The Gentleman Bastard Series Read Free Page B

.”
    “So,” the Eyeless Priest said, “that was just the very first night of your association with my very own mystery windfall bargain boy.”
    “I’m gratified that you’re starting to take a possessive bent to the little cuss, Chains, because it only gets more colorful. I don’t know quite how to put it. I’ve got kids that enjoy stealing. I’ve got kids that don’t think about stealing one way or another, and I’ve got kids that just tolerate stealing because they know they’ve got nothing else to do. But nobody—and I mean nobody —has ever been hungry for it like this boy. If he had a bloody gash across his throat and a physiker was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and die laughing. He … steals too much .”
    “Steals too much,” the Eyeless Priest mused. “Of all the complaints I never thought I’d hear from a man who trains little thieves for a living.”
    “Laugh now,” the Thiefmaker said. “Here’s the kicker.”
    6
    MONTHS PASSED. Parthis became Festal became Aurim, and the misty squalls of summer gave way to the harder, driving rains of winter. The Seventy-seventh Year of Gandolo became the Seventy-seventh Year of Morgante, the City Father, Lord of Noose and Trowel.
    Eight of the thirty-one Catchfire orphans, somewhat less than adept at the Thiefmaker’s delicate and interesting tasks, swung from the Black Bridge before the Palace of Patience. So it went; the survivors were too preoccupied with their own delicate and interesting tasks to care.
    The society of Shades’ Hill, as Locke soon discovered, was firmly divided into two tribes: Streets and Windows. The latter was a smaller, more exclusive group that did all of its earning after sunset. They crept across roofs and down chimneys, picked locks and slid through barred embrasures, and would steal everything from coins and jewelry to blocks of lard in untended pantries.
    The boys and girls of Streets, on the other hand, prowled Camorr’s alleys and cobbles and canal-bridges by day, working in teams. Older and more experienced children (clutchers) worked at the actual pockets and purses and merchant stalls, while the younger and less capable (teasers) arranged distractions—crying for nonexistent mothers, or feigning illness, or rushing madly around crying “Stop! Thief!” in every direction while the clutchers made off with their prizes.
    Each orphan was shaken down by an older or larger child after returning to the graveyard from any visit outside; anything stolen or gathered was passed through the hierarchy of bruisers and bullies until it reached the Thiefmaker, who ticked off names on an eerily accurate mental list as the day’s catch came in. Those who produced got to eat; those who didn’t got to practice twice as hard that evening.
    Night after night, the Thiefmaker would parade around the warrens of Shades’ Hill laden down with money pouches, silk handkerchiefs, necklaces, metal coat buttons, and a dozen other sorts of valuable oddments. His wards would strike at him from concealment or by feigned accident; those he spotted or felt in the act were immediately punished. The Thiefmaker preferred not to beat the losers of these training games (though he could work a mean switch when the mood was upon him); rather, they were forced to drink from a flask of unalloyed ginger oil while their peers gathered around and chanted derisively. Camorri ginger oil is rough stuff, not entirely incomparable (as the Thiefmaker himself opined) to swallowing the smoldering ashes of poison oak.
    Those who wouldn’t open their mouths had it poured into their noses while older children held them upside down. This never had to happen twice to anyone.
    In time, even those with ginger-scalded tongues and swollen throats learned the rudiments of coat-teasing and “borrowing” from the wares of unwary merchants. The Thiefmaker enthusiastically instructed them in the architecture of doublets, waistcoats, frock