He pulled himself gingerly up off his seat. “Girl,” he called, motioning for her to come over. “Do you know who runs the caravans?” The little gardener nodded, and Tolem produced a gold-plated gaming slip, one of a bare handful he’d snagged when he’d turned over that table in the casino. He placed it in her palm. “I’d like you to secure me a place in the next one headed east. I don’t have a horse, but still, that should cover it.”
The girl’s eyes went wide as she stared at the thing in her hand. She was shaking. She’s holding more money in her hand right now than she’ll make in five years, Tolem thought. And it’s only gold on the outside.
Tolem smiled at her. “Do this for me, and I’ll have two of these for you when you get back.”
At that, the gardener looked like her knees might buckle beneath her. “Sir...sir, I—I can’t accept this, it’s...you’re too generous and...” She looked down at his clothes. “...don’t you need these?”
Tolem looked down at himself. His clothes were tattered from his flight through the crowd and streaked with blood from his spill down the steps. He chuckled at the sight of himself, then stood and dusted himself off. “Don’t worry about me, miss,” he said. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
Epigraph
“The West is dead. After decades of corruption and decadence, our poisoned cities weakened the Empire into a feeble, toothless shade of its past power. Then the Imperator fell, her line broken, and with her Legions no longer patrolling the wastes, dark things that had slept hidden in cracks and shadows began to prowl the moonless nights once more. Over the century to follow, tribes began to assemble in the absence of kings, and, more recently, rueful whispers have begun to spread that a New Swarm is gathering strength in the East.
“This is a new dark age. But it is not the first dark age.
“We, the men and women of The Collegium, have studied the ebbs and flow of civilizations. As House Imperator collapsed and the light of the old world began to gutter out, we gathered the children of the elder houses into our keep, shut the doors, and sealed ourselves in with powerful workings. In so doing, we have kept our young wards safe from the storms of the old world and immune from The Great Calamity which burned out most of the world’s magic twenty years ago. Here, in solitude, we teach; crafting great young minds to build the next empire and the one beyond that.
“Unfortunately, some of those great young minds have other plans…”
— Excerpted from a recent letter from Headmaster Parnick to Archroyal Vaezzoi,
dated 54441
Part I : Life in the Tower
Instructor Winselle
Devan smirked. And a wall of flame engulfed him, leaving only his stupid-looking haircut behind.
Devan smirked. And a herd of horses trampled and ate him.
Devan smirked. And an immense stone pillar fell on him, stomping him into the earth.
Instructor Winselle ground her teeth as she daydreamed.
Forty-nine years of age and looking older even than that after three decades in front of a classroom, Instructor Winselle stared dully out over the fifteen students of her alpha class. Her round white face and curly brown hair were all that showed from under the hood of her shapeless white robes. She was stout around the middle and wide in the bottom, and under most circumstances, she had the kind of face made for smiling. But that wasn’t how she used it during her alpha class.
From the back of the classroom, Devan of the Fields glanced up from his transcription practice and stared at her from under those long black bangs that perpetually covered his left eye. He always seems to know when I’m watching him, Winselle mused. And he always made a show of letting her know he was watching her right back.
Long ago, Winselle had chosen a role as an instructor because she wanted to inspire young minds. But in Winselle’s thirty years of teaching exploratory mysticism, she’d never come across a student quite like Devan. Ironically, she found that Devan inspired her.
As he turned back to his work, Devan’s lip drew up in that casual smirk, the one that just begged you to belt him one in the mouth.
Devan smirked. And a swarm of ants devoured him, starting from the inside and then bursting forth from his mouth and ears and eyes.
Oh, good one, Winselle thought to herself. That’s positively inspired.
She wasn’t proud of the fantasies that slunk through her mind while her pupils scribbled away on their exercises. And of course, she would never—could never—act on them. No matter how simple the spells would be to work. No matter how splendid it might feel in the moment.
