Ruler of Scoundrels (Chronicles of a Cutpurse Book 2)

by Carrie Summers

  As for contract killing or blood debts, she’s steered clear. Even the ousting of the Slivers syndicate, one of the biggest turf acquisitions in the history of Ostgard, was done with almost no injuries on either side.

  Today will be different. Noble and his crew killed dozens of innocent people with their fire. At this point, Myrrh feels no hesitation at the thought of offing those murderers.

  “Did you really send those whelps to ask me for a room and food?” Ivy asks, startling Myrrh from her thoughts.

  Myrrh’s temporarily off-balanced by the question. She assumed the other woman would accept the orphans without question. After a moment, Ivy smirks.

  “Thought so,” she says. “And of course I’ll do it. Can’t help but feel sorry for the little fleas, eh?”

  Myrrh swallows as she nods. “After today, I hope we can put together some sort of safe squat for the district’s urchins.”

  “But seeing as it’s still today, and you clearly called us together for a reason…” Toad prompts.

  “Right. I had three doses of etch and I’m down to one. I think I can track Hemlock back to Noble with the final dose, but I need you to be ready. We need to come with enough force that they can’t possibly escape into a new hole.”

  “Can you get more etch if you can’t track down Noble today?” Warrell asks. No doubt he’s thinking about her choice to follow Nab’s trail and his part in suggesting it.

  “That’s part of why I brought Rattle back into the discussion. Any sightings? Last I heard from him, he was leaving to run a freelance job, likely poached, in Seven Fingers territory. Something about rubies.”

  “I tailed him once,” Ivy says. “After he came to The Queen’s Dice looking for you.”

  Myrrh raises an eyebrow. “And?”

  The other woman shrugs. “Sixing man lost me within four blocks. He’s good. If he’s trustworthy, he’d be quite an asset.”

  “And if not, he’d be a formidable enemy,” Myrrh adds. “Anyway, catching Noble was something of a personal challenge given to me by Rattle. Not that I needed the motivation, and not that I appreciate being treated like an apprentice testing for my tradesman’s mark. Regardless, I don’t know if he will give me more etch if I fail. So I don’t intend to fail. It’s simply not an option given what Noble has proved he’s willing to do.”

  At her words, Myrrh’s friends sit a little taller.

  “Are you ready to come with everything we have?” she asks.

  They nod.

  “Then bring everyone in. I’ll fill them in on our strategy.”

  ***

  Myrrh sticks tight to Hemlock’s track; ironically, it left the burned area just a few hundred paces from where she broke off her search to follow Nab. Meanwhile, around three dozen of Ghost syndicate’s best members follow behind, sweeping through Rat Town in broad daylight.

  Rat Towners—the honest ones—back away at the sight of their scarred faces and armored bodies, the lingering scents of lampblack and weapon oil that trail behind the thieves. True, the humble shopkeepers and tradespeople don’t have any specific reason to fear the precise steps of the footpads, no cause to run from the steely glares of the vigilantes. In fact, many of the townsfolk probably raise drinks and roll dice with syndicate members.

  But now, Myrrh’s people are clearly working. Hands hover inches from their blades. Tension coils in their muscles. They move with utter awareness of their surroundings. Each has become something much different than the gambler who lost five silver on a string of sixes last night or the beefy stranger who bought a round for everyone in the tavern because their last heist included some unexpected bolts of Tuvkish silk.

  And if honest Rat Towners know that Ghost syndicate is coming for vengeance, she can bet Noble’s heard it too. He still has sympathizers in the district, and even if he didn’t, he could import starving urchins from In Betweens or the Neck and pay them well to stand lookout.

  But even if he knows Myrrh’s bearing down on his nest, he can’t do anything about it. Especially now that the morning’s rainstorm has cleared. Noble and his henchmen are Whites. Glimmer-blind. A glimpse of daylight will cripple them with pain. And unlike most of the city, Rat Town has no sewers. The Whites have no escape that avoids the open sky and the bright afternoon sun. If Noble gets desperate, thinks it’s his only chance to survive, he might try to make a blindfolded run for it. Maybe even try to bring a horse into these narrow streets where nails and broken metal are a threat to animals’ hooves and the ruckus often makes them bolt.

