Taziar assessed the couple. The man sported the heavily callused hands of a smith or builder, and well-muscled arms completed the picture. A receding line of brown hair dusted with gray revealed a scalp freckled from exposure to the sun. The plump woman at his side wore her locks swept back into a tight bun. Clothes of unsoiled linen suggested a comfortable living. Taziar located their purses by the play of dawn shadow on pocket fabric. He guessed that the woman carried the bulk of their money in a recess in her shift, while the left pocket of the man’s tunic held a smaller amount. Taziar suspected they’d chosen the arrangement to confuse thieves, but he doubted it would succeed against any except a young amateur. Or maybe I’m overestimating the average pickpocket.
Since Taziar sought attention rather than money, he went after the bait. As the couple wandered by, he slipped his fingers into the man’s pocket, seized the pouch of coins, and ripped it free. Taziar fumbled it intentionally, catching the bag with a dull clink of coins. Through the fabric, he identified six copper barony ducats before whisking it into the folds of his own cloak. He awaited the woman’s scream, the man’s bellow of outrage, the guard’s shouted command above the irregular clamor of the merchants.
But none of those sounds came. Apparently oblivious, the couple continued down the walkway without so much as a break in stride. Dumbfounded, Taziar turned his attention to the guard. The man chewed a fingernail, stopped, and studied the tattered edge. He picked at it with his thumb, then bit at it again.
Irony struck Taziar a staggering blow. Aga-arin’s almighty ass, I can’t be that good. Stunned by the revelation, Taziar allowed a young man carrying a crate of chickens on his shoulder to pass unmolested. Taziar’s hand closed over his spoils. I have to give this back. He glanced in the direction the couple had taken, but they had disappeared around a corner. Weighing the time the return would cost him against the couple’s affluence, Taziar accepted his newfound money reluctantly. I’m just going to have to learn to be more inept. He settled back into his position against the wall.
Within seconds, a young man trotted along the sidewalk, his expression harried. He wore a patched, woolen cloak, sported a blotchy beard, and carried a stand sign tucked beneath his armpit. From a glance, Taziar discovered a pouch of coins in the man’s hip pocket. He closed, every movement deliberately awkward. Jamming his hand into the pocket, Taziar meticulously gouged his fingers into the man’s pelvic bone before scooping the purse free. It flew in a wild arc, and Taziar caught it with a dexterity that belied his earlier clumsiness. He shoved it into his cloak with the other purse.
The stranger spun with a yell of outrage. “Help! Thief!” The lettered board thunked to the cobbles. He swung a punch at Taziar who dodged easily. The guard rushed toward them from across the street. Locking his gaze on the stranger’s hands and seeing that the man intended to grab rather than hit, Taziar suppressed his natural urge to dodge. Thick hands seized the collar of Taziar’s cloak and crossed, neatly closing off his windpipe. He gasped and struggled, suddenly wishing he had not made it so simple for the stranger to catch him.
“Stop!” The guard’s spear jolted against the stranger’s arms. The hands fell away, and Taziar staggered free with a dry rasp of breath. “What’s going on here?”
The stranger answered before Taziar could regain enough air to speak. “He stole my money. Guard, that man is a thief.”
Taziar cringed, aware most of the baron’s guards would seize the opportunity to batter him to unconsciousness.
The guard whirled, his forehead creased. He studied Taziar in the thin light of morning, and his eyebrows arched abruptly in question. His expression went bland as he turned back to face the stranger. “I’m sorry, sir. You’ve made a mistake. This man took nothing.”
Taziar went slack-jawed with surprise, and his victim’s face echoed his like a mirror. “He’s a thief,” the man insisted. “He stole my purse. I demand justice. Are you going to let the little weasel go prey on someone else?”
“I’m sorry,” the guard said with finality. “I was standing here, and I didn’t see him take anything.” He winked at Taziar. “It’s your word against his word.”
“No, it’s not.” Desperate, Taziar abandoned subtlety. “I took his purse I admit it.” To demonstrate, he retrieved the pouch and dangled it before the guard.
