Elminster_ The Making of a Mage - Ed Greenwood [33]
Four
THEY COME OUT AT NIGHT
Thieves? Ah, such an ugly word… think of them instead as kings-in-training. Ye seem upset, even disputatious. Well, then, look upon them as the most honest sort of merchant.
The character Oglar the Thieflord
in the anonymous play Shards and Swords
Year of the Screeching Vole
It was just one more in an endless string of hot, damp days in the early summer of the Year of the Black Flame. Folk in Hastarl had taken to lying more or less unclad on the flat stretches of their rooftops and their balconies after sunset, hoping for a breeze to blow over their skin and bring them some fleeting moments of comfort.
This was good for both pleasure and business-the predictable pleasure, and one business in particular.
"Ah," Farl said softly, leaning forward to peer out of the slit window. The show of flesh beginneth again, so it doth."
"When ye've finished drooling down the stonework," the slim, beak-nosed youth behind him said dryly, "do ye hold the line while I go down."
"That'll be about dawn, I'd say," was the reply.
"Aye, then, hold the line now and look later." Elminster cast a glance over the head of his fellow thief and squinted professionally. "Ah, yes, quite a tattoo there… though how the man sees it, with the curve of his belly between his eyes and where it is, only the gods can know."
Farl chuckled. "Think of what it must have felt like, getting it, too." He winced with an exaggerated flourish, and added, "But you're supposed to be looking at the maids, El, not at the men!"
"Ah, I've got to learn to tell the difference. It gets me into more trouble," Elminster replied serenely. Then what he'd been waiting for befell: a large bank of clouds drifted across the moon. Without another word, he slipped through the narrow window, one hand on the rope harness, and was gone.
Farl settled the smooth leather rope slide securely on the sill, and with surprising strength slowed the line gliding through it to a gentle, continuous movement until a sharp jerk told him to stop. He thrust a dagger into one of the holes in the wheel from which the rope unwound, then looked out the window.
Directly under him, in the empty air beneath the outthrust upper room of the tower, Elminster calmly hung suspended outside the window of the room below. One of his hands-the hand wearing a wrapping coated with sticky honeycake-was on the tower wall; El was keeping himself to one side of the window, out of the view of the room's occupants. He peered in for what seemed a very long time before raising his hand in a signal, not looking up.
Farl passed the reachers down on their own lines.
Hanging there in the quickening night breeze, Elminster took hold of them: two long, thin wooden sticks with wrist-braces at one end, like crutches, and sticky balls of precious stirge glue on their other ends. A hooked and pad-ended side-prong jutted from one stick.
El delicately used that prong to swing the shutters fully back-and then withdrew the reachers and waited patiently. No sound came from within, and after several long breaths, he reached out again. One stick slid in until its leather sleeve caught the sill. He balanced its weight there, and then slid it onward through its sleeve, probing delicately inside the room. When he drew it out, a gem gleamed on the sticky end. He backed the stick until he could slide his hand up to its tip, let it dangle from its line while he thrust the gem into the tube-bag of stout canvas he wore around his neck, and then reached into the room with the stick again, slowly… smoothly… silently.
Thrice more the sticks appeared, were emptied of precious cargo, and returned to the room. Farl saw the youth below wipe sweating hands on dark, dusty leather breeches, and then lean forward again. He held this breath, knowing what that gesture meant: Eladar the Dark was about to try something especially reckless. Farl mouthed a silent prayer to Mask, Lord of All Thieves.
Elminster reached into the bedchamber once more. His sticks slid over the bare, slumbering body of the young merchant's wife, only