The Stealers' War

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘Look at that beauty,’ said Nocks, wistfully, glancing towards the massive downed air machine. Much of its metallic fuselage had been cut away and taken inside the city. It did not resemble the crashed merchant carriers of Alexamir’s acquaintance – mostly wood, canvas and card-like struts burnt up after a crash. This Vandian craft was a black powder cannon compared to a sharpened stick. But still the Rodalians’ spirits struck her from the sky. Alexamir banished his doubts. But the spirits that protect this city have not yet faced the Prince of Thieves.

  ‘Have you ever seen so much metal sitting in one place,’ Nocks continued. ‘Just begging to be carried away?’

  The Weylander isn’t wrong. Such a fortune in metals wouldn’t have lasted a day out on the steppes if she had, Atamva willing, been brought down inside his homeland. Cassandra would have been saddened to see this sight, though. Her people’s mighty warship wrecked and stripped, covered by rice-eaters like carrion crows over a corpse. ‘The treasure I seek is worth more,’ said Alexamir as they climbed, the nomad trying not to stumble with the weight of the crate.

  ‘To your Krul of Kruls, perhaps,’ said Nocks.

  ‘I was speaking of the Golden Fox.’ Alexamir hadn’t told the scarfaced soldier that the woman he ventured here for was a Vandian princess. As far as Nocks was concerned, she was just a sick loved one. Alexamir was willing to trust the foreign fighter as far as their raids here coincided, but little more. For every good reason there is to tell the truth, there is a better reason to lie.

  ‘You can buy ladies cheaper by the hour,’ grunted Nocks.

  ‘Hearts bought with silver are filled with poison.’

  ‘Wasn’t their hearts I was talking of renting. Old Nocks, he’s forgotten all them curious wrinkles of your Nijumeti code. You’re as mule-headed as your pa. Well, if it’s sweeter for the theft of it, you’ll get your chance of a taste of that with me too.’

  ‘Before I help you, I will steal a copy of the Deb-rlung’rta.’ They climbed further away from the wreckage.

  ‘Just another old temple book? Damned if I ever understood you people.’

  ‘The power to call the rice-eaters’ spirits . . . who would not desire it?’

  ‘A fresh hurricane starts blowing up, I suggest heading for the nearest wind harbour before praying for storm’s end,’ grunted Nocks, amused at his own humour. ‘And if you want a healing for your true, true love, then I reckon buying medicines from a Rodalian doctor will see you a sight further than your shaman’s promises.’

  ‘If you had met our clan’s sorcerer, you would not speak with such disrespect. He is a powerful man.’

  ‘Well, it’s your game as much it is mine, “Norbu”.’

  How Alexamir would be glad to have Norbu disappear from the face of the world forever. The rice-eater from the Mask Heights had started as a tale, a fiction of his clan’s sorcerer, and would end as one too. ‘This game is a deadly one.’

  ‘You’re preaching to the choir. I fought at Midsburg,’ said Nocks. ‘Them Vandians broke the city like an egg against an iron anvil. I reckon when the Imperium knows what to make of their bad luck here, they’ll be back with a vengeance. You and me better both be gone by then. After they start raising siege works around HadraHareer, one Weylander and a half-caste Rodalian at the end of a gun sight will look much the same as the next.’

  And when Temmell’s enchantment over my features fade, there will be a Nijumet inside the city for the rice-eaters to hang as a spy. No, as far as Alexamir was concerned, any siege should start after he had escaped the rice-eaters’ capital. Not trapping him inside. Following that happy event, the Golden Fox’s people could damage Hadra-Hareer as much as made them happy. Lady Cassandra had claimed her empire would come looking for her. And here her people were. Atamva, hear me, let them travel no further north. Do not take the Golden Fox from me before I can prove myself to her. This is my time. This is my prize. In truth, the sight of the ruined ship on the slopes filled him with dread. Alexamir hadn’t witnessed the raid’s fighting first-hand. The city bells sounding an attack had barely finished ringing when the warning of a storm followed. But the wealth of the crash below spoke of how little a dirt-poor nomad like him had to offer the Golden Fox compared to her homeland’s riches. How does Lady Cassandra see me? A fool? A savage? A diversion? This is my one and only chance to prove to her what the Prince of Thieves is capable of. To dazzle her with my cunning and claim her heart. The gods would never have carried me so far if they meant for me to fail, surely?