And yet…
She thought back to the dismissive way Devan brushed past her as he walked into the classroom today. She thought about the haughty way he laughed her off last week when she tried to admonish him for talking to his neighbor during lessons. She thought about sneers and eye rolls and quiet laughter while her back was turned.
And, most of all, she thought about the thing she knew he was going to try to do later that night.
By the unholy ones, what Instructor Winselle would have given to lean in close and …pull that smirking lip…right off his...
She clenched her hands into first position as hard as she could, mashed her eyes shut, and hissed a three-word incantation. All around the classroom, all the potted plants that she had meticulously cultivated over the past three seasons simultaneously shriveled up and crumbled into fine black dust.
When Winselle unclenched her teeth and opened her eyes, Zella of the Peak was staring at her, cocking an eyebrow. From her seat in the front row, Zella looked over to one of the now-empty herb pots, then shot another questioning look at her teacher. Winselle narrowed her eyes into a withering glare. “Back to work, now,” she said in a voice more husky than she would’ve preferred. Unimpressed, the slender auburn-haired girl clucked her tongue softly and returned to her writing.
From three stories above them, the tower’s bell rang, and the class rose. The room emptied fast, a whorl of excited mumbling and books stuffed haphazardly into satchels. Most of the students hustled out into the long, torch-lit hallway, but Devan just sat there, waiting, his eyes—one visible, one hidden—locked on Instructor Winselle's.
He turned away, closed his eyes, and stretched like a great cat, his long, thin torso drawn up to its full height. Devan relaxed and shrugged his shoulders. He clearly had nowhere in the world more important to be just then than right where he was. "So," he said at last, fixing his eyes on his teacher once again. "Tonight's the big night."
Instructor Winselle looked back to him again, slit-eyed. "Curtain time is at six bells," she said crisply. "You are talking about the concert this evening, I assume."
Devan smiled at that and swept his bangs up off his face. "I'm not sure what else I could be talking about, miss,” he said, his voice slow and sweet. “It is, after all, a command performance. Attendance is mandatory, is it not?" He rose from his desk and took his cane from its hook on the wall behind him. The boy had been born with a weak leg; that fact didn’t make Winselle feel any better about her daydreams, but it didn’t entirely discourage them either.
He walked toward her down the row of desks. His cane caused him to sway back and forth in his stride. To Winselle, it looked as if he was moving to music only he could hear. Where other boys his age were crackling with nervous energy, Devan was different. Every movement was deliberate, like he was painting a moment with his gestures, gaze, and presence that seemed to fill the entire room. He wasn’t rude due to a youthful obliviousness to social niceties; everything he did had purpose.
Instructor Winselle rose as Devan approached her desk. “I’ll look for you, then,” she said, “in the recital hall.”
“And I’ll look for you, miss.” He winked at her and smiled. “Until then.” On his way out to the hall, he paused, looked at one of Winselle’s herb pots set on a cabinet near the door, and brushed some sooty residue off the lip. He glanced back over his shoulder at her, smirked, and hobbled on his w
ay.
Her body a clenched fist, Instructor Winselle stood there, willing her face to stop burning and her chest to stop seizing up as she tried to inhale. And so, it might have been seconds, minutes, or hours before Tolem leaned in the door, looked his frozen colleague over, and said, in his quiet nonchalance: "Smells like burnt parsley in here."
Her head snapped his way. "Tolem?" she asked distantly, then again, with a shaky smile, "Tolem?"
He limped into the room. "Most of me." He still had that wolfish grin that had nearly ruined her life when they were both Devan's age. Devan had the same smile. "What'd I miss?" he asked.
"When did you get back?" Winselle's hands went to her forehead, to her hair, tending to sweat, tucking stray strands back in line. "Gods, it must have been...” She paused, counting in her head. “Have you really been gone six years?"
He looked away, hiding a pleased smile as the men from his generation still did. "I'd trust your guess better than mine. They don't have much use for clocks and calendars outside The Tower anymore."
