Javre pressed finger against thumb and flicked Fallow’s two front teeth out. A trick she had learned from an old man in Suljuk and, as with so many things in life, all in the wrist. She left him hunched in the road struggling to cough them up.
‘The next time we meet I will have to show you the sword!’ she called out as she strode away, wedging the package down behind her belt. Goddess, these Sipanese were weaklings. Was there no one to test her any more?
She shook her sore hand out. Probably her fingernail would turn black and drop off, but it would grow back. Unlike Fallow’s teeth. And it was scarcely the first fingernail she had lost. Including that memorable time she had lost the lot and toenails, too, in the tender care of the Prophet Khalul. Now there had been a test. For a moment, she almost felt nostalgic for her interrogators. Certainly she felt nostalgic for the pleasure of shoving their chief’s face into his own brazier when she escaped. What a sizzle he had made!
But perhaps this Kurrikan would be outraged enough to send a decent class of killer after her. Then she could go after him. Hardly the great battles of yesteryear, but something to wile away the evenings.
Until then Javre walked, swift and steady with her shoulders back. She loved to walk. With every stride she felt her own strength. Every muscle utterly relaxed yet ready to turn the next step in a split instant into mighty spring, sprightly roll, deadly strike. Without needing to look she felt each person about her, judged their threat, predicted their attack, imagined her response, the air around her alive with calculated possibilities, the surroundings mapped, the distances known, all things of use noted. The sternest tests are those you do not see coming, so Javre was the weapon always sharpened, the weapon never sheathed, the answer to every question.
But no blade came darting from the dark. No arrow, no flash of fire, no squirt of poison. No pack of assassins burst from the shadows.
Sadly.
Only a pair of drunk Northmen wrestling outside Pombrine’s place, one of them snarling something about the bald boss. She paid them no mind as she trotted up the steps, ignoring the several frowning guards, who were of a quality inferior even to Fallow’s men, down the hallway and into the central salon, complete with fake marble, cheap chandelier and profoundly unarousing mosaic of a lumpy couple fucking horse-style. Evidently the evening rush had yet to begin. Whores of both sexes and one Javre was still not entirely sure about lounged bored upon the overwrought furniture.
Pombrine was busy admonishing one of his flock for overdressing, but looked up startled when she entered. ‘You’re back already? What went wrong?’
Javre laughed full loud. ‘Everything.’ His eyes widened, and she laughed louder yet. ‘For them.’ And she took his wrist and pressed the parcel into his hand.
Pombrine gazed down at that unassuming lump of animal skin. ‘You did it?’
The woman thumped one heavy arm about his shoulders and gave them a squeeze. He gasped as his bones creaked. Without doubt she was of exceptional size, but even so the casual strength of it was hardly to be believed. ‘You do not know me. Yet. I am Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.’ She looked down at him and he had an unpleasant and unfamiliar sensation of being a naughty child helpless in his mother’s grasp. ‘When I agree to a challenge I do not shirk it. But you will learn.’
‘I keenly anticipate my education.’ Pombrine wriggled free of the crushing weight of her arm. ‘You did not … open it?’
‘You told me not to.’
‘Good. Good.’ He stared down, the smile half-formed on his face, hardly able to believe it could have been this easy.
‘My payment, then.’
‘Of course.’ He reached for the purse.
She held up one calloused hand. ‘I will take half in flesh.’
‘In flesh?’
‘Isn’t that what you peddle here?’
He raised his brows. ‘Half would be a great quantity of flesh.’
‘I get through it. And I mean to stay a while.’
‘Lucky us,’ he muttered.
‘I’ll take him.’
‘An excellent choice, I—’
’And him. And him. And her.’ Javre rubbed her rough palms together. ‘She can get the lads warmed up, I am not paying to wank anyone off myself.’
‘Naturally not.’
‘I am a woman of Thond and have grand appetites.’
‘So I begin to see.’
‘And for the sun’s sake someone draw me a bath. I smell like a heated bitch already, I dread to imagine the stink afterward. I will have every tomcat in the city pursuing me!’ And she burst out laughing again.
One of the men swallowed. The other looked at Pombrine with an expression faintly desperate as Javre herded them into the nearest room.
‘… you, remove your trousers. You, get the bandages off my tits. You would scarcely credit how tightly I have to strap this lot down to get anything done …’
The door snapped mercifully shut.
Pombrine seized Scalacay, his most trusted servant, by the shoulder and drew him close.
‘Go to the Gurkish temple off the Third Canal with all haste, the one with the green marble pillars. Do you know it?’
‘I do, Master.’
‘Tell the priest who chants in the doorway that you have a message for Ishri. That Master Pombrine has the item she was asking after. For Ishri, do you understand?’
‘For Ishri. Master Pombrine has the item.’
‘Then run to it!’
