The Thief Who Went to War

by Michael McClung

  “I love you too,” I muttered, and snatched it and my package up, got to my feet, and staggered my way across the empty street just as an alarm bell started up behind me, somewhere in the tower.

  I lurched my way to the corner as quick as I could, and turned past the blank brick wall of the Old Barracks and into the Foreigners’ Quarter proper. It wasn’t the Rookery, but the streets were narrow and maze-like, and I knew them very, very well. Certainly better than the gentlemen, or Gammond. Whoever won this round would have a time cornering me again. Mister Hope’s employers, on the other hand, were probably about to be delighted, but you can’t have it all.

  I went down the Thirst, heading for Lantern Alley. From there I had half a dozen options to lose myself. Between the stab wound in my thigh and my abused heels, I went as fast as I could, which wasn’t as fast as I would have liked.

  Behind me, the night sky lit up briefly in a horrid shade of puce, and I heard fresh screams. The alarm bell faltered. I decided that I could, in fact, go faster.

  Lantern Alley was as dark as ever – oh, it had plenty of lanterns, but because Lucernans think they’re funny, not a single one was ever lit. Some were used as flower pots. Most were dusty, empty chuckles. I hurried down to the crumbling shophouse that Rashy Ghent dealt out of. It was the nearest entrance to the low road that I knew of.

  A scabrous teenager was guarding the door, trying to look intimidating. He stood as I approached, bright-eyed from the tail end of a hit of hellweed. He had a length of wood on one hand with a few nails driven into it.

  “Fuck you want?” he asked. I wasn’t in the mood, so I kneed him in the crotch and entered the hellweed den.

  Hellweed had a one-two punch. First it set your mind to drifting, giving you an immense sense of well-being and ease. Often it gave you visions or dreams which, I had been told, were better than any reality you would ever experience sober. Which was all well and good, I suppose. But what hellweed gave, it always took away.

  The comedown made you frenetic, possessed of an immense and often paranoid energy. You went from an idyllic high to a hellish, driven low. Food wasn’t something a hellweed fiend was much interested in, either. Or bathing. Or, eventually, talking in coherent sentences.

  I wasn’t there to partake. Rashy Ghent’s den housed more than addicts. It also had a way down into a disused tunnel that had been built not long after Lucernis’s founding, and then forgotten by most. It was a good bet that the tunnel had originally been part of the city’s defences, since it terminated at the old armory, but that end had been blocked up centuries before. Whatever; you leave a tunnel just lying around and shifty types are bound to discover and make use of it. They called it the low road, and I wanted in. It beat taking a stroll through the Foreigners’ Quarter – I was pretty sure that such a stroll would quickly devolve into a running battle for me. So, Rashy Ghent’s.

  The ground floor was empty except for a couple of customers slumped side by side against the wall and a third sprawled out on the filthy tiles, pipe clutched tightly in his grimy hand. The place smelled of stale sweat and piss. And hellweed. I climbed the stairs at the back. At the top, I was confronted with another of Rashy Ghent’s employees who was sitting in a chair beside a door. He stood at the sight of me, scowling. He was considerably larger and healthier-looking than the scab at the front door. His balls weren’t made of any sterner stuff, though. I stepped over him and opened the door.

  The proprietor was in bed, and the bed was the only furniture in the room. Two women were with him. I could see where he got his nickname from, and wondered how his companions couldn’t. I mean, their faces were so close to it.

  “Damn,” I said, shuddering. “Hellweed really is a hell of a drug.”

  Rashy and his bedwarmers didn’t hear me. Behind me, the muscle was getting to his feet and grunting threatening things, so I closed and locked the door. Then I went over to the bed, much as I didn’t want to, and got Rashy’s attention.

  A knife at your throat will help you focus, no matter what your situation.

  “Hey, Rashy. How are you doing?”

  He looked up at me. The girls hadn’t even noticed my sudden appearance. I tried not to look down there. It’s not that I’m a prude – well, I am, - but trust me, what was happening below his navel would only excite someone with a fetish for skin conditions.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “Nah.”

