Thief Who Knocked on Sorrow's Gate

by Michael McClung

  They could have been my bones just as easily. It could have been my body stuffed into the knee-hole of a desk for more than a decade. Murdered then crammed out of the way like rubbish. How many more were out there in the nooks and crannies of the city? How many more stuffed in crawlspaces, up disused chimneys, dumped in cesspits, and discarded in unmarked graves? I couldn’t begin to guess at an exact number, but I had a good idea of the digits. Hundreds.

  Hundreds. And nobody would remember them. Except for people like me, survivors of the Purge, nobody cared.

  Finally, I got up, found one of the volunteers that doled out the candles and kept the temple tidy, and put the bundle in his arms.

  “This one needs a home,” I told him.

  Once he figured out what he was holding, he tried to give it back to me. I didn’t take it. “This is not a cemetery, mistress, just a place to remember the departed,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, nobody remembers this one. Not even his or her name.”

  “The temple isn’t for the dead; it’s for the living,” he replied not unkindly.

  “Make an exception,” I told him and dug out one of my more precious gems. “Find this kid a place to rest here in the temple. That fire opal will keep this place in candles and brooms for a while. The roof is leaking. The benches are torture devices. You could use the donation; don’t pretend otherwise.”

  “All that is true, mistress, but it’s also true that the temple is not a place to lay anyone to rest.”

  “According to who?”

  “Well, tradition, I suppose.”

  “Then start a new one. There’s no god to gainsay you. Not here.” The temple of the departed was a purely mortal place, owing no allegiance to any deity, living or dead. No god had lent a hand to this murdered street rat in life. They could piss off in death as well.

  “But…but where? Where will we put this?”

  “I don’t know. That’s up to you. Anywhere will be better than where it’s been the last decade and more. Just give the bones a little dignity for pity’s sake.”

  “All right. I suppose we can do something.”

  I turned to leave. Turned back.

  “Put up a plaque.”

  “A plaque?”

  “It should say, ‘Victim of the Purge.’” I put another gem in his hand.

  “All—all right.”

  “Good. I will be back to check. Take care of it. And thank you.”

  I left the attendant standing there, holding the bones of a murdered child in one hand and a small fortune in the other, with a look of consternation on his face.

  #

  Number 7 was still there. But it wasn’t the same place I’d visited the night before.

  The leaded glass windows were grimy and cracked. The signboard was faded, its paint peeling. I made my way to a service entrance on a side alley, made short work of the lock, and entered.

  Nobody had lived or worked there for quite a while. Dust covered every surface, including the floor. It was undisturbed except for a couple of tracks leading back and forth from the front door to the kitchen.

  Only the kitchen showed any sign of recent use. Or at least recent cleaning. The ashes in the grate were fresh at least, and the table, benches, and floor were dust-free. A couple of the lamps had clean windows, fresh wicks, and a decent amount of oil.

  I did a quick search of the upstairs rooms, ones I hadn’t seen on my previous visit. The entire upstairs was bare. Not a stick of furniture. There might have been a cellar, but I didn’t bother to check.

  I went out, climbed the stairs, and checked “Theiner’s” room.

  It, at least, was exactly as I had found it the night before.

  “What the hells is going on?” I said out loud.

  Nobody answered, not even the little voice in my head.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I spent the rest of the day sorting truth from lies, fact from fiction, and emotion from reason. I was angry at being manipulated. Furious, actually. I was also confused as all hells as to what the point was.

  Fact: Somebody had sent me Borold’s head marked with a magic-infused rune. Those same sorts of runes had warned me of a trap and led me to a years-old murder.

  Fact: Somebody with magic, and lots of it, had tried to kill me. Twice. I had somehow tapped into some sort of power that lay deep in the heart of Mount Tarvus, and used it to regenerate my own flesh and drive off one of the vicious magical attacks.

