Changes

::Dunno yet. Mebbe somethin’ worth chasin. Kids, but they was comin’ here fer a reason.::

“Hoi!” came a whispered voice. “They done a runner!”

There was a whimper. “We ain’t a-gonna git paid naow! I‘m hungry, Merrow!”

“Shut it!” said a third voice. Mags identified it as belonging to the oldest of the three. “Mebbe they done a runner, but they left house open. Lessee what we kin find. Mebbe they’s still stuff i’ there.”

With infinite caution the three slipped up to the back door. One skittered up to the door and peered inside.

“Ain’t nobody ’ere,” came the whisper. “Pew! Stinks!”

The youngest whimpered again, this time sounding terrified, and the whimper rose to a thin wail. “Noooooo!” the child cried, backing up from the door. “Don’ go in there! It’s Death! It’s Death!”

And despite the hunger that Mags sensed gnawing at her belly, the little girl fled.

The other two paused.

“She’s—” there was an audible gulp. “She’s right. Ma smelt like this, arfter a day . . .”

The older one was indifferent. “So? If they’s dead, they ain’t a-gonna need their stuff. Doors and winders open, must mean Guard’s been an’ gone, an’ ain’t nobody else aroun’. We’ll git first pickin’s. Gotta be somethin’ we kin use er sell.”

The younger hung back. “What if they’s—ghostes?”

“Then them ghostes kin pay us,” the elder said defiantly. “We done what we was ’sposed to. We kin take what they owes us outa their stuff.”

The two figures slipped inside the house, one boldly, one reluctantly.

Oho. So them bastiches got thesselves some errand-runners, eh? An’ th’ new ones don’ know ’bout ’em, or they’d’a tidied up the kids afore they bolted.

Mags weighed the notion of confronting the children—but they might manage to elude him and run, and even if he caught them, they’d probably lie. What to do? He wanted to find out just what sort of errands these youngsters had been running . . .

It made perfect sense for the assassins to use children for almost anything that didn’t require strength. A hungry orphan would do just about anything, no questions asked, if you approached him right, didn’t frighten him, made sure he thought he was getting the better of you.

I surely would’ve, back at th’ mine.

And if you needed to be rid of them, a couple of stray children would never be missed.

All right. Then the best thing to do would be to eavesdrop on them now, follow them back to whatever place they called home, and figure out exactly where that was. If he tried to intercept them now, they’d run. After all, they could tell by the stink that someone had died here. Anyone they encountered would likely be involved in a killing or be a rival looter. Better to approach them later, when he could figure out how best to get at them without spooking them.

He slipped back inside the house and stayed well out of sight, but not out of hearing. One of the two found a candle and the means of lighting it, and they carried it with them as they went from room to room. Once inside, when they thought they were alone, they were not exactly stealthy. Unfortunately, he didn’t learn very much from listening to them, since most of their comments were restricted to evaluating how much they could carry away and what was likely to bring the most money if they sold it.

When they moved their search upstairs, he pulled himself back up into the attic and listened from there.

Adults might have been disappointed, even angered, by the lack of things of real value—what the Guards hadn’t taken, he suspected that the pair of killers had carried away—or by the fact that garments had been ripped up and things taken apart. But these little fellows were not dismayed—and he certainly felt kinship with them when they discovered a pile of warm stockings and exclaimed in glee to find that not one had a hole in it. He remembered a time when finding a stocking of any sort was cause for rejoicing.

Eventually they staggered out, laboring under the burden of two full packs apiece, one carried on the back and one in the front, with whatever else they thought salable tied on the outside. It made them ungainly and ridiculously easy to follow, and they were so concerned with their burdens that they were not paying any attention to their surroundings at all. He was even able to follow them down on the ground, ghosting along behind them near enough that he could still overhear their occasional mutterings.

But such disregard for their surroundings was not only to his advantage. It also made them targets.

He spotted the thief about the same time that the thief spotted them. A ragged youth in his teens, he was lounging in a doorway near what Mags figured was an ale shop when he saw the two children. Mags sensed his greed and glee as soon as he spotted the easy targets, and knew then what the fellow was. He was probably a little younger than Mags, but he was several years older and much taller and heavier than his potential victims. In fact, he was not at all unlike—

The flash of memory overcame Mags for a moment.

Mags sensed the cutpurse who was hiding in the alley ahead; then sensed that the thief had spotted the assassin that Mags called Temper. The surface thoughts of the thief, desperation crossed with greed, alarmed Mags, and he stopped, bending over to fumble with a shoe while he tried to figure out what was going to happen and if he could do anything about it.

The would-be thief was a boy, not a man, a boy no older than he was. A boy with a master to answer to, and who, so far today, had nothing to bring back to him. Coming back meant a beating or worse, and no supper. The boy looked at Temper with the eyes of a hunter and saw good clothing, a man well fed, with no obvious weapons. That was enough; the thief made his decision. Before Mags could even think of something to try to stop him, the boy was moving.