  “Do I owe you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then what the fuck?” He wasn’t afraid. It might have been him sampling his own wares, but his reaction was one of faint annoyance. The muscle was beating on the door, now. He’d break it down soon.

  “I need to use your low road.”

  “I don’t kn-urk.” So I drew a little blood. He’d live. If he didn’t get stupid.

  “I don’t have time, Rashy. Where is it?”

  “It’s downstairs. Where do you think?”

  “All right. Tell your man to ice his balls and show me.”

  “Why should I do shit for you?”

  “Because I could have cut you from ear to ear, and I still might if you don’t. And because you’re about to be visited by representatives of the crown, and I just warned you about it, and so now you owe me.” I mean, they’d be coming after me if they did show up, but Rashy Ghent didn’t need to know that.

  “How do you know?” The door was starting to splinter.

  “The fuck does it matter?”

  “The watch’re getting greedy, then. They’ve been paid.”

  “It ain’t the fucking watch, Ghent. If it was the watch, I wouldn’t have bothered fucking about with the likes of you.”

  “And who the hells are you, again?”

  I sighed. “Let’s review. You’re the one with no weapon and no pants. I’m the one with a knife and precious little patience, you thick fuck.”

  He thought about it. Then he unceremoniously pushed the women away. Yes, they’d been at it the whole while. Yes, it made me uncomfortable.

  Not bothering with a sheet or any other covering, he got out of bed and shouted “Oi, Matcher! Quit beating your meat against my door. Law’s coming!”

  The pounding stopped. Then a muffled “You all right, boss?” came through the splintered panels.

  Rashy unlocked and opened the door. “No thanks to you, you giant turd. Sweep the place, starting with those two.” He pointed a thumb at his bedmates.

  Matcher gave me the death glare. “What about that one?”

  “Maybe later. Get the fuck to work.” Matcher did, grabbing each of the women by the hair and dragging them out of the room. They didn’t fight. They barely protested. Hells, they barely knew what was happening. If I’d ever had any small desire to give hellweed a whirl, that night killed it.

  Ghent picked his shirt off the floor and began to dress.

  “Kerf’s balls,” I said. “If I was you, I’d start with my trousers.”

  “You talk some shit for somebody who’s got a scratching post for a face. Might want to buy a sack, cut some eyeholes in it.”

  “At least my blemishes don’t weep pus. Hurry the hells up.”

  He didn’t, but he wasn’t putting on layers, so he was done quick enough. I followed him out the door and down the stairs. There, Ghent’s two minions were ejecting the last of his customers. They closed and barred the door.

  “What have you got in that bundle?” Ghent asked me.

  “Underpants. I can lend you a pair. Give, rather. I wouldn’t want ‘em back. Where’s the passage?”

  “I know who you are, now. That face of yours, it’s, what’s the word? Distinctive. There’s lots of folk looking for you. They’ll pay well, and they don’t much care what shape you’re in.” His two minions flanked him, and both had their pig stickers out and their tough faces on.

  “You don’t want to do this, Ghent. It’s not gonna end the way you think.” I just wanted access to the low road. I didn’t want to kill anybody. Not even
these shitheads.

  But I would.

  Gods help me, I would. You don’t aim to just wound or disable in a knife fight, unless you want to die. And I did not want to die.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Drop your knife and we’ll just rough you up a bit. What happens after they come to collect you is a problem for the future, eh?”

  “Last chance, Rashy.” I dropped my bundle of clothes. “Don’t fucking speak. Just point me to the entrance to the low road, and we’ll call it a night.”

  He opened his mouth to say something stupid and I lunged forward and slammed my knife into the hollow of his throat.

  His toughs were used to dealing with hellweed fiends. Even in my battered condition, I was like nothing they were used to facing. They were slow, painfully slow, and shocked to see their boss spouting blood. The big one barely got his knife up in the time it took me to pull the knife out of his boss and put it into his carotid artery. I jumped back. Ghent went down to his knees. The big one, Matcher, clapped a hand to his neck and, give him credit, took a couple steps toward me with his knife in a business-like posture. The skinny one froze, his mouth hanging open.

