Skoren whistled a happy tune and sliced off Thomas’s left ear with the knife, sending the man into a fresh fit of screaming. He tossed the severed bit to the slavering dogs at his back, and they snarled and fought over it in a clatter of rusty chains.
Skoren gave the poor bastard a moment to regain his composure and turned to Starling, wiping the bloody blade clean on his apron hem. “Let’s make an accounting, shall we?”
Starling shrugged, then nodded helplessly. He was in no position to argue.
Skoren gestured around the dank pit of the abandoned slaughterhouse. “Everyone in this room is out coin to you and Sadene. Only one of you is here to answer for it.”
Starling took in the gathered cabal, eight notorious gangsters from the city’s underbelly. Eight horrible ways to die, plus whatever Skoren might have in store for him once he was done carving up poor Thomas.
“Who started your little shell game?” Skoren asked. “Was it you? Or was it Sadene?” Starling was slow to respond, so Skoren answered for him. “It was Sadene, wasn’t it? Because no offense, Starling, you’re not that clever.”
Starling raised his hands in surrender. “Is there anything I can do to make this right?”
“Do you have my money?”
“I don’t.” And he didn’t. Sadene had robbed him as blind as they together had robbed everyone else.
“Then, no.” Skoren motioned to one of his goons lurking in the corner, and the man came forward with a familiar set of saddle bags. Starling’s saddle bags. “Pour it out,” he ordered.
The thug turned the bags out onto the filthy floor and came up with a collection of coin purses. Nothing else. None of Starling’s other belongings. Just six bags of coins, ones he thought he’d had carefully stashed in six secret locations. Apparently not so secret after all.
Skoren came over and squatted over the pile of purses and saddle bags. Then, picking up each one, he nicked them open with his knife and let the coins spill out into the pile. Gold kingsmarks, silver drakes, bent pennies, and tineyes clinked and clattered to the floor in a spreading pool.
“Two hundred forty-seven kingsmarks, seven drakes, thirty-one shill,” Skoren declared, waving his hand over the pile like a presenter at a carnival. “I believe this is every penny left to your name.”
Starling nodded. No sense in denying it. “Yessir.”
Skoren picked through the coins with the point of his knife. “That’s a lot less than what you owe us.”
Again, there was no sense in denying it. “Yessir.”
“But, not an inconsiderable sum. Enough for a man to drink and whore for a year. If his tastes aren’t too refined, anyway.” Smiling, the gangster looked around the room at his associates. “Does anyone so owed wish to make a claim on good Starling’s last fortune?”
Chuckles of amusement. Little more.
Starling felt his heart sinking, and he fought to keep it from turning to piss running down his leg.
But Skoren shrugged. “Well. Good fortune for you then, Starling.”
The thief blinked in confusion. “Beg pardon?”
“You can keep it.”
Starling didn’t know how to respond. So, he held his tongue.
“You have five gates and two harbors to choose from. If you can get out of Peregos alive, this is yours to keep.” Skoren smiled. Like a friend. Like a man who wasn’t kneeling there with a wicked knife and bloody hands. He picked through the pile of coins and took up nine kingsmarks. He tossed one to each of his conspirators and tucked the last one into the pocket of his apron. Then he winked. “There. If there was any question, now we’re all cashed out. The remainder is yours.”
Again, snickers from the gaggle of gangsters.
Starling swallowed the lump bobbing up and down in his throat. “If I can get out of Peregos alive?”
“Yes.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” Starling wondered aloud before he could stop himself. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t know what the game was, but he couldn’t believe these esteemed murderers would let him out of the room alive, let alone the city.
“By whatever means suits you,” Skoren replied. “Donkey cart. Row boat. Boot leather. Whatever carries you away from here.”
The fear, the rioting paranoia, it got the better of him. “But?” Starling asked, a pained hitch in his voice.
Skoren’s smile turned unfriendly, altogether sinister. “But.” He rose and walked his knife through bloody fingers with the deft touch of a bard at his lute. “How long since my men scooped you up? Half an hour or so?”
