He thought at first he could not simply go back down the stairwell and throw something at it; the sound of the trap going off might alert the wizard. But he remembered the trap at the door. It had been silent. The wizard did not want to be disturbed by anything as trivial as the sound of a thief’s body exploding into bloody little chunks of flesh and bone and brain. Still, he did not want to do it. Professional pride made him hesitate. Set off a trap rather than avoid or disarm it? That just was not something a great thief did. And Alex was a great thief. He knew it; the world would one day agree. But how many thieves could disarm a magical trap? Only a wizard could do that, maybe. Was it cheating to admit to what you couldn’t do? No! It was practical. Anyway, he liked cheating. Why should a thief care about cheating? At the end of the day, or more usually night, what mattered was the size of the sack of loot you carried away. But still, it would be an inelegant solution to the problem. As an artist, or scoundrel, which is much the same thing, he hated inelegant solutions.
He went back to the door and stepped outside, looking up. He had left the rope and grappling hook hanging at the gate. He had his claws, for more challenging surfaces. If the wall could be scaled, and what wall could not? then he could get in through a window higher up. But the only window he could see was the one at the top. Come to think of it, he had never seen any window but that one, no matter where he had seen the tower from, no matter from what angle. And from that window even now oozed the same threatening sorcerous light. There was no way he was going to go through that. All he wanted to do was break into the lower levels of the tower, find some loot, and get out of there before the wizard could discover him and redecorate by making a mural of his gizzards.
He shrugged, stepped back inside, and took the pack off his back. It could not be anything too heavy, or when it hit the stair it would make a noise itself, whatever the trap did. He took out a pair of ladies’ gloves he had filched from a glove maker’s stall. He had thought Rose might like them, but business comes first. Even if he told her, as a pragmatic whore she would understand. He rolled the gloves together and twisted the fingers around the whole to tie the bundle into a neat compact mass, then he walked back up to the first lantern. He was now a bit further from the trap in the stairwell than the brambles he had landed in earlier had been from the trap at the door. He threw the gloves so they landed right on the rune.
Even shielded by the curvature of the stairwell the blast launched him back down the stairwell, deafening him with the roar of sudden fire. His reflexes kicked in as he hit the stone and he rolled, awkwardly because he was travelling sideways and stairs are not a good surface to roll down. He ended up on his feet but was on fire and dropped back down to the stairs to roll about some more, putting it out. He had been wrong expecting it to be the same trap. It had not been silent. It had not been friendly. He did not generally get personal with his unsuspecting patrons, but he would like to thump this wizard. Maybe when he was asleep, then run away before he could wake up and throw a fireball at his arse. That had not been a pleasant experience. Still, he was alive, which was always a special pleasure to discover. A little bit singed, a little bit battered, like a fish fried in oil by a talentless cook. But this fish wasn’t going to be anybody’s meal. This fish was pissed off.
He breathed until he calmed down. Anger was not professional. It marred your judgement, made you do something stupid, though what could be more stupid than breaking into a wizard’s tower and deliberately setting off his fiery trap of thief death was hard to say. Alex’s ears were ringing, but that soon subsided, and the tower was silent. He waited for footsteps, but none came. Probably the wizard thought that whoever set off the trap was dead. Anyone but Alex probably would be. Or maybe he was so busy with his dark magic that he did not notice the sound. Or maybe there was nobody here, and the wizard was long dead, leaving nothing but rumours to scare little children and traps to squash, or roast or disembowel or whatever else, any thief who did not respect the power of the place. But if the wizard was dead, where did that oozing darkness come from?
He continued up the stairs when he was sure the fireball trap was not still alive. The rune had completely vanished and did not reappear as he approached. Knowing what to look for now he could move more quickly, though he cautioned himself not to become too complacent. There were doorways without doors leading off into the central well of the tower, and he checked each of these. The first room was empty except for a broken crate and barrel hoops without a barrel to hold together. No rats, no mice, no cockroaches, not even a spider. The second was a storeroom with sacks of grain, barrels of beer, amphorae of wine or olive oil, rolled up rugs and tapestries, a broom and mop and bucket, and a chest.
