City of Jade

37

BURGLARS

EARLY SUMMER, 6E9

“Har!” shouted Queeker, holding the lantern even higher. “Wot’re they doing here, I wonder? Lookin’ for their chest, d’y’think?” Queeker broke into nasal snorts, even as Binkton and Pipper struggled to get free.

“What do you think, Tark?” asked the huge man who clutched Pipper to his chest. “Kill them? Break their scrawny necks?”

Even as Tark nodded, an older, gray-haired, thin, and rather bookish-looking man entered the room. “Kill them? No. Instead we’ll wait until Largo gets back. He’ll tell us what to do.”

Tark made a scoffing sound, but otherwise said nothing.

“Oi, now!” exclaimed Queeker. “Maybe these two are the ones what’s been taking our silvers.”

Tark looked in amazement at Queeker. “By the crabs, I think you’re right.” Even as Queeker thrust out his bony chest and strutted about, Tark turned to the gray-haired man. “Brander, I think Queek has hit upon it: These are the thieves who’ve been robbing us.”

Binkton snarled and started to speak, but Pipper cut his cousin off, shouting, “Silvers? What silvers? We came to get back our trunk.”

Tark snorted and said, “Trunk? Ha! As if that matters.”

Queeker crowed and said, “Oh, Tark, Largo’s going to love us. I mean, we’ve caught ourselves the thieves.”

Binkton shouted, “You’re the thieves, not us.”

“Downstairs with them,” said the man called Brander. “We’ll throw them in the hole till Largo gets back.”

With Binkton yelling curses and both he and Pipper kicking and twisting and wrenching and flailing, the two brutes holding the Warrows carried them downstairs and into a room, where Queeker threw back a rug and Tark lifted a trapdoor and the two men dropped the buccen into a small, unlit, rock-walled chamber and slammed the lid shut.

As Binkton shouted epithets upward in the dark, with but a step or two Pipper found his way to one side of the cell, and he began pacing out the dimensions: six Warrow strides by seven. He discovered a cot along one wall, with an empty lidded chamber pot beneath, along with a bucket, perhaps for water.

“This is a dungeon, Bink,” said Pipper, when his cousin paused in his cursing to take a breath. “Does that trapdoor have a lock?”

Binkton seethed for a moment, and then got control of his breathing and said, “Yes, but it’s a hasp on the outside in a recess, with a shackle and a keylock. I saw it just before they chucked us in. There’s no way I can reach it. Not unless we cut a hole in that rat-eating door up there.”

Even though Binkton couldn’t see him, Pipper nodded, and then asked, “Did you get anything?”

“Get anything?”

“When they were carrying us downstairs, did you manage to get anything off the one holding you?”

“Oh, Pip, I’m sorry. I was so angry, I didn’t even think of that.”

“Well, don’t fret, Bink. I didn’t get anything either.”

Binkton fumbled his way toward Pipper’s voice, and found him sitting on the cot. As he took a place beside his cousin, Binkton said, “We’ll have to make our break when they take us out.”

“ If they take us out,” said Pipper.

“Oh, Pip, do you think they’ll leave us down here?”

“Who knows what those”-Pipper grimly smiled to himself-“rat-eating, Ruck-loving sons of Trolls will do to us?”

The Warrows talked of what they might use as a weapon, but only the privy pot and water bucket came to hand, and neither one had a bail. The cot itself was built into the wall, and nothing could be broken away to use as a cudgel, and they couldn’t find a single loose rock. Though Binkton still had the wire in his belt, he had lost his lockpick kit in the struggle upstairs, and neither he nor Pipper had even a cloak pin, for the pins, along with those garments, lay on the far side of the alley wall.

It seemed as if an endless time passed before the buccen heard a number of footsteps overhead, followed by a rattle and snick of a lock being opened and a hasp clacking back. The trapdoor lifted, and lantern light shone from above, and as the Warrows squinted in its brightness, a ladder came scraping down.

“All right, you two,” snarled someone, Tark by the sound of his voice, “up here.”

As they approached the bottom rung, Pipper whispered, “When you see a chance, Bink, take it.”

As they clambered out from the tiny dungeon, they saw that one man stood before the closed door, and another at the window, each with a leashed mastiff in hand. Pipper’s heart fell, for he knew they could not outrun the dogs, and even if they tried, with a snap and a crunch they would be brought down like the chickens running in the yard.

As soon as the buccen had emerged from the hole, Queeker and Tark stepped to one side and looked to their left, where gray-haired Brander stood to the right of a wing-back chair in which Rackburn sat. Largo was yet dressed in the finery he had worn when he had set out for the theater. He had black hair and dark eyes and a long, straight nose above the hint of a sardonic smile that touched his lips. With an elegance of motion, he tented his hands together, fingertip to fingertip, and canted his head to one side and peered at the Warrows. “So these are the burglars?”

“That’s right, Mr. Rackburn, sir,” said Queeker. “Snatched ’em right up, we did, ’cause they didn’t know the windows and doors are connected by hidden bell cords to jinglies in the ward room. And we-”

Without taking his eyes off the buccen, Largo threw up a hand to stop Queeker’s blathering. Then Rackburn once again tented his hands and said, “And you believe these are the ones who have been taking our. . due?”

“Yes sir, we do,” said Tark.

“Hmm. . ” With a dark eye, Largo fixed Binkton and then Pipper. “What have you two to say for yourselves?”

“These rat-eating-” began Binkton, but Pipper cut in and said, “Tark and Queeker stole our chest. We were merely trying to recover our property.”

Rackburn smiled and nodded. Then he reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and said, “If that’s all you came for, then why carry this?” He held up Binkton’s lockpick kit.

