Chapter Fourteen: The Last Thief
Wren barely escaped East Square, and he was one of only a handful of others who did as well. Pip was not among them.
The face of the dead man stuck in his mind’s eye as he fled through the city, blindly making his way back to the safety of the Waterworks. Every corner he turned, he saw the face of the man who’d given him the lute. Every shout or cry made him think that the man was calling him back to question him – to ask him what he’d done to deserve death.
You did nothing, Wren thought as he stumbled through an alleyway, trying to answer the man’s ghost and send it away. You did nothing. You did nothing.
The litany pounded through him in time with his heartbeat, as if the knowledge of the death had infected him and was being carried by his blood through his body. He felt too warm, as if he had a fever, and he kept touching his chest and side, where the weight of the lost lute was most noticeable.
The loss was not the loss of a possession. It was a physical break, a tearing away akin to losing an arm or a leg, and he was still bleeding from it. His fingers still itched to touch the wood, his head still spun with the last melodies he’d played, and his whole body felt too light and somehow lopsided.
What remained of the Thieves Guild congregated beneath the Waterworks that night. After the botched job, they knew the guards would crack down across the city in a final push toward eradication. Many Thieves had already been taken, even those who hadn’t followed Bruth. The bare handful left, including Wren, weren’t enough for anything. Many of them were almost hysterical as they conveyed the rumors they’d heard on their way back to the hideout: those who’d been taken and who could be convicted of murder were scheduled for trial the following day and would doubtless hang soon after, while those that were less guilty had been thrown into the castle prisons, from whence they might never return.
There was no reason to stay in the city. They had to flee.
Wren listened as avidly as he could, trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of thoughts and feelings that threatened to cripple him. There were no Guild leaders left – Bruth himself had been taken by the guards, and had died resisting – and there was no one to convince them to stay. They pooled what gold they had and went for the gates, toward the one guard they agreed could still be bribed. They took everything they could carry, which was not much.
Wren sleepwalked after them. It was as though the thread holding together his thoughts had been cut, and the result was a jumble in his mind that he could not sort out. He followed the others and they seemed to take it as a given that he was one of them. No one knew the details of what had happened in the center of the Square; no one had made it out from that far in save for Wren.
They escaped through the northern gate, but the guard who could still be greased knew the predicament they were in. He demanded a king’s ransom, and when the money changed hands the Thieves were destitute in truth, with barely two coppers to rub together.
They crossed the bay with difficulty. It was a dismal night, wracked by storms that swept over Caelron and the whole Peninsula, turning the normally placid waters into rough, choppy swells and sending rivers of rain crashing into the lower towns. Even the pilot of the ferry looked green in the face, and he muttered to himself under his breath every second they were in the water.
They reached the other side alive, but so wet they might as well have swum. They disembarked in pairs and faded into the city, then met again and holed up until the morning turned to afternoon and the storm began to blow itself out. It wasn’t hard to avoid notice. There were few guards in the city around Var Athel because few were needed. Everyone knew that to commit a crime in sight of the Citadel was to be the lowest kind of fool: enchantments were woven into the very stones of the fortress that sought out wrongdoing, and the justice of the Sorev Ael was swift and final.
But the truly desperate are willing to tempt fate.
They had not eaten more than salvaged scraps during their escape, and many were still smarting from the beatings they’d taken and thus eager to cause mayhem. All that remained were the worst of the lot: the cowards, the truly evil, and those blessed with simple, dumb luck.
“Wake up!”
It was deep into the night when they were roused, but they did as commanded. The man doing the waking was known simply as Oak, one of Bruth’s lieutenants, and he was not to be trifled with. He’d lost an eye during the escape – a clean slice that was on its way to healing, but he would never see out of it again – and he’d covered the useless socket with a black patch. His pockmarked cheeks and chin were covered with several weeks of scruff that was the grizzled gray-black of late middle age, and yellow-brown teeth sneered out between his twisted lips.
“What’s going on?” one of them muttered groggily.
