THE THIEF WHO WENT TO WAR
Amra Thetys: Book Five
MICHAEL McCLUNG
COPYRIGHT © 2019, Michael McClung
No animals were harmed during the production of this product. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or events, past, present or future, is purely coincidental. This product not to be construed as an endorsement of any product, company, or deity, nor as the adoption or promulgation of any guidelines, standards or recommendations. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. This product is meant for educational purposes only. Some literacy required. Batteries not included. Package sold by weight, not volume. Contents may settle during shipment. No user-serviceable parts inside. Use only as directed.
Do not eat. Not a toy.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Thief Who Went To War (The Amra Thetys Series, #5)
DEDICATION
For my crazy chickens, as always – and for all the Amra readers who have waited so long.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all the members of the Ministry of Fiction for assuring me this book did not suck, while at the same time showing me where the book could suck less. You are a special bunch. Never change.
Abanon wields the Blade that Whispers Hate
Moranos holds the Dagger of Desire
Ninkashi grips the trembling Blade of Rage
with which she pierced the heart of her mad sire
Heletia grips the Knife called Winter's Tooth
Visini wields the Blade that Binds and Blinds
Husth fights with the Kris that Strikes Elsewhere
and woe betide the soul it finally finds
Kalara hones the Knife that Parts the Night
Grim Xith commands the Dirk that Harrows Souls
Eight Blades the Goddess has, and one
from eight will ren-
ONE
FUCKING BELLARIUS.
I did not love the city of my birth, and never would. I would never forgive it for all that it had done to me – that just wasn’t in me. The best I could do was forget about it, and my history with it. Which I could not do while I was still in it.
I just wanted to leave. As soon as Holgren was fit enough to travel, that’s exactly what we would do, if I had any say. I was not getting stuck in Bellarius again.
The big question was where we would go.
I’d got enough of Holgren's story out of him to know that Lucernis probably wasn’t the safest place for him at the moment. Maybe ever again. Which was a pity, really; I’d made a home there. I’d built a life. Even made a friend or two. But considering what was coming after me, it was probably best I stay away from heavily populated areas. And anyone that I cared about, that could be used as leverage. Holgren excepted, of course. He’d gone through literal hells the last time I wandered off. He’d do it again, that much was clear. And besides, I didn’t want to be parted from him again, despite the situation.
Maybe that was selfish of me. Probably. I didn’t really care anymore. Holgren was far from toothless; he had as much of a chance to stand against the Blades as I did. More, in a lot of ways.
Holgren had also told me about the deal he’d made with the demon, Tanglewood. I’d offered to cut the seed out of his palm, but he’d shaken his head.
“It would almost certainly kill me,” he’d said. “Besides, I struck a bargain. Tanglewood kept its end, so I’ll keep mine.” Then he’d gone back to sleep in the dusty bed on the first floor of the Telemarch’s citadel.
Holgren was sleeping again. That was mostly what he’d done since we’d returned to the world, to Bellarius, to the Citadel. I made something approaching soup, hoping all my rattling would wake him up. I brought the soup up from the kitchen. He hadn’t moved a muscle since last I checked, so I checked to see if he was still breathing. He was. I took a long look at his face. Gaunt. Unshaven. Pale. And missing an eye. Well, from what he’d mumbled, missing his original eye. He’d got a replacement, but he refused to remove the black leather patch. When I’d asked, he said he’d tell me about it later, and then he’d gone back to sleep.
I paced. The soup was getting cold. My boredom was swelling to epic proportions. So I gently brought him to wakefulness.
“Oi! Wake up, Holgren!” I may have kicked the bed, a little. So I’m not the best nurse.
He sat up, hair wild and eye wide, snorting something that sounded like “Wuzzing hemeh?”
“Dinner time,” I said in my most sunshiny voice, and brought him his bowl on a tray.
“Not hungry.”
“Too bad. Eat.”
Dutifully, he took a spoonful in his mouth. Reluctantly, he swallowed.
“What is it?”
“Soup?”
His eye narrowed and he poked at the lumps in the broth. “I’ve had soup. This is not it, not in any of its forms.”
“Water, meat, vegetable. Boil. Soup.”
“No wonder Bellarius is such a dour place. Nobody born here can cook.”
“I’d be insulted if that wasn't so close to the truth. Try your best.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You aren’t going to eat?”
“Me? Eat that? Do I look crazy?”
He literally growled at me. But he ate.
“Hey, what did you do with my flunky?” I asked him while he struggled to chew an especially gristly lump.
He swallowed before he replied, because Holgren was classy like that. “Keel? The worst thing imaginable.”
“You made him join the navy?”
“Worse. I sent him to school.”
“You monster.”
He shrugged. “It’s what he got for being intelligent but unlettered.”
“Where?”
“Gol-Shen.”
“Good thinking. Far enough away that he can’t easily get revenge.”
