Free The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch Page A

on the boat.… I hid it. Loosened a floorboard under the bed.”
    “I know you did. I unloosened it. Took it back.”
    “You eel! I wanted you to have something to get away with when you—”
    “I knew you’d try it, Locke. There weren’t many hiding places available within stumbling distance of the bed.”
    “Argh!”
    “Argh, yourself.” Jean heaved himself over on his back and stared at the ceiling, breathing shallowly. Nothing felt broken, but his ribs and everything attached to them were lined up to file complaints. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll go out and find some blankets for you. I can get a cart. Maybe a boat. Get you out of here somehow, before the dawn. We’ve got a lot of darkness to use.”
    “Jean, you’ll be watched until you leave. They’re not going to let you”—Locke coughed several times—“steal anything big. And I’m not going to let you carry me.”
    “Not let me carry you? What are you going to fend me off with, sarcasm?”
    “You should have had a few thousand solari to work with, Jean. Could have gone anywhere … done anything with it.”
    “I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. Now, you go with me. Or I stay here to die with you.”
    “There’s no reasoning with you.”
    “You’re such a paragon of compromise yourself. Pig-brained gods-damned egotist.”
    “This isn’t a fair contest. You have more energy for big words than I do.” Locke laughed. “Gods, look at us. Can you believe they even took our firewood?”
    “Very little surprises me these days.” Jean slowly stood up, wincing all the way. “So, inventory. No money. Clothes on our backs. Mostly
my
back. Some weapons. No firewood. Since I doubt we’ll be allowed to lift anything in the city, looks like I’ll have to do some highway work.”
    “How do you plan on halting carriages?”
    “I’ll throw you in the road and hope they stop.”
    “Criminal genius. Will they be stopping out of heartfelt sympathy?”
    “Revulsion, more likely.”
    There was a knock at the front door.
    Locke and Jean glanced at one another uneasily, and Jean picked up a dagger from the small pile of weapons that had been left to him.
    “Maybe they’re back for the bed,” said Locke.
    “Why would
they
bother knocking?”
    Jean kept most of his body behind the door as he opened it, and he tucked the dagger just out of sight behind his back.
    It wasn’t Cortessa, or a dog-leech, or even the master of the Villa Suvela, as Jean had expected. It was a woman, dressed in a richly embroidered oilcloak streaming with water. She held an alchemical globe in her hands, and by its pale light Jean could see that she was not young.
    Jean scanned the curb behind her. No carriage, no litter, no escort of any sort—just misty darkness and the patter of the rain. A local? A fellow guest of the Villa Suvela?
    “I, uh … can I be of assistance, madam?”
    “I believe we can be of assistance to one another. If I might come in?” She had a soft and lovely voice, with something very close to a Lashani accent. Close, but not exact.
    “We are … that is, I’m sorry, but we have some difficulty at the moment. My friend is ill.”
    “I know they took your furniture.”
    “You do?”
    “And I know that you and your friend didn’t have much else to begin with.”
    “Madam, you seem to have me at a disadvantage.”
    “And you seem to have me out in the rain.”
    “Um.” Jean shuffled the dagger and made it vanish up his tunic sleeve. “Well, my friend, as I said, is gravely ill. You should be aware—”
    “I don’t mind.” She entered the instant Jean’s resolution wavered, and gracefully got out of the way as he closed the door behind her. “After all, poison is only contagious at dinner parties.”
    “How the hell … are you a physiker?”
    “Hardly.”
    “Are you with Cortessa?”
    The woman only laughed at that, and threw back the hood of her oilcloak. She was about fifty, the well-tended sort of fifty that only