Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids

by Michael McClung

  “My blood,” I replied. “His knife,” I said, pointing at Heirus who, I have to say, wasn’t looking all that bothered.

  “I do not ask the living,” she told me with contempt.

  The tombs opened, and the dead poured forth.

  I looked down the hill and saw Corbin walking towards me. Behind him were the three armsmen, and a whole host of the dead I neither knew nor cared to.

  “Who shed blood?” asked the Guardian again, and half a hundred fingers, in various states of decomposition, pointed at Heirus.

  “Whose blood was shed?” And the fingers moved to point at me.

  “Don’t forget him,” I said, pointing to the Arhat.

  “His blood has not yet fallen.” The Guardian replied.

  “Well that’s splitting hairs.”

  “Rules are rules.” She turned to face Heirus. “By what cause or right do you spill blood here?”

  He sniffed. “An oath forsworn.”

  “What oath?”

  “This one promised to bring me the statue she holds in her shirt, but refuses to give it up. Thus is she forsworn.”

  That massive head swivelled back to me. “Is this true?”

  “I said I'd bring it, not give it to him!”

  “Now who is the splitter of hairs? Tut-tut.” She shook her massive finger at me, then looked at the gathered dead. “Who here witnessed this oath?”

  A dozen mouldering hands raised. Including, I noticed, Corbin’s. He had come to stand beside me.

  “Thanks a lot,” I told him, and he shrugged.

  “Here is my judgment,” said the Guardian. “The woman, being known to the honest dead, and having her blood spilled where it should not be, may go free.” Pause. “After she gives up what she agreed to, here on this sanctified ground.”

  Bloodied, near-mad with thirst, aching with hunger and my wounds, I swore in disgust and pulled the hated toad from inside my shirt. I threw it at Heirus’s feet.

  “Choke on it,” I said.

  He bent down to pick it up, and Corbin whispered in my ear, voice slurred a little by decomposition: “When the time comes, do not let her have the Blade. We are her jailers as much as she is our Guardian. Keep the Blade from her grasp.”

  Heirus held the toad up before his face. “Finally,” he said. Then he began to whisper words that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck.

  “Kerf’s crooked staff,” I swore. “He’s a mage too?”

  As Heirus spoke, the golden toad began to melt. The gold ran down his arm like mud and pattered on the grass, not in the least hot.

  “Oh, that’s a nice trick,” murmured Holgren, and then all at once it was free, and that sickening feeling I’d felt when I’d tried to sleep with it in my hiding place in the wall suddenly beat down on me, on everyone there, living and dead.

  Heirus held it in his hand, a shimmering, writhing thing that seemed to take on a hundred forms with each heartbeat, shedding cold blue sparks and jags of light that died out a hand’s breadth away from it.

  He turned and smiled at me, gave me another mocking duellist’s salute.

  “You asked me what I planned to do with Abanon’s Blade, thief. I will tell you. I will finally, finally exit this sorry world, and be free of it and all you mayflies. Farewell.”

  Then he plunged the knife into his own heart.

  As he crumpled to the ground, Corbin pushed me forward, shouting “Now!” in that creaky, slurred dead man’s voice. The Guardian was already reaching down to pluck the Blade from Heirus’s corpse. I turned the push into a lunge.

  My shaking, bloodied hand got there just before her giant stone one.

  And Abanon began to whisper to me, driving for a time all sense from my mind.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The next thing I can recall: I am stumbling, shambling. I do not trust my feet or my hands or my eyes. I do not trust my breath or the taste of my own sour spit. The Blade is talking, whispering, and it has terrible, terrible things to tell me. I try to drown it out “No. No no no no no,” I say, but it doesn’t listen to me.

  I am not in the Necropolis. I do not remember leaving. But I remember the Guardian, furious, and Corbin telling me to go to the temple. I remember Holgren pounding the Guardian with his magics, distracting her so that I could escape. I do not remember what happened to either of them.

  Just get to the temple. Bath’s temple. Just get to the temple, that’s what the small part of my mind is saying. The part that’s not being drowned by the hate, an ocean of bile pouring into my soul.

