Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids

by Michael McClung

  “Let him go, Bosch,” I said. But he ignored me.

  “How do you like my sanctum, Amra?” His voice was a series of piping notes originating from somewhere in his thorax.

  “I’ve seen nicer slaughterhouses. Let the man go, and we might let you go.”

  “Is that the dead thief’s fat brother I see back there? Do tell him for me how his brother screamed when I chopped his fingers off, would you? If he somehow survives. If you somehow survive.”

  I had nothing to say to that. I just wanted to smash the abomination that Bosch had become. I wanted to throw my knife, but doubted it could pierce the amber shell his head was encased in.

  The mercenary was fading fast. He was clawing at the spike in his chest, but his movement was growing feebler by the moment.

  “What to do, what to do? Will you deal with me, thief? Or will you deal with that?” He pointed with another blood-spattered brass leg back toward the room where Holgren and the others were trapped.

  “Oh come on. Do you think I was born last night?” As if I was going to turn my back on him. Then I heard it.

  A rumbling, grinding sound.

  Then a voice that was not a voice, but a presence in my head.

  The Gate opens. But it is a tight fit, as yet.

  I risked a quick glance back.

  The demon webs were falling furiously, now. Kluge was keeping the area around their group relatively clear, his light-whip in constant, lashing motion, but it seemed almost impossible that those of us in the corridor could re-join them without becoming trapped. Still, I could see them, and the hellfire of the hearth. And the thing that was slowly tearing its way through it. Like some giant, bloated caterpillar with corpse-colored flesh. Holgren stood before it.

  I felt it coming and darted to the side. Bosch’s needle-sharp leg speared the air where my chest had just been.

  “Worth a try,” said Bosch in his calliope voice, and then he flung the now-dead halberdier at us and started loping down the corridor away from us, a horrid, drunken spider.

  Holgren Angrado. You meet us half-way. This is…pleasant. Like a deep, cracked bell ringing in my head, I heard the voice of the demon Holgren faced. I turned around again, torn.

  Holgren glanced back at us.

  “Go, get Bosch!” he shouted, and then he turned to face the thing that was making its way out of the hearth. He rolled his head, stretched his shoulders, like a brawler about to enter the ring. Then he spoke a harsh syllable, and there was a sound like thunder, and the demon roared in pain and rage.

  Reluctantly, I went, feeling relieved I did not have to face that thing, and feeling as though I were a coward, and determined to take it out on Bosch.

  “Let’s go,” I said to the men with me. And we went, pounding down the hall after him. He may not have been steady on his many legs, but he was swift. We didn’t lose sight of him in that long, straight corridor, but we couldn’t seem to gain on him, either.

  Then suddenly there was a door ahead, plain blonde wood and horribly out of place. He lost time opening it, and even more time trying to fit through it. He just had time to slam it shut before we got there.

  I tore the door open. Or tried to. It was locked.

  “You’re a thief, right?” asked one of the swordsmen, barely out of his teens. “You gonna pick the lock?’

  “The hells with that. Take too long. You’re hefty, give it a good kick.”

  “Aye.” His massive booted foot lashed out and something cracked.

  “Again!”

  It took three more kicks, then the door sprang open with a juddering sound.

  Beyond was a room I recognized, despite the gloom. The one with the corpse sporting a knife in his heart.

  Bosch was crouched over the ensorcelled corpse, his own spidery brass body humming and shivering with eldritch energies. With his head mounted atop that grotesque thing, he should have looked blackly ridiculous. He didn’t. He looked vile, mad, and dangerous.

  “I want you to meet my employer,” he said in that pipe organ voice. “You won’t like him.” And two delicate, shimmering spider legs plucked the dagger from the Elamner’s heart.

  He came up screaming, knocking Bosch into a corner. The look in his eyes was feral. Mad. Both the angry kind and the crazy kind. He saw the armed guards surrounding him, and disappeared.

  Blood and chaos ensued.

  I have never seen anyone move as fast as him. I suppose technically I didn’t actually see him move at all. Maybe the faintest of blurrings in the air. My eyes couldn’t track him.

  Osskil’s little army, the ones with me and not stuck in that chamber of horrors with Holgren, started to die.

  There were eight armsmen in the room with me. In three heartbeats they were all falling to the floor, throats slit, bloody handprints covering their surprised faces.

  And then it was my turn.

  He just appeared before me, a knife in his hand. The tip of the knife pressed ever so delicately against the skin over my carotid artery.

  “Abanon-touched,” he said.

  “Whatever you say. You’re the one with the blade.”

  “No. You have Her Blade. Or you did. I can smell it on you. You must give me the Blade. Or I will kill you.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I truly wish I did.”

  He sniffed again, shuddered. His lip curled. “I also smell an arhat.”

  “If you say so.” It's not like the bald kid rubbed himself up against me.

  “Do you believe I will kill you?”

  “Very much so. But I still don’t have Abanon’s Blade.”

  His eyes bored into mine. “You’re not lying. So you must be mistaken.” Suddenly he shuddered again, violently. His face went pale. “I will find you again. When I do, you will have found the Blade. Or you will be very unhappy in the brief span before you die.” And then he vanished. The window shutters rocked slightly in the breeze caused by his passage.

