The Star Thief

by Lindsey Becker

  Only Lord Vidalia, Lux, and Honorine remained on the quiet deck of the ship.

  “Well, we’d best be getting to our work, then,” Lord Vidalia said as he turned to navigate the trails of oak roots laced across the deck. “I’m sure you have questions, so let’s see if we can find you some answers.”

  “You go ahead,” Lux added, shaking out his shimmering white coat. “I’ll be along in a little while to check on you.”

  Honorine and Lord Vidalia made their way to his study, which comprised a large collection of alcoves formed by walls of tangled roots, down in the belly of the ship. There were a few pieces of proper furniture—chairs, desks, bookshelves, and even an old potbellied stove tucked against a wall. The room smelled of paper and sweet tobacco and sand, and was lit with lanterns hanging from the dangling roots along the ceiling and glowing shelf mushrooms of every color, clinging to the walls. The floor was a bit smoother, carpeted with worn silk rugs and dusted with glistening sand that gathered in piles in the corners.

  “This is beautiful,” Honorine said, gazing at the odd treasures scattered about the room: a globe dotted with stars rather than continents, a black stone obelisk carved with images of stargazers looking up at a sky full of flying creatures, a tapestry woven with black wool and silver threads, depicting what must have been Lux running across a field of stars, among dozens of others. “So this is where you’ve been all this time?”

  “Well, I’ve been here…” he began as he lowered himself into an old armchair beside his desk, “ten… eleven… twelve years. It doesn’t seem so long. But then it’s been your entire life, hasn’t it?”

  “As far as I know,” Honorine said, settling herself onto a fat, puffy ottoman. In her days at the Vidalia Manor, there had been many hundreds of questions she had wanted to ask him, but now she couldn’t think of one. There was nothing she wanted to know about further back than the previous day. “I don’t remember anything before living in your house.”

  “Well, you would have been far too small,” Lord Vidalia said with a nostalgic smile.

  “You knew I was there all this time?”

  “I was the one who sent you there.”

  Now the many hundreds of questions flooded into Honorine’s skull, along with a hundred new ones, but she could only come up with a single word.

  “Why?”

  Lord Vidalia began to rummage in the drawers of his desk. He pulled out a battle-scarred cheese board and a dull-looking paring knife with a bone handle and a broken point, followed by a flat basket stacked with an array of fruits.

  “Well, where shall we start?” Lord Vidalia asked with a deep breath and a long sigh. He cautiously split a fat yellow apple and offered her a slice. “Let’s go back a bit further. You’ve seen my collections, the work I brought back from my travels?”

  Honorine nodded and took a bite of the apple. It was tart and juicy and somehow tasted like pale morning sunlight.

  “When I was younger, I studied ancient civilizations. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Incan Empire, and many other grand, old societies that have since crumbled into ruins or vanished into folklore. Along the way I met many fellow explorers, most of them crackpots or treasure hunters out for their own glory or to make their fortune robbing graves and desecrating temples. It was on my travels that I met Nautilus. And he was different from the rest of them… at first.”

  Lord Vidalia handed her a section from a dark green fruit mottled with stripes of red. It tasted of sweet apple but also cinnamon and a hint of buttery crust like a whole slice of fresh apple pie.

  “Nautilus was brilliant,” Lord Vidalia said. “I suppose he still is. When I met him, he was already an inventor, full of grand ideas. He wanted to build things that would advance the world’s capabilities with communication, education, nutrition. He wanted to help people. He traveled the world, gathering information from every culture he could find. We were very similar in that regard, except he was studying living cultures, and I was focusing on those from the past.”

  He cut into a fruit that looked citrusy, but the flesh inside was very dark. It tasted of orange and also chocolate when Honorine bit into the offered slice.

  “Do you like these?” Lord Vidalia said, gesturing to the various pieces of fruit.

  “They’re unbelievable,” Honorine said, taking another eager bite of the apple pie–flavored slice.

  “It’s the trees,” replied Lord Vidalia. “Mordant trees hold a curious kind of… I suppose you’d have to call it magic. Though that’s not exactly the right word.”

