wasn't that the tavern patrons actually moved away from the newcomer, but they did make room for him to pass. They hadn't done that for anyone since Skif had been sitting there, which meant that whoever had come in was respected, but not feared. So he wasn't one of those half-crazed bullies, he wasn't someone that people feared could be set off into a rage. But they gave him room. You earned that here.
When the man made his way to Skif's part of the tavern, Skif knew why people gave him room. He didn't know the man's name, but he knew the face — closed, craggy, hard. The man was a sell-sword; he didn't start quarrels, but those that others started with him, he finished, and he was so good he never actually drew his sword when fights were picked with him. After the third bullyboy to go outside with him wound up in the dust, finished off by a man with two knives against their swords, no one picked another fight with him. Defeat was one thing; anyone could have a bad day and get beaten in a fight. Humiliation was another thing altogether. You could live down a bad day; you lived with humiliation forever, if only inside your own head.
So nobody bothered this man anymore.
He took his seat at the little table across from Skif's target with an attitude that said — quite calmly — that he had expected that the seat would be free and would be kept free for him.
But to Skif's disappointment, even though he strained his ears as hard as he could, he couldn't make out anything more than an occasional word, and none of them had anything to do with the fire.
“Rethwellan” was one word. “Vatean” was another. The first was a country somewhere outside of Valdemar; the second he recognized as a merchant — a very wealthy merchant — and a friend of the great Lord Orthallen. Skif still filched food from Lord Orthallen on a regular basis; he'd gone back to it in the wake of the fire, after his three moons had run out. It was hard to go back to the roof road, and the liftin' lay didn't pay enough for him to have a room, buy drinks to loosen tongues, and eat, too. So all this winter past, he'd lifted silks and fenced them, lived in a little box of a garret room tucked into the side of the chimney of a bakehouse — wonderfully warm through the rest of the winter, that was — and went back to mingling with the servants in Lord Orthallen's household to get his food. Only now he knew far, far more. Now he knew how to slip in and out of the household, knew how to conceal more and what to conceal. He knew what delicacies to filch and trade for entire meals of more mundane foodstuffs. That, perhaps, was the best dodge.
With educated eyes, he soon learned how to get into and out of the storage rooms without being caught. The easiest way was to bribe one of the delivery boys to let him take what had been ordered to Lord Orthallen's manse. Now these days he no longer bothered to disguise himself as a page. While the cook or the butler was tallying what had come in on his pony cart, he would carry foodstuffs into the storage room and leave a window unlocked. Then he would come back once the frantic work of preparing a meal had begun, slip in, help himself to whatever he wanted, and slip out again. He wasn't buying a lot of food anymore.
When the bakehouse room became unendurable in late spring, he packed up his few possessions and found his new room over a stable that supplied goats and donkeys for delivery carts. Cheap enough, with windows on both sides, it caught a good breeze that kept it cool during the day while he was sleeping. The animals went out each day at dawn — when he got back from his work — and came back at sunset, by which time he was ready to leave. The goats and donkeys took their pungent smells and noise with them, and by the time he had finished eating and was ready to sleep, there was nothing but the sound of the single stableboy cleaning pens and very little smell. It was a good arrangement all around, and if his landlord never asked what he did all night, well, he never asked why on nights of moon-dark a certain string of remarkably quiet donkeys with leather wrapped around their hooves went out when he did and arrived back by dawn.
By spring he had gone back to roof work, although he kept his thefts modest and more a matter of opportunity than planning. What he did mostly was listen, for it was remarkable what information could be gleaned at open windows now that the weather was warm. Some of that, he sold to others, who trafficked in such information. Why should he care who paid to keep a secret love affair secret, or who paid to avoid tales of bribery or cheating or other chicanery quiet? It was all incidental to his hunt for Bazie's murderer, but if he could profit by it, then why not? When a valuable trinket was left carelessly on a table in plain sight, though, it usually found its way into his pocket, and then to a fence. His own needs were modest enough that these occasional thefts, combined with his information sales and garden-variety raids on laundry rooms, kept him in ready coin.
The beauty of it all was that the three activities were so disparate that no one who knew one of them was likely to connect him with the other two. If it became too dangerous to filch silks, he could step up his roof work. If he somehow managed to get hold of some information that proved dangerous, he could stop selling it, and filch more laundry. And if rumors of a clever sneak thief sent the Watch around on heightened alert, he could stop going for the trinkets and confine himself to listening at chimneys, which sent up no smoke in this lovely weather, but did provide wonderful listening posts.
Unfortunately, although he had cultivated acute hearing, it wasn't good enough to enable him to hear what it was that the dour sell-sword was saying.
However, it did seem as if the man was buying, not selling, information. When the surreptitious motion that marked the passing of coins from hand to hand finally took place, it was the sell-sword who passed the coins to Skif's target, and not the other way around.
Might could be I could sell 'im a bit, if's Lord Orthallen he's wantin' t' hear about, Skif thought speculatively. He decided to investigate chimneys at the manse at the next moon-dark. They might prove to be useful.
“Fire,” he heard then, which brought him alert again, and he closed his eyes and put his head down, the better to concentrate.
“Bad enough,” the sell-sword grunted. “Ye'd'a seen me a-passin' buckets that night.”
Skif's target, who Skif knew as “Taln Kelken,” but who the sell-sword addressed as “Jass,” laughed shortly. “Could'a bin rainin' like'tis now, an' ye'd nawt hev got it out,” he replied, with a knowing tone. “Reckon when a mun hev more'n twenny barrels uv earth tar an' wax painted on mun's buildin', take more'n bucket lines t'douse it.”