  This is what the Arhat dealt with since he was ten years old? I will light candles for him in the temple of the departed. I swear it. I swear it. If I survive.

  The Blade was shifting, shifting, now no bigger than a needle, now as long as a spear. I had to hold tight, very tight as it writhed in my hand.

  And the Goddess’s Blade whispered to me all the way.

  —all these people on the street. Kill them. They deserve it and it would be so easy. Humanity, cockroaches all, deserving nothing more than being trod underfoot. What vile, foul sacks of meat, their breathing and grasping and fornicating and defecating. Shoving food into their faces, shoving their genitals at each other, shoving out more wailing, hairless monkeys at every turn who grow and grow and do more of the same. A blight. This city is a blight, a running sore on the face of the world. Scour it. These maggots deserve extinction—

  An unending monologue of hate. It was all in my own voice. And the worst of it was that most of me did not disagree. I knew I was nodding my head, even as my mouth moaned out its ‘no no no.’

  —fucking wagon, see how it’s just been left there to block the street? Thoughtless, careless self-absorbed, self centered apes all of them, just left to block the street and it’s in the fucking way but it doesn’t have to be—

  The hand that holds the Blade twitches and the wagon just disintegrates into dust, along with the horse that was hitched to it. “NO no no no,” I wail, and start to run.

  What if a child darts out in front of me, or an old man blocks my way?

  My natural impatience, magnified a thousand-fold, will be the death of—anyone. Everyone.

  What if the sun shines too brightly in my eyes? What if I breathe a breath of less-than-fresh air? No. No no no. I can’t carry this burden. I’m no Arhat. I cannot hold this Blade.

  I run faster.

  I hug the Blade tight, lest I lose hold of it accidentally again.

  Soon Bath’s temple appeared before me, and my ‘no no no’ gave way to relieved sobs.

  #

  Bath’s acolyte was waiting for me on the steps of the temple. His look was serene.

  “My Master cannot accept this burden,” he said somehow through sewn lips.

  “Oh, gods, please. I can’t. I can’t. I hate you. I hate him. I fucking hate him and I hate your fucking secrets you pile of stinking—” I slap my hand over my mouth.

  —miserable shit never meant to help anyone or anything his only secret is the terrible things he does to worshippers in a dark back room while his god watches—

  He leaned forward and put a hand on my shoulder. I hated him for it. But then I hated him for everything.

  “What do you imagine would happen if a god who knew all the secrets of the world, of creation itself, felt the hate that you feel right now? No, Amra; this burden cannot come to rest with Bath.”

  “Then where?” I choked out. “I can’t. I can’t—”

  “No,” he said gently. “You can’t either. But Bath knows a secret that he wants me to share with you.” And he leaned down and whispered in my ear.

  He whispered for a long time, for all that it was a single word. The word was very long, and it was forged in the fires of creation. I say it was a word, because that’s how Bath chose to express it to me, but really it was a single, pure, undiluted concept.

  No, it was not love. Love is not the opposite of hate.
In fact, they’re closer than you might think.

  What is the opposite of love, you ask? Or hate, for that matter? I have no clue. Bath didn’t share that secret with me.

  What Bath shared with me was the undiluted truth of Apathy, the rat-fucking bastard, and it worked.

  And what is Apathy? Best I can describe it is fatalism mixed with utter indifference. Things are as they are. Things will be as they will be. No point thinking about them, much less worrying. No point doing much of anything at all, as a matter of fact.

  The acolyte whispered that terrible Word into my ear, and I collapsed on the steps like a puppet with cut strings.

  The Blade poured its poison into my ear, and I no longer cared. Not about that, and not about anything else, either. Left to my own devices, I would have lain there on the steps of the temple until I starved to death or died of thirst. I was a motiveless shell. My body breathed, my heart beat, but beyond that I did nothing, because I was indifferent to everything. A mote of dust drifted into my eye and it was meant to be so. Blinking was futile.

  Bath had pulled the Blade’s fangs. He’d also turned me into, essentially, a breathing corpse.

