“Anyway, in a real sense it wasn’t jealousy. It was desperate denial,” I said.
After a short silence he said “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, really. Betrayal is betrayal, and traitors always find compelling reasons to excuse their actions.” His heavy-lidded gaze rested, unblinking and again hot, on the box.
“How long will it take?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Who can say? If she towels herself thoroughly first, perhaps fifty heartbeats before she notices anything. Much faster if she wears it wet. Either way, she will be a long while about the business of dying. The spasms will be ferocious. People poisoned thus have been known to break their own backs, the muscles convulse so furiously.” His eyes may have shown emotion, but his voice displayed none.
I shuddered. “A terrible way to die.”
“Poison is the proscribed death for traitors.”
“Why?”
“Because traitors poison faith and trust.”
“I mean why tell me about this at all?”
He was silent for a long time. I began to believe he would not answer. Then, “I loved my brother. My father sent me to see justice done because it was expected. But he despised Corbin. I’ll never be sure why, but I think it was because Corbin favored Mother so much, in his looks. If only he’d looked a little less like her....”
He looked at me. “Because, of all those searching for my brother’s murderer, only you did so not because you were ordered or paid to. Because you shamed me in that prison.
“Only you and I know the world grew a little darker at his death. Only you and I and this damned dog.”
There was one other who probably knew, but I didn't bring up Corbin's lover. Best leave well enough alone, I thought.
Osskil reached down and scratched behind Bone’s ears. Holgren had brought him round the day before, saying he was going somewhere for a couple of days, and that I needed a guard dog more than he did. When Osskil had first seen Bone, and been told it was Corbin’s dog, he’d immediately asked if he could keep him. I couldn’t say no.
“You were in on the beginning of it all,” he said, pulling me back from my thoughts. “It is only fitting you know how it ends.”
“Speaking of the dog,” I said, changing the subject, “are you sure you want to burden yourself with such an ugly mongrel?” I hated to admit it, but I was going to miss Bone, slobber and all.
“Mongrel? This dog is a pureblood royal boarhound. He has the best lines I’ve ever seen of the breed. It would not be uncommon for one such as Bone to fetch more than a warhorse would. How he ended up on the streets of Lucernis, I’ll never fathom.”
“You’re joking.”
“My family breeds the finest dogs in Lucernia. I never joke about dogs.”
I could think of nothing to say. We sat there for a while in silence, a thief, a baron and a royal cur. Then he rose, a beautiful, horrible death tucked under one arm.
“Thank you for the wine. If you are in Courune, and not then spectacularly at odds with the law, I would consider it an honor if you would call upon me.” A ghost of a smile touched his heavy lips.
“You’ll make a practice of taking in strays if you aren’t careful. But all right. If I am in Courune, and not employed, I’ll do just that.” A thought occurred to me. “When will you send it?” I pointed at the box under his arm.
“I will call on Madame Haig personally this afternoon. We will pass pleasantries. I’ll make discreet noises to the effect that she should not consider trying, in any fashion, to leverage her relationship with Corbin to gain anything from the Thracens. I will give her this gift as a token of my admiration. I wager she will think it no more than her due. And she will be right.”
“What about whatever thugs she hired to kill Corbin? Will you hunt them down as well?”
He shook his head. “I don't see much point in that,” he said. Silently, I agreed.
He left then and, shooing Bone before him, stepped into the gilded carriage waiting outside my door, oblivious to the threadbare crowd that had gathered to gawp at such a sight, in such a neighbourhood.
#
A couple of days later I found myself in Loathewater, one of the many slums of Lucernis. The day had dawned grey and heavy with rain that refused to fall. I hadn’t been able to sleep much or well, what with all the punishment my body had taken over the past few days, and so I found myself doing what I always seem to do when at loose ends; walking aimlessly, trying to keep ahead of my thoughts. Or trying at least to tread water, so to speak.
I’d set out to kill Corbin’s killer. I might not have done it with my own knife, but it was done. Estra Haig was a dead woman, whether she knew it yet or not. Along the way a lot of others had gotten dead. Some had deserved it. One, at least, had desired it. But I couldn’t help but wonder if things wouldn’t have been better off, in the grand scheme of things, if I’d just let well enough alone.
After all, none of it had brought Corbin back.
I’d walked most of the night away and on into the dawn when I looked around and found myself surrounded by the scrap shanties and towering trees of Loathewater. The sudden feeling of being watched had pulled me out of my ruminations.
She was standing in her doorway. She, like her house, was crisp and clean and straight, though the neighborhood was dilapidated, quietly desperate, and muck-strewn.
The bloodwitch.
“Seems you’ve found your way to my door,” she said.
“Just passing through.”
“Oh, come now. I knew you’d be around. I Saw it. Come inside then, and have some tea.”
“No offense, but I’d rather not.”
