by Jeff Ayers
“Nah, not likely. Haman’s doing great, and the Boss don’t need any more help. What have you been drinking?”
Delly laughed. “Nothing but the boiled water they give us in the hideout with meals. This is just to throw off the Guards if they catch me and start asking questions about what I’m doing, see?” When Skate shook her head in confusion, Delly rolled her eyes. “I been picking! You know, bumping into people and nicking purses and coins. I’m ‘drunk,’ though, so they don’t think nothing of it except to worry about the poor kid in such a bad situation.” She laughed at the pity she had been getting. “Most of ’em don’t care, though. Most of ’em just want the stinky little rat out of their way, ’nd I am alls too gladsh to do sho.” She began slurring her words and giving a mock salute, falling easily into the cover story. “And if tha Guardsh wanted to shee me, I just tell ’em I’m not sure where my homes is at. No questions, and a swift kick out of the district. They only rough ya up a little when they gotta do that, since most of ’em don’t really want to hurt a kid.”
Skate nodded, very familiar with the casual cruelty of the Guards, a cruelty born not of any real malice, but of simple day-to-day irritation building up over time and spilling when dealing with the criminal element. “Scum, the lot of them,” she said, spitting into the snow. “They don’t know what we gotta do to live. They don’t gotta starve. They don’t die on the streets for not having clothes.”
“Speaking of clothes,” Delly began, motioning toward Skate’s fine raiment, “you didn’t answer me. What’s with the nice stuff?”
“I’m doing a job,” Skate said. She explained her situation, and how Belamy had decided finer clothes might help with her disguise. “You shoulda seen the faces of the tailors when I walked in with a bag of scepts and picked out a coat from the rack.” Skate laughed; the shock and obvious discomfort mixed with greed at the sight of the gold coins was a sight Skate would not soon forget.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Delly said, waving her hands in front of her, “the guy you’re stealing from—”
“Going to steal from.”
“—going to steal from, whatever. That guy gave you money to go buy clothes so that you could steal books from someone else?”
“Yeah. Nice, huh?”
“Is he an idiot?”
“No.” Skate thought after she had answered. “No, I think he’s pretty smart. He just…cares about some stuff more than others. Like, things that most people don’t care about as much. He’s got money, and he can easily get more of it, it looks like. But he really loves books, and he’s always after more. So money spent on a thief to get books he doesn’t have is a job well done, to him.”
“Sounds like an idiot to me.”
Skate shrugged, not having anything else to say to discredit the assessment. “If he wants to spend money, that’s no problem for me. How’s picking going?”
Delly smiled and patted a pocket in her ratty clothes. There was the unmistakable clink of coins beneath. “Oh, I’m doing fine, don’t worry. These dummies just walk around with their purses and fine bags out and unprotected. I’ll be able to pay up with Boss Kernisk for months at this rate.” She leaned back and laughed. “Boss says I got a gift for picking. Says I’ll make lieutenant well before I’m twenty. Think of that, Skate! Me, a lieutenant to a Boss. I’d be one of the ones running this city, then, you know? Someone important, someone the local dips would know to respect; someone who could pay her own way; someone who could buy fine clothes all her own.” She ran a hand on Skate’s shoulder as she spoke. “I’d be able to read, then, Skate. Could read a story, could learn stuff about history, could learn the old stories, new stories, could learn math good. I could write, then, too, and people’d have to read what I wrote. I’d matter, you know?” She wasn’t looking at Skate anymore, but up at the dark, starless sky as a few fine pellets of snow made their way between the roofs of the buildings. “But I gotta work to get there. Gotta give the Boss his due. Gotta take from them what’s got too much already, right?”
“Right.” Skate knew that Delly wasn’t just bragging or wishing nonsense. She had seen the younger girl at her work, dipping between rubes who could not notice slender fingers digging into pockets or slipping around belt loops. Delly never failed to make a weekly quota; others in Boss Kernisk’s crew had told Skate as much with more than a hint of jealousy in their voices. Delly would be lieutenant well before her twentieth year, Skate decided—at least three or four years before then. She was too good at what she did to be held back for much longer than that. Even though she was young, younger even than Skate, she was one of the most determined people Skate had ever known.
“Speaking of,” Skate said, “I need to get back to my mark.”
“Oh, yeah? Gonna make your move tonight?”
“Nah, I gotta steal a few more books for him before I get in good enough to find the best thing to steal from him.”
“I hear you. Well, good luck, madam,” Delly said, dipping into a low bow to mock her fancy dress, “and may your feet be ever soft.”
Skate returned the ridiculous bow and said, “And your fingers always be swift.”
“You know it, dummy.” With that, the girl resumed her swaying. “I dunno why anybody drinks this stuff,” she muttered before she left the alleyway. “It stinks just wearing it.” She teetered into the street and took a moment to “steady” herself against the wall, as if the sudden change of direction had disoriented her, and then hobbled away the direction she had been going before their conversation. Skate waited a few minutes before heading out herself.
