Luck is very real, and anyone who tells you differently wants all the credit for their own success. Luck is a river. I can actually feel when I’m in it and when I’m out of it, too. Think about that for a moment. Most people try something difficult or unlikely with very little notion of whether it’ll work or not. Not me. When I feel the inner sunshine of good luck under my breastbone, I know that, yes, I can snatch that woman’s pouch and that it’s got a diamond or three gold lions in it. I know I can make the far jump to the next roof and that my foot will miss the loose tiles. And I know when I sit down to shuffle a Towers deck, the other fellow’s going to drown in Bees and Shovels and probably get a visit or two from our old friend Death.
Playing games of chance wakes luck up in me, and soon, it’s running out of control. You can only win so many hands or dice-throws before the others are ready to cut your throat. Worse, running through my luck at the gaming table means I’ll be well out of it when I need it. When I feel the empty chill of luck running thin, I know a walk on an icy path is like to split my tailbone. I keep my head down, because I’ve good odds to meet a man I ran a confidence game on the year before or some girleen I left things sour with.
It was luck that got me moved from a straw farm to a True School when I joined the Takers Guild. Normally, see, they recruit all the lads and lasses they can get to sign for the Low School, but only three of the nine schools are true. The straw farms teach basic lock-picking, basic climbing, some knife-fighting, but nothing advanced. No spells. No trap-finding or animal-talking, no cozening, no misdirection. Just loads of conditioning. You graduate from a straw farm strong, fast, tough, lightly skilled, and heavily in debt. If you can pay your debt somehow, good on you. When you can’t, you’re indentured. This means the Guild has at its beckon many thousands of leg-breakers, prostitutes, and hard laborers. They can summon a mob to terrorize a town, then disperse and hide them before the baron’s spearmen show up.
Myself, I went to a True School.
Or at least I think I did.
But I am nonetheless very much in debt, as they want us all to be.
Here, read for yourself.
Our Most Esteemed Kinch Na Shannack,
Third Year Physical,
First Year Magus,
Debtor
It is with great reluctance and no small disappointment that we, the bursars of the Pigdenay Academy of Rare Arts, in fealty to the Takers Guild, inform you that the meat of your debt has outgrown the shell of your willingness to work and is at risk to crack your body.
As your last four seasonal payments to us averaged less than two trounces each, at this laggardly march, you will not clear your debt of eighty-five trounces gold, one gold queening, one silver knight, and three silver knaves (plus interest), for a period of some sixteen years. Our actuaries need not be bothered to tell us this is beyond your likely life span and at the outer limit of your plausibly useful years in the profession. It is only at the argument of one of your former masters that we have measured your remunerative value alive and unmaimed beyond your cautionary value harmed for all to see or dead for all to know.
You are therefore commanded, on pain of unthumbing, to deliver yourself to the closest chartered Guildhouse for a lookover and a tongue-wag, the most likely outcome being a deed indenture of the greater sort. Our intelligence places you on the White Road and suggests that Cadoth may be the advertised Guildhouse most near your person. Of course, prompt payment, upon your arrival, in the amount of
Two lions gold and five owlets silver
or
One trounce gold, two queenings gold, one shilling silver
will render the conversation far more cordial and do much to reassure us as to your good intentions toward your promise. We need not remind you that the skills gifted to you within our walls render most students capable of discovering monies enough to clear their names within seven years leisurely or three years hard and lucky, and that our lenience in only burdening you with the mark of the open hand will not long persist without some laudable action on your part.
Tenderly (for now),
The Humble Bursars
of
Your Masters in Arts Rare and Coveted
By our hand
This First Lūnday of Ashers, 1233 Years Marked
It was now the eighteenth, exactly halfway through Ashers. Lammas month was coming fast, and with it, a new payment due the Guild.
Stinkleathers’s ring had been a good start, but I was going to have to do some stealing in Cadoth.
And I was going to need a buyer.
3
Tick-Turd
“Goblin silver, eh?” said the oldish woman scowling through a lens at Stinkleathers’s ring, not that she needed a lens to know it had been worked under a goblin’s hammer; goblin silver gave light back green, and some thought its weird beauty put gold to shame. And by some, I mean me. The light of her candle-lamps showed off my open-hand tattoo to great effect as well. “And yer on the bad side of the Takers. Ye want work?”
She didn’t really want to hire me for anything. She wanted to know how hungry I was. She didn’t get her shop full of high-end stolen goods by hiring people she didn’t know.
“I’m already working, but thank you.”
“Think nothin’ of it.”
Turns out that’s exactly what I thought.
“Who’s working ye, then? Ye with Cobb?”
“Ten shillings,” I said, “and I’ll be grateful for any owlets.”
She laughed, showing the brown nubs that passed for teeth.
“Owlets I got, but yer nae getting ten. More like six for this.”
“We both know it’s worth fifteen to you, and you’ll sell it for a queening and a gold whore. My game is I ask for one shilling more every time you offer less than I say. Now I want eleven. If you prefer to give me twelve, offer me seven.”
“Why, ye little tick-turd,” she said.
“I don’t charge for you calling me things, I like being called things. But if you want this beautiful bit of silver greening, I need eleven, preferably—”
“Owlets, yae, I know, ye little—”
“If you call me a tick-turd again, it’s twelve. I only love laziness in myself.”
She shut her nub-box, then squinted at me.
A snoring came down at us through the roof-boards.
Her eyes unsquinted.
“Yes, I know, he was going to follow me out and give me rough hugs in the alley if you said so. I did a little sleep spell while you goggled my ring. A cantrip. Small magic. Thief magic. Wouldn’t have worked on a strong-minded fellow, but that one’s overfond of his beer and stretching his shirts a bit, judging by his snore. Fat men have a singular snore.”
As if to illustrate, the snore hitched, paused, then sawed down louder.
“I’ll give ye nine just to get ye and yer eastie talk out of here the faster, ye Galtish tick-turd.”
“You’ll give me thirteen because you threw low and then repeated yourself.”
She moved like she meant to toss me out herself, but then settled back in place.
“Ten, and that’s robbery enough.”
“Fourteen. And if you hesitate again, I might start thinking how the shop on Featherbow Street there under the bell tower might like to have a look at this. Spider sign over that one—Cobb’s, yeah? Rival of yours? Used to be a lover when you could both see what you peed with? Just that little bit of sour warmth in your voice when you mentioned him earlier. The fact you haven’t kicked me out yet tells me you’ll pay fifteen like I said, but if you’re quick and smart, I’ll take fourteen because I’m sentimental and you remind me of the smelly old woman who took my virginity.”