Among Thieves: A Tale of the Kin

by Douglas Hulick

  Shatters spit. “Screw,” he said.

  “That’s not a name,” I said. I stood and pushed his face into his own vomit with my foot, crushing his nose against the floor in the process. “Try again.”

  Shatters gagged and tried to wrench his head up. I let him after a moment.

  “Ioclaudia,” he gasped. “The name’s Ioclaudia.”

  I arched an eyebrow. It was an old-fashioned name; certainly one I wasn’t familiar with on the street. “Who is . . . ?” I asked.

  Shatters started on another coughing fit. I nudged him with the toe of my boot.

  “Who is?”

  “Don’t know. Athel wouldn’t say.”

  “What’s her connection with Athel? Was she his buyer?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Where is she?”

  Shatters shook his head.

  “What about the reliquary?” I said. “Did you find out where it is?”

  Shatters was rising to his hands and knees now, arms trembling but getting stronger every moment. “All he said was he needed to make some kind of swap. It sounded as if it came up suddenlike.”

  “And he used my reliquary?”

  Shatters nodded.

  Bastard. “What did he swap it for?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Anger had found its way back into his voice. “Shit,” he said, looking up at me. “You little shit. Do you know what my brothers will do to you for this?”

  I reached out and put his own dagger against his cheek. Shatters froze, staring at the steel. It was sharp; a rivulet of blood appeared without any effort on my part.

  “Don’t even think about making this personal,” I said. “You tried to shake me down, and I called you on it. It’s business. It’s over.” I moved the blade down, letting it linger beside his neck. “But if you insist on bringing in your fellow Agonymen, not only will I take it poorly, but Nicco probably won’t be too pleased, either. And I know you don’t want him mad at you.”

  Shatters paled at the mention of Nicco’s name. Niccodemus Alludrus was well-known for his temper, especially when he thought he was being crossed. Trying to cheat me was not automatically the same as trying to cross Nicco, but there were times when the lines between his and my interests blurred. This wasn’t one of them, but I wasn’t about to let Shatters know that.

  “Do we have an understanding?” I said. Shatters nodded his head as gently as he could, given the dagger at his throat.

  “Good.” I withdrew the blade and turned away, leaving Shatters to gather himself while I went to see Athel the Grinner.

  If I had had any second thoughts about treating Shatters roughly, they vanished as soon as I saw what was left of the Grinner. The Agonyman and his boys had moved on from Athel’s hands and feet after I’d left; now, there was precious little left on the smuggler that was not torn, cut, or mutilated in some way. Just seeing him hurt. Worst of all, he was still conscious . . . and looking at me.

  I kept my bile down, not for Athel’s sake, but because I wasn’t about to give Shatters the satisfaction. I took a deep breath, ran a hand down my mustache and goatee, and stepped over to the barrel.

  Athel’s breathing was ragged and wet sounding. One eye was swollen shut, but the other managed to keep me in sight as I came up beside him. I expected hatred there, or anger, or madness—anything but what I seemed to see: calm. Not the false serenity brought on by shock, or the stillness of exhaustion, but a quiet, almost-composed ease. I felt myself shudder beneath that placid gaze.

  Athel the Grinner, I realized as I met his eye, was done. There was nothing more we could do to make him talk; nothing left he was willing to tell us before he died. Letting Ioclaudia’s name out had probably been an accident, or a gift, and he wasn’t about to let that happen again—his gaze told me as much.

  I crouched down beside him, keeping my knees out of the blood that covered the floor. He blinked his good eye slowly, briefly. After a moment, I realized he was winking.

  I reached for my own blade and found I still had Shatters’s knife in my hand. Athel followed my look, then turned his lone eye back to me. He grinned as I cut his throat.

  When I came walking back from the barrel, Shatters and his two boys were waiting. One of the apprentices had refilled the bucket. Shatters’s vomit-stained shirt was gone, revealing a mixture of knobby muscles and old scars scattered across his torso. Water still clung to his head and chest from where he had rinsed himself off.

  “That was stupid,” Shatters said. A knuckle popped.

