The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Did you get it?” the magus asked from the bank.

  “No.” I sloshed toward him sullen and embarrassed. “I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find anything.” Nothing except huge chunks of obsidian. “There’s no naos, no altar, no treasure room.” I told him about the maze as I climbed up the sandbank out of the water. “It’s not very big.” He reached out a hand to help, grabbing me first above the wrist and then behind the elbow.

  “There’re still two nights left,” he said optimistically. “Come get some breakfast.”

  We woke Pol, who made us breakfast. He’d been hiding six eggs in his bags as well as more coffee. The magus dug out a dry set of clothes for me, and after breakfast I lay down and went to sleep. The sun was just rising.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I SLEPT THROUGH THE DAY with sunlight and blue sky filtering through my closed eyelids. After a cold, wet night in the temple maze, the sun was contentment itself, and I didn’t wake until it was setting. I had been dreaming again of the lady in the chamber; her hair was held away from her face by a string of dark red stones set in gold. She used a swan feather pen to put a second mark by my name, and she seemed concerned for my sake. I was about to ask where was the temple, where was the altar and the statue of the goddess, when the smell of coffee woke me.

  I groaned as I woke. My eyes were still closed as I stretched my muscles, my arms over my head. There was someone standing above me, Sophos, I thought. He put a little cup of coffee in my outstretched hand.

  “Gods bless you,” I said to him.

  “You’re welcome,” said the magus dryly. “When you have returned to the land of the living, I have some questions to ask.”

  I scowled and took my time over the coffee. It was thick and sweet, and I was sorry when I reached the grounds at the bottom of the cup.

  The magus had many questions. First, though, he asked me to describe my night in the temple. I told him about the corridors mined out of the solid rock with their walls sagging in to make arched ceilings. I told him about the trap and how I’d almost been caught in it. I didn’t tell him about the antechamber that I recognized in my dreams. I didn’t really believe that myself, and only reluctantly did I tell him about the pool of bones.

  “How many bones?” he wanted to know.

  Ghoul, I thought. “The skulls were in pieces, I saw parts of four or five, maybe more. Does it matter?”

  “My predecessor came here, I think,” the magus explained. “But as far as I know, he came alone. The other bones would be older. I wish I knew…” he murmured.

  “Knew what?”

  “Knew why whole expeditions have disappeared after this goal.”

  “I wish I knew,” I said, “how the bones came to be piled in the back of the maze and none of them left in the trap at the front.”

  The magus raised his head to look at me and then raised his eyebrows as well. “An astute observation,” he said. “Somebody moved them?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. Maybe in five hundred years every thief that came here had been as smart as myself, but I found that difficult to believe. I looked around the campsite as a different thought occurred to me.

  “I’d move camp if I were you,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “The river turns here. We’re right across from the falls. If the water came back faster than it did last night, it would jump that falls and land on top of you. You and Pol and Sophos would be washed across the sandbar and end up somewhere downriver, probably drowned.”

  The magus nodded. “We’ll move. Eat some dinner.”

  While I ate, I asked Pol if he had any rope or twine. I needed a piece longer than the ones I’d had in my pockets. After dinner I changed back into my clothes of the night before. Everything but one pocket lining had dried in the sun while I slept. Just after midnight the river sloshed in its bed and disappeared. It was as magical the second time as it was the first. I waited longer for more of the water to be gone from the maze before I took the line that Pol offered me and stepped into the pool.

  I slipped through the stone door in the bluff and found one of my shoes. It was bobbing in the little bit of water still trapped behind the door. The other shoe had been dropped by the receding water in a corner of the antechamber. I put them on and grimaced with distaste. They were cold. I lifted the locking bar on the inner door and stepped into the maze. By the time I had opened the locks on the metal door my body heat had warmed the shoes on my feet and I had forgotten them.

  Locks are not difficult things to open. They all work on the same system: Little tumblers keep the lock closed in this position and open in that position. The more tumblers you have, the more expensive the lock, but if a thief can open a lock with four tumblers, he can open one with six or eight or twelve almost as easily. He just uses a longer false key with adjustable strikes to move the tumblers.

  If you want to keep something safe, I say hire a guard, at least until someone invents a better lock. Or hide your treasure where no one will find it. That’s what most people do. Being able to find valuables in boxes hidden behind bed frames, being able to move through a building with no one the wiser, those are more important skills for a thief than opening locks. Those and a good head for heights. People don’t usually hide their emerald earrings in the cellar.

  I blocked open both of the metal doors with stones I’d brought from the riverbank and wandered through the maze to the pool of bones. I stood and looked at it for a while with the light of my lamp reflecting off the dark water. This was the one place in the maze that might hold Hamiathes’s Gift, and I didn’t want to look. I paced the length of the pool a few times before I started at one end and raked my fingers through the cold water, disturbing silt and bones. I found a ring, two rings, gold buttons, silver buttons, brass buttons, fibulas, brooches. The thieves who had come to this place had been a wealthy bunch, but none of them had found what they came for. The brooches were set with lapis and obsidian and a variety of other stones, but none of them was Hamiathes’s Gift. There was one ring that held a large green emerald engraved with a design I couldn’t make out in the dim light. It was too big for my finger. I slipped it over my thumb. The rest of the things I’d found I shoveled back into the pool, offerings to the gods.

