The Thief Who Went to War

by Michael McClung

  “Oh, fuck no.” I flicked it away with equal parts vigor and disgust. When it stopped rolling, it immediately scuttled back towards me, uttering a shrill, chittering battle cry.

  Making myself small and waiting for the dust to settle was no longer an option. I crabbed backwards away from it as quick as I could, not daring to stand what with all the deadly fuckery just above my head. I didn’t get far before I backed into what proved to be somebody’s legs. The light whip flicked down and turned my small assassin into a cinder, then went back to taking the rest out of the sky. I looked up at whoever had just saved my ass.

  It was Kluge. He was standing in the hole I’d made in the Dripping Bucket’s wall.

  Being tortured was almost preferable to being rescued by Kluge, but there we were.

  There we fucking were.

  “Don’t move,” he said, his long face strained and sweaty.

  “Sure thing,” I replied. And then I scrambled past him, back into the tavern through the rent. His curses followed me, but the rest of him was otherwise occupied.

  I found the barkeep huddled behind the bar that he kept, crammed into a corner. He had a wooden trencher gripped in both hands, and was holding it over his face like a shield.

  “You should probably run away now,” I told him as I passed. No idea if he followed my advice, but I sure as hells did. I went through the entrance at speed, and only got faster once I was outside again, punctured thigh be damned. My conscience did not bother me in the slightest. Kluge had signed up for such things, and I emphatically had not. I did not look back. I ran down the lane, and when it turned, I kept running the shortest, straightest distance away from the insanity at the Dripping Bucket, which meant I ran roughshod over somebody’s radish field. I jumped a split-rail fence when I came to it, surprising a couple of goats on the other side. And then I ran some more. Actually, I ran a lot more. I didn’t stop until a stitch in my side forced me. My thigh also had some things to say. By then, I was at the ass-end of Loathewater.

  It was called the Mire, the mud flats that formed the border between Loathewater and the Ose. There are plenty of charmless, cheerless places in Lucernis. Most of them were made so by people, but the Mire had only itself to blame. A few inches of still water floated atop mud that was deep enough to drown you there, broken up only by occasional forlorn clumps of reeds. The only things that prospered were leeches, mosquitos, frogs and mud herons.

  Like the Dripping Bucket, the Mire also spoke to me on a soul-deep level; but it didn’t say anything I liked to hear.

  I collapsed on a dryish patch of clover at the margins, and stared out at it while I regained my breath. From there, I could see the spires of Temple Street to the east across the Ose, though I couldn’t see the river itself because of the reeds.

  I gave those spires the fingers.

  The gods weren’t going to save me, the cowards. I hadn’t really expected them to; they’d never done me much good before, with the rare exception. But still. In a way I felt like I was cleaning up their damned mess. The Eightfold was one of theirs, after all. I harbored a smidge of bitterness, I’ll admit. Looking at those sky-poking symbols of worship, I started to get angry. Stupidly, unreasonably angry. Who the fuck did they think they were?

  “You know what? Fuck all of you, individually and as a cack-smeared whole,” I shouted at the distant spires, because I was as alone as I was likely to get, and because I’d just spent a considerable amount of time being magically cooked, and then running for my life, and I was undeniably still... off. Shouting obscenities at divine beings seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, just then.

  “I don’t need your sorry, cowardly asses!” I flung a few handfuls of mud in their general direction, for good measure. “I’ve got a plan, you miserable shits.”

  When I couldn’t think of anything else to say, or anything more satisfying to throw, I lay back in the clover and forced myself to take long, slow breaths. With each exhalation, I willed the crazy out along with my breath.

  Gammond had almost broken me. That was the root of it. If Kluge hadn’t showed up, if she’d got even one more round of incineration in, I would have told her absolutely anything and everything she wanted to know. And the hilarious thing was, it wouldn’t have helped her in the slightest. That was baked into the plan as well, if inadvertently. She would never be able to take Holgren unawares. Not anymore.

