Skate the Thief

by Jeff Ayers

  Petre was older than Alphetta, but only by three or four years. That first year with us was rather chilly between them, as she found him irritating and he found her somewhat haughty. After I refused her request, though, the relationship warmed. I think that probably had much to do with the fact that they were the only two other people here in the house, and I made a convenient target for their shared frustrations. For Alphetta, an overprotective and stifling father had kept her from her heart’s desire. For Petre, a demanding and stern master was expecting excellence in all things at all times. I may have pushed them together by my decisions.

  A wizard’s training takes years; the best and brightest can learn to master the basics of the practice in as little as four, but that’s a rarity. Petre would be done with my tutelage in no sooner than seven or eight years—a respectable amount of time, mind you. In his fifth year—I think it was the year that Alphetta saw her fifteenth birthday—the war began. Petre, I know, has already told you about my military career. I won’t reveal anything more specific about the time period, as it’s nothing I’m particularly proud of, and it has little to do with our topic of conversation today. I bring it up only to explain that my military service compelled me to take two young people out into dangerous territory. I could not leave Alphetta here alone; the city was dangerous then. It is now, but that was before the Guard had been officially organized. Law and order are vapor and images, something to be chased after and eventually caught, but back then they were impossible. I also could not leave behind my promising young apprentice, whose father had passed during his training. He wanted to continue his education, and his father had paid well before his passing for the opportunity for his son to learn the highest of Arts.

  So, in command of scores of men and women, and with a bitter young daughter and a promising young pupil in tow, I began to aid the conquest. I did not know it for what it was at the time, but the nature of the conflict would come up again and again over the following months, with it becoming more and more apparent that this was not a war I was fighting on behalf of the unduly attacked, but a war of pain and death—a cold-hearted push by the nobility to squeeze money out of our neighbors during negotiations.

  The disgust I felt when I fully realized what the war was being fought for stuck with me, and I carry it to this day. One must always be skeptical of the powerful, Skate. Kings, merchant lords, even high priests—it doesn’t matter the stripe of their power. The allure of strength, money, and influence is irresistible, and those who have a measure of such things only ever want more. I found that to be true of myself. When I did finally realize that I’d been fighting—killing and ordering killing, shedding blood and making widows and orphans of soldiers wrapped up in a conflict that wasn’t even theirs—in order to line the nobility’s pockets, it almost broke me. Because I had known, Skate. Or at least, if I hadn’t known, I hadn’t questioned it too much. I had not bothered to investigate the causes of the conflict, had not thought to even ask if it had been worth fighting over.

  The worst events of the war were the executions of our own. Some men fled out of fear or desire for glory elsewhere. If caught, they were to be punished by edict of the king, and his edicts were cruel. The method of execution for the crime of desertion was death by exposure. I did this only once, though I knew in my heart it was wrong. He was a very young man. I still remember his name: Hugo. I did what I was ordered to do, though I knew it was needlessly cruel. I was happy to be of service, happy to be a war hero, happy to serve my king and country in battle. I had power, and I rushed to use it. I brushed aside my conscience, and the boy paid with his life.

  I’m drifting off course; I said I wouldn’t talk much of the war, and I’ve made a liar of myself. During precious breaks in the fighting, when I could, I continued Petre’s education. I spent time with Alphetta, though she had grown somewhat cold to me in the intervening years, never forgiving me for my refusal. She didn’t hate me. I know that, and she told me as much, but the wound never healed.

  They were never in danger; I made sure of that. Miles behind the battlefield were they, always. I made sure neither saw the horror of combat, nor made themselves targets for it. It was during this time that I made Rattle in an ill-advised foray into experimental research.

  A few months after Rattle’s creation, the war was over. The king had gotten what he’d wanted, so it was time to come home. The awards and honors were doled out. I accepted mine, a fine set of crimson robes woven through with protective magic, though I cared nothing for it. The war and everything to do with it was abhorrent to me. I still have those robes, as a sort of insurance policy should I ever need a vast sum of money all at once. My daughter, my apprentice, and I returned home.

  I should have been paying closer attention during those years, but I had been so preoccupied with the war effort that the relationship burgeoning right under my nose might as well have been happening on a different world for all the notice I took of it. You see, my daughter and my apprentice had fallen in love. I’m sure they were doing their best to hide it from me, and I’m equally sure that their efforts would have appeared comical to me had I not been so distracted.

  As it turned out, though, I was distracted, and I only came to know of the true nature of their relationship by degrees. At first, I took note of their much-improved level of conversation. More than merely trying to be polite around one another, they conversed as friends might, and my old heart rejoiced at the idea of the pair of them becoming better acquainted. I found out later, from Petre, that they had already fallen in love by the time I noticed their warming dispositions.

  Another fault of mine; after the war, I spent most of my time alone, reading, studying, mixing in the basement. I did not want the troubles of the world to bother me again, and I was ready to live the rest of my days in retired obscurity surrounded by stories and histories and theories. Had I been more active, had I been more tuned in to the lives of those nearest me, I may have prevented the folly that happened thereafter.

