George Martin - Rogues

Pombrine made a despairing lunge, bottle and glass tumbling to the floor and spraying wine, but the package slipped through his clutching fingers and was whisked smoothly upward out of his reach.

“Guards!” he roared, shaking his fist. “Thief!”

A moment later he realized, and his rage turned in a flash to withering horror.

Ishri would soon be on her way.

With a practiced jerk of her wrist, Shev twitched the parcel up and into her waiting glove.

“What an angler,” she whispered as she thrust it into her pocket and was away across the steeply pitched roof, kneepads sticky with tar doing most of the work. Astride the ridge and she scuttled to the chimney, flicked the rope into the street below, was over the edge in a twinkling and swarming down. Don’t think about the ground, never think about the ground. It’s a nice place to be, but you wouldn’t want to get there too quickly …

“What a climber,” she whispered as she passed a large window, a garishly decorated and gloomily lit salon coming into view, and—

She gripped tight to the rope and stopped dead, gently swinging.

She really did have a pressing engagement with not being caught by Pombrine’s guards, but within the room was one of those sights that one could not simply slide past. Four, possibly five, or even six naked bodies had formed, with most impressive athleticism, a kind of human sculpture—a grunting tangle of gently shifting limbs. While she was turning her head sideways to make sense of it, the lynchpin of the arrangement, who Shev took at first glance for a red-haired strongman, looked straight at her.

“Shevedieh?”

Decidedly not a man, but very definitely strong. Even with hair clipped close, there was no mistaking her.

“Javre? What the hell are you doing here?”

She raised a brow at the naked bodies entwined about her. “Is that not obvious?”

Shev was brought to her senses by the rattle of guards in the street below. “You never saw me!” And she slid down the rope, hemp hissing through her gloves, hit the ground hard, and sprinted off just as a group of men with weapons drawn came barreling around the corner.

“Stop thief!”

“Get him!”

And, particularly shrill, Pombrine desperately wailing, “My package!”

Shev jerked the cord in the small of her back and felt the pouch split, the caltrops scattering in her wake, heard the shrieks as a couple of the guards went tumbling. Sore feet they’d have in the morning. But there were still more following.

“Cut him off!”

“Shoot him!”

She took a sharp left, heard the flatbow string an instant later, the twitter as the bolt glanced from the wall beside her and away into the night. She peeled off her gloves as she ran, one smoking from the friction, and flung them over her shoulder. A quick right, the route well planned in advance, of course, and she sprang up onto the tables outside Verscetti’s, bounding from one to the next with great strides, sending cutlery and glassware flying, the patrons floundering up, tumbling in their shock, a ragged violinist flinging himself for cover.

“What a runner,” she whispered, and leaped from the last table, over the clutching hands of a guard diving from her left and a reveler from her right, catching the little cord behind the sign that said Verscetti’s as she fell and giving it a good tug.

There was a flash like lightning as she rolled, an almighty bang as she came up, the murky night at once illuminated, the frontages of the buildings ahead picked out white. There were screams and squeals and a volley of detonations. Behind her, she knew, blossoms of purple fire would be shooting across the street, showers of golden sparks, a display suitable for a baron’s wedding.

“That Qohdam certainly can make fireworks,’ she whispered, resisting the temptation to stop and watch the show and instead slipping down a shadowy snicket, shooing away a mangy cat, scurrying on low for three dozen strides and ducking into the narrow garden, struggling to keep her quick breath quiet. She ripped open the packet she had secured among the roots of the dead willow, unfurling the white robe and wriggling into it, pulling up the cowl and waiting in the shadows, the big votive candle in one hand, ears sifting at the night.

“Shit,” she muttered. As the last echoes of her fiery diversion faded she could hear, faintly, but coming closer, the calls of Pombrine’s searching guards, doors rattling as they tried them one by one.

“Where did he go?”

“I think this way!”

“Bloody firework burned my hand! I’m really burned, you know!”

“My package!”

“Come on, come on,” she muttered. To be caught by these idiots would be among the most embarrassing moments of her career. The time she’d been stuck in a marriage gown halfway up the side of the Mercers guildhall in Adua, with flowers in her hair but no underwear and a steadily growing crowd of onlookers below, would take some beating, but still. “Come on, come on, come—”

Now, from the other direction, she heard the chanting, and grinned. The Sisters were always on time. She heard their feet now, the regular tramping blotting out the shouting of Pombrine’s guards and the wailing of a woman temporarily deafened by the fireworks. Louder the feet, louder the heavenly song, and the procession passed the garden, the women all in white, all hooded, lit candles held stiffly before them, ghostly in the gloom as they marched by in unison.

“What a priestess,” Shev whispered to herself, and threaded from the garden, jostling her way into the midst of the procession. She tipped her candle to the left, so its wick touched that of her neighbor. The woman frowned across and Shev winked back.

“Give a girl a light, would you?”

With a fizzle it caught, and she fell into step, adding her own joyous note to the chant as they processed down Caldiche Street and over the Fintine bridge, the masked revelers parting respectfully to let them through. Pombrine’s place, and the increasingly frantic searching of his guards, and the furious growling of a pair of savagely arguing Northmen dwindled sedately into the mists behind.

It was dark by the time she slipped silently through her own open window, past the stirring drapes, and crept around her comfortable chair. Carcolf was asleep in it, one strand of yellow hair fluttering around her mouth as she breathed. She looked young with eyes closed and face relaxed, shorn of that habitual sneer she had for everything. Young, and very beautiful. Bless this fashion for tight trousers! The candle cast a faint glow in the downy hairs on her cheek, and Shev felt a need to reach up and lay her palm upon that face, and stroke her lips with her thumb—

But, lover of risks though she was, that would have been too great a gamble. So instead she shouted, “Boo!”

Carcolf leaped up like a frog from boiling water, crashed into a table and nearly fell, lurched around, eyes wide. “Bloody hell,” she muttered, taking a shuddering breath. “Do you have to do that?”

“Have to? No.”

Carcolf pressed one hand to her chest. “I think you might have opened the stitches.”

“You unbelievable baby.” Shev pulled the robe over her head and tossed it away. “It barely broke the skin.”

“The loss of your good opinion wounds me more deeply than any blade.”

Shev unhooked the belts that held her thief’s tools, unbuckled her climbing pads, and started to peel off her black clothes, acting as if it was nothing to her whether Carcolf watched or not. But she noted with some satisfaction that it was not until she was slipping on a clean gown that Carcolf finally spoke, and in a voice slightly hoarse besides.

“Well?”

“Well what?”