by Unknown
A lifetime of professional experience told Krunzle that a mud-brick building’s greatest weakness was in its roof. He went up the fire steps with practiced quiet, slipping past the noises of clattering pots, squalling babies, and arguing couples, all overlaid by what sounded like a semi-skilled musician singing a maudlin love song while endeavoring to accompany his cracked voice on an out-of-tune zither. At the top of the stairs, a wooden ladder led to the tenement’s flat roof. He scaled it and rolled silently onto a surface of dried mud overlying matted reeds.
The zither player was up there, somewhere. But the shadows were thick enough. Krunzle rose to a crouch and made his way to the lip of the roof where it overlooked the mud-brick house, paused to listen for any sounds that indicated someone might be enjoying the upper air—though he was fairly sure the zither-player’s amelodic strains would have driven indoors all but the profoundly deaf. He slowly raised his head above the low parapet until he could see down. The flat space was empty and unlit. Krunzle readied a grapnel and its knotted cord.
Moments later, he was crouched in darkness. He had chosen one of the corners of the roof above the front wall. He knew that rooms at the rear of a building were more likely to contain servants busy at their tasks; front rooms were for the quality, who more frequently left them empty while they sashayed out to enjoy privileges denied their underlings.
He took a small, sharp blade from his toolkit and applied its point to the roof’s packed-earth surface. The desiccated soil broke into powdery flakes, and soon he had exposed a layer of dried reeds laid over a network of thin laths of wood. He removed a patch of reeds and beneath it saw the pale gleam of plaster.
New tools came to his hands. He drilled a tiny hole through the plaster, inserted a thin tube fitted with an eyepiece, and a moment later he was seeing a fly’s eye-view of a sitting room illuminated by brass lamps whose wicks were turned low. The decor tended toward erotically curved furnishings and draped swathes of faux-soie. The room was otherwise empty.
Busy seconds passed, then the thief was standing on the thick-pile carpet beneath a Krunzle-sized hole in the ceiling.
He padded silently to the closed door, opened it, and saw a corridor ending in a downward-leading staircase lit from below. He crept to the top of the stairs and listened, hearing a faint bustle of kitchen noises and beneath it a female voice half-raised in a monotonous chant.
He went down to the ground floor. The clatter of pots and pans grew louder; it came from somewhere to the rear of the building and down another level. The chanting also increased in volume; it originated from behind a pair of large, ornate doors that must lead into a room that took up all of the ground floor’s front. A wizard would have his study there, he thought. Or perhaps a witch.
Krunzle looked about. So far he had seen nothing worth stealing, even if this had been a burglary of his own devising. It was possible the apprentice’s eye, whatever it was, was in the front chamber, being chanted over right this minute. If not, it would be somewhere it could be kept safe and perhaps guarded. Again, experience told him that somewhere would probably be below ground, behind layers of defense.
He searched his memory for the image of the map Baalariot had provided. He recalled the symbols for more downward-leading steps and soon found them, through they were behind a double-locked door, strongly made, itself concealed behind a wall hanging that depicted a decidedly female person making an intimate though unlikely connection with a snake at least twice her length. Krunzle swiftly picked the locks, opened the door, and stepped through to a small landing above a set of narrow stone steps that circled down into darkness.
“So this is the apprentice’s eye.”
A rank smell wafted up from the stairwell. Krunzle didn’t recognize the odor, but some part of him decided that it was the kind of reek that ought to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. Cautiously, ears straining the silent darkness, he began to descend.
He counted fifty steps before his outstretched hand encountered a barrier: another door, also well locked. He again deployed his picks and with small effort soon had the way clear. Beyond was yet more darkness, but here the acrid stench was far stronger.
Krunzle put his head through the doorway and looked to either side. There was a dim glow, enough to show him that the door opened onto a vaulted subterranean passage. The source of the illumination was a thin bar of yellow light that he took to be a leak of lamplight from under a door at one end of the corridor. The other end was unlit and ended in a blank wall with what seemed to be a pool of stygian black at its foot. The pit, Krunzle thought. The stench came from there.
