The Thief Who Went to War

by Michael McClung

  Get it unlocked I did, though, after considerable silent cursing.

  Beyond was just as black as behind. I’d never been in the Plague Keep, and had only the haziest of ideas as to how it was laid out. Silently, more out of habit than worry, I put the picks in a pocket and eased myself inside, latching the door after me. There was no lock on the interior of the door, unfortunately, though my fingers told me there had been at one time.

  I felt my way slowly and carefully around the cellar in search of the stairs, disturbing nothing but dust. Then I found the far wall the hard way, and followed it around the room until the stairs finally made themselves known. There was another door at the top, and it was lockless. Beyond it, I finally got a little bit of light after far too long from a couple of tiny, barred windows on either side of the great entrance that let in a grudging amount of starlight. It was welcome.

  Less welcome was the decision I now faced. Hole up here until the next cavalcade of fuckery appeared? Or rush out to meet it? In one sense it didn’t matter – whatever I decided, Visini would pull strings. I was honestly too tired to worry about whether I was playing my part. Mostly I just wanted to do whatever would bring this nasty little game to its swiftest conclusion. Too bad I hadn’t a clue what would get me there.

  I tossed my package next to a wall and sat down on it. I was also tired in the physical way. I leaned back against the stone and stretched my legs out.

  What did Visini want? Greytooth’s histories seemed to say that she wanted her victim broken before she ended them. That she delighted in hounding them to exhaustion. That she used others as her cat’s paws to do the hounding.

  Resting up would only draw out the suffering. And while being in a fortress seemed like a great defensive strategy at first blush, it wasn’t like I had an army to defend it. She’d make me run, one way or another. Also, I could really do with a bite and a drink, and the Plague Keep had neither. With a groan, I stood and went to the great door. It wasn’t locked or even barred, which was surprising. I slipped out and into the weed-choked courtyard, which was about fifty feet by eighty. The courtyard wall was in good repair, maybe fifteen feet high. I could scale it easily if I left my wardrobe behind, which I mulishly was not going to do, or with quite a bit of difficulty if I took it with me. The gate had been bricked up.

  But there was a lone, forlorn oak tree at the far end of the courtyard that had been allowed to grow far too close to the wall over the decades. A glance told me it probably wouldn’t be much trouble to climb it one-handed, and then jump to the top of the wall. From there it would be just a dangle and a drop down to First Wall Road. And after that? Well, I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.

  The courtyard was flagged near the entrance, but a few feet away from the keep all the flagstones had been ripped up at some point, leaving the weeds to run riot. But the soil must have been pretty shabby stuff because instead of jungle, there were just clumpy patches of waist-high bramble separated by desolate, hard-packed dirt. I set off at a slow trudge towards the oak.

  I’d made it maybe a third of the way when I heard... something. I couldn’t identify the sound. I stopped, pulled out my knife and listened.

  Digging. Scraping. Soil shifting. All muted. I scanned the courtyard and saw nothing at all, but my ears told me the sourced was ahead and off to the left.

  And then it was behind me as well. And then it was all the fuck around me.

  The first corpse to claw its way out of the earth was a woman, judging by the remains of her dress. She was badly desiccated and eyeless, but clumps of long, pale hair somehow still clung to her skull. She came out of the dirt and started staggering towards me, her jaw askew. Behind her and all around me, dozens more thought that was a great idea.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I DIDN’T WASTE BREATH on a curse, or mental energy on wondering who was responsible, or time on gawping. I just ran for the tree as quick as I could. It was either that, or back to the keep, where they’d have me trapped. No thank you.

  But the whole courtyard seemed to be a mass grave, and every resident now, suddenly, had decided resting in peace was overrated. Very quickly I had no clear path to escape, so I started stomping on and knocking down corpse after corpse. They none of them had any weapons, thank fuck, but dozens of skeletal hands reached out for me, and corpse after corpse tried to take me in a decidedly unwanted embrace.

  Needless to say, I was having none of it. With knife and fist and packet of clothes, with knee and boot tip I knocked down corpses and made bones fly free. Most of all, I kept moving. I did not want to get buried under a clacking mass of undead. They weren’t strong or fast, but gods did they have the numbers.

  I was barely making headway by the time I got to the oak. Skeleton climbed atop skeleton to get to me, and to block my path. Half a dozen stick arms thrust out half a dozen bony hands to grasp at my legs with each step I took.

  “I think I understand what is happening,” came a voice from up in the tree. Chuckles’ voice.

  “Fuck’s sake, not now!” I screamed at her, smashing skeletons. I couldn’t climb the fucking tree with my hand full of knife, so I sheathed it, and got a bony claw tangled in my hair for my trouble. It started pulling.

  “You expressed a sincere desire for me to experience the full span of human emotion.”

  I’d also expressed a sincere desire for her to die a horrid death, if memory served. I did not have time for Chuckles’ bullshit. I swung around and bashed all the closest corpses with my packet of clothes, swinging it like the world’s shittiest hammer. It didn’t damage them in the least, but because they were so light and clumsy, it did knock them off balance and into the ones crowding behind them. Which gave me a moment to claw my way furiously up the tree’s trunk.

