Take a Thief (45 page)

"What has age to do with being a Herald?" Alberich rasped.

Skif said nothing, and the man's eyes narrowed as his arm tightened a little more on Alberich's throat. "Be still, or I will snap your foolish neck for you. A Trainee, then. But still— that's
quite
out of character— unless—"

He stared at Skif then, with a calculating expression, and Skif sensed that he was thinking very hard, very hard indeed.

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It was, after all, no secret that the latest Trainee was a thief. But what that would mean to this wealthy villain— and whether he'd heard that—

Then the Guildmaster's eyes widened. "Well," he said, and his mouth quirked up at one corner. "Who would have thought it. The Heralds making common cause with a common thief. Oh, excuse me— you're quite an uncommon thief. Old Bazie's boy, aren't you? Skif, is it?"

Skif went cold with shock and stared at the Guildmaster with his mouth dropping open.
How'd he know— how—

The Guildmaster smirked. "I make it my business to know what goes on in my properties, as any good landlord would," he said pointedly. "Besides, how do you think that cleverly hidden room got there? Who do you think arranged for the pump and the privy down there?"

"But you
killed
him!" Skif cried, as Alberich tried to move and turned a little bluer for his trouble.

"I had no intention of doing so," the Guildmaster pointed out, in reasonable tones. "That was Jass' fault. If he'd
obeyed orders,
everyone would have gotten out all right, even Bazie."

Since Skif had heard the truth of that with his own ears, there was no debating the question of whether Jass had gone far beyond what his orders had been. But—

How would Bazie have gotten out in time, even so? How? The boys
couldn't have carried him—

The Guildmaster interrupted his thoughts. His expression had gone very bland again. He was planning something….

"You've been very clever, young man," he said, in a voice unctuous with flattery. "I don't see nearly enough cleverness in the people I hire— well, Jass was a case in point. Now at the moment, we seem to be at a stalemate."

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Alberich writhed in a futile attempt to get free. His captor laughed, and punched the shoulder wound again, and Alberich went white. "If I kill this Herald," he pointed out, "I lose my shield against whatever you might pick up and fling at me.
You
can't go anywhere, because Kash is between you and the door. Stalemate."

Skif nodded warily.

"On the other hand," he continued. "If you decided to switch allegiances, I could strangle this fool and we could all escape from here before the help he has almost certainly arranged for arrives."

Skif clenched his jaw. In another time and place— "An' just what'm I supposed to get out of this?" he asked, playing for time to think.

Cymry was oddly silent in his mind. In fact— in fact, he couldn't sense her at all. For the first time in weeks he was alone in his head.

"What do you get? Oh, Skif, Skif, haven't you learned
anything
about the way Life works?" the Guildmaster laughed. "Allow me to enlighten you.

No matter what these fools have told you, the
only
law that counts is the Law of the Street. What you'll get is to be trained by me, in something far more profitable than the liftin' lay."

"Oh, aye—" Skif began heatedly.

"No. You listen to me.
This
is what is real. These are the rules that the real world runs by." He stared into Skif's eyes, and Skif couldn't look away, couldn't stop listening to that voice, so sure of itself, so very, very rational.

"Grab what you can, because if you don't, someone else will snatch it out from under you. Get all the dirt you can on anyone who might have power over you— and believe me,
everyone
has a past, and things they'd rather not have bruited about. Be the cheater, not the cheated, because you'll be one or the other. There's no such thing as truth— oh, believe me about this— there are shades of meaning, and depths of self-interest, but there is no
truth.
"

Skif made an inarticulate sound of protest, but it was weak, because
this
was all he'd seen at Exile's Gate,
this
was the way the world as he had 315

Take a Thief

always known it worked. Not the way it was taught in the Collegium. Not the way those sheltered, idealistic Heralds explained things—

"And there is no
faith
either," the Guildmaster continued, in his hard, bright voice. "Faith is for those who wish to be deceived for the sake of a comforting, but hollow promise. Think about it, boy— think about it. It's shadow and air, all of it. Cakes in the Havens, and crumbs in the street.