She smiled. “We each of us do things we’d rather not. It’s part of life. There are things we should discuss that are best not spoken of on the street.”
I really didn’t want to offend a bloodwitch. Still, I hesitated.
“Come, I’ll feed you as well. You look like the type who enjoys a scone.”
My stomach rumbled. I went inside.
The interior was sparse and almost harshly clean. I don’t know what I expected. Jars of newt eyes and bats in the rafters, maybe. Instead it reminded me of how my mother had kept her house, all those years ago. I could almost hear her muttering “poor’s no excuse for filthy” the way she had when she was scrubbing something.
There was tea, with honey, and freshly toasted scones, with raisins, all on a little table set for two. I'm not all that fond of raisins, but the scones did smell good.
“You Saw me coming? Or do you lay out breakfast like this every day?”
“I know why you don’t like me, Amra Thetys,” she replied. Or didn’t reply.
“How can I dislike you? I don’t even know you.”
“But you know what I am, and what I can do. You hate the very idea of fate, and so how could you be comfortable in the presence of someone who can See it?”
I took a sip of tea while I considered what she’d said. It was true, as far as it went.
“I don’t doubt you have the Sight. But I’d make a distinction between seeing the future, however cloudily, and knowing what fate has in store for someone. If fate even exists.”
“Oh, it does, though I won’t bother trying to convince you of the fact. But you are right in believing seeing the future isn’t the same as knowing what fate has in store.”
“I wouldn’t have expected you to agree.”
She shrugged her thin shoulders. “To see the future is to see the likeliest route of a journey. To know fate, my dear, is to know the destination. I Saw your future, dear, and I’m sorry to say that it is a dark and bloody one, for the most part.”
“Was. That’s over. Abanon’s Blade is no more, and Red Hand is dead. I’m done with your Eightfold Bitch.”
She smiled, and while there was a little pity in it, it seemed to me there was far more of something I’d call contempt. But then I generally assume the worst of people unless
given a reason not to.
“I’ve Seen your future, and something of your fate. While you think you are done with the Eightfold Goddess, She is far from done with you. You will have truck with gods and goddesses, demigods and demons, and Powers of the Earth and Aether before you breathe your last—”
I stood up, knocking back my chair. “Why the hells would you tell me such things?”
“Because they are true.”
“So what? What good does it do me?”
“Because you need to prepare.”
“And just how the hells do you suggest I go about doing that?”
She looked down at her scone. “I don’t know. That’s for you to discover.”
A hot flash of anger surged through me. “And there, right there, is why I want nothing to do with Seers. Because for all your signs and portents, however true they might be, you never offer a scrap of useful advice, and you never, ever offer the simplest shred of hope. Fate is a slaver, bloodwitch, and I refuse its chains.”
As I walked out her door, she spoke in a quiet voice.
“That is why fate has singled you out, Amra Thetys.”
#
Holgren found me at sunset. I was sitting on the breaker wall just north of the harbour, staring out at the darkening sea, not think much of anything, if I’m being honest.
“The sunset is in the other direction,” he said, sidling up beside me and leaning on the rough stone.
I grunted. “I’ve seen enough sunsets in my life. How did you find me?”
“The ways of the magi are mysterious,” he said with a small smile. He held out two pinched fingers. It took me a moment to see the hair trapped between them.
“You left this on your first visit to my sanctum.”
I gave him a flat stare. “That’s a bit creepy.”
He shrugged and let the hair float down to the restless sea below us. “Speaking of hair, yours is coming in quite nicely.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I didn’t. The silence stretched, but it wasn’t uncomfortable.
“I’ve got some bad news,” he finally said. “Gavon is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Gone, disappeared, vanished.”
“With my money. Of course.”
“I’m afraid so. But Daruvner said he’d like to see us once we’ve recuperated. There’s a commission he thinks would be perfect for us.”
“Are you broke, too?”
“Not really. But I may have mentioned that I was open to commissions if you were involved.”
“What? Why?”
He smiled and raised an eyebrow. “I told you before. You’re capable, and you have two wits to rub together. And you do get up to the most interesting goings-on.” He put out a hand. “Partners?”
I looked at him. I realized for the first time that I trusted him without question, for all that he was a mage. Realized, however much I didn’t want to, that in the past few days I had come to rely on him. Realized with something close to shock that I was fine with that reliance.
And so I took his hand, and shook.
Epilogue
An age was ending. In the grand scheme of things, this was not such an uncommon occurrence. The Age of the Gods had been on the downhill slope for more than a millennium in any case. Soon magic would run dry, barring some unlooked-for intervention. Soon the gods and demons, those who still survived after the Wars and the Cataclysm, would take their longstanding squabbles on to some new plane of existence.
As for what would come next, well. Perhaps the Age of Humanity, of Invention, of Ingenuity. Or perhaps something entirely other.
