Take A Thief v(-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  The door creaked open. “Got 'nother one?” said a voice in a harsh whisper, with accents of surprise. “Tha's third'un tonight!”

  “Pickin's is good,” said the man to Skif's right, as the one carrying him grunted. “Got'r eyes on two more prime 'uns, so le's get this'un settled.”

  “Boss'll be right happy,” said the doorkeeper, as the men moved forward and closed the door behind them.

  “Tha's th'ideer,” grunted the man with Skif.

  They moved more slowly now, and to Skif's dismay there was a fair amount of opening and closing of doors, and direction changes down passages. This place must be a veritable warren! How was Alberich supposed to find him in all of this if he got inside?

  :Let us worry about that,: said Cymry — right before there was the sound of another door opening, then the unmistakable feeling that his captor was descending a staircase.

  Descending a staircase? There's a cellar to this place? There isn't supposed to be a cellar here!

  Skif was in something of a panic, because part of the emergency plan figured in the Companions coming in as well as Alberich, and the Companions were not going to be able to get down a narrow, steep set of stairs into a cellar.

  He had to remind himself that he was not alone, he was armed, and he was probably smarter than any of these people. No matter what happened here, sooner or later they would have to take him outside this building, and when they did, he could escape.

  Even if he and Alberich couldn't actually catch the head of this gang of slavers right now, so long as Skif could get a good look at him, they'd have him later.

  What's the worst that can happen? he asked himself, and set himself to imagining it. Alberich wouldn't get in. He'd be held for a while, maybe with other children, maybe not. The master of this gang would inspect them; Skif could make sure he saw enough he would be able to pick him out again. Then — well, the question was how attractive they found him.

  He had to stop himself from shuddering. Just by virtue of being healthy and in good shape, he was as pretty as most of the street urchins they'd been picking up. Which meant there was one place where they'd send him.

  Now the panic became real; his throat closed with fear and he had trouble breathing. Oh, no — oh, no —

  In all his years on the street, he had never really had to face the possibility that he might end up a child-whore. Now he did, for if he couldn't get away from these people, or they found out what he was doing —

  His imagination painted far worse things than he had ever seen, cobbled up out of all the horrible stories he had ever heard, and his breath came in short and painful gasps. He went from stifling to icy cold. What if their — the brothel was here, in this building? They wouldn't have to take him outside. They wouldn't have to move him at all. He wouldn't get a chance to escape — they could keep him here as long as they wanted to, they could — they would! strip him down first and find his knives. What would they do to him then? Drug him, maybe? Kill him? Oh no, probably not that, not while they could get some use out of him —

  Don't panic. Don't panic.

  How could he not panic?

  :Chosen — we won't let that happen. We'll get to you, no matter what — :

  But how would they? How could they? It would take a small army to storm this place, and by then —

  The man carrying him got to the bottom of the stair and made a turning. “This brat's awful quiet,” he grunted to his fellow. “Ye sure ye didn' 'it 'im too 'ard?”

  “No more'n the rest uv 'em,” the other snapped. “ 'E's breathin', ain't 'e?”

  “Aye — just don' wanta hev'ta turn over damaged goods. Milord don't care fer damaged goods.” The man hefted Skif a little higher on his shoulder, surprising him into an involuntary groan, caused as much by desperation as by pain.

  “There, ye see?” the second man said in triumph. “Nothin' wrong wi' 'im. 'E's wakin' up right on time.”

  “Les’ get 'im locked up, then,” said the one from the door.

  There was the sound of a key turning in a lock, a heavy door swinging open. Then, quite suddenly, Skif found himself being dumped unceremoniously onto something soft.

  Well, softish. Landing knocked the breath out of him, though he managed to keep from banging his head when he landed. He heard the door slam and the key turn in the lock again before he got his wits back.

  He struggled free of the stinking confines of the blanket, only to find himself in the pitch dark, and he was just as blind as he'd been in the blanket. He felt around, heard rustling, and felt straw under his questing hands. The “something soft” he'd been dumped on was a pile of old straw, smelling of mildew and dust, but infinitely preferable to the stench of the blanket.

  He got untangled from the folds of that foul blanket, wadded it up, and with a convulsive movement, flung it as far away from himself as possible. The wooden bowl that had saved his skull from being cracked clattered down out of the folds of it as it flew across the room.

  Which wasn't far, after all; he heard it hit a wall immediately. His prison was a prison then, and a small one. He got onto his hands and knees, and began feeling his way to the nearest wall. Rough brick met his hands, so cheap it was crumbling under his questing fingers, a symptom of the damp getting into it.

  He got to his feet, and followed it until it intersected the next wall, and the next, and the next — and then came to the door.

  A few moments more of exploring by touch proved that this wasn't a room, it was a cell; it couldn't have been more than three arm's lengths wide and twice that in length.

