Thief of Lives

by J. C.

  Tilswith stopped and looked her full in the face. "This he say? Exact he say?"

  "Yes," she answered with a frown. "What does it matter?"

  Wynn had frozen in place as well. She and Domin Tilswith began speaking rapidly again in their own tongue, agitated and perhaps arguing. Finally Tilswith ended with a shake of his head, and Wynn turned slowly to Magiere.

  "He told you an object of great power was guarded by ancient undeads, and he has been preparing you to assist him in attaining this?"

  "What is this about?" Leesil asked.

  Tilswith shrugged. "Not certain. But if he undead, can hide self from hound, and seek object, you must find first. This thing not be in his hand."

  For a moment, his words, like part of an overheard conversation, didn't fully settle upon Magiere as having anything to do with her.

  Leesil sighed deeply. "Oh, spiteful deities."

  "Are you suggesting Leesil and I go after him?" Magiere asked. "We wouldn't even know where to look. Chap can't even track him."

  Tilswith pondered this for a moment with an appraisal of Chap. All eyes in the room followed his gaze.

  Chap glanced about at all of them and began to fidget, slowly sliding his butt backward across the floor, not able to meet anyone's gaze. The old sage grunted.

  "Track… no," Tilswith said. "But Welstiel first to know majay-hi, yes? And elf hunt Leesil stop because hound here. Chap has part in all."

  At his mention, Chap lowered his head.

  "He your guide," Tilswith added, bright green eyes warm as he delivered a disapproving frown to Chap. "From his mistake to Wynn, you three meant to be. Dhampir, majay-hi, and one half-elf in all land? Now find why—and what—to Welstiel."

  The room was silent for a moment. Wynn took up where her domin left off.

  "Some of our guild see a time of convergence approaching, though we do not all agree on what it means or what it will be… or even if it will be. We have seen strange occurrences over the decades but without a clear connection."

  She hesitated.

  "From what little you have told us," she said, "both you and Leesil hide pasts filled with regrets. It is the time to choose your own path and stop letting others choose it for you. Centuries ago, the fabled war cost the world so much in the Forgotten. Knowledge, great works, even civilization faded so utterly that we know little of what happened before, during, or following that conflict. If this Welstiel discovered a power of that time, he will continue to seek it—with or without you. Find it before he does. If he murdered Chesna just to bring you here, think what he would do to get it and to use it."

  Everything the sages said made sense, but it was too much to ask. Magiere simply wanted to go home. Each time she stepped outside the life she wanted, unwillingly doing whatever was asked, some far greater burden fell upon her.

  "We didn't even finish our task here," she said, and took a deep breath that was hard to let out. "Not only did we chase the wrong undead, but we let Welstiel escape and Chane as well."

  Tilswith blinked in surprise, and Leesil threw up his arms in disgust, then winced at the pain such action sent through his wounds.

  "Take money for Miiska," Tilswith insisted. "No other could take Noble Dead. You make city safe. You refuse Welstiel so he not stay here—find other way to that he seek."

  Leesil clearly agreed. "That pack of stuffed pheasants on the council used what happened in our town to drag you into this. I've got two heads in a satchel, and there's a third in that house we can add to it."

  She let his words sink in but wondered if they were motivated by guilt over burning down the warehouse to save her life.

  "What about Chane?" she asked.

  Wynn averted her eyes at the name.

  "Chane is scholar," Tilswith answered, "but we know he is too Noble Dead. Small chance he come to us and small chance we help him. He not stay in Bela, not take risk." He held up his hands with a shrug, as if the answer were obvious. "So task done. All Noble Dead gone."

  "I will take the bankdraft to Miiska for you," Wynn added, "and seek out the baker you mentioned named Karlin."

  The sages truly believed the situation was resolved, but this was all happening too fast for Magiere. Now they expected her and Leesil and Chap to somehow stop Welstiel from finding whatever he sought, though no one knew what or where this thing was. When she closed her eyes, she could still feel the last moments of Chesna and Au'shiyn, and how their killer felt nothing—no pity, no regret, not even satisfaction.

