Stealing Life

by Antony Johnston

  Not bad, short and to the point. Nicco walked into the bathroom and took a long, hot shower.

  “In a daring theft today, a gang of thieves stole a necklace belonging to the governor of Hurrunda, who is visiting Azbatha to sign a new trade negotiation between Turith and Varn...”

  ‘Daring,’ he liked that. But ‘gang of thieves’? They made him sound like a bunch of dim-witted bank robbers. He dressed and cooked himself a meal.

  “It just goes to show, some things never change. What in the fifty-nine hells did he expect, coming to Azbatha and waving his priceless magic necklace around? Is he senile?”

  Not the most sensitive wording, but Nicco couldn’t argue with the logic... He sat on his couch, barefoot and relaxed, flicking from stream to stream with equal parts amusement and amazement that it was such a big story. Slow news day?

  “The mayor tonight expressed his anger at what he called a ‘blatant act of sabotage against the trade agreement between Turith and Varn,’ which remains unsigned after Governor Werrdun’s sudden illness and the theft of his chain of office. The mayor promised to direct every available resource to finding the necklace and punishing the culprits...”

  Sabotage against the trade agreement? Nicco laughed, almost choking on his roast tallus.

  “Mirrla Werrdun, the governor’s daughter and personal assistant, told reporters tonight that Mr Werrdun is still unwell after what now appears to have been an outbreak of food poisoning during his dinner reception on the Azbathaero Astra, a prototype airship belonging to the local engineering company. The governor, who is... erm...” The anchor suddenly looked confused. He looked angrily at someone off-camera and hissed, “What do you mean, ‘check and confirm age’? Never mind...” He turned back to the camera. “Excuse me. Miss Werrdun said the governor, who is staying at the mayoral palace, will now remain in Azbatha until he is well enough to return home to Hurrunda.”

  Nicco felt a brief pang of worry. Whatever the official line, and sprightly as he’d been, there was no denying Werrdun was an old man. Had the dope been too much for him? An average man would be over the worst of it by now: the vomiting should have stopped after an hour at most, and the stomach cramps would fade by the evening. But Werrdun wasn’t an ordinary man, he must have been ninety years old. By the watery saints, thought Nicco, don’t let him die of a bloody ulcer or something.

  “The thieves have not yet been identified, but sources close to the mayor tell us one of them may have been disguised as a doctor. Whether this is connected to the outbreak of food poisoning is...”

  That hit a little close to home. ‘Sources close to the mayor’? What in the fifty-nine hells did that mean, anyway? Nicco doubted any of the Hurrundan security men would be talking to the Azbathan police. Who else might have pegged him as a fraud? The ship’s own doctor, perhaps? Nicco thought he handled that one rather well, but it had been touch and go...

  Regardless, there was nothing solid to tie Nicco to the theft. The only person who’d seen him out of his Dr Karth disguise had been the rock star and his escorts. The rocker was too drunk to recall anything clearly and the escorts would never give it up to the police. At least, he hoped not. Xandus wouldn’t even be a suspect and of course wouldn’t give himself up, but even if he did, the wizard couldn’t prove a thing. And the necklace itself was currently lying somewhere at the bottom of the Nissal Straits. All that could tie Nicco to the crime was a skyfall suit and some omnimag grips, which were easy enough to explain away. If that was all the police could pin on Nicco, they’d be laughed out of court and they knew it.

  Someone hammered on the door.

  “Police! Open up, Salarum! We know you’re in there!”

  “WHAT IN THE fifty-nine hells are you doing in my elevator? Ballasar, couldn’t you just ring the bloody bell downstairs?”

  “Frankly, sir, no.”

  There were two of them, Azbathan plainclothes cops. Nicco knew Detective Ballasar from his days as a teenage tearaway. Ballasar was a street cop, with family of his own living in the city. If he could solve a problem without actually bringing something messy like the law into it, Ballasar would do it. He was that kind of cop.

  The other, the one who spoke and shoved his way into the apartment, Nicco didn’t know. He was tall and thin, with a mop of long white hair, and he looked vaguely familiar...