Krunzle went on silent feet to the source of the light. It was definitely another door, but there were no locks, only a thick iron bar that slid into a slot in the stone wall. And, his fingers told him, another peephole.
The thief peeped, and saw a windowless cell not much bigger than the one in which he had spent part of the day, but with a good carpet on the floor, a three-wick oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, a narrow cot (though with pillow and quilt), and a table and chair.
Seated on the chair, back turned to the door, was a small figure in a plain white shift—by the narrowness of the shoulders and the fineness of the golden, collar-length hair, either a young woman or an older child. She (or he) was concentrating on something in her (or his) lap.
Krunzle studied the scene, angling to look through the peephole into the corners of the room. He saw no intimations of danger. After one last visual sweep, he slid the latch and eased open the door.
The figure in the chair turned and looked up at him over one shoulder—a girl on the cusp of becoming a woman, startled in the act of reading poetry from the small book now visible in her grasp. Then surprise turned to excitement tinged with pleasure. “Did he send you,” she said, “to rescue me?”
Krunzle ignored the girl’s question. You will recognize it when you see it, Baalariot’s note had said. And now, as the thief looked at the slim, young figure, and especially at the chain around her neck, and most especially at the amulet that hung from it, he knew.
He stepped into the cell, reaching for the apprentice’s eye. It looked like nothing all that special. It was a palm-sized circle of some shiny metal, in the center of which was set a large green cabochon. Around the rim ran a legend carved in a script he could not read.
The young woman stood, her face showing alarm. “Wait!” she said.
“I can’t,” he said, and took hold of the gaudy thing, giving it a yank that expertly parted the chain. As he did so, two events occurred: the unfaceted green gem in the center turned red; and something cold and strong curled itself around one of his ankles and rapidly rose up his leg. The stench that had been so powerful in the corridor was overwhelming now.
Krunzle held tightly to the amulet—the geas made sure of that—at the same time as he tried to shake his leg free of whatever had seized it. He looked down and saw a broad, triangular head, clad in leprous white scales, its eyes filmed and blind but its forked tongue aflickering. The head connected to a thigh-thick, limbless body that continued to slither toward him along the floor of the corridor, even as it slid upward and addressed its huge strength to the task of squeezing air and life from his torso.
He toppled headlong onto the carpet as the great snake opened its fanged maw and hissed into his face.
“Oh dear,” said the girl in white.
Chapter Four: Caught
His first awareness was of the ache in his ribs, that swelled every time he took a breath. He cursed the pain, then thought, No, wait, I’m still breathing. That has to go on the positive side of the ledger. He took a deeper breath and groaned, his emotions mixed.
“Get up,” said a voice from somewhere above him: female, but without the girlish tone of the amulet-wearer. This was a mature contralto, with strong overtones of I am used to being obeyed. Krunzle opened his eyes and discovered he was lying on a thick carpet. He recognized the hole in the ceiling.
A toe nudg
ed his sore ribs—bruised, not broken, he deduced—and the voice said, “Up.”
From this vantage, she seemed extraordinarily tall, an impression that did not diminish when he struggled painfully to his feet and found that she still overtopped him so that he had to crane his neck to meet her eyes. In doing so he discovered that his neck was joining his ribs in registering a complaint of maltreatment. “Ow,” he said, rubbing it.
She looked to be of middle years, except for a face as smooth and ageless as magic could make it. She wore a complex headpiece of entwined snakes fashioned from some pale metal, inset with eyes of polished opal. Hair the same shade as that of the girl in the cell cascaded down onto a robe of pale silk, marked in red and black arcane symbols.
“I am Hortenza, and this is my house,” she said. “Name yourself.”
He did so, without resorting to sleights or subterfuges. She did not look the type to enjoy a frivolous puzzle.
