And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (16 page)

Paibrush was stunned, not so much by the fight as by how easily the tables had turned. No less stunned was Jill McCulloch, who hadn't remembered doing any of it until she'd completed the maneuvers and still couldn't believe that she'd actually performed them. Clearly this Yoni had an incredible instinct for self-preservation that fully matched her skills and agility.

"And now, Sir Sugrin, we shall proceed with the theft," she announced triumphantly, dagger still at his jugular. "Just rip your own purse loose and toss it to your right, near your sword."

He smiled, seemed to shrug, and did as instructed.

"I warn you that I toss this dagger as well as I wield it," she said, then released him and in a flash dashed over to the sword and purse.

Paibrush rose unsteadily to his feet, his face still reflecting his surprise and embarrassment.

"Hustled!" He swore to himself in disgust. "Twenty-two years in the business and I let myself get hustled!"

She laughed. He still wasn't much of a threat, but he could be. She felt his sword-a fine, well-balanced weapon that was surprisingly light, almost as if made from aluminum yet with a blade as hard as steel.

"And now, sir, if you will remove your jerkin and breeches," she ordered.

He looked shocked. "My what?"

"Your clothes. Oh, you may keep the hat and boots -I shouldn't want you to catch cold. The rest you will remove and toss to me-do it! Now! Or I shall have no need of removing them!"

He removed the shirt easily, baring a hairy chest, but took some additional prodding to take off his pants. As she'd guessed, underwear wasn't in style on this world. She stood back and looked at him as he stood embarrassed in his nakedness. "Cute," she decided.

"B-but-look here! You can't leave me like this!" he protested. "What is the point of this?"

She laughed. "I want no one coming up in back of me when I carry out my errands this night, particu-larly no one who bears me a grudge. This will keep you busy until you can discover a sheet or potato-sack. I'll leave the clothes at the Guild Hall."

That plan seemed to upset him more than anything. "No! Please! Toss them in the gutter, sink them in the harbor-but not at the Guild Hall! I couldn't
stand
the humiliation," he pleaded.

She laughed again and started to back off with her booty. "Very well, then-under the light on the street up there. Good luck and thank you, Sir Sugrin, for all the help you have been this night to me."

He stood and watched her go, and as she made the street, gave a little wave, and turned, dropping the clothes just
across
from the intersection, some reflec-tions overcame his mortification. She really was good, he thought. She really
might
make it .. .

In the meantime, he hoped no one stole his clothes before the early morning hours, when the streets would be deserted enough for him to retrieve them.

3

The Thieves' Guild headquarters was pretty con-spicuous despite its lack of signs. Paibrush had ex-plained its visibility as something tolerated by most local authorities, since that way they knew who the thieves were, and often had need of their services themselves. There was, of course, the additional prob-lem that spells protected the building just as other spells protected the castle. No one without the mark on his thumb could enter it; and, being a gathering place for thieves, it was probably the safest, most pro-tected, most burglarproof building in the city.

She entered without resistance, noting the two men on the other side of the street, one leaning against a lamppost and the other pretending to look in a shop window. They were obviously cops.

It didn't matter-she'd been known as a thief the moment she hit town, of course. And from what Paibrush had said, nobody who entered the Guild Hall left with anything but what they had entered with-except money, of course. It was always a good trick to enter the hall in full view of the officials, slip out by one of the dozens of secret ways designed into the place, do the job, slip back in the same way, then emerge. The perfect alibi.

The building itself was quite something, too. Its en-tranceway looked like that of dozens of small office buildings; there was a receptionist to direct you, com-plete with hand-pumped compressed air tubes to fire messages to the various offices and departments. There was also a Directory well posted on a central support pillar, and a large message board.

Jill scanned the message board. It contained all sorts of "I'm here, where are you" type notices, notes about arrests and convictions, and even ads for jobs. "Ocean-based pirate crew forming.

Barbarians preferred, sail-ing experience essential," one read. There were lots of others.

