Chapter 4: "Thieves, Liars and Other Useful People "
1148 Words
The market was louder on the second day.
Or perhaps Vesper was simply paying more attention.
She moved through the crowd with her hood down this time, something she would never have done on her first day. But she had watched Thyrandor for a full night and part of a morning and she had come to understand something important about it. The city was too exhausted to notice things that did not directly threaten it. People walked with their eyes down and their minds on survival. Nobody was looking at her. Nobody was looking at anyone.
Nobody except the boy who had been following her since she left The Iron Sparrow.
He was young, perhaps seventeen, with a sharp clever face and dark skin and eyes that moved too quickly and too deliberately to belong to someone simply wandering the market. He was good. She would give him that. He kept three bodies between them at all times and changed his pace when she changed hers and twice he had ducked into a stall with the practiced ease of someone who had been doing this for years.
He was also, she noted, extremely bad at following vampires.
She stopped at a fruit stall and examined an apple she had no intention of eating and waited.
He stopped twenty feet behind her and pretended to examine a bolt of cloth.
She put the apple down and turned around and looked directly at him.
He froze.
She raised an eyebrow.
He stared at her for a long moment. Then something shifted in his face, the caught expression dissolving into something closer to appreciation, the look of someone who has just watched a trick they did not expect and wants to know how it was done. He weaved through the crowd toward her with his hands raised slightly in a gesture that was half surrender and half greeting.
"You are good," he said.
"You are not," she replied pleasantly.
He grinned. It was a spectacular grin, the kind that made you want to trust him immediately which was precisely why you should not. "Zed," he said, extending a hand. "I am not trying to rob you, for the record."
"You were absolutely trying to rob me," Vesper said.
"I was assessing the situation," he corrected. "There is a difference. And then I saw your eyes and decided assessing was enough."
Vesper studied him. He was lean and quick looking with ink stained fingers and a leather satchel at his hip that clinked faintly when he moved. Not a common thief. Something more interesting than that.
"What do you want Zed?" she asked.
"Honestly?" He tilted his head. "I want to know what you are. Because you are not from here and you are not entirely what you look like and things that are not entirely what they look like are usually the most interesting things in any room."
"We are not in a room," Vesper said.
"In any street then," he said without missing a beat.
Zed, as it turned out, knew everyone.
He was an information broker of sorts, seventeen years old and operating with a confidence that belonged on someone twice his age. He knew which soldiers were taking bribes and which merchants were watering their goods and which of Governor Aldric's officials had secrets they would pay generously to keep quiet. He was not cruel about it. He used the information the way a craftsman uses tools, carefully, precisely, for specific purposes.
Most of those purposes, Vesper discovered over the next hour, involved feeding people.
"You steal information from corrupt officials to buy food for the lower quarter," Vesper said slowly.
"I prefer redistribute," Zed said. "Steal has such ugly implications."
"It is exactly what it is," Vesper said.
"Most true things are," he said cheerfully.
She liked him.
He took her through three streets she had not yet seen, past a baker who slipped extra loaves to the children waiting outside without acknowledging them, past a healer's house with a red cloth in the window that Zed explained meant it was safe for people with no coin, past a narrow doorway that led down into a basement room where a woman with silver locs and arms like a blacksmith was teaching a group of young girls how to throw a punch correctly.
"That is Rue," Zed said. "She was a soldier once. Before Aldric decided women made him nervous."
Rue looked up when they entered and assessed Vesper in one long sweeping glance with the eyes of someone who had spent years calculating threats.
"She is not human," Rue said flatly.
"No," Vesper agreed.
The room went very still.
Rue studied her for a long moment. The girls behind her had stopped their practice and were watching with wide eyes. The silence had the particular quality of a held breath.
"Vampire?" Rue asked.
"Yes," Vesper said.
Another silence. Longer this time.
"You are not one of Belphegor's," Rue said. It was not a question. She said it the way someone states a thing they have already decided.
"No," Vesper said. "I am not."
Rue held her gaze for another moment then nodded once, the short decisive nod of someone who has made a judgement and intends to stand by it.
"Then sit down," she said. "You look like someone with information and I look like someone who needs it."
Vesper sat.
Zed dropped into the chair beside her with the ease of someone coming home and stole an apple from the bowl on the table and took a loud bite. One of the girls giggled. Rue silenced her with a look.
"Belphegor's scouts," Vesper said. "I saw them last night. Moving through the lower streets. Six of them. They were not feeding." She paused. "They were mapping."
The room went still again. A different kind of still this time.
Rue leaned forward slowly, her large hands flat on the table, her eyes sharp and steady.
"Mapping what?" she said quietly.
"The exits," Vesper said. "Every road out of the lower quarter. Every gate. Every alley wide enough for a cart."
The silence that followed was the heaviest one yet.
Zed had stopped eating his apple.
"They are not just raiding," Rue said slowly. The words came out carefully, like she was placing them one by one on fragile ground. "They are planning something larger."
"Yes," Vesper said.
"How much larger?"
Vesper looked at her steadily.
"I think," she said quietly, "they intend to take everyone."
Nobody spoke.
Outside the sound of the city continued, oblivious and ordinary. Boots on cobblestones. A vendor calling his wares. A child laughing somewhere in the distance.
Inside the basement room under the streets of Thyrandor the air had changed into something cold and certain and irreversible.
Zed put his apple down very slowly.
"Well," he said quietly. "That is not good."
- Writer