  “Kerf’s crusty old balls,” I swore, and looked around the room.

  Bosch had disappeared as well. All of the men who had come with me were dead, and the bloody handprint on their faces was the signature of the most feared, deadly assassin in the world. Red Hand.

  Heirus the Elamner was Red Hand, and he wanted me to give him something I didn’t have, or he was going to kill me.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “The Elamner is awake, and he’s Red Hand the assassin,” I told Holgren as he came through the door a few seconds later. I may have been gibbering, just a little.

  “Yes, we managed to deal with the demon, thanks very much for ask—” He saw the bodies littering the floor. “What happened here?”

  “I told you, Heirus is Red Hand. Bosch pulled the knife out of his chest and woke him up. He killed everybody. He wants me to give him Abanon’s Blade or he’s going to kill me too.”

  I watched him chew on it for a moment, then decide what question to ask first.

  “Where’s Heirus now?”

  “Gone. But he said he’d find me again.”

  “We’ll deal with it. We will, Amra. Where is Bosch?”

  “I don’t know. He disappeared when Red Hand started slaughtering everybody. Bosch is, uh, different now.”

  “I know, I caught a glimpse. It should limit his options for hiding at least. I don’t see him renting a room, or doing much of anything where people can see him.”

  While I spoke to Holgren, Osskil posted one of the remaining armsmen at the window and the other at the door. Kluge was inspecting the bodies and the circle that Heirus—Red Hand—had been resting in. Professional curiosity, I suppose.

  “First things first,” said Osskil. “We need to do something about this house of horrors.”

  “Agreed,” said Holgren.

  “Good idea,” I chimed in. “How do you close a hell mouth, by the way?”

  “With fire, of course,” said Kluge. “Fire with fire.
But then you have to seal it, lest some other mad idiot reopens it.”

  “And how do you do that?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “With magic, and lots and lots of very big, very heavy rocks.”

  “That’s for another day,” said Osskil. “First let’s get our dead out of this foul place, then burn it to the ground.”

  #

  Kluge and one of the armsmen made sure nobody sneaked up on us while we hauled the bodies of the rest through the window. It was the shortest route, and besides, no one wanted to chance those hallways again. I agreed in principle; I didn’t like to think of those dead men resting in the ashes of that house. I may not have known them, but I didn’t have to, to want them out of there. But I was less enthusiastic about having to haul the bodies.

  I’m not particularly squeamish. It wasn’t handling their corpses that bothered me. It was seeing that bloody handprint on those dead faces, and knowing it might very well be me next. If Red Hand wanted me dead, then I was dead. If even a fraction of the tales told about him were true, he’d been around for generations, dealing death to kings and queens, priests and generals, merchants and even godlings all around the Dragonsea. He would disappear for years, then the all-but-impossible assassinations would start again, all with that signature bloody handprint. Red Hand was literally the stuff that legends—and nightmares—were made of.

  When we’d shifted all the corpses that Red Hand had made, I turned to Osskil.

  “I hate to say it, but there are two more in there.” The arquebusier the demon crab had killed, and the halberdier Bosch had done for.

  “I know,” he said, “but we dare not risk more deaths to recover them.” He shook his head. “We were not prepared. I was not prepared, not for this. We should not have continued once we knew what this place had turned into.”

  “I don’t think it would have mattered if we’d brought a hundred men,” I told him, “or a dozen mages. You didn’t see how Red Hand moved. Eight men dead in the space of three heartbeats. There is no preparing for a foe like that.”

  He just shook his head.

  “We should have burned the place to the ground right off,” he said. “Never even entered at all.”

  “But then you’d never have known for certain Corbin’s killer was done for. He might've been out having a shave when you came calling.”

  “I could live with that. In retrospect. I went looking to avenge one death. Now there are ten more, and my brother’s murderer no closer to being dealt with.”

  “Such talk does not become you, Lord Osskil.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That sounded rather haughty.”

  I shrugged and pointed towards Holgren. “Been spending too much time around that one.”

  It got a smile out of him at least.

  #

  Holgren and Kluge reduced the villa with magefire, which for the most part looked like normal fire. Except, you know, it was being blasted out of their hands. It was especially bright, even in the dim predawn light. I noted with some satisfaction that Kluge had to quit halfway through. He looked as though he’d run from the Dragon Gate to the Governor's Palace without stopping. Admittedly, Holgren didn’t look much better when he’d finished. I’d have made a joke, but neither mage looked like they were in the mood.

  The stench from the burning villa was more than awful, and the breeze coming off the Dragonsea was light but variable; more than once it shifted direction unexpectedly, and the vile smoke reduced Holgren or Kluge to gasping retches. It was not a pleasant chore, and to the credit of both they never complained once.

  While they were about it, the rest of us loaded the dead into the omnibus along with the prisoners. Alain wasn’t going to be happy about the blood. Alain would get over it.

  I took a water skin from one of the men and gave it to Holgren, who was surveying the ruins of the villa. He took it with a grateful look and drank deep.

  “So. You think Bosch is in there?” I asked him.