  Fact: Someone purporting to be Ansen had sent me to the old family home, where a mage purporting to be my uncle had given me a locket with my mother’s portrait (real) and a story about helping Theiner hunt down those responsible for the Purge (part of which, at least, was false).

  Fact: The God of Sparrows wanted me to believe the whole city would be destroyed in two days and that me killing the Telemarch was the only way to avert that. Fallon Greytooth wanted me to believe that Kalara’s Knife was in Bellarius, probably being used by, and in turn using, the Telemarch. And that it wanted me.

  “Well, Amra,” I said to myself as I paced my rooms, “that’s an impressive number of facts you’ve got gathered up there. But what do they all mean?”

  They didn’t hang together neatly. They didn’t hang together at all, really, that I could see. Oh, I could take various pieces, glue them together with a liberal dose of guesswork and supposition, and get any number of pictures. But none of them were pretty. All of them were logic-challenged to put it kindly. The only thing I could really divine from all that had happened was that someone was trying to run a game on me. That and Bellarius was bad for my health and peace of mind.

  Mysterious, powerful, nameless entities toying with my life kind of scared me spitless. I don’t like being scared spitless and couldn’t do anything about the mysterious or powerful parts, so I decided I’d work on the nameless bit. I didn’t happen to have a name, so I made one up.

  “Chuckles will do,” I said to myself.

  The only way not to lose the kind of game I found myself in, whose rules were obscure and whose players were cyphers, was not to play. And to give said cyphers ridiculous names.

  By late afternoon, I’d reached a decision. It wasn’t one I was entirely happy about, but then those sorts of decisions are fairly uncommon in any case.

  I’d come to help Theiner. Theiner was elusive, possibly dead. It was time for me to go.

  Theiner’s list, if it was real, was far heavier in my pocket than paper had any right to be. But I was not some vigilante, some instrument of justice. I certainly wasn’t going to be hunting down bad people for things they’d done fifteen years before. Not because they didn’t deserve it; they did. They deserved all the pain and suffering it was possible to visit upon a living thing. No, I wasn’t going to start, or continue, some campaign of retribution because I deserved to have a life and had been lucky enough to survive and to build one.

  Vengeance would suck that life away from me as surely as Athagos had sucked the life out of the Mad Duke of Viborg and his men back in Thagoth if more slowly. It would consume me. I knew that. I’d been down the revenge road with my friend Corbin’s murder, before Thagoth. Revenge hadn’t been nearly as sweet as I thought it would be, and it had gotten a lot of people killed unnecessarily who’d still be walking around Lucernis instead of decomposing, if I hadn’t gone looking for my own personal justice.

  If I went looking for those responsible for the Purge?

  In all likelihood, I’d become a monster. There was a sea of rage deep down in my soul. It had taken years for those dark waters to become still. When I’d first arrived in Lucernis and the terror had abated, I’d been angry all the time. At everything. I’d learned quickly enough to channel that rage, that energy, into productive things like making money and not getting caught. But I wasn’t going to pretend that I had anything approaching a normal life.

  I had more scars than those on my face. I wasn’t about to start cutting them op
en again.

  Stirring up that rage was not something I wanted to do. I couldn’t.

  Not if I wanted to stay me. And I was finally, after decades, fairly content with myself.

  “So. Sorry, Theiner. I tried,” I said to the lengthening shadows that were slowly coating the room in autumn gloom. “Sorry, Sparrow God, Blood God. I really hope for Your sake, and Your little friend with my mother’s name, that You’re just mentally damaged and delusional.

  “Goodbye, Bellarius. Time for me to go.” Holgren would forgive me for his unnecessary trip. If he got upset, all I had to say was, “Thagoth. Six months. Eating grubs and bark.”

  “Sorry, Chuckles, but your game is no fun. Time for me to go,” I whispered again.

  But you just got here, said the voice in my head.

