The Fly Guild (8 page)

“Ah, you’ve discovered Kate,” said
Huck. “Ain’t she beautiful?”

Quinton didn’t even hear him. He
was too busy trying to get another glimpse of her through the crowd.

“She’s probably the best-lookin’
one in there, though there’s so many sometimes it’s like choosing one stone
from a pile of jewels. She’s probably not much older than us, really, but
around here, who can really tell? This city has a way of aging people. Don’t
get too attached to her, though, because you’ll never be able to afford her.
Only the richies from the other side of the wall can afford her.”

He turned away, this time grabbing
Quinton’s arm to make him follow. “Come on, lover boy, we got to go.”

As he took one last glance, Kate
looked out the door, saw him staring at her and a smile crept onto the corner
of her mouth. Quinton smiled back, then tripped and almost fell flat on his
face. He looked back at the doorway, but there was a large number of people standing
on the steps now, and he could no longer see her. He smiled to himself and
followed Huck back through the maze of the city to return to the guild.

When they got back to the door,
Huck pounded on it twice. A bar was pulled back on the other side and the door
swung open. Master Red eye was waiting for them.

“You’re late,” he whispered, his
eyes seemingly more bloodshot than they had been that morning.

Huck bowed slightly. “Forgive us,
Master Red eye, but I hope you will think that our delay was worth your
inconvenience.” Red eye’s expression was blank and he seemed to be staring
through them. “With my compliments, from two of your students, master.” Huck
handed him the two bags.

Red eye snatched the bags out of
Huck’s hands. He opened Huck’s first and scowled, dumping the contents on a
table inside the door. It was covered with a similar collection of coins,
foodstuffs, a wineskin, a small barrel of beer and some personal items like
clothes, combs and quills. He opened the second bag and his eyes went wide for
a second, and he almost smiled before composing himself and returning the blank
expression to his face.

“Who’s responsible for this?” he
asked, his voice barely audible.

“He is,” said Quinton, pointing to
Huck.

Red eye looked at Huck who said, “We
worked together to get this, master.”

Red eye nodded. “Go to dinner now.”
He carried the bag with the piglet in it at his side and disappeared through
another door.

“Guess that’s the only thanks we
get,” said Huck with a smile. “Come on, let’s eat.”

Dinner proved to be not a whole lot
better than breakfast. There were a few pieces of meat that were mostly
gristle, a broth of some sort and some wormy bread. Foul taste didn’t stop
Quinton from wolfing every bite. He had lived on the streets too long and been
hungry far too many times to be concerned about the quality. The boys ate with
the other maggots in the same nondescript room where they had breakfast. He
looked around for Teli but didn’t see him, though there were a number of the
boys missing and he suspected they were already done and had gone somewhere
else.

“What happens now?” Quinton asked
Huck, who was chewing a particularly tough piece of meat.

“Drawing lessons,” he said between
chews, the words barely understandable.

Quinton got a puzzled look on his
face. “Why do we need to learn to draw?”

Huck smiled and kept chewing. “No,
idiot, we draw lessons. There’s a pot with some numbers in it. You draw one to
see which lesson you go to. You study under a master for a while, then it’s
back to work.”

“Back to work?”

Huck kept chewing and nodded. “Back
to work. More stealing. This time only money or good stuff. We’ll be stalking
people and picking pockets mostly. Do you want to work together again? I think
you’re good luck.”

Quinton shrugged. “Sure. Don’t know
much about pickin’ pockets, though.”

Huck finally gave up chewing and
swallowed the difficult chunk of meat and smiled. “That’s okay, most of the
people are so drunk it’s not too hard. But you do have to be careful, ‘cause
some of them are armed and will run you through if they catch you.”

The boys put their empty bowls on
the table at the front of the room and headed out into the main hallway. Huck
led them through one of the doors, which led to another hallway with more
doors.

“This place is very confusing,”
said Quinton.

“It’s meant to be. If someone ever
attacked us or tried to break in, their confusion would give us time to make
good our escape.”