  But she’s planned for this. If Noble has sentries across the district, Myrrh has more. Every low-level thief in the syndicate has a window to watch through or an alley to defend. If the Slivers boss and his lieutenants try to move, Myrrh’s people will know exactly where they go. They won’t make it out of the district alive.

  Hemlock’s etching parallels the River Ost, heading north through alleys and along thieves’ paths behind the row of businesses that front the water. Occasional pools of his residue make her think he paused now and again to watch the fire spread. Did he feel any guilt? Or was he simply gloating over the pain he caused her and the innocent Rat Towners living in the fire’s path?

  Past First Docks, where the river’s channel becomes naked stone without wooden platforms or tied-up barges to soften the edges, Hemlock’s trail drops to street level, abandoning the thieves’ path it followed across a series of rooftops. The etching, still reminding her of autumn leaves and fallen wasp nests, turns away from the river and into a small section of the district where dyers stir yards and yards of roughspun cloth in large stinking vats. The stench of the dyes burns Myrrh’s eyes and stings her nose as she hurries forward.

  She stops when she spots another trail that matches the first. Fresher. It crosses the etching she’s following half a block ahead. The fact that Hemlock left two etchings in the same area means she’s close. She raises a fist and feels the movement around her cease.

  Proceeding according to her plan, syndicate members emerge from nearby alleys and drop from rooftops. They’ve been following in a loose, sweeping line. Close enough to remain in communication, wide enough to quickly fan out now, encircling the area so they can close in from multiple sides.

  Wherever Noble is hiding, the defenses will be strong. He’ll have crossbows to strike from range. Maybe even a rooftop ballista.

  And like a trapped animal, she can be sure he’ll fight with vicious claws extended.

  ***

  The etch has faded, but that’s okay. She can still envision the fog of Hemlock’s residue lingering around the door of the low-slung building that sits diagonally across the intersection from her perch atop a two-story tailor’s shop. She remembers the other signs too, etchings that circled the area around the building, some climbing atop the flat roof, some pooling in hidden alcoves. Sentries and patrols, no doubt.

  But the people who left the trails are gone now. Inside, she assumes, having slipped behind the safety of the building’s walls when Noble’s informants brought word of her advance.

  The scene bothers her, and she’s not sure why. Is it because the hideout lacks a high vantage and therefore seems like a bad choice for a former kingpin to choose as his fortress? Is it because the resistance she expected to encounter hasn’t showed up?

  Or is it the whispers she heard from the cloth dyers as they swung heavy doors shut over their workshops and shuffled away at Myrrh’s request?

  The uncomfortable sensation reminds her of the gut feeling she sometimes got as an eleven-year-old pickpocket scanning the crowd at the Rat Town market. She remembers too well how her instincts once stopped her from slipping fingers into a foreigner’s pocket, how that same man caught the wrist of a boy who wasn’t so cautious. The man’s touch did something that made the boy’s skin turn strange. First the boils, then the blackening. The healer took one look at it and called the Shield Watch. Myrrh never saw the boy again, but when she asked the healer w
hat had happened, the only answer she got was how curses set by Olvv desert dwellers could spread if the cursed person had negative thoughts.

  Myrrh thinks the healer was repeating false superstitions.

  Anyway, the point is this raid doesn’t feel right. But Hemlock has definitely spent a lot of time in that building, so she doesn’t have much choice but to go in.

  The hideout stands on the corner of two narrow streets, giving good lines of sight out windows on those aspects. On the other two faces, narrow aisles separate the building from the adjacent structures. One of the neighboring buildings is a cloth dyer’s shop. For a significant pouch of copper and silver coins, she convinced the proprietors, a pair of sisters, to leave the side doors unlocked when they swung the large panels at the front entrance shut. Myrrh doesn’t want to think about how the fumes are affecting the thieves she sent to hunker in the darkened workshop.

