Stealing Life

by Antony Johnston

  A second later he couldn’t see anything, either.

  Everything went black.

  SOMEONE SHOUTED AT him. Whoever it was, he couldn’t hear them properly. It all sounded like muffled gibberish. In a daze, Nicco’s mind was gripped by a terrible thought—he was brain damaged. He’d heard of people with head injuries who suddenly forgot how to talk, or understand language. Aphasia, it was called; a sort of aural dyslexia. By the watery saints, thought Nicco, I’ll have to learn Turithian all over again!

  Then he remembered where he was, and what had happened. You don’t understand them because they’re not speaking Turithian, you bloody idiot.

  He opened one eye. Slowly, his vision focused on a man standing over him, shouting something in Varnian. Nicco lifted his head to get a better look around but regretted it immediately. Pain lanced up his spine, through his neck and into his skull. It felt like the worst hangover he’d ever had, times about a million.

  Chaos surrounded him. Thick black smoke filled the air, and his lungs. Above him, through the smoke, was only sky. Dark, heavy clouds filled his vision. He blinked as cold rain splashed down on his face. At first he thought the roof had come crashing down around their heads, but then realised he couldn’t see any walls, either. He was in the street outside.

  The man standing over him noticed he was awake and shouted something Nicco couldn’t understand to someone he couldn’t see. The man wore a kind of bright yellow battle suit. Some kind of emergency rescue service, no doubt.

  Nicco was lying on the ground, the hard street surface underneath his back. How long had he been out for? Long enough for some kind soul to carry him out of the airship port and onto the street. Was he injured? He must have been concussed by the shockwave from the blast—a Kurrethi bomb, surely—and been blown back into the store. Those stupid soft toys had probably saved his life. He turned his head to the side, with a little less pain this time, and saw more of the yellow-plated men carrying people out of the wrecked building.

  He tried flexing his toes and fingers. They reacted, moving as he expected, though not without some pain. He tried lifting an arm. Pain again, but it worked.

  The medic, assuming that was what he was, whipped out a small metal scanlite and pointed it at Nicco’s eyes. A cool blue beam shone from the tip, blinding him. He tried to turn his head away, but the medic grabbed his chin and turned his head back to face the light. He moved the scanlite to the other eye, then grunted and said something to Nicco in Varnian that contained the word fingers. Nicco lifted his arm and flexed his fingers, and the medic nodded approvingly.

  “Something something bend something something legs.”

  Nicco drew his knees up toward his chest. It hurt, but nothing felt broken.

  “Something something sit?”

  Nicco pushed himself upright into a sitting position. His abdomen ached, but looking down at himself, he couldn’t see any major injuries. He had some minor cuts on his exposed skin from the impromptu glass shower, and he was covered in masonry dust, but besides that he seemed fine. Fine and very lucky.

  “You something okay?” The medic turned away from Nicco and ran over to help two of his colleagues, who were wrestling with the unconscious form of an elderly lady.

  Nicco assumed that meant he’d just been given the all clear. “Hurrka!” he shouted after the medic, and clambered to his feet. Bloody typical. He’d been in Hurrunda less than an hour and already he’d been chased by the police and involved in a terrorist bombing. Still, at least he was alive and apparently fully functioning. A quick change of clothes and he’d be right as the rain that was currently soaking him wet through.

  Except, he suddenly realised, he didn’t have his kit bag. Whoever had carried him out obviously hadn’t brought it out with them. And why would they? Whoever it was, he was more concerned about saving his life than his lunch. He should be grateful for that. Nicco checked his jacket, and was surprised to find his wallet still in the inside pocket. Then he remembered he wasn’t in Azbatha any more. Not everyone on these streets was a potential thief.

  So he still had the cash he’d exchanged at the airship port. The exchange rate had been ridiculously low: a thousand lire, practically all the money he had left to his name, had got him eight million Hurrundan rakki. He hoped that meant the cost of living over here was low and not that a sandwich would cost him half a million.

