The Republic of Thieves (4 page)

Beth took the purses and the handkerchief from Locke. Her fingers brushed his, and he trembled. Beth’s eyes narrowed.

“Hit your head earlier?”

“Yes.”

“Who pushed you?”

“I just fell.”

“Of
course
you did.”

“Honest!”

“Seems to be troubling you. Or maybe you’re ill. You’re shaking.”

“I’m … I’m fine.”

“Have it your way.” Beth closed her eyes and massaged them with her fingertips. “I guess you’ve saved me a hell of a lot of trouble. Do you want me to … look, is there someone bothering you that you want to stop?”

Locke was startled. An older child,
this
older child, of all people, and a member of Windows, was offering him protection? Could she do that? Could she put Veslin and Gregor in their place?

No. Locke forced his eyes away from Beth’s utterly fascinating face to bring himself back down to earth. There would always be other Veslins, other Gregors. And what if they resented him all the more for her interference? She was Windows; he was Streets. Their days and nights were reversed. He’d never seen her before today; what sort of protection could he possibly get from her? He would keep playing dead. Avoid calling attention to himself. Rule one, and rule two. As always.

“I just fell,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she replied, a little coldly. “As you wish.”

Locke opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying desperately to imagine something he might say to charm this alien creature. Too late. She turned away and heaved Tam and No-Teeth to their feet.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, “but you two idiots owe your supper to the arsonist of the Narrows here. Do you understand just how much hell we’ll all catch if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone?”

“I do,” said Tam.

“I’d be very put out to catch any at all,” Beth continued. “Any at all! You hear me, No-Teeth?”

The poor wretch nodded, then sucked his knuckles again.

“Back to the Hill, then.” Beth tugged at her kerchief and adjusted her cap. “I’ll keep the things and pass them to the master myself. Not a word about this. To
anyone
.”

She kept her now-customary grip on No-Teeth all the way back to the graveyard. Tam dogged her heels, looking exhausted but relieved. Locke followed at the rear, scheming to the fullest extent of his totally inadequate experience. What had he said or done wrong? What had he misjudged? Why wasn’t she delighted with him for saving her so much trouble?

She said nothing to him for the rest of the trip home. Then, before he could find an excuse to speak to her again once there, she was gone, vanished into the tunnels that led to the private domain of the Windows crew, where he could not follow.

He sulked that night, eating little of the supper his nimble fingers had earned, fuming not at Beth but at himself for somehow driving her away.

DAYS PASSED
, longer days than any Locke had ever known, now that he had something to preoccupy him beyond the brief excitement of daily crimes and the constant chores of survival.

Beth would not leave his thoughts. He dreamed of her, and how the hair spilling out from beneath her cap had caught the light filtering down through the interlaced greenery of the Mara Camorrazza. Strangely, in his dreams, that hair was purely red from edge to root, untouched by dye or disguise. The price for these visions was that he would wake to cold, hard disappointment and lie there in the dark, wrestling with mysterious emotions that had never troubled him before.

He would have to see her again. Somehow.

At first he nurtured a hope that his relegation to a crew of troublemakers might be permanent, that Beth might be their minder on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, the Thiefmaker seemed to have no such plans. Locke slowly realized that if he was ever going to get another chance to impress her, he’d have to stick his neck out.

It was hard to break the routines he’d established for himself, to say nothing of those expected of someone in his lowly position. Yet he began to wander more often throughout the vaults and tunnels of his home, anxious for a glimpse of Beth, exposing himself to abuse and
ridicule from bored older children. He played dead. He didn’t react. Rule one and rule two. It almost felt good, earning bruises for a genuine purpose.

The lesser orphans of Streets (that is, nearly all of them) slept en masse on the floor of crèche-like side vaults, several dozen to a room. When his dreams woke him at night Locke would now try to stay awake, to strain his ears to hear past the murmuring and rustling of those around him, to detect the coming and going of the Windows crew on their secretive errands.

Before he’d always slept securely in the heart of his snoring fellows, or against a nice comforting wall. Now he risked positions at the outer edge of the huddled mass, where he could catch glimpses of people in the tunnels. Every shadow that passed and every step he heard might be hers, after all.

