by Logan Jacobs
Brendel’s face turned beet red as he grabbed at his few strands of gray hair. I was sure he was about to have a stroke when he started screaming halfling gibberish and stringing together an amusing list of profanities.
It should only take Dar two minutes tops to ferry the goods from the cart into his pockets, and if we were lucky, maybe even a few coins for our troubles. Brendel wouldn’t even know Dar was there … well, as long as Dar didn’t knock anything over in the process, but it was a risk I was willing to take. Either way, Brendel wouldn’t know until he set up shop in the next district.
I watched out of the corner of my eye, and amidst the laughter and yelling around me, I glimpsed Dar’s dark hair receding into the background with pockets bulging full of our newly acquired goods.
As Brendal screamed at me, I flashed him a half-smile and set the pony down on the roof of his cart. Then I walked back to the coffee shop, where Dar caught up with me. The other patrons doffed their caps and waved us in to the head of the line. The sight of Brendel hopping up and down, trying to convince his horse to climb down from the cart, was a welcome bit of morning entertainment.
“Did he have anything good on him?” I asked Dar.
Dar turned out his pockets. “Got some licorice tonic we can sell.” He shrugged. “I don’t think Rubert has figured out a way to cut that with anything yet, so it should be legit.”
“Oh, I believe that was my order,” said a quavering voice, and I turned around to see a halfling matron standing behind us.
She peered up at me timidly from under her big kerchief.
“How much was Rubert charging you?” I asked.
“Twenty copper,” she sighed with a grimace.
“Take it for ten,” I said as I took the parcel from Dar and handed it to her.
“Oh, bless you!” The old lady smiled and clutched the package to her chest.
A tiny girl popped out from behind her skirt, and her face was fixed in a wide-eyed stare, mouth agape.
“Are you a giant?” she asked.
A deep bark of laughter boomed out, loud as a thunderclap. “If he is, what does that make me?”
Osman, the coffeemaker, leaned over the counter with a clank as his iron gauntlets hit the polished wood. Each one was wider than a cannon but still looked like they were pinching his bright blue forearms. The djinn winked at the little girl, who buried her face in her mother’s skirts.
She didn’t stay there long, though, since she was lured out again by the offer of a cookie pinched delicately between a colossal thumb and forefinger.
I let the mother order ahead of me and motioned for Osman to put it on my tab. I had fallen into the habit of visiting Osman’s shop every morning, because it was one of the few places in the neighborhood with furniture big enough to fit my “giant” human limbs. It also helped that the coffee, just about the only stimulating substance elves let the lesser races still enjoy, was terrific.
Osman set to work brewing my cup. It was coffee done in the Eastern style, so he always put on quite the show. Everyone in the shop watched as Osman buried a long-handled copper pot in a tray of sand and lit a fire under the whole contraption, which brought the coffee to a boil instantly. I was one of the few who knew how Osman kept his prices so low, an eternally-fruiting coffee bush he kept hidden on the roof.
A gift from a former client, he’d said the one time I asked. The tone of his voice had been all I needed to know not to ask ever again.
Taming the djinn had to be one of the elves’ cruelest feats. Every djinn in the city had been captured in the wild, and each one was bound to the elf hunter who had routed him out until all three wishes were granted.
Those silver-eyed devils usually took one wish for themselves and then used the second wish to transfer the djinn over to a labor broker, who simply declined to ever make a third wish.
Once in a while, you heard of some elf getting sloppy, saying “I wish,” and springing a whole stock of djinn loose at once, but Osman’s owner was a grumpy old bastard who barely said ten words a year. Unfortunately, all my friend could do was wait for the fat elf to pop off in a millennium or so and hope the next generation had looser lips.
“Here you go, big man,” Osman said as he poured my coffee into a small urn with more showmanship than was strictly necessary. “Busy night last night?”
“Took the night off,” I lied with a shrug. “Haven’t you seen how much more money your customers have to spend than usual?”