At that, Winselle grimaced. For the first time, she noticed the deep red gash across his forehead, standing out against the deep red sun burns on his cheeks. It was getting worse out there. It was always getting worse out there when Tolem came back home.
"Hey, hey..." He grabbed her by the shoulder with one of his huge, calloused hands and shook her gently, as if trying to shake the worry out of her. "Don't. I've got good news, too."
At that, her expression brightened. The deep lines around her eyes smoothed out, and for a moment she felt closer to being the eighteen-year-old she was when Tolem first left than the dowdy matron she’d become. "How many?" she asked. Tolem stroked his beard and demurred. "Come on, come on, how many?"
"'Bout a hundred," he said. "Maybe more." She squealed—literally squealed—with delight, and that made him hide another smile. "I tucked this one aside. Figured you'd want first crack at her." Opening his coat, he pulled a leather-bound book out of a bag on his hip. The binding was rough, as it always was on books printed in the last twenty years. Beaming, Winselle snatched it from him and hugged it to her chest.
She held it out in front of her and read the cover out loud: "Air Magic: A Practical Guide." Her smile went lopsided. "Not exactly the Cauldgood Grimoire, is it."
"Weren't many about the Art, obviously," Tolem said, circling around her and making his way to her top desk drawer. He knew that was where she kept the whiskey. "Not much use in it since the Calamity. But there were more than a few about the..." Tolem rustled around in the drawer. "Well, shit, Winny, when'd you stop keeping your short cask in here?"
Wordlessly, she pushed past him and pulled the drawer open wide. She slammed it and pulled out the one below it, then slammed that one too. She bit her lip and looked around the room, furious and impotent. "Son of a...that kid, that fucking..." With the flat of her hand, she swatted a pair of texts off her cabinet, and followed it up by threatening to kick a wall.
"This kid got a name?" Tolem asked. He groaned softly as he sidled into one of the students' desks.
"Devan." Winselle spat his name on the floor. She began to pace back and forth. "That boy...that boy is a thief, and everyone knows it. He’s a thief, and a liar, and a scoundrel, and a—“
"Devan?" Tolem's eyebrows shot up in amusement. He smirked. "My nephew was the one had you all sweating up your petticoat when I walked in?"
"I swear to the darkest gods, you do not want to smirk at me today," Winselle barked, shaking a finger at him. "Listen to what I’m saying to you. Your nephew is a thief."
Tolem sat back and fell quiet for a long moment. “Is he now," he said at last.
"He broke into Mytaff's office two weeks ago and stole the ledger scroll.”
“My nephew?” Tolem snorted. “My half-crippled nephew? Broke into…”
Winselle continued, ignoring him. “Two months before that, he broke into the chain room and took the black hatchet. Two months before that, he..."
"The black hatchet!" Tolem craned his neck, trying to pop the bones inside. "Okay. All right. Assuming that—somehow—he was able to drag his gimp leg fast enough to get past all the guards watching both Mytaff’s office and the chain room, what would he want with either of them? Stealing your homebrew cinnamon whiskey, I can see the point in that. But either of the other..." Tolem groped for the words. "It's not like the kid can sell 'em or use 'em here in The Tower. All they're good for is a pounding from the guards and a few months' lock-in."
"I don't care what he's doing with them," Winselle said in a slow, controlled burn. "All I care about is that he's been sniffing around my quarters for weeks now. Sketching in his little sketchbook. Watching me as I go in and out. I know what he's doing."
Tolem squinted at her. "What, he's fixing to..." His eyes widened again, and he laughed. "What, the idol?"
Winselle spread her arms wide. "What else?"
Tolem burst out laughing. "Come on, Winny. How would a kid like that even come close? I mean, even the chain room is a long goddamn way from the security you've got on the idol. The boy would end up a gibbering brain case, assuming he didn't melt his hands off just trying to touch the thing. And that’s overlooking the fact that the kid’s only got one working leg."
Winselle sniffed. "I suspect…” She paused, folded her arms, and considered her phrasing before she went on. “I suspect that he’s not as handicapped as he wants all of us to think."
