The Thief Who Wasn't There

by Michael McClung

  “We’re not provisioned for a siege, magus,” said Marle. “Water is no problem, but food is.”

  “Don’t be concerned,” I told him. “The Citadel has a back door.”

  Marle smiled. “It wouldn’t be located behind the kitchen hearth, would it?”

  “Indeed. I think it’s time to show you all the Telemarch’s basement,” I replied. “Or at least a portion of it. There are places you won’t want to wander. Chalk, would you help Keel bring down the two nets from the top floor?”

  #

  We had only a few candles and no other means of illumination, so I called up magelight and led us all down into the bowels of Mount Tarvus. Keel had wrapped the nets up in sheets to make them more manageable to carry. They were still obviously burdensome, more for their bulk than their weight.

  When we came to the first branching corridor, where the Telemarch had played with his vile sorcery, I stopped.

  “Never, ever go in there. No matter what you hear, or think you see. Do I make myself clear?”

  “What’s down there?” Keel asked.

  “Evil, and madness, and death,” I said, and left it at that.

  When we came to the second corridor, I stopped again.

  “This corridor leads, ultimately, to the far side of Mount Tarvus. If we find it necessary to flee the city for whatever reason, we have the luxury. Master Thon, have you or your brother ever been to Jedder?”

  “Once.”

  “It is possible, but highly unlikely, that I might need for you to go there and recruit some fellow armsmen. This would be the route you would take.”

  He nodded. “I can do that, magus. If it comes to it.”

  “Good. I’d show you all the door, but it’s a long walk, and I haven’t got all night.”

  We continued our descent.

  Outside the cellar door I told Keel and Chalk drop the nets, which they did with a will. Then I gathered them all close and altered the weave I’d crafted into their burning tower badges, so that the construct would ignore them. Mindful of the resident busybody up the street and Gammond’s threat, I also layered on a hasty disinterest spell, to keep any dangerous eyes from taking any real notice of my people. It wasn’t in any way an invisibility spell—as far as I know such magic is impossible. It just kept observers from getting curious about the bearer. It was quite similar to what I’d made for Amra after Guache Gavon had inked a contract on her life. Gods, that seemed like ages ago.

  “Beyond this door is a cellar. Above that, a ramshackle building somewhere in the Girdle. I don’t know enough about the Girdle to tell you just where, but it will serve us well as an entry to the city. Master Marle, you’ll be able to do marketing whatever When’s daughter tries.

  “Inside the building above, one of the Telemarch’s workings is active,” I told them. “It is a construct, a guardian. It is not alive, but it is deadly. It should ignore you so long as you wear your badge. Do not attempt to enter the building above without your badge, from either direction, unless you’ve grown tired of breathing.”

  “What happens if we lose the badge?” Keel asked. “What should we do?”

  “It’s a good question. There’s a tavern up the street, called the News, according to Moc Mien. If any of you are outside the Citadel and lose your badge for whatever reason, wait there. Someone will eventually notice you’re missing, and when we come looking for you, that will be the first stop.

  “Now, gentlemen, go on back up the stairs. I’m off to meet with Moc Mien. If all goes well, we’ll catch a rift-spawn tonight and be measurably closer to getting the hells out of Bellarius.”

  “We should be going with you, magus.” said Thon, indicating his brother as well as himself. “You can’t mean to go alone.”

  Keel said “I’m going too.” Marle just frowned.

  “More is not better, gentlemen, not in this case. I’m baiting a trap, and you would only frighten off the prey. Or be eaten by it. Moc Mien will not be bringing his crew, for the same reason.”

  “But—”

  “This is not negotiable, Keel.”

  Marle cleared his throat. “What if you don’t come back?” he asked.

  “Don’t talk like that,” Keel told him.

  “If I have an unfortunate evening, Keel takes over your employment. Keel, if something happens to me, go to Magister Greytooth. He’ll be able to give you the key to the casks on the second floor.” Meaning he’d be able to open them using the Art. “I hope he will also help in continuing the search for Amra. What happens next would be up to you.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Keel said, more loudly.

  “Everybody dies. I very much doubt it will be my turn tonight, but it’s good to get such talk out of the way, in the event. Master Marle has the right of it. Now go, all of you.” I tethered the magelight to Keel, and opened the cellar door. I didn’t look back.

  Thirteen

  Moc Mien was right. The News was a shithole.

  I had an hour or more to kill before night fell, so I left the nets there in the corridor and went up past the motionless construct, out the door, and through a miserably cold drizzle to the tavern.

  The old man outside was there again, or had never left. He certainly hadn’t bathed or changed his clothes since last I saw him. The sentry was sitting on her sagging balcony, buttoned up against the chill wind. She took no notice of me, of course; I’d come ready for prying eyes this time. I watched her scan the street, making a mental note of what little foot traffic crossed her view. Her eyes slid over me half a dozen times as I walked up the street towards her.

