Chapter Fifteen

 

 

He was waiting, again. Sometimes, Rion thought it was all he ever did, all anyone ever did. If things were bad, they waited for them to get better. If they were good, they waited for them to go sideways—which they inevitably did. It was all a question of waiting. After all, what was life, in the end, but a long—or sometimes not so long—wait for death?

Damn, but you’re a miserable bastard to be around, he said to himself.

Yes, he agreed, taking another long pull from his ale before setting it back down on the tavern’s table. Yes, I am.

But if he was a miserable bastard, at least he’d come by it honestly. After all, there didn’t seem to be much to be happy about, not just now.

He glanced around the tavern common room. It was packed with people, men and women drinking with undisguised—and unsurprising—abandon. Not that Rion could blame them. If anything was likely to drive a man to drink, he supposed being threatened by an army of nightlings and worshippers of the Dark would do nicely. Normally, such a tavern would have been filled with laughter or music, likely punctuated by the sounds of someone getting their nose broken in one of the fights common in such establishments. Now though, what little conversation there was—as most had chosen to sit and silently get drunk—was had in whispers with glances around as if the nightlings might pop up at any moment. Rion decided that if he was a miserable bastard, he certainly wasn’t the only one. None of the other tavern customers looked in danger of breaking into song and dance anytime soon either.

“Sorry, I’m late.”

Rion jumped at the sound of the voice and turned to find Sigan standing before him, though how the big bastard had reached the table without Rion seeing him was a mystery. “Oh, no problem,” he said sarcastically, “I’ve just been enjoying the liveliness of the place.”

Sigan gave him a cold smile—the only one of which the man seemed capable. “I’m sure.”

“Well?” Rion asked. “Sit down, why don’t you? Can’t say I love you looming over me like that. I’ve had nightmares that started this way.”

Sigan snorted then glanced around the tavern, and for the first time Rion noticed the complete silence that had fallen over the common room at the crime boss’s entrance as everyone stopped to watch the big man. “Out,” Sigan said, motioning to the door with a thumb.

Here, in the poor district, there were few men or women who didn’t know the crime boss on sight, and none who hadn’t heard of him, so Rion wasn’t very surprised when the thirty or so people in the common room rose and left, shooting worried glances at Sigan far more pronounced than the ones they’d been showing moments before. That too, wasn’t surprising. After all, nightlings were scary, were an otherworldly threat, but they weren’t here, and the crime boss was a danger all his own. Rion was a bit surprised, however, to see the bartender—also the tavern’s proprietor—follow them out, but not overly much.

Rion grunted, turning back to the crime boss as the last few filed out. “You must be a blast at parties.”

“Sure,” the crime boss agreed. “I kill.”

The man’s expression remained unchanged, so it was impossible to tell if he was joking. “So uh…what news? About Ed?”

Sigan relaxed in the chair opposite him, propping his feet on the table as if he owned the place. Which, judging by the barkeeper’s willingness to flee with the others, Rion thought he probably did. “Oh, plenty. Once that little bastard started talking, it was all we could do to get him to shut up.” He shook his head. “The things that bastard’s done…I never would have imagined it, not lookin’ so…ordinary as he does.”

“Well,” Rion said, “not all of us can have wicked scars on our necks and be as big as some people’s houses, I suppose.”

“True,” Sigan agreed, either not hearing or not caring about the sarcasm in Rion’s tone which was probably just as well—as far as Rion was concerned, there were plenty enough things trying to kill him just now without adding a pissed-off crime boss to the bargain.

“So,” Rion said, “did you bring a list? As much as I enjoy our conversations, there are a lot of pressing matters—”

“No need for a list.”

Rion frowned. “But you said—”

“It’s been taken care of,” Sigan interrupted.

Rion coughed. He thought he probably knew what the crime boss meant by that but judged it best to make sure. “You mean…”

“Those he named won’t be a problem,” Sigan said, “not anymore.” He leaned forward, his arms on the table, and as he did one of the sleeves of his tunic slid up enough to reveal a bandage wrapped around his bicep.

“You’re sure?”

“I saw to the matter personally,” Sigan said. “Like you said, figured there were plenty other pressin’ matters needed seein’ to.”

