The Thief Who Wasn't There

by Michael McClung

  I did not expect to see any signs of magic on Song Street, so when I saw a fellow sitting on the pavement, grimy begging cap before him and a luminous stripe floating in front of his eyes, I took note.

  When I saw the second watcher on the corner of Daudon and Crane, the same strip of light before his eyes, I knew that Kluge had not been making idle noises about keeping me on a short leash.

  In other circumstances, it would have amused me. I would have let him hound my every step, set people to watch me while I drank wine or visited the workshop. I might even have waved at the poor sods tasked with surveilling my boring daily routine.

  Unfortunately, I was going to be doing something Kluge would, without compunction, kill me to prevent. And while I knew it was almost certainly perfectly safe to reopen the hell gate, I very much doubted he would take my word for it.

  So. I needed to part ways with my watchers. And I knew just where and how I could manage it, sadly.

  I hailed a hack and told the driver to take me as close to the Rookery as he dared.

  #

  Lucernis is filled with some of the greatest architectural achievements humanity has been able to create since the Cataclysm. There is a reason it is known as the Jewel of the West. It is filled with the sort of beauty that was almost completely lacking in grim, utilitarian, and frankly ugly Bellarius.

  Lucernis is also filled with slums, a veritable patchwork of poverty. Each of these downtrodden neighborhoods comes complete with its own character. Barely-more-than-shacks, breeding sullen desperation and abject poverty, generation after generation. Working class hovels shoved up against each other, proud to sport a second story and badly whitewashed wooden walls. Blocks of once-handsome buildings in long, slow decline, each structure facing inevitable ruin in solitary fashion, home only to the homeless, the hopeless, and the agents of decay. Streets choked with rough commerce, cheap, brightly painted facades projecting false cheer to mask grim interiors…. Lucernis does not want for ‘color’.

  And then there is the Rookery.

  The Rookery has the dubious distinction of being so nightmarish that even Morno’s tax collectors refuse to enter it. Which is saying much, as Morno only employs combat veterans to collect the King’s fifth.

  The Rookery is every bad element of every other slum in the city, only gone feral and festering with it. If I couldn’t lose Kluge’s watchers there, then I had a serious problem.

  The hack dropped me off on the main thoroughfare closest to Lucernis’s civic tumor, took my money, and shook his head as he switched the horse. I walked past weed- and detritus-choked vacant lots and burned out shells of buildings in the early evening. It was likely the darkest place in the city; no lamplighters would venture here, even if there had been lamps. There were no lamps, because they would just have been torn up and sold for scrap, and damn the highly flammable natural gas pouring into the neighborhood.

  I looked back, once, and standing conspicuous on the corner the hack had let me off at was a figure indistinguishable except for that narrow blue-white glowing strip across the eyes. I waved at him or her and walked deeper into the snake pit.

  I had no doubt Kluge was somehow tracking me using the Art. His watchers were not all he was using; he was coordinating them somehow. But whatever magic he was employing wasn’t a standard tracking spell. I would have known that the instant he activated it. If he needed eyes on me, then whatever he was doing wasn’t something he had much control over, or trust in. Well. First I’d lose my followers, and then I’d see what I could do to defeat Kluge’s unknown spell.

  The Rookery proper slowly rose up around me, complete with rubbish, vermin, and glassy-eyed toughs lounging in front of doors you never wanted to go in. They wanted to know what was in my pack. And my pockets. And possibly what I’d had for lunch. They’d be happy, most of them, to cut everything open to find out.

  Five bravos stood up and started sauntering towards me. Just like that, they had me surrounded on the narrow street. I tapped my well and summoned a brightblade, willing it to lengthen to the size of a cavalry sword.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” I said, smiling. “Nice night for a stroll.”

  Two of them took the hint, as Amra would have said. Three were either too stupid to, or too afraid to look afraid in front of their peers.

  “Wotcher got inna pack?” the one directly in front of me asked, fiddling with what was obviously a throwing knife.

  “The head of a monster,” I replied, truthfully if not exhaustively. Why was I always bringing severed heads into the Rookery?

  “Lemme see it.” His two friends were positioning themselves to be out of my direct line of sight. I stepped to the side to keep them in view, mentally cursing my reduced vision.

  “I’ll count to three,” I said. “If you’re not all back sitting on your stoops before I finish, I’ll kill all of you. One.”

  The one furthest left suddenly broke off and started walking away.

  “Two.”

  The thug in front of me raised his knife to throw at my face, while the second charged in, knife low and ready to go for my gut.

  I disincorporated the one in front of me, and swung the brightblade around in a low arc at the same time, sweeping my right flank and lopping off the remaining man’s knife hand. The Brightblade made sizzling, crackling sounds as the robber’s blood met it, and evaporated.

  “Three.”

  The man fell to the filthy cobbles and started screaming. Rather than let him bleed out, I put the brightblade through his heart.

  “Anyone else?” I asked the street in general, silent in the wake of the man’s screams.

  No one else.

