CHAPTER TWO
Josephine rushed from the carriage and into the house faster than the footman burdened with her purchases could follow. Her cheeks stung from the brisk autumn chill.
As she brushed past Fenrik, their family steward, she shed her jacket and the new hat she’d bought. He collected her garments with his usual aplomb.
“Welcome home, mistress. I trust your excursion was pleasant.”
“Marvelous! Is Father upstairs? I must see him right away. I have amazing news! Anastasia is to be married this Yeartide Day and to such a dashing man. His name escapes me at the moment, but he’s very tall and handsome. Did I mention he was an officer in the Sacred Brotherhood?”
“No, mistress. But—”
She flew past him without waiting for another word. Father would be ensconced in his study with his books and papers. Retired from his government post for four years, he still maintained his connections in political circles, a thing for which she was especially grateful. Someday those connections would net her a smart match like Anastasia had just made.
Josey paused on her way to the stairs. An unfamiliar overcoat hung from the brass rack on the wall.
“Fenrik, who visits with my father?”
“A man from the palace, milady.”
“From the palace?” She raced up the wide marble steps.
“He does not wish to be disturbed.”
Of course Father would want to see her straightaway. A visitor from the palace could only mean one thing. Her father was finally making a match for her hand, and to a man from an outstanding family. Her heart was ready to burst from her chest. Just to think, she and Anastasia could both be married by this time next year.
A curtseying maid passed on her way to the study. Josey paused for a moment at the door. She couldn’t remember it ever being closed. She glanced down the hall. The chambermaid was gone. On an impulse, she pressed her ear against the wooden panels. The voices of two men murmured on the other side. A tendril of guilt knotted in her belly, but she didn’t pull away. If this visitor was here to discuss her matrimonial options, it concerned her more than anyone. But she couldn’t make out what was being said. She wished they would speak up.
The voices ceased and Josey jumped back as the door opened. She smoothed the front of her dress and did her best to look as if she had just arrived. The guest was a tall gentleman, younger than she imagined. A sigil of crossed keys was emblazoned on the breast of his gray mantle, which he wore over a suit of the same color. He had a sallow face with a nervous look about him, a look that amplified Josey’s anxiety. Had their discussion not gone well? Had Father not offered an adequate dowry? She was bursting with questions. The man bent in a stiff bow before striding past her to the stairs.
Josey peeked inside. Her father sat at his perennially cluttered desk with a hand pressed to his forehead. The light from an open window illuminated his pate, bald save for a halo of sparse white hair around the crown. He would be sixty-two this winter. She remembered how strong and tall he had looked when she was a child. Now, he spent most of his time in this study, surrounded by the trappings of his former power. The room was stuffy and warm, but he kept a blanket wrapped around his legs.
He straightened when he saw her. “Josey. I didn’t hear you return. How was your shopping? Did you find Anastasia well? I want to hear everything.”
“Father.” She entered and sat in the leather chair beside his desk. “Who was that man? Fenrik said he came from the palace.”
He reached out to take her hand. His fingers were thin and cold.
“His father was a friend of mine. In younger days, the two of us were powerful men. Members of the Court vied for our attention and would give much for our patronage, but now he’s dead and buried and I am an old man.”
“You are still a great man. I just had this notion your visitor was calling about something…more auspicious.”
“Ah.” He placed a finger alongside his nose. “You thought he came with a betrothal offer.”
She tried to blush, but it was a trick she’d never mastered. “It was silly of me. I’m only seventeen, I know.”
“Seventeen and as lovely as a rose in bloom. I wish I had such an offer, Josey. Sadly, the news is not so gay. There are rumors of strange troubles in the north. Banditry and worse. Envoys have gone missing and things are deteriorating here in Othir. How would a voyage suit you?”
His question caught her off guard. “Suit me? Father, I can’t leave Othir. Anastasia is to be married. That’s what I’ve come to tell you. She’s asked me to be her maiden of honor.”
“I’m quite serious, Josephine. The political tide is shifting faster than I anticipated. I had hoped we could weather the storm, but I fear it’s not safe anymore.”
