Thief: A Fantasy Hardboiled (Ratcatchers Book 2) (2 page)

The process of unlocking the door took some time, there were gears and switches and a vial of quicksilver and other things Alret didn’t understand. The whole process just gave him time to wind himself up. Sooner or later the door would open and it would be the ragman come for him and that would be it.

He was just about pissing himself when the door finally swung open, revealing…not the ragman, nor the jailor with his food.

“Pinwhistle!” Alret said.

“Right first time,” Aimsley Pinwhistle said, congratulating himself. The small blonde polder took a step into Alret’s cell, looked around, and said “Come on.”

“How did you…,” Alret said, looking at the door. “How did you get in here?”

“In was easy,” Aimsley said. “Getting out…,”

There were three bodies in the corridor. Guards. They looked….

“Did you…?” Alret stepped gingerly over them.

“Don’t be stupid,” Aimsley snapped. “Blackout balls and knockout gas,” he said.

Alret nodded. Even the infamous polder fixer from the Cold Hearth wasn’t going to kill the ragman’s watchers.

The long corridor emptied into a square room with three other doors. The polder walked to the door opposite, pulled. Nothing happened. He stopped, pulled again, nothing.

He looked at the door. He looked at the floor. He went to the other two doors. He went to the open door they’d just come through, he looked at the floor, where the door would be if it were closed. Got down on his hands and knees, blew on the floor for some reason.

“They floated the floor,” Aimsley stood up, grimacing.

“What?”

“They floated the floor so the door won’t…., doesn’t matter. Go grab one…grab two of the bodies in the corridor. Come on!”

Alret was thin, wirey, and not well, but he dared not disobey the fixer.

He dragged first one, then another body into the room.

“There,” Aimsley pointed at the door opposite the one they were trying to exit. Alret deposited the bodies.

“Ok, let’s go,” Aimsley said. This time the door opened smoothly. Alret wasn’t sure what had just happened.

They passed the stairs up.

“We’re not going up?” Alret said.

“Nope,” Aimsley said.

“Why not?”

“The stairs know how many people come down and go up.”

“They…they
know
?”

“Told you getting out was the hard part, come on.”

A random section of the hallway past the stairs, and Aimsley Pinwhistle stopped.

“We’re running out of time,” he said. “You ready?”

Alret was more scared now than when he thought the ragman was coming to question him. “F-f-for what?”

Aimsley shook his head. “You’re not going to like this part,” he said, mostly to himself.

“This part?!” Alret squeaked.

“Thought about mirrors,” Aimsley said, pulling an egg from his pocket. Alret frowned at it. “Would have worked, but the only imager I know is pissed at me.”

He cracked the egg and something green and slimy slithered out and onto the floor.

“Plus there’s all sorts of heinous shit comes after you in here if you use arcanism,” he said casually as the thing on the ground grew. Alret couldn’t make it out, it was like a green worm. But it wasn’t…it wasn’t complete, it writhed and pulsed. It seemed
part
of the floor, like it had grown into the floor since the polder had deposited it. And it was much larger now. There were white protuberances….

It was a mouth. They were teeth. It was a rapidly growing, green, snarling, pulsing mouth. Black within, a snaking red tongue sometimes flicked around the edge. Even though it was flush with the floor, it seemed to be seeking, searching. But there was no throat, only blackness.

“So, demonism,” Aimsley said, palm held out, offering the writhing, snarling, toothed maw as an example. It was now almost as wide as the corridor.

“Fuck me!” Alret said.

“It’s sniffing for me,” Aimsley explained. “Won’t close and swallow until I jump in. You first,” he said.

“What!?”

Aimsley sighed. “They’re coming for you, you realize that right?”

“What?!”

“You want to wait for the castellan’s men to find you? I get paid either way,” this was his mantra, it was not literally true, they both knew.

“You want me to jump in that!?”

“Ah…yeah, basically. Nothing to it, really. You won’t feel a thing. I’ll be right behind you. Better than a mirror. Don’t have to carry around a big, fuck-off silver frame everywhere.”

“I can’t do it!” Alret said, looking furtively behind him.

“Sure you can,” Aimsley said.

“I can’t! I can’t I can’t I can’t!” He was getting hysterical.

Aimsley shrugged. “Ok,” he said. “The guards are here anyway,” he pointed behind Alret.

Alret looked behind him. There was no-one there. Before he could spin back around and stop the fixer, Aimsley had grabbed his belt, kicked his feet out from under him, and pushed the skinny man down and into the huge maw gulping in the ground.

There was a gulp. But this did not satisfy the yearning, biting, tonguing mouth. It snapped back open and, sensing Aimsley nearby, snapped at him. The red demon-tongue whipped toward him. He batted it away like an errant fly.

