Among Thieves

by Hulick, Douglas

  I fought to keep the concern off my face and out of my voice. “Fit. Dangerous. Probably on my trail,” I said. I hoped.

  Truth be told, with a dozen Rags and Shadow thrown into the mix, I had no idea how Degan might be faring. I had seen him handle long odds before—but this? All it took was a lucky stroke or a random swing to change the equation. And Shadow probably still had some coins left over.

  “As he should be,” said Iron. “He’s an Oath to uphold, after all.” Iron raised his eyes at my silence. “Surprised I know? Heh. Well, I didn’t until just now, but I suspected.” He took a long drink. “Bronze bound to you, and me to . . . well, someone else. No, I’m not going to enjoy resolving this one; he and I, we go back. Tell me, did he know I was involved in this before he took your Oath?”

  I stared down at Iron Degan and made a show of crossing my arms. My back was beginning to ache where I had hit the street, but I leaned against the tree and tried to ignore it.

  “Fair enough,” said Iron. “Frankly, I’d be disappointed if you said. But you ought to know this: We degans, we don’t fight one another—not if we can help it. If Bronze took your Oath knowing I might have to stand against him, then he’s the one in the wrong. Win or lose, he won’t be the Order’s favorite son when this is done. Remind him of that for me, in case you see him before I do; and I pray you do.”

  “Same here.” I glanced back to where Lyria had been. “So that’s why you used her,” I said. “By sending her, you wouldn’t have to risk facing Deg—I mean, Bronze—when coming after me. Plus, who’s going to argue with a White Sash? Everyone would assume she was on imperial business.”

  “They said you were clever. Aye, I used her for that, at least in part. As for the other reasons, well . . . Let’s just see how clever you turn out to be, hey?”

  He drained his cup and set it on the table. “Now,” he said, his voice turning crisp, “we’d best get a move on. Don’t want to be late. You’ve been ‘requested,’ after all.”

  “Requested?”

  “By the lady herself, lad.” Iron Degan clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re going to see Solitude.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The house was large, well-appointed, and empty. Decorated with wrought-iron willow trees and laurel leaves, the gate to the street opened onto a summer garden not yet in bloom. A crushed-gravel path curved up from the gate to the front door, past budding trees and weed-crowded flower beds.

  It was a gilt-ken—one of the fine, furnished houses that was rented out to country nobility when they came to court. These houses supposedly sat vacant the rest of the time, watched over by caretakers—except when the caretakers rented them out to well-heeled Kin. Gilt-kens usually played host to traveling games, flash whorehouses, or high-end cons, but I wasn’t surprised to learn that a Gray Prince might hire one out for meetings as well.

  Iron led me along the path. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, blinked again. It had taken a while for us to slink out of Ten Ways and get across the city, and somewhere along the way the sun had come up. Now, the morning light reflected off the gravel path, making my eyes sting and blur.

  It was leftovers from Shadow’s flash glimmer, I knew. While my night vision had come back, my eyes were still overly sensitive to light, much as they had been when I first got the gift from Sebastian. It would pass, I knew, but the question was how soon.

  I blinked and squinted until we entered the shadow of the main entry. Iron opened the doors without knocking. The foyer beyond was small, with a tiled floor and dark wood covering the walls. It was cool inside. The only light came from a pair of small windows set high in the wall behind us.

  I sighed for the shadows and felt some of the tension drain out of my neck and shoulders. Then I noticed the woman in the archway across from us.

  Solitude looked different in person than in the dream. She had traded in the close-cut jerkin and hose for an unremarkable blue dress, and her hair was falling casually to her shoulders. There were the beginnings of small lines at the edges of her eyes and mouth—from laughing or frowning, I couldn’t tell—but the eyes themselves were still the same gold-sprinkled jade that would make any jeweler wring his hands in envy. Those eyes regarded me for a long moment before they turned to Iron.

  “Well?” said Solitude.

  Iron Degan stepped in close and spoke softly in her ear. Solitude’s eyes narrowed in response to what he said, but otherwise her face stayed a careful blank.

