Crooked Streets

by R. J. Creaney

  Soon enough they were off, making their way through the city streets.

  With the heavy wooden frames fastened about their ankles, Cainen and Kozef could not hope to walk with a normal gait, and had to resort to a kind of absurd back-and-forth waddle, one that the thieves – and certainly anyone else who might have been looking at the time – found positively hilarious.

  Kozef – biting his bottom lip and jutting out his jaw – seemed to be bearing the ridicule and humiliation of it all stoically enough, but Cainen, who knew him better than anyone else, noticed the cracks about the edges of that facade. He may have been considerably bigger and stronger than his smaller and younger companion, but poor Kozef was far more susceptible to the devils that were shame and embarrassment, and the Fennishman could see it slowly taking its toll on him.

  The Polecat who carried Cainen’s axe seemed to notice this also and, giggling maniacally, proceeded to slap Kozef hard on the buttocks with the flat face of the axe-bit, as a parent might discipline a misbehaving child with a clothes-beater.

  Kozef stumbled forward but, grunting through his gritted teeth, did not trip over.

  “Look at the red mark!” the slapper screeched, pointing at the red welt he had brought up on Kozef’s arse.

  “Ah, big fellow,” Cainen piped up, hoping to help his friend take his mind off the miserable circumstances. “Who would’ve thought we’d be in another situation like this so soon?”

  “What are you saying, small man?” Kozef grunted.

  “Captured by a sinister guild, again! Just like the other time! Remember the Tanners, down there in Thieudan?”

  “You silly little peat-eater!” Fitch cut in, looking up from examining the head of Kozef’s hammer, as if to appraise its value. “We’re no guild, not us. We’re the Honourable Thieves’ Society of Auvand, you see. Over a century ago, we were a guild, though. The Honourable Thieves’ Guild of Auvand – that was us. But according to inviolable and ancient municipal laws, only reputable and law-abiding groups of craftsmen, merchants or labourers may call themselves a ‘guild’. Our trade itself is against municipal law, and therefore municipal law will not recognise our society as a true guild!”

  Cainen raised his eyebrow at that. “Out of all the dozens of city laws you break every day, that is the one you choose to honour?”

  “One has to draw the line someplace, I figure.” Fitch said, laughing. “Right there is as good a place as any, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is.” Cainen gave a shrug – although with the heavy wooden frame locking his neck and his wrists in place, it wasn’t much of a shrug at all. He could not help but wonder then what other laws, ancient and obscure, the Polecats saw fit to adhere to.

  *

  The Polecats took them south through the city streets, quickly and quietly – the band of thieves, perhaps unsurprisingly, proved adept at moving without creating any sound, and all the noise that could be heard in the streets of the southern Donjon quarter at that point seemed to be coming only from Kozef and Cainen, waddling along with the cumbersome wooden planks fixed about their necks, wrists and ankles.

  The city buildings and townhouses became gradually more mean and dilapidated as they progressed south.

  Soon enough they had arrived at a particularly decrepit corner of the city; one dominated by a great graveyard; a sprawling mess of grave-markers and tufts of snarled, sprouting weeds. At the edge of this burial ground there stood a dilapidated fane, and it was towards this that the Polecats prodded their current prisoners.

  The old temple building was a rotten, blackened husk of its former self. The steeple leaned to one side and seemed ready to topple with the slightest gush of wind.

  The stained-glass windows had been shattered and pulverised, the sculpted icons all toppled. The front doors were nowhere to be found, leaving the entranceway to gape open like a great toothless mouth. Inside, the tile floor was spattered with the scat of several generations worth of rats and pigeons – and Kozef and Cainen could not help but tread on it with almost every step.

  They proceeded straight through the nave and passed the upended high altar, coming at last to a dark passageway at the very back of the formerly hallowed house.

  Cainen peered over, noticing stairs that dropped down and away into inky blackness – it was a narrow, winding staircase hewn from cold stone. With the stock-frames locked about their feet, descending that treacherous stair would have been impossible.