The streets remained mostly empty, and the snow increased its tempo. It collected in small piles at the edge of buildings, where street and wood met, making the cities’ buildings look like needles pushing through tight-woven white cloth. The snow had begun to sting Skate’s nose and ears by the time she reached Belamy’s heavy front door. She did not bother knocking before opening it, stepping into the welcoming warmth of the main room. She spoke half of the Dwarvish words she knew, and the room was suddenly awash in blue, rather than natural yellowish-red, light.
The master of the house sat in his customary spot downstairs. No, not customary, Skate thought. When she and Twitch had been observing Belamy before their attempted robbery, they’d never seen him sitting downstairs. He had only begun to sit in that desk regularly when Skate had begun to stay here. Maybe not, she told herself. You only watched him for two days. All he does is read, and he may have chosen any number of places in his house to read on a given day.
Her mind returned to her first night here. There had been something at the table that night: those red stones, whatever they were, that Skate had not seen since—stones that she was sure were behind the locked door in the cellar. Belamy was very trusting of his new student, but there were some things he was clearly unwilling to risk losing to a too-curious, already-caught thief. Still, she thought, he is down here almost all the time now.
Belamy looked up from his reading, smiled by way of greeting, and returned his attention to Ossertine’s book. He appeared nearly done with the Chronicles.
“How goes the reading?” Skate asked, breathing in the warm air. There was a whiff of Rattle’s earlier work in the scent; the creature had made a delicious tomato soup, the twenty-year-old ingredients as fresh as ever. It had helped keep her warm, though the new clothes had helped considerably more.
Skate moved in front of the desk and leaned forward, looking at the words on the page. She was seeing them upside down, but it made little difference; the elves, Belamy had informed her, did not write using the same letters as Caribolians. The night their lessons had begun, he had explained the concept of not only letters and words, but the existence of totally separate sets of symbols that other languages used. Caribolians—Skate included—spoke Thervonian, “an old tongue with a long history,” as Belamy had described it. He said that the Thervonian language used its own letters, and writers of many other newer languages had found it convenient
to copy the same letters for their use, though they often added their own bits and pieces along the way, and changed the pronunciation and usage for their own purposes.
Belamy smiled again and said, “It’s going very well indeed. Bereziah and his entourage are returning home, their mission complete and mostly successful. However, several problems still face them: harsh terrain, unfamiliar groups not present at their first passing-by, and general malaise at being gone from home for so long. His use of emotional language here is quite moving, especially since such displays of emotion are comparatively rare in the extant elven literature; they seem to have a cultural taboo against such expression in writing that they breached only at the most poignant moments.”
“What, they were never happy or sad?” Such a way of living seemed impossible. “They didn’t feel anything?”
“Presumably, they did experience emotion. After all, Bereziah felt it appropriate to display emotions in this section,” Belamy said, pointing to the large block of text in front of him; to Skate, who was only just now learning the Thervonian alphabet, the elven writing looked like random squiggles on a page. “They just very rarely thought it appropriate to express such feeling in writing. I’m not as sure about what they were like in person. Their skittishness about revealing powerful emotion may have been confined to the written word.”
Skate thought of Haman, then, as he went about his work for the Ink: always serious, rarely showing anything on his face other than polite disinterest. “I bet they were like that in person, too,” she said.
Belamy smiled indulgently. “Very possibly.” He marked his place and stood. “Are you ready for your lessons?”
Skate nodded. This had been the pattern each night: Skate returned after hours and hours of observation of Gherun, and then had her reading and writing lesson with Belamy and Rattle. They had agreed that Belamy’s fee for such generous tutelage would be an extra book each week, with the option to defer book delivery up to one week as needed. She planned to take far more from Gherun than she had from Ossertine, which should not be hard. Belamy was not interested in any specific books of Gherun’s; just any that he did not already have. Rattle, who had already devoured many times over the whole of Belamy’s library, would be able to quickly pick out new books for Belamy’s enjoyment.
“I plan on doing the next job tomorrow night.”
“Good!” he said, motioning her toward the stairs and gathering his book to follow her up. “And you’re sure you’ll be able to move around unheard and unseen? Laribel wasn’t home when you visited her house, remember,” he said for perhaps the fifth time.
“Yes, I’m sure,” she responded a fifth time. “I’m actually really good at moving around without getting caught.” She began walking up the stairs.
“I caught you.”
Skate stopped in her tracks, one hand on the decorative banister as she glared at the old man. “Yeah, I guess you did.” The old man’s face was impassive, but she thought she saw dancing laughter in the darks of his eyes. “How’d you do that, Mr. Belamy?”
The old man smiled. “I have excellent hearing,” he said, gesturing again for her to continue up the stairs. “Excellent hearing perfected with years of practice.”
“You ‘practiced’ hearing better?” She turned and moved up the stairs as she spoke. “Doesn’t make any sense,” she muttered under her breath.
“Of course it does,” Belamy said from the bottom of the stairs.
Skate spun around to face him. With the crackling fire and the sound of her footsteps on the stone, it should have been impossible for the old man to hear her murmur.
Before she could say anything, he pressed on. “The ear can be trained to hear better just as the eyes can be trained to see better, the tongue to speak, the hands to manipulate, and on and on. A musician knows her craft because she has trained her body—and in particular, her ears—to be most in tune with her work.” He smiled, arms spread in a welcoming gesture, inviting a discussion on the matter.
