---
Tolem cracked the lid of Allister’s toiletries case just a hair, and the radiance within lit up their corner of the comfort room. It was a show just for Devan...Devan and any passersby who might be watching them. Devan looked over. Tolem caught his gaze.
The look in Devan’s eye spoke volumes: cockiness, swagger, confidence bordering on the absurd. Come on, you little bastard, Tolem wanted to say. Give me a reason to feel better about this.
Devan stiffened, his eyes narrowed. “You slimy shit,” his look seemed to say. “How can you possibly live with yourself, throwing in with people like Samus and Vertus? When did you realize how far gone you really were?”
But then Devan’s face relaxed, and he fixed his smirk—that smirk—on his uncle. “Say, pally,” he asked, loudly, gregariously. “Whatcha got there?”
Tolem just glared at Devan. Without a word, he closed the suitcase again and headed back toward the gaming hall. As Tolem headed into the crowd, he could hear Devan’s voice over his shoulder. “That man,” he said. “He had something in his suitcase...” The rest of what Devan said was lost in the noise of the crowd.
---
Thirty seconds later, Tolem had lost the guards and was on his way back to Samus’ suite. Fifteen minutes later, Tolem was back on the casino floor. He was clean shaven for the first time in twenty years, and, though he hated to agree with a thug like Torg, his face was absolutely freezing.
“You look good,” Samus said, straightening the folds on Tolem’s new tunic.
“Is that something else I want to hear?” Tolem asked.
“Well,” Samus smirked, “isn’t it?”
Tolem brushed the other man’s hands away and started making for the grand stairway. “How did Zella do?”
“How did she do?” Samus was positively bristling. “She almost got us both beheaded by Faerathore. But apparently ‘almost’ isn’t good enough for young Zella.”
“The girl just cannot take a hint.” Tolem shook his head. “You drop off the letter yet?”
“Not yet.” Samus waved off a concierge who was moving to block Tolem’s way up to the mezzanine. “I was too busy installing the shunt. I’ll go back up closer to the time of the fight, if I have time.”
“Make time.”
Samus sighed his disapproval. “Fine.”
The two parted ways, and Tolem set to work insinuating himself into the crowd. Partway through a particularly dull conversation with a Kaulethi fur baron, Tolem let his mind go quiet and open. He loved that moment, when the noises of the crowd died away and were replaced by the sounds of people’s thoughts.
The trick was to stay close enough to Faerathore to gather information from the steady stream of underlings who relayed messages to him throughout the night. While mages couldn’t typically detect the workings of mentalists, Tolem wasn’t about to put anything past one as skilled as Thomme Faerathore. So Tolem listened discreetly to the stray thoughts of the Ceneron family’s minions and relayed anything important to his own team.
Every now and then, Zella would push her way through the crowd in her hideous gray suit and Tolem would have to curtail his surveillance. The girl was good. She was very good, in fact. Tolem hadn’t been able to pull off a decent inflection until he was in his thirties, and the mental link he’d built for his crew was nowhere near as airtight as the one Zella had made for hers. It had taken Tolem some extraordinary measures to discover it, let alone eavesdrop on it, and even so, he kept expecting her to figure out what he’d done at any minute.
But good as Zella was, she wasn’t listening for Tolem, so avoiding her was just a matter of keeping quiet. Once, she even bumped into him, but she was so busy rehearsing what she was going to say to Faerathore that she barely noticed him.
Token couldn’t help but laugh at that. She’d been watching his ass like a hawk since the day he called them all up to The Summit, but tonight he practically bowled her over and she never saw him coming. Devan was brilliant, but Tolem saw more of himself in Zella than any of the kids. Sharp as a razor, but too much to prove. It’s how he’d gotten himself in so much trouble when he was her age.
His smile fell. Stupid kids, Tolem thought grimly as he watched her go by. Stupid, stupid goddamn kids.
---
The whistle sounded in the casino and betting on the main event began.
Droves of gamblers made their way downstairs to the betting parlors, and Tolem could practically hear the trickle of gold coins from The Palace’s tabernacles swelling into a torrent. A torrent that was flowing directly into his own pocket.
Tolem hadn’t lied to Devan; shunts were difficult to make, and there really was no way they could have installed one on each tabernacle in The Palace. Fortunately, they hadn’t needed to. All they needed was to place a single shunt—a shunt carved into the shape of a lion’s head—in the treasure hold. Then, Vertus would handle the rest.
By the time the whistle blew, the treasure hold was already half full of Tolem’s counterfeit coins. And just as Tolem was beginning to suspect the hold would be getting close to full, that was when he heard a ruckus coming from the gaming hall.
---
“My boss isn’t who you think, Drake,” Phaedra sputtered. She must have had her fingers crossed because the link was open, letting Tolem hear every word she said. “I’m not working for Faerathore. You idiot.”