  Nocks stopped and they lowered the crate to the rock for the Weylander to examine his map. Ahead of them, between a ring of boulders, a brick stack as tall as a man’s height jutted out from the slope. One of thousands of similar chimneys dotting the twin mountains and canyon tops. ‘Reckon this is the right vent.’

  There was an irony in the fact Norbu had been bound for HadraHareer to repair and maintain the city’s air vents, and here was Alexamir about to attempt the same dangerous trade. You enjoy your jokes, Atamva. I shall make you roar with amusement by stealing your rivals’ power. Just see me safely through their dirty squeeze holes. Alexamir rummaged inside the crate. Below the tools needed for breaking apart the Vandian ship were rods and keys designed to remove the iron grates blocking his way.

  ‘You get stuck down there, don’t be counting on me to get you out. Best you starve yourself thin enough to climb free.’

  ‘I will shake their mountain apart with my bare hands sooner than fail here,’ said Alexamir. This Weylander is frightened of shadows in a shaft. No wonder Nocks departed the lands over the sea and left the battles for my father to enjoy. This is what happens to a people who only have a solitary god to protect them. It’s a miracle Nocks ever summoned up the courage to raid Hadra-Hareer for this saddle-wife he speaks of with such lust. ‘Keep your watch until I return.’

  ‘Don’t tarry too long, boy,’ urged Nocks. ‘These slopes are going to get mighty empty of wreckers when the stars come out. The passes in our pockets will get examined real hard if we’re the last team back inside.’

  ‘You worry too much, old man,’ said Alexamir. And what I am about to steal will not be found by any guards’ search. Not unless they can read minds. He strapped the tools around his waist, belted a rucksack of equipment around his chest and climbed into the stack, working his way to the vent’s entrance. There, he knelt, brushed debris off the iron grille. When it was clear, he moved sideways to the narrow ledge before using his keys to open the gate’s lock. His keys fitted as well as the Hellenise agents had promised.

  ‘If it was me,’ opined Nocks from above, ‘I’d just go in the temple’s front way and kill a few monks until they brought me out this holy relic you’re fixing on stealing.’

  ‘Atamva favours the hard ride,’ said Alexamir. And the Weylander was unaware the monks must never know their ancient enemy possessed the Deb-rlung’rta’s contents. Scattering the corpses of guards and monks around the temple would give even the dimmest Rodalian pause for thought. The hard ride, indeed. Alexamir uncoiled the ropes he had brought with him. He found a rusty iron pin in the shaft’s wall and secured his line, then began to scramble down.

  ‘Like a ferret after the hares,’ said Nocks from above. Alexamir didn’t reply. Who knows how far the echoes will travel or where they might end up. He carried a couple of torch wands tucked behind his belt. Raising the covers, he activated the sunstones embedded along their length. Expensive, but a tar-soaked wooden torch would quickly be blown out by the flow of air down below.

  Alexamir continued his descent, out of sight and sound of his untrustworthy partner. He tried not to shiver as he penetrated the chill darkness. Nobody born to the open hills and endless steppes of the north felt comfortable in a city’s confines, let alone these mountain tombs carved out by the rice-eaters. For Alexamir, shimmying down the Rodalians’ shafts and ventilation chimneys was uncomfortable, excruciating work. Dangerous if I had been trained for the trade. Even more dangerous if the nomad
hadn’t committed to memory every trap set to murder unwanted visitors. The little guild that maintained Hadra-Hareer’s air passages had the art of more than clearing cave-ins and rock falls. They took a pride in their hidden razor lines, pressure plates activating poisoned darts, fire blasts, sand drownings, skull-crushing stone pendulums and switch-stone plunges down into staked pits. Of course, the people who had sold this information on to the Hellenise spies might have been lying or omitted a few traps, trusting the thief at the other end of the transaction would come to a bad end. But they reckoned without Alexamir Arinnbold. The Prince of Thieves could avoid and disarm every trap without their help. This way is faster, but I will not rely on the dogs’ map. I rely on my wits and my skill. This is how the gods tested him. Tested his resolve and his passion for the Golden Fox.