  Nicco looked back at the airship port building. The police and medics were turning everyone else away, pushing back the swiftly-gathered crowd of civilians come to see what the fuss was all about. Even the press were getting short shrift. There was no reason anyone would let him back in just to retrieve a bag. He’d lost his spare clothes, his fake citi-card and return airship ticket.

  He had a feeling he wouldn’t be needing them anyway.

  Nicco pushed through the crowd of rubberneckers, trying to put as much distance between himself and the medics and police as possible. He hadn’t seen either of the undercover guys who’d chased him, but if Nicco had escaped relatively unscathed then there was a good chance they had too. The crowd seemed to go on forever—people shouting above the wail of sirens, pushing and shoving to get a better view or to find some shelter against the rain... in some ways it was like being back in Azbatha. Nicco ducked and dived through the mass blocking the street, steering clear of the emergency vehicles inching their way through.

  Halfway across the street the crowd still hadn’t thinned out, and everyone seemed to be moving in one direction. Nicco went with it, figuring he could at least lose himself in the throng. There really were a lot of people shouting.

  For the first time, he made an effort to listen to the voices. It was difficult to make anything out through the din. It sounded more like an angry mob than a crowd of concerned citizens. He heard someone shouting Werrdun’s name, something about government and traitors...

  By the watery saints, it didn’t just sound like an angry mob, it was an angry mob! They weren’t trying to get a better view, they were marching toward something, hundreds of them defying the weather, blocking the streets and carrying Nicco along on their wave. What was this all about?

  Nicco remembered his conversation in the airship viewing pod with Sothus. There’s a big pro-Kurrethi rally scheduled for this evening. Rumour mill says Ven Dazarus himself is going to be there...

  Nicco tried to look over the heads of the crowd to get some kind of bearing, but the low-storied buildings of Hurrunda told him nothing. There wasn’t even much air traffic to give him a clue. Were they headed into town or away from it? Where was this heaving mass carrying him to? Nicco suddenly felt stifled by the crush of people. He had no problem with crowds, but this one had a certain energy to it, a crackle in the air that made Nicco wonder. It felt like they could explode at any moment, like they were just waiting for an excuse to start something.

  A riot was in the air. For the second time that day Nicco feared for his life.

  And then a realisation struck him. Did it matter? He could have died back there at the airship port.

  In fact... maybe he had.

  How easy would it be to just vanish? There must be hundreds of people still trapped in the airship port. Many of them probably wouldn’t make it out alive. They may not even be identifiable. Nicco could easily have been one of them. If the Azbathan police knew he was in Hurrunda, but never saw him again, how many conclusions could they draw?

  It would mean never returning home, never seeing Tabby again. It would mean that Werrdun would die. But it would give Nicco his freedom, freedom from Bazhanka and that smug son of a squid Patulam...

  An ear-splitting shout from behind him startled Nicco from his thoughts. The crowd had stopped moving, and him with it. They were in some kind of plaza, a small city square filled with hundreds of protestors packed in tight. Like fish in a vacpac, thought Nicco. And they were all facing the same way.

  The crowd burst into raucous applause. Nicco stood on tiptoes and followed their gaze, directed toward
one side of the plaza where an impromptu stage had been erected. A man wearing a long green robe, cinched at the waist with a length of rope, took to the stage and basked in the crowd’s cries of support for a moment. He walked from one side of the stage to the other, waving to them all, and they loved it. In the centre of the stage was a single microphone. The robed man finally walked to it and began speaking.

  Nicco’s Varnian was rusty as ever, but he could follow the gist of the man’s speech. He was some high-up representative of the Kurrethi, a colonel or something, and he was mocking Governor Werrdun’s cowardice for not wanting to return to Hurrunda without his precious, devil-spawned necklace. He also made some insulting remarks about Turithians being congenital thieves and liars, that Werrdun was an idiot for ever trusting the “pale-skinned heretics,” and that this was only to be expected of a man who took his orders from the demon Ekklorn.

  The representative capped off his preamble by stating that only the Kurrethi could rescue Hurrunda from the demon-spawned chaos and depravity that the city had fallen into, by—of course—reinstituting their religious order and declaring Ven Dazarus as their Emperor. And if the Hurrundan police stood in their way, then the Kurrethi would fight to a glorious death, with Ven Dazarus himself at the vanguard of battle.

