Read Thieves of Islar: Book One of The Heirs of Bormeer Online
Authors: James Shade
J
aeron heard fear in the timbre of the strange voice, and a protective righteous anger layered underneath. It was the farmer or one of his hands. They had not left in time.
He looked at Chazd. His brother had already cocked his crossbow and was loading a bolt in the weapon. He reached over and touched his brother’s arm, mouthing a silent ‘no’ when Chazd looked at him. Jaeron did not want to hurt the man.
“I will call the Guard! Who’s there?”
“Excuse me,” Avrilla’s voice responded from somewhere below.
Jaeron came to his feet, hand reaching for his sword.
What was she thinking?
“You there! Come on out here!”
“I’m sorry to have startled you, good sir. I’m afraid my brothers and I lost track of time last night and were not able to make it into the city before the gates were closed.”
Yes, that’s right.
Jaeron nodded and saw Chazd doing the same. The thought had come unbidden, with no disagreement until Jaeron consciously registered his sister’s lie.
By Teichmar! She was doing it again!
“Even so, we are having trouble locating our cousins. We are without work and without a place to stay. It should be okay for us to shelter here for a couple of days?”
His sister’s voice had phrased it as a question, but Jaeron felt the power of magical suggestion in the words. Her voice seemed to carry a hidden vibration that entered his mind and settled at the base of his neck. Now that he had the sense of it, he was able to ignore the effect despite it reaching right into his brain. It felt eerie, unnatural.
Jaeron had a unique insight into the supernatural. Most children of Bormeer were brought up hearing stories of magic and of fantastical creatures. The legends of Kolmar and Sophir, the Goblet of Altrumak, and the frightful tales of the Tainted of Malfekke were well known. Priests, especially of the outlawed religions, were rumored to have been able to heal the sick or cure the insane through special rituals and prayer. And the chief advisors to the once-beloved matriarchy were said to have been powerful wizards or sorcerers. But at some age everyone realized they were just stories.
Jaeron, however, knew the truth. Through his study and training amongst the acolytes of Teichmar, Jaeron had learned that some magic was real. Every once in a while, and generally along particular genealogical lines, an individual would be blessed, or cursed, with a magical talent. Some, like Avrilla, could unnaturally influence people’s minds or hearts. Others had more physical manifestations, like the ability to manipulate fire or mend bones or purge infections.
A few, very rare, cases had multiple abilities and these were very strong. The Church viewed these individuals as very dangerous and did everything it could to identify them and send them to the Cathedral at the Bormeer capital for seclusion. Records within the Teichmar library also confirmed other truths, too. The Tainted were real. Some people chose to exchange a portion of their essence, their soul, to Malfekke in return for a transformation of their own flesh and blood. These creatures were actively hunted and exterminated by both the Church and the Bormeeran government.
Jaeron had read accounts confirming that some priests had access to powers that seemed magical, as well. Within Teichmar, certain blessings and ceremonies had effects that could only be explained by divine intervention. Most worrisome amongst those entries were records confirming that the priests and priestesses of the Forbidden religions had similar capabilities. To Jaeron’s mind, that could mean that even though worship of those deities was no longer legal, the deities themselves might very well be real.
“You are welcome to stay. I’m sorry that the barn isn’t more comfortable, but please let me know if there is anything else you need.”
The farmer’s statement back to Avrilla broke Jaeron’s musing. He stepped to the edge of the loft and looked down. From this vantage, Jaeron could see the back of his sister’s head and shoulders. Leaning casually on his pitchfork, a man stood facing her. He appeared sturdy, but worn, like clothes that had been left in the sunlight too long. He had a ruddy face, etched with concern, but he was smiling at his sister.
Avrilla reached out to grasp the man’s hand. “Thank you, sir.”
The farmer graced her with a bigger smile and a nod, then turned and left the barn to begin his workday.
D
windeKale felt the trickle of sweat begin on his neck and slide down his back. He would blame the weather, or the woolen tabard he wore as part of the uniform of the Cerulean Couriers. But the fact was that Larsetta i
n’
Shil made him nervous.
As a message courier, Dwin was used to a variety of assignments and environments. He was tasked with long horse rides from Dun Lercos to any location within Bormeer and had seen the best and worst of his country’s geography. He had faced or escaped from some of its most dangerous animals. He had visited the warfront and come home unscathed. His duties were performed for the government, sometimes for military reasons, but mostly to enable urgent communication at the behest of the Prime Minister, the High Court, or the Office of Revenue.
Dwin did not like the idea of the Cerulean Couriers being used for personal gain and there was no doubt in his mind about in’Shil’s purposes. Despite the direction of his superiors, and notwithstanding the affluent lifestyle evident in the apartments that surrounded him, Dwin felt that the woman before him had less than noble intent in the use of his services.
Plus he did not like the way she watched him. Like he was a roast fowl set out on a platter.
