Master of One

by Jaida Jones

  For the moment, Rags gave up on the door and knelt nearer to the corpse instead, drawn by the movement of fabric that the worm managed to stir. Barely perceptible, but there.

  The corpse’s pale, silken sheet of long hair spilled like a waterfall over its face, its knees. A bit much for a common thief. All flash and no substance. No wonder they hadn’t made it far.

  Rags brushed the hair out of the way, then recoiled as he met empty eye sockets and black—black?—bone.

  He gasped and fell backward onto his ass.

  Black-boned.

  It couldn’t be Oberon himself, but did that make Rags feel better?

  He was staring at a dead fae.

  The corpse wasn’t mere months old. Its clothing only appeared to be. There was nothing but more black bone under its sleeves, while its silver gloves, which glistened like wet flesh at the right angle, in this lighting, had deceived Rags for not yet completely rotted hands. They perched and met, fingertip to fingertip, on top of the corpse’s bony knees.

  Hands.

  He didn’t have to touch the door. Not risking his own fingers.

  Rags grinned, calming the racing of his heart after the shock of meeting a fae skeleton. Without flinching—he knew his share of corpses and they didn’t spook him, since the dead wouldn’t fight you for a day’s earnings—he pinched the sleeve between his fingertips. The fabric was cool and sleek, light as gossamer. Some kind of Lost-Lands fae bullshit.

  This place was the real deal.

  No wonder a sorcerer and an Ever-Noble were so obsessed with it, needed a master thief to break them into the place.

  Rags stomped on the urge to shiver. Fae stories were hundreds of years old. No living fae, no new tales to tell.

  Plundering a fae tomb should be simple enough. But being in this place gnawed on him like teeth on a bone.

  In a setting best suited for myths and legends, Rags was an ant scuttling through a palace.

  Keep moving.

  He rolled the corpse’s sleeves up to its black elbows and noticed neat silver hinges attaching them to the next bones. The metal was warm, as if it had recently been touched. Rags ran his thumb around the circumference, finding and flattening a silver disc. The forearm slid free with a sigh. Flopped into Rags’s lap soft as a kiss. Rags set it aside, freed the second forearm, then held both by the wrists as he approached the door.

  The gloved hands were unusually large, the perfect size to match the etchings. Rags held them up to the handprints, took a steadying breath, and pressed forward, bony palms to empty outlines.

  The door swallowed the gloves like he’d poured water onto hot sand.

  9

  Rags

  After the door disappeared into the surrounding wall with the same liquid dissolution as the gloves, Rags was left holding two bare bone hands. Warm wind blew over him from the newly exposed path.

  Though calling it a “path” was generous.

  The room ahead was a chasm once spanned by a broken bridge now little more than a jagged platform. A crooked tooth in an otherwise empty mouth. The walls were decorated with the same style of arches that had surrounded Rags on his descent, only now he was going deeper, and there was nothing glowing to light his way. He could barely make out the knobbed shapes of twisting, metallic vines clinging to the stone.

  Rags returned the arms to their owner—not like their owner missed them—and watched with grudging amazement as a force like magnetism drew them back, clicked to lock them into place. He set the hands on the corpse’s knees the way they had been. No point in making things hard for the next guy. Isn’t going to be a next guy. Then he rubbed his chest in thought.

  When one is opened . . . let me know.

  He fished the mirror out of his pocket, breathed on the glass. Wiped it clean.

  “Uh,” Rags said. “I’m letting you know?”

  Silence followed. Rags couldn’t make sense of whatever the connection was. Morien could reach into his head to talk outside the ruins—but not here. And he didn’t seem to know what Rags was thinking. Good. Rags couldn’t manage politeness inside and out, not at the same time.

  “Hello?” Rags tapped the glass with one finger, feeling like a wet-brained idiot, when the sound of footsteps in heavy, single-file march revealed his success.

  Rags turned to meet Morien and Lord Faolan’s retinue of six Queensguard, still blindfolded.

