“Fine, fine. Kerf knows I’m not interested in Bath’s pillow talk.” An unbidden image of Bath kissing somebody entered my mind. I shuddered. The two times I’d met Bath, he’d been masquerading as one of his own priests. Those guys sewed their mouths shut.
“So,” I said. “The Knife set all this up on the off chance I’d decide to visit Bellarius after fifteen years so it could destroy me along with the rest of the city? Seems like chopping down a tree to make a toothpick.” But actually, I hadn’t returned on some off-chance, had I?
“I could not say what the Knife wants. The Telemarch, however, is terrified of you and wants you to die as soon as possible. The moment you appeared in the city, he began pouring more power into his reservoir at a reckless rate. He will kill everyone in a few days if he does not stop. Or isn’t stopped.”
“The Telemarch is afraid of me?” I laughed.
“Aither is afraid of his own shadow. I believe the Knife has twisted him to be that way, but that, admittedly, is speculation. What is not speculation is the fact that you scare him spitless for whatever reason. He set traps for you throughout the city long before you ever arrived.”
“I’ve run into a couple.”
“And you are still here. Perhaps he is right to fear you.”
“The first was too slow. The second wasn’t, but I had…help.”
“What sort of help, may I ask?”
“I sort of found some magic of my own. I don’t really understand it.”
“You ‘found some magic,’” she repeated, amusement in her voice. “Was it lying in the street then?”
“No. Beneath it, actually. Deep down in Mount Tarvus. I was dying, and I felt it down there, and I reached out to it, or maybe it reached out to me. It gets confusing. It was like sunlight. Or…”
“Or pure, undiluted possibility,” she finished for me. “I think I know why the Telemarch fears you, Amra Thetys.”
“Why?” I asked. But I was afraid I already knew the answer.
“Because, somehow, you have access to the power he has been building up for more than a decade.”
“The power that’s going to destroy Bellarius in a matter of days?”
“The very same,” she replied.
Silence settled between us. I thought about my situation. In order to save myself and the city, I needed to steal a two-ton slab of stone from the Syndic’s throne room, cart it all the way down the Mount, through the Girdle, out the gates, through Hardside, and to the Wreck. And that was the easy part. After that, I had to kill the Telemarch and, probably, break another of the Eightfold Goddess’ Blades. And there was still a list of names in my pocket, one of which, I realized, I very much wanted to see crossed off. Though how I was going to do any of that escaped me at that moment.
“We’re all well and truly screwed,” I muttered.
She laughed.
“What’s so funny? This isn’t the least bit amusing.”
“I’ve been a prisoner for a thousand years. My perspective is slightly different from yours, I suspect.”
“I just hope you aren’t as batshit crazy as the last thousand-year prisoner I freed,” I replied, standing. Though Tha-Agoth hadn’t been as blatantly insane as his sister.
“I look forward to finding out,” she replied. “Will you share your memories now or once you’ve brought me the Founder’s Stone?”
“I’ll wait if it’s all the same to you. I prefer to do the impossible before the unpleasant.”
“As you wish, Doma Thetys. As you wish.”
#
Past the Girdle, on the increasingly steep slope of Mount Tarvus, were the houses of the Gentry.
Carved into the rock of the Mount itself, their façades built vertically for the most part, the rising towers of the Gentry vied, each against the others, to look down on who and what was below them. Elevation equaled status. The higher up the slope, the more elite the house—and the House. For those lower down, building up was some sort of partial remedy. Or maybe they just wanted to block the views of those higher up. I don’t know. The Gentry might as well have been another species as far as I was concerned. I didn’t spend much time trying to puzzle out their mindsets.
Anyway, the mad jumble of towers and spires had always struck me as singularly ugly. But it afforded me a large number of vantage points to climb to, from which I could get a closer look at the Citadel and the Riail. I had no idea how I was going to break into the two most secure, well-guarded buildings in Bellarius, but I figured taking a look at them from somewhere closer than the Girdle was a good start.
