Skate the Thief

by Jeff Ayers

  “You’re under our protection, right?”

  “Yes,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Good.”

  Not knowing what else to say and seeing that her words were doing nothing to make the situation any better or easier, she turned on her heel and began the walk back through the streets. Neither man tried to stop her. If Gemhide was under the protection of the Ink, she wouldn’t be stealing any books from him. That meant her days learning from Belamy were limited.

  They were always limited, she reminded herself. While this was true, it did little to make her feel better about her situation. It’s probably over tomorrow. The Big Boss was expecting her to make her move when Belamy attended the show; once she took the only thing she thought could be the soul tether, she’d be out of the old man’s house for good. If she didn’t make her move, the Big Boss would know about it, and wouldn’t likely take kindly to her failure to produce results.

  The air burned her lungs as she walked the half-cleared streets. There were few pedestrians out, and those who were kept coats wrapped tight and stepped with a fervent haste on the clearest parts of the road. A carriage passed her, its occupant shrouded in shadow as the driver “heed” and “hawed” at the horse to turn this way or that around snowdrifts and corners.

  The knot had returned to her stomach. It was time for her to make her decision, to make her move, and she wanted to do nothing of the sort. “Steal or run. Steal or run.” She was muttering to herself, and she knew it, but she couldn’t help it. The question had been running through her head for weeks, at varying speeds and urgencies. It had become very urgent. “Steal or run. Steal or run.” Normally, she would have people to discuss such a problem with, but all of them were of the Ink and could only be expected to give one answer: steal. Twitch probably would have actually thought about it before answering. He’s been weird, though. Whatever Tillby’s crew did really stuck with him. In his addled state, he couldn’t be trusted with her doubts.

  A month ago, she wouldn’t have considered it much of a choice; the theft would have been easy and guiltless, because it would have helped her survive. The Ink was still helping her survive, but she had other considerations, too.

  She could not do it, she decided. Selling Belamy into servitude was not an option. If she were someone like Kite, it would be easy, and she felt a mixture of jealousy and revulsion. He doesn’t care about anyone. He’d sell his own mother if he thought it would help him, never mind save him from being cast out or punished. She hated herself in that moment, for thinking Kite was worth envying.

  Having made the decision, Skate felt the knot in her stomach disappear. “I won’t do it.” She said it out loud, just to hear it. Hearing it said convinced her even further that it was the right thing to do. It raised questions, of course. Will I be able to run? Where will I go? Should I tell Belamy? These questions, though important to answer, did not weigh heavily on her. She would figure it out in time. She had confidence in that, though she couldn’t explain why.

  The snow did not seem as biting as she made her way to the home of Barrison Belamy once more.

  Chapter 24

  In which alchemy drives one to tears, ethics are discussed, and geography is puzzled over.

  Skate found the home much as she’d left it, though the fire had died down again. She lifted a log at a time from the ever-full supply until she felt confident that the heat would be just short of oppressive. Then she opened the bookcase and made her way down to the lab.

  Belamy was still there, working away on his creations. There were three stoppered bottles full of something brackish collected on a table opposite him, far away from where he was currently working. The acrid smell made Skate’s eyes water. The old man was pouring a gray powder into a bottle of clear liquid. As he poured, the clear water began to take on the cloudy, brownish appearance of its completed fellows. When he finished pouring, Belamy set the empty container down and swirled the liquid around in the bottle. Satisfied, he stoppered that one, too. The smell got to be too much; she coughed, and the wizard noticed her.

  “Upstairs!” he said, shooing her away and waving with the bottle around the room generally. “I don’t have the vents open; you can’t be down here.”

  Skate coughed more and nodded, keeping a hand against the wall as she walked, not trusting herself not to fall over on the way up. She wiped away the painful moisture from her eyes, and found that the heat from the fireplace made the irritation subside. She sat in front of the increasingly warm fire, knees bent, and arms resting on her knees while she waited for Belamy to come up.

  At some point, Belamy had turned the flames back to their natural color. Wanting to enjoy the color of the blue fire, Skate spoke the Dwarvish words: “Gerunk kekondahash.” Immediately, the room was awash in the azure light. Skate stared into the flames and thought.

  I should explain everything to him. She backed off of the idea immediately; the more Belamy knew about her and her connection with the people he was hunting, the more likely it was he’d never want to see her again, and then she’d have isolated herself from all possible friends and safe places. He can’t know that I was one of them.

  If she did decide to leave the Ink, which was her only option now that she’d decided not to steal Belamy’s tether, she’d never be safe on the streets again. She needed a place, and the wizard’s was her only option. If it had just been Boss Marshall and Haman she’d be breaking with, she might have been able to explain herself and get away with a clean separation from the organization; but with the Big Boss keeping a close eye on the crew’s activities, looking over the Boss’s shoulder with regard to every decision, that couldn’t happen. BB would demand retribution, and the crew would be forced to oblige, or else another crew would be brought in to do the job. Here, though, protected by the heavy stone walls of the house and the magic of its owner, she’d be safe.

  He can’t know.

