Den of Thieves

by David Chandler

  “Another sound policy,” Malden suggested. Some strange intuition gripped him then—a preternatural sensation that something was deeply wrong. He shot a hand down at his side and grabbed a scrawny arm. ’Levenfingers was trying to lift his purse. Malden laughed with glee. “In this mutable world I am glad to see some things don’t change.”

  “It’s good to see you as well, Malden,” ’Levenfingers said. Lockjaw just scowled.

  “So, have anything big planned?” Loophole asked.

  His face was the picture of innocence. Malden shot him a shrewd look, but the oldster simply blinked as if he didn’t know anything.

  Which told Malden what he needed to know. Cutbill might not have told them what had happened, but Malden knew perfectly well that they had asked the dangerous questions—they had just asked them very discreetly. How much they knew would remain a mystery, but it was next to impossible to keep a secret from these three. “Well, as a matter of fact . . . there’s a certain house on the Lady-park Common, a very special house—do you know the one I mean? I shouldn’t make it any more plain.”

  “Then there’s only one you can mean,” ’Levenfingers said with a shiver. “Ooh, I wouldn’t want to be in that place in the dark. But good luck to you. No one’s ever tumbled that place and lived to tell the tale.”

  “Even I wouldn’t try it,” Loophole agreed. “And I’d steal pearls off the queen’s throat, were she here now.”

  Lockjaw mumbled something and then spat into the charred ruins.

  Malden and the other two oldsters turned to stare at him.

  “I said, ’ware the eye, and that’s all I’m saying,” Lockjaw snarled. “Now get inside, before someone sees you out here.”

  “My thanks,” Malden told him. Then he headed down into the lair and was pleased to find that things had returned to a kind of normalcy. Bellard wasn’t there, of course, but the dice game in the corner was back in swing. More importantly to Malden, Slag was working at his bench, putting together some kind of collapsible fishing pole.

  “It’s for taking hats,” Slag said, hefting the pole. “You know the arch under the Royal Ditch bridge? Aye? Windy fucking place. You crouch up in the supports, in the shadows, and you pluck the hats off the wealthy shits as pass underneath, and they think the wind took them.”

  “Brilliant,” Malden said.

  “It’ll fucking do. What do you want now?”

  Malden described his needs while the dwarf scowled at him.

  “The climbing gear I have in stock, no problem. This other thing, though—it’ll take a week, maybe more,” Slag told him.

  “I can give you no more than three days,” Malden told the dwarf. Even that was pushing things—it meant he would not be ready until the eve of Ladymas.

  “Fine. Now pay me. Gilding metal’s not bloody cheap, if you want it to look right.”

  “Ah,” Malden said. “Well, perhaps I can owe you.”

  It was commonly believed that dwarves never laughed. This was perhaps because most people were not so foolish as to ask them for credit. Slag did laugh at the idea, though the sound was not like a human laugh. It sounded more like a squeaky wheel coming free of a rusted axle.

  “It really is important,” Malden said. “Perhaps there is some way we—”

  “Sod off,” Slag said, turning back to his fishing pole.

  It seemed to be a day for marvels. Lockjaw had given away a secret (or part of one), a dwarf had laughed—and now the door to Cutbill’s office swung open and the guildmaster of thieves leaned out.

  “I’ll pay for the work,” Cutbill said.

  Malden bowed low toward his master.

  “Of course, Malden, you’ll pay me back,” Cutbill said.

  “Of course.”

  Cutbill shook his head. “At a rather ruinous level of interest.”

  Malden bowed lower. “Of course,” he said again.

  His business in the lair done, he headed back to the surface. Perhaps Croy had been filleted by the beggar children, he thought. Or maybe they’d just doused him with lamp oil and set him on fire.

  One could hope.

  Yet when he returned to where he’d left the knight, he stopped in his tracks and just stared. A score of the vile little children had emerged from their hiding places and gathered around Croy. They sat in the dust, staring up at him with rapt faces.