  Ah, yes. It was the officer he’d seen during the bomb hoax in City Plaza, the sergeant he’d marked as one to avoid.

  Too late.

  Ballasar looked faintly embarrassed. “Sorry, Nicco, we got a tip-off...”

  “Pretty ballsy, nicking it in broad daylight,” said the tall cop. “But the game’s up. Now where have you stashed it? Is it in here? You’re probably stupid enough.” He walked around Nicco’s apartment, lifting up printzines and holovids in a cursory way.

  “Tip-off, my arse!” said Nicco. “Ballasar, who is this clown? Have you even got a bloody warrant?”

  “My name is Sergeant Patulam,” said the thin cop. “Remember the name, because you’ll be hearing it a lot more during the trial. And here’s your warrant.” He shoved a folded sheaf of papers into Nicco’s hand and turned back to the apartment.

  Ballasar hadn’t moved from the doorway, evidently keen to let the sergeant get it out of his system. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, lit one and watched.

  “Oh-ho, what’s this?” Patulam held up the damp skyfall suit.

  “I sometimes go skyfalling,” said Nicco. “But I’m not very good at positioning. I ended up in the drink instead of on land.”

  Patulam smiled. “Oh, no you didn’t, lad. Not today. The north end of town was an exclusionary zone from sunrise to sunset. The Astra was the only ship within ten miles.”

  Nicco hadn’t known that. The more this guy talked, the less he liked him. But if Nicco clammed up now, he and Ballasar would whip him down the station for sure. He had to maintain his front. Then he realised what the cop had just said, and smiled. “I didn’t say I was at the north end. Actually, I was down south-side. The water’s not so choppy.”

  Patulam narrowed his eyes at Nicco. “And your card records will back that up, will they?”

  “Ooh, I’m not sure. Do you know, now that I think about it, I may have paid with cash.”

  Ballasar coughed on his cigarette and tried not to laugh. Patulam shot him a hard stare. Nicco smiled to himself and opened the warrant, to see what on earth this joker thought he had on him.

  It was a menu from the fried fish café down the road.

  Nicco’s sense of humour abandoned him, and he threw the fake warrant at Patulam.

  “Get out! Get out of my apartment right now, before I call the city attorney’s office and tell them how well you follow procedure.”

  Patulam let the menu drop and slowly walked to the exit. Ballasar dropped his butt and ground it into the elevator floor.

  “We’ll be back,” said Patulam.

  “I doubt it,” said Nicco. “You haven’t got a clue who did this, have you? You never had any bloody tip-off, you’re just fishing around blindly. Get out!”

  Ballasar gave Nicco a sheepish look and started to apologise, but Nicco slammed the door to the elevator so hard he almost whacked Patulam in the back.

  Well, he thought, that could have gone better.

  Time to call Xandus.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TEA FOR TURITH was almost full. The one good thing about the freezing Azbathan winter was the ocean winds cleared the usually smog-ridden air for three solid months. In the clear air, the view from the restaurant situated atop the 500-storey Lighthouse Tower was stunning. On a good day you could look south-east and see fully half the archipelago stretched out across the water, right the way to Shalumar.

  Nicco entered the restaurant and scanned the room for Xandus. The wizard was sitting on his own at a small table, nursing a glass of purple wine and gazing out over the city. Nicco nodded at the maitre d’ and strode past, leaving the man no chance to ask his n
ame or check his coat. He walked straight to Xandus’ table and sat down opposite him.

  Once again the wizard was dressed in drab, dark clothes and unaccompanied by his thinmen, though the make-up was still there. It struck Nicco, then, that perhaps he was being too harsh on the wizard. With everything that had happened in the past year, the Turithian attitude to magic had probably become the norm rather than the exception. Not that Archmages like Ramus-Bey or Comul would care, but perhaps ordinary wizards like Xandus no longer felt safe wandering the streets in outfits that advertised their calling to all and sundry. He imagined Xandus donning his silk finery in that stone-walled lair, admiring himself in the mirror but unable to go outside. Not an image Nicco particularly wanted in his head, but he couldn’t deny he may have judged the wizard too soon.

