“This ain’t no problem, Gorthis, I swear to you it ain’t.” She bent and dived after the lump in the middle of the laundry, held it up in both her hands, because that was what it took. “This here’s gold. Gorthis. You don’t got to fence it, you don’t got to tell anybody, you just use it and gimme an account here-look, look-” She set down the clay-covered lump and stripped off her headscarf, shaking out blonde curls the sort that Moria of the streets never had had. “It’s still Moria,” she said in purest Rankene accents, “But I’ve come up in the world, Gorthis, Ipass, and I need the money. Do me this favor and I won’t forget it when I’m back in society.”
“Magery,” Gorthis breathed, wide-eyed. “You been witched.”
“Expensive magery. And it lasts.” She picked up the lump and held it toward him. “Lift it. It’s a lot of gold. A lot of gold, Gorthis. No plated rock, you can test it. You’ll have it. Like I said, all you have to do is pay me out a little at a time, in silver I can spend without answering questions.”
“Shalpa and Shipri.” Gorthis drew out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “They said it was you uptown. They said it was you, Mor-am come in here-trying to pawn this knife, fie said you’d gone uptown.”
“Where is my brother?” She did not want to know, she truly did not want to know. He was still Ischade’s creature. He must always be, or suffer in terrible pain. But not to know whether he was living or deadthat uncertainty she could not bear.
“Ain’t seen him since. I got no idea. Lemme see that thing.”
She handed it to him. He hefted it.
“Damn-” he said.
“Told you, that’s no rock inside.”
He took it over to a work counter, through a barred gateway to a table where a barred shutter gave a little light. She followed, anxious, biting her lip as he brought the lump down hard on the table and shattered the clay around it.
Yellow gold shone in the light, veined with lines of soot.
“This’s melted stuff,” he said.
“It’s not stolen.” That was half a lie. She clenched her hands together. “It came from friends. They died in the riots. But I haven’t got a place to melt it down. I know you’re honest, Gorthis, you always were. You take your old cut, same as you always did, and you pay me out little at a time, isn’t that fair?”
“Wait here. I got to get something.” Gorthis hurried back past her to the cage door and through it.
He slammed it shut, and Moria stared at him open-mouthed in shock. But Gorthis was a little crazy about security. He always had been. She was willing to think it was that.
Until he turned the key and took it.
“It’s my damned gold, Gorthis, I’m not going to steal it!”
“You ain’t going nowhere,” Gorthis said, and went and pulled on the cord that rang a bell somewhere way up on the roof, a thief-bell, that called the watch.
“What are you doing?” she yelled at him. She shook the bars of the gate, hopeless, because Gorthis’s locks were always sound. “Gorthis, have you lost your mind?”
“I’m respectable,” Gorthis said. “I been respectable ever since the Troubles started. I ain’t getting into it any more, I got too many uptown clients.” Another series of tugs at the bell rope. “Sorry, girl. Truly I am.”
“I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them who you are!”
“Who are they going to believe, huh, girl, when I turn over you an’ that great lump of gold to the watch? No, missy, this is going to be better fer me than fer you. I prove to ’em I changed my ways, that’s what this’ll do.”
“I have friends uptown.”
“No, you don’t. I know what yow friends are, girl, the neighbors done talked, the neighbors what got burned out around Peres, uptown. They got a warrant out fer you, hiring mages and all, arson and murder-you know the law doesn’t come down on mages, ain’t no way the watch is going to arrest them. now, is they? But them as hires ’em, now, they’re responsible, ain’t they? You go burning the whole town down, come in here with a lump of witched gold-”
“It ain’t witched!”
“It come from the burnin’! Ever’thing up there’s witched! And I ain’t makin’ no jewelry out of it and sellin’ it to my clients’ You’re goin’ to the watch, girl, an’ you can explain to your neighbors ‘fore the magistrate what you done up there on the hill, / ain’tl”
“Let me out of here! Damn you, damn you, I got friends, Gorthis, I got friends’H fry your insides, you damned snitch! I got wizard friends!”
“No way,” Gorthis said, pale-faced and sweating, and still ringing the bell for all he was worth. “No way you got friends like that, missy, or they’d melt that there gold for you and not need no furnace- I ain’t no fool! And you’re going to hang, that’s what’s going to happen to you-”
An alarm was ringing in midtown, and Crit stopped the gray to listen. Not particularly his business: the watch and the guard responded to that sort of thing, and his own mind was on personal problems-a partner who had had a run-in with the watch last night, and who had been let go because the watch did not know what to do with him-and a PrinceGovernor whose orders were getting more and more arbitrary-now the damned be-curled and perfumed prig wanted a barrel tax and wanted all the taverns in town to pay a head tax … per customer. And he was supposed to break the news to Walegrin, whose men were supposed to make the thing work.
An alarm was not the kind of thing the city commander took for a personal responsibility. But he was in a mood to crack heads. He debated it a moment, then, set the horse off at a good clip-no run, counting the slick cobbles, just a businesslike jog that cornered well enough in the twisting streets, with their ghostly drift of cloaked, hooded figures themselves heading toward the trouble-daytime reflexes, the more so that the watch was surely on the way and folk figured there was some kind of entertainment to be had, watching the guard putter about after a thief who had probably run like hell when the bell went, and listening with delicious smugness to the shopkeeper tearing his hair and wailing … a morning’s worth of gossip, at least- And more of them would come, when they saw the city commander involved in it.
Damned busybodies.
He had an idea where the bell-ringing was coming from when he found the right street, about the time the bell went silent and he had an idea the watch had gotten there ahead of him. There was a jeweler hereabouts notorious for his eccentricity-and a shady past; and he saw the crowd and the waiting horses that said that matters were tolerably well under control.
He almost turned the gray about to go back about his business, back to his troubles with Strat and with the Prince-Governor, figuring there was nothing here that needed intervention.
But the crowd ohhhed and aaaahed to a great deal of shouting, and pressed close upon the door, where there was evidently something going on. A guardsman was trying to keep spectators out.
Maybe, he thought, someone had cut the jeweler’s throat.
But the place was supposed to be a real obstacle course. So the rumor ran. Real crazy man.
Curiosity drew him, since the morning’s business was not that attractive. He nosed the gray on through the crowd, figuring the guard could use a little help-might well be a few neighbors there hoping for free samples, if there had been some fracas inside and some stuff scattered.
“Get out of here!” the beleaguered guard was yelling, shoving with his sheathed sword at a clutch of women who wanted to get their noses in the door. The crowd booed that, and guffawed when a fat man appeared behind the guard and screamed at them to get out of his door.
“What’s going on here?” Crit asked the guardsman, forcing the gray into service as a living barrier, and its teeth and the stamp of its feet made a little room.
“Dunno, sir,” the guardsman said. “We got a woman and a laundry basket and a damned great lump of gold old Gorthis says is witched and stolen and he locked ‘er up and called the watch.” The guardsman looked doubtful a second, then: “Woman looks Rankan, sir, and old Gorthis says she’s a thief named Moria who lived in the Peres house, and we got a warrant out on her. The corporal don’t know. We got a lot of warrants.