Among Thieves totk-1

by Douglas Hulick

  “Not surprising,” said Jelem. He had taken a small brush from his coat and begun sweeping it through the air around the body. “The yazani who did this can likely come and go as he pleases, at least where your efforts are concerned.” Jelem paused, wet his dark thumb, and rubbed at something on Task’s corpse. “You may want to consider some glimmered defenses, Drothe,” he said. “My rates are, well, let’s not say reasonable; affordable, perhaps?”

  “I can handle this just fine!” snapped Fowler. “I don’t need some cut-rate glimmer monger throwing magic all over the place-magic that’ll just end up getting in my people’s way.”

  “Yes,” said Jelem as he returned to his brushing. “You’ve obviously done a superb job so far. Tell me, do I need to make an appointment to try to kill Drothe, or is it simply on a first-come, first-served basis? I can never keep Kin etiquette straight.”

  I reached out and grabbed Fowler’s arm as her long knife cleared its scabbard. Fowler glared at me, yanked against my grip. I shook my head. Jelem didn’t even glance our way.

  “Would your glimmer have stopped my visitor?” I asked.

  Jelem sucked on his seed. “Her?” he said, pointing at the assassin. “Most likely, although I wouldn’t be surprised if she was killed somewhere else and brought here afterward. It’s far easier to veil corpses than it is live bodies. As for whoever put her here in the first place? No, I don’t think my spells would have done anything other than annoy your anonymous benefactor.”

  “Like I said,” said Fowler, “we can handle this.” I let go of her arm. She put her knife away and moved over to one of the room’s two windows. With a shove, Fowler opened the shutters the rest of the way and seated herself on the sill.

  “You said ‘benefactor,’ ” I said to Jelem.

  He nodded, still circling Task. “What else? Believe me, if whoever did this wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

  We all grew silent after that. Jelem continued to work on the floating corpse, pausing occasionally to mutter softly to himself in singsong Djanese. Fowler sat in the window, brooding. Every now and then, I caught her making small gestures to the world outside: signaling her people and gathering reports. Doubling the guard, more likely than not.

  I turned this newest question over in my head. Why kill a Blade and go to all the trouble of suspending her in my room, when a well-thrust knife and a note under my door would have accomplished the same thing? It was, I decided, more than a warning; it was a statement. Not only was someone watching over me-they had access to the kinds of power I couldn’t come close to touching. And if they had access to this kind of power-and were willing to flaunt it-what were the odds of whoever was after me having the same level of resources? The glimmered rope had been bad enough, but what if that was only small-time for them?

  I looked back up at Task. Why even bother hiring Blades at all? If the person behind Tamas and Task was as potent as my benefactor, why wasn’t I dead already? And why, for that matter, was either of these people interested in me?

  I placed my forehead in the palm of one hand and drew a seed from my pouch with the other, then stopped myself. No. Ahrami wasn’t the answer now. No matter how many I ate, they would only make me alert, not awake. My mind was a jumble of questions and information, none of it fitting together well. Tackling that mess now would be like trying to find my way out of a maze wearing a blindfold. I needed sleep. Hell, I practically ached for it.

  “How much longer until you have her down?” I asked Jelem, already starting to lean back onto my bed.

  “Hard to say,” said Jelem. “Not soon, anyhow.”

  “I thought you said the glimmer on her was breakable.”

  “And every lock is pickable, but do I stand beside you in dark hallways and shake your elbow?”

  “Then where the hell am I supposed to sleep?”

  “I would suggest ‘not here,’ ” said Jelem, turning back to Task’s body. “I don’t want company, and you don’t want to be here for some of the things I’ll need to do to get her down. You find things for a living-surely you can find someplace to sleep.”

  Finding someplace wasn’t the problem; finding someplace safe, though, was another matter. Still, Jelem was right-I didn’t want to think about the kind of dreams I would have if I stayed here.

  I looked over at Fowler Jess.

  “Oh, hell no,” she said. “Hell no!”

  “Jess… ” I began.