  Welstiel hadn't even fed on them. He'd murdered them as bait to draw her in. For a moment, Magiere felt anger's heat return. As much as Welstiel knew of her nature, how much did he know of the means by which she was brought into this world? Dhampir, the child of a vampire with hidden knowledge and a mortal mother Magiere had known only from a wooden marker in a village graveyard.

  And how far back in her life did Welstiel's meddling reach? There were possibilities in that she did not want to think upon.

  Leesil leaned close to her. "There's actually something more I haven't told you."

  Magiere's dampened anger flared at the thought that he'd once more left something until after the fact.

  "Back on the ship that brought us here," he continued, "I spoke with the thug locked in the cargo hold. Master Poyesk hired those men to stop you from returning with the bankdraft. Karlin has to be warned how far Poyesk will go to prevent the new warehouse from being built."

  Magiere's wounds started to ache as if the numbing salve had worn off, and the pain merely added to her ire.

  "Damn you, Leesil."

  "You had too much to deal with already," he snapped back at her. "And some of it you wouldn't even face."

  He dropped his eyes, head down, and Magiere's anger waned. He looked tired and sad. There was more to his reaction than the tangle of deceptions they'd unraveled since leaving Miiska. Part of his exasperation had more to do with her.

  "Not to worry," Wynn said matter-of-factly. "You can tell me exactly what to say or you can write a letter. I promise that Karlin will be made aware of all."

  Magiere longed only for home, but the sages' words plagued her. She—and Leesil and Chap—weren't finished. She wanted answers for her past, her future, and why she was here.

  With Leesil close but ignoring her, she felt suddenly tired of talk. All she wanted now was to be out of this crowded room and to be alone with him.

  "We don't have that bankdraft yet," she said. "We can't decide anything until that's settled."

  The two sages said their good-nights and quietly left. Leesil lifted Magiere's good arm over his shoulders, winced once as it settled around his neck, and led her toward their barracks room. Chap ambled along behind them, sore and stiff, but otherwise well enough.

  As Leesil settled Magiere upon the lower bunk, he still appeared lost inside himself.

  "I'm sorry," Magiere said. "I've been weighed down by all that's happened since before we even left home."

  "Yes…" he whispered. "But leave that for the moment. There's something else you need to know. Something that happened tonight in the sewers."

  Magiere held her breath, unsure if she could take anything more.

  "My mother…" he whispered, somehow afraid to speak it aloud, "may be alive."

  Magiere grabbed his arm and pulled him down to crouch in front her. Before she could ask the first urgent question, he told her of his encounter with the elf—the anmaglâhk— who called himself Sgaile. Nagging suspicion grew when she heard how the elf cowered back as Chap intimidated him into partially answering Leesil's questions.

  "Maybe they imprisoned her for what she taught me," Leesil finished. "Though from watching Sgaile, she didn't have time to teach me everything of their ways, or she chose not to. I think she may have gotten away from Darmouth, and if I'm right, the elves don't kill their own—even a traitor, so-called."

  Chap watched them both with keen attention. Magiere thought she saw the hound wrinkle his jowls at the mention
of the elven assassin.

  "She was the one who gave me Chap," Leesil reminded her.

  A new sorrow settled upon Magiere. Leesil's guilt over his parents, so long hidden, had been tossed back in his face with the uncertainty of his mother's fate.

  "If she's alive, we'll find her," she promised. "We'll find out why all of this has happened to us."

  As quickly as this journey had started, the day the council letter arrived in Miiska, the days to come settled in her mind. Home would have to wait.

  "Us," Leesil answered, with a soft laugh that made Magiere uncomfortable. "That is another puzzle entirely. And I know the crux of it, now."

  He looked at her with sorrow, as if she'd betrayed him with some secret he'd uncovered. Magiere tensed, frightened.

  Leesil held out his left wrist, the scars of her teeth plain to see. She shoved his arm away and shrank back.