  I didn’t say anything—I just rested my hand on the blued steel of my rapier guard and turned it to catch the light. It was sheer bravado; I wasn’t nearly good enough to take three of them at once. With luck, I might hold them off while I yelled to Degan for help.

  Shatters followed my movement and smiled. “Jumpy? Ought to be, but I ain’t talking about my bath.” He gestured behind me. “I meant your meat back there. You shouldn’t have dusted him—I could have gotten more.”

  “He was done talking.”

  “So you say. I say he had more in him.” Shatters tsked and laid a thumb across one of his fingers. “Such a waste. I could’ve made that meat squeal”—pop—“till it was music.”

  “Make music on your own time.” I wasn’t about to try to explain what I had seen in Athel’s gaze—Shatters took too much joy in his work to admit anyone could outlast him. “Just clean the place up and make sure the body’s found.”

  Shatters frowned but nodded nonetheless. When Athel’s corpse turned up in a day or two, it would be missing the ring finger of each hand—street code for “This one betrayed his own.” Ages ago, the empire had cut off a thief’s thumb to mark him as a criminal; now, we criminals cut our own to mark them as traitors. Who says we don’t learn anything from polite society?

  I stepped aside as Shatters and his boys moved past on their way to the corpse. I watched them for a moment, just to be sure they weren’t going to jump me, then continued back to where I had had my “conversation” with Shatters. Athel’s things were still heaped in a pile on the floor. Some of the water from the spilled bucket had run over to it. Sighing, I picked up the damp mass and held it away from my body, letting it drip freely.

  They had taken the lantern with them. Only a single candle remained, perched on a nearby box. I set Athel’s things on a crate and looked at the candle, considering.

  It was a mixed blessing, being able to see in the dark better than anything, save maybe a cat. In alleys, on rooftops, for stalking the night, the strange gift my stepfather, Sebastian, had given me was invaluable. But at times like these, with natural light and the temporary blindness it could bring a mere glance away, my night vision was an uneasy proposition at best.

  That, and the risk of discovery, gave me pause. I didn’t relish trying to explain my examining Athel’s things in the dark should Shatters or his assistants return. The best edge was one you kept hidden, and this was mine. I’d never met anyone else who had night vision except for Sebastian, and he had given it up the night he performed the ritual that passed it on to me. I’d shared its existence with only three people since that night decades ago, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to bring Shatters into that select circle.

  No. Convenient as it might have been to step off into the darkened warehouse and have Athel’s belongings limn themselves in a faint amber glow, now was not the time to take chances.

  I moved the candle closer to Athel’s sodden possessions. I’d searched his things earlier, but not especially well. I had been counting on the questioning to give me the answers I wanted. Now, though, with nothing more than a name and a dead smuggler getting cold . . .

  I started with the clothes, wringing them out and checking for hidden pockets, lined seams, or false soles on the shoes. Nothing. The purse held a few coins—three copper owls and a silver hawk—and a scarred lead lozenge. I recognized it as an old pilgrim’s token from my grandfather’s time. It was triple-stamped with the
three symbols of the emperor, one for each of his recurring incarnations. Whoever had originally owned this had completed the imperial pilgrimage route—no small feat, given it had stretched nearly a thousand miles. A series of border wars and an imperial decree had shifted the route since then, making these tokens a rare thing. I put the coins back in the purse for Shatters’s men to find, and pocketed the token.

  The contents of Athel’s shoulder satchel hadn’t changed, either: a pipe, two thin candles (broken), a leather smoker’s packet, and a wedge of moldy cheese. Feeling the need to be thorough, I broke apart the pipe, crumbled the cheese in my hands, and upended the small packet onto the crate. The pipe held nothing but char; the cheese smelled dry and old; and the packet contained some finely shredded tobacco and three long, narrow scraps of paper twisted lengthwise to form simple pipe tapers.

  I turned the shoulder satchel inside out, checking the lining and cutting open the seams for good measure.

  Nothing.

  Hell.