  “Good afternoon, Mr—”

  Nicco shushed him. “Keep your bloody voice down, and call me Mr Millurat.” It was the most common name in Turith.

  “Exactly, Mr Millurat. Is it with you?”

  Nicco slowly reached a hand into his coat, but the sudden appearance of a waiter stopped him removing it.

  “Good afternoon, sir, and welcome to Tea For Turith, the highest restaurant in the country. You are now on the northern most point of the entire archipelago, and from this unique vantage point the view—”

  Nicco cut the waiter off. “Cut the spiel, and just get me a glass of whatever he’s drinking.” He gestured at Xandus’ wine.

  The waiter’s smile faltered for a moment, then returned as if nothing had happened. “The Hurrundan ’75, sir, certainly. An excellent choice.”

  Nicco watched the waiter retreat, then looked over at Xandus and laughed. “You ordered Hurrundan wine?”

  Xandus smiled and raised the glass to his lips. “It seemed appropriate.”

  Nicco shook his head and quietly laughed. Yeah, this wizard wasn’t so bad. At least he had a sense of humour.

  The waiter returned with Nicco’s wine. When he’d left, Xandus leaned across the table. “You were saying. It is with you, yes?”

  Nicco reached back into his coat.

  SILVER MOONLIGHT LAY on the water like a knifeblade. The moon hung low on the horizon, bright and full, bringing light to the otherwise dark sky over Azbatha.

  Not the best night to remain unseen while out in a dinghy.

  But Nicco couldn’t wait any longer. It had been two days since the police called round at his apartment, and Xandus was becoming impatient. So was Nicco—he wanted this over and done with, and the money to pay off Bazhanka. He was sure another twenty-five grand would persuade the mob boss to forego the balance. And then Nicco would be a free agent once again.

  He let the oars rest for a moment and pulled a cheap smartphone out of his pocket.

  Every phone could be set to display its own location on a map; people used them in navigation all the time. More usefully, though, every phone could display the location of any other phone. You had to know both the number and an access code—nobody wanted stalkers tracking them—but that wasn’t a problem for Nicco. After all, it was his own phone he wanted to find.

  He opened the tracker software. A white point in the centre gave his current location, and a small red point showed the location of his other phone. He released the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.

  Nicco picked up the oars and resumed rowing. According to the tracker, it was another couple of hundred yards north. The water lapped quietly against the dinghy as Nicco worked the oars, back and forth, steady and slow. He checked his watch. Just gone two in the morning. Three hours until sun-up. He’d waited until the sky whale ferries finished running for the night, back and forth across the Nissal Straits. Nicco was a couple of miles away from the nearest ferry route, but there was still a chance he might be seen, and he couldn’t take that risk. Not right now.

  He let the dinghy come to a stop close to the location of the phone signal. In the bottom of the boat was an oxygen tank and mask, all black—as were the boat itself and the wetsuit Nicco wore under his jacket. He strapped on the tank and picked up the final piece of kit, a powerful waterproof torch.

  Turith called itself the ‘Nation of a Thousand Islands,’ but in truth there were probably many more. No-one had ever bothered to count them all, not least because politicians, scientists and cartographers could never agree on what exactly should be classed as an ‘island.’ The entire archipelago sat on its own tectonic plate, the Tur Shelf, crushed on all sides by the larger plates making up Varn, Praal and Hirvan, forcing up the islands and peaks marking the region. Swarming around a handful of large islands up to 40,000 square miles in size—like Turilum itself—were hundreds of city-sized islands like Azbatha and thousands of tiny skerries that thrust out of the water like the fingers of drowning men, some barely more than ten yards wide. Many of the ‘islands’ disappeared or merged with the changing tides.

  Turith was a cartographer’s nightmare. In the age before airships, Turithian sailors who could navigate the waters had been rare and highly prized.

  And the seas were shallow. Under pressure from its neighbours, the Tur Shelf had risen nearly to sea level; here on the northern edge of Turith, where the Nissal Straits fed into the Demirvan Sea, the water was deeper than in the centre of Turith, but still shallow enough for a man to dive down and retrieve something from the seabed without having to spend twelve hours in a compression chamber.