Starling nodded.
“Well, then that means every cutthroat in the city has a half hour lead on tracking you down.” The glittering knife stopped, and Skoren used it to point to the pile of coins. “And there is the bounty on your head. The sum welcome to be kept by whoever puts a miserable end to you. Or the prize you win for surviving. Whichever comes first.”
Starling’s heart skipped and skittered in his chest. His mind raced, events moving too fast and chaotically to snatch hold of, like trying to catch sparrows in an attic.
“Fly fast, Starling,” Skoren said, turning his attention back to his work on poor Thomas. “The word on the bounty has been out for a while now. Time isn’t waiting for you.” The hungry dogs began to whimper and growl in anticipation as their master moved back toward the meat.
Hands trembling, stomach clenching, Josiah Starling scooped the coins out of the grimy rushes and ran for his life, while Thomas’s screams, the baying of hounds, and the laughter of killers echoed after him.
THINGS HAD NOT always been so desperate. Not so long ago, Starling was up and coming in the underworld of Peregos. He had built his own crew, surrounded himself with real talent. Inside a year they went from small time to taking real scores. People who mattered were beginning to take notice. Admittedly, Starling had always been more of an idea man. Much of the heavy lifting, the day to day, he’d left to Thomas, who was now feeding the dogs, and to Maeda, who was running the crew in his increasing absence.
Now, he was cowering in the ass-end of a rundown stable not a block from where Skoren’s men had turned him out onto the street. Wondering if he’d live to see the next block over.
You can’t just sit here and die, he thought, his belly full of quivering worms. Get yourself together. One thing at a time. Take it all one thing at a time. What did he need first? What did he need most? What would keep him alive for the next ten minutes?
Curling up in a ball right here until I die of thirst, he thought. But that wouldn’t do. Though the idea wasn’t entirely without merit. He wouldn’t actually die of thirst. There was a moldering rain barrel just outside the alley door. He’d shit himself to death from drinking putrid water before he died of thirst.
Starling couldn’t help it. He giggled. A madman’s chuckle. Since he couldn’t stop it, he indulged himself and let it happen as nature willed it. Then, when the giggling fit dried up, he tried to carry on, head pounding, eyes hot with tears.
What did he need? And what did he have? He needed a lot. Other than the clothes on his back and the damnable coins in the saddle bags, he had nothing. There would be no going back to his apartments. Same for any safehouse he knew. He had cached a few essentials here and there throughout the city, for emergencies, but retrieving them would require him to expose himself.
You’re going to have to do that, no matter what, he thought, swallowing the lump of dread that came with it. A thief could disappear from the Law, from the Kingsmen easily enough. But the scoundrels of Peregos would be hunting him on the rooftops, the thieves’ highway, the sewers, in every alley and flophouse. His head was worth a year of drunken fuckery. And word would be spreading like wild fire. Anywhere he might hide from decent folk would put him right in his hunters’ laps. And anywhere he could hide from his hunters was no place to hide at all.
A disguise. What he needed first was a disguise.
He ransacked the stable, looking for anything he
might use to make him look less like himself. A ratty red horse blanket thrown about his shoulders was worth a try. That lasted five seconds before he decided all it accomplished was making him look like Josiah Starling gone mad, running through the streets in a ratty red horse blanket.
Come on, you idiot, do better. What would have served best was a dress and a bonnet. Starling knew from experience he made a fine looking woman—bristly scruff of a beard aside. He checked the corners of the barn and peeked into the alleyway, seeking clotheslines laden with any suitable fare. He found almost nothing to pick from. Is it not washday on Ashby Street, you miserable bastards?
He hovered over the rain barrel, staring down into his own murky reflection, trying to come up with something near at hand that would hide him from prying eyes. The man looking back at him seemed to have aged a decade in a day. His eyes were wild and hollow. His cheeks sunken. The gray spreading at his temples and creeping into his short beard made him look like an old man.