  “My Master did bid you be careful of the Eightfold Goddess, Amra,” he said as he grabbed me under the armpits and began to drag me up the steps. “Well. Bath is the lord of secrets. He keeps them well. He will keep you well as well. What is another secret to Bath?”

  He was dragging me up to the inside of the temple where, presumably, I’d disappear for good. Just another secret kept. Every blade needs a sheath.

  Hate and apathy. The unstoppable against the immovable, and me being ground down in between. We were almost at the top of the stairs.

  “Secrets are power,” the Acolyte whispered in my ear. “How does it feel to be powerless? Useless and used? A tool for powers far greater than you?”

  I felt hate for him, then. No, I felt… not hate. Rage.

  I felt rage. And beneath that, terror.

  Against the lifeless nullity of apathy and the corrosive torrent of poison that was the Blade’s hate, rage blossomed in me. It burned and it cut and slowly made its way to my mouth as a scream.

  I am no one’s tool.

  The echoes of that awful Word he had poured into my ear burned away to nothing, to silence. The Blade’s vile whispering stuttered, stopped. The acolyte stopped dragging me and whispered a final time in my ear.

  “Some secrets cannot be shared. Some secrets must be discovered.”

  I lay there on the steps and gasped, trembling with rage. I felt I had to stay still, or I would burn the world down.

  The Blade had stopped its ceaseless, restless shifting. It was a throwing knife now. Perfectly weighted for my hand. For the first time it addressed me directly.

  I will be your tool. I was meant to be your tool. Use me, Amra.

  “Shut up,” I told it. And it did.

  The rage inside me screamed, inchoate, on and on. If I gave into it I knew the world would burn. I knew it. I could not let it slip its leash. Slowly, with great care, I sat up on the steps and looked at the acolyte.

  “I know a secret or two as well,” I told him through clenched teeth. “Secrets have no power. Not by themselves. It’s the control of secrets that’s power. Control is power, isn’t it—Bath?”

  He nodded. “Some secrets cannot be imparted. They must be discovered.”

  “And if I had not discovered this secret? Would You have salted me away in some secret place, to absorb the Blade’s hate forever?”

  “Yes,” he said, without the least hesitation.

  “At least You’re honest.” I climbed to my feet and carefully started down the steps. I couldn’t look at the god of secrets. The rage inside me wanted to reduce him to ashes. A rage that was wholly human, wholly mine.

  “What will you do with the Blade?” he called after me.

  I kept walking, but said over my shoulder, “I could tell You it’s a secret, but really it’s just none of Your fucking business.”

  His laughter followed me down the strangely deserted street.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Another secret Bath surely knew, and kept to himself, was that control is an illusion.

  I’d built myself a bridge of rage, but as I walked across it, it disintegrated behind me. I had broken free of the Apathy the god of secrets had laid on me. But with the removal of the threat of being secreted away in some corner of his temple for eternity, a breathing corpse, a receptacle for the Blade’s hate — with that threat avoided, it was hard to keep hold of my wrath.

  The Blade was quiescent, but I didn’t trust it. The old priest of Lagna was right; it wanted to be used. And if I did use it? What then? How could I possibly trust it? How could I trust myself? I was riding a dragon. Whatever control I believed I had, there would be a reckoning as soon as I turned loose.

  And if I never turned loose? If I used Abanon’s Blade as it wanted me to? Heirus was right. I could use the Blade to do awful, magnificent things with just a shred of hate and the will to see it through.

  Yes, Amra. Show me what you hate, and that we will obliterate.

  “I told you to shut up.”

  Traitor’s Gate had seen better days. Better centuries, maybe. The gate itself was long gone. The pale yellow stone was fissured, and the narrow steps leading up to the abandoned guard room above were choked with refuse. But the oak door to the guard room was still relatively sound, and the lock sturdy. I should know, since I installed it myself. Another one of my bolt-holes. One with a nice view of the market, and a stupendous reek of rotting produce.

  I sat in the window, on the wide ledge, looking down on the afternoon bustle. By this time of day most of the greens were limp. People haggled. Children darted amongst the makeshift tables, playing and shrieking.

