Soon enough the crowd began to disperse. Hood left on foot, followed by a retinue of watchmen. He made no attempt to speak to Malden.
Feeling it was his duty, Malden stayed long enough to pay some boys to cut Janbart down and take his body away for burial. When that was done, he and Slag were completely alone in the square.
“Well, lad,” Slag said softly, and not unsympathetically. “Now you’re fucked.”
Malden said nothing. He was anxious to get away from the scene. There were still things he could do. He would need to work quickly, giving reassurances and promises to those members of the guild of thieves who were already allying against him. He would need to consolidate those who would stand by him, and form his own alliances, inside the organization he supposedly governed. It was going to be a very long day.
Trailing at his heels, Slag muttered curses because Malden was walking too fast for someone with short legs to keep up. Malden did not slow down.
He did not know if he could do this, frankly. He felt reasonably secure for today, that no one would try to slide a dagger between his ribs when he wasn’t looking. But tomorrow He had no doubt that tomorrow, at dawn, another thief would hang. And the day after, yet another.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Slag followed Malden all the way across the Sawyer’s Bridge into the Royal Ditch. Normally the narrow old bridge-named for the woodcutters who used it to carry firewood to the northern part of the city-creaked with the weight of all the pleasure-seekers heading across to the gaming houses and wineshops on the far side. Harlots had for ages walked back and forth along the bridge wearing red skirts and enticing daytime custom with their unshod feet and bare ankles, a living advertisement for the entertainments to be found on the far side. That day only a lone girl holding a house cat to her bosom was abroad. She waved cheerfully at Malden, but he had no more for her than an acknowledging nod.
On the far side of the bridge Slag dropped to the ground and begged Malden to stop a moment. “I can’t run so fucking fast as I used to,” he complained. “And this blasted sunlight makes me half blind. I need to catch my breath. What’s your hurry, anyway?”
Malden stared along Pokekirtle Lane, at the signs of the brothels there, all done in gaudy paint that stood out among the plain half-timbered houses. If it weren’t for the pornographic pictograms on the signs, this could be any other street in Ness. It was deserted enough not to show its traditional commerce. “Something I need to work on. Something that might give me guidance and solve our problems.”
“Ah. Cutbill’s cipher.”
Malden whirled around to face his friend. He’d mentioned the coded message to no one but Coruth and the three elders of the thieves’ guild. “How did you know about that?” he demanded.
“Lockjaw’s good at keeping quiet, aye,” Slag said, sounding almost apologetic. “The other two never shut their fucking flaps.”
Malden shook his head. If Slag knew about the message, then the entire guild must be aware of it by now. If they knew how it still mystified him, the thieves might start thinking he wasn’t smart enough to lead them.
Maybe there was a way he could turn this to his advantage, though. “Listen,” he said, “Will you do me a favor? Something that would help me greatly?”
“Depends what it is, lad. I’ve got my standards. I’m a dwarf, you know. We have a very exacting moral code we’re expected to follow. Very strict.”
Malden frowned. “I need you to tell a lie.”
“Ah, well, that’s fine, then.”
“I need you to spread a rumor, actually. Let it be known that I’ve cracked the cipher. That I found Cutbill’s advisement, and that it contains a secret that’s going to save the guild.”
Like all good lies, it was based on a kernel of optimism. Malden had made little progress with the cipher-it remained impenetrable. And yet he had come to believe, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the information the message contained in the cipher would be his salvation.
It was a thin thread of hope, but to a man trapped in a pit of confusion and despair, a rope as thin as a strand of hair could be a lifeline.
Malden gave Slag a moment to rest, then headed straight for the Lemon Garden-one of the less reputable houses of ease in Pokekirtle Lane. He had chosen it because he was known there, but also because it was one of the few businesses in the Royal Ditch that Cutbill hadn’t owned any part of. The guildmaster of thieves hadn’t wanted to absorb any of the Garden’s debts. That meant it was less likely to house a spy for the rival factions that wanted to oust him from his position.
Normally during the day Malden had to announce himself repeatedly and hammer on the door to get in, but this day the Garden was open for business even in the early morning. Elody, the proprietress, welcomed him with a kiss on the cheek and explained. “Business is so bad I can’t turn anyone away,” she said, ushering him into the courtyard. A single scrawny lemon tree grew there, a few withered fruits still hanging from its boughs. Around its base were pallets of straw for the tupenny clientele. None of them were occupied at the time. “I’ve slashed my prices, offered delights to the public that I normally save for my most discriminating patrons-nothing seems to work,” she went on with a sigh.
Malden was saddened by this but unsurprised. The vast majority of Elody’s customers had left town with the Burgrave. The very old men who remained were rarely in need of negotiable tenderness. Certainly Pritchard Hood and the handful of watchmen he retained didn’t seem the type to dally in brothels. “I’ll see if I can’t send some custom your way,” Malden promised. His thieves were one of the few groups of young men remaining in the city. Elody had been one of his mother’s fastest friends, and even sat by her bedside while she was dying of the sailor pox. He owed her something.
At that particular moment he owed her some silver, which he paid happily. “You’ve kept the room locked?” he asked her.
“Haven’t needed it for anything else,” Elody told him. The silver coins disappeared into her sagging cleavage. “What about him?” she said, indicating Slag.
“He’s all right. Slag, come with me-unless you see something here you like.”
The dwarf squinted in the daylight but peered up at the gallery surrounding the courtyard. The women gathered there looked haggard to Malden, thin from hunger and tired from being up at all hours. They knew how to dress themselves, however, to show off their better features.
Slag shook his head, though. “Hairless as babies, all of them.”
Malden raised an eyebrow. Like all the city’s whores, the women of the Lemon Garden kept their hair very long and dressed with ribbons. It was one of their chief enticements, since most honest women in Ness kept their hair covered by hoods or wimples.
“I like a woman with some hair on her lip,” Slag explained.
Malden laughed-for the first time in days-and brought Slag to the private room he’d hired from Elody. It was there he’d been working on the cipher. The room contained a large bed, of course, but this was now strewn with pieces of parchment, scratched on with a quill pen in abortive attempts to break the code. The original cipher was tacked to one wall, while fresh parchment, ink, and a book of grammar were waiting for Malden on a chair.
He set to work immediately, scanning the message over and over, looking for suspicious groupings of given characters. “Each symbol here must correspond to a letter of the alphabet,” he explained to Slag-it was what Coruth had taught him.
“But how can you break it unless you know which character stands for which letter?” Slag asked. The dwarf looked intrigued-here was a bit of cleverness, a skillful science he had not mastered.
“The trick is knowing that some letters are more common than others,” Malden explained. “For instance, the letter E is the most common in our language, so it stands to reason that the most common character in the cipher would correspond to E. Unless, of course, it actually represents A, which is also very common.”
“It can’t be that simple,” Slag said.
Malden sighed and shook his head. “Sadly, no. I find combinations of common letters all the time here, but they never link up to form familiar words. I’ve been working on a theory that the message is not in the language of