  I walked on, brightblade in hand, and was not bothered again. I realized, and not for the first time, that I wasn’t a very nice person. I could have disabled my accosters. It hadn’t been necessary to kill them. I came to the realization that I could have done what I had done the last time I’d found myself in the Rookery, and simply blown them all off their feet, sent them tumbling down the filthy street like the human debris they were.

  I hadn’t even considered it this time. It hadn’t even occurred to me to use less than lethal force until well after the fact and I wondered, with a vaguely uneasy sort of curiosity, what was different this time around. When the answer came, it was accompanied by a sharp pang.

  The difference was Amra. There had been something about her, even then, that had made me not want to be quite such a ruthless bastard.

  That was why, after we’d braced my shit-stain of a cousin and the jackals had gathered outside his door to wait for their chance at us, I’d just blown them off their feet and out of our way. I hadn’t even killed the one who had attacked me inside the Cock’s Spur, though I would have in almost any other circumstance. But Amra was there, watching, and I’d felt the weight of her gaze on me as I crouched over the man. I knew without a doubt she wouldn’t be clapping if I dispatched a helpless foe. So he had lived.

  When Gavon had asked me why I didn’t kill the wretch, he’d been genuinely surprised. He knew me as only family could. Which of course is why he’d made himself scarce afterward. He knew I’d come for him, and I had. I was intent on killing him for what he had done decades earlier. I am not a nice person, but compared to Guache, I am a paragon of virtue.

  He’d disappeared without a trace. Guache Gavon was a dark parody of a human, with a soul as twisted as a corkscrew. But he wasn’t in the least stupid.

  #

  I ruminated my way through the Rookery, walking more or less at random, but generally south and west, as much as the tangle of streets allowed. I gave Kluge sufficient time to set up a cordon of watchers around the loose boundaries of the Rookery. I wanted as many of them as possible waiting for me to re-emerge, or even better, to come in looking for me. If I was lucky, they’d waste the entire night on their fruitless search, and I’d be far, far away.

  The River Ose is very big, and very long. One of the reasons it is so big and so
long is that it has a damned lot of tributaries that feed it on its long, long journey from somewhere in the Silent Lands to the Bay of Lucernis. One of those tributaries ran right through the Rookery. Or rather it ran under it; the River Senna had been bricked and covered over nearly two centuries before, having become a polluted and vile breeding ground for disease. Now it was an all-but-forgotten storm drain.

  The things you learn while researching ways not to spend your afterlife in eternal torment.

  Case in point: I happened to know that there was a well somewhere in the Rookery whose shaft went down to the Senna, built after the river had had time to become wholesome again, but before the neighborhood had had time to fester. I even knew more or less where the well was, and once I started actively looking for it, it wasn’t difficult to find. It was in the middle of a squalid little square, surrounded by tall, narrow half-timbered houses whose eaves rustled with rats or bats or gods-only-knew what vermin, and whose windows were black squares that still somehow managed to give the impression of malevolent eyes.

  It turned out I didn’t know that at some point someone had capped the well with a rough-carved stone that weighed a ton or more. I suppose it had become too convenient a place to dispose of corpses.

  I was reluctant to remove the stone using the Art for a few reasons. First, because I wanted to conserve as much of my power as possible. Reopening the hell gate wasn’t going to be child’s play. Second, once I removed it, it would be impossible to put it back, since I’d have to smash it to gravel. I might as well paint an arrow on the street for Kluge to follow. Finally, I was more than a little worried that Kluge was somehow tracking not me, but my use of the Art. It was possible to do so, and there weren’t all that many mages running around Lucernis. If I gave Kluge the end of a piece of string, he was perfectly capable of pulling on it.

  So I cast around looking for some other way to get at the underground Senna. If it had been re-purposed as a storm drain, then there had to be some way for the runoff to enter.

  I have an excellent memory, but not so excellent as to be able to recall with perfect clarity the Senna’s course to the Ose. The maze that was the Rookery’s streets didn’t help. It took me almost an hour to find a grate that I could fit through, and even then I had a bad time of it. Being stuck in a narrow space that had obviously been used as a piss-hole for decades was incredibly frustrating More than once I was on the verge of using the Art to ease my passage, but I resisted the urge. I was already befouled. Giving my location away to Kluge would mean I’d gotten filthy for no reason. So I wriggled and squirmed, keeping tight hold of my patience and my pack, and after what seemed like centuries I finally squeezed my way past the obstruction that had given me such a hard time, and fell ten feet or more into the lightless, chill waters of the Senna.

  The water was deep enough that I sustained no injuries, and wasn’t so deep that I had to swim. All in all, not as bad as it might have been. But an underground river doesn’t provide much in the way of light, so I pulled out the old, withered glory hand from my pack and hung it around my neck from the chain that pierced the remains of the wrist. The corpselight was enough to keep me oriented, though the stench of whatever had been used to embalm it was enough to make me dizzy. The uneven riverbed threatened to trip me or turn my ankle, and so I felt my way slowly and carefully downstream, shivering and feeling out each step.

  It was no scented bath, the Senna, but the Ose was infinitely worse, and people actually ate things that were caught in the Ose. Other people, that is. Not me. The charnel grounds were beside the Ose, after all, and the ground sloped down towards the river. I knew what was going into the Ose every time it rained, and it was considerably more off-putting than sewage.

