Skate the Thief

by Jeff Ayers

  Then Skate saw something over his shoulder that gave her a great idea.

  “If you’re not going to spill ink, lemme go,” she said, pretending to plead. She let her voice turn into a whimper. “Please, Kite, come on.” When she saw the familiar look in his eye (the one like a snake about to strike a cornered mouse), and he was about to speak, she kicked her foot straight forward as hard as she could and connected lower than his stomach—which was exactly what she meant to do. Kite’s arm loosened. “Now!” Skate said and dropped down to the ground, crying out as the movement hurt her arm.

  A whirl of black lines and flapping wings filled her vision. Rattle’s white “body” bobbed in the air as it brought its legs to bear, slapping and stabbing the young man, who could not understand what he was seeing, much less fend it off.

  “Get off!” Kite yelped several times, his voice slightly higher than normal. Rattle slapped him across the face, drawing a thin red line and sending him twisting against the wall. The thin legs poked through Kite’s clothes, pinning him up against the wall. It had a leg pulled back to strike at his throat when Skate yelled, “No!”

  Rattle paused, and twisted slightly toward her, its eye shifting to the right and left in a quizzical gesture. “Don’t kill him,” she said, grabbing the backpack off the ground. “No killing,” she added emphatically as it turned its attention back to Kite.

  “What…” he muttered, his arms dangling uselessly off to his sides as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. “Wassis?”

  “Get outta here, Kite; I dunno if it’ll kill you or not if you don’t.”

  Rattle pulled its legs out of the wall behind Kite and let him settle back on his feet. Skate saw with relief that the blow to the face hadn’t actually drawn blood, though it had broken the skin.

  Kite stood stunned for a second before his feet began to take him down the narrow space between buildings. He did not look back.

  “Thanks,” Skate said to Rattle. In response, it bent one of its legs and patted her twice on the head. It then flapped over to the bag and crawled back in. “You could probably fly the rest of the way, now,” she said. Rattle just clicked again and brought a leg out to tap on the straps. Skate sighed and scooped the pack up as she stepped into the only well-lit avenue of Old Town.

  Chapter 5

  In which a parcel is delivered, a room is explored, and a pancake is dropped on the floor.

  Once Skate found her bearings on the main road through the Old Town, reaching Belamy’s house was simple. Her arm still hurt, but her breathing had returned to normal since Kite’s assault. By the time she found Belamy’s stone-block home, she was bitterly cold. The fire burned low downstairs, but she could not tell if any of Belamy’s guests were still there. The white light was on upstairs, but that told her nothing on its own.

  “Rattle, do Barrison’s friends know about you?” She felt a poke at her back, which she took to mean “yes.” She tapped the bag and said, “Good. Go inside and tell me if the coast is clear to come in.” She heard the flap open and the flutter of Rattle’s wings as it extricated itself from the bag. It puttered over her shoulder, letting its slender legs clack playfully as it went to the house’s front door. It hooked two of its legs around the handle and flapped its wings fitfully to get it open. Once the door was cracked enough for it to get through, the thing slipped in, leaving Skate utterly isolated in the cold. With nothing but the pain in her arm for company and nothing to do but wait, she thought over the confrontation with Kite.

  He had seen Rattle and would not likely forget what the thing looked like. With some snooping, he would be able to determine its origin and owner. He would know the next time they met whom she was working for, and he was smart enough to puzzle out that Belamy was either hiring her out as a member of the Ink, or that he was soon to be a mark for thievery. If he decided it was probably the former, she would be fine; Kite did not care much for rules, but he knew better than to interfere with a contract. If he correctly guessed the latter, he would almost certainly decide to steal from him first, ruining her plan and landing her in hot water with the Boss. Any mark that wasn’t part of a contract was fair game for whomever got the goods first.

