TEN Parley in the Thief's House

Crope moved with as much stealth as he could manage. It wasn't much—seven years in the mines had turned his joints to creaky doors-but it was enough to sneak up on the fly. It was a big one. A biter. Most people called them black flies, but if you looked real close you see they were really brown. This one had landed on the wall next to the strange shiny stain that smelled of snails. It was the perfect position from which to launch an attack upon the figure on the bed … and that wouldn't do. Crope dove forward and snatched it into his fist. That wouldn't do at all.

The fly bit the tender center of his palm as he opened the door and stepped into the hall. Crope couldn't really blame it, but it did hurt, and he decided to release the fly in the hallway and let it find its own way out. The house had four stories and he was standing on the topmost floor. "Fly down," he advised as the insect buzzed away.

Crope took a moment then just to settle his mind. It wasn't that he was upset or anything… just things got a bit much from time to time. The light in the hallway helped. Late-afternoon sun shone red and golden, warping floorboards and stirring dust. Quill said that the man who had originally built the house had been a sea captain who'd once plied the trade routes between the Seahold and the Far South. "Missed the ocean, he did," Quill had reported. "So he built himself a ship." With its round windows and plank decking the house did look a bit like a boat, but mostly it just looked like a house.

It wasn't home, though. Crope couldn't guess how long he would have to hide out in the cold and stony city at the base of a mountain. It made no difference: it would never be his home.

Quietly, he let himself back into the sleeping chamber. Entering the cool, low-ceilinged dimness was like passing into a cave. His lord could not bear bright light. Even in his sleep he shied away from it, screaming from his fever dreams that it burned. Boiled-wool curtains, dyed black and double-lined, concealed the chamber's only window, yet some portion of light still got through. Crope used this to navigate the room as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark.

His lord was still sleeping. Baralis' slight, misshapen body lay curled in a fetal position on the bed. The sour, grassy scent of fresh urine was leaking from the mattress and Crope fretted over whether it was better to let his lord sleep or waken him and strip down the sheets. Crope was not good with choices. Choices could lead to mistakes. Dimwit, Halfwit, Nowit. Couldn't pluck a half-bald chicken. The bad voice was like an itch inside his head and he tried very hard to ignore it. His lord was sleeping quietly, at rest in his mind. Perhaps it was best to let him be. Crope could not recall many hours where his lord had simply slept. Mostly he shook and clawed the sheets and repeated the same word over and over again in different ways. No. No.

No.

Crope shivered, though the room was warm. Not hot, not cold. Lukewarm. His lord could bear no other temperature on his skin. His lord was broken and needed mending. Crope had experience with mending. He'd fixed chickens and dogs and squirrels before but there was so much profoundly wrong with his lord that he wasn't sure it could ever be made right.

But it would not stop Crope from trying. Silently he crossed the room to where the driftwood table with the charred legs stood. The water he'd fetched earlier had now reached the same temperature as the room and he soaked some of it up in a heavy cloth. Cupping his free hand beneath the cloth to catch the drips, Crope moved toward his lord. As always when he neared him, Crope felt the anger knot in his chest. He did not understand how one man could have done this to another. During his first year at the tin mines he had pulled a digger from the rubble of a collapsed seam. The man had been smashed by falling stone, his body torn and punctured in a dozen places by sharp edges of quartz. A fluke upward shearing of rock had punched out his eye and replaced it with a shiny chunk of tin. His left leg had been disjointed at the hip and the tendons in both his feet had snapped. Unable to inflate his lungs, he had lived for about an hour. Crope thought of the digger's broken body whenever he saw his lord.

Crushed, that was the word. And it was one thing for a lode-bearing seam of tin to do that to a man. Another thing entirely for someone to do it to someone else. It was evil, and Crope lived with the real and secret fear that even though he had killed the man who had harmed his lord the evil that had been created still lived on.

Crope was gentle as he dripped water on his lord's brow. Baralis' eyes were almost destroyed, the corneas folded inward, the whites scarred and crisscrossed with strange veins. Even the lids were scarred, Crope noticed as he washed his lord's race.

"You are with me," he murmured softly as Baralis stirred, "and you are safe."

Eighteen days had passed since he'd rescued his lord; Crope knew this to be so because Quill kept an account. Quillan Moxley was a friend and thief. He was also a man of business, and Crope worried about the cost of hiding out in his house. Eighteen days of food, medicine and shelter added up—especially, Crope conceded rather sheepishly, when it was him doing the eating. Quill had asked for no reckoning, but Crope knew how these things worked. Obligation had been created, and obligation meant debt.

Still, Crope respected Quill. He was a man of his word. He'd promised to help Crope free his lord from the chasm below the pointy tower and had gone ahead and done just that. And Quill would never run to the bailiffs to settle a grievance. Men who enforced laws in this or any other city were not friends of Quill, and that suited Crope fine. Just the thought of bailiffs was enough to make Crope scan the room for likely escape routes. When a bailiff locked you up you never got out.

Jangly music rose through the floorboards as the girls in the floor below began to prepare themselves for the night's work. Crope worried about the girls. Some of them wore too little and might catch chills-Others drank too much and Crope would find them passed out on the flairs in the morning. Quill called them prostitutes though the girls never used that name themselves. He rented out the two middle floors to them in return for a portion of their take. Crope was shy around the girls. They reminded him of wounded animals who needed mending, but he knew It wasn't his place to try and fix them.

He required all his mending skills for his lord. Methodically over the past eighteen days he had tended Baralis' ailments. Open wound were the most pressing problem and Crope cleaned them with alcohol and rubbed them with a salve made from aloe and sweet fennel. The ulcers and pressure sores had to be washed with a tincture of calendula twice a day, and Crope was careful not to let his lord lie in the same position overlong else the skin break up and become worse. There was deadnettle for the bladder, horehound for Baralis' weakened lungs, and butcher's broom for his enlarged heart. Ewe's milk so thick with cream it coated your hand like a glove helped restore his weight. Then came the potions that dulled the pain and dimmed the night terrors: blood of poppy, skullcap, devil's claw. Crope tried not to think too long on their names; they were a warning, he left it at that.

What he could not drive from his mind were the things wrong with his lord that could never be made right. Bone had been broken, allowed to partially reheal, and then systematically broken again. What was left was a body that would never bear its own weight, a spine riddled with bone spurs, vertebrae that had fused around the neck, a femur with a head so misshapen that it no longer fitted squarely in its socket, finger joints that would not bend, a wrist that could not rotate, a rib cage that lay like the collapsed hull of a shipwreck beneath the skin.