His successes were few. He saw her at evening meals several times, but she never spoke to him. Indeed, if she noticed him at all, she did a superb job of not showing it. And for Locke to try and speak to her on his own initiative, with her surrounded by her Windows friends, and they by the older bullies from Streets … no presumption could have been more fatal. So he did his feeble best to skulk and spy on her, relishing the fluttering of his stomach whenever he caught so much as a half-second glimpse. Those glimpses and those sensations paid for many days of frustrated longing.

More days, more weeks passed in the hazy forever now of childhood time. Those bright brief moments he’d spent in Beth’s presence, actually speaking to her and being spoken to, were polished and re-polished in Locke’s memory until his very life might have begun on that day.

At some point that spring, Tam died. Locke heard the mutterings. The boy was caught trying to lift a purse, and his would-be victim smashed his skull with a walking stick. This sort of thing wasn’t uncommon. If the man had witnesses to the attempted theft he’d probably lose a finger on his weaker hand. If nobody backed his story, he’d hang. Camorr was civilized, after all; there were acceptable and unacceptable times for killing children.

No-Teeth went soon after that, crushed under a wagon wheel in broad daylight. Locke wondered if it wasn’t all for the best. He and
Tam had been miserable in the Hill, and maybe the gods could find something better to do with them. It wasn’t Locke’s concern anyway. He had his own obsession to pursue.

A few days after No-Teeth got it, Locke came home from a long, wet afternoon of work in the North Corner district, casing and robbing vendor stalls at the well-to-do markets there. He shook the rain from his makeshift cloak, which was the same awful-smelling scrap of leather that served him as a blanket each night. Then he went to meet the crowd of oldsters, led by Veslin and Gregor, who shook down the smaller children each day as they came in with their takings.

Usually they spent most of their energy taunting and threatening Locke’s fellows, but today they were talking excitedly about something else. Locke caught snatches of the conversation as he waited his turn to be abused.

“… right unhappy he is about it … one of the big earners.”

“I know she was, and didn’t she put on airs about it, too.”

“But that’s all Windows for you, eh? Ain’t they all like that? Well, here’s something they won’t like. Proves they’s as mortal as we is. They fuck up just the same.”

“Been a right messy month. That poor sod what got the busted head … that little shit we used to kick the chompers out of … now her.”

Locke felt a cold tautness in his guts.

“Who?” he said.

Veslin paused in mid-sentence and stared at Locke, as though startled that the little creatures of Streets had the power of speech.

“Who what, you little ass-tickler?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Wouldn’t you like to fucking know.”

“WHO?”

Locke’s hands had formed themselves into fists of their own accord, and his heart pounded as he yelled again at the top of his lungs, “WHO?”

Veslin only had to kick him once to knock him down. Locke saw it coming, saw the bully’s foot rising toward his face, growing impossibly in size, and still he couldn’t avoid it. Floor and ceiling reversed themselves, and when Locke could see again, he was on his back with
Veslin’s heel on his chest. Warm coppery blood was trickling down the back of his throat.

“Where does he get off, talking to us like that?” said Veslin mildly.

“Dunno. Fuckin’ sad, it is,” said Gregor.

“Please,” said Locke. “Tell me—”

“Tell you what? What right you got to know anything?” Veslin knelt on Locke’s chest, rifled through his clothes, and came up with the things he’d managed to clutch that day. Two purses, a silver necklace, a handkerchief, and some wooden tubes of Jereshti cosmetics. “Know what, Gregor? I don’t think I remember Lamora here coming home with anything tonight.”

“Nor me, Ves.”

“Yeah. How’s that for sad, you little piss-pants? You want dinner, you can eat your own shit.”

Locke was too used to the sort of laughter that now rose in the tunnel to pay any attention to it. He tried to get up and was kicked in the throat for his trouble.

“I just want to know,” he gasped, “what happened—”

“Why do you care?”

