The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids Read Free Page A

avoid a beating or an eviction or the symptoms of one withdrawal or another. The ones who were willing to accept rough trade. One trollop in a soiled satin ball gown, his blue chin bristling out from under streaked face powder, cast aspersions on my manhood when I ignored his proposition. I would have found that amusing on several levels in other circumstances.
    I had avoided their fate when I was younger, thanks to some wise words from somebody who could have taken advantage instead, and thanks to a cold stubbornness. But it made me uncomfortable to see how I might have ended up. It always did. I deepened my scowl and ignored the various opening ploys, trudging past with my hands in my pockets.
    As always, when the tired come-ons had no effect, they turned to jeers and catcalls. Anything to elicit a response. They faded behind me as I turned off Silk Street on to the nameless, barely-more-than-an-alley where Corbin’s hovel was. The entire street was lined with narrow wooden houses, two and three stories high. Some needed paint; most needed to be torn down. Almost all of them were built far too close together. A few of the houses were so close to each other you couldn’t have walked between them sideways. It needed only a small fire and a stiff breeze to all go up.
    As I got closer to Corbin’s pit, I could hear howls, and a rough old voice screeching in anger.
    “Shut it! Shut up, you mongrel! Shut it, Gorm take you!” The sound of something breakable being hurled against something less breakable. The howls went on and on, heart-breaking. I’ve heard wolves calling to each other across snow covered hills, mournful and lonely. This was nothing like that. This was grief made audible. Other dogs in the area had begun picking it up, and other voices, rough and querulous with interrupted sleep, yelled protest in several languages. A door slammed. I broke into a trot. For people like me, there are damned few coincidences. Expecting the worst helps to keep you from getting sucker-punched—and in my world, there are always fists waiting to hammer on the unwary.
    I saw the old man first. The one who'd used Gorm’s name in vain. Not that there’s any other way to use it, Gorm being dead and all. The old man was a greasy grey smear of nightshirt and skinny, hairy legs with knobby knees. He was swinging something that would have been a truncheon if it was shorter, would have been a club if it was thicker. His back was to me; I couldn’t see what he was beating. Then I came up on him and saw that it was Bone. The geezer was bringing his stick down on Bone’s spade-shaped head, again and again. The dog kept howling, and refused to flinch. Behind Bone was something wet and lumpy.
    The mind takes in images in little snatches, and sometimes they make no sense at first. It looked like the dog was guarding a pile of garbage. I saw the red, and knew it for blood, and knew from the quantity of it on the cobbles that someone had died badly. But these little pieces of knowledge didn’t fit together right away. There was just the gut anger at an old man beating a dog.
    I plucked the stick from his hand on a back swing and rolled it around across his windpipe. He squawked and gagged and clawed at the stick. I pulled him back a few steps, turned him around and planted a boot in his scrawny backside, letting the stick go with one hand. He sprawled to the cobbles, hacking. I guessed he’d stay down for a bit, so I went to check out the dog.
    With his skull-thumping at least suspended, Bone had turned his attention to the bloody lump. He was nuzzling what I recognized as a hand. When it flopped back down to the street, I saw that the last three fingers were missing. Cut off cleanly, at the last joint. Of their own accord, my eyes travelled to the corpse’s face.
    It was Corbin. He lay huddled at an unnatural angle, maybe a half-dozen steps from his own doorstep. Bone started up that soul-splitting howl again. Shutters were  opened here