“If I was working for Faerathore,” Phaedra hissed at Devan, “your whole stupid crew would be dead now. You would have been dead five minutes after you showed me the arts and crafts project Allister whipped up in his toilet bag.”
Tolem winced. He could only imagine the look on Devan’s face.
“Get. Me out. Of here,” she hissed at the two boys. “Now!”
Through the link, Tolem could hear her begin to sob.
Tolem clenched his jaw and watched the scene play out below. Devan and Allister made for the stairwell. Phaedra called after them as the mages moved to surround her.
But Tolem just watched. He listened to her crying up at him. He listened to Devan and Allister whispering back and forth through Zella’s mind link. They were almost to the stairs. Phaedra was being led away by the mages. And there was nothing Tolem could do about any of it.
He let out a sigh of silent relief.
Suit. As in ‘of armor’.
Something about the way Nalan said it brought back a hint of what Phaedra had said earlier. When she’d reported in, she mentioned there were three guards in the lock room. But the guards in The Palace never went anywhere in groups of three.
Tolem put a hand over his mouth.
Tolem watched as the two boys approached the door to the stairwell. All he had to do was say nothing. In another second, they would be gone. In another second, they would be safe.
Tolem squeezed his eyes shut.
“Wait!” Phaedra’s voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling of the gaming hall. Devan and Allister turned and looked back. In the long silence that followed, Tolem told Phaedra what he’d heard through Zella’s link and what it meant.
“They don’t have the vault icons,” Phaedra said. “But their accomplice does.” The satisfaction she felt traveled up to Tolem through the link, manifesting as a burst of warmth he felt all through his body. The sensation, the glee she felt in that moment of poisoned triumph, stunned him for a moment.
Tolem let the link close. Slowly, he turned and walked into the crowd, trying not to think about what was to happen next.
---
After that, the plan proceeded perfectly. Better than Tolem could have hoped, in fact. Not only did Vertus and his men get every last coin from the tabernacles, but Devan and his crew were successfully able to steal every last decoy coin from the treasure hold. And better still, they’d done so in spectacular fashion. With every eye in the entire Palace watching them, no one would have any reason to suspect that the night’s take was anywhere other than in the back of an airship flying away over the rooftops of Kauleth.
It took hours for The Palace guards to quell the riots that stretched from one end of the great ship to the other. Each of Tolem’s crew waited out the storm in their own way, and sometime just before dawn, they all met at a small wine concession on the southwest promontory. Below them, the city burned as the rioters took out their frustrations on people and places that were less capable of fighting back.
Torg smiled at the flames. Samus pretended not to notice them. Vertus chatted up a visibly uncomfortable wine stewardess. Phaedra, still shaken from her ordeal with the mages, sat in a chair and sipped her wine, not speaking to anyone.
And Tolem stared off into the western sky and wondered if Devan had been able to make it to the cave.
Devan
“Devan?”
Zella was staring at him, waiting for an answer. He had been sitting in the grass since they’d made their new camp, far from the cave, far from where Tolem would think to send someone to look for them. For two hours, he’d sat there a few dozen yards away from the rest of them, staring at the coin in his palm, turning it over and over, saying nothing.
Zella snapped her fingers at him. “Devan,” she said firmly. “We need to talk about this.”
Devan knew it was time to talk. The time for punching the side of the airship, kicking the pile of coins, and setting trees on fire—that time was over now. So too, was the time for quiet sulking, the time for snide comments, and the time for unsolicited bouts of ugly swearing. The group was hungry, tired, and cold, and they weren’t getting any less so.
But Devan just kept staring at the coin.
That is, until Zella walked over and smacked him hard across the back. Devan stared up at Zella in mute rage. The others watched from a distance.
“Well?” he seethed. “What do you want?”
Zella folded her arms. She looked from Devan to the others and back again. “I want you to help us make sense of this. I want you to stop wallowing and beating on yourself and act like Devan of the goddamn Field for a minute.”
Devan sneered at her. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“Yes you do,” Zella said, stepping closer to him. “Talk it out. How did this happen?”
Devan scoffed and turned back to his coin. Zella shot out a quick hand and snatched it away from him.
“Talk,” Zella said, gripping the coin in her fist, “it out.”
Devan just turned away. “You talk it out. I already know how he did it.”
Steaming, Zella threw the coin as hard as she could at Devan’s head. As he rooted in the grass to find it, he could hear her feet stomping down the tall grass as she turned and headed back toward the center of camp where the others were standing, watching them.
Allister spoke up first. “So…”
Zella answered him with a snarl as she pushed past.
“All right,” Allister said, clamming up. The group fell quiet.
To Devan’s surprise, the next voice he heard was Nalan’s. “The big question,” Nalan said, “is, ‘How did they do it?’ Every big question is made up of little questions. So the best way to answer a big question is by answering the little questions first.”
There was a long silence; Devan could imagine the others looking at each other in shock as Nalan took center stage.