“Not safe? Why not?”
He eased back in his chair, suddenly looking old and feeble. “Affairs on the Capitoline are in disarray.”
Father still used old-fashioned terms like the Capitoline, even though the Nimean Empire had died out ages ago and everyone else had taken to calling it Celestial Hill.
“There is unrest in the streets,” he continued. “And the prelate’s ability to contain it grows weaker. Just the other day, a man was killed not three blocks from our doorstep. Suffice it to say I wish you to adjourn to a safer location until these problems pass.”
“I was out the whole afternoon and I didn’t see anything amiss. The city is as calm as a summer day. Anyway, Anastasia is my best friend. I can’t miss her wedding, Father. Not for anything.”
“Josey, my dear. I promised your mother I would always see to your well-being. And I act from my own selfish desires. I couldn’t bear to see you come to harm. You possess the key to my heart.”
She placed a hand on her bosom. Under the lace fronting of her dress, the cool hardness of a pendant pressed against her skin. She knelt before him and folded her hands on his lap.
“Mother wasn’t afraid of anything. She wouldn’t want me to leave your side.”
He brushed a rogue curl from her face. The corners of his eyes drooped amid folds of wrinkles. “She would want you to trust my judgment and obey my wishes. Please, Josey, pack your things. I have arranged for a ship.”
“Father, please!”
“No, Josey. My mind is adamant on this. You will go to Navarre and remain there until I send for you. The new exarch is a good man and as trustworthy as we’ll find in times such as these. He will see you safe—”
Josey jumped to her feet, her entire body trembling. “I won’t go! You cannot make me.”
“It is settled. Chide me no more on this subject, Daughter.”
Cheeks wet with tears, she dashed from the study, brushing past Fenrik in the hallway loaded with wrapped bundles from the carriage. She slammed the door to her room and stood at the foot of the feather bed, hands clenched at her sides. How could he be so cruel? Why couldn’t he see that she couldn’t leave? They needed each other. She had no other family. Only him, and now he was sending her away. What would she tell Anastasia?
Josey took deep breaths and composed herself. Tears wouldn’t get her anywhere. She sat down at her dressing table and began to brush her hair with short, hard strokes. She needed to think, to devise some argument to sway her father. She had to convince him to let her stay. She had to.
* * *
Raging flames painted the night sky in hues of orange and gold, and threw shadows across the yard of the villa where the tall bodies sprawled. Caim peered through the wooden slats of the fence.
“We have to go,” a voice whispered behind him.
Caim wanted to turn away, but his limbs had turned to stone. The frigid wind flogged his small body. The cold slid through his veins like ice water. There was blood on his hands. He wiped them on his shirt, but they wouldn’t come clean.
The world shimmered and he was standing in the yard. A large man slumped at his feet. Strings of red-black blood ran from the wound in his chest. A tremor ran through Caim as the corpse opened its eyes, black spheres without irises or whites. A whisper issued from blue-tinged lips.
“Justice…, my son.”
Caim opened his eyes and was greeted by a razor-sharp moonbeam that pierced through the slats of the window shutters. A cool breeze flitted over his chest as the last vestiges of the dream—the images of fire and death—sifted through his mental grasp. He settled back into the fabric of the cot under him and stared at the ceiling, debating whether to get up or try to fall back asleep for another hour.
With a sigh he threw back the woolen blankets and dropped to his chest on the cold floorboards. His muscles stretched and contracted through a routine of exercises: push-ups, stomach tighteners, lunges, and handstands. Thirty minutes later he was sweating freely. After splashing his face with water from a chipped clay pitcher, he stood before his only extravagance, a full-length cheval glass in a bronze stand. Hard eyes stared back at him from the wavy depths of the mirror, chips of granite set in deep cavities beneath his thick, black brows. He ran his hands across his torso, examining the damage; a few scrapes and cuts, broken skin at his elbows and the backs of his hands, but all in all he was in better shape than he probably deserved. Fragments of the dream scudded through his mind. The words of his father’s ghost haunted him. Justice. Had it been served in Ostergoth?
