Skate the Thief

by Jeff Ayers

  “What are you doing?” she asked, waving at Rattle as it returned to its extended-leg-guided tour. It looked at her, but did not stop its trip.

  She was about to ask again when two things happened: she realized that asking was pointless since Rattle was unable to communicate through conventional means, and a voice spoke in her head, as if from a distance, “It’s alphabetizing.” She recognized the voice as Petre’s, and went to collect him from the sill.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Alphabetizing.” Petre’s expressive eyes shifted into view, as if he’d been looking elsewhere and found the view boring. “It’s putting the books in order by the name of the title. It’s the order the whole library is supposed to be in, but as you saw, there are aberrations in the order that Ol’ Batball needs to fix. It’s dreadfully boring to try to accomplish, but it doesn’t seem to mind too much. Sometimes we make a game of it. Just to pass the time, I’ll name a book and try to time the thing to see how long it takes to find a book. If it takes more than ten seconds, we talk about reorganization. I guess it’s not a game so much as a stress test for the system,” he said as an afterthought. “Anyway, it’s dead useful for trying to find a specific book when you’re looking for it, so long as the title is known to you.”

  Skate watched Rattle move some more, and it seemed only to be using the one leg to detect the titles, instead of the eye. “How come it’s not looking as it goes?”

  “Because it’s a weird flying bat eyeball.” Petre’s eyes danced with mischief. “How should I know what goes on behind that big eye of its?”

  “So you don’t know what Rattle is.”

  “No one knows what Rattle is. Barrison made the thing, but even he couldn’t spell out what exactly it is if you asked him. I know what he was trying to do when he made Rattle, and it wasn’t…that.” When Skate said nothing but remained obviously interested, he went on. “At the time, he was trying to create a being of living magic. A very dangerous undertaking, but theoretically possible. I could name dozens of wizards over the centuries who have tried to make this happen—Billion the Dwarf, Moriak the Mad, Perianne Redmane…” Seeing no recognition in Skate’s face, he said, “Well, never mind, but as I said, it’s an undertaking many have tried, but none have succeeded. Barrison caught the urge, and Rattle was the result.”

  Rattle continued its trek with the next row of books. It must have been nearly done, since there was only one row of books on the wall after its current circle finished.

  Skate said, “It was supposed to be a spell, but it turned into something alive?”

  “That was the idea, yes.”

  “Why? What’s the use of something like that?”

  “Since it’s never been successfully done, there’s no way to know for sure. But the magic theorists suppose that such a being would be formidable in battle, probably able to ignore weapons and armor that were not themselves magical in nature.”

  “Rattle was supposed to be a weapon?”

  “Yes. Barrison made it during the war. You can imagine the lure of such a weapon, and how useful it would have been to have on the battlefield against scads of heavily armored soldiers. They’d find themselves totally helpless if the theories were right. So, the Iron Wind made the attempt, and when the smoke and lights cleared, Rattle was there, flapping away and looking around. We weren’t sure if Barrison had been successful or not, but it seemed to respond well enough to words, especially if Barrison was the one talking to it. He set it on a training dummy, and while its legs made quick work of the cloth and stuffing, it could not pierce any armor. It wasn’t a living spell, but something else. Barrison didn’t know what else to call it, so Rattle is just Rattle.”

  Skate continued to watch the thing floating around the room. It was meant to be a weapon, she thought. It did not surprise her, really. She’d seen it fight. It was odd, though, to think of the thing she’d come to enjoy being around as a failed war experiment.

  A few moments of quiet as Rattle finished its last flapping lap brought the question from that morning back to her mind. She knew asking would do no good, so she stated her thoughts as fact instead. “You know what AB is.”

  “Yes.” Petre wasn’t looking at her as he spoke, but continued following Rattle’s path.

