Douglas Hulick - Among Thieves

In that kind of environment, suspicion could fall on anyone-even on the people, like me, who were supposed to track rumors and informants.

“How loud are these whispers?” I said.

“Soft, for now.”

“Any idea where they started?”

Mendross shrugged. “Someone said someone else said his uncle knows a Cutter who overheard his sister’s husband talking to a guy who.. .”

“That’s not soft,” I said, feeling some of the tension drain out of me. “That’s damn near silent.”

“Call it what you want, but the whispers have been circulating for a couple days now. You know me-if something stays on the street that long, I pass it on.”

I nodded in appreciation and finally slipped the orange section into my mouth. Silent or not, the rumor was still something that could grow and get back to Nicco. Having him go on a rampage wouldn’t be good for any number of things, including my peace of mind. But mostly, it would be bad for business.

“Have you heard anything about anything big going down?” I said.

“No,” said Mendross.

“Any important corpses turn up?”

“Nope.”

“Anyone pawing at the edges of Nicco’s territory?”

“Not that I’ve heard of.”

“Me neither,” I said. “Which makes me think this is nothing. Snilches are too hard to recruit to waste on something small, and from what I hear, there’s nothing but small going down right now. There’s no reason for a Snilch to do anything that might get him noticed.”

“What if he made a tiny mistake and it got out?” said Mendross.

“There are no tiny mistakes when you do that kind of work,” I said. “Remember, this is Nicco’s organization we’re talking about here-a spy with half a brain would bend over backward to keep this quiet. Hell, I inform for the man, and the thought of his getting wind of this makes me nervous.”

Mendross considered it and shrugged. “You know the ins and outs better then I do,” he said.

Damn straight I did. But Mendross was right in one sense: I couldn’t just shrug it off. I looked out over the bazaar and decided.

“This could be nothing, or it could be a setup,” I said as I took another bite of orange. “Someone might be wanting to use this as an excuse to settle some old scores.” Or to start a power grab. Chaos in the ranks made for a wonderful distraction. “Put the word out that the rumors are just gutter-mumbles. If they die, so much the better. If they stick around, let me know.” And I hoped like hell they did die; otherwise, I’d need to track down who was behind the rumors before they got to Nicco.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

We went over the rest of Mendross’s news as I finished my breakfast. I filed some of what he told me away for later consideration, but ended up discarding most of it. It was a slow day on the street.

When we were finished, I made a show of wiping my fingers on a towel Mendross kept hanging on the side of his stall.

“All my best to Rizza,” I said as I picked up a fig and hefted it.

Mendross nodded contentedly at his wife’s name and took a step back. I cocked my arm and hurtled the fig at him, missing by inches.

“And don’t even think about coming up short next time!” I snapped, my voice pitched to be heard by anyone nearby. Mendross cringed and stammered apologies as Degan and I turned and walked away. I put an arrogant swagger in my step as I left.

The moment we exited the bazaar, I let the swagger drop and surrendered to a slow, almost dragging pace.

Degan yawned and scratched at his chin. “Do you still have things to do?”

I looked up at the sky. The sun was obnoxiously high-nearly four hours past rising. I dearly wanted to crawl in out of the daylight, but I had one more person to see, and now was the best time to do it.

“Yeah,” I said. “I have things.”

“Do you need me for them?”

“No.”

“Good, because I wasn’t coming, anyhow.”

“Hmm, maybe I need you after all.”

“Tough.” And without waiting for a reply, Degan stepped off into the crowd and headed home. I swear I could hear him whistling as he went, too. The bastard.

I watched him go for a moment, then turned in the opposite direction. I needed to talk to a man about a piece of paper.

Baldezar was a Jarkman, which meant he could read and write old dialects and modern foreign tongues, as well as produce forgeries and copies when the need arose. He was also a master scribe who ran a penman’s shop in the cordon next to my own. It was a big operation, with more than a dozen apprentices and journeymen working under his unforgiving eye. Baldezar would never sell you the contents of a trust, for that was what he considered the papers assigned him to be, but he’d happily knock off a forgery or copy of anything you brought to him.

The shop was bright and busy when I entered. The windows in the walls and the sliding panels on the roof had been thrown open to admit the morning sunlight. Tall, slanted desks covered the main floor. Most held an original page and the copy in progress side by side, but a select few played home to acts of individual creation. At these desks, the most skilled scribblers and illuminators plied their work. Each page, each line, was history in the making, art in progress.

I took a deep breath, savoring the smell of ink, paint, paper, and chalk. For me, this was the aroma of knowledge, of history, and I loved it. It didn’t matter whether they were copying histories or inventories; as far as I was concerned, there was magic in the air.

“A bit early for you, Drothe,” said a voice off to my side.

I turned to find Lyconnis coming toward me, a bundle of parchments in his meaty hands and quiet humor in his eyes. He was taller than I-not hard, that-and built more like a farmer than a scribe. Broad shoulders, thick limbs, heavy neck, and an open and trusting face that always made me feel vaguely uneasy. I’m not used to being around blatantly honest people.

“Late night?” asked the journeyman scribe.

“Does it show that much?”

“Afraid so.” Lyconnis gestured toward the back of the shop. “We can pull a stool over to my desk if you’d like-I’ve finished another chapter of the history.”

“The one on the Fourth Regency?”

“Is there any other?”

I licked my lips. It was tempting. The Fourth Regency was one of those periods in imperial history where legend met reality; where the recurring rule of Stephen Dorminikos was truly challenged for the first time; and where the first subtle cracks began to show in our emperor’s sanity.

By that time, the emperor had been on the throne in one incarnation or another for more than two hundred years. True, it wasn’t the six-century mark we had recently observed in Ildrecca, but his selection by the Angels to serve as our perpetually reincarnating emperor had been well established. He was the Triumvirate Eternal, the ruler whose soul had been broken into three parts so that he might forever be reborn as one of three versions of himself-Markino, Theodoi, and Lucien-each version following the next by a generation, to watch over the empire. So the Angels had decreed, and so it had been.

But that didn’t mean everyone had to be happy about it.

Like the rest of us, Stephen Dorminikos had started out mortal, and that fact wasn’t lost on people. If a man could be born-and even reborn-so the reasoning went, he could die, too. And he had-several times, in fact. And so the emperors had created the Regencies- appointees who ruled whenever one of the incarnations died before the next one could be found. In the case of the Second and Third Regencies, the gaps had come about through foul play and court intrigue; however, during the Fourth Regency, it had been a bout of the plague that killed off two incarnations of Stephen back to back. Innocent enough, and an eventuality the empire had long been prepared for, which was why the chaos that had followed was so surprising.