The Shadowmage Trilogy (Twilight of Kerberos: The Shadowmage Books)

by Matthew Sprange

  The current ringleader of pickpockets, an old thief called Callum, shifted in his seat as he leaned across the table in an attempt to intimidate Grennar.

  “These are kids you are talking about,” he said with a growl. “We can’t keep track of them all, not all day. Anyway, there is enough money to go round in Ring Street, don’t think you beggars have a sole right to it.”

  Grennar leaned across the table to confront him, utterly unfazed by his demeanour. Lucius could not help be impressed once again by her nerve and he suppressed a smile.

  “Actually, Mr Callum,” she said, speaking slowly as if he were the child. “We do have the sole right, as agreed by myself and your guildmaster. Ring Street is ours, but for the few provisions that I know you are already aware of. As for tracking children, if we can manage to watch them, then I am sure any competent thief can do the same. If need be, I can provide you with names...’

  There were a few sniggers from the other senior thieves and Callum, seeing himself humiliated by a girl, and one outside of his guild at that, bristled.

  “Now look here, girl,” he said, beginning to stand.

  “Callum!” Wendric said, not raising his voice but putting enough iron in the word to demand attention. When he was sure he had the attention of Callum and the other thieves, he turned and nodded to Lucius, who continued.

  “You will be civil to our sister from the Beggars’ Guild, Callum. As I said earlier, we pay them a great deal of money for their services, and I consider them vital to our operations in this city. You will rein your kids in or, so help me, I will find someone who can. Is that clear?”

  For a second, Callum glared at Grennar who smiled back at him with all the sweet innocence of a young teenager. Then he threw up his hands in surrender and settled back in his seat.

  “Do all of you understand?” Wendric said to underscore his guildmaster’s words, glancing at each senior thief in turn. Again, mutters and nods of agreement.

  “I swear,” Lucius said, “if any of you don’t know the value of the beggars, you are not fit to be senior thieves. Not in this guild. Remember, Vos is a huge Empire and even they paid the penalty for dismissing the beggars.”

  A hand went up further down the table. Lucius nodded his acknowledgement to Brynn, a young man barely into his twenties who had been allowed within the ranks of senior thieves due to the creation of a gambling franchise throughout the docks. Lucius had already marked him as someone with potential but with a tendency to leap into situations without thinking too hard about them first.

  “What if I see a juicy cargo coming in from the sea? We can’t just let it go through, right?”

  Lucius sighed and rubbed his temples with a hand, exchanging a look with Wendric.

  “What did the guildmaster just say?” Wendric asked the young thief. “No new jobs that aren’t already on schedule. No one is going rogue while he is away. Is that understood?”

  Brynn nodded, but Lucius could see the reluctance.

  “Look at it this way,” Lucius said. “Imagine you are a big, fat, greedy merchant. You have a big shipment coming into the city, but you are worried about scurrilous thieves.”

  That image drew a snigger from Grennar, though she had the sense to stop when she noticed Callum glaring at her again.

  “You stock up on guards and informants among the dock workers... but nothing happens. Your cargo goes through, unmolested. So does the next one. Perhaps the thieves are no longer working the docks, eh? Or perhaps they are cowed at how powerful you are and won’t dare attack your shipments. So, you decide to maximise your profits and bring a really big cargo in, one brimming with gold.”

  “And that is when we strike,” said Brynn.

  “Indeed. My departure, as brief as it will be, is an opportunity we should not miss out on. Run our regular operations, but let any merchant, craftsman, soldier, or citizen live without us for a short while. They could do with the break, and when we come back we will find much richer pickings.”

  “Clever,” said Grennar, nodding her appreciation.

  “Thank you,” Lucius said. “Now, can I count on you all to watch one another to ensure no one does anything... ambitious?”

  “Oh, you can count on us,” Savis said, rubbing her hand through Brynn’s hair. She ignored his plaintive cry to leave him alone.

  “Any other business to raise?” Lucius asked, but no one stirred. “Good. Then I bid you a brief farewell, and entrust the guild to your command while I am gone. For goodness sake, please let there be a guild still here when I return.”

  LUCIUS OPENED THE door briskly, his mind full of plans and questions in equal measure as he strode into the small storage room.

  “Grennar, I was wondering – oh!”

  He stopped short suddenly. Grennar had her back to him as she folded her dark shift. She was completely naked.

  “Shut the door, Lucius, I would be happier if I don’t have the entire thieves’ guild gawking at me while I change.”

  “Umm, sorry,” he manage to stammer. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Don’t be simple, man, I am sure you have seen this all before. And we have things to discuss. But do close the door.”

  Lucius complied with her instruction, but was acutely aware he was confronted by a total lack of modesty. He also could not help but notice that, for a beggar, she was in extremely good shape, with pale skin completely free of blemishes – so far as he could tell at this distance.

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “Don’t you think I am just a little too young for you anyway?”

  He coughed, and dropped his eyes to the floor, wondering just why he was the one feeling uncomfortable.