I chose a house whose thin tower was particularly ugly, ornamented with so many stone friezes that climbing it was child’s play even in the rain. The seal on the gate was of a stylized hart wearing a crown, its neck bent back at an improbable angle, its hooves kicking up flames. Whatever. Heraldry wasn’t my strong suit.
The single guard wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t exactly wary, either. I slipped over the ornamental wall as quiet as a shadow and began to climb the tower on the northeast side, out of his view. I peeked in one window and realized the tower was wholly for show. Inside was just a staircase, no space for rooms of any sort. It was just a folly. Which meant all of the living portions of the house were carved into the Mount. I stifled a laugh.
The Gentry, those high and mighty nobles of Bellarius, basically lived in caves.
When I reached the top, I hung an arm over the rusted weather vane and took a long look at the Riail.
It was like a pale, stone necklace adorning the throat of the Mount. It was a graceful building, especially for Bellarius. Level upon level rose up like layers of a cake, buttresses and arches and spires graceful in the glow of hundreds of lanterns. For all that, it wasn’t especially big. There just wasn’t enough land to work with that high up the Mount.
Small or not, I knew nothing of the interior. I certainly didn’t know where the throne room, and the Founder’s Stone, was located. Visiting the Syndic wasn’t something I’d had the opportunity to do when I’d lived here.
I was going to need plans of the building or, failing that, a description from someone who had been inside and seen the interior well enough to describe it with some accuracy.
I thought I knew where I might get the first as well as plans of the Citadel. Both would cost me, but you can’t spend money if you’re dead. The second wouldn’t be terribly difficult either if likely less useful.
I looked up higher to the Citadel, where it loomed just above the Riail, brooding and heavy where the Riail was graceful.
The Citadel was just a massive, square, squat tower built of a stone so gray it was almost black. It took up the peak of the Mount. Windows of random shapes and sizes pierced its sides in random places. No getting around it, the Citadel was an ugly piece of stonework. Worse, I could intuit nothing of the layout from its exterior.
I studied it a while longer, then sighed and prepared to climb back down.
Something moving through the air caught my attention. It was far too big to be a bird.
Rising into the air from somewhere below the Riail, but above my position, was a man. He was too far away to make out facial features; he was turned away from me in any case. But I recognized the particolored cloak he wore, even in the gloom of the night and the softly pattering rain.
Fallon Greytooth. Magus. Philosopher.
What the hells was he doing?
When he had floated up until he was level with the Citadel, he whipped his hands in the air in some sort of arcane, sorcerous gesture. With a squeal of tortured metal, the grate that covered the window was ripped out of the wall along with a goodly portion of the stones the grate was attached to. Greytooth made another gesture, and the grate flung itself out over the city, far enough that it would end up in the Bay. After a moment, Greytooth himself flew at amazing speed through the dark, gaping hole he’d just ripped open.
Nothing happened for two, three, four heartb
eats. Then, a blazing gout of fire shot out of the window followed immediately by a low, loud roar and a loose-limbed body in a smoking, particolored cloak. Greytooth was hurled with vicious force out and away from the Citadel. I watched him fall, his terminal arc ending down in the Girdle. I knew where he’d landed. Jaby Cemetery.
“Well, that’s fitting, I suppose,” I whispered to myself, shaken.
If that’s what happened to Greytooth when he stormed the Citadel, I didn’t want to think about what was going to happen to me.
I waited a few minutes more, but nothing else happened. The citadel was as dark and quiet as it had been before Greytooth’s intrusion. Apparently, the show was over. I started back down again.
At some point during my climb down the tower, I realized that I had decided to go and check out Greytooth’s body. I must have been getting morbid in my old age.
#
The bastard was still alive.
Oh, he didn’t look good. He’d crashed down atop a little mausoleum, crushing the lead roof and cracking the marble-fronted walls. He lay there, unconscious, in a pool of his own blood. What parts of him that weren’t charred were bloody. But he still had all his limbs and digits.