  "All the distance you placed between us," he said accusingly. "This is why."

  "Leesil, not now," she warned him.

  "I told you before," he said. "I'm not that easy to kill."

  Magiere's stomach lurched as memory rushed at her upon his words. She felt his flesh between her teeth the night he burned the warehouse. She tasted his blood in her mouth as she swallowed it down, the only thing she desired in that moment. Not anyone's—only his.

  "Yes, you are," she shouted. "You can't make this so simple!"

  Leesil hung back, confused. "What do you mean… ?"

  "Neither of us really knows what I am," Magiere answered. "You're here with me now, and I wouldn't wish it any other way. But each time you try to make it more than that, it becomes dangerous, unnatural, and you—"

  "What?" Leesil snapped at her. "I'm not the one holding secrets now. You tell me what's so—"

  "Because I can kill you," Magiere said through her teeth, and her anger added vicious bite to her words. "And worst of all, you'd let me!"

  She wanted to slap him, shake him from this foolish blindness that had almost cost him his life. It was better to finally have done with it, once and for all, and she spit out every word.

  "The night you saved me from the warehouse, you just slit yourself open and fed me without a thought. If Brenden hadn't been there to pull you away, you would have stayed there and died in my teeth. I'd have awoken with you dead in my arms. Not once did you think of it—don't even try to deny it, because you didn't. That's how easy it is to kill you, Leesil. And you'd let me be the one to do it."

  Magiere could no longer look at him. Between the memory of his blood in her mouth and the heated rage in her flesh came the pain of final loss.

  Leesil dropped to one knee, leaning toward her.

  "Neither of us knew what was happening that night," he said. "You no less than me. How could we, how could I? But we're beyond that, and we're not those same people anymore."

  He put one hand to her cheek, and as much as Magiere felt the urge to pull aside, she couldn't bring herself to harm him any more man she just had.

  "I've lived three lives," he said. "As a child in the War-lands, knowing only deceit and death. Then roaming the countryside alone but for Chap. Finally, the game with you, from the night we met… with Chap's meddling. I'm looking at a fourth life now. Any life begins by simply living it. And I say again—I won't die on you."

  Before she could stop him, Leesil placed both hands upon her cheeks, and pressed his mouth against hers.

  Magiere stiffened in revulsion as the touch mixed with the lingering memory of the night he fed her. But the blood faded from her taste.

  His mouth was warm and soft for that brief moment, and beneath the swirl of fear and sorrow, she felt another loss when he pulled away.

  "I will never leave you," he whispered. "But I can't stay adrift between lives. You will have to decide—for both of us, it seems—since you already think you know what I can and can't do."

  Without another word, Leesil crawled tiredly up into the top bunk and out of sight.

  It was a long while before Magiere lay back upon her bed, numbed with a maelstrom of emotions in the room's silence. Chap lay quietly on the floor, now and again lifting his head to look at her.

  Sometime during the night, Magiere drifted off, but only after she could hear the comforting sound of Leesil's slumbering breaths from above.

  Chapter 21

  Leesil rose in the morning with his stomach churning. Only severe fatigue had brought sleep in the night, as his thoughts tumbled into dreams—or nightmares. Not of death or the repulsive lessons of his childhood, but of his mother, locked away for years somewhere unknown, and of Magiere's sadly confused eyes as he left her sitting upon her bed. So it came as only a minor shock when Magiere announced there was more to be done before they were finished with the undead of Bela.

  From his perspective, they need only retrieve the head of the undead they'd found mysteriously struck down on the house's second floor. With Wynn and Chap along again, they returned by coach to the three-story stone house. As Magiere entered, she immediately began shattering furniture with her falchion.

  "There are too many things we've found to be false in hunting these creatures, like the stake through Sapphire's heart," she explained. "We need to be certain this is all done with."

  Though she winced in pain from her wounded shoulder, as before it seemed to be healing more quickly than it should. When she dumped a divan's remains in the street, oiled them, and lit the pile ablaze, Leesil understood, though he wasn't certain this was the best place. Wynn was aghast, but Magiere silenced any objection with a dour shake of her head. They'd continually stumbled upon false superstitions in their hunts, and Leesil understood leaving nothing to chance.