The Directory showed the scope of the Guild. There were specific departments for Cutpursing and Pickpockets, Blackmailers, Highwaymen and Robbers, and so on down a list of larcenies.

She found Burglary and Grand Theft, then scanned the internal departments. One group would help case the place, another would outfit you, consider and work out your plan and make suggestions-or even come up with a plan if you didn't have one-and even fence the goods afterward. You could even check your balance in a foreign numbered account and make deposits and withdrawals on it. The network was incredible.

There was also, she noted, a beard of honor and ethics, a disciplinary and enforcement squad, as well as social auxiliaries for sporting events, banquets, and the like.

Talk about organized crime,
she thought as she read the list.

About the only thing that protected the public was the fact that you could very easily get caught-and torture and death were the rule, as the long list of In Memoriam opposite the Directory attested. No one-to--five with time off for good behavior at a minimum-security prison farm here.

It was a sobering thought.

The receptionist was efficient and directed her to the proper department with a minimum of trouble. The first step was a junior clerk who looked more like a beginning bank teller than an official in the Thieves' Guild.

"And where are you talking about?" he asked pleasantly.

"Castle Zondar," she told him.

He hesitated a moment. "You realize that the castle is considered a three-star risk?" He scribbled notes down on a house form that was beautifully printed in a kind of Old English or Germanic script.

She nodded. "I am aware of the dangers," she as-sured him.

He shrugged. "The danger isn't much of a problem. It's the low potential for success: You'll have to have at least the basic fees up front, you know, to cover our expenses, and you are specifically excluded from our group hospitalization and life insurance policies."

"I expected as much," she answered truthfully. "What sort of fees are we talking about?"

He took out another pad, mostly blank, and an abacus and started figuring. A lot of stuff was listed. He paused several times to ask additional information.

"General sortie or specific objective?"

"Specific objective," she responded.

He nodded to himself. "That's a
little
better
.
Single object, then? Piece of art for a private collector? You'll get a good discount if so, since you won't have to bother with our fencing, and you wouldn't need to pay for smuggling and transport unless-until-you come back with the goods."

"Something like that-as good as that, anyway. A talisman of no value to anyone except my employer that just happens to be there."

"Small?"

"Very," she agreed.

That seemed to please him even more, and the list soon contained a lot of cross-outs and corrections. Finally he was finished and turned to her.

"All right. Basic layout of the place, twenty. Briefing on guard schedules, basic spells, and known super-natural guardians, thirty-five. Ropes, pitons, miscel-laneous climbing equipment, along with the proper spells to render them most effective and least visible, twenty-five.

Associated magic repellers, ten. Standard set-but I hope you understand that, considering the failure rate, there's obviously a bunch we don't know about, so don't put too much stock in them.

Surcharge for three stars, one hundred. That comes to one hun-dred ninety exactly, plus five percent tax, one ninety-nine fifty, payable to the cashier in Room Twelve."

"Tax?" she responded incredulously.

He shrugged. "Since the local authorities can't come in, they have no way of estimating the property tax on the building. We got around that by accepting their bid for a sales tax. Don't worry-the payment can't be specifically traced to you."

She shrugged and sighed. This was not her idea of crime at all.

Yoni's purse held only twenty-nine of the gold pieces, far short, but Paibrush's contained seventy-five. Enough for the fee and a good dinner if she wanted it, and that was about it.
Oh,
well,
she thought to her-self,
if I get the jewel I don't need the gold, anyway-and if I don't, I
almost certainly won't need money.

She stood up and went down the hall to Room 12, taking the intricately coded itemized price sheet with her. The cashier looked at it, took and counted her money, then wrote out a series of receipts for each service, placing his signature and a wax seal on each.

"Go to the rooms indicated, in order," he instructed.

Jill sighed and turned to go. She felt as if she were getting a driver's license rather than being briefed for a crime.

