Crown Thief

by David Tallerman

  The average tortoise would have been unlikely to describe my movements as sudden; but I slowed even further, inching the straps off by degrees. Once they were free, I laid the pack on the strip of tousled grass between me and the edge. If I still wasn't sure how I could turn my one hole card into a genuine bargaining tool, common sense suggested that placing it in jeopardy was a good start.

  I unbuckled the pack's straps, folded back the flap, loosened the drawstring within. I reached inside, drew out my bundled cloak and placed it delicately beside the bag. I didn't need to look to know I had Synza's interest. Making my movements all the more deliberate, I peeled back the layers of cloak and clothing as though they were the skin of some impossibly delicate fruit.

  I only looked up when the first glint of gold was revealed. Now I had his attention, all right.

  "Is that what I think it is, Damasco?"

  "If you think it's the royal crown of Altapasaeda," I said, "the one object that could consolidate Castilio Mounteban's authority over the city beyond doubt or question, then yes, it's what you think it is."

  "How did you… no, that's a redundant question. You're a thief and, as I've observed more than once now, improbably lucky. Let that be explanation enough. Give it to me now."

  I picked up the crown with my good left hand – but instead of passing it to Synza, I held my arm straight out behind me. "I could do that," I said. "Or I could just let go."

  "Not before I got to you."

  "Maybe."

  "And not without abandoning your only hope of bargaining for your life."

  "Is that what we're doing, then?" I asked. "Bargaining?"

  "Perhaps we are." His tone was grudging.

  I shifted closer to the edge. "I think I'm going to need something a little more definite than 'perhaps'."

  "It's all you'll get with such transparent bluffing."

  "You're really willing to chance it?"

  "Perfectly so."

  This wasn't going well. Then again, what had I expected? Synza was right. I was bluffing, it was obvious, and it was getting me nowhere. I was tempted to hurl the crown off the cliff, just to reclaim a shred of dignity before my inevitable demise.

  The thought must have shown in my face – because unexpectedly, Synza said, "Since the advantage is in every way mine, however, why take chances? Bring it to me, and we'll discuss the possibility of your continuing existence."

  "What guarantee do I have?"

  Synza sighed with mock weariness. "None at all. I could make you a promise you'd have no reason to believe, if it would make you feel better. You have my word that we'll discuss the matter. It's all you'll get."

  Fair enough. I had no intention of giving him the crown anyway. I just wanted to get closer, while anger and frustration were blunting his killer instincts. The crown might not be heavy, exactly, but it had some heft. Anyway, this was my one and only option. Synza would certainly spot an attack, probably faster than I could conceive it. His knife would be acquainting itself with my guts in a flash. It was a chance, though. If nothing else, it was a chance.

  "With your right hand, please."

  There went my chance.

  "I hurt my arm," I said, sounding even more pathetic than I'd intended. "It's useless."

  "Nonsense. You've suffered a slight fracture. If you should survive the next few minutes, and if you're careful, it will heal within a week. If you weren't such a coward in the face of pain, you could use it perfectly well."

  I almost asked how he could possibly know such a thing. Then it struck me that if anyone would understand the intricacies of the human body, it was a man who'd spent a lifetime studying how to damage it in imaginative ways.

  I tried to flex my fingers. Pain thundered up from them, nailing itself in my shoulder. But my fingers moved, if slightly. I tried again. The pain redoubled. So did the degree of movement. Synza was right, damn him. If I could only endure the excruciation, the arm was useable.

  Gritting my teeth, I transferred the crown from my left hand to my right. That meant clasping my fingers all the way, and that meant a rush of liquid fire, as though every drop of blood from the tips of my fingers upwards had spontaneously combusted. I was determined not to give Synza the satisfaction of hearing me scream. However, the whimper I made instead was far from manly.

  I kept my arm as outstretched as I could stand. Now the crown was suspended over thin air – and my threat was suddenly far less empty. In fact, it was all I could do not to drop it.

  I took a short step forward. Synza put his free hand out. The knife was in his right, forcing him to use his left. One pace would bridge the gap between us.

  "I give you the crown and we'll talk?" I asked.

  "We'll talk."

  "About you letting me live?"

  "Absolutely." He made no effort to hide his impatience.

  I edged forward. "You promise?"

  Synza reached for the crown, still just barely out of his reach. "I promise."

  I shuffled another short step. "On Mounteban's life?"

  "On Mounteban's…? For the love of…"

  I hit him in the face with the crown.

  It might have been the weakest blow ever struck by one grown man upon another. It definitely hurt me a thousand times more than it did him. Still, Synza looked inordinately shocked. He licked a trickle of blood from his lower lip. "Did you really just…?"

  I hit him with all my strength. This time, I used my good hand and aimed specifically for his jaw. I felt it crunch like a bag of grit.

