Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune (34 page)

Today was the day. He’d put it off too long, wasting his time with textures and perspectives and strangers who passed this busy place. Above the gate was a plaque, a stone carving, two men in profile, facing one another, two crossed swords over a spear … there was an inscription, a
dedication
Grandfather had said, but he had eyes only for the profile on the left.

Kadakithis.

It was not, according to Grandfather, a particularly good likeness, but he had dim memories of the time
before
the Hand, of clay busts Grandfather had made, multiple trials to try to catch the prince’s elusive vitality. It was time he began his own search, to set those features in his mind while he still had Grandfather to confirm his vision.

He had a lump of clay in the pile at home, carefully protected by oilcloth, regularly dampened. When the time came, when he tried his hand, Grandfather would be able to tell just by touch, if he’d gotten it right.

His (currently) favorite stick, grown dry with time, shattered on the first stroke. Refusing to accept that
accident
as some sort of ill omen, he smoothed the area and selected (and tested) a second stick. First the profile, then, assuming the nose was thus, the eyes thus and thus … slowly he began to rotate the head, to make a three-quarter view, then full—

“Not very good, are you?”

The stick jammed into the sand and broke, gouging out Prince Kadakithis’ left eye. He winced, lifted shaking hands to his face and told himself, for the thousandth time, it was all ephemeral. It was the practice that counted. Training the hand to be ready for when the time came and he could actually commit his dreams to parchment, or clay, or …

He turned slowly toward the owner of the rather shrill, young voice. A dark-haired boy with eyes a touch too limpid stared down his small nose at the drawings in the sand.

“Wha’s wrong wid ’m?” he asked, in his outside voice.

“Froggin’ shite, doesn’t look at all like the froggin’ portrait, now does it?”

He smothered a grin. The foul language sat oddly on the boy’s tongue and not just because of his youth—he’d heard far worse from much younger Maze-rats. It was the refined Ilsigi wrappings of the filth that called its verisimilitude into question.

“Froggin’ carvin’ don’t look like no froggin’ prince, neither,” he replied, in his lowest Maze speech, making his own tongue match his clothing as he’d learned to do years ago. “That-there rock-chipper, he made ol’ KittyKat’s face th’ way ’e seed ‘im, I makes ’im th’ way I sees ’im.”

“You never! He’s long gone. Went to live with the fish, he did. Easy life. Left us all to the Hand and the raiders.”

“He did not!” Defense of his hero made Kadithe careless—of his opinions as well as his vowels—and the boy was quick. Suspicion fairly oozed from him, sitting oddly on that heretofore open countenance. Suspicion and (worse) curiosity.

The boy hunkered down beside him, and asked softly, almost … conspiratorially: “If he didn’t go to live with the fish, where is he?”

The unchildlike tone, the sharp-eyed look, made him uneasy. Made him wonder if he was dealing with a boy at all. Some said there were people who could change the way they looked, for real, or just make a person think they looked different. That would be mighty useful for a spy.

Kadithe bit his lip on his desire to defend the long-gone prince, loathe, now, to reveal his stance on that matter, and discovered, to his utter disgust, that he couldn’t hold that suddenly keen gaze, and retreated to his drawing, smoothing the damage and restoring the eye.

Grandfather knew this gate well, he’d complained at length and in specific detail about the differences between that image and the real thing.

“I never saw him, of course,” he said quietly, dropping the pretense of gutter-speak, but returning to the first, far safer, question. “But I … knew someone who did He’s described the man he knew. The stonecarver carved the man he knew, with the tools and in the substance he knew. I’m …” How to put Grandfather’s teaching into words this child could hope to understand? “I try to imagine how that stonecarver’s eyes saw the world as opposed to how I see it, then adjust for the difference, using the first man’s verbal description.”

“That’s … dumb.”

So much for explanations …

“He’s
dead,
you know,” that childishly ingenuous, nonchildishly low voice continued, confident, and rather bloodthirsty.
“Drowned.
Just like Chenaya.”

And so much for avoiding question of Kadakithis’ disappearance. The boy had backed off his initial slander, that most popular theory regarding the Disappearance, had shifted to something far more possible, considering the truth he knew. Still … dead? like Chenaya?

He refused to believe it.

