All That Glitters (11 page)

 

A
rtus wiped the sleep out of his eyes and bent back just far enough to work the crick out of his lower spine. Three hours following some blue-­haired friend of Tyvian's as he wandered about New Crosstown was not what he had been looking forward to that evening. Were he not in the middle of one of the more interesting things he'd gotten to do in the past month, he might have just told Tyvian where to stick it and crawled into a haystack in some stable somewhere to sleep.

“He moves. Let's go!” Brana grunted, slapping Artus on the shoulder and then darting out of the alley on all fours. He was wearing his shroud, but it wasn't making much of a difference. A giant dog running around wouldn't have attracted more attention than a young man in gentleman's clothing jumping around like an animal in the middle of a slum. Fortunately, those wandering the streets just before dawn looked to be various kinds of clerks, couriers, and porters running errands and making early deliveries, and therefore most had their bleary eyes too firmly affixed to the cobblestones in front of them to care much.

Artus ducked out of the alley, pulling the hood of his traveling cloak far up over his head, and walked casually in the direction Brana had darted. There was no sign of the gnoll-­boy at the moment, but their target was clearly visible. Andolon came out of what Artus had originally assumed was a defunct barbershop but turned out to be still functional, just only if you knew the proper knock. When he went in, he was swinging his cane and whistling, and when came out he was doing the same thing. His hair, Artus noted, looked exactly the same, and Andolon didn't look like the kind of guy to need back-­alley surgery. Artus didn't know what he had done there—­or any of a half dozen other places he had visited—­but whatever it was didn't seem to dampen his mood any.

Artus didn't really see the need for as much stealth as he was using, but Tyvian's words floated up at him from the depths of his memory:
Just because the man you're tailing doesn't see you, that doesn't mean the
other
person tailing doesn't. Always assume you're being watched, always assume you're being listened to, and you can't go far wrong.

It was good advice, obviously, but Artus felt irked by it nonetheless. He was actively mad at himself for stopping every dozen paces or so and looking behind him. His time with Tyvian had made him paranoid and joyless. He could scarcely remember the last time he'd had fun, and he thought that a damned shame, given how much money he sometimes had at his disposal. He wasn't sure what he'd
do
for fun, really, but anything was probably better than being Tyvian Reldamar's human donkey.

A pebble hit Artus in the head, and he looked up to see Brana perched on the third story balcony of one of Saldor's frighteningly tall apartment blocks. “The water!” Brana chirped. “We're going to the water!”

“Get down here!” Artus waved at the gnoll, who was balancing on the railing of the balcony in a way no sane human would. “Somebody will see you!”

Brana cocked his head to the side and then jumped off. Artus almost screamed, but stopped himself. Brana slid down a clothesline and hit the ground, collapsing into a roll, and sprang back to his feet in one smooth motion. This display caused one man to jump in surprise and two others to hand him a few coppers for the show. Tongue hanging out like an idiot, the gnoll aped a ridiculous approximation of a bow and skipped off after their quarry.

Artus sighed—­at least somebody was enjoying this.

Despite Brana's enthusiasm, he didn't get closer than twenty paces from Andolon. Since Tyvian had sent him off unarmed, he wasn't exactly spoiling for a fight. Evidently Andolon had, at one point, been a duelist, and furthermore this city had Defenders who could see the future and arrest you immediately after (or even sometimes before) you did something wrong. It was a harrowing thought—­it made Artus question Tyvian's sanity for the hundredth time since he had brought them to Saldor. Why the hell would Tyvian's mother frame Myreon? Why would that encourage Tyvian to bring them all into a trap? They were all going to end up petrified in one of those terrible penitentiary gardens, he just knew it.

Andolon never looked behind him—­not once—­so the tailing was easy. So easy, in fact, it made Artus unreasonably suspicious of what was
really
going on. All kinds of Tyvian's warnings came flooding back: a person who never looks behind them after committing a crime is never alone, never assume a man is drunk unless you see him drink, never assume you are in control of a situation unless you have vetted all the angles first (he wasn't clear on what that last one meant, actually, but assumed it had something to do with having eyes in the back of your head). Artus put his hands in his pockets and sighed. He kind of hoped Andolon
would
turn around and start something. Getting in a fight would be a lot more interesting than this cloak-­and-­dagger nonsense, Defenders or no Defenders.