She studied the thief. Krunzle had seen much the same expression on the faces of farmwives deciding which chicken would have its neck wrung for the stewpot. As if interested in the decor, he looked about him. The room was still windowless; there was one exit, besides the one he had made.
“Meddling in the affairs of spellcasters is rarely advisable.”
As if she could read his thoughts—and perhaps she could—she said, “The door is locked and the snake is on the roof. He likes to take sleeping birds. But he’d rather have you.”
Krunzle thought of several things he could say, but none of them seemed likely to profit him. He remained silent while she studied him some more. Meanwhile, the geas was urging him to escape, and to do so loudly. He focused mentally on the impossibility of doing so, and the urge quieted. Thanks to Cardimion for making it discriminating, he thought.
By now, his new captor seemed to have seen all there was to see. She said, “Baalariot sent you.”
Again, the thief saw nothing to be gained by speaking. After a moment, she said, “Answer.”
“I did not hear a question.”
Her hard face hardened further. She raised a finger whose nail tapered to a black lacquered point and pointed it at him. The air around him crackled and he smelled a whiff of sulfur, then he became aware that every bone in his body had suddenly become hot enough to scald the flesh that touched it. The pain lasted only moments, but the memory of it lingered after she lowered the digit.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “that question. Indeed, Baalariot sent me.”
“To steal Galathea.”
His eyebrows knitted themselves in confusion. “He called it something else.”
That brought him a quizzical look. She studied him again, then said, “What, exactly, did he call her?”
Krunzle blinked. Her? But he was in no position to offer a correction. “He called it an apprentice’s eye.”
As a young student, the thief had never risen to the top of any class in literature, history, or philosophy. His was a practical intelligence, best expressed through his hands, whose remarkable deftness at eye-bamboozling speed had won him his nickname. But his inability to recite even the best-known dates and precedents used to win him a certain look from the preceptors at the day school, a look that said, Can this oaf really be that much of a thimble-wit?
He was seeing that look again, on the face of the witch. Now she looked down at the carpet, where the amulet with the color-changing cabochon lay, the polished, uncut stone now green again. The snake’s coiled embrace must have pressed it to him. Indeed, he suspected the hard stone was responsible for one of the bruises on his ribs. The moment he noticed it, he involuntarily stooped and picked it up.
“That?” she said. “You want me to believe he sent you for that?”
The darkening expression on her face told Krunzle that he needed her to believe it, because it was the only explanation for his conduct that he was able to offer.
She was studying him even more closely now. “You’re not one of his coterie.”
“I have never been a joiner,” Krunzle said.
“A hireling?”
“Not as such.”
She picked up the amulet and held it to him. The green stone turned red. “Ah,” she said.
“Why does it do that?” he said.
“It is an apprentice wizard’s tool,” she said. “It perceives the energies involved in magic, and mostly serves to prevent the inexperienced from touching that which might do them harm. Right now, it tells me that you have been ensorcelled.”
She tilted her head in thought then added, “Which might make you dangerous. Don’t move.”
She went to a cupboard that stood against the wall, opened a door, and selected an object from several that were stored there. She brought it back and he saw that it was a tube carved from black crystal. She put it to her eye and inspected him through it.
“Ah, Baalariot,” she said. “Always the obvious. Of course it would be Cardimion’s Discriminating Geas.” She went back to the cupboard, chose other items from its contents and brought them to a table. Then she moved a brazier to the same part of the room and, with a mere motion of one hand, ignited its charcoal. She inspected the things she had arranged on the table—Krunzle saw scrimshawed ivory, an ebony rod, some old, time-worn knuckle bones, a scrap of pale hide tattooed with blue runes, a diminutive, oddly shaped skull—then she began to perform actions beyond his comprehension.
