The gods-damned wizards were at it again.
Well, she had a thirst, and an appointment, and odd rain wasn’t even close to the worst thing that had ever fallen on her from the skies over Theradane. As she walked, Amarelle dripped flickering colors that had no names. She cut a ghostly trail through fog that drifted like the murk beneath a pink-and-orange sea. As usual when the wizards were particularly bad, she didn’t have much company. The Street of Pale Savants was deserted. Shopkeepers stared forlornly from behind their windows on the Avenue of Seven Angles.
This had been her favorite sort of night, once. Heavy weather to drive witnesses from the streets. Thunder to cover the noise of feet creeping over rooftops. These days it was just lonely, unpredictable, and dangerous.
A double arc of silvery lights marked the Tanglewing Canal Bridge, the last between her and her destination. The lights burned within lamps held by rain-stained white marble statues of shackled, hooded figures. Amarelle kept her eyes fixed on her feet as she crossed the bridge. She knew the plaques beneath the statues by heart. The first two on the left, for example:
BOLAR KUSS
TRAITOR
NOW I SERVE THERADANE ALWAYS
CAMIRA THOLAR
MURDERESS
NOW I SERVE THERADANE ALWAYS
The statues themselves didn’t trouble her, or even the lights. So what if the city lit some of its streets and bridges with the unshriven souls of convicts, bound forever into melodramatic sculptures with fatuous plaques? No, the trouble was how those unquiet spirits whispered to passersby.
Look upon me, beating heart, and witness the price of my broken oaths.
“Fuck off, Bolar,” muttered Amarelle. “I’m not plotting to overthrow the Parliament of Strife.”
Take warning, while your blood is still warm, and behold the eternal price of my greed and slaughter!
“I don’t have a family to poison, Camira.”
Amarelle, whispered the last statue on the left. It ought to be you up here, you faithless bitch.
Amarelle stared at that last inscription, just as she promised herself she wouldn’t every time she came this way.
SCAVIUS OF SHADOW STREET
THIEF
NOW I SERVE THERADANE ALWAYS
“I never turned my back on you,” Amarelle whispered. “I paid for sanctuary. We all did. We begged you to get out of the game with us, but you didn’t listen. You blew it.”
You bent your knees to my killers before my flesh was even cold.
“We all bought ourselves a little piece of the city, Scav. That was the plan. You just did it the hard way.”
Someday you will share this vigil with me.
“I’m done with all that now. Light your bridge and leave me alone.”
There was no having a reasonable conversation with the dead. Amarelle kept moving. She only came this way when she wanted a drink, and by the time she got off the bridge she always needed at least two.
Thunder rolled through the canyons of the streets. A building was on fire somewhere to the east, smoldering unnatural purple. Flights of screeching bat-winged beasts filled the sky between the flames and the low, glowing clouds. Some of them tangled and fought, with naked claws and barbed spears and clay jars of explosive fog. The objectives the creatures contended for were known only to gods and sorcerers.
Gods-damned wizards and their stupid feuds. Too bad they ran the city. Too bad Amarelle needed their protection.
2. The Furnished Belly of the Beast
The Sign of the Fallen Fire lay on the west side of Tanglewing Street. Was, more accurately, the entire west side of Tanglewing Street. No room for anything else beside the cathedral of coiled bones knocked down fifteen centuries before, back when wild dragons occasionally took offense at the growing size of Theradane and paid it a visit. This one had settled so artistically in death, some long-forgotten entrepreneur had scraped out flesh and scales and roofed the steel-hard bones right where they lay.
Amarelle went in through the dragon’s mouth, shook burnt orange rain from her hair, and watched wisps of luminous steam curl up from the carpet where the droplets landed. The bouncers lounging against eight-foot serrated fangs all nodded to her.
The tavern had doors where the dragon had once had tonsils. Those doors smelled good credit and opened smoothly.
The Neck was for dining and the Tail was for gambling. The Arms offered rooms for sleeping or not sleeping, as the renters preferred. Amarelle’s business was in the Gullet, the drinking cavern under the dead beast’s ribs and spine, where one hundred thousand bottles gleamed on racks and shelves behind the central bar.