I assumed he was dead until he coughed.
“Kerf’s bunched back,” I muttered. “You’re a tough one.”
His only response was a groan.
I got up onto the remains of the mausoleum and, with not a little difficulty, dragged him down to the ground. He was not small. Once there, I nudged him in a relatively blood free place. Eventually, his eyelids fluttered open.
“Are you going to be dying in the next hour or so?” I asked him. “Because I’m not hauling your dead body through the streets. That sort of thing never ends well.”
He didn’t laugh. Some people have no sense of humor.
I got his arm around my neck and him more or less to his feet.
Chapter Sixteen
“Like a stain, it soaks into the fabric of reality. Between the warp and weft of what is, is what might be. For those who want it badly enough. For those not concerned with consequences. This is what Aither, the Telemarch, has done.” Fallon Greytooth knew lots of big old words.
He’d been coherent enough to direct me to his lair, which hadn’t been all that far from Jaby. Greytooth was staying in one of the lowest and smallest of the houses of the Gentry. It was, apparently, deserted. He didn’t offer to explain how he’d ended up there, and I didn’t ask. And yes, it was almost completely carved into the rock of the Mount. It was dusty, cold, dark, and barely fit for human habitation despite its expensive furnishings.
We were sitting in a cramped, close room whose ceiling was low enough to make me uncomfortable. Greytooth couldn’t have stood up straight in it even if he were capable of standing. Which he wasn’t at the moment. He was slumped on a very expensive, very old couch that had not been made with comfort in mind. The bloodstains he was getting on it would never come out, I noted absently. I was sitting on a stool. I’d found a bottle of wine in a cupboard though there were no glasses. The bottle stood between us on an ugly little gilt table. Two oil lamps smoked and blackened the ceiling, making the air grimy and my eyes itch.
“He used the Knife that Parts the Night to cut open reality, to get himself some power,” I replied. “I know.”
“He used the Knife to attempt to bring magic back into the world. In so doing, he evoked the law of unintended consequences. And we will all be destroyed by it. Unless he is stopped.”
“I know that too. So go stop him. You’re the Philosopher, the mage.”
“What do you think I just attempted to do?”
“Commit suicide?”
He gave me a sour smile.
“You can’t have it both ways, Mistress Thetys. Either I should be trying to stop him or running away from certain death. Which would you prefer?”
“I’d prefer to be back in Lucernis, drinking bad wine at Tambor’s and watching people pass by on the street, shaking my head at their poorly thought-out fashion choices.”
“This conversation is going nowhere.”
“All right, how about this: other than the Telemarch, you are almost certainly the most powerful and deadly person in this piss-pot of a city. You seem to want to stop him. You failed once, but you survived. It goes to reason you should try again with a better plan.”
“Oh, you want to talk reasonably. All right. I tried, and failed, to stop the Telemarch. I failed to destroy the Knife. I failed to avert the coming disaster. Your turn.”
I glared at him. “I’m just a thief. A retired one at that.”
“You are more than that, and you know it. Whether you like it or not.”
“Look. I already saved the world from evil once, maybe twice, depending on how you count such things. I’ve paid my dues. If you failed, I have absolutely no chance of succeeding.”
“I am powerful. But the power that resides in the Citadel is beyond me. I tried to intercede. The Knife slapped me down as though I were a child. What else would you have me do?”
“The same thing you’d have me do, I suppose.”
“If you will not, then I will try again. But I will fail. Again.”
My temper snapped. “What makes you think I won’t fail, Kerf damn you?” I shouted.
“I don’t know that you won’t,” he replied calmly. “But the Knife wants you, Amra Thetys. That presents opportunities open to no one else.”
“How in the cold hells do you know that? Or any of this you’ve been talking about? Just what, by Kerf’s dirty beard, is the connection between you Philosophers and the Eightfold’s blades, Greytooth?”