Judging by his bandaged arm, Rion thought he could take the man at his word. Not that he really had any choice. The whole reason he’d asked the crime boss for help in the first place was that the castle couldn’t spare any guards or troops to hunt down leads, all of them already busy preparing to defend the city and all that.

“Well,” Rion said, surprised. “Thanks.”

Sigan shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

Said like he was a wainwright fixing a customer’s axle on their wagon or a blacksmith hammering horseshoes into shape, but he was neither of those things. Smiths smithed, clerks clerked, and killers, well…

“Still,” Rion said, “I appreciate it.”

“Anything else the city needs?” Sigan asked.

While Rion couldn’t fault the man’s efficiency in getting the task done, he was decidedly uncomfortable with the casual way in which he discussed it, and he cleared his throat, wiping a hand across his suddenly sweating forehead. “Not that I know of, but I’ll be sure to let you know if somebody needs stabbing.”

“You do that,” Sigan said with a wink, levering his bulk out of the chair. Rion watched him leave, deciding that, sometimes, the cure might well be worse than the disease.

The men and women who’d occupied the tavern’s common room began to filter back in moments after the crime boss left, glancing at Rion with vague looks of surprise as if they’d expected to find him dead. In truth, he couldn’t blame them—anytime he dealt with the crime boss, he always accepted a terrible death as a possibility.

He sat for a moment, taking slow deep breaths and doing his best to ignore the stares of the others, then he ordered another ale. After dealing with the crime boss, he thought he’d earned it.

 

***

 

Weary and more than a little drunk, Rion finally found his way to his quarters in the castle and staggered inside, pushing the door closed behind him. He removed his cloak and hung it in the large wooden wardrobe sitting against one wall. At least, he meant to. Instead, the cloak—sodden with rain or ale, possibly both—fell into a wet pile on the floor, and he decided he was too tired and far too drunk to care.

Blinking to clear his ale-blurred vision, he stumbled to the bed and began removing the knives he always kept secreted about his person, placing one then the other on the bed with deliberate care, reasoning that it would be a damn shame to accidentally slice his wrist open after surviving another run in with the crime boss.

When that was done, he knelt, retrieving the sack he’d hidden beneath the bed, and pulling out the thick leather roll where he kept his knives. He unfastened the latch that held it together and opened it, laying it on the bed. He planned to put his blades back before trying—and likely failing—to get some much-needed sleep. A plan that went out the window in a moment when his gaze locked on an empty space, one that should not have been empty.

Rion knew his knives well, for they had saved him on more than one occasion, so he knew immediately that one was missing, and precisely which one it was. A chill ran up his spine as he gazed at that empty leather loop. You’re drunk, he reasoned. You just forgot you took it, that’s all.

The problem was that, while he was drunk, he wasn’t anywhere near enough drunk to forget something like that. Still, hoping against hope, he returned each blade to its proper place, willing himself to be wrong.

When he was finished, the empty place still remained. There could be no denying it, not now. Someone had been in his rooms and taken one of his blades. He made a quick search of his quarters to see if anything else was missing but, in the end, found that whoever had taken the blade had taken it and it alone, save for some flint and steel.

What was even stranger—and more worrying—was that none of the sacks of coins he’d secreted about the room had been touched. That, coupled with the fact that several of the blades still in the leather satchel would have sold for far more than the one which had been taken meant that whoever had stolen the knife hadn’t been after money. And why would a person steal a knife if not to sell it and make a bit of coin? Drunk or not, the answer to that, unfortunately, seemed far too obvious. Knives could sell for some fair coin, sure, but then, they could also stab people.

Had it been some member of the castle cleaning staff who’d stumbled on the knives? Perhaps such a person might have known nothing about the value of the blade, might have decided Rion wouldn’t miss a single knife, where as he would definitely notice missing coin pouches. It was possible, but though he wanted to believe it, he found that he couldn’t.

A missing knife was a small thing, maybe, when they had plenty of big things to think about, but he didn’t like it. After all, a knife was a pretty small thing, relatively speaking, but plenty of folks had been killed with them just the same.