Broarn snorted. "Run to the Calishar and get Ilhundyl to teach you to be master mages so you can come back and fight these magelords ... get a friendly mage to hide all of you as frogs before the magelords can find you and do it swifter ... go to the depths of the elven realms and get them to hide you somehow... call on the gods for miracles ... I believe that about covers it."
"There's one other place," Elminster said quietly.
The silence of utter astonishment fell on both Helm and Broarn. They turned as one to look at the lad in the scorched leather jerkin, standing alone in his stall. He'd slid his sword into hiding and picked up the bowl of turkey soup Broarn had brought him. As they watched, he calmly took a spoonful, smiled, dipped his spoon into the bowl again, drew forth another spoonful, and blew on it to cool it.
"I'll slay ye, lad, if ye don't stop playing the fool," Helm growled, taking a step toward him.
"That's more or less what the magelord said to me," Elmin¬ster remarked mildly, "and look ye what befell him."
Helplessly, Helm started to laugh, and that set Broarn and the other outlaws off into roars of mirth while Elminster as¬sumed an air of innocence over his bowl and ladled several spoonfuls into his mouth, fearing chances to do so later would be few.
"All right, lad," Broarn managed when he had breath enough, "give. Where to hide?"
"Among a lot of folk that wizards dare not slay or upset too many of, or they'll have no realm left. In Hastarl itself," Elmin¬ster said.
Helm—and alot of the outlaw knights behind him—stared at the youth with open mouths, aghast.
"But ye'll attack the first mage ye see when ye step inside the gates, and we'll all perish right then!" the battered knight protested.
Elminster shook his head. "Nay," he said. "Watching sheep taught me patience . . . and hunting wizards is teaching me guile."
"Ye're crazed," one of the other outlaws muttered.
"Aye," another agreed.
"Wait a bit," still another protested. "The more I think on it, the better it seems."
"Ye want death at yer elbow every day, whene'er ye go out?"
"I've got that now ... an' if I go to Hastarl like the lad says, I might get me a warm house to sleep in o' winters."
Then they were all talking, arguing earnestly, until Broarn hissed, "You will be quiet!" to knight after knight, waving his axe under their noses for emphasis. When he had silence, the fat innkeeper said, "If you make that sort of noise, I'll have arms-men up from their beds and in here to see what fun they're miss¬ing. Anyone want that?"
He let silence stretch for a moment or two, and then went on quietly, "Some of you will want to remain in the hills or flee to other lands, but some may want to go with the lad here to Has¬tarl. Whatever you decide, do it well back in the woods; I want all of you away from here before dawn. Helm, bring Mauri and the home-stuffs she's got in by the back door. She stays here. Don't let anyone help you who can't move quietly. Now out, all of you—and may the luck of the gods cloak you and keep you!"
*****
The meeting was breaking up; the time to strike was now. This deed would surely win him a rank among the magelords! No more apprenticeship to fat old Harskur ... and real power at last!
Saphardin Olen rose from the cold hillside, letting his eaves¬dropping spell fade away. He raised the wands in his hands, aim¬ing at the hatch—best to strike now, before any of them left the place.
"Die, fools!" he said with a smile, and then pitched forward like a felled tree as a stone the size of a war helm smashed into the back of his head.
As the blood-spattered rock settled smoothly into the snow, the two fallen wands rose by themselves and glided in a gentle arc through the trees to the next knoll, where a tall, lean woman stood watching them come with large, dark eyes.
Her face was bone white, and her hair a curling honey-brown. At one glance, a farmer would have bowed to her as a lady. She put out a hand to take the wands as they glided up to her, and her dark green cloak swirled about her, as if moved by unseen hands. Silvern threads on its shoulders were worked in a mage-sigil of linked circles.
The sorceress watched the outlaws stride into the woods, and waved a hand. Her body faded, rippled, and became just another of the shifting shadows here in the winter-stripped trees— cloaked and unseen, save for her large, liquid black eyes.
They blinked once as they watched Elminster hug Helm in farewell before heading south, alone.
"The soul is strong in you, Prince of Athalantar," their owner said quietly. "Live, then, and let us see what you can do."
Four
THEY COME OUT AT NIGHT
Thieves? Ah, such an ugly word . . . think of them instead as kings-in-training. Ye seem upset, even disputatious. Well, then, look upon them as the most honest sort of merchant.