The first place was Layout. They actually had the blueprints of the castle there, which surprised her. The woman in charge noted her reaction. "Why not? After all, it takes
years
to build a castle-forty-six to build Zondar-and in all that time you
know
somebody can steal the best guarded blueprints."

That was a point.

The woman offered hypnotism to allow Jill to mem-orize the plans, but she turned it down. She didn't really want to be hypnotized-no telling what would come out-and besides, it cost ten gold pieces and she didn't have them, anyway.

The blueprints were good enough. They showed the correct passageways in the maze of the castle, and also indicated where most of the traps were. It was very easy to get around in there if you knew the layout-it had to be. Although the castle had a very small permanent population, during the day almost two hundred civil servants worked in one part or another. She won-dered why one or more of those workers hadn't turned thief, but the woman in Layout scoffed. "They undergo hypnotic spells when they leave, to scramble all their knowledge up. Besides, if you work for the govern-ment you can steal so much more than we could, any-way-why bother?"

Again, that was a point well taken.

Satisfied after a while that she had the basic design features down pat-and there were some pretty nasty ones if you chose the wrong door or corridor at a number of junctions-she thanked the woman and moved on.

Next was a thin, elderly man who somehow reminded her more of a Shakespearean actor than a functionary in a place like this. It took all kinds, of course, but Jill wondered whether the place was staffed with former thieves or if, in fact, this was just another office job to these people who never themselves had to take a risk.

The elderly man headed Briefing. After greeting her, he went back to an enormous file cabinet, rummaged through a drawer, and came up with a thick folder. "Castle Zondar's one of the ones we keep up front, since everybody wants to hear about it," he explained in a melodious baritone. "Not too many go through with it, though." He paused a moment. "Going up the cliff face?"

"Yes," she told him. "And I'm interested only in the tower-the Hall of the Sleeper, to be exact."

A bushy white eyebrow shot up. "That's interesting," he replied. "Well, we suggest going to the tower di-rectly, then, bypassing all the other crap. It means an extra fifty-meter climb, which is rough; but doing it that way bypasses a lot of foolishness as well. There is a guard position on top of the tower, and patrolling guards at the tower base on the roof of the castle. Get as far over to the right as possible and angle yourself so that once you're onto the tower proper, you'll be out of sight of the lower guards. There are no shortcuts, though. You can enter only at the top or along the guard wall."

Jill looked at his diagrams and recalled the blue-prints. That would mean a sheer climb of almost a hundred and ten meters straight up, the last fifty on a curved surface! She protested as much to the briefer.

"That's true," he admitted, "but then you only have to go down two levels rather than up fourteen with all the attendant risks not only of discovery but of tripping alarms, running into people-or things worse than people. The top guard basically tends the lighthouse at the top, and he's the only human you'd have to bother with under normal circumstances. He guards against an attack by air-sorcerers can do some interesting things, sometimes with as simple a thing as a carpet-by a simple trick. The fuel to the lighthouse is carefully measured and metered to last only ten minutes, after which a complex mechanism must be operated in the proper sequence. Otherwise the light goes out and, quite literally, all hell will break loose. There are two rather enormous gaunts, for example, bound to the top, circling around the tower. They won't bother you as long as the light burns, and they won't pick you off the side, either. They are, in effect, incorporeal as long as the light shines. Let the light go out and they will land, devouring everything on top."

She gulped a little. "What is a gaunt, anyway?"

He shrugged. "Who knows? Amorphous black crea-tures of sorcery that eat flesh. Need any more details? I've never known anyone to meet up with one and live, so that's the best I can tell you."

"That's enough," she assured him. "So the light has to burn until I'm down in the tower."

"All the time, if you intend to get out," he re-sponded. "The guard is almost certainly just a bored and perfectly ordinary watchman. Just wait on the side of the wall until he goes and rekindles the lamp. Climb up onto the tower, get around, and when he comes out just pace him around the tower and go in and down. No reason he should have to know you're there until you're on the way out, if he doesn't have to."