Rogues Read online

  “I will take first watch,” he said. He listened to their breathing settle and thought that if he had to abandon anyone to the Vandaayo, he would prefer to leave Fulferin behind.

  The little god read his thoughts. The voice said, I must do as I must.

  At first light, they heard the Vandaayo moving off but waited in the tree until midmorning. They descended and made a thin breakfast of water from the stream, then set off up the watercourse. The part-men would be anxious to replenish their stolen larder, Raffalon told the others. Trails and tracks were their preferred settings for ambush. Besides, the sound of the moving water would disguise the noise of their movements.

  They walked in silence and single file for a time. Then the thief felt a tug on his sleeve. Fulferin said, “That is my satchel slung across your shoulder.”

  “Opinions are divided on that matter,” said Raffalon. “I found it abandoned, which entitles—” but even as he spoke, he saw that his treacherous hands were unslipping the strap and handing the leather bag to the other man.

  Fulferin threw open the cover flap and delved into the satchel. He came out with the puzzle box then issued a yelp of unhappy surprise as he saw its secrets exposed and its velvet-lined inner compartment empty.

  He looked a sharp question at his rescuer, but the voice in Raffalon’s head was already saying, Give me to him. The thief complied without reluctance, glad to be his own man again, but he watched Fulferin carefully as the little sculpture changed hands. Actually, he noted that hands were not equally employed on both sides: the lanky man did not touch the wood but instead held out the box so that Raffalon could snug the eidolon into its former place. Then he carefully slid the cover back into position and restored the hidden locks.

  Raffalon heard the other man’s sigh of relief. While Fulferin slung the satchel’s strap over his own shoulder, the thief studied the man he had saved. He was interested to compare the reality before him with the image the little god had put into his mind. They did not match. Physically, Fulferin was as advertised, tall and spare, with long spatulate fingers and knobby protrusions at knee and elbow. But the face was different. Raffalon had been shown a wide-eyed visionary; the visage he now saw was that of a man who calculated closely and went whichever way his sums dictated.

  The exchange had been watched by the young woman, whose manner indicated that she found little to choose between the two men and, despite having been rescued by one of them, would not have gladly elected to spend time with either. For his part, Fulferin ignored her, all his concern fixed on the box and its contents.

  Raffalon studied the woman as frankly as she had him. She was well past girlhood, but not matronly, sharp of eye and even sharper of nose, with a thin-lipped mouth that easily fell into a mocking twist. She was dressed better than a farmer’s girl though not so richly as a merchant’s daughter. When his gaze rose again to her face, their eyes met. He said, “I am Raffalon, already known to you as a man of resource and valor. He is Fulferin, a god’s devotee. What is your name and station?”

  “Erminia,” she said. “My father is an innkeeper—the Gray Bird at Fosseth.”

  “How did you come to be taken by the part-men?”

  “My father sent me to pick morels for the Reeve’s banquet.”

  Raffalon’s brow wrinkled. “When the Vandaayo were ahunting?”

  The corners of her mouth drew down. “The inn’s license comes up for renewal next month. My father weighs the value of his possessions by his own scale.”

  “We should get on,” Fulferin said, clutching the satchel to his chest. His chin indicated the stream. “Where does this lead?”

  The thief shrugged. “I have seen maps. It parallels the forest road. Somewhere ahead it flows through an old estate that was abandoned after Olverion’s slight miscalculation. If we can find it, it would be a good place to stay under cover until we are sure the Vandaayo have gone home.”

  “I must get to Port Thayes as soon as I can.”

  Raffalon gestured eloquently at the thickets that lined the stream on either side. Fulferin subsided, but the thief saw a flicker of calculation in those definitely-not-otherworldly eyes and surmised that the same thought about having someone to leave for the anthropophagi had just crossed Fulferin’s mind. The god’s man gestured in a way that invited his rescuer to lead them on.

