The Thief Who Went to War

by Michael McClung

  Tomorrow I was going to have to get some new clothes. For someone who hates shopping as much as I do, it seemed like I did it far more than was normal. But that’s what happens when somebody burns down your house, with everything in it. And after replenishing my wardrobe, I’d have to move on with the next part of the plan Holgren and I had worked out.

  It wasn’t the worst part, but it definitely wasn’t something I was looking forward to. Praying for divine intervention was one thing. Bracing a god in his temple and demanding a favour was something else.

  Even if he agreed, and that was a big if, I was under no illusion that Bath wouldn’t make demands of his own, in recompense. I shuddered to think what they might be. The god of secrets didn’t hand out favors on the street, and just because he wasn’t straight evil didn’t make him any less of a sketchy bastard.

  Eventually I slept, at first brokenly and then deeply. I dreamed about knives – thousands upon thousands of knives, just scattered all over the streets. I was looking for one particular one, though I didn’t know what it looked like. The dream logic told me I would know it when I picked it up. Every knife I handled turned in my hands, though, and somehow managed to cut me no matter how careful I was. By the time I woke, I hadn’t found the knife I was looking for, and my hands were practically mincemeat.

  FIVE

  THE GOOD THING ABOUT my tailor having my measurements on record was that it took about ten minutes to place my order. The bad thing was that it took about ten minutes to place my order.

  Her name was Marfa and she was a strange bird, alternately distant and overfamiliar. She was pretty, if a little too thin, and dressed in shades of colors I would be hard-pressed to name. ‘Eye-watering’ would be an apt if unhelpful description.

  She did everything herself; no assistants or seamstresses or even an apprentice, though she certainly had enough custom both to warrant and pay for some help. I’d asked her why once and she’d said that people irritated her, and also the other way around. That’s when she secured my custom for life.

  She wanted to check and see if my measurements were still accurate, and I was tempted to let her, if only to put off my visit to Temple Street. But not tempted enough to stand still for half an hour while she poked and prodded and ran a measuring string all around my body and said things like ‘wine goes straight to a woman’s belly and lodges there, doesn’t it?’

  “Half a dozen, then,” she said, “with twice as many shirts.”

  “Yep.”

  “And all of them black. Again.” Her disappointment was palpable.

  “Fine. Make one suit charcoal gray. For parties.”

  “Delivered to the same address?”

  “Uh, no. My house has a slight case of being ashes, which is why I’m here. Send ‘em to the Oak.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry to hear it,” she said, and seemed to mean it.

  “Never mind. Be sorry for whoever did it once I get hold of them.”

  “Did you want delicates as well, then? Socks? Kerchiefs?”

  I’d forgotten all about the finer points of dressing like a civilized person. I blamed the hangover. “That seems like a good idea, yeah.”

  Her eyes lit up. “You’ll also be wanting night clothes, I take it.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was more excited about the additional custom, or the chance to get me into something womanish. She was the only decent tailor I’d found who seemed perfectly happy to dress me to my specific, decidedly masculine and knife-toting taste, color preference aside, so I let her down gently.

  “Eh, no. I sleep in what the gods gave me.” Or whatever I happened to be wearing when I nodded off, to be honest. Maybe it said something about me that I was prepared to admit to intimate details, rather than just being slovenly. Probably it did. But I’ve no idea what.

  “Just so, mistress,” she replied, her eyes suddenly bright. She retreated to her small, cluttered desk and did the sums, and told me the total. I put gold in her hand.

  “It’ll be four days, mistress.”

  I added two more marks to her handful.

  “Two days it is, then,” she said with a smile. “My other clients will understand the urgency of your case, I’m sure.”

  “No doubt.” By which I meant there was no doubt they wouldn’t care why their own orders were delayed. But hey, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about their disappointment, so that seemed equitable.

  After Marfa’s I directed the coach, which I’d hired for the day, to Temple Street. Reluctantly.

  There are only two kinds of luck. Ask anyone from Hardside, and they’ll tell you what they are: Bad and worse.