  #

  There was one place in Bellarius—or Hardside, actually—that I wanted to go to. Well, wanted might be a stretch. Say rather that I felt obligated to go to and didn’t feel reluctant about. If I was going to be leaving, I needed to go there first, and any magical traps be damned. I had a quick dinner in my rooms, threw a bottle of Gol-Shen in my sabretache, and went out into the chill evening.

  They’d burned down his shack and him in it of course. I’d watched them do it after he died. You didn’t take chances with something like lung fever. But I knew exactly where it was or had been.

  Arno had been much more of a father to me than my own ever had. I’d had him for six months before he drove me out of his shack with a stick and coughed curses and tears lest I catch the lung fever as well. Six months. Long enough to teach me what I needed to know to survive as a thief. How to pick a pocket and a lock. How to cut a purse. How to tell good coin from bad and gems from glass. How to move as silent as a shadow, and how to avoid notice in a busy street. He trained my hands and feet, my ears and eyes. But most importantly, he trained my mind. He taught me how to think, even when my fear threatened to choke me.

  He gave me everything I’ve ever really needed to survive. And all he ever asked for in return was food and the occasional bottle of wine. Blacksleeves had caught him years before I ever met him, and the magistrate had ordered every bone in both his hands broken. Then, they’d kept him in a cell long enough to ensure they would never heal properly. Then, they’d let him go, laughing. The funny thing was, he told me, they’d pinched him for a theft he hadn’t actually committed.

  Yeah. Funny. Ha ha.

  Anyway, after that, his thieving days were over. But he could still teach, and when he found me hiding in the muck under his shack, clutching my mother’s comb and the knife I’d ended my father with, he took me in and proceeded to teach me everything he knew.

  I was a much better thief now than he had ever been. But I would never be a better person.

  After he died, I was truly on my own, navigating an endless, perilous path between the everyday dangers of the streets, the Blacksleeves, and the street rat gangs.

  I survived. Many, many more did not. The difference was what Arno had taught me about theft and what Theiner had taught me about knives, and eventually, when the purge was at its height, Theiner’s help in stowing away on a ship bound for Lucernis.

  I retraced my route down to South Gate. The street was still torn up. I walked through Hardside to the place where Arno’s shack had been in the shadow of the Rimgurn cliffs. The whole area was deserted despite the ground being rather less waterlogged than most of Hardside. Common wisdom in Hardside had it that the stretch of ground where Arno had built his shack was cursed, poisoned with some sort of dark energy. He hadn’t believed it; he called it superstitious nonsense.

  Maybe he was right, maybe not. But nobody else had died of lung fever that season. At any rate, the place was shanty-free for quite some distance around.

  My feet led me up the slight, almost imperceptible rise almost of their own accord. Of course, there were no charred beams, no ash drifting in the still air. That was just my memory. But half-hidden in the coarse weeds that passed for grass in parts of Hardside, I found without even trying the motley collection of scavenged bricks and cobblestones Arno had laid down in front of his shack and had called his stoop.

  “A man, and even a girl, needs a place to sit outside of an evening without their arses getting muddy,” he’d told me once as we sat there and watched the sun set over the Dragonsea.

  I sat down in my old spot and imagined him there, to my left, grizzled chin pointing seaward as he hugged his knees. I pulled out the bottle of Gol-Shen, prised out the cork with a knife and long practice, and took a swallow. Stared out at the stars and the ceaseless sea. To the north, the stars were disappearing. Rain was coming again.

  “Brought you some of the good stuff, old man,” I whispered and poured the rest into the ground.

  I never heard it coming. It literally didn’t make a sound.

  I looked up from pouring out the wine, and there was someone—something, sitting next to me, where Arno had once sat.

  It looked human. Sort of. A young man with sad eyes and some sort of brand on his forehead. It was also a flayed corpse, dressed in smoke and shadows. Wet meat and white tendons and damp, pink bone, teeth exposed by a gaping hole in one cheek, and all of it hidden, exposed, hidden again in a restless cloak that seemed torn from the night sky. All this I took in, in the instant it took for me to drop the bottle, whip out both knives, and drive one toward its throat.

