Douglas Hulick - Among Thieves

I crouched down beside him, keeping my knees out of the blood that covered the floor. He blinked his good eye slowly, briefly. After a moment, I realized he was winking.

I reached for my own blade and found I still had Shatters’s knife in my hand. Athel followed my look, then turned his lone eye back to me. He grinned as I cut his throat.

When I came walking back from the barrel, Shatters and his two boys were waiting. One of the apprentices had refilled the bucket. Shatters’s vomit-stained shirt was gone, revealing a mixture of knobby muscles and old scars scattered across his torso. Water still clung to his head and chest from where he had rinsed himself off.

“That was stupid,” Shatters said. A knuckle popped.

I didn’t say anything-I just rested my hand on the blued steel of my rapier guard and turned it to catch the light. It was sheer bravado; I wasn’t nearly good enough to take three of them at once. With luck, I might hold them off while I yelled to Degan for help.

Shatters followed my movement and smiled. “Jumpy? Ought to be, but I ain’t talking about my bath.” He gestured behind me. “I meant your meat back there. You shouldn’t have dusted him-I could have gotten more.”

“He was done talking.”

“So you say. I say he had more in him.” Shatters tsked and laid a thumb across one of his fingers. “Such a waste. I could’ve made that meat squeal”-pop-“till it was music.”

“Make music on your own time.” I wasn’t about to try to explain what I had seen in Athel’s gaze-Shatters took too much joy in his work to admit anyone could outlast him. “Just clean the place up and make sure the body’s found.”

Shatters frowned but nodded nonetheless. When Athel’s corpse turned up in a day or two, it would be missing the ring finger of each hand-street code for “This one betrayed his own.” Ages ago, the empire had cut off a thief’s thumb to mark him as a criminal; now, we criminals cut our own to mark them as traitors. Who says we don’t learn anything from polite society?

I stepped aside as Shatters and his boys moved past on their way to the corpse. I watched them for a moment, just to be sure they weren’t going to jump me, then continued back to where I had had my “conversation” with Shatters. Athel’s things were still heaped in a pile on the floor. Some of the water from the spilled bucket had run over to it. Sighing, I picked up the damp mass and held it away from my body, letting it drip freely.

They had taken the lantern with them. Only a single candle remained, perched on a nearby box. I set Athel’s things on a crate and looked at the candle, considering.

It was a mixed blessing, being able to see in the dark better than anything, save maybe a cat. In alleys, on rooftops, for stalking the night, the strange gift my stepfather, Sebastian, had given me was invaluable. But at times like these, with natural light and the temporary blindness it could bring a mere glance away, my night vision was an uneasy proposition at best.

That, and the risk of discovery, gave me pause. I didn’t relish trying to explain my examining Athel’s things in the dark should Shatters or his assistants return. The best edge was one you kept hidden, and this was mine. I’d never met anyone else who had night vision except for Sebastian, and he had given it up the night he performed the ritual that passed it on to me. I’d shared its existence with only three people since that night decades ago, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to bring Shatters into that select circle.

No. Convenient as it might have been to step off into the darkened warehouse and have Athel’s belongings limn themselves in a faint amber glow, now was not the time to take chances.

I moved the candle closer to Athel’s sodden possessions. I’d searched his things earlier, but not especially well. I had been counting on the questioning to give me the answers I wanted. Now, though, with nothing more than a name and a dead smuggler getting cold

…

I started with the clothes, wringing them out and checking for hidden pockets, lined seams, or false soles on the shoes. Nothing. The purse held a few coins-three copper owls and a silver hawk-and a scarred lead lozenge. I recognized it as an old pilgrim’s token from my grandfather’s time. It was triple-stamped with the three symbols of the emperor, one for each of his recurring incarnations. Whoever had originally owned this had completed the imperial pilgrimage route-no small feat, given it had stretched nearly a thousand miles. A series of border wars and an imperial decree had shifted the route since then, making these tokens a rare thing. I put the coins back in the purse for Shatters’s men to find, and pocketed the token.

The contents of Athel’s shoulder satchel hadn’t changed, either: a pipe, two thin candles (broken), a leather smoker’s packet, and a wedge of moldy cheese. Feeling the need to be thorough, I broke apart the pipe, crumbled the cheese in my hands, and upended the small packet onto the crate. The pipe held nothing but char; the cheese smelled dry and old; and the packet contained some finely shredded tobacco and three long, narrow scraps of paper twisted lengthwise to form simple pipe tapers.

I turned the shoulder satchel inside out, checking the lining and cutting open the seams for good measure.

Nothing.

Hell.

I leaned against the crate and stared into the darkness of the warehouse. Back behind me, I could hear Shatters’s men cursing as they moved something unwieldy-likely Athel’s body. I also heard someone call my name.

“Drothe?” It was Degan.

“Here,” I called.

I listened to him thread his way through the barrels and crates, then saw the glow that came with him. He must have taken one of Shatters’s lanterns. I squinted and purposefully turned my back to him, but the illumination still made my eyes burn. The place must have been dim enough to start awakening my night vision after all, even with the candle.

“Anything?” he said as he came up beside me.

“A name,” I said, blinking rapidly as my eyes gave one last fiery protest and then settled into normal vision. “Ioclaudia.”

“Old name,” observed Degan.

I nodded. “Know anyone who goes by it?”

“Nope.”

I nodded again. It would have been too much to hope for, anyhow.

Degan waited. I remained silent. “Tell me that isn’t all you got,” he said.

“That’s all I got.”

Degan set the lantern down on the crate and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Why is it always like this with you? Why is it never easy?”

“Luck?” I said. Degan didn’t smile. I sighed and reached for the lantern. “Come on,” I said, turning away. “The smell in here is-” I froze in midmotion. “Damn.”

Degan’s hand drifted ever so slightly toward his sword. “What?”

I set the lantern back down and leaned forward over the crate. There, on one of the pipe tapers, just visible among the folds and twists of the paper, was an ideograph.

I picked up the taper and carefully untwisted it. No, it hadn’t been a trick of the light. The symbol pystos, along with a host of other random markings, had been inked on the scrap of paper. Pystos meant “relic.” And near it, the block symbol immus, simple shorthand for “emperor.”

Degan bent down and peered over my shoulder. He chuckled.

“Luck, indeed,” he agreed.

I held the slip of paper up and slightly away from me, angling it to better catch the sunlight coming over my shoulder. It was about as wide as my ring finger and a little longer than my hand. Finely inked markings-lines, dots, odd angles, and curves-ran along the left half of the paper; the rest was blank. The ideographs for pystos and immus were jumbled in among the rest of the markings. Aside from those words, though, it looked like a bunch of insect tracks set down in ink.