  “It seems our bond is at least partially active, despite your refusal to acknowledge it.”

  I could see her now. She was sitting on an upper branch, swinging her feet like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Do you not fucking see the fucking army of the fucking dead down there, you crazy bitch?” I said as I scrambled higher.

  She glanced out at the courtyard. “Oh. Them. They aren’t real.”

  “What?”

  “They are illusory. Created by the burned magus who is following you.”

  “Gammond? Where?”

  “I don’t know. I see only what you see. I just see it more clearly.”

  “Then she’s either behind me, in the keep, or ahead of me somewhere out there,” I said, gesturing vaguely towards the city. “If you’re not lying.”

  “I’ve found another thing that irritates me – endlessly repeating myself. I can’t lie to you.”

  “Did you want me to clap?”

  “I’m experiencing new things, new emotions after more than four thousand years. It wouldn’t go amiss.”

  “Oh, how I wish you could experience my hands around your neck.” But I didn’t have time to play with the little abomination. If she was telling the truth, all those corpses trying to claw their way up the oak weren’t real – but their creator was, and if she was close enough to cast that sort of magic, it was time for me to get gone. The only question was which way to go.

  Chances were she had followed my trail – it made more sense than her just knowing I’d be in the courtyard of the Plague Keep. Didn’t it? Hells, I couldn’t be sure. Mages were fucking tricky. There was no telling. But if I went to ground in the keep and she was there, she could torture me for as long as she liked, and nobody would intervene. Whereas it would be hard for her to do likewise and uninterrupted on the street in the Foreigners’ Quarter.

  Not that there was anyone about on the streets yet. To the east, the sky was just beginning to pink, while night still ruled the west.

  “Why didn’t she just do the falling and burning thing again?” I wondered.

  “I imagine she’s depleted her well considerably, battling the gentlemen. The illusory skeletons were likely easier to conjure. It’
s just a guess, though.”

  It had been a rhetorical question, but Chuckles’ answer made sense. Or at least wasn’t something I could disprove. Fuck. I needed to make a decision. The street seemed to be the safest bet, but it was also the home turf of Mister Hope’s masters. I’d be trading one deadly threat for another. Which was almost certainly just what Visini had planned.

  Kerf’s shit-stained breechclout.

  “You can’t just stay in this tree forever,” she told me. As if I didn’t know that. What decided me was the clattering horde below me suddenly disappearing, and the keep’s great door slowly, groaningly swinging open.

  “Well, I’m off then,” I muttered, and climbed out as far as I could on the limb nearest the wall. I tossed my package over, and then jumped for the top of the wall myself. My form was pretty good, but my thigh betrayed me when I hit, and I slowly toppled over the side, uninjured arm wheeling in a vain attempt to get my balance back.

  A fifteen-foot drop is enough to break bones if you land badly. I was able to get a fleeting grasp on the wall’s lip with my good hand, which would have been enough if the masonry hadn’t crumbled in my hand. Still, it was just enough to make the fall semi-controlled. I hit the ground with my feet, which hurt like hells, and then my thigh betrayed me yet again. I ended up on my back, teeth gritted in pain, still holding a chunk of stone about the size of an apple. A gray, jagged, traitorous apple.

  It could have been worse. But I wasn’t going to be sprinting anywhere any time soon, and that seemed to me to be a real fucking problem. When you’re trying to run away from people who want to do incredibly violent things to you, you want to be able to do the running bit in more than a metaphorical way.

  “I can’t believe you fell for the same trick twice, honestly.”

  Oh, fuck. That was Gammond’s slurred voice. I looked up and there she was, maybe twenty feet away, suddenly standing in the middle of the road. Her face was just a blur, as before, but it seemed like she was having trouble maintaining the illusion. Little flashes of melted flesh revealed themselves here and there, regular as a heartbeat.

  “What trick? I don’t remember any other walking corpses.”

  “Pushing you to run towards me instead of away.”

  “Oh. That. I didn’t think you’d try it twice, if I’m honest. Did you have fun with the gentlemen?”

  “The who?”

  “Those ones you had a scrap with at the tower just a while ago.”

  “They were more prepared for magic than I would have guessed. Not prepared enough to stop me.”

  “Obviously,” I said, sitting up. “But actually, you should’ve been working with them.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “You both want the same thing.”

  “Your lover’s head on a pike?” She started limping towards me.

  “Holgren’s location, anyway. But I couldn’t tell them what I don’t know any more than I can tell you.” I started to rise, and made it seem like I was having even more difficulty with it than I was.

  “Well. We live in a world of questions, from the mundane to the profound. What’s for dinner? Why are we here? What is the purpose of existence, and of agony? Where is justice to be had? Where is Holgren Angrado? Answers aren’t guaranteed, of course. But that shouldn’t stop the questions. If you think on it long and hard, and I have, the questions are just as important as the answers.”

  I’d gotten on my feet by then. I put a little extra swaying into my stance. She stopped just out of arm’s reach.

  “You’re that scary kind of crazy, you know that? Anyway, how have you been tracking me?”

  “Surely you’ve been around a magus long enough to know that all it takes is a hair. Now. I’ll ask once, nicely. Where is Holgren Angrado?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I’ll be the judge.”