He pulled a clean chiton and breeches from his footlocker and went out into the kitchen. The rest of his apartment lacked for furniture: a plain table stood with a single chair, a coldbox and small brick oven in the kitchen, and a pantry. The living area was bare except for a wide mat and assorted pieces of exercise equipment, sand-filled bags suspended from the ceiling. A charcoal etching of a lighthouse drawn by a street artist hung on the wall in a plain wooden frame. In the picture, black frothing waves battered at the rocky base of the lighthouse as its beacon shone bravely in the face of the storm. Tiny lights flickered in the distance. They made him think of Kit.
He put on a pair of scuffed leather boots and wondered where she was. Kit came and went as she pleased. Sometimes he wouldn’t see her for days, and other times he couldn’t get rid of her. He didn’t know what Kit was, not exactly. When he was a boy he had thought of her as an imaginary friend, but as he grew older and she did not leave, he began to suspect something else. No one else had invisible friends who tagged after them. But she was real. She knew things he didn’t, things he couldn’t know. Countless times she’d warned him of danger before it materialized.
His ability to meld with the shadows was another mystery. He had always been good at going about unnoticed, even as a boy, but where did the power come from? Had he been born with it or was he cursed? More trouble than anything, it was another quirk of a past he remembered only in murky fragments. Maybe he didn’t want to.
Caim strapped on his knives and covered them with a fustian cloak as he went to the door, its olive green paint peeling away in strips to reveal the slab of old wormwood underneath. He peered down the hallway in both directions. As he secured the door’s rusty latch, a small, pale face stared up at him from across the hall. He had seen the girl a few times before, playing alone in the hallway at odd hours. Her wheat-colored hair hung down across her thin shoulders in tangled skeins. She couldn’t have been older than six, or maybe seven. Angry voices echoed from beyond the door beside her. Caim walked away.
He descended a flight of creaking stairs and passed through the dirty foyer. The tenement building might have been a stately manor house in its former days before the neighborhood took a turn for the worse. Still, he liked its location and found the current owner’s policy of studied indifference toward his tenants convenient. As long as the rent was paid on time, the old geezer never asked questions.
As Caim reached the street, a stench assaulted him like a wet sock full of rotten eggs, a combination of sea air and human refuse that clogged his head and clung to the back of his palate. It was worse in the summer.
The ancient stone buildings of Low Town, once the heart of the city according to the local salts, were stained with centuries of weather, soot, and foul air. Over the years, the inner city had grown upward as well as outward. Buildings four and five stories tall hung precariously over the narrow streets. With the defeat of the pirates of the Stormcatcher Islands fifty or so years back and the subsequent expansion of trade on the Midland Sea, those with the means to capitalize on the sudden influx of new goods left the neighborhood to build bigger homes on the hills above the Processional. So High Town was born, eventually to become the glowing jewel of Othir. Things had only gotten worse for the Low Towners in recent years, such as increased taxes to pay for distant wars and expensive public works like the new cathedral under construction in the city center, and food shortages. The poorest families were put out on the street by landlords feeling the pinch. He saw them every day, begging on the main thoroughfares, selling their children in back alleys.
As he hopped over a fetid puddle on Prior’s Cross, Caim caught a glimpse of the horned moon, perched over the roof of an abandoned dyer’s factory like a silver sickle. Its otherworldly beauty, forever out of reach, always made him uneasy in a way he couldn’t rightly describe. It was like being homesick, but for a home he had never known.
Othir had been his home for six years. He had originally begun plying his trade as a sellsword in the western territories. He’d done time in various mercenary crews during his teen years, earning his silver with one hand and spending it with the other. But after a bit of nasty business in Isenmere, his gang was run out by a posse bent on revenge. He drifted from town to town, always watching over his shoulder. When no lawmen showed up to arrest him, he passed into a new life.
A right turn onto Serpentine Way brought Caim to a tangle of back streets and alleyways known as the Gutters. Here the buildings were built of old, crumbling brick covered in dingy whitewash. Their sooty slate roofs tilted sharply, with tall steeples and shuttered gables. The Gutters were home to every sort of crook and deadbeat imaginable. It was a place to tread lightly, where anything could happen and often did.