  While Croy told them a story.

  “. . . the dragon came swooping down,” Croy was saying as Malden approached, “with fire in his jaw, ready to roast the king’s men in their armor. It was fifty feet from wingtip to wingtip, and its eyes blazed red in the dark as its tail swung out behind it like a pennon flapping in the breeze. And then—”

  “It breathed fire and they all died. The end,” Malden said.

  The children scattered like crows when a boy throws a rock among them. They hurried back into the ruins, worming their way through gaps and crevices too small for an adult to pass through and were gone.

  “We have work to do,” Malden said. “Come with me.”

  Croy rose and brushed soot from his breeches. He followed along as Malden headed back into the Stink.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  “Where are we going?” Croy asked as they headed up Midden Lane, where the city’s refuse was gathered and sorted and gleaned for anything of value. The smell was horrible, but Malden knew the watch never came down that road.

  “A tavern I know.” He stepped in something foul and scraped his leather shoe against the cobblestones. Not that it helped much—in this district the cobbles barely protruded through a thick layer of scum that had hardened into a kind of paving. “There we’ll find bravos willing to sign on for coin. I need men who are good with weapons to fight Hazoth’s retainers—and Bikker, for that matter.”

  “I’m going to fight Bikker,” Croy pointed out.

  “Not on your own—not wounded as you are. Even Cythera could see you had no chance to take him.”

  “And you think a band of common street toughs can? They won’t last a moment against Acidtongue.”

  “Well, that’s what they get paid for. To die for some pointless cause. The place is just up here.” Malden lifted his chin and pointed. “They only have to live long enough,” he explained, “to convince the guards to lower the magical barrier. If they die once I’m inside, they’ll have served their purpose. The coin I give them can go to their mothers, or widows, or orphans, what have you.”

  Croy shook his head. “No, hold, Malden. I’m quite serious. If you’re going to engage Bikker you need more than brave young men with stilettos. I can’t allow you to throw away lives just for a diversion.”

  “It’s all I can afford!” Malden turned on the knight. “You need to understand something, Croy. I know you’ve never wanted for anything in your life. You’ve never had to want for anything since you were a babe. Any problem that might arise could always be met with a sword stroke or a purse of gold, and so you never had to learn about survival. Down here in the Stink that’s all we know. Those children back in the Ashes—they already know more than you ever will. They know when to hold their tongues. And when to cut someone’s throat. They know how to stay alive, and they don’t count the cost too dear.”

  “You make them sound like bloodthirsty savages.”

  “Yes! Because that is what they are. They are perfectly suited to the life they’ve been handed. I admit it’s an ugly life, but it’s theirs.”

  “They just need a little compassion shown them. I always find that’s worth more than coin.”

  “Do you really think a few sweets and a stirring tale of brave hearts will change their plight?” Malden demanded. “They’re among the very few people in this city with less of a chance at life than I have. They’ll never be anything but beggars. Or thieves if they’re lucky. All because their parents died before their time. Tell me where the justice is, there. Tell me why they shouldn’t become savages, if that helps them survive.”

  Croy looked confused for
a moment. Then he nodded as if he’d thought up the perfect answer. “There’s nothing ignoble about begging,” he pointed out, “if that’s the station the Lady assigns to you.”

  “The Lady—” Malden caught himself before he could tell Croy exactly what the Lady could go and do. Knowing Croy, he’d probably take that as blasphemy and burn him at the next convenient stake. “Tell me, Croy,” he said instead. “Did the Lady choose me for a thief?”

  The look of confusion passed over Croy’s face again. “Well, no. Since thievery’s a sin in Her eyes. Instead, you should have chosen to enter an honest trade.”

  “Had I known it was so easy, I would have become a goldsmith,” Malden sneered. “You think I didn’t try?”

  “Not hard enough, apparently.”

  Malden’s blood rushed into his face. How dare this hoddypeak of a knight say such a thing to him. What could Croy possibly know of what had driven him to a life of crime? How dare Croy judge him?

