“Keep your hands on your guns, Aris,” Kelsey warned. “Pickpockets might not know what they are, but that won’t stop them from stealing them to find out.”

“Pickpockets?” Aris asked.

“Thieves,” Kelsey told her. “In a crowd like this, you can get right up to someone without them noticing and make off with their purse.”

“How do you know that?” Anton asked. Kirido wasn’t exactly crime-free, but the thieves there mostly concerned themselves with evading the dungeon’s traps. Stealing someone's purse wasn’t going to work when everybody knew everybody else.

“Oh, I hear things around the place— Whoa!”

Kelsey’s exclamation was due to the exact thing she was just talking about. Quick as a flash, a small figure had stepped in and made a snatch for Kelsey’s purse. The quick flash of a dagger made sure that the strings didn’t hold it. Before Anton could react, the pickpocket was already moving out of reach.

“After him!” Anton moved without thinking. The thief was already out of sight, hidden behind another passerby. If Anton didn’t move fast, there would be no catching the pickpocket. Then Kelsey grabbed him by the arm.

“Hold up, there,” she said.

“Why? Wait—” Anton said, as his thoughts caught up with him. When did Kelsey start carrying a purse?

“Don’t want you getting too far ahead,” Kelsey reminded him.

Then a blood-curdling scream sounded. Not in the direction the thief had gone.

“Ah, that sounds promising,” Kelsey said and started leading him towards it. The others followed, wondering what was going on.

“It’s the handoff,” she explained. “The guy that steals the purse doesn’t keep it, he passes it off to someone else. That way, if you catch him, he doesn’t have your purse, and you look like the bad guy. Depending on the sophistication of your pickpocketing ring, there might be a couple of handoffs. But sooner or later, someone’s going to open the purse.”

Most of the crowd was heading away from the screams, but Kelsey forced her way through to an alley, too narrow for stalls. It looked like it was mostly used for waste disposal. Near the entrance, there was a gap in the crowd as shoppers diverted away from what sounded like a murder.

A few yards into the alleyway, a small figure, clothed in rags was writhing on a pile of garbage, screaming her throat hoarse. One of her arms was clutched to her chest.

“Huh, she managed to get it,” Kelsey noted as she approached. Anton didn’t know what she was talking about until he noticed the crushed corpse of a palm-sized spider. A very familiar-looking corpse.

“Kelsey, what did you do?” he asked.

“Nothing…” Kesley said innocently, fooling no one. She knelt beside the girl, pulling the girl’s arm clear to examine it. There was a nasty-looking welt on it. “She just got bit by a spider, is all.”

“Leave her alone!” The voice came from the other end of the alley and belonged to the boy who had stolen Kelsey’s purse in the first place. His drawn dagger and quick charge were something Anton knew how to deal with. Stepping past Kelsey, he intercepted the boy, grabbing the knife arm and twisting.

Kelsey didn’t even look up. Producing a vial of ointment out of nowhere, she smeared it on the girl's arm. The girl tried to pull away, but Kelsey’s grip was like iron and the girl's captured arm didn’t move an inch. Once applied, the effect of the ointment was immediate. The girl gasped in surprise as the pain vanished, and she stopped thrashing about.

Kelsey looked up to see the boy that Anton had captured and grinned.

“Two for one!” she crowed. “Who knew fishing for thieves would be this easy?”

“What spider was that?” Anton asked. The boy was struggling in his grasp, but Anton kept a hold of him easily. Anton still wasn’t clear on what was going on, but if the boy attacked Kelsey he could get hurt. “No, what venom was that?”

“Serpent’s Scourge,” Kelsey said. Anton winced. Serpent’s Scourge caused no lasting damage, but the pain it inflicted was extreme.

“Couldn’t you have used the sleeping one?” he asked.

“That wouldn’t have done us any good,” Kelsey said, “How would we have found her if she just went to sleep?”

“Ah, Kelsey?” Aris said diffidently from the end of the alley. They both looked over to her. As they did so, a uniformed courl came around the corner.

“What’s going on here?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh there’s no trouble here, Officer,” Kelsey said. She rose to her feet, still holding the girl's arm. Staring fearfully at the guard, the girl was forced to follow Kelsey as she walked towards him.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“This poor girl had the misfortune of being bitten by a spider,” Kelsey said. “I happened to be passing by, and as luck would have it, I happened to have an antidote. Using it on the bite seemed like the decent thing to do.”

“Did it,” the guard said suspiciously. He looked at Kesley and then frowned in confusion. “What about the other kid?”

“A friend of the girl. He was concerned that I might mean harm to the girl. My friend is making sure he doesn’t do anything rash.”

“Is any of that true, street rat? You being helped?”

The girl didn’t seem inclined to answer him. Unable to escape Kelsey’s grip, she had twisted her body to get as far away from the guard as possible. Now, she spat on the ground and cursed. Anton didn’t know the words she used, but he tried to remember them for later.

The guard’s face darkened and his hand went for the short club hanging by his side.

“Can I just say how much I appreciate you taking an interest in the welfare of those less fortunate?” Kelsey said. It was a long sentence for a short moment, but the guard was distracted by the handful of silver she was showing him in her free hand.

“What?” he said.

“Such concern for the less fortunate! It needs to be acknowledged,” Kelsey said, jingling her coins. The guard looked at the girl and then back at Kelsey. Then he looked at the silver.

