waited up above were cut down by orcs. The second party set out in early spring. In view of the failure of the first expedition, we sent an expedition of more than a hundred men. Experienced soldiers, eight magicians of the Order, plus support from the dark elves, who acted as our guides in the Forests of Zagraba. . . . And, may the demons take me, nothing came of it! Eighty men went down into the burial sites, and only one came back out, as white-haired as a snow owl and completely insane. The remnants of the second expedition arrived in Avendoom a week ago. All eight magicians were left behind, underground. With seventy-one other men, more than half of whom were my soldiers!”
“And now you’ve decided a thief will be able to do what a hundred men couldn’t,” I summed up.
Wonderful, the big shots have failed to do the impossible and now they want a lowly thief to do their bidding. I wonder which brilliant mind came up with this idea?
“Can I refuse?” This was a purely rhetorical question, as Brother For likes to say.
“Yes, Baron Lanten is still outside the door. You can take a ride to the Gray Stones with him,” Alistan laughed.
I get it. So that’s the way it is. Either take your chances in Hrad Spein or rot in the Gray Stones—and who knows which is better? If it was up to me, I’d choose the Gray Stones, but I can probably risk it and try to trick the whole Council of Lunatics.
“I accept,” I said, nodding, and got up out of my armchair. “Can I go now? To carry out my mission?”
At least it seemed like I had a real chance to cut and run before they really had me on the hook.
“Of course,” the king said with a feeble wave of his hand, and his immense ring glinted as it caught the light of a candle. “You accept the Commission?”
At that point I sat back down in the armchair. I’d thought I was going to trick them all, thought I was the most slippery eel there, but they were the ones who had tricked me.
When a master thief performs a task for a client, he accepts a Commission, which renders the agreement between thief and client stronger than any amount of gold could. In accepting a Commission, a thief undertakes to carry it out (or, if he is unsuccessful, to return the initial pledge, together with interest on the total value of the deal), and the client commits himself to paying in full when the task has been completed.
The Commission is an inviolable contract between the master thief and the client. And it cannot be violated, torn up, or put aside without the agreement of both parties. As the masters say, you can cheat and break a contract even with darkness, but not with Sagot. The punishment will follow immediately—something like falling into the firm grip of the guards at the scene of the crime, finding yourself in prison, or running into a knife in a perfectly safe alleyway. Luck will simply turn her back on the night hunter. And the client will not flourish if he refuses to pay, without good reason. The patron of thieves turns a blind eye to the doings of footpads and petty criminals, but not to those of master thieves following sound and reliable leads.
To refuse the Commission meant confessing to my recent lie about being willing to cooperate and being sent to the most uncomfortable cell in the Gray Stones, with a grand view of the Cold Sea. To accept meant that I couldn’t make a run for it, because the Commission wouldn’t let me go. There was no way I could pull out of it. “What are the terms?” I asked Stalkon hopelessly.
“You must deliver the Rainbow Horn to the capital before the beginning of January.”
“The payment?”
“Fifty thousand pieces of gold.”
“As the pledge?” I tried to keep my voice steady.
Fifty thousand . . . well, of course, it’s not half the kingdom or the hand of the princess from the fairy tale, but it offers plenty of scope. . . . Several generations could live well on that amount of money. The fortunes of certain barons and counts are no more than a third of the sum proposed.
“How much do you want?”
I thought for a moment, hesitating.
“A hundred will do.”
“You’ll get the money as you leave the palace. By the way, don’t forget your