Among Thieves totk-1

by Douglas Hulick

  “Hunh, business is bad,” said Mendross when he came back. He slipped a small pouch behind the bushel. I took it, making sure anyone who knew their business would catch the handoff.

  “Tough all over,” I said. “But it’s nothing personal…”

  Mendross resurrected his frown. “Yeah, I know. It’s just business.” He spit off to one side.

  The pouch was filled not with coins, but seed pits and gravel. It was a false payoff, a bogus protection dodge for the benefit of any curious Kin, as was our chatter. Mendross was an Ear-he worked for me.

  I smiled at his display and sampled some nearby dates. I had noticed no one hanging around the surrounding stalls any longer than they should, so I gave Mendross a tiny nod, as if in appreciation of the fruit. He leaned forward and began rearranging a pile of oranges. It brought his face near mine.

  “Niccodemus wants you,” said the Ear, his lips barely moving.

  “Why?”

  Mendross shook his head as he set a bad orange aside. “Don’t know. I only heard the call.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  He gave a minuscule shrug.

  I considered. Nicco could want me for anything, from running down a rumor to handing me a new job. And all of them would involve my going well out of my way, rather than home to bed, which was where I desperately wanted to be.

  I sighed and picked up an orange. I needed sleep. I didn’t want to go running down any more rumors or Kin this morning.

  “Nothing about its being important?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “All right,” I said, piercing the skin of the orange with my thumbnail. The sharp, sweet smell made my nose tingle. “Get word back: I need to-No, I have to follow up on something this morning. I’ll see him tonight, after I’ve run things down.” It wasn’t the best answer and wouldn’t win me any points, but it would cover my ass until I finally knocked on Nicco’s door.

  Mendross made a show of looking resigned, nodding as if at the inevitable loss of the orange. Translation: Word would get back. I suppressed a grin: Mendross had missed a calling to the stage.

  “Anything else?” I said.

  “There’re rumblings in Ten Ways.”

  I snorted. “There are always ‘rumblings’ in Ten Ways.” Ten Ways was a hole of a cordon that no one truly controlled. Nicco had minor interests there, but so did several other bosses. “Let me guess: A couple of gangs crossed steel over their border and one of Nicco’s clients got clipped in the process. Now the client’s complaining about not getting the protection he paid for.”

  Mendross stopped rearranging his produce and stared at me. “There wasn’t a gang fight involved, but yes, that’s basically it. Why do I bother telling you these things if you already know them?”

  I smiled slyly. I’d come out of Ten Ways years back-I knew how the place worked.

  I separated out a section of orange. Juice trickled down into my palm. “Next?” I said.

  Mendross went back to work on a pile of dates. “There’re whispers,” he said, his voice dropping. “Someone’s snilching Nicco.”

  I stopped, the orange midway to my mouth, which had suddenly gone dry. “Snilching?” I said. That wasn’t good. No one liked spies, but Nicco was pathological about them. Even the hint of another crime lord’s man inside his organization would send Nicco into a rage. And when that happened, he’d tear the place apart until he found one, even if he had to manufacture the proof out of rumors and suspicion.

  In that kind of environment, suspicion could fall on anyone-even on the people, like me, who were supposed to track rumors and informants.

  “How loud are these whispers?” I said.

  “Soft, for now.”

  “Any idea where they started?”

  Mendross shrugged. “Someone said someone else said his uncle knows a Cutter who overheard his sister’s husband talking to a guy who.. .”

  “That’s not soft,” I said, feeling some of the tension drain out of me. “That’s damn near silent.”

  “Call it what you want, but the whispers have been circulating for a couple days now. You know me-if something stays on the street that long, I pass it on.”

  I nodded in appreciation and finally slipped the orange section into my mouth. Silent or not, the rumor was still something that could grow and get back to Nicco. Having him go on a rampage wouldn’t be good for any number of things, including my peace of mind. But mostly, it would be bad for business.

  “Have you heard anything about anything big going down?” I said.