  I left that corridor and began the tedious work of measuring the maze, using the line Pol had given me. It took all night. I was just finishing when the panic came again. I coiled the rope with shaking hands and hurried toward the exit of the maze. By the time I reached the doors I was running and I almost collided with the first one. It was closed. My stone block had not stayed in position even though I had placed it carefully and wedged it firmly so that it would hold against the returning Aracthus. I fumbled for my tools and unlocked the door. When I started for the next one, which I could see was also closed, my foot kicked the stone door block, lying where it had been pushed by the swinging door. My other foot kicked the pry bar which I had dropped and forgotten the previous night. That was a more painful impact, but I didn’t stop. I limped on as quickly as I could to the far door and through it and out of the maze. My exit was perhaps a little more dignified than the night before, but not much. The magus was waiting for me.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  “None,” I said.

  “Dammit. What are you doing all night?”

  “Tripping over pry bars,” I told him. “Where’s my breakfast?”

  After I ate, I asked the magus if he had any paper. I knew he had a journal that he kept a record of our days in.

  “Did you want to write a letter to your sweetheart?” he asked.

  “What makes you think my sweetheart can read? Shut up and get me a piece of paper.”

  The magus laughed and pulled himself up to walk to his backpack, lying beside his bedroll. He tore a sheet from the back of his journal and flourished it in front of me. “I hear and obey,” he said, “which is more than you have ever done.”

  I snatched the paper out of his hands and
noticed Sophos staring in astonishment. “What are you looking at?” I asked him.

  “Nothing,” he answered.

  “He is merely astounded by my good humor, Gen,” explained the magus, “and my ready compliance to your grumpy requests.” To Sophos he said, “I have the highest respect for a craftsman, and Gen is nothing if not that. Although if he doesn’t bring back Hamiathes’s Gift tonight, the three of us may as well drown here as go back and tell the king that we have failed.”

  “The three of you?” I asked pointedly. “What happens to me?”

  “Oh,” said the magus, waving one hand, “you would drown in the maze.”

  A chill shivered down my spine. I turned to the paper in my hand without speaking. I used a charcoal stick from the fireside to mark out the measurements I’d stored in my head. The maze took shape under my hands while the magus looked silently over my shoulder.

  “What’s that?” He pointed with a finger at a dark smudge.

  “A mistake,” I answered. “I keep getting my measurements turned around. That big piece of obsidian that I told you about, though, is right there.” I marked it with another smudge.

  “If I were here to get rich, I’d be a happy man. How long is the rope?” he asked after a pause.

  “About thirty feet,” I told him.

  “Thirty exactly,” Pol volunteered.

  “So this space here”—the magus put his fingertip down on the page—“might be as much as eight feet by six?”

  “I think so,” I told him.

  “You think there is a room hidden?”

  “I don’t know. Every wall is two feet or three feet thick. There could be a hidden storage space anywhere. And then there are the outside walls of the maze. A secret way could lead to a tunnel a mile long. I just don’t know.”

  “You’ve checked those walls?”

  “Every inch,” I said, frustrated.

  The magus squeezed one shoulder. “If there were a door, you would find it, Gen,” he said, and I shrugged. I was pessimistic of finding anything hidden in any of the seamed walls of the maze. There was no door. I was positive of it.

  “Did you look among the bones?” he asked quietly. He hadn’t suggested it the night before, although the necessity was obvious to both of us.

  “Yes.”

  “Find anything?”

  I looked down at the ring still hung around my left thumb. He looked as well and whistled. In the sunlight I could see that the emerald was flawed, milky white on one side. The seal engraved in it was a curving fish, maybe a dolphin. The white flaw was a breaking wave.

  The magus leaned over me to lift it off my thumb. “The writing on the ring itself is in the old style, pre-invader. Whoever wore it here must have had it in his family for many generations.”

  “Or he lost it here a long, long time ago.”

  The magus agreed. “Or that. I’ll put it in my bag, so that it doesn’t get lost.”

  “You will not,” I said. The ring didn’t belong in a bag; it belonged on a finger. My finger.

  The magus looked down at me, and I started to get up. Pol rose as well.

  “If you want a seal ring,” I said, louder than I’d intended, “go get one yourself.”

  “Oh, very well.” The magus capitulated with a smile, handing it back to me. “Grave robber.”

  I laughed at that. “I’m trying to rob a god’s temple, and you think I should worry about the ghosts of a few dead men?” I slipped the ring back over my thumb and went to lie down. With the image of the maze in my head, I slept.

  And dreamed again. In the antechamber the woman in white called me by name. Of course she had written my name on her scroll, I knew that, yet hearing her say it aloud tore away a comforting pretense of anonymity. I hesitated, and she called me again.

  “I am here,” I answered.

  “Many have sought twice in the maze and yet gone away,” she said quietly. “If you go a third time into the maze, you will not leave without what you seek.”

  I nodded my head.

