Getting into Sabella’s hadn’t proven difficult; bribing the whore to tell Tannerson someone special waited for him in the room had been easy enough, as well. The girl’s native stupidity had not caused her to think any farther than her full purse of gold without Sabella taking a cut. Now she’d keep quiet out of fear.
For the first few moments of her flight, fear had nearly overwhelmed the girl. For the first five minutes after reaching the roof, she had just sat, too numb to move. Tannerson’s blood had covered her from chin to waist, and she had finally gotten her fouled clothing off. Then she had heard the movement of men down the streets below and fear kept her from attempting to leave. As she waited, fatigue pushed in on her, and she half dozed—for a minute or an hour, she wasn’t clear—and then the raid had brought her alert. Now fatigue was pushed aside by fear; if those men who had entered Sabella’s had been sent by the Nightmaster, she could have been seen or identified. Being hunted by the Prince’s police was one thing; being hunted by the Mockers was another. Her only hope in the second instance would be to flee the city and get as far away as possible, up to LaMut or down into the Empire of Kesh.
She crept along the roof until she came to where she had left her rope. Tossing aside the small bag that had contained her regular trousers, shirt, vest, dagger, and boots—and now contained a bloody knife and a blood-snaked shirt and trousers—she glanced over the eaves.
Two men of the rear guard hurried past in the darkness below and she moved to another corner of the roof, where she saw others moving in the same general direction as those who had just left the whorehouse. The girl sat back on her heels, considering. None of the men she had glimpsed looked remotely familiar to her, and she should have recognized at least one of them if they were Mockers. Whoever had come into Sabella’s were the Prince’s men, no doubt, for no one else in the city would be able to mount such a raid, especially not with men who seemed to appear and disappear out of the darkness like the best in the Guild of Thieves. It had to be the Duke of Krondor’s special agents, his secret police.
But what had they wanted with Tannerson and his band of thugs? wondered the girl. She was not worldly, but she was clever, intelligent, and curious. She gauged her distance to the next roof, backed up, and made a nimble leap to the roof opposite and continued along the “Thieves’ Highway” after the men below. After a block she was falling behind and quickly found a drainpipe she could clamber down.
At this hour the streets were dark and nearly empty, so she had to keep to the shadows, lest she attract attention. Twice she spied rear sentries who were placed to prevent anyone’s following, so she waited and slipped after them when they at last moved out.
It was an hour before dawn when she lost sight of the last man she had trailed, but she was near certain where the raiders had been bound: the Prince’s palace.
They had used a circuitous route and they had taken pains to avoid being followed, but she had kept her wits and hadn’t rushed, and now she could see they were moving directly for the palace.
She paused and looked around. The streets were completely deserted as far as she could tell, but there was an uneasiness in the pit of her stomach that made her suddenly wish she hadn’t been so curious. Fatigue was again threatening to overwhelm her, and she was due to report to the Daymaster in less than two hours. She feared going to sleep, for if she did she was certain she wouldn’t awake in time. Missing one day’s picking pockets in the market wouldn’t usually earn her more than a harsh word or a cuffing around, but not the morning after Tannerson’s murder. She must do nothing to call undue attention to herself.
Tannerson had been a brute and a man of few friends, but he’d had many allies and had established himself as something of a minor power among that faction of the Mockers known as bashers, those given to strong-arm tactics—armed robbery, extortion, and protection, as opposed to the beggars and those who used more subtle forms of larceny. The Sagacious Man and his lieutenants, the Daymaster and the Nightmaster, had been reluctant to curb Tannerson and others like him who produced, and say what you might about the swine, he had produced. His small-scale reign of terror over the merchants near the docks and Poor Quarter had more than doubled the protection money coming into the guild over the previous year.
But if she could show up with an account of men moving through the streets to the palace, she might divert any suspicion from herself and ensure that the Sagacious Man was more concerned with the actions of the Prince’s secret police than with those of a single girl pickpocket. She might even plant the idea that it was the Prince’s men who had cut Tannerson’s throat.