He reached out a bloodied hand, grabbed the wine bottle, and took a healthy slug. Then another one. Put the bottle back carefully.
“Do you really want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“‘Moranos holds the Dagger of Desire,’” he said.
I stared at him for a second. It sounded familiar. Then, I remembered where I’d heard it before. “I’m aware of the poem. Or most of it, anyway. The copy at Lagna’s temple in Lucernis is missing the end bit. What’s your point?”
“Do you remember the Cataclysm?”
“Why do people always ask me that? How Kerf-damned old do I look?”
“What the renegade Philosophers who caused the Cataclysm a thousand years ago desired most was to understand the workings of reality itself. What they did not realize, sadly, is that which is observed is changed by the very fact of its observation.”
“You’re saying one of the Eightfold’s Blades caused the Cataclysm?”
“Caused it? No. Men caused it. But the Dagger of Desire made it possible.”
“That’s just word games, Greytooth.”
“Perhaps. It doesn’t really matter. To answer your original question, the Order of Philosophers is tasked with tracking down and securing the weapons of the Eightfold Goddess so that nothing like the Cataclysm may ever happen again.” He leaned back on the couch, pain and exhaustion plain on his long face.
“Your job is to find and secure the Blades. Not destroy them?”
“We didn’t even think it was possible to destroy one of Her blades until you did it.”
“So how many have you managed to ‘secure’ then?”
“At the moment, none.”
“None? After a thousand years?”
“At one time, we had six contained. That was a century ago. Since then, they have, one by one, managed to breach their containments or subvert their guardians. The last we lost was the Blade that Whispers Hate. Which leads us back to the matter at hand.”
I got up. Started pacing. In that small cave of a room, it was unsatisfying. It reminded me of my cell in Havelock prison only with less feces on the floor and gaudy furniture.
“Everybody who’s anybody in this stinking city is pushing me to go kill the Telemarch and destroy the Knife, and you all seem
to think I’m the only one who can do it, but not one of you can give me the least clue how to go about it.”
“I planned my assault with great care. Much good it did me.”
“You flew into a window and tried to burn the Telemarch to a crisp. You call that planning?”
“I bypassed a dozen layers of guards and wards. I attacked with what should have been an element of extreme surprise. It afforded me the best chance of success. Or so I thought. I did not give sufficient weight to the Knife’s capability or independence of action.”
“You thought the Telemarch controlled the Knife, not the other way around.”
“I had hoped their union was of a more equal nature. He is the Telemarch, after all.”
“Have you ever actually held one of Her Blades?” I asked, and he shook his head. “He’s a meat puppet for the Knife, Fallon. Never doubt it. And now, the Knife knows you’re out there trying to get it. You showed your hand, put its guard up. If surprise was an option before, I very much doubt it is now.”
He sat up straight though it caused him obvious pain. “Do you want to know how I would go about it if I were you?”
“Oh, yes, please. Enlighten me.”
“I would just walk into the Citadel.”
I stopped pacing and turned to stare at him.
“Did I do something to you to make you want me dead?”
“I’m completely serious. The Knife wants you. I don’t know why, but it does. I think you are the only person in the world who could just walk up to it and take it.”
“That is the most spectacularly stupid idea I have ever heard in my life. Let’s assume you’re right, and the Knife wants me for whatever reason. I have it on very good authority that the Telemarch wants me to become a greasy red smear, the sooner the better. Do you think he will just let me take his shiny away from him?”
“Didn’t you just call him a—what was that lovely expression you used? Ah yes. Didn’t you just call the Telemarch a ‘meat puppet’ for the Knife?”
“Yeah, well, the Knife didn’t keep him from laying deadly traps for me all around the city, did it? He might be some sort of gibbering tool, but he obviously has some free will left to him. And anyway, the point is moot. You did notice what happened to the sky earlier tonight? And the big ‘guilt’ rune floating over the Citadel?”
Thief Who Knocked on Sorrow's Gate Page 12