  While the passage started out glacial from the cold mountain air outside, it soon grew warmer with air carried from the subterranean city. Climbing down this shaft was much like descending into a well, only enough torchlight to see the walls by his side, never what lay below or above. The mirrored shafts that carried daylight into HadraHareer ran on a parallel labyrinth too narrow for a man to enter. The nomad kept on descending. Slow work when a single slip would prove fatal. The head of his line had a carabiner clip he carefully attached to iron pins driven into the shaft by the tunnel’s builders. Alexamir’s line had been woven around a cord. A hard yank on the cord’s handle opened the clip and sent the rope tumbling down towards him to fix to the next pin. Climbing back up these shafts will be harder work. He would need to whirl the rope around like a lasso, catching the open clip around every pin above him. Climbing, and then repeating the manoeuvre. If only that cowardly Weylander the gods sent me was courageous enough to venture down here with me. Climbing in pairs is easier. Any fool knows this. He reached a second grille with only darkness and more shaft below the metal barrier. Two horizontal air passages fed off the shaft. Alexamir’s prize lay somewhere below, but he had no intention of opening this particular gate with his tools. Doing so would open a hidden door in the well; a door leading to a ramp loaded with a very large and heavy granite ball designed to leave his body smeared across the chimney’s distant floor. He gathered up his climbing gear and selected the passage with a stone carving of a three-eyed gargoyle above its entrance, falling to his hands and knees to crawl through the inlet. The other tunnel has only traps to offer the Prince of Thieves.

  He followed the maze of claustrophobic horizontal tunnels for half an hour, needlessly complex, avoiding the trapped tunnels and dead ends, opening each gate and grille he encountered. Every now and then he came across another shaft to descend, unfurling his lines and climbing gear. Then more cramped horizontal passages. Alexamir experienced a moment’s hesitation when a circular chamber with six tunnels failed to materialize, but he resolved to push on. As uncomfortable as crawling through these tight passages was for one who lived for the open skies, crawling backwards would be worse. He found a junction with two passages where both marker gargoyles had crumbled away. I thought this lay behind me? Left then, I think. He crawled ahead and, after ten minutes of leaden progress, finally arrived inside the six-tunnel junction. Enough space inside to stand and stretch his cramped bones and muscles.

  Alexamir lifted a torch out to examine the features of the wind spirits carved above each tunnel. As he did so, he heard a challenge echo out of the fourth passage. Low and distant, but clearly discernible.

  ‘Who is there?’ called the voice.

  A vent-man! Atamva preserve me. Alexamir said nothing, hoping the worker would think him a rat scurrying about the vents.

  ‘I know every sound inside here,’ echoed the voice again. ‘Give me no answer and you’ll hear mine fast enough.’ There was a low click in the distance. The sound of a pistol being cocked. Alexamir touched the knife on his belt. He would have brought his sword along, but it hardly fitted his false tale of a couple of wreckers out stripping the Vandian ship.

  Alexamir found the inlet he wanted and scrambled into the narrow passage, hoping to put enough distance between him and the ventman to throw the worker. Keep on heading for their temple. Perhaps the vent-man will lose my trail. Alexamir made as many tight turns as he could inside, scaling the horizontal chimneys by hand without ropework to slow him down. I have climbed the heights of Rodal to raid this forsaken land. What are a few chimneys to a man such as me? The nomad covered up all but one of his torches, keeping the illumination so low he could barely see where he was going himself, relying solely on his memory and questing fingers to guide him. Is that a glow behind me? He turned into a horizontal passage so narrow he could barely squeeze through. I don’t think this is marked on the map? Alexamir had memorized an area of the passages so narrow only the youngest, smallest vent-men could enter. But it is far from here, surely? Unless Alexamir was lost, disoriented by the chase. No, my memory is as strong as sword steel. I can navigate the steppes at night and locate the same blade of grass I made camp on the previous year. His tunnel grew narrower still. The only way Alexamir would pass through here was by staying until he starved himself thin, just like the Weylander had suggested. I have to turn back. He reversed course, crawling and backing up until he came to a junction whose space he could use to turn around. This was the fourth junction he had passed. Yes, I know where I am. But so did the vent-man. He spotted a dim glow from a torch identical to those he carried. Alexamir turned into the safety of the passage, out of the way of a pistol shot.

  ‘It’s Norbu,’ called Alexamir. ‘One of the new apprentices.’

  A laugh from the darkness. ‘There’s thirty apprentices currently on the rolls and not one of them with that name, thief.’

