Den of Thieves (16 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

I
t took Malden the better part of the day to scrub the shit out of his clothes. He couldn't afford to hire a washerwoman, and he certainly didn't want to answer any questions she might have had, so he did it himself down by the river Skrait, rubbing his cloak against smooth rocks until its color was almost back to normal and it didn't stink. When the time came, he told himself—when he was in Cutbill's firm employ, and able to earn for himself—he would never have to wash his own clothes again.

Perhaps it would happen tonight.

He had been very worried after leaving Castle Hill that he might be arrested at any moment. The torturer got a good look at his face, after all, and could have reported his description to the watch. So he had spent the predawn hours slinking from one darkened part of the city to the next, spying on every cloak-of-eyes he could find, watching them to see if they were alerted and searching for a thief. And they had been—a woman, in a velvet cloak, in a little boat. Cythera. They were looking for Cythera.

Which perhaps explained why she had not been waiting for him when he left the pipe and unceremoniously fell into the filthy river. He supposed he could not blame her for fleeing once the guards spotted her. In the midst of the confusion in the palace above, they would be unlikely to listen to whatever story she spun for them. She could have ended up in the strap herself.

He would just have to make contact with her or with Bikker somehow, and make proper arrangements for handing over the crown. Which might be difficult if they were being sought by the watch—most likely they would have gone to ground. Still, he possessed ways to find them the authorities lacked. It would just take a little digging.

On his way back from the river he decided, though, that he could afford to rest and lie low for a day. He was exhausted from his nocturnal jaunt, and his hands ached and desperately needed to be idle for a while. He was also starving, as he hadn't eaten since the day before.

So he took his time heading home. Down in his part of the Stink, the river ran flat and wide through a district of fishermen's homes, all built on stilts to weather the annual springtime flood. He climbed up a bank thick with salt grass, where coracles and punts lay overturned, the tar between their timbers softening in the sun. The fishermen sat in their boats, to keep them from being stolen, waiting for the tide to turn. In the meantime they laughed and joked amongst themselves as they repaired their nets with thick, scarred fingers. They eyed him warily but without comment. Surely it wasn't the first time they'd seen a furtive figure, his clothes drenched with river water, come up the bank and slinking away in the early morning light. He hoped it happened often enough they wouldn't remember him when he was gone.

A short flight of stairs brought Malden up to the high street, where he bought a day-old loaf and three gulps of wine ladled out of a barrel. It was better fare than he often ate, but he was hungry enough to spend the extra coin. He picked apart the bread as he wended his way up the street, careful not to step in anything that might ruin his newly clean shoes. The houses here leaned over the roadway, their upper stories built out so far they were nearly touching. Even in the midday the shadows were thick under the eaves. He sat for a while on a horse trough to finish the meal, and watched the comings and goings of his neighbors.

The people of the Stink dressed plainly, and few among them had clean faces—in fact, most bore the pockmarks of long-healed disease, or other signs of bad diet and unsanitary living. None of them could read or write, and by the age of twenty-five even the most comely of girls looked old and stooped.

“ 'Ware below,” someone shouted from above his head, and a cobbler's apprentice in the street had to dodge a cascade of garbage and filth poured out a second floor window. His leap sent him sprawling into a sawyer and they both went down in a heap, the woodchopper's load of firewood spilling out onto the cobbles. The man pulled the boy's ears for that, and demanded that he help pick up the wood, but the boy merely made a rude gesture and hurried on. Across the street a goodwife stepped out into her dooryard, her face flushed from the heat in her kitchen. She fanned herself with her apron for a moment, then hobbled back inside and back to her endless tasks. She had to work constantly to feed her family, and to have enough left over to sell so she and her husband could make the rent.

These people were miserable, and their lives meant nothing. Malden had never felt like one of them, even if he lived among them. And yet he wondered, as he often did, what his life could have been had he tried to be an honest man.

Not, of course, that he'd had much choice in the matter. The son of a whore—the bastard son of a whore—could never rise far. He had learned both letters and figures as a child, and kept the books for his mother's house, but such skills were useless to one of his station. No merchant would ever have trusted him to add up accounts. By the time he'd left the brothel, he was too old to apprentice in any lucrative trade. He could have given himself over to unskilled labor, and broken his back unloading ships or carrying goods to market for farmers too poor to own a cart. He thought he would not have lasted long at that business, though. He would have turned to drink, to soothe his sore muscles, and wasted that tiny pittance of money he earned.

