The Thief Who Wasn't There

by Michael McClung

  “What are you making now?”

  “Nothing, being unemployed at present.” He smiled.

  “What were you making before you became a man of infinite prospects?”

  “Two gold, six silver a month.”

  “Then I’ll pay you eight.”

  “Two-and-eight?”

  “No. Eight gold.”

  “That’s too much, Magus.”

  “Three gold for your services. Five for your hazard.” I scooped out a handful of marks from my pocket and counted out twenty. “Your first month in advance. The rest is for marketing. If you need more just tell me, but I’ll expect a weekly accounting.”

  “As you say, Magus.”

  “Any other questions, Master Marl?”

  He looked around. “Where’s the kitchen, then?”

  #

  The third caller was an old man pulling a hand cart. The steep incline had obviously worn him out. Inside the cart were two fishing nets, reeking of the sea. I foolishly hadn’t specified to Keel that they should be new.

  Live and learn.

  I tipped the man a couple of silver for his trouble, and brought the nets inside. If I hadn’t needed a bath and a change of clothes before that, I certainly did after. I dumped them on the floor and called out for Marl.

  “Aye, magus?” he replied, half-climbing the stairs and poking his head up from what I just knew he would refer to as the galley, if only to himself.

  “Any idea how to make these less rank and less slimy?”

  “Aye, I can do it, magus. Will you be needing them today?”

  “Tomorrow will serve.”

  “D’you need `em dry?”

  “No. Just not sopping wet.”

  “I’ll have `em ready by morning. But I’ll need to buy a tub. Among many, many other things.”

  “Noon tomorrow is soon enough.”

  There was another knock on the door.

  “Would you like me to get that, Magus?” asked Marl, and I shook my head.

  The furniture had arrived.

  Five beds, five smallish wardrobes, three silver-backed mirrors in wooden frames, another table and six straight-backed dining chairs, a couch whose pastel embroidery made my eyes want to bleed. Bedding. Linens. Chamber pots. Pitchers. A coat rack. A boot scraper. A porcelain flower vase. Pewter tankards and stamped iron utensils. Other things I didn’t bother to unpack and identify.

  Keel was having entirely too much fun.

  I had them dump it all there on the first floor. Keel could have fun setting it all up, as well.

  I tipped them well. Bellarius, being dishearteningly vertical for the most part, couldn’t boast much in the way of draft animals. Human toil was the norm.

  “D’you want me to get started on all that, Magus?” Marl asked me, face impassive. Here was a man unafraid of work.

  “No, let’s leave it for Keel, shall we? I asked him to buy a few necessities, for a few days. It looks like he cleared out every furnishing shop in the city.”

  “Well, to be fair magus, the shopkeepers are hurting. Like as not he paid a pittance for all these goods.”

  “Speaking of which, have you worked up a list of what you’ll need for the kitchen?”

  “Aye. I’ll be going marketing now, with your permission. And I’ll pick up my kit while I’m about it.”

  “Of course.”

  #

  By the time the next knock on the door came, I’d fashioned four burning tower badges. It was intricate work, and being practically frivolous, I rather enjoyed it. I rarely had a chance or a reason to be artistic with the Art. The exacting work required a level of concentration I was familiar enough with. The consequence of failure was nothing at all; a feeling I’d almost forgotten.

  I’d transformed a few marks into the shape of the Citadel, then tied and hardened tiny little flickering flames of green witchlight to come licking out of the windows. The effect was somewhat gaudy, and I’d need to renew each of them every few days. But I was pleased with the result.

  There was another knock, more insistent this time.

  I got up from the table, expecting Moc Mien. I went and opened the door.

  It wasn’t Moc Mien.

  The man at the door was a hulking brute with a scar that ran up his face and creased his shaved, tanned scalp. His eyes were a dirty green, small, and rather evil-looking. The teeth he exposed with his insincere smile were very, very white, though. He was dressed in woolen trousers and a leather jerkin that was too small to go all the way around his barrel chest. A silver amulet on a chain gleamed between his overdeveloped pectorals.