That
is all that faith is about."

The priests— oh, the priests— how many of them actually
helped
anyone in Exile's Gate in the here and now? Behind their cloister walls and their gates, they never went hungry or cold— they never suffered the least privations. Even the Brothers at the Priory never went hungry or cold….

Skif's heart contracted into an icy little knot. Alberich's eyes were closed; he seemed to be concentrating on getting what little air the Guildmaster allowed him.

"Throw your lot in with me.
I
won't deceive you with pretty fictions.

You'll obey me because I am strong and smart and powerful. You'll learn from me to be the same. And maybe some day you'll be good enough to take what I've got away from me. Until then, we'll have a deal, and it will be because we
know
where we stand with each other, not because of some artificial conceit that we
like
each other." He laughed. "The smart man guards his own back, boy," the insidious voice went on. "The wise man knows there is no one that you can trust, you take and hold whatever you can and share it with
no one,
because no one will ever share what he has with you.
Hate
is for the strong; love is for the weak. No one has friends;
friend
is just a pretty name for a leech. Or a user. What do you think Bazie was? A
user.
He used you boys and lived off of
your
work, kept you as personal servants, and pretended to love you so you would be as faithful to him as a pack of whipped puppies."

And that was where the Guildmaster went too far.

Bazie,
thought Skif, jarred free of the spell that insidiously logical voice had placed on him.
Bazie
had shared whatever he had, and had trusted to his boys to do the same. Bazie had taken him in, with no reason to, and 316

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every reason to turn him into the street, knowing that Londer would be looking for him to silence him.

And Beel— Beel had protected him, Beel
could
have reported a hundred times over that Skif had fulfilled his education, but he didn't. And when Beel could have told his own father where Skif was, he'd kept his mouth shut.

And the Heralds—

Oh, the Heralds. Weak, were they? Foolish?

Skif felt warmth coming back into him, felt his heart uncurling, as he thought back along the past weeks and all of the little kindnesses, all unasked for, that he'd gotten. Kris and Coroc keeping the highborn Blues from tormenting him until Skif had established that he was more amusing if he wasn't taunted. Jeri helping him out with swordwork. The teachers taking extra time to explain things he simply had never seen before.

Housekeeper Gaytha being so patient with his rough speech that sometimes he couldn't believe she'd spend all this time over one Trainee.

The girls teasing and laughing with him in the sewing room. The simple way that he had been
accepted
by every Trainee, and with no other recommendation but that he'd been Chosen—

Cymry.

Cymry, who had filled his heart— who still
was
there, he sensed her again, now that he wasn't listening to the poison that bastard was pouring into his ears. Cymry, who cared enough for him to wait while he listened—
to make his own decisions,
without any pressure from her.

No love, was there? Self-delusion, was it?

Then I'll be deluded.

Did the Guildmaster see his thoughts flicker across his face? Perhaps—

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"Kash, now!"
he shouted. The wounded bodyguard lunged, arms outstretched to grab him—

But Skif was already moving before the bodyguard, clumsy with his wounds and pain, had gotten a single step. He jumped aside, his hands flicking to each side as he evaded those outstretched arms.

And between one breath and the next—

The bodyguard continued his lunge, and sprawled face-down on the floor, gurgling in agony, one of Skif's knives in his throat.

The Guildmaster made a strangled noise— and so did Alberich.

The arm around Alberich's throat tightened as the Guildmaster slid down the wall.

Skif's
other
knife was lodged to the hilt in his eye.

But Skif's dodge had been deliberately aimed to take him to Alberich's side. The Guildmaster had been a stationary target. And at that range, he couldn't miss.

In the next heartbeat he had pried the dead arm away from the Weaponsmaster's throat, and Alberich was gasping in great, huge gulps of air, his color returning to normal.

Skif helped him to his feet. "You all right?" he asked awkwardly.

Alberich nodded. "Talk— may be hard," he rasped.