He finished the last of his bread and got up again. He headed up a side street, a narrow, winding passage between two closes, piles of houses built around tiny, stinking courtyards full of livestock. He heard voices from all around him, snatches of conversation dripping from every window thrown open to catch a breath of air. Hundreds of people lived in the closes, pressed into a space the size of a rich man's parlor. Some of the houses were six stories high. Imagine, he thought, to every day go down to the river to fetch water and bring it back up all those stairs. He saw in his mind's eye an endless course of pails, sloshing and losing a bit of their contents with every step they climbed, a river of water moving up and down inside those tall houses every day. And every pail needed a poor blighter to carry it.

He shook his head and hurried up the street. His own room was in the next block over, above a waxchandler's shop. The shop turned out candles, whole barrels full of them every day made of beef tallow that stank when it burned or more expensive and reliable beeswax. His room stank always of paraffin, and the stairs leading to it were used to store extra spools of wicking and blocks of rancid tallow. Still, the room at the top of those stairs was warm all winter from the heat of the wax kettles underneath, and he didn't have to share with anyone else. He headed up the exterior stairs to his door and lifted the latch, thinking only of his bed. It was a simple mattress stuffed with straw and sagging in a frame of ropes. He wondered if he would care enough to tighten them before he climbed inside. He wondered how long he would stay awake once his head touched the scratchy sheets.

He hurried inside and closed the shutters. It wouldn't be the first time he'd slept through an afternoon, wishing to be rested for the night to come. Yes, just a few hours with his head down and then—

Thief. Hearken to me, thief
.

The damned crown!

When he first touched it, it had spoken to him. During his escape from the dungeons it had mostly been quiet, but only because there was enough noise to drown out its voice. Now, when his room was still, when he was alone with his thoughts and his exhaustion, he could hear it whisper to him.

It never stopped.

Thief, I can help you. I can save you from all dangers. Simply listen to what I have to say. Thief! Listen to me!

Malden stormed over to the middle of the room, where he'd hidden the crown beneath the loose floorboards. He stamped on the spot, hard enough he thought he might stave in the boards and ruin his hiding place. Like a man pounding on the floor to tell his downstairs neighbors they are too loud.

I've seen what you desire, thief. And I can help you get it. I ask only one thing. Place me upon your head.

His stomping was of no use. The damned thing would be quiet just long enough to let him crawl into his bed. Then, before he could even close his eyes, it would speak again, inside his head where he could not block it out.

Thief, put me on. Place me on your head and I shall tell you secrets. Thief, I can tell you where treasure is buried. I can tell you how to make wealth out of thin air, how to acquire all the riches you desire. Thief! I can make you free!

The thing had hardly stopped talking since he stole it.

And much worse—he was starting to believe the things it said.

All he had to do was put it on his head. All he had to do was wear it for just a moment and it would tell him anything he wanted to know. It would tell him why Bikker and Cythera wanted it so badly. It would teach him all the secrets of the Burgrave.

And so much more, thief. I know the way to a woman's heart. The witch's daughter can be yours, thief. I can make her obey your every command. I can make her long for you until her body aches for your touch. Just put me on.

The crown wouldn't let him get a wink of sleep. Long before dark he surrendered. Not to its suggestions, of course, but to the fact that he would go out again, as tired as he was, and find Bikker or Cythera immediately.

It couldn't wait another hour.

Chapter Thirty-Three

F
inding Bikker was easily enough done, for a man with the right connections.

Malden headed across the city again, this time taking the bridge that ran high over the Skrait to the Royal Ditch. He kept clear of the Goshawk Road there—that place was only for the sons of rich men, idle and carrying too much coin for their own good. They would have been an attraction for a man with his deft fingers if not so well-guarded. At every corner of the Goshawk Road armed men lounged, looking out for people like Malden. The guards, employed by the gambling houses and upscale brothels of the Road, would take him down an alley and beat him senseless without bothering to ask any questions first.

Besides, Malden's destination was in a far more humble part of the Royal Ditch. A part of the city he knew very well. He should, since after all it was where he'd grown up. As he headed down Pokekirtle Lane, a few haggard whores leaned out of doorways to shout propositions at him, but he ignored them. Too drunk to recognize him, they let him pass without impugning his manhood too severely.

Malden had to knock on the door of the Lemon Garden for ten minutes before he was answered—and then only from a window on the second story. Elody, the madam of the house, leaned out into the dusk, her shoulders barely covered by a frayed silk shawl. She clucked her tongue down at him. “Sorry, love, we're not open yet. Come back after dark.”

