99 - For him, a masterpiece

Perhaps out of stupidity, as he’d said, perhaps wanting vainly to sound like a semanakraseye, perhaps reflexively, like throwing up a hand at a blow, or perhaps just to indulge myself in a pretense of the ethics I had once been free to hold, I said: “But robbery is a crime.”

His face said, I want to smack you silly. His mouth said, “Cheng… look where we are.”

“I know, I know. I wake up each morning and we’re still here.” He would fight today, incidentally, his first in the Ring proper. While I watched, I would have to show nothing that made me seem his friend.

“All-Spirit—the best person to rob would be Kurkas’s snotty gold-encrusted brat—better still if we could kill the little kyash-eater too. But… don’t stare at me like that, Cheng, I’m allowed to be stupid for a bit, too. Too dangerous, I know. The place would be absolutely crawling with Mahid.”

I’d already thought of asking Minis for the money, claiming that I wanted to buy a few things for myself; but it would implicate him, once we vanished. It is very strong in me, never to betray a child. For Yeola-e, I should be willing to do anything; but in my heart I also felt Yeola-e would do better with him as a friend. I prayed history would forgive me, if I were wrong.

“Maybe if you think of it this way,” said Mana: “we’re at war with them. Taking you was an act of war, was it not? So we needn’t be more mindful of hurting anyone than we were charging into Lakan lines. Please think of it as war, Fourth Chevenga, because then we’ll have your ability as a strategist.”

I took a deep breath. “Yes. It will be war, in more than name, soon enough. Any hopes we cling to, that it won’t, are a fool’s. So—we’ll rob someone. I can steel my heart to that, too. Lying when taking out a loan is robbery, in effect, anyway… Have you turned it over in your mind, too, or are we relying on my ability as a strategist in that, which I hope not, because it is absolutely none?”

He’d already decided stealth was better than force, and I agreed; better to sneak into somewhere unseen than waylay one or more people and have to kill them since we so stood out. The question was where; anywhere in Arko where such sums of money were kept, we could be certain, would be locked, barred, walled and guarded like fortresses.

“You know when a very large sum of money travels in Arko?” said Mana. “When the Director sends the earnings from the latest Mezem fight to the bank, the day after. Hey, if we did that tomorrow, it wouldn’t even be entirely robbery on my part. I’ll have put my life on the line for that gold.”

For the first time, I warmed a touch to the idea. “But ambushing the couriers would be waylaying someone,” I said. “Daylight, well-guarded, on busy streets…”

“So we sneak into the Director’s apartment the night of the fight—tonight—and get some. You’re good at dark-work, ever since you, em, didn’t go to that nameless school.”

“He keeps the money in his apartment?” I said. Trust Mana to know something like that.

“Apparently. I heard Iska say he probably rubs the chains all over his body before he sends them to the bank.”

“I hope they don’t get too sticky,” I said. “And we’re going to touch them…” He did a tongue-stuck-out grimace, like a kid again. “But wouldn’t they be in a strongbox?”

“Of course, but where do you think he’d keep the key, other than his apartment also?”

“Anywhere else, if he had a lick of sense—never mind, never mind, I know, it’s the Director. All-Spirit… I’ll be a common burglar… please never tell Esora-e.”

Of course we couldn’t ask Iska or the boys anything about Forlanas’s habits, or they’d know immediately who the thieves were once he started screeching about missing gold. We planned further: we wouldn’t try to sneak into his office from inside, but pretend to be going out after the fights for a night on the town, each of us at a different place—we had to meet Erilas again tonight anyway—faking thorough drunkenness until the death-hour, then scale the wall from the street, to make it look like Arkan thieves. If the Director didn’t already have the shutters and panes open for coolness, I’d jimmy them (the school Mana had not named had not taught me that, fairly well), unlock the strongbox and take chains if I could find the key, otherwise drop it down to him, and we’d smash it open in the woods with rocks.

That afternoon, it was easy enough watching Mana fight, my heart lighter for knowing we had a plan. He won his fight quickly and easily enough, and the crowd showed more white than red, so he got to earn a chain without killing. All our lives, I thought, he’s had all the luck.

“I think I want to be elegantly understated when I go out this evening,” I told Skorsas; of course he’d taught me such terms. The suit I wore under the cloak was embroidered satin, but black on black, which no one would see in the dark.

Erilas had been turning things over in his mind, too. “We submit to your expertise,” I said, once we were all together in the dive.

