Among Thieves

by M. J. Kuhn

  The light glinted off the waves outside the weathered walls of the arena in front of her and reflected off the massive bell behind her as she tiptoed, barefoot, along the foot-wide ledge. The view was breathtaking. She could see the whole island. The sails of every ship in the harbor, the stage, the roiling mass struggling to escape the arena. The training barracks, one each for Sensers and Kinetics, positioned on either side of the Guildmaster’s manor on the eastern cliffs.

  Click, click, click.

  The sound pulled Ryia’s eyes back to the tower.

  Click, click, scratch.

  She slipped along the edge of the bell, heart leaping into her throat as she saw it. The relic of Declan Day. It was here. The Quill.

  It looked just like the drawing. A long, ornate writing stick made of stone and carven wood. It shuddered, hovering on its point, sloshing, whirring, and hissing.

  Beneath it lay the map of Thamorr, covered in tiny pinpricks of deep red ink. Ryia blinked. The dots were moving. Shifting slightly. One cruised along the western coastline. Another moved slowly across the border from Gildemar to Dresdell. Hundreds milled around the small island marked Guildmaster’s Stronghold. It seemed more sinister than she had expected. Its energy felt less like a hunting dog, sniffing out Adept, and more like a fox, cunning and dangerous. Once again, she was struck by the feeling that there was something about this relic that she just didn’t understand.

  Click, click, scratch.

  The Quill darted across the map, floating through the air before placing a fresh dot of ink right in the heart of the Rena desert.

  Ryia drifted a step closer. After all this time. After all this running, it was right here. On the desk beside it sat half a dozen thick leather books. She picked one up, leafing through with numb fingers.

  Known Adept per city; Oryol, Boreas, the first page read.

  The following pages were covered with city names and neat tally markers. A count of the number of Adept that should be there corresponding with each dot on the map.

  No wonder it was against the law for anyone other than the Guildmaster to sell Adept. The whole key to his power was knowing where they all were and where they all should be. Finding the splotches of ink that didn’t belong on the map. Without that power, he couldn’t find new Adept babies. Couldn’t kidnap them and brainwash them into submission. And then eventually, slowly, the Guilds would fall.

  Would it throw Thamorr into complete chaos? Probably. But what did she care? She would just find a nice quiet corner of the world and watch the Guildmaster’s hold on Thamorr crumble. Watch with a smile on her face as he faded into irrelevance, powerless and alone. She grabbed a splintered wooden beam from the floor, raising it over her head like a club to smash Declan Day’s treasured Quill into a thousand tiny pieces.

  But just as she tensed, preparing to strike, she hesitated.

  Here it was, her freedom, the only thing she could ever remember wanting, staring her in the face, and she was hesitating.

  Ridiculous. There was no other option. If she stuck with the Saints’ plan and stole the thing, she would still be in the same situation she was in before, only the Mad King of Edale would be hunting her instead of the Guildmaster. After all she had gone through to get here, she would have to be an idiot to just leave it untouched. No. She was going to crush it to splinters and run like hell.

  Thamorr would figure itself out. And the team… the bastards were from the Lottery. Betrayal wasn’t exactly a novel concept there, right?

  Her blood ran cold as she heard the unmistakable scuff of a boot on stone.

  Mind full of images of Disciples closing in on her, she turned on her toe, blindly flinging her axe toward the noise. Her stomach clenched as her eyes found her target.

  Evelyn Linley stood sideways, edging carefully around the bell. And Ryia’s axe was spinning straight toward her ivory throat.

  No!

  Without thinking, Ryia thrust her power out like a lasso. The weapon froze in midair, inches from Evelyn’s skin. The captain’s eyes grew wide. She stared at the axe as it hummed softly, frozen for a moment, then dropped at her feet. She turned her gaze to Ryia.

  “I knew it.”

  26

  NASH

  We’re looking for a woman.

