop. Eppyris was waiting in the doorway to his family’s apartments, framed by candlelight from behind. The light burned my night vision, bringing tears to my eyes. I wanted to look away, toward the cooling, dark shadows of the ground; instead, I stared straight ahead and gritted my teeth.

  Eppyris remained silent as I walked up. Straightbacked, square-shouldered, with a hard jaw and high forehead, Eppyris is one of those men who comes across taller than he actually is. In truth, he barely has three hands on me, but, between his iron posture on the outside and solid demeanor within, it’s hard to see him as a little man.

  Behind him, I could hear Cosima’s voice, talking softly to their two girls.

  “Something for the pain,” I said. I was wincing with every step now, and limping every other. “Lots of something.”

  He nodded once. “In the shop. We’ll talk there.”

  Before I could answer, he had shut the door in my face.

  It was shaping up to be a wonderful evening all the way around.

  I blinked in the semidarkness, waiting for my eyes to recover from Eppyris’s candle. I knew if I concentrated hard enough, I could hasten the recovery, but I just didn’t have the will right now. Instead, I walked over to the stairs.

  There was laundry everywhere. I bent down, picked up the laundry basket, and looked at the knife lodged in it.

  A throat cleared itself behind me. I turned to find Fowler Jess standing in the arched doorway to the street.

  “Let me start,” she said, “by saying that I don’t know how he got in.”

  “Through the door you’re standing in, I imagine,” I said, setting the basket down. “Funny thing is, someone’s supposed to be watching that door.”

  The Oak Mistress put her hands behind her back and looked up at me from beneath blond brows. She had a thick, flowing mane to match, but right now it was tied back and hidden beneath a floppy green cap. The cap was big, making her delicate face and fine shoulders seem even smaller than usual. A bit of dirty lace showed at her neck, escaping from beneath the green doublet she wore. Her skirt was a deep brown, but beneath it, I knew, were green stockings. She was all of nineteen summers, maybe, and if I weren’t so furious, I would have taken her upstairs right then.

  “We never saw him,” she said.

  “ ‘We’?”

  “All right, I. But I was on rover, so I can’t be sure. Sylos was watching the front. I’ll check with him and see what the problem was.”

  “The problem,” I said, my voice rising, “is that I was almost dusted in my own hallway! I got shoved down the stairs, chased into the street, and all your people did was watch! If I hadn’t drawn the Blade over to that alley, Scratch would still be picking lice out of his hair and I’d be dead.”

  “I was coming.”

  “When?”

  “It takes time to get down off a roof, Drothe.”

  “And Roma?”

  Fowler cocked her head, brows knitting together. “What about her?”

  “To hear Scratch tell it, she was supposed to be on the alley he came out of, only she wasn’t.”

  Fowler looked over her shoulder in the direction of the alley.

  “You’d better check on your people, Fowler,” I said. “You might find one’s been bought out from under you.”

  Fowler’s head whipped back around. “My people don’t sell out,” she snapped. “I don’t do the cross, and neither do they. That’s why you hired me, and that’s why I hire them. I’ll talk to Roma and see what happened, but I know her. She wouldn’t give you up like that.”

  “You’d better do more than talk,” I said, “or I know some people who aren’t going to be happy.”

  Fowler’s hands came forward to rest on her hips. “Look, Drothe, I botched it, all right? You almost died, and I’m supposed to stop that from happening, so yeah, I botched it. Be mad, but be mad at me. Scratch, Roma, Sylos, and the rest are my worry. If there’s a problem, I’ll take care of it. Don’t be threatening to put weight on my coves—I can do that myself.”

  I reached out with my right hand and laid it where her shoulder and neck met. She flinched but didn’t move away.

  “Listen up,” I said. “Anyone leaves my blinds open when they should be shut, I take it badly. And personally. You talk to those Eriffs you call Oaks and get things straight. But tell them this, too: Any more problems and I deal with them myself.”

  Fowler’s jaw set, pushing her lower lip out. Anyone who didn’t know her would think she was pouting, instead of barely keeping her hands from my throat.

  “My people, Drothe,” she said. “My problem.”

  “My neck takes precedence over your people,” I said. “Just remember that.”

  Fowler clenched her jaw some more. “Like you’ll . . . Oh, to hell with this! ” Fowler gagged and took two quick steps back, waving her hand in front of her face. “I can’t argue with you when you smell like that. What did that Blade attack you with, anyhow—a chamber pot?”

  I resisted the urge to look down at my clothes. “It’s a long story.”

  “Then tell it to me after a long bath,” she said. “I’m going to try and figure out what went wrong before I lose my dinner. Do you need to yell at me about anything else before I go?”

  “No.” I waved a hand. The adrenaline was finally starting to wear off, and I could feel the fatigue setting in. “Wait—yes.”

  Fowler stopped just beyond the archway and turned back, the setting moon turning the hair at the nape of her neck into fine silver. “What?” she said.

  “Send someone to find Jelem the Sly. He’ll either be in Brass Street or Quarters cordons this time of night.”

  Fowler nodded. “It may take a while.” She waved up and down the street. “I have a few things to do here, first.”

  “You’ll find me.”

  “Damn s
traight I will,” she said. Then she was off, jaw set, steps fast. I didn’t envy her people the grilling they were about to receive.

  I sat down on the steps. I knew Eppyris was waiting on me, but I didn’t have the energy for another argument right now. I needed five minutes—just five minutes of no motion.

  I leaned back on the steps and winced as something shifted and poked into the small of my back. Oh, right.

  I reached behind me and pulled out the case—or rather, its broken remains. The fall down the stairs had split its top nearly in two, and the fine hinges and clasp that held it closed were a twisted and buckled mess.

  The filth from the sewers was dry now, and some of it had flaked away. I could see more of the inlay and make out hints of gold wire along with the ivory—even a few glints that might have been precious stone. It looked for all the world like the box a person would . . .

  “Son of a bitch,” I said as I carefully lifted the broken lid. Inside the battered case, on a bed of padded velvet scented with myrrh, rested a narrow crystal tube. Gold filigree scrolled around it, forming artful flowers and intricate symbols, almost hiding the crystal itself. I didn’t need to look in the small window that had been left in the filigree to know what was inside the tube, but I did anyhow, and saw an old, faded, slightly dirty quill pen, its end feathers nearly gone.

  I knew it; or rather, knew of it. It was the pen the emperor Theodoi had used to write the Second Apologia in an attempt to make amends with his other incarnations almost two centuries ago. By all accounts, he was still the most consistently sane of the three, but that hadn’t stopped him from writing far less placating tracts to his various selves in later incarnations.

  I resisted the urge to bow to the quill three times, then three more, then three again. I’ve handled enough purloined relics to know my obeisance wasn’t going to make a difference to the Angels anymore—I was damned a couple times over, by that reckoning.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said again as I examined the goldwrapped tube. “What the hell were you doing with my relic, Fedim?”