He got up, and he and Lyle advanced on the mannequin together. Then Lyle pretended to stumble and fell against it, setting all the bells jingling; as it fell into him, Deek grabbed for it. “ 'Ey there, lad!” he exclaimed. “Steady on! An' you — watch where yer goin', you! Mussin' up a gennelmun like that!”
Skif would have expected Deek to pretend to brush the mannequin off, and get hold of his goods that way, but Deek did nothing of the sort. He simply set it straight. They both moved off, but now the mannequin no longer had the kerchief around its neck, and Deek held up both the kerchief and the pouch that had been tucked inside its tunic triumphantly.
“Tha's th' easy road, but riskier,” Bazie noted. “Chance is, if mun figgers 'e's been lifted, 'e'll send beaks lookin' fer th' shaker — tha's Lyle.”
“An' I'm be clean,” Lyle pointed out. “Ain't nothin' on me, an' beak'll let me go.”
“But if 'e knows th' liftin' lay, it'll be Deek 'e'll set beak on, an' Deek ain't clean. Or mun might even be sharp 'nuff t' figger 'twas both on 'em,” Bazie cautioned. “Ye run th' shake'n'snatch, ye pick yer cony careful. Gotta be one as is wuth it, got 'nuf glim t' take th' risk, but one as ain't too smart, ye ken? An' do't when's a mort uv crowd, but not so's ye cain't get slipput away.”
Skif nodded solemnly.
“Na, 'tis yer turn. Jest wipes, fer now.”
Skif then spent a humbling evening, trying to extract handkerchiefs from the mannequin's pocket without setting off the bells. Try as he might, with sweat matting his hair from the strain, he could not manage to set off less than two. And here he'd thought that he'd been working hard, hauling water and doing laundry, or going over walls and roofs with Deek! That had been a joke compared with this!
At length, Bazie took pity on him. “That'll be 'nuff, lad,” he said, as Skif sagged with mingled weariness and defeat. “Ye done not bad, fer th' fust time. Ye'll get better, ye ken. Put yon dummy i't' corner, an' leave 'im fer now. Time fer a bit uv supper.”
Skif was glad to do so. It was beginning to occur to him that the life of a thief was not as easy as most people believed, and most thieves pretended. The amount of skill it took was amazing; the amount of work to acquire that skill more than he had imagined. Not that he was going to give up!
I'll get this if't kills me.
“So, wha's news, m'lads?” Bazie asked, deftly slicing paper-thin wafers of sweet onion. This was going to be a good supper tonight, and they were all looking forward to it. Deek and Skif had done well for the little gang.
Lyle sliced bread and spread it with butter that Skif had gotten right out of a fancy inn's kitchen that very morning. He and Deek had been down in the part of town where the best inns and taverns were, actually just passing through, when one of those strokes of luck occurred that could never have been planned for.
The inn next to the one they had been passing had caught fire — they never found out why, only saw the flames go roaring up and heard the hue and cry. Everyone in the untouched place they'd stopped beside, staff and customers alike, had gone rushing out — either to help or to gawk — and he and Deek had slipped inside in the confusion.
Somehow, without having a plan, they'd gotten in, snatched the right things, and gotten out within moments. For one thing, they had gone straight to the kitchen as the best bet. Taking money was out of the question; they didn't know where the till was. There was no time to search for valuable property left behind in the confusion. Without discussion, they had gone for what they needed, where they knew they would find something worth taking.
The kitchen.
Like the rest of the inn, it was deserted — when the chief cook left, everyone else had taken the excuse to run out, too. There must have been a big delivery not long before, since the kitchen was full of unwrapped and partially unwrapped parcels of food.
It was like being turned loose in the best market in town. Skif had grabbed a wrapped block of butter, a cone of sugar, and a ham, and a handful of the brown paper the stuff had come wrapped in. Deek had gone for a whole big dry-cured hard sausage, a string of smaller ones, and half a wheel of cheese. Then out the back and over the wall they went, into an alley that was full of smoke and hid them beautifully. As soon as they were in the smoke, Skif and Deek pulled out the string bags they always brought with them just in case something in the nature of foodstuffs presented itself. Quickly wrapping up the articles in paper under cover of the smoke, they stuffed their booty into the bags, then came running out of the smoke into the crowd, coughing and wheezing far more than was necessary, acting like innocents who'd gone shopping for their mums and been caught in the alley. No one paid them any mind — they were all too busy ogling the fire and the bucket brigade or craning their necks to see if the fire brigade had gotten to the burning inn yet. Skif and Deek had strolled homeward openly, carrying enough food to last them all for weeks. All of it luxury stuff, too — not the sort of thing they got to taste more than once in a while. They had eggs a lot, since they were pretty cheap, with just about anyone who had a bit of space keeping pigeons or chickens, even in the city.
Bread was at every meal; bread was the staple of even the poorest diets.
Roots like tatties and neeps were cheap enough, too, and cabbage, and onions — even old Kalchan had those at the inn. Dried pease and beans made a good soup, and Kalchan had those, too, though more often than not they were moldy.
Skif had eaten better with Bazie than he ever had in his life, even allowing for what he'd snitched from Lord Orthallen's kitchen. Good butter, though — butter that was all cream and not mixed half-and-half with lard — they didn't see much of that. Deek's cheese wasn't the cheap stuff that they generally got, made after the cream had been skimmed from the milk. And as for ham and sausages — sausages where you didn't have to think twice about what might have gone into them — well, those were food for the rich. And sugar —
Skif had never tasted sugar until he started snitching at Lord Orthallen's table. Bazie had a little screw of paper with some, and once in a while they all got a bit in their tea. Now they'd be able to sweeten their tea at every meal.
Each of them had a slice of bread well-buttered, with a thin slice of onion atop, and a slice of hard sausage atop that. The aroma of sage and savory from the sausage made Skif's mouth water. Bazie had put some of his sprouting beans on his slice, and had taken a second slice of buttered bread to hold it all together. Skif hoped the sprouts wouldn't taste bad with all that good stuff in and around it. They were going to eat like kings for a while.
“Kalchan croaked.” That was from Lyle, with his mouth full. “They sez. Nobuddy sez nothin' 'bout Londer. I ast 'round 'bout Skif. Don' seem nobuddy's lookin' fer 'im now. Reckon they figger 'e saw t'set-to an' run off.”
“Huh.” Skif shrugged. “Tol' ye about th' fire. Tha's all we saw.” Deek nodded agreement, but his mouth was full, so he added nothing.
“White shirt's sniffin' 'round Little Puddin' Lane,” said Raf. “Dunno why; askin' a mort'uv questions, they sez.”
Huh. Wonder what Herald wants down there? There wasn't anything down in that part of town that a Herald should have been interested in; Little Pudding Lane was just a short step above the neighborhood of the Hollybush so far as poverty went.