9: The Second First Rule of Thievery

“Lower,” Gaxna whispers, walking slightly behind me in the road. I’m dressed in a dirty blouse and a frayed wrap, greasy black wig on my head marking me as one of the poorest in the city. But apparently my posture isn’t up to it. I try again to drop my shoulders.

“First rule of thievery,” she hisses. “Don’t stick your nose in the sky.”

I know that wasn’t the first rule, but I do it anyway. Posture isn’t something they taught us in the temple, exactly, but the training just brings it out in you: strength, confidence, nobility. All the things a Blackwater girl shouldn’t have.

Gaxna sighs behind me, so apparently I’m still not doing it well enough. I managed to steal my lunch today, and we’re headed to a fountain to practice wearing disguises in public. Gaxna’s a master at this, and we have an escape route planned, but I’m still nervous.

We’re not far from where I holed up that first morning, in a row of smithies, and Serei churns around us. Hammers ring, sellers haggle, mongrels bark and forges roar with a heat that sticks the wig to my head with sweat. The place stinks of coal smoke and sewer slop, and the waterways run dark with the city’s waste.

“There, maybe,” Gaxna slurs, and I see the fountain she points to. Its waters are clear, if tepid, aqueducts feeding it from the river above. If I stuck my hand in, I could hear the thoughts of the city, the overseers chatting to each other and the cries of those needing help, maybe some hints of the temple itself. But something holds me back, some fear that even with my blind it would alert them to where I am. Besides, it’s not something a Blackwater girl would do, and I need to learn disguises if I’m going to survive out here.

We sit and unwrap what we got from the market. Mine looks a little sad next to Gaxna’s, and she adds some of hers to my wrap without saying anything. She’s got the lowtown posture down perfect: slouched, eyes quick but not totally open, one leg bouncing like she never learned to sit. I try to imitate it as best I can.

“What do we do now, then?” I ask.

“Do?” Her voice is changed too, gruffer, and with a slurriness to it. “Don’t do nothing. Just eat your food, huh? Feel the breeze.”

I eat, but I can’t help scanning the crowds. I feel exposed. Overseers aren’t as common down here, and I’m guessing witches aren’t either, but still. My mind can’t help cataloguing what I could use if I needed to fight—the long handle of a broom across the square, some iron rods a blacksmith is cooling, the loose ends of a stick-built lean-to slumped against a fastener’s shop.

A crier is working the far side of the fountain, calling out news and rumors to get a crowd together, then taking coins to share the details. “Man eaten by giant squid!” he calls. “Saltmaker’s Guild to hire theracants! Chosen engaged to foreign woman! Philosophers predicting drought!” No one pays him much mind. “Giant squid!” he tries again, then with a sour expression walks to the fountain for a drink.

I straighten up. I’m supposed to be learning disguises, but I knew there might be criers down here, and I’m burning to find out more about my father’s death.

“Tough day, crier?”

“Piss-flooding poor ass day is what it is, miss,” he says in a distinctly less-educated voice than the one he was using to cry.

“Sorry to hear it.” Gaxna shoots me a look, but I ignore her. “Times is hard all around, these days.”

“Aye.” He slurps from his hand, dips back for more. “Same as ever.”

I dip my hand in the water, but his is out before I can water-read more than vague impressions. I’ll have to talk it out of him then.

“Take a cloveleaf to ease the time?” The cigarillos are part of my disguise, Gaxna insisting no lowtowner would be caught dead without them. She also said no crier would talk without at least some kind of bribe.

He narrows his eyes, though. “What’s in it for you?”

“Piss on that one, eh?” Gaxna cuts in. “Flooding cloves ain’t cheap.”

“Bit of fresh conversation’d do me good,” I say, ignoring both of them and trying to sound less monastic.

The crier grunts and sits. I pull a cloveleaf for him, and Gaxna surprises me by striking a match. He draws deep and sighs smoke appreciatively out his nose.

“Now there’s a smoke. What’d you want to know then?”

I suppress a smile. A little bribery works wonders, apparently.

“Nothing major. Just a story a ways back, something about the other Chosen, the older one—” I pause, as though I’m looking for words.

As though I don’t know my own father’s name.

“Stergjon,” the crier says. “Yeah?”

I shrug. “Had thoughts of being a crier meself. Heard there was good money in crying before he passed.”

“Oh aye,” the crier says, taking another pull. “Bloody fortune, that one. Not like this new chump. No one’s spending to bend his news.”

Bend the news. I ice the excitement that bubbles up in my chest, the possibility that Nerimes paid criers to bend news about my dad. “What were they bending then? The bit about the Theracant’s Guild?”