  “I was hoping your people knew something about Adrianna that I might not – like why she is so keen to come with me to the Territories.”

  Grennar pursed her lips as she considered her answer.

  “Understand this, Lucius,” she said. “Turnitia is doing well right now. It may not be free, it may still have lords and masters from the outside world, but we are doing alright. Business is up for everyone, and no one walks the city scared they might be picked up by Vos soldiers on some trumped-up charge.”

  “This is true.”

  “Moreover, this is a very good time for us – not just the beggars, but your thieves and, I daresay, Adrianna’s Shadowmages too. It would take an act of monumental stupidity to rock this boat and ruin things for, well, everyone.”

  “What are you saying, Grennar?”

  She sighed. “I am saying, Lucius, that I cannot and will not take sides. Not between you and Adrianna. Placing myself alongside that woman would lose me ties to a guild that has always been traditionally close to us. Placing myself alongside you would just be suicide. No one crosses Adrianna.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I am not unsympathetic to the position I think you will find yourself in, in the weeks and months to come. And while I do not want to upset the cart our Triumvirate is perched upon, I also have no interest in seeing the Shadowmages become all powerful.”

  She sat down on a stool then grabbed a pair of well-worn boots, the sole of one flapping uselessly as she pulled it on. Then, Grennar looked up at him, giving Lucius her full attention.

  “She knows more than you think, Lucius. Much more. Her Shadowmages have been working hard in this city, trying to build their own information network. We are also aware of many scrolls and tomes being intercepted from merchants and wizards alike as they travel to this city.”

  “Do you know what she is really after?”

  Grennar shrugged. “Ultimately, she is after power. I think if she saw a chance to rule this city or, God forbid, an entire Empire, she would take it. However, I also think that is not her goal. Adrianna likes more cerebral pursuits. She wants to become the greatest practitioner of magic the world has ever seen. She wants to surpass the greatest achievements of the Old Races.”

  “So, she thinks that coming with me might be
an opportunity to gather, what, some ancient lore?”

  “I’ll go further than that, Lucius. I cannot prove it, as she has masked her activities well and, in any case, none of my beggars would have a clue what they were looking at if Adrianna laid down all her arcane plans in a diary. But I do think that not only is Adrianna fully conversant in where you are going, she also knows exactly what the two of you will find there.”

  He thought for a moment. When he spoke, it was with an increasing sense of unease.

  “The only logical conclusion to reach from what you have just said is that she knows what this artefact is, what it does, and that she intends to snatch it from me once we find it.”

  Having finished dressing for the street, Grennar looked nothing like the capable, confident guild leader of just a few moments ago, and could have blended in with any group of homeless children. She stood and crossed the room to face Lucius, putting a flat palm on his chest as a show of support.

  “Watch your back, Lucius, and be very careful,” she said. “You cannot trust anything Adrianna tells you about this object, and once you leave this city, I won’t be around to help you.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE FARM WAS a broken, wounded thing, left to bleed in the wilderness. Lucius directed their horses to give the homestead a wide berth, ignoring Adrianna’s quizzical glance.

  The farmhouse and two outbuildings had seen better days, with gaping holes in the tiled roofs letting the constant drizzle slowly rot them from the inside out. An attempt at using thin wooden boards to repair the worst of the deterioration in the farmhouse had been made, but it seem lacklustre, as if the inhabitants had not really cared whether they continued to live in misery or not, as if it were all they could expect in this world.

  Lucius knew the type well, having worked as a mercenary in the Anclas Territories for several years before his return to Turnitia. A broken wall surrounded the buildings, supplemented with a burnt out cart and other detritus. There could not be much more than a dozen family members and farmhands living there, and Lucius could well imagine them living in constant fear.

  Even now, he felt eyes upon him, squinting through darkened windows or gaps in the structure of the buildings, wondering whether he and Adrianna were a scouting party for brigands or some other wild, dangerous, adventuring type. When the brigands did come, as they inevitably would in the Territories of today, the farmer was left with a simple choice. He could raise arms – maybe an old family sword, but more likely a rake or hoe fashioned into a makeshift weapon – and fight against the land pirates and die against hopeless odds. Or, he could simply let the marauders take whatever they wanted – food, drink, clothing, perhaps let them borrow his wife and daughters... and then die when the winter came and the food stores were empty.

  It was a bleak existence that made Lucius feel sorry for the inhabitants of the farm, but he knew there were thousands more like them across the Territories. This was simply what happened when all vestiges of law and authority disappeared from the land. Even the rule of Vos was preferable to this life.

  Entry into the Anclas Territories had been marked, as if they had travelled to a new world. Years of war between Vos and Pontaine had ensured that, and even though the conflict had been resolved long ago, its wounds were still a blight on the contested land.

  They might travel for an entire morning over the rolling hills that covered most of the Territories without seeing anything more sinister than a circling crow but then they would clear a rise, and would be struck by a sight that seemed out of place, despite the history of the region.

