Honor among thieves

Chapter Fifty-Four

Slag followed Malden all the way across the Sawyer’s Bridge into the Royal Ditch. Normally the narrow old bridge-named for the woodcutters who used it to carry firewood to the northern part of the city-creaked with the weight of all the pleasure-seekers heading across to the gaming houses and wineshops on the far side. Harlots had for ages walked back and forth along the bridge wearing red skirts and enticing daytime custom with their unshod feet and bare ankles, a living advertisement for the entertainments to be found on the far side. That day only a lone girl holding a house cat to her bosom was abroad. She waved cheerfully at Malden, but he had no more for her than an acknowledging nod.

On the far side of the bridge Slag dropped to the ground and begged Malden to stop a moment. “I can’t run so fucking fast as I used to,” he complained. “And this blasted sunlight makes me half blind. I need to catch my breath. What’s your hurry, anyway?”

Malden stared along Pokekirtle Lane, at the signs of the brothels there, all done in gaudy paint that stood out among the plain half-timbered houses. If it weren’t for the pornographic pictograms on the signs, this could be any other street in Ness. It was deserted enough not to show its traditional commerce. “Something I need to work on. Something that might give me guidance and solve our problems.”

“Ah. Cutbill’s cipher.”

Malden whirled around to face his friend. He’d mentioned the coded message to no one but Coruth and the three elders of the thieves’ guild. “How did you know about that?” he demanded.

“Lockjaw’s good at keeping quiet, aye,” Slag said, sounding almost apologetic. “The other two never shut their fucking flaps.”

Malden shook his head. If Slag knew about the message, then the entire guild must be aware of it by now. If they knew how it still mystified him, the thieves might start thinking he wasn’t smart enough to lead them.

Maybe there was a way he could turn this to his advantage, though. “Listen,” he said, “Will you do me a favor? Something that would help me greatly?”

“Depends what it is, lad. I’ve got my standards. I’m a dwarf, you know. We have a very exacting moral code we’re expected to follow. Very strict.”

Malden frowned. “I need you to tell a lie.”

“Ah, well, that’s fine, then.”

“I need you to spread a rumor, actually. Let it be known that I’ve cracked the cipher. That I found Cutbill’s advisement, and that it contains a secret that’s going to save the guild.”

Like all good lies, it was based on a kernel of optimism. Malden had made little progress with the cipher-it remained impenetrable. And yet he had come to believe, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the information the message contained in the cipher would be his salvation.

It was a thin thread of hope, but to a man trapped in a pit of confusion and despair, a rope as thin as a strand of hair could be a lifeline.

Malden gave Slag a moment to rest, then headed straight for the Lemon Garden-one of the less reputable houses of ease in Pokekirtle Lane. He had chosen it because he was known there, but also because it was one of the few businesses in the Royal Ditch that Cutbill hadn’t owned any part of. The guildmaster of thieves hadn’t wanted to absorb any of the Garden’s debts. That meant it was less likely to house a spy for the rival factions that wanted to oust him from his position.

Normally during the day Malden had to announce himself repeatedly and hammer on the door to get in, but this day the Garden was open for business even in the early morning. Elody, the proprietress, welcomed him with a kiss on the cheek and explained. “Business is so bad I can’t turn anyone away,” she said, ushering him into the courtyard. A single scrawny lemon tree grew there, a few withered fruits still hanging from its boughs. Around its base were pallets of straw for the tupenny clientele. None of them were occupied at the time. “I’ve slashed my prices, offered delights to the public that I normally save for my most discriminating patrons-nothing seems to work,” she went on with a sigh.

Malden was saddened by this but unsurprised. The vast majority of Elody’s customers had left town with the Burgrave. The very old men who remained were rarely in need of negotiable tenderness. Certainly Pritchard Hood and the handful of watchmen he retained didn’t seem the type to dally in brothels. “I’ll see if I can’t send some custom your way,” Malden promised. His thieves were one of the few groups of young men remaining in the city. Elody had been one of his mother’s fastest friends, and even sat by her bedside while she was dying of the sailor pox. He owed her something.