  When he was done, Solitude turned and led us deeper into the house, the charms on her dress and in her hair tinkling softly through the empty spaces. I couldn’t help but notice that some of them were old pilgrim’s tokens.

  Of course—I should have guessed earlier.

  We passed through three rooms, each larger than the last, each filled with furniture covered by cloths. The rugs had all been rolled up and set aside, and the drapes were still drawn across the windows. The place smelled of dust and disuse.

  The fourth room we entered was smaller than the previous three. A pair of low chairs stood uncovered, a small slate-topped table between them. A book sat open on the table, with an extinguished taper next to it. One entire wall of the room looked to be made up of windows, given the size of the drapes and the amount of light leaking in beneath them.

  Solitude settled herself in one chair. I moved toward the other.

  “You’ll stand,” she said. There was no hint of warmth in her voice, none of the candor I’d experienced in the dream. She was all cold steel today.

  I stopped and hooked my thumbs in my belt. Iron Degan took a position a few feet behind me.

  “Well?” said Solitude after it became obvious I wasn’t going to start.

  “I don’t have the journal on me, in case you’re wondering,” I said.

  “Yes, I can see that. Where is it?” Her lisp, I noticed, became more pronounced when she was irritated.

  “I didn’t tell Kells and I didn’t tell Shadow; what makes you think you’re any different?”

  Solitude leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. They were nice legs. “They haven’t got you. I do.”

  “Threats,” I said. “How imaginative.” I crossed my arms. “Let me explain something to you. I’ve been targeted by Nicco, cajoled by Kells, beaten by a White Sash, found a dead assassin floating in my bedroom, and gone up against Shadow face-to-face, all in the past three days! And those are only the highlights. So you’ll understand if I don’t give much of a damn for your threats. If you want to get your hands on Ioclaudia’s journal, you’re going to have to give me a better reason than, ‘I’ll make you bleed.’ I’ve been bleeding since this thing started, and it doesn’t bother me that much anymore. So offer me something besides blood, or shut the fuck up.”

  The room grew silent. I could hear the house settling, a temple bell ringing in the distance, Iron Degan shuffling his feet behind me. The last sound made me tense my neck.

  Solitude didn’t move. She sat watching, her body still. Except now, there was a hint of fire in her eyes.

  “Ironius,” she said at last, her voice making me jump, “leave us.”

  There was a brief silence behind me; then I heard Iron Degan turn and move away. His footsteps were far softer than I would have expected from someone his size.

  “Never trust a sell-sword,” pronounced Solitude once the door had closed behind him.

  “Even a degan?” I said.

  “Especially a degan. People who charge promises for their lives worry me. And people who can call those promises in anytime it suits them worry me even more.”

  “And yet you’re working with one.”

  “Some worries are larger than others,” she said.

  I had to agree, but not when it came to Bronze Degan’s promise. I’d seen what that had entailed, and I was still amazed. My worry with him centered around whether he was still alive; whether Shadow was dead; whether my sister was in danger. I wasn’t worried about what I owed Degan; rather, I was comforted by
the thought that he may still be out there, looking out for my interests.

  Solitude gestured at the chair across from her. “Please,” she said. I sat. “Tell me what you know about Ten Ways,” said Solitude once I was settled.

  “It’s a shit hole,” I said.

  “And?”

  “It’s surrounded by imperial troops.”

  “And?”

  “And there’s a Kin war going on there,” I said. “One you started.”

  Solitude didn’t even flinch. “Good. Why did I start it?”

  “You tell me.”

  She showed me a smile that would have made a razor seem dull. “It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “You spill what you know. Then I fill in the gaps.”

  “So you can keep back whatever you don’t want me to know?” I said. “No. If you want to hear my side, I get to hear yours. All of it.”

  Solitude settled back and folded her hands before her face. I heard a faint clicking. It took me a moment to realize she was tapping at her front teeth with a thumbnail.