He examined the chest for traps. Even if it was owned by a wizard, people bought chests with mechanical traps built into their locks. This had none that Alex could find. He searched carefully for any runes which might indicate a magical trap, but could find none. He did not feel anything strange as he had approaching the last trap, or before the one at the door had struck. The lock was relatively easy to pick. He opened it, and found inside a velvet cover, underneath which were a number of small phials. He picked up one, and took it back to the stairwell, where another lantern glowed with its magical light. The phial was green glass, no bigger than his thumb, with a tiny cork. A little label had been scrawled on, but the writing was illegible. You’d think wizards would write neatly, he thought. Perhaps they only cared about the neatness of their runes, like the ones they wrote to murder thieves. He went back to the chest. Should he take some of the phials? He was not sure whether he would be able to sell them. Rose was a pretty good fence, but who would buy something without even knowing what it was? He noticed that the flasks were too elevated in the chest, so he started removing them. One would not budge. He pushed it forward, sideways, pressed down, and heard a click. He removed the rest of the phials and opened the secret compartment.
Inside was a large transparent phial. Its contents sparkled. It was much larger than any of the others. It was dark in the room though; Alex’s shadow blocked the light from the stairwell; what light could be causing that? He picked up the phial and took it out to the mage-light. There was no label on the outside. It was clear glass, or equally transparent crystal. Inside was a clear liquid, or seemed to be. When he shook it gently it felt no different than had it been empty, the contents as light as air, but he could see the liquid splashing about, and when he returned to the dark storeroom it still sparkled, like sunlight on a waterfall. He slid it into his pack.
He continued up the tower and came to another doorway, but this one had a door. It was not locked or trapped, and when he opened it a light in the ceiling cast the scene within into sharp, unnatural relief. In the room was a small bed, with chains extending in from each of the posts to a partly fleshed and still bloody skeleton. There was blood on the floor, brown, almost black, and congealed in patches like curdled milk, and runes scrawled in blood on the walls. The skull was not attached to the chained skeleton; eyeless it stared at him from the nearest bedpost, its mouth hanging open, bloody flesh still dangling, rotting, from the bone.
Who had died here? So many people disappeared in Thedra that it was hard to know what happened to most of them. If a wizard wanted to murder someone in a bloody ritual there were plenty of willing thugs in North Bank, and not a few elsewhere in the city, to kidnap and sell the victim. No one asked questions about the missing in North Bank, and few cared about the denizens of the southern quarters. Perhaps it was different for the children of rich merchants or guild masters in north east Thedra, or of the lords in the north western quarter, though money could more easily buy death than life anywhere in Thedra. As far as Alex could tell, this city was sick to the core. Corrupt and violent, with sufficient order for the powerful and rich in their palaces and guildhalls, and the reality of desperation for the many others, the tinkers, itinerant journeymen and day labourers, actors, thieves, beggars and whores. Were it not for his skills
and the whores who had taught him to pick the pockets of naked customers when he was a boy he would not have survived long after his father had died, fighting over the whore who called herself his wife but not Alex her son. Despite Alex’s skills he would probably die sooner rather than later, his body mouldering on the refuse heap, remembered with satisfaction only by the kites who fed on his flesh. So he had seen too much death to be easily disturbed by it.
This was different though. The hairs prickled on the nape of his neck, but he did not dodge out of the way. There was no trap here. He felt rage and horror, but he could not tell whether the rage was another’s or his own. It rose like a tide of blood and like blood it clung to him. He tried to shake it off but could not. He felt rather than heard the scream. The eyeless sockets glared darkly into his heart, seeing into the places he dared not look himself. The jawbone hung open and the scream had the force of a fist, striking him at the centre of his being, threatening to freeze and shatter his bones.