At that particular moment he owed her some silver, which he paid happily. “You’ve kept the room locked?” he asked her.

“Haven’t needed it for anything else,” Elody told him. The silver coins disappeared into her sagging cleavage. “What about him?” she said, indicating Slag.

“He’s all right. Slag, come with me-unless you see something here you like.”

The dwarf squinted in the daylight but peered up at the gallery surrounding the courtyard. The women gathered there looked haggard to Malden, thin from hunger and tired from being up at all hours. They knew how to dress themselves, however, to show off their better features.

Slag shook his head, though. “Hairless as babies, all of them.”

Malden raised an eyebrow. Like all the city’s whores, the women of the Lemon Garden kept their hair very long and dressed with ribbons. It was one of their chief enticements, since most honest women in Ness kept their hair covered by hoods or wimples.

“I like a woman with some hair on her lip,” Slag explained.

Malden laughed-for the first time in days-and brought Slag to the private room he’d hired from Elody. It was there he’d been working on the cipher. The room contained a large bed, of course, but this was now strewn with pieces of parchment, scratched on with a quill pen in abortive attempts to break the code. The original cipher was tacked to one wall, while fresh parchment, ink, and a book of grammar were waiting for Malden on a chair.

He set to work immediately, scanning the message over and over, looking for suspicious groupings of given characters. “Each symbol here must correspond to a letter of the alphabet,” he explained to Slag-it was what Coruth had taught him.

“But how can you break it unless you know which character stands for which letter?” Slag asked. The dwarf looked intrigued-here was a bit of cleverness, a skillful science he had not mastered.

“The trick is knowing that some letters are more common than others,” Malden explained. “For instance, the letter E is the most common in our language, so it stands to reason that the most common character in the cipher would correspond to E. Unless, of course, it actually represents A, which is also very common.”

“It can’t be that simple,” Slag said.

Malden sighed and shook his head. “Sadly, no. I find combinations of common letters all the time here, but they never link up to form familiar words. I’ve been working on a theory that the message is not in the language of Skrae, but perhaps the written form of the script of the Old Empire, or even that of one of the Northern Kingdoms. The real problem, however, is that there are characters I can’t account for. There are twenty-two letters in the alphabet I was taught. Yet there are far more different kinds of characters in the message. It’s possible they stand for marks of punctuation, or numbers, or… anything, really. Musical notes? It’s also possible there are two messages interwoven here, each in a completely different cipher.” He started to crumple a piece of parchment in his hand. Another wasted effort. He stopped himself in time, though-the stuff was far too expensive to waste.

“Cutbill meant for you to break the code,” Slag said, laying a hand on Malden’s elbow. “You’ll find the answer, lad.”

“I devoutly hope so, and that I find it soon.”

He had things that needed to be done, far more pressing things. Luckily, most of them could be done from the room at the Lemon Garden. He was able to send Slag out on various errands, even in the daylight when all sane dwarves were asleep in their beds. Runners came to him from the Ashes and from Castle Hill, where he had spies watching Pritchard Hood and his men. Elody eventually brought him a plate of herring and bread, and he realized he’d wasted half the day on the cipher. He didn’t stop, however, and time sped by once more. When a knock came on the door and he rose to answer it, he saw that night had fallen outside.

He’d spent a whole day working on the code, and was no nearer an answer.

Blinking away the cobwebs behind his eyes, he looked at who had come to him. He almost didn’t recognize her at first. “Herwig?” he said. “Where are your furs?”

The madam of the House of Sighs, the grandest and most expensive brothel in the city, stood on his doorstep in a plain smock of wool. He had never before seen her when she wasn’t dressed in ermine like a duchess.

“Sold, all of them, for this,” she said, and she crossed his palm with gold. “It’s what I owe you.”

Cutbill had owned a sizable interest in the House of Sighs. It was one of his most profitable speculations. The gold must represent his own cut, Malden concluded. “Feels a little light,” he said by instinct.

“Business has been down,” she said. “But it’s all there.”

“Very well,” he said. “You have my thanks.” He turned to go, but she put a hand on his arm.

“And now,” she said, “I want what’s mine.”