“Please … please …”

“Well, if you’re gonna be civil about it.” Veslin dropped Locke’s takings into a dirty cloth sack. “Windows had themselves a bad night.”

“Cocked up proper, they did,” said Gregor.

“Got pinched hitting a big house. Not all of ’em got clear. Lost one in a canal.”

“Who?”

“Beth. Drowned, she did.”

“You’re lying,” whispered Locke. “YOU’RE LYING!”

Veslin kicked him in the side of his stomach and Locke writhed. “Who says … who says she’s—”

“I fuckin’ say.”

“Who told you?”

“I got a letter from the duke, you fuckin’ half-wit. The master, that’s who! Beth drowned last night. She ain’t coming back to the Hill. You sweet on her or something? That’s a laugh.”

“Go to hell,” whispered Locke. “You go to—”

Veslin cut him off with another hard kick to the exact same spot.

“Gregor,” he said, “we got a real problem here. This one ain’t right in the head. Forgot what he can and can’t say to the likes of us.”

“I got just the thing for it, Ves.” Gregor kicked Locke between the legs. Locke’s mouth opened, but nothing came out except a dry hiss of agony.

“Give it to the little shit-smear.” Veslin grinned as he and Gregor began to work Locke over with hard kicks, carefully aimed. “You like that, Lamora? You like what you get, you put on airs with us?”

Only the Thiefmaker’s proscription of outright murder among his orphans saved Locke’s life. No doubt the boys would have pulped him if their own necks wouldn’t have been the price of their amusement, and as it was they nearly went too far.

It was two days before Locke could move well enough to work again, and in that interval, lacking friends to tend him, he was tormented by hunger and thirst. But he took no satisfaction in his recovery, and no joy in his return to work.

He was back to playing dead, back to hiding in corners, back to rule one and rule two. He was all alone in the Hill once again.

WEAK SUNLIGHT AGAINST
his eyelids drew him out of sleep. The brightness intruded, grew, made him blink groggily. A window was open, letting in mild afternoon air and a freshwater smell. Not Camorr. Sound of waves lapping against a sand beach. Not Camorr at all.

He was tangled in his sheets again, light-headed. The roof of his mouth felt like sun-dried leather. Chapped lips peeled apart as he croaked, “What are you …”

“Shhhh. I didn’t mean to wake you. The room needed some air.” A dark blur on the left, more or less Jean’s height. The floor creaked as the shape moved about. Soft rustle of fabric, snap of a coin purse, clink of metal. Locke pushed himself up on his elbows, prepared for the dizziness. It came on punctually.

“I was dreaming about her,” he muttered. “The times that we … when we first met.”

“Her?”

“Her. You know.”

“Ah. The canonical
her
.” Jean knelt beside the bed and held out a
cup of water, which Locke took in his shaking left hand and sipped at gratefully. The world was slowly coming into focus.

“So vivid,” said Locke. “Thought I could touch her. Tell her … how sorry I am.”

“That’s the best you can manage? Dreaming of a woman like
that
, and all you can think to do with your time is apologize?”

“Hardly under my control—”

“They’re your dreams. Take the reins.”

“I was just a little boy, for the gods’ sakes.”

“If she pops up again move it forward ten or fifteen years. I want to see some blushing and stammering next time you wake up.”

“Going somewhere?”

“Out for a bit. Making my rounds.”

“Jean, there’s no point. Quit torturing yourself.”

“Finished?” Jean took the empty cup from him.

“Not nearly. I—”

“Won’t be gone long.” Jean set the cup on the table and gave the lapels of his coat a perfunctory brushing as he moved to the door. “Get some more rest.”

“You don’t bloody listen to reason, do you?”

“You know what they say about imitation and flattery.”

The door slid shut and Jean was gone, out into the streets of Lashain.

LASHAIN WAS
famous as a city where anything could be bought and anything could be left behind. By the grace of the
regio
, the city’s highest and thinnest order of nobility (where a title that could be traced back more than two generations qualified one for the old guard), just about anyone with cash in hand and enough of a pulse to maintain semiconsciousness could have their blood transmuted to a reasonable facsimile of blue.