“Because you took Lady Jane’s silvers!” blurted Binkton. “You’re a bunch of Troll-begotten, Ruck-loving-”

Tark backhanded Binkton, knocking the Warrow sideways and down. One of the mastiffs snarled and lunged forward at the buccan, only to be brought up short by his handler’s leash.

Largo lifted his right hand and snapped his fingers, and held open an upturned palm.

Brander gave him two small, capped bottles, each filled with a dark liquid.

“Force this down their throats,” said Rackburn, holding the vials out to Queeker, who jumped forward to take the little containers.

Tark jerked Binkton to his feet, and Queeker uncorked one of the vials as Tark forced the buccan’s head back. Queeker reached forward, bottle in hand, but Binkton slapped it aside, knocking it flying, and the thin glass shattered when it hit the wall, the dark liquid running down.

Tark smashed a fist into Binkton’s temple, and the buccan fell unconscious to the floor.

“Bink!” yelled Pipper, and he sprang toward his cousin. But Tark caught Pipper up and grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back. This time Queeker held tightly to the second vial, and he poured the contents in and clapped a hand across Pipper’s mouth.

Pipper struggled and tried not to swallow the bitter fluid, all in vain, for the men were just too strong. In the end he could not help himself, and the liquid burned his throat on the way down.

Almost immediately the sides of the room seemed to draw inward. Darkness descended, and his knees gave way, and his mind began to fall toward blackness. Even though he could no longer see, he could yet hear, as one of the men asked, “What next?”

Rackburn answered: “Weight them down and take them out to sea and throw them in.”

“Out to sea, boss?” asked one of the henchmen.

“That’s what I said,” replied Rackburn.

“Whatever for?” asked Tark. “Why not just cut their throats and throw them into delta mud for the crabs to strip?”

Suppressed rage sounded in Rackburn’s voice. “Think, fool, think. The last thing we need is for a pair of Warrows to be found slain anywhere near Rivers End. It would call the attention of the High King, and that’s the last thing we want to happen.”

“He’s right, Tark,” said Queeker. “I hear tell ever since the big Dragonstone War, the Warrows, they be favorites of King Ryon.”

Pipper could hear as Tark gritted his teeth, but then all consciousness fled.

Half-aware, the side of his head hurting there where Tark had hit him, Binkton heard the chank of heavy links clacking together, and felt something being fastened to his ankle. Then a manacle clicked shut on his left wrist. Someone lifted him up, and a voice said, “Throw ’em over, Tark. Throw ’em over.” And then he was hurled outward.

Binkton came fully awake as he struck the water and, even as he realized his wrist was shackled to Pipper’s, the remaining length of a long, heavy chain splashed into the water beside them, and it jerked Binkton under by his left ankle as it plunged toward the bottom, Binkton dragging Pipper along as down through the water they plummeted. Swiftly Binkton withdrew the wire from his belt and poked the sharply angled tip into the wide key slot on the ankle lock. Come on, bucco, come on!

He felt the tine catch on the single tumbler, and with a sharp twist the shackle sprang open. The chain fell away and continued to plunge onward, as Bink clamped the pickwire between his teeth and began kicking and stroking upward with one hand, dragging Pipper along by the manacle that held them together.

Binkton desperately needed to breathe, but there was no air.

Above he could see a glimmer of light, as if day had come.

Swim, bucco, swim, else you and Pip will drown.

Upward he stroked, and upward, Pipper a deadweight, but Binkton stroked and stroked one armed, his lungs heaving but not breathing in, for his mouth was tightly clamped shut.

And then he broke through the surface and took in a great gulp of air past the wire held between his clenched teeth, even as he pulled Pip up into the sweet morning breeze.

Pip, though unconscious, had not taken in any water, and he started breathing on his own.

Binkton took the pickwire from his mouth and stabbed the angled end into the fetter on his wrist. And even as the manacle opened, from a distance Binkton heard laughter-Queeker’s nasally whine riding above Tark’s deep roar. And Binkton could see a white sail on a small skiff, faring away, heading toward the land the buccan could just see.

I need to get Pip to shore, but I can’t let Queeker and Tark see me. Oh, Adon, Adon, let them not look back.

In between buoying Pipper up, Binkton kicked off his boots and shed his shirt, but kept on his trousers. Struggling, he stripped Pipper likewise. Then, towing Pip, Binkton rolled onto his back and began swimming after the craft. He swam for long moments before he rolled back over to sight on the land. By this time the skiff itself had drawn far away, and he no longer feared that Tark or Queeker would catch sight of him and Pipper.

Again he rolled onto his back, and stroked for long moments more, but when he rolled over to take another sighting, he could no longer see the land or the skiff itself, though he did spot the top of its mast.

What’s this, bucco, where did the land go?

Once more he rolled onto his back and swam for what he thought might have been a quarter candlemark altogether. But when he again took a sighting, not only was the land gone, but even the top of the mast had disappeared.

“What’s happening here, Pip?” he asked aloud, but, of course, Pip didn’t answer.

Think, bucco, think. Surely you know the reason.

A moment later it came to him: The Argon. The mighty Argon. It flows into the Avagon Sea, and we are caught in that current. Adon, but I cannot swim against the force of that flood. What will I do? What will I do? Oh, come on, Pip, wake up. I need you to have one of your harebrained schemes to get us out of this mess.

Slowly a full candlemark passed, and Binkton, weary beyond his means, struggled to stay afloat.

“Oh, Pip, oh, Pip,” he called aloud, “please wake up. I don’t think I can hold out much longer.”

And as Binkton strove to keep his head above water and keep Pipper’s up too, the relentless spillage of the Argon River pushed them farther out into the deep blue indigo sea.