The Thief Who Wasn't There

by Michael McClung

  Amra was the only one whose presence I never seemed to feel the need to retreat from.

  Master Marle was peeling cloudroot; an impressive feat for a one-handed man. I nodded to him and stepped through the illusory back wall of the hearth over an unlit stack of cord wood. Behind me, I heard him grunt in a ‘well what do you know’ kind of way. I smiled slightly. I was beginning to like Marle.

  I took the right hand set of stairs down. I was certain one of the branchings I’d ignored on my first excursion down to the oubliette would take me where I wanted to go.

  Gammond would be watching the barricades, waiting for me to try and slip past. But she couldn’t keep the whole of the Girdle under surveillance.

  As I descended, I also berated myself for all the missteps I’d made since washing up in Bellarius. After I’d killed Steyner’s assassin, I should have just ignored him. I certainly doubted he could have had any other arrows in his quiver. But mages will be mages. I also should have ignored the Just Men, or rather the People’s Committee, and gone about my business. Instead I’d tried to calm the waters.

  I should have realized such an attempt was pointless. The gentry had been too harsh for far too long, and they were reaping now all the bitter discontent they’d sown. I’d gone down to the Girdle to try and reason with a scythe. All in all, I’d gotten off lightly.

  Lessons learned. I would not be drawn further into the sucking bog of Bellarius’s self-destruction. I would get what I needed as quickly as I could, and be gone. And I would not be gentle with anything that stood in my way. So resolved, I quickened my pace.

  The first branching led to a closet of horrors.

  The room itself was small, no more than four paces long and wide. There was no door. I felt something in the weave, something foul, and summoned magelight.

  I’ve no idea who the mummified corpses might have been, but they were all women with long, blond hair. There were at least a dozen deaths on the black marble floor, limbs twining about each other, positioned in such a fashion as to suggest an especially vile sigil. They were all positioned within a circle that had been inscribed into the floor. The meaning of the corpse sigil teased at the edge of my consciousness, something full of dread import and power, power, pow-

  I tore my gaze away before the sigil could draw my consciousness down into whatever madness waited. Then I summoned magefire to burn the corpses, a vomitous, sour feeling sucking at the pit of my stomach. This went beyond necromancy as I understood it. The Telemarch had been dabbling in what even I would consider evil; and I do not use that word lightly. I didn’t even want to contemplate what sort of horror he had been about in that room, lest I start to understand. I vehemently did not want to understand anything about it.

  Good riddance to him, then.

  Before I released the magefire, something moved in the room, the barest shadow rising up from one of the corpses. Then another, and another. A dozen in all, one for each of the corpses. They quickly took on substance.

  Each of them looked exactly the same. Each was a perfect replica of the thing that had taken my eye.

  They looked drowsy, sated. Slowly they drifted towards me, but stopped at the sorcerous circle that contained the corpses. They smiled at me, revealing teeth any gray urdu would be envious of. They slithered across the surface of their containment, spectral flesh merging and parting, merging and parting.

  Suddenly I had the intimation that interfering with what the Telemarch had created in that room would lead to terribly unhealthy consequences. I dropped my hand and released my well.

  I retraced my route to the main stairs and continued my descent. I refused to look back on general principle, but the skin on the back of my neck didn’t stop crawling for a long time.

  The second branching went on for quite a long way. I walked for an hour or thereabouts before coming upon ascending stairs and a massive iron door which wept rust. I forced it open with some difficulty, and found myself on a scree-littered slope. It took me a few seconds to get my bearings, but when I did, I smiled. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but it was potentially useful nonetheless.

  I’d found a passage to the far side of Mount Tarvus. Below me lay a patchwork of fields, gray and brown in the twilight, and made even darker by the shadow of the mount.

  This was likely why Steyner had wanted the Citadel so badly. He would have been able to move mercenary troops up from Jedder in numbers sufficient to win him the Syndicacy in a matter of days.

  Too bad for him.

  I walked back into the mount, shutting the door after me and setting a binding on it.

  It was a long walk back to the central stairs, and hunger had started to gnaw at me. I’d missed both breakfast and lunch.

  I descended.

  The third branching yielded up what I needed.

  It was a relatively short passage, and at the end of it was a damp-swollen wooden door. I lay a silence upon it, and with more effort than I liked to admit, pried it from its frame with muscle and the Art.

  It opened on a root cellar; one that had not been used in decades for anything other than breeding spiders and centipedes. A decrepit set of stairs ascended to a trap door. I crossed to it and listened. No sign of any sort of movement.

  The trap door had a bolt on my side of it. I shot the bolt and slowly lifted the door. The room above was in darkness. The dust of years coated the floor. Jumbles of rubbish were just barely visible in the thin, reedy light that managed to leak in past closed shutters. I opened the door fully and began to climbed up.

  I heard it a bare moment before it attacked me from behind, just the softest scrape of chain along the wooden floor.

  Ten

  It was a thing of rusted wire, warped wood and broken chain; splintered bone, saw-teeth and magic. It sprang at me from a night-dark corner. It was a construct, a golem set to watch the way and eliminate anyone who didn’t do what they were supposed to do upon arriving at the far end of the tunnel. I flung myself back down the stairs, shifting to my magesight, searching for the filament that must connect the construct to the Telemarch’s greater wards.

