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But such as she met did not know it and kept from her path or, sauntering and mocking, still shied from brotherhood cant. Some passwords were a cut throat to use without approval, and thieves out of the Sink taught interlopers bitter lessons.
She paused to rest at the Serpentine of midtown, crouched in the shadows, sweating and hard-breathing dizzy with want of sleep and food. Her belly had passed the point of hurting. She thought. Of a side excursiona bakery's back door, perhapsbut she did not dare the possible hue and cry added to what notoriety she already had. She gathered what strength she had and set out a second time, the way that led to the tinsel shrine and one house that would see its busiest hours in the dark.
Throw it in the canal: she dared not. Once it was gone from her, she had no more bargains left, nothing.
As it was she had a secret valuable and fearful to someone. There comes a time, Genat had told her often enough, when chances have to be takenand taken wide.
It was not Sophonisba's way.
Panting, she reached the red window, rapped at it; there was dim light inside and long delaya male voice, a curse, some drunken converse. Gillian leaned against the wall outside and slowed her breathing wishing by all the gods of Korianth (save one) that Sophonisba would make some haste. She rapped again finally, heart racing as her rashness raised a complaint withinmale voice again. She pressed herself to the wall, heard the drunken voice diminish Sophonisba's now, shrill, bidding someone out. A door opened and closed.
In a moment steps crossed the room and the shutter opened. Gillian showed herself cautiously, stared up into Sophonisba's white face. "Come on out here," Gillian said.
"Get out of here," Sophonisba hissed, with fear stark in her eyes. "Out, or I call the watch. There's money looking for you."
She would have closed the shutters, but Gillian had both hands on the ledge and vaulted up to perch on it; Gillian snatched and caught a loose handful of Sophonisba's unlaced shift. "Don't do that, Sophie. If you bring the watch, we'll both be sorry. You know me. I've got something I've got to get rid of. Get dressed."
"And lose a night's"
"Yes. Lose your nose if you don't hurry about it." She brought out the razor, that small and wicked knife of which Sophonisba was most afraid. She sat polishing it on her knee while Sophonisba sorted into a flurry of skirts. Sophonisba paused once to look; she let the light catch the knife and Sophonisba made greater haste. "Fix your hair," Gillian said.
"Someone's going to come back here to check on me if I don't take my last fee front"
"Then fix it on the way." Steps were headed toward the door. "Haste! Or there'll be bloodletting."
"Get down," Sophonisba groaned. "I'll get rid of her."
Gillian slipped within the room and closed the shutters, stood in the dark against the wall while Sophonisba cracked the door and handed the fee out, heard a gutter dialogue and Sophonisba pleading indisposition. She handed out more money finally, as if she were parting with her life's blood, and closed the door. She looked about with a pained expression. "You owe me, you owe me"
"I'm carrying something dangerous," Gillian said.
"It's being tracked, do you understand? Nessim doesn't like the smell of it."
"O gods."
"Just so. It's trouble, old friend. Priest trouble."
"Then take it to priests."
"Priests expect donations. I've the scent of gold, dear friend. It's rich men pass such things back and forth about things they don't want authority to know about."
"Then throw it in a canal."
"Nessim's advice. But it doesn't take the smell off my hands or answer questions when the trackers catch me upor you, now, old friend."
"What do you want?" Sophonisba moaned. "Gillian, please"
"Do you know," she said softly, reasonably, "if we take this thingwe, dear friendto the wrong party to someone who isn't disposed to reward us, or someone who isn't powerful enough to protect us so effortlessly that protection costs him nothingwho would spend effort protecting a whore and a thief eh, Sophie? But some there are in this city who shed gold like gods shed hair, whose neighborhoods are so well protected others hesitate to meddle in them. Men of birth, Sophie. Men who might like to know who's paying vast sums of gold for favors in this city."
"Don't tell me these things."
"I'll warrant a whore hears a lot of things, Sophie. I'll warrant a whore knows a lot of ways and doors and windows in Korianth, who's where, who has secrets"
"A whore is told a lot of lies. I can't help you."