“Shut it,” Oak growled. The offender did as told, and the rest took the hint and stayed silent as they came to their feet. They’d hidden themselves in a dark and grimy alley that smelled of refuse and waste, just beside the road that led south. Oak turned back to the alley’s opening and looked out, watching with hungry, wolfish eyes. Wren followed the gaze and saw the object of his attention: an approaching merchant train.
It was a simple gilded wagon with a single driver, and only two men on horseback to guard it. There were two others as well. The first, a servant, was not worth noticing, but the second was dressed in finery and rode a mount burdened with bulging saddlebags that were carefully secured.
“That’s a lordling if I ever saw one,” whispered another strongarm named Lopin. “We can take him easily.”
Oak smiled.
“Send the boys out front to distract,” he growled, gesturing to Tiar and Squeak, the twins that had come to them only a few months back and who were somewhere around ten. “They look half drowned – little lordling will stop to help. You three – you’re picks, yeah?”
He was speaking to Wren and two others – Dice and Hop, both of whom were older thieves in their late twenties. They were the last true thieves left – the ones called pickpockets by the strongarms like Oak. Dice and Hop grunted their assent before Wren could say anything, and Oak turned away.
“Good – circle around,” he said. “Rob ‘em quiet if yeh can. We’ll distract ‘em, you cut the strings. Got it?”
Dice and Hop murmured their agreement, and Wren felt himself begin to slowly waken. He had not eaten in nearly three days, save for water and mildewed bread. They needed this – they needed what that lordling had. A thrill rushed through him, and his mind started to work again. The face of the man in the Square began to fade; this was not like that. This lordling was not an innocent. No man who rode a fine horse and led a gilded wagon was an innocent.
Dice and Hop moved off along the alley, ready to circle back around, and Wren went with them. His heart had begun to beat quickly in his chest, and his head was clear and his eyes wide. The air was cool and misty tonight after the faded storm – perfect cover – and a thin film of dew coated his skin, mingling with the sweat and grime that had become as much a part of his attire as the clothes he wore.
They passed through a cluster of single-story wooden houses, careful not to make a sound, and stayed away from the center of the road, lit as it was with oil lamps that spread a flickering golden glow across the scene. They turned down the cross street and heard noise ahead of them.
Wren’s pulse pounded in his ears, and he realized he was smiling. This was what it was supposed to be like – robbing from those who could spare it, robbing from those who could buy a hundred thousand lutes and yet kept all that money to themselves. This was what had gone missing! It was a good start to a life outside of Caelron. A fresh start. This would set them up, this would get them food and shelter.
They slowed to a stop several yards behind the train as it too came to a halt. There was some deliberation, and then the lord rode forward, flanked by his two guards, to examine the boys that had emerged from the alleyway in front of them.
Dice turned back to check that Wren had followed, and as he did he caught a glimpse of Wren’s ghostly smile. He spoke contemptuously: “Wipe that smirk off your face, lute-boy. You do this job and you give us whatever you get. There’s no Guild now – you do this and you do it right, or you’ll answer to me.”
As the words sank in, the heady thrill of the chase was replaced with a numb, hollow feeling. Dice turned back around, his greasy black hair swaying over his shoulders and hiding him in the shadows. There was no time to say or doing anything in response though, no time to protest even if he’d wanted to, because just then Oak and the others attacked.
They ran for the two guards and unhorsed them before they knew what was happening, gnarled old Oak in the lead. He struck the first guard with a plank of wood that was warped and cured with age, bearing him to the ground. The second guard followed soon after.
“Go!” Hop whispered fiercely. He took off running for the horses, ready to catch them. Wren took a step back.
But Dice must have sensed what Wren was only just beginning to contemplate, because he turned and grabbed him. With his free hand he unsheathed a thin stiletto dagger, exactly the same as the one Pip had used, and pressed it against Wren’s throat.
“You take one more step and you die this very second.”
Cold fear washed through Wren, like ice injected into his veins, and he swallowed around the blade.
“Follow Hop,” Dice hissed, pushing him forward. “Go! Now!”
Wren went.