  "You did."

  He lurched towards me, knife first – or rather, towards where I'd been the barest instant before. Synza wasn't the only one who could move fast when circumstances called for it. Now there was no Easie Damasco where he expected me to be. Now there was only my outstretched leg.

  If he'd been even remotely calm, I'd never have got away with it. That made the bewildered anger contorting his face all the more satisfying.

  I only got to enjoy it for a moment.

  Synza spun into a crouch, in one long-practised defensive movement. It was graceful, elegant – and performed on the verge of a sheer drop. Further, it was a sheer drop that a body had been kicked off not so long ago. The ground was already loose and broken.

  Synza realised it just before I did. But not in time to stop himself. A hunk of dirt and stone shuddered and sank. It happened to be the only thing supporting his left foot. The chunk of cliff edge tore free in an explosion of dirt, and disappeared.

  Synza's foot followed. Then his leg. Then the rest of him.

  The last I saw was his face. There was no fear in it, no anger even – just a look of the most profound frustration.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I couldn't pretend I'd felt the slightest affection for Synza. I certainly hadn't wanted him to kill me. Yet, as the last skittering of falling pebbles subsided, I couldn't but feel a little horrified by his abrupt vanishment from the world.

  I fell back against the trampled grass. My struggle with Synza had drained what little strength I'd managed to recover. The possibility of staying conscious was as remote as the likelihood of my climbing onehanded back up to the forest edge above.

  One thought, however, rattled in my brain, even as it sank into welcoming darkness. Synza had defeated Stone, reputedly one of the greatest killers in the land. I in turn had played a part, more by luck than intent, in Synza's demise. Perhaps I'd never been much of a thief, but my ranking as an assassin had just gone through the roof.

  I almost wanted to laugh. Knowing how much it would hurt, I passed out instead.

  • • • •

  I dreamed someone was shouting my name. Every time they called, they kicked my head – inside my head, somehow, with a boot covered in hot pins.

  It didn't take much of that to make me open my eyes. The light had changed; it was softer, yellowed like new butter. The kicking, however, continued unabated.

  "Damasco!"

  I was curled over, feet to
wards the brim of the ledge. Alvantes's voice came from behind me and above.

  Where was the crown?

  If he saw it, it would mean more explaining than I could even begin to contemplate. My eyes flitted desperately across the narrow outcrop. There – a clump of tall grass close to the edge, and stripes of gold amidst the green. It must have rolled from my fingers when I blacked out. I made it to all fours, though the rush of pain through my hurt arm made me want to weep. Now I could see Alvantes, peering down. He, too, was hurt. A gash in his forehead was bleeding liberally, staining the left side of his face a rich, moist crimson. Another cut on his arm had clotted but looked, if anything, deeper and more unpleasant.

  "What are you doing down there?" he called.

  I crawled forward, placing myself between Alvantes and the crown. "I used to be a thief. Now I mostly seem to fall off things. It's not a change I much planned."

  Alvantes's gaze wandered further down the cliff face. His face showed faint surprise. "Is that Stone?"

  "Yes."

  "And…?"

  "Next to him? That's Synza."

  I might have expected admiration or at least approval, but Alvantes's tone was lifeless as his expression. "How?"

  "Long story. I've lived through it, and you don't want to. Any chance of a rescue?"

  His only response was to disappear from view.

  Alvantes was gone for almost an hour – ample time for me to recover the crown, wrap it once more in my cloak and cram both into my pack. That done, I propped myself against the rock wall to try and recuperate a little. When he returned, it was with a bundle of knotted creepers, presumably gathered from the strip of forest. Tied together, they made a length of rope just long enough to reach me.

  It was a sound enough plan in theory, utterly hopeless in practise. Between Alvantes's single-handedness and my recent injury, it wasn't long before his rescue attempt had come to seem like a particularly bad joke.

  How did the one-armed man help the other one-armed man climb the cliff?

  Very, very slowly.

  Eventually, after colossal discomfort and much cursing, I caught hold of a tree perched on the ragged rim of the cliff and hauled myself up, to lie panting in the long grass before the woodland.

  Once my head had stopped swimming and my eyes had uncrossed, I took a moment to consider Alvantes's latest injuries. The blood on his face had dried now, a grotesque half-mask of gore. He'd made no attempt to clean himself, which probably made the wounds appear worse than they were – but they certainly looked bad enough.

  "You got him?"

  Alvantes didn't answer. For a moment, I considered pressing the question, pushing to discover how he'd single-handedly dispatched one of the most notorious killers in the land. It took me that moment to realise I really didn't want to know. There was something behind his eyes that told me all I needed and more.

  Instead, I asked, "Do you think it was him? I mean, was he the one who…" Even that sentence wasn't worth finishing. "Either way," I finished lamely, "they're both dead now."