  You see, I would not have minded had Alphetta and Petre decided to marry; he was a fine young man, and she a healthy young woman by that time, and both driven toward greatness and ever-greater heights that their union on its own terms would have been a fine development in its own right. But what they worked even harder to conceal from me was that my apprentice had done something incredibly foolish: taken an apprentice.

  He was not ready to teach; he was barely ready to perform any magic of his own. In reality, all he was doing was regurgitating our lessons to Alphetta in private, so that in actuality I was serving as a master of two, though I’d no knowledge of that fact. I did begin to get suspicious, though. Snippets of overheard conversation. Lingering sidelong glances after seemingly innocent remarks. I think they must have sensed my growing unease, because a little over a year after returning home, both of them disappeared on me. Rather than talk to me and explain themselves, they eloped.

  I was devastated. They’d left no note, no written explanation for their absence; I feared the worst, that some political rival during the war had come after my family for petty revenge or that some enemy made in the same period had come to attack me, but had found my child and apprentice an easier place to start for destruction. So, I did everything in my power to find them.

  It was at this time that I bought my enhancer (I’d had the crystal ball itself for years, a relic of my time as a military commander, when I’d sought information on the enemy’s movements), the better to find one or both of them. I did, at last, find them, and it broke my heart further. They were in the midst of a lesson. I saw my daughter performing magic, and I saw my apprentice teaching her how. He had been continuing his studies without me, you see, and learned spells and tricks I’d never taught him. So there they were, the self-taught master with his promising student—with his wife.

  I knew they’d abandoned me. I was hurt, of course, but not nearly as hurt as I’d have expected to be. They were alive, after all, and seemingly happy. If th
eir desire was to be away from me, what right did I have to make them return? It was clear they did not want me in their lives anymore, so I stayed away. I maintained intermittent clairvoyant contact but never made any overtures to let them know I’d found them. I had some idea of their physical location but didn’t have anything specific to go on. I found out later that they had not even left the city, but were actively avoiding my part of it.

  They were happy. They were safe, or as safe as a fledgling wizard and her neophyte teacher could be. I resigned myself to dying alone in my old age, content that my daughter had found satisfaction in her home and in her drive to achieve her greatest goal. I had done my part.

  Unfortunately, an inexperienced teacher with a student determined to reach ever higher is a dangerous match. That which I had feared since her childhood came to pass. During their research, something went horribly wrong. Alphetta was killed. I did not see it happen, and that is a mercy I will ever be thankful for; but it happened, nonetheless. I could no longer see her. That’s how I found out. One day, I could check on her, and the next, emptiness in the glass. I found Petre easily enough in my glass, on the run. He soon found a way to detect, then block, my observations.

  A cold fire spread through me, Skate. One that I had not felt for almost a decade. It was the fire of war. I believed Petre to have killed my daughter. I was an older man by that point, but not so old that I could not be roused, and the murder of my daughter roused me. I left my home, my city, for the first time since returning from the war, after any lead I could find. I started with what little I’d learned from my last successful scrying, and thereafter relied on witnesses and observations. I hired a bounty hunter to aid me, and the chase was on.

  It took years. Petre was skilled at avoiding notice, and with magic aiding him in his travels, the chase proved fruitless for years. Further frustrating our hunt was my own old age. So, breaking off to let my hired man do his work alone, I researched ways to thwart the ravages of time. It was during this period that I discovered a secret that many would kill for: how to extend my existence beyond the paltry four score years and ten I might have been afforded by the luck of my own fortitude. Even better, I found a way to do so that did not involve some vile ritual or deal with infernal powers. When I began my second life, I began it fresh, with no monstrous acts weighing on my conscience and with the cruelty of age gone forever.

  I rejoined the hunt only to find the trail cold. My bounty hunter, noble soldier of fortune that he was, had contracted fever and perished some months before, chasing Petre deep into the savage wilderness of the southerlands, where vicious beasts prowl and the air itself carries fetid and oppressive heat. Such concerns no longer bothered me, but they explained my hunter’s failure. What hope had he of surviving such environs alone?

  During my extended forays into the shadowy groves, I encountered wondrous sights. There were tribes of lizardmen, who were shocked to find a human being blithely trekking through their territory. None had any specific information about Petre’s whereabouts, though they spoke of rumors of another human who was said to travel among the tribes, using magic to disguise his nature. That was promising but ultimately unhelpful: thousands of these serpentine folk lived in the jungle. Trying to find the one who didn’t belong would be as fruitless as searching for a particular seed after the bag has been dispersed to the winds. I began to question the wisdom of my search when I came face-to-face with one of the elder powers of the world.

  The great dragon Zuri-shantar greeted me by name, dispelling the illusion it had made of its surroundings. What I had thought to be a thicket choked with undergrowth faded into a rare open area, a slight hillock free of trees or bushes. The grass, which I’d wager had not been chewed by any grazer for many years, came up to my waist. It did not even crest one of Zuri-shantar’s terrible claws.

  “Barrison Belamy. The wizard who would be immortal, as his betters are. Why are you trespassing here?”