The stranger’s eyes went so wide, the whites showed in a circle around the irises, and he made only a feeble gesture to retrieve his property. As the stranger’s fingers touched the strings, Taziar released it. The pouch plummeted to the walkway. A coin bounced free, wound a wobbly course around a cobblestone, and dropped to its side. The guard recovered first. “You’ve got your money back.” He jabbed a finger into the stranger’s arm, then waved curtly at Taziar. “You, be on your way, and don’t cause any more trouble.” Using his spear like a walking stick, the guard returned to his post before the alleyway.
Bending, the stranger rescued his money and his sign and continued silently down the sidewalk as if in a trance. Taziar hurried off in the opposite direction, equally confused. The guard’s reaction made no sense to him. A decade without war had driven Cullinsberg’s soldiers to turn any violent tendencies they might harbor against criminals, orphans, and beggars. Many disdained the justice system, abandoning law for the right price. Taziar shook his head, floored by the idea that he had discovered a guard not only mercifully peaceful, but who disregarded pickpockets without so much as a hint of a bribe. It was an accident, a bizarre coincidence I’ll probably never understand. How hard can it be to find a normal guard?
Taziar wandered by the stands, noting as he passed that many had not opened because of the holiday. The others would close by midday, and Taziar knew he would need to work fast or lose any chance of getting himself arrested. Who would have imagined I would find it difficult to get thrown in prison? He chuckled as he wandered by a barefoot girl in tattered homespun selling flowers. Across the road on the opposite walkway, Taziar saw a guard, eyes glinting from beneath a disorderly mop of hair. One meaty hand prodded an unkempt, young woman who cursed him with oaths vicious as a dockhand’s.
Seizing the opportunity, Taziar darted across the street, narrowly missing a trampling by a pair of mules hauling a groaning wagon. The team pulled up reflexively, with the calm indulgence of habit, but the driver’s blasphemies paled beneath the girl’s coarse profanities.
Oblivious, Taziar skidded across the walkway and caught the guard’s forearm. “Wait! She didn’t do it. I did.”
Startled, the guard and his prisoner stared with perfect expressions of surprise. Gradually, the guard’s features lapsed into the same complacent smirk Taziar had seen on the face of the other sentry. “Did what?” the guard challenged.
Taziar tugged at the guard’s sleeve. “Whatever she did. What are you arresting her for?”
The guard rolled his tongue around his mouth, then spat on the cobbles. “Freelance prostitution.”
I can’t get a break. Taziar changed his tactics instantly. “You can’t take her in. She’s ... my sister.”
The guard glanced from Taziar’s fair skin and light eyes to the girl’s olive-toned countenance. “Sure.” He brushed off Taziar’s grip. “Go bother someone else.”
“Really. She’s my sister.” He seized the guard’s hand in a grip tight enough to pinch, watched the man’s cheeks redden in annoyance. “You’re my sister. Aren’t you my sister?”
Eager to grasp any chance at freedom, the woman nodded. “I’m his sister.” A harsh Western accent made her claim sound even more ludicrous.
The guard made no attempt to free his hand. “Do I look stupid to you? She’s not your sister, and I wouldn’t let her go if she was your sister.”
Taziar met the guard’s gaze, followed the pursed lines around the stranger’s mouth and read waning tolerance. Carefully, Taziar’s hand skittered across the woven linen of the guard’s uniform. Discovering a pocket in the lining, Taziar dipped his fingers inside. He was rewarded by the graye
d, leather braid of a purse’s strings. Seizing it, he pulled it out, released the guard, and slipped the pouch into his own hip pocket. “I’ll bribe you to let her go.”
The guard kept a firm hold on the prostitute’s bony wrists. “How much?”
Taziar groped the contents of the guard’s purse. “Four silver.”
The guard’s grip relaxed. “Fair enough.”
Taziar produced the guard’s pouch, little finger hooked through the braid.
The guard sucked breath through his teeth. The plump face creased into a mixture of emotions Taziar could not begin to decipher. “You little bastard! That’s mine.” He reached for it.
Exploiting the guard’s consternation, the prostitute twisted free and ran. The guard lunged for her, missed, and tensed to give chase.
Taziar shot a foot between the guard’s ankles. The man crashed to the cobbles as the woman sprinted around a bend in the road and was lost to sight.