  An hour’s more walking brought them to a weir that cut across the stream at a place that must have been the beginning of a stretch of rapids before the barrier was put in place. When they scrambled up they saw that the weir had created a long and narrow lake. On one of its shores, surrounded by weed-choked gardens and orchards of unpruned fruit trees, stood a moldering agglomeration of vine-draped stone walls, spiral towers, cupolas, colonnades, peristyles, and arcades.

  They explored and found that one of the towers had been built with defense in mind—probably some generations ago when the Vandaayo were only an inchoate nuisance. It had a stout door and hinges so well greased that they had not rusted. In the basement, the stored food had long since rotted, but the wine in one of the butts was still potable.

  Erminia said that she would gather fruit from the orchards if someone would come and keep watch. Raffalon volunteered. Fulferin said that he would climb to the highest point of the tower and stand sentry, calling out if he spied any Vandaayo coming their way. The thief doubted that the god’s man would make so much as a squeak, and when he and the woman reached the fruit trees he climbed the highest and kept a lookout.

  Erminia found apples, persimmons, karbas, and blood-eyes, wrapping them up in her shawl. She called up to Raffalon, who climbed down to rejoin her. The thief thought this might be an opportune moment to test the extent of the young woman’s gratitude for his having delivered from the Vandaayo cooking pot. She was not his type, but she was here.

  A moment later, face smarting from a hard-handed slap and hip aching from a knee that he had avoided just in time, he understood that Erminia drew sharply defined limits. Angered, he briefly considered enlisting Fulferin’s help in mounting a concerted assault on the innkeeper’s daughter’s virtue. But the thought of any cooperative endeavor with the god’s devotee gave him more qualms than did the concept of forcing her acquiescence.

  He showed Erminia two palms in token of surrender and accompanied her back to the tower, where they bolted the door and climbed the spiral staircase to the top apartment. Here they found Fulferin, not on the alert but at ease amid the dust, sprawled on a grimy divan, drinking from a wineskin he had filled from the ample supply downstairs.

  The windows were glassless, but the season was mild. Raffalon cleared a table and Erminia spread her harvest on it. They found chairs and Fulferin came to join them, bringing the wine. The young woman went to rummage in a sideboard and came back to the table with a stout cook’s knife. But instead of using it to cut the fruit, she showed the point to each of the men in a meaningful way, then tucked the blade into her kirtle.

  They ate in silence, passing the wineskin around. The liquid had a tinge of the vinegar to it but was otherwise drinkable. Finally, his stomach full and his blood warmed by the wine, the thief pushed himself back from the table and regarded the god’s man.

  Fulferin looked back with an expression that said he did not invite the curiosity of strangers. Raffalon ignored the implied rebuff, and said, “Your god made an arrangement with me. Having rescued you, I am sure you will want to help him honor it.”

  The worldly eyes narrowed. “What arrangement?”

  “He is a god of luck in small things. He said that, if I aided you, he would henceforward bless me with his intervention. I believe his influence has already served me, and it will grow even stronger once you have revived his powers.”

  Fulferin shrugged. The matter clearly did not engage his interest.

  Erminia said, “What is this god talk?”

  Fulferin seemed disinclined to answer. Raffalon succinctly described the series of events that had brought them all together. He saw
no profit in disclosing the god’s willingness to sacrifice her.

  The woman leaned forward, her heavy brows downdrawn. “What is this rite that will restore the god’s strength? And what, by the way, is his name?”

  Raffalon realized that the question had not come up and turned to Fulferin, his face forming an interrogative. Again, the god’s man showed no inclination to continue the conversation, but when pressed, he said, “Gods who do not hear their names from worshippers gradually forget them. It is akin to falling into a deep sleep, from which it is difficult for them to wake.”

  “So the rite will wake him up?”

  The god’s man shrugged. “I am no expert.”

  When the thief questioned him further, he displayed annoyance and made gestures that said the inquisition was an affront.

  “Why this reluctance?” Erminia said. “Are you not this god’s devotee, dedicated to restoring his powers? Speak!”