  Nothing I experienced as a child made me think that was anything other than the gods’ own truth. It wasn’t until I was with Arno that I learned to think of it as a warning, rather than an expression of defeat.

  “What’s the two kinds of luck, sprog?” he’d ask me.

  “Bad and worse.”

  “So don’t you ever count on luck to get you what you need. It’ll only break your heart, and that’s if you’re lucky. Heh. If you’re lucky. Damned if I ain’t half-clever.”

  I don’t know if Arno would’ve approved of what I was about to do. If my luck was bad, Bath wouldn’t make an appearance at all, or he’d straight tell me to fuck off. If my luck was worse...

  I didn’t like to think about worse. This was the god that had had every intention of letting me lie comatose in perpetuity in some dank corner of his temple, to keep the Blade that Whispers Hate off the streets. But that was the reason I was approaching him – he’d shown that he was at least disinclined to let the Eightfold’s Blades run completely amok. And he was the god of secrets. If anyone knew something about the Blades that would help me overcome them, it was him.

  Badgering him for aid was part of the plan Holgren, Greytooth the Philosopher and I had agreed on. It wasn’t the part we’d hung our hopes on, though.

  The ride to Temple Street was far shorter than I would’ve liked. I had the hack stop at the far end of the street, where he wouldn’t be harassed overmuch while waiting, and walked the rest of the way down.

  Temple Street, or the Street of the Gods if you wanted to be formal about it, was the same mad shambles as always. Trash-choked vacant lots abutted soaring marble edifices (and just because the lot was vacant didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a temple, complete with worshippers). Some of the temples were burnt-out husks covered in graffiti. Some weren’t much more imposing than a corner shop. And some throbbed with invisible, undeniable power. Bath’s temple was one of those.

  Much more interesting, to my mind, were the people going in and out of the temples, or simply loitering in the street. The watch never came here without an invite or a specific purpose, because the gods only knew if the mad bastard speaking in tongues while taking a shit on the curb was just cracked, or was in fact a high priest moved by his patron god. Truth be told, I had a hard time telling the holy from the deranged myself.

  Of course, the homeless and aimless and mentally burdened flocked to Temple Street as a result of the watch-free environment. The fact that Isin’s temple handed out free meals twice a day didn’t hurt, either. Say one thing about the goddess of love, she meant love in all its forms and not just the naked kind.

  As I approached Bath’s place, I saw that the pavement ahead of me was blocked by a rag lady with about a dozen bags filled with fuck knows what. She was sitting cross-legged amongst her dubious treasures, muttering to herself and picking at her face with the aid of a little silver-backed hand mirror. Things must have improved in my absence. The way I remembered Temple Street, she’d have lost that eminently pawnable item to a snatch thief within about ten seconds of whipping it out. I moved out into the street to go around her.

  “He won’t help you,” she said, not looking up from her toilette.

  “Eh?” I kept moving, but slowed down despite myself.

  “Bath. Most that go in, they just want to unload their dirty secrets. But you’re
going to ask him for something. For a favour.” She shrugged. “He won’t help you.”

  I stopped. The little hairs on the back of my neck were starting to stand. I couldn’t tell for certain if it was because I was in the presence of magic, or in the presence of creepy.

  “And how would you know that? Are you a blood witch?” I asked her. I wasn’t being sarcastic. You don’t talk snidely to women who can give you blood poisoning or worse if you offend them. You spoke politely to anyone who might be a blood witch, if you weren’t an idiot.

  “Me? No, I’m a crazy old lady who likes to collect rubbish and haul it around the city.” She’d moved on from picking at her blemishes and was now finger-combing her stiff gray hair.

  “Then out of curiosity, how do you know what I’m about, or what Bath will do?”

  She looked up at me and pointed to the mirror. “She told me.”

  “Your reflection.”

  “Pfft. I’m not that crazy. It’s not me in there; it’s Her. It’s She.”

  I squatted down and looked her in the eye. “And does she have a name?”

