Honor Among Thieves (35 page)
And even if he tried to do just that—well, he could be replaced. And with Mörgain on the defensive, able only to react to his own moves, there could be only one warrior ready and capable of being Mörg’s replacement.
Mörget walked away from the palace of justice with a vast smile deforming his face, despite how he’d been slighted by the Great Chieftain. No one dared ask him what he found so pleasant. He returned to the wall between the inner and outer baileys and collected Balint once more. As he headed toward his tent he told her all that had been said between father, brother, and sister. He wanted to know if she thought his plan to invade the West was brilliant or headstrong.
“Does it truly matter? It means more blood, and that’s what you’re really after,” the dwarf said, her jeering tone gone for once. She sounded afraid. “It means you get to kill more men of Skrae.”
As usual, when she wasn’t trying to be funny, she made Mörget laugh the hardest.
“Oh yes,” he agreed, “that’s certainly a benefit.” He boomed out with laughter that shook the windows in the houses all around him.
“T
he Godstone is cracked. The cracks need to be repaired. Only blood will do. Blood is what He wants! How can you not see this?” The madman, the child-killer, was chained to the bars of his cell in the gaol. He looked badly used. Bruises covered his chest and one eye was swollen shut. Clearly his keepers had been beating him.
Malden wondered if they had done so in self-defense or because they hated his crime. He supposed he couldn’t blame them for being angry. Still, he sighed. “I want him made as comfortable as possible. He’s beyond rationality—beyond knowing right from wrong. There’s no reason he should suffer because he’s lost his wits.”
“You could end his sufferin’ right now,” Velmont said. The Helstrovian thief didn’t look angry. He looked like he pitied the man. Yet it seemed he could imagine no better way to express that pity than slitting the madman’s throat.
The laws of Skrae—and the customs of Ness—agreed. If anyone but Malden had been in charge of his fate, the man would already be dead. But there had to be a better way—didn’t there? Mercy had to mean something.
“No,” Malden insisted. “There will be no executions while I’m Lord Mayor. The Burgrave hanged beggars for stealing a loaf of bread. Things are going to be different now.”
“There’s only six cells in this gaol,” Velmont pointed out. “There’ll be more like him, an’ soon enow.”
“Then we’ll build more cells,” Malden said, and headed up the stairs toward the ruins of Castle Hill. Velmont was right, of course. The gaol wasn’t going to serve his purposes for long. It was meant only for holding criminals until they could be brought to trial. It had not been designed for keeping anyone more than week at a time. The sanitary facilities were rudimentary. There was no air or light down there. Prisoners would sicken and perish if they were locked away in that hole for long.
Yet he knew he was right. Killing a man for a simple crime didn’t redress the original offense. It wouldn’t bring back the madman’s child. There had to be a better way, and it was up to him to find it.
Maybe, he thought for the first time, he’d been given this unwanted responsibility for a reason. Maybe he could use his power, instead of being used by it. Maybe he could change things for the better.
If he was only to be given a chance.
Up in the air again, he turned to Velmont and asked, “How much grain did we save from the stores?”
Velmont shrugged. “Enow fer a month, if we’re lucky.”
“We may have to ration it to last longer,” Malden said. He knew that would not be popular. In the two weeks he’d been Lord Mayor, the daily complaints he received about people unable to get flour to make bread had tripled. It was bound to get worse. Hungry people would want to know why he wasn’t feeding them. Starving people would start to think maybe they’d be better off with someone else. Every time he tried to explain the situation, he was met with blank stares.
The worst part was, he couldn’t blame the people of Ness. He couldn’t get angry with them when they didn’t understand. Back when he’d just been Malden the Thief, he would have had the same reaction. Living in a city, so far from farms and fields, people forgot that food had to be grown and harvested and brought to Ness and stored. When you could just go down to the market and buy a loaf of bread you never had to think about its provenance.
“Perhaps we should form details of men to go outside the walls and search the closer farms. There may be stores of grain left behind when the farmers fled. Though I imagine the Burgrave probably raided them. He’ll need to feed his army, and—”
Malden stopped because he’d heard a noise coming from beyond the wall of Castle Hill. A great jeering roar, full of boos and hisses.
“That can’t be good,” he said. They rushed to the broken gates and hurried out into Market Square. A crowd had gathered before the Cornmarket Bridge, a rough mob of women and old men who were throwing garbage at a train of wagons. Malden’s first thought was relief that the subject of the crowd’s ire was not himself.
His second thought was that it was his job to find out what was going on—and to stop it.
“We need to get through there and see what’s happening,” he said.
“On’t,” Velmont said, and started grabbing people from the crowd and thrusting them out of the way. Cursing and kicking, he forced a path through the gathering and Malden swept through until he stood at the end of the bridge, where rotten vegetables and bits of refuse coated the cobblestones, the remains of garbage thrown by the crowd.