  But Fulferin did not. Instead, with a gesture of irritation, he rose from the table, taking his satchel and its precious contents with him, and went up the small flight of stairs that ended in a door that opened onto the flat roof.

  Raffalon watched him go and was prey to dark thoughts. Fulferin was not the man the god thought he was. He remembered how careful the fellow had been not to touch the idol, which would have given the deity access to his innermost thoughts.

  The thief made a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat. His gaze slid sideways toward Erminia. The woman, sitting with her chin in her hands and her elbows on the table, had also watched Fulferin depart. Now she threw a look Raffalon’s way, tilting her head and moving her mouth in a way that said she knew something.

  “What?” he said. “What do you know?”

  But now her face said she was keeping the information to herself.

  Raffalon grunted. “Next time I rescue people from the Vandaayo’s cauldron, I mean to be more choosy.”

  That won him a short laugh from Erminia, but the sound lacked humor. She took a final apple and went to sit in one of the open windows, where she could keep an eye on one of the approaches to the estate. Raffalon took the embrasure opposite. As the day wore on, one or the other would come back to the table for a swallow of wine or a piece of fruit, but otherwise they kept their separate vigils.

  At nightfall, Fulferin came down from the roof. They did not seek to light a fire, the windows being unblockable. Raffalon said he would take the first watch. Erminia said she would take the second. Fulferin shrugged and lay on the floor, his satchel for a pillow.

  After three hours without incident, Raffalon woke the woman—carefully, because she slept with her knife to hand—and disposed himself to sleep. Fulferin snored loudly in a corner, but it had been a long day following a short night’s sleep in a tree, and that in a tree. The thief soon fell into oblivion.

  He awoke in the full light of morning to find Erminia shaking him. “Get up!” she said. “The bastard has betrayed us!”

  He sprang to his feet and followed her to a window. The sun was a good handsbreadth above the forest canopy. Below, in a leaf-strewn, flagstoned courtyard, a fire smoldered, sending a tall column of gray smoke into the still air. Of Fulferin, there was no sign.

  “The Vandaayo will have seen the smoke,” said the woman. “We have to get out of here!”

  Raffalon was already moving toward the staircase. He picked up his wallet along the way, then went leaping down the stairs, Erminia close on his heels. At the ground floor, he found the stout door open, its lock crammed with mud.

  Outside, the thief hopefully kicked aside the smoldering fire, then went to an ornately perforated garden wall and peered through one of the openings. Across the lake he could see motion in the tree line. In a moment, it had resolved into the shapes of Vandaayo. They plunged into the water, trusting in the amphibian strands of their ancestry to sustain them. It would not take them long to cross the distance.

  “Run!” he said.

  “If we’re lucky,” he said to the woman as they pounded along a trail that he thought would lead back to the road to Port Thayes, “Fulferin went this way, and we’ll catch up to him.”

  “And then?” she said, panting as she strove to keep up.

  “Between the two of us, we overpower him and leave him to do for us what he intended us to do for him.”

  “Leave him for the Vandaayo? Agreed.”

  The trail was hard-packed and showed no tracks. But Raffalon caught sight of an overturned pebble, its reversed side darker than the others around it. A little while farther on, he spied a thread snagged on a thorn. The influence of the god of small luck was still with him.

  They came to a wider stream, crossed by stepping-stones. As they slowed to navigate their passage, Erminia said, “I know something about Fulferin that he does not know I know.”

  “What?” said the thief. “And how?”

  “He has come through Fosseth and stopped at our inn.”

  “He didn’t recognize you.”

  “I am mostly consigned to the kitchen, scrubbing pots and scraping plates while my sister, Elfrey—she of the blond hair and balloonish breasts and pneumatic hips that draw all eyes—she waits on the customers. Father reckons it good for business.”

  Raffalon extended a hand to help across a wide gap where the current ran strong between the stones. “What do you know of Fulferin?”

