Skulduggery Read online

  Chapter 1

  I knelt down to get a better look at the lock and felt my boots squelch into something unpleasant. Could be mud, could be sewage, could even be blood. In a dwarf neighborhood, there was really no way to know for sure.

  “Give me some light,” I said to Dar, but as usual, my halfling friend was zoned out and not paying the slightest attention to the fact that we had a job to do.

  “Hey.” I gave him a sharp elbow, and he startled a bit.

  “Sorry,” Dar said, and he moved the lantern so it illuminated the task at hand.

  And the task at hand was an iron lock set in a rough-hewn door. It was of dwarven construction, but not the best. I was always grateful to the builders who cheaped out on the security features. Made robbing them a lot easier.

  I felt my heart pounding in my chest and a sting at the back of my throat as adrenaline flooded my system. Moments like this were what I lived for. Just me, the lock, and all the goodies on the other side about to be mine for the taking.

  A few scrapes of my lock pick here, a pinch of the springs there, a twist of the tension rod at the right time, and the door swung open for me like I owned the place. The gust of stale air made my eyes water, reeking as it did of old books, old leather, and the acrid spices dwarves smothered everything they ate in.

  “This whole side of town smells like that,” Dar said as he wrinkled his nose. “I once saw a dwarf child put that peppery stuff on his ice cream, my hand to the gods.”

  “Halfling food’s not much better,” I whispered, “unless you like boiled fish.”

  “And who doesn’t?” Dar said as he shook his limbs to loosen up.

  I opened the door a crack, he shimmied in, and his slight, child-sized frame barely brushed the doorframe. I waited as he scoped out the scene in the dark, and I heard his leathery barefooted steps padding around on the stone floor. There was a heart-stopping scrape, but I forced myself to stay calm. Despite his small size, Dar wasn’t the most graceful thief I’d ever lightened purses with.

  Some backstory? All right, I’ll make it quick. Idyllic pastoral childhood. Father’s a woodcutter, mother’s a weaver. Brothers, sisters, pet dog, rides into town on the back of our shaggy old donkey Bill every Sunday, everything’s peachy. Orc army base sets up nearby. Orcs do training exercises. Orcs get drunk during training exercises. Training exercises get out of hand. Orcs eat my whole village. Fire here, screaming there, long ride in the back of a hay cart, and here’s little old Wade, country mouse in the big city.

  Nobody’s hiring orphaned human teenagers for legitimate work, so the Guild takes me in. The Guild teaches me to pick pockets and locks. Now I’m all grown up and owned, wholly and entirely, branded and bound, by one parsimonious old conman of a halfling named Hagan. He doesn’t like me much, so when he has a very stupid and dangerous idea, as he often does, it’s me, his most expendable employee, who pulls the short straw more often than not. This job was easy, but the next one, man. The next one might be the one that finally does me in.

  A window above my head swung open, and Dar’s curly head popped out.

  “All clear!” he chirped. “I told you, no dwarf shopkeeper ever stayed at his post past sundown. It puts him at too much risk of having to provide customer service.”

  I signaled for Dar to keep quiet and let myself in. The door opened into a small, shabby storeroom. Dusty shelves glinted with cheap brass serving dishes and costume jewelry, a sop for any smash-and-grab jobber who might take a jaunt down this alley after scalding his tongue at one of the dwarven restaurants along the main road. I didn’t give any of that cheap tat a second glance. Dar and I weren’t here to find a few pennies’ worth of junk to fence. If we were, there were plenty of jewelry shops in the neighborhood that were no less vulnerable to a lockpick of my skills.

  No, I was here for something the old dwarf didn’t put out on public view.

  “Remind me again why you’re certain this is the place?” I asked Dar.

  I’d checked every display case in the main room, but none of them held more than the ceremonial daggers, ceremonial spoons, and ceremonial cups the store advertised in the front window. If I were looking to throw a dwarf wedding, I’d be all set, but that wasn’t why I was here. I ran my fingers along the bottom of a jewelry case and looked for a hidden switch that might make the whole thing flip over dramatically, revealing … well, I wasn’t actually sure. I’d never seen a magical artifact before, and despite all his talk, I was pretty sure Dar hadn’t either.

