Authors: Kyell Gold
He did pause for a moment, because the tunic was all that was standing between him and complete nakedness, but then set forth resolutely toward the door and the wall to its left. Gaps where the mortar had been offered his small paws easy purchase, but Helfer wasn’t used to climbing. Years of running helped his legs push him up and stabilize him when he needed to rest, but once he was above the lintel, he was still some feet away from the window sill and the ground seemed quite a distance away. He wasn’t so much worried about falling, but the mortar was more solid up here and the closest handhold he could find took him a bit too far to the left of the window. He rested one hind paw on the top of the door frame and examined the wall more closely, looking for some other crack he could slip a finger into.
Below him, the door creaked open. Helfer froze against the wall, pressing as close as he could manage. He couldn’t turn his head, so all he could do was listen to shuffling footsteps and a splash of something into the alley. Sour milk smell floated up to his nostrils. He was very aware of the spread of his legs, his balls dangling down between them. If it was a bear in the kitchen, as it sounded like, he would be able to reach up...
He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to banish the image of a fruit tree. Seconds ticked by. He felt he would never forget the intricate pattern of colors and lines in the stone right next to his eyes. He hadn’t taken a breath in minutes, his muscles were starting to cramp, and he was itching in three different places for no reason. Trust in Weasel, he thought, and as if in response, a moment later the footsteps shuffled back into the building and the door closed.
Helfer closed his eyes for a moment and murmured a prayer of thanks. The handhold to the left looked a lot more inviting now, so he pulled himself up to it and saw, just above, another crack from which he might be able to drop to the window sill. With a little luck and a lot of balance, he could catch himself before falling to the street.
When the moment came to make the drop, he hesitated, gauging the leap one more time. Eyes on the narrow ledge, he let go and felt his feet hit the sun-warmed wood a moment later. Muscles bunched as he bent quickly to a crouch, grasping at the window frame to steady himself. In a moment, he was inside the dark room, on a hot, dusty floor, panting for breath.
“Weasel’d be proud of me,” he murmured into the quiet, giving his eyes a moment to adjust. Regular shapes resolved out of the darkness, short stacks of wooden crates. A dry goods storeroom, no doubt. He could now smell spilled grains over the dust, and feel rice beneath his paws as he moved away from the window.
“No chance of any of these boxes having pants, I suppose,” he said under his breath, walking around to sniff at them. Weasel, it seemed, either did not care that much, or liked seeing His faithful servant walking around pantsless. It was a tossup, really.
Helfer was just crossing to the other side of the room when, for the second time in the last few minutes, the squeak of a door opening froze him where he stood. The door opposite the window was opening slowly, light spilling in from the hallway around a tall shadow.
11
He scrambled behind a box as claws clicked on the floor. Behind the first person, a second came in and closed the door. A familiar voice said, “This private enough for you?”
“There’s people following me around today,” the first person snapped. Something was familiar about his sharp, nasal voice, but it was more that he reminded Helfer of someone he’d once known than that he himself was familiar.
“If you have what you say you do, then you’d be a fool to be surprised by that.” The second person moved further into the room. Helfer couldn’t get a read on either scent over the box of barley he was crouching behind, which he hoped meant they couldn’t read his scent either.
“Why is that window open?” the nasal voice said.
“You think the Bashers are going to fly up through to get you?”
“I’m not worried about the Bashers.” Claws clicked across the floor. Helfer slid around the side of his box so that he was pressed between the box and the wall. He could still see part of the window from where he was; a moment later he saw a black paw reach over and pull it closed. The swish of a russet tail crossed his vision as the person walked back to the center of the room.
“Let’s get this done quickly,” the first voice said. “It’s gonna get stuffy in here fast.”
“All right.” The first voice paused. “Do you smell anyone else in here?”
“Teeth and bone, if I’d known you had fleas I’d have stayed further away.” Now Helfer recognized that voice: it was Dicker, the rat. “Let’s see these papers.”
The other person, whom Helfer suspected was a fox, sighed. The weasel heard the rustling of parchment, then a low whistle. “Nice. Where’s the rest?”
“Where’s the money?’
