She pressed her mouth shut by sheer tonnage of will, counted out fourteen shillings, none of them owlets, and shoved them at me, pocketing the ring. I pursed up my money, wondering if she was really going to let me go without a last rejoinder.
She wasn’t.
She hissed the next bit like an Urrimad basket-snake.
“I can see ye think yer clever, and praps y’are, but by my lights, yer nothin’ but a dirty, blacktongue thief and will ne’er be more.”
I smiled an oily smile, half bowed, and stepped out backward, just dodging a strand of drool probing its way down from a murder-hole in the ceiling.
I heard something break against the door after I shut it.
I truly love the thrill of commerce.
Now I was off to the Takers Guild to see how much of their carefully rationed goodwill I might buy back.
4
The Hanger’s House
“How’s your face?”
I was sitting at a table in the Hanger’s House. The building was quite near the front gate, sitting in plain sight. This was the official, lower-level way to reach the Takers Guild. Of course, the Guild is where you think they aren’t, but they’re also where they say they are, which means they have little to fear from barons and dukes, and they have even been known to flout a king. No crown sits so sure that a knife in the dark may not topple it.
I had noted the square wooden sign with our hanged man holding his own noose. Good sign, that, different colors of wood inlaid and a border of gold leaf. Also, a gold livre-coin nailed to the hanged man’s free hand because nobody would dare to take it. A Gallardian lion, I noticed. Did I mention I love those? The woman sitting across from me reading my lamb-parchment ledger sheet was distractingly pretty. She appeared to be about nineteen, but the hairs on the back of my neck told me she was magicked, so she might have been older than the cronish owlet-miser I had just left.
“Nobody’s managed to slap it off me yet, so no complaints.”
The girl might have broadened her waifish smile a hairsbreadth; she might not have. Behind her, an Assassin-Adept, who had so little fat on her you could count her muscles through her tight but giving woolens and silks, lounged against the bar, just lounged lazy as the long day, as if she weren’t threat made flesh. It was hard not to stare at the adept; you could tell from her blackened neck, cheeks, and forearms she was inked almost from crown to soles in dark glyphs that would let her disappear, drink poison, spit poison. I had seen an adept at the Low School fly. Actually fly. There were maybe a hundred of them in the world. Or maybe only twenty. Whoever knew wasn’t saying. I stopped reading the glyphs on the adept’s skin before anyone caught me doing it. I wondered what the clock tattoo on her chest did.
The false waif checked the seal on my document against the one in the huge book slouched open before her, then wrote 1T 1Q 14s on each. She passed a witness coin bound to her wrist over the trounce, queening, and fourteen shillings on the table, then fed them to a leather sack, which she tossed to the Assassin-Adept, who ferried them behind the bar and appeared to descend stairs, though she had just as likely disappeared upstairs.
“Staying tonight, Prank?” the maybe-young woman said, definitely broadening her smile. A Prank is the lowest thieving rank, but a true thief, not a Scarecrow, and that’s something. I was made a Prank at the Low School in Pigdenay. Assuming I clear my debt, complete another year of study, and/or pull off a notorious caper or three, I promote to Fetch. Then, should I further distinguish myself in all the wrong company, I may earn the title of Faun. A Faun in myth has deer’s legs—you’ll not easily catch a Faun. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? One of the Guild’s strengths is its poetry—it makes you feel you belong to something not only unopposably strong but also wickedly sly and clever.
Most of the best of us are content to remain Fauns because the last level is for ascetics and the half-mad.
The last rank of thieves, called Famines, takes an oath of hunger, and they further swear to pay for nothing. What they cannot steal, the rest of us provide for them, but even the older and slowed-down among them earn their keep by running schemes, planning for the able-bodied, and teaching. I’d learned under the baton of a Famine or two.
My interviewer hadn’t closed the book yet. “It says you favor tall girls. Is that true?” Even as she spoke, her legs lengthened, and she was looking down at me where we had once been level. I felt a pleasant but embarrassing sensation that caused me to cross my legs. “It’s a new moon tonight, you know. Most propitious for first couplings. One gold queening and I’m yours ’til midnight.”
“If you knew what I’ve done to get that money.”
“If you knew what I could do to make you forget.”
“Who’s going to watch the shop? While I wreck your womb and enslave your heart, I mean?”
“I had them both removed. And she will,” she said, nodding at an older but still-lovely woman who had appeared behind the bar. A second look confirmed it was the same girl who sat across from me now, only twenty years older. This “girl” was no mere secretary or whore; she was quite probably a Worry (a high enforcer), taking direct orders from the Problem (think mayor). My skin flushed warm with an ugly, seething jealousy. However she had doubled herself, whether grafting, echoing, or somehow bending time, I would never do magic that strong. Never.
“Never,” I said.
“Never what?” she said, pressing her tongue to the corner of her mouth and letting it retreat.
“I’ll never get this tattoo off me if I don’t…” I trailed off, watching the place her tongue had been, enjoying the hum of the erotic cantrip she was working on me.
“Pay the family?” her mouth said.
“Yes.”
“What if I told you that I had work for you?”
“I’d say keep talking for as long as I get to watch your mouth move.”
“I have work for you,” she said. Before I could respond, she pressed a witness coin to my head and magicked pictures into my mind.
I saw.
I saw.
I was running in the cold at sunset.
I was a woman, a youngish girl pressing a witness coin into my head and turning to look behind me.
Somebody yelled at me in Oustrim’s language, Gunnish, which I don’t normally speak, telling me not to look.
I saw a tower of two colors in ruins, its stones collapsed. I saw a massive statue toppled on its face. The king’s bodyguard formed up, presenting wing-tip spears to a shadow coming out of the dust; they were marching backward with great discipline, despite their terror. Huge drums beat, strange horns lowed, and everyone was yelling. Stones flew through the air, and arrows. A ram horn sounded a lamenting retreat.
More shadowy figures could be seen beyond the wreckage of the keep, each of them the height of two men and built like barrels. They held axes with bronze heads the size of children’s coffins and slings that could hurl stones a man would want two hands to lift. Some held the trunks of trees to their belts as cabers. One chucked just such a tree, and it spun and hit the halberd-men, killing or crippling as it went. The rest of the king’s guard ran.
A hand clutched at me and spun me, and a woman with a big emerald on a gold choker shouted into my face with wine-breath to run, just run, and somewhere, a child screamed. Everything went black, and then I was standing on a sort of rocky hill watching small figures stream out of the broken city in the last light, watching large ones stream in. Fires chuffed black pillars into the sky, reflected on the face of a large, calm lake or bay. Crows and gulls wheeled over a battlefield just beyond the breached west walls. I was cold.