“How d’you—” He pressed his lips on the angry challenge, which could only bring unwanted attention to him, worse, questions about his own belief, and kept drawing, stabbing the sand viciously, there in the hair, where finesse made little difference.

“’Cuz I knew someone who knew him, too. Knew him
real
well.”

Kadithe couldn’t prevent his involuntary twitch.

“Name’s Bec. Becvar.” A small, ink-stained hand appeared in front of his nose.

He ignored it. Even if this Bec wasn’t a shape-changing spy, friends, especially small friends several years his junior and (from his clothing) worlds beyond his current station, were not a part of his life. He had two kinds of peers: those who had been rounded up by the Hands and those who had escaped them. This boy, who must have been born after Arizak took the palace, was neither.

Those he’d met who’d survived the pit kept to themselves, convinced those who’d escaped that life couldn’t begin to understand their nightmares. Those who had escaped capture spent a great deal of time and energy trying to match misery for misery; some, the gods only knew why, even pretended they were themselves survivors.

Not that he could remember much about those years. He’d been four when his grandfather had opened this same gate to let in Molin Torchholder, his life to that point little more than darkness, tucked away while Grandfather worked. With the steady tap of a mallet for a lullaby, he’d learned, as Grandfather put it, to hold his peace long before he’d learned to hold his piss.

The ink-stained hand disappeared.

“You got a name?”

Persistent brat. He ignored him, this
Bec.

No, it hadn’t been the reign that had instilled the instincts of the hunted in him, that made him turn to shadows in which to hide rather than extend gestures of greeting. Grandfather had never believed the Hand was gone, had always known a child of his would be a special target, if ever they discovered his part in the so-called liberation. Grandfather had taught him to go up into the bolthole the moment anyone came to the door, to watch and wait until it was safe to come down.

He’d been nine when the Hands took their revenge. He’d watched from the upper floor, through the hole in the wood as they held Grandfather’s eyes open with his own tongs and slowly,
slowly
dripped the slag in, a tiny drop at a time.

His grandfather had never made a sound, not in pain, not in betrayal. He’d refused even to cry for help, knowing his neighbors were no match for those animals. And Kadithe? Brave Kadithe? He’d crouched there, barely breathing, as those red hands had smashed every clay model and mold, had seen every wince as his still-conscious grandfather had heard his legacy destroyed around him.

A shadow fell across his sand drawing.

“Why don’t you just go away?” he muttered, and thrust himself to his feet.

The neighbors hadn’t known about him, but the screams he couldn’t contain had been the cock’s crow for all of Sanctuary that morning. They’d brought help—and left his voice permanently scarred.

Maybe it hadn’t been the Pit, but he’d lived his own brand of hell—still did—and that was nothing to what Grandfather, the kindest, most talented man who ever lived, suffered.

No, there’d been misery enough to go around, as Grandfather was wont to say, and the living had no damn right to complain.

He tossed the sticks into the roadway where passing carts would crush them, and ground his bare feet through the sand, obliterating the images.

“Hey!”

He rounded on the smaller boy. “What did you think I would do? Leave them there for you to laugh at? For the birds to shite on?” He swept up his packet, food for the next week, and headed for the gate.

“But—” A small voice, quivering at the edges and following him. “I
didn’t
laugh. I
liked
them.”

Laughter, strangely enough of real humor, burst free. “I thought you said I was no good.”

“That was when I thought you were copying. And it’s not a good copy. But if you were drawing what’s—” He tapped his skull. “Up here, well … it felt like I knew him, like he was looking at me. A friend. He looked …
real.”

Nothing could have disarmed him more. “The rain would have taken them anyway,” he said gently with a nod toward the darkening skies, and indeed the first spatters struck his hand as he held it out. “Kadithe.”

“H
eard ye’re hirin’,” the one-eyed Ilsigi said, shuffling up to the table, and Camargen gave him a glance. “Name’s Pewl,” the Ilsigi said.

“Hands,” Camargen said, and Pewl, first point in his favor, didn’t ask why. He turned them up to the wan daylight sifting through the open window of the taproom, and Camargen read the history in the calluses.

“Foretopman,” Pewl said. “Twenty year.”

“What are you doing here?” Camargen had learned, that
here
was not a prosperous port, and that it far from abounded in deepwater sailors. Fishermen was more the mark.