  Dar raised his lantern to his face, so I could see him rolling his eyes.

  “My cousin Fenir saw the old dwarf who runs this shop haggling over a pair of dragon-hide gloves at the night market last month,” he said.

  “So?” I asked.

  “Putting on dragon-hide’s easy enough, but when you take it off, it takes half your skin off with it,” he replied and gave me another eye roll.

  “Dar, we don’t have a lot of time,” I groused, “so trust me that I really mean it when I say it this time: so?”

  “So, I don’t care how tough you are,” the halfling went on, “the only reason you’d catch me putting on a pair of gloves like that was if I was touching something that’d do me a lot worse harm than dragon-hide. If I was touching something magic, you see?”

  Dar continued, telling me gruesome stories he heard from his cousin’s sister’s barber’s brother about all the harmless-looking magical whatnots littering the landscape that would curse you if you so much as laid a finger on them, but my attention was drawn to something else. A very ordinary looking door, the usual shopkeeper’s office sort, carved with the hours of operation, threats of death by torture for shoplifters, and a few lines of that interminable epic poetry dwarves loved to paint on walls and stitch onto pillows, always something about hammers and smashing, and then smashing with more hammers.

  But crammed in among all that … a lock.

  And not some blacksmith’s two-for-one special like the piece of shit I unlocked with a snap of my fingers out in the alley, either. A real, premium, brand-new elven lock, brass gleaming like gold, not a scratch on it.

  It seemed a shame nobody’d even tried to pick it yet.

  This wasn’t the kind of lock you’d waste on an office. Even if the old dwarf was cooking the books, and they were always cooking the books, this lock had to represent at least a year’s income for a grubby old secondhand shop like this. That is, a year’s legitimate income.

  There was something expensive hidden here.

  My fingers twitched, and I set to work.

  Here’s the thing about shiny objects, especially shiny security features. They did most of their work just by looking good, assuming nobody would have the balls to touch them. “Oh ho, look at this pricey lock,” the elves figure will say. “No simple thief such as I could possibly defeat such a masterpiece of craftsmanship.”

  A hammer would have gotten the job done in half a second, but despite Dar’s constant chatter, I was still holding out hope we might help ourselves to the inventory without the old dwarf noticing anything was amiss right away. And of course, hammers weren’t exactly instruments of stealth. If I lifted a few ordinary knick-knacks, I might not get more than a few days in the clink, but to be caught stealing magical artifacts, well, that was certain death.

  And I heard they didn’t make it a quick one.

  Then again, a skilled lockpicking job pointed to the Thief’s Guild without question. No picker worth his salt worked solo. The risks were too great. The Guild’s generous and consistent application of bribes had kept me out of a prison cell more than once. Of course, in exchange I had to take whatever job the Guild gave me, which lately was mostly dead-boring pickpocketing runs a child could do. Getting to do some actual proper skulldug
gery was a rare thrill.

  With that in mind, professional pride won out, and I worked the lock open while leaving it as pristine as the day it was made. Good locks were easier to pick, in some ways. Everything did exactly what it was supposed to, as easy as a handshake.

  The door swung open silently and gave way to a genteel, wood-paneled room with thick carpeting and furniture much more graceful than I’d expected a dwarf to choose. This was for the VIP customers, and they weren’t all dwarves, I wagered.

  There was a strange quality to the air, something I’d never felt before. It wasn’t a smell, exactly, but something that raised up all the hairs on the back of my neck, like the way it felt to be out in an open field right before a thunderstorm rolled in. The feeling of realizing that, if lightning were to strike, it’d have nothing to strike but my thieving ass.

  The dragon-hide gloves were folded neatly on the wide mahogany desk next to a jeweler’s loupe and an array of variously-sized tongs and tweezers. There were a few scorch marks on the felt blotting pad, but I reminded myself that wasn’t necessarily from magic mishaps. Every dwarf I’d ever known smoked like a chimney, women and children, too. Although I didn’t see an ashtray anywhere.