The guard scrambled to his feet with the natural grace of a warrior. “Why!” he sputtered. His fists clenched to blanched knots, and his cheeks twitched involuntarily. “What in hell ... ? Why did you ... ?” Apparently realizing something more important was at stake, he changed the focus of his verbal attack. “Give me back my purse!”
“No.” Glibly calm, Taziar tucked the pouch back beneath his cloak. This has to be a dream. I know ancient crones on the street who would kill for less cause than this. “Why should I?”
The guard flushed to the roots of his hair. His fingers slacked and clutched as he fought some internal battle. But when he spoke, his tone sounded almost pleading. “Please. That’s two weeks’ wages. I’ve got a wife and three children.”
Taziar blinked in astonishment, his sharp retort forgotten in the growing realization that something was terrible wrong. “Aren’t you going to arrest me?”
“Were it my decision ...” The guard’s voice remained dangerously flat. “... I would stave in your insolent, bloody, little skull.” He smiled sweetly, a chilling contrast to his threat. “But the baron has forbidden any of his men to arrest, harm, or even touch you. He says you’re working for us. In truth, I liked you better on the other side of the law ...” He finished from between clenched teeth. “... when I could kill you. Fortunately for you, I’d rather starve for two weeks than lose my job.”
Taziar went still as death, desperately trying to hide surprise behind a less revealing expression. In silence, he handed the pouch of silver to its owner, adding the six copper ducats from his previous heist in honest apology. When he managed to speak in normal tones, he chose to lie. “The baron asked me to test his men’s loyalty to his orders. Forgive my abusive methods, but I wanted to give you fair trial. You passed, of course, with honors.” Taziar bowed his head in a gesture of respect, turned, and wandered off down the street before the guard could reply.
Taziar waited only until he had passed beyond sight of the guard before dropping to his haunches beneath the overhang of the baker’s shop. What now? The clop of hooves reverberated from a side street, its rhythm soft in Taziar’s ears. There’s no way Harriman could know I would try something as crazy as getting myself arrested. Is there? Taziar slid to one knee, the thought cold and heavy within him. No, he answered himself cautiously. Harriman has other reasons to arrange things so the guards can’t act against me. First, it convinces everyone, guards, underground, and street people, that I am, in fact, the informant. Second, the baron cannot interfere with any plans Harriman might have for me.
Taziar rose, in awe of Harriman’s thoroughness despite his need to struggle against it. The stronger the enemy, the better the fight. If Harriman wants me free, I’ll get myself arrested. And, if the guards won’t do it, well, sometimes a man has to do these things for himself.
Aware Harriman might still want him prisoner, Taziar kept to the main thoroughfares where the underground’s spies were less likely to prowl. He traveled northward, between the puddled shadows of gables and spires. Through occasional breaks between buildings, Taziar could see that the edge of the sun had scarcely crested the horizon, touching the eastern skyline with glazed semicircles of color. Aside from the merchants, the majority of the townsfolk remained in slumber. Like their baron, most of Cullinsberg’s citizens worshiped Aga’arin. By tradition, Aga’arin’s followers abandoned routine on his High Holy Day. Instead, they slept until the sessions of prayer which began at high morning on the temple grounds.
Taziar ignored the scattered merchants, trusting his instincts to protect him while he dug knowledge from memory. The layout of the baron’s keep was common information, spread throughout the underground as much from curiosity as necessity. No thief ever attempted to rob more than the main corridors near the entrance; those had become appropriately free of grandeur as a result. Since the mansion sported no other inlet, the baron kept his sentries clustered there to prevent any but guards and royalty from penetrating the deeper areas of his keep; there was always enough of the most faithful on duty to prevent a mass bribe. Other routes existed to allow Baron Dietrich and his family an escape in case of emergency, but the underground had discovered that these opened only from the inside and were just as carefully warded.
From rumors in the underground, Taziar had learned that the boulders composing the castle walls had been cut square and polished to shiny smoothness. Between blocks, the builders had layered mortar with an artist’s eye for perfection. More than once, friends and strangers had tried to commission the Shadow Climber to obtain items which were in the baron’s possession, but Taziar had never found the reasons compelling enough to justify the thefts. The insistence that only the Shadow Climber could scale the castle walls took all challenge from the undertaking; since every member of the underground seemed certain he could succeed, Taziar felt no urge to prove it. He was too busy accomplishing the impossible.