“Oh yeah, I’m getting rich over here,” Osman laughed and shook his head. “By the way, whatever you’ve got on you, you’d best not carry it around like that. It’s ringing so loudly I can barely think straight.”
I instinctively clutched the key in my pocket. “You can hear that?” I asked with forced calm.
Osman rose to his full height to survey the crowd, which made his turban brush the copper-tiled ceiling of the café. His shop was always busy at this hour, but all the halfling patrons were busy doing the things upstanding citizens do in the mornings, reading newspapers, arguing about the darts championship the night before, trying to enjoy a few minutes of freedom before the work bell rang. Satisfied that nobody could hear him, he hunched back down and looked me eye to eye.
“It’s magic, isn’t it?” he asked.
I kept my face carefully neutral. “Maybe.”
“Yeah, well so am I,” he snorted, “and we magical things know our own. You better keep that away from anybody with a foot in the planes beyond, mortal, or I’ll be short a customer.”
This was a big problem. If the key was going to be any use to me, I had to carry it halfway across the city without anyone noticing it, or me. The closer I got to the warehouse where the wine was, the more guards there would be, and the greater the risk. Most people with magical abilities were kept on a pretty short leash. Someday I’d have to ask Osman how he managed to set up shop for himself all the way out here.
“Anything I can do to hide it better?” I asked.
Osman tugged on his braided beard. “Let me see what I can do. Any chance you could tell me what you’re planning to use it for?” he asked.
“Hell no,” I laughed.
Osman laughed too, with a roll of thunder that rattled every cup and saucer in the place and earned him some grousing from two fat accountants poring over the stock exchange reports on the other end of the counter.
I shot the men a hard look before they were foolish enough to say anything to Osman.
The bracelets might have kept him from doing any significant magic, but he wasn’t above a minor curse or two on a customer who offended him.
“Had to ask.” He shrugged. “Come back later, I’ll scare something up.”
The warning bell rang suddenly and alerted everyone on the street to get hustling off to work before the towers started picking off stragglers. Everyone in the outer boroughs was supposed to be at work, or at least seem like it, from an hour past dawn until an hour before dusk. Normally, I’d be able to clock in at the Guild and go back to sleep until lunch, but I predicted Hagan was going to be in one of his moods.
I went around back, since the front door was for customers only. Then I punched myself in and ducked into the small cloakroom where I kept a few necessities on a high shelf out of everyone else’s reach. It wasn’t much, just a comb, a mirror, a shaving set, and my stash of coins. That was my get-out-of-town fund, and it was a lot smaller than I’d like it to be.
I dug into my pocket and remembered the other illegal knick-knack I was carrying, the magic mirror fragment. I tore a strip of cloth off an old cloak no one had collected in all the time I’d been at the Guild, and then I folded it around the shard before I tucked it into the back of my storage box. I could swear I saw an eye glowering at me as the mirror caught the light.
Better to worry about that another day.
I ran a hand over my jaw to see if I could get by without a shave. Hagan demanded all his charges stay clean-shaven “to show we’re not any sodd
ing dwarves,” but he didn’t pay for razors, and mine was getting so rusty I risked my life every time I used it. I decided to stretch it one more day and ducked back out into the courtyard to fetch a pail of water.
I stripped down to the waist and draped my shirt over the edge of the well while I splashed myself down. As filthy as the rest of the Guild was, the well water was always cold and clear. I wet my hands and ran my fingers through my hair as I tried to slick down the cowlick that always popped up disobediently at the back of my head.
Then I felt a pair of eyes on me.
I dunked my shirt in the bucket and toweled myself off with it slowly as I waited until the very last second to turn. Between one breath and the next, my head whipped around just in time to catch a flutter of green silk disappear behind a column.
Almost got her.
“You’re not going to put that filthy rag back on, are you?” a lilting voice called out.
Penny stepped out into the courtyard like she hadn’t just been watching me, and she affected a bored and languid posture that didn’t fool me one bit.
“I can leave it off, if you’d prefer,” I teased.