Caim strode down the center of the street. Footpads slunk deeper into their hidey-holes as he passed by. Muggers found business elsewhere. He’d drenched these cobblestones in blood more than once. Still, he kept his cloak tight around his shoulders and one hand on a knife.
His first contract had been right here in Othir. Dalros was a luxuries trader whose business had suffered a turn of bad fortune. When he couldn’t cover his debts to the local usurers, they decided to make an example of him. Caim was tapped for the job. It was a simple break-and-stab, nothing fancy, but Caim would never forget the shakes he’d suffered that spring night as he scaled the low wall surrounding Dalros’s home. He was in and out in less than fifteen minutes. With the merchant’s blood on his hands, he’d crept past a lounging sentry, slipped back over the wall, and gone on his way. He was paid twenty gold soldats for that job, a fortune to him in those days.
A shout from behind made Caim spin around. His knife slid out of its sheath as a squadron of soldiers on horseback rode down the street. On their bloodred breastplates gleamed a blazing sunburst in gold, the symbol of the Sacred Brotherhood, or the Knights of the Noose, as they were called behind their backs—a jest about the manner in which their patron saint had gone to meet his Maker. Some in Othir said they were the real power behind the prelacy, but Caim paid little heed to politics. It made no difference to him who ruled as long as he could count on them to sow discord and corruption; unrest made for good business in his line of work. And over the past few years, business had been extraordinarily good.
Caim slipped into the shadowed doorway of a cobbler’s shop and sheathed his blade as they rode past. The soldiers’ presence in the Gutters at this hour made the skin between his shoulder blades itch. The denizens of these squalid alleys were typically left to their own devices after sunset.
Once the soldiers passed from sight, he continued on his way. Another three blocks brought him to Chirron’s Square. A marketplace by day, it brokered a different type of commerce after sundown. Pimps and drug peddlers lounged amid the marble pedestals of broken statuary. Ladies of the night trolled for interested buyers. In the center of the plaza rose a scaffold. Its weathered timbers supported a massive crossbeam from which dangled five bodies, adult, probably male, but it was impossible to tell for sure. They had been burned before they were hanged, their hands and feet lopped off, their eyes gouged out. No one paid the bodies any mind. Who had they been? Robbers? Rapists? Or just some poor souls foolish enough to criticize the ruling powers in public? Caim continued on his way, but the spectacle lingered in his thoughts.
He turned onto Cutter Lane. Windows were thrown wide open down the length of the street despite the chill in the air, spilling the rosy light of a dozen taverns and festhouses onto the grimy cobblestones. Pipers and lutists competed with the din of hard drinkers.
He ducked into the third house on the left. The cracked placard over the door depicted three buxom ladies in short frocks. Bright light filled the Three Maids. Wooden tankards clanked on the tabletops, and rough hands clapped in time with a zithern while a scrawny girl clad in only her snow-pale skin and long red locks danced under the glassy stares of tradesmen and stevedores. A shore party of sailors—Arnossi by their accent and swarthy features—sang sea ballads in a corner.
Caim threaded his way to the bar. Big Olaf was tending tonight. He grinned through a row of uneven teeth as Caim approached.
“Hey, boyo. You should’ve been here last night. I had to toss out a pair of uptown rakes with a mean-on. Swear they flew a dozen paces before they hit pavement. Each.”
Caim slid a silver noble, double-penny weight, across the bar. “Is he in?”
The coin disappeared, and Olaf jerked a sausage-thick thumb at the back stairs. Caim headed around the bar. Mathias, the owner of the Three Maids, also handled several of the biggest fish in Othir’s murder-for-hire game. He was their broker, their middleman, the one who ferreted out the contracts and matched them with the right talent for the job. He lived above the tavern, he claimed, to be closer to the people, and always acted hurt when anyone insinuated he was a miser. Caim didn’t know why Mathias continued to live amid the dregs of the city. With the commissions he’d made in the last year alone, he could afford a comfortable house in High Town. Some folks couldn’t bear to leave their roots, no matter how high they climbed. Caim had never had that problem.