  “Done,” she said. “But you still go first. I need to know what Nicco and Kells and Shadow think I’m after in Ten Ways. You’ve been their main source on that count. I need to hear your version before you start adjusting it to fit my facts.”

  I pulled out a seed and rolled it between my palms. The combination of sweat and warmth released a burned, musky-sweet scent from the ahrami. I bent down and breathed it in, an old friend in a strange room.

  This was the woman who had told me—in a dream, no less—to keep things close to my chest. I had to assume she played the same way. But there was a difference between being careful and being stupid, and holding out on a Gray Prince when she was willing to meet me halfway definitely fell into the stupid category. I doubt I’d get a better offer any time soon.

  “All right,” I said, still hunched over my hands. “You want to be the next Dark King. You needed the war in Ten Ways to pull Nicco and Kells in and get them reeling so you could take them down. From there, you’re going to move into their territories, and then the rest of Ildrecca after that.”

  Solitude didn’t move. “What about the other Princes?” she said. “They won’t much care for that kind of a move on my part.”

  “That’s why you want the book,” I said. “It’ll give you the power to roll over them if they decide to get in the way.”

  “Ah.” Tap, tap, tap—the sound of a nail on a tooth. “And this is what you’ve told them?”

  I put the seed in my mouth and clicked it against my own teeth. Tap, tap, tap. “More or less,” I said.

  Solitude smiled. At first, I thought it was in reaction to my imitation of her; then, she began to laugh.

  “I could kiss you, Drothe,” she said. “This is perfect!”

  “Um?” I said.

  “If Nicco, Kells, and Shadow think I’m after all of Ildrecca, they’ll try to stop me outside of the cordon. None of them truly wants Ten Ways, so they’ll pull back and try to keep me contained. That means the cordon will fall even easier.” A dark gleam entered her eyes. “And if the war doesn’t go past the cordon’s walls, then the empire will pull out, too. Once they’re done wrecking the place, of course.” She laughed again, clapping her hands together. “Oh, this is beautiful. I should be paying you to tell tales like this!”

  I sat up in my seat, suddenly feeling far less clever than I had a moment ago.

  “You mean this is all about Ten Ways?” I said. “The setups, the rumors, getting Nicco and Kells at each other’s throats—even drawing in the empire—is all so you can take Ten Ways? You don’t want to be the Dark King?”

  “Hell no!” said Solitude. “I have enough headaches without anyone becoming the next Dark King, let alone myself. No, I just want the cordon.”

  I asked the obvious question—the one she was waiting for. “Why?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “I thought you might.” Solitude smiled and leaned forward. “Because it didn’t always used to be called Ten Ways,” she said. “Because a long time ago, it was called Ten Wise Men.”

  I noticed that somewhere along the way I had chewed and swallowed my seed without noticing. I put another one in my mouth. “How long ago?” I said, starting to have a bad feeling.

  “Right around the time Stephen Dorminikos became emperor,” she said, “and before the beginning of the Endless Cycle.”

  “And why was the cordon called Ten Wise Men?”

  “I think you’re starting to suspect why,” said Solitude. I kept silent, and she shrugged. “It was called Ten Wise Men after the people Stephen Dorminikos granted it to. He gave it to his Paragons—ten of them to be exact—so they could conduct research for him, uninterrupted.”

  “And one of those Paragons was named Ioclaudia Neph,” I said.

  Solitude nodded. “Including Ioclaudia. Who wrote a journal as insurance against her life, for all the good it did her.”

  “Insurance?” I said. “Why would she need insurance if she was working for the emperor?”

  “Why does anyone need insurance when they work for someone of great power?”

  “To protect them against that power.”

  “Precisely. The emperor didn’t put them in Ten Wise Men to work on Imperial magic; he put them in there to work on soul magic. He put them in there to make him immortal.” Solitude leaned forward and stared me in the eye. “The Angels didn’t choose Stephen Dorminikos to serve as the Undying Emperor—he did. He charged his Paragons with finding a way to make him immortal, but it didn’t work. For some reason, reincarnation was the best they could manage. So they broke his soul into three pieces and somehow arranged for those pieces to follow one another in a constant cycle. That’s how Stephen Dorminikos Progenitor became Markino, Theodoi, and Lucien. The Angels had nothing to do with it.”