Although Hagan still liked to call me pipsqueak and scarecrow, the truth was there had been a lot of good meals and hard labor between the day he took me in and now. My naturally lanky frame had filled out with a lot of solid muscle, and Penny wasn’t the only woman I’d caught staring.
I wrung out my shirt, just so she could see my forearms at work.
Penny pretended not to notice.
“Hagan’s been looking for you all night,” she said in a low voice as she pointedly watched a sparrow fly across the flat blue sky.
I took the chance to sneak a look at her. Turnabout, after all, was fair play.
Penny was about as tall as a male halfling, so short enough for me to rest an elbow on her head, not that I ever would. She’d have torn my arm off for even thinking of taking such liberties. She had piercing green eyes rimmed with heavy dark lashes, a pert little chin, and soft, full lips that were usually curled into a sneer. Penny claimed to be a halfling on her father’s side and a pixie on her mother’s.
Penny was a liar. She was as red-blooded as me, a human hiding in plain sight.
I might have tried the same if there was any other race I could pass for, but no luck. Halflings were baby-faced and short, dwarves were hairy and short, elves were pointy and tall. Centaurs came close, but I didn’t have quite enough legs.
“Hagan knows damn well where I was all night,” I said, not bothering to keep quiet about it.
“And I know damn well how long it takes to get from there to here,” said the man himself.
The squat little halfling bastard stomped out into the courtyard, and then he emptied his pipe on the flagstones he knew it was my job to sweep.
“Oh yeah? How long’s that?” asked Penny. She clearly enjoyed this.
“Fifteen minutes. Ten if you’re sharpish about it.” Hagan scowled. “I let you skive off the night shift just to take care of a wee little bit of business, and I don’t see you again until first bell?”
I walked into the parlor and hung my shirt up to dry in front of the fire. Even on hot days, Hagan kept the fire roaring. The better to burn evidence with, should the need arise.
Hagan followed me and jabbed my back with his pipe.
“And here you are, empty handed, acting like a goldbricking dogsbody I oughta cut loose,” Hagan mocked.
I sat down in one of the threadbare wing-backed chairs, stolen right off a moving cart in the elf quarter, one of my first big jobs, and took my sweet time serving myself a ladle of porridge from the kettle nestled at the base of the fire.
“Whatsa pointa keeping a big lug like you around, eating me out of house and home, if you can’t even do what’s asked of ya,” Hagan sputtered on.
I took a bite of the porridge and regretted it instantly. The gruel was clearly left over from the day before, and my stomach churned as I set my bowl down.
Penny draped herself in the neighboring chair, arranged her skirts so they clung to her curves just so I could see, and then raised an eyebrow at me.
“I think Wade’s been holding out on you, boss,” Penny joked. “I wager he’s been running other jobs, right under your nose.”
I glared at her. This was a bridge too far. Hagan was starting to turn red.
“I swear on my sainted mother’s life, if you so much as let a single thought wander through that great gallopin’ big head of yours about stepping out on me, boy, I’ll kill ya. I’ll boil you in oil right here on this here hearth. I’ll play billiards with your eyeballs, I’ll knit me a sweater out of your entrails, I’ll--”
“Coffee, boss?” Dar popped up in the nick of time, and he waved an urn of Osman’s finest right under Hagan’s blotchy nose.
Hagan shut up immediately and gulped down the coffee.
Worked every time.
I made use of the momentary silence and dropped the key on the table. It made a satisfyingly heavy “thunk,” like a purse packed tight with coins. I hadn’t had a good look at it in the light yet, but it was glorious. The gold drank in every drop of light from the windows on one side and the fire on the other, burning brighter than any of it. I could see now the handle was decorated with impossibly tiny jewels, rubies and sapphires that shimmered like fish scales.
Hagan and Penny stared blankly, and I had to admit their reaction was a bit less than I was expecting.
“What the hell is that supposed to be?” Hagan growled.
“A rusty old key? Good work, Wade,” Penny drawled with a clap of her hands.