He and Brana followed Andolon to the docks. From Tyvian's primer on Saldorian geography, Artus knew they were somewhere along the West Mouth of the Trell River, nearing Crosstown Harbor. Across the glass-­still waters he could see the colored lanterns of a hundred ships bobbing at anchor out beneath the setting quarter moon. “Boats!” Brana said, pointing. “Big ones!”

They hid themselves behind a stack of empty barrels outside a cooper's shop and watched as Andolon marched himself out onto a pier and was met by some kind of large skiff with a fancy little house where Andolon could sit as two men wearing lace ruffs and shiny helmets rowed the boat. Tyvian's friend settled himself amid a few cushions and, from there, the two helmeted oarsmen took to their oars and they began to slide out into the harbor.

“Saints!” Artus swore, “How will we follow him now?”

Brana's eyes got wide for a moment before his grin followed suit. “Boat?”

“I don't know how to row a boat! Do you?” Artus asked, but it was a stupid question. Hool wouldn't let Brana so much as dip his toe in a pond larger than she could jump across.

“Boat!” Brana repeated, hitting Artus in the arm.

“No, Brana! I can't row . . .
or
swim. It's a bad idea.”

Brana pushed him and snarled in gnoll-­speak,
“Coward!”

Artus pushed him back. “I am not! It's a stupid idea!”

“Let's go!”
Brana barked.
“Let'
s go or you're a rabbit!”

Artus pushed Brana again. “I am not a rabbit! You're stupid!”

Brana sucker punched Artus just north of his groin. Artus, though, had enough experience with Brana that it didn't catch him completely flat-­footed. He caught Brana's arm with his and twisted it behind the gnoll's back. Brana slammed his heel down on Artus's instep hard enough to force Artus off-­balance, and then the gnoll simply twisted in such a way that Artus found himself falling toward the cobbles, shoulder first.

Now it was Hool's voice in Artus's head.
If you're going to fall, fall. Let the power of the fall fill you and then change it into something good.

Artus tucked his shoulder and rolled, letting go of Brana but allowing himself to roll to his feet. He turned to face the oncoming attack, but it wasn't coming. Brana had abandoned him and was running out on the pier. “Dammit! You stupid . . .”

Artus ran after him, but Brana had a head start and was ten times as fast anyway. By the time Artus caught up, the gnoll had skipped down a gangplank to a dock at which a half-­dozen small skiffs, coracles, and longboats were tied up. Brana was pacing the dock, sniffing at each boat's bow, his legs spread wide to adjust to the odd movement of the water beneath him.

“Brana, I said no! This is a really bad idea!” Artus descended to the dock as well, his hands gripping the guiderails on the gangway for dear life as he felt the sway and bob of the dock. “Saints, Brana—­you're going to get us drowned!”

Brana gave him a devilish grin and then hopped into an eight-­foot skiff. “Rabbit!” he said.

Somewhere behind them a dog barked. Artus turned to see the lights inside a shack by the pier light up. The sign above the door took a moment for Artus to sound out. “Dock . . . mast . . . er. Dockmaster.”

He had five seconds to determine what a “dockmaster” was before the man himself appeared at the door to his shack, a knobby cudgel in one hand and the leash of an angry dog in the other. “What's about down there! Hey, you boys—­you know what I does to boat thiefs on me dock? Eh? Come away from there!”

Artus waved Brana out of the skiff. “C'mon!”

Brana was busy untying the rope that held the skiff to the dock. “Rabbit rabbit rabbit.”

“Stop! Thiefs! I'll knock yer stinkin' brains, ye Kroth-­spawned tits! Varner, boy—­have at them! Go!” The dockmaster loosed his hound, and the big dog shot down the gangway with all the speed of a crossbow bolt. Artus felt his arse tighten at the thought of the beast's jaws clamped onto one of the cheeks. He jumped in the boat, lost his balance immediately, and nearly fell overboard save for Brana, who pulled him to safety.

Assuming, of course, by “safety” one meant “a boat they couldn't pilot.”

