Free The Box by Unknown Page A

parlor.
    “Would you answer that damn door already?” Aeventius spoke without looking up from the box, and Kostin, noting the banging downstairs for the first time, tore his attention away from Taldara. No, he did not run a harrow parlor, but he did run that most ubiquitous of Varisian institutions: the odds and ends shop. Among the citified Varisians who, like Kostin’s father, had given up their wandering to settle throughout the Shore District of Magnimar, the small import-export emporiums like Dalakcz Durables of Callowcaulk Street, Beacon’s Point, were a profitable link between the inland caravans and the sea.
    Of course, such businesses had proven even more lucrative as fronts and fences for stolen goods, and if Kostin’s father could see what had become of his once above-board shop, he would no doubt spit curses enough to make an Ulfen blush.
    The banging three stories down had changed—it now sounded more like someone trying to smash down the door. Kostin could feel the vibrations through the floor with each blow.
    “Probably some dumb drunk stevedore looking for the Whale’s Belly,” he growled, kicking his way toward the street-side windows through the detritus of the loft; a clutter of unsaleable items like a litterbin for all Golarion. Forcing open a window, Kostin leaned out. “Two blocks shoreward, you souse!”
    The pane above him shattered before Kostin even registered the crossbow-armed thugs arrayed in the street below. He ducked back inside, collapsing to the floor and upsetting a standing shelf full of brass fittings and tarnished silverware. Another thunk drew his attention to the ceiling, where a second crossbow bolt buried itself a hand’s breadth away from the first.
    There must have been fifteen of them out there, that damn Shoanti gutter-gang bristling with weapons and painted for war.
    Downstairs the door crashed in with a splintering final boom.
    “New friends, or old?” Aeventius asked, stretching to his full height and cracking his knuckles. Taldara had rushed to Kostin’s side, checking him for injuries. Her badger hissed eerily, bristling in agitation as it clung to her shoulder with curled nails the length of a man’s fingers. Until that moment it had seemed a mere cute pet to Kostin, with its black-and-white face and bumbling demeanor—now it seemed about as cuddly as a war dog.
    Kostin scrambled to his feet, glass crunching beneath his boots. The sounds of destruction rose muffled from the first floor. The shop was being trashed. “New,” he said in answer to the wizard’s question. “A dozen or more. But I never crossed any Shoanti. “
    Aeventius tapped a finger on the polished lid of the stolen box. “I do not believe in coincidence.”
    Kostin shook his head as he strapped on his sword belt. It sounded as if a cavalry squadron maneuvered downstairs—or a single, epileptic giant flailed about in destructive seizure. “Not these guys. Small-time thugs running low-level stuff between the Point and Rag’s End. A real headache for the Sczarni, but not someone like me. If anyone would be looking for the box, I’d expect the Scales, or one of the Shadow bosses. These guys are street trash.”
    “Sounds like the ‘street trash’ have just reached the second floor,” Taldara said, drawing a long knife from beneath her jacket.
    Aeventius, stooping low under the slanted ceiling at the far end of the room, was already peering out the alley-side windows. “Seems clear. Difficult to tell.”
    Leaning with one ear pressed against the attic’s only door and listening to the intruders’ chaos, Kostin uttered a string of fluent Varisian under his breath. “We could fight…”
    “Don’t be a fool,” countered the wizard.
    “It’s my home, Aevy,” said Kostin.
    “It is our lives I am thinking of,” Aeventius said, raising the window and once again inspecting the street. “And I told you never to call me that.”
    “He’s right,” Taldara agreed. Pulling Kostin