The back stairs were unlit. As he started up, Caim heard the whisper of leather glide over wood a moment before a shape appeared above him. An image flashed through his mind: clinging to the walls of Duke Reinard’s keep, gazing up at a mysterious black figure crawling along the battlements. A twinge quivered in his chest. Both suete knives were out in an instant, held low and pressed against his thighs to hide their shine. His knees flexed, ready to leap back or lunge ahead.
Two white circles appeared in the gloom above him, a pair of hands held open. “Peace,” said a low voice. “Good evening, Caim.”
“Ral.” Caim slipped the knives back into their homes, but he left an inch of each blade free. “If you’ve got business with Mathias, I’ll wait below.”
Ral descended a step. The faint glow from the common room highlighted his features. Bright blue eyes peered from beneath coiffed spikes of stark blond hair. Dressed all in black leather, he melded with the shadows of the stairway. The intricate silver cross-guard of a cut-and-thrust sword jutted from his belt. Glints of steel at his wrists, waist, and boots hinted at other weapons; Ral was notorious for all the hardware he carried.
“No, we are concluded.” His lazy way of talking reminded Caim of a dozing cat, always a moment from showing his claws. “I heard you did quite well up north. Reinard and his bodyguards slain in front of a hundred witnesses, but not a single person could identify the killer afterward. Not bad.”
Caim chewed on his tongue. He didn’t like discussing his business, especially where idle ears could overhear. He leaned against the wall of the stairwell, trying to appear casual.
“It’s done. That’s all that matters.”
Ral came down another step. “Exactly, but you should be careful. There’s been a citywide crackdown these past couple days.”
“I saw the display in the square.”
Ral chuckled. Despite his butter-smooth voice, it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “A gang of roof-crawlers got pinched robbing a vicar’s home. All involved were caught and hanged, but not before they tortured his entire family for the location of a cache of jewels. Word says they even cut off the youngest boy’s fingers and toes.”
A leader of the True Faith, supposedly sworn to vows of poverty and chastity, keeps a house in High Town with a wife and children, and no one cares to comment. But why should they? Large sins are easily forgotten. It’s the little ones that gnaw at your soul in the lonely hours of the night.
“Of course,” Ral said, “the fops up on Celestial Hill are terrified out of their wigs that it’s another movement toward rebellion.”
Caim nodded, uncomfortably reminded of young Lord Robert. “If you’ll excuse me, I have business of my own with Mathias.”
“I’ve no time for palaver myself. I’m heading out of town.”
They passed each other on the stairs and Ral turned. “You know, Caim. It’s not fair.”
Caim paused with a foot on the top step. “What isn’t?”
Ral opened his hand and a slender throwing blade appeared, too fast for the eye to follow. Caim tensed.
“Here we are,” Ral said. “Two of the deadliest men in the city. We should be running things, lording it up in the palace. It’s all wasted on those powdered fools whose only claim is their family name.” His eyes lit up as he spoke.
Caim looked down at the other man without a shred of empathy. According to the rumors, Ral was a son of privilege who had enjoyed many a night rutting in Low Town until his inheritance ran out. Then, broke and desperate, he had weaseled his way into the assassination trade. He must have found the taste to his liking, because he came back again and again between benders on Silk Street. Knifings in the merchant district in broad daylight, pregnant mistresses found floating in the harbor—those were Ral’s stock in trade.
What does that make you? A vigilante with bad dreams or a thug just smart enough to stay one step ahead of the law?
Searching for a way to end the conversation without giving insult, Caim decided on brevity. “It is what it is.”
“I suppose so. Farewell, Caim. I’m off to a warmer clime to take care of some business. We’ll talk another time.”
Not if he had any choice in the matter, Caim thought as he climbed the last step. He was tired. He just wanted to get his money and go home. Maybe he would take some time off. He approached the only door on the upper floor, knocked twice, waited a heartbeat, and gave two more knocks. He opened it without waiting for an invitation.
