Honor among thieves

Chapter Fifty-Five

“Protection?” Malden repeated when Herwig had told him what she meant.

“It was promised to me by your former master. I assume our arrangement still stands. My business has fallen away to nothing, but I’m paid up now. So you need to meet your obligations.”

“But-protection from what? Don’t tell me some gang is trying to move in on you,” Malden said. That was the last thing he needed-a rival organization working against the guild of thieves.

“In a fashion,” Herwig said. “May I sit?”

Malden hurried to clear off the room’s chair and bring it nearer the fire for her. Herwig had come up with his mother as well, though they’d never gotten along. Still, Malden honored all the women who’d survived on Pokekirtle Lane long enough to grow old. It was a hard life with particular dangers most people never needed to face.

“I was visited last night by a group of men with knives in their hands. As bad as business is, I welcomed them. But they hadn’t come for swiving. They slashed paintings in my vestibule, tore tapestries from the walls. Smashed several pieces of erotic sculpture I’d had shipped all the way from the Old Empire.”

The art collection of the House of Sighs was one of Ness’s more unconventional treasures. This was, in its way, a kind of desecration. Malden jumped to his feet. “I’ll gather some bravos at once. We’ll find them and make them pay you back for everything.”

“You won’t have to look hard,” Herwig told him. She pressed her lips tightly together for a moment, as if holding back a curse. “They came from Castle Hill. Oh, they’d taken off their cloaks-of-eyes. But there are not so many watchmen in this city that I didn’t recognize one of them. I went to Pritchard Hood himself this morning and demanded recompense. Do you know what he told me?”

Malden shook his head.

“That images of lust were an offense before the sight of the Lady. I told him, of course, that I am not a worshipper of his new religion. He informed me, quite politely, that in times of war the Lady’s favor was to be sought by all people. Believers and nonbelievers alike.”

“He truly is a zealot,” Malden said, and new hatred burned in his heart for Hood. The people of the Free City of Ness had always in the past been granted a certain measure of religious liberty. Clearly Hood intended to revoke that freedom.

Malden wondered, though, if this attack were purely motivated by faith. It was too well calculated to hurt him as well. It was well known that Cutbill made more money from his investments in the Royal Ditch than he ever had from direct thieving. The gaming houses alone made Cutbill rich. Now that he had inherited all those accounts, perhaps Hood intended to beggar him by cutting off his sources of revenue.

Herwig exhaled noisily. “You need to do something, Malden. You need to help me. You and I have never been close. But you are a friend to every working woman in this city-or so I’ve heard. Demonstrate that friendship now.”

“I’d like to,” Malden said, playing for time to think. “I have my own problems, you know.”

It seemed Herwig would brook no excuses. She rose from the chair and headed for the door. Before she left she turned back to stare at him. “I’ve always found men to be useless when real needs arose. It’s why I never married any of them, and instead found ways to make my own place in this world. For once-just for once-I hope I’m proved wrong.”

She left before he could promise anything. Herwig was a shrewd woman, and he doubted she would have believed anything he said anyway.

He was visited twice more that night by the madams of other houses, who told similar tales. It seemed Pritchard Hood had been very busy. The only house that hadn’t been visited by the watch on some trumped-up pretext was the Lemon Garden, which gave credence to the theory Hood was trying to bankrupt Malden before he slaughtered him. In desolation, Malden did the only thing he could, and turned back to the cipher.

He made no progress at all. He worked well into the night and nothing came to him. Slag returned and kept him company, for which he was grateful. Yet Malden’s frustration had grown to the point where he was afraid he would lash out at even his most faithful friend if he wasn’t careful.

“It’s gibberish!” he howled, tearing a sheet of parchment into ribbons and casting them into the air. They fell like the fluttering leaves of autumn. “There are just too many characters. Or too few. If it was two ciphers intermixed, there should be forty-four characters. But there are only thirty-seven.”

Slag looked up from the plate of sops he’d been eating. “Thirty-seven?”

“Yes!” Malden, exasperated, grabbed up the grammar book he’d been using. “Which makes no sense at all. The alphabet of the Old Empire uses twenty-nine characters. Even in the Northern Kingdoms, where half their letters are draped in umlauts and circumflexes and diacritical marks no one can even remember how to pronounce, there are only thirty-one. There has never been a human alphabet in all our history that used thirty-seven marks, not even if you include full stops and question marks and the like.”

“Not a human alphabet, no,” Slag said, “but-”

“It’s useless!” Malden shouted, and threw himself full length on the bed, crushing his wasted parchments and staining his tunic with ink. “Cutbill didn’t want me to break this. I see it now. First he sent an assassin to slaughter me. When that didn’t work, he gave me this job knowing I would foul things to the point my own thieves would turn on me. And he left a maze of meaningless characters for me to lose myself in, and waste so much time I would miss the killing stroke when it came.”

“No, lad, I don’t fucking believe it for a moment. He wanted you to solve this riddle. He knew what tools you would have on hand-Coruth, to teach you of ciphers, and, well, me.”

Malden sat up suddenly. He said nothing, for fear of interrupting Slag.

“There are thirty-seven runes known to the dwarves. Exactly thirty-seven,” Slag said in a very, very quiet voice.

Malden got to his feet and walked over to where the dwarf sat in the chair, the plate of milky bread in his lap. He started to reach for the dwarf’s shoulder.

He was stopped because there was a knock on the door. Before Malden could answer it, the door flew open and he saw Velmont standing there. The Helstrovian thief looked like he’d run all the way from the wall-he was gasping for breath and sweat slicked his face. “The thief-takers’re at it again,” he announced.

“Who did they get this time?” Malden asked.

Velmont wiped at his mouth. “Loophole,” he said.