  He took a bite of apple, the crisp fruit snapping between his teeth, then rubbed the tired knuckles of his frail, old hands.

  “Let me help,” Honorine said, pulling the old cheese board across the table. She eyed the dull, chipped blade of the bone-handled knife. “Haven’t you got any other?”

  “Hmm? Oh, certainly, somewhere around here,” Lord Vidalia said, puttering through drawers and producing wooden pens with no nibs, chopsticks, coins from around the globe, spare bits of string, tattered playing cards with curious symbols, and a few large brass buttons, along with a scattering of unrecognizable parts of other things. Finally, a much larger knife with a stout wooden handle and a curved blade appeared.

  “There’s this,” offered Lord Vidalia. “But it’s uncomfortably heavy for me, I’m afraid. Now, where were we?”

  “You were telling me about when you first met Nautilus,” Honorine said as she lifted the heavier-but-sharper knife.

  “Right, right,” he said, nodding. “We spent years together traveling, researching, gathering knowledge while I compiled a great history of the ancient world and Nautilus made advances on the great machines he would create to change the world. And then… we discovered the Mordant. Or rediscovered is more correct. The constellations are so important to every culture, you see, past and present. We found mentions of them everywhere. But we didn’t truly understand until we finally made contact with one. Only then did we realize how important they are. How powerful, and also how dangerous. It was the discovery of a lifetime… but it was also the beginning of the end.”

  “Why?” Honorine asked as she tinkered with the other detritus on the desk. “The Mordant seem so… amazing. All I had to do was touch Lux to feel brave, and Sirona healed my arm in moments!”

  Lord Vidalia looked up at Honorine from under his bushy white eyebrows. “That reminds me. Are you thirsty?” he asked, getting up from the desk and shuffling into an alcove to retrieve a kettle, a tray of cups, and a tin of loose-leaf tea. He took them to the woodstove. “Sirona brought this particular blend. It works marvelously for my arthritis.” He rubbed his knotty hands again.

  “Can’t Sirona do anything else for you?” Honorine asked. “If your hands hurt, can’t she heal them?”

  Lord Vidalia shook his head. “By now you must realize how powerful the Mordant can be,” he said. “But there are limits. Sirona can heal the body, and teach others to heal, but she cannot stop time. Only ease it as we pass through.”

  “And she can teach others?” Honorine asked. “Francis said the Mordant are muses. But… I’m not sure what a muse does.”

  “Well, they aren’t exactly teachers,” Lord Vidalia said as he carefully portioned out the tea leaves into little silver diffusers shaped like fish, “though one can certainly learn from them. They provide inspiration, and understanding of possibilities. They heighten one’s own abilities and natural inclinations, but each in their own ways. Lux can inspire courage, Astraea justice. Scorpio can both instill fear and take it away, and Sirona, as you saw, can heal.”

  “Can she inspire anyone to heal?” Honorine asked as she began to assemble the stray items on the desk into something new.

  “She can inspire those with an inclination toward biology and physiology, certainly,” Lord Vidalia said. “But hers is an art that requires a specific temperament and intellect. Not everyone can learn, but not everyone would like to, you see. Societies need practitioners and specialists in man
y areas in order to thrive and grow. There are many others, with many other wells of knowledge to share with us. You’ve barely met a fraction of them. For instance, Sirona is not the only one with knowledge of healing. Serpens is stronger with medicines. You haven’t met him, though. He was one of the first ones Nautilus captured.”

  “So, while he’s been missing…” Honorine said, fitting the thoughts together in her mind as she fit buttons and wood scraps and bits of string together in her hands. “Has no one been able to learn to make medicines? Are the sick going without remedies?”

  “Well, without inspiration, superstition can take over,” Lord Vidalia said. “The world is a darker and more dangerous place without the Mordant in it.”

  “Then why would Nautilus capture them and take them away?” Honorine asked.

  Lord Vidalia looked away from Honorine.

