Roofrats 14

"Okay," Weft said. "Is it far to your hotel? You know where it is from here?"

He turned his head briefly, and his hand twitched too, when a night bird took off from atop one of the lanterns and set a patch of blue light swinging.

"Yep, that way," she said with conviction and pointed somewhere downslope and off to one side.

She didn't ask apout the reflexes, knowing that they came with that general kind of job. "What do they put into those lamps, anyway?"

"Candles," said Weft; "paraffin, or beeswax uptown."

It looked like some kind of paper, or possibly vellum, stretched over a wire frame.

"And the blue is the lampshade?"

"What else...?" Weft hopped up onto a wall, caught one and unhooked it for her.

The cosntruction was quite sturdy. And nobody immediately appeared to shout at them for messing with the illuminations. Perhaps nobody dared.

"Could have been your paraffin burns blue," Nico replied with twinkling eyes. She crossed her arms and tilted her head, looking up at Weft.

Weft looked down into the top of the lantern to see if it did (no: just a faintly yellowish-white flame), before replacing the thing as he'd found it.

He stayed where he was, seeing as he was being looked at without being given an order. He took his other hand off the lanterns' cable, but otherwise didn't shift or fidget. Perhaps the monk just liked high-up places.

After a few moment of watching Weft doing nothing at all, Nico shrugged and half turned away. "I'll head home. You coming along, or heading to yours?"

Weft hit the boards noiselessly and caught up with her. "I suppose I should make sure you're not beset by singing pirates," he said, very maturely and dutifully.

Nico nodded solemnly, slapsing her hands behind her back. "I might get unpleasant if they can't sing well enough."

"Then," said Weft, briefly turning his head to observe two snooty passers-by with sooty-looking faces, "then they'd probably be so scared of us that they'd run and hide below decks, and that would just be a let-down. A skittish tar is a boring soul."

"Better for the health of everyone concerned, though."

"Oh, I don't know. I never claimed I didn't enjoy all those extremely temporary attempts to mug me. It keeps life interesting and me on my toes."

Nico snorted, seguing into a chuckle. "Well, yes, I can sympathise. Better than getting bored to death, often."

Weft kept examining alley-mouths, pedestrians and occasionally windblown paper bags with ferocious care. With what little attention was left, he wondered if Nico's last remark been a veiled criticism/instruction.

"All right, here's a joke. What do you call an assassin-brother with ten concealed knives?"

"Underdressed?" She was a bit surprised at the turn, but did not even get anywhere near guessing Weft's motivation.

"Ah, you've heard it before." Weft chuckled.

She nodded. There had been one occasion on which the person telling it had been stabbed on the spot by someone taking pride in requiring far less cutlery.

"And is it a fact?"

"It's a joke. In real life it depends if he's on the job, at an ambassadorial function, asleep in his cell, in the bath, at morning service..."

And in none of those situations would he be entirely unarmed. Not when your whole body was someone's weapon.

"I was assuming on the job, specifically the part of the job that makes him a brother assassin," she said. Not that she wouldn't take 'ah' for an answer, she just wanted to clarify. And, well, general curiosity. Nico did not try to undress him with her eyes and count, but she did remember Daaren mentioning after the midwinter festivities he'd spotted five concealed weapons on the monk.