  A cloth seller’s shop stands across the other narrow corridor from Noble’s safe house. A few of the etchings she connected with Noble’s crew entered the back door of the shop. Myrrh doesn’t trust the inside of the building as a point for her people to attack from, so she’s placed thieves on the roof.

  The rest of her people are arrayed in a wide circle around the hideout. On rooftops, in alleys, and in some cases, standing in plain sight on the street.

  She raises a hand, two fingers outstretched, then waves a pair of burly thieves forward. They’re wearing splint mail, hardened leather reinforced with plates of metal. Gorgets and caps of hardened leather cover their heads and necks, but there’s little she can do to protect them from a crossbow through the eye.

  She makes the sign of the Queen of Nines in the air before her, hoping for a boon.

  The men tromp toward the front door looking more like soldiers than thieves and assassins—in fact, she chose them for this contingency based on their histories of fighting in distant wars. This isn’t how the underworld usually does business. Poison and blackmail are more likely tools than the mace and longsword the men hold in their grips. Syndicate operations, whether heists or turf grabs, almost never happen in broad daylight. But times are strange in the city. The Shield Watch has all but disappeared from Rat Town. In other districts, merchants jockey for power and influence while no one sits atop the heap in the Maire’s palace.

  And Ghost syndicate does what it must to remove the final lingering pustule of the Slivers organization.

  No crossbow bolts hiss across the street as her men approach the door.

  One raises a leather-armored fist and pounds hard on the thick wood. The sound seems to fill the street, breaking a silence Myrrh didn’t realize had fallen.

  No answer.

  The man bangs on the door again.

  Nothing.

  Myrrh’s instincts are screaming now, clawing up her backbone and into her skull.

  She stands, ready to call for the men to pull back.

  A guttural yell comes from the workshop where her thieves are waiting, steeped in the caustic stench of the dyes.

  Metal clangs from within, a loud bong. Moments later, vermilion dye spills from beneath the closed front doors of the shop.

  Myrrh rushes down the rooftop, feet skidding over the shingles. None of the etchings led from the hideout to the dyer’s. How could Noble’s people have gotten inside?

  She glances back toward the hideout. Out front, the former soldiers have already abandoned the door and are rushing toward the workshop and the sound of fellow syndicate members in distress.

  That’s when Noble makes his presence known.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ALL DOWN THE dyers’ street, doors roll up and swing open, exposing darkened workshop interiors. Myrrh skids to a stop near the edge of the roof and stares in horror as vats of dye—or what she thought was dye—overturn, spilling pools of something onto earthen floors and cobblestone pavement. Shadows move inside the buildings. Unable to see what’s happening in there, she shouts to her leaders, hoping they have a better view.

  In the workshop closest to the hideout, the place where she sent thieves to wait until signaled to descend on the hideout, wisps of sickly yellow mist start to rise from the spilled dye. Squinting, Myrrh can just barely make out a body lying on the floor near the wall. Deeper into the large space, shadows move, a single candle showing a face with a rag tied over nose and mouth. Faint light glints off the handle of a bucket as the person stops, whirls, and tosses the empty container toward the building’s front entrance. Best she can guess, the bucket contained something that, when combined with the dye, caused the yellow mist.

  “Get out! Away from the dyers!” she yells.

  She runs along the lower edge of the roof, leather boots barely avoiding the brink, and leaps to the adjacent building. Warrell is crouched by a stone chimney, eyes wide with indecision.

  “We need to pull people out of that building. Don’t breathe the air.”

  Myrrh skids down the roof, hits the rotting rain gutter, and leaps into open space. She lands hard and tucks into a roll. As she comes up, her ankle twinges, a reminder of an injury from another long drop when a different operation went sideways.

  As she sprints across the street to reach the workshop, the first crossbow bolt hisses through the air. It whizzes past her face and thunks into the wooden wall of the building behind her.

  “Find the archers!” she shouts, pulling her dagger from its sheath and hunching to make a smaller target.