"But you can, pretty Sophonisba." She held up the razor. "I daresay you know names and sucheven in the king's own hall."
"No!"
"But the king's mad, they say; and who knows what a madman might do? What other names do you know?"
"I don't know anyone, I swear I don't."
"Don't swear; we've gods enough here. We improvise, then, you and I." She flung the shutter open. "Out out with you."
Sophonisba was not adept at ledges. She settled herself on it and hesitated. Gillian thought of pushing her; then, fearing noise, took her hands and lei her down gently, followed after with a soft thud.
Sophonisba stood shivering and tying her laces, the latter unsuccessfully.
"Come on," Gillian said.
"I don't walk the alleys," Sophonisba protested in dread; Gillian pulled her along nonetheless, the back ways of the Grand Serpentine.
They met trouble. It was inevitable. More than once gangs of youths spotted Sophonisba, like dogs a stray cat, and came too close for comfort. Once the cant was not password enough, and they wanted more proof: Gillian showed that she carried, knife-carved in her shoulder, the brotherhood's initiation, and drunk as they were, they had sense to give way for that. It ruffled her pride. She jerked Sophonisba along and said nothing, seething with anger and reckoning she should have cut one. She could have done it and gotten away; but not with Sophonisba.
Sophonisba snuffled quietly, her hand cold as ice.
They took to the main canalside at last, when they must, which was at this hour decently deserted. It was not a place Gillian had been often; she found her way mostly by sense, knowing where the tall, domed buildings should lie. She had seen them most days of her life from the rooftops of the Sink.
The palaces of the great of Korianth were walled, with gardens, and men to watch them. She saw seals now and then that she knew, mythic beasts and demon beasts snarling from the arches over such places.
But one palace there was on the leftside hill, opposed to the great gold dome of the King's Palace, a lonely abode well walled and guarded.
There were guards, gilt-armed guards, with plumes and cloaks and more flash than ever the rufflers of midtown dared sport. Gillian grinned to herself and felt Sophonisba's hand in hers cold and limp from dread of such a place.
She marked with her eye where the guards stood, how they came and went and where the walls and accesses lay, where trees and bushes topped the walls inside and how the wall went to the very edge of the white marble building. The place was defended against armed men, against that sort of threat; againstthe thought cooled her grin and her enthusiasmguilded Assassins and free-lancers; a prince must worry for such things.
No. It was far from easy as it looked. Those easy ways could be set with traps; those places too unguarded could become deadly. She looked for the ways less easy, traced again that too-close wall.
"Walk down the street," she told Sophonisba. "Now. Just walk down the street."
"You're mad."
"Go."
Sophonisba started off, pale figure in blue silks, a disheveled and unlaced figure of ample curves and confused mien. She walked quickly as her fear would urge her, beyond the corner and before the eyes of the guards at the gate.
Gillian stayed long enough to see the sentries' attention wander, then pelted to the wall and carefully with delicate fingers and the balance Genat had taught, spidered her way up the brickwork.
Dogs barked the moment she flung an arm over. She cursed, ran the crest of the thin wall like a trained ape, made the building itself and crept along the masonrytoo much of ornament, my lord! As far as the upper terrace.
Over the rim and onto solid ground, panting. Whatever had become of Sophonisba, she had served her purpose.
Gillian darted for a further terrace. Doors at the far end swung open suddenly; guards ran out in consternation. Gillian grinned at them, arms wide, like a player asking tribute; bowed.
They were not amused, thinking of their hides, surely. She looked up at a ring of pikes, cocked her head to one side and drew a conscious deep breath, making obvious what they should see; that it was no male intruder they had caught.
"Courier," she said, "for Prince Osric."
4
He was not, either, amused.
She stood with a very superfluous pair of men-at-arms gripping her wrists so tightly that the blood left her hands and the bones were about to snap, and the king's bastardand sole surviving sonfingered the pouch they had found in their search of her.
