“You have no weapon?” he asked suspiciously.
Again, Entreri offered only a little shrug in reply.
“Very well, then,” the thug said, his tone firm, as if he had just made a decision. To accentuate that very point, he took up the board, still dripping with the blood of the old man. Decisively he brought it up to his shoulder, brought it up, Entreri realized, to a more accessible position. The thug was barely twenty feet away when he began his approach.
So much more was going on here, Entreri knew, and he wanted answers.
Ten feet away.
Entreri held his steady and calm pose, but his muscles tightened in preparation.
The man was barely five feet from him. Entreri’s right hand whipped out of his pocket, hurling a spray of fine sand.
Up came the club, and the man turned his head away. He was laughing when he looked back. “Trying to blind me with a handful of sand?” he asked incredulously, sarcastically. “How clever of a desert fighter to think of using sand!”
Of course it was the proverbial “oldest trick” in sneaky Calimshan’s thick book of underhanded street fighting techniques. And the next oldest trick followed when Entreri thrust his hand back into his pocket, and whipped a second handful of sand.
The thug was laughing even as he closed his eyes, defeating the attack. He blinked quickly, just for an instant, a split second. But that instant was long enough for ambidextrous Entreri to withdraw his left hand from his pocket and fling the edged stone. He had just one window of opportunity, an instant of time, a square inch of target. He had to be perfect-but that was the way it had been for Entreri since he was a child, since he went out into the desert, a land that did not forgive the smallest of mistakes.
The sharp stone whistled past the upraised club and hit the thug in the throat, just to one side of center. It nicked into his windpipe and deflected to the left, cutting the wall of an artery before rebounding free into the air.
“Wh-?” the thug began, and he stopped, apparently surprised by the curious whistle that had suddenly come into his voice. A shower of blood erupted from his neck, spraying up across his cheek. He slapped his free hand to it, fingers grasping, trying to stem the flow. He kept his cool enough to hold his makeshift club at the ready the whole time, keeping Entreri at bay, though the younger man had put his hands back in his pockets and made no move.
He was good, Entreri decided, honestly applauding the man’s calm and continued defense. He was good, but Entreri was perfect. You had to be perfect.
The outward flow of blood was nearly stemmed, but the artery was severed and the windpipe open beside it.
The thug growled and advanced. Entreri didn’t blink.
The thug stopped suddenly, dark eyes wide. He tried to speak out, but only sputtered forth a bright gout of blood. He tried to draw breath, but gurgled again pitifully, his lungs fast-filling with blood, and sank to his knees.
It took him a long time to die. Calimport was an unforgiving place. You had to be perfect.
“Well done,” came a voice from the left.
Entreri turned to see two men casually stroll out of a narrow alley. He knew at once that they were thieves, probably guildsmen, for confident Entreri believed only the most practiced rogues could get so close to him without him knowing it.
Entreri looked back to the corpse at his feet, and a hundred questions danced about his thoughts. He knew then with cold certainty that this had been no random meeting. The thug he had killed had been sent to him.
Entreri chuckled, more a derisive snort than a laugh, and kicked a bit of dirt into the dead man’s face.
Less than perfect got you killed. Perfect, as Entreri soon found out, got you invited into the local thieves’ guild.
Entreri could hardly fathom the notion that all the food he wanted was available to him with a snap of his fingers. He had been offered a soft bed, too, but feared that such luxury would weaken him. He slept on his floor at night.
Still, the offer was the important thing. Entreri cared little for material wealth or pleasures, but he cared greatly that those pleasures were being offered to him.
That was the benefit of being in the Basadoni Cabal, one of the most powerful thieves’ guilds in all the city. In fact there were many benefits. To an independent young man such as Artemis Entreri, there were many drawbacks, as well.
Lieutenant Theebles Royuset, the man whom Pasha Basadoni had appointed as Entreri’s personal mentor, was one of these. He was the epitome of men that young Artemis Entreri loathed, gluttonous and lazy, with heavy eyelids that perpetually drooped. His smelly brown hair was naturally frizzy, but too greased and dirty to come away from his scalp, and he always wore the remnants of his last four meals on the front of his shirt. Physically, there was nothing quick about Theebles, except the one movement that brought the latest handful of food into his slopping jowls, but intellectually, the man was sharp and dangerous.
And sadistic. Despite the obvious physical limitations, Theebles was in the second rank of command in the guild, along with a half-dozen other lieutenants, behind only Pasha Basadoni himself.
Entreri hated him. Theebles had been a merchant, and like so many of Calimport’s purveyors, had gotten himself into severe trouble with the city guard. So Theebles had used his wealth to buy himself an appointment to the guild, that he might go underground and escape Calimport’s dreaded prisons. That wealth must have been considerable, Entreri knew, for Pasha Basadoni to even accept this dangerous slug into the guild, let alone appoint him a lieutenant.
Entreri was savvy enough to understand, then, that Basadoni’s choice of sadistic Theebles as his personal mentor would be a true test of his loyalty to his new family.
A brutal test, Entreri realized as he leaned against the squared stone wall of a square chamber in the guild hall’s basement. He crossed his arms defensively over his chest, fingers of his thick gloves tapping silently, impatiently. He found that he missed his street in the city outside, missed the days when he had answered to no one but himself and his survival instincts. Those days had ended with the well-aimed throw of an edged stone.
“Well?” Theebles, who had come for one of his many unannounced inspections, prompted again. He picked something rather large out of his wide and flat nose. Like everything else that fell into his plump and almost baby-like hands, it quickly went into his mouth.
Entreri didn’t blink. He looked from Theebles to the ten-gallon glass case across the dimly lit room; the chamber, though fully twenty feet underground, was dry and dusty.
Swaying with every step, the fat lieutenant paced to the case. Entreri obediently followed, but only after a quick nod to the rogue standing guard at the door, the same rogue who had met Entreri on the street after he had killed the thug. That man, Dancer by name, was another of Theebles’s servants, and one of the many friends young Entreri had made in his time in the guild. Dancer returned the nod and slipped out into the hall.
He trusts me, Entreri thought. He considered Dancer the fool for it.
Entreri caught up to Theebles right in front of the case. The fat man stared intently at the small orange snakes intertwined within.
“Beautiful,” Theebles said. “So sleek and delicate.” He turned his heavy-lidded gaze Entreri’s way.
Entreri could not deny the words. The snakes were Thesali vipers, the dreaded “Two-Step.” If one bit you, you yelled, took two steps, and fell down dead. Efficient. Beautiful.
Milking the venom from the deadly vipers, even with the thick gloves he wore, was not an enviable task. But then, wretched Theebles Royuset made it a point to never give Entreri an enviable task.