  Skate took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. The next time they met would be unpleasant; Kite was not the type of person to let personal injury or insult go unanswered, and his answers to such things were usually escalations. She had once seen a new Ink member (she’d never learned his name) muscle past him in a hall in one of the safe houses. When Kite and this neophyte had later gone on a job together with a team, the job had gotten done, but the hall ruffian had been the only one caught by the Guard. He’d never left their custody, and was found dead in his cell two days later. The magistrate’s official decree on the matter was “mysterious circumstances,” and no more investigation occurred into the death of the lowly thief. It was whispered that Kite had had something to do with it, but there was no proof, or even a hint of it, so the Boss let him be. She did not like to think about what he would want to do to her for her well-placed kick.

  As Skate was ruminating on these dark considerations, Belamy’s front door creaked a bit wider open. A thin black leg poked out and bent upward three times. Skate took that as a sign that it was safe to enter, and crossed the street. The cold was quite painful now, in the dark, and even a low-burning fire would be of immeasurable comfort.

  The fire crackled intermittently, casting a low reddish glow around the room. There were no lanterns lit downstairs anymore. Belamy sat behind the desk at the far end of the room with a book open. He was tracing a line across the page with his thin finger, reading in the shadows. As she watched, he traced the same line several times. She guessed he must have been memorizing the text. Not wanting to interrupt, she moved toward the fire without a word and began to warm herself in its glow. She lifted a log from the rack and dumped it into the embers. The thud as it hit jolted Belamy out of his trance. He looked up and smiled.

  “Welcome back to the conquering heroes!” He laughed as he stood up and walked around to the other side of his desk. “Rattle has filled me in on your progress, of course,” he said as he rubbed his hands together. His eyes were fixed on the bag. Skate handed the backpack to the old man and sat back down in front of the fireplace, enjoying the increased warmth as the new log caught. “Oh, yes, wonderful! Bereziah’s Chronicles! Good find, Rattle. And good work, Skate. I’m going to get started on this right away. Rattle, take that.” He pointed to the open book on his desk, and Rattle clicked its legs together and obeyed, flapping over to retrieve the text. The flying eyeball made its way upstairs, leaving Skate and Belamy together in the now much brighter room. Skate leaned forward, letting the warmth from the fireplace roll over her as she gingerly explored the damage to her arm. She could move it, but it hurt. Hopefully that was something that would disappear in time.

  “You don’t have to stay in here, you know,” Belamy said without raising his eyes from the pages in front of him on his desk. Skate turned her head to look at him but did not answer. In the yellow-orange light from the fire, he looked very old indeed. His nose was large, his cheeks were sunken in and shriveled, and a liver spot marked his forehead. His hands were equally wrinkled, his fingers appearing to be little more than bones with skin covering them. She thought of the last time she had stayed too long in water, and how it had caused deep and winding waves on the skin of her fingers; his whole body looked that way to her, of what she could see.

  “How old are you?” The question came without her bidding, and she blinked several times after she asked it, not even sure if she had spoken the words aloud. Belamy took his eyes from the page with a quizzical look.

  “How old are you?” he responded pointedly.

  “Nine years,” she said, “and it’ll be ten on New Year’s Day.”

  “You were born on New Year’s Day?”

  “Dunno when I was born, do I? So I just call it New Year’s Day and be done with it.”

&nb
sp; Belamy seemed to consider the answer, then nodded in acceptance. “A reasonable way to handle it, I suppose.”

  “So how about you?”

  “Oh, I wasn’t born on New Year’s Day.”

  “But how old are you?” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “What’s wrong with your arm?” he said, moving out from behind his desk, a look of concern on his features.

  “Don’t change the subject.” Skate held her arm in her other hand and shifted it away from him, as if she meant to play a game of keep-away. She didn’t believe his concern was genuine, but merely a way to avoid telling her something personal.

  “I’m not changing the subject, I just—”

  “Get away!” she said, more loudly than she meant to, scrambling to her feet and cradling the wounded arm in her good hand.