  “You fucking killed me, you bitch,” Matcher wheezed, and then thrust towards my gut. He cut only air.

  “Didn’t want to. Dumb bastard.”

  He took a wild swing, stumbled, fell. I kicked the knife out of the one hand while his lifeblood leaked past the other. I looked at the skinny, scabrous one.

  “Don’t be a dumb fuck like these two. Where’s the fucking exit?”

  He started to tremble. Ghent went face-down on the filthy tiles, choking on his own blood.

  “Time’s short, boy. Tell me what I want to know. Or come at me, or fuck off.”

  He chose the last option. I let him go; I wasn’t going to knife him in the fucking back. I closed the front door after him and put the bar back in place, and started searching for the entrance to the tunnel. I knew I’d find it – it was one of the things someone in my trade got good at – but the question was how long it would take. Visini wasn’t going to let me dawdle.

  Most likely it was in the floor itself. Besides the stairs, the ground floor was one big open space, about five paces wide by thirty deep. The disgusting floor was tiled in a green and white checkerboard pattern. The tiles themselves were cheap; indifferently painted and badly fired, more of them were cracked than not, from what I could tell.

  Matcher stopped moving, and slumped in that final way. Both he and Ghent had become the source of slowly widening pools of crimson. But next to Ghent’s head, the blood was spreading in only one direction. On the other side, the blood flowed into a crack between tiles, and the crack never filled up.

  I dragged his corpse out of the way, and stuck my blade in the crack. It met resistance about two inches deeper than it should have. I looked at Ghent. His eyes were open, and glassy with death.

  “You dumb bastard. It was right there. You should’ve just told me.” He was a piece of shit, but I hadn’t wanted to kill him.

  I didn’t want to kill anybody.

  I prised up the cover, and saw there was a makeshift wooden ladder that went down into the dark. It was spattered with Ghent’s blood. I went and got my bundle of clothes and dropped it down the hole, and then began my own descent, pulling the cover closed after me.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I’D ONLY BEEN IN THE low road once before, and not this part of it. I’d just started contracting with Fengal then and he’d brought me along on a handoff, sort of showing me what was what. I hadn’t needed to be there, but I didn’t trust him at that point. To be fair, I didn’t trust anybody at that point. I’d followed him down a ladder and trailed him down the dark, dank tunnel and held the lantern as he passed over the package that I’d stolen for the customer to the customer, and got a sack of coin in return. Wordlessly, he’d handed me the sack, showing me far more trust than I’d shown him. Then we’d gone back and counted the coin in silence. He’d taken his fifteen per cent and passed the rest to me.

  “It’s good to be cautious,” he’d told me then, pouring us both a drink. “It keeps you alive. But trust, judiciously applied, lets you prosper.”

  I’d bristled at the time, despite his genial demeanor. But I’d listened, and kept his advice in mind. Maybe he saw that, even through the bravado. Fengal’s true talent is reading people, after all – it’s how he’s lived and prospered for so long in a shady business.

  Back then, I could count the number of people I trusted on one hand, and still have the majority of fingers left over. Sure, nowadays I still only needed one hand. But I did need all the digits to make the tally. Which is a long way of saying I’d grudgingly and slowly taken Fengal’s advice to heart.

  Too bad I couldn’t trust him, or anyone in the city just at the moment. Fucking Blades. Fucking dumbfuck Ghent. Fucking... fuck.

  I got to the bottom of the ladder and sat down in the pitch dark and let the shakes take me. In the moment, I had always been able to do what needed to be done. No hesitation. Hesitation got you karked. Bellarius had taught me.

  But afterwards, when whoever it was that needed it was dead and everyone else had fucked off – that’s when the shakes came and, sometimes when I was younger, the puking. I still did the dance with nausea. Bellarius had never been able to break me of it, nor had anything that followed after. Theiner’d told me it meant I was still human. When I’d pointed out he didn’t get the shakes after a rumble or a duel, he’d told me he went home and cried in his pillow.

  Liar. He didn’t have a home. Or a pillow. None of us did.