Goldclaw Grask, the floor manager, was an ebony-scaled goblin in a dapper suit woven from actual Bank of Theradane notes. He had one in a different denomination for every night of the week; tonight he wore fifties.
“Amarelle Parathis, the Duchess Unseen,” he cried. “I see you just fine!”
“That one certainly never gets old, Grask.”
“I’m counting glasses and silverware after you leave tonight.”
“I’m retired and loving it,” said Amarelle. She’d pulled three jobs at the Sign of the Fallen Fire in her working days. Certainly none for silverware. “Is Sophara on bar tonight?”
“Of course,” said Grask. “It’s the seventeenth. Same night of the month your little crew always gets together and pretends it’s just an accident. Those of you that aren’t lighting the streets, that is.”
Amarelle glared. The goblin rustled over, reached up, took her left hand, and flicked his tongue contritely against her knuckles.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be an asshole. I know, you paid the tithe, you’re an honest sheep living under the bombardment like the rest of us. Look, Sophara’s waving. Have one on me.”
Sophara Miris had mismatched eyes and skin the color of rosewood, fine aquamarine hair and the hands of a streetside card sharp. When she’d paid her sanctuary tithe to the Parliament of Strife, she’d been wanted on 312 distinct felony charges in eighteen cities. These days she was senior mage-mixologist at the Sign of the Fallen Fire, and she already had Amarelle’s first drink half-finished.
“Evening, stranger.” Sophara scrawled orders on a slate and handed it to one of the libationarians, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the contents and locations of all the bottles kept the bar running. “Do you remember when we used to be interesting people?”
“I think being alive and at liberty is pretty damn interesting,” said Amarelle. “Your wife planning on dropping in tonight?”
“Any minute now,” said Sophara, stirring equal parts liquor and illusion into a multilayered concoction. “The self-made man’s holding a booth for us. I’m mixing you a Rise and Fall of Empires, but I heard Grask. You want two of these? Or something else?”
“You feel like making me a Peril on the Sea?” said Amarelle.
“Yours to command. Why don’t you take a seat? I’ll be over when the drinks are ready.”
Ten dozen booths and suspended balconies filled the Gullet, each carefully spaced and curtained to allow a sense of intimate privacy in the midst of grand spectacle. Lightning, visible through skylights between the ribs, crackled overhead as Amarelle crossed the floor. Her people had a usual place for their usual night, and Shraplin was holding the table.
Shraplin Self-Made, a softly whirring concatenation of wires and gears, wore a tattered vermilion cloak embroidered with silver threads. His sculpted brass face had black gemstone eyes and a permanent ghost of a smile. A former foundry drudge, he’d taken advantage of the old Theradane law that a sentient automaton owned its own head and the thoughts therein. Over the course of fifteen years, he’d carefully stolen cogs and screws and bolts and wires and gradually replaced every inch of himself from the neck down until not a speck of his original body remained, and he was able to walk away from the perpetual magical indenture attached to it. Not long after that he’d found klepto-kindred spirits in Amarelle Parathis’s
crew.
“Looking wet, boss,” he said. “What’s coming down out there?”
“Weird water,” said Amarelle, taking a place beside him. “Pretty, actually. And don’t call me boss.”
“Certain patterns engrave themselves on my ruminatory discs, boss.” Shraplin poured a touch of viscous black slime from a glass into a port on his neck. “Parliament’s really going at it tonight. When I got here purple fire was falling on the High Barrens.”
“That’s one advantage of living in our prosperous thaumatocracy.” Amarelle sighed. “Always something interesting exploding nearby. Hey, here are our girls.”
Sophara Miris had one hand under a tray of drinks and the other around Brandwin Miris’s waist. Brandwin had frosted lavender skin that was no magical affectation and thick amber spectacles over golden eyes. Brandwin, armorer, artificer, and physician to automatons, had the death sentence in three principalities for supplying the devices that had so frequently allowed the Duchess Unseen’s crew to evade boring entanglements in local judicial systems. The only object she’d ever personally stolen in her life was the heart of the crew’s magician.