If Mathias acted the skinflint with his patrons below, he spared no expense to make his living space look and feel like a mansion. Overlapping hand-woven carpets covered the floors. Silken arrays embroidered with eastern-style hunting scenes decorated the walls, hiding the bare panels underneath. Heavy furniture in glossy hardwoods cluttered the room, along with marble tables and expensive bronze artwork.
Mathias came through the archway on the far side of the parlor, dressed in a gaudy teal robe splashed with tiny golden cranes. He was a heavyset man past his middling years. He still had most of his hair and employed dyes to keep it black and lustrous except for a pair of silver wings brushed back over his ears. An admission of inevitability, he called them.
“Our good friend returns from the north!”
They shook hands, and Mathias offered him a choice of seats. Caim sat down on a high-backed chair with no armrests or cushion.
Mathias fetched a bottle and two glasses from a malachite sideboard. “By the gods above and below, I am glad to see you back.”
“Blasphemy, Mat? At your age?”
“Aye. I’m too old to care anymore what the Church thinks. What has that prattle ever done for anybody? Nothing. But forget about that. Everything went well, yes?”
Caim accepted a glass of amber brandy and settled back into the hard seat. “Well enough, although trying to get anywhere in this country is becoming a right pain in the ass. The roads are a mess and tollhouses have sprung up over every hill.”
Mathias flumped onto a banquette and sloshed liquor on his expensive robe. “The realm is coming apart like an overripe melon. Every warlord who can put together a dozen half-trained men-at-arms is trying to carve out a piece for himself. It’s almost enough to make one long for the good old days of imperial law and order. Almost.”
“Anyway, I stayed in Ostergoth long enough to hear the bells ring His Grace’s departure from the world of the living before I left.”
Mat lifted his glass. “To another job completed and another villain vanquished.”
Caim took a sip before setting the glass down. “I’ve gathered there was some trouble in town while I was away.”
“I had nothing to do with it.” The rubies encrusting Mat’s pinky ring gleamed as he placed a plump hand over his flabby breast. “You know I never touch that sort of smash-and-grab work. It’s an unsavory business and a trifle pathetic. Now we all have to suffer through a few weeks of heightened security, but things will settle down. They can’t stay on full alert forever, eh? More brandy?”
“I’ll just have my fee and leave you in peace.”
Mathias smiled. “That’s the man I know. All business—and business is good!” He reached under his seat and tossed a bulging leather sack to Caim. “Five hundred soldats, just as the contract stated.”
Caim caught the bag and slipped it into his shirt.
“Not going to count it?”
“No need to. I know where you live.”
“Right enough. You’re acquiring quite a reputation, Caim. That’s why I know you’re just the man for another job I’m sitting on.”
Caim rose to his feet. “No thank you, Mat. I don’t want to see anything you’re sitting on. That cushion looks like it’s had enough.”
“It’s not like you to pass up money, especially for a worthy cause.”
“I’m sure. Another priest with a fetish for children, or a landlord who squeezes every last crumb from his destitute peasants. No thanks. I’m going to take some time off. Like you said, the city’s heating up.”
“That’s why I’m turning to you, Caim. Believe me when I say this job is easy. So easy you could do it blind and one-handed.”
“Not an image I want to ponder.”
Mathias brushed the air with his pudgy fingers. “You know what I mean. But it has to be done fast.”
He headed for the door. “Sorry, Mat.”
“Caim, I’m desperate!”
Caim stopped with his hand on the knob. Mathias wasn’t a stranger to theatrics, but he sounded genuinely worried, and Mathias Finneus never worried. The look of relief on his face was almost comical as Caim came back and stood by the high-backed chair.
“What’s the job?”
“Please, sit, my friend,” Mathias urged. “More brandy?”
“No more drinks. Tell me about the job.”
“It’s very simple. One target, living in High Town.”
Caim’s hand hovered over his glass, resting still on the table. “Inside the city?”
“Yes, you’ve done local work before.”
“Who is he?”
“A retired general, a real hard case from what I’ve heard. He was responsible for some big massacre during the war. Up in Eregoth, I believe. You’re from those parts, aren’t you?”
