‘You’ll have to go back,’ said Raubin.
‘Back?’ muttered Wonderful, her dirt-streaked face a picture of disbelief. ‘Back, you mad fucker?’
‘You know the hall caught fire, don’t you?’ snapped Brack, one big, trembling arm pointed down towards the thickening column of smoke wafting up from the village.
‘It what?’ asked Raubin as Whirrun blasted a fresh shriek at the sky, hacking, gurgling, only just keeping on his feet.
‘Oh, aye, burned down, more’n likely with the damn thing in it.’
‘Well … I don’t know … you’ll just have to pick through the ashes!’
‘How about we pick through your fucking ashes?’ snarled Yon, throwing the cup down on the ground.
Craw gave a long sigh, rubbed at his eyes, then winced down towards that shit-hole of a village. Behind him, Whirrun’s laughter sawed throaty at the dusk. ‘Always,’ he muttered, under his breath. ‘Why do I always get stuck with the fool jobs?’
Skipping Town
The Near Country,Summer 575
‘Maybe we should skip town.’ said Javre.
‘Oh no, no, no, not this time,’ Shev snapped back at her. ‘You can’t just career through life leaving the wreckage of your mistakes behind you.’
A silence as they hurried on through the shadows, Shev having to half-jog to keep up as Javre ploughed ahead with immense strides, brow furrowed in thought.
‘What is it that we have been doing this past year, then?’
‘Well … we’ve …’ Shev thought about it. ‘That’s just my point! We can’t keep doing it.’
‘I see. So we give Tumnor his jewel, we collect the promised money, we pay our gambling debts-’
‘Your gambling debts.’
‘Then what? We put down roots here?’ Javre raised one red brow at the crumbling buildings, the rubbish-strewn street, a fish-stinking beggar hacking out diseased coughs in a doorway.
‘Well, no. We move on.’
‘And what we left behind us tonight?’ Javre jerked her head the way they’d come. ‘Would you call that wreckage?’
‘I would call that …’ Shev wondered how much this particular truth would stretch before it tore to bits. ‘A series of mishaps.’
‘It looked like wreckage to me. Once the front of the mansion collapsed, you would have to call that wreckage, no?’
Shev glanced quickly over her shoulder yet again to make sure no one was following. ‘I suppose an uncharitable speaker could describe it so.’
‘Then explain to me, if you would, Shevedieh, how your way differs from mine, except that we leave town with less money?’
‘We leave with less enemies as well! I tire of leaving a new score in every shit-hole we pass through like a rabbit leaves droppings! Sooner or later I might need a good shit-hole to pass through again. All the damn enemies. I wake up sweating, you know, in the night!’
‘That is all that spicy food,’ said Javre. ‘I do not know how often I have warned you about your diet. And enemies are a good thing. Enemies show you make … an impression.’
‘Oh, you make an impression, all right, that I would never deny. You made a hell of an impression on those boys tonight.’
Javre grinned a mass of white teeth as she punched one scabbed fist into one calloused palm with a smack like a door slamming. ‘I certainly did.’
‘But I’m a thief, Javre, not … whatever you are. I’m supposed to keep a low profile.’
‘Ah!’ Javre raised that same red brow again as she glanced sideways. ‘Hence all the black.’
‘And it does look rather well on me, I think you’d have to agree.’
‘You certainly are a shadowy and seductive corruptor of innocent maidenhood!’ Javre playfully jogged Shev in the ribs with an elbow and nearly sent her careering into the nearest wall, then caught her by the hand and dragged her into a crushing embrace, her cheek squashed into Javre’s armpit. ‘We shall do it your way, then, Shevedieh, my friend! Straight and true and morally upright, just as a thief should be! We shall pay your debts, then get drunk and find some men.’
Shev was still struggling to get a breath in after that elbow. ‘What is it exactly that you think I’d do with them?’
Javre grinned. ‘The men would be for me. I am a woman of Thond and have grand appetites. You can keep watch.’
‘My towering thanks for the immensity of that honour,’ said Shev, slipping from under the weight of Javre’s mightily muscled arm.
‘It is the least I could do. You have been a fine sidekick so far.’
‘I thought this was an equal partnership.’
‘All the best sidekicks think that,’ said Javre, striding towards the front door of the Weeping Slaver, its sign hanging precariously from a rusting pole by one loop.
Shev caught Javre’s arm and, by hanging off it with all her weight and digging her heels into the mud, managed to stop her taking the next step. ‘I have a feeling Tumnor will be expecting us.’
‘That was the arrangement.’ Javre looked down at her, puzzled.
‘Given that he was less than entirely forthcoming about the job, it may be that he’ll try to double-cross us.’
Javre frowned. ‘You think he might break the agreement?’
‘He didn’t mention the traps, did he?’ asked Shev, still heaving at Javre’s arm. ‘Or the long drop? Or the wall? Or the dogs? And he said two guards, not twelve.’
Muscles worked as Javre clenched her jaw. ‘He said nothing about that sorcerer, either.’
‘Exactly,’ Shev managed to gasp, every sinew trembling with effort.
‘Breath of the Mother, you’re right.’
Shev breathed a sigh of relief and slowly stood, patting Javre’s arm as she released it. ‘I’ll sneak in around the back and make sure that-’
Javre gave her a huge smile. ‘The Lioness of Hoskopp never uses the back door!’ And she sprang up the steps, raised one boot, kicked the front door splintering from its hinges and strode inside, the filthy tails of her once-white coat flapping after.
Shevedieh gave brief but serious consideration to sprinting off down the street, then sighed and crept up the steps after her.
The Weeping Slaver wasn’t the most auspicious of settings, though Shev had to admit she’d been in worse. Indeed, she’d spent most of the last few years in worse.
Size it had, big as a barn with a balcony at first-floor level, ill-lit by a vast circular chandelier with smoking candles in stained glass cups. The floor was covered in dirty straw and a mismatched jumble of chairs and tables, a warped counter down one side with the cheapest spirits of a dozen dozen cultures stacked on shelves behind.
The place smelled of smoke and sweat, of spilled drinks and sprayed vomit, of desperation and wasted chances, and was very much as it had been three nights ago when they took the job, just before Javre lost half their promised earnings at dice. There was one clear difference, however. That night it had overflowed with scum of every kind. Tonight there appeared to be just the one patron.
Tumnor sat at a table in the middle of the room, a fixed grin on his plump face and a sheen of sweat across his forehead. He looked extremely nervous, even for a man perpetrating a double-cross on a pair of notorious thieves. He looked in imminent fear of his life.
‘It’s a trap,’ he grunted through his clenched teeth, without moving his hands from the tabletop.
‘That we had gathered, fiend!’ said Javre.
‘No,’ he grunted, eyes swivelling wildly sideways, then back to them, then sideways again. ‘A trap.’
That was when Shev noticed his hands were nailed to the table. She followed his glance, past a large brown stain on the floor that looked suspiciously like blood and into the shadows. She saw a figure there. The glint of eyes. The glimmer of steel. A man poised and ready. Now she took in other telltale gleams in the dark corners of the inn – an axeman wedged behind a drinks cabinet, the nose of a flatbowman peeking into the light on the balcony above, a pair of boots sticking out from the door to the cellar which she deduced must still be attached to the dead legs of one of Tumnor’s hired men. Her heart sank. She hated fighting, and she had the strong feeling she was going to be fighting very soon.