  “You will go a third time?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is no shame if you did not.” She paused as if she had wandered as far as she could from a script that was written out for her. “Who brings you here?” she asked.

  “I bring myself,” I whispered.

  “Then will you go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be cautious,” she said as she turned and picked up her white pen. “Do not offend the gods.”

  I woke before she looked up from the third mark beside my name.

  It was still more than an hour before sunset. The sand under me was warm with a day’s heat, and I was comfortable. I stayed where I was with my eyes closed and thought about the stones I’d used as door blocks the night before. They shouldn’t have moved. I had been very careful. Had someone removed them? A woman in white? A little voice inside me laughed. Of course she knew my name. She was a dream, something made of my own imagination. If I knew my name, then so did she, but those blocks hadn’t been moved by a dream.

  I opened my eyes in slits and looked over at the magus. He and Pol were sitting by the cold fire ring talking quietly, so as not to wake me, about some army campaign they had fought together. Pol wouldn’t have moved the blocks. He didn’t particularly care if I found the stone, but he was no enemy to the magus. The magus could have moved the blocks, but I couldn’t see why he would. I had an ugly image of him sealing the outer door of the maze and refusing to let me out until I produced Hamiathes’s Gift, but it was a nightmare, nothing real. The magus, in spite of his dogged pursuit of world sovereignty for Sounis, was a reasonably honest man. When I’d accused him of intending to knife me in the back after I’d delivered Hamiathes’s Gift, he’d been insulted and angry. He’d steal an entire country, but he wouldn’t murder one dirty little thief. Nor would Pol, unless the magus ordered it, nor did I need to worry about Sophos as an assassin. Ambiades I would worry about, but we’d left him on the far side of the dystopia.

  So who had moved the blocks? No one, I finally decided. The doors were heavier than I’d allowed for, the wet stone slicker. I’d have to be more careful, that was all. My stomach rumbled for the lunch it had missed, and I sat up.

  “Welcome,” said the magus. “Would you like some dried beef, some dried beef, or some dried beef for lunch?”

  “Oh, I’ll take stuffed pigeons in sauce, thank you, and some decent wine to drink. None of that cheap stuff, please.”

  The magus handed me an almost empty paper package of dried beef and half of a loaf of bread. “Enjoy your meal,” he said.

  The bread was four days old and as difficult to chew as the beef. I worked my way through my portion listening to Pol and the magus go on discussing their campaign. I looked around for Sophos, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “I sent him after more wood,” the magus broke off to tell me.

  Knowing Sophos, I thought he had probably fallen in the river. “Can he swim?” I wondered out loud.

  The magus glanced over at Pol, who shrugged his shoulders. Without another word they both stood up, brushed the sand off the seats of their trousers, and went to look for Sophos. Once they were gone, I flipped open Pol’s bag and helped myself to another slab of dried beef, which I stuffed into one pocket. The magus would have given it to me if I had asked, I think, but I’d given up asking for extra food since the scene with the riding crop.

  Sophos came over the ridge behind me, bringing a bundle of brush. “Where is everybody?”

  “Looking for you.” I explained that they thought he’d drowned.

  He sat in huffy silence for the next half hour until the magus came up the riverbank from downstream. When he saw Sophos, he stepped back around the curve in the bank and must have waved to Pol because both of them reappeared.

  They sat down beside us, and Sophos, staring straight ahead, said pointedly, “I swim very well.”

  “Is there any dinner?” I asked.

  So
we ate and waited for the river to disappear. I had moved away from the fire to sit in the dark. Sophos moved with me.

  “Gen,” he asked, “can you hear the river coming inside the temple?”

  I thought about my panic on the previous two nights. Maybe my ears heard what my head didn’t understand. “I don’t know,” I had to answer, and told him about the panic. I told him about the sliding stone door blocks as well.

  “Do you think,” he stammered, “there’s some…body in the maze with you?”

  I wished he hadn’t so obviously substituted “somebody” for “something.” Not that I thought ghouls and ghosts were real, but they were easier to believe in when standing in a cold, dark, wet hole in the ground.

  My third night in the maze I remembered to pick up the pry bar, lying abandoned in the entranceway to the maze. Then I went directly to the corridor through the middle of it. I searched fingertip by fingertip every stretch of its inner wall from one end of it to the other, and then as nearly as I could tell, I circled through the maze to the far side of the same wall and searched it, too. It took most of my night, and I found nothing. I went to the pool in the back of the maze and waded through it, bones occasionally crunching under my feet despite my care. I searched the rear wall of the maze and again found nothing.

  As I searched, Sophos’s unspoken words came to haunt me, “…something in the maze with you?” I broke off every few minutes to look over my shoulder and cursed Sophos for bringing up something I didn’t want to think about.

  The flame in my lamp sputtered once, and the panic swept down on me. I went back to the middle corridor and stood there while the panic rolled over me, sweeping and pushing me toward the exit of the maze. I knew that there was still time before the maze filled, and I refused to admit defeat. I planted my feet and actually held on to the rock for support. I intended to find Hamiathes’s Gift, and if I couldn’t, or if as I suspected, it was not there to be found, I told myself that I might as well drown. What, after all, was there to go back to?