“Shraplin, my toy,” said Brandwin. She touched fingertips with the automaton before sitting down. “Valves valving and pipes piping?”
“Fighting fit and free of rust,” said Shraplin. “And your own metabolic processes and needs?”
“Well attended to,” said Sophara with a smirk. “Shall we get this meeting of the Retired Folks’ Commiseration and Inebriation Society rolling? Here’s something phlegmatic and sanguine for you, Shraplin.”
She handed over another tumbler of black ooze. The artificial man had no use for alcohol, so he kept a private reserve of human temperaments magically distilled into asphaltum lacquer behind the bar.
“A Black Lamps of Her Eyes for me,” said Sophara. “A Tower of the Elephant for the gorgeous artificer. And for you, Your Grace, a Peril on the Sea and a Rise and Fall of Empires.”
Amarelle hefted the latter, a thick glass containing nine horizontal layers of rose-tinted liquors, each layer inhabited by a moving landscape. These varied from fallow hills and fields at the bottom to great cities in the middle layers to a ruin-dotted waste on high, topped by clouds of foam.
“Anyone heard from Jade?” she said.
“Same as always,” said Shraplin. “Regards, and don’t wait up.”
“Regards and don’t wait up,” muttered Amarelle. She looked around the table, saw mismatched eyes and shaded eyes and cold black stones fixed on her in expectation. As always. So be it. She raised her glass, and they did likewise.
“Here’s a toast,” she said. “We did it and lived. We put ourselves in prison to stay out of prison. To absent friends, gone where no words nor treasure of ours can restore amends. We did it and lived. To the chains we refused and the ones that snared us anyway. We did it and lived.”
She slammed the drink back, poured layers of foaming history down her throat. She didn’t usually do this sort of thing to herself without dinner to cushion the impact, but hell, it seemed that kind of night. Lightning flashed above the skylights.
“Did you have a few on your way over here, boss?” said Shraplin.
“The Duchess is dead.” Amarelle set her empty glass down firmly. “Long live the Duchess. Now, do I have to go through the sham of pulling my cards out and dealing them, or would you all prefer to just pile your money neatly in the center of the table for me?”
“Oh, honey,” said Brandwin. “We’re not using your deck. It knows more tricks than a show dog.”
“I’ll handicap myself,” said Amarelle. She lifted the Peril on the Sea, admired the aquamarine waves topped with vanilla whitecaps, and in two gulps added it to the ball of fast-spreading warmth in her stomach. “There’s some magic I can appreciate. So, are we playing cards or having a staring contest? Next round’s on me!”
3. Cheating Hands
“Next round’s on me,” said Amarelle an hour and a half later. The table was a mess of cards, banknotes, and empty glasses.
“Next round’s IN you, boss,” said Shraplin. “You’re three ahead of the rest of us.”
“Seems fair. What the hell did I just drink, anyway?”
“A little something I call the Amoral Instrument,” said Sophara. Her eyes were shining. “I’m not allowed to make it for customers. Kind of curious to see what happens to you, in fact.”
“Water off a duck’s back,” said Amarelle, though the room had more soft edges than she remembered and her cards were not entirely cooperating with her plan to hold them steady. “This is a mess. A mess! Shraplin, you’re probably sober-esque. How many cards in a standard deck?”
“Sixty, boss.”
“How many cards presently visible in our hands or on the table?”
“Seventy-eight.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Amarelle. “Who’s not cheating? We should be pushing ninety. Who’s not cheating?”
“I solemnly affirm that I haven’t had an honest hand since we started,” said Brandwin.
“Magician,” said Sophara, tapping her cards against her breast. “Enough said.”
“I’m wearing my cheating hands, boss,” said Shraplin. He wiggled his fingers in blurry silver arcs.