I can look like an old man, he thought then he laughed at his own reflection. How the fuck does that help you? You are an old man. Good God. Running for your life was a young man’s game. He could feel that in every unsteady breath he took. He didn’t have the nerve for this anymore. Maybe once, when he was still too young to know better. But not now. Ten minutes on the run and his nerves were already shot.
You don’t need a disguise, he thought, flicking his fingertips against the glassy surface of the black water. What you need is a way out of this city. He spat in the barrel and slunk back into the stables. Of course he needed a way out of the fucking city. He had to survive long enough to do that. Every crooked guardsman would be watching the gates for him. Every harbor rat on alert. Maybe he was getting the cart before the horse. He didn’t need a way out of the city. Not yet. He needed a way out of the neighborhood.
He stared a thousand-yard hole through the stable wall until dusk fell, reciting the same question over and over again in his mind.
How? Where? Who? He came back to the same answer every time.
Maeda. The lady rogue who had helped him keep the crew running and in the good graces of everyone he hadn’t outright insulted along the way. And with less and less of his participation since Sadene had come along. The lady rogue who had kept all the daggers juggling while he’d played at being a gentleman thief and falling in love like a schoolboy. Maeda, who he’d overlooked, abandoned, and betrayed in every way short of taking a knife to her.
If Maeda couldn’t get him out of the neighborhood and out of the city, no one could.
And she had no reason to help him at all. But he didn’t think she’d knife him either, just for the coins in his bag and the favor of Skoren. At least, he very much hoped not.
With no better plan than that, Josiah Starling pulled his hood low over his head and made out into the streets, ducking and weaving along a mad random path like a man who’d lost his mind and sense of direction on the same day.
To be fair, he had.
“NO,” MAEDA SAID. She was standing over her fishbowl in her worn apartment, crumbling a dried cricket over the surface of the water for a school of tiny blue darters with feathery fan tails.
It was the answer Starling most expected. “Hear me out, please.”
“Let me try this another way,” Maeda said, “Fuck off.” She smiled as the little blue streaks pecked and nipped at the brown flakes floating on the surface of their bowl. She touched the tip of her finger to a larger piece of cricket wing lingering on the surface and skimmed it around in a slow figure eight, prodding the hungry little fish to chase after it.
“I will, Maeda. I promise. Once I’m out of the city, you’ll never have to hear from me again.” He thunked the coin laden saddle bags down onto the thick slab of a table. “And all of this is yours.”
Maeda finally turned away from her fish, scowling at the saddle bags. “I don’t want Skoren’s money. Not without your head to go along with it. That is the gist of the arrangement everyone’s chattering about.”
“Who would know? If I was gone and you kept the money?”
“Whatever bastard you blabber to when someone does catch up to you and finds you without it, that’s who. Besides, whether you believe it or not, Skoren just knows things. Sees things. No one even asks what sort of evil he does in the back rooms of his gambling halls. How do you think he caught onto you?” Maeda crossed her arms and shook her head. “I don’t want the money, Starling.”
Fighting down the panic, Starling changed tack. “A favor then. Just your help, this once, and I’ll be on my way. Out of your life, out of your affairs forever. The crew, all its business. It’s yours. Like I never existed at all.”
Maeda cocked a slender eyebrow. “I seem to recall asking Josiah Starling for his help and favors no less than three times in as many months. And receiving no answer at all, because he was too busy with his newest distraction to be bothered. How is Sadene, by the way?”
Starling took the knife twist to the gut in stride. “Gone.”
Maeda gave a chuckle. “I told you. Didn’t I?”
Starling nodded, the well of shame and regret rolling in his belly threatening to show itself in a display of dry heaving. “You did, Maeda. For what it’s worth I’m sorry.”
“Well, at least I gave you a ‘no.’ That’s more than I’ve heard from you in months.” She shrugged. “There’s your favor. I said no. Now you don’t have to wonder if I’m ever going to show up and do my part.”
“I know,” Starling conceded. “I… bobbled everything. Left you cleaning up my messes. Left you holding the bag.”
“Yes. You did,” Maeda said. “But this one, this one is all yours. And I can’t help you clean it up.”