  What in the hells did that mean? The Guildmaster had sounded so certain, but of course, he was dead wrong. Maybe the bastard wasn’t as all-knowing as everyone thought. Her spine crawled as she remembered the familiar way he had studied the axe, Ryia’s axe. Or maybe he knew even more than she had suspected.

  But that was irrelevant for now. Nash pressed herself into a broom closet in the servants’ passageway as footsteps clicked down the hall. She held her breath, waiting to be discovered… but they thundered right past. Like Ryia had said, Sensers could only detect someone who posed a physical threat, and Nash didn’t plan on hurting anyone. Either that or those footsteps had belonged to Kinetics. Either way, it was the first stretch of good luck she’d had this whole damned job. If that luck held until the sun went down, they might actually make it off this rock alive.

  Nash eased the door open, peering left and right down the hall and adjusting her fake mustache. Empty again. She extracted herself carefully from the closet, sidestepping the broom and buckets inside before slipping down the hall to the right.

  The servants’ entrance led to a maze of corridors and rooms. There were kitchens and larders and dressing rooms. Nash peered at her blueprint again in the low light of the lanterns on the walls. She edged past a deserted icebox full of expensive liquors and fruit wines, finally stopping before an elegant oak door.

  Blood thundering noisily through her veins, Nash pressed an ear against the door, listening for footsteps or voices, but it was useless. The racket from the arena was deafening, bouncing around the enclosed corridors like a hive of bees trapped in a bottle. She winced, closing her eyes and flinging the door open.

  Sunlight flooded the corridor, and Nash opened her eyes slowly, letting out a relieved breath as she saw nothing but a deserted path stretching out in front of her.

  “All right, Tristan, you surprisingly resilient son of a bitch,” she said under her breath, shutting herself inside the servants’ corridor and shuffling to the right. “I’m coming for you.”

  She had plotted out her path a hundred times last night, but she would only get one shot at this. Tristan had clearly resisted whatever torture he had been subjected to so far. He had kept the Saints’ plans to himself and kept them all safe. Once she got him out of that dungeon, she was going to apologize for all the shit she had given him over the past few weeks.

  Well, maybe not all of it.

  Nash ripped the false mustache from her upper lip, tracing a soot-stained finger along her path on the map. The manor was just on the far side of the next hill, positioned along the northern cliffs of the tiny island. There were two proper entrances to the building, according to the drawings.

  The front door—no good, there was bound to still be at least one Disciple left there, no matter how big a commotion they made in the arena.

  The other door was at the top of an outdoor staircase, leading directly into the Guildmaster’s private chambers on the third floor. Nash wasn’t sure if Disciples would be posted there when the Guildmaster wasn’t inside, but it was pretty far out of her way. She wanted to get into the basement, after all. Seemed just plain dumb to risk running into whatever Disciples might be inside on three unnecessary floors on her way there.

  Thankfully, the building plan had offered a solution.

  Massive, deadly storms were pretty common on the southern seas, especially in autumn. On an exposed island like this, even Kinetic powers couldn’t save someone from the destructive force of those winds. A storm-cellar entrance stood twenty paces from the edge of the manor. The cellar itself was just a rough-looking rectangle, some ten feet below the ground, but it was connected to a snaking tunnel that led to the manor’s storerooms. Even Adept had to eat, apparentl
y.

  The storerooms were just a few corridors away from the steep staircase that led down to the infamous dungeon.

  Sure, there were bound to be a few locked doors in the way. Nash stowed the sketches in her coat pocket and slipped up the hill, clinging to the shadows at the edge of the outer arena wall. But she knew the doors would not be her only obstacle. The dungeon was plenty secure from the inside, but there was still no way the Guildmaster would leave a prisoner completely unguarded. She would come face-to-face with a Disciple before the day was through.

  Shit.

  She patted her pockets, feeling to see if any of Ivan’s magical black marbles were still tucked there. She found two lonely Trän vun Yavol. If worse came to worst, she hoped they would be enough to cover her tracks—to cloud the Disciples’ vision long enough for her and Tristan to escape. It was a long shot, but it was the only one they had. They had started this job as five random members of Clem’s crew, but in the past few weeks Nash thought they had become something of a family. At this point, she had the distinct feeling they would be leaving the island together or not at all.

