by Deck Davis
The other patrons didn’t seem to care. A group of elderly men were playing dominoes, two women were hunched close together with a bottle of wine on their table, and one man was sitting on his own with at least a dozen empty tankards in front of him.
Was that the Black Cleric? He didn’t look much like a cleric; no robes, no religious symbols. He just looked like a drunk.
Jakub walked over to the bar, where the innkeeper was cleaning a glass.
“Woah, no,” he said, seeing Jakub in his vagrant guise. “Not a chance. No begging allowed in here. See the sign?”
He pointed behind him, to a wooden board that read, No beggars, no charitie. Let patrans drink in piece.
“I just want a beer, the strongest you’ve got. I have coins,” said Jakub.
“You don’t look like a man with a full purse, and I don’t offer credit. See the sign?”
There was another sign - I dun offer no credit.
“A guy has to prove his wealth to you before you’ll turn your taps?” said Jakub. He took a silver coin from his bag and slapped it on the counter. “Here. One pint of Rose’s Golden, please.”
The innkeeper turned the coin in his thumb and index finger, bit it, and then nodded. He grabbed a glass and started to pull on a beer tap.
“Fancy a pie? Bake them myself. Something I’ve been practicing, and you might have heard about my recipes. A man’s only worth what he puts into life, I always say. Do nothing but pull beer taps, and that’s all they see you as. But create something, do something new, and you got yourself a life.”
“My purse is only going to stretch to the beer for now. Has the Black Cleric been in today?”
“Can’t say I’ve seen anyone with that name. Can’t say I’d tell you if I had. A man’s got a right to drink without people poking into his whereabouts.”
“You know what? I will take one of your pies. The smell is making my stomach dance.”
“Coming up.”
“And the Black Cleric? Think you might have seen him now?”
“Ahh, yes, now I remember. As it happens, that fella over there might answer to that name. See the one with the dozen tankards around him? I try to clean ‘em, don’t like my place looking like a hovel, but he gets tetchy. Best to just collect ‘em once he’s plastered and stumbled out into the gutters.”
“What’s he drinking?”
“He’s got an expensive taste. Don’t think your purse can take it.”
“Give me two of what he’s having.”
Jakub joined the Black Cleric at his table. The whole tavern smelled of spilled beer, but most of the aroma was concentrated here, in this nucleus of ale and tobacco where the cleric had seemed to have set up shop for a week’s worth of boozing.
“Fuck off,” said the Cleric.
Nice guy, thought Jakub.
“You look thirsty. I’ve seen what dehydration can do to a man,” he said.
The cleric pulled a chair out in front of Jakub. “Why didn’t you say so? Pull up a pew, my alcohol-bearing friend.”
“Thanks. Here,” said Jakub, passing him the beer.
The Black Cleric had black hair so long and coarse it looked like a witch’s wig. His beard was just as black, and looked like it had never been groomed. Jakub guessed that if he stared at it long enough, he’d see fleas leaping from hair to hair.
Maybe the Black Cleric has a Vagrant Blade of his own.
Although the academy didn’t offer cleric training, a few clerics had sometimes visited, so Jakub knew what they looked like. This man wasn’t it.
He had no cape, no cross, no book of holy spells on him. The only thing vaguely cleric-like were his eyes; they were pure white, not a speck of anything else in them.
“See the kid over there?” said the Cleric. “Watch the way he moves. All awkward, like a clown with a verruca.”
A boy walked through the tavern, bumping into tables. At first he looked drunk, but there was something deliberate in his drunkenness; he only bumped into the tables that had people sitting around them. The empty ones, he was sure-footed enough to avoid.
Each time he knocked a table he’d put his hands on the people around it, on their shoulder or sides, while saying a slurred “Sorry, sorry. Beg yer pardon.”
“It’s an act. He’s a pickpocket,” said Jakub.