  For all the formidability of the lock, the old dwarf shopkeeper certainly didn’t make any secret about his trade. All four walls of the windowless room were lined, floor to ceiling, with shelves, and every shelf was jam-packed with artifacts. There were jars stuffed with severed toes, some human, I noticed with a shudder, and eyeballs floating in brine like pickled eggs. In one corner, an entire phoenix, stuffed and mounted, rained faintly smoldering feathers down into a large silver dish. A kelpie leg sat under glass with a matching set of fine, ivory-handled carving knives at the ready. It seemed the old dwarf was something of a gourmand.

  I was perilously close to snatching a lovely little locket that hovered an inch or so above its velvet storage box when an otherworldly voice boomed out at me.

  “What is your heart’s desire?”

  It damn near made me jump out of my skin, and I whipped my head around and saw a man’s face leering at me from the doorway. But no, I’d closed the door. I realized this was a mirror.

  Only it wasn’t my face in the reflection.

  “Holy hell, Wade, I thought you said to keep quiet.” Dar barreled through the door, none too quiet himself.

  I swore I saw the man in the mirror wince as he went slamming toward the wall. Then I shushed Dar and closed the door again gently. “That wasn’t me.”

  The man in the mirror regained his composure. Now that I had a good look at him, he was ordinary enough, except for the mirror part. Human looking, bald head, flowing robes, billowing clouds of smoke behind him. I couldn’t see his feet, if he had any.

  “Ah!” the man in the mirror perked up when he saw Dar. “Good sir, I was just speaking with your manservant.”

  Dar shot me a scandalized look and turned bright red, but I was used to it. This city was a ladder. Halflings were on one rung and humans were on another lower one.

  I wondered where mirrors fell in the rankings.

  “What is your heart’s desire?” the mirror continued as he spread his silvery arms and gestured to the room around us. “Love spells? No, surely not for a young, strapping man such as yourself. Perhaps this?”

  The mirror man snapped his fingers, summoned a small wooden box from one of the nearby shelves, and sent it to hover in front of us. That was a neat trick. The box popped open and a deck of cards shuffled themselves before landing in Dar’s open hand.

  “Never lose a game of cards again,” the mirror boasted. “The deck is fully customizable, altering the style and suit to match any of those used in the finest gaming houses anywhere on the continent.”

  Seeing Dar’s expression, the mirror man shrugged and sent the cards back to their place on the shelf with a snap. “No? Maybe something more exotic. We have a unicorn blood tonic, fresh in from the Southern Isles. Very invigorating.”

  I was getting tired of this, so I figured it was time to move things along.

  “We’re looking for an invisibility cloak,” I said.

  The mirror looked at us blankly. “A what?”

  “A cloak you put on and it turns you invisible,” Dar said.

  The mirror laughed, an unearthly sound like a glass flute. “There’s no such thing.”

  Damn.

  I’d have to have a word with the man who wrote plays for the puppet theater that came around to my village when I was growing up. Sir Gallant always had an invisibility cloak at the ready, the perfect tool for sneaking past sleeping dragons and spying on ladies brushing their long golden hair by placid silver ponds. Did that mean his talking sword was made up, too? I’d spent the day thinking up anything that might help with the next job, the one everyone assured me I’d need magic to pull off. To be completely honest, I didn’t like the idea of relying on anything but my own two hands, but I didn’t like the idea of suicide missions much either.

  Dar pressed on. “An invisibility hat or invisibility jacket would work fine too. Just anything that turns you invisible.”

  “Temporarily invisible,” I clarified.

  “Yeah,” said Dar as he waved his hands over his chest like a street magician, “definitely some sort of removable invisibility, something we can turn on and off.”

  This particular suicide attempt for which we were preparing came in the form of an assault on the impregnable fortress that was the elven royal warehouses. They kept many novel weapons there, as well as cartloads of delicious food, fine silks, priceless jewels, pretty much anything those blue-blooded, pointy-eared devils liked to wallow around in while the rest of us worked for a dishonest living all day.