  I almost added something like, Your father's death is avenged. However, I could read Alvantes's face even through its half coat of red – and for all my occasional tactlessness, even I could see that the grief ingrained there could never be cleansed by anything as simplistic as revenge.

  If I'd ever felt real sympathy for him, it was then. Yet it wasn't quite enough to make me forget my own misfortunes. After all, I'd just tumbled down a cliff, nearly been assassinated, nearly been assassinated again and then been dragged back up that self-same cliff – all with an arm that, medical opinions of recently deceased assassins aside, certainly felt broken. Nothing I said was going to make things better for Alvantes. Platitudes would only waste the strength I needed to endure the next few hours.

  We were, after all, still fugitives. Sooner or later – likely sooner – Stick and Stone's absence and therefore the possibility of their failure would come to the royal attention. Given the King's penchant for lunatic overreaction, it was hard to imagine what forces he'd marshal against us next. If we had the faintest hope of survival, our only hope lay in not waiting to find out.

  We had one thing in our favour, at least. Alvantes had managed to hang onto his mount, and to recover mine as well. They were tied to a spindly aspen near the verge of the forest, watching us steadily.

  I walked to my horse and patted his nose. "So what's our plan?" I asked.

  "Plan?"

  "How do we get out of here? Back to the Castoval?"

  "What does the Castoval matter?" said Alvantes, without interest.

  I could have argued, could have mentioned Estrada or the Altapasaedan guardsmen he'd left in jeopardy. But I knew enough to recognise a man who was beyond the point of being reasoned with, not even by himself. If I was going to get through, I'd need to keep it simple.

  "Have you forgotten what your father told you?"

  Alvantes's dark eyes flashed like embers in his halfbloodied face. "I haven't forgotten."

  "Then what's the plan?"

  "An acquaintance I met in Aspira Nero mentioned he'd be stopping near here," he said. "If we ride fast, we might catch him."

  I wasn't convinced either of us could ride at all, let alone fast. I wasn't about to tell Alvantes that. "You'd better pick our route," I said. "I haven't had much luck in that department so far today."

  We travelled westward at first, towards the distant mountains, following the line of the cliffs below and the edge of the forest to our right.

  Eventually, the dense trees petered out, revealing plains much like those we'd crossed outside Pasaeda. Soon after, a way downward presented itself; the cliffs to our left became broken ground, then steep slope, and finally a steady decline to another vast swathe of grassland.

  The ground was still uneven, though, littered with blunt protrusions of rock as though the sward was flimsy fabric tearing around the contours of the Earth. It was sheer in places, and slow to navigate. To our left I could still see the cliffs, descending in jagged tiers. On one of those lay Synza. I had no reason to feel guilty for my part in the momentary carelessness that had cost him his life. I should have been glad to be rid of him, glad our interminable chase was finally over. I was. But the memory of watching him plummet from sight still plucked at my mind. If nothing else, it was a reminder that I hardly needed of how tenuous life could be.

  After a while, the ground levelled once more. Ahead, it was bracketed only by the mountains to our right and a shimmer of heat haze in the direction of the river. We made sure to keep our distance from the only signs of life – herdsmen marshalling great squadrons of cattle and of horses, which drifted across the land like cloud shadows.

  We camped that night near a thread of stream, in a clearing neatly fenced by trees. It was my suggestion; Alvantes would probably have ridden all night if I'd left him. We had no food, and neither of us was in any state to catch any. However, I did struggle through my languor to carefully unpack my cloak without revealing its precious cargo.

  Had I given the matter a little thought, I could have saved myself the effort.

  "Your pack." Alvantes's voice was ethereal in the darkness.

  I started. "What about it?"

  "They took it. When we were arrested."

  "Oh." My heart was in my mouth. I wanted urgently to gulp it back down. Instead, I said, "That's right. I found it."

  "Found it?"

  "Your bags were there too. But empty." I strained my ears, trying to catch a reaction. All I could hear was the sigh of wind in leaves. "There must have been something in them they wanted."

  I sat tensed, not even quite sure what to fear. More questions, which would penetrate my obvious lie? Alvantes to tear the pack from my shoulder?

  When I eventually dared look, long minutes later, he was curled with his back to me, obviously sound asleep.

  In the morning we used the stream to wash. For the first time, Alvantes made some effort to bathe his wounds. The gash on his
forehead was messy, though shallow. The cut on his arm was deep, as I'd expected, but cleaner than I'd have guessed. I counted it a small mercy that neither showed sign of infection.

  For my part, my arm hurt abysmally. I reluctantly asked Alvantes to help me strap it, and was surprised when he did an excellent job. If the splint he improvised rendered it even more useless, it at least dulled the pain to a level I could about tolerate.

  "How much further?" I asked. "Can we still reach this friend of yours?"