  “Something in him has changed,” he said, holding his hands near the steaming teapot to warm them. “When I knew him, he was tenacious, but also clever and kind. Now he has become… ruthless. Though perhaps he always was, and I just chose not to see it.

  “We were working together for… it must have been five or six years, before we finally contacted a Mordant. And after that, the whole world seemed to change. We met so many of them. Eventually, they brought us to their city, a place only the Mordant can find. That was the most productive and inspiring time of our lives. Both of us were working like madmen, I on my historical records and Nautilus on his inventions. We were finding ways to record the wisdom of the Mordant and channel their power into the most comprehensive catalog of technology and history ever compiled in the modern age. Until, of course, the Mapmaker found out.”

  The kettle began to whistle. Lord Vidalia poured the water, disappearing in a cloud of fragrant steam.

  “The Mapmaker, you see, has different objectives than we did,” Lord Vidalia said. “He’s been around for too long to count, I imagine. He’s seen the world through a hundred cataclysms and apocalypses. All those societies I had found decaying in the jungle or the desert or under the foundations of new societies—he had watched them fall. All the current, flourishing societies that Nautilus was studying—the Mapmaker knew they, too, would someday disappear from the world.”

  Lord Vidalia picked up his tray and shuffled toward the desk, the cups wobbling and tinkling, threatening to spill with every step.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to carry that?” Honorine asked.

  “No trouble at all,” he replied as he finally made it back to the desk, setting the tray down on the only available bit of space. “My word, what have you got there?” He nodded at the growing structure in front of Honorine.

  “Oh, I like to work with my hands while I think.”

  “What a lovely habit,” Lord Vidalia said. “Sugar?”

  Honorine nodded, and Lord Vidalia dropped a cube into her cup. The tea was faintly lavender in color and had a scent like flowers blooming on a spring afternoon.

  “The Mapmaker did not like finding mortal people in the Mordant city,” Lord Vidalia said after a long pause. “He’s weary from spending centuries guiding civilizations to their peak, only to see them destroyed by those who become too ambitious or greedy and the people he cared for left suffering. And he never could come to terms with how short mortal lives can be. Now he’s decided that he wants to simply fade away into mythology, for the world to forget about him completely. Some of the Mordant agree with him. But not all.”

  “But couldn’t some of them stay?” Honorine asked. “And the Mapmaker go away?”

  “Ideally, yes,” Lord Vidalia agreed. “But the Mapmaker doesn’t see it that way. The Mordant can teach you anything. Music, language, agriculture, architecture—everything about the natural world. But the Mapmaker… he has talents that are even more prized.”

  “Why?” Honorine asked. “What can he do?”

  Lord Vidalia looked uncomfortable. He leaned closer, his eyes sweeping the room, as if the walls themselves were listening.

  “Well, even I don’t know the full extent of his power. But I know what I have seen these past dozen years. He can kill a man with a touch. He can shake the very fabric of the earth. Tsunamis, mudslides, avalanches—I’ve seen them all happen at his command. I’ve seen a volcano erupt, and I suspect it had something to do with him. He has a connection to the earth itself. But none of that is why people seek him out.”

  Honorine stopped tinkering with her invention and looked up at Lord Vidalia.

  “The Mapmaker can tell what you want most in the world,” he said. “But even more important, he can show you exactly how to get it.”

  Anything you wanted. And exactly how to get it. Honorine immediately pictured herself with her mother and father. Could the Mapmaker tell her who they are?

  “And now you’re thinking about what it is you want most, aren’t you?” Lord Vidalia asked.

  Honorine nodded. “My parents,” she said. “He could tell me how to find them?”

  Lord Vidalia took a long breath and then a longer sip of tea before he answered.

  “Indeed.”

  “But if he can do that…” she said, “he could help so many people.”

  “Ah, but not everyone wants to protect their children or find their long-lost families,” Lord Vidalia said. “Not everyone’s goals are so noble. Or noble at all. Many people have to hurt others to get what they want, and what has broken the Mapmaker is how many people are willing to do it.”