  But did Hagan want any of those highly in-demand, easily fenced goods? No, Hagan liked to make things complicated. Hagan wanted me to steal the one thing I’d get the chop for so much as looking at sideways. And I didn’t mean a hand. Many a gentleman thief found himself needing his shirtsleeves tailored after a long con runs short on luck. No, this would be the big chop, the one with a very strong chance of messing up my hair. But not to worry, Hagan said, any boy of his who gets the death penalty can have a half day off to attend his trial.

  I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to the debate with the mirror. Dar was cocking this all up.

  “No,” the halfling was saying, “I was told in a dream I must seek an enchantment in this very place, to fulfil my family’s destiny of--”

  “Regardless, good sir,” the mirror interrupted, “invisibility charms do not exist.”

  “Then how come the lady in the lake told my fairy godmother about them?” Dar implored as he refused to give up the game.

  Dar always made up cover stories that were much too elaborate, too many rambling details. If a mirror could look skeptical, this is what it would look like, I imagined, so I cleared my throat so I could try another approach.

  “If I may, my lord,” I said, and Dar suppressed a giggle. “We may as well tell this fine shopkeep … mirror… the truth, embarrassing though it may be.”

  I turned to the mirror, took upon myself the kind of diffident stance I’d seen human servants use as they trailed behind their masters, and then gestured to Dar. “My lord’s heart’s desire lies behind a door that cannot be opened. It is a challenge, issued by a maiden, to prove his heart is true.”

  It was a lie, of course, but this mirror man seemed a little too trusting.

  “Ah!” the mirror perked up. “To win the lady’s favor, you must solve the puzzle! Quite common, quite common. I assume you’ve done the usual checks for qualities of sentience in the door, answered any riddles it posed, and so on?”

  “Quite,” said Dar, and I watched him puff himself up as he began to lean into his new role. “I have effected all the usual strategies, but to no avail. I’m sure you understand.”

  The mirror tapped a wispy hand on its ethereal chin, deep in thought.

  My mind went to the time
again. We’d been here a lot longer than I intended, and the night watchmen would be making their rounds sooner or later. My hobby of staying out of jail depended heavily on me not being in places like this at times like that.

  The mirror snapped his fingers again and summoned a large wooden chest, the sort ship captains kept their crews’ wages in. I’d liberated a few in my time, and I knew how heavy they were, so I wondered exactly how much the mirror’s magic could lift.

  “Sometimes, my lord, the answer is quite simple.” The man in the mirror snapped his fingers again, and the chest flew open to reveal dozens, maybe hundreds of keys.

  Ordinary, non-magical looking, iron keys.

  “Keys?” Dar squeaked with dismay, but then he caught himself. “Good mirror, sir, if this door takes a key it would be a very particular one, very special.”

  “Special is as special does, my lord,” said the mirror, and I was beginning to get irritated with his big smug face. “Reach in, see if something suits you.”

  Dar shot a wary look at the dragon-hide gloves, but it was hard to believe he needed them. Even floating, keys were just keys. He reached a cautious hand in and rummaged around, then looked at me and shrugged.

  “They all feel the same to me,” he said.

  The mirror bobbed its head, as if to shrug. “Any key you require will be in there.”

  I moved to dig my hands into the chest, but then I caught myself. “Uh, if I may take the liberty, my lord.”

  Dar nodded in imperious assent and ran a handkerchief over his hands, as if he could wipe off any curse the keys might have transferred to him.

  Iron. Cold, rusty iron, and that was all. The more I shuffled the keys around, the more I smelled the salt and rotten wood of the chest. It smelled like it had been dredged out of a shipwreck where every soul was lost. It smelled like the captain had died clutching it in his arms, honestly.

  Maybe it was a particular shape I was looking for. What would an elven key be shaped like? Probably one of their pointy noses. They sure weren’t shy about putting them on all their coins. One of the few things I liked about dwarf-town was that elven money didn’t spend there. Elves may force dwarves to build anything they asked for, but they had to pay in good old-fashioned gemstones to do it. Convenient for a thief like me, since gems were impossible to trace, and I respected the sheer stubbornness of it.