  A roar erupted from the crowd at this last. Nicco looked around and realised some of the people here were wearing green robes like the man on stage. A few of them were waving placards, shouting Ven Dazarus’ name and the glory of Kurreth.

  The whole thing seemed absurd to Nicco. These people weren’t revering a god, they were canonising some guy who, as far as Nicco could tell, just wanted to be a dictator himself. None of the placards, none of the banners hanging at the sides of the stage, made any reference that Nicco could see to their god. They all bore the same image, a stylised version of a man’s face—presumably Ven Dazarus. What kind of hold did this guy have over his followers, wondered Nicco? What was it that drove people to actively want a dictator, to place their lives in the hands of one man and follow him without question?

  Ven Dazarus himself didn’t look like much. He looked like any of the hundreds of South Varnians you could find on any street—dark hair, dark skin, the same little goatee beard. The only thing that marked this rebel leader out was his eyes, piercing and blue. That was unusual, as most Varnians’ eyes ranged from brown to amber, like Nicco’s. Nicco figured the images were flattering toward this Ven Dazarus guy, they’d probably upped the brightness of his eyes to make him seem special. After all, if his eyes were really that colour, Ven Dazarus would look just... just like...

  Watery saints!

  “Xandus!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  HE COULDN’T BELIEVE it. And yet...

  It made sense. If Xandus—no, Ven Dazarus—knew somehow that Werrdun’s necklace was keeping him alive, and Werrdun was the last remaining obstacle to his own coup...

  Nicco’s mind raced with the implications of what he’d done. The pieces fell into place, and made him feel ill. He’d been used, not just so some small-time wizard could steal a magical bauble, but as part of a grander scheme—a plot that could bring about not only Werrdun’s death but a full scale revolution, costing hundreds, thousands of people their lives. All because Nicco had needed a quick cash injection.

  They would all be Varnian, of course; no-one from Azbatha was in jeopardy besides himself and Tabby. But the wars were over, now. These people, the baying crowd surrounding him, weren’t his enemies anymore. Were they ever? He looked around at them. Ordinary people. Sure, they had some weird religious cult thing going on, but they were still normal people, just trying to get on with their lives, looking out for themselves. Just like him.

  But that wasn’t what sealed the deal for Nicco. It was something else entirely that made his mind up, drove him to a commitment to finish this game.

  Revenge.

  He’d been used like a common pawn without even knowing it. Nothing but a game piece in Ven Dazarus’ play for power.

  Nicco pushed through the crowd, shoving and squeezing his way toward the stage. Around him, the gathered crowd hollered and chanted, shouting the Kurrethi’s praises and Ven Dazarus’ name. As he neared the front of the plaza he saw Hurrundan police standing at the edge of the demonstration, a loose circle of men in primitive battle-suits modified for riots. Each man carried an entropy rifle. They looked distinctly uneasy, and Nicco wondered what it would take for them to start breaking heads. Probably not much.

  A moment later, he was proved right. Hearing the sound of shattering glass, Nicco looked round, trying to find the source, but it was impossible. Then, in the corner of his vision, he saw a missile of some kind soar over the heads of the protestors and smash against the helmet of a riot cop. More followed. The cops stood their ground.

  Then they opened fire.

  The high-pitched shriek of entropy guns filled the air. People at the fringes of the crowd began dropping to the ground, some to avoid the riot cops’ fire, some because they’d been hit. Their hair turned grey, their skin wrinkled, and men and women in their prime suddenly turned into frail, elderly octogenarians. They fell to the floor, rendered unconscious by the physical shock to their systems.

  The effects of entropy guns were only temporary. Those hit would be back to normal within an hour or two. All the same, it made Nicco worry. The magical weapons weren’t yet widespread in Turith, but now that peace reigned it was surely only a matter of time. The spread of cultural influence was inevitable.