  The wizard’s slippered feet made soft scooching noises on the stone steps of the hidden staircase. She turned to look at him, her eyes clear of the stinging vapors trapped below. He looked as he always had, old and bent but still alert, still able to move around. He had a look of concern. “Is everything all right? Why did you come down, when you knew I was working with my alchemical tools?”

  “I wanted to see if you needed help with anything.” In truth, she wasn’t sure what had driven her downstairs. It wasn’t as if she could share her good news with him. “Hey, I decided not to steal from you and betray you after all!” That would have been a great way to start a conversation. But it was why she’d wanted to see him; she’d made her decision, and it had made her happy. However, it was a happiness she could not share with him. “You know, get something for you, or just pester you while you work.”

  “No, I don’t think I need anything like that,” Belamy said with a soft smile. He threw his hands over his head and turned back toward the staircase.

  “What are you doing, anyway?” Skate put her legs back under her and stood up, taking a step away from the fire. The logs had caught and were starting to burn with their bright blue waves of heat.

  “Getting prepared. I have magic, but I can’t rely on that alone. How did that brigand Tillby put it? ‘Fortune favors the ready.’ Something like that. And he’s right. So, I need to get ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “War.” He walked downstairs without looking back at her.

  Skate took a step to follow, but decided that was a stupid thing to do, given the choking fumes. Instead, she took the stairs upward and went into the library. There, Rattle and Petre were reading in their usual position on the small table against the wall. She walked over and brushed Rattle’s legs aside to see the page they were examining. The legs made a sound like rocks tumbling down a metal tube.

  The letters on the page were not anything she could identify. They must have been Elvish, she decided. The unknown letters flowed and drifted together in a more intricate way than the letters she
could read, and were far less blocky than the runes the dwarves used. She put a hand on Petre’s sphere. His eyes flowed into view, looking at the book.

  “What is this?” she asked, giving the unreadable words another cursory, polite glance.

  “It’s a political treatise written by an elven philosopher comparing the benefits of taking consideration for the self above all others and of taking a more altruistic approach to decision-making when it comes to making choices on behalf of a nation or kingdom.”

  Skate smiled at this response, struck by how wonderful it was to know these two—to eat Rattle’s food, and to learn of stories and history and philosophy from Petre. Watching them further convinced her that she could not throw this all away, even for the Ink.

  The gang wouldn’t be happy about it. BB wouldn’t especially.

  Her smile faded. The Big Boss wouldn’t be happy to hear of it at all. He was expecting a lich delivered into the hands of a subordinate tomorrow. When he learned he wouldn’t be getting one, he’d be furious. A furious man might lash out at those around him, and assign blame where it didn’t belong, like on Boss Marshall’s head. She didn’t want him hurt over any of this. Her—and by extension, his—recent acquisition of Gherun as a paying customer might help smooth over any disappointment. That’s loads of free money each month that they didn’t have before, right?

  “Blade for your thoughts.” Petre was watching her, an eyebrow arched. “You seem unusually pensive.”

  “Just thinking about the past. And you don’t have any money.”

  “You’re right about that. At the moment, I don’t have a copper coin to my name. Or a body for that matter. What holds your attention in the past?”

  Skate sighed. “How you can’t change it. How it’s part of who we are, whether we know it or not.” She couldn’t deny that the Ink would always be a part of her—literally, with regard to the tattoo on her back—and that it had brought her to where she was. But if staying with it meant throwing Belamy into slavery, she had to move on.

  Petre was silent now, his gaze in the blue haze far away; he might have been looking at the book, but it seemed he was looking beyond it. Rattle’s legs clicked idly as it floated, sounding like a wind chime in a breeze.

  When Petre spoke, his voice was thoughtful and low. “It binds us. It controls us. It shapes our every move. And it’s not even real.” Now it was Skate’s turn to look curious. Petre’s tone lifted a bit, becoming more energized at the apparent challenge of her questioning stare. “It’s not. Think of it a moment: what’s the most real of the three—past, present, or future?”

  “They’re all real.”

  “Oh, really? Can you do anything with any of them? Interact with any of them but the present?”

  The conversation had taken a rather sudden and bewildering turn. “Uhh.” Skate shrugged. “No? I can’t go to the past, or to the future. It’s just always now.”

  “Exactly my point. The future is speculation and guessing, hope and fear, but not tangible, not experienced, not real. And the past is nothing but memory and records. It did happen, but it is no longer real, just as the future will certainly happen but is not yet real. You see?”

  “No.” The discussion had become immensely confusing, but Skate was almost certain what Petre was saying was nonsense. “No,” she said again, “the past is real because it happened. We know it happened.”

  “But it’s not happening now,” he said, leaning on the final word with a hint of exasperation. “That’s what I mean. Of course it happened, when it was now, and of course the future will happen—when it becomes now. That’s what I mean by the past being unreal—it’s not real in the same way that now is.”

  “Oookay,” she said, shaking her head at the dizzying pace and direction of the topic at hand. “So what? What’s it matter that the past isn’t the same as the present? Does that mean it doesn’t matter?”

