Honor among thieves

Chapter Sixty-Four

Malden grabbed onto a window ledge and hauled himself upward. One foot on the casement, he thrust his arms up to grasp the sharp edge of a roof, then swung himself up with a grunt and scrabbled up the shingles toward the roof ridge. Dancing around a chimney pot, he dashed to the edge of the roof and leaped into empty space, barely catching the head of a marble statue in the square beyond. Before he’d lost his momentum, he kicked off the statue’s shoulders and somersaulted onto a second floor balcony across the way.

Through the windows of the house he’d landed on, he saw a family of four sitting at table, taking their midday meal. The father looked up and for a moment made perfect eye contact with him-a thief, climbing around on the outside of his house.

The man gave him a cheery wave and rushed to the window to fling it open. “Lord Mayor! Lord Mayor!” he called, but Malden was already on his roof and running up the slope of shingles as fast as he could.

There had been no time to acknowledge the change that had come over his life. No time to reflect and even think about what he was doing. He’d been so busy since the people carried him through the streets and put a garland of dried roses on his head. Too busy to think or even stop and reflect on the burden he now bore. The only peace and quiet Malden ever got anymore was on top of someone’s roof, running as if every man in the watch was after him.

Except there was no more city watch, and the people chasing him all wanted to shake his hand and express their gratitude.

In the week since the death of Pritchard Hood, things had changed in Ness. The people owned their own city now. It had always been a Free City, and the people of Ness had always enjoyed certain liberties. Freedom from royal taxes. Freedom from conscription. Freedom to own property, and to keep their own money. All those things were guaranteed in their charter, a piece of paper Juring Tarness had signed eight hundred years ago. They had a saying in Ness: “City air makes you free.” Of course, there had been limits on that freedom. All other rights not specifically listed in that document were still the province of the king.

Now there was no more king. There was no more Burgrave. Only, now, a Lord Mayor. There had been much debate about what to call the new leader of Ness. The title they’d eventually chosen was not a Skraeling honorific at all-it was the name given to the men of the Northern Kingdoms who were elected to serve as the leaders of their mercantile cities. It was technically incorrect, since Malden was no lord by birth or right, but the people did love calling him by his new title.

A title Malden hated, because it made him the enemy of freedom.

Freedom was one of the few things he truly loved or believed in. Freedom was what he’d sought all his life, even as all the lords and knights and kings tried to take it away from him. Freedom was wonderful-at least until your neighbor decided to be free with your property, or your spouse, or your life. Then someone had to step in and take away his freedom to preserve yours.

Malden, who had spent his entire life hating watchmen and judges and especially rulers, was now the one who sent people to the gaol. The one who sat in judgment at their trials and decided who was worthy of freedom and who must be constrained for the good of Ness. The one who would have to punish miscreants, as soon as he figured out a way to do so that didn’t make his stomach cramp and tie itself in knots.

There had been no hangings in Ness since the night Castle Hill was razed. There had been a dozen murders, though. Just that morning he’d had to send Velmont and a crew of thieves into a bad part of the Stink. Because there were no watchmen left, it was up to the thieves to maintain order-something they found hilariously funny, though Malden had not laughed when he asked this of them. A man, a citizen, deranged in his faculties, had killed his own daughter. He claimed he was going to take her blood to the Godstone and make proper sacrifice there. The madman thought that reinstituting human sacrifice was the only way to drive off the barbarians.

Malden had him put in chains. After talking briefly with the man, he was convinced that were the murderer’s freedom returned to him, he would only find somebody else to kill. The murderer had six more daughters, and two infant sons.

“Enough,” Malden said out loud, up on the rooftops, because all this thinking nearly made him miss a step. Twenty-five feet aboveground, on a roof of crumbling shingles, a misstep would be fatal.

And if he died here, who would keep Ness from descending into anarchy?

He ran the rest of the way to the Lemon Garden feeling like a black wind was howling through him. When he dropped down into the courtyard beside the withered lemon tree-all its fruit was gone now, he saw-he felt almost human.

Unfortunately, the courtyard wasn’t empty. The whole city knew that Malden had taken the private room upstairs as his office. Men and women from every corner of Ness came now, and paid the tupenny fee Elody demanded (the price of her quickest and least sanitary engagements) just to get in the door.

“Lord Mayor! There’s no one working the grist mill in Chapeldown Lane-I can’t get the flour I need to make bread!”

“Lord Mayor! My wagon threw a wheel this morning, but the wheelwright says he can’t find any bodgers to make new spokes!”

“Lord Mayor! I put an image of the Lady in my window last night, you know, just in case-and a gang of boys broke my window with rocks!”

“Lord Mayor, please, a moment!”

“Lord Mayor!”

“Lord Mayor!”

Their breath filled the courtyard, cutting through the chill in the air but making Malden’s head spin. They pressed close and grabbed at his clothing, all trying to get his attention, just for a moment.

Malden felt faint. He felt a desperate need to escape. He scuttled up the swaying trunk of the lemon tree and jumped to the gallery above. More supplicants awaited him there, but he was able to duck inside his private room and bar the door before they could do more than shout his name. They knocked and begged through the portal, but for a moment, at least, he was alone.

Or rather-alone with the one person in all of Ness he wanted to see. On the bed, Cythera turned over and opened one bleary eye to look at him. Then she smiled.

There were some small compensations for being called Lord Mayor.