Larsetta in’Shil sank back in the luxury of the divan. The down-filled cushions absorbed her shape as she stretched back against the
yathri
fabric. The morning sunlight filtered through the light color of the sea-folk’s material, clashing with the woman’s black and scarlet body suit. Despite the close fit of the leather clothing contouring her shape, the messenger from Bormeer did not believe it was as comfortable as it looked.
“Has Witaasen accepted my offer?” Larsetta asked.
“Not directly, m’lady,” the man said. He forced himself not to stammer, nor stare too long at any one part of the woman stretching in recline before him.
Larsetta closed her eyes and asked, “He made a counter offer then?”
Dwin swallowed and nodded. He slowly pulled the sealed letter from his coat and offered it to the woman.
“Yes, m’lady. He would not tell me the details.”
Larsetta’s eyes flicked open and she lifted her arm. The document seemed to pull from his grasp of its own volition and was suddenly in Larsetta’s hand – seal broken and unfolded. deKale continued to stand in place, waiting to be dismissed. He was a second from stepping back, thinking that she had forgotten him, when she spoke again.
“No, no, Lord Neal. That simply will not suffice. I want a city of my own to play with and you will help me make Islar that city.”
By the time Dwin realized that she was not speaking to him, the letter was in tiny shreds falling toward the floor. It was some trick of the light in the room, perhaps the flickering candles. He never saw her tear the paper. Larsetta’s arm seemed to drift slowly over the edge of the divan and then the letter was gone. Before each piece landed on the coral marble, it smoldered into a fine, white-gray ash.
“I would have you bring a message back to Lord Witaasen,” Larsetta said to him. “But you have other plans.”
“Other plans, m’lady?” he asked. “I don’t think I’m–”
Suddenly Larsetta was no longer on the divan, but behind him. Her small, delicate hands were on his wrists, locking them in an iron grip. Her body against his back did not feel soft and curvaceous. Rather she was like jagged metal, catching at his traveling clothes and skin. Dwin felt her face against his right ear, chin pushing painfully into his shoulder, and her hot breath on the side of his face.
DeKale would have spoken, called out for help. His brain struggled to make it happen. Neurons began firing to put contextual thought into the right words. Synapses were just beginning to send the right commands to the mouth, jaw, vocal chords, and chest. But the process was interrupted. Dwin deKale never even got to realize he was going to die.
~
She sighed. She had been impatient. Her tongue had scrambled the courier’s brain into a thick warm soup. Then she had sucked it down too quickly. She frowned, examining the now empty head lolled over on its neck. The letter must have upset her more than she thought. The courier was not even that handsome.
~
Valche's office was stifling. The man still had a fire burning in the full-wall fireplace despite the weather’s transition into spring over a week ago. Twice Holger considered pulling off his heavy cloak and tabard, but realized there was no place to hang it other than the landowner's chair. The bastard earned his reputation. He did not want his visitors to feel comfortable.
The second door to the office opened, providing a gentle hint of fresh, cooler air and then Tonas Valche entered the doorway blocking the flow. The man smelled of fish and onions overlaid with a musky perfume that Holger guessed was supposed to hide the acrid tang of body odor. Valche turned nearly sideways to fit through the door and deLocke suddenly realized why the man's desk was in the center of the room.
“Have you arrested them?” Valche asked, not bothering with so much as a formal greeting to the city guardsman.
Holger decided he could be as informal. “No one's been arrested yet,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“I'm still questioning witnesses. No charges have been pressed.”
“You've at least interviewed the surviving deAltos?”
“We cannot find them.”
“Which should give you plenty of reason to arrest them! Would they go into hiding if they haven't done anything wrong?”
This was, in fact, Holger's opinion on the matter, but he was not going to give Valche the satisfaction of agreeing with him.
“It’s been three days, deLocke. I’m beginning to believe that my tax dozecs are being wasted. Do I need to get you some help?”
“No, sir,” Holger choked out a reply.
deLocke’s face could not help but betray his emotions toward the man. He resisted the impulse to lunge forward and squeeze the life out of Valche’s fat neck. It was probably fortunate that the slumlord never looked up from his paperwork to acknowledge his guest.
Holger waited for a dismissal. However, as he watched Valche work, he realized that one was not coming. He snapped the briefest possible bow and flew from the office.
T
he new hay bales were tightly bound and clean, fresh and light brown. Avrilla did not particularly like the smell of hay, but she had become accustomed to it over the past few days. She looked around the barn loft. She and her brothers had been comfortable enough here for a couple of nights, but they needed to figure out what to do next. Avrilla was not sure, being so unfamiliar with her special abilities, but she felt like her hold over the farmer was not going to last forever.