Accompanied only by his own thoughts, Taziar shambled through the streets, uncontested, and soon arrived at the cleared stretch of ground separating the town proper from the wall that enclosed the baron’s keep. Tucked into the shadow of a mud-chinked log cottage, Taziar studied the keep from its western side. Lantern light bobbed through windows in the lowest stories, but the upper levels and corner towers remained dark, black arrows silhouetted against the twilit sky.
From remembered description, Taziar located the baron’s balcony, which jutted from the fifth floor toward the southern tower. Curtains swirled and flapped in the wind. As they moved, Taziar caught interrupted glimpses of morning’s scattered glow sparkling off glasswork. Taziar’s position accorded him a flattened view of the southern side of the keep and the seventh story window from which he had escaped the corridor outside the baron’s dungeon by plummeting into the moat. With all my injuries, I would have drowned, too, if Moonbear hadn’t pulled me from the water. Taziar grimaced, recalling that the barbarian prince was also responsible for turning his controlled climb down the wall into a crazed fall. He meant well. Even so, I’ve no desire to repeat the maneuver nor force it upon anyone else. And I won’t have to so long as Astryd brings the rope.
The other windows remained mysteries to Taziar. As a member of the underground, he had found the floor plan to the baron’s keep so readily available it seemed a waste of time, effort, and brain space for him to memorize it. And, though Taziar hated to begin a caper with less than complete knowledge, he doubted he would need to identify the maze of rooms and passageways defining the baron’s keep. The object he sought was on the baron’s person. And right now, I can find the baron’s person, almost certainly, in the baron’s bed.
More accustomed to working beneath the unrevealing crescent he called the “thieves’ moon,” Taziar wanted to start while the sun was still low in the sky. Afraid to tarry too long, he crossed the plain and huddled in the block of shadow cast by the keep and its surrounding wall. Once there, he shinnied up the blocked granite of the wall.
Taziar’s elevated position accorded him a perfect view of the keep and its courtyard. Y
oung oak and hickory dotted lush grasses tipped with autumn’s brown. Carved from stone blocks or twisted from wrought iron, benches were set at the western and eastern sides of the trees to catch the daily shade or sun. The moat spoiled the grandeur of the scene. Its waters shivered in the breezes, an oily black halo near the base of the keep.
Taziar took in the layout at a glance and turned his attention to the sentries who paced through the twilit gloom. Their movements appeared crisp; apparently their shift had just begun. Even so, Taziar found their patterns indecipherable. He had managed to identify two guards who might cross the straight tract he hoped to take to the baron’s window, when a scraping sound on the wall startled him. Taziar flattened to the summit, eyes probing the haze. The noises grew louder, transforming to the unmistakable sound of footsteps on granite. A man became visible walking atop the wall, a colorless, dark shape etched against the dawn.
Taziar scuttled over the edge, climbing partway down the wall toward the courtyard. Something sharp jabbed his back. A spear? Taziar froze. When no challenge followed, he rolled his eyes, easing his head around until he saw a spreading oak, its branches stretched to the wall, one pressed into his cloak. Taziar loosed a pent up breath which earned him another poke from the limb. The slap of the wall guard’s footsteps passed directly overhead then faded as the man’s vigil took him beyond Taziar’s hearing.
When I watched from town, I didn’t even see the sentry on the wall. Gently, Taziar began extracting himself from the hold of the oak. A branch creaked as he moved. He cringed and further slowed his progress. That’s because I couldn’t spend all the time I needed to study things. The only way I could have missed him is if there’s only one sentry on the wall. Taziar pulled himself free of a twig. It broke with a faint snap. Suppressing a curse, Taziar gazed into the courtyard. Apparently oblivious, the nearest sentry continued his march. Stupid place for a tree, this close to the wall. Taziar guessed it had been planted as a seed or sapling. Probably no one considered its branches might eventually grow over the walls and provide access to enemies or that its roots might disrupt the structure of the wall. Looking down, Taziar saw a haphazard pile of sawed off branches and knew he echoed someone else’s concerns. Within the week, this tree would sit in pieces, a neatly stacked pile of seasoning hardwood.
Mickey Zucker Reichert - Shadows Realm Page 23