"You think he’s been faking it? Since birth?" Tolem asked incredulously. "But Krist, woman…even if he wasn’t hopping on one foot through the layers and layers of incantations you got on the thing, and even if he did find a way to work the locks on your holding case, and even if he did get a pass from the enchantment circle that's tuned to your mystic field and yours alone...what the shit is he going to do with the thing? He's locked in The Tower. Same as everybody. He can't sell what he takes. He can't keep it. There's no keeping secrets in this place. Best possible outcome? He'll put it on a pile in the back of his closet with the black hatchet and the ledger scroll."
Winselle folded herself into her chair behind her desk. "He doesn't have them anymore," she grumbled.
"What?"
"The hatchet. And the scroll. He doesn't have them anymore. He gave them back."
Tolem leaned forward. "He gave them back?"
"No one even knew they were gone. The scroll showed up one morning on Mytaff's desk. The hatchet was buried in Headmaster Parnick's salad at dinnertime. No one ever knew they were stolen.”
Tolem sat back again and steepled his fingers. “And the boy…”
“Never caught, never punished,” Winselle said distantly. She folded her hands in her lap. “But it was him. Everyone knows it was him.”
Out of the corner of his mouth, Tolem smiled again. “You’re in a place where nothing can really be stolen,” he said, more to himself than anyone. “So why steal things? What’s the point in being a thief when there’s nothing to steal?”
Devan
The recital hall was Devan’s favorite room in The Tower. All throughout the building’s 111 stories, the decor was almost always the same: walls and floors built of dark gray stones, set in chalky white mortar and trimmed in oak so black it seemed to have been damaged in a fire. But the recital hall was different. Bright and airy, the walls were a polished rose-colored marble, adorned with bas relief carvings of scenes from classic literature. Ringing the vaulted ceiling were life-sized statues representing the old gods who served as patrons of artistic endeavor. Below each was a massive stained glass window; they, like the room as a whole, were among the school’s few concessions to the opulent designs of the Imperial Age.
Devan had spent many hours marveling at this room. It was his lone example of what wonders the world beyond The Tower’s walls might hold, far from The Collegium and the sad, quiet people who shuffled back and forth its darkened hallways. Everywhere else in the tower, the rooms were drab, functional, good enough. But here, someone had atte
mpted something magnificent, and they succeeded magnificently.
Devan allowed himself a subtle smile. Tonight was going to be amazing.
Abruptly, his smile twisted into a wince of pain; the rock-hard, riser-style benches were causing his bad leg to cramp up. He shifted his weight, pulling his knee into a new position to keep it from stiffening. He sighed. That ache. It was always there, a constant reminder of all the things he couldn’t do.
Some students at The Collegium had been marked at birth to serve as conduits for the wild energies of the extant universe—those students studied magic. Some had been marked at birth with a special attunement to the mystical power of the mind—those students studied mentalism. But Devan had been marked at birth with a gimp leg, a mother who’d died in delivery, and a father who wanted nothing to do with him. He’d never been formally marked, but in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he decided to study everything.
He couldn’t conduct magic, but he could understand it. He couldn’t read or influence minds, but he could explore the latest theories on how it was done. He couldn’t speak with machines or employ martial tactics, but he knew what was possible, and what was possible was amazing.
Everything came easily to him. Every test, every trial, every recital. While his classmates played and made jokes, Devan was devouring every text and tome he could get his hands on.
A young man of thirteen does not spend all his waking hours reading without receiving a fair amount of scorn from his classmates, and a young man of thirteen does not long suffer scorn from his classmates without developing either a serious bout of depression or a healthy superiority complex. Devan opted for the latter, and it wasn’t long before his opinion about his classmates spread to the teachers.
It was around that time that his hands fell upon a book by Bellit of the Mire.
This is all Bellit’s fault, Devan thought, trying to rub the feeling back into his calf. He smiled to himself. Fuck that guy.
Proper Thieves Page 2