“Oh no, that was all right as rain. Witches were rising up, sure as not. Hoping this new one finally takes care of them.”

I nod, trying to conceal my disappointment, trying to ignore Gaxna’s urgent hints that I should stop drawing attention to myself, especially from a crier.

“The heresies, then?”

“Aye, all that bit. Flooding hard to cry, it was, having to make up the details all the while. Never did find out what it was all about.” He pulls on the cloveleaf and blows out. “All the same though, right? Stergjon or Nerimes or whoever the next pitstain is, they’ll keep us down and we do what we can to stick it out.”

I suck in a breath. The heresies weren’t real. They paid the criers to fake the stories of the heresies. Then probably used that to convince the temple! It’s proof the traditionalists set my dad up—or someone did. I try to ice the excitement inside, but some still comes out.

“Who paid you to do it, then?”

The crier takes a long pull and eyes the cloveleaf. “That’s real information you’re asking for there. Take more than a stick of clove to relax me that much, if you catch my meaning.”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

More money. Floods. I still don’t have any. I glance at Gaxna. She scowls back.

“You have to forgive the lass,” Gaxna says to him. “Gets ideas in her head some days. Slopping dumb ones.”

I can’t let this slip away, but there’s no way I’m getting his hand back in the fountain. So I slap the back of his neck, hard.

“Piss was that for!” he yelps, his own hand flying to where I hit him.

It’s just an instant of contact, but I am an old hand at watersight. I follow his thoughts from my question back to a vague figure of a man with a hood over his head. A monk? But in the strange picture-thought reality that is mindsight, I know in the same moment this was a merchant, not a monk.

What would a merchant care about playing up heresies?

I realize the crier’s still staring at me, angry.

“Stingfly,” I say, shrugging. “Nasty little buggers.”

The crier walks off shooting me a nasty look, but the waters run too fast in my mind to care. Merchants—why would they pay to set up my dad? Unless they had a stake in Nerimes coming to power somehow. What did Gaxna say—that oversight was spotty in the last few months? Something about the salt merchants having an army of overseers watching their guildhouse, and others nothing at all. So maybe the salt merchants did it, in exchange for business opportunities once Nerimes was in power?

Are the traditionalists actually just puppets to business interests?

Did a merchant kill my father?

Gaxna stirs beside me. “Sh’we go then?” She’s eaten most of her lunch, and even in character I can see she’s glancing around too much. She’s worried I’m attracting attention.

“Aye,” I say. Useful information or not, I feel exposed down here too. Like my hand’s in the water with no blind up, thoughts bare for everyone to read.

I start to stand and she slaps her hand down on my leg. “Easy,” she says, and it’s Gaxna’s voice, her real voice, not the Blackmarket porter boy she’s playing today.

I glance the direction she’s looking and freeze: not one, not two, but six overseers come striding into the square. People shrink from them, but not enough to avoid their outstretched hands as they touch wrists, arms, any skin they can use to read thoughts.

To find me.

That has to be what they’re after. Overseers work alone, never in more than pairs. Why would six of them be together, now, unless it was because of me?

And here I sit, out in the open, not even a staff at my side, nothing between me and them but a dirty shirt and a ratty wig.

“Keep your head down,” Gaxna says, and I realize she could give me away too. As long as they don’t see my eyes, my waterblind will keep them from reading my thoughts. But Gaxna knows all about me. All they have to do is touch her.

Sweat beads on my scalp as they enter the fountain square, moving without talking, water-reading each other’s thoughts. Heading straight for us. I keep my head down, my feet still, but it’s everything I can do not to run for the iron rods in front of the blacksmith’s shop, to not go down at least defending myself, keeping the monks off.

But the only chance I have is escaping notice. I know this. They chase anyone who runs, and I can’t outrun them. Probably not even on the rooftops. They come closer, spreading through the market. The crier could give me away too, having seen my violet eyes, having talked to me about my dad.

Flooding damn hells. But the only thing I can do is sit here and hold my disguise. I ice everything inside, pick at my last rice wrap like I don’t want it, and wait for the iron hand to clamp down on my shoulder.

An overseer passes in front. Two. A soft hand brushes my wrist, ever so lightly, robes close enough to rub against my leg.

I hold my breath. If even a thread of my thoughts got through the blind, if they happen to read Gaxna, it’s over. And the proof I just found won’t be enough to convince the temple.

The moment stretches like tar under a boot heel.

The overseer moves on.

I exhale, but we’re not out of the shallows yet—they could still come back, so I keep my head down, keep fiddling with my wrap. Gaxna wears the same bored Blackwater expression, but her shoulders are tense. Behind her another pair of monks come, passing on the far side of the fountain, and then they’re gone, striding into the next street with hands outstretched.

