D. Jackson: Thieves' Quarry

“Are you sure there isn’t something else you want me to do?” Diver asked. “Maybe follow Spectacles, or his big friend?”

“I’m sure,” Ethan said.

“Right.” Diver drank the rest of his ale and stood. “Best be heading off then. I have an exciting day at the wharf ahead of me.”

“Sleep well, my friend,” Ethan said.

Diver nodded, but lingered by the table. “I really am sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“It can’t happen again, Diver. It’s not just my livelihood I’m risking by letting you help me. It’s my life, and yours too.”

“I understand.”

Ethan smiled. “Good. Get some rest.”

Diver left the tavern, raising a hand in farewell as he passed Kelf. Not long after, Kannice came to Ethan’s table, as he had known she would.

She sat and took his hand. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked.

Ethan chuckled. “Diver would prefer that I didn’t.”

“I thought as much. That’s why I asked you.”

“I won’t bother you with the details, but the upshot is that Sephira learned of my work for Mister Short from a girl Diver knows, and it cost us a few pounds.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing to be done about it now.”

“She could have killed you.”

“Sephira has had ample opportunity to kill me, if that’s what she wants,” he said. But Kannice was right. It could have been far worse. For Tanner it nearly was. He wondered if he had been too quick to let Diver work with him again.

“You know what I mean,” Kannice said. “I understand that he’s your friend, but you’re best off leaving him to the wharves and doing your thieftaking on your own.”

Sound advice. He would have been wise to take it.

“You’re already letting him help you with something else, aren’t you?”

She knew him as well as she did the wood grain of her tavern’s bar, and she was as smart as anyone he had ever known. He would have been well served to have her work with him, but she was too clever for that.

“It’s not a job,” Ethan said, an admission in the words. “I saw something tonight, and I just want to make sure that Sephira isn’t causing more trouble.”

She glared at him, lamplight shining in her bright blue eyes. “And you thought it would be a good idea to let Derrey tag along as you meddle in Sephira Pryce’s affairs.”

Strange that it hadn’t sounded half as foolish when he himself said much the same thing. He didn’t like to admit that loyalty to a friend could be a fault, but perhaps he had been too quick to forgive Diver.

“Honestly, Ethan, sometimes I think his stupidity rubs off on you, like it’s contagious or something.”

She shook her head, got up, and started toward the bar. Halfway there, she stopped, heaved a sigh, and walked back to his table. Halting in front of him, she offered a contrite smile. “I didn’t mean for that to come out the way it did. I just remember what’s happened in the past when you’ve crossed her.”

He remembered, too. Over the years, Sephira’s men had beaten him to a bloody mess, stolen his money, and come close to killing him more times than he could count. “I’m not going out of my way to start a new fight with Sephira Pryce. I promise. But one of the men I saw in here tonight is a conjurer, and I think I overheard him and his friend talking about Sephira. I don’t like the idea of her having access to spells.”

“I can see that.” She tilted her head to the side, a coy smile curving her lips. “Are you staying tonight?”

“I’d like to, if you don’t mind having a man as foolish as me in your bed.”

She grinned and draped the towel she was carrying over her shoulder. “It’s never bothered me before,” she said, and walked away.

Strange, dark dreams troubled his sleep. At first he was chasing Tanner through the narrow fog-shrouded byways of the South End. Soon, though, he was the one being pursued. He couldn’t see who followed him, but he knew it had to be Sephira and her men, and he knew as well that they were intent on killing him.

Before long, though, he had stopped running. The bespectacled man stood before him, a knife in his hand, blood on his forearm, and the words of a spell on his lips. Ethan grabbed for his own blade and fumbled with his sleeve, but he knew his own spell would come too late to block the fence’s assault.

Which may have been why he felt so disoriented when he awoke suddenly to what felt like a mighty wave of conjuring power. It seemed to rise from the earth itself, like the deep rumble of thunder after a flash of lightning. The entire building trembled with it. Or did it? At first Ethan thought he was dreaming, and even after he opened his eyes to the faint morning light seeping into Kannice’s bedroom around the edges of the shuttered window, he couldn’t tell if what he had felt was real or imagined. His heart labored in his chest, and he took several long breaths, trying to calm himself.

Kannice stirred beside him. “Whassamatter?” she asked in a muffled, sleepy voice.

Ethan kissed her bare shoulder. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

But he was already wide awake. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his body tense as he waited for another pulse of power. None came, and as the minutes dragged by he began to doubt that he had actually felt the first one. It would have taken a powerful conjurer to cast such a deep spell, and there weren’t that many in Boston. At least, not among the people he knew.

His thoughts turned once more to the foreigner he had seen downstairs in the Dowser the night before. His awareness of Ethan’s conjuring marked him as a speller. But Ethan had no reason to think that the bespectacled stranger was powerful or skilled enough to cast a spell as strong as the one he had just felt. Such an accomplished conjurer would have known what kind of casting Ethan had used the night before, and would have left the tavern rather than continue a conversation that, for good reason, he didn’t want others to hear. A speller with such abilities might even have determined exactly who in the tavern had cast the listening spell.

But if Sephira’s friend hadn’t cast the spell this morning, who had? Tarijanna Windcatcher, a self-described “marriage smith,” was a powerful speller and made no effort to hide the fact that she conjured. Janna, though, did most of her conjuring at night; the one time Ethan had gone by her place before midmorning, he had woken her with his knocking. Janna had been none too pleased.

Gavin Black, an old conjurer who lived on Hillier’s Lane, gave up spells long ago, or so he claimed. From what he had told Ethan, it seemed he had done most of his conjuring as a younger man while sailing on merchant ships and captaining his own vessel. But he had long since made his fortune, and though Ethan had spoken to him about conjuring, he had never known him to cast a spell.

The other conjurers he knew of in Boston weren’t skilled enough to work such powerful castings.

If the spell had been real.

Ethan closed his eyes again, trying to remember what he felt in the instant before he woke. At first all that came to him was the physical sensation, the feeling that the air around him, the bed beneath him, the walls of the room, were all reverberating with a single tone, as if God himself had struck some enormous bell. But sifting through his memory of those first few sensations, he realized that he had awakened feeling vaguely uneasy, though whether because of his dreams or something inherently dark in the casting, he couldn’t say.

His pulse had slowed, but still Ethan knew that he wouldn’t get back to sleep. He swung himself out of bed and began to pull on his clothes.