Among Thieves: A Tale of the Kin

by Douglas Hulick

  “Is that what I think it is?” I said.

  Jelem glanced down at his lap. “This?” he said as he flicked a corner of a page. “If you mean, is this the waterlogged tome I’ve taken so many pains to dry properly, then yes, it is.”

  “Put it down,” I said.

  Jelem raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  I ignored my muscles’ complaints as I pushed myself into a sitting position and pointed at the book. “Put it down,” I said. “Now.” Dream warning or no, I hadn’t slogged through sewers and fought White Sashes so Jelem could page through it at his leisure.

  Jelem regarded me for a long moment, his expression fading from mild surprise to cool displeasure. Slowly, he closed the cover and set the book on the table.

  “As you wish.” Jelem picked up the glass of wine and sank back even farther into the chair. He took a long, lingering sip and held the glass up to the lamp’s light. Then he smiled.

  I knew that smile. He had something—something he’d found in the book. Something he wanted to trade for.

  Fine. Let him smile. What could he have possibly found in just . . .

  I looked past him to the window and the crisp, clear stars outside—stars that had been hidden behind storm clouds when I was last awake.

  Oh.

  “How long have I been here?” I asked.

  Jelem’s smile deepened at my tone. “A night, a day, and nearly another full night. It’s almost Owl’s day, and a new week, by your reckoning.”

  “Owl?” I echoed. Damn. Maybe he had gotten through enough of the book to find something after all. But what was he doing with it in the first place?

  “Where’s Degan?” I asked.

  “He’s been in and out—more like a worried hen than an Arm.” Jelem took another sip of wine and looked at me. “You can ask me directly, you know. It’s not as if I haven’t already been insulted.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What are you doing with the book?”

  Jelem nodded. “Better. Simply put, you wouldn’t let it out of your sight. You made Degan promise to leave it with you. He did.”

  “And you just decided to help yourself to it?”

  “No one made me promise not to.”

  “I take it,” I said, “that you found something interesting in there.”

  Jelem tipped his glass toward me in salute.

  “And that it’s going to cost me,” I said.

  Jelem set the glass on the table. “That,” he said, “is entirely up to you.” He picked up the book again. “I’m sure you’d be able to puzzle a fair amount of this out on your own, or pay someone else to do so, but that would take both time and trust. I doubt you have much of either to spare at this point.”

  I didn’t bother denying it. He had me in a corner, and we both knew it.

  “How much?” I said, steeling myself for what I knew was going to be a very large number.

  Jelem surprised me by waving the idea away with a sweep of his hand. “Money? For this? Perish the thought. You already owe me, and besides, who am I to be greedy?” I was good; I didn’t laugh in his face at that. “No,” continued Jelem, “I was thinking of something of more immediate use.”

  “Such as?”

  Jelem tapped his finger on the book meaningfully.

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. The book stays with me.”

  “You misunderstand,” said Jelem. “I don’t want the book—I’m not stupid, nor do I have a death wish—but I do want to know why you’re so interested in it. You and glimmer don’t usually mix, Drothe, especially when the glimmer’s imperial, so I—”

  “What?!” I said, throwing the sheets aside and swinging my feet to the floor. I stood, or at least tried to. My legs refused to bear my weight, and I only stayed upright by catching myself on the bed’s footboard.

  “Oh, be careful,” said Jelem absently. “Your legs won’t be able to hold you for a while yet. The healing glimmer used up most of the strength in the surrounding muscles to speed up your recovery. It should finish replenishing itself in a day or so.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” I growled, clawing my way back to my perch on the bed. I took a deep, shaking breath and let it out about as smoothly as it had come in. “Are you telling me,” I said, “that book is about Imperial magic?”

  Jelem smiled lazily. “As far as I can tell, yes. And no. It—”

  “What do you mean, as far as you can tell?” I said. “Either we can be executed for having that book, or we can’t. You’re the Mouth, damn it—is the stuff in there forbidden or not?”

