“A witch,” Malden said, because he couldn’t stop thinking it. A witch like Coruth. There were worse allies a Lord Mayor could ask for than a pair of resident witches. Though for some reason the thought of Cythera wearing shapeless robes and staring into other places with wild eyes made him feel weak and alone.
A witch could not be owned by a man, she had said. And what man would want such a dangerous creature for his own? He might have answered that question. And yet he sensed there was more at stake here than Cythera simply becoming a woman with her own power.
Where witchcraft was involved, there were always rules. Rules only a doomed man would fail to follow. Rules no man could ever know.
“I don’t understand,” he said, his body going limp with a sudden weakness.
She wouldn’t let him go. She pulled him toward her, and he lacked the strength to resist. “Don’t shy away from me now,” she said. “I haven’t even had my initiation yet. Let’s make it seven nights and a day.” She reached up and started unlacing her bodice.
Chapter Sixty-Six
Loophole would never walk easy again. When the mob seized Castle Hill, someone had been smart enough to free him from the Burgrave’s dungeon before they set the place to the torch, but one night in the torture chamber had been too much for the old thief. He had spent too long in the iron contraption known as the boot.
Malden had found him a crutch in an abandoned apothecary’s shop. It was well-made, with a comfortable pad to fit under his arm, and its shaft was inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Loophole was just able to hobble around on it, though clearly it pained him to do so. Moving at all pained the oldster now that every bone in his left leg had been shattered.
“Don’t mind me, lad,” the elder said as he winced around Cutbill’s headquarters. “Just glad to be alive.”
“Tell me everything you require,” Malden said, one hand over his mouth so Loophole wouldn’t see his fallen face. “It shall be yours. Food, wine, female companionship-you’ll be honored, old man, as only those thieves who escape the gallows are. Gold. Fine clothes-”
“It’s not the first time I got out of a noose,” Loophole laughed. “Of course, last time I was eighteen years old. I knew a trick, y’see, that you can use when they tie your hands. You tense up the muscles in your forearms much as possible, that makes ’em bigger. Here, like this.” He showed Malden how it was done. “Then later, you relax your hands again, and your bonds are loose. So when they put the rope around my neck, I waited until they started reading the charges, then slipped my hands free. I grabbed the rope over my head, like this
…” Loophole reached above his head. The crutch slipped out of his armpit and he twisted around on his good foot. Malden barely caught him before he fell.
Carefully he led the old man over to the comfortable chair behind Cutbill’s desk. Loophole gasped for breath for a while, his mouth puckering and blowing like he was a fish that had jumped up onto a dock by mistake. Blood flushed his face, and his eyes couldn’t seem to focus properly. Malden began to worry that the oldster was succumbing to apoplexy, but after a minute Loophole calmed down again. “Mayhap I’ll tell you the rest of that story some other time,” he said.
“Of course,” Malden said. “I’d like that.” He went to the door and called for Tyburn. The man who came at his call had once been Cutbill’s personal bodyguard. Malden had made him the castellan of the underground lair. “Let Loophole stay here as long as he wants. See to his needs.”
“Yes, milord,” Tyburn said. “Velmont’s been asking for you. Says it’s urgent. And ’Levenfingers came by this morn, said some of the thieves are getting restless.”
“What now?” Malden asked.
“They say they’ve looted just about the whole of the Golden Slope. All those abandoned houses, and no watchmen-well, the work went fast. They’re running out of things to steal.”
Malden had been afraid of that. Thieves would be thieves, and needed prodigious quantities of coin to pay for all the ale they quaffed while they weren’t actively working on a job. Meanwhile a delegation of honest citizens-the same honest citizens who had torn Pritchard Hood limb from limb-had petitioned him to offer them protection from robbers and cutpurses. He would have laughed them off if he didn’t already know that pickpocketing and footpaddery were running rampant in the city, right when the nonthief population was having trouble making ends meet. If this kept up, there wouldn’t be any coin left in Ness that hadn’t been stolen out of one pocket to be spent from another. He was probably the first guildmaster of thieves in history to actually have to find a way to reduce crime. It galled him, but he couldn’t just ignore it.
The Golden Slope had provided one outlet for the thieves. The houses there were boarded up and abandoned-but not empty. The rich folk of Ness had left plenty behind when they fled the city, so Malden had turned his men loose on the unguarded treasure. At first he’d thought they would resent this work as it was just too easy. He’d underestimated the base laziness in the heart of every thief. The whole point of being a thief was to get at the easy money. They had cheered him and offered to pay him a tenth of everything they stole, even before he thought to ask for it.
“When the Slope is wrung dry, when there are no more abandoned places to rob, talk to me of this again,” Malden said.
Tyburn nodded. He didn’t look happy, but since Malden became Lord Mayor he’d learned that politics was not the art of making everyone happy, it was making sure no one was so miserable they were willing to stab you in the back. “And Velmont? Will you hear what he has to say?”
“Yes. Let me just grab my cloak.”
Velmont had become Malden’s eyes and ears in the city, proving himself more valuable every day. The Helstrovian had no friends in Ness, but he brought a pair of fresh eyes that could see problems Malden might miss. To Malden, Ness had always been on the verge of collapse-he knew too well how shoddy and unstable the institutions of his home city could be. In the midst of the general chaos, no individual problem stood out in high relief. When Velmont saw a problem, however, Malden knew it had to be fixed immediately. This was one summons he had no choice but to accept.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
He already knew what his Helstrovian second-in-command wanted, but still he let Velmont explain it in the most dramatic terms. That, at least, meant spending some time on the rooftops. The two of them raced each other across the Stink and up into the no longer aptly named Smoke, that zone of manufactories and work yards that girdled the city and now lay mostly quiet, cold, and unproductive. Even the terrible smell of the place had dissipated. “There, brother, what do you see?” Velmont asked, pointing down into the courtyard of the city’s biggest grain mill.
“I see wheels that aren’t turning, and wheat rotting in sacks,” Malden said. The giant mills needed oxen to turn them, and the rich merchants had taken all the best livestock when they fled the city, long before Malden’s return. Now the mill wheels stood silent and unmoving. Some needed replacement, too, but none of the workers remaining in the Smoke-a bare handful of those who’d been there before the Burgrave enlisted all their fellows- knew how to lever a mill wheel off its axle.
“Slag says he has a solution,” Malden told Velmont. The dwarf had been working even longer hours than Malden on one project or another. “A way to use the current of the river Skrait to turn the wheels.”
“Won’t the grain get wet if you put ’em in yon river?” Velmont asked, looking confused.
“Don’t second-guess a dwarf when he says he’s invented something new,” Malden told the Helstrovian.
“Won’t matter, anyroad,” Velmont said, his shoulders slumping. “Come, keep up if you can, and follow me uphill. There’s more to see, and worse.”
The two of them hurried across the roofs of the Smoke and up the Golden Slope toward Castle Hill. It was not a place Malden truly wanted to see ever again. The burnt-out stones of the palace and the fallen public buildings were a mute accusation of guilt he would never be able to atone for. Yet when Velmont led him along the fire-