“Just doing my job, ma’am,” he said, holding out his hand. Kelsey smiled and poured the silver into it. With one last glare at the girl, the guard turned his back and walked away.

“Now we can get an inn,” Kelsey said. “These two will give me something to do while you’re having a bath.”

“What are you going to do with them?” Anton asked. Kelsey just looked at him and raised an eyebrow. Anton cursed. He’d lapsed back into Tiatian. They’d agreed to only speak Elitran where possible, accelerating the learning process.

Anton repeated himself in Elitran. The boy in his arms went still, clearly interested in the answer.

“We need to make contact with whatever criminal organisation is in this city,” Kelsey explained. “Where better to start than with a couple of pickpockets?”

“We ain’t helping you, northie bitch,” the boy said. “Anyone can see you’re bad news.”

“How rude,” Kelsey said. “And after I helped your dear friend Leila? She was in quite the pickle.”

“The spider was in the pouch!” the girl exclaimed. She’d been trying to pull away from Kelsey for the entire time of the conversation, but Kelsey’s grip was unmoved. “You trapped your own bag!”

Belatedly, Anton thought to check the two of them with Delver’s Discernment.

Leila Zafar, Level 0, No Class

Karim Bezirgan, Level 3, Thief

“You poisoned a child, Kelsey,” he said with distaste.

“I’m old enough to cut you!” Leila retorted.

“Hey, she was the one who opened the bag after it was stolen from me,” Kelsey said. “Blame him, he stole it.”

“Bull!” the boy said. “There was money in that bag, I sniffed it out!”

“Oh sure, there was some silver in there,” Kelsey agreed. “The guard has it now, so it all worked out for somebody.”

“You gave away all your coin?” Karim asked doubtfully.

Kelsey blinked. “Oh, that was what you meant. You’ve got a trait for sniffing out coin? Nice. But I don’t keep my coin where the likes of you can get it.”

She winked a silver piece into existence. Karim started with surprise and stared at Kelsey intently.

“You see?” she said, making the coin disappear. “I’ve got plenty more where that came from, and a small amount of it could be yours, if you cooperate and tell us about how the underground works around here.”

She gave him a wide, predatory smile. “Or, I’ve got more spiders, if you prefer.”

“Kelsey,” Anton warned. She rolled her eyes.

“Fine, fine, no spiders, no torture, just silver if— just silver. Anton, you make the deal.”

“Fine, fine,” Anton said, letting go of the boy. The kid stepped away from him warily but didn’t go for his dropped knife. Anton picked it up and offered it to him.

“She serious about the silver?” Karim said.

----------------------------------------

The inn they eventually found had an attached bathhouse, but mixed bathing was absolutely forbidden. So Aris and the two courl had gotten to go, but Anton was stuck in Kelsey’s room with her two informants. Aris had offered to take the girl for a bath, but the offer had been vehemently refused. Apparently, coming back to the Nest smelling of roses would seem like they had spent their stolen money on smelling nice, instead of the food the Nest needed. A beating was sure to follow.

The Nest was an abandoned building where the twenty-some members of their gang lived, supervised by an older thief known as the Shrike. He was the one who took their money and brought them food.

“He takes all the money,” Karim clarified. “And you have to hope it's enough for the food he brings, otherwise it’s beatings.”

“This guy’s connected?” Kelsey asked. “He knows the people who run things around here?”

“Yeah,” Karim admitted. “Sometimes he has us do stuff for the big gangs, take messages or watch a place.”

“The nest is just kids, right?” Anton asked. Kelsey gave him a look but didn’t otherwise interfere. “What happens when you grow up?”

In truth, Karim couldn’t have been that much younger than Anton. He’d clearly been working hard as a thief to get his three levels that quickly. Now he grimaced at a thought that was clearly bothering him.

“It gets harder, once you get a Class,” he admitted.

“Oh? I would have thought that the Class made it easier,” Kelsey said.

“Easier in some ways, sure,” he replied, “But… the guards don’t care about kids, no matter if they’re thieves or not. But once you’ve got a level, there’s a bounty if they catch you.”

“They don’t care about kids?” Kelsey asked. “I thought kids made the best slaves?”

“Not us street urchins. We make terrible slaves. We’re dirty and scrawny and we steal stuff. They’ll take us, but they don’t hunt for us.”

Kelsey chuckled, but Anton was still confused.

“Wait, why does that change when you get a Class?”

“They got a use for us then— they can put us in the Dungeon.”

“A dungeon doesn’t grow if it eats kids without levels,” Kelsey told him. “You need a Class to be good dungeon food.”

The kid nodded, unaware of why Kelsey was snickering at Anton’s repressed outrage.

“So that's… what happens to you? You get snatched off the street and fed to the dungeon?”

“Sometimes,” Kalim said. “Sometimes you can find a place in a proper gang. Every now and then the Shrike goes on to bigger things, and a new Shrike gets picked from the older ones.”

“Right,” Kelsey said, “Back to the Shrike. Does he live at the Nest? Or do you know where we can find him?”

Karim looked at the small pile of copper coins and the single silver coin that Kelsey had placed on the table between them.

“You gonna talk to him, pay him to talk to the next guy up?”

“That’s how it tends to work.”

Karim scowled. “I might know about someone higher up.”

Kelsey smiled and put another silver coin on the table. “Tell me more.”