Her hands moved reflexively to her kukri when she heard the wood ladder creaking, but she relaxed when she recognized Chazd’s tousled mane of hair. Her brother finished his climb and sauntered over to their makeshift camp with a small sack slung over his shoulder. He put the sack on the hay bale and began handing out the food he had stolen or bartered for. A loaf of dark wheat bread, a half dozen sweet quince, a small ring of cheese. He also had a half-pitcher of milk provided by the cow downstairs. It was as much of a breakfast as they had been able to pull together since the morning after the fire.
“We need a plan, Jaeron,” Chazd said as he cut the wax off the ring of bright orange cheddar.
“We can’t stay here forever, hiding from farmer Baldy and his wife.”
Chazd had given the patriarch of the farming family that name the first morning they were there. Her brother observed from the hayloft as the man did his chores. The man’s bald pate was slightly burned and reflected the morning sun. Avrilla made the mistake of remarking on it first, but Chazd had insisted that the farmer must buff and wax it each morning. Natural skin could not shine like that, he laughed. Jaeron had glared at him, but not for long. It was good. They had all needed a laugh, even a half-hearted one.
“Eventually, Avrilla’s… explanations aren’t going to make sense. Plus, we are out of money. I used the last
mizec
this morning, though my haggling might have gone better if I had been there in the evening with my mandolin. And stealing meals three days in a row isn’t smart – Father taught us that.”
Jaeron finished chewing his bite of quince and wiped a dribble of its juice from his chin.
“I agree, Chazd,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it and perhaps it is time to lay it all out.
“To your point, we need to find a real place to stay. Somewhere that we can start collecting our gear and we don’t have to hide every time we hear a little noise. Without knowing what we are really up against in the city, I think we should look into staying in Peakinaw.”
“Peakinaw?” Chazd asked. “We can’t run a guild from outside the city!”
“It wouldn’t be permanent. But it does have a couple of advantages. No one knows us there. That would allow us to avoid questions. There is a lot of traffic through Peakinaw due to both the mine and supply shipments to the warfront. We could easily keep up on current news from Islar.”
“It’s still an hour’s walk away, and we need to spend more time in Islar trying to figure out who killed Father,” Chazd said around a mouthful of bread.
“Chazd, we'll be safer in Peakinaw,” Jaeron began to explain.
“Safe from who, Jaeron? We don't know that anyone is after us!”
“Chazd-” Jaeron looked closely at his brother. Then he gave up. “We can make this decision later. It’s not important, anyway. I also want to find out what happened to Father. I think we all agree on that?”
Both of her brothers were looking to her. Pain reflected in their eyes, but with resolve behind. She nodded.
“So we need to understand why Father was killed in order to figure out who did it. It's not what he wanted, or he would have told me. It didn't look like anything was stolen, though I didn't really have time to look around. We have to assume that it was either the jewelry job,” Jaeron continued.
He pulled the elegant wooden box out of the bag he collected.
“Or it's because of these,” Jaeron pointed to the cloth bundle around the wooden toys.
“You're joking!”
Avrilla tensed in preparation for another argument, trying to figure out ahead of time a way for her to intervene and diffuse the situation. She could see Jaeron’s posture stiffen. He was getting tired of the constant dispute.
“Father wasn’t killed because of a bunch of toys,” her brother did not back down.
“Chazd, listen to me,” Jaeron said.
He lifted the latch on the jewelry box and threw open the lid. Then he unwrapped the cloth bundle.
“Assuming we’d have to fence that necklace, which do you think we’d get more money for?”
He gave his brother time to consider, but spoke again before Chazd answered.
“It’s close, right? You're better at this than I am, but they’re close?”
Chazd chewed his lip. He picked up one of the toys and examined it. Finally, he nodded.
"Aye, Jaeron. It would be close. We’d probably get more money for the toys once we found a buyer. Assuming we could prove they weren’t stolen, but family gifts. A collector would pay more.
“But what about the letter?”
Avrilla understood at once that Chazd meant the letter pressed into the lid of the jewelry box, not the one from Nana Sarah. She looked at the folded parchment and wax seal. She was convinced that the letter was the real purpose behind the grab from the Dockpads, but had so far resisted cracking the seal to read its contents.
Jaeron ignored him, cleaned his knife, and put it back in its sheath. “As far as creating a guild, I don’t know what plans Father had. But if we are going to find out who killed him, then my feeling is that we cut as many old ties as we can. We should assume that someone betrayed him. I don’t know whether it was because of the Dockpad job or the wooden toys, but we need to figure that out. With that in mind, who do you think we can continue relations with?”
There was silence, other than Chazd’s munching on a quince. Avrilla sat down, leaning forward to help herself to another wedge of cheese.
“So, we’re going to do this?” she spoke quietly. “We’re going to build a guild?”
“It’s what we’ve been trained to do,” Chazd said.
“That doesn’t mean we should,” she said.
“It’s what Father wanted,” Chazd added.