Maybe it was the accent. Pewl dug in his ear as if to clear it, and grimaced. “Cap’n died an’ the mate took ’er.”

“Mutiny, you mean.”

“Weren’t me, Cap’n.”

“Who said I was a captain?”

Pewl shuffled and looked at the table. “Ye sounds it. An’ ye’re hirin’.”

“Haven’t got a ship, yet. Will.”

“Yes, Cap’n.” Easy faith, if there was pay coming.

“Foretopman, able seaman.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

“Name’s Jarez Camargen. Captain, to you.” Easy hire, easily dumped in the harbor if he lied. But there was a simplicity to the man—landsmen could call Pewl stupid, but it wasn’t in his answers and it wasn’t in those hands. Camargen had met them by the hundreds, illiterate men who could, however, read a ship from her keel to her top, no hesitation about being in the right place, no stupidity at all about going aloft.

No hesitation at all about drinking every copper penny of his pay if he got any in hand. “Mug of ale,” he said. “Go get it and sit down. I want to hear the rumors floating this town.”

“Mug of ale, aye, Cap’n.” Nothing sluggish about the man, either, in his striding over to the bar and giving an order. “On the cap’n’s coin,” Pewl said, and when Camargen nodded, the barkeep drew it.

Pewl came back, industrious and in his element, sipped at the ale as he sat down in the chair Camargen kicked back for him.

“Rumors,” Camargen said. “What’s the rumors?”

“Rumors is,” Pewl said, “that that bloody great ship wot grounded on the reef is gone wi’ this blow. Maybe slid down to the bottom, maybe floated off an’ broke up. Rumor is she broke up. Planks an’ all been floatin’ in. Scavengers is busy.”

He’d heard a bit of that one. A ship stuck on the reef. “What ship?” He hadn’t been able to understand the barkeep’s rendition.

“Some foreign job. Real strange. No sign o’ crew nor nothin’. Washed up there three month ago an’ then gone wi’ th’ gale, no one ever the wiser.”

There hadn’t been any ship there that Camargen had seen, not on his little patch of reef.

That was peculiar.

“An’ there was this odd feller, this mornin’,” Pewl said, “just kinda wandered down the beach.”

“Who?”

“That’s the odd part. Silver hair down to here—” Pewl stopped cold at the look Camargen gave him.

“Go on. What about him?”

Pewl went on, very quietly, very respectfully under that look. “Dunno, Cap’n, wish I did to tell ye, but I heard it round the shipyard.”

“There’s a shipyard?”

“Aye, Cap’n, but not as to say much of a shipyard. More a breaker’s yard. Capper runs ‘er, an’ I pick up work from time to time, I did, savin’ your offer, Cap’n, for which I’m—”

“The silver-haired man. What happened to him?” Damn him.
Damn
him. Things magical had their own way of finding a shore, hadn’t he said it to himself, about the ruby, about the rest of the
Fortunate’s
treasure. So had their personal curse, whose last gasp had come with Camargen’s hands around his neck, as they went under the waves.

“Far as I know, Cap’n, ‘e disappeared into the town. Talk was he was the oddest-lookin’ sod wot ever was, an’ not answerin’ a hail, but nobody wanted to touch ’im.”

“Just walked in.”

“So’s to say, sir.” Pewl had a very honest face at the moment, a scared-honest face. One could see all the way to the back of the bloodshot eyes. Camargen knew the look, was relatively sure Pewl wouldn’t cross him, not for his life. But it was well to have these things firmly laid out.

“So’s you know, Pewl, I’m from foreign parts myself. And I want that man. I want him alive, so I can have the pleasure of killing him myself. And I’ll fry the guts of any man who ever crosses me in that particular or any other. Do you hear me clear, Pewl?”

“I hears ye, Cap’n.” Marble-mouthed Pewl was, like everybody else hereabouts, but the old Ilsigi was in the rhythms of Pewl’s speech, Pewl himself seemingly coming from elsewhere, and Camargen understood him well enough. Likely Pewl understood him better than anybody else at hand. “I hears ye clear.”

“That’s very good, Pewl,” Camargen said. “I’ll not be hiring many, at first. I’ll be looking for a ship, a proper ship, d’ ye understand me?”

An animal cunning came into Pewl’s eyes, the hint of a grin to his mouth, which was missing a front tooth. “Aye, Cap’n. A deepwater ship.”