“Y-yeah, okay, Nalan!” Zella said brightly, stumbling a little in her speech. “Go on! Please!” She sounded like she’d discovered a baby bird building a pocket watch; she wanted to encourage this rare find without accidentally frightening it away.
“So what are those little questions?” Nalan asked.
Allister spoke up next: “Okay, um...how did Tolem get shunts on all the tabernacles in The Palace?”
“Good. What else.”
“Why poison me?” Breigh asked. “What business was it of theirs if I won or lost?”
“How could Phaedra hear us on the link?” Zella asked.
“Where’s the gold?” Allister asked. “Where’d they transport it to?”
Devan turned slightly to watch the scene over his shoulder. Nalan was scratching the questions into the dirt near the campfire with the end of a long stick. “Let’s start with the tabernacles,” he said. “The original idea was to put a shunt on each one, redirecting their teleportation spells to send the gold to a hiding place.”
“But Tolem was right when he said they were hard to make,” Allister said, “and putting one on each tabernacle in The Palace would have taken forever.”
Zella paced back and forth in front of the fire. “But...maybe he didn’t need one on each tabernacle,” she said. “Maybe he just needed one.”
Allister’s face lit up, then immediately fell. “He just put one in the treasure room.” He covered his hands with his face. “To redirect all the incoming teleports to a different place. Of course.”
Nalan nodded. His eyes darted back and forth, piecing the puzzle together in his mind. “As the gold poured into the hiding place, Tolem’s people teleported an equal amount of fake coins into the treasury. But how? Why wouldn’t the shunt just direct that teleport too?”
Allister unburied his face from his hands. “It’s doable,” he said. “There are ways to sublimate the harmonic…” He trailed off, waving his hands in the air, then said again, “It’s doable.”
“So…” Breigh said, trying to follow along, “gold coins go from the cashiers to Tolem’s lair. Iron coins go from Tolem’s lair to the vault. We steal the iron...”
Nalan nodded along. “...The guards start chasing us...”
Allister continued the thought. “...Everyone else freaks out because there’s no gold in the vault to pay off everyone who won by betting on the fights...”
“...And Tolem, Samus, and Torg move the gold out of The Palace in any number of ways while the unpaid gamblers start to riot,” Zella said.
For a split second, Devan couldn’t help but look up at them in surprise. They got it, he thought. On the first try. And without me. A lump formed in his throat. He turned quickly away.
“They had all the angles covered,” Nalan said. He almost sounded like he approved of such an elegant plan.
“And for the angles they didn’t cover? They had Phaedra,” Zella said. “Making sure we didn’t go ‘too far off the script’.”
“Which brings us to…” Devan could hear Nalan scratch a checkmark in the dirt. “...how could Phaedra hear what we were saying on the link?”
The group fell silent again. Devan looked back over his shoulder. This was the part he couldn’t figure out. It was the thing he hadn’t planned for; the thing that ultimately killed their plan. The others were looking around at one another, hoping someone else would offer something up—all of them except Allister. Allister was staring uncomfortably down into the fire.
Zella seemed to notice him, too. “Alli?”
/> Allister stared at the fire for a long time, saying nothing.
“Allister,” Zella said firmly. “What do you know?”
“Nothing, I...” His voice trailed off, then: “I had a suspicion. No, not even that. It’s like...something I should have suspected.”
Devan stared over at Allister. Allister rubbed his hands over his face for a moment. “Z...open the link. Just for a second.”
“No!” Breigh barked. “They could track us here! If Phaedra could listen in, so could the mages!”
“It’s okay, B,” Allister said, placing a hand on Breigh’s back. “It’s okay, it doesn’t work that way.” He looked over at Zella. “Go ahead. The rest of you, keep quiet. Try to keep your minds still and just...just listen.”
Zella placed two fingers to her forehead. Across the way, Devan could feel the familiar sensation that came with the link, like a change in the air pressure of a room when someone opens a door to another part of the house. Then, in the quiet, he heard it, faintly.
Eight notes. Tolem’s song. Allister hummed along with it, and Zella’s eyes snapped open. “You can hear that?”
“Me too,” Nalan said.
“And I,” said Breigh.
“It’s been there in the background of your thoughts ever since we left The Tower,” Allister said. “At first I didn’t think anything of it. It was just a catchy tune stuck in your head, and you let it bleed out into the link. No harm, right?”
“So what is it?” Zella asked, her eyes wild as she walked around the fire toward Allister.
Allister grimaced at the sight of Zella so upset. “It’s a...” He paused, then tried again. “It’s like a shunt. But it’s made of music. It’s, well...it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. If Tolem made this...” Allister looked over at Devan. “It looks like Devan’s uncle has hidden talents.”
Nalan squinted. “Tolem’s a mentalist?”
“Everyone’s something,” Allister said.
Devan scowled at that. While he hadn’t been marked at birth, most of the other members of his family had. They had all been machinists or martialists, though. He’d never considered that Tolem might have been marked as anything else.
Proper Thieves Page 25