The force of Artus's jump had pushed them away from the dock. Varner the hound stopped short at the dock's edge, barking until foam flew from his jowls. The dockmaster was behind his dog, shaking his cudgel and spitting almost as much. “I know your faces, ye stinking ragamuffins! I'll find ye! I'll have yer arses!”

Artus managed to get himself right-­side-­up, but the thought of standing in the boat was too terrifying for him to contemplate, so instead he found himself peering over the gunwale at the receding form of the dockmaster. It took him a few seconds to fully realize what they had done, but when he did, all he could do was swear. “Kroth. Kroth's bloody teeth. We just stole a boat, didn't we? We stole a bloody boat.”

Brana's tongue was lolling out. “Yeah! Fun!”

Artus sighed. “Right. Fun.”

Whether it was the current, the tide, the wind, or some other nautical phenomenon Artus wasn't aware of, something was drawing their little boat away from the dock and out into the harbor among the hulls of the big oceangoing ships. Artus, whose firsthand experience with watercraft was limited to riding on a river barge a few times, found himself marveling at the sheer size of most of the vessels that surrounded them. He knew terms like “galleon” and “brig” and “galley” were used to describe ships, and suspected that some or all such terms could be correctly applied to the watery castles of lumber that loomed over them, but there was no way he would be able to tell which was which. All he knew was that their little boat floating amid such massive ships felt an awful lot like a leaf on a stream floating amid rocks and whirlpools.

Brana barked at some of the vessels they passed, which made Artus want to strangle him, for fear that they'd be turned in to the dockmaster as the obvious boat thieves they were. Besides the odd curse shouted at them from windows and rigging far above them, nothing came of it. Their forward progress was slowing as well, but they were still moving, languidly and calmly, on a collision course with a big ship with two masts directly ahead of them.

“Dammit!” Artus snarled, snatching up an oar. “If we hit that boat, we'll sink! Row! Row!”

Brana picked up the other oar and the two of them did their best to change the course of their little vessel. The thing was, though, they had no clear idea how this was to be achieved. Oars, it turned out, were less intuitively used than one might imagine. Artus and Brana thrashed about, slapping and stabbing the oars against the water in a variety of ways but never with quite the desired effect. About the only thing they managed to do was make themselves rotate around backward for a second before turning back the way they started. Then Brana dropped his oar.

“Kroth!” Artus yelled. “You idiot gnoll! You've killed us!”

Artus could see Brana's teeth gleam in the moonlight. He howled in mock dismay and then cuffed Artus across the head. “Rabbit!”

The big ship now loomed over them, blocking out the moonlight, blocking out everything with its midnight-­black bulk. Artus found a rope and wrapped it around his hands, not certain if by so doing he was guaranteeing his survival or just the opposite. If a boat fell apart, did its pieces sink to the bottom or did they still float? He closed his eyes. He could hear the water slapping against the sides of the ship's hull; he could smell something fishy and salty at the same time. Brana gave off a little whimper just before they hit.

. . .
bump. . .

They struck the side of the great ship gently, causing their boat to shudder slightly, but nothing else. Nothing cracked, nothing leaked, and Artus did not find himself dumped in the harbor. Slowly, he exhaled and opened his eyes. “Oh.”

Brana was glaring at him, he could tell.
“Stupid rabbit,”
Brana muttered in gnoll-­speak.

Artus scowled back. “Oh yeah, like you knew we wasn't about to die, huh? I heard you whimper! I know that whimper—­that was your ‘call for mommy' whimper.”

“Shut up.”

Artus stuck his chin out and mimicked Brana's gravelly voice. “ ‘Waah, waaah! I'm Brana and I miss my
moooommy
!' ”

Brana took a swing at Artus, but the boat rocked and he missed. The gnoll lost his balance and almost fell over. He was only saved when he reached out and touched the hull of the ship they were floating beside for balance. It pushed them off that ship and sent them slowly drifting toward another one.

This gave Artus an idea of how to get around the harbor, if not back to shore. Using the oar, he pushed against the hull of the next boat that came close, thereby bouncing them off in another direction. The two of them spent the next quarter of an hour taking turns bouncing themselves from anchored ship to anchored ship, trying somehow to get closer to a dock somewhere.