  “No, never that. It matters immensely. As you said, it brought us to now, and there’s no changing that fact. We all owe our existence to the past, one way or the other. That was my whole point: it’s insane that we rely so much on something that’s not real, and that it has such power over everything.”

  “So we should…what, ignore it? Pretend it doesn’t matter?” She was guessing at the tilt of the train of thought, but immediately found the flaw in her own estimation.

  Petre seemed to see in her face what she had realized, and his smile reached his eyes to give them a point at each corner. “Never that, either. I’m in here because of the past. I will not leave here because of the past. It matters immensely to me that the past should hold a great authority over the affairs of mortals like you and me. We cannot escape it.” He looked away again, his stare growing distant. “We should not seek to. To do so would be to lose who we are.”

  The pronouncement hung in the air, unanswered and unanswerable, because Skate did not know how to even begin interacting with the ideas wrapped up in the statement. Rattle’s legs continued their gentle clicking.

  Skate shook her head. The Ink, the past, and her relation to both were swimming and mingling in her head so freely that she feared she’d never be able to sort them out without long hours of further mind-boggling discussion and self-exploration. “What did the elves have to say on the matter?” she said, pointing to the open book on the table.

  Petre blinked and brought himself out of his own reverie. “Well, as with most things, the elves viewed the past as a weapon, a tool to be wielded when needed, and disposed of when it became prudent to do so. They were entirely willing to report mistruths about history, particularly political history, when it was convenient for them—their own meticulously passed-down histories will often record these instances of prevarication with a sense of pride and admiration, an attempt to show themselves as being wiser and more cunning than their enemies. Nevertheless, they showed a bizarre dedication to ensuring their own histories were well-documented and sourced with eyewitness accounts when available. So, in some ways, they cared a great deal about the past, and even seemed to have a great reverence for it in their private histories; but in other ways, they showed a great potential for contempt of the truth of history when it served them to do so, particularly in political and military matters.”

  “You make them seem like snakes.”

  “You’re not the first to have called them such in their long stretch of time involved in the affairs of mortals, and likely not the last. Still, a prolonged study of them is a fascinating exercise, for what it can teach us not only of these mysterious would-be conquerors, but of philosophy, and of history. If we were half as committed to ideas like truth and honesty as the elves were committed to their opposites, the world would be a different place entirely by now. But in the elves we see only ourselves, turned toward our most unpleasant and self-serving interests. We’re not that far removed from them, and that should be concerning in the extreme.”

  Skate crossed her arms. “I’m not like them.”

  “We all are, in some way or another. You’ve never wanted to make someone else suffer?”

  Skate thought of Kite, and she winced.

  “You’ve never cheated or lied in order to get what you wanted?”

  She looked to the floor and frowned.

  “This is a reflection of us all, Skate. The worst of us are no different from the elves in that sense, while even the best of us are at least tempted toward such behavior on a near-daily basis. Even the holiest priest has had to resist the urge to politick, to mislead, to steal.

  “It’s not all bad news, though. I think there’s something redeemable in even the worst of us, and I’m not sure that wasn’t true of the elves. They themselves noticed this in their description of the various kingdoms of men: some, they praised for their cunning and wiliness; while others, they chided and mocked for their ‘weakness,’ which is how they described things like kindness and honesty. But they made sure to note even in their praises of vicious neighbors that these humans cared for some
one, be it a mate or a parent or a friend. The elves viewed such relationships as folly. That’s what I mean by our not being far-removed from them: there are those among us who would agree with the assessments of the long-gone conquering creators of magic.” His eyes became sad. “And I’m afraid they may have had a point when it came to rulership. The fall of a kingdom is a terrible thing. It leads to death and destruction for the common folk as well as the king.”

  She considered that for a moment. “I don’t like it. They’re wrong. I’ll think of why later, but I know they’re wrong.”

  “Maybe. And aren’t we lucky we get to talk about it? That, more than anything, might be what differentiates even the worst of us from the elves of old. I don’t know if they had any such choice in their behavior. Their texts are universal in this ethos; it may not have even been a discussion they could have in these terms. This is one of those times when in theory, I’d love to meet an elf to ask such questions; but practically, that would be a nightmare because their return to the world would not be something to look forward to.”

  “Better leave the question unanswered in that case.” Skate smiled and said, “Well, that’s enough history for me.” She picked up her reading from another table. “I’m going to go work on this some more.” She was almost out of the room when an idea struck her. She returned to Petre. “Is this one true?” she asked, tapping the heavy cover of The Last Dragon of the Lost Brink Islands.

  “Every history is true in some sense, just as every history is a lie. It’s not a work of fiction, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Skate nodded, satisfied with the answer, and went to her own room. Petre’s eyes dissolved in his blue fog. She sat on her bed and put the book in her lap. She found herself unable to focus, however; she read the same sentence three times before realizing she was doing so, and couldn’t even remember what the line said. She rubbed her eyes and tried again, this time reading aloud, her rhythm and speed much improved over the preceding weeks.