Take a Thief Read online

  "You tell me," the sell-sword sneered. Evidently he didn't care much for the man he faced. Maybe Taln-Jass couldn't tell it, but there was thick-laid contempt in the sell-sword's voice.

  The bullyboy laughed, and Skif seethed. "That'd be tellin'. An' I'm too dry t'be tellin'."

  Skif thought that this was a hint for the sell-sword to buy his informant a drink, but a scrape of stools told a different story. "This rain ain't liftin'

  afore dawn," the arsonist said. "I'm off."

  "Sweet dreams," the sell-sword said, his tone full of bitter irony that wished the opposite.

  Laughter was his only answer. Skif opened his eyes to see his target turn and shove his way out through the crowd to the door. The sell-sword remained seated, brooding.

  Then his back tensed. He stood up, slowly and deliberately, and for a moment Skif thought he was going to turn around to look behind him to see who might have been listening to the conversation.

  Skif shrank back into his alcove as far as he could go, and tried to look sleepy and disinterested. Somehow he did not want this man to know that he had heard every bit of the last several moments.

  But evidently the sell-sword trusted in the unwritten rules of the Arms. He did not turn. He only stood up, and stalked back out through the crowd, out the door, and into the rain.

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  Two tenants of a nearby, more crowded table took immediate occupation of the little table. And Skif breathed a sigh of relief, before he settled back into his smoldering anger. Because now that he knew who the tool was—that tool would pay. Perhaps not immediately, but he would pay.

  When the rain died, Skif left; there was still a drizzle going, but not enough to keep him in the Arms any longer. His mind buzzed; his anger had gone from hot to cold, in which state he was able to think, and think clearly.

  Somehow, he had to find the next link in the chain— the man who had paid for the arson. But how?

  Loosen the bastard's tongue, that's what I gotta do. As Skif dodged spills out of waterspouts and kept when he could to the shadows, he went over his options.

  No point tryin' to threaten 'im. Alone, in his stable loft, he could indulge himself in fantasies of slipping in at a window and taking the man all unaware— of waking the scum with the cold touch of a knife at his throat.

  But they were fantasies, and Skif knew it. Knives or no, unaware or not, the bullyboy was hard and tough and bigger than Skif. Much bigger.

  So what were his real options? Drink? Drugs?

  Not viable, neither of them. He couldn't afford enough of the latter to do any good, and as for the former— well, he'd seen that particular lad drink two men under the table and stagger out with his secrets still kept behind his teeth. The closest he ever got to boasting was what he'd done tonight.

  Just stick on 'im like a burr, Skif decided, and ground his teeth. It wasn't the solution he craved. Watch 'im, an stick to 'im. If he takes up summat to

  'is rooms, I gotta figger out which chimbley leads t' his, or—

  Suddenly, an idea struck him that was so brilliant he staggered.

  I don' need all that dosh fer shakin' loose words loose no more! He knew who had set the fire! So the money he had been using to pay bribes could be used for—

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  For a room in th' bastard's own place!

  Above, below, or to either side, it didn't matter. So long as Skif had an adjoining surface, he could rig the means to hear what was going on no matter how quiet the conversation was. Bribes weren't all he'd been paying for— he'd been getting lessons at spycraft. How to follow someone and not be detected. How to overhear what he needed to. In fact, so long as Skif had a room anywhere in the arsonist's boarding house, he'd be able to eavesdrop on the man. It would just take a little more work, that was all.

  He lifted his face to the drizzle and licked the cool rain from his lips, feeling that no wine could have a sweeter taste. I'm gonna get you now, he thought with glee. An' once I know what you know—

  Well.

  Knives weren't the only weapons. And poisons were a sight cheaper than tongue-loosening drugs.

  * * *

  "I don' need a lot've room," Skif said to the arsonist's scrawny, ill-kempt landlord, who looked down at him with disinterest in his watery blue eyes. "No cook space, neither. Mebbe a chimbley an' a winder, but mostly just

  'nuff room t' flop."

  "I mebbe got somethin'," the landlord said at last. Skif nodded eagerly, and did not betray in the slightest that he already knew the landlord had exactly what he wanted, because Skif had bribed the tenant of the highly-desirable room right next to his target to find lodgings elsewhere. Young Lonar hadn't taken a lot of bribing— he was sweet on a cookshop girl, and wanted some pretties to charm her out of her skirts and into his bed. Skif simply lifted a handful of jingling silver bangles from a dressing-table placed too near an open window; they were worth a hundred times to Lonar what Skif would have gotten for them fenced.

  It had taken him time to work this out, time in which his anger kept ice water flowing in his veins and sparked his brain to clever schemes. First, 137

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  finding out the arsonist's exact room. Next, casing the place, and discovering who his neighbors were. Then picking the most bribable, and finally, the bribe itself.

  Lonar had one room— Skif had even been in it several times already. It was ideally suited for Skif's purposes; the back of the arsonist's own fireplace and chimney formed part of one of the inner walls. From the look of the bricked-up back and the boarded-up door in the same wall, the room and the arsonist's had once been part of a larger suite, and the fireplace had been open between the two rooms, giving each a common hearth.