  “Did Keel send you?” I asked, thinking it was one of the mercenaries.

  “No. Gabul Steyner did.” And then he punched me in the face. Through the wards.

  Through the Telemarch’s wards.

  I staggered back, momentarily stunned, and he followed me in, as if the wards simply weren’t there. He punched me again, and I fell to the floor, ripping power from my well as I went down. With a flick of my wrist I released it, regretting for Marle’s sake the mess of blood and tissue that was about to coat the room.

  Nothing happened.

  “They all do that,” the man said, standing over me and waving his hands in a parody of a mage casting a spell. “And then they all get that stupid look on their faces when nothing happens.” He smiled. “I never get tired of that.”

  He picked me up by the front of my shirt and threw me onto the table. Everything on it went flying. I bounced once and tumbled to the floor. I landed hard and awkward on my side, with an awful wrench to my shoulder, one hand twisted behind my back.

  “Sorry I didn’t introduce myself. I’m the Magekiller.”

  He flung the table aside and squatted down, reaching for my neck.

  “What do you want?” I asked, and then his hands were squeezing the breath out of me. Hard.

  “I got what I want; Steyner’s money. Now he gets what he wants. You dead.”

  The muscles in my shoulder shrieked in abused protest as I pulled Amra’s knife out of my belt, where I kept it at the small of my back, and plunged it into the side of his neck.

  He fell back. I kept the knife. He put his huge hands to the wound, but it was pointless. I’d hit the artery. He looked at me in shock.

  I worked myself up to a squatting position, spat blood out of my lacerated mouth. A piece of tooth went with it.

  “They all get that stupid look on their faces, when a mage sticks steel in them instead of waving his arms around,” I panted, an ugly, oily hate possessing me. “You should have run me through with a sword as soon as I opened the door,” I continued, over his dying grunts. “But no, you had to make it personal. You had to dominate before you destroyed. You had to mix business and pleasure, you miserable, twisted shit.”

  Then I leaned over him and, with a violence-shaky hand, reached out and took the amulet from his neck, snapping the chain. Then I sat back.

  As soon as I’d touched the thing, I’d become completely cut off from my well. I knew what it was. For whoever touched the thing, and for as long as they touched it, magic simply didn’t exist. I’d heard of such things before, but had never actually seen one. They were rare artifacts even before the Cataclysm, and completely impossible to fabricate nowadays. How this murderous thug had gotten hold of one was a mystery.

  “Thanks for the magical sink,” I told him as the spark faded from his eyes, slipping the amulet into my pocket. “It might prove useful.”

  Then, with a groan, I got up and dragged his carcass out to the street.

  Five

  “I want two thousand,” said Moc Mien when he finally showed up.

  “Done,” I replied. I wasn’t in the mood to haggle.

  “Maybe I should have asked for more.”

  “Too late now. The first thing I need is all the information you can get on the rift spawn; where they’ve been sighted, what they look like, what they do, what they eat. Anything and everything, including the
deranged mutterings of back alley drunks. But I’m especially interested in anything we can determine about their movements. Think your men can handle that?”

  “Collecting rumors? It’s not the most arduous of jobs.”

  “That’s only the first step. We’ll meet back here tomorrow at the same time, go over what you’ve found out, and then plan the hunt. Clear?”

  “Perfectly. Where’s my money?”

  “Did you bring something to carry it in?”

  His smile was answer enough.

  “By the way, you wouldn’t happen to know where Gabul Steyner lays his head of a night, would you?”

  “In the Steyner House. Where else?”

  “Care to point it out for me?”

  “Can’t miss it. It’s the one with the giant bronze hammer topping the weather vane and all the soldiers milling about below. Planning on visiting him?”

  “Planning on killing him.”

  “Maybe you want to talk to the Just Men first, or Councilor When. Or hells, both. I’m sure they’d pony up some coin to see it happen.”

  “Tempting. But I’m intent upon getting all the various factions to leave me the hells alone, not getting sucked further into their maneuverings.”

