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 steeply 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!’