  “No,” said Mendross.

  “Any important corpses turn up?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anyone pawing at the edges of Nicco’s territory?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “Which makes me think this is nothing. Snilches are too hard to recruit to waste on something small, and from what I hear, there’s nothing but small going down right now. There’s no reason for a Snilch to do anything that might get him noticed.”

  “What if he made a tiny mistake and it got out?” said Mendross.

  “There are no tiny mistakes when you do that kind of work,” I said. “Remember, this is Nicco’s organization we’re talking about here-a spy with half a brain would bend over backward to keep this quiet. Hell, I inform for the man, and the thought of his getting wind of this makes me nervous.”

  Mendross considered it and shrugged. “You know the ins and outs better then I do,” he said.

  Damn straight I did. But Mendross was right in one sense: I couldn’t just shrug it off. I looked out over the bazaar and decided.

  “This could be nothing, or it could be a setup,” I said as I took another bite of orange. “Someone might be wanting to use this as an excuse to settle some old scores.” Or to start a power grab. Chaos in the ranks made for a wonderful distraction. “Put the word out that the rumors are just gutter-mumbles. If they die, so much the better. If they stick around, let me know.” And I hoped like hell they did die; otherwise, I’d need to track down who was behind the rumors before they got to Nicco.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  We went over the rest of Mendross’s news as I finished my breakfast. I filed some of what he told me away for later consideration, but ended up discarding most of it. It was a slow day on the street.

  When we were finished, I made a show of wiping my fingers on a towel Mendross kept hanging on the side of his stall.

  “All my best to Rizza,” I said as I picked up a fig and hefted it.

  Mendross nodded contentedly at his wife’s name and took a step back. I cocked my arm and hurtled the fig at him, missing by inches.

  “And don’t even think about coming up short next time!” I snapped, my voice pitched to be heard by anyone nearby. Mendross cringed and stammered apologies as Degan and I turned and walked away. I put an arrogant swagger in my step as I left.

  The moment we exited the bazaar, I let the swagger drop and surrendered to a slow, almost dragging pace.

  Degan yawned and scratched at his chin. “Do you still have things to do?”

  I looked up at the sky. The sun was obnoxiously high-nearly four hours past rising. I dearly wanted to crawl in out of the daylight, but I had one more person to see, and now was the best time to do it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I have things.”

  “Do you need me for them?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because I wasn’t coming, anyhow.”

  “Hmm, maybe I need you after all.”

  “Tough.” And without waiting for a reply, Degan stepped off into the crowd and headed home. I swear I could hear him whistling as he went, too. The bastard.

  I watched him go for a moment, then turned in the opposite direction. I needed to talk to a man about a piece of paper.

  Chapter Three

  Baldezar was a Jarkman, which meant he could read and write old dialects and modern foreign tongues, as well as produce fo
rgeries and copies when the need arose. He was also a master scribe who ran a penman’s shop in the cordon next to my own. It was a big operation, with more than a dozen apprentices and journeymen working under his unforgiving eye. Baldezar would never sell you the contents of a trust, for that was what he considered the papers assigned him to be, but he’d happily knock off a forgery or copy of anything you brought to him.

  The shop was bright and busy when I entered. The windows in the walls and the sliding panels on the roof had been thrown open to admit the morning sunlight. Tall, slanted desks covered the main floor. Most held an original page and the copy in progress side by side, but a select few played home to acts of individual creation. At these desks, the most skilled scribblers and illuminators plied their work. Each page, each line, was history in the making, art in progress.

  I took a deep breath, savoring the smell of ink, paint, paper, and chalk. For me, this was the aroma of knowledge, of history, and I loved it. It didn’t matter whether they were copying histories or inventories; as far as I was concerned, there was magic in the air.

  “A bit early for you, Drothe,” said a voice off to my side.