The character Oglar the Thieflord
in the anonymous play Shards and Swords
Year of the Screeching Vole
It was just one more in an endless string of hot, damp days in the early summer of the Year of the Black Flame. Folk in Hastarl had taken to lying more or less unclad on the flat stretches of their rooftops and their balconies after sunset, hoping for a breeze to blow over their skin and bring them some fleeting mo¬ments of comfort.
This was good for both pleasure and business—the pre¬dictable pleasure, and one business in particular.
"Ah," Farl said softly, leaning forward to peer out of the slit window. The show of flesh beginneth again, so it doth."
"When ye've finished drooling down the stonework," the slim, beak-nosed youth behind him said dryly, "do ye hold the line while I go down."
"That'll be about dawn, I'd say," was the reply.
"Aye, then, hold the line now and look later." Elminster cast a glance over the head of his fellow thief and squinted profession¬ally. "Ah, yes, quite a tattoo there .. . though how the man sees it, with the curve of his belly between his eyes and where it is, only the gods can know."
Farl chuckled. "Think of what it must have felt like, getting it, too." He winced with an exaggerated flourish, and added, "But you're supposed to be looking at the maids, El, not at the men!"
"Ah, I've got to learn to tell the difference. It gets me into more trouble," Elminster replied serenely. Then what he'd been waiting for befell: a large bank of clouds drifted across the moon. Without another word, he slipped through the narrow window, one hand on the rope harness, and was gone.
Farl settled the smooth leather rope slide securely on the sill, and with surprising strength slowed the line gliding through it to a gentle, continuous movement until a sharp jerk told him to stop. He thrust a dagger into one of the holes in the wheel from which the rope unwound, then looked out the window.
Directly under him, in the empty air beneath the outthrust upper room of the tower, Elminster calmly hung suspended out¬side the window of the room below. One of his hands—the hand wearing a wrapping coated with sticky honeycake—was on the tower wall; El was keeping himself to one side of the window, out of the view of the room's occupants. He peered in for what seemed a very long time before raising his hand in a signal, not looking up.
Farl passed the reachers down on their own lines.
Hanging there in the quickening night breeze, Elminster took hold of them: two long, thin wooden sticks with wrist-braces at one end, like crutches, and sticky balls of precious stirge glue on their other ends. A hooked and pad-ended side-prong jutted from one stick.
El delicately used that prong to swing the shutters fully back—and then withdrew the reachers and waited patiently. No sound came from within, and after several long breaths, he reached out again. One stick slid in until its leather sleeve caught the sill. He balanced its weight there, and then slid it on¬ward through its sleeve, probing delicately inside the room. When he drew it out, a gem gleamed on the sticky end. He backed the stick until he could slide his hand up to its tip, let it dangle from its line while he thrust the gem into the tube-bag of stout canvas he wore around his neck, and then reached into the room with the stick again, slowly ... smoothly ... silently.
Thrice more the sticks appeared, were emptied of precious cargo, and returned to the room. Farl saw the youth below wipe sweating hands on dark, dusty leather breeches, and then lean forward again. He held this breath, knowing what that gesture meant: Eladar the Dark was about to try something especially reckless. Farl mouthed a silent prayer to Mask, Lord of All Thieves.
Elminster reached into the bedchamber once more. His sticks slid over the bare, slumbering body of the young merchant's wife, only inches above the soft curves of her flesh—and paused over her throat. She wore a dark ribbon there ... and below it, a pectoral of linked emeralds, topped by a spider of black wire whose body was a single huge ruby.
Elminster watched the jewelry rise and fall, ever so slightly, with her slow and even breathing. If it was like others he'd seen, the spider could be unclasped to be worn alone as a cloak-pin.
If... a touch, just so—a wiggle to be sure it was caught... and now so was he (This had to work, or he'd be left with a stick twice as long as a man stuck to the breast of a naked woman who'd not stay asleep for very long). . . and a little lift, up and back, so. Don't brush her nose with it, now . . . with infinite care and pa¬tience El brought the reachers back out of the window.
When he dropped the jewels into the bag and jerked the rope for Farl to pull him up, he felt that the spider was still warm from her breathing. Elminster smelled the musky scent clinging to it, sighed soundlessly, and wondered fleetingly what women were like....