  He paused to refill his teacup.

  “He doesn’t want to see into the dark hearts of any more evil men. It took me a long time to understand him. But when I finally did, I agreed. He should be able to vanish, even if it would make the world a lesser place. By the time I realized this, though, it was too late. Nautilus had already done something irreversible.”

  Again, Lord Vidalia paused, taking a long sip of tea and looking at the few remaining pieces of fruit in the basket.

  “Would you like another?” he asked, reaching toward the basket, but Honorine held up her hand.

  “Let me try this,” she said, picking up a rust-red apple striped with orange and placing it in her mostly finished machine. Then she pressed her hand on a paddle fashioned from a pair of wooden pens secured with twine. These attached to the handle of the curved, heavy knife on its own little easel structure, which held it steady as the blade bobbed downward, slicing cleanly through the fruit before it made a quarter turn to be sliced again. Honorine offered a slice to Lord Vidalia before popping another in her mouth. It tasted slightly of cheddar cheese.

  “Well, isn’t that delightful!” Lord Vidalia said, eating his own slice, and then eagerly loading another crisp green fruit to test out the contraption for himself. He smiled with amusement as he dipped a freshly cut piece of fruit into his tea, and motioned for Honorine to do the same. This fruit tasted of peppermint. “Forgive me, but where were we again?”

  “You were about to tell me what Nautilus did,” she said. “The reason why the Mapmaker despises him.”

  “Well, there’s more than one reason for the Mapmaker to be a bit sore with Nautilus now. But the first thing, the one that started all this nonsense, seemed so innocent at the time.”

  Lord Vidalia put down his cup and took another long breath.

  “Nautilus had a child,” he said finally. “A child with a Mordant mother.”

  “Who—” Honorine began to ask, but Lord Vidalia shook his head and held up his hand.

  “The Mapmaker was trying to separate from the mortal world, to erase himself from mortal history, and cut the connections between Mordant and humans. But a child—this child—half Mordant and half mortal, would do just the opposite. In his mind, it would bring the two worlds closer than ever, make the ties stronger, and make it impossible for him to escape it.”

  Honorine put her hand to her forehead. “But what could he do?” she asked. “If Nautilus already had a family, what could the Mapmaker do about it?”

 
Lord Vidalia’s expression grew very grim. “Well, you see, he could… eliminate… Nautilus and his family before anyone in the mortal world ever knew about them.”

  “Eliminate?” Honorine asked quietly. “You mean… murder.…”

  “The possibility was considered,” Lord Vidalia replied. “I don’t know if he ever would have actually gone through with it. The rest of the Mordant intervened before the situation grew any more perilous.”

  “What did they do?”

  “A very delicate kind of truce was reached,” Lord Vidalia explained. “The Mordant convinced the Mapmaker that Nautilus would cause no further harm, that he would leave the Mordant city and never contact them again, and that his child was to be raised never knowing of Nautilus or the Mordant. And I agreed to travel with the Mapmaker, erasing every trace of him from human history so that he could fade away and live in peace. We spent ten years gathering every ancient scroll, every carving, anything that might lead someone to find him again. The Mapmaker was satisfied with the arrangement. He promised not to pursue Nautilus any further. But as you now know, that arrangement didn’t last.”

  Honorine shook her head. “What happened?”

  “A few years ago, we learned that Nautilus had built a new ship. That he was possibly trying to contact the Mordant once again. And then, only a short time later, the Mordant began disappearing.”

  “Nautilus was capturing them,” Honorine added. “But why?”

  “For information, most likely. Whatever his true intentions may be, once Nautilus started hunting, we began trying to gather up the Mordant to protect them, while also trying to devise a way to stop him. And of course, there was still the child. Nautilus broke his word to stay away from the world of the Mordant, and so the Mapmaker felt no obligation to hold up his end of the agreement—to keep his distance from Nautilus’s child. Which is why he was a bit cross with me when he found out I had known your whereabouts all this time.”

  Honorine sat back on the ottoman, her skin prickling as if she had been dipped in ice.