The whole square seems to breathe a sigh of relief, but no one so loud as me. “C’mon,” I elbow Gaxna, wrapping up my food. “Let’s get out of here.”

We run the rooftops up and east, angling toward her tower, but Gaxna stops me on the shaded balcony of an Uje convocation hall. “That—what you did back there, that was magic?”

I wipe sweat from my brow. I’m keeping up better with the thief all the time, but she sets a mean pace. “Not magic. Concentration. You get all your thoughts behind a blind, so they can’t read any of your true mind. Kind of like hiding behind a curtain, only if your concentration’s strong enough the curtain is a mile wide and ten feet thick. That’s why we follow our breathing, to build concentration.”

Gaxna bites her lip. “If one of the overseers had touched me…”

“We’d both be locked up. I could teach you, you know. Anyone can learn the breathing. Might be useful in your line of work.”

She shifts on the balcony, breeze catching her blond wig. “Maybe that’d be good. Just—don’t do it on me, okay?”

“I won’t. But if you’re up for it, we should start now. On the rest of the trip back, picture your breath like waves in the ocean, constantly coming in and going out.”

Gaxna looks doubtful. “That’s going to keep the overseers out of my head? Waves?”

“The concentration is. It’s like a muscle, only you can exercise it constantly. Just let there be one little piece of your mind that’s always watching the waves, no matter what else is going on. That’s the same part that’s going to keep them out when you need it, and ice emotions when you don’t have time to deal with them.”

Gaxna is slower after that, walking rooftops and balancing across eaves, and I can see that she’s concentrating. I test it when we get back. “In or out?”

“Huh?”

“Your breath. Is it coming in or going out?”

“Oh, uh—”

“You should know without thinking. What distracted that part of your mind? Try again.”

We spend the next hour or so like that, Gaxna focusing on her breath and me testing her, while the heat of the day burns off and I de-ice everything I froze from when the overseers came. The traditionalists must think I’m a real threat, to be sending overseers after me in packs.

And I am a threat, with this new information. My father’s heresies were played up, and the city’s merchants were behind it. Now I need to find out which merchants, and if they were the ones responsible for my father’s murder, or Nerimes used them as part of his master plan.

Either way, the evidence will be damning. My opinions or my gender can be seen as a heresy, but selling out the temple’s holiest position to the highest bidder? That’s outright treason.

“Breath?” I ask, only half paying attention.

“Out,” Gaxna says, eyes closed, wig off to catch the breeze. “Slow.”

“Good. Again.”

It still seems a little crazy, what I’m trying to do. Turn the whole temple against its ruler? And me not even a seer, or a man for that matter? Still, I have to try. My dad is worth that. The temple is worth it, at least the temple as it could be. And much as I’m learning to survive out here, the temple will always be home. I want it back.

“Now.”

“In.”

“Lies. I was watching your breath.”

“Slops,” Gaxna curses, opening her eyes. “I got distracted. I just—”

“It’s hard,” I remember my first days in the temple, the endless hours kneeling in the water while Urte or one of the other trainers read our thoughts, urged us towards concentration. I was good at it even then, but their training made me the best.

“It takes time,” I say. “You’ll get it.”

“Flooding right I will. To keep the overseers out of my head? I’d do a lot worse than this. Speaking of which. I thought of something you could do, to keep the overseers from finding you.”

“What?” My blind already protected me when they literally touched my skin today.

“There’s a woman, in the heights. Used to be a Theracant. She stains eyes now.”

“She stains them? How?”

“I don’t know. All I know is it’s expensive, and it works. Had a friend who needed to disappear for a while, after a job went bad. Turned his blue eyes jet black.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. “If I stopped having violet eyes…”

“There’s no way they’d find you. Not with the way you protect your thoughts.”

Hope surges like an unchained beast in my chest. I am so tired of being targeted. Of being afraid. Without my eyes, I could be anyone.

“But then the temple wouldn’t know who I was,” I say, that same hope faltering. “Even if I showed them everything, they could just deny I’m Stergjon’s daughter.”

Gaxna’s gaze on me in steady. “Would that be so bad?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Well think about it. In the meantime, I’m gonna need my clothes back.”

“What?”

“My clothes,” the thief repeats, a gleam in her eye. “You didn’t steal them. They’re not yours.”

I don’t point out how backwards that logic is. “Right. Okay. I’ll get my other pair.”

“The ones you wore when the witches, overseers and an entire market saw you? I’d say those are done.”

“You’re saying I need to steal new clothes.” I swallow a lump. I need to get used to this.

“Yup. But I’ll give you a hint. The market’s not the best place to do it.”

“Where is then?”

Gaxna grins. “The baths.”