  Jelem sat up straighter in his chair and fixed me with a hard look. “I can tell you,” he said evenly, “that this book was put down in that ridiculous mixture of termite tracks and rodent droppings you Imperials call writing; I can tell you that it’s in a different dialect than you use today; and I can tell you that an imperial Paragon named Ioclaudia Neph wrote the book, mainly because she was kind enough to sign it. What I cannot tell you is what exactly Ioclaudia wrote about, because someone woke up in a foul mood and told me to put the book aside before I could finish.”

  “But if an imperial Paragon wrote it, what else would it be about?” I said. Paragons were a select cadre of imperial magicians. By decree, they were the only ones allowed to work with Imperial magic.

  “Not having finished it, I’d rather not hazard a guess.”

  I stared at Jelem and his smug smile for a long moment. The bastard knew more than he was letting on, and he wanted me to know it.

  “All right,” I said. “So if you don’t want a book that may or may not be about Imperial magic, what do you want?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Yes, but how does knowing why I want the book help you?” I said.

  “Simple,” said Jelem. “If I know why you’re interested in it, I will know why others are after it. Kin and Imperial magic don’t often cross paths—having that happen, and being involved in it, puts me in a rare position.”

  “You mean it’ll give you leverage with whoever has the book in the end, be they criminal or imperial.”

  Jelem shrugged. “Something like that, yes. I’ve found that leverage is never a bad thing to have.”

  “That could be a hell of a dangerous lever,” I said.

  “A tool is only as dangerous as the man who uses it.”

  I leaned back into my pillow and considered. The offer made sense from Jelem’s point of view; the more he knew, the more he could parlay it into an advantage. And, given the hints he’d just dropped, he had a fair start on the book’s contents already. But that didn’t help him unless he knew whom to play—or avoid—down the line.

  As for my end—well, there was a hell of a lot to tell. What had started separately as a cleanup job and a hunt for a missing relic had become a twisted mass involving my sister, assassins, Gray Princes, a Kin war, White Sashes, and now, apparently, a long-dead Paragon and her notes on Imperial magic. I knew I could run most of it by Jelem without betraying either Kells or Degan, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  As a Nose, my instinct was to keep things close until I had them figured out. Except, in this case, I wouldn’t live long enough to do that unless I found out what I had.

  Besides, I wanted to know exactly what all the fuss was about.

  “Got any seed?” I asked.

  Jelem reached into one of his sleeves and tossed me a pouch. I emptied two of the dark orbs into my palm, rolled them there briefly with my fingertips, and then took them into my mouth. They were superb.

  “You have to keep this tight,” I said. “I know I can’t expect you not to use it, but it can’t make the rounds. Understood?”

  “Completely.”

  “All right,” I said. And I told him. I talked about being sent to dust Fedim, the conversation above the sewer grate, the attempts on my life. I talked about the missing relic, the scraps of paper, Iron Degan and the Gray Prince and Ten Ways. I went over everything that impacted either Ioclaudia’s boo
k, Ten Ways, the fighting between Nicco and Kells—even my dream encounter with the Gray Prince. The only things I left out were my Long Nosing, my Oath to Degan, and my relationship to Christiana.

  When I was done, Jelem remained silent for a long time, slowly swirling the last of the wine in his glass and staring at the light that gilded its rim. When he did speak, his voice was soft, as if coming from a great distance.

  “The dream,” he said. “The dream . . . disturbs me.”

  “You and me both,” I said.

  Jelem shook his head. “I’m not talking about the woman’s warning, although I think you should heed her to be safe.”

  “Then what?”

  Jelem looked up from his wine. “Dream manipulation is . . . Well, it’s not done. At least, not that I’ve ever heard of. Not in the empire.”

  “But they do it somewhere else?”