In the Lower Realms and in the Upper, change was coming, and sentinels who had stood watch for thousands upon thousands of years were abandoning their posts, drawn to the siren call of re-creation, of rebirth, of a resetting of the cosmic board.
Soon there would be no one left to watch for the return of the Eightfold Goddess. Soon there would be no one left who knew what to watch for, or why. The signs and portents would come about, and none would be the wiser.
The first already had.
Abanon’s Blade was dust, destroyed by a mortal’s will.
The first of the eight seals had finally, finally been broken.
In Her hiding place, in Her self-made prison between the planes, She laughed, and stretched Her fearsome frame.
Amra's World
or
A Very Brief Guide To The Known World, Inhabited By Countless Multitudes, Among Them Being One Particular Thief Known As Amra Thetys
by
Lhiewyn,
Sage of Lucernis, High Priest of Lagna the God of Knowledge (Deceased), Very Old Man
(Translated and edited by Michael McClung)
Dedications
Lhiewyn:
For Jessep, because everyone else I know well enough is dead. And stop “meditating” in the stacks, boy. I know what you're doing, and it will make you go blind.
Michael:
For all the readers over the years who have discovered Amra's world and come to love it as I do. Thank you.
The World: An Incredibly Brief Overview
The world is a big place. Really, really big. As far as we can tell, it is spherical, and it circles the sun, which is likely a big ball of fire hanging in the void. No, I don't know what it's hanging from. Don't be cheeky.
The stars are likely other balls of fire, either much smaller or much further away. Most are fixed, some move. Nobody knows why, and if anybody says they do they're lying. Oh, and astrologers, like children, should be beaten often on general principles.
There, wasn't that easy? You're welcome.
Oh, all right. So there's more to the world. The gods alone know why you'd want to know; probably to set out on some idiotic adventure far from home. I feel obliged to tell you that adventures are, on the whole, stunningly bad ideas, best avoided at all costs. Having spent thirty years wandering the world, I should know. I didn't get this useless leg from staying home and milking cows.
I'll tell you what I know. I very much doubt it will do you any good, but at least you won't be able to say I didn't warn you.
The Known World: A Slightly Less-Brief Overview & History
Virtually everyone who isn't a liar or a drunkard agrees the world boasts two large landmasses, or continents. There is some credible speculation that a third continent exists on the far side of the world, but no real proof. Those who have gone looking for it haven't come back. Now they certainly might have found some veritable paradise where they were treated like kings and queens, and sensibly gave up any interest in returning and letting the rest of plodding humanity know about it. Let's just say I'm not inclined to believe this is the case.
Of the two continents we are certain of, the northern one is home to virtually all of humanity, and stretches for thousands of leagues from east to west. Elamners call it 'Sulamel' which means Landfall. No other culture calls it anything in particular as people are, by and large, ignorant twits.
The southern continent (named 'Lubania' by the intrepid and very dead explorer Rafe Luban but universally known as “Deathland” to everyone else) is roughly half the size of Sulamel, and is longer than it is wide. Those who have explored some small portion of it and returned (yours truly) report that it is a barren place of rock and sand and ruined cities, hot as all the hells combined, and full to the brim with interestingly horrid ways to die. If you take only one piece of advice from this old scribe, let it be this: Don't go there. Just don't.
If you do go, please have this tombstone made up beforehand:
I Went To Deathland Even Though
Lhiewyn Of Lucernis Told Me Not To
And Now I'm Dead, Because I'm Stupid
And no, I'm not going to publish my maps and notes from that expedition, because I don't believe in encouraging stupidity. So stop asking.
Right then. As for Sulamel, read on. Anyplace t
hat is especially deadly, I'll (thoughtfully) indicate by writing in big, bold letters: “Stay the Hells Away.” You're welcome.
But first, a bit of history.
I can hear you whining from here. “History is useless. History is boring. Tell me about the exciting and exotic lands,” you're saying. Stop it. You're saying this because you're an idiot. History is important and you don't need all that much of it to keep you healthy. Those who do not learn from it are doomed to repeat it, and even worse, the rest of us will probably suffer the consequences. So pay attention.
Prehistory
Nobody knows where humans come from. The furthest back we can trace our mutton-headed race is about five thousand years ago. We probably came from the southern continent after we mucked it up good and proper. After all, somebody lived in those shattered cities, and unless you count grohl, we're the only animal that makes human-sized dwellings.
The Age of Legend
It's said that, thousands of years ago, the gods walked the World and interacted with humans on a daily basis. It was, according to some accounts, a golden age of peace, an idyllic epoch. This is bullshit. The gods warred against each other and used humans as their pawns. They killed us and each other in many interesting and horrid ways. I'm the high priest of a dead god. He didn't cut himself shaving.
Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids Page 19