"Courier," he said.
They were not alone with the guards, he and she. A brocaded troop of courtiers and dandies loitered near amongst the porphyry columns and on the steps of the higher floor. He dismissed them with a wave of his hand; several seemed to feel privileged and stayed.
"For whom," the prince asked, "are you a courier?"
"Couriers bring messages," she said. "I decided on my own to bring you this one. I thought you should have it."
"Who are you?"
"A free-lance assassin," she said, promoting herself, and setting Prince Osric back a pace. The guards nearly crushed her wrists; they went beyond pain.
"Jisan," Osric said.
One of the three who had stayed walked forward, and Gillian's spine crawled; she knew the look of trouble, suspected the touch of another brotherhood, more disciplined than her own. "I was ambitious,"
she said at once. "I exaggerate."
"She is none of ours," said the Assassin. A dark man he was, unlike Osric, who was white-blond and thin; this Jisan was from southern climes and not at all flash, a drab shadow in brown and black beside Osric's glitter.
"Your name," said Osric.
"Gillian," she said; and recalling better manners and where she was: "majesty."
"And how come by this?"
"A cutpurse& found this worthless. It fell in the street. But it's some lord's seal."
"No lord's seal. Do you read, guttersnipe?"
"Read, I?" The name rankled; she kept her face calm. "No, lord."
He whisked out a dagger and cut the cords, unfurled the parchment. A frown came at once to his face deepened, and his pale eyes came suddenly up to hers. "Suppose that someone read it to you."
She sucked a thoughtful breath, weighed her life, and Jensy's. "A drunk clerk read itfor a kiss; said it was something he didn't want to know; and I think thensome great lord might want to know it; but which lord, think I? One lord might make good use and another bad, one be grateful and another not might make rightest use of something dangerous might be glad it came here in good loyal hands, and not where it was supposed to go; might take notice of a stir in the lowtown, bully boys looking for that cutpurse to cut throats, armed men and some of them not belonging hereabouts. King's wall's too high majesty, so I came here."
"Whose bravos?" Jisan asked.
She blinked. "Wish I knew that; I'd like to know."
"You're that cutpurse," he said.
"If I were, would I say yes, and if I weren't, would I say yes? But I know that thing's better not in my hands and maybe better here than in the River. A trifle of reward, majesty, and there's no one closer mouthed than I am; a trifle more, majesty, and you've all my talents at hire: no one can outbid a prince not for the likes of me; I know I'm safest to be bribed once and never again."
Osric's white-blue eyes rested on her a very long, very calculating moment. "You're easy to kill. Who would miss you?"
"No one, majesty. No one. But I'm eyes and ears and Korianthine" Her eyes slid to the Assassin. "And I go places where he won't."
The Assassin smiled. His eyes did not. Guild man. He worked by hire and public license.
And sometimes without.
Osric applied his knife to the lead cylinder to gently cut it. "No," Gillian said nervously. And when he looked up, alarmed: "I would not," she said. "I have been advisedthe thing has some ill luck attached."
"Disis," Osric called softly, and handed the cylinder into the hands of an older man, a scholarly man whose courtier's dress was long out of mode. The man's long, lined face contracted at the touch of it in his hand.
"Well advised," that one said. "Silver and leada confining. I would be most careful of that seal majesty; I would indeed."
The prince took the cylinder back, looked at it with a troubled mien, passed it back again. Carefully then he took the purse from his own belt, from beside his dagger. "Your home?" He asked of Gillian.
"Dockside," she said.
"All of it?"
She bit her lip. "Ask at the Anchor," she said, betraying a sometime haunt, but not Sophonisba's, not the Rose either. "All the Sink knows Gillian." And that was true.
"Let her go," Osric bade his guards. Gillian's arms dropped, relief and agony at once. He tossed the purse at her feet, while she was absorbed in her pain. "Come to the garden gate next time. Bring me wordand names."