  The plan. I was starting to hate the plan. It had been picked apart and reassembled a hundred times by myself, and Holgren, and Greytooth. Were there weaknesses in the plan? Unavoidably. Was it a shit plan? Absolutely not. But putting it together and living through it were two very different critters.

  We knew enough about Visini. Not everything, but enough. Greytooth had laid out how she operated, the three times the Philosophers had tried to trap her over the centuries. With a little distance and multiple historical examples, the way she played her game was easy enough to understand. It also showed that she was marginally saner than, say, Abanon, in that she could put in the mental effort to plan in the first place. She was a functional maniac, rather than just batshit insane like the Blade That Whispers Hate had been. She wasn’t as coldly rational as Chuckles, though.

  It was also plain that Visini was aware enough of what was going on in the wider world to want to know where Holgren was at, or at least to use the question as a stick with which to beat me back and forth across the city. All of my adversaries had that question as their motivation. I’d got a knife in me, a magical burning and the threat of a contract on my life because I couldn’t say where he was.

  In a way, it was weirdly comforting, in that it was confirmation of a sort that Visini was the one pushing the pieces. Or so I believed. If it had been fate or chance that had brought such awful luck down on me, I was pretty sure that the motivations of each of my individual tormenters would not have aligned quite so nicely. In other words, as an expert at swimming in the shit, I could sense that this particular shit was not organic and natural, but rather manufactured, contrived.

  It was still shit, though.

  Was Visini herself worried about Holgren? Did she have sufficient grasp of the situation to care where he might be, what he might be capable of doing? I didn’t know. I hoped not, because I like my enemies to be as clever as a bowl of oatmeal whenever possible. But I wasn’t so foolish as to assume she didn’t know how dangerous Holgren was. If she was manipulating the gentlemen, then she knew he had Lagna’s eye. I could only assume she knew what that made him capable of.

  Thinking back on how hard the gentlemen and Gammond had tried to ‘persuade’ me to reveal Holgren’s whereabouts, I decided that yes, Visini probably was keen to know where he was. It wasn’t just an excuse to harry me. She wanted to be satisfied that I didn’t know, at least. She wanted to be as satisfied as possible that he wouldn’t step in to rescue me when she finally appeared to administer the coup de grace in person.

  Because, as far as we knew, that was her single moment of weakness.

  The Blade That Binds and Blinds did so from the shadows, unseen and, practically speaking, invulnerable. We knew going in that the only way to hunt her down would be to let her hunt me, via whatever unsuspecting puppets she bound to her purpose. Holgren, even with the aid of Lagna’s eye, could not find her precise location – he knew she was in Lucernis, but that was it. The fact that she was in Lucernis is what made us decide to tackle her first, of all the remaining Blades. She wasn’t in our chosen hometown for a holiday, and we both had people and interests to protect there.

  I still wondered if that was Visini’s way of issuing a challenge. If so, Holgren and I had accepted it. I’d accepted that it meant being hunted, and Holgren had accepted that it meant just watching, whatever happened, until the moment Visini finally revealed herself. He had something special cooked up for her, but he could only use it once.

  Surprise was essential. So essential that even I didn’t know what he was going to do to her.

  When,
and only when, she revealed herself, would she be in harm’s way. Only when we knew who carried her could she honestly be considered vulnerable.

  Well, as vulnerable as any of the Blades were.

  Visini wasn’t going to appear until she’d had her fun, though, and not until she was reasonably certain there was nothing I could do about it – or when she let bloodlust override caution. That’s why Holgren hadn’t stepped in to save my ass from any of the various shitshows I’d stumbled into since my return. We’d only get one shot at Visini. We couldn’t waste it. So I got to be the whipping girl until the bitch revealed herself. Yay, me.

  There was a reason I’d got my drunk in early – I’d been sure I wouldn’t get the chance later.