A dozen men and women huddled there, sheltering themselves from the stinking missiles. They were dressed in heavy mantles and scarves as if they intended to travel a great distance. Behind them mules pulled three wagons overloaded with bundles and crates.
“What’s going on here?” Malden asked.
The leader of the group lifted his arm away from his face. It was the priest of the Lady who’d ministered to Pritchard Hood the night the bailiff died. The others, Malden realized, must be those few people left in Ness who still worshipped the Lady. The last few weeks had been difficult for them, Malden knew.
The priest stared pure hatred into Malden’s eyes. “I’m taking my flock to a better place.”
“Beyond the walls of Ness? It’s dangerous out there.”
“Less so than staying,” the priest insisted. “We are attacked by ruffians in the street. Our images are smashed. Our churches defiled by thieves and whores! You’ve driven the Lady’s face away from this city, Lord Mayor, and you will suffer the consequences.”
Malden grunted in frustration. He’d heard tales of violence against the Lady’s adherents, but had been able to do little about it. His staunchest supporters were those most devoutly attached to the Bloodgod, who seemed to think that the Lady’s priests were fair game.
“Don’t go,” he beseeched. “I’ll protect you. I’ll make it illegal to persecute anyone for their belief.” It had been one of the things he wanted to do anyway. He’d assumed he had some time before he had to start convincing people that they should accept all religions. Apparently it was now or never.
“We’ll take our chances with the barbarians, thank you very much. If you really want to help us, move this throng out of our path.”
Malden shook his head. “Where will you go?”
“The Northern Kingdoms do not worship the Bloodgod. Their interpretation of the Lady’s word is different from ours, but we share some articles of faith. Perhaps they will listen to our preaching there. If not, well, the Old Empire knows many faiths. The Emperor tolerates all religion as long as no one preaches against his rule. We can live there without fear of being murdered in our beds, simply because we believe in the true faith,” the priest said. He looked tired already. Malden wondered how far he would get before bandits killed him and his people for the contents of their wagons. Ten miles? Twenty? The Northern Kingdoms were two hundred miles away, and crossing the sea to the Old Empire would take months—assuming the pilgrims weren’t slaughtered by pirates or wrecked by storms.
“I won’t stop you,” Malden said, when for a minute he’d considered doing just that. He turned around and faced the jeering crowd. “All of you get back and let them through. And stop throwing that filth! They’re leaving. Isn’t that what you want?”
Grudgingly the crowd moved back to make an opening. They kept jeering and shouting insults but kept their garbage to themselves. Malden bowed to the priest and gestured for him to go through.
Velmont, however, had thought of something Malden had missed. “Boss,” he said. “What’ve they got in yon wains?”
For the first time Malden paid close attention to the priest’s wagons. They were filled to bursting with bundles of clothing, tents, and tools. More importantly, they were full of bags of flour, casks of lard, whole sides of salted beef and pork, and barrels of small beer.
Food. Enough food to get them to their destination. Alternatively, food that could feed a hundred people in Ness for a week.
Malden wrestled with himself. He could not, in good conscience, do what good politics demanded of him.
But he needed that food.
“Hold,” he said. The priest glared at him. Malden took a purse from his belt. It was full of silver coins and a few gold royals. “I’ll give you fair recompense for the food you’re carrying,” he said.
“We’ll need it on the road,” the priest said. But there was a new look in his eye. A look of fear.
Malden tried to push the purse into the priest’s hand. The old man wouldn’t take it. “You can buy food on your way. It’ll make your load lighter.”
“Let me pass,” the priest insisted. His voice was weak. He knew that without Malden’s approval, he would never make it as far as the city gates.
“You can stay here and keep everything. Or you can leave the food behind on your way out of Ness,” Malden said through gritted teeth. His heart shriveled in his chest, just speaking the words. “Take the coins, damn you.”
“Every demon of the pit will take turns gnawing on your soul,” the priest said.
But he took the coins.
“B
e of good cheer, lad,” Slag said as he led Malden down toward the Meadlock Stair. “Think of the fucking bright side already.” Ahead of them the river Skrait was at its narrowest, and it ran cold and fast, swollen with melted snow from the north. That morning white flakes had settled for a moment on the courtyard of the Lemon Garden, melting before Malden could be sure they were real. Winter was almost upon them.
Malden could barely imagine a bright side, much less see one. He strained for optimism, and came up with only the barest rationalization. “The pilgrims will die on the road, long before they would have had need of those foodstuffs,” he said, mostly for his own benefit. “In this weather—they’ll freeze before they starve.”