  Nicco wrapped his smartphone in a vacpac bag and sealed it tight. Then, with the phone in one hand and torch in the other, he rolled backwards over the side of the dinghy and disappeared under the surface.

  He kicked out and descended a few feet in darkness before switching on the torch, to minimise the chance of someone seeing it from the surface. The red target on the display almost overlapped the white dot marking his own position. Nicco continued straight down. As he descended, nearing the signal, the resolution of the display changed, the scale dropping from hundreds of yards to tens.

  He looked up from the screen to see the translucent bell of a tanglefish in his path, its tentacles shimmering behind it. Nicco kicked sideways and watched it float past and upwards. The light from his torch refracted as it passed through the tanglefish’s ghostly body, illuminating the surrounding water in a rainbow of dancing colours.

  It was quite beautiful, but he wasn’t here to admire the marine life. He kicked again, and reached the seabed two minutes later.

  At the bottom he turned, rotating in the water until the signal was directly ahead: just twenty feet away, according to his phone. He moved forward, skimming the black coral that covered the sea-bed in this area. Bottom feeder fish, pale and blind, flapped lazily across his path as he swam toward the signal.

  The torch beam passed over the black coral. He should have remembered it would be colourless down here. A more brightly coloured bag would have been easier to see. Too late for that now. He’d just have to—

  There. A strap, poking out from under a flatfish. And nearby, an omnimag grip.

  Nicco batted the flatfish out of the way and checked the bag. Still sealed. Should he open it down here, to double check? What if someone had found the bag before he did, removed the necklace and thrown it out of the Astra? His phone was stitched into a waterproof section of the lining, anyone looking through the bag would probably miss it completely.

  On the other hand, exposure to water might damage the necklace. Or worse, it might already be damaged and opening the bag could dislodge a fragment into the murky water. Nicco didn’t fancy searching around down here for a single chain link.

  Bugger it. He had to check. He let the tracker fall to the bed and carefully opened the bag.

  The necklace was fine. Complete, as far as he could see, and unharmed by the water. Nicco exhaled with relief and refastened the bag. Now for the ascent back to the surface, but first he had to destroy the burner phone. The vacpac bag containing it was bloated with surface air. Nicco took it in both hands and pressed it hard against a jagged outcrop
of black coral. The bag burst, spewing forth a cloud of air bubbles, and water rushed into the bag in its place. The unit was submerged immediately, destroying the electronics inside and hopefully taking care of any errant fingerprints. Nicco dropped it back to the sea-bed.

  Then he kicked out—disturbing the flatfish, which had just gotten settled again—and slowly floated up.

  NICCO DREW A brown paper package from his coat, unmarked and tightly wrapped, and pushed it across the table toward the wizard.

  “Don’t even think of opening it here. You’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Exactly, yes. I believe you right.” Xandus reached under the table and pushed a briefcase over to Nicco’s side.

  “More cash?”

  Xandus nodded. “Another twenty-five again, all it is.”

  Nicco nodded. The wizard had been good for his advance; he had no reason to think he’d rip him off for the rest.

  Nicco looked closely at Xandus, wondering again about the wizard’s motives. “You’ve seen the chaos this has caused? This could turn out to be a major international incident. So much for the peace, you know?” He didn’t mention that, actually, another outbreak of war could be good news, in Nicco’s line of business.

  Xandus placed the package inside a shoulder bag and stood up. “Then is good we shall not see again, yes? I was not ever here. Exactly.” He turned and walked away without finishing his wine.

  Nicco watched him go, then turned to look out the window. Pink sunlight reflected off the Nissal Straits and the wide ocean beyond. They caught the polished hulls of skycars and airships overhead, steel and chrome and pink light dancing though the air like fairy dust. The light poured down on distant trees and hills across the water, bringing a warm, inviting glow to the countless islands occupying the hundred-mile stretch of water between Azbatha and Rilok. Hype aside, the view from Tea For Turith really was spectacular.

  Nicco ignored his Hurrundan wine and patted the briefcase happily. First he had to stash the cash, but then he’d call on Tabby and celebrate.