  Something you need to know, Skate: since my transformation, I do not feel fear in the same way you do. It is a weakness of the flesh that I simply do not experience anymore. I can be concerned about things, but only in the detached, clinical, practical way that one might be concerned about the weather or ill rumor. But I can remember fear. I remembered it very strongly at that moment. I’d never seen something so primordial as a dragon, something so majestic yet terrifying, so wise yet brutish. He could have snatched me up in the blink of an eye and crushed my body to dust, and all of my magic could have done nothing to stop it from happening.

  I steeled myself; the destruction of my body no longer concerned me, since it would form anew if destroyed. “I seek a man, one who fled into this place to escape from me.”

  “He must be quite fearful indeed to have done something so foolish.” The dragon wrapped his gargantuan claw around me and lifted me clean from the earth, as a child might grasp a mouse. “Why do you chase him?”

  “Justice,” I said.

  Zuri-shantar laughed, a booming that sounded like a thousand bellows at the forge that made the world. Hundreds of birds took flight at the sound. “No, no. That is not why.” He brought me up to his eye, the pupil of which was roughly the size of my torso. “A man may do what you have done for many reasons, but justice is not one of them. You may have fooled yourself, but not me.”

  I admitted my justification had not been accurate. “Revenge.”

  “That’s closer, lich. Much closer to the heart of it. Something else lurks, I think, but revenge is indeed enough of a catalyst to force a man into violent, purposeful action.” I remember the pressure as he squeezed at the end of his sentence. “What will you do when you find your prey, mighty and tireless hunter?”

  I hesitated in answering, and he laughed again, shaking my body with each breath. “That’s what I saw skulking in the recesses of your soul. You don’t know yet!” The laughter continued, and he tossed me down. Had I been alive, I would have been mangled. “What foolishness is this! In my millennia roving the lands of this world, I have seen things strange and wonderful, the rise and fall of kingdoms and powers, whole peoples rising from nothing only to disappear without a trace. I have met dozens of your kind, practitioners of magic who have sought to escape the fate of mortals, ignorant hatchlings fumbling in the dark with things beyond their comprehension. None of them had conflict in their rotten, decrepit hearts. I have only ever seen hatred, coldness, and ambition. Today, I have seen something new. Hesitation! Softness! In a lich!” More laughter erupted, so much that the great beast rose up on his hind legs, swatting the air as if to dispel his mirth. When he gained control of himself, he dropped onto his back with a thunderous crash, tearing down trees and undergrowth at the perimeter of the clearing. He began lazily picking at his spear-like teeth with his claws.

  I stood and watched, unclear what was now expected of me. When he continued ignoring me, I slowly turned and began to walk away. I had almost reached the end of the clearing when the voice of the dragon ripped through the oppressive silence of the surrounding jungle. “I know where your man is.” I turned to find him scratching his great stomach, running a claw on the scales to pick out irritating debris. He spat a gout of fire toward some of the trees not yet trampled, and the blast of heat lit a swath of jungle aflame. He snorted in satisfaction at the sight.

  “Will you tell me?” Had I been capable of feeling fear as people do, I’d have already lost consciousness from it. As it stood, I felt only apprehension, an assessment of risk that found the danger high, but worth the reward if it brought me closer to Petre.

  He snapped up into his four-legged position with a speed totally at odds with his size. A thing so large has no business being that fast. Nevertheless, there he preened, scraping his massive horns along his back and sides, scratching and cleaning.

  “Oh, I think so. If only to watch what you will do. I’ll keep an eye on you afterward, too.” He brought his fiendish head down low, to a point I hardly had to crane my neck to catch full view of
him. “Have you begun to feel it yet, I wonder?”

  “Feel what, mighty one?”

  “Such flattery! You must have been a courtier at heart—when it was still beating, of course.” He rose again, this time to his full height on all fours, his majesty and power bared in casual shifts of titanic muscle beneath crimson scales as large as dinner plates. “I speak of the madness that plagues your kind. Loss of memories of your former life, poisoning of relationships you desperately cling to, paranoia about imagined plots to destroy your precious tether.”

  “I have not,” I replied. I knew of such troubles; one cannot take up a study of immortality without running across warnings of its effects on those who would take it as their own.

  “You will.” The certainty in that impossibly resonant booming voice gave me no small amount of dread. “I have met with the eldest of your kind, lich. I visited him on the eve of the thousandth anniversary of his new birth. Rech Bolthek is his name. He did not remember it.”

  “His birthday?” I asked.

  “No,” he said with a snarling chuckle, “his name. He had forgotten his own name. It took him a thousand years to get there, but he ended up where all mortals go when they try to avoid their natural fate: utter madness. It will come to you, too. It is the way of things, little Belamy. Your kind is not meant to view the passage of centuries; doing so degrades your mind, warps and contorts it in ways too strenuous, until it, like a piece of strong and unyielding metal bent with a force greater than it can stand, must break. Perhaps it will do so when you find your prey. That would be something worth seeing!” He laughed again, smoke pouring from his mouth and throat.