Weasel Presents (26 page)

The rat was nowhere to be seen. Coryn tried to crane his neck further out the opening, banging the candlestick against the stone sill in the process. “Ey!” came a soft voice from below. “No call t’wake the street.”

There was the rat, below him. He’d turned his cloak around and was holding the ends out in front of him, forming a kind of sling. Water glistened at the bottom. Under the cloak, he wore no tunic, only a grey vest laced at the front. “What’cha got? Toss it down.”

Coryn dropped the candlestick. It landed in the sling with a squelch. As he clambered over the sill, the rat looked up at him. “Whoa, what ya doing?”

“I got the silver.” Coryn stopped, puzzled.

The rat chuckled. “Oh, sweet thing. There was more than one of these in there, ennit?”

“Sure, but...” He gestured. “Isn’t that enough?”

Slowly, the rat shook his head. “When we’ve got the rest of the candlesticks an’ you’ve had a nice look through them cabinets, then we’ll talk about enough.”

Coryn’s heart pounded. The rat smiled. “Yer doin’ great,” he said. “Look, i’s only another fifteen minutes. Nobody’s gonna come by. Just help me out with this, an’...” He tilted his head as if thinking. “Tell yer what...Cathedral’s all closed up, but I know a way in. Could take ya in there.”

“Inside?” Coryn bit his lip. He looked back again at the fine sitting room, all the elegant furnishings.

“Aye. Been meanin’ to go back m’self,” the rat said. “Been too long since I seen all those lovely glass windows, an’ the statues...the shrine of Canis, oh, it’s a wonder, it is.” He sighed. “But, if you wanna stop, I’ll just walk ya back to yer stall. No harm.”

It wouldn’t really be so bad, would it? The family that lived here could afford lots of silver. And they had so many nice things. In his mind, Coryn saw again the spires of the Cathedral and the golden sun of Gaia atop it. The memory of the golden gleam gave him a guilty start. He’d wanted to see a master thief in action, not be party to some cutpurse’s nighttime raid. Gaia wouldn’t look too kindly on stealing.

But surely, the lessons he remembered from church were about stealing necessities--“thou shalt not take from another what he needs to survive,” and so on. He never stole more fruit than a pawful at a time, never more than a couple eggs. And he knew the consequences, if he were caught. Perhaps it was not knowing the consequences that was giving him pause now. Would he be fined? Thrown in jail? Executed?

Below him, the rat sighed. “Ah, a’right then. Hop on down an’ we’ll nip back to the market. ’Sbeen a fun evenin’. I hoped for more, but...”

“No,” Coryn said. “I’ll be right back.”

He hopped back into the house, moving as stealthily as he could, ears perked, and returned with the other two candlesticks. The rat had placed the first one on the ground so that the others wouldn’t make any noise when dropped. “Now see about them cabinets,” he said.

Coryn didn’t hesitate this time, emboldened by the silence and the ease with which the candlesticks had been extracted. He made his way into the dining room again and set his paw to the cabinets, but the doors didn’t move. There was a small keyhole at the top of the rightmost door, but no key in evidence, of course. He rubbed his wet muzzle, examining the cabinet, now trying to think like a thief. Where would the key be hidden? There was not much place to hide it in this room; other than the two cabinets, the chairs, and the table, the only other furniture was a tall standing clock, silently watching him from beside the opposite door.

Think, think, he told himself, and then his eyes returned to the clock, and the small door beside it. It was the size of the doors in his house, where the rest of the doorways were all massive enough to accommodate bears. Even a small bear would have a tight squeeze through that door. Curious, he padded over to it, and on the way over he realized that it must be the servants’ door.

It was unlocked, and beyond it was the kitchen. And hanging on the wall just inside the door was one dark key.

Tail wagging, he grabbed the key and returned to the cabinet. It fit perfectly, opening the doors to reveal row upon row of silver eating utensils. Heart pounding with excitement and pride, Coryn grabbed as many as he could in both paws and ran back to the window. “There’s lots more,” he panted, dropping the silver with a clatter into the waiting cloak.

“Careful!” the rat called, but Coryn had already run back to gather another load. He returned to the window and held his paws out, but the rat called, “Wait, wait!”

“What?”

“Find somethin’ to wrap ’em with! Napkin or something, makes less noise.”