  Soon enough I went into the Ose, and swam for the nearest set of moss-slick steps built into the retaining wall. I got out of the water, packed away the hand, and climbed back up into the city, not all that far from Brass Eye Bridge.

  There were no watchers that I could see.

  My next stop, the last before I went to reopen the hell gate if all went well, was to see Fengal Daruvner.

  Twenty-Three

  Magesight is passive magic; it pulls nothing from the mage’s well, simply the mage’s vitality. It is just there, and you can choose to see with it or not, just as you can choose to open your eyes or not.

  In consequence, I considered the risk of Kluge being able to track my use of magesight to be vanishingly small, whereas the advantage of being able to spot any watchers he set in my path was pronounced. So, dripping and reeking of the Ose, I hailed another hack, then overcame his reluctance to convey me anywhere by paying triple what a reasonable fare might come to.

  I had him drop me off two blocks away from Third Wall Road, and then made my way through back alleys that smelled of old grease, urine and fish guts until I came to the back door of Daruvner’s establishment.

  His nameless eatery was a large affair with high ceilings, though shabby and in a poor state of repair. I doubt he made much profit, considering the pittance he priced his food at and the dauntingly large portions he served out. Third Wall was a working class neighborhood, and having somewhere to eat that would actually fill you up after a long day’s toil without biting too deeply into your pocket had earned him a certain amount of good will. Daruvner’s cooks would win no awards, however.

  I walked into the kitchen as if it were something I did every day. The three cooks were too busy to give me a second glance. I stepped through quickly into the noisy, crowded dining area, dodging one sweating server, and spotted Daruvner immediately. He was seated at his usual table near the back, bald head gleaming in the lantern light, face flushed with drink. Some things never change, thank the dead gods.

  He was having a low conversation with Kettle, his portly runner. Daruvner was speaking and the young man was nodding. None of his nieces seemed to be about, for once. Daruvner glanced up and saw me, and his eyebrows shot up.

  “Holgren! I’ve seen you looking better,” he said, taking in my bedraggled clothing and missing eye.

  “And hopefully you will again,” I replied, taking a seat at his table. Kettle nodded to me and withdrew.

  “Wine?”

  “I thank you.”

  He poured, and we both drank. Fengal served bad food and decent wine. It was good to get the Ose off my tongue.

  “Not an hour ago,” Daruvner said while scratching his ample belly, “I got paid a visit by the recently appointed Commander of the Watch.”

  “And how was dear old Kluge?”

  “Very keen to find out your whereabouts, actually. Keen enough to show me a handful of carrots in one hand, and an iron rod in the other.”

  “I apologize for any inconvenience I might have caused you, Fengal. It was wholly unintentional.”

  He waved it away. “Part and parcel of the business. Kluge wouldn’t be the first to try and get his thumb on me, and he won’t be the last. But he did make me curious. Just what have you been up to, to make him so passionate about finding you?”

  “I was offered a position he very much wanted. He believes I am utterly unsuitable for it. I happen to agree with him, but not so much so that I’ll stick my head in the noose he’s braiding for me.”

  “Do I want to know what this position is?”

  “It would embarrass me to tell you.”

  “Well enough.” He swirled the wine in his glass, obviously deciding to broach the subject that had so far not been even hinted at.

  “So how is Amra these days? I heard that she went to Bellarius. Then all we’ve been hearing about Bellarius is how it’s been eating its own guts.”

  I would have liked to tell Fengal everything that had transpired. He had a soft spot for Amra. With me he was cordial; with her he was protective. I decided to tell him the truth, while leaving out the facts that would only beget even more questions.

  “Amra was lured to Bellarius. I think she was supposed to die there. She didn’t, but she has disappeared
. I’m trying to find her and bring her back.”

  “Who—no. You would tell me who would do such a thing if you thought it safe or useful for me to know.” He drank down the last of his wine and set the glass on the table. He looked at me and smiled. “Tell me, Holgren, what can I do for you then, this fine evening?”

  He said it lightly, but when Fengal Daruvner offered assistance, it meant he was willing to commit his considerable resources to whatever task lay at hand.

  “I’ll be leaving town tonight. It may be a long time before I return. If I return. I’ve got people I need to take care of; two retainers and a—protégé, I suppose is the best term. Thanks to Kluge, I can’t get them sorted before I depart.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s all?”

  I shrugged. “Should there be more?”

  “No, no. Don’t misunderstand me, please. But please also take no offense if I’m a little surprised.”

  “It would be rather churlish of me to be offended by what I don’t understand.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “It’s not important, magus. But I approve of the effect Amra’s had on your character.”

  “Are you saying I wouldn’t have seen to my people before I met Amra?”

  “No, I’m saying you wouldn’t have had people to see to. Now tell me, how would you like me to sort your people?”

  I told him, and he seemed rather disappointed that it would be so easy a thing. Then I told him there was one other thing he could help me with, and what it was, and he didn’t like it much at all.

  “You might as well slit your wrists now and be done with it,” he told me. His frown was impressive.