In their eagerness, two guards practically fell down the stairs. They started off down the corridor the way Aimsley had come. He could not afford to be seen.

He threw down a blackout ball, and black smoke filled the corridor. He looked down at the demonic mouth as he heard the sounds of the castellan’s guards running toward him. Braving the smoke.

He leapt gingerly into the waiting maw. It snapped shut behind him.

Alret climbed from the sewer in the alley first. Aimsley followed. They were covered in sewer water…and worse.

“Wasn’t sure that would work,” Aimsley said, trying to wipe some black bile off of him.

“It shat me out!” Alret gibbered.

“Uh, yeah,” Aimsley said trying to get the stuff out of his hair. “Mouth on one end, where’d you think you’d come out?”

“It fucking shat me out its arsehole!” Alret was shaking with abject terror. Aimsley shook his head. Poor idiot.

“Yeah, well…,” Aimsley shrugged. What was there to say to that?

Alret look along the alley and saw the citadel’s tower. They had just come from under there.

"You got me out," Alret said, demonic arseholes momentarily forgotten.

"Yeah," Aimsley nodded.

"Didn't think no one ever got out from there."

"Yeah."

"Didn't think no one could get in," the scrawny man looked in awe at Aimsley.

"Fixer, ain’t I?" the polder said, with a sniff.

“Ragman hears you can get in and out…,” Alret began, his eyes wide.

“He won’t hear,” Aimsley said.

Realization dawned on Alret’s pinched face.

“Aw shit,” he said.

“Sorry,” Aimsley said, with some authenticity. “You live, ragman comes after Brick. You die,” Aimsley shrugged. “Balance sheet is closed.”

“I thought…when you didn’t kill me inside, I thought….”

“They can bring you back in there,” Aimsley said. “They got priests.”

Alret nodded absent-mindedly while he shivered in the night in the middle of the alley. No one would find his body for hours out here.

“Tell Brick,” he said, his teeth chattering, mostly from terror, “tell him I didn’t tell no one nothin’.”

Aimsley nodded. “I will.”

“They didn’t ask me nothin’, anyway.”

“I tried to get to you before they could.”

Aimsley had his dirk out.

Alret saw it and gasped. An instant later and Aimsley was standing on the other side of him, dirk gone.

Alret collapsed in a heap, gurgling, squirming.

Looking at the Dusk Moon, Aimsley saw it was almost midnight. He stood in the alley looking at the cobbles at his feet, blood pooling around them. The alley emptied out on Gore Street to the north, the direction of the Mouse Trap, and Falmouth to the south, the direction of the Hammer & Tongs.

"He wanted it fixed?" he said to himself. "I fucking fixed it."

Brick would want to know what happened, without
knowing
what happened obviously. Brick wanted a lot. Brick got more out of this arrangement than Aimsley did.

Aimsley turned right and walked north toward Falmouth.

“I know how this ends,” Tam said.

The count smiled what was, he would assure anyone, a genuine smile. But showing his perfect teeth, with his thick blonde moustache and sharp eyebrows, it looked wolfish and sinister.

He aimed his smile at Garth. The two shared a moment.

“Do you?” The count asked, tilting his head.

The alchemist shrunk a little. He felt completely powerless here, and after weeks of that his dreams of getting out, getting free of the count and his tame killer had evaporated. Now he just wanted everything over. “I know Elise is dead,” he said. “When you don’t need me…,” he didn’t finish. He looked at the count “I’m not stupid.”

“Noo,” the count interrupted. “But you are somewhat melodramatic.”

Tam slumped a little, exhausted. “Why lie about it?” he asked.

The count chuckled and walked around the worktable. It was one of three in the small room in which the alchemist Roderick Tam had been perfecting his method for creating the Dust and sealing it into small glass marbles. The room was full of inks and metals and flasks and a whole table piled with
codices
, all open to different pages, stacked on top of each other.

With the table between them, the count looked at the alchemist through the maze of glass pipes and metal cylinders. “Mister Tam, do you know why we chose you?”

The alchemist sighed. “Because I owed all that money to the Truncheon.”

“That was,” the count admonished, “foolish, I will admit. The midnight man is the most brutal, efficient killer in the city. Far worse than me,” he said. “He rules the Darkened Moon through terror, his agents spend more time fighting each other than mine. Were it not for me, he’d have had you beaten to death, slowly, over days.” The count grimaced as he said this, as though the thought disgusted him.

“Why in all Orden would you place yourself in that man’s debt?” the count asked.

“I was weak,” Tam said, and looked about to collapse in sleep.

“Yes, well,” the count said, and glanced again at his fixer, “we all have weaknesses, don’t beat yourself up over it. We traded you for someone the Truncheon was eager to kill, slowly. The better fate for you, I promise.”

The count flicked his fingers, like he was shooing a fly.