While Holgren contended with his dinner, I wandered around the room, at loose ends. It wasn’t the first time I’d done so in the day and a half we’d been pent up there. The Citadel was still a shithole, but it had more furniture than the first time I’d entered it.
“You gonna tell me about your eye, now?” I finally asked.
“It’s not my eye, actually. It’s Lagna’s.”
My mouth dropped open a little. “Seriously?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Let me see it!”
“I would, but if I open it, complicated things happen.”
“Like what?”
“Like my mind goes someplace else, where I can see... anything, if I know where to look. And then I can physically go to it. It’s how I finally found you, but it’s not really something I enjoy doing. I have to look at the corpse of Lagna’s ghost, more or less, when I use it”
“Oh.”
I spied the pack that Holgren had had on when he appeared at my hidey-hole outside reality. I hadn’t disturbed it while he was sleeping, because messing around with a mage’s stuff without his permission was neither safe nor bright. I scooped it up and settled on the floor next to the fire.
“Right then, let’s see what a mage packs when he goes to hells.” I stuck a hand in the pack, and was met with a sticky, tacky residue of... something. It seemed to cover everything inside the pack.
“Ew. What the hells got in here?” I asked, pulling my hand out and wiping it on the cooking rag that was still on my shoulder.
He coughed slightly and shifted himself higher in the bed, then leaned back against the pillows. “There was a river of blood. I had to cross it.”
“Oh.” What do you say to that? I opened the pack wider and started to pullin
g things out, wiping them cleanish as I went.
“Oh, look. A monster’s head under glass.”
“Amra, meet Halfmoon. Halfmoon, Amra. He’s not very nice. He wants to eat my brain.”
“Well who wouldn’t? It’s a very clever brain.” The thing blinked its dozen eyes and ran a long, gray-blue tongue along the glass. I shuddered and put it aside. Facing the wall.
“Mages,” I muttered. I rooted around a bit more and came up with a small glass vial.
“Anonymous powder,” I said. “Let me guess, an ingredient for a spell.”
“No, that’s a jar full of the Road.”
“Seriously?” There really wasn’t anything worse you could put in your body, except straight sharp steel. The Road was a dead end. Worse than hellweed.
“Yes.”
I shook my head and threw it in the fire. “What, wine just not scratching the itch anymore? I take back what I said about your brain.”
“Well I never opened it,” he said, peevishly.
“Thank Vosto.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“Really?” The god of fools and drunkards, Vosto was the closest deity there was to a god of mercy.
“Really.”
“What was that like?”
“He compared me to a turtle stuck on its back, intimated that I was pathetic and ridiculous, told me I was in his debt, then told me to bugger off. Also, he very much seemed to enjoy calling me a fool.”
“Sounds like my kind of god.”
“Meeting a divine being not threatening or actively trying to kill me was a nice change of pace.”
I rooted around some more in the blood-goop inside the pack, but couldn't find anything else. “Is that it?”
“All that's left, anyway.”
“You could have told me instead of letting me play with hell blood!” I threw the pack on the floor, took up the rag, and started scrubbing at my hands.
“I could have. But you said hurtful things about my brain. Also, the soup.” He pointed the spoon at me in an accusatory fashion, and I gave him two bloody fingers in response.
“When you get better, I’m going to smother you in your sleep.”
I went downstairs, where there was a bucket of water and soap, and made good use of them. When I came back, the soup had been exiled to the far edge of the bed. I shifted the tray to the table and sat down in a chair facing him.
“All right, lover, listen up. We have a serious conversation in front of us, and not a bit of it contains light or joy.”
He shrugged. “I doubt it will be worse than dinner, so I feel suitably prepared.”
“First, the bitch Kalara, the Knife That Parts the Night. I renamed her Chuckles, by the way. Long story. Anyway, she’s more or less responsible for every shitty thing that has happened on this side of the Dragonsea for the past thirty years or so. Heavy on the ‘more’ side. She started the Helstrum-Elam war, for a start, and then the plague and famine that followed.”
“To what end?”
“To flood Bellarius with refugees; specifically, children.”
He frowned. “I assume it wasn’t because she has a special fondness for unripe humans.”
“Unripe – that’s pretty dark, Holgren, even for you.”
“Sorry. In Thraxys there was an orchard – actually, you don’t want to know.”
“When I’m in the mood for a good screaming nightmare, I’ll bring that back up and you can tell me a bedtime story, thanks. Anyway, Kalara crammed Bellarius full of street kids. It was an experiment, kind of. Or a contest. Of sorts. She packed this city with street rats, and then started turning the screws on us. She suppressed any impulse towards pity for us from the citizenry of this fair city, to make sure we would have to fend for ourselves. And then she started the Purge.”
“And she did all this by manipulating the Telemarch.”
“That’s how the Blades seem to work, yeah. Or at least the two I’ve encountered. They can’t do all that much on their own. They need a human flunky, a slave to wield them for most things.”
“The obvious question, regarding Kalara’s actions, would be why.”
“She says it was to make me.”