Caim considered the carpet between his feet as a jumble of old feelings knocked around in his chest. “What makes you say that?”
“Nothing much. You just have a northernish look about you.”
Caim looked Mathias in the eye. “I told you before. I’m from the western territories.”
But he wasn’t. As far as he could piece together from his shambled memories, his family had hailed from Eregoth, one of several border states that had once been part of the Nimean Empire. But it was a past he didn’t want known, for no better reason than it was personal.
“Oh yes.” Mathias winked. “I forgot.”
“Go on.”
“Well, what makes me nervous is the timing. This job has to be done in two days.”
“Impossible. You know I don’t do rush jobs. Go find some desperate sailor deep in his cups and slip him a few silvers.”
“Caim, this client isn’t someone to disappoint, if you get my meaning. It must be done quickly, and with no mistakes. That’s why I need you. You’re the only one I can trust with a job like this on such short notice.”
“I want to help you, Mathias, but there are too many things to consider. I spent weeks stalking Reinard before I took him down. I would need time to study the target, learn his habits and movements. After that I would have to do the same for his family and bodyguards.”
Mathias bounced off the chaise and waddled to a rolltop desk against the wall. He held up a bundle of papers bound together with a red cord.
“I have all the particulars here: daily itinerary, personal security details, interior layouts, everything you’ll need. He lives with a young daughter, but don’t worry about her. The mother’s dead. He doesn’t keep any guards, just a broken-down manservant who sleeps like a log. It will be the easiest money you ever made.”
Mathias held out the bundle, but Caim didn’t take it.
“Who gathered all this?”
“A mutual friend. I vouch for its authenticity.”
“It was Ral, wasn’t it?”
“Why does it matter? Just take it.”
“Damn it, Mat. He took the assignment and then dumped it back in your lap when a better job came up, didn’t he? No wonder he was so chummy. No thanks. I’m passing.”
Caim took two steps toward the door. Mathias reached out as if to grasp his sleeve, but drew his hand back before it made contact. Caim stopped as the bundle of papers was thrust in front of him.
“It’s his loss!” Mathias said. “In and out, and a thousand soldats in your pocket.”
“I don’t clean up other people’s messes.”
Mathias cocked his head to the right. “My friend, that’s precisely what you do. Please, don’t make me beg. I’ll throw in half of my end. That’s another three hundred in gold. Then you can take a nice, long sabbatical.”
Caim sighed as Mathias shook the papers at him. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t let down the man who had given him a chance as a young man on the run, a vagabond with no contacts or vouchers.
Caim took the papers. “All right. I’ll do it. But hang on to your fee. You’re getting old, Mathias. You should think about retiring soon.”
Mathias gathered his robe around him as he returned to his chair. “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I ever retired.”
“Buy a big villa somewhere nice. Live the life of a country gentleman.”
Mathias laughed so hard he almost choked on his wine. “Can you see me as a country squire? I wouldn’t last a month. Good fortune, my friend. I’ll see you when the job is done.”
Caim tucked the papers into his tunic. The bundle made a lump under his arm opposite the money pouch. He crossed to the door, but hesitated with his hand on the knob.
“By the way, what was the other job Ral took?”
“What?” Mathias twisted around to look at Caim over his shoulder. “Oh, something in Belastire. He’ll be bow-legged and as dusty as a beggar by the time he returns.”
“Belastire? It’ll be cold on the Midland coast this time of year.”
Mathias nodded. “Cold and bitter. The blackheart should feel right at home, eh?”
Caim thought back to the conversation on the stairs. Hadn’t Ral mentioned a warmer clime? What game was he playing?
Caim checked his knives out of habit as he departed the Three Maids. Revelers accompanied by torchbearers filled the benighted streets, pushed out the door by exhausted tavernkeeps. The sun would be rising in another couple hours. He would have liked to go back home and crawl into bed for a couple sennights, but he had work to do. Two days wasn’t enough time.
Tucking the pouch and the papers deeper into the confines of his shirt, Caim pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. The broadcloth wrapped around him in a warm cocoon as he delved back into the Gutters.