That put a pause in the conversation.
Jaeron spoke, “Not at the end. And that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, either.”
It was a twist on the argument that they had been having for days, but Jaeron’s comment still caught Avrilla off guard.
Chazd challenged his brother, “Are you changing your mind?”
Jaeron, for once, ignored the heat in his brother’s tone and replied calmly. “No, Chazd,” Jaeron said, “I’m simply saying that, in itself, Father wanting or not wanting us to form a guild does not mean we should do it.
“This isn’t a game. This business is dangerous. If anything, Father’s death should tell us that. We will start this venture with enemies whom we do not even know. We have to understand that.”
“So, you’re afraid!” Chazd yelled back. His brother’s calm seemed to goad him more than the normal argument would have.
“Teichmar’s Hammer, Chazd!” Jaeron finally yelled back. “Of course I’m afraid. And you should be too!”
He turned and strode across the loft to look out the window onto the Islar skyline.
“But it doesn’t mean I don’t mean to,” he said. Jaeron’s voice had dropped so low that Avrilla barely heard him. “Either way, whatever you two decide. I mean to do it.”
“Then why?”
“I’m not really sure, Avrilla,” he said. “All our lives, we’ve been at the edge of that world. Thieves have been our friends, our teachers, our family. And most of my exposure to the other side of life – the supposedly honest side – has been ugly and unforgiving.
“This city is broken. Without the guilds it would probably collapse under the weight of the war. Half the government is corrupt and I am beginning to think that the other half doesn’t care. Most people we know trust thieves more than they trust the city guard.
“I don’t know why, but I just don’t think it should be this way.”
Chazd teased his brother, shaking his head “So, you don’t want to get rich?”
Jaeron did not take the bait this time. He looked over his shoulder to where Chazd lay back in the hay with his head leaning against the wall.
He just asked, “Do you know many rich thieves, Chazd?”
“Nah, I guess not,” her brother conceded. “But I don’t have any illusions about making Islar a better place to live. I just want to get the bastards that killed Father.”
Jaeron sighed. “So, back to my question. Who do we need?”
Avrilla responded first. “I still have a lot to learn from Lady deChel and I want to continue that training. She seems out of the picture of any guild operation, since I worked for her to pay my way. It’s possible father had some other arrangement with her, but I don’t believe she knew about the Dockpad’s job.”
She paused before continuing, pursing her lips.
“I think we need to stick with Uncle… Ardo Tabbil. I think we know he was the source of this jewelry job, but I can’t believe he’d have been involved in any kind of violence against Father. Maybe I am misjudging him, but in my mind he was… is family.”
Jaeron nodded, “That sounds reasonable, assuming you can keep a low profile in your work for deChel. And I agree with your thoughts about Ardo. Chazd?”
“I guess I’m with both of you on Uncle Ardo,” he said, shaking his head doubtfully. “Something doesn’t make sense there, though. Both Father and Ardo keep pretty mum about any jobs they have. And Ardo is a fence for a lot of low-end jewelry lifts.”
Avrilla watched her brother. He was struggling to maintain himself and she guessed that he was having trouble thinking about Henri’s death.
“Anyone else, Chazd?” Jaeron prompted, giving his younger brother a way out.
“Yes. I want to keep training with Master Rodin. He’s outside of the Guild structure, too. And I’ve just started to… well, learn to play the harp.”
Avrilla sensed for some reason that embarrassed Chazd. She was glad when Jaeron ignored it.
Chazd continued, “You see the problem there, though. This morning’s breakfast kind of proves it.”
“What’s that, Chazd?” Avrilla asked.
“Well, if we break off all of our contacts… Father’s contacts, we’re going to lose most of our barter system. And face it, we have no money.”
Avrilla had already come to the same conclusion. And it had nothing to do with the choice of breakfast. Jaeron apparently thought the same way.
“You’re right, Chazd. We need to generate some coin. Which is part of the reason I want to finish the jewelry job. Avrilla, do you think you can get Uncle Ardo to reveal the name of the client?”
She nodded.
“Can you do it without…”
She saw her brother trying to figure out a way not to mention her special abilities.
“I’ll figure out a way, Jaeron. And I won’t draw attention to myself.”
“Good. That should give us some initial funds and may give us a lead on father’s killers.”
Jaeron continued, “The last thing to address is people. If we really want an information based guild, we need informants. We need guild members – preferably ones that are not already associated with existing guilds.
“Can you each recruit one person? Someone you trust?”
Chazd shrugged, “Sure, shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Chazd. I am serious. Someone you can really trust.”
Her brother’s smile melted away. “Jaeron, I hear you, okay? I know what’s at stake here.”
Jaeron looked at her. Avrilla looked back at him and slowly nodded. She could tell that Jaeron saw the doubt that was bubbling through her. She was not sure she could find someone, but she would try.