  Alexamir cursed.

  ‘Tell me then “apprentice”, how large is the bounty our guild pays for every dead intruder dragged out of the shafts?’

  ‘Two nights in your wife’s bed,’ laughed Alexamir. ‘Or three with your hag of a mother biting the pillow.’

  ‘So, perhaps not a thief, but a beggarly bard with a talent for jokes? Were you chased up here from a bedroom by some maid’s jealous husband? In either event, the money your corpse will earn me remains the same.’

  Alexamir groaned. The nomad crawled as fast as he could down the tunnel. This tunnel felt damp below his hands and he could hear the drip-drop of water ahead. There would be another shaft ahead, if his remembrance of the map was correct. And here it is. Just where it should be. The nomad remembered the shameful time he had fought an older boy from the clan, wrestling with him in the rapids of a river. How the lout had held young Alexamir’s head under the water with his superior strength. How alien and strange the battle had seemed, water streaming around them, threatening to drag him under and pull him away. His aunt had smacked him around the head when she’d heard how badly he had lost. ‘He is the son of a fish netter!’ Nonna swore at him. ‘He knows how to swim and knows that you do not. He goaded you into wrestling by the riverbank so he could throw you in. Always choose your own field of battle, or you choose only your defeat. You must first fight using your brain before you fight using your hands.’

  This is my foe’s field, but I am no boy now.

  A crack sounded, followed by a ricochet of a round on the wall behind him. Missed! Alexamir gave the vent-man no further banter to use to help direct his fire. The nomad secured his line to the well’s highest iron pin. A second, louder shot exploded behind him. The vent-man hadn’t aimed into the correct side-passage yet, but that third killing shot was coming, Alexamir could feel it. He swung his hands on to the lip of the well and tentatively entered the shaft, just narrow enough to place his back against the wall and walk its walls down without the time-consuming business of line and clip. Alexamir hadn’t scaled more than a tenth of the deep well’s drop when the vent-man’s fierce victory whoop sounded above him. The nomad grabbed the end of the climbing line dangling before him, but the clip and line method of descent was even slower than spine-walking it. The riceeater leane
d over the well’s mouth and aimed his pistol down towards a target a blind man wouldn’t fail to hit.

  ‘You’ve made me work for this one,’ the vent-man called triumphantly. Alexamir sensed the gun’s sight focusing on the top of his skull. ‘Sing me a song as you fall!’

  SIX

  THE VANDIAN MISSION

  Cassandra sat in a chair, the wooden table in front of her covered by a pile of Temmell’s books. Histories, for the most part. The particular tome in front of her was the first volume in a series titled The Rise of Empire, penned by a long-dead scholar called Cinneide Tarson. Vandia’s achievements weren’t mentioned once, however. This book was all about the empire north of the steppes, Persdad. That it had risen at all seemed to be attributed by Cinneide to the nomads of the steppes, who had burnt their path through the nations preceding Persdad, hastening its formation much like the scars on a wound, sealing the Nijumeti into the territory they currently roamed. Cassandra had passed the ruins of city-states sacked by the riders out on the grasslands. Little more than boulder-strewn hills now, shadows in the ground marking once-mighty citadels. At least the history texts are of some interest.

  Temmell possessed a great many tomes, but much of the goldenskinned sorcerer’s library was of a wholly practical nature. Books on botany and anatomy, flight and engineering, metallurgy and chemistry, a variety of atlases; albeit of the crude, inaccurate variety that would have disgraced any Guild of Librarians’ hold, let alone the Imperial Ordnance Survey Service’s charts. Everything the trickster once needed to make a living as a travelling peddler and medicine man. Temmell had certainly landed on his feet among the nomads, the clans duped into believing the self-proclaimed sorcerer’s claims about his powers and talents. Except there’s the glamour that makes Alexamir appear Rodalian. A powerfully strange sort of hypnotism. How does Temmell manage that? And there is my broken spine. The bizarre nature of Cassandra’s healing. Ten sparse minutes of glorious mobility every morning, fully healed, sauntering and then sprinting before she collapsed pole-axed towards the grass. Her legs useless again, as dead as if both limbs had been amputated following her flying wing crash. Everything I was taught about surgery and anatomy by Doctor Horvak says my temporary recovery should be impossible. I am either healed or I am wounded. Not flipped between the two states like a tossed coin each morning.