  But of course, he knew the answer. In Croy’s world the poor were simple, honest folk, too crude in their sensibilities to know anything but how to toil and farm. Knights and lords were there to care for them like kindly parents. To make decisions for them since they were incapable of doing so for themselves.

  In Malden’s world—the world he’d been seeing ever since Cutbill opened his eyes—people like himself were prisoners, caught inside bars of poverty. And people like Croy were the gaolers who made sure they never got out. The Lady, the goddess Croy worshipped so fervently, was the warden who assigned each inmate to his given cell—and made sure they could never, ever escape.

  He wanted to slap the knight across the face, or perhaps just call him names. That, of course, could have been dangerous. Yet he couldn’t just let his anger go. Croy had been quietly disapproving of his life ever since they had met. It was time to show Croy what the real world was like. “Come. I wish to show you something.”

  He didn’t have time for this, not really. But the knight had rubbed his nerves raw, and he wanted to rub reality in the fool’s face for once. He took him down to the bottom of Midden Lane, where the gleaners labored.

  A city the size of Ness generates a mountain of dross every day. Though the citizens never threw out anything that could be cleaned out and reused, still they created junk by the wagonload—after all, wood eventually rots, iron rusts, and eggshells and fish bones are only good for so much. The city’s moldy vegetables, broken bottles, and the unusable parts of pig and cow carcasses were collected once a week and piled up in great mounds in Hunnicart Yard. It was a great rotting tower of filth, a palace of decomposition, and the smell rivaled anything the tanner’s yards up in the Smoke could generate. The heap of it glistened in the sun, the ugly rainbow sheen of rancid grease.

  And on top of it whole families were employed.

  The work of the gleaners there was never done. Old men in smocks, matronly women with forearms like pestles, even their scrawny children, all worked the mounds, up to their thighs in ordure, flies thick on their backs as freckles. They dug through the middens with their bare hands, searching for any bit of bone that could be carved into a spoon, any torn and soiled rag that could be shredded for its fibers and used to make paper. There were legends of the gleaners, of the ones who found gold coins in the trash, of the gleaner who pulled a magic spear from the bottom of the pile where it had laid for a thousand years, and used it to slay a giant who threatened the city. If the teller of the tale were leaning over a fire for effect, and trying for maximum realism, he would tell of human bodies found at the bottom of the heaps, still moving feebly and begging for help, and what the gleaners did to make sure the watch never came around asking questions.

  A wooden palisade ringed the middens, a high fence hammered together from scrap lumber useful for no other purpose. Dogs barked just inside, ready to attack any intruder, and a guard with a cudgel stood at its gate, overseeing the carts that came down the lane laden with garbage. The guard eyed the thief and the knight warily, as if he expected them to break in and steal all the trash in broad daylight. Probably because sometimes thieves tried just that.

  “These people are among the hardest workers in the city,” Malden said as Croy stared in horror. “They toil in shifts to make sure nothing is missed. Their bodies are riddled with plague and disease, they eat nothing but thin pottage, and they die years younger than their fellows, because they breathe nothing but foul vapors. They toil in the heat of summer, and when winter comes they shovel the snow off those heaps and sort through the offal wearing fingerless gloves. They don’t do this for glory, or honor, or love or justice. They do it so they can eat for one more day.”

  “That’s terrible, Malden,” Croy said. “I never knew. Are they slaves that do this work? I thought there were no slaves in Ness.”

  “There aren’t. No one compels them to this life. In fact—the gleaners have a patent from the Burgrave that gives them sole right to do this. If you or I were to wade in there and start looking for treasures in the trash, they would drive us off with clubs and thrown stones. They kill anyone who tries to encroach on their livelihood. Generations of men have worked these heaps—when a father dies, he passes down his writ of patent to his sons, who are glad to have it, for they know they’ll be able to feed their children.”

  “So they have pride in their work,” Croy said, lifting his chin. “I find that admirable.”