  "I'll get more wood," she said quietly. "Start bringing out the bodies."

  Leesil nodded, and signaled Chap to follow him. Before he stepped back into the house, he looked at Magiere standing near the fire, hair bound in a tail, and the flames feeding blood-glimmers into her black hair in the early-morning light. She was tired and worn in her damaged armor, falchion on her hip, but she gazed pensively into the pyre. Leesil felt suddenly afraid he'd pushed her too far the night before. He turned into the house.

  Stopping short of the parlor and Sapphire's body, he glanced to the cellar stairs. If there were any uncertainty for the demise of an undead, there was one he wanted to be certain of first. He headed down to the passage into the sewers.

  Leesil didn't relish a return to the city's underbelly, but the distance seemed shorter somehow, as Chap led the way. They found Ratboy's body lodged against the walkway a little way down from the intersection where Leesil had taken his head. The severed hand seemed to have been washed away.

  "He looks dead to me," Leesil said.

  Chap yipped once in agreement, but they weren't about to argue with Magiere. Leesil dragged the waterlogged corpse all the way back and dropped it next to Sapphire's in the parlor. He was about to climb to the second floor, and instead returned to crouch next to Sapphire's corpse.

  A thin, raised line in the congealed black fluids on the carpet had caught his attention. Leesil slipped out a stiletto and poked at it. It shifted slightly, and he hooked it with the blade's tip to pull it out.

  It was a necklace covered by dark ichor. He wiped it with the skirt of the blue gown, and before him hung a gold pendant with a sapphire the size of his small fingernail.

  Leesil stared at it in thought, knowing just how Magiere would react if she caught him pilfering the dead—or the undead, for that matter. There might be long months ahead, and what the council would pay them needed to go to Miiska.

  Spoils of war, he thought, and finished roughly wiping it off before tucking it into his hauberk. He would deal with Magiere later, when objections were pointless. If later still remained a possibility in her mind. Then another thought occurred to him.

  A gown with a matching stone. And if there were other gowns… ?

  He was about to head upstairs when Wynn scurried through the front door.<
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  "You have to stop this," she urged. The outright dread upon her face was plain to see. "You cannot let Magiere burn bodies in the middle of a public street!"

  Leesil was about to answer when Magiere stepped through the door behind the young sage.

  "You find Ratboy?" she asked him.

  Leesil nodded. "He's in the parlor. I'll bring the third one down, the one we found already dead last night."

  "Time to finish this," Magiere added. "People are already out and about, and that's not such a terrible thing—though they may not agree when they see what we're doing."

  She headed back outside and down to the pyre.

  Leesil sensed there was more to this than burning undeads to be certain of their destruction. Wynn looked at him uncomfortably. While the little scholar respected Magiere, she would never understand all of it.

  "She hates to admit it," Leesil said. "But deep inside, Magiere likes the drama of a good show. She's angry that these creatures lived comfortably amidst the wealthy, and none of these fools appeared to know or care enough to realize what was happening. We'll shake them out of their complacency."

  "Oh…" Wynn answered. "Is she still angry with me over Chane?"

  For a moment, Leesil tried to find some way to spare her feelings, to understand what she had done. But he couldn't.

  "You were wrong, Wynn. You should've done anything in your power to help Magiere take his head."

  Wynn stepped back, and it was perhaps the first time he'd seen her grow cold and harsh.

  "I had a place among you in this," she said. "You, Magiere, and Chap possess strength and courage beyond anyone I have known, but you lack conscience. I was that conscience last night. Not all beings of a kind are the same, Leesil. And I believe it is possible not all Noble Dead are the same."

  Her answer surprised him. He appreciated how she stood by her convictions, even if she was completely naive.

  "If you still want to help," he said, "go out there and keep people away from Magiere as best you can. One wrong word and… well, you know her enough to guess the worst."