“Okay, yeah, you can be trained to listen better,” Skate said, rolling her eyes, “but I meant just ‘hearing.’ If something hurts your ears, there’s nothing you can do to get your hearing back. There’s no exercises you can do, there’s no ‘training’ to get them back where they need to be. Ears are either strong or weak, and that’s all there is to it. You just have strong ears.”
“Ah, but I’m old. Old people have weak ears, don’t they?”
Skate thought about that. He was old, but his hearing was very strong—probably stronger than her own, if this conversation was anything to go by. Skate reminded herself of the most likely true reason for his impressive hearing abilities: something about the transition from life to unlife had made him better at it.
“If they’re alive, yeah.” She was not sure why she said that out loud; she had not been aware of making the decision to do so.
The old man did not look surprised; instead, his eyes narrowed, and he nodded. “Say more. I’d hear your reasoning, please.”
Skate swallowed before speaking. “You move too…neatly for an old man. Too loose. You sit for hours at once without griping about soreness. You don’t eat. You don’t sleep. You don’t breathe. You don’t use the latrine. You don’t even get tired. You aren’t bothered by the cold—at all, even though it’s the dead of winter. The only thing you want is books and their stories—things that last forever, or at least last a really long time. I know there’s things that move and think and talk even though they’re not alive anymore. I think you’re one of them.” She took a steadying breath. “I think whatever magic you did to yourself killed you, kind of.”
The same narrow-eyed expression stayed on Belamy’s wrinkled face. He answered, “I can do magic. Isn’t that as good an explanation for all of it as anything? Why do you go so quickly to assuming I’ve somehow cheated death?”
“I don’t know,” Skate answered half-honestly. She herself knew little, but Boss Marshall and Haman had been fairly convinced. She could not readily cite them as sources, though, given the context of the conversation. “But it would mean magic does way more than I thought it could.”
The suspicious expression expanded to a smile. “Yes, that’s probably true. Nevertheless, you’re right. The reason I don’t draw breath, eat, sleep, tire, or shiver is that I’m not alive. I haven’t been alive for about two decades now. I’m a lich.”
Chapter 10
In which a term is defined, disguises are explored, and the man in the ball is explained.
Silence greeted Belamy’s confession. Skate knew the word; Haman had mentioned “lich” while listing the different varieties of monsters that the old man might be. Belamy could not know about that, though, so she chose not to react. He had confirmed her suspicions, at least partially; while not a vampire, Barrison Belamy was no longer counted among the living. Looking for something to say, she asked, “What’s ‘lich’ mean?”
Belamy’s face neutralized somewhat, changing from the oddly proud and interested expression to that of the practiced lecturer as his voice fell into a more pedantic pattern. “It’s the name of a particular group of undead who have willfully chosen to avoid the ravages of the grim reaper by escaping, through the use of magic, into a state of half-death. As such, I am no longer bound to the limitations that most people have to deal with, as you’ve so thoroughly explained.
“My body will continue to age and will, in fact, begin to decompose much as a dead body does if left unattended until I’ve been reduced to a moving skeleton. However, I’ve so far staved off most of the results of such decay with preventative magic, and should be able to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I stand before you today in as good of shape as I was the day I died—er, stopped living, as it were. Better, actually, since my joints and muscles no longer feel the weight of years.” He gave a demonstration of his ease of movement by executing a passable, if not exactly graceful, full squat to the ground, then standing straight up with no sign of pain or discomfor
t.
“So you’re a monster.” Skate said the words as her mind raced; Belamy was standing between the door to the street and her. She could not hope to jettison herself out of the downstairs windows with Belamy’s locks on the latches, with the magical reinforcements he had placed on them besides, and jumping from the higher floor would be outright suicide. If this revelation was a prelude to an attack, she was not sure she could get away from him. Outwardly, she tried to show nothing but casual indifference, but she knew her body was betraying her; the hair on her arms was standing straight up, the tension in her legs aching, and part of her mind was screaming Run! over and over again. Her voice wavered as her throat constricted out of pure terror.
“Some would call me so, yes.” Belamy nodded, either not noticing her fear or not caring about it. “But I don’t think that’s quite fair. I’m not hurting anybody. I didn’t have to hurt anybody to get to this point. I wasn’t ready to die, and old age wasn’t waiting, so I made a change. It’s true,” he went on, sweeping an arm through the air vaguely, his loose-hanging sleeve billowing softly in the current that it caught as it moved, “that most people who go through this process must lose something of their humanity in doing so. You wouldn’t believe some of the horrible things I found in my research leading up to the execution of the deed.” He gave what appeared to be a genuinely involuntary shudder. “Anyone who found such paths and followed them would be truly monstrous.”
“You did.”
“No!” His eyes went wide as he spoke, the passive tone replaced by vehement denial. “I told you, I hurt no one. I did my own research; I found another way. Because of what they had to do in order to reach this state, most of my kind deserve death, real death. But I did not do what they have done. My way hurt no one. I am not a monster, Skate.”