  I turned to find Lyconnis coming toward me, a bundle of parchments in his meaty hands and quiet humor in his eyes. He was taller than I-not hard, that-and built more like a farmer than a scribe. Broad shoulders, thick limbs, heavy neck, and an open and trusting face that always made me feel vaguely uneasy. I’m not used to being around blatantly honest people.

  “Late night?” asked the journeyman scribe.

  “Does it show that much?”

  “Afraid so.” Lyconnis gestured toward the back of the shop. “We can pull a stool over to my desk if you’d like-I’ve finished another chapter of the history.”

  “The one on the Fourth Regency?”

  “Is there any other?”

  I licked my lips. It was tempting. The Fourth Regency was one of those periods in imperial history where legend met reality; where the recurring rule of Stephen Dorminikos was truly challenged for the first time; and where the first subtle cracks began to show in our emperor’s sanity.

  By that time, the emperor had been on the throne in one incarnation or another for more than two hundred years. True, it wasn’t the six-century mark we had recently observed in Ildrecca, but his selection by the Angels to serve as our perpetually reincarnating emperor had been well established. He was the Triumvirate Eternal, the ruler whose soul had been broken into three parts so that he might forever be reborn as one of three versions of himself-Markino, Theodoi, and Lucien-each version following the next by a generation, to watch over the empire. So the Angels had decreed, and so it had been.

  But that didn’t mean everyone had to be happy about it.

  Like the rest of us, Stephen Dorminikos had started out mortal, and that fact wasn’t lost on people. If a man could be born-and even reborn-so the reasoning went, he could die, too. And he had-several times, in fact. And so the emperors had created the Regencies- appointees who ruled whenever one of the incarnations died before the next one could be found. In the case of the Second and Third Regencies, the gaps had come about through foul play and court intrigue; however, during the Fourth Regency, it had been a bout of the plague that killed off two incarnations of Stephen back to back. Innocent enough, and an eventuality the empire had long been prepared for, which was why the chaos that had followed was so surprising.

  With two versions of Stephen dead, someone-no one quite knew who-had got to wondering what would happen if all three versions of the emperor were dead at once. Would he be able to come back? Save for the first time Stephen had died and gone to the Angels, there had always been at least one incarnation alive somewhere in the empire. The writings of the Imperial Cult hinted at dire consequences if no emperor strode the earth, but no one knew if the warnings were apocryphal or prophetic.

  Of course, someone decided to find out. Unfortunately for Stephen, it had been his own Regents.

  And so had begun the Regency Wars: eighty-one years of cat and mouse between the usurpers and the incarnations of Stephen Dorminikos. Lucien died twice, once to plague, and once to a dagger in the back. Markino passed from the same plague as Lucien while still a babe in arms. Theodoi was butchered leading an army against the walls of Ildrecca. In the sixty-fourth year of the Fourth Regency, the Regents declared there were no incarnations of Dorminikos left on this earth, let alone on the throne.

  The emperors were dead.

  And then, seventeen years later, Markino proved them wrong and emerged from hiding at the head of an army out of, of all places, Djan. Things had gotten interesting after that.

  “Are you to the Cleansings yet?” I asked. On the march from Djan to Ildrecca, Markino had ordered his troops to deface every depiction of his former incarnations they came across. He claimed he was “cleansing” the temples and promoting a fresh start after the Regency; his other selves had had other opinions. They didn’t like being erased when they weren’t around. And so had begun the centuries-long, ongoing spat among the incarnations of the emperor. Lyconnis had hinted that he had found a new source on the topic, but he hadn’t been willing to elaborate on it.

  Today was no different. Lyconnis smiled a crafty smile-or, at least, he tried to; it didn’t really fit his face. “I’m not telling,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t be.” I considered pressing him-he loved to talk about his work, and it wouldn’t be hard to get him to relent-but sighed instead. “No, as much as I’d love to read it, I have to see your master on business.”

  Lyconnis’s face clouded over. “Ah. I’ll leave you be, then.” He didn’t know the specifics of my relationship with Baldezar, but he was smart enough to realize it was something he would rather stay ignorant about.