  As if reading Cainen’s thoughts, some of the Polecats then knelt down and unlocked the stock-frames from their ankles. Cainen stretched his legs out, relieved to be able to walk normally once again. They kept the upper stock-frames in place, however – they alone would cause more than enough difficulty for talking those narrow and winding steps.

  “After you,” Jackdaw hissed, gesturing for them to descend.

  “You heard the man!” some of the Polecats shrieked. “Go on!”

  Cainen felt the jab of one of the thieves’ cudgels on his backbone, urging him onward. And so he entered the dark passageway and descended – carefully and slowly, using only his feet to feel his way down from one step to the next. The frame locking his neck and wrists into place not only obstructed his view of where he was going, but also ensured that he could not reach out a hand to steady his descent – not that there was anything for him to take hold of, had he been able to. With Kozef not far behind him, he managed to descend some seven of the winding stairs before seeing the light – a dimly-burning taper set into a wall sconce.

  Behind them, the Polecats were chattering and sniggering amongst themselves.

  “Hurry up, you dog-brothers,” one of them shouted down at Cainen and Kozef. “You’re holding us all up!”

  Much to the relief of the two captive mercenaries, there were only a few remaining steps. At the bottom of the stair, a narrow passageway stretched out before them.

  They were obliged to proceed in single file, and it was barely narrow enough to accommodate the stock-boards around Kozef and Cainen’s necks and ankles – with every step forward through the dark passage, the corner or edge of the timber frame would knock or scrape against the roughly-hewn stone wall.

  To either side of them were cavities hewn into the living stone – long and deep enough to accommodate a man’s earthly remains lying in repose.

  And for many of them, that is exactly what they accommodated - Cainen could see interred the bones of dozens of ancient Auvandiers – some were fully laid out, with their hands lying to either side or folded neatly over their midsections. Others were simply piles of bone, haphazardly arranged with a grimacing skull sitting on top, sharing the corpse-cavity with up to three, four or even five bone-piles. Some of the cavities were crammed full of bones.

  Astonished at all the ancient remains, Cainen did not see the gate of heavy iron bars directly in front of him – the wooden frame around his neck slammed into the bars, resulting in a loud clang that reverberated throughout the catacomb. A chorus of hooting laughter and cackling flared up amongst the Polecats, and Fitch rushed forward, elbowing Cainen aside.

  “Out of the way, peat-eater!” he spat.

  The wiry thief pulled a large iron key from his belt, slid it into the keyhole and turned it about, this way and that, and soon enough the gate of heavy bars was opened wide.

  The captive vagabonds proceeded down the tunnel, and soon enough they arrived at a second divider blocking their path – not a set of cold iron bars, but a heavy indigo curtain, silken and sumptuous. It was something decidedly unexpected, there in the dark and grimy underground passageway. Light and sound seeped through the gaps, and Cainen wondered at what it could be concealing.

  Gruffly Fitch trudged forward again, sweeping the curtain to one side with a single motion and revealing to Cainen’s eyes the opulent and gleaming home of the Polecats.

  The vagabonds stepped over the threshold, astonished at their suddenly glorious surroundings.

  It seemed that the Polecat’s hideout
was a repository for beautiful and priceless objects; a veritable cabinet of curiosities. The flickering, dancing lights from a hundred candles and tapers – as well as the welling smoke from that multitude of flames, which managed to reach every inch of that place – gave the whole scene a hazy, dream-like quality.

  Everywhere Cainen looked, he saw treasures and valuables: no doubt the accumulated fruits of decades – or even centuries – of constant thievery.

  Here and there covering the walls of bare hewn stone were an assortment of paintings and tapestries, all startlingly gorgeous. One tapestry in particular was a banquet for the eyes that any prince would have been proud to hang on the wall of his feasting hall: it illustrated a fantastical hunting scene, and it seemed that every second thread was pure shining gold.

  There were gold and silver serving-dishes of all shapes and size, gleaming flagons, chalices, pitchers, salt cellars and aquamaniles of every description.

