“You haven't charted out the return trip?” he asked.
“I'm no cartographer. I've just been following the rising sun.”
“Well then, we'll just have to estimate.” And I spent the next hour describing the terrain I'd traversed over the last month, between bites and sips, giving him my best guesses as to distances traveled.
“I wish I'd thought to bring a compass. Still, you've been traveling latitudinally for the most part, so no harm done there.” He fiddled with the map a while, then set it aside.
“We don't have to spend months traversing uncharted terrain, you know. I can open another gate—”
“No.”
“It's only a month's journey back to Thagoth, and you've got the talisman this time.”
"No. Absolutely not. I'm not going to let Tha-Agoth have another crack at my mind or yours."
"He didn't force you to free him before."
"A mistake he will most likely remedy if we return. I won't do it."
He sighed.
"Let's get moving, I said. “I'd like to get to that river. The mules need watering and I'd like to take a bath. I'd think you would, too."
"Yes. Yes, of course. Sorry."
We got our mules going again and reached the river in less than two hours. It was broad and shallow, and the mules drank greedily. The gelding, who I'd taken to calling Dandy, drank almost daintily – as if to distance himself from the disgraceful manners of the mules.
Holgren had pulled out his map again and was sketching in the last bit we'd traveled.
"Can you start filling the water skins?" I asked him. "I'm going to clean up."
He raised a hand in distracted assent.
I pulled a lump of the late Duke's soap out of a pack and walked a little distance downstream. The Duke had been a fastidious man, and his taste in soap expensive if a bit perfumed for me. I stripped and jumped in.
The water was frigid. I gasped, and proceeded to scrub myself up vigorously, and quickly.
It was on the third or fourth dunk, as I was trying to get all the soap out of my hair, that I noticed something across the river, on the thin ribbon of bank between river and tree line.
It was one of my mules. What was left of it. It had been hacked to pieces, its guts strung up in the trees. The mule’s severed head was staring sightlessly at me. It had been stuck on a branch that jutted out of a log half submerged at the river’s edge. The neck had been hacked at raggedly, and red gobbets of flesh hung down from it almost to the river, blood pinking the water near it before being carried off by the flow. Flies crawled all over its open eyes, its froth-flecked nostrils...
I sprinted up the bank to my clothes, yelling for Holgren all the way.
As I made it to my pile of clothes I felt the familiar chill along the nape of my neck, and knew Holgren was performing magic. He ran up to me, holding a glowing sphere in one hand. I pointed to the mule's head as I quickly dressed.
We decided to take a detour.
“No animal would do that,” Holgren said. “Kill, yes, but play with the remains? I don’t think so.”
“I’m just wondering how the mule got across the river in the first place.”
“No telling. Mules are pretty intelligent beasts. Perhaps it broke its hobble in the night, and just wandered off for a drink.”
We were backtracking a mile or so, then planned to parallel the river for a few more miles before we started looking for another ford. Holgren looked a little ridiculous riding a mule. His long legs didn’t quite hang naturally. But Dandy wanted nothing to do with him.
“Bloody as it was, what was done to the mule shows at least some level of intelligence,” he continued. “I’m curious as to who or what makes those woods home.”
I was going to tell him I'd used up all my curiosity in Thagoth, but then I was being strangled.
It was the necklace I'd yanked off the Duke's doomed neck. It had tightened suddenly. I couldn't breathe. I gagged and hacked and clawed at it, and fell to the ground.
Holgren was right there beside me, alarm in his eyes.
"Move your hands, woman! Move them!"
I stuffed down the panic enough to drop my hands from my neck. He put his own on the necklace and muttered a few liquid syllables, eyes closed. There was a thunderclap and a brilliant flash of light, and Holgren flew back half a dozen feet. Mercifully I could breathe again.
Holgren got up and came back over to me. I panted raggedly.
"Thank you," I rasped.
"Don't thank me. My spell failed, rather spectacularly at that. The necklace ... decided to let you go."
"What do you mean?"
"Just that. Let me see it again. This thing has to come off."
"Kerf, yes. Get it off me."
He tried for nearly an hour, to no avail. Finally he sat back on his haunches and huffed.
"It's powerful, and it's complex. I don't know if I could remove it in the best of conditions." He looked around, plainly missing his sanctum. "These are not the best conditions."
"You've got to get this thing off me. I mean it."
"I can't. I'm sorry. I have been able to decipher something of its nature, however. As far as I can tell, its purpose is to make the wearer go… somewhere."
"What are you talking about?"
"Put simply, the necklace didn't like you traveling back the way we came."
"But the Duke must have come this way. He definitely traveled west to get to Thagoth in the first place."
"As I said, its nature is complex. I'm seeing only part of the weave of commands embedded in it. Very fine work, actually."
I swore again.
Holgren went on and checked the campsite. I stayed with the mules. I whiled away the time trying to get the necklace off, and succeeded in making my neck even more raw. The clasp had frozen shut and it refused to break.
Funny how it had slipped right off the Duke's neck just before Athagos had sucked him dry. The clasp had just opened when I snatched it from him.