She bent, gathered the purse with a swollen hand, stood again and gave a shy bow, her heart pounding with the swing of her fortunes. She received a disgusted wave of dismissal, and the guards at her right jerked her elbow and brought her down the hall, the whole troop of them to escort her to the door.
"My knives," she reminded them with a touch of smugness. They returned them and hastened her down the stairs. She did not gape at the splendors about her, but she saw them, every detail. In such a place twenty thousand in gold might be swallowed up. Gillian might be swallowed up, here and now or in the Sink, later. She knew. She reckoned it.
They took her through the garden, past handlers and quivering dogs the size of men, and there at the garden gate they let her go without the mauling she had expected. Princes' favor had power even out of princes' sight, then; from what she had heard of Osric, that was wise of them.
They pitched the little bundle of her skirt at her feet, undone. She snatched that up and flung it jauntily over her shoulder, and stalked off into the alleys that were her element.
She had a touch of conscience for Sophonisba. Likely Sophonisba had disentangled herself by now having lied her way with some small skill out of whatever predicament she had come to, appearing in the high town: forgive me, lord; this lord he brought me here, he did, and turned me out, he did, and I'm lost truly, sir& Sophonisba would wait till safe daylight and find her way home again, to nurse a grudge that money would heal. And she& Gillian was shaking when she finally stopped to assess herself. Her wrists felt maimed, the joints of her hands swollen. She crouched and slipped the knives back where they belonged, earnestly wishing she had had the cheek to ask for food as well. She rolled the skirt and tied it in the accustomed bundle at her belt.
Lastlyfor fear, lastlyshe spilled the sack into her cupped hand, spilled it back again quickly, for the delight and the terror of the flood of gold that glinted in the dim light. She thrust it down her blouse, at once terrified to possess such a thing and anxious until she could find herself in the Sink again, where she had ratholes in plenty. This was not a thing to walk the alleys with.
She sprang up and started moving, alone and free again, and casting furtive and careful glances all directions, most especially behind.
Priests and spells and temple business. Of a sudden it began to sink into her mind precisely what services she had agreed to, to turn spy; Triptis's priests bought whores' babes, or any else that could be stolen.
That was a thief's trade beneath contempt; a trade the brotherhood stamped out where it found it obvious: grieving mothers were a noise, and a desperate one, bad for business. It was that kind of enemy she dealt with.
Find me names, the lord Osric had said, with an Assassin standing on one side and a magician on the other. Suddenly she knew who the old magicker had been: Disis, the prince had called him; Aldisis, more than dabbler in magicspart and parcel of the prince's entourage of discontents, waiting for the mad king to pass the dark gates elsewhere. The prince had had brothers and a sister, and now he had none; now he had only to wait.
Aldisis the opener of paths. His ilk of lesser station sold ill wishes down by the Fish, and some of those worked; Aldisis had skills, it was whispered.
And Jisan cared for those Aldisis missed.
Find me names.
And what might my lord prince do with them? Gillian wondered, without much wondering; and with a sudden chill: What but lives are worth twenty thousand gold? And what but high-born lives?
She had agreed with no such intention; she had priest troubles and hunters on her trail, and she did not need to know their names, not from a great enough distance from Korianth. One desperate chanceto sell the deadly information and gamble it was not Osric himself, to gamble with the highest power she could reach and hope she reached above the plague spot in Korianth& for gold, to get her and Jensy out of reach and out of the city until the danger was past.
Dangerous thoughts nibbled at her resolve, the chance she had been looking for, three years on the street with Jensya chance not only of one purse of gold& but of others. She swore at herself for thinking of it, reminded herself what she was; but there was also what she might be. Double such a purse could support Jensy in a genteel order: learning and fine clothes and fine manners; freedom for herself, to eel herself back dockside and vanish into her own darknesses, gather money, and power& No strange cities for her, nothing but Korianth, where she knew her way, all the low and tangled ways that took a lifetime of living to learn of a cityno starting over elsewhere, to play whore and teach Jensy the like, to get their throats cut in Amisent or Kesirn, trespassing in another territory and another brotherhood.