  The woman looked aghast, and stared at me with round eyes, as if I’d said something ridiculous. Or profane.

  “Her name is hidden. You should know that. Everybody knows that.”

  Almost, I walked away then. The conversation was going nowhere. What did I expect from a bag lady?

  But she’d known where I was going.

  “So what do people call her, then, if her true name is hidden?”

  “She, you twit. She Who Casts Eight Shadows.”

  Almost instinctively, I shot up and backed off a few steps.

  I’ve said before I don’t believe in coincidences, only cause and effect. The Eightfold Bitch was an obscure goddess. No fucking way did her name just happen to come out of this random nutter’s mouth.

  “You talk to the Eightfold. Through your mirror.”

  “No, you muttonhead. She talks to me.” She smiled. Her teeth were amazingly clean and straight, but it was a nasty smile for all that. “Do you want to talk to Her? I wonder what she’d say to you.” She started to turn the mirror to face me.

  My every instinct shouted ‘fuck that’ so I turned and walked the rest of the way to Bath’s temple, not looking back. I would have run, but there’s a balance to be kept between pride and caution.

  “She’s just a crazy lady,” I told myself. “You just wanted to get away from her smell.” But she hadn’t actually smelled bad, that I had noticed.

  The bag lady’s cackles trailed me down the street and up the steps to the doors of the temple.

  SIX

  I STOOD THERE A MOMENT, staring at them. I hadn’t been inside since before Bath almost turned me into a mindless, drooling nursemaid for the Blade that Whispers Hate. There was a very large part of me that was reluctant as hells to walk in those doors ever again. I remembered how blithely I’d kept my retirement money in there, thinking myself clever, and shuddered.

  Even outside the closed doors, I could still smell the musky incense that was Bath’s alone. The smell of secrets.

  Impossibly, I didn’t even notice him until he spoke.

  “If you stand there long enough, even you will have your pocket picked, Amra Thetys.” He was sitting on his steps looking up at me sidewise, sort of hunched over from what I could tell, with his arms hugging his knees. It was difficult to make him out, since he looked mostly like slowly-writhing shadow – except for those damned godly eyes. Pinpricks of starlight in ink, they were. My mind insisted he’d been there the whole time, though just a moment before it would have insisted no one was there at all. Whatever, I was just glad I couldn’t see his sewn-lipped mouth.

  “Not bloody likely,” I told him.

  “Is that so?”

  “The day somebody’s light-fingered enough to pick my pocket is the day I become a shut-in and take up needlework.”

  He raised his shadowy hand. In it was the little velvet bag that held the green marble full of souls.

  “Gods don’t count,” I said, snatching it back.

  He shifted a little. “You’ve taken your time, coming to see me.”

  “After the Blade that Whispers Hate, can you blame me for being reluctant?”

  “If you’ll recall, I warned you about the Eightfold Bitch years ago. And surely it should be the Blade that Whispered Hate, now,” he replied.

  “Oh, yes, make jokes. It wasn’t you who had to deal with a mad shard of a mad goddess driving you not-slowly insane.”

  “I gave you what you needed to deal with her, did I not?”

  “You got me good and pissed off is what you did. I don’t think that merits you patting yourself on the back. It’s not that hard to do, if I’m honest.”

  He shrugged. “It worked.”

  “Yeah, it worked.”

  “And here you are once more, and once more a Blade... troubles you.”

  “Hey, I was just taking a walk.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Fine. I’ve come to ask a favor.”

  “Oh? Then I should tell you to keep walking.”

  “Are you? Because the crazy lady down the street just said the Eightfold Bitch told her you wouldn’t help me.”

  He leaned out toward the street to see who I was talking about.

  “Can you describe said crazy lady?”

  “She’s sitting on the pavement surrounded by sacks of rubbish, holding a hand mirror. Hard to miss.”

  “Then perhaps my godly powers of perception are failing me.”

  I looked back. Reluctantly. She was gone. “What the fuck? She was right there.”

  “Perhaps the stress of your... situation is beginning to take a toll, Amra Thetys.”