“Should have known better than to think a vagrant wouldn’t have noticed. But if we’re being honest with each other - and I always say if a man doesn’t have honesty then he has nothing - you’re not a vagrant, are you?”
“If it looks like a vagrant, if its smells like a vagrant, then odds are it’s a vagrant.”
“You smell like the academy. Spent mana and boiled cabbage dinners. My brother sent you, didn’t he?”
“Your brother?”
He drank the rest of his drink in one gulp and slammed the glass on the table, rattling the rest of his collection. “You’ll probably know him as Instructor Irvine, master necromancer and possessor of a giant stick up his tight arse. He likes to check up on me. Pretends he doesn’t, acts like I’m the black sheep. Gets all uppity when I ask for extra roast potatoes at our family Christmas dinner. But he cares more than he lets on. There’s a heart beneath those stupid fucking checked shirts.”
“Irvine gave me this,” said Jakub.
“That’s his handwriting, alright. Didn’t think he’d send one of his novices to me, though.”
“Well, the thing about being a novice is that when the academy kicks you out, you lose the benefits that brings. Instructor Irvine said you might have work for me. I’m a few coins short of where I need to be. I don’t know what kind of work he thought you’d have for me, but…”
“What are you? Mage? Warlock? No, wait. If Irvine’s taking an interest, you must be one of his necros. See that boar on the wall? That big fucking ugly thing mounted on wood? Denny says he shot it on a hunt, but we all know he bought it so he could tell that story. Suppose he bragged to you about his pies, too? He buys them from a bakery on Royal Mile. The boar - bring it back to life, necro. Let’s see what you can do.”
Jakub’s Minor Creature Resurrection spell was only a level [2], so it was touch and go whether he’d be able to resurrect something the size of a boar. Not only that, but he only had a broken soul necklace with him, so he had no soul essence to use on a spell.
He wasn’t going to tell the Cleric that, though. No sense down playing his own abilities.
“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “One, it’d be a neat trick bringing something back when it’s missing a body. Two, the resurrection window-”
“The window has been shut longer than a nun’s knickers. Gods, you sound like Irvine. Fair enough, ex-novice-come-vagrant. Sorry, though, I don’t have anything for you.”
“Why would Irvine send me to you?”
“To instill false hope? To piss me off and ruin a perfectly good afternoon of drinking? What did you think I’d have for you?”
“I don’t know…some kind of cleric stuff.”
“The guardship sometimes bring me in to help on things. Kind of as an investigator, except without the lingering smell of tobacco smoke and sense of failed dreams. Murders, kidnappings, that kind of thing; they like someone who can divine from the Blacktydes.”
“And they use necromancers too, then?”
“Yeah. The love that spell, you know, the one where you can see through dead people’s eyes, or whatever.”
“Last Rites. It lets us see a person’s last moments.”
“That’s it. Handy for the guardship to know that kind of thing when a corpse washes up on the riverbank. There’s been nothing like that in the city lately, though. Or at least, nothing they couldn’t solve. Tough break. Now leave me alone to drink until the floors start shaking.”
Jakub left the cleric to his drink and headed toward the door. Since the cleric had no work for him, there was only one thing left; go and see Kortho.
As he neared the door, someone fell into him. Jakub p
ushed them away, to see that it was the pickpocket.
The boy tried to move away, but Jakub grabbed him.
“No. No you don’t.”
He quickly cheeked all his pockets and his bag. Satisfied the kid hadn’t stolen from it, he let him go.
“Watch it, tramp!” said the boy.
16 – Lightfingers
The others called him Lightfingers, which he really hated; in his line of work, it was the opposite of what he’d call a sensible nickname. Kind of like calling an assassin The Murder Man – it drew unwanted attention.
Kelvin liked to think about his job as a craft. He was like a magician in a way, in that to perform a trick he needed to use sleight of hand, the root of which was distraction. Knocking a table, spilling a drink, bumping into someone, anything that set a target off balance.