  “It’s something to do with Mr. Belamy, isn’t it? One of his secrets.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he told you not to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  His short answers were not unexpected, but Skate found herself getting frustrated just the same. Calm down, she told herself; at least he’s talking. “Would he tell me what it means if I asked?”

  “You shouldn’t ask.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Skate frowned. “I’m going to ask him.”

  “I can’t stop you.” His eyes faded into smoke.

  Knowing the conversation to be over, she set Petre down on his perch by the window. Rattle floated back down to eye level and watched her leave. She shut the library door behind her.

  She found Belamy where he’d been earlier, staring into the clear glass ball. The golden enhancer was by him, spinning with agitated speed. It was throwing reflections of the firelight around the room like shooting stars. The room was dimmer than it had been, so she tossed a log onto the flame, knowing the magic of the hearth would create more fuel for later as it always had. Once the new wood caught, she stood in front of Belamy’s desk and waited. He ignored her for several minutes, but eventually the golden enhancer began to slow. Belamy leaned back in his chair and stroked his short white beard. He didn’t look tired—presumably, he was no longer capable of being tired—but he looked annoyed.

  “How’d your search go?”

  “Poorly. Those whom I thought had some connection to the people I’m hunting for either knew nothing, pretended to know nothing, or avoided me entirely. The Lady was not at home when I called on her, and the butler wasn’t lying about that—I checked—so that is a dead end, at least for now. The various hedge wizards were unwilling to discuss the matter no matter how insistent I was or what offers I made of payment.”

  “What, did you not offer enough gold?”

  “Neither gold nor secrets nor offer of magical service proved of any use toward loosening tongues. It has been quite a frustrating day, I’m afraid. Well, more disappointing than truly frustrating,” Belamy said, coming forward again in his chair and looking into the glass ball. “I’ve got some time to find these people, I hope, and I have not yet exhausted all of my contacts. Perhaps the good Lady Flandel will return from her travels tomorrow; her manservant suggested that was likely, though the weather may interfere.”

  “These guys must be pretty scary to keep everybody quiet like that.” Really, the silence was surprising; what honor there was among thieves was generally not shared by their victims. Not talking to the authorities about criminals made sense. Refusing to talk to friends about the Ink didn’t. There was no way to answer the question of why no one was talking, though. She’d need to speak to Haman or Boss Marshall again to try to figure that out.

  Belamy shrugged. “Yes, they must be. I know some of these people quite well, and for most of them, this is the first time I’ve ever been stonewalled in a line of questioning. No matter; I’ll find them out eventually. Enough about my work; what about yours?” He pointed to the burlap poking out of the side of her pack. “I take it the book has been delivered?”

  “Yep.”

  He waited for her to elaborate, and when she didn’t, he asked, “And how’d it go?”

  “Fine.” She walked past him to the kitchen to prepare a plate for herself of something plain. She wasn’t really hungry, but it was a convenient excuse for trying to dodge this conversation.

  The old man followed her. “It went ‘fine’? What does that mean?”

  Skate opened cabinets at random, looking for a platter or dish to hold the bread and cheese
she wanted. “It means it went fine. She got the book, safe and sound.”

  “Did anyone see you?”

  “Where are the plates?”

  He pointed to one of the cabinets she hadn’t opened yet. “Skate, did anyone see you?”

  She pulled out a plate from the identified cabinet and set it on the table, which put it at just about eye level for her. She sighed before she answered. “Yes, Ossertine saw me.”

  The wizard’s eyes went wide. “Did she recognize you?”

  Skate rubbed her forehead and eyes. “Yeah. We talked.” She explained how she’d been caught, and the direction the conversation had taken regarding her situation with Belamy. He looked relieved that she’d been able to cover for him so easily.

  “She has no idea I was the one who told you to steal the book? Oh, that’s fantastic,” he said, opening the larder door and handing Skate a plate with a few light, fluffy bread rolls.

  “No, she thinks you found me out and sent me back with it.”