  “I’m afraid not.” He pulled out the compass he’d prepared with Bosch’s hair. The needle pointed due East.

  “I don’t understand. It’s pointing at the house. Or what’s left of it.”

  “If only it were. If he were as close as that, the needle would be spinning aimlessly. He’s much farther away.”

  “But that’s the Dragonsea.”

  “Precisely. He doesn’t need to breathe, and there isn’t much to him anymore to attract a hungry pheckla.”

  “Kerf’s balls. He’s well and truly beyond reach then, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. For now. That one won’t be content to scuttle along the sea bed for long, however. We will see him again, and sooner rather than later.”

  #

  I was deeply, deeply tired. I parted company with the others as soon as we got into the Spindles, and headed toward another one of my bolt-holes to sleep, after promising to check in with Osskil and Holgren the next day. I don’t know what Kluge and Osskil did with the Elamner’s guards, or with the bodies. I also don’t know what Myra and Alain thought about the condition they received their omnibus in. It was all in one piece, though, so they couldn’t have been too upset.

  I probably should have gone with Holgren to his sanctum, but it was just too far. Instead I trudged over to the herbalist’s whose back room I rented and sneaked in the window.

  As I crawled under the single dusty sheet that graced the cot in the dark, funny-smelling back room of the herbalist’s, though, one thought kept nagging at me.

  It was a little thing, and it probably meant nothing, but it kept me awake for a considerable time considering how exhausted and sleep-deprived I was. You’d think it was Red Hand, and his demand that I give him something I had no idea how to get, but it was something else.

  Bosch. Gloating about chopping off Corbin’s fingers.

  Sure it was a nasty thing, calculated to enrage, horrible enough in its own way. But why gloat about that and not the actual murder? Why not talk about letting him run, as Kluge had mentioned, and hunting him down like an animal? That was just as cruel, if not more so.

  It was a small thing, but it didn’t fit.

  Something was missing. Something was off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I slept until noon, then left the herbalist’s the way I came. What the old woman thought about her mysterious boarder I couldn’t say. The room was paid up months in advance and the door triple-locked from the inside, which must have seemed odd, but not odd enough to turn down easy money. That’s one thing I like about Lucernans; once money changes hands, they become deeply uncurious.

  At Osskil’s manse I was informed that I was invited to another funeral. Or funerals, rather. Three of the armsmen he’d hired had no one to claim their bodies, and so he’d decided to inter them in the Thracen crypt reserved for retainers. It was, apparently, a rather gracious gesture on his part. They’d have a posher afterlife than they would’ve had otherwise, at least. It was scheduled for the late afternoon. I wasn’t all that keen on going, but Osskil wouldn’t be available until then. I was led to believe by his servant that he was off getting scolded by Lord Morno again.

  I decided to have a very late, or rather for me a very early breakfast. At which point I realized I was thoroughly broke. I didn’t trust Holgren to have any food, and didn’t want to walk all the way to his house in any case, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and get a meal and an advance from Daruvner. I’d promised to check in with him anyway.

  It was quiet at his dive. No nieces, no Kettle, and very few patrons. Daruvner fed me, loaned me a few marks and then insisted I tell him everything that had been going on.

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  “I think I do.”

  I shrugged. “On your head, then, old man,” I said, then filled him in about Corbin, how I’d decided to go after his killer, and how things had gone straight to hells. He supplied me with wine as I wound through the
whole sordid mess, and when I was done he sat back, stared up at the water-stained, sagging plaster on the ceiling and idly rubbed his massive belly.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” he finally said.

  “You’re ahead of me, then. I’m starting to feel like I don’t understand anything.”

  “‘Thus wisdom grows; in stony, unaccustomed soil,’” he replied.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m sure it wasn’t flattering.”

  “Just a quote. Look, you don’t even know who killed Corbin.”

  “The hells I don’t.”

  “Hear me out, woman. You’ve pinned this on Bosch, and his boss Heirus—”

  “Call him what he really is. Red Hand.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that, but say that he is. Bosch admitted to cutting off Corbin’s fingers, but never said anything about killing him, correct?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “That’s been bothering me. But his boss is Red Hand, Daruvner. You know, king of assassins? Maybe Bosch didn’t do it. Doesn’t mean his boss didn’t.”

  “You say you saw this Elamner kill a half-dozen men right in front of you. You say you know it was Red Hand because he put his bloody mark on their faces. Correct?”

  “It was eight men, actually, but yes.”

  Daruvner leaned forward, locked eyes with me. “Did Corbin have Red Hand’s mark?”

  I wanted it to be the Elamner. After all the blood and trouble, I wanted it to be the obvious bad guy. But the truth is the truth, and facts are facts.

  “No. Damn it.”

  He leaned back again, chair creaking under his weight. “I’m not saying he didn’t do it. I’m not saying Bosch didn’t do it. I’m not even saying it wasn’t hired out by one or the other of them. What I am saying is, you’ve been mistaking what you think for what you know. You wouldn’t do that on a job. You’ve let your anger cloud your judgment like you never would if this was business.”

  “It’s not business, Fengal. Somebody killed my friend. How can I treat it as though it was just another theft?”