“Attack us?” Quinton asked as he
followed Huck through one of the doors, trying to make a note to himself which
one it was so he could find it again.

“Yeah, attack us. You know, rival
gangs, city guards, pirates, Orcs, who knows.”

“Has anyone every attacked us
before?”

“Not since I’ve been here, but
that’s only been a couple of years now. Fist has the other gangs on the run,
and some of them have been destroyed. I guess before I came here, things were
really rough. Lots of fights and people getting stabbed in the streets and
stuff like that. Nasty business. But the Fly Guild now pretty much controls
everything.”

“Except the walled part of the
city,” Quinton added.

“Hey, I guess the lord should get
to control somethin’, shouldn’t he?”

Huck walked up to a large pot that
was sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the room. He reached in and drew a
number. “Five. That’s stalking. Not too bad. Now you draw one.”

Quinton reached his hand in and
drew out a small wooden coin with the number eight on it.

“Eight, that’s languages. Hope
you’re pretty smart. Otherwise, that’s a tough one. Mistress Glitter teaches
that one. She’s nice to look at, so even if you don’t take to the languages,
you can stare at her tits.” Huck winked at him. “Come on, this way.” Huck led
him through a door and into another hallway. This time the doors all had
numbers on them. Huck stopped in front of the door with his number on it. “You
can figure out the rest, can’t you?”

Quinton nodded, glancing down the
hallway where he could see the number eight door.

“Good. I’ll meet you outside. If
you get out before me, just wait across the street from the main door.”

“What’s the point of all this
schooling?” Quinton asked, as Huck started walking away.

“Only the best can be masters. It’s
what sets us apart from other gangs. We’re smarter.” He pointed at his head,
sporting anything but a smart look on his face. “Honestly, I think it just
makes the masters feel more important.”

Quinton watched Huck disappear
through the doorway before slowly opening his own door and entering. Inside was
a barren room with no furniture, save for a small table at the front. A woman
was standing over the table, looking through a pile of scrolls neatly piled on
the table. She was probably in her late 20s and had a youthful face, with eyes
that looked much older. Her dirty blond hair was worn in a long braid that hung
down the middle of her back almost to her waist. Her crimson dress had several
beads sewn on the front of it near the neckline, which sparkled in the light of
the fading sunlight that came through the room’s only window. The dress at one
time had probably been stunning, but the years hadn’t been kind to it. Small
stains and tatters were evident upon closer inspection. The dress had a small
cutout below the neck that exposed her large cleavage, which Quinton stared at.
The woman glanced up at him, said nothing, and went back to picking through her
scrolls. After another moment, she looked up at him again and frowned.

“Sit down,” she said disgustedly.
“First time?”

“Yes,” Quinton stammered.

“Sit down with the others,” she
said, motioning to the dozen or so other maggots who were seated on the floor.
Quinton recognized a few faces from the boys who were arrayed in an arc around
the table. They were looking at him with a blank expression, so he made his way
to the end and sat down on the rough wood floor. “I’m Mistress Glitter, for
those of you who haven’t already been under my tutelage. This is languages. Who
in here can tell me why languages are important?”

There was no answer, and Glitter’s
face turned to a scowl. “Come on, now, someone answer me or I’ll start knifing
each one of you until I get an answer.” The look on her face told Quinton that
she meant every word that she said.

A boy in the middle raised his hand
half-heartedly, his arm barely pushing his hand above his head.

She acknowledged the boy with a
simple flick of her head.

“Because it will save us some day?”

Glitter sighed. “Yes, maggot. If
you are lucky and can pull your head out of your ass long enough to take a look
at the world around you, you might realize that something you are looking at is
something that you have seen before in this class. And at that moment, you
might realize that what you are reading is a wizard’s curse, or an Elvish
warning or the Dwarvish symbol for gold vault.” She paused to move a scroll
that was trying to roll off the crude desk. The boy next to him whispered, “I
ain’t believe in Dwarves” before Glitter continued, “And at that point, you
will know what to do. If you don’t read the symbols properly, then you’ll be
guessing.” Her eyes scanned the class, hesitating at each boy for a moment.
When she got to Quinton, he stared back at her. She was quite pretty, and would
be more so if she smiled, but he doubted that she had ever smiled in her life,
or at the very least, not for a very long time. He wondered what circumstances
had brought someone like her into the world of the Fly Guild.