“The money was for all of them.”
“That first one is to prove I have them. You’ve read it now, memorized it for all I know. I’m not letting you memorize the rest of them and then walk away without paying. Trust me, they’re all that good.”
Dicker laughed. “Trust you? That would be a first.”
Helfer was starting to get a cramp in his leg. He tried to adjust the position quietly. The fox was responding with an even more aggrieved tone. “I have never done anything...”
“And that’s why I don’t trust you.” Dicker laughed again. “But never mind, at least for the moment I will take it on faith that you didn’t just pilfer one sheet. I think twenty is a fair price for the lot?”
“Twenty would be a fair price for the one you saw,” the fox said, now with more animation and less whine in his voice. Helfer tried to place who the fox reminded him of. It wasn’t Volle, who had a lighter, less nasal voice. Maybe it wasn’t a fox at all.
Dicker didn’t respond immediately. Helfer heard the clink of coins. After a moment, the rat said, “The information itself will require a certain level of investment to capitalize upon.”
“That’s hardly my problem.”
Over their exchange, Helfer shifted his position again to relieve pressure on his other leg and ended up with his sheath pressed up against his thigh. The air in the room was getting warmer with the window closed, the smells of grain becoming thicker. “Well,” Dicker said, “what would you consider a fair price for the lot?”
“I was looking for a hundred.”
“Hah! You predators, always looking to sink your teeth into us poor defenseless Herbies. I can maybe go up to thirty.” That exclamation came from nearer the door. Helfer twisted his head around and watched that portion of the room, heart beating faster. If Dicker wandered over past the door, he’d see the weasel easily. The slight movement dislodged the box, making a scraping sound that sounded as loud as if it had dropped from the ceiling to Helfer’s ears.
“What was that?” the fox said. Helfer kept as still as he could, but the fox’s claws clicked across the floor toward him anyway.
“Don’t try to distract me,” Dicker said. “It won’t work. Thirty is my limit.”
The claw clicks paused. Helfer could almost see the fox looking toward him, then back at the rat. He held his breath in the ensuing silence.
“And you,” the fox said, “always trying to scrounge whatever scraps you can get. I won’t take less than ninety. Nobody else has the kind of access to get you these papers.” He walked back away from Helfer. The weasel exhaled as softly as he could, closing his eyes in relief.
They traded amiable insults, while Helfer’s muscles cramped further. Fortunately, Weasel had blessed him with enough flexibility that he could keep twisting his head around and remain alert in case he had to move. Unfortunately, Weasel had also blessed him with an active sheath, which was responding to the pressure from his thigh. The hardness made it that much more difficult to keep still. He couldn’t stop his tail from twitching, but the soft fur made no noise against the wall, so he let it go. It would have been nice had the window stayed open; he was feeling he would rather take his chances jumping out than dealing with Dicker if he were discovered. Once, the rat moved peripherally into Helfer’s field of vision, but just as he was shifting his weight, Dicker moved back toward the fox again.
Helfer, thus preoccupied, spent little time worrying what they were haggling over. They didn’t mention any more details except when Dicker talked about coordinating the team he would have to put together to take advantage of whatever was on the papers. All Helfer thought, over and over, was that he wished they would finish already and get out of the room. He tried moving his leg to ease the pressure on his stiff sheath, but that threatened to slide the box again, so he stopped.
Finally, the two agreed on a price of forty, with the fox getting a portion of whatever profit the rat made. Helfer, who had developed itches in addition to his cramps and erection, silently chanted in his head, “take the money and get out, take the money and get out.”
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Dicker said. “You care for a drink? All that talkin’s made me dry.”
“Sure,” the fox said. “Just need to use the privy. I’ll see you down there.”
Two sets of claws clicked toward the door. It opened and shut, leaving Helfer in blessed silence.
He waited for a few heartbeats, in case one of them came back in, but the knowledge that he
could
move now made the itching, the cramps, the pressure on his sheath all that much more unbearable. Slowly, he uncoiled himself from behind the box, stretched his limbs, and came face to face with a tall fox, leaning against the door and playing with a wicked-looking curved knife as long as Helfer’s forearm. He wore a purple velvet doublet, and trousers dyed a light blue. He was, without question, the fox Helfer had seen earlier.