“Anyway I’ve got lots of people in to me, lots of alchemists too. No, we traded for you because you are
smart,
” he said, picking up a crystal and looking at it, shrugging and putting it down. “You worked out all this, for one thing,” his gesture took in the whole laboratory.

Tam stared at a thin phial of black fluid. The most recent deposit from the count.

The count followed his gaze.

“You want to know what the source is. Where we get it?”

“No. No, I don’t.” Tam was eager to deny this.

“You do! Of course you do. How could you not? You’re an alchemist, aren’t you?”

“I was. I retired. If you tell me, I’ll never leave here.”

“Fear not,” the count said, enjoying the alchemist’s distress. “The ingredient is here. He is nearby,” the count said, letting a little theatricality seep into his voice. “Does that surprise you?”

Tam looked at the count from under a heavy brow. The source was a “he,” not an “it.” This was dangerous knowledge. Lethal knowledge.

“What happens to me after this?” Tam challenged. “You can’t let me go.”

“Well, no,” the count admitted. “Bad for business, that. We’re partners now, Roderick,” the alchemist didn’t respond. “You don’t mind if we call you Roderick, do you?” the count asked, pointing between himself and Garth.

Of the two, the count was the fit, dashing swordsman. His dirty blonde hair curling in a fashionably haphazard heap on his head, his strong jaw and pointed chin adding to the look of angles and muscle which his military uniform, hereditary of course, accentuated. Garth, by comparison, was shorter, slimmer and in most ways unremarkable. He had no interest in standing out, being recognized, no interest in anything except skill.

“You’ll kill me when I’m done,” Tam repeated. Every time he said it, he died a little more, making the final blow that much more bearable. Why did it have to end like this? He was a good man, once.

The count sighed and shook his head.

“If we were going to kill you, we’d not bring you here hooded. Roderick you are smart, resourceful, and you work like a dwarf. We’d be fools to have you killed or even treated badly. Haven’t we treated you well?” The count feigned insult.

Roderick Tam looked at the floor and didn’t say anything.

“You have a fine apartment, good food. What about that girl we sent?” He looked at Garth standing in the middle of the small room. “Garth didn’t we have Miss Elowen have a girl put on for our friend here?”

Garth nodded. “Said she liked him” Garth said. “Said he was nice.”

“There you are,” the count turned back to Tam, his argument proven. “We have treated you well and you have performed well. All this suspicion,” The count walked back around the table and stood next to the alchemist. “Quite unnecessary.”

“So what….”

The count held up a finger. “If you could pick any place in the world to visit, where would you pick?”

“Where would I…,” Tam looked confused.

“Take your time, think about it. Have you ever dreamed of studying somewhere more…civilized than Corwell? Capital, perhaps? Best universities in Orden. The Commonwealth?”

Roderick couldn’t let the truth show. He muttered the first place that came into his head that wasn’t Celkirk.

The count frowned at his fixer. “What was that?” he asked the alchemist.

“Khemarna,” the man said more loudly.

“Ah! The great desert, certainly. Now, you will finish up your project here for us,” the count said, picking up a newly made glass marble with swirling black dust in it, “and then we’ll probably keep you on locally for another project just to make sure this wasn’t a fluke.”

Tam looked at the count with a mix of hope and suspicion. It sounded so reasonable.

“This may take a couple of years, but you’re young yet. You’ll work here, for yourself as you like and for me as I like. Plenty of time for both and then, once we’re sure of you, we’ll set you up in in the City of the Everlasting Sun, as you wish, and you’ll get to work on whatever research strikes your fancy and all you’ll have to do,” the count said, “is a few tasks for us now and then. Minor things, nothing big.”

The alchemist stood there, not knowing how to react, unable to trust these men.

“You could have a family again, and why not?” The count said. “Not here, of course, once you’re out of the city. We get an agent in the Pharaoh’s capital city, someone who can interpret what the Eternal Sun’s viziers are up to in a way no spy ever could, and you get to live out the rest of your life surrounded by exotic beauties. An arrangement to the benefit of all parties,” the count smiled.

The man stared back, jaw slack with incomprehension. He looked like a peasant. Of course, he
was
a peasant, most alchemists and wizards were. It was a known way to power. But the count had a particular distaste for those who seemed to relish their lowly stature. The man could bottle starstuff and cause the dead to walk again in this new age without deathless, and he still looked like a dirt farmer.
I mean, look at his clothes. Really. Have some dignity. You can afford it now, what?

He sighed at the alchemist, knowing the man would never understand. Good with the potions, terrible at the real world. He clapped the man on the shoulder and said “Alright off with you. Enough for today, back to your apartment. Your hood awaits.”

The alchemist lurched around the table, putting lids on powdered who-knows-what and grabbing a
codex
to read at home, before backing his way out of the laboratory, looking once from the count to Garth, bowed and left.