The White Gryphon v(mw-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  “How, when mages are so watched and bound by laws and priests?” Skan asked skeptically.

  She had no answer for that, but there was no reason why he couldn’t pursue that particular quarry for a moment. “I suppose that accidents could happen,” he mused aloud. “This is a large country. A child could be overlooked, or even run away from the school. Once he knew what he was, if he didn’t turn himself in—”

  “Then obviously he would already be a criminal,” Zhaneel stated.

  “A good point. Which would mean he would drift into the company of other criminals.” He nodded, and leaned a little more into her preening; she knew where all the really itchy spots were.

  “Which would mean that he would become a weapon in the hands of other criminals,” she replied. “I think the most likely is that this woman had a great enemy, and that the enemy decided to rid himself of the woman during a time when he was unlikely to be caught.”

  “During the Dance, you mean? But everyone knew we were going to be there, didn’t they? After all, it was supposed to be in our honor.”

  “That would be known to those in the Court itself. The fact that the murder looked as if a gryphon did it might actually only be a coincidence, if this was a crime of terrible and profound anger,” she pointed out. “And the murderer could simply be incredibly lucky, to have gotten into his victim’s suite, killed her, and gotten out without being seen. People do have that kind of luck, you know.” She glanced at him slyly. “Certainly, you did.”

  “Huhrrr.” He thought that over. It was possible. Not likely, but barely possible. “He’d have to be lucky and good. And if that’s the case, we’ll never catch him.”

  “But when nothing more happens, this will all evaporate in a few days,” Zhaneel pointed out. “After all, you could not have done the deed, even Palisar admits that. As unreliable as magic is, even if you had done this by magic, you would still have needed privacy and a great deal of time, and there would be traces. So, when nothing more is discovered, all the attention upon us will fade in importance in no more than a week, and they will remove their guards and precautions.” She glanced at him, with a sideways tilt of her head. “They may never find the murderer, but this will soon become only the interest of what passes for a policing force here.”

  Skan sighed, and nuzzled her tiny ear-tufts. “You’re right, of course,” he said as she craned her head upward to blow out the lamp. “In a few days their suspicion of us will be forgotten.”

  There. I have said what will comfort her. Why don’t I believe it myself?

  Five

  There was a familiar knock at the door, a little after dinnertime and just before Court. The servant spoke a sentence or two in hushed tones.

  “Don’t tell me,” Skandranon groaned, as the servant—once again—ushered in Leyuet and the Spears of the Law. This was the third time in six days. “Another murder.”

  Leyuet nodded grimly. His dark face was drawn and new worry-lines etched the corners of his mouth. And was there more gray in his hair? It seemed so. “Another murder. Another professed opponent of the treaty. This time, in a room locked and barred from within. It must be by magic. You were, of course, watched all afternoon during your sleep period?”

  Skan gestured broadly to indicate the pair of heavily-muscled spear-bearers, standing stoically in what passed for the corners of the room. “They never left my side, and they never slept.” After the second murder, a single watcher had not been deemed enough to insure Skandranon’s innocence by some parties, so a second Spear of the Law had been added to make certain that the first was not duped or slumbering. “I’ve either been here or in the garden. Just ask them.”

  Leyuet sighed, a look of defeat creeping over him. “I do not need to, for I know that they will confirm your words. But I also know that no magician of the Haighlei could have done this. As you rightly pointed out, to overcome all the disturbances in the use of magic would require more power than any of our priests or mages has available to him. Thus the mage must be foreign, with foreign ways of working magic.” He rubbed his eyes, a gesture that had become habitual over the past several days, as Leyuet clearly got less and less sleep. “No Haighlei would ever have committed murder so—so crudely, so impolitely, either.”

  Skan coughed to keep from choking with astonishment. Every time he thought he understood the Haighlei ways, someone said something that surprised him all over again. “You mean to tell me that there is a polite way to commit murder?” he blurted.

  Leyuet did not rise to the bait; he just shook his head. “It is just the Haighlei way. Even murder has a certain protocol, a set ritualistic aspect to it. For one thing, a murderer must accomplish certain tasks to be certain that the spirit of his victim has been purged from the earth. How else could the perpetrator feel satisfaction? But this conforms to nothing Haighlei. It is not random, but there is no pattern to it, either.”

  Zhaneel coughed politely, drawing Leyuet’s gaze toward her. “All the victims were women as well as being opposed to the alliance,” Zhaneel suggested delicately. “Could it be a case of a jilted lover? Someone who approached all three of the women about an assignation and was rebuffed—or someone who once had affairs with them and was cast off for another?”

  But Leyuet only shook his head again. “There would be even more of ritual in that case. No, this has no pattern, it was done by magic, and it is like nothing we have ever seen in the Empire.”

  As if some madman among the Haighlei could not act in a patternless fashion. “It is new, in other words,” Skan said flatly. “And since it is new, and we are new, therefore—”

  “Therefore I must summon you before the Emperor Shalaman once again,” Leyuet finished for him, spreading his hands wide. “It is the pattern.”