  “It all worked out then, didn’t it? Smart thinking, Skate, really. You can think on your feet, and that’s no small skill.”

  Skate smiled at the compliment, though that was purely for Belamy’s benefit. She did not feel like smiling as she thought of the conversation that had followed about honor and dignity. He doesn’t need to hear about that. Something about her smile must have come across as less than sincere, because Belamy’s smile faltered somewhat after a moment. “Is everything all right?” he asked, concern clear in his voice.

  “Sure, why wouldn’t it be?” To cover the awkward moment, she took a huge bite off of a roll.

  Belamy frowned but pressed no further. “As I said, a job well done. And that’s another week of room and board.”

  Skate nodded, not able to get around the bread in her mouth just yet.

  “More to come when you take care of Jack. A while to go before then, though. This business with his criminal acquaintances has cut into my reading time considerably. I’m sure I’ll be done with at least one of the books by the time your store of weeks runs out, though, so don’t fret about that. And if I’m wrong, there are always more books to steal, eh?”

  Skate smiled, a genuine expression this time, and shrugged. She was finally able to swallow. “Lesson went okay without you today.”

  “Oh? The blending of letters and the new sounds didn’t throw you?”

  “Nope. Try me.”

  He considered her for a moment and nodded. He left the desk and moved to the fireplace. “I don’t have any writing materials handy, so this will have to do.” With a roll of his hands and some rhythmic chanting she couldn’t follow, he spread his arms toward the fireplace.

  The flames streamed toward his hands like water poured from a jug. His hands worked in circles, packing the fire into a ball much like Skate and the other street kids sometimes did with snow to harass passersby. The result was charred wood smoldering in the hearth and a ball of orange flames in the wizard’s grasp, burning on nothing and not harming the old man at all.

  “Now then,” he said, pulling one hand free of the fire, “show me.” He drew in the air with the free hand, and behind the finger the flames trailed out the exact path he made. When he was done, there were two symbols she couldn’t read in tongues of orange and red.

  She tried to puzzle out the letters and failed. It was not that she was having trouble recognizing them, but that they were letters she had never seen at all. “I don’t know what those are.”

  He screwed his face up in confusion. “Skate, you know all your letters. I know for a fact you—oh,” he said with his eyes widening in understanding. He stepped back and swept his arm across the face of the unfamiliar letters. They spun in the air and then Skate understood, too: she’d been looking at them backwards.

  “C H. Ch.” The recitation was in the pattern they’d practiced, and Belamy nodded. He pulled his hand back, and the fire returned to the ball. He wrote again. “S T. St.” He nodded again, pulled back again. He wrote a third time. “A N. An.”

  Satisfied, Belamy pulled the fire back into his hands a final time, and then lobbed the whole ball back into the fireplace, where it latched back on to the wood and began devouring it once more. “Rattle is a reliable tutor in my absence, as expected,” he chuckled, wiping his hands against each other as if removing dust from them. She was surprised when dust actually did fall from them, gray and flaky chunks that wound their distracted way to the ground.

  “Ash,” he explained, seeing her confusion.

  “What’s the point of something like that?” Skate walked forward and toed the ash that had formed a tawdry little pile in front of Belamy. “Why would you know magic that lets you write in the air with fire? When would you need to do that?”

  “It’s got a number of uses,” he replied, placing his hands on his hips. “As just demonstrated, it can help when you’ve got no paper and ink directly handy.”

  “All right, but that’s really specific. That can’t have been the original use of it, right?”

  “No, I suppose not. It’s much more commonly used as a way to send messages over large distances. I made them very small, but writing with fire can be as large as you need it to be, so long as you’ve got the fire to write it all and can get to where you’re writing.” He pointed a finger toward the wall facing south. “The harbor master keeps a wizard on his payroll just for this spell. If he ever needs to send a message to ships at sea at night, that’s how he does it.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Skate said, starting to doubt the story. “I’ve lived here all my life, spent plenty of time by the docks.”