  He shrugged “Up to you, of course.” And without a further word, he left.

  From the time he showed up to the time he left, he never once mentioned the corpse outside the front door, or the blood on the floor. Perhaps in his world they were unremarkable sights.

  #

  Keel, on the other hand, seemed excessively preoccupied by such things.

  “You can’t just leave a dead body outside the door, magus!”

  “Why not? Are Blacksleeves going to come knocking? Afraid of getting arrested?” There were plenty of bodies made along the barricades on a daily basis, or so I’d been informed. Most of the Blacksleeves, the local constabulary, had either quit the city or been conscripted into one or the other of the Councilors’ armies. The rebels certainly wouldn’t have them, as brutally corrupt as they’d been for so long. More than a few had been strung up from the eaves of houses in the rebel-controlled areas of the Girdle. And if Keel was correct, many more were sitting on spikes wharfside.

  “It’s a dead body, Holgren.”

  “No. It’s a warning.”

  “It’s going to start to smell.”

  “The weather’s fairly chill. That’ll take a while. When it does, you have my permission to do whatever you want with it. Meanwhile, there’s a whole lot of furnishings there, waiting for your special touch.”

  He threw up his arms, one expressively and the other awkwardly, and walked away. The two armsmen he’d returned with looked as though they were having second thoughts.

  “Gentlemen,” I said to them, “Welcome to the Citadel. I am going to pay you an exorbitant amount of money. In return, you are going to make sure my young friend Keel and our chef and housekeeper, Master Marle, do not suffer from any of my unwise choices. Any questions?”

  They appeared to be brothers. The younger of the two cleared his throat and said “When you say exorbitant, that means what, exactly?”

  “How much would you normally get a month for your services?”

  “Three-and-two. Plus the odd city-sacking, of course. And room and board, and physicking,” said the elder of the two.

  “Sorry, I’ve no plans to sack any cities. But you’ll get room and board and medical when you need it, and I’ll give you five Lucernan gold. Per day.”

  They started to smile a little too broadly, so I said “But,” and the smiles went away.

  “But,” I repeated, “I’ll be putting a Compulsion on you to make sure you aren’t working for someone else, and I want to make it very clear that if Keel or Marle are killed on your watch, I expect them to have died after you did, defending them. Still interested?”

  The younger one, whose name was Chalk, looked at the elder, whose name was Thon. Thon said “Aye, magus.”

  #

  When Marle returned, he cleaned up the blood without comment, and had a word with the armsmen, who then proceeded to help Keel setting up the furnishings while he went down and started dinner. He didn’t even give me a reproachful glance.

  I never said I was particularly likeable. And two attempts on my life in one day had made me rather ill-tempered.

  When the tailor showed up, I had everybody kitted out in black, Gosland-style military coats, stiff collared and completely unadorned except for emerald green sashes, Fel-Radoth style. I ordered matching trousers and white linen everything else. When the cobbler arrived, everyone got measured for Imrian cavalry boots. I may not know fashion, but I know uniforms. I made it known to both tradesmen that I expected everything to be delivered first thing in the morning.

  The barber arrived. He decided I needed a goatee. I didn’t care. He decided Keel needed to have the wispy patches of hair he called a mustache eradicated. I cheered. On the inside. Everybody else apparently already had some sense of personal grooming, and got away with trims.

  Then it was time to eat.

  Master Marle could cook. Not much talking got done around the table. When everyone had finished, Keel handed me a sheet of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “List of ships for sale. Got it from an agent wharfside. He said he can come talk to you, or you can come to him. He made it sound like the second option was his personal favorite. Felt a bit bad, getting his hopes up like that.”

  “Thank you, Keel.” I stood up.

  “Gentlemen, I have something for you.” I passed out the burning tower badges I’d fashioned. “These are a symbol of this house. They’re also your key to passing the magical wards that protect this building, so don’t lose them.” I paused for a moment, and decided to take a cue from Marle and be a little less reticent.