  Skan simply bowed to the inevitable. I have no choice, after all. I cannot even try to go back to White Gryphon now; they might decide that retreat was an admission of guilt and send an army. “Lead on,” he replied, gesturing with his foreclaw. “I am at your disposal.”

  And I only hope that isn’t a prophetic phrase! I would very much prefer not to be “disposed of!”

  Kanshin worked the little wooden ball up and around his fingers, from the index to the littlest finger and back again, in an exercise often used by street-entertainers who practiced sleight-of-hand and called it magic. He was no street-entertainer, however. He was a thief, and a master thief at that. More than any street-entertainer, he needed to keep his hands supple.

  His father would be horrified, if he still lived, to know what “trade” Kanshin now plied. Better to be a master thief than a master-ditchdigger. That was what Kanshin’s father had been, and his grandfather, and so on back for ten generations. That, so the priests and the gods decreed, was what Kanshin should have been.

  Kanshin sneered at them all, at his father for being a fool, at the priests for the “decrees” that duped so many. A pox upon priests and gods together. Assuming there even are any gods, which I doubt.

  He worked the ball around his left hand, across the palm, and up to the index finger again. My father believed in the gods and the priests, and we starved. I like my way better.

  Kanshin had more intelligence than to believe the pious rhetoric spewed out in regular, measured doses by the priests—especially when the only way to “be certain” of a better position in one’s next life was to bestow all of one’s wealth on the priests in this one. Not that a ditch-digger was going to acquire much wealth over the course of a lifetime, but Kanshin’s father had devoted every spare coin to the purchase of that new life, to the detriment and hardship of his own children.

  Perhaps that was why Kanshin had seen through the scheme by the time he was five. Hunger undermined manners. Polite people didn’t question.

  He glanced at the door to the guest room, thinking he had heard a sound, but it was nothing.

  Even our guest would certainly agree with me and not with my father. He might be insane, but he certainly isn‘t stup
id.

  He had hoped for a while that he might escape the endless cycle of backbreaking labor and poverty by being taken by the priests as a mage—but that never happened. No mage-craft and easy life for me. What a joke! If the gods really existed, they’d have arranged for me to have the powers of magic, wouldn’t they? If they had, I’d be one of their fat priests or fatter mages right now, and there would be many people still in the incarnations I cut short. But there were no gods, of course, and no priest had come to spirit Kanshin away to a better life. So, one day, when his father and mother and bawling, brawling siblings were all sleeping the sleep of the stupefied, he ran away. Away to the city, to the wicked, worldly city of Khimbata, and a chance for something better than blisters on his hands, a permanently bent back, and an early grave.

  Kanshin smiled with satisfaction at his own cleverness. So much for the gods, who sought to keep him in his place. For although he could not go higher in caste to win himself the fortune and luxury he craved—he could go lower.

  He transferred the ball to his right hand, and began the exercise all over again.

  He had started out as a beggar, self-apprenticed to one of the old hands of the trade, aged Jacony. Jacony had taught him everything; how to wrap his body tightly with bandages to look thinner, how to make his face pale and wan or even leprous, how to create sores from flour, water, and henna, how to bind his leg or arm to make it look as if he were an amputee. That was all right for a while, as long as he was young and could look convincingly starved and pathetic—and as long as the sores and deformations his master put on him were strictly cosmetic. But when the old man let drop the fact that he was considering actually removing a hand or a foot to make Kanshin into a “wounded lion hunter,” Kanshin decided that he’d better find another trade and another master.

  I can’t believe the old man thought I’d stand for that. I wasn’t that desperate! But—maybe he was. And missing a hand or afoot, I’d be a lot more conspicuous if I tried to run off—a lot more dependent on him, too, I suppose.

  It didn’t take him long to find a new master, now that he knew his way around the city. By that time, he was quite conversant with the covert underground of beggars, whores, and thieves that swarmed the soft underbelly of the lazy metropolis, like fleas living in the belly-fur of a fat, pampered lapdog. And he knew what he wanted, too.

  There were other masters ready to take me at that point. Lakshe, for instance. He hadn’t ever given Lakshe’s offer serious thought because he didn’t intend to become a boy-whore, although the trade paid well enough. He would have only one chance in ten of earning enough before he became too old to be called a “boy” anymore, and there wasn’t a lot of call for aging catamites.

  And the odds of becoming a procurer like Lakshe are even lower than earning enough to keep you for the rest of your life.

  He’d tried being a beggar, and he just looked too healthy, too strong; not all the paste-and-henna sores in the world would convince people he was really suffering, not unless he did undergo a self-amputation. I didn’t like begging, anyway. No chance for a fortune. And scraping out a living that way was hardly better than digging ditches.