  Nicco dropped into a running crouch and weaved his way through the crowd. It had stopped raining, but the ground was still slick, slowing him. If he slipped here, he’d be caught in the crush and lose his quarry: the Kurrethi representative. But all the protestors cared about was avoiding the entropy gunfire, so they surged from the stage and away the police, leaving Nicco trying to move against the tide of bodies. The police had the whole plaza surrounded, but they ran all the same, and Nicco was almost knocked to the ground several times before he reached the front of the stage. The Kurrethi representatives had already left. Nicco whirled around, looking for their exit, and saw the man in the green robe jump into a large groundcar with blacked-out windows.

  Nicco ran at the car, but as he reached the rear of the stage the vehicle’s doors slammed shut and it sped off. The street in front was full of panicked people running for their lives but the groundcar driver just ploughed ahead, sounding the horn and revving the engine. People scattered out of its way, leaping into the gutter.

  Nicco gave chase. The groundcar already had a good head start on him, but regardless of the driver’s disregard for the safety of pedestrians, the crowd slowed it down. Nicco sprinted down the street, moving in the wake of the vehicle’s street clearing efforts, and reached into his pocket for a tracking bug.

  But his pocket was empty. The bugs had been inside his kit bag.

  Nicco jogged to a stop, cursing the Kurrethi for all his troubles. The groundcar turned a corner onto a long, wide street where the crowd was thinner, and accelerated away into the distance.

  Nicco leaned on a street post for support and panted. Ven Dazarus himself might have been in that car. If so, would he have recognised Nicco? Would he even remember the stupid thief whom he had manipulated so easily?

  Nicco hoped so. When he finally caught up with him, he wanted Ven Dazarus to know his face.

  He pondered his next move. He wasn’t just taking on a charlatan pretending to be a wizard any more. This was the leader of a rebel cult, a veteran of the war who, according to what Nicco had read about the Kurrethi, commanded absolute loyalty from his men. Perhaps, on reflection, losing the groundcar was a blessing. After the violence they’d already perpetrated since Werrdun was confined to his bed, Nicco had no doubt Ven Dazarus’ men would kill him outright if threatened.

  He needed to find a better way, some way to infiltrate or sneak up on them unseen. To do that, he needed to know more about the Kurrethi than the fragmented
overview he’d learnt when researching Werrdun.

  THE CENTRAL HURRUNDAN library was as alien to Nicco as the streets outside. Dim and musty, with creaking shelves fashioned from dark wood and an atmosphere composed of equal parts air and dust, it felt like a relic from before the war. The shelves were stacked to bursting, permanently bent and bowed under the weight of old books and sheafs of printzines. Loose books lay on top of ordered books, pieces of paper lay forgotten on the thickly carpeted floor and not one of them looked like it was printed in the last century.

  Even the Azbathan wizard’s college felt more modern than this place.

  A weight sank inside Nicco’s stomach. He’d spent two hours just trying to find the library, and now he was here it all seemed for nothing. It could take days—weeks—to sift through all this stuff and find something valuable. Assuming any of it was valuable at all, and given the collection’s age that seemed unlikely.

  He walked past tables of people reading, all leafing through their ancient tomes in dutiful silence. Some of them were taking notes. Some of them looked like adepts. None of them was using a terminal, of any size. By the watery saints, he thought, it wasn’t just cell phones that Hurrunda was slow in adopting. If this library was any indication, the city was as technophobic as Azbatha was arcanophobic. How in the fifty-nine hells was he supposed to find anything here? Even if he read Varnian fluently, which he didn’t, it would take a day just to work out where everything was.

  He walked down a corridor of high shelves hoping there might be a section of encyclopedias, maybe even one written in Turithian, when a heavy wooden door opened up ahead. A young man in grey robes walked out. An adept, maybe? Nicco didn’t care. It wasn’t the man he was looking at, it was the glow of an old-fashioned terminal vidscreen in the room behind him that caught Nicco’s eye.

  He caught the door before it closed and entered the room. A single terminal, almost as old as the books in the main library by the looks of it, sat humming on a dark wooden desk. Nicco sat down and scanned the vidscreen. He hadn’t used one of these since he was a child, but it should have been easy enough to slip back into. The menu was all in Varnian, so he touched the corner of the vidscreen to look for a multilingual function.