  I leaned against the crate and stared into the darkness of the warehouse. Back behind me, I could hear Shatters’s men cursing as they moved something unwieldy—likely Athel’s body. I also heard someone call my name.

  “Drothe?” It was Degan.

  “Here,” I called.

  I listened to him thread his way through the barrels and crates, then saw the glow that came with him. He must have taken one of Shatters’s lanterns. I squinted and purposefully turned my back to him, but the illumination still made my eyes burn. The place must have been dim enough to start awakening my night vision after all, even with the candle.

  “Anything?” he said as he came up beside me.

  “A name,” I said, blinking rapidly as my eyes gave one last fiery protest and then settled into normal vision. “Ioclaudia.”

  “Old name,” observed Degan.

  I nodded. “Know anyone who goes by it?”

  “Nope.”

  I nodded again. It would have been too much to hope for, anyhow.

  Degan waited. I remained silent. “Tell me that isn’t all you got,” he said.

  “That’s all I got.”

  Degan set the lantern down on the crate and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Why is it always like this with you? Why is it never easy?”

  “Luck?” I said. Degan didn’t smile. I sighed and reached for the lantern. “Come on,” I said, turning away. “The smell in here is—” I froze in midmotion. “Damn.”

  Degan’s hand drifted ever so slightly toward his sword. “What?”

  I set the lantern back down and leaned forward over the crate. There, on one of the pipe tapers, just visible among the folds and twists of the paper, was an ideograph.

  I picked up the taper and carefully untwisted it. No, it hadn’t been a trick of the light. The symbol pystos, along with a host of other random markings, had been inked on the scrap of paper. Pystos meant “relic.” And near it, the block symbol immus, simple shorthand for “emperor.”

  Degan bent down and peered over my shoulder. He chuckled.

  “Luck, indeed,” he agreed.

  Chapter Two

  I held the slip of paper up and slightly away from me, angling it to better catch the sunlight coming over my shoulder. It was about as wide as my ring finger and a little longer than my hand. Finely inked markings—lines, dots, odd angles, and curves—ran along the left half of the paper; the rest was blank. The ideographs for pystos and immus were jumbled in among the rest of the markings. Aside from those words, though, it looked like a bunch of insect tracks set down in ink.

  “Cart,” said Degan from off to my right.

  I looked up and found myself a step away from walking into a parked baker’s cart. I sidestepped, but not fast enough to avoid catching my hip on a corner. Bread and rolls jostled from the impact, and the baker scowled as he made sure I wasn’t helping myself to any of his goods.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t let me run into the damn thing,” I said as I came alongside Degan, rubbing where I’d connected with the wood.

  “I considered it,” said Degan, “but it seemed a shame to ruin that baker’s day just for my own amusement.”

  “There’s a saying for friends like you, you know.”

  Degan laughed.

  We were in Long Brick cordon now, with Little Docks and its warehouses ten blocks behind and receding. A trace of the sea still hung in the air, but it was quickly being overpowered by the earthier smells of the cordon: filthy cobbles, sweaty day laborers, busy women on their way to the public fountains, and yes, the aroma of freshly baked bread. Groups of children rushed around carts and ducked between legs, adding to the frenzy of the early-morning traffic. I figured at least a quarter of the children were on the dodge—lifting goods, cutting purses, or spying out marks for their older partners.

  This was the edge of Nicco’s territory—my territory—and I marked my fellow Kin as I went. A Purse Cutter here, with her small sharp knife and deft hands; a Tail Drawer there, wearing a long cloak to better hide the swords he stole from other men’s belts; a Talker across the way, all fast words and plausible stories, setting up cons for the unwary; and a dozen other dodges as well. And everywhere, the Masters of the Black Art, begging bowls in hand, their faked maladies displayed for the Lighters as they walked by. A few Kin gave me discreet nods or a small signal of greeting. Most just got on with their business. I did the same.

  Degan cleared his throat. “So . . . ?” he said, indicating the slip of paper still in my hand.

  “Beats the hell out of me.” I folded it up and stuck it in my ahrami pouch. “Could be a code. Could be a cipher. Hell, it could even be a scrap of paper for lighting a pipe.”