Even Dar looked at me warily. His ears twitched like they did when we were running a con and he was a step behind.
“I thought you grabbed the gold one,” Dar said.
“I did!” I exclaimed as I pointed at the key, irritated.
This wasn’t funny. I picked the key up again, just to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I felt the heat from its otherworldly energy, and my bones started buzzing.
Yep, still a magic key.
Dar stepped between me and Hagan and attempted to play peacekeeper. “When we picked it out of the chest, I couldn’t feel anything,” he said. “Wade was the one who found it. I think it only reveals itself to him.”
“It? What is it supposed to be?” asked Hagan as he squinted his beady eyes at me.
He snatched the key out of my hand, bit it, then spat on the floor. “Yech. Solid iron.”
“It’s a thief’s key,” I said.
“The thief’s key,” Dar added.
I shot him a look that said “don’t help,” but Dar just shrugged.
“I was told it can open any door,” I said.
“Oh yeah? By who?” Hagan asked as he tossed the key up and down in his grubby hand.
By a talking piece of boudoir furniture, I thought to myself. Best not to say that. I reached for the key, but Penny was quicker.
She swiped the key out of Hagan’s hand and held it up to the light as she examined it.
“Magical items do tend to disguise themselves,” she said as she squinted at the key.
She ran it over her fingers like street magicians did with coins, over and under like it moved all on its own.
I can see why you like her, the key said in the back of my brain.
I snatched the key away from Penny.
You’re going to get me fired, I answered back.
So? You’ll never become a king taking orders from a stupid little man like that.
At least the key was a good judge of character.
I put the key back into my pocket and leaned over Hagan. “If you don’t believe the key’s magic, we could always go back to my original plan, just picking the locks like I’ve done for you on every job for ten years.”
Hagan scowled. “Won’t be time for that. I been casing that joint for longer’n you’ve been alive, buddy boy. This is the big job, and they got security to match.”
“Have
you figured out how the hell you’re going to fence the stuff?” Penny asked.
Hagan, the gullible idiot, was so thrilled to have a “genuine” pixie on the payroll he let Penny get away with impertinence that would have earned any of the rest of us a boxing around the ears.
“Fence? Who’s fencing? I got buyers secured already, legit ones, too. Lotta thirsty people out there who’ll pay good honest money for a once in a lifetime haul like that,” Hagan said with a belligerent thump of his chest.
Our boss had been repeating that line ever since he announced the plans to rob the royal warehouse, but privately Dar and I believed he was just going to drink it all himself. Word ‘round the underworld was back in the good old days, Hagan had been such a lush he once lifted an elf priest’s prayer book by accident instead of his purse. He got caught and did sixty days in the cellars for it. By the time he got out, good and parched, there wasn’t a drop of the good stuff to be found within the city limits. He’d been twitchy ever since.
“I just want to make sure I’m not sticking my neck out for nothing,” I grumbled, “like the time I broke my back hauling Iberian marble all around town, trying to find one of your ‘sure thing’ buyers who actually had the money.”
Penny shot me a dark look, and Dar sucked his teeth. The Iberian marble fiasco was a forbidden subject, but I was sick and tired of Hagan’s bluster.
“If you don’t like it, then walk right out that door, boy!” Hagan bellowed. “Let’s see how long you last once I let the coppers know you aren’t under my protection anymore. They’ll have some ideas of what to do with your neck, I tell you that!”
“Okay gentlemen, let’s get back to business, shall we?” Penny dropped a fat purse on the table in front of Hagan and shook it open so fat copper coins tumbled out, earning a gasp from the old man. “Some of us actually earned our keep last night.”
Hagan ran his fingers through the coins and cackled.
“You hit that party like I told you?” he asked her.
“Didn’t need to.” Penny shrugged and somehow managed to turn it into a whole-body motion as her hips writhed underneath their layers of silk. “Ran into a groomsman’s party in from Cordia on their way to the casinos. I told them I knew a game that was much more sporting.”