  * * *

  "Ten copper a fortnight," the landlord said tersely. "No cookin', no fires. Chimbley oughter be enough t'keep ye warm'o nights."

  In answer, Skif handed over enough in copper and silver to pay for the next six moons, and the man nodded in terse satisfaction. This wasn't unusual behavior, especially out of someone who had no regular— or obvious— job. When you were flush, you paid up your doss for as long as you could afford. When you weren't, you tried to sweet-talk the landlord as long as possible, then fled before he locked up your room and took your stuff.

  Probably he expected that Skif would be gone by the end of those six moons.

  Be nice, but I ain't countin' on it.

  The landlord handed over a crude chit with an "M" —for Midwinter Moon— on it. That was how long Skif had; if the landlord tried to cheat him by claiming he'd paid for less time, he could show it to a court to prove how long his tenancy was supposed to be. There was, of course, no key to be handed over, not in a place like this one. Tenants were expected to find their own ways of safeguarding their belongings. Some were more interesting than others.

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  Skif pocketed his chit, picked up his pack and bag, and ran up the narrow stairs to the second-floor landing. Three doors faced it; his own was in the middle. His room wasn't much bigger than a closet between the two sets of two rooms each on either side. The door was slightly ajar, and Skif slipped inside quickly, closing it behind him and dropping a bar across it. The room itself wasn't much wider than the door.

  Lonar hadn't left anything behind but dirt. The walls, floor, and ceiling were a uniform grime color. Impossible to tell if there was paint under the dirt. Closed shutters in the far wall marked the window. From the amount of light leaking in around them, it didn't look as if they were very weathertight. Not that it mattered. Skif wasn't here for the decor. He was, however, here for the walls.

  Never mind how well the shutters fit, it was the window itself that featured prominently in Skif's plans.

  He flung open the shutters to let air in, and unrolled his pallet of blankets on the floor, adding his spare clothing beneath as extra padding, and untied the kerchief in which he had bundled
the rest of his few belongings.

  Including the one, very special object that he had gone to a lot of trouble to filch.

  A glass. A real glass.

  He set it in the corner out of harm's way, and laid himself down on his pallet, closing his eyes and opening his ears, taking stock of his surroundings. Bazie would have been proud of him.

  Not a lot of street noise; this house was on a dead-end, and most of the other places on the street also supplied rooms to let. Skif identified the few sounds coming from outside and ignored them, one by one.

  Above him, footsteps. Four, perhaps five children of varying ages, all barefoot. A woman, also barefoot. That would be Widder Koil, who made artificial flowers with paper and fabric. Presumably the children helped as well; otherwise, he couldn't imagine how she alone would earn enough to 139

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  feed them all. The voices drifted down from above, edgy with hunger, but not loud.

  Below, nothing. The first-floor tenant was still asleep; he was a night carter, one of the few tenants here with a respectable and relatively well-paying job.

  To the left, the wall with no fireplace, four shrill female voices. Whores, four sisters sharing two rooms; relatively prosperous and without a protector. They didn't need one; the arsonist slept with at least two of them on a regular basis, and no one wanted to chance his anger.

  And to the right…

  Snores. The chimney echoed with them.

  Not surprising; like Skif, the arsonist worked at night. The question was, which of the two rooms was the man's bedroom?

  Skif's hope was that it was not the one with the fireplace, but there was no way of telling if the man was snoring very loudly in the next room, or not quite as loudly in the fireplace room.

  At least I can hear him.

  Well, there was nothing more to do now. He let his concentration lapse, and consciously relaxed the muscles of his face and jaw as he had learned to do when he wanted to sleep. He would be able to learn more in a few candlemarks. And when his target went out tonight, so would he.

  * * *

  He woke all at once, and knew why. The window above his head showed a dark-blue sky with a single star, his room was shrouded in shadows, and next door, the snoring had stopped. Jass-Taln was awake.

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  He sat up quickly and felt in the corner for his precious glass. He put it up against the wall and put his ear against the bottom of it.

  The man moved like a cat; Skif had to give him that much grudging credit.

  He made very little noise as he walked around his rooms, and unlike some people, he didn't talk to himself. No coughing, no sneezing, no spitting; how ironic that a cold-blooded murderer made such an ideal neighbor.

  Ideal. Unless, of course, you actually wanted to hear what he was up to.

  Now there was some noise in the fireplace! Skif frowned in concentration, isolating the sounds.

  Whittling. Shavings hitting the bricks. The sound of a hand scraping the shavings together, then putting them in the grate. Then the rattling and scratching of a handful of twigs. A log coming down atop them.

  A metallic clunk startled him, though he should have expected it. Taln-Jass had just slapped a pan down onto the grill over his cooking fire.

  A while later; the sound of something scraping and rattling in the pan.

  Eating sounds. Frequent belches.

  All of which were sweeter than any Bard's music to Skif's ears. The trick with the glass worked, just as his teacher had claimed it would! And it sounded as if the room with the fireplace was the arsonist's "public" room, for all of these noises were nearer than the snores had been. Which meant that when the man brought clients here for private discussions, it would be the room nearest Skif where those discussions would take place.