  “Bollocks. I was born stressed. She was right fucking there.” She could not have moved all that baggage so fast on her own.

  He shrugged. Or at least I think he did. The shadows just below his head briefly humped themselves up, anyway. “Well, the ways of the gods are fathomless. Or so I’m told.”

  There was something about his tone. Dismissive in some indefinably false way. I felt like there was some kind of subtext that I just wasn’t getting. My gut started churning a little.

  “It was Her, wasn’t it? Fuck me. She’s supposed to be locked away somewhere.”

  “If She Who Casts Eight Shadows were to appear on the Street of the Gods, it would not be as a rag and bone woman, I assure you.”

  “What would it be as, then?”

  It took him a moment to answer. “A calamity,” he said, almost to himself. “Ask your favour, Amra Thetys. And then tell me why I should grant it.”

  I tore my thoughts away from what a calamity might look like and focussed on the matter at hand. “Look, this is not complicated. I need a weapon. Something to give me an edge against the remaining Blades. If anyone knows if, and where, such a thing exists, it’s you, god of secrets.”

  He stared at me for a moment, his eyes getting subtly brighter. “You want another weapon when you’re already carrying blades. Lots of them. It seems greedy to me.”

  “Nothing I’m armed with will do the job, secret-monger.”

  “If you say so. Now, why should I help you?”

  “Because I helped your girlfriend’s avatar?” Bath and the goddess Mour had been an item, apparently, before the Cataclysm. Her avatar had been imprisoned on the Wreck for centuries, before I got her free.

  He was silent for a time. Then, “And you think that your action merits my aid.”

  “Well I was hoping, yeah.”

  “How shall I put this? Ah: Your hope was a vain one, alas.”

  That set me on my back foot. Getting Bath to assist had always been something of a long shot. I’d expected him to want something in return, something I’d be unwilling or unable to pony up. I hadn’t expected sarcasm about helping Lyra, or what that implied.

  “She was stuck in that cabin for centuries.”

  “And I could have freed her from it at
any time, did I wish it. I did not.”

  I stared at him for a moment, letting it sink in. When it did, I started to get hot.

  “That’s just plain shitty, that is. You’re a cold one, secret-monger.”

  “And you’re a presumptuous one, mortal.”

  “It’s not presumptuous to see that an eternity of imprisonment is fucking evil, whatever hard feelings you were nursing.”

  “You’re hopeless at petitioning gods for their favour, do you know that?”

  “Yeah? Well at least I didn’t leave a woman trapped since the Cataclysm, slowly going mad. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Are you trying to shame me into helping you, now?”

  “No, I very much doubt that’s possible. I’m telling you you’re a shitloaf. Fuck your help.” Maybe it wasn’t the smart thing to do, but just then I didn’t give a damn. I turned and started back down the steps. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like he pulled back from me a little as I passed him.

  “We haven’t finished our conversation,” he said.

  “I haven’t finished my walk.”

  “I hope you enjoy it, then. Storm’s coming.”

  I looked back at him. “You can save the metaphors. I know I’m deep in the shit.”

  “No, I mean an actual storm. You’ll be piss-wet through in about five minutes.” And then he was gone, just as the first gust of wind brought the scent of rain.

  I just stood there for a moment, taking it in.

  “Well, hells,” was what I finally came up with.

  Holgren wasn’t going to be happy. All I’d had to do was get was a name, a clue out of the secret-monger. Instead, I’d let my temper get the best of me.

  That was no way to win a war.

  Now I’d have to go with the backup plan, and the backup plan, to put it mildly, sucked Kerf’s dangly balls.

  SEVEN

  I COULDN’T DO MUCH about Kerf’s danglies until nightfall, and it was indeed pissing down, so I went and had lunch at Fraud’s. The part of me that will forever be poor noted disapprovingly that I was letting coin run through my hands like water. The part of me that likes to eat well told that part to go hang itself. The part of me that provides the rationalizations noted that step one of the plan was to act like I had no clue what was about to land on me. So it was two against one.