  The tavern itself reeked of fried onions, sour ale, and layers of vomit. The floor, recipient of years of spilt alcohol and bodily fluids left to gel, sucked at the soles of my boots like a bog. There were three patrons. None of them were conscious, and I was convinced that only two of them were actually breathing. The barkeep had a lazy eye and no personal experience with bathing. He also didn’t seem to understand the word ‘wine’ so I took a mug of something semi-liquid and retreated to a corner table facing the door and watched the late afternoon light bleed out of the sky through tiny, grimy leaded glass windows while I waited for Moc Mien.

  I’d wasted too much time the first few days after Amra’s disappearance, I admitted to myself. I’d ignored important events going on around me and obsessed over increasingly unlikely strategies for retrieving her. The reward for my shortsightedness was the infuriating entanglements I now dealt with. Skulking about the Girdle to get what I needed, lest I be forced into a running battle on its streets, irritated me to no end. It was more than just my pride, though; it was that every additional risk and delay lessened Amra’s chances in some non-measurable but real way.

  And I had no one to blame but myself.

  I’d made bad choices at the outset, and then I’d allowed myself to be provoked into making my situation considerably more complicated and risky not once or twice, but three times. Steyner, Gammond and When’s actions had all been predictable, given the context of the situation in Bellarius. I’d failed to predict them because I’d considered them unimportant in relation to my own goals. And so I’d reacted in ways that were at best unhelpful, and at worst, stupid.

  Why?

  I sat there at that filthy table for a long while, pondering the question. I didn’t much like the answers that suggested themselves. They all spoke of a certain level of selfishness, and misaligned priorities. Fortunately Moc Mien arrived in time to distract me from any serious foray into soul-searching.

  He seemed to just appear at my table, which either said much for his ability to move quietly, or my distraction.

  “Ready, then?” he asked, and I stood.

  “Not going to finish your drink?”

  “I’m not even going to start it,” I replied. I was fairly sure I’d seen things moving in the depths of the mug. “You’re welcome to it.”

  “And I thought we were starting to get along.”

  “I’ll go and
get my equipment, it will only take a few minutes, if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “I mind just breathing the air in here. But I’ll wait.”

  I returned to the bolt-hole, retrieved the nets, and returned to the News, silently cursing my bulky packages. Moc Mien was staring idly at his fingernails when I entered. He looked up, noticed the bulky sheet-wrapped bundles of nets. I put one down on the table in front of him.

  “What’s this?”

  “A net, to catch the rift spawn.”

  “And what have you got?”

  “A backup net.”

  “Mages really are wise,” he replied, and I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  He stood up, took up his net, and led the way to the back of the tavern, where an intentionally-almost-unnoticeable door, half-hidden behind a moldy cloak handing from a hook on the wall, opened onto a very narrow, refuse-choked back alley that was all stair steps. The tap man pretended we weren’t there right next to him.

  “I thought you didn’t want to be caught dead in this place,” I said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how did you know that door was there?”

  “The News is mine. I own this shit shack.”

  “That’s—you—never mind.”

  He squeezed himself through the narrow door, and I followed. The alley, or stairwell, was so narrow that my shoulders brushed both filthy walls.

  “Storm channel,” Moc Mien commented. “Quite a few in the city. Keep the place from flooding and buildings washing away down the slope. Most folks use `em to toss their rubbish. Also useful for getting about without attracting attention.”

  “Picaresque,” I commented.

  “Whatever that means. You’ll want to avoid `em when it rains.”

  “What do you call what’s happening now?”

  “This ain’t what you’d rightly call rain, though it’ll freeze by morning, I warrant. That’ll make moving around on the mount an exciting proposition, storm drains or streets.” He moved off down the storm channel, and I followed.

  “So why do I want to avoid places like these in the rain, then?”

  “If you manage to keep your feet in the flood, the rats’ll find you a convenient piece of higher ground.”

  “Rats don’t bother me.”

  “You’ve never been swarmed by hundreds of `em, obviously.”

  #

  Moc Mien led me a long, torturous route through storm channels so narrow we had to walk single file and sideways, and through real alleys and near deserted streets. Once or twice we crossed low roofs, me cursing the bulk of my burdensome net. Finally we came to one of the areas that had been effected by the rift. Halfmoon Street, I remembered him saying. One of the slagged areas, as he called it.

  And he was not wrong. Stone is not supposed to run like wax left in the hot sun.

  We climbed a set of flimsy, groaning metal stairs that led to a high, flat roof, and from there looked down on ruin, on the aftermath of chaos. Whole buildings had slumped over, some almost to the point where their eaves touched the street. Others leaned against and melded into each other. A few had only been partly affected; a portion standing perfectly normal, while the rest of the building, brick and glass and wood, had pulled away from it, sagging and stretched and distorted.

  It was a cityscape out of a nightmare, or a madman’s dream.

  “Did any of the residents survive?” I wondered aloud.

  “A few,” Moc Mien replied. “They got put out of their misery quick enough. Or did it themselves, if they were still able.” He shifted the bundle to his other hand and pointed to one of the partially ‘slagged’ buildings on the periphery of the damage. Only one corner of it had been affected. “That’s where it waylaid my boys.”

  “All right. Wait here, please. I’ll need your help in dragging it back to the street the News is on.”

  “You’re going in there alone?”