  “Funny idea of company you sorcerers have.” Rags couldn’t help himself, figured he’d earned a smart remark by passing through the first door. “All those swords can’t be for me. You expecting we’ll run into something else that’ll need all that steel?”

  Although Morien’s scarves swathed only the bottom half of his face, his eyes were as cool and blank as mask-glaze as he regarded Rags.

  Not impressed.

  “I trust you have something of value to show me.”

  If there was this much secrecy to the venture, could a single shard of sorcery be enough to ensure Rags’s silence? No. There was no reason to believe death didn’t wait for him at the end of this, even if he managed to triumph where the others had failed.

  Rags grimaced, pessimism having been his closest companion for the past sixteen years.

  “There’s a big hole.” Rags jerked his chin toward it. “Should have brought a circus acrobat along, too. For jumping.”

  Trust the fae to lock a door that opened onto nothing. From every whispered rumor and legend about the fae bastards, Rags wasn’t surprised they’d let him feel like he’d progressed, only to have him slam headfirst into another blockade.

  “You’ve been nimble in past endeavors,” Morien said.

  Yeah, without an audience.

  Rags turned his back on the sorcerer, facing the next chamber. Pit of agony? It was too dark to tell how deep down the hole went. He edged onto the silver path. Impossible to figure out what supported it. What supported him. Rags eyed the vines on the wall. He was slender, skinny. This had aided him in his chosen profession on many occasions in the past. No reason that couldn’t continue.

  “Question,” Rags said. Morien’s silence encouraged him to proceed. “How murderous are those vines?”

  The sorcerer didn’t deign to respond.

  “Guess I’ll find out for myself,” Rags said, and reached for the nearest one.

  10

  Rags

  The vine he chose didn’t try to kill him.

  But the edges of the leaves were sharp, almost serrated, like a torturer’s knife. They also folded, which Rags only discovered after he’d nicked his thumb at first touch. A warning before he discovered the trick to not slicing himself into ribbons.

  Lovely and deadly, in keeping with what Rags knew about the fae.

  Rags gave the vine a sample tug to see if it would hold—it held—then stepped onto the broken bridge. Its surface was slippery-smooth, like glass. He took a deep breath, wrapped the vine around one arm at the elbow, the wrist.

  “This is nothing,” Rags lied to himself.

  He’d scaled Ever-House spires, their walls slick, purchaseless polished marble. He’d danced around the wrought-iron spikes lining their tiled roofs.

  Climbing up was ten times easier than going down.

  But there was no preparation adequate for leaping into a fae-made precipice toward your apparent doom. Rags closed his eyes before realizing that didn’t help, either, and finally eased himself backward off the silvery edge of the half bridge into the darkness below.

  For one terrible moment he hung there, gently swaying back and forth. Then he kicked out once, twice, finding the wall with the balls of his feet.

  Hand over hand, like he’d practiced in the Clave, Rags lowered himself down the vine.

  It was like being swallowed, traveling down the gullet of an enormous beast. Folklore said the fae had lived alongside the Ancient Ones, made dwellings from their bones. Those massive creatures who had roamed the world in its infancy and left their remains to fortify mountains, channel
streams, cup the oceans, seed the forests.

  Rags wasn’t superstitious about the dead, but a bad feeling followed him in this place like eyes on the back of his neck.

  He’d only wriggled down the height of two men before the dark gobbled him whole, abruptly shutting out the sight of Morien and the Queensguard. A lesser thief might’ve yelped in surprise. Rags held his tongue by biting its tip, sharpening his focus with a touch of pain. Cold, clammy under the collar, like a first-year pickpocket. It followed that he’d revert to one of their tricks, distracting himself from his nerves with a bit of verse.

  Oberon comes when the moons are high—

  No, that wasn’t the kind of rhyme that brought comfort in the bowels of a fae ruin. His bootsoles scraped the pit wall as he rappelled down. Grit fell and vanished into the darkness. The vine flexed, metal supple under his fingers. What would a single polished leaf be worth?

  Time for another rhyme, one about shiny secrets, not a litany of terrible things Oberon could do to lesser creatures.