  “As it happens, he’s behind you.” I used my free hand to wave at something over her shoulder, taking a half-step closer at the same time.

  “How stupid do you-”

  That’s when I smashed her in her blurry face with the traitor rock.

  The thing about mages, they see you holding a rock, nine times out of ten they’re going to dismiss it. They have fucking magic, and you’ve got a fucking rock. I mean, who would you bet on? That’s how my reasoning went, at any rate. And the fact was, she was going to use her magic to torture me anyway, so I had very little to lose at that point. So I gave her a good one. I didn’t throw it; I held it tight, and blurry target or not I didn’t miss.

  She toppled backward and I went with her, free hand now gripping a handful of her coat. I got her again before she hit the cobbles, and this time the rock came away bloody.

  Then she hit me with her burning spell. And then her falling spell. And I screamed and I fell, but I still had hold of her coat, even if I couldn’t see it, and I still knew roughly where her head was, and I kept beating, and beating, and beating. Our screams intertwined.

  Eventually the fire and the falling stopped.

  I lay atop her, panting and intimate as a lover. I’d made her already badly mangled face much worse. It was a wet ruin, now. One of her cheekbones was most definitely shattered. The breath from her nostrils made bloody bubbles. My right arm was bloody almost up to the elbow.

  We are terrible creatures, we humans, capable of terrible things.

  “You should finish her,” Chuckles told me.

  “Yeah,” I replied, and slowly regained my feet. I realized I was still holding the bloodied stone in my hand, and let it drop to the cobbles. I’d had enough of killing. Maybe she would survive, maybe not. I hobbled away. It was a really, deeply unsatisfactory means of locomotion.

  “She will not thank you for your mercy.”

  I swallowed. “If you think that’s mercy, you’re not so clever, Chuckles.” I wasn’t letting her live out of kindness. I just couldn’t stomach the thought of smashing her head until the brains leaked out, or slitting her throat while she lay there unconscious. There’s a limit. I had reached it. Maybe I would regret it later, if there was a later. I was all right with that. Right then I stuffed my hands, one bloody and one not, into my pockets to help still the trembles.

  Then I remembered that fucking packet of clothes, and hobbled my ass back to get it in the early morning light. Of course it didn’t matter anymore, since I’d probably either be dead or rid of Visini before the day was out. But stubborn had strangled sensible by that point.

  “You are doing lasting damage to your quadricep,” Chuckles informed me as I worked my way deeper into the Foreigners’ Quarter. She didn’t bother to appear. The streets were no longer empty; I knew by the reaction of passers-by that I looked like a fucking disaster. Talking to invisible people didn’t help matters. I no longer cared.

  “Since I don’t know what that is,” I told her, “I am determined not to be bothered by it.”

  “It’s the big muscle in the front of your thigh.”

  “Oh. Then I revise my previous statement to ‘no shit.’”

  “What will you do now?”

  I sighed. There wasn’t much left for me to do. I was pretty sure Visini’s fun-time was fast approaching its conclusion. When the game could no longer run, then the dogs would circle and bay. And then the huntsman would close in to finish it off.

  I started to regret my decision to not hole up in the Plague Keep, even though I knew the security it seemed to offer was a lie. It would be a death trap for me, unless I suddenly stumbled upon a score or so of armsmen to defend it.

  “Time for the final stand, Chuckles,” I finally replied. “Or near enough. I think what’s left to me is to choose the ground.”

  “There is one other thing.”

  “That again? Seriously, what part of eat shit is unclear to you?”

  “If you do not acknowledge me as your goddess and accept your role as my avatar, then my sister Visini will destroy you, and likely everyone you care for. In the course of
more than four thousand years, no one has ever outwitted her. No one has ever come close. You will not be an exception, Amra.”

  “I fucking outwitted you and Abanon. Bitch.”

  “Abanon is, practically speaking, insane. As for me, the best you can claim is a draw. And neither of us is the Blade That Binds and Blinds. You think you know what that means. You don’t.”

  “Then enlighten me.”

  “I am prepared to. I’ve already told you what must be done first.”

  “Then we’re back to ‘eat shit,’ I guess.”

  Chuckles had nothing more to say. I turned my attention to where I wanted things to end, and what was within limping distance.

  There was no good place. No place that would give me much of an advantage, that I could think of. But there was one place I could think of where I could at least get a drink before everything kicked off.

  As fate would have it, I was only three long blocks from Tambor’s, which never closed.

  They really should have closed.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I STUMBLED INTO TAMBOR’S and sat down at the long bar with a groan, tossing the packet on the stool next to me. Normally I’d’ve sat outside under the leafy green pergola of the wine garden, but I was pretty sure that Mister Hope’s goons had been informed I was in the Foreigners’ Quarter by that point, and I didn’t want to get an arrow in my neck before I had a chance to get some of Tambor’s Best down my throat.

  The gentleman behind the bar was as broad as he was tall and perfectly bald. He looked at me with jaundiced eyes deep-set in his dark, lined face. Behind him two huge tuns of wine rested on a massive rack, silent proof of the power of quantity over quality.