  Eventually the shakes passed. I cast about with blind hands until I found my wardrobe, still bundled neatly in its canvas. I stood, tried to spit the sour out of my mouth, and set off for the far end of the tunnel. It was slow going in the dark. I walked blind and slow, my fingers brushing the rough stone wall as a guide.

  I knew of three entrances to the low road, though there were certainly more. Rashy Ghent’s had been one. The second, the one that Fengal and I had used back when, was in the basement of a bakery, and unless things had changed, sacks of flour would be stacked on top of it. I’d be lucky to find it in the dark anyway.

  The third was at the far end of the tunnel. When they’d built it, the tunnel had connected the Armory to what had been, at that time, the Lower Bailey. But time had worked its magic, the city had expanded, and expanded again, and the Lower Bailey had ceased to have any defensive relevance, and became the Old Bailey, though everybody called it the Plague Keep. It now took up most of one side of First Wall Road.

  It had been used for many different purposes over the centuries, most of them I neither knew nor cared about. The last thing it had been used it for, though, was a plague hospital, before I was born and long before I came to the city. Thousands had died within its walls, in agony. Or so I had been told.

  It had sat empty since forever, because when you mixed the chance of lingering plague death and the chance of a shit-ton of ghosts in one location, the value of a property went straight into negative territory. Of course, the crown didn’t care much, and was content to let it crumble. It’s not like they had to pay taxes. Or maybe Morno was just keeping it in his pocket, for when the next plague arrived. Whatever, it was a derelict space that not even the roughest of sleepers was willing to avail themselves of.

  That could also have been because the place was physically quite literally a fortress, of course, and they hadn’t left the doors unlocked when it was abandoned. You’d have to be pretty determined to get over the curtain wall and into the courtyard, and even more motivated to find a way into the tower keep from there. Coming from the tunnel, I only had to pick a lock.

  The loosely affiliated criminal underground of my adopted city hadn’t just claimed the tunnel; not being idiots, they’d also seen the value of the Plague Keep for a whole host of unlawful purposes. From temporarily storing goods that had fallen off the back of a wagon or a ship, to asking pointed questions
of reluctant individuals, to meetings where the territory needed to be neutral, the Plague Keep served as a sort of communal workshop for the more organized elements of the Lucernan underworld. Or at least the ones who weren’t superstitious.

  All of which meant that the tunnel entrance to it would be in working condition – the lock would be pickable, not rusted solid. Or so I was counting on.

  My stroll through the dark took approximately forever. The longer I walked, the more anxious I became that one of the many people I did not want to meet would find their way down to the Low Road. In a sane world, the chances of that happening would’ve been between slim and none, but if there was one thing I had learned, it was that events had no problem tying themselves into knots to please the Blades. Someone would follow, somehow. Or, if I was truly fucked, someone would be waiting for me at the other end.

  Whoever it was, I hoped it would not be Gammond. Of all of them, she scared me the most. I tried to think positive – maybe the gentlemen had sorted her. But the memory of Arno walked with me there in the dark, reminding me about luck, its flavors, and what not to do with it.

  “I know, old man,” I muttered to his ghost. “No need to remind me. There wasn’t a word you said that I ignored.”

  Eventually my blind journey met an abrupt end, when I ran into something unyielding. Questing fingers told me it was a wooden door. After a little more searching, I found the keyhole. I dropped my package, sat down on it, and struggled with my bootheel.

  When you’re as short as I am, nobody much remarks on a somewhat generous bootheel. I was happy to let anyone who wanted to think it was a little vanity on my part. In reality, you could keep all sorts of small but useful things secreted in them. Things like the gems in my left bootheel. Things like the lockpicks in the right one.

  Also, they made me a little taller.

  Eventually I got the picks out and into the lock. The dark didn’t matter. Arno had trained me with a blindfold, and it was all about feel and understanding how the guts of the things worked anyway. This one was an old warded lock, with one simple ward, but the latch was a heavy bastard. I got it eventually, but the drawback of having a set of picks short enough to hide in a bootheel was sacrificing leverage in such a situation. There was barely enough pick left sticking out to get a grip on. It was a pain in the ass, is what I’m saying. Or to be more accurate, a pain in my fingertips.