  Rags hummed to hear the sound echoing downward into silence. Not every bit of doggerel about the fae was a warning. Some were promise.

  He buried fae treasure, all silver and blood,

  Deep in the earth, where sleeping things grow.

  Measure by measure comes Oberon’s flood,

  More precious than gold, so final the blow.

  A hidden fortune sleeping beneath the earth was something Rags could get behind.

  Pleased with himself and unused to the sensation, he nearly missed the hairline fracture in the wall. He stopped sharp, already past it, running the sensitive pads of his fingers back over the space. The seam traveled in a perfect line.

  Cut, not cracked.

  Few others would have noticed it, but Rags’s fingers were smarter, more sensitive. He’d trained them to pick out intricate but minute differences in any surface. He’d found an important one here, a groove in the stone. A thin, thin break, traveling down.

  Rags chased it down to where it stopped at a pointed tip, drawn upward again on either side in a sharp V.

  Didn’t need to be a genius thief and expert lockpick to recognize the shape.

  An arrow.

  Rags lowered himself down the vine after it, found a circle of slippery-smooth stone below its point. When he settled his thumb against it, it depressed. Lights flooded on around him.

  A lot of them.

  His eyes adjusted to the shape the lights made: more arrows. Everywhere. Glowing seams in the stone walls. They filled the pit, flowing together and apart, a flock of identical geometries carved into the rock. Each of them pointed down.

  The vine that was Rags’s lifeline shifted, stretched, a breathing thing. He yelped as it slithered around his arm and away, spooling out beneath him in clockwork circles around the pit’s walls. Rags dropped, scrambling for purchase, before landing on a jutting ledge of stone barely wide enough to hold him.

  A narrow crack in the rocky wall to squeeze through.

  An obvious pathway. How hospitable.

  His time on the streets had taught him to be wary of too much help.

  “Little eager for me to head that way, aren’t you?” Rags said aloud.

  In response, a real arrow shot through the air. Made entirely of silver, it narrowly missed taking off the end of his crooked nose.

  “Shit,” Rags said.

  All he had breath for.

  The arrows came in volleys of three, fired from every direction. Rags had scarcely ducked one before the next whisked past him, nicking his sleeve, lodging in stone.

  The metal barbs left behind something black and sticky on his shirt. Poison? Rags sniffed it, then flared his nostrils at the acrid scent. Hawkshade.

  If it got into his blood, he’d rot from the inside out.

  Rags knew a man in the Clave who dabbled in toxins. The stuff messed with his head and he was always rattling off distracted ditties about his flowers. Silverseal caused shakes and blindness. Powdered redbell could make someone bleed to death inside before they showed a single outward symptom. Felltooth, a tasteless paralytic, stopped the heart last, kept it beating so a man could feel each part of himself die.

  Hawkshade offered a quick end, without subtlety or suffering.

  Morien wouldn’t save Rags if he were poisoned. He’d find another thief, had probably left the bodies of Rags’s predecessors to prove that.

  Fine.

  Rags could save himself. He always did. He squeezed through the crack in the wall, stumbling out into a tunnel.

  More arrows.

  Bent double at the waist to avoid the first volley, half falling into a crouch and weaving to avoid the next.

  Where were they coming from? The walls themselves?

  “Poison,” Rags reminded himself sharply as he dodged another arrow, this one tearing his shirt at the small of his back. The refrain kept him keen. “Poison, poison, poisonpoisonpoison.”

  Scrambling down the narrow path, moving without looking at his feet—had to keep his eyes on the arrows—Rags stumbled as the ground evened out under him.

  At the bottom already?

  Glancing up to see where he’d come from, Rags snapped into a roll that saved him from a skewering. Arrows pinged too close to his face. He rolled back onto his feet and plunged forward, past an archway of glowing arrow shapes cut into the walls, a volley of real arrows firing from them.

  No light at the end of the tunnel. The door there sealed shut, same as Corpse-y’s door. The constant assault of projectiles meant no opportunity for thoughtful examination. Rags was in constant motion, rappelling off the walls and floors, leaping like a flea from one orphan to the next.