“Oh.” Coryn’s ears flattened. He should’ve thought of that.

The other cabinet revealed rows of bone-white plates, and, on the second shelf, a stack of cloth napkins. Carefully, Coryn wrapped batches of the silver forks and spoons in cloth parcels, finding that he could carry more that way. When he dropped them to the waiting rat, they fell without a sound. “Nicely done,” the rat whispered, and Coryn’s ears flushed with pride.

“Last batch,” he called, dropping it.

“Beautiful,” the rat said. “I s’pose that’s a nice haul for a night.”

“Wait.” Coryn grinned down. “One more thing.”

He’d seen a large silver serving dish left out in the kitchen. Quickly, he ran back for it, rather surprised to find that it was heavier than any of the candlesticks had been. He kept it in one paw as he clambered out of the window, and was about to drop to the street when the rat said, “Close the window, ay?”

“Oh, right.” He held the serving dish down for the rat to take, then pulled himself back up to the sill and pulled the window shut.

“This way,” the rat said, jerking his head as Coryn landed beside him. He’d removed his cloak and bound it around all the silver except for the dish, which he handed to the wolf. “An’ stick this under yer cloak.”

Coryn held onto it, not even minding the steady rain that soaked his fur anew. “I found the key,” he said in a low voice. “The cabinet was locked, but I didn’t want to force it open, so I thought, where would the key be, and I found the servants’ door, and I thought, the servants would need to open the cabinet, right, so I went in there and the key was hanging right there!”

“Nicely done,” the rat said again, absently, scanning the street in front of them, holding Coryn back with a paw. “Now, we’re goin’ to that alley over there, but not together. I’ll go first an’ then I’ll wait for you, got it?”

“Sure.” Coryn blinked water from his eyes. “How long should I wait?”

“Count to twenty,” the rat said. He looked to his left and right. “An’ don’t come across if you see a guard. But you won’t. But don’t, if you do.” And before Coryn could say anything, the rat was walking briskly across, splashing his way through puddles without appearing to hurry any more than was warranted by the rain.

The serving dish was getting heavier. He watched the rat disappear into the alley, and counted.

At five, he was still feeling the flush of the successful job. The serving dish was his trophy, the proof that he could be really useful.

At ten, he was staring at the alley, where there was no sign of the rat. A cloud moved in front of the moon, deepening the shadows. The dry goods store next to the alley was dark and lifeless.

At fifteen, he began to wonder if the rat were still there waiting for him. The rain had soaked back into his clothes, and he wasn’t sure which way the market was. All he knew was that the Great Cathedral was still rising into the clouds, off to his left. He actually took a step out into the street, thinking that he could maybe still catch the rat, but then he thought, if he
is
there, he’ll know I didn’t count to twenty.

At twenty, he took a step out into the street, looked around to see whether any guards were watching. Apart from a bedraggled mouse trudging away from him, nobody was within fifty feet. He walked across slowly, almost dreading the dark alley ahead, because if he reached it and the rat was gone, well, he didn’t know what he’d do then, alone in Divalia in the pouring rain with a stolen silver dish.

The mouth of the alley loomed in front of him. The rain washed away any scents he might have gotten; for all he knew, there could be a whole squad of guards waiting, or the alley could be completely empty. He hesitated, then turned the corner, around the dry goods store.

He stepped into an array of discarded wooden crates, the stone under his paws slippery with dirt. Apart from the crates, there was nothing in the alley, all the way down to the next street.

“That was a lot longer’n twenty,” the rat said, stepping out from behind a pile of crates. The makeshift sack slung over his shoulder jingled as he walked.

Coryn felt a wash of relief, enough to lift his sopping tail. A grin spread across his muzzle as he followed the rat, hopping over boxes to the end of the alley and across the narrow, less busy street beyond.

The sound of the rain grew louder, though it didn’t feel any harder. The rat skipped through the street and around what looked like an old warehouse, into another alley that sloped downward. He wasn’t looking to see that Coryn was following him, which the wolf took to be trust that he could keep up. He clutched the silver dish more tightly, determined to live up to that confidence.

At the end of the alley, Coryn saw that what he’d taken for a building across another street was a gatehouse on a bridge. And below it--

The sound he’d heard was not the rain growing in strength. It was the rain falling on the broad expanse of the Lurine River, as wide as three of his father’s fields laid end to end. He stood and stared at the boats, the ripples in the water, the pattern of the rain falling, and then the high, majestic bridge with the gatehouse and the smaller stone bridge to his right.