  Not a very well-constructed cell, though. Rough brick made up the walls, and the floor was nothing more than pounded dirt with the straw atop it. And when Skif got to the door, he finally felt some of his fear ebbing. The lock on this door had never been designed with the idea of confining a thief. He could probably have picked it in the pitch-dark with a pry bar; the throwing daggers he wore were fine enough to work through the hole in the back plate and trip the mechanism.

  I can get out. That was all it took to calm him. These people never intended to have to hold more than a few frightened children down here. As long as they thought that was what he was, he'd be fine. If this was their child brothel, he could get out of it.

  :Or you can jam the lock and keep them out until we get in,: Cymry pointed out, and he nearly laughed aloud at what a simple and elegant solution she had found for him. Yes, he could, he could! Then help could take as long as it needed to reach him. Even if they set fire to the warehouse to cover their tracks, he should be safe down here. He remembered once, when one of the taverns had caught fire, how half a dozen of the patrons had hidden in the cellars and come out covered in soot but safe — and drunk out of their minds, for they'd been trapped by falling timbers and had decided they might as well help themselves to the stock.

  :Will you be all right now?: Cymry asked anxiously.

  :Right and tight,: he told her. And he would be, he would.

  He had to be. Everything depended on him now.

  He would be.

  * * * * * * * * * *

  He heard the men enter and leave again twice more, and each time a door creaked open somewhere and he heard the thump of some small load landing in straw. He winced each time for the sake of the poor semiconscious child that it represented.

  Between the first and the second, Cymry told him that Alberich had gotten into the building, but could tell him nothing more than that. It was not long after that the men arrived with the second child — and soon after that when the cellars awoke.

  There was noise first; voices, harsh and quarrelsome. Then came heavy footsteps, and then light. So much light that it shone under Skif's door and through all the cracks between the heavy planks that the door was made up of.

  Then the door was wrenched open, and a huge man stood silhouetted against the glare. Skif didn't have to pretend to fear; he shrank back with a start, throwing up his arm to shield his eyes.

  The ma
n took a pace toward him, and Skif remembered his knives, remembered that he didn't dare let anyone grab him by the arm lest they be discovered. He scrambled backward until he reached the wall, then, with his back pressed into the brick, got to his feet, huddling his arms around his chest.

  The man grabbed him by the collar, his arms and hands not being easy to grab in that position, and hauled him out into the corridor and down it, toward an opening.

  The corridor wasn't very long, and there were evidently only six of the little brick cells in it, three on each side. It dead-ended to Skif's rear in a wall of the same rough brick. The man dragged Skif toward the open end, then threw him unceremoniously into the larger room beyond, a large and echoing chamber that was empty of furnishings and lit by lanterns hung from hooks depending from the ceiling. Skif landed beside three more children, all girls, all shivering and speechless with fear, tear-streaked faces masks of terror. Facing them were five men, four heavily armed, standing in pairs on either side of the fifth.

  Was this the hoped-for mastermind behind all of this?

  “'Ere's th' last on 'em, milord,” said the man who'd brought Skif out. “The fust two ye said weren't good fer yer gennelmen. This a good 'nuff offerin'?”

  Skif looked up from his fellow captives. For a moment, he couldn't see the man's face, but he knew the voice right enough.

  “Very nice,” purred the man, with just an edge of contempt beneath the approval. “Prime stock. Yes, they'll do. They'll do very nicely.”

  It was the same voice that had spoken with Jass in the tomb in the cemetery. And when “milord” came into the light, Skif stared at him, not in recognition, but to make sure he knew the face later. If this man was one of those that had attended Lord Orthallen's reception, Skif didn't recall him… but then, he had a very ordinary face. What Bazie would have called a “face-shaped face” with that laugh of his — neither this nor that, neither round nor oblong nor square, nondescript in every way, brown hair, brown eyes. He could have been anyone.

  The man was wearing very expensive clothing, in quite excellent taste. That was something of a surprise; Skif would have expected excellent clothing in appalling taste, given the circumstances.

  Milord — well, the clothing was up to the standards of the highborn, but something about him didn't fit. Since being at the Collegium, Skif had met a fair number of highborn, and there was an air about them, as if everyone they met would, as a matter of course, assume they were superior. So it was second nature to them, and they didn't have to think about it. This man wore his air of superiority, and his pride, openly, like a cloak.

  So what, exactly, was he? He had money, he had power, but he just didn't fit the “merchant” mold either. Yet he must have influence, and someone must be feeding him information, or he never would have been able to continue to operate as successfully and invisibly as he had until now.

  The man gestured, and one of the four men with him grabbed the shoulder of the girl he pointed at, hauling her to her feet. She couldn't have been more than eight or nine at most, thin and wan, and frightened into paralysis. The man walked around her, surveying her from every angle. He took her chin in his hand, roughly tilting her face up, even prying open her mouth to look at her teeth as tears ran soundlessly down her smudged cheeks, leaving tracks in the dirt. He didn't order her to be stripped, but then, given that she wasn't wearing much more than a tattered feed sack with a string around it, he didn't really need to.