My neck was hot and stinging when Holgren returned.
I sighed, and scratched my head. It required an act of will to keep my hands from straying up to the necklace and trying to rip it off.
“Well, do we go forward or try to go around?” he asked. “It’s your neck, so to speak, so perhaps you should decide.”
I gave the chain another tug and stood up. “Let’s try to avoid the mule butcher’s territory if we can. Let's see how far this thing will let me get.”
It let me get about six miles downriver before it started choking the life out of me again. I whipped Dandy back the way we'd just come and set him to a canter. The necklace eased almost immediately.
"You handled that adroitly," said Holgren from muleback.
"This is not something I want to get used to," I rasped. "You're the mage. Figure something out, for Kerf's sake."
"For what good it will do, I'll try again when we make camp. Speaking of which, I would only loosely term this daylight." He gestured at the sky. There was still a decent amount of light in the west, but night was falling rapidly.
"Fine. You make camp, I'll hobble the mules."
He nodded, dismounted, and started pulling open packs.
Once camp was set up and we'd eaten, he sat down in front of me and peered at the necklace again.
“They used similar items in Elam, before slavery was outlawed. Kept the slaves from running off. What you're wearing is much more complex, however.”
“I’m not interested in a history lesson, oddly enough. I want it off.”
“I'll try. Of course I'll try. I just don't hold much hope.” And he bent back to the task at hand.
I ignored his breath on my cheek, and the inadvertent touch of his fingers on my bare skin as best I could. This was neither the time nor the place, I told myself forcefully.
An hour passed. He dropped his hands and leaned back.
“It's no use. I'm sorry. The spells laid on it are seamless, and I still can't see
what all wet into the making of it. There's nothing for me to get hold of, to try and unravel. I'm afraid if I try anything truly invasive, you'll get hurt.”
“So be it,” I said with more conviction than I actually felt. I was tired of thinking about the damned thing.
The next morning we forded the river and went into the woods. I was jumping out of my skin at the slightest sound, and Holgren held his power ready for an instant casting. I could feel it, that crawling sensation in the back of my neck. It gave me some comfort.
The woods were sparse enough that we had a decent view of our surroundings, and no real trouble leading the mules. There were birds, and squirrels, and rabbits, but we saw no sign of larger game.
Holgren called a halt at midday and we ate a sparse meal. Then we continued on, much as before.
It wasn’t until late afternoon that we saw anything out of the ordinary. A wall.
The wall was ancient, vine-choked, tumbledown. In its day it must have been massive, but we had no trouble leading the horses through one of the many great rents in it. Beyond, a small city in even worse shape than Thagoth had been. Tumbled granite blocks and raw winter grass was all that remained. If the stones had not been obviously carved, I might have been tempted to believe it was some natural, if odd, meadow.
No stone stood atop another in all that great space, save for an odd, low stepped pyramid in the center.
“Night is coming,” Holgren said. “Might as well camp here.”
“All right. I’ll look around and gather firewood.”
“Be careful. I sense the residue of old magics. Very faint, but best be cautious.”
“Any idea what this place was?”
He shook his head. “No telling. So much was lost in the Diaspora. It might be Trevell, or Hluria, or one of a dozen other shattered cities.”
As I wandered closer to the pyramid, I realized there was a large stone bowl at the top and, almost invisible in the daylight, a fire was lit in that bowl. I climbed the steps of the pyramid to get a closer look, already thinking that this place was inhabited, probably by the mule killers, and that we needed to get moving before they came back. But something was compelling me, more than my natural curiosity, and even as I was thinking how stupid it was, I was moving closer to that fire.
A pale blue flame burnt in the bowl, feeding on nothing. Stone and flame was all. With a sense of disbelief that quickly transmuted to panic, I saw myself sticking my hand into the flame.
The meadow and everything in it melted away.
Chapter 4
I stood in the center of a great grey stone hall whose walls rose up into darkness. Dozens of staircases and hundreds of hallways stretched away in every direction and at impossible angles. I could not imagine what it would have taken to build such an edifice, beyond sheer insanity. Torches flickered wanly, imparting a dull, will-sapping gloom rather than honest illumination.
The whole fantastic place reeked of age and abandonment—no not abandonment exactly. No-one had ever lived here, of that I was somehow sure. There was nothing about this place that I even remotely liked.
“A thief,” said a voice high above. “Nothing to steal here, I'm afraid. Any treasure you take from my halls must be earned, oh yes.”
“Who's there?”
“I ask the questions here, and you answer them as you can. I am the judge, and you are the judged.”
“I'm here to be judged?”
“You placed your hand in the flame. Therefore some part of you wishes to be judged. Some shame compelled you to do so.”
“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”
“Well, if you have had a change of heart, just walk out through those doors behind you. You might survive.”
I glanced back. Massive black double doors beckoned, easily twenty feet tall. I turned back around.
“What happens if I just leave without being judged?”
“That depends on your undischarged guilt. In Hluria, the law has always been an eye for an eye.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “So you’re saying—”
“No more questions. It is time for judgment.”