  The ground fell away in front of her as she crested the hill, the cliff side manor now clearly visible in the distance. Although “distance” was a strong word for it: it was only a few hundred feet away. Nash dropped to her stomach, peering over the top of the hill toward the building, looking for the telltale sign of blue robes swirling in the wind.

  Nothing. No sign of a single Disciple—or a single breathing body—in sight.

  Suspicion tugged at the back of her mind, but she shrugged it away. Maybe the Disciples were doing rounds and happened to be on the far side of the building? She couldn’t afford to turn down a stroke of good luck.

  But she also couldn’t expect that luck to hold out forever. She sprinted across the open stretch of grass surrounding the manor. It was only a matter of time before someone turned up, and she didn’t want to be caught out in the open when that happened. She tore around the side of the building, bent over in an attempt to diminish her six-foot frame.

  The storm cellar doors lay flat against the ground: two slabs of heavy wood that looked like they might just have been tossed onto the grass. To the north, the ground dropped eighty feet into the ocean. Just as she had hoped, the storm doors had no locks—it wouldn’t be a very useful emergency shelter if no one could get inside quickly. Nash wrenched one door open and found an old wooden ladder leading to a scraped-earth floor.

  Shooting one last look at the deserted manor lawn, Nash lowered herself into the darkness, closing the door behind her.

  First hurdle: cleared.

  The door leading from the cellar to the storeroom was sealed with a rusting padlock and a heavy chain. Nash picked it easily enough, tiptoeing her way through the empty storeroom and peering into the hallway beyond. The manor was eerily silent. She could hear the sound of her own breathing, echoing in her ears. Where were all the Disciples? They wouldn’t really have left the entire manor and dungeon unguarded to run off to the arena, would they?

  Nash shivered uncomfortably, thinking of the Adept she had seen before. They could move quieter than jungle cats. She could be completely surrounded and not even know it. She whirled suddenly in a circle at the thought, fists raised… but there was no one there.

  “Keep moving,” she intoned to herself. The lack of guards was suspicious, sure, but she wasn’t about to throw away her chance to rescue Tristan because of a little suspicion, right?

  But the suspicious voice in her head got louder and louder the deeper she moved into the manor. As she snuck through larders and wine cellars and corridors, all silent and empty. She pulled the Trän vun Yavol from her pocket, rolling the capsules between her fingers as she reached the door at the top of the dungeon stairs.

  This was it. The place where her luck was bound to run out. She was ready. Or as ready as she possibly could be to face an impossibly strong magical being in single combat.

  She pulled her lockpick out again, inserting the sticks into the knob, then frowned. Her stomach swirled uncomfortably as she turned the knob and the door swung open. It was unlocked. Why in Felice’s bitterest hell would the door to a dungeon be unlocked? It made no sense.

  Unless…

  Was Tristan already dead?

  Her heart thudded in her chest, sending pulsing beats down her arms and into the tips of her fingers, still clenched tight around her two precious Trän vun Yavol, ready to chuck them at the ground at the first sign of trouble. The stone stairs were coated thickly with dust. Her steps left clear prints behind her as she walked. The only set of prints on the stairs. As though she was the first person to tread this staircase in a very, very long time.

  By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, she already knew what she would find when she turned toward the cells. And she was right.

  Nothing. No one. The prison was unguarded because it was empty. Because Tristan wasn’t here.

  Because he had never been here.

  Nash turned in a slow circle, struggling to process the thought. But if Tristan wasn’t here, then where the fuck was he?

  27

  EVELYN

  Evelyn barely even heard the clatter of the axe as it fell. She kicked it out of reach.