The wagon was tall and long, with a covered canvas top and flaps down the sides that hid from view whatever was inside. The strongarms had succeeded in unhorsing the lord, but something seemed wrong. Wren slowed just enough to see that one of the guards was on his feet again and had managed to unsheathe his sword. His dark cloak had been torn off by the first attack and his subsequent fall, and Wren could now see the colors of his clothing underneath: red and green in a strange pattern, not like a guardsman at all but like a… like…
Viretorum.
A new kind of fear rushed through him, one that bordered on terror. His thoughts scattered like startled quarry, and a ringing filled his ears. He pulled up short in his rush toward the stray horses, just long enough to see Hop get picked up and thrown a dozen feet through the air.
No one and nothing had touched him.
Wren spun back around and saw Dice standing a dozen paces back behind him, just barely concealed in shadow. He hadn’t seen Hop go flying, and he was staring murderously at Wren.
There was no way out.
The sudden sound of pounding hooves filled Wren’s ears. The lord’s horse, riderless and as startled by the flying Hop as Wren had been, went racing past him, away from the wagon and back toward the way they’d come.
“Get it!” Dice hissed at him, flashing again the thin, deadly dagger.
Wren at the horse just in time. It reared back, frightened of what it couldn’t see, and kicked out wildly. Wren dodged the flaying hooves easily and then reached up to grab for the reins, turning the beast’s head to keep it under control.
Shouts came from the other side of the wagon, and the ring of swords.
Wren steadied the horse as best he could and went for the luggage. The saddlebags were tied shut. He plunged his hand into his shirt, pulled out the curved pick knife he kept there, and cut the straps. Something heavy shifted inside the bag; he caught it with the practiced, dexterous twist, slide, and pull of a life-long thief, and then pushed past what felt like cloth to find a box made of metal and wood. His hand closed over it, and he pulled it out with a heavy tug.
He had a split second to disengage from the horse – to pull back, look down at the box in his hand and realize it was covered in some strange foreign language – before the searing pain raced through him.
He could not have said if he cried out, or fell, or did anything but stand there. All he knew was that every part of him, his entire being, was suddenly flooded with pain from where his hand had touched the box. His vision blacked out and then came back, tinged with red, and he found himself on his knees, slapping his hand against the ground, trying to dislodge the source of the agony.
It would not go.
He stumbled to his feet, puling at his wrist, his hand, screaming for someone to do something, shouting for someone to cut it off, to end the pain, but it was no use. It felt as though someone had fused the metal to his skin.
A single thought crossed his mind in the middle of the scene, a single snatch of song that made no sense at all. He thought, with whatever dim corner of himself that was not consumed by pain, that his mind had broken and he’d gone insane, but the notes wouldn’t die. They kept playing themselves over and over again in his mind, inexplicably reminding him of running water.
Unconscious of the effort, his lips rounded themselves and let out a thin stream of air. The whistle echoed the notes in his head perfectly, and the melody seemed grew until it enveloped him.
The pain cut off as quickly as it had come, and the box fell from his hand.
Gasping, Wren looked through the film of tears that had welled up in his eyes and begun to stream down his cheeks. Where he’d expected to see a blackened, burned stump, he saw instead a fully functioning hand that, though it looked slightly red where he’d clutched the box, was completely unharmed.
He looked down at the box and saw that it had split in two where it had hit the ground. The metal and wood had retreated, curling out to form what looked almost like a claw, and inside was a shining piece of metal.
There came sound from behind him – shouts from the knights.
He grabbed the ring. A sharp sensation raced up his arm and disappeared in a flash of heat that left him gasping. He ran for the lord’s horse, which was still nearby; it shied away from him, hesitant, but Wren grabbed the reins and pulled it around. He unsheathed the pick knife again, sliced the straps holding the heaviest bags to the saddle, and vaulted onto the horse’s back. Deprived of the excess weight, the beast whirled around easily, and Wren dug his heels into its flanks. It shot off up the street, rushing past Dice as he lunged out of the alley in a futile attempt to stop them, and raced out into the dark and stormy night.