He was not sure afterwards if it was terror or a physical force that drove him out, but the door slammed behind him without his touching it. He had encroached on an angry spirit’s domain, the place where their mortal form had died, sacrificed in ritual offering to one of the crueller gods or lords of the demonic planes. He felt a sickening revulsion. He had watched men die on the gallows, some never to be revived. He had seen the bodies of whores who had been bashed and raped to death then thrown in the gutter with no more respect than a you gave the contents of a chamber pot. When he was ten he had held his own father as the life bled out of the knife wound in his gut and the light faded from those drink addled eyes. He had learned to shrug off the brevity and horror of life with a joke and a laugh. But he could not shrug off this. This had to stop.
But what could he do? He was only a thief. The greatest thief in Thedra, he reminded himself. And what would be the greatest thing a thief could do in this city? Steal what this wizard valued most from right under his nose. He could do it. He was Alex Quickfingers. He would do it. He ignored the door into a comfortably furnished room with a bed, a table, crystal balls, magnificent tapestries hanging from the walls, plush Kemetese rugs on the flagstones, and several chests. There would be many valuables in there. He knew it and ignored it, driven on by a sudden anger, climbing higher and higher. He no longer searched for traps. There were worse fates than death. He had seen one below. Did another wait for him above?
And up he climbed, it seemed for an eternity. He had known the tower was high, but it seemed to him it could not be this high. He must have climbed for hours, days, months. And still he climbed. His legs ached, his eyes blurred. He was tired. How much further could the stairs extend? Then they ended. There was no door, only a blank wall. He sat down to rest, defeated. It did not seem possible, but it did not seem possible that the tower was so high. Should he go back down? Was this all an illusion, created by the wizard to frustrate thieves? Did the tower even exist at all? Was he in a dream. It seemed dreamlike, with the inevitability of failure despite all striving. As he looked down the stairwell it seemed he could see around the curve in the wall, and down, and down, an endless stairwell unwinding, descending into nothingness. He could not even be sure that it went down. Perhaps that was it. He had mistaken up for down. He should go down and that would be up. But none of this made sense. And would he see such things if he were not dreaming?
Perhaps if he lay down and slept he would wake up. Perhaps he would wake up holding Rose. Rose Redlips, or queen Rose, as he sometimes called her, because that was the young queen’s name. Redlips had always liked that. “If I’m a queen you have to do what I tell you,” she had said to him once. “I’m willing to do anything for a price,” he had replied. “That’s my line. And you have to kneel and kiss my hand.” “What, like this…or should I kiss you here?” “You’re a naughty courtier.” “Only obeying my queen.” He smiled. He would rest. He would kiss Rose the way she liked. She would be gracious and grant him entry to her rosy chambers.
“Aren’t you the greatest thief in Thedra?” the familiar voice asked. It startled him awake. He was lying down on the stairs, just above the door he had passed, that led into the furnished room. He turned to look up the stairwell, but the stairs still ended there, with nothing but a wall beyond. He thought of going back down to the wizard’s comfortable looking living quarters, but he hesitated. There was something more than stairs between that room and the top stair. Some kind of illusion, affecting his brain, as had the darkness of the path from the gate to the tower. It made a few steps look like an eternity of climbing. How did it do that? If he went back down he might not make it all the way back up, though it was only a few steps. As to how he would make it out of the tower and its environs when he had finished stealing all he could carry he did not like to think.
He examined the wall, and there was no trigger to open a secret door. His hand went straight through where his eyes told him the wall was. It was set back further. Another illusion. Was it magic or just clever construction? He looked at it from several angles but could not decide.
He stepped forward, into the passage. There was only one way to go, unless he was looking at yet another illusion, and given how many he had encountered to this point he could not dismiss the possibility. He turned, stepped forward, then turned again. The passage opened out and curved around the central well of the tower like the stairwell, but without rising. The outer and inner wall of the passage came together in a high arch. When he had walked nearly a full circuit he saw a light ahead, coming from the inner side of the passage, where there was a large open doorway, or rather a large archway through the stone with no door attached. The light oozing through it had the same characteristics as the light he had seen coming from the tower window when looking from outside. He still felt anger at what he had seen below. He also felt dread, guessing that what would lie beyond that doorway would be even worse, but knowing he could not go back. He was too curious. Or foolish, he corrected himself. He peered around the corner of the archway.