  “There are stories, told in the oldest wajiq tals in Djan—what you might call magicians’ academies, though you have nothing to equal them here—of ancient masters who could step from one reality to another like we pass from room to room in a house. These studies were banned ages ago. The despots felt this power too closely mimicked the traveling of our gods, that it was a kind of blasphemy. It’s said the first step to such travels was to be able to enter the land of another’s dreams.”

  “Are you saying there’s a Djanese yazani after this book, too?”

  “No,” said Jelem. “I’m saying that, if your dream was manipulated as you say, the person responsible has access to a form of magic banned in my homeland for generations. Whether your imperial glimmer can do such things, I don’t know.”

  “But why all the dancing around?” I said. “Why not just use glimmer to find the damn thing in the first place?”

  “Two reasons,” said Jelem. “First, it’s very hard to use magic to locate things. Unless you are intimately familiar with what you are looking for, the chances of finding something with a spell are minimal at best. You would do only slightly worse if you flipped a coin at every crossroads you encountered in the city. And secondly, if you suspected other potent magicians, as well as the emperor himself, were interested in the same thing as you, would you want to advertise your involvement in the first place?”

  “You forget,” I said, “I seem to have been doing exactly that all along.”

  “Ah, but you’re a fool,” said Jelem. “The people looking for this book know better. They’ve understood the stakes from the beginning, while you’re just beginning to realize the risks now.”

  “So tell me why this book’s so damn special,” I said.

  Jelem set his glass aside and opened the book. The bindings creaked in soft protest. “As I told you,” he said, beginning to turn the stiff pages with disturbing disregard to their condition, “I can’t be completely sure of the contents. It’s in a strange script. I haven’t had much of a chance to examine it. And, frankly, what passes for magical theory in your empire still puzzles me sometimes. Djanese magic is much less eccentric.”

  “Quit making excuses,” I said, “and get to the point.”

  Jelem paused long enough to favor me with a dark look, then continued leafing through the book. “This is a personal journal. Part of it focuses on court politics, and part of it deals with glimmer. It’s hard to say what’s what. Ioclaudia skipped from topic to topic like an excited child—like so many Imperials, she obviously had no formal training in rhetoric—but when she does mention magic, it certainly seems to be of the Imperial variety.

  “What’s more, Ioclaudia Neph appears to have been one of the emperor’s personal magical advisers—part of his inner circle. When he needed something, or someone, glimmered, she was one of the people he called. Information, punishment, defense, manipulation . . . She did it all for him.”

  I let out a low whistle. “That’s one serious Paragon.”

  “When you cast for, and on, the emperor, you’d best be. But that’s not the most interesting part.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Jelem was still turning pages, scanning over them as he went. When he reached the page he wanted, he brought the book to me.

  “Here,” he said. He handed it over and pointed to a portion of the page. “Read this section, here.”

  The book was in better shape than I had expected. I’d dealt with religious and historical texts that were more rot than book, and most of them weren’t a third of the age of this one. Yes, there was water damage, both old and new, and some of the ink had faded, and the binding was loose, but the book was still in one recognizable, usable piece. Aside from the traces of Barren’s mud still lingering in a few spots, I would have thought it had been residing in a library until now.

  I tipped the book toward the light coming from the lantern. Jelem was right; Ioclaudia’s hand had been atrocious. The ideograms looked to be a stylized form of cephta, but they had been put down in a careless manner. I could barely recognize it as writing.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “I find I’m still having some problems with the third portion of the . . . incantation. Could it be a centering issue? Perhaps, but I suspect it is more the nature of the spell itself. Hystia’s Theorem states that . . .”

  I looked up at Jelem. “ ‘Hystia’s Theorem’?” I said.

  “Patience,” said Jelem. “Keep reading.”

  I repositioned the book in my lap. “Hystia’s Theorem states that while magic can be focused through the . . . fala n’arim?”

  “It’s a Djanese term. Keep reading.”

  “It cannot be used to effect the same. This is known. It is a Truth, handed down by the Angels, immutable as time.