  “He is no more than a hedge sorcerer, if that.” She leapt over, daintily. “I doubt he knows more than a handful of minor spells, but he is in service to Bolbek, who calls himself the Potence, a powerful thaumaturge in Port Thayes.”

  “Why does Bolbek send him through Fosseth?”

  “It is on the old road to the ruins of Itharios.”

  The man knew of the place, a tumble of broken walls and upheaved pavements, devastated in an earthquake millennia ago. “So?” he said.

  “Fulferin delves in the old fanes, seeking out effigies of foregone gods. These he delivers to his master. Though sometimes they dig together.”

  “To restore their powers?”

  They had crossed over now. She shook her head. “It involves powers, to be sure, but from what I heard them whispering when once they both stopped at the Gray Bird, the thaumaturge uses the gods the way a spider uses a fly.”

  “Ah,” said Raffalon. Having been once incarcerated and treated in ways he had not enjoyed, he had since tended to come down on the side of flies and to reject the claims of spiders. “He has fooled the god,” he said.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that even deities are disposed to believe what they want to believe, especially when they are desperate to survive. And when a powerful mage cloaks his assistant’s true nature.”

  The man remembered the image of an innocent Fulferin that the god had put up on the screen in his mind. “Hmm,” he said, then, “we had better move on.”

  The continued along the trail, making good time. The thief always seemed to place his foot in just the right place for maximum traction. Bushes did not impede his passage. He wondered if his luck would actually put barriers in their quarry’s way and decided that it could not. But it might be enough to keep him out of the Vandaayo’s reach. He wondered if he was also lucky to have found Erminia; she was turning out to be a useful companion.

  He came across another upturned pebble and paused to examine it. The exposed bottom was still wet even though the sun was now well up and the day warming. He said to the woman, “He has slowed down. By now, he thinks the Vandaayo have us and is no longer hurrying.”

  “He struck me as the kind who expects matters to arrange themselves to his convenience,” she said.

  They went quickly but quietly now. The country was more up and down than level and soon they found themselves traversing a ridge. Through the trees, Raffalon saw a flicker of movement ahead. He stopped and peered forward, and in a moment he was sure. “There he is.”

  “He’s long-legged,” Erminia said. “If he hears us coming, he may well outrun us.”<
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  The man took a moment to appreciate that scrubbing pots had not diminished this woman’s ability to focus on what mattered. Meanwhile, he was scanning the woods around them, seeking an opportunity for advantage.

  Ahead of them, the ridge and the trail made a leisurely curve to the right. If, swiftly and silently, he could cut across the bight, he might come out on the track ahead of the sauntering Fulferin.

  “There,” he said, pointing. A tall tree had recently fallen, crashing through what would otherwise have been an impenetrable thicket. They pushed through the bushes, scaled the tree’s exposed root mass, and now they were on a clear, straight course. They ducked low and ran fast.

  The fallen trunk was branchless for a long stretch and when they encountered its first foliage, they dropped down onto an open space carpeted in moss and lichens. It followed what must have once been the course of a spring-fed stream, now dried up, that led through a low tunnel of overarching branches and ended up behind a screen of a single flowered bush, only a few paces from the trail.

  The man and the woman arrived just in time to see knob-kneed Fulferin come striding along at an easy pace. There was no time to plan a strategy. They simply leapt from concealment and threw themselves on their betrayer. Raffalon took him high, and Erminia low, and between them they conclusively toppled the tall man to the ground. By another bit of luck, the thief’s knees landed square on the god stealer’s midriff, driving the air from him in a great whoof.

  Raffalon dug in his wallet and came out with a length of cord. With Erminia’s help, he flipped the recumbent, gasping man over and quickly bound him at wrist and ankle. Then they turned him again so that he was sitting with his back against a bank of earth. The woman tore a strip from Fulferin’s shirt and gagged him well, lest he speak a spell to do them mischief.

  While she was doing this, Raffalon said, “If you had merely abandoned us, I could be more forgiving. But lighting a fire to draw the Vandaayo?” He left the consequences unsaid.