David Chandler - Den of thieves

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.”