Free The Fly Guild by Todd Shryock Page A

two bags.
    Red eye snatched the bags out of
Huck’s hands. He opened Huck’s first and scowled, dumping the contents on a
table inside the door. It was covered with a similar collection of coins,
foodstuffs, a wineskin, a small barrel of beer and some personal items like
clothes, combs and quills. He opened the second bag and his eyes went wide for
a second, and he almost smiled before composing himself and returning the blank
expression to his face.
    “Who’s responsible for this?” he
asked, his voice barely audible.
    “He is,” said Quinton, pointing to
Huck.
    Red eye looked at Huck who said, “We
worked together to get this, master.”
    Red eye nodded. “Go to dinner now.”
He carried the bag with the piglet in it at his side and disappeared through
another door.
    “Guess that’s the only thanks we
get,” said Huck with a smile. “Come on, let’s eat.”
    Dinner proved to be not a whole lot
better than breakfast. There were a few pieces of meat that were mostly
gristle, a broth of some sort and some wormy bread. Foul taste didn’t stop
Quinton from wolfing every bite. He had lived on the streets too long and been
hungry far too many times to be concerned about the quality. The boys ate with
the other maggots in the same nondescript room where they had breakfast. He
looked around for Teli but didn’t see him, though there were a number of the
boys missing and he suspected they were already done and had gone somewhere
else.
    “What happens now?” Quinton asked
Huck, who was chewing a particularly tough piece of meat.
    “Drawing lessons,” he said between
chews, the words barely understandable.
    Quinton got a puzzled look on his
face. “Why do we need to learn to draw?”
    Huck smiled and kept chewing. “No,
idiot, we draw lessons. There’s a pot with some numbers in it. You draw one to
see which lesson you go to. You study under a master for a while, then it’s
back to work.”
    “Back to work?”
    Huck kept chewing and nodded. “Back
to work. More stealing. This time only money or good stuff. We’ll be stalking
people and picking pockets mostly. Do you want to work together again? I think
you’re good luck.”
    Quinton shrugged. “Sure. Don’t know
much about pickin’ pockets, though.”
    Huck finally gave up chewing and
swallowed the difficult chunk of meat and smiled. “That’s okay, most of the
people are so drunk it’s not too hard. But you do have to be careful, ‘cause
some of them are armed and will run you through if they catch you.”
    The boys put their empty bowls on
the table at the front of the room and headed out into the main hallway. Huck
led them through one of the doors, which led to another hallway with more
doors.
    “This place is very confusing,”
said Quinton.
    “It’s meant to be. If someone ever
attacked us or tried to break in, their confusion would give us time to make
good our escape.”
    “Attack us?” Quinton asked as he
followed Huck through one of the doors, trying to make a note to himself which
one it was so he could find it again.
    “Yeah, attack us. You know, rival
gangs, city guards, pirates, Orcs, who knows.”
    “Has anyone every attacked us
before?”
    “Not since I’ve been here, but
that’s only been a couple of years now. Fist has the other gangs on the run,
and some of them have been destroyed. I guess before I came here, things were
really rough. Lots of fights and people getting stabbed in the streets and
stuff like that. Nasty business. But the Fly Guild now pretty much controls
everything.”
    “Except the walled part of the
city,” Quinton added.
    “Hey, I guess the lord should get
to control somethin’, shouldn’t he?”
    Huck walked up to a large pot that
was sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the room. He reached in and drew a
number. “Five. That’s stalking. Not too bad. Now you draw one.”
    Quinton reached his hand in and
drew out a small wooden coin with the number eight on it.
    “Eight, that’s languages.