Though he was dressed as a noble, he wasn’t one Helfer recognized, and he didn’t stand like a noble. Even relaxing, his form radiated tension and readiness--not to mention he was fifty pounds lighter than any other Canid noble Helfer knew, Volle excepted. “Smelled you about halfway through that,” the fox said, off-handedly. The point of the knife came around as if of its own volition to point at Helfer. “Didn’t want to involve Di--the other fellow in this. You’re clearly after me, and it’s none of his business. Though,” he added, glancing pointedly at Helfer’s erection, which was lifting the hem of his tunic, “if that’s all you’re after, I might as well save you the trouble now and tell you you’re not my...type.”
He said the last word slowly, eyes widening as they came back to meet Helfer’s. The weasel’s mind was racing with anything he could possibly say or do that would make the situation better.
12
“Right, then. Why don’t you put that away, and I’ll put this away, and we can both forget about sticking each other.”
The fox laughed, a short, sharp bark, and lowered his knife. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
“Should I?” Helfer stared, his erection subsiding slowly.
“It’s only fair,” the fox said. “I didn’t recognize you, at first. But how many oversexed weasels can there be in the nobility?”
“None,” Helfer said. “I have precisely the amount of sex that Weasel bestowed upon me.” He was aware that the tugging down of his tunic reduced the dignity of his words somewhat. Who was this fox, and why was he so familiar? The only foxes in the nobility that Helfer knew at all were Volle and... “Oh,” he said, staring at the fox’s muzzle. Yes, a little wider than Volle’s, the ears shorter, the smile not as kind. He matched the muzzle to the memory of a cub he had been thinking about only that morning. “
Dewry
?”
“It has been five years,” the fox said, “though you haven’t changed all that much. Apart from having less pants than when I last saw you.”
“You’ve grown,” Helfer said. “Good Weasel, I thought something had happened to you.”
The fox’s muzzle twisted into a smile that didn’t reach to his eyes. “Something did,” he said. “My father married.”
“Oh.” Helfer’s tunic kept him modest without any tugging now. He let his paws fall to his sides. “I can’t believe I never made that connection.”
Dewry shrugged. “It’s not
your
life. Not like we were best of friends or anything.”
Helfer looked the fox up and down again. “You’ve been keeping yourself well, it looks like.”
“Starvation becomes me?”
“I didn’t mean that.” His gaze fell to the purse in Dewry’s other paw. “I mean, you’ve got yourself a nice business going...or something.”
The fox’s ears came up again, that coiled alertness closer to the surface in his body language. “My father should be able to provide for me one way or another,” he said. His paw didn’t move toward the purse, but his fingers did twitch.
Helfer had more than a suspicion that stealing was involved. Did he want to ask more? After all, this was just politics, really, of a different sort than usual. While he was deciding, Dewry glanced once more down at his thighs. “Speaking of providing,” he said with forced lightness, “is it the new fashion in the palace to go without trousers?”
“I would hate to see Ullik or Alacris if it were,” Helfer said, and that brought a more genuine smile to the fox’s muzzle.
“So what did happen to you?” he asked. His shoulders relaxed, and his ears cupped forward.
“That,” Helfer said, “is rather a long story.”
He told it anyway, in true Weasel fashion. He left out the bit with Dicker and Hensley, because he thought it might be a delicate subject considering the recent scene he’d overheard, but he made a great deal out of his sneaking around the palace. Dewry smirked at that, but when Helfer got to the point of the story where he couldn’t avoid mentioning Stark, the tension in the fox’s body returned. “Stark? You met Stark?”
“Well, more than just met,” Helfer said. “I mean, he’s the one who’s still got my pants.”
Dewry laughed. “Stark? I never knew...well, I suppose the subject never did come up.”
“Who is he?”
The fox fingered the handle of his knife. “He’s someone important.”
“He’s not a noble.”
Dewry laughed, bitterly. “Not everyone who is important is a noble. Not all nobles are important.” He gestured to himself.