  My heart gave a flop, but I hardly noticed it. “And the Paragons?” I said, already knowing.

  “Dusted. Them and everyone else in Ten Wise Men—servants, apprentices, bakers, everyone. All on the same night. The emperor surrounded the cordon, sent in his troops, and when they were done, he had the place burned to the ground. It’s been rebuilt countless times since, and each time the name has changed slightly. But underneath it all, Ten Ways is still Ten Wise Men. And there are secrets buried there.”

  “Like Ioclaudia’s journal,” I said.

  “Like Ioclaudia’s journal,” agreed Solitude. “Hers is supposed to be the most complete, but there are notes, fragments of journals, ancient runes, and circles of power still down there. And I want to dig them all up, which means I need Ten Ways.”

  I stared at Solitude, trying to wrap my mind around what she had just told me. If what she said was true, then the Angels had had nothing to do with Stephen Dorminikos’s reincarnations. And if that was the case, then his whole foundation for sitting on the Undying Throne—being the chosen of the Angels, being an intermediary between Them and humanity, being guided in his rule by aspects of the divine—was all a construct, a hoax, a fucking con.

  I felt my world starting to shift, and I didn’t much care for it.

  “How?” I said, scrambling for purchase. “How could anyone possibly set something like this up? The religion, the cults, the sheer belief. It’s not possible!”

  “Of course it is,” said Solitude, her green eyes flashing. “How do you start a rumor on the street? You tell a few key people the tale you want spread, give them an incentive to talk, and step away. If done right, it’ll take on a life of its own. Look at what I did with Nicco and Kells in Ten Ways—that was small-time.

  “Now, think about what an emperor can do, especially if he has years to prepare. He could lay the foundations for a cult, create a corps of fanatics, indoctrinate the bureaucracy so it would be waiting for him when he came back. Stephen’s Paragons didn’t come up with the Endless Cycle overnight, and he didn’t die the instant they worked the magic. There was time to plot,
to lay groundwork, to make sure he would be reborn into an empire that was counting on his return as an article of faith. And when he did return?” Solitude spread her hands. “Everything was confirmed. The hardest part for Stephen was throwing down the First Regency when they decided they didn’t want to surrender power to him. After that, it was just a matter of meeting the expectations he had already set.”

  I rubbed at my temples. The pain was back, but I knew it wasn’t solely from my strained vision. “But why?” I said. “Why go through all of this just to keep the throne?”

  “Why did Stephen kill his uncle and become emperor in the first place?” said Solitude.

  “To save the empire,” I said. Or, at least, that was the popular story. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Exactly,” said Solitude. “He saved the empire, but he also knew that, no matter how good a foundation he laid, it would collapse someday. You know history—sooner or later, someone comes to the throne who undoes all the work of his predecessors. Have enough of them close enough together, and the empire falls.” Solitude held up a finger. “Unless.”

  “Unless he stays on the throne forever,” I said.

  “That’s the theory, anyhow. And so far, it’s been working.”

  “But what about the Angels?” I said. “Stephen’s been claiming to be their Chosen One since he came back. If They didn’t set him up to come back, why haven’t They cast him down?”

  Solitude shrugged. “How should I know? I’m no theologian. Whatever They think of this, it’s between Them and Stephen. For all we know, his creeping insanity is the punishment for blaspheming against Them, but I hope not. It’s too damn tame for me.”

  I rubbed at my temples some more and reached for my herb wallet. It wasn’t there. Of course. It had gone the way of my clothing seemingly so long ago. I pulled at one of the altered seams of Nestor’s doublet and felt it give a little. I wasn’t much longer for this outfit, either.

  “Pardon my asking,” I said, “but you have to understand when I say, where the hell are you getting all of this?”

  “You mean, assuming I’m not making it up, or crazy, or both?”