He looked at me a while with his one eye. It was still raptor-like, that gaze. He didn’t notice that he was rubbing at the lump in his palm, but I did. “Do you think Kalara was responsible for what happened with your father?” he finally asked. He knew my story, of course.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t like that. The only person responsible for that piece of shit’s actions was himself. But once he was dead, and once Arno was taken by the lung fever, there I was on the streets. In Kalara’s proof house.” A proof house was a place where they tested armor and other metal implements to destruction, to see what they could stand. I used to steal scrap from the one in the Girdle, when they were careless enough to leave anything out in the yard overnight.
Holgren struggled up a little bit higher in bed. “And did Kalara explain what she meant when she said she’d made you? Made you into what, exactly?”
“The little bitch has been cagey about it. All she would say is she wanted a survivor.” Actually, she’d called me the ‘ultimate survivor’ but that just sounded overblown and stupid.
“Were you meant to be a replacement for the Telemarch?”
“No. She was talking about something bigger.”
“What?”
“She didn’t say. All she said is that the remaining Blades will be after me, now. Some to kill me, some to make me their slave. And that’s why I pulled the disappearing act the night we killed the Telemarch. Well, that and the whole city exploding if I hadn’t.” I was still feeling ambivalent about being the savior of my shithole birthplace.
“Yes, Amra, let’s talk about that, shall we?” His tone was suddenly light, and as false as cut-glass masquerading as diamond. This was a part of our conversation I would happily skip.
“It’s getting late, Holgren, and you look really tired—”
“I went through literal hells to get you back after you disappeared.”
I nodded. “I will pay poets to write sonnets—”
“I don’t remember much at the very end, when the chaos magic was killing me and I was suffocating, but I do remember wine bowls scattered all over the floor.”
“Well I was bored. It’s not like I was having a party or—”
“And then we were back here, and the chaos magic didn’t come back with us. Which leads me to believe you could have returned from whatever no-place you were, minus city-ending threat, at any time you chose. Which means I went through hells to rescue someone who did not want to be rescued.” His tone was not light, there at the end. Not light at all.
I got up from the chair and sat down at the foot of the bed, and put a hand on his blanketed knee. “Do you remember Thagoth?” I asked him.
“Don’t change the subject, Amra.”
“I’m not, I swear. Just listen. When the Shadow King added you to his khordun, you made the case that it might be better for the whole world if you stayed in Thagoth, outside of his control. Until you died.”
“And you shouted me down. And you were right.”
“That time. This time, there are six Blades after me, each one potentially more powerful that the Shadow King. I did the plusses and minuses, and I made a decision.” Actually, I hadn’t initially expected to survive Kalara and the chaos magic at all, but there was no way in hells I was going to tell him that.
He leaned forward and put one long finger on my knee. “But Amra, here is the difference—in Thagoth, we decided. The night you killed the Telemarch, there was no we involved in your sums.”
“There was no time.” It sounded weak even to my own ears now, even if it had seemed true at the time.
“You left me.”
“To save you.”
He pulled back and sat up straighter, his face as solemn as I had ever seen it. “I will say this only once, Amra Thetys, because it is em
barrassingly, unforgivably, excruciatingly treacly, for all that it is the truth: if being saved means I don’t have you, I prefer not to be saved. Do not forget to include that figure the next time you are doing world-altering sums, if you please.”
What could I say to that?
I pushed him back onto the pillows, and kissed him long and hard despite the scraggly fur on his face. And then we started to do other things that are none of your damned business. Which of course is when the gods-damned door opened. Holgren summoned up his magic, and I dove for a knife in the pile of clothing by the bed. Then I remembered all I had was a paring knife I’d brought up from the kitchen.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Greytooth, turning away, but not fucking leaving. “You did give me the key.”
“Most people knock,” I muttered, and started getting dressed. “How are you, old man?” I probably shouldn’t have talked to him that way, him being both a mage and a Philosopher. But I was feeling a tad frustrated.
“Better than I was, now that I know you two are alive.”
“That’s sweet, thanks. How can we help you?”
“It’s I who have come to help you. I’ve received permission from my brothers to open our archives.”
“Archives?” Holgren asked, his voice betraying his interest. Once a bookworm, always a bookworm. I mean, I liked books quite a bit. But I’d liked what we were doing quite a fair bit more, and was hoping to get back to it sharpish. Now Holgren was practically inviting Greytooth in for a chat.
“Every piece of information we have acquired on the Eightfold’s Blades,” Greytooth replied. “Six centuries of research, and the first-hand accounts of the Philosophers who have contended with them.”
“That seems... useful,” I said. “You can turn around, now, by the way.”
“We hope it will prove so,” he replied, and stumped over to the fireplace. “We suspect that, with Kalara’s destruction, the remaining Blades will seek to end the threat you represent. Anything we can do to assist you, we will. My own opinion is that you should bring the fight to them.”
“Or I could run far, far away, and keep running.”
My suggestion was greeted with silence.
“What?”
The Thief Who Went to War Page 1