Scalacay dashed away leaving Pombrine to hurry to his office with hardly less haste, the package clutched in one sweaty hand. He fumbled the door shut and turned the key, the five locks closing with a reassuring metallic clatter.
Only then did he allow himself to breathe. He placed the package reverently upon his desk. Now he had it, he felt the need to stretch out the moment of triumph. To weigh it down with the proper gravitas. He went to his drinks cabinet and unlocked it, took his grandfather’s bottle of Shiznadze from the place of honour. That man had lived his whole life waiting for a moment worthy of opening that bottle. Pombrine smiled as he reached for the corkscrew, trimming away the lead from the neck.
How long had he worked to secure that cursed package? Circulating rumours of his business failings when in fact he had never been so successful. Placing himself in Carcolf’s way again and again until finally they appeared to happen upon each other by chance. Wriggling himself into a position of trust while the idiot courier thought him a brainless stooge, clambering by minuscule degrees to a perch from which he could get his eager hands around the package, and then … unhappy fate! Carcolf had slipped free, the cursed bitch, leaving Pombrine with nothing but ruined hopes. But now … happy fate! The thuggery of that loathsome woman Javre had by some fumbling miracle succeeded where his genius had been so unfairly thwarted.
What did it matter how he had come by it, though? His smile grew wider as he eased the cork free. He had the package. He turned to gaze upon his prize again.
Pop! An arc of fizzy wine missed his glass and spurted across his Kadiri carpet. He stared open-mouthed. The package was hanging in the air from a hook. Attached to the hook was a gossamer thread. The thread disappeared through a hole in the glass roof high above where he now saw a black shape spreadeagled.
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 upwards out of his reach.
‘Guards!’ he roared, shaking his fist. ‘Thief!’
A moment later he realised, and his rage turned in a flash to withering horror.
Ishri would soon be on her way.
With a practised 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 ste
eply pitched roof, knee pads 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 inside the room was one of those sights one couldn’t 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 on 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 barrelling around the corner.
‘Stop, thief!’
‘Get him!’
And, particularly shrill, Pombrine desperately wailing, ‘My package!’
Shev jerked the cord at 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 reveller 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’d 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. That 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 neighbour. 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 revellers 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’ve 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?’
‘It has always been a dream of mine to see a Sister of the White disrobe before my eyes, but I was rather wondering whether you found the—’
Shev tossed over the package and Carcolf snatched it smartly from the air.
‘I knew I could rely on you.’ Carcolf felt a little dizzy with relief, not to mention more than a little tingly with desire. She’d always had a weakness for dangerous women.
Bloody hell, she really was turning into her father …
‘You were right,’ said Shev, dropping into the chair she had so recently frightened Carcolf out of. ‘Pombrine had it.’
‘I bloody knew it! That slime! So hard to find a good expendable decoy these days.’
‘It’s as if you can’t trust anyone.’
‘Still. No harm done, eh?’ And Carcolf lifted up her shirt and ever so careful
ly slid the package into the uppermost of her two cash belts.
It was Shev’s turn to watch, pretending not to as she poured herself a glass of wine. ‘What’s in the parcel?’ she asked.
‘It’s safer if I don’t tell you.’
‘You’ve no idea, have you?’
‘I’m under orders not to look,’ Carcolf was forced to admit.
‘Don’t you ever wonder, though? I mean, the more I’m ordered not to look, the more I want to.’ Shev sat forward, dark eyes glimmering in a profoundly bewitching way, and for an instant Carcolf’s head was filled with an image of the pair of them rolling across the carpet together, laughing as they ripped the package apart between them.
She dismissed it with difficulty. ‘A thief can wonder. A courier cannot.’
‘Could you be any more pompous?’
‘It would require an effort.’
Shev slurped at her wine. ‘Well, it’s your package. I suppose.’
‘No, it isn’t. That’s the whole point.’
‘I think I preferred you when you were a criminal.’
‘Lies. You relish the opportunity to corrupt me.’
‘True enough.’ Shev wriggled down the chair so her long, brown legs slid out from the hem of her gown. ‘Why don’t you stay a while?’ One searching foot found Carcolf’s ankle, and slid gently up the inside of her leg, and down, and up. ‘And be corrupted?’
Carcolf took an almost painful breath. ‘Damn, but I’d love to.’ The strength of the feeling surprised her, and caught in her throat, and for the briefest moment she almost choked on it. For the briefest moment, she almost tossed the package out of the window, and sank down before the chair, and took Shev’s hand and shared tales she had never told from when she was a girl. For the briefest moment. Then she was Carcolf again, and she stepped smartly away and let Shev’s foot clomp down on the boards. ‘But you know how it is, in my business. Have to catch the tide.’ And she snatched up her new coat and turned as she pulled it on, giving herself time to blink back any hint of tears.