  THE CLOVER PROVED TO be full of ants, because of course it did. No fucking rest for the likes of me. I shook them out and started walking westward along the margins of the Mire. The problem with the plan was that I didn’t get to be particularly proactive. There was nothing I could really do, except endure it, and pretend I didn’t know what Visini was about.

  There was one thing I could do. That Mother Crimson told me I had to do. One addition to the plan. Assuming the old blood witch herself hadn’t been influenced by Visini, I suddenly realized with a chill.

  By all the dead gods, it was a very short step from my natural suspicion of everyone and everything into full-blown paranoia. I picked at the idea, but couldn’t see any way Visini would benefit from me talking to Chuckles. That didn’t mean there wasn’t one, but you have to draw a line somewhere, sometime.

  “Hey, Chuckles, you abomination,” I said as I trudged along the soggy turf. “What do you think happens now?”

  Chuckles appeared. I was mildly surprised, after she’d buggered off the night before. She stood in the Mire, maybe twenty feet away from and ahead of me. She was squatting down staring into the water. Her long, tight curls trailed into the water, but didn’t get wet, of course. She also didn’t get sucked down into the mud, more’s the pity.

  “Now? Now my sister runs you from pillar to post. You know this.”

  I grunted. “Any suggestions?”

  “Acknowledge me as your goddess. Accept your role as my avatar. Stop calling me Chuckles.”

  “Any suggestions I’ll actually consider?”

  She shrugged. “Try to survive.”

  “Any helpful suggestions I’ll actually consider?”

  “You should come here more often. I like this place.”

  “You fucking would, wouldn’t you. Let me just remind you that if I die, you die too. There’s no more Knife for you, Chuckles; there’s only me. I’d think that would motivate you a little more to help keep me breathing.”

  She cocked her head as she considered my words. “I have told you what you should do. You have refused to accept it. If you survive, I have fulfilled my purpose. If you do not, I have no more reason to exist. My die is cast, and I do not fear an end to my existence, Amra. I do not fear anything at all.”

  I stopped. “Fuck you too, then.” My mouth was suddenly sour, and I spat. “I wish you could feel fear. I wish you could feel fucking everything. It’s a travesty that you can’t, that you’re immune to human emotion. I have no idea why the blood witch thought it was so important I talk to you. You’re about as useful as Kerf’s hairy nipples.”

  She stood straight and took a couple of steps towards me.

  “I have done what I was created to do. I shaped you. I schemed, manipulated and murdered by the thousands. I started a war, and fanned to life famine and plague. I drove the world’s greatest living mage mad, and turned him into a depraved killer. I had children hunted and executed in the streets, then used their shades to further my ends. And now you get to hope that I was good at it, that you are indeed the survivor I created you to be. Because what is to come will make all that I have done pale in comparison. You stand at the threshold of a conflict unlike any the world has seen – a war between She Who Casts Eight Shadows and fate itself. You stand at the end of an age, Amra Thetys.” She shrugged once more.

  “What happens now – what you do now – could determine whether another age begins.”

  I gave a long, slow clap. “That was an absolutely outstanding verbal tower of crap.”

  “I have told you multiple times that I can’t lie to you.”

  “Repeating a lie doesn’t actually make it true.”

  She raised an eyebrow, then turned away from me and stared down into the water once more.

  “You can choose to lie to yourself, if you wish. But stop whining about your situation. I don’t feel impatience, but it seems I do have the capacity to experience irritation.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. It’s now my life’s goal to irritate you to death.”

  “If that is what it takes to motivate you.”

  “Never underestimate my capacity for pettiness. You can fuck off, now.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I’D BE FOUND WHEREVER I went. That was a certainty. That’s what the day had taught me, or rather confirmed. Visini wasn’t about to allow me to climb down a hole and pull it in after me. She wanted me to run, and she wanted me to keep thinking I could beat the trap, until the perfect moment came to crush me, first in spirit, and then in body. So wherever I went, she’d prod one or another of the various fuckers who were after me in the right direction if she had to.