  “He hasn’t needed to do anything like that in years; it’s an emergency measure, not something to be done all the time. Anyway, you asked for the purpose of such magic, and now you have it. It’s enormously useful for sending a written message to groups across open spaces, like a harbor.”

  “Or a battlefield.”

  His eyebrows twitched upward. “Yes. It is useful in the chaotic din of battle to send messages to commanders quickly. That’s an odd observation to make on your part. Why bring it up?”

  Skate shrugged and avoided eye contact.

  “Oh, I see. Petre’s been telling tales again.” He walked past her, his gait stiffer than usual, and took his place again at the desk.

  “He said you were a war hero.”

  Belamy grimaced and shook his head, like a horse shaking off an irritating fly.

  “Is that why you know that magic?”

  He nodded once—a jerking, clipped motion. “Yes. As you pointed out, it’s very useful.” He was frowning slightly, and she wasn’t sure whether it was in concentration on the glass sphere or irritation with her.

  “He said you had a name in the war: Iron Wind.”

  He shook the invisible fly away again. “Petre certainly likes to talk,” he muttered, setting the enhancer spinning. “Skate, if you’re wanting to know about the war, I’d really rather not talk about it. It’s not a time I’m particularly fond of.”

  Not a monster, she thought for perhaps the dozenth time. No monster would shy from discussing his bloodshed. She might have expected relish in the telling, or perhaps callous indifference; this looked more like shame.

  “No, that’s okay,” Skate said, changing the subject. “But I did have a question about something else.”

  He raised his gaze from the empty glass ball. “Yes?”

  “What’s ‘AB’ mean?”

  Belamy mouthed the letters back in confusion, then twisted his face in a fury she’d never seen from him. “He talks too much, indeed!” He stood with such force that his chair skittered back to bump against one of the bookcases behind him.

  “Petre didn’t say anything!” She took a step back, afraid for the first time since the night she’d met this man. “I asked and he wouldn’t say anything, except I should leave it alone.”

  “He’s got some wisdom left, it would seem,” he growled. “Where did you hear
those in—those letters?”

  “They were carved in my desk upstairs.” His odd phrasing and his catch of himself did not escape her, but she wasn’t sure she should press him on the topic right now. His face had not softened any, but was no longer the boiling with anger as it had been; it had instead calcified into grim irritation. He moved out from behind his desk and stomped toward the door. “Where are you going?”

  “Out.” He slammed the door behind him, leaving Skate alone with a smear of ash and a crackling fire.

  Chapter 18

  In which someone says “I told you so,” clairvoyance is explored, and a snowball is thrown with some ice in it.

  The sound of flapping echoed down the stairway just after quiet settled in. Rattle came down carrying Petre on his stand, a leg through each of the three small iron loops around the base. Skate took the imprisoned man from it, and he immediately appeared, the smoke sweeping from his eyes faster than it ever had before.

  “I told you not to ask him about it.” His tone was more smug than actually reproachful. “Very specific about that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, waving her hand. “So you gonna explain what it means now?”

  “You’re joking, right? You saw how he responded even when you didn’t know anything, and you’re wanting me to make it worse by telling you what he doesn’t want you to know? Not going to happen.” Rattle went into the kitchen, leaving Petre and Skate alone. Petre watched it go, and his eyes lingered on the desk. “Huh,” he said, mildly interested in something he saw.

  “What?”

  “He left the ball out. And the enhancer’s still going.”

  This meant something to Petre, but not to Skate. “So?”

  “So,” he said, darting his eyes around, “if someone had a mind to, they could use his crystal ball and enhancer freely.”

  “Someone who knew magic, you mean.”

  “Well,” he said, half-nodding his head in consideration, “sort of. Using the ball is a kind of magic, but it’s a kind anyone can do. Just takes some concentration. Really easy to do with the enhancer rolling; it takes a word to get going, which Barrison did…and left.”