Kite stood stunned for a second before his feet began to take him down the narrow space between buildings. He did not look back.
“Thanks,” Skate said to Rattle. In response, it bent one of its legs and patted her twice on the head. It then flapped over to the bag and crawled back in. “You could probably fly the rest of the way, now,” she said. Rattle just clicked again and brought a leg out to tap on the straps. Skate sighed and scooped the pack up as she stepped into the only well-lit avenue of Old Town.
Chapter 5
In which a parcel is delivered, a room is explored, and a pancake is dropped on the floor.
Once Skate found her bearings on the main road through the Old Town, reaching Belamy’s house was simple. Her arm still hurt, but her breathing had returned to normal since Kite’s assault. By the time she found Belamy’s stone-block home, she was bitterly cold. The fire burned low downstairs, but she could not tell if any of Belamy’s guests were still there. The white light was on upstairs, but that told her nothing on its own.
“Rattle, do Barrison’s friends know about you?” She felt a poke at her back, which she took to mean “yes.” She tapped the bag and said, “Good. Go inside and tell me if the coast is clear to come in.” She heard the flap open and the flutter of Rattle’s wings as it extricated itself from the bag. It puttered over her shoulder, letting its slender legs clack playfully as it went to the house’s front door. It hooked two of its legs around the handle and flapped its wings fitfully to get it open. Once the door was cracked enough for it to get through, the thing slipped in, leaving Skate utterly isolated in the cold. With nothing but the pain in her arm for company and nothing to do but wait, she thought over the confrontation with Kite.
He had seen Rattle and would not likely forget what the thing looked like. With some snooping, he would be able to determine its origin and owner. He would know the next time they met whom she was working for, and he was smart enough to puzzle out that Belamy was either hiring her out as a member of the Ink, or that he was soon to be a mark for thievery. If he decided it was probably the former, she would be fine; Kite did not care much for rules, but he knew better than to interfere with a contract. If he correctly guessed the latter, he would almost certainly decide to steal from him first, ruining her plan and landing her in hot water with the Boss. Any mark that wasn’t part of a contract was fair game for whomever got the goods first.
Skate took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. The next time they met would be unpleasant; Kite was not the type of person to let personal injury or insult go unanswered, and his answers to such things were usually escalations. She had once seen a new Ink member (she’d never learned his name) muscle past him in a hall in one of the safe houses. When Kite and this neophyte had later gone on a job together with a team, the job had gotten done, but the hall ruffian had been the only one caught by the Guard. He’d never left their custody, and was found dead in his cell two days later. The magistrate’s official decree on the matter was “mysterious circumstances,” and no more investigation occurred into the death of the lowly thief. It was whispered that Kite had had something to do with it, but there was no proof, or even a hint of it, so the Boss let him be. She did not like to think about what he would want to do to her for her well-placed kick.
As Skate was ruminating on these dark considerations, Belamy’s front door creaked a bit wider open. A thin black leg poked out and bent upward three times. Skate took that as a sign that it was safe to enter, and crossed the street. The cold was quite painful now, in the dark, and even a low-burning fire would be of immeasurable comfort.
The fire crackled intermittently, casting a low reddish glow around the room. There were no lanterns lit downstairs anymore. Belamy sat behind the desk at the far end of the room with a book open. He was tracing a line across the page with his thin finger, reading in the shadows. As she watched, he traced the same line several times. She guessed he must have been memorizing the text. Not wanting to interrupt, she moved toward the fire without a word and began to warm herself in its glow. She lifted a log from the rack and dumped it into the embers. The thud as it hit jolted Belamy out of his trance. He looked up and smiled.
“Welcome back to the conquering heroes!” He laughed as he stood up and walked around to the other side of his desk. “Rattle has filled me in on your progress, of course,” he said as he rubbed his hands together. His eyes were fixed on the bag. Skate handed the backpack to the old man and sat back down in front of the fireplace, enjoying the increased warmth as the new log caught. “Oh, yes, wonderful! Bereziah’s Chronicles! Good find, Rattle. And good work, Skate. I’m going to get started on this right away. Rattle, take that.” He pointed to the open book on his desk, and Rattle clicked its legs together and obeyed, flapping over to retrieve the text. The flying eyeball made its way upstairs, leaving Skate and Belamy together in the now much brighter room. Skate leaned forward, letting the warmth from the fireplace roll over her as she gingerly explored the damage to her arm. She could move it, but it hurt. Hopefully that was something that would disappear in time.
“You don’t have to stay in here, you know,” Belamy said without raising his eyes from the pages in front of him on his desk. Skate turned her head to look at him but did not answer. In the yellow-orange light from the fire, he looked very old indeed. His nose was large, his cheeks were sunken in and shriveled, and a liver spot marked his forehead. His hands were equally wrinkled, his fingers appearing to be little more than bones with skin covering them. She thought of the last time she had stayed too long in water, and how it had caused deep and winding waves on the skin of her fingers; his whole body looked that way to her, of what she could see.
“How old are you?” The question came without her bidding, and she blinked several times after she asked it, not even sure if she had spoken the words aloud. Belamy took his eyes from the page with a quizzical look.
“How old are you?” he responded pointedly.
“Nine years,” she said, “and it’ll be ten on New Year’s Day.”
“You were born on New Year’s Day?”
“Dunno when I was born, do I? So I just call it New Year’s Day and be done with it.”
Belamy seemed to consider the answer, then nodded in acceptance. “A reasonable way to handle it, I suppose.”
“So how about you?”
“Oh, I wasn’t born on New Year’s Day.”
“But how old are you?” she said, rolling her eyes.
“What’s wrong with your arm?” he said, moving out from behind his desk, a look of concern on his features.
“Don’t change the subject.” Skate held her arm in her other hand and shifted it away from him, as if she meant to play a game of keep-away. She didn’t believe his concern was genuine, but merely a way to avoid telling her something personal.
“I’m not changing the subject, I just—”
“Get away!” she said, more loudly than she meant to, scrambling to her feet and cradling the wounded arm in her good hand.
“Will you stop? You could hurt—”
“How old are you?”
“I’m a hundred and seven!” he shouted back at her, his eyes wide with concern. “I’m a hundred and seven years old. Now stop jumping around. Is your arm hurt? What did you do?”