  “I knew it,” she breathed. She wasn’t mental after all. If the Butcher was Adept, it explained everything. She frowned. Well, almost everything. “But how…”

  She wasn’t quite sure how to finish that sentence. How are you not a dead-eyed half-wit seemed rude. But she had never heard of a mother being able to avoid the Disciples when they came for a child. It was why parents never named their children until their first birthdays. Until then, not even a king could be sure his child wouldn’t be taken by the Guildmaster.

  The Butcher didn’t need her to finish the question.

  “I might have the skills, but I sure as hell wasn’t born with them.”

  “What do you mean you weren’t born with them?”

  Ryia studied the ghastly scars on her wrists, still half-hidden by billowing silk sleeves. “Isn’t it obvious, Captain? I was made.”

  Evelyn could almost feel smoke pouring from her ears as her mind tried to wrap around the word. Made. Adept couldn’t be made. If they could, then every bloody man and woman in Thamorr would be bursting with unnatural powers.

  Her eyes flicked to the device sitting on the ancient-looking table. It looked just like the drawing. A pen, ornate and old beyond measure, hovering over a map of Thamorr. Then she registered the broken timber in Ryia’s left hand, poised like a hammer over an anvil, ready to smash the priceless relic into smithereens.

  “What about your mate, Clem?”

  “This was never about Clem,” Ryia said with a hollow laugh.

  “You think he’ll let you live after you cheat him out of half a million crescents?”

  “I wasn’t planning on going back to break the news to him, to be honest.” A thin line of sweat ran across Ryia’s forehead. Evelyn swore she saw her hand tremble.

  “You’d just abandon us like that?”

  “We don’t exactly swear oaths of loyalty in the Lottery.” Ryia’s throat bobbed. “So what’ll it be, Captain? Are you going to climb back down that tower, or were you planning on standing between me and my target?”

  Evelyn looked back to the whirring Quill. To the wriggling dots on the map beneath it. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what the device did, just like it didn’t take a genius to figure out why Ryia would want it destroyed.

  “You swing that log, and no one on this island will help you escape,” Evelyn said slowly, bare feet shaking as she dared a half step forward. “You’d be trapped. You still need us.”

  “I’ve been slipping nets my whole life—I’m something of an expert at this point,” Ryia said. “I may have needed you to get this far, but now you’re just another obstacle.”

  Just another obstacle. Evelyn wondered how many “obstacles” the mercenary had overrun. How
many other poor sods had she tricked into working with her? How many cities? How many jobs? Was Ryia even her real name?

  Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered. The “Butcher of Carrowwick” wasn’t her real name either, but it was the one that would win Evelyn her prize when she turned her in to the Needle Guard.… Her father’s ring felt like it was made of lead.

  She twitched a hand toward her jewel-encrusted hip. A useless gesture, with her sword tucked safely aboard The Hardship, but an obvious one nonetheless. A challenge.

  Ryia followed the motion with her eyes and tutted derisively, sending Evelyn’s pulse skittering through her fingertips. “Bad call.”

  Evelyn ducked backward, swaying into the cover of a support beam as the Butcher brought the makeshift club down toward her head. She pushed her skirts aside to roll forward, placing herself between Ryia and the Quill. Evelyn fumbled around on the floor for a weapon, coming up with nothing better than a frayed length of rope. She held it, taut, above her head, catching the second swing of the broken beam. The rope pulled and burned her palms, but it held.

  She could only imagine how ridiculous they looked, grappling for their lives, armed with makeshift weapons, dressed in silken skirts and clattering glass jewels.

  “How does all this end for you?” Evelyn asked, snapping the rope toward Ryia like a whip. Ryia took a step back, away from the Quill on its table.

  “What does that matter to you?” Ryia asked, ducking sideways and bringing her right fist toward Evelyn’s jaw in a vicious hook.

  Evelyn swayed backward, teetering on the ledge, barely catching herself from tumbling headlong into the bell hanging beside them. That was a good question. She jabbed a fist forward, catching Ryia in the stomach.

  She shrugged as the mercenary gasped for breath. “Just curious to see what you’re willing to sell out your entire team for.”