“Afraid a customer will see the pox sores on your rump if they aren't hidden by darkness?” Malden asked.

Elody's painted face turned dark with anger—until he stepped back away from the door so she could see him. Then a wide grin split her face, showing her missing teeth. “Malden! It's been ages!”

It was true. It had been years since he'd returned to his childhood home.

Elody slammed the door shut, and he heard her racing down the stairs to get the door. She must have alerted the others inside to his presence, because half a dozen girls were squeezed in the portal when it opened, all of them giggling and simpering for him. He favored them with a warm smile, and a dozen soft hands pulled him inside and shut the door after him. The older “girls,” some of whom had worked alongside his mother, tousled his hair and poked him in the ribs to see if he'd gained any weight. The younger doxies reached for other parts of him, only to have their hands slapped away by Elody.

“He isn't here for that,” she scolded, “you spavined sluts. Malden's not a
customer.
He's
family
. He could have girls younger and more talented than you for the price of asking but he never does.”

“Maybe he just hasn't tried someone his own size yet,” a slender girl said.

“Or maybe he doesn't like seafood,” one of the oldsters told her. “You might try washing it out after you use it all night.”

“Maybe he doesn't like girls.”

“You do like girls, don't you, Malden?”

“Don't you like me?”

“Learn some manners!” Elody shrieked. “Mirain, fetch him some wine. Gerta—you get some pillows together, make him a pile to lie on. The rest of you go finish putting your faces on, it's only an hour till we open. You don't get paid for fawning over our boy! Malden, Malden, it's good to clap eyes on you. How you've grown. Come in, come in!”

Elody was a madam who knew more of hospitality than any ostler. After all, she'd been entertaining men all her life. She let him take her plump arm and directed him into the courtyard garden that gave the house its name. A single withered lemon tree swayed there over piles of freshly strewn rushes. It was here the tupenny whores entertained their clients—the penny trulls (called penny uprights, sometimes) never bothered to lie down. In the rooms above, which had curtains instead of doors, wealthier clients might be entertained by girls who advertised themselves as virgins (unlikely) or by their varied specialties, which ranged a wide gamut.

Malden was led beneath the tree and provided with a bed of cushions and a cup of mulled wine. It wasn't very good, but he pretended to sip at it to appease his hostess. She smiled and saw to his every need and asked a million little questions about his life since leaving this place that had once been his mother's house. These questions he answered only vaguely, or with outright lies—Elody knew perfectly well how he earned his living, and wasn't asking for real information anyway.

He imagined he could have found this same reception in any brothel between the Golden Slope and the city walls. One of his jobs when his mother had still been alive was to run errands back and forth between the various houses of prostitution, and he learned early on that whores had three special talents other women lacked: one was the obvious, but another, less widely advertised, was that they took care of their own. They had to—even by the liberal standards of the Free City of Ness, a working woman was on the absolute bottom rung of the societal ladder. If they had problems, they turned to one another to solve them, because no decent citizen would ever stoop to aid a whore. The children of whores were treated like royalty among their number—because outside the walls of the brothel, they would be treated worse than livestock.

“It's been so long,” Elody said, playing with a curl of her hair. The henna she used for dye left it thin and fragile, but she could never stop playing with it. “Why didn't you come back sooner?”

Malden smiled at her but made no answer. When he left, when he'd grown too old to be a baby of the house, when the previous madam of the place shoved him out in the streets, she'd not been unkind but was firm. There was no place for him there any longer. The house that had been his only home when he was a boy had suddenly seen him as a seed between its metaphorical teeth, and spat him out into the streets of Ness with as little ceremony. He could still remember the look on the faces of Elody and the other “girls” that day. They'd fought with themselves not to show him any pity. And they'd won.

For a while afterward, while Malden tried to find honest work—and then when he began his life of crime—he'd sworn to himself he would never return.

Now, seeing how Elody received him, he realized what a fool he'd been.

The madam patted his hand and let his silence go. She filled it with her own words instead. “So much has happened that I must tell you about. Wenna had her baby, she's a pretty little thing, and Gildie actually made good on all her promises, and bought out her contract, and is living with a wood-carver now, she's an honest woman at last. She who was the most scurrilous of commodities once, as you'll no doubt remember.”

“Really? I thought she was all bluster, that one.”

Elody laughed. “Nothing stands still for long these days. Even old baggages like me can change our ways when the wind blows—oh, and have you heard the latest? It's all the talk today. The Burgrave's tower fell down! It seems a wonder, even now when I've had time to grow accustomed to the notion. Eight hundred years it stood. They say it was lightning that done for it.”