  “I would much rather be about my business in a quiet, unnoticeable fashion, leaving Bellarius to get on with its own. That isn’t going to happen, unfortunately. The principal players in the conflict happening in Bellarius have decided I figure in their power struggle, so figure I shall. They have armies. I have the Citadel, and magic, and now you. For the short time that I am here, you each have a role to play in assisting me.”

  “Assisting you in what, exactly, magus?” asked Thon, the elder armsman.

  “Eight days ago a woman named Amra Thetys saved Bellarius and everyone in it from being completely destroyed by the Telemarch. In doing so, she disappeared. I’m going to find her, and bring her back. For the time being, I need the Citadel to do so. Others, especially Gabul Steyner, want the Citadel for their own reasons. Steyner has been particularly annoying about it, which is why I’m going to go and kill him.” I stood up and put on my coat.

  “What, you mean right now?” Keel asked.

  “No time like the present.”

  “Begging your pardon, magister, but you can’t go and kill a Syndic-Elect wearing that,” said Marle.

  “And why is that?”

  “Forgive me for imagining, but I imagine you killing Steyner has somewhat to do with the dead fellow outside the front door. Steyner sent his message, and you replied, is how I reckon it. You killing Steyner will be a message to everybody else.” He rubbed his chin with his stump. “Again, begging your pardon, but if you go and end Steyner looking like that, it’ll lack a certain level of dignity, of… gravity. Your message won’t carry the full measure of its weight. Or so I believe.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously, magister.”

  I looked down at my coat. So it was a touch dirty. And blood-stained. And charred. I looked up at the others. “Do I look that bad, then?”

  The armsmen kept quiet, obviously not wanting to offend. Keel had no such reservations.

  “You look better after your barbering, but you still look like you’ve been sleeping in a ditch.”

  I sighed. “So be it. Steyner gets a short reprieve, while I wait for clothes more fitting to kill him in.”

&n
bsp; “And a bath,” Keel chipped in.

  “Speaking of which, where are we getting our water from?”

  “A cistern, magister,” Marle replied. “No worries on that front. It’s deep and nearly full. Bellarius at the end of autumn does not lack for rain.”

  “Very good, Master Marle. Baths all around in the morning. Keel will of course assist you in heating all that water, it being his idea.”

  #

  Sleep was long in coming, and when it finally claimed me I dreamed of Amra. She lay atop a mound of knives as high as the walls of the Necropolis; hundreds of thousands of them. She was unmoving, face as pale as alabaster.

  I cut myself to bloody ribbons climbing to her, trying to reach her, never getting any closer.

  Six

  One thing about the Citadel. It was bare as a barn and as cheery as a prison, but it had the best view of Bellarius in Bellarius. Not that Bellarius is picturesque, but if you’re going to be stuck in a midden, you might as well be sitting at the top of the mound.

  Amra had told me once that the difference between a good burglar and a dead burglar was, essentially, mental balance. The ability to ignore distractions such as fear, nervousness, anger, and get on with the job. To be able to retain the ability to think, analyze, and act without undue haste whatever the pressures at hand. Magic wasn’t all that different, really

  I looked down on the ugly city that had taught her that hard truth, and realized that Gabul Steyner had managed to rob me of my own mental balance. His multiple provocations had nearly goaded me into doing something I would likely regret. Could I walk into his house and kill him? Certainly. Could I also kill all the armsmen between him and me, and then make my exit unscathed?

  Possible, even likely, though the risk of me being taken down by sheer numbers was real enough. And if Steyner had a mage on his payroll, which was not inconceivable, I’d simply be overwhelmed by mercenaries while the greater threat distracted me.

  Looking out from the city-facing window of the library, or rather what was left of it after Greytooth had apparently made an abortive attempt to assassinate the Telemarch, it didn’t take long to find the bronze hammer weather vane Moc Mien had mentioned. Two towers down, three to the left. I wouldn’t have to walk far to pay my respects to Steyner, if I had a mind to do so. If he was even there.