“Of course, of course, barbarian fighting lads,” he said. “This one—aigh, equal-to-equal, equal-to-equal it must be, forgive this one’s, er, my ceaseless disgraceful errors. I must make preparations… but I am not willing to do that, and I’m sure you understand, until I see a portion upfront.”

“We’ll have it all by tomorrow,” I said.

His unscarred eyebrow rose without changing the expression in his eye in the slightest. “You have a… plan? Very good, very good… half before and half after is what I consider fairest… yourselves?” I noticed he didn’t ask what our plan was, though I’d been ready to tell him. There is a custom of discretion among wrongdoers, I remembered, from reading it in stories.

“Half before and half after, yes,” I said. “Is there any way we can help?”

“Oh, no, no, young foreign fighter; both of you are simply too spectacular to be even close, as I am preparing. Not to worry, I will have it all in hand! But there is one thing I must ask you, if I’m to use the plan I’m considering. You are barbarians and they have all manner of odd customs about death, I’ve heard; would either of you balk at being conveyed out under”—and here he said an Arkan word I didn’t know. “People who are dead,” he explained, when I asked.

“What’s he saying?” Mana asked. “He asked you something! Don’t answer him without asking me too!”

“No, I mean yes, that’s fine,” I told Erilas. “Mana, he just asked if we mind being smuggled out with cadavers, and I said no. It’s not as if we haven’t had plenty of them near us before, by making them.”

“Cadavers? Do we have to pretend to be cadavers? What if I sneeze?”

I passed on that concern to Erilas. “Of course, no, no, no, you don’t have to play dead—that’s such an old ploy for getting people out that the guards frequently prick the stiffs in the side with their spears if they inspect, so I’d never use it. Feh… simple-minded. But, however we do it, young fighters: you sneeze, you die.” I translated that to Mana, who gravely signed chalk. “The only thing is, sometimes… stuff… seeps out of caskets… cheap-built ones, you know, their occupants never complain. And could drip onto you.”

“No matter, when it’s for freedom,” I said. We should keep our mouths firmly shut anyway, I thought.

Erilas laid out his whole plan. Though some element of luck was unavoidable, it was devious enough to satisfy me.

We would go in one of the carts used to convey corpses up to the cemeteries, which by custom are outside the City, lying lie in a false bottom built to look too slender to hold anyone—“it will be very tight,” he said, “so if you good young barbarians are not lovers, I hope at least you aren’t enemies”—and taking the most lax way, the Great Gate. With each load going out the guards rolled a die to determine whether they’d inspect it or not, so you never knew, but Erilas had a plan for that. By placing some bit of contraband more typical of his work in one of the caskets, he’d let himself be caught for the small thing, apologize grovellingly and abjectly pay the bribe the guard required, or the fine if a Mahid happened to be overseeing the guards that day. “That makes it much more dangerous, when one of them is there, but it’s only about one in twenty times,” Erilas said.

I translated it all to Mana, and he liked it well enough. “Good,” I told Erilas. We touched foreheads again, agreeing to meet in two days for further preparations, which I took to mean us paying him the first installment, and began to go our ways.

Maybe Erilas had been a fighter, at least on the street, in his day; his hands were fast enough. As we turned to go, something jabbed my ribs searing hard; his finger, for out of the corner of my eye I saw his other hand do the same to Mana. We must have looked like a Yeoli and his image in a mirror, for we both whirled wordlessly and glared at him, the only difference being where our hands hovered near our sword-hilts, mine over my shoulder, Mana’s at his hip.

“Forgive and don’t spit me, I beg, good barbarian fighters!” Erilas said with an obsequious grin everywhere on his face but that untouchable eye. “A test, that is all. You’ve seen the murals; you know I will putting my life at risk as much as you do, or more, so I will survive by your nerve as much as you will by mine. If either of you were the kind to cry out when he’s startled or hurt, I’d be telling you, keep your money.”

Did I see a faint trace of actual pleasure, in that glass-like grey orb? He’d taken this profession, presumably, because he had some liking for it; he was plenty intelligent, and so surely he could have more honest work if he wanted it. I suddenly understood: spiriting us out of Arko was for him a masterpiece, like a painter’s greatest commission, or the statue a sculptor must do for a town that pays him enough to retire on, asking for the best of his life. It was all or nothing; with what he was charging us, he might be set for life if he succeeded, but worse than dead if he failed. I found myself, of all things, liking him.

“I am very pleased you have both passed,” he said.

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