  Its tail, a length of rusted chain whose links were as thick as my thumb, clipped my ear as it lunged through the space I’d just vacated. That was painful, but not nearly as painful as the back of my head meeting the bottom stair. I scrambled back, dizzy, senses momentarily blurred and magesight lost, certain the construct would be on me in less than a heartbeat.

  Nothing happened.

  My vision cleared, and I saw its dark bulk motionless at the head of the stairs.

  “You must be bound to that room,” I told it while calling up my magesight once again. It didn’t respond; I hadn’t expected it to. Constructs intricate enough to speak hadn’t been made since before the Cataclysm. The fact that the Telemarch had managed to create one at all was a testament to his skill and power, if nothing else.

  I could see the filament now, a dirty yellow thread that stretched from the thing down into the tunnel and, certainly, all the way back to the Citadel. It was a subtle thing, impossible to see unless you knew it was there. Which suggested it was meant to be a magekiller. Or perhaps the Telemarch had just been paranoid. Or an obsessive craftsman. I supposed I’d just have to live with the mystery.

  Whatever the case, I wasn’t going to trek all the way back to the Citadel to sort out whether the node I’d co-opted was the one that controlled this thing. I took hold of its filament, and with a slash of will and power, I cut.

  The construct went berserk for a few moments, throwing itself violently around the room. I could have let it just wind down on its own; eventually the Telemarch’s hardening would dissipate and it would collapse into its components. But it was making an awful racket, and I might have a use for it at a later date. So as quickly as I could, I fashioned a simple set of commands, a little node of my will, and began to splice the severed ends of its filament to it. The cellar was cold, but sweat was running into my eye. Impatiently I wiped it away, though
it wasn’t mundane sight I was working with.

  At first the filament wanted to reject the graft I was imposing on it, but I had enough familiarity with the Telemarch’s very particular, very driven personality as it applied to his use of the Art to persuade the severed ends to accept this new, unwelcome addition. It had no choice really, since the will to exist had been leavened into it at its inception, and I held its continued existence in my hands.

  The construct suddenly became still once again. The filament had been re-knitted. That did not necessarily mean I had succeeded.

  If my extemporaneous casting had worked, the construct would now simply do nothing in my presence. Later I could revise and expand the commands it would obey. I ascended the stairs once again.

  If my casting hadn’t worked—if I’d botched it, or if the Telemarch had been prepared for someone such as me—the construct would once again try to make me a corpse.

  It was sprawled on the floor, motionless, perhaps a yard from the trap door. I climbed the last step, and set foot on the floor proper. It shuddered once, and went back to motionlessness. I frowned. It shouldn’t even have done that. But good enough for the present.

  I summoned up magelight and took a look around. There wasn’t much to look at. A long abandoned building, it seemed, littered with detritus and smelling strongly of the black mold that covered much of the walls and ceiling. The plaster had mostly fallen, exposing brick walls. The entire building seemed to be just this one room and the cellar below. There was one shuttered window hard up against one door that led, presumably, to the street outside.

  I put an eye to a gap between the shutter slats and saw a narrow, rain-slicked cobbled street and a darkened, shuttered shophouse opposite. It certainly looked like I was in the Girdle, at least.

  I turned my magesight and my attention on the door, discovered a simple binding there and took a few minutes to dismantle it. Then I opened the door and stepped outside.

  It smelled of rain, and pungent fried fish. There were few lights, and the sky was overcast, but none of the great cities of the Dragonsea are ever truly dark. Bellarius might only just qualify as one of great cities, but it did qualify.

  I needed to know exactly where my new-found route into the Girdle terminated. So I walked up the dark street until I came to a rather dismal little public house. An old man sat on a stool outside, chewing determinedly on some sort of seed or leaf and spitting regularly into the street. Inside there wasn’t a single patron.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the spitting gentleman. “What street is this?”

  The old man continued chomping and spitting as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “You won’t get anything out of that one,” came a voice from above. I looked up, and across the street a heavyset woman looked down at me from a tiny balcony. “Hellweed, you see. Took it up after his wife died.”

  I looked back down at the old man. On closer inspection, I could see his pupils were tiny as pinpricks.

  “I do see, thank you. Could you tell me what street this is?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Gosland.”

  “What you doing here?”

  “Trying to leave.”

  “You don’t need the name of the street for that.”

  I sighed. I’d obviously just met the local gossip. “True, true. Goodnight then. Thanks for the help.” I started back down the way I’d come, feeling her eyes on me the entire way. I found it vaguely amusing that I could survive magical attacks and political maneuverings, but I couldn’t manage to learn the name of the street I was on.

  Of course, she might well be more than a busybody. It was entirely conceivable she was the People’s Committee’s version of the local watch. There were no Blacksleeves in the Girdle anymore, certainly, and the People’s Committee wore no uniform, it seemed, beyond what appeared to be a wholly optional cockade.