  There had to be something that triggered the arrows. They hadn’t been firing when he first descended. His presence had tripped the attack.

  How?

  Rags shifted his attention to the walls and ceiling, spaces visible between the paths carved through the air by silver-fleet arrows.

  There was a pattern to their firing. Like the steps of a complicated dance, they kept their own time. Rags breathed with their rhythm, fell into it, bobbing and lunging toward the end of the tunnel.

  There was a pattern on the walls, too. What had once been a series of jagged V’s pointing haphazardly in the same direction now looked like a series of right angles on the left-hand side only. They were still V’s, but their tilt and order had grown, mimicking steps carved sideways into the rock.

  Rags flung himself toward the nearest one, arms out, hands searching. His fingers caught a groove.

  An arrow pinged off the wall near his elbow.

  This was either stupid or brilliant. Rags ascended sideways along the wall, not his most graceful climb, until he’d risen bare inches above the many paths the arrows charted. One wrong placement of his hands and he’d drop back into their ceaseless volleying.

  “There’d better be something incredible at the end of this,” he wheezed.

  His hands were slippery with sweat as he dug his fingers in tight to the stone grooves, holding on for dear life. No thief wanted to die in the dark, speared like a prize boar.

  Hanging in place to catch his breath, surveying the lay of the land, he noticed what hadn’t been visible to him below. A narrow ledge overhung the door at the end of the tunnel. A quiet, shadowed alcove. One spot the arrows weren’t firing toward.

  Rags jumped. Weightless, breathless. Then he landed, half crouched, half kneeling, on the slate.

  His knee throbbed, having taken most of his weight. But he quickly forgot about the pain.

  Before him, tucked into a second alcove within the first one, was a strange silver sculpture, intricate as the skeletal insides of a termite nest. Every part of it moved, ticking ahead and around with miniature mechanical parts. The effect made it look alive with crawling metal beetles.

  Despite the danger below, Morien’s mirror in his pocket, and Morien’s shitting shard in his heart, Rags couldn’t help himself.

  H
e poked the thing.

  Delicate clockwork pinched his finger, almost immediately providing the expected punishment for his stupidity. Rags tugged, then began to pry carefully at the spindly teeth that held his finger in place.

  Rags had once found a broken, but quality, pocket watch on the street, its casing shattered, the back popped apart. The smooth inner workings of the silver termite nest resembled the inside of that watch, writ large in interlocking silver gears and rotating discs of polished crystal. Each piece flowed in seeming independence from the others, yet they all worked together to power the whole.

  It was breathtakingly beautiful.

  Beautiful for a thing that was, Rags suspected, controlling the arrows trying to kill him.

  Rags reached in, pinching one of the visible gears between his fingers. The mechanism made a wrenching sound as it ground to a halt. The steady thwip thwip thwip of arrows slowed. From the door below, he heard a clunk, the telltale sound of a bolt slipping free of its hole.

  “Shh,” Rags whispered hopefully, lulling the gears to sleep. “Shush now, there you go.” The gear fought against his hold. When he let go, the mechanism stuttered back to life. Arrows began firing again. The door relocked.

  Rags couldn’t stay up here to hold the door open and slip through it at the same time. He had to jam the mechanism. Or break it. Do something permanent, so he’d have time to shinny back down, race through the door, and not be shot.

  Bend one of the gears, and he’d throw the whole thing out of whack. Rags reached gingerly for another cog, less solid and thick than the first he’d grabbed. A skin-thin sheet of hammered silver. He pinched it between forefinger and thumb, then tried to pry up the edge before it disappeared under the toothy advance of another gear.

  The metal fell apart under his hand. Something nipped his finger and Rags yelped, pulling back.

  A tiny silver beetle had attached itself to the webbing of his hand, metal mandibles clenched around his flesh. At his touch, the disc had dissolved into a mass of insects, scuttling through the clockwork and buzzing angrily at Rags for his invasion. He reached to crush the beetle biting his hand and it opened its shell, metal wings beating a rapid reprimand. Rags shook his hand, smashing it against the wall in retaliation.