  “Yes,” the man said, after contemplating her for long moments, during which she shivered like an aspen in the wind. She was a very pretty little thing under all her dirt, and Skif's heart ached for her. Hadn't her life been bad enough without this descent into nightmare? How could a tiny little child possibly deserve this?

  And this was the man who had ordered the deaths of Bazie and the two boys with no more concern than if he had crushed a beetle beneath his foot. This man, with his face-shaped face — this was the face of true evil that concealed itself in blandness. No monster here, just a man who could have hidden himself in any crowd. He would probably pat his friends' children genially on the head, even give them little treats, this man who assessed the market value of a little girl and consigned her to a fearful fate. He was valued by his neighbors, no doubt, this beast in a man's skin.

  Skif hated him. Hated the look of him, the sound of his voice, hated everything about him. Hated most of all that he could smile, and smile, and look so like any other man.

  “Yes,” the man said again, with a bland smile, the same smile a housewife might use when finding a particularly fat goose. “Pretty and pliant. This one will be very profitable for us.”

  “Oh — it is that I think not, good Guildmaster,” said a highly accented voice from the doorway. Skif's heart leaped, and when Alberich himself walked through the door, sword and dagger at the ready, it was all he could do to keep from cheering aloud.

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  THERE was a moment of absolute silence, as even the Guildmaster's professional bodyguards were taken by surprise. But that moment ended almost as soon as it began.

  The man who'd brought Skif out bolted for the door behind the Guildmaster, disappearing into the darkness. All four of the bodyguards charged Alberich, as the Guildmaster himself stood back with a smirk that would have maddened Skif, if he hadn't been scrambling to get out of the way. He pushed the three little girls ahead of him into the partial shelter of the wall, and stood between them and the fighting. Not that he was going to be able to do anything other than try and push them somewhere else if the fighting rolled over them.

  Not that he was going to be able to do anything to help Alberich. He knew when he was outweighed, outweaponed, and outclassed. This fight was no place for an undersized and half-trained (at best) adolescent. Besides, Alberich didn't look as if he needed any help, at least not at the moment.

  The Weaponsmaster had been impressive enough in the salle and on the training ground; here, literally surrounded by four skilled fighters, Skif could hardly believe what he was seeing. Alberich moved like a demon incarnate and so quickly that half the time Skif couldn't see what had happened, only that he'd somehow eluded what should have killed him —

  Still — four to one — maybe he'd better do something to try and drop the odds.

  Skif slipped the catches on his knives and then hesitated. The combatants were all moving too fast and in unpredictable ways. He'd never practiced against anything but a stationary target; if he threw a knife, he could all too easily hit Alberich, and if he threw a knife, he'd also throw away half of his own defenses.

  :Skif, get the children out now!:

  Cymry's mental “shout” woke him out of his indecision; with a quick glance to make sure the Guildmaster (what Guild was he?) was too far away to interfere, Skif grabbed the wrists of two of the three — the third was clinging to the arm of the second — and pulled them onto their feet. Then he got behind them and slowly — trying not to attract the eye of their chiefest captor — he herded them in front of him, along the wall, and toward the door that Alberich had entered by.

  One of the three, at least, woke out of her fear to see what he was trying to do. She seized the wrists of both of the others and dragged them with her as they edged along the wall. Her eyes were fixed on that doorway; Skif's were on the fight.

  It was oddly silent, compared with the tavern- and street-fights he was used to. There was no shouting, no cursing, only the clash of metal on metal and the occasional grunt of pain.

  And it was getting bloody. All of the bodyguards were marked — not big wounds, but they were bleeding. It looked as if the four bodyguards should bring Alberich down at any moment, and yet he kept sliding out from beneath their blades as Skif and his charges got closer and closer to their goal. Skif wanted to run, and knew he didn't dare. He didn't dare distract

  Alberich, and he didn't dare grab the attention of the Guildmaster.
/>   Ten paces… five…

  There!

  The girl who was leading the other two paused, hesitating, on the very threshold, her face a mask of fear and indecision. She didn't know what lay beyond that door — it could be worse than what was here.

  “Run!” Skif hissed at her, trusting that Alberich had already cleared the way.

  The girl didn't hesitate a moment longer; she bolted into the half-lit hallway, hauling the other two with her. Skif started to follow — hesitated, and looked back.

  There was a body on the floor, and it wasn't Alberich's. While Skif's back was turned, the Weaponsmaster had temporarily reduced the odds against himself by one.

  But Alberich was bleeding from the shoulder now. Skif couldn't tell how bad the wound was, and Alberich showed no sign of weakness, but the leather tunic was slashed there, and bloody flesh showed beneath the dark leather whenever he moved that arm. Skif's throat closed with fear. Somewhere deep inside he'd been certain that Alberich was invulnerable. But he wasn't. He could be hurt. And if he could be hurt — he could die.