He was getting sick of it though. Every day was harder than the last. Not because he was scared of getting caught; at least in Dispolis the guardsmen didn’t punish theft by taking one of your fingers or hands. Not like back home, where a thief didn’t get to thirty without losing at least one of his digits.
No, it was the pressure. He was seventeen, and he had four children to feed. Not his, of course, but other urchins like him. Poor bastards who didn’t have families, who’d run away from the workhouses and only to find out that life on the streets was worse. Kelvin had taken them on, shared his food with them, and when they were old enough, maybe he’d teach them his craft.
“Better see what I managed to get…”
He turned into Greyash alley. As alleyways went, this was top notch; warm air blasted from the vents of one of the bakeries, and the whole alleyway was covered by an overhanging arch. He settled under it, out of view from the street.
“Two golds, three silver, four bronze. What’s this? Shit…a button.”
Not much of a haul, but it’d feed him and the kids for a few nights. He’d hoped for more because in a few days there was going to be some kind of parade, so the streets were going to be rife with guards and that meant his light fingers had to stay in his pockets.
Then, he remembered that he had stolen something else. From the vagrant.
He’d snatched something from the vagrant’s bag. The vagrant seemed wise to him, so he’d barely had time to take anything. The strangest thing was, when he’d reached into the vagrant’s bag, it’d seemed bigger than it should. Maybe artificed, or something.
He should have taken the damn bag itself.
He took his prize from his pocket, only to see that it was an envelope.
“Gods damn it.”
As he tried – and somehow failed – to open the envelope, he heard footsteps.
Three guys in robes were walking into the alleyway. Kelvin looked around, wondering if this was some kind of secret mage meeting point. You heard about that sometimes; places where mages gathered together and got up to all kinds of weird magic.
“That’s him,” said one of them.
He could tell from their builds that two were men and one was a woman, but he couldn’t see their faces. Whoever they were, they made him shiver a little. He couldn’t place it, but something unnerved him.
“I didn’t think we’d find him in a gutter,” said one.
“We tracked the envelope here. Henwright said he’d given it to the novice; this must be him.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s from the academy…”
Academy? Tracking?
Kelvin didn’t like it. The rule of the street was this; beg, steal, defraud all you like, but don’t go poking into other people’s shit.
He stood up. “Sorry, guys, I didn’t know anyone was coming here. I’ll leave you to it.”
One of them grabbed him.
“Hey, let go of-”
Something smashed into the back of his head, knocking the words from his brain before he could finish them.
He awoke later with a sore head and a ringing in his right ear. He had no idea how much time had passed. He only knew that he was now in a dark room, and that he was naked.
And the three robed weirdos were staring at him.
His head stung, he could taste blood on his lips, and being naked in front of these people and worrying what they were going to do to him made his cock shrivel.
“Where are your tattoos?” one of them said.
“Tattoos?”
“The glyphlines. Show me.”
“I don’t have any tattoos,” said Kelvin.
“Is Henwright playing a trick?”
“Who the hell is Henwright?”
The tallest of the three pointed at him. “Check him again. Every inch.”
And he did mean every inch, because Kelvin had to stand and hold in his fear while they checked every bit of him; his chest, arms, thighs, arse cheeks.
When they finished, one of them shoved him down onto the chair.
“Nothing. No glyphlines, no tattoos.”
“He’s got a mole on his thigh…”
“We’re not interested in a fucking hairy mole. We’ve got the wrong boy.”
“But he had the letter. It has to be him.”
“Boy,” said the taller one. “The letter you were holding - where did you get it?”
“Oh, err, did I…Listen; I didn’t know what I was taking. I just nabbed what I could. If the letter was yours, I’m sorry. Some old tramp had it.”
“A tramp? What the hell is Henwright playing at?” said the woman.
“He’s going to find out that a curse can be given back as easy as it is removed. Kill the boy, dump him, and for god’s sake; make it look like an accident.”