“That’s not precisely what I meant. Here, let me show you something I think will please you,” Slag said. He headed down the steps toward the river, where his latest creation was spinning freely on a massive steel axle. It looked like the Bloodgod’s own wagon wheel, twenty feet across and made of massive beams of wood. All along its circumference paddles stuck out like the oars of a war galley. The paddles dipped into the water, where the current pushed against them and sent them speeding upward again, water spilling from them in a constant torrent. “The force of the river, you see, is transmitted to the axle as angular moment, and from there to a reducing gear which—”
“I don’t speak dwarven, and you know it,” Malden said. He followed Slag up a rickety scaffolding to look down on what had once been a yard for the storage of tar barrels. Now it had been turned into a grain mill. The steel axle of the waterwheel was connected by some ingenious bit of clockwork to a wooden shaft as big as a tree trunk. This rotated constantly, turning as it did so a millstone busily churned out crushed wheat. The human millers down there looked afraid to touch the mechanism, but they worked spryly enough at gathering up the grain and scooping it into sacks.
“This rod turns that rod, which turns the arsing stone,” Slag explained, a bit testily. “It works, that’s the important thing.”
Yes. Yes, it was. As little grain as Ness still possessed, it was worthless if it couldn’t be ground into flour. Now, at least, that part of the problem was solved. Malden felt hope blossom in his chest for the first time in days. “Slag,” Malden said, “you’ve done it again. Is there no end to your invention?”
“Now, I can’t rightly claim to have thought this one up,” the dwarf admitted. “There’s wheels like this in Redweir, turned by the Strow. Or at least, there used to be. Who can say what’s come of that town?”
Malden nodded solemnly. News from the eastern half of Skrae was rare as hen’s teeth, but all of it was bad. Those few travelers who actually came as far as Ness now reported a countryside ravaged by barbarians, full of bandits and starving peasants too terrified to leave their homes in search of food.
“For the nonce, at least, we’ll have flour,” Malden said, because that was what Slag wanted to hear. “You’ve done a wonderful job here. The city will give you a medal, or some commendation. I’ll see to it.”
“Lad, bollocks on that. You know I don’t care for honors. I’m trying to help you, that’s all. And maybe I can offer you something else today, if you’ll step into my office.” The dwarf’s eyes burned with excitement as he led Malden into a shack at one corner of the millyard. It was cold inside, and cramped—the ceiling was far too low for Malden’s comfort—but once he saw what the dwarf had in mind, he could not look away.
A piece of parchment lay weighted on a table. On it was a message written in dwarven runes, with beneath each rune a character from the alphabet of Skrae. This second set of characters was grouped into individual words.
“You’ve deciphered it?” Malden asked, breathless. Cutbill’s message had become a touchstone for him, a hope he could cling to no matter how dark things got. He had convinced himself, with no evidence whatsoever, that if he could only read it, all his problems would be solved. In his more lucid moments he knew that was folly, but with so many people believing in him, he needed something
he
could believe in. “But no,” he said, glancing at the alphabetical marks. “No, it’s still gibberish.”
“Trust a guildmaster of thieves to be paranoid,” Slag said. “He used not one cipher, but three. First the symbols on the original ledger page, which were then revealed to be substitutes for dwarven runes. I had to convert the runes to your tongue, by comparing the sounds they stand for. That wasn’t simple! And even then the wrong man wouldn’t be able to read it, because he ciphered the runes as well.” Slag shook his head. “Crafty bastard.”
“One step closer,” Malden said. He had not expected it to be easy.
“More than that. Look here. This last word in the message—ASRZGJJ. Does it look familiar at all?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Slag groaned. “Think, lad! Use the damned skills Coruth gave you. It’s a substitution cipher. A rotation cipher, I warrant, or blind me with a stick. Seven letters. The last two the same. Think!”
Malden wished the dwarf would just tell him the answer. He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two in days. Every time he closed his eyes he saw only the fear in the priest’s eye as his food was taken away. He could use something easy, for once
.
But—all right, he thought. Work it through.
Seven letters. Two the same, at the tail. Think of words that end with a double letter, most of them end in TT, SS, or—ah—LL . . .
“It’s a signature,” Malden exhaled. “It’s—”
“Cutbill’s name, ciphered!” Slag agreed. “And more than that, it’s a partial key to the whole fucking thing! Now I know every time the letter J appears in the message, it’s actually an L. Every A stands in place of a C. Fill in the rest, and we have it.”
“We . . . have it,” Malden said.
“Together we can solve this in an hour,” Slag said, nodding happily.
A strange fear gripped Malden. So close. He desperately wanted to read the message. And yet—if he did—his one hope would be gone. There couldn’t possibly be anything in the message to solve his problems. It just wasn’t long enough.
Yet he had to know. He must know what Cutbill had deemed so important it had to be kept so carefully secret.
“I’m supposed to go address a meeting of the wool carders’ guild right now,” Malden said. “After that I’m supposed to sit in judgment at the hall of justice. Velmont has my whole day sewn up with meetings and audiences.”
“So—you don’t want to work on this right now?”
“Blast you, no, that’s not what I meant at all. I meant bar the door, so when Velmont comes looking for me, he can’t get in. And hand me that quill!”