  The gaudy golden crown of some ancient and forgotten barbarian king sat on a ledge to one side, while lying alongside it was the heavily jewelled ceremonial sword that must have belonged to that same king. Standing across from these was a superb suit of engraved and gilded plate harness; the exorbitantly-expensive parade armour of some prosperous count.

  Not even items of religious devotion, it seemed, were free from the thieving fingers of the Polecats. There were rich priestly vestments, altar furnishings, wrought-gold candelabra, hand-bells and thuribles. Amongst these were an assortment of holy relics, such as the grinning jewel-studded skull of some holy sage, or the black and shrivelled hand of an ancient saint, set in an exquisite frame of ivory and gold.

  To see such venerable remains there in that den of thieves would have surely made any clergyman go black in the face. Cainen could imagine his old abbot Aegus, with his thick neck and bushy grey eyebrows, flying into a holy rage over them – railing against thieving scoundrels who managed to contravene both civil law and divine law and disrespect the earthly remains of the hallowed dead with one single act of callous larceny.

  Moreover, the Polecats had an assortment of votive statuary in their collection, from a dozen different fanes. Some of the pieces were especially large and cumbersome, prompting thoughts as to what bold feat of illicit ingenuity had been involved in its taking. Arousing Cainen’s curiosity and astonishment in particular was a great section of dazzling stained glass window, larger than a man, depicting Holy Jannaeus himself giving a sermon, with both the common folk and the gods in attendance. It had been left to lean, almost haphazardly, against the hewn stone wall of the chamber. To hide such a sublime work of stained-glass art so far away from the illuminating light of the sun was perhaps a more deplorable crime than the theft itself.

  Despite all the great efforts the Polecats had gone to beautify that underground space, one simply could not forget that it remained a damp and foul catacomb – behind the sumptuous tapestries and the sideboards laden with gleaming valuables one could still see, here and there, the skulls of the ancients sitting uneasily amidst their dusty bones.

  That underground space was a long and broad gallery, and as Cainen and Kozef were urged forward down its length, followed by the band of Polecats who had apprehended them, assorted other thieves emerged from various openings to see their passage; to gawk and laugh and make crude remarks and the two wretched captives.

  In the world up above the Polecats had worn for the most part plain clothes, garments that featured common – albeit dark – hues and patterns. Garb intended to help them blend into the crowd and not be seen.

  It made sense, after all – ostentatiously showing off stolen high-fashion clothes and valuables would have aroused scorn and various other sorts of unwanted attention in the world above.

  Down in their hole, however, amongst themselves, that convention seemed not to apply.

  Cainen saw that one young Polecat was all puffed up from wearing three princely silken doublets at once – it seemed that he simply could not decide on which one to flaunt, and instead opted to flaunt them all at the same time. His fingers, meanwhile, were overloaded with fine rings of copper and silver and gold, all glittering and clinking together.

  Another thief clutched a large and beautiful ewer to his breast as if he were a mother bearing a small child on her hip – it was silver-gilt and inscribed all over its surface with floral and pomegranate motifs.

  Indeed, there were small children down there in the hole, too – apprentice thieves, pickpockets, purse-cutters, burglars and swindlers as young as perhaps nine years old. Polecat kits. They too were given to displaying the fruits of their larceny, just as the adult thieves were – one little boy wore a battered helm and well-worn brigandine lifted from a city guardsman, both comically oversized on his diminutive frame.

  One man had a pair of particularly impressive earrings dangling, not unlike war-flails, from his earlobes. Those earrings were huge things: gaudy and bulbous, wrought of gold and clear shining amber. His face split into a great big grin when Cainen’s eyes settled on them – he appeared to be incredibly proud of them, despite the fact that they were intended only to decorate the ears of women. His earlobes, too, were rather oversized – they were swollen, pustular and gangrenous. Obviously, his ear-piercing skills were not at the same degree as his thieving skills.

  Eventually that long, broad underground gallery terminated with a high dais in the middle of which was a piece of furniture of some extravagance – a stately chair with delusions of being a throne.

