Bazie had gotten two new boys just before Lyle fell to the love-god's arrows, and it was left to him and Skif to train them up. That was why Skif was going for a big stake now; the boys weren't up to the lifting lay yet, and only one was adequate at swiping things out of laundries. Skif had the feeling that Bazie had taken them more out of pity than anything else; Lyle had brought them in after finding them scouring the riverbanks — mudlarking — for anything they could salvage. Thin, malnourished, and as ignorant as a couple of savages, even Bazie wasn't about to try and pound reading, writing, and reckoning lessons into them. That fell on the head of some poor priest at the nearest Temple.
Skif traced the last line of the lid of the safe-cupboard and found the keyhole easily enough. No one had made any effort to hide it, and he slid his lock pick out of a slit pocket in his belt and went to work by touch.
Before very long, he knew for a fact that Kalink had been cheated, for this was the cheapest lock he had ever come across in a fancy house. It wasn't the work of more than a few moments to tickle it open, and ease the lid of the safe-cupboard open.
With the lid resting safely on the floor, Skif reached into the cupboard and began lifting out heavy little jewel cases, placing them on the floor until he had emptied the cupboard. What he wanted was gold and silver.
Gold was soft; with a hammer and a stone, Skif could pound chains and settings into an amorphous lump, which any goldsmith would buy without a second thought and at a reasonable price. Silver wasn't bad to have; you could cut it up with a chisel and render the bits unidentifiable. He'd rather not have gemstones; you couldn't just take them to a goldsmith, and you wouldn't get more than a fraction of their worth.
So he opened each box and examined its contents by feel; rejecting out-of-hand all gem-studded rings, earrings, and brooches. He selected chains, bracelets, pendants, anything that was mostly or completely made of metal. The emptied boxes went into the bottom of the cupboard, with the rest stacked on top. With luck, the theft wouldn't even be uncovered for days after Kalink and his wife returned. By then, of course, everything would have been disposed of, melted down — it might even become part of whatever baubles the mistress picked to replace what was lost!
Each piece he selected, he wrapped in one of Bazie's purloined silk handkerchiefs to cut down on sound and stored in one of the many pockets of his “sneak suit.” It didn't do a thief a great deal of good to be chiming and chinking when he moved!
He hesitated once or twice, but in the end, opted to be conservative in what he chose. He had no way of getting rid of that triple rope of pearls, for instance, nor the brooch that featured a huge carven cabochon. And when his fingers told him that the piece he was holding was of finely-detailed enamel, he couldn't bear the idea of destroying something that so much work and creativity had gone into. The same, for the wreath of fragile leaves and flowerlets — a clever way of getting around the fact that a commoner couldn't wear a coronet. But the rest of what he chose was common enough, mere show of gleaming metal, without much artistry in it.
He replaced the last box and eased the lid back down on the cupboard. Now came the fun part: getting out.
He didn't want the maid to get into trouble; that was hardly fair. If he left the window in her room with the catches undone, she'd be the first to be blamed. So after he slid out from under the bed, he crept across the mistress' room to try the next door over.
It was a bathing room, and he laughed silently. Good old Kalink! Nothing but the best for him for certain-sure. Nothing but the latest! There was an indoor privy, everything flushed away with water after you'd done, and a boiler to heat bath water, all served from a cistern on the roof. Good place to leave open.
He opened the catch on the window and pushed open the shutters that served this room instead of ironwork. Let Kalink presume that this was how his thief got in, and wonder how on earth he came up the wall from the yard, or down the wall from the steeply-pitched roof.
Now he returned to the maid's room. He'd go out the way he came, but he had a trick to use on the kind of simple bar catches on that window. A loop of string on each of them let him pull them closed again once he'd closed the window behind him.
By now the moon was down, and there wasn't a chance anyone could see him. In moments, he was down in the alley, running like a cat, heading for his next destination. He didn't dare be caught in this outfit! There would be no doubt in anyone's mind that of what his business was!
But there was a remedy for that, too. Two streets over was that wonderfully handy cavity in Lord Orthallen's wall, and that was where he'd left a set of breeches and a tunic. In the safety of the utter blackness, he pulled the bricks loose and extracted them. The hood of his shirt became a high collar, the scarf around his face and throat went around his waist beneath the tunic. He wiped the charcoal from his face with the inside of the tunic, and in very little time, a perfectly respectable young lad was strolling down the street with a bundle under his arm. He could be anyone's page boy or young servant on any of a dozen errands, and he even passed patrols of the Nightwatch twice without any of them stopping or even looking at him.
If they had, they'd have found nothing worse than a bundle of gentleman's underthings. And if he was asked, he'd mumble and hide his face and say he couldn't rightly say, but his mistress had told him to take them quietly to a certain gentleman and there wasn't anything else he could tell them.
The Watch would, of course, assume that the gentleman in question had been forced to make a hasty exit from a bedroom where he'd had no business being and had left the least important of his clothing behind. As it was no business of the Watch to oversee the morals of anyone, Skif would be sent on his way, perhaps with a laugh.