  “A scrap of paper that just happens to mention an imperial relic?” said Degan. “Pretty convenient.”

  “It says ‘imperial’ and it says ‘relic.’ It doesn’t say anything directly about an ‘imperial relic.’ ”

  Degan stayed eloquently silent.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I don’t believe in coincidences like that, either, but the thing that really doesn’t make sense—”

  “You mean some of this makes sense?”

  “The thing that really doesn’t make sense,” I continued pointedly, “is Athel. Why did he stand the knife so well?”

  “Ah,” said Degan. “That.”

  “Yes.”

  Relic hunting was one of the riskier dodges out there. The empire frowned on people lightening its holy objects, let alone selling them, and they were none too gentle with those they caught in the act. It ranked somewhere below trying to actually kill the emperor, but above desecrating an imperial shrine, and the Kin who ply the trade know just what to expect if they get caught.

  That was part of why I only dabbled in the trade; but Athel had made an art of it. He was famous for having hidden prayer scrolls in sausage casings, floating olive oil on top of sacred water in cooking jars, and wearing a vestment sash wrapped as a turban. But he’d also burned a four-hundred-year-old tract on imperial divinity rather than let the imperial relic trackers—the Brothers Penitent—find it on him. Athel hadn’t been the kind of man to fold in the face of adversity, or to risk himself needlessly. He had known how to cut his losses, which was why it hadn’t made sense for Athel to stand against Shatters for so long.

  “Why would Athel keep silent?” I said out loud. “What was the point?”

  “Money?” said Degan.

  I shook my head. “The relic was worth a lot,” I said, “but Athel knew he was dustmans from the moment I caught him. Why keep quiet if you know you aren’t going to be around to enjoy the hawks?”

  “Vindictive?” suggested Degan.

  “How do you mean?”

  “If he knew you were going to dust him, why tell you anything at all? He knew he was dead either way—maybe he just wanted to rub your nose in it one last time.”

  “That wasn’t Athel’s style,” I said.

  “People’s styles change under a knife, Drot
he.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but Shatters did more than enough to break a simple stubborn streak. You don’t put up with that kind of pain just to be petty.”

  “Petty men do.”

  I thought back to the look in Athel’s eye at the end. “He was a far cry from petty,” I said.

  Degan sighed. “All right—what about loyalty?”

  “From one of the Kin?” I laughed out loud.

  “I’ve known one or two to keep their word,” he said, eyeing me sidelong. “Some even make a habit of it.”

  “Usually to their regret,” I said drily. I looked around again, spotting a few of my fellow Kin on the street. Would any of them stand the knife for one of their fellows, let alone a local boss? Would any of them be able to stand it like Athel had?

  Once, maybe. When there had been a Dark King. When Isidore had stood at the head of all the Kin, controlling a criminal empire that spanned the underside of the true empire. The stories told how he had formed and shaped us, turning a morass of petty criminals and local bosses into a tightly run organization. Nothing was stolen that he didn’t get a cut of; no dodge pulled he couldn’t get the details on; no betrayal or cross he wouldn’t make someone pay for. Kin didn’t prey on Kin, Isidore had said, and, for a short time, until the empire—and the emperor—had taken notice, it had even been true.

  Emperor Lucien, maniacally jealous of his power in those days, couldn’t abide the thought of anyone else claiming sway over a kingdom—even a dark one—within his empire. All power flowed from the imperial throne; to set up any lesser authority within the empire without his permission was a challenge to his supreme authority. And so the aging incarnation had created the White Sashes, to set his personal hunters apart from his gold-sashed house guards and the black-belted legions. They had poured through the streets of Ildrecca and beyond, those White Sashes, dragging the Imperial legions in their wake. Kin had filled the gallows like apples in autumn orchards. Those the Whites couldn’t find rope for, they left lying in the streets. Entire families were cut down because one member was part of Isidore’s empire within the empire. And Isidore was marched through the streets and butchered like a sheep over the course of a day and a night, kept alive by Imperial magic to make sure the message struck home.