snow owl and completely insane. The remnants of the second expedition arrived in Avendoom a week ago. All eight magicians were left behind, underground. With seventy-one other men, more than half of whom were my soldiers!”
“And now you’ve decided a thief will be able to do what a hundred men couldn’t,” I summed up.
Wonderful, the big shots have failed to do the impossible and now they want a lowly thief to do their bidding. I wonder which brilliant mind came up with this idea?
“Can I refuse?” This was a purely rhetorical question, as Brother For likes to say.
“Yes, Baron Lanten is still outside the door. You can take a ride to the Gray Stones with him,” Alistan laughed.
I get it. So that’s the way it is. Either take your chances in Hrad Spein or rot in the Gray Stones—and who knows which is better? If it was up to me, I’d choose the Gray Stones, but I can probably risk it and try to trick the whole Council of Lunatics.
“I accept,” I said, nodding, and got up out of my armchair. “Can I go now? To carry out my mission?”
At least it seemed like I had a real chance to cut and run before they really had me on the hook.
“Of course,” the king said with a feeble wave of his hand, and his immense ring glinted as it caught the light of a candle. “You accept the Commission?”
At that point I sat back down in the armchair. I’d thought I was going to trick them all, thought I was the most slippery eel there, but they were the ones who had tricked me.
When a master thief performs a task for a client, he accepts a Commission, which renders the agreement between thief and client stronger than any amount of gold could. In accepting a Commission, a thief undertakes to carry it out (or, if he is unsuccessful, to return the initial pledge, together with interest on the total value of the deal), and the client commits himself to paying in full when the task has been completed.
The Commission is an inviolable contract between the master thief and the client. And it cannot be violated, torn up, or put aside without the agreement of both parties. As the masters say, you can cheat and break a contract even with darkness, but not with Sagot. The punishment will follow immediately—something like falling into the firm grip of the guards at the scene of the crime, finding yourself in prison, or running into a knife in a perfectly safe alleyway. Luck will simply turn her back on the night hunter. And the client will not flourish if he refuses to pay, without good reason. The patron of thieves turns a blind eye to the doings of footpads and petty criminals, but not to those of master thieves following sound and reliable leads.
To refuse the Commission meant confessing to my recent lie about being willing to cooperate and being sent to the most uncomfortable cell in the Gray Stones, with a grand view of the Cold Sea. To accept meant that I couldn’t make a run for it, because the Commission wouldn’t let me go. There was no way I could pull out of it. “What are the terms?” I asked Stalkon hopelessly.
“You must deliver the Rainbow Horn to the capital before the beginning of January.”
“The payment?”
“Fifty thousand pieces of gold.”
“As the pledge?” I tried to keep my voice steady.
Fifty thousand . . . well, of course, it’s not half the kingdom or the hand of the princess from the fairy tale, but it offers plenty of scope. . . . Several generations could live well on that amount of money. The fortunes of certain barons and counts are no more than a third of the sum proposed.
“How much do you want?”
I thought for a moment, hesitating.
“A hundred will do.”
“You’ll get the money as you leave the palace. By the way, don’t forget your toys. Is that all?”
“I request you to pronounce the official formula. That is, of course, if Your Majesty is familiar with it.”
“I request Shadow Harold to accept my Commission,” said the king, speaking the official formulation of a contract between a thief and a client.
“I accept the Commission,” I sighed.
“It has been heard,” the elfess said with a flash of her fangs, and threw the veil over her face.
There was no thunder and no lightning. Simply, somewhere Sagot remembered what had been said, and now he would watch carefully to make sure the conditions of the contract were observed. Or if not him, then his servants would watch. The important thing was that the Commission would have to be carried out. If it cost me my life, I had to do it, because there is no running away from fate. And not to carry out the Commission was absolutely impossible. I couldn’t go off to Hrad Spein, hide somewhere near the entrance, and then say: Sorry, I gave it a try but it didn’t work out. They were right when they said Stalkon was clever; he had closed off all the escape routes and loopholes by offering a huge sum of money. And if I didn’t manage to pull it off, I would have to return the pledge and a huge amount of interest on the total sum of the deal. I didn’t have that kind of money, so that meant the terms of the Commission would be violated.
“Congrotolations, Harold!” Kli-Kli bowed elegantly in my direction. “Now you’re the king’s man.”
“I have questions.”
The words “Your Majesty” were set aside now until afterward. Now there was only a client, a master thief, and Sagot observing us from heaven, or wherever it is that he lives.
“Yes?”
“Am I going there alone?”
The thought flashed swiftly through my head that if I went alone, I’d certainly never get there. I’d either lose my way in the Forests of Zagraba or get clubbed to death somewhere along the way.