  The street turns chaotic as more yellow fog starts rising from the pools of liquid. Ghost members shout as they dash from hidden alleys and leap from roofs. Opposition fighters suddenly materialize, stepping from alcoves and shadows with rags tied over their faces. The sound of metal striking metal echoes off buildings, and she hears a grunt as someone throws off an attacker.

  A tendril of the poisonous vapors slips into her nose and mouth and Myrrh’s throat begins to burn. Her vision blurs. Dragging a section of her wool tunic from beneath her leather jerkin, she pulls it over her face and stumbles forward.

  Three of her people were waiting for orders in the workshop. She only spots two bodies. Sliding to a stop, she whips her gaze around the cavernous interior, checking to make sure she won’t be jumped before she shoves her dagger back into its sheath and lays fingers on a thief’s pulse point. His heart is beating, but it’s erratic.

  She shoves her hands under his arms and tries to drag him upright. No use. The sixing man must weigh twice what she does.

  And abruptly, she has help. Black-gloved hands nudge hers aside. She looks up to the sight of Rattle’s one-eyed stare, the empty socket filled with what looks like an obsidian orb. He has a scarf tied over his face.

  “Get his feet.” The words are muffled, but clear enough to understand.

  Latching onto the unconscious man’s ankles, Myrrh heaves. The body hangs limp between them, head lolling. Rattle follows her lead as they quickly move the man out the side door and into the narrow aisle between buildings. She hates to leave him there unprotected, but there’s little choice if she wants to save the other one.

  Dashing back inside, she finds Warrell struggling with the second body. Rattle lays a hand on her shoulder and urges her back out the door as he jogs forward to help the other man.

  Outside, shouts pepper the air. Her people are fleeing the noxious yellow cloud, armed fighters on their heels.

  The attackers aren’t ordinary Rat Town denizens. They’re certainly not Ostgard thieves. Judging by their weapons and armor and the vicious snarls on their faces, she guesses they’re mercenaries.

  After taking control of the territory from him, she didn’t expect Noble to have the resources to hire a private army. But then again, she did give him exclusive looting rights to the Maire’s palace. Sixing pox…

  An arrow strikes one of her thieves in the calf, and he stumbles, goes down. Drawing his blade, he just barely manages to catch a descending short sword on the guard. Yelling thr
ough gritted teeth, he starts to push the attacker’s sword away, but the mercenary pulls back a fist and prepares to strike.

  Myrrh leaps from the space between buildings and lands a kick on the side of the attacker’s knee. His punch misses her thief, striking cracked cobblestones instead. He growls and turns to her. Myrrh scrambles to unsheath her dagger as she backpedals. The blade snags.

  The mercenary’s sword comes up.

  With an angry shout, her downed thief rolls onto his side and kicks, sweeping the mercenary’s feet. Noble’s fighter goes down onto a knee as Myrrh’s blade finally clears the sheath.

  The man’s back is exposed, knobs of his spine pressing against the light leather vest he wears for protection.

  Myrrh hesitates for a breath, looking up and down the street and toward the hideout door. There must be fifty hardened fighters on Noble’s side. Almost all mercenaries, by the look of them, and far more accustomed to outright melee than Myrrh’s cadre of smugglers and con men. The Slivers boss is nowhere to be seen.

  She can indulge regrets later, if it comes to it. Right now, every enemy she eliminates increases the chance for Ghost syndicate members to survive. She screams and plunges her dagger into the man’s back, striking below his shoulder blade and turning her weapon so it slips between his ribs. His flesh resists then gives with a series of pops as the blade sinks deeper. He lets out a startled gasp then coughs and collapses.

  Myrrh has to plant a foot on the man’s back to get enough leverage to free her blade. It comes out bloody. She looks away and starts searching for the next attacker.

  “North exit!” someone shouts. “Watch out!”

  Myrrh whirls toward the shout and spots a thief frantically jumping and waving from atop the cloth seller’s shop, the building at the rear of the hideout. He’s stabbing his finger toward the gap below.