  I held the Blade in my hand. I couldn’t put it down.

  What did I hate?

  I thought on it for a while. Could I actually use the Blade for some sort of good?

  “Blade, could I use you to, say, kill every rapist in Lucernis?”

  It throbbed in my hand. Yes. Yes. We will hunt them down and make them pay-”

  “No. I mean right now. Can you make every rapist just drop dead.”

  Its silence was all the answer I needed.

  What did I hate?

  “Blade, can you end hunger? Poverty? Deformity in children? Can you heal the sick? Can you do one useful fucking thing other than destroy?”

  Silence.

  “You’re bloody useless, aren’t you?”

  I am the hate of a goddess made manifest. I am a Power.

  “You know what I think? I think she discarded you because you were useless. No, more than useless. A hindrance. A liability.”

  I could extinguish the sun. I could rip the world in twain. I could drown nations in rivers of blood. The stones of the gate tower trembled.

  “But you can’t fill one child’s empty belly, or cure a cough, or even get a stain out of linen.”

  Tools are made for a purpose. They have a function, sometimes many functions. Their existence is predicated on their usefulness.

  A tool that cannot be reliably taken in hand, fit for no useful purpose: Was it even a tool, in any rational sense of the word?

  This Blade I held wasn’t broken; it was flawed from its very creation.

  It must have sensed the direction my thoughts were leading, because it began to vibrate in my hand, its form flickering from one type of cutlery to another. A dull keening started up from it, and a hellish red glow.

  “A workman relies on his tool to do the job at hand. His skill, his hand, guides the tool. A tool that turns in his hand should be discarded.”

  Yes. Discard me. Leave me here—

  “But no responsible craftsman would leave a dangerous tool lying around for any fool to pick up. Even swords, meant only for killing, come with scabbards.”

  Then find a sheath for
me. I will lie quiet.

  “Ah, but every tool, flawed or not, put away or left out, holds the potential to be used again.” I held it up before me, looked long and hard at its coruscating form. Felt the hate bubble up like hot bile. Let it.

  “You asked me what I hate. I’ll tell you. I hate you, you useless—”

  There was a soft pop, and a soft sigh. In my hand was only grit and ash, and tiny bits of charred bone.

  I wiped the residue on my thigh, but it left a gray stain on the skin of my palm. I didn’t think that stain would go away any time soon.

  After a time, I got up and walked down the steps. I still had one more job to do.

  I still had to tell Osskil who’d killed his brother.

  With Abanon’s Blade dust, I found I’d lost my thirst for revenge. After everything that had happened, dealing with Estra would just have been an unpleasant chore. But it might still mean something to Osskil.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  It was a beautiful robe. No, beautiful did not do it justice. The robe was exquisite. Made of the finest silk, it lay in an almost liquid pool of itself, every ripple casting a lustrous crimson sheen. It probably cost what I made in an average year. It was probably the costliest bathing robe ever made. I reached to touch it, and he closed the lid of the carved, lacquered box.

  “Better not,” said Osskil. “Only the interior has been… treated. But why take a chance.”

  It was odd, having him here in my rooms. All I had for him to sit on was a decrepit sea chest. He didn’t seem to mind.

  I looked into his eyes, saw the flicker of some deep passion. Something hotter than rage. Something colder than revenge. Then he blinked, and shrugged, and the raw emotion subsided beneath the lordly demeanor.

  “All the time we thought it was about some Goddess’s artefact,” he murmured, “when in fact my brother was murdered over the basest of human emotions. Jealousy.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not so simple, I think. Estra Haig has been a great beauty all her life, and it’s slipping away from her now as she grows older. When Corbin threw her over for a younger, prettier girl, it must have struck her at her core, her very sense of self.” I rubbed absently at my hand, permanently marked by the Blade, or its residue. A barely visible discoloring of the skin; virtually unnoticeable compared to all the other scars I carry, and an itch that wouldn’t go away. I'd learn to live with it. I've learned to live with much worse.