Kill him? They’d brought him here to strip him naked and kill him?
What could he do? He looked around, but he saw nothing he could use, nowhere he could go.
He started to panic. He pictured the children, alone where he’d left them under the bridge. They’d be pacing, asking each other where Kelvin was.
He started to tear up.
“I don’t have much, but it’s yours. Every coin. Just-”
“Gag him and strap him up. I have enough to think about.”
Kelvin struggled as the smaller man tied more rope around his chest, legs, and arms, so tight that he couldn’t move. He stuffed a sock into his mouth, pushing it so far back that Kelvin retched.
“I am an experienced torturer,” said the smallest one. “My work is centered around inflicting the maximum of pain and destruction upon a body. Do you really think I can make it look like an accident?”
“Hmm. I have had another thought. This lad clearly isn’t our necromancer, but we know that a necromancer expelled from the academy is in Dispolis. Tell me, what do the guardship do when they find a corpse?”
“They ask the necros for help.”
“Necros?” said the woman. “Did they never teach you manners, dear?”
“Sorry; necromancers. I know you hate me calling you that.”
The taller one nodded. “The novice was expelled from the academy, so he will need work. Soon, the guardship will need a necromancer’s help with their corpse. Kill this boy here, then take him to the trainyard and put him on the tracks. We want it to look like someone tried to make it look like an accident. That’ll create enough of a stink of foul play to have the guardship running for a necromancer’s help.”
“What then?”
“Then we wait and watch who goes to the guardship office. If it is a young necromancer who we don’t know, then we have our target and we’ll soon have our product.”
“All of this trouble for a necromancer. Why this particular one? Why not just find another?”
“Henwright says the boy has no family, few friends. Nobody to really miss him. Besides, we have orders to fill, and we need his special glyphlines.”
“So, we just kill the lad here? You sure?”
“Certain. And show his body a bit of respect when you carry him. He isn’t a bag of potatoes.”
17
Jakub was woken up
the next morning by someone knocking on his door so hard that it rattled. It must have jolted his neighbors in adjoining rooms from their slumber too, because each knock was met with a ‘shurrup, for God’s sake!’ and ‘knock one more time and I’m comin’ out there!’
This was what he got for staying in the cheapest place he could find. He was only surprised he’d been able to sleep at all; the guy in the room next door sounded like he’d been having an orgy, and his night-long grunts were met with the fake ecstasy-moans of the women until the early hours.
More thuds on the door made him want to fling his sword at it. He’d never been a morning person.
“I paid until ten. If it’s not ten in the morning, you can piss off,” he said.
“That you, necro?”
He recognized the voice, but he couldn’t place it. It always took his head a while to clear in the early hours.
“Necro?” said the voice.
More thuds.
“Alright, gods damn it, stop it. You’re going to have everyone in here out for my guts,” said Jakub.
He dressed in his black trousers, white shirt, and put a jumper on over it, and then he put on his boots. He didn’t plan on going anywhere yet, but when an unknown visitor called on you unannounced, especially when you hadn’t told anyone where you were staying, then it was wise to be ready to leave.
Next, he opened his artificed bag and put it on the table next to the wall. Then he took his sword and let the hilt poke out of the bag. Still mostly hidden, but easy enough to grab.
More thuds. “Necro!”
Another voice bellowed out, “Will whoever the fuck is outside stop that, or I’m gonna come out, cut your cock off, and feed it to the rats.”
“That sounded a little bit like a threat,” said the voice. “Better let me in, necro.”
Jakub opened the door to find the Black Cleric standing there, leaning against the doorway.
After seeing him the previous day with at least a dozen empty beer tankards around him, and knowing that he hadn’t even finished his day of drinking at that time, he was surprised that the cleric didn’t smell of beer this morning. He didn’t look hungover at all, and he had washed up a hell of a lot better than Jakub expected.