  So—that left thief, an avocation he was already attracted to. He smiled as he worked the ball across his fingers. I’d even picked a pocket or two by then, so I was ready, ready to learn more.

  He was still young enough—just—to get a master. He chose one of the oldest thieves in the city, an alcoholic sot who lived on cadged drinks and a reputation many doubted. No one knew that Poldarn was more than a drunk and a liar. Kanshin had not doubted him after several of the stories had, on investigation, proven to be true. Nor had he doubted the man’s ability to teach him, if only Kanshin could keep him sober and alive long enough to do so.

  He had managed both, and now, if he was not the master-thief in the city, he was certainly among the masters. Poldarn did know every trick of the trade, from picking locks to climbing up walls with no more gear than ten strong fingers and toes. He was good, I’ll grant him that. Too bad drink addled his wits.

  And his master? Dead, now; collapsed back into the gutter as soon as Kanshin left him on his own. He couldn’t stay sober a day without me. He was drunk the day I set up on my own, and I never saw him sober after that. I don’t think he lived more than a fortnight after I left.

  Hardly a surprise; the man’s liver must have been the size of a goose. Either that—or he went back to drinking the same quantities of strong liquor that he had of weak, and the drink itself killed him. Small loss, to the world or to me. Where were the gods for him, when he was drinking himself into a stupor?

  The young thief had been good—and careful. He neither over- nor under-estimated his own abilities, and he always brought back the goods he’d been paid to take.

  Now Kanshin had all the things he had dreamed of; a house, slaves, fine foods to eat and wines to drink. The food was as good as that from the King’s table, and the wines were often better.

  The house was a grand affair, like the dream of a palace on the inside—granted, the house was in the heart of the Dakola District, but no one was stupid enough to try to rob Kanshin. The last fool who’d tried was still serving out his punishment, chained to a wall in Kanshin’s basement, digging a new cesspit. That was afar more effective deterrent than simply killing or maiming interlopers. After all, most of them, like Kanshin himself, had become thieves to avoid hard labor. When they found themselves little better than slaves, forced to wield shovels and scrub dirty dishes, they never tried to rob him a second time.

  He listened very carefully, and smiled when he heard the faint scrape of a shovel on dirt. Now there was one unhappy thief who would not be making a second visit to Kanshin.

  The house itself looked like every other filthy, rundown heap in the district—outside. Inside, it was crammed with every luxury that Kanshin could buy or steal. Perhaps service was a little slower than in the homes of the nobles—the slaves were hobbled with chains to hinder their escape—but Kanshin didn’t mind. In fact, he rather enjoyed seeing people who could probably boast higher birth than he, weighted down with iron and forced to obey his every whim. Slavery was not legal in this kingdom, but none of these people would dare to complain of their lot.

  Not all of this was due entirely to his own work, but it was due to his own cleverness.

  He set the ball aside, and began to run the same exercises using a coin. It was clever to find this perfect partner. It was clever to see his cleverness. Some eight or nine years ago, right after that strange winter when the priests all seemed to vanish for a time and there were rumors all over the city of magic gone horribly wrong, a young and comely stranger began walking the streets of the Dakola District. He claimed to be a mage, which all men knew to be impossible, since no mage—by definition a Law-Keeper—would ever frequent the haunts of the Law-Slayers. So all men laughed him to scorn when he told them this, and that he was looking for a thief to partner him in certain enterprises.

  No one believed him. They should have known that a story so preposterous had to be true.

  All men laughed at him but one—Kanshin, who bethought him that if a ditchdigger could slip through the Law to become a master-thief, could not a renegade mage slip through the Law as well to retain his magic? So he sought out this man, and discovered that what no one else would believe was nothing more nor less than the barest, leanest truth.

  He—the man called himself “Noyoki,” which meant “No one”—was a mage. And he had, by sheerest accident, slipped through the hands of the priests. At seventeen he had been discovered in some unsavory doing by the priests, his teachers—what, Kanshin never bothered to find out for true, although Noyoki said it had been because he used his powers to cheat at games of chance.

  That seems unlikely . . . but then again, these priests find cheating to be a sin only second to murder. I suppose it never occurs to them that they are the real cheats. They had, of course, decreed that he should have his powers remove
d, as always. No child caught misusing his powers could be allowed to retain them. For that matter, it was rumored that adult mages had been stripped of their powers for misuse.

  A useful rumor to circulate I suppose, if you are intent on preserving the illusion of the integrity of your adult mages.

  It was the mad magic that had saved Noyoki, that first wave of mad magic ten years ago that had lit up the night skies, created abortive and mismade creatures, muddled everything and turned the world of the mages upside-down. The priest that should have burned the magic out of his head had been struck down unconscious and died the following week without ever waking again, but Noyoki had the wit to feign the sickness that came when such a deed had been done. And with magic gone quite unpredictable, no one of the priests could tell that it had not been done.

  So he was sent back to his family in disgrace—powers intact, and lacking only a few months of training to be a full mage.