  “You’re pulling in trouble like a crooked Rag rakes in hawks, Drothe. No way I’m letting you anywhere near my place.”

  “It’s just for one night,” I said. “And besides, in a way-”

  “Don’t!” she said, slipping down off the windowsill. “Don’t you dare tell me I owe you, or it’s my fault you don’t have a place to stay, or anything like that. Killing you would ruin my reputation, but, right now, I’d happily pay that price if you said something stupid.”

  Since that was exactly what I had been going to say, I shut my mouth. “I don’t suppose you can spare anyone to watch me if I go to an inn?” I said instead.

  Fowler leaned back against the wall. A look of pity crossed her face. Apparently, I was still being stupid.

  “I’m having enough trouble keeping the Kin out of your place,” she said. “I don’t need the headache of trying to secure a public inn against another Blade, let alone a Mouth who can walk through walls. Go someplace unexpected, where people won’t look for you. That’ll protect you better than an army of Oaks could right now.”

  I nodded. She was right. Go someplace unexpected…

  I stood up.

  “I’m off, then,” I said, heading for the door.

  “That quickly? Where to?” asked Fowler.

  “To someplace even I can’t believe I’m considering,” I said, and closed the door behind me.

  The large wooden door swung open just as I was reaching for the knocker for the second time. If Josef felt any surprise at seeing me, he hid it well. My sister’s butler of the chamber merely inclined his head and stepped aside to let me in.

  “Good to see you again, sir,” said Josef as I crossed the threshold of my sister’s house. I grunted a reply.

  “Is the baroness expecting you?” he asked.

  “What do you think?”

  Josef smiled a bit. He closed the door. “Yes, well, I’ll announce you then, shall I?”

  “Yes, do,” I said. “I suppose it’s an occasion of sorts, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed,” said Josef as he turned away. “And, if I may, it’s a pleasure to see you entering the home this way again.”

  How many years had it been since I had actually used the front door to come calling? Not since before Nestor’s death. It hadn’t seemed right to come walking into his house after that, but it felt somehow wrong to come skulking over the garden wall tonight, too. Maybe I’d come knocking because, for the first time in a long time, I’d be asking my sister for a favor, rather than striking a bargain of necessity.

  I looked around the entry foyer. Little had changed-same polished tile floor, same mosaics on the wall, same view through the archway to the garden beyond. I almost expected my brother-in-law, Nestor, to come strolling through one of the side passages, a half-unrolled scroll dangling from his hands, ready to launch into a discussion on his latest interpretation of Regency history. I smiled briefly at the thought.

  Of all the men Christiana could have married, Nestor had been the most unexpected. Then again, maybe that was why they had come together. An eccentric nobleman, he hadn’t cared that his wife was a former courtesan, nor, when he found out, that his brother-in-law was a criminal. If anything, he had flown in the face of court propriety and declared it “quite charming” to have a “Gentleman of the Shadows” as a relative. It had taken Christiana nearly a week to persuade Nestor that introducing me at their wedding, let alone at court, would be a disaster for them both. He had agreed in the end, but I suspect part of him had wanted to see just how the scandal would have played
out.

  I yawned and leaned my head back. Above me, on the wall, depicted in a mosaic of cut glass and stone and marble, stood Releskoi, Nestor’s family’s patron Angel.

  Releskoi was tall, with the traditional blue-white skin, golden eyes, and fair hair of his kind. This version had a scar on his left cheek, marking not only the Angel but also Nestor’s family as followers of the Achadean sect-those who saw the Angels as more supernatural than divine, more as the original servants of the dead gods than as the deities they had become. The traditional fox and desert lion crouched near Releskoi’s feet. The Angel’s symbol, a staff wrapped in a banner of holy inscriptions, floated before his chest.

  I yawned again. “Fat lot of good you did Nestor,” I said to the Angel.

  “Releskoi is one of the Angels of Judgment,” said Christiana. “I doubt he can do much when it comes to stopping poison and plots.”

