David Chandler - Den of thieves

It also led him past the King’s Gate, so called because it opened on the road to the royal fortress of Helstrow, a hundred miles away. Malden paused a moment to muse that Helstrow might as well be on the far side of the moon. He had never traveled more than a mile in any given direction in his life. He could not, bound as he was by the city’s walls.

The gate stood twenty feet high-tall enough for knights to ride through with their lances raised. It was made of the same bluish stone as the city wall, and on this side was fronted by a massive triumphal arch celebrating some military victory or other. Malden doubted anyone living in the Stink could have told him what battle it commemorated. He let his gaze wander briefly over the carved figures of soldiers fighting wicked elves, but what really drew his eye was the land beyond the gate.

It was green, for one thing. Green grass grew out there, catching the sun. It was so wide and open, and not a soul in sight. Malden took a few steps into the narrow tunnel of the gate and found the guards there didn’t even look at him. No, of course not-they had no brief to keep people from leaving. The people of Ness were free to go outside if they pleased. They just weren’t free to come back in.

The sun on the grass out there looked so warm and inviting. A summer breeze played with the blades of it, stirring them gently, then letting them fall back. Behind Malden, in the Stink, all was noise and grime and desperation. Out there it would be quiet, he thought. Quiet and peaceful and “Make way, you little fuck!” someone shouted, and suddenly a brown and black dog was snarling at him, its wet teeth snapping shut on his cloak. Malden looked up in startlement and just had time to jump back as a mounted man came thundering through the gate, heedless of where his horse’s hooves fell. The owner of the dog, a footman wearing the same coat of arms as the rider, shoved Malden back against the wall of the gate with a cudgel. “There’s people of importance trying to use this gate, and you’re just standing here gawking?”

Malden tried to stammer out a reply. “I assure you, I was simply-”

The footman knocked him down with the cudgel, and probably would have beaten him senseless if he hadn’t needed to run off then, to keep up with his master. Down in the dust Malden felt at his ear where the footman had struck him. He was glad his fingers didn’t come away bloody.

“Oh, just get out of there,” a guard said, grabbing his arm and pulling him away from the gate. “You’re lucky I don’t dump you outside and let the reeve take you.”

Lucky indeed. The green grass out there might look inviting, but the second he trod on it he would have legally become a villein. A slave, in all but name.

But if he had a little money to his name-if he could purchase even a small plot of land in some cheap place… the story would be different. And that was what Cutbill had promised him, wasn’t it?

Cutbill had said he was a prisoner in Ness. Malden had never felt that way before-now he could think of himself in no other terms. A prisoner. And Cutbill had the means to set him free.

It could happen tonight, for the price of a little risk.

The rest of the morning he spent cutting purses down at the fish market by Eastpool. He needed to earn back all he’d spent or be penniless by nightfall. He supped on cockles at a little shack by the river gate and then rented a room in a doss-house frequented by sailors. He would gladly have gone back to his own rooms above the waxchandler’s but he had to make sure none of Cutbill’s people saw him when he met Cythera later.

Much of his movement during the day had been for this purpose. He knew that Cutbill would have spies watching him, especially if he seemed bent on some specific task. Then there would be the unaligned thieves, the pickpockets and grifters of too small account to join the guild. They tended to follow Cutbill’s people around the way gulls will follow a galleon, hoping to pick up scraps left behind by the more established thieves. Malden knew he had to make sure none of either sort were aware of what he was doing, so he spent the day acting as if he had nothing planned at all. There had been no reason to rise early, and in fact he spent the afternoon asleep in his rented bed. It was just past midsummer, with the festival of Ladymas less than a fortnight away, and the sun would not set until well into the evening.

When he rose, he brushed the bed’s freight of insects from his hair and clothes, then climbed out the window and up onto the roof of the doss-house. He was relatively certain no one was following him, but to be sure he crossed three streets by the rooftops, leaping silently from one building to another. When he dropped down to street level again he was at the very edge of the river Skrait. He traveled northward again, upriver, by moving from pier to dock to wharf-hundreds of them stuck out from the riverbank, as each house along the Skrait had its own. He ended up deep in the Smoke, the region of manufactories and workshops where tanners, papermakers and bookbinders, hatters, blacksmiths, brewers, and bakers all plied their trades. The shops stained the air with their fumes and turned the river black with their dumping, and the smell was intense-the region downwind of the Smoke was called the Stink for good reason. It was here that Malden was to meet Cythera.

He had time to consider what he was doing. He had time to wonder if he was mad, or if he truly expected to live through this. He had time to think of that green grass beyond the gate, and how good it would feel under his feet. Eventually the sun went down and he had no more time to think.

When she came for him, gliding out of the vapors in a tiny boat she rowed herself, she asked him if he was ready. He spoke no word, but simply dropped into the boat and grabbed a pair of oars.

As they hauled away from the Smoke and up the river toward the Golden Slope and the Spires, the docks and piers that stuck out into the water grew fewer in number. The river narrowed and grew faster, so they had to row all the harder. The water turned clean again, with only the occasional floating bit of sewage or debris to mar its churning surface. The river Skrait had driven its channel right through the northern half of Castle Hill, creating a winding canyon through half the Free City. Conforming to the slope of the hill, the ground along the riverbanks grew higher until it had to be held back by retaining walls, so that eventually they traveled between two high and sloping walls of ancient brick, with moss slowly eating away its mortar. Here and there a tree had taken root directly into the bricks, and its branches swayed over them, its leaves making the moonlight flicker through the mist that hung over the water.

The river bent away from them, concealed by the rising wall. Malden saw a glimmer of light. “Hold, someone’s coming,” he whispered, and reached back to grab Cythera’s arm. He was strangely hurt when she yanked her arm away before he could touch it.

What he saw took all his concentration and kept him from thinking why. A long boat came nosing around the corner-little more than a dugout, really, its sides well-patched. An old woman stood in the stern, poling the boat downriver, while half a dozen children leaned over the thwarts. They skimmed the water with long hooks, snatching at every piece of jetsam they passed. One held an oil lamp just above the surface, illuminating a milky patch of water.

“Move aside and let them go past,” Malden said. Cythera steered her boat over toward the last of the docks on the southern side of the Skrait. One of the children raised his dripping hook in thanks.

“What are they looking for?” Cythera asked, her voice a tight whisper, no louder than the rustling of leaves.