  Malden shook his head. “Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you? There is competition for this. There are people willing to risk their lives to sneak in here in the middle of the night and sort through rusted nails and the guts of slaughtered chickens. Because their own lives are that much worse.”

  Croy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “The Lady gives each of us our lot in life, and her abundance sustains us all. This I believe, and this I live.”

  Was he quoting from some missal? Malden had never listened to the blandishments of the Lady’s priests. Not since he’d realized that Her teachings gave an excuse why rich men should always be rich, and the poor shouldn’t try to rise above their stations. Like most in the Stink, whatever religious feeling he possessed was directed toward the Bloodgod, who promised equal justice for all, if only after death.

  “You’ll never understand, will you? I can’t make you see it. Enough. Let us find our bravos and be done. Perhaps you can be of some little use by pointing out which of them are likely to last the longest against Bikker’s sword.”

  Malden hurried away—the prospect of the middens never gave him any joy, nor did he wish to linger in that disease-haunted place.

  “Hold,” Croy said. “If it’s strong arms you need, perhaps I have a better idea.”

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  The river Skrait was the Free City’s lifeblood. It flowed through every district of Ness and was used by every citizen. Where it entered the city in Swampwall it flowed clean and pure, and its water went right into cookpots or horse troughs. As it flowed east it became a dumping ground for refuse too liquid for even the gleaners to cart away. After it bent around Castle Hill it supplied the great manufactories of the Smoke, and then washed away the poisons and the waste products of those workshops. Finally, where it widened out at Eastpool a whole flotilla of fishing boats rode its current out to the sea, some miles off, and then rode it back in the evening, rowing against its flow. Ness owed half its prosperity to the mighty river Skrait, and it had always been counted one of the city’s best assets.

  Yet for one Burgrave in the city’s youth, it must have seemed the city’s greatest weakness as well. Where it entered the city on its western end it was open to the world outside. An invading army could send war galleys up the Skrait to attack Castle Hill, or fireships to set the city ablaze. To plug that gap, said erstwhile Burgrave had extended the city wall across the course of the river and forced the Skrait through a pipe no more than ten feet across.

  He had not consulted with any dwarven engineers before embarking on this great
public work. Had he, they might have told him that narrowing the Skrait where it entered the wall would cause it to flood its banks once it came inside. A wide swath of the lowest section of the city was deluged in the weeks following the pipe’s construction, and no one had been able to drain it since.

  No man or woman lived in Swampwall anymore. Ferns and tall grasses and willow shrubs had taken over the streets, and only the weathered foundations and a few walls of the old houses remained, sticking up through the shimmering plant life. Here and there a bit of old architecture could be discerned—a listing chimney toppling in slow motion toward a pond, a horse rail sticking up from a pool of mud. As Malden—at Croy’s behest—picked his way down the muddy slope into the swamp, he followed the remains of a cobblestone street, the old stones worn as smooth as glass under three inches of stagnant water. There was plenty there to be dragged away and refurbished, yet Swampwall had been left alone far more than the Ashes had. Malden could see why. “This place breathes with fever,” he said, sneering as his shoe was sucked down into black goo. “And the flies—Bloodgod take these flies!”

  “It’s farther down than I thought,” Croy said, frowning at the expanse of fen before them. “The last time I was down here I came on horseback. Still, it’s just over there.”

  “What is just over there?” Malden demanded. Croy was pointing to a low point in the swamp, where reeds as tall as houses shimmered in the sun.

  “You’ll see.”

  Otters plunked down under the water and crabs scuttled away from their feet as the two men clambered into the muck. It never got past Malden’s ankles but clung to him like the hands of dead men in a haunted graveyard. He sloshed noisily through the water and pushed at the reeds with his hands, trying to make a path.

  “This is your revenge, isn’t it?” he demanded. “You don’t like the way I talk to you, as if we were equals. So you bring me down here to remind me I’m the lowest of the low.”