A light appeared on a staircase high above me, one that could only have been used by spiders and flies since most of it was upside down. Swiftly it began to descend, and all the while the voice spoke on, sibilant, insinuating.
“So many crimes,” it said, “so many to choose from. But you don't consider theft a crime, do you? Not a moral one. 'Take what you can from those who don't need it, and take punishment, if it comes, as punishment for stupidity, not wrongdoing.' Isn't that what your crippled teacher told you? Ah, but you'd rather forget old Arno, wouldn't you? All he did for you, all he taught you, and you left him to die in that shack in Bellarius.”
“What? It wasn't like that—” I hadn't thought of Arno in years. He'd been my mentor, more of a father than my father had ever been. He'd taken me in, showed me how to steal bread without getting caught. How to pick a lock. How to pick pockets. How to scam unwary merchants out of pocket change. He'd been a fine thief before he got caught ant the magistrate broke all the bones in his hands. Then he'd been a fine teacher, before the lung fever took him the winter after he took me in. When he started coughing up blood, we both knew what it meant, and he drove me out of his shanty lest I catch it as well.
He'd died within a week.
“All that he did for you, and you let him die alone. If it weren't for him, you'd never have seen your fourteenth birthday.”
“Arno chose to die alone. If I had stayed with him, we wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be dead along with him. I know the debt I owe him, you bastard.”
“Do you? Perhaps you do. That was hardly the worst thing you've ever done, though, abandoning him.”
I didn't like where this was going, not at all. I'd let a lot of things stay buried in the past for god reason. The light had gotten much closer, but it was still high above. It seemed to be carried by a robed figure, though I couldn't make out much detail.
“What's the point of this?”
“For the third time, I ask the questions here. Do not make me tell you again.”
“Or else what?” I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.
It was silent for what seemed a long time, but was likely only seconds. The figure was almost at the bottom of the stairs, hidden by a corkscrew turn.
“Else I will show you what you least desire to see.” With those words, I felt a sick dread begin to worm its way through my guts.
The figure descended to the floor, suddenly somehow right side up. It held a lamp high, illuminating its face, and laughed. I screamed.
Its face was the face of my dead father. Guilt and terror crashed down on me.
I couldn't face him, wearing my father's face. I couldn't. I fled into the labyrinth of passageways, past staircases and intersections and dust-choked, empty rooms in that hellish, twilight world. I scurried away like a rat, a cockroach. Like the nothing that I was. I fled. The voice followed wherever I went, just a step behind.
“What was it like, plunging the knife into your own father's back? Could you feel the blade strike bone, the shock of it run up your arms? Could you hear the steel grate along his rib? A clumsy kill, but you got better at it, didn't you? You learned to keep your blade parallel to the ground. You learned where to thrust, and why. You learned to kill quickly and quietly.”
I ran, panting, down another torch-lit corridor. I remembered everything. I remembered my father, I remembered the time after his death, before Arno took me in; death struggles over scraps of food or begging territory, pitched battles on rooftops and in alleyways, filthy, starving boys and girls dying alone and terrified. Not me. Never me. I remembered the mantra I would mouth silently as I rocked myself to sleep every night: I will survive. I will survive. I will survive...
I rounded a corner and plunged down darkened stairs, the voice hard on my heels.
“How he m
ust have screamed, though. Even in his drunken stupor, it must have been agony, feeling his own daughter's blade in his back, in his lung. Feeling his life seep away. Unable to breathe once you pulled that filthy scaling knife out of him and his lung collapsed.
“Do you remember how he writhed, bloody bubbles at the corner of his mouth, mewling like a dying kitten? Do you remember how he kept kicking, feebly? How he clawed at the floor? Do you remember? Do you? Of course you do, Amra. You remember very well.”
And I did. I remembered the night I killed my father in perfect detail. I remembered coming home to a darkened house, hearing my father's fists thudding into my mother's body, her dazed pleas for forgiveness, for mercy. My mother, who didn't even know what she was begging forgiveness for, whose only failing had been choosing a viper-mean drunkard for a husband.
I had picked up the scaling knife from the muddy ground next to the loose, splintered front steps, where it lay next to a pile of fish guts. The worn wooden handle was tacky with fish blood and viscera. Flies buzzed clumsily around the pile of guts and fish heads in the chill autumn air, and inside my mother was being beaten. Yes, I remembered.
I walked into our one room hovel on the dying edge of Hardside, found my father hunched over the prone figure of my mother, beating her in the face with a cold, wordless fury. I remember his fists hammering down again and again, methodical, almost workmanlike.
And yes, I remembered holding that filthy, slender single-edged knife over my head in a two handed grip, and driving it down into my father's back with all the force my eleven-year-old body could muster.
I'd held my mother's unconscious body, cradling her bloody head in my lap as my father bled his life away on the floor next to us.
She never woke up.
The terror and sick guilt of what I'd done were suddenly replaced by anger. I knew then that it had not been natural. Fecking magic.
“So many have died around you, at your hand. How very many deaths you are tangled up in, little thief. How great your guilt must be.”
The Thief Who Spat In Luck's Good Eye Page 6