“I hadn't heard,” Malden said.

“You must be the last.” She squinted at him suddenly. Malden tensed, thinking she might guess he'd had some hand in the tower's collapse. She was a shrewd woman, Elody—one had to be to get to run a bawdy house in Ness. Could she see it written all over his face? “There's something different about you,” she said finally.

“I'm the same as ever,” he protested.

“No. What is it? What do I sense here?” Her face opened wide with a bright smile. “You've met a woman! You must tell me all, at once!”

Malden's shock could not be overestimated. “I—I—ah—yes,” he finally said, simply glad to change the subject, not thinking overmuch on what he said. “But—how did you know?”

“You've combed your hair!” Elody said, exploding in laughter.

Malden reached up and touched his short hair. It was true he'd groomed himself before heading out that morning. He'd wanted to look presentable when he turned over the crown. It did not occur to him that he had done so thinking that he would see Cythera again, but—

“It's nothing,” he protested. “She's a beauty, and far beyond what I might hope to attain. I've done nothing but make a fool of myself when I'm around her. Surely she's not interested.”

“Some women like that,” Elody told him. “But I can see your discomfort talking on this, so I'll let it be. For now. Tell me, Malden, why you've really come here,” she said, a sparkle in her eye. He knew he hadn't heard the last of this. “I know you aren't here just for advice on love.”

He set his cup on the ground and looked up at a shriveled lemon hanging from a branch above him. “I'm looking for someone. Either of two people, actually—a man and a woman.”

“We've plenty of the latter, to meet all requirements,” Elody japed.

He smiled and looked her in the eye. “How much of this place does Cutbill own?” he asked. He still wished to keep the master of thieves as far out of the job as he could manage, just as Cythera and Bikker had asked.

“That scrawny weevil? None,” she insisted.

“In truth?”

Elody sighed. “You know we're not the finest house, nor the most lucrative. Truth be told, we've fallen on hard times, Malden. Cutbill could buy this place ten times over, doors, windows, coneys and all, and not feel the pinch. He never made so much as an offer. He steers clear of us because he doesn't want to absorb our debts.”

Malden nodded understandingly. “I'm not sure if the people I'm looking for were ever clients of yours . . . or of any woman plying the trade. But perhaps you've heard tell of them.” That was the third great talent of the harlots: they heard things. Men were famous for talking in moments of extreme relaxation. The working girls tended to share the juicier bits of gossip they acquired with each other. Had the Burgrave himself a dark secret to hide, if he whispered it into the ear of his favored concubine at midnight, for certain it would be the small talk of streetwalkers in the Stink by midday.

“Let's see what we can learn.” Elody offered him a hand to help him rise from his cushions and led him up the stairs to the private rooms, where the girls were getting ready.

Once there, he described the shifting tattoos on Cythera's cheek to a girl who billed herself a Barbarian Princess (in truth, she was only tanned by the sun). While a trull twice his age coated her face with white lead to hide her wrinkles, he spoke of Bikker's acid-spitting sword. A girl of fifteen put powder of belladonna in her eyes while he elocuted on Cythera's ability to appear from thin air. When she was done, she looked as surprised as he'd been on the roof of the university, but she had no news to share with him.

It wasn't until he reached Big Bess's closet that he found what he was looking for. Bess was taller than Malden by a full head and broader through the shoulders. She wore a tight bodice that made her substantial bosom look as big as Castle Hill. Perversely enough, her specialty was for dwarves—the diminutive craftsmen liked their women sturdy, and far from home they would settle for Big Bess's powerful frame. It seemed they weren't the only ones.

“A bit wild, but a smooth talker, you say. Big sword over his shoulder, oh, aye.” Bess grunted. “He leaves his chain mail on when he ruts.” She rubbed red powder onto her cheeks to make them look permanently flushed, then smeared some between her breasts as well. “You say he's called Bikker? Milles is the name he uses, but of course it's not what they call him at home. He doesn't come often, but when he does I make him pay for the full night because I know I'll be bruised and no good for anyone else in the morning.”

“I imagine we're speaking of the same man,” Malden told her. “Bess, do you know where he lives? Or at least where I might find him?”

“Are you going to kill him?” the trollop asked while gluing on a set of horsehair eyelashes. “Because I won't have that on my conscience.”

“No, no,” Malden said. “Perish the thought. He owes me money.”

“Ah!” Bess exclaimed. “In that case—”