  I sat up to find my sister framed by daylight in the garden’s archway. She was wearing a simple linen morning dress, undyed, that left her arms exposed. A belt of fine silver links drew the otherwise shapeless dress in at her waist. Her hair was gathered up casually and held in place with a pair of silver pins.

  “How convenient for Nestor’s killer,” I said.

  Christiana sighed and walked into the shade of the foyer. “I hope you’ve haven’t come here to throw that old accusation around again. If so, you know where the door-or the wall-is.”

  I chewed on a particularly nasty response for a moment, then swallowed it. There was no point in arguing about Nestor’s death again; or at least, not right now.

  “Someone tried for me again,” I said. “Another Blade-I mean, assassin.”

  One of Christiana’s eyebrows arched upward. “And you’re not trying kill me as a result? How novel.”

  “It’s worse,” I said, and I told her.

  By the time I was finished, she was sitting next to me on the bench, staring hard into the middle of the room.

  “So whoever knows about us is a magician,” said Christiana. Her voice made the stone bench we sat on seem warm and soft by comparison.

  “ ‘Us’?” I said. “Angels, Ana, this isn’t about you-I’m the one they’re trying to kill!”

  “By using my livery and forging my name,” she said. She turned and glared at me. “You weren’t followed here, were you?”

  “Give me some credit.”

  She nodded and turned back to the foyer. “In case you’re wondering, yes, I do realize they’re trying to kill you. But they used our connection to try to set you up the first time, so I’m involved as well.”

  “Only peripherally,” I said.

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  “What the hell do you want me to do, Ana? I came here to warn you-what else do you want?”

  “For a start? Bring me that magician’s head on a platter.”

  I laughed harshly. “Oh, by all means-we can’t have the Baroness Sephada inconvenienced. If I wasn’t motivated before, I am now.” I leapt to my feet. “Stay here and powder something while I gather up the Kin and scour the city!”

  “Don’t be an ass. I want whoever knows about us eliminated. That means I’ll help.” She held out her hand. “Give me the paper strips you were talking about.”

  “What?”

  “I used to be a courtesan and am still a dowager baroness-I’ve had some experience with secret letters and messages, Drothe.”

  I stared at her, hesitating.

  Christiana sighed. “Drothe, why did you come here?”

  “To warn you,” I said. “And to get some sleep.”

  She nodded. “Mm-hmm. And when was the last time you came through the front door?”

  “I…”

  “Drothe, you’re nearly asleep on your feet. You’ve been going for Angels know how long, and have a dead assassin and a Djanese magician in your home. But even with all that, I know you didn’t walk in here because you’re too tired to climb the garden wall.”

  “It is a high wall… ” I said.

  Christiana leapt to her feet. “Fine, dammit! Go ahead and be a stubborn son of a-”

  I couldn’t help myself; I started laughing.

  Christiana stopped and glared at me. Then she grinned just like she used to when she was eleven. It was good to see.

  “You bastard,” she said.

  “You’re still easy.” I reached into the pouch and pulled out the slips of paper. Little sister or no, she had a point-she dealt with codes and ciphers more than I did.

  Christiana took the scraps almost casually, but her demeanor changed as she looked them over. She held them up, frowning, and turned the papers this way and that. Finally, she went over to the entrance to the garden to stand in the sunlight.

  I resumed my seat on the bench and leaned my head back, Releskoi’s image perched above me. “Lay your odds on her not cracking them,” I said to the Angel. He didn’t take the bet. I chose to take that as a good sign.

  I closed my eyes.

  And awoke to Christiana kicking my foot.

  “Where the hell did you get these?” she said.

  I rubbed at my face, trying to wake up. The closest I managed was consciousness.

  “What?” I said.

  Christiana waved the slips under my nose. “These,” she said. “Where did you get them?”

  “I told you-off a smuggler and a turn-cloak. Why?”

  “Is that all you know about them?”

  I looked at the papers, then up at my sister. There was enough tension running through her for the both of us. I felt myself finally starting to wake up.