“Guessing gets you killed,” she
said, still looking at him. Her gaze was so powerful he finally looked away,
especially because she put extra emphasis on “killed.”

Glitter spent most of the class
holding up various scrolls again and again. Each one was written in a different
language. She would unroll it and hold it up for all to see, and then tell the
class what language it was in. There was the flowing script of the Elves, the
simple block symbols of the Dwarves, the angry slashing of Orc writing and
ancient runes used mainly by wizards. These were followed by a mind-numbing
host of others: mountain giants, men of the east, south sea dwellers, goblins,
pirates, gnomes and several that were so hard to pronounce he didn’t have a
guess as to what she was talking about. Most of the things she named Quinton
had never seen, and a few were only in stories. He couldn’t believe that those
creatures not only existed but could also write. When she was done going
through them, she picked one at random and unrolled it.

“What is it?” she demanded. The
graceful script was a giveaway. No one wrote as beautifully as the elves.

“Elvish,” three or four of the boys
said together.

She unrolled another. The marks
looked familiar, but he couldn’t remember which one. Many of them were so
similar he couldn’t figure out how you could tell them apart. They all looked
like random collections of dots, dashes, lines and slashes. No one had an
answer. Glitter slowly walked in front of all the boys, holding the scroll in
front of her. “Not one of you can tell me?” She got to Quinton, paused, then
spun around and slowly walked back the other way.

“Men of the east,” said Quinton
flatly. He couldn’t believe he said that out loud. It just sort of popped into
his head.

Glitter whirled on one heel in an
instant. Her eyes narrowed and she walked over to Quinton and lowered the
scroll. He looked back at her, again feeling the power of her gaze, but this
time refused to yield.

“You have a good memory, maggot.”

He swallowed hard. “Forgive me,
mistress, but I didn’t really remember it. I guessed.”

Her expression was blank. Quinton
wasn’t sure if she was going to kill him, kiss him, or just walk away. “Then
why did you say what you did?”

Quinton frowned. “I … I thought it
was familiar to the common letters I’m used to, just in a different type of
writing, but sort of similar, if that makes any sense. I figured they were
maybe related, and the men of the east are the closest to us, so it would make
sense that their language writing might be similar to ours.” He glanced at the
other boys. Their gazes were ones of shock, mouths hanging open in surprise.

Glitter rolled up the scroll and
walked back to the table. She picked up two scrolls and walked back over to
him. She handed one to him and told him to unroll it, while she held the other
one open. “Look at these two scrolls,” she said quietly. “Do you see anything
in common between them?”

Quinton glanced back and forth
between them. They both looked like a random jumble of shapes in neat lines,
but not much else. The one he was holding had mostly squared ends, while the
one Glitter held had more arcs and circles composing the letters and words. He
looked through them both and started to slowly shake his head. He just didn’t
see any relationship between them. She started to roll the scroll back up when
he saw something.

“Wait,” he said. “There. That one.”
He pointed to a word on her scroll, or at least a jumble of symbols he thought
was a word. “It’s not identical, but looks similar to this one.” He pointed to
a word on his scroll. The two didn’t bear much resemblance at all, but there
was a familiar shape to them, and even though they were drawn differently, to
him, they looked related. “They don’t really look much alike, but they seem
related, like cousins or something.”

Her eyes narrowed again into that
powerful gaze. She lowered herself down until she was peering over the scroll
and right into his eyes. Her pale blue eyes looked deep inside of him and
caused him a great deal of discomfort as he tried to hold her gaze.

“Guessing gets you killed, maggot,”
she hissed. “Would you be willing to bet your life on what you just told me?”