  I walked to the back of the shop and climbed the narrow circular stairs to the gallery. Baldezar was waiting for me at the top.

  “Young Lyconnis does not seem to appreciate your trade as much as you do his.” The sentence rasped out of Baldezar’s mouth, his words dry and brittle as the parchments that surrounded us.

  “I think it’s your business with me he disapproves of,” I said.

  “Most likely.” The master scribe turned away and paced slowly toward his office. “But since the opinions of my lessers matter nothing to me…” He let the sentence drift to the floor, stepped past it.

  I let my eyes brush the works that resided here. Books and scrolls filled the narrow spaces between the windows in the gallery, the shelves running floor to ceiling. Many were of little use to anyone except the scribes, but there were enough histories and collected tales here to keep me busy for ages. Baldezar consented to rent some out to me now and again, but only grudgingly, and always at a high price.

  “No touching or taking,” he warned over his shoulder. There was no humor in the tone.

  I bristled at the implication. “Mind your words, Jarkman.”

  “It’s my trade-how can I not? You just mind your trade, burglar.”

  “I haven’t cracked a den in years,” I said.

  Baldezar sniffed but otherwise stayed silent.

  We stepped into his office. The master scribe arranged himself like a potentate behind his reading table. I took the narrow seat across from him. The shutters to the room had been thrown back for light, but the glass windows themselves were closed against the dust and noise of the street. It made the space feel tight and bright and warm. I fought a yawn and sneezed instead.

  For most people, such a basking would have made them appear healthy, or at least alive; but all it did for Baldezar was highlight the sharp crags of his face. I could make out a similar collection of jutting angles and projections beneath the ink-stained tunic, which hinted at the sparseness of his frame. He let his eyelids droop halfway closed as he regarded me.

  “I hope you are not here for the work you commissioned,” he said. “I told you it would not be ready until next week. I’ve not even received the proper linen paper from the presser yet
.”

  I waved my hand. “No, no rush on that. Take your time.” I was having him do a bit of forgery for my sister, but it wouldn’t hurt to let her wait a bit. It might even teach her some patience, though I had my doubts. “I’ve come here for your opinion on something.”

  The scribe nodded as if this made perfect and natural sense, which I’m sure it did to him. He was Baldezar, after all.

  I reached into my ahrami pouch and drew out the piece of paper I had taken from Athel.

  Baldezar’s eyebrows formed themselves into a brief pair of peaks, then settled down again. “May I?” He held out his reedlike fingers. I obliged, and he held the strip of paper up to the light.

  “And what are you looking for here?” he asked after a long moment.

  Even after giving him the paper, I hesitated. My instincts were to keep as many people out of my business as possible. I had to remind myself why I had come here in the first place.

  “I’m hoping it’s a cipher you might recognize,” I said.

  “As in a coded message?”

  I nodded.

  “Where did you get it?”

  I regarded the Jarkman silently.

  “I only ask,” he said, “because the provenance might help me to-”

  “It doesn’t matter where I got it,” I said sharply, my fatigue getting the better of my patience. “What matters is what you can tell me about it.”

  “I see.” Baldezar rubbed the paper between his fingers. “Do you know what it pertains to?”

  “This is dusty stuff, Jarkman-don’t play the Boman.”

  Baldezar lifted the side of his mouth in distaste. “I may understand your canting, Drothe, but it doesn’t mean I enjoy hearing it. Use the imperial tongue in my presence, or get out.”

  I snapped forward in my chair, stopping myself just before I came out of it. Baldezar’s eyes went wide as he almost fell back in his own.

  I took a long, slow breath.

  “All right,” I grated. “In plain Imperial, I’m not happy about what that paper implies. In fact, I’m downright pissed. I’m having a bad day because of what’s on that paper, and I don’t expect I’ll be the only one. Now, we both know what that means, so my advice is to tell me what you see here. Otherwise, my using the cant won’t be the only thing you don’t enjoy.”