Paul Kemp - Twilight Falling

When he neared his flat, Riven circled the block a few times to determine if he had a tail. He didn't. Satisfied, he headed for home.

His flat shared half the space in a one-story wooden building with a scribe-for-hire's shop. The scribe-Riven had never bothered to remember his name-owned the building and had let it to Riven only because he was afraid to refuse. The scribe made his living notarizing bills of lading and shipping contracts, and drafting documents for the illiterate. He also sold paper, ink, and writing quills. He and Riven had exchanged exactly one sentence since Riven had taken the flat and that suited Riven fine. Riven made the scribe so nervous that the man's ink-stained hands visibly shook anytime Riven walked in his direction. That too suited Riven fine. No conversation meant no questions.

The building stood at the corner of Mal's Walk and Drev Street, both narrow, dirty little cart roads near Selgaunt's western wall. Most Selgauntans held those who lived "under the wall" in contempt, but Riven felt at home there. He could have afforded a much nicer location, of course, but denied the urge. Luxury made a man soft, he knew, and needed only look to Cale for an example of the phenomenon.

The thought of betraying Cale and that little bastard Fleet had entered his mind, of course, but he had dismissed it. Mask clearly wanted him and Cale to work together, and Riven still owed Vraggen a handswidth of steel in his gut for that spell. More than a handswidth. He thought of the dark place that spell had taken him, full of shadows….

He shook his head. In any event, the surest way to get a go at Vraggen was to pair up with Cale, and if the half-drow and the rest of his crew got in his way, all the better.

He strode past the door to the scribe's shop, past his own door, and ducked down Mal's Walk. He didn't see the girls-they'd be along-and no one else was in sight. He pulled a slim dagger from a boot sheath, slid the blade between the shutters of his only window, and carefully lifted the latch. Silently, he pulled open the shutters and slid through the window.

Good habits, he told himself. Unless absolutely necessary, he tried to avoid obvious entrances and exits. With all the corpses he'd left in his wake, it paid to stay sharp.

No one was inside the two room flat. Riven's spartan furnishings took up little space. In the front room, a plain wooden table and chair stood near the hearth. An oil lamp and a water jug sat upon the table. Other than the hardware for the hearth and the girls' buckets beside the door, the room contained nothing else. His bedroom contained a wood framed bed with a feather mattress-his lone indulgence-with a wagon-trunk at its foot. That trunk held most of his personal belongings.

Around the room he had secreted the wealth he'd accumulated throughout his career in the Network: several diamonds behind a loose stone in the chimney, and four separate coin caches under the floorboards. He went to each in turn, removed the contents, and put them in his coin purse.

He was leaving; he knew that. Possibly, he would not return. Cale didn't see that yet, but Riven did. Whatever they were involved in, whatever Vraggen and this half-drow were scheming, it was bigger than Selgaunt. It had to be. Riven's dream visions had become more frequent, the pain in his skull upon waking more intense. Mask was preparing him for something….

A scratch at the door drew his attention, a chuffing at the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.

"Here I come," he said, smiling.

He rose and glided across the room. He checked the buckets-one filled with water, one filled with the boiled scraps he regularly purchased from a butcher on Tenderloin Street. Typically, he pre-paid by the month, and a butcher boy delivered the buckets of scraps every day or two.

He opened the door and the girls thundered in, tails wagging and tongues lolling.

He kneeled down to receive their charge and they nearly bowled him over. He rubbed each behind her ears.

"Hey, girls, hey. Good dogs, good dogs."

They licked him in greeting, fairly covering him in dog spit, while their tails wagged furiously. He fought through their affection to shut his door. The smaller of the two, a short-haired brown and black mutt with bright eyes, flopped onto the floor and showed Riven her stomach. Riven obliged her with a belly rubbing.

The larger brown hound with the gentle eyes, obviously the smarter of the two, left off Riven's affection and went for the buckets while the other was distracted with the belly rub. The smaller caught on fast, though. She rolled onto her feet and scampered over to the food. The larger made a hole and the two began to eat in earnest.

Riven slid near them and patted their flanks as they ate. He marveled at how gentle they both were. Most strays would squabble over food, and growl if they were disturbed while eating. Not his girls. He thought they might be a bitch and her daughter but he had no way of knowing for sure.

"I'm thinking I'll be gone for a bit, girls," he said, surprised at how sad those words made him.

He'd grown attached to his girls, as attached as he got to anything. They looked back at him, meat and drool hanging comically from their mouths. He scratched each behind the ears again. The smaller licked his hand.

"But I'll make sure you're cared for."

He had encountered the girls on his way home one night, perhaps two months before. Both dogs, obvious strays, had been as weak as infants and as thin as reeds. When Riven held out his hand and softly called to them, they had approached him timidly. But when he gently rubbed their muzzles and flanks, their diffidence vanished and they fairly overwhelmed him with licks. Since then, they'd been his girls, and they returned to his flat almost every day. He suspected that they lived in the alley nearby.

He'd never bothered to name them. He wasn't sure why. Maybe he would someday.

Riven had loved dogs since boyhood. Back in Amn, in a life that was so far removed from the present that it seemed to be someone else's past, he had been a kennel boy for Lord Amhazar, an insignificant but sadistic nobleman with a taste for women and violence. Riven's hours with the dogs had been the only happy moments in an otherwise harsh boyhood typified by episodic beatings and chronic hunger.

One morning, that nobleman had beaten him senseless for a reason Riven still did not understand. It was Amahazor's signet ring that had popped Riven's eye. Afterward, he'd left Riven for dead on the side of the road. But Riven didn't die. A passerby, a slaver out of Calimshan, had taken him in and for reasons still unclear to Riven, nursed him back to health, and trained him with weapons. Looking back, Riven realized that he owed that slaver much. He might have told him so if he hadn't put a punch dagger into the base of his skull over a decade before.

When Riven reached early manhood-even then he was already a highly efficient killer-he'd returned to the Amhazar estate in the night, murdered his former lord and the entire Amhazar family, then burned the place to the ground. He'd spared only the serfs and the dogs from the slaughter.

You can always trust dogs, he thought, looking at his girls as they licked the bucket clean. Dogs were utterly guileless. Dogs always stayed loyal. Not so with men, as Riven knew well from experience.

Absently, he rubbed them each in turn. They lay on their bellies on either side of him, full and content.

He would not betray the trust they had given him.

"Stay," he said to them, and he rose.

They gave no sign they understood, but both their tails drummed the wood floor.

"I'll be back."

He opened the door and walked next door to the scribe's shop.

The door was ajar so Riven walked in without knocking. The small shop was crammed full with shelves covered with parchment rolls, inkpots, quills, paperweights, and a host of other paraphernalia that Riven, who could not read and write, didn't recognize. The scribe, a thin, plain looking man with squinty eyes, sat behind a huge walnut desk on one side of the room. He was writing something on a piece of parchment and had not yet looked up at Riven.