  It blocked my thrust with enough force to make my wrist go numb. The knife in my left hand slid from suddenly nerveless fingers. Then, almost as quickly as Red Hand, it punched me in the face.

  My head snapped back, and I went sprawling. My vision went black around the edges, and I saw stars, swarming like agitated fireflies. Felt the hot blood gushing from my nose and down my lips and cheek.

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” it said in a voice like cemetery gates creaking in the wind. “Don’t do that again.”

  Get up. Get up. I still had one knife. I started to roll over, away from him, intending to come up in a fighting crouch. As soon as I started to shift, an iron grip pinned my wrist to the ground. I froze. My vision cleared. Those sad, soulful eyes were inches from my own. I recognized the brand on his forehead now. It was the Hardic rune for justice. An image of Borold’s rotting noggin flashed through my mind.

  “Listen,” it said.

  “I’m listening.”

  “They are all going to die,” it said.

  “Who’re they?”

  “All the souls in this city.”

  I got it. Suddenly, I got it. Or at least I thought I did. “You’re Chuckles,” I said.

  “We are Justice.” The way it said it, you could hear the capital “J.” It should have been funny. It wasn’t, not in the least.

  “So it says on your forehead,” I replied. “What do you want with me?”

  “You are the witness. You must see and understand.”

  “Why me?”

  “You are the witness.”

  “You sent me Borold’s head, didn't you? You lured me here.” It was just a wild guess, but the rune was kind of a big coincidence.

  “You are the witness,” it repeated. It wasn’t really an answer.

  “Get off me.”

  It did. I rolled over, sheathed the knife I was holding. Took a corner of my cloak and staunched my bleeding nose. Kept it in view. It just stood there, impossible, gruesome. Once I’d got the bleeding more or less under control, I said, “So you’re going to kill everyone in Bellarius, and you want me to watch.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did an entire city do to deserve death?”

  “This city killed innocence. Over and over and over.”

  “I won’t argue that. But not everyone in this city is guilty.”

  “Bellarius must die.”

  “That’s not justice. That’s mass murder.”

  “Yes. And that is what makes it just. One mass murder for another.”
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  “What are you? Who are you to decide the fate of thousands?”

  “We are Justice. We are legion.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He stared at me for a time then seemed to come to some decision. “You are the witness. You must understand.”

  Suddenly, its hands were on either side of my head, and its eyes had locked mine. I fell into them.

  I was running down an alley, scared out of my mind. The fear blocked out the agony of the cuts and weeping sores on my bare, freezing feet, the hunger that gnawed my belly hollow. My breath came in ragged gasps, pluming in the cold night air. The Blacksleeves were coming, and I was going to die. I had to run, run faster, run furth—

  The crossbow bolt took me high in the back. The steel head sprouting suddenly from my thin, bony chest. It had pierced a lung. I stumbled, fell, sprawled on my side on the frigid cobbles. Nothing had ever hurt like this before. I curled up around my pain, around the bolt.

  Footsteps approached.

  I opened my eyes, stretched out my hand, opened my mouth to say please.

  The billy came down on my head again and again until my skull cracked then shattered, and all the light in the world went out.

  My eyes fluttered open. It was still holding my head, staring into my eyes, my soul.

  “One,” it said.

  “I—”

  It was dark and smelled of mold and rotting wood. I was crammed into a tiny space, tiny even for my tiny body. I was trying to breathe silently. I was terrified they could hear my heartbeat. I was terrified of the spiders and centipedes I could feel crawling over my face, down the neck of my filthy shirt. I wanted to scream. I dared not scream or even breathe.

  On the other side of the wall, I could hear footsteps on the warped floorboards of the abandoned warehouse. The insects began biting, and their bites were like fire. I thought I would go mad with it, with having to stay still as they stung me over and over.

  It was a good hiding place. It was a safe hiding place. Too small for Blacksleeves to fit. Too hard to find, I told myself over and over, silently.