  “Will you stop? You could hurt—”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m a hundred and seven!” he shouted back at her, his eyes wide with concern. “I’m a hundred and seven years old. Now stop jumping around. Is your arm hurt? What did you do?”

  Skate smiled through the wince as she dropped her hand to her side. “I think I landed on it wrong,” she said, mimicking a trip to get her point across. “You don’t look a hundred and seven.”

  “Clean living,” he said offhandedly as he moved to one of the bookshelves. He pulled one of the decanters being used to help the books stay upright off the shelf, and the end book fell over. He paid it no mind as he uncorked the delicate-looking glass. It held a dark blue liquid. “Hold out your arm.”

  “Why?” Skate said, reflexively bringing the injured arm up to be held by the other arm, wincing again as another wave of pain shot through her.

  “I want to help.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “How do I know it won’t hurt me?” she asked, shooting a swift glance at the bottle. “How do I know it’s not a trick?”

  Belamy’s lined face fell slack for a moment; his expression might have been one of surprise. Then he restored himself to a look of irritation. “Young lady,” he began, using that term that Skate was sure was being meant to belittle and mock her, “if I wanted to hurt you, I would be using a far less expensive method to do it. I don’t invite people into my home only to injure them for a lark.”

  “You invite them over to steal from them.”

  “Borrow!” he insisted, “to borrow from them. And I invited them over weeks ago, before I’d ever met you. It was just a happy coincidence that they were—never mind!” he said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not going to hurt you. I promise.”

  He held the dark blue liquid out, offering its contents again. Gingerly, she put her arm forward, careful to hold it limp to avoid more pain. Belamy tipped the decanter, being very careful to control the amount that left the bottle. As the dark blue stuff poured out, Skate had time to notice that it flowed much like water before a trickle landed on her sprained wrist. She yelped as it landed, feeling more pain. She cut the yelp short, though, because she realized she was only feeling the coldness of the liquid rather than the burning she had first thought. The dark blue disappeared into her skin as soon as it landed. Belamy lifted the decorative glass bottle back up after the brief contact the liquid made with her skin. He had been careful not to spill a drop on the floor or himself. “Better?”

  Skate looked at her arm. It didn’t feel any different, but she had been holding it in that position on purpose. She risked a contraction of the muscle and brought her hand up a fraction of an inch. It responded without sending any warnings to her. She clenched her hand into a fist. No pain there, either. “Wow!” she said, forgetting her mistrust of the old man. “It’s perfect.” She bent her arm and threw it in a wide circle with abandon. “It’s like I never hurt it at all!” She had never encountered such an immediate relief from pain before. “What’s in that stuff?” she asked, casting an eye on the bottle.

  “Magic,” Belamy responded with a satisfied smile as he replaced the bottle on the shelf. “A gift from a priest, a healer, years ago. For minor injuries—cuts, bruises, sprains, that sort of thing—it does the trick. As long as I don’t use it all at one go, it always refills itself. It’s been enormously useful over the years, though recently—well, I’m glad it helped.”

  “Is that how you got to be a hundred and seven? Using that stuff?”

  Belamy locked his expression into that satisfied smile. “No. The potion does nothing to help fight aging. Clean living,” he repeated with a wave of his hand, dismissing further inquiries into his longevity. He walked back to his desk. “Now, if you’re ready, you know where your room is. I had Rattle clean it when you left this morning, so it should be ready for you. There may be some dust that evaded cleaning, but it will certainly be better than sleeping on the street.” He returned his attention back to his book and said no more to her.

  Knowing a dismissal when she heard one, she turned toward the stairs, then stopped. “And Rattle really cooks?”

  “Rattle really cooks.”

  Skate tried to gauge the old man’s reaction to her question. As far as she could tell, there was none. He was utterly engrossed in his reading. She felt a question forming in her mind, and she was divided about it. As she looked at the book and saw the joy and concentration on the old man’s face, the question glowed hotter in the back of her brain. She pushed it down, away, where it would not come out into the world unbidden:

  How do I read?