  To a certain extent I had to play along. I had to act as if I didn’t know how she operated, so that she would continue to be broadly predictable. If she started acting in a way we couldn’t foresee, then all bets were off.

  Therefore, I did what I might be expected to do – try to get on a ship and away from all the insanity.

  Just taking a stroll through the city to the docks seemed like an especially bad idea, though, so I kept walking west, skirting the Mire until I came to more solid ground and a slightly more populated area. Technically I was still in Loathewater, but the western end was mostly smallholdings that supplied the city with a portion of its eggs and meat and fresh greens. Lucernis was a hungry beast, and ringing the city were countless small farms that fed it. The good thing about the ones in Loathewater was that they mostly transported it into the city proper by boat.

  Well, mostly by river barge, to be specific, and they’d all have set out by dawn or thereabouts. Farmers were funny like that. But river barges needed a dock, especially to load goats and whatnot, and docks meant boats of all types, and people with boats were seldom averse to being on them, especially when a stranger put money in their hand to do it. Or so I had found. I’d never been to the Loathewater dock, but I knew it was there and I was certain I’d find somebody at it to take me where I wanted to go. And if I couldn’t, well, stealing a boat wasn’t all that complicated, and I knew how to row.

  Most of an hour later saw me at the Loathewater dock. There weren’t many folks around. It smelled bad. Well, worse than most of Loathewater. The street wasn’t paved, except in old dung. A total of four buildings stood in close proximity to the decrepit wooden dock, two of which seemed to be combinations of barn and warehouse. One was definitely a slaughterhouse. All of them looked to be empty of people at that time of day. The last building, inevitably, was a tavern.

  By tavern I mean a construction from which alcohol was sold. This one was just an indifferent thatch roof supported by rough-cut poles. The seats were sawn logs. There were no tables, and the bar itself had been somebody’s narrowboat in a previous century. It had been turned belly-up, and rested on a couple of logs that had been driven into the muck. A kilderkin of ale sat atop it. A woman who made three of me was asleep on a log beside it, resting her back on the narrowboat’s stern, her mouth agape.

  There was exactly one patron, an old man who seemed to be putting all his concentration into sitting as straight and still as possible. His eyes were glassy.

  I’d obviously come at a quiet time. Avoiding larceny didn’t look promising. I continued down to the dock, to see what was availa
ble for thieving.

  The answer, it turned out, was fuck-all.

  Exactly one boat was visible. It was pulled up onto the bank about thirty feet to my right, and there was a sapling growing out of its sprung bottom.

  “Well fuck me, then.”

  “‘Tain’t nice to swear.”

  I looked around, but didn’t see anyone. Then a kid’s head popped up from the other side of the pier. He was about eight or so, muddy and gap-toothed. He squinted at me and I squinted back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. You ain’t from here.”

  “That’s true. I’d also like to get somewhere that’s not here, but I don’t see any boats.”

  “That’s cos there ain’t any boats.”

  “You’ve got a point there, kiddo. Will there be any boats any time soon?”

  He scratched his head and thought about that. “Depends on what you mean by soon, I guess.”

  I was starting to not like this kid. “Say before dark?”

  “Prolly not.”

  “So if I wanted a boat, I’d have to wait here until morning.”

  “Well, you could wait, sure enough. But I doubt you’d find one even then.”

  “Oh? And why’s that?”

  “’Cause they don’t use this pier no more. It’s got woodworms.” He held up a bucket full of the squirmers. “They’s awful for wood, but they made great chicken feed.”

  “That’s, uh, worth knowing, kid. What I’d really like to know is where the new pier is.”

  “I could tell you.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “Do you have chickens?”

  “I do not.”

  “That’s too bad, then,” he said with a comically sad frown.

  “Bloody hells. How much?”

  “Four coppers?”

  “Done.” I flipped him a silver. “You can keep the change. And the worms.”

  “Go back to the lane, mistress, and keep walking west. You’ll see it in about ten minutes or so.” His smile might have been gap-toothed, but it was filled with self-appreciation.