“This is sad.” Amarelle reached behind her left ear, conjured a seventy-ninth card out of her black ringlets, and added it to the pattern on the table. “We really are getting old and decrepit.”
Fresh lightning tore the sky, painting the room in gray-white pulses. Thunder exploded just overhead; the skylights rattled in their frames and even the great bone-rafters seemed to shake. Some of the other drinkers stirred and muttered.
“Fucking wizards,” said Amarelle. “Present company excepted, of course.”
“Why would I except present company?” said Brandwin, tangling the fingers of one hand in Sophara’s hair and gracefully palming an eightieth card onto the table with her other.
“It’s been terrible all week,” said Sophara. “I think it’s Ivovandas, over in the High Barrens. Her and some rival I haven’t identified, spitting fire and rain and flying things all over the damn place. The parasol sellers have been making a killing with those new leather-and-chain-mail models.”
“Someone ought to stroll up there and politely ask them to give it a rest.” Shraplin’s gleaming head rotated slowly until he was peering at Amarelle. “Someone famous, maybe. Someone colorful and respected. Someone with a dangerous reputation.”
“Better to say nothing and be thought a fool,” said Amarelle, “than to interfere in the business of wizards and remove all doubt. Who needs a fresh round? Next one’s still on me. I plan on having all your money when we call it a night, anyway.”
4. The Trouble with Glass Ceilings
The thunder and lightning were continuous for the next hour. Flapping, howling things bounced off the roof at regular intervals. Half the patrons in the Gullet cleared out, pursued by the cajoling of Goldclaw Grask.
“The Sign of the Fallen Fire has stood for fifteen centuries!” he cried. “This is the safest place in all of Theradane! You really want to be out in the streets on a night like this? Have you considered our fine rooms in the Arms?”
There was a high-pitched sound of shattering glass. Something large and wet and dead hit the floor next to the bar, followed by a shower of skylight fragments and glowing rain. Grask squawked for a house magician to unmake the mess while the exodus quickened around him.
“Ahhh, nice to be off duty.” Sophara sipped unsteadily from a tumbler of something blue and uncomplicated. The bar had cut her off from casting her own spells into drinks.
“You know,” said Amarelle, slowly, “maybe someone really should go up there to the High Barrens and tell that old witchy bitch to put a leash on her pets.”
The room, through her eyes, had grown softer and softer as the noisy night wore on and had now moved into a decidedly impressionist phase. Goldclaw Grask was a bright smear chasing other b
right smears across the floor, and even the cards on the table were no longer holding still long enough for Amarelle to track their value.
“Hey,” she said, “Sophara, you’re a citizen in good standing. Why don’t we get you made a member of Parliament so you can make these idiots stop?”
“Oh, brilliant! Well, first I’d need to steal or invent a really good youth-binding,” said the magician, “something better than the three-in-five I’m working now, so I can ripen my practice for a century or two. You might find this timeline inconvenient for your purposes.”
“Then you’d need to find an external power locus to kick up your juice,” said Brandwin.
“Yes,” said Sophara, “and harness it without any other hazard-class sorcerers noticing. Oh, and I’d also need to go completely out of my ever-fucking head! You have to be a dead-eyed dirty-souled maniac to want to spend your extended life trading punches with other maniacs. Once you’ve seized that power, there’s no getting off the merry-go-round. You fight like hell just to hold on or you get shoved off.”
“Splat!” said Brandwin.
“Not my idea of a playground,” said Sophara, finishing her drink and slamming the empty glass down emphatically.
An instant later there was a horrendous shattering crash. A half ton of dark-winged something, its matted fur rain-wet and reeking, plunged through the skylight directly overhead and obliterated their table. A confused blur of motion and noise attended the crash, and Amarelle found herself on the floor with a dull ache between her breasts.
Some dutiful, stubborn fraction of her awareness kicked its way to the surface of the alcoholic ocean in her mind, and there clutched at straws until it had pieced together the true sequence of events. Shraplin, of course—the nimble automaton had shoved her aside before diving across the table to get Sophara and Brandwin clear.
Rogues Page 27
