Stealing Into Winter. Graeme Talboys K.

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СКАЧАТЬ on Jeniche, pinning her to the spot. The business of the world seemed suspended.

      When the old man finished, he stepped forward and held out his cupped hands. With an inexplicable sense of relief, Jeniche shrugged. The Tunduri were begging and she had nothing to give. Apart from the basket. She hadn’t bothered to look at the contents when she helped herself. She gestured to it in the doorway and slipped past the monks, hurrying to get away.

      The encounter left her unsettled. The last few days had taken their toll on body and mind. She didn’t understand how she had missed seeing the monks as she entered the alley; didn’t like the idea they had probably seen her transformation from serving girl to lad about town. Worst of all was the way the child had looked at her. Into her. Smiling. Or maybe he was the sort of child that some peoples would abandon in a wild place to let nature reclaim its own. Like the Antari.

      At the top of the alley, she looked back. The Tunduri had gone. Ah well, she thought, nothing there a good meal won’t help to fix. If only the rest of life was that easy.

      ‘Hello, Pennor.’

      Pennor dropped the tray he was carrying, stumbled as he tried to avoid treading on the wooden platters and ended up sprawled on one of his benches. He heaved himself upright, clutching his chest. ‘You little bastard. What you want to creep up on someone like that for?’

      Jeniche grinned and settled herself at a table, close to the kitchen and facing the main door.

      ‘What you doing here?’

      ‘It’s a café, Pennor. I want some food.’

      ‘Not that, you scruff. I heard you was arrested.’

      ‘Oh? And where did you hear that?’

      Pennor frowned. ‘You’re not pinning that on me. You was dragged out of Dillick’s place by four city guards. Made a right mess of his place.’ He smiled. ‘Word gets round quick.’

      ‘That much is true. I hadn’t got my spoon in the bowl before they arrived. Who could get to them that quickly, eh?’

      ‘No good asking me,’ said Pennor, edging past Jeniche into the kitchen doorway. ‘You want to be talking to Dillick.’

      ‘I will be, don’t you worry. But I want to eat first. Without fear of interruption.’ She looked up at Pennor. He gave a sickly smile in return.

      ‘You can trust me.’

      ‘I know. Because I know too much about you.’

      ‘What would you like to eat?’ he asked. ‘On the house.’

      She paid when she left, not wanting to be in debt to Pennor. Besides, it was worth it. He might be all sorts of low life, but Pennor could cook and he kept a clean kitchen.

      Before heading for Dillick’s tavern, Jeniche made a detour into the maze of alleys close to the top of the Old City grandly known as the Jeweller’s Quarter. It was a ramshackle place with dozens of small workshops and safe rooms crowded into the back ways behind the classier shops where jewellery and other items of metalwork were sold.

      The whitesmiths shared it with locksmiths and sword smiths and all manner of artisans who spent their days hunched over their work, making the most of the natural light. The sound of hammers, saws, and files rang over the wheeze of bellows and the conversation and catcalls of the boys who worked them.

      Jeniche had been in two minds about venturing so close to the Old City, but there seemed little evidence there of the invading forces. Thin trails of smoke still rose from the direction of the docks, occasional squads of pale-faced, sweating men in dark uniforms trotted by on business of their own. And that was it.

      She stopped outside one workshop and waited for the crouched figure of Feldar to finish. Long, thin fingers worked with delicate instruments, plaiting gold wire. When the work was done the jeweller looked up. He squinted, refocusing his eyes.

      ‘Well, this is a surprise.’

      ‘You’d heard as well, I take it.’

      A grey, bushy eyebrow was raised. ‘Aren’t you taking a risk?’

      ‘I think the city guard is otherwise occupied, just now.’

      ‘Hmmm.’ Feldar lifted the board on which he had been working from his knees and put it to one side. He unfolded his long, thin frame; joints cracked and Jeniche winced at the sound.

      They went through into the dark, leaving Feldar’s tools and precious metals where they lay. Jeniche had been unable to believe it when she first wandered through the alleys, all that wealth for the taking. And then she had seen what happened to someone who tried, noticing only then that the workshops at the end of the alleys all belonged to blacksmiths.

      The would-be thief had been carried back to the whitesmith’s workshop where he returned the silver ingot he had tried to run away with. And then his fingers had been laid one by one on an anvil and broken with the blade end of a hammer. Jeniche had been standing outside Feldar’s workshop at the time, watching open mouthed and feeling more than a little queasy. There but for the grace of fate…

      ‘Fool,’ Feldar had said. ‘Where,’ he had added with a wink to Jeniche, ‘did he think he was going to sell that silver apart from back to the man he had just stolen it from?’ It had been the beginning of a long, friendly, working relationship, not least because Feldar knew Jeniche had seen what happened if you stepped out of line.

      In the cool interior, they sat in comfortable chairs behind a curtain well away from prying eyes and savoured the lemonade Feldar’s apprentice brought.

      ‘Have you had any trouble here?’ asked Jeniche.

      Feldar shook his head. ‘I don’t understand it. Everyone is edgy, but apart from a few skirmishes, it all seems to…’ His words faltered and he stared at his hands folded in his lap.

      ‘Has the city fallen to the enemy?’

      ‘The Occassans.’

      ‘Occassans? Are you sure?’

      Feldar shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. No one seems to know. There are plenty of rumours but not many hard facts. And few of those I trust. Occassus is so distant it barely seems credible. Tales of the Occassans have always seemed like the distant growl of thunder from a dark horizon.’ He paused for a moment, thinking. ‘The Citadel is badly damaged. That’s certain. Some of the warehouses on the docks are badly burned. That too is certain. And there are, according to some who are in a position to know, a thousand more soldiers in barges on the river.’ He sighed. ‘I just hope the young hotheads in the Old City don’t start thinking they can fight back. Not against these new weapons.’

      Jeniche leaned forward. ‘What new weapons?’

      ‘Have you not seen?’

      ‘No. It was… chaotic down there last night. And I’ve not seen any soldiers up close today.’

      ‘You must have heard them, though. That firecracker sound?’

      ‘I thought that was… well… firecrackers.’

      ‘No. СКАЧАТЬ