The room was circular, and larger than any of the others he had encountered, encompassing the entirety of the central well delineated by the outer circular passage, but in a funnel shape due to the arching of the passage wall. Where the funnel terminated with the arch the wall continued straight up, and roof beams arched across from the walls to support the conical roof, several ordinary house stories above the floor. Impractically high up, beyond the arching of the wall, was a shutter-less, small single window, too small and high to allow much light of sun or moon into the room. A ladder extended up the wall to a small wooden platform a few feet below the window.
A huge crystal hung suspended by, apparently, nothing more than the air in the centre of the chamber, pulsing with that unnatural, terrifying light. On the walls, from manacles, hung men and women and skeletons of indeterminate gender, in various stages of decay; some were only bones, though whole, held together by whatever ligaments and joints remained; others had the withered gaunt look of starvation, the way the peasants looked in the worst years of famine, dark sunken eyes, concave cheeks, ribs thrusting forward through skin that seemed to cling to them, but without the flies buzzing about their lips, or maggots polluting their flesh, for this was a place of death not life, however lowly or repulsive the life; yet others had the skin flayed from them, blood pooled and congealed at their feet, black, dead blood, the threads of exposed muscle on their limbs visible enough to count. He did not dare to look into the eyes of the victims. He felt their pain, as if their murders were happening now and he was of their number, hanging from the walls alongside them, horrified at his fate. He felt their rage also, like that of the spirit in the room below, only subdued, as if that had only been an experiment, in which the victim’s spirit had not been fully subordinated to the wizard’s will. Or rather the necromancer’s will, for that was clearly what this wizard was, murdering and using the life force of his victims in some way Alex did not understand. Alex felt the same revulsion he had down
below in the raging spirit’s room. He knew without knowing how that if he did look into the eyes of these victims he would be lost, trapped in the world of their torment, an accidental slave to the dark arts here practiced.
Instead of their eyes his eyes saw what they saw, or rather what their dead eyes were turned towards, for he knew without seeing that they all turned those eyes toward the crystal. Energy flowed from their eyes, their bodies twisted in their manacles, terrified, powerless to escape, even by death. The life that had been torn from them, that was somehow still being torn by them, by torture and this sick necromancy, flowed toward the crystal, making it pulse as if with the heartbeat of a cruel god. Alex understood without knowing how that the foul magic was fuelled by their death, by the suspension of their souls between this world and the next, trapped in a space between spaces, tortured in spirit as they had been in body, subjected to worse than indignity, worse than death, made to serve…, who? what terrible purpose? The lines of energy flowed, sickly, like light but shedding no radiance beyond those streams, crossed and recrossed in a tangled web, some loose strands of which flowed to the walls, flowed up them and across them and around them, and at the window flowed out. But most of the strands of that grotesque web flowed toward the huge suspended crystal, seeping into its heart. And from the base of the crystal, more strands emerged and flowed down.
Below the crystal, also suspended in air, was a sword. The streams of energy flowed to its pommel, which seemed to be missing a stone. The energy glowed and pulsed where that stone should be, like an illusory ruby, red as blood, blazing like fire. The red energy flowed from there through and along the hilt and further, in tendrils that tightly held the blade, and branched off into shifting, changing runes, which licked the air like fire. It was clearly not an ordinary sword; it was not made of iron or steel, nor even of the bronze Alex had seen some Pectish traders wearing in the great market; but of a bone white substance. It was the size and shape of a normal long-sword. And it trembled where it hung in the air, seeming to struggle against the constraint of that false ruby’s power. The tip was pointing between the breasts of a young woman who lay beneath.
Horn of the River God: Book I of The Song of Agmar Page 5