  “What did you find?” I said.

  “It’s what I didn’t find,” she snapped, turning away in a swirl of linen and perfume. “No codes, no hidden sequences, no secret writing. Nothing.”

  I noticed the room had changed while I was asleep. A low desk had been brought in, along with a chair and a small reading table. A handful of books were scattered across the table, some open, others piled at the corner. The desk held two more books, a candle, several bowls, and a collection of small vials and bottles. Beyond them, the garden was in partial shadow.

  Midafternoon, then. I’d been out for two hours at least.

  “These don’t make any sense,” complained Christiana, waving the strips in the air. “There’s not enough consistency for a code-you need actual writing, or at least repeating symbols, for that. I checked them against a mirror, in case they used a reversal or partial cipher, but that didn’t show me anything, either. And none of them matches up against one another, or against any common printing type I can find, so it’s not a text cipher, either.”

  “Invisible ink?” I said.

  “I tried the four most common reagents,” said Christiana, gesturing at the desk.

  “What about the less common ones?” I asked.

  “Poisonous, expensive, or both.”

  I thought back to the dead Blade floating in my bedroom. “ ‘Too dangerous’ and ‘too expensive’ aren’t necessarily limiting factors here.”

  Christiana shrugged. “Fine, I can test the others later, but I don’t think it will do us any good.”

  “Why not?”

  Christiana came back and leaned down over me. Nutmeg and musk, with an mild undertone of salt from her sweat, came to my nose. “Look at the line where all the writing stops before it reaches the far edge,” she said, handing me one of the slips. “That means whoever wrote this did something to the paper when he wrote on it, something that broke or stopped the writing at that point.” She straightened up and ran a hand absently through a loose strand of her hair. “If we want to break this, we need to physically do something to the paper-manipulate it in some way.”

  I stared at the ideograph fragments, the dots and lines that surrounded them, and the razor-edged strip of whiteness that ran along one edge, cutting through the marks. I could feel something trying to take shape in the back of my mind, something from long ago, but, when I reached fo
r it, it faded away.

  “Have you tried folding it?” I asked.

  “More ways than you can count. You can get a few marks to match up here or there, but the rest is still gibberish.”

  I leaned back against the wall. My shoulders complained, but I ignored them. “We have to be missing something,” I said. “These were meant for Kin, not imperial spies. If someone was sending written instructions to Athel and Sylos, I don’t think he’d make the cipher more complex than the message.”

  Christiana grunted and straightened up. She began to chew absently on her lower lip, twisting a strand of hair around her finger as she did so.

  I looked up at Releskoi. “Should have taken the bet,” I murmured to him.

  “What?” said Christiana.

  “Nothing.” I levered my way to my feet and walked over to the desk. “These other reagents for invisible ink,” I said, turning around to face my sister. “How hard are they…?” And I froze.

  She was standing, looking at me, arms crossed. The strand of hair she had been playing with now hung beside her ear. It had curled slightly from her worrying it.

  “Your hair,” I said, pointing.

  Christiana raised a hand self-consciously. “My hair? Drothe, what are you talking-”

  I looked from her to the mosaic of Releskoi-at his staff with the parchment spiraling around it. At his credo written on the parchment.

  Of course.

  “There!” I said, pointing up at the Angel. “The staff. And your hair. And my own damn habit of wrapping the paper around my own fingers. I should have seen it!” I brandished one of the strips. “You don’t fold it or hold it to a mirror or look for hidden writing,” I said. “You spiral it around something so the marks match up and form ideographs!”

  Christiana’s eyes went wide. “A scytale cipher?” she said. “Those haven’t been used in centuries.”

  “All the better,” I said. “Who would think of using something that old? You didn’t.”

  Christiana humphed but didn’t argue. “It makes sense,” she admitted. “All they would need is the same diameter rod, and they could wrap the paper to either write or read the messages. It’s certainly simple enough for anyone to use. Did either of the corpses have a baton or rod of some sort? Something innocuous, that no one would question their keeping on them?”