  I also realized I didn’t have to know the name of the street; a landmark would do. I looked back at the pub, and took note of the signboard—an improbably pink pheckla holding a tankard in each tentacle. I counted the number of doors between it and the Telemarch’s bolthole. Fourteen, as it happened. I knew the gossip was still staring at me. It was too late to become unobtrusive via magic, so I gave her a little distraction in the form of an aural phantasm instead: I made it sound as if the old man chewing hellweed had begun barking furiously. Then, when her gaze had lifted from the back of my head, I slipped into the bolthole, reset the binding, and started the long walk back up to the Citadel.

  Eleven

  Upon my return, which startled Marle more than he liked to show, I ate a hasty meal of beef stew and black bread. Keel passed on Gammond’s response: ‘Mistakes have consequences.’

  I grunted and ran a hunk of bread around the bowl to sop up the last of the gravy. Master Marle’s fare was simple and excellent.

  “Any word from Moc Mien?” I asked.

  “Not yet.” He stifled a yawn. It was late. I was tired myself, but I wouldn’t see sleep for hours. I still had work to do.

  “If he hasn’t shown up by morning, I’m going looking for him. We need to get out of this city before I level it out of sheer irritation.”

  I drafted the guard brothers to help me haul the nets up from the kitchen to the inner sanctum on the fourth floor, much to Marle’s obvious if silent relief. They were more than a little in the way down there.

  It was the brothers’ first look at the room. They didn’t like it any more than Keel did.

  “What in hells happened here?” asked Thon.

  “That is the question I’ve been trying to answer,” I replied.

  “It doesn’t feel right in here,” Chalk said. To which I had no response. He was right. Reality had been twisted out of true in that space. Or rather, a portion of reality had been ripped away. But it didn’t bother me the way it seemed to bother everyone else. Perhaps I should have been worried about that. Certainly it didn’t say anything comforting about me. But I had a sufficiency of worry as it was.

  “I’ll be busy ‘til morning,” I told them, “but let me know if Moc Mien shows up.”

  They left me to my own devices with alacrity and I settled down to the tiresome, tedious and critical process of turning the fishing nets into something capable of trapping a rift spawn without being torn to shreds.

  #

  Call it a weave, a strand, a filament of purpose. Or of desire.

  It doesn’t really matter what you call it; magic frustrates ordinary speech. Any word you might apply to any facet of it is only an analogy, a dull metaphor devoid of the spark of meaning that makes magic magic. Words, in the context of the Art, are merely an attempt to contain a concept that, by its very nature, is change, is changing, is changeable, has already changed, and has never changed, all at the same time.

  Magic is the slipperiest of scale-bright fish, quicker than the here-and-gone-and-back sunscalds in the Bay of Bellarius, and language is a net with gaping holes. When I write of magic, understand that I am sharing a comfortable lie, a useful approximation; for the precise truth is simply inexpressible.

  In the chamber where whatever had happened to Amra had happened, I wove a filament of my will through the fibers of the still slightly damp nets Keel had procured for me. As my fingers followed every inch of cord and squeezed every knot, I muttered in Kantic the words for strength, passivity, and immobility. Kantic is a beautiful language, the syllables liquid, the lexicon deep and rich, the grammar stunningly logical. It is the language of magic, though it is not magical. It is the language of instruction, because it lends itself to precision of meaning. It is also a dead language, Kantos having been devoured in the Cataclysm. Superior grammar is no defense against chaos. There is probably a lesson to be learned from that, but I’ll be damned if I know what it might be.

  Magic can, of course, be cast without speaking, or even moving a single muscle, come to that. But
words can be a great aid in concentration, in precision. They helped to prevent careless mistakes, especially when it came to repetitive magic such as I was casting.

  The last thing I needed was a weak spot in the weave for the rift spawn to exploit.

  Trapping the thing, while sure to be dangerous, was the easiest part of my plan. Forcing or convincing it to do my bidding would be much more difficult. It would be a creature born of chaos, the likes of which had not been seen since the Cataclysm. Unpredictability would be bred into its bones—if indeed it had bones—and rationality would be a foreign concept to it, as like as not. Its intelligence might be no greater than a dog’s, or it might make me look like a simpleton. Indeed, its intellect might shift from one extreme to the other depending on the phases of the moon or what it had for dinner. There was just no telling.

  I had finished the first net, and was contemplating starting on the second with a distinct lack of enthusiasm when a knock came at the door. Gratefully I summoned up a magelight, rose, and opened the door.

  It was Keel, looking sleep-rumpled, freshly barbered hair sticking up at odd angles.

  “Moc Mien’s here,” he yawned into a fist. “He looks like he tangled with a gray urdu.”

  “You don’t seem especially upset about that,” I remarked.

  “I’m deeply concerned.” He smiled a not-nice smile. “On the inside.”

  He followed me down to the first floor, where Moc Mien was slouched in a chair at the table, trying to look nonchalant. The effect was spoiled somewhat by a fresh black eye that was blossoming, and the freshly stitched claw marks on his forearm.

  “Now I know why you didn’t haggle over the fee, mage,” he said by way of greeting.