He didn’t have much time to admire the statues atop the high stone towers of the gatehouse, nor the broad stone bridge beyond it. The rat had turned at the head of a narrow stair and was beckoning him forward.

Coryn hurried to join him, down the narrow stairs to the walkway beside the river, toward the gatehouse bridge. “This is the Palace Bridge,” he said, gesturing upward. “An’ this is our friends.”

He led Coryn under the bridge. Beneath the wide span, a squat houseboat floated, tied with a single rope to a post on the bank. As Coryn shook water from his head and tail, glad for the shelter of the rain, a cougar emerged from the cabin of the boat and leaned over the rail, watching them closely. The rat raised a paw to him, and he nodded. “Evenin’, friend,” he said, his expression neutral. His eyes flicked to Coryn and then back to the rat.

“Found my way by the light of the moon,” the rat replied casually. He hefted the sack, so that its clinking sound carried through the night.

“She lights the way of friend and foe alike.” The cougar’s ears had perked up, but otherwise his posture remained unchanged.

“Aye, but the foe follows fruitlessly, while the friend finds,” he let the sack drop to the ground, “fortune.”

The cougar smiled broadly. “We wondered if you’d be turning up, Two-Claws. What have ya for us? And who’s this strapping young fella?”

“Tourist from the farms,” the rat said. “Here to take in the sights of the city and lend me a paw.”

“I’m from Doubleford, in Deverin,” Coryn said. “My name’s--”

“Ah, ah!” The rat cut him off. “We call ’im ‘Legs’,” he told the cougar.

“Legs it is. Welcome to Divalia. I’ll fetch the measurer.” He raised a paw again and disappeared into the cabin.

“Why did you call me ‘Legs’?” Coryn asked.

The rat reached inside his cloak and took the dish. “Cause I noticed when you went through the window that you got a lovely pair.” He added the dish to the pile on the dock and looked around, humming under his breath.

Coryn’s ears flushed. He rubbed his paws over them on the pretense of trying to dry them, looking at the rat in a new light. He’d played with both boys and girls, back on the farm, and if he was all but betrothed to Kika (daughter of Kulic of the Whitefoot family), that was more of a business arrangement than a romantic one. He hadn’t even been thinking of the rat as a potential lover, not until that remark, but now he studied the rat with a different eye.

The rat’s shoulders, left bare by the repurposing of the cloak, showed lean muscle under the slick, wet fur. His vest, now dark with rain, was laced tightly around a narrow chest and a stomach that Coryn thought he might be able to circle with both his paws. He’d never been with a rat, though there was a squirrel back home who’d spent a very pleasant afternoon with him, three or four summers back. The rat was leaner and more fit than the squirrel, for sure, and much more confident. Coryn felt his sheath stir beneath his sodden clothing. Once he was betrothed, which would probably happen when Kulic paid the bride-price at the end of this season, his days of playing with boys would likely be over, or at least relegated to infrequent stolen moments. The possibility that this adventure might not end with a tame sightseeing walk was more than he could have hoped for.

“Wait ’til you see how much gold they turn this silver into,” the rat said. “Then that tail will
really
wag.”

The cougar had re-emerged, followed by a fox wrapped in a thick black cloak. While the cougar resumed his position at the rail, the fox leapt over it lightly, letting the cloak billow out to reveal a white tunic and dark vest underneath. He alit on the stone balustrade that lined the bank, hopped down to the walkway, and studied the pile of silver without a word.

The first thing he picked up was the silver dish, shaking water from it and then turning it over. He gave it one approving nod and then set it aside. In a matter of seconds, he had undone the cloak and reached in, finding first the candlesticks, then the napkins rolled around the dinnerware. The dinnerware he set on the tray; the candlesticks he set to one side, and each piece he moved, he hefted in his paw, his muzzle dipping in a quick mental measurement before he set it down.

When all the silver was on the dish or beside it, he stood and beckoned to the cougar, who leapt from the boat to the bank. The fox reached to a pouch at his waist and walked over to Coryn and the rat. “Twenty pounds silver. Quality looks good. Twenty Royals.”