  “Not exactly,” I replied, and took out his ‘lucky’ knife. I couldn’t argue that it had been lucky for him; it had earned him a small fortune, after all. I squatted down, cut the fleshy pad below my thumb, and let the resulting blood drip onto the knife’s blade. From there it pooled on the grimy stone.

  Making a blood doll wasn’t something I enjoyed. To give it enough substance to die convincingly, I had to put entirely too much of myself into it. The connection would exist until my doppelganger was murdered, which meant I got to feel it. Not the full effect, but enough that I didn’t go around creating blood dolls just for the fun of it.

  The first time I’d ever created one for myself had been during an especially vicious vendetta season. I was very young then, before I went to study under Yvoust, and the only sort of training I’d been given was in blood magic, by my mother, in secret. Theyoli House had assaulted and overrun the family compound in the middle of the night, and were going room to room, slaying every one they could find. In a frenzy of desperation, I’d summoned up a doppelganger and commanded it to lie down on the bed while I hid in the wardrobe.

  They’d had a mage with them. He disincorporated the blood doll. The blood link between me and the doll insured that I knew, intimately, what it felt like to be turned into a bloody mist. Which is, ironically, why I find that particular magic so easy to cast.

  At any rate, making blood dolls never ends up being terribly amusing.

  Add to that the fact that I could cast no other magic while the doll was an entity, and you can see why it’s something I do only when necessary. Pain and debilitation are not my two favorite things to experience.

  Once, in the ruins of Hluria, I’d cautioned Amra not to mix her blood with mine when I’d made blood dolls for each of us, to sacrifice to the nightmare Shemrang. Now I was doing it deliberately with the rift spawn’s ichor. If I succeeded in what I was about, the rift spawn would get an unpleasant surprise when it attacked my doll.

  I worked the blood, balancing the passionate certainty that fed blood magic and the cold clarity that the Art demanded. It was a chill night and getting colder, but sweat ran down the back of my neck and along my ribs soon enough.

  I was lost to my physical surroundings as I wrestled the two powers and the two bloods, bending all to my will, forcing an amalgam at finer and finer degrees—until the final acquiescence, when reality itself could no longer deny the change I had forced upon it.

  That is the seduction of magic, for those who long to dominate. Even I, who care nothing for power or mastery, was not immune. When you can take the very stuff that makes up your world and force it to change according to your desire, you cannot just pretend that you are the same as the butcher, the lamplighter, the tailor. But instead of thinking myself as better, or more, I came to the realization long ago that I am simply other.

  Which has had its own pitfalls.

  I only realized I had closed my eye when I opened it, and my own face looked back at me. Or a fair approximation, at least. My doll’s features were coarser, and it still had two eyes. I hadn’t consciously decided to make it so. They were vacant.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that,” Moc Mien commented. “Not sure I ever want to again.”

  “I’m going in to lay the trap. I’ll be back out soon, or not at all,” I told him, wrapping my lacerated hand in a less-than-fresh handkerchief. “Do please keep an eye out for the thing, and give a shout if you see it.”

  I lifted up one of the nets onto a shoulder. I gave the doll a mental instruction to do the same with the other, and then follow me down the rusting back stairs and out to the street.

  Fourteen

  I might have made a locator for the rift-spawn using its blood, if I’d had the time or energy. I’d had neither, and really didn’t think a locator was necessary anyway. The creature seemed to take intrusions on its territory in a bad way. If it was as belligerent as Moc Mien had described, I thought it safe to rely on it showing itself without me having to hunt it down.

  The doll followed me silently up the st
reet to the place where two of Moc Mien’s crew had met their end. The door was shut.

  “Here’s the uncertain part of the plan,” I told my creation. While it had a convincing-looking brain, it did not have a mind of its own and so of course did not respond. If the creature was still waiting on the other side of the door, I’d have no time to set up the trap.

  I commanded the doll to drop its net and open the door. When nothing jumped out to rend it limb from limb, I ordered it inside the pitch-black interior. When bad things failed to happen a second time, I followed and got busy laying out the nets on the ground floor, one atop the other, by magelight. It was work that was too manually dexterous for the blood doll to do quickly, so I had it wait out of the way. The interior of the room was unremarkable, except for one corner. While the outside portion of the structure had, in some fashion, melted, the interior area that had been affected looked as if it had been put on a slow boil.

  There was a wholly unremarkable stockinged foot attached to a body sitting in a rocking chair in that corner. Neither the body nor the chair were something my eye wanted to linger on. Unnatural, impossible things had happened to both. Wood and flesh and clothing had become indistinguishably intertwined in places, and had bubbled like a gravy left unattended on the fire in others.

  When I was satisfied that the nets had been laid out in a useful fashion, I ordered the blood doll in, had it stand in the center of the nets, and retreated up the street, leaving it to its fate. I could do nothing more, magically, until it had expired.

  I didn’t want to retreat all the way back to Moc Mien’s position, but neither did I want to be too close to the trap, for fear it would scent me instead of my double. It was impossible to judge how far, or how close, I should position myself, so I split the distance and waited halfway down the street.