The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids Read Online Free PDF Page B

complemented each other quite well, and we’d done three jobs together in quick succession. Then he’d stopped taking contracts. I found out later from Daruvner that Holgren Angrado worked only when he had to. He’d make a pile of coin, then go into semi-retirement until it ran out.
    Holgren sat, legs crossed and hand to lips, digesting what I’d told him. He shook his head. “Corbin told you he’d set up the meet in a safe place. Any idea where?”
    “Not really. Obviously someplace not as safe as he thought.”
    “He could have been betrayed.”
    I shrugged. Probably. There was just no telling.
    “This Kluge, what did he look like?”
    I described him. Holgren shook his head.
    “I don’t know him. I don’t know what sort of power he wields. I might assume that, since he takes a civil servant’s pay, he is not terribly talented, but I don’t like to assume.” He tapped his full lower lip with one long forefinger. He was staring at me, through me. Long enough that I started getting the creeps. “Well,” he finally said, shaking himself. “Nothing for it but to see what we can see. Come sit here.”  He vacated the chair.
    I took a deep breath, then shifted from the couch to the chair. He stood behind me, which made me more than a little nervous. He put his fine-boned hands on my shoulders. He smelled of lavender, and under that, something acrid. As though he’d been working with chemicals. He didn’t smell bad, just strange. Bone looked on from where he was stretched out next to the couch, a thin rope of drool slowly stretching to the floor from his black lips. I felt a little laugh bubble up at that, but choked it down.
    The hairs on the back of my neck stirred faintly. Holgren shifted his hands to the sides of my neck, then cool fingers touched corners of my jaw, then my temples. My skin tingled and I repressed a shudder. It’s not that it was unpleasant. It wasn’t. It’s just that it was… intimate. More intimate than I was comfortable with. And the feel of his magic had a different quality to it than Kluge’s. More confident, somehow. More knowledgeable. Self-assured. The difference between a grope and a caress. I found myself blushing, and was glad Holgren couldn’t see my face.
    “You can sense me,” he remarked, a faint note of surprise in his voice. I nodded slightly, and the feel of whatever he was doing changed, somehow. Became more business-like. More formal. Almost remote. I found myself at once relieved and vaguely disappointed.
    Finally he took his hands away. He sprawled out on the couch, and one hand dropped down. He rubbed between Bone’s eyes with a casual knuckle, and the dog stretched out and presented his chest. Holgren scratched dutifully.
    “Well?”
    “Well, you were right. This Kluge marked you with a location spell. A basic working, really, but sometimes the basic ones are the most reliable. At some point during your conversation he must have collected something particular to you. Most likely a hair. Then he made physical contact with you, a simple handshake being quite sufficient.”
    I remembered his hand on my back, in all probability plucking a fallen hair. “That sneaky—and then?”
    “And then he most probably winds that hair around something, perhaps a pin, and places the pin on a specially prepared map.”
    I frowned. “And then he watches the pin shift along the map as I go hither and yon.”
    “That’s about the size of it.”
    “So what do I do?”
    “Nothing. Right now that pin is rolling around like a sailor four hours into shore leave. He’ll know you’ve gone to see a mage, of course, but he would have known that if I’d simply severed the connection. Better he wonder who you might know who could tie his spell in knots.”
    “What? Why? You’re putting yourself in line for unnecessary scrutiny, aren’t you?”
    He smiled. “When you came here you assured a knock on my door from the inspector, I think. I’d rather he come wary and