“Please. Maeda. I just need a little help. That’s all. A single, tiny favor. A hand out of the city. It’ll cost you nothing.”
“Being in business with you has cost me plenty,” Maeda said, her expression darkening. “Sums owed add up. You already can’t pay me what you owe me. And Skoren’s gold doesn’t count.”
Starling opened his mouth to protest but found no words.
“Look around you, Starling. See all that smoke and fire? That’s all the bridges you’ve burned. Catching flame all at once. I wash my hands of you. As far as I can tell, our business ended when you got your cock knotted up in Sadene. And good riddance to you at that.”
Starling wilted, throwing up his hands in resignation. “Is there nothing at all then? After all we’ve been through together in this city?”
“Sure,” Maeda said, and the dagger at her belt came free of its sheath.
Starling jumped, expecting violence. He was still woefully unarmed, and even if he hadn’t been, he didn’t think he could take her in something approaching a fair fight. But rather than come at him with the blade, she stabbed it into the table beside his saddle bags and left it there quivering.
“There you go, Starling,” she said with sneer. “A fighting chance for you, between here and wherever you wind up next.”
The startled breath Starling had been holding exploded out, and with a grateful nod, he plucked the dagger from the table. At least he had that much. He fished into his saddle bags for a token gesture, a kingsmark or two for the dagger if nothing else.
“Not a chance,” Maeda said. “Don’t you leave a single penny of Skoren’s money here.”
Starling retreated without another word, his head hung low, shame and regret taking their toll as he fled into the deepening night.
ALL OTHER DOORS closed, all other bridges burned, Starling knew he only had two real choices. Run or hide. He knew you couldn’t do either one forever, but the farther he ran from the city, from Peregos, the more likely it was his pursuers would give up the chase. Miles and days would peel the hounds away one by one until the doubt of catching him and the return on chasing him combined to discourage the effort. If he stayed, if he tried to hide, it would only be a matter of time. He’d be caught. He’d be found. And it would end bad
ly.
If he ran, every day would increase his odds of survival. If he stayed, each passing day would make them worse.
So, there wasn’t really any choice at all.
Every minute you wait makes getting out harder. One more run across the city, he told himself. One more artful dodge. By the time the sun comes up in the morning, you’ll be a free man. The dagger up his sleeve and the bag of gold dangling from his shoulder did very little to help him believe it.
Summoning up his courage for the last time, Starling ran.
For a man of four decades, he was still light and fast on his feet. And the newly fallen night had come on blessedly dark. He dashed pasted tradesmen closing up shop for the night. Past tavern-goers mobbing the street in search of a mug. Between carriages as they carted the well-to-do off to supper or an evening at the theater. He skated over the narrow bridges that spanned Peregos’ winding canals, down the twisting streets in the lamplight evening murk. Had anyone seen him call on Maeda and then slink out again? Of course they had. If so, were they somewhere back there in the dark, giving pursuit? Most assuredly.
He kept out of the alleys and side streets and stuck to the main avenues. He was much less likely to find himself murdered on some wide-open public street at a busy tavern hour than in some back alley. He wasn’t hidden in plain sight. Not by a long shot. But it might keep him alive for a while until he came up with something better.
Of course, it didn’t take long, darting down the street like that, for a curious watchman to wonder what he was up to.
“Oy!” a yellow bearded watchman called out. “Hold there. What are you about?”
Running for my life, Starling thought. But instead he slowed to a trot and answered, “I’m going to be a father!” He capped it off with a happy hoot and a cheerful wave. And with no one calling out alarms in his wake, the guard lost interest and let him pass unmolested.
The tide would be right soon. Ships would be putting out that evening. If he could make Bell Harbor in two hours, he could throw a sack of gold at a captain or sailor and maybe get himself hauled aboard with few questions asked. To where didn’t matter. Anywhere was better than Peregos Failing that, maybe he could stowaway or ride out of port in some ship’s quarter netting before being found out. He had enough gold to spread around that it might make him a captain’s favorite unexpected passenger.
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