  And seated in that high gilded seat, Cainen saw, was a woman who could only have been the queen of this underground kingdom of thievery. She stood up from her chair as the two vagabond fighting men and their captors approached the dais.

  She was short-statured and altogether slender woman, but her garment, hairstyle and headdress – as well as the fact that she was standing upon a raised dais – all helped to belie this fact.

  She wore a luxuriant grey gown of the finest Olitanian silk, suffused with silver gilt thread and figured with elaborate artichoke motifs and swirling and interlacing florals. The shoulders and sleeves were thickly puffed, and although her waist was exceedingly narrow, the skirt of her gown flared out all around her, causing her to seem altogether larger and more imposing than she really was. It was a garment that was without doubt fit for a queen, Cainen realised: and more than likely it had been stolen from one.

  Her hair was the same grey colour as her garment, albeit with streaks here and there of the darker hair of younger years, and it had been wound tightly into two great buns that sat on either side of her head. These both were bound by a hairnet, a delicate and exquisite piece of jewellery studded with wine-dark rubies that spangled in the candlelight.

  Her age must have been fifty-five years or more. The wrinkles of her face seemed to concentrate chiefly about her eyes and her brow – her lips, chin and cheeks were still relatively smooth and youthful. Her eyes, however, were small and dark and hard – as if they were shards of shiny black glass, wreathed with a web of wrinkles.

  To Cainen’s surprise, she barely glanced at the two strange men who had been brought before her, naked and bound. Instead she looked only upon Jackdaw, held out her hand to him and raised her eyebrows at him expectantly.

  The whole catacomb went as silent as the bones of the long-dead as she stood there with her open palm outstretched, waiting for Jackdaw to place the Star of Caelummar in her hand.

  Jackdaw’s face was a solemn mask, and he seemed to be frozen in place where he stood.

  Eventually, the grey matriarch realised that no treasure was forthcoming, and her hand clasped shut into a tight, angry fist.

  “Lady Vole, we –” Jackdaw began. But he did not get far at all.

  “And where in bloody damnation is the accursed thing, Jackdaw?” she shrieked, cutting him off.

  With that, she tugged up her skirts in great heaped handfuls, stepped down from the dais and trudged over to them. The assorted Polecats standing nearby had to
jostle against one another so as to avoid insulting her by treading on or brushing against her grand, overflowing skirt.

  Although she may have been garbed and jewelled as if she were a dowager queen, her crude diction and manners were straight from a hinterland hamlet. She seemed purely Coeronian by birth, but it was clear for all to see that she was no native of the city. She had most likely came to Auvand in her youth seeking steady employment – and Cainen would not have been surprised at all if she had found it, at first, through harlotry.

  “It ought to be right here in my hand!” she growled. One of the veins seemed to be throbbing in her forehead, and flecks of spittle flew from her lips as she barked and raved at her lieutenant. “Argh! I’m so arsey I don’t know whether I ought to shit myself or go blind! Why am I not holding it right this moment, Jackdaw? Tell me why!”

  The hardened outlaw swallowed hard before speaking. “Our task met some complications, Lady Vole,” he explained. “Their chest was only a decoy – it contained a lump of wood wrapped in linen. In truth, the star was carried by one of the primate’s men – in his purse. He fled just as we launched our strike on the main column, and we pursued him... But by the time we had caught up with him, these two foreign ruffians had come into possession of the star.”

  Finally, she turned her attentions on to Kozef and Cainen, and her hard dark eyes scrutinised them closely, roving up and down and all about their faces and their bodies, for what seemed to Cainen an inordinately long amount of time.

  “And these two sorry sods are those foreign ruffians, you say?”

  “This is them, Lady Vole,” Jackdaw answered. “They are a separate party, as far can be told, not in the employ of the primate or anyone else. The item managed to come into their possession through chance, and before we were able to secure it, they had sequestered it away someplace. There was a struggle, and a few of our own were wounded. A couple were killed.”