  Skate turned away and made her way upstairs, leaving behind the old man brooding over his new book. The air got noticeably colder as she ascended, but not nearly to the point of freezing that it was outside.

  The stairs led directly into an upstairs hallway with three doors. The one on the left went to Belamy’s room, and the first on the right led to the other study. She could hear the soft flapping and clicking of Rattle moving about the latter, presumably either replacing books on the shelf or else taking one down for itself. The remaining room was to be her own.

  When she’d been here that morning, Belamy had opened a creaky door into a room that looked untouched for decades. Everything in the room had been caked in a considerable layer of dust. There were some unidentifiable pieces of furniture that had long ago either been broken into kindling or else rotted away into useless debris. The room had been suffused with a smell like moldy clothing, and Skate had been glad that there had not been warmth to make the odor overwhelming. “Don’t worry,” Belamy had said, “Rattle will clean this up before you get back. I’ll have him take care of it immediately, in fact.” He had closed the door on a room that Skate did not look forward to inhabiting.

  The room as she now saw it was unrecognizable. The floors had been swept, and nothing was broken. The room held an empty desk with a chair, a bed with an end table with a white-lit lantern on it, and a dresser. It was this last piece of furniture that she gravitated toward first. She had never stayed in a room that held such a thing. She had nothing to place inside it, but thinking of the tall, heavy wooden set of drawers as being in some way her own felt exhilarating. It’s not mine, she reminded herself, not really. But it was hers to use while she stayed here.

  It did not look particularly old. She opened the empty drawers, relishing the feel of the grating wood as she slid them open and shut with successive light bangs.

  Skate moved to the bed next. It was set on sturdy legs, the mattress soft but having some resistance to it. Further investigation revealed a wicker latticework to support the soft pallet on top. The bed was not fabulously decorated, nor particularly expensive-looking—if she had been burgling and came upon a room with this type of bed, she’d likely move on to bigger and better marks—but getting to sleep in such a bed was an enormous extravagance. In the safe houses, she slept on mats on the floor or in dingy hammocks strung up between beams. She had only slept on a proper mattress before the fire of her earliest years.

  Skate pushed away the unexpected and painful memories, and went to examine
the desk. It was a simple affair, with a drawer in the front and nothing on its surface. She knew immediately that it was a thing of age, unlike the other two pieces of furniture in the room. The top was mostly smooth, with a few small pits scarring it where an overzealous writer had pressed through the page with their quill—or else someone had used it as a convenient surface to cut something. Skate could feel each divot as she ran her hand across the top, each scar like a message from the past. There are memories here; there is history here.

  She opened the desk drawer. Inside was a black slate, somewhat worn around the edges. She had seen these before, but they had always been accompanied by a stick of chalk. She could find nothing of the sort within the drawer. She did notice more marks in the drawer, though. These were not sporadic as the marks on the top had been; they were deliberately carved in the lower right-hand corner. She brought the lantern closer, its magically created light illuminating the drawer completely. She recognized the carved things as letters, though she had no idea what their significance was.

  Skate replaced the slate in the drawer and closed it. She noticed a small washtub, bucket, drying cloth, and privacy shade in the corner. The tub was near a vent in the wall; she felt hot air blowing through, just as Belamy had said it would. The water in the bucket wasn’t hot, but it wasn’t cold either; the hot air had kept it from turning to ice.

  Skate hadn’t bathed in weeks. She decided to change that, leaving her filthy clothes on the floor.

  The water was cold, so her bath was quick. She dried off with the cloth, then bent over the tub and dipped her filthy rags into the water. When she had swished them around to her satisfaction, she laid them out flat in front of the vent. By morning, they would be dry, and hopefully not frozen.

  Skate put the cloth down too and quickly got into the bed; the room had felt fairly warm before the bath, but felt significantly less so now. Snuggling in, she fully shuttered the lantern, extinguishing all light in the room.