Skif laughed giddily, feeling as if he had drunk two whole bottles of that fabulous wine all by himself. "Like that's gonna make the Trainees unhappy," he taunted. "You, not bein' able to lecture 'em!"

The wry expression on Alberich's face only made him laugh harder.

"Come on," he said, draping his teacher's arm over his shoulders. "We 318

Take a Thief

better get you outside an' get back to where th' good Healers are afore your Kantor decides he's gonna put horseshoe marks on my bum."

They got as far as the door when Skif thought of something else. "I don'

suppose you
did
arrange for help, did you?"

"Well," Alberich admitted, in a croak. "It comes
now."

:Cymry?:

:Half the Collegium, my love.:

Skif just shook his head. "Figgers. Us Heralds, we just keep thinkin' we gotta do everything by ourselves, don't we? We can't do the smart thing an'

get help fixed up beforehand. Even you. An' you should know better."

"Yes," Alberich agreed. "I should.
We
do."

We.
It was a lovely word.

One that Skif was coming to enjoy a very great deal A Herald he didn't recognize brought Skif his knives, meticulously cleaned, as the Healer fussed over Alberich right there in the street, which was so full of torches and lanterns it might have been a festival. Well, a very grim sort of festival.

It actually looked more like something out of a fever dream; the street full of Heralds and Guards, more Guardsmen swarming in and out of the warehouse, a half-dozen Heralds and their Companions surrounding Alberich— who flatly refused to lie down on a stretcher as the Healer wanted— while the Weaponsmaster sat on an upturned barrel and the Healer stitched up his wounds. Four bodies were laid out on the street under sheets; one semiconscious bullyboy had been taken off for questioning as soon as he recovered. Not that anyone expected to get 319

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much out of him. It wasn't very likely that a mere bodyguard would know the details of his master's operations.

No one had sent Skif back to the Collegium, and he waited beside Alberich, between Kantor and Cymry, listening with all his might to the grim-voiced conversations around him. Most of the Heralds here he didn't know; that was all right, he didn't have to know who they were to understand that they were important. He did recognize Talamir, though, who seemed considerably less otherworldly at the moment and quite entirely focused on the here and now.

"This is going to have an interesting effect on the Council," he observed, his voice heavy with irony.

Alberich snorted. "Interesting? Boil up like a nest of ants, when stirred with sticks, it will! Sunlord! Guildmaster
Vatean!
Suspect
him,
even I did not!"

"Gartheser is going to have a fit of apoplexy," someone else observed.

"Vatean was here was here at his behest in the first place."

Hadn't they noticed he was here? This was high political stuff he was listening to!

:They know,:
Cymry told him.
:But you're a Herald, even if you aren't in
Whites yet. You proved yourself tonight. No one is ever going to withhold
anything from you that you really want or need to know.:
Well! Interesting….

"Gartheser will be a pool of stillness compared to Lady Cathal," Talamir observed, with a sigh. "He was a Guildmaster after all, and she speaks for the Guilds."

"Oh,
Guildmaster
, indeed," someone else said dismissively. "Becoming a Master in the Traders' Guild…." He left the sentence dangling, but everyone— including Skif— knew that the requirements for Mastery in the Traders' Guild mostly depended on entirely on how much profit you 320

Take a Thief

could make. Provided, of course, that you didn't cheat to make it. Or at least that you didn't get
caught
cheating.

"He was," Talamir pointed out delicately, and with a deliberate pause between the words, "quite… prosperous."

"And now, know we where the profits came from," Alberich said harshly.

"It is thinking I am that Lady Cathal should be looking into profits, and whence from they come."

"
And
Lord Gartheser," said Talamir. "Since Gartheser wished so sincerely to recommend him to the Council."

"There is that," observed someone else, in a hard, cold voice. "And
now
we know where the leak of Guard movements along Evendim came from."

"It would appear so," Talamir replied thoughtfully, "Although… it is in my mind that Lord Orthallen was equally, though less blatantly, impressed with the late Guildmaster's talents…."