  A fierce elation thrilled through him, and he grinned with clenched teeth.

  Who needed drink, drugs, or even threats when you could listen to your target at will, unnoticed?

  Now all he needed was time and patience, and both were, at last, on his side.

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  10

  Although Skif's patience was taxed to the uttermost by the lack of any concrete progress in his quest, he at least was collecting a great deal of personal information on his "neighbor," Jass. The arsonist, it soon developed, had as many names as there were moons in the calendar.

  Not only was he known by the two Skif knew, but he was addressed variously as "Hodak" by his landlord, "Derial" by the whores, and various nicknames derived from the slight squint of one eye when he was thinking, his ability to move silently, the fact that a small piece was missing from his ear, and some not-very-clever but thoroughly obscene epithets that passed for humor among his acquaintances.

  Skif decided on "Jass." Easy to remember, it had no associations for him other than his target. But he was careful never to personally address the man at all, much less by name, since he wasn't actually supposed to know any of his names. The few times they met on the stairs or the landing, Skif ducked his head subserviently and crammed himself to the wall to let the arsonist pass. Let Jass think that Skif was afraid of him— all that meant was that Jass had never yet gotten a look at anything other than the top of Skif's head.

  A man of many trades was Jass. Over the course of three fortnights, Skif listened in to his conversations when he had someone with him in his rooms— pillow talk and business talk, and boasts when deep in his cups.

  He wasn't "just" an arsonist. If he had been, he'd have gone short more often than not, as that wasn't a trade that he was called on to practice nearly often enough to make a living at it. Together with all four of the whores he practiced a variation on the ketchin' lay where one of the girls would lure an unsuspecting customer into Jass' clutches where the would-be lecher soon found himself hit over the head and robbed.

  He was also known for setting fires, of course— though, so far since Skif had moved in, they were all minor acts of outrage, designed to frighten shopkeepers into paying for "protection" from one of the three gangs he worked for, or to punish those who had refused to do so. On rare occasions, he sold information, most of which Skif didn't understand, but 142

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  seemed to have to do with intrigues among some of the city's wealthier folk. Where he got these tidbits was a mystery to Skif, although there was a direct connection with the darker side of Haven, in that the information generally was about who among Jass's cronies had been hired by one of the upright citizens, and for what dirty job.

  The craggy-faced sell-sword was not the only one interested in Jass'

  information. There were at least three other takers to Skif's knowledge, two of whom transacted their business only within the four walls of Jass's fireplace room.

  But to Skif's growing impatience, not once had Jass been commissioned by the same person who had put him to igniting the tenement house.

  Skif might have learned more— this summer brought a rash of tiny,

  "mysterious" fires to blight the streets of Haven— but he had to eat, too.

  Frustratingly, he would sometimes return to his room after a night of roof walking only to hear the tail end of a conversation that could have been interesting, or to hear Jass himself come in after a long night of— what?

  Skif seldom knew; that was the frustrating part. He might learn the next day of a fire that Jass could have been responsible for, or the discovery of a feckless fool lying coshed in an alley, who had trusted in the blandishments of a face that drink made desirable that might belong to one of Jass' girls. But unless Jass boasted, and boasted specifically, there was no way of telling what could be laid at his door and not someone else's.

  Midsummer came and passed, remarkable only for Midsummer Fairs and the fine pickings to be had at them, and Skif was no closer to uncovering the real culprit behind the fire. Day after day he would come awake in the damp heat of midday with a jolt the moment
that the snoring in the other room stopped, and lie on his pallet, listening. Sweat prickled his scalp, and he spread himself out like a starfish in a vain hope of finding a hint of cooler air. He longed for the breezes of his stable loft, but still he lay in the heat, waiting for a word, a clue, a sign.

  He had thought that he knew how to be patient. As days became weeks, and weeks tuned to moons, he discovered he knew nothing at all about patience. There were times when his temper snapped, when he wanted to curse, rail at fate and at the man who was so obstinately concealing his 143

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  secrets, to pound the floor and walls with his fists. That he did none of these things was not a measure of his patience, but rather that he did not dare to reveal himself to Jass by an overheard gaffe of his own.

  The more time passed, the more his hatred grew.

  But at least he was not alone in hating and despising Jass. The sell-sword was no friend to the arsonist either, not if Skif was any judge. Twice he had caught the man glaring at Jass' back with an expression that had made Skif's blood turn cold. Twice only— no more than that, but the second time had been enough to convince Skif that the first was no fluke.

  Whatever he had done to earn the sell-sword's enmity, Skif was certain that only the fact that Jass was, and remained, useful to the man that kept Jass alive and unharmed.

  One stifling day, Skif lay on the bare boards of his room dressed in nothing more than a singlet, eyes closed and a wet cloth lying across them in an attempt to bring some coolness to his aching head. He could only breathe in the furnacelike air, and reflect absently on how odd it was that this part of town actually stank less than some better-off neighborhoods.