  Mighty spells of destruction had been unleashed here, deep battle magic, the type of incantations requiring several wizards to properly fuel and that could blast half an army apart in one incandescent salvo, leaving nothing but ash. More minor spells left their mark with mere craters, some of them yards across, stones and boulders torn from the earth and hurled into the air lying scattered around them.

  One grey morning, they saw a valley filed with the dead, the scene of a vicious struggle between the two empires. Armour rusted where it had fallen decades before, the skeletal owners inside long since picked clean of flesh by animals and of valuables by more human scavengers. Lucius estimated more than a thousand men had met their end in that valley.

  At the centre of this open graveyard was the remnants of a massive machine, one that must have towered over the knights and soldiers as they fought. A single, large iron-shod wheel propped up the black structure, canting it at a high angle, while the main hull was rent in two, perhaps from a particularly devastating spell. Lucius did not recognise the device, but he had heard of huge war machines, propelled or pushed in battle by men or horses, large mobile fortresses that were used to crush the enemy and serve as elevated platforms for archers and other missile troops. Heavily armoured, such machines were no longer built by either Empire, each costing as much as a regular fort or small castle. He had little doubt they would appear once more if the peace between Vos and Pontaine ever broke down and war came back to the Territories.

  They passed several villages on their route, each as wretched as the farm and little better than a slum. Approaching another, Lucius saw it was little more than a line of tiny hovels lining a worn track, itself blocked by the corpse of a horse that looked as though it had been worked to death.

  “Why do these people not move?” Adrianna wondered. “We are little more than a week out of Turnitia, anyone could make the trip and find far better conditions in the city. Even the beggars live better than this!”

  “Not everyone can make the journey,” Lucius said. “We can protect ourselves if attacked, but what are these people to do? They are just as likely to be killed for their clothing by the people of the next village. Besides, this is all they have known. They saw the products of civilisation when the armies of Vos and Pontaine marched through their villages, trampled their crops and killed their livestock. It is possible they think this is as good as life gets if you are not a knight or some warlord.”

  He pulled out a map and studied it for a moment, looking up occasionally to gauge his whereabouts. The map was not complete, nor highly detailed, but it had allowed him to count off the number of villages he expected to pass on their journey. Beside him, Adrianna shifted uncomfortably in her saddle. She was no skilled rider, but had so far not complained about her discomfort.

  “How much further?” she asked.

  Lucius pursed his lips as he tried to judge the esoteric method of scaling the baron’s cartographer had used. “We will make Jakus Point... maybe this evening,” he said. “Give us a chance for a decent bed, should be cheap enough out here. Then we strike out in the morning. Apparently the Pontaine camp is east of Jakus Point, maybe northeast. About half a day’s ride.”

  “East, maybe northeast,” Adrianna stated with some irritation.

  He shrugged. “From what I understand, map-making is not as cut and dried as magic. It tends to be less than precise.”

  “Will anyone in this Jakus Point know about it?”

  “That is what I am hoping.”

  Folding the map away, he gently kicked his horse forward.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  JAKUS POINT MIGHT well have once been a central hub in the Anclas Territories, a common trading area for the surrounding villages and farms, with merchants passing through regularly from Pontaine and perhaps even Vos. If this had been so, it was before Lucius’ time.

  After the war, the small township could call itself as free and independent as Turnitia had been, or as Freiport was now, with no direct master. However, Lucius could see the entire town was enslaved to something far worse – poverty and neglect. Few outsiders came here and those that did were rarely welcomed by the locals.

  As Adrianna and Lucius rode slowly down the main street that was little more than a churned up track interspersed by cobbles, the few inhabitants they saw avoided all eye contact. Children crouched behind dilapidated wagons or ran behind buil
dings in an effort to hide, while men and women running errands quickened their pace as the horses drew nearer.

  “This place is filthy,” Adrianna said, wrinkling her scarred face in disgust, and Lucius suspected she referred to the people as much as the town itself.

  “This is how people here live. They have no other choice.”

  Adrianna did not answer, but he could almost feel her contempt, and began to think just how far removed the Shadowmage had become from other people. A large building down the end of the rough street caught his attention and he pointed it out.

  “There. I think we’ll find what we are looking for there.”

  Peering through the rain, Adrianna snorted. “Looks like a slop house.”

  Lucius shrugged. “It probably is, but it is the best accommodation we are likely to find here.”

  “I would almost prefer sleeping in the rain again.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said, with half a smile. “However, it is not just us I am thinking of. Any outsiders will also be there, likely as not.”

  “You think people come here intentionally?”

  “If the Pontaine camp is as close as the baron’s cartographer thinks it is, then I think we might well be in luck.”

  The inn had no name that Lucius could see as they approached, though the lantern light from the common room spilling onto the street seemed welcoming enough. Whatever Adrianna thought of the place, Lucius was glad to have any bed that included a roof over his head, no matter how many fleas and rats might share it with him. He had certainly spent nights in far worse places.

  A young boy hesitantly poked his head out of the low stable next to the tavern, taking a few steps towards them when Lucius smiled and held out a coin. They dismounted and let the stableboy lead their horses into the dry, and then followed suit, pushing open the front door of the inn.