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those he heard continually from Master Furgo. He started to ask more, but Gord waved him off, and Hoddy shuffled discontentedly to his own place above.
    Gord liked the little fellow, and that was saying a lot, for Gord had but two other such comrades in the whole place. Hoddy thought him big, strong, and smart. As far as Gord knew, that made Hoddy different from all the others in the Beggarmaster’s decrepit “palace.” Of course, Gord was often congratulated for his cunning, stealth, and even good thinking. But somehow, he didn’t take such great pride in being praised for clever begging or thievery. Hoddy’s adulation was for Gord as a person, not for anything in particular he did.
    Soon the massive old structure was quiet. The practice rooms in the loft were empty. The two floors beneath were filled with sleeping beggars. The first floor, the offices of the Union, and the sprawling quarters of Master Theobald were silent too; the obese Beggarmaster was anxious that everyone be rested and alert so that all would go well on the morrow.
    Before dawn the next morning, Gord and a score of other special apprentices were assembled. Each received instruction as to what he or she was to be that day. For this mission Gord was teamed with Violet, a beautiful young girl of about sixteen. She was a whore. Gord liked her, for she had been nice to him from the first. Violet was a top earner and a favorite of Theobald, and Gord didn’t like to think about that. He supposed she had been put in the special group originally because the Beggarmaster liked her.
    Gord was still naive at times. In reality, Violet was an accomplished actress and seasoned strumpet by the age of thirteen. Theobald simply knew talent, and that was why she was in the select group. She could pose as a pitiful young mother with a starving child, a vaguely pretty but crippled girl, an armless crone, or a striking doxy. Today she was the latter, posing as a courtesan from out of town-slumming, as it were, amid the merchants and artisans of the Garden Quarter’s sporting district. She shot Gord a smile, and his heart raced. Gord was beginning to feel new stirrings within himself of late, especially when he was around Violet.
    Dressed in ragged cloaks, the teams slipped out of the building separately. Each group went its own way quietly, disappearing quickly so as not to elicit unwanted attention. Gord and Violet made their way quickly to an empty building nearby, slipping in through a side door. A beggar there accepted their hand signs and took them into the next room, where he moved a table and lifted a concealed trap door. Gord helped the girl descend the ladderlike stairway.
    At the bottom, some twenty or more feet beneath the streets above, was a secret passage that led under the wall dividing Old Town from New. There were gates to pass through, of course, but the cost was more than an iron drab for each pair of legs. Spies and watchers were at these places too, and the Beggarmaster wanted no reports of beggars moving to places where thievery would be reported later-thievery for which the guild took no responsibility or paid no share to city officials. Already the guild was getting pressure to account for such activity, and suspicion of the thieves was rife. Neither could the new corps go in nonbeggar disguises, for obviously the whole scheme would come to light then. Thus, hidden ways and quick changes in secret stations were used to throw any observers off the track.
    After a hundred or so paces, the pair came to a ladder. Violet ascended first, and Gord watched her from below, holding his candle so that he could view her shapely young legs. He began thinking of ways to be alone with her when they got back to their headquarters.
    They changed in the room to which the ladder brought them. It was a small place hidden in the basement of the establishment of a pawnbroker. He was one of the Beggarmaster’s trusted henchmen and made a fat profit from the goods he