*****
"With those, we can live like idle rich blades for five tendays, at least," Farl said, eyes shining in the dim light of their hovel hideaway.
"Aye," Elminster said, "and get noticed in three evenings. Just who d'ye think we think we can sell that spider to in this city? We'll have to wait for a discreet merchant—who's got some¬thing to hide an' knows we know it—leaving the city, and sell it to him then. Nay; we sell the ring with the emerald this night, before word gets out; no marks there to say it's hers for certain. Then we lie low—back to hanging around the Black Boots wait¬ing for hire as dockhands and errand-runners."
Farl stared at him for a moment, mouth open to protest, but then closed it in a smile and nodded. "You've the right of it as usual, Eladar. You've the cunning of an alley cat, to be sure."
Elminster shrugged. "I'm still alive, if that's what ye mean. Let's go discover some place that serves drink to young blades with dry throats and loose purses."
Farl laughed, slid the bag back into the hollow stone block, clambered up the ragged stones of the crumbling chimney, and shoved the block the full length of his arm back into the dark, hollow space between floor and ceiling. Withdrawing his arm from the splinter-edged hole, he replaced the dead, dangling, half-eaten rat they used to deter searchers, and slid back down the chimney to the floor.
Around them, the gloomy back room of the shut-up cobbler's shop stank from its occasional use as a toilet by cats, dogs, drunks, and stray street folk. The cobbler had died of black-tongue fever early in the spring, and sane folk made no plans to disturb the place until at least a season had passed. Then it would be smoked to clear disease-vapors and torn down; by then,
Farl and Elminster planned to have a new and better loot-cache among the ornamental roof-spires of the proud houses near Has¬tarl's north wall. They had their eyes on a tall residence whose roof sported crouching, snarling sculpted gargoyles; if one could be beheaded and hollowed out without anyone in the grand house beneath noticing, they'd have an ideal place. Aye, 'if.'
The two youths nodded to each other, knowing their silent thoughts had skulked along the same alley. Farl peered out the watch hole and after a moment waved Elminster on. He stepped unconcernedly out into the narrow, dark passage outside, and slipped away. Farl followed, dagger drawn—just in case. It was a full breath later before any of the rats dared come out into the open to get at the moldy slab of cheese the young thieves had thoughtfully left behind.
*****
The Kissing Wench was a loud, crowded press of goodfolk— ribaldry and slapping and pinching, pursuit of a night's lust, roared jests and tossed coins, and reckless chase of wine-soaked oblivion. Farl and Eladar took their tankards to their favorite dark corner, just off the bar, where they could see who came in but be seen only by the night-sighted and the determined.
Their spot was occupied already, of course, by ladies whose names they knew well despite a persistent lack of the coinage necessary for more intimate acquaintance. The hour was too early for business to be brisk, so the evening-lasses were sipping from glasses in their hands and rubbing scent into the backs of their knees and the crooks of their elbows, and there was still room to sit down on the benches.
"Game for an early kiss and cuddle?" Ashanda asked disin¬terestedly, examining her nails. She knew what their reply would be before it came. Nothing from the one with the unruly black hair and the beaky nose, and from Farl—
"Nay. We just like to watch." He leered at her over his tank¬ard.
She gave him a mock coquettish look, batting her eyes and putting two delicate fingers to her mouth in a shocked expres¬sion, and then replied, "An' most of 'em want a cheering audi¬ence, so that's aright. Just be sure to give way when we need the space on the benches, or it's my blade-toe you'll be feeling!"
They'd seen her put her dagger-tipped boot into the shins of many a man, and once into the gut of a sailor who didn't know his own cruel strength; he'd ended up screaming his guts out—literally—on the tavern floor. Both thieves nodded hastily as the other girls tittered.
Farl gave one of them a wink, and she leaned forward to pat his knee. The movement made her low-cut silken bodice slide, smooth and cool, across Elminster's arm. He hastily transferred his tankard out of the way, feeling a stirring in him.
Budaera saw his swift movement and turned her head to smile up at him. Her scent—something of roses, not so strong as some of the reeks the ladies used—wafted to his nostrils. Elmin¬ster shivered.