  “And yet, we have found flaws in the Theorem. While the fala n’arim is the ideal lens, it might serve as a template as well. As a lens may be polished or faceted, so may it be altered to change its focal length. Is this the case for the fala n’arim as well? An imperfect analogy, I admit, but if it is so, then we can do much more than we thought. So much more than we were told we could. . . .”

  I looked up. “All right,” I said. “She’s on the verge of something big, at least to her. Things aren’t what they seemed. Great. What does it mean?”

  Jelem took the book and returned to his seat. He stared down at the passage I had just read. “Fala n’arim is an old term in Djanese sorcery. There’s no direct translation into Imperial, either, for the language or magical theory.” He ran a finger absently along the edge of the book, then drew it hastily away.

  “Fala n’arim,” he said, “refers to the core of the caster, the very essence of the self. The great yazani of Djan have always written of shielding the fala n’arim, of keeping it pure and untainted. To bring power into it is to corrupt it, and therefore the man as well. It is one of our oldest precepts of magic.

  “But Ioclaudia writes of using it as the focus for her magic, of taking power into it and shaping it within. More, she even hints at using the fala n’arim to draw power from the Nether itself.” Jelem paused and rubbed at his lower lip. “I suppose I can see it in theory,” he said. “And it could give you access to immense power, but still, to—”

  “Jelem,” I said, “is the fala n’arim a soul?”

  “For lack of a better term, yes.” Jelem looked up at me. “Ioclaudia is talking about using her very being to tap directly into the power of the Nether. No gathering up the seepage like most Mouths, no constrained external taps—just Ioclaudia and the Nether.”

  “So that’s what Imperial magic is—casting magic through your soul?”

  “That’s what Ioclaudia seems to be saying, at least as I understand it so far. There’s still a great deal more to read.”

  I stared at the book in his lap. I wasn’t much on theology, but you can’t help but pick up some when you trade in stolen items. What little I knew was waving warning flags like crazy.

  “She’s talking blasphemy,” I said. “Big blasphemy.” Even the Angels had hesitated before they had divided Stephen Dorminikos’s soul into three p
arts and set up the cycle of Imperial Reincarnation. No one messed with souls. It was the third Declaration in the Book of Return, just after, Honor the Angels in all things and The Angels are the true successors of the Dead Gods.

  And then there was the whole topic of Imperial magic on top of it.

  “That thing’s a fucking death sentence twice over,” I said.

  “And a possible key to great power as well,” said Jelem.

  “No wonder those Sashes were after it.” I ran my hand along my thigh, feeling a dull twinge where the sword had cut and gouged me. “We got lucky. This could have been far worse if they’d gotten away and told the emperor who had that book.”

  “Things still may be,” said Degan.

  I started and looked over to see Degan standing in the doorway, a canvas bag under his arm. Big men weren’t supposed to move that softly.

  His eyes had deep smudges underneath them. His clothes, while different from those he had been wearing in the Barren, still looked rumpled and hard worn. There was a dirty bandage on his left hand.

  “The third Sash?” I said.

  “Off into the night.”

  I closed my eyes. “Damn.” Make that a death sentence thrice over.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “How’d she get away?” I said.

  Degan, still in the doorway, shrugged. “It was either keep track of Larrios and the book, or kill her. Given how badly you said you wanted the book, I settled for shoving her into the basement and running Larrios down.”

  “That little bastard ran?”

  “Like the wind,” said Degan. “Well, the wind if it had a bad eye, a bad leg, and a couple of broken ribs. He ended up dropping the book rather than let me catch him.”

  “Where was I in all of this?” I had a vision of myself lying unconscious in the rain, a White Sash climbing out of the basement toward me, and I didn’t care for it much.

  Degan eyed me a moment. “You weigh more than I’d expect. Did you know that?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Degan nodded, then hefted the sack. “By the way, your clothes were ruined. I got these for you, instead.” He tossed the canvas bag onto the bed. I opened it.