“If we were out in the street,” she said, touching this and elevating that, “I could scarcely make a dent. But I have an arrangement with Our Lady’s sanctuary next door, and that gives me access to a power that…” She broke off, concentrating while she tapped the black rod a precise three times on the top of the skull, then covered the bone with the tattooed skin. The air inside the room was suddenly charged with energy. Kunzle felt a crackling in his ears. Then she looked over at him and aimed the rod in his direction, saying, “This will probably hurt a little.”
Chapter Five: A Diversion
“Hurt a little?” Krunzle began. “Then perhaps we could—” He was unable to continue because his senses were now reporting that his insides and outsides had apparently changed places, and that his entire carcass had subsequently been consumed by a raging firestorm wrapped in a freezing blizzard, then crushed to the size of an ant—and not a very big ant, at that.
He was next conscious of screaming hoarsely, and then vision returned, along with the rest of his sensorium, which advised him that all his systems were now running normally—except for his fear-measuring capacity, which was strained to its limit. He closed his mouth and took in a long, shaky breath through his nostrils. “Please,” he said, “don’t do that again.”
“Typical,” said the woman. “I free you from a serious enchantment—a service, I want to point out, that I perform at no charge. And do I see gratitude? Do I hear so much as a murmur of thanks?”
“Thank you,” Krunzle murmured.
“Too late now,” she said, picking up the knucklebones and rolling them expertly between her palms. “Now let’s see what you can do for me in return.”
“I thought you said there was no charge.”
“Typical,” she said again, shaking her blonde locks. She threw the bones onto the tabletop, regarded them for a long moment, then said, “Apparently, the answer is: nothing. You’re not part of my future at all.”
Krunzle heaved a sigh of relief, until the thought occurred that the bones might be saying he was not part of anybody’s future. The demon worshipers next door could likely use a spare body. And he knew that some of the uses to which the bodies were put rendered them useless for any future employment.
She had picked up the amulet again. “So he sends in a thief to steal this piece of gimcrack, which the idiot Didmus gave to the equal idiotic Galathea as some sort of mawkish love-token.”
Krunzle dared to interrupt. “Who,” he said, “are Didmus and Galathea?”
Again, that look that his teachers used to give him, then she shook her head as one
does who accepts that some shortcomings must be borne with. She said, “Galathea is the girl from whom you took the apprentice’s eye. She is my daughter. And Baalariot’s, for that matter. Didmus is a half-grown half-wit of a sorcerer’s apprentice. They think they are in love.”
“You and Baalariot are married?” he said.
Again, the look of disbelief. “Men and women do not have to be married to produce children,” she said. “Baalariot wants to wed her to one of Hedvand’s courtiers. I have a better plan: she will train to become a priestess of Nocticula, cementing my relationship with the cult.”
“And Didmus,” the thief said, his mind beginning to form the picture into whose frame he had been pressed, “what does he want?”
She assumed an exasperated look. “What does any young man want?”
“He doesn’t happen,” Krunzle said, “to play the zither?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him.”
For all its academic shortfalls, Krunzle’s intellect was adept at plans and schemes, his own and others’. The pieces now fell into place. He debated for a moment as to whether he should voice his conclusions—but only for a moment. If he was right, events would shortly reveal the facts for themselves, and he would gain nothing by too late a revelation.
“I believe,” he said, “that I am here as a diversion.”
Hortenza’s brows consulted each other, then her eyes widened. She opened her mouth to speak, but at that moment a heavy concussion sounded from downstairs. The building shook, and shards of plaster sifted down from the hole in the corner of the ceiling.
The priestess recovered quickly. “The bastard!” she said, reaching for the ebony rod and striding to the door. She slammed it behind her and he heard the click of the lock. He gave her a moment to clear the corridor outside then went to kneel at the keyhole, reaching for his picks.
But, even in her hurry, Hortenza had been thinking a step ahead of him. The pick would not engage the tumblers. He went to the table, where she had left the apprentice’s eye, and brought it to bear on the door. The lock made the stone glow bright red.