Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 1
THIEF MAGE
BEGGAR MAGE
CAT HELLISEN
Text Copyright 2022 Cat Hellisen
Cover 2022 © Cat Hellisen
First published by Ghost Moth Press, Scotland, 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.
The right of Cat Hellisen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library
www.ghostmothpress.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-7396851-2-6
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Thief Mage, Beggar Mage
THIEF MAGE
THE FLINT POUCH
MARKED
A CHARGER AND A KING’S RANSOM
THE RICH MAN’S DREAM
A CLOCKWORK PRINCESS
THE MONKEY’S INVITATION
BARGAINS AND MAGICS
A HIGH PRICE FOR A TRINKET
ORESH
LAKETRI
VOICE TO VOICE
PAPER MASKS
TET
THE RIVER SERPENT
NUMBER SIX CHILD PERSON
BEGGAR MAGE
TIK-TOK-TIK-TOK
A PROMISE MADE
SPARKS TO FLAMES
NANAK, VITASH, EPSI
THE MONKEY’S STRATAGEM
PRINCE MAGE
NAMELESS, SOULLESS
OUT OF TIME
BLOOD AND SHADES
THIEVES AND MASTERS
A CURIOSITY
AND NOW THE DEAD
A NAME OR TWO
THE GILDED PISTIL
GHOSTING
THE MERITHYM
FIVE TIMES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
For all the people who need to slip their skins and find new shapes
THIEF MAGE
The thief mage walked into the traveller’s camp with the dark at his heels, night falling with a flash of final bloody red. He greeted the People of the Dogs like old friends, one arm raised. The other was an empty sleeve, pinned up at the elbow.
From the shadows on the guest side of the caravan’s great fire, Tet watched the mage. He massaged his scarred right knee, tamping down his pain like tobacco into an old pipe as he listened to the mage talk. The wound was not a lie, even if the rest of Tet’s identity was a stitchery of half-truths and suggestions. Once, he had been a powerful priest-mage; now he was nothing more than another worn-out soldier with a worn-out soldier’s pension to his name, and a limp to match his current identity. No one paid attention to one more war-crippled man, barely more than a beggar. Broken veterans were thick as corpse-maggots in Deniah.
The mage told the People he was selling witchery for an evening’s safety. ‘Even mages need protection in the mountains,’ he said, and they laughed, their wrinkled eyes flashing at this rare guest filled with promises.
He’d woken Tet’s interest like the smell of meat wakes a monster. The mage was barely inconvenienced by his deformity. An accident, Tet supposed. Some fall or fight that had sliced his right arm off at the elbow. They were a match – the mage’s right arm a thing of memory, and Tet’s right leg a thing of nightmare.
The mage sat casual as a prince on the family side of the fire. A rare honour.
It was not this that intrigued Tet. Not his lazy sprawl or his smooth dark face like a statue of a god cut from stone, the long black hair held loosely back from his face with two thin braids.
No.
The travellers’ honoured guest was rotten with magic, seething with it.
Most mages were little more than pretenders, weaklings with barely enough spark to light a match. They liked to call themselves something they were not, and Tet half-pitied them for it. But here was a true mage. One that Tet had never seen in the temples – and he’d grown up surrounded by magic, knew every mage worthy of the title. There were few true mages and fewer still who left the mountain temples of Nanak, Vitash, and Epsi, and the austerity of their training and libraries. Here was a man not from the temples, and power swirled around him in an oily blanket.
It could not be a coincidence that this brash princeling had turned up when the caravan was drawing closer to the central city of Pal-em-Rasha. He was not here to beg protection, or pass on news, whatever he’d told the travellers.
The mage had to be the contact Tet had been waiting for, carrying a message from the Monkey. A flicker of hope warmed in Tet’s chest, and he pinched harder at his ruined leg, using the screaming pain to douse that hope.
The Monkey was Tet’s only route to the ritual-oresh. To his promise of salvation. He was the only one who claimed to know the ancient ritual magic that would hide a man from the gods. And with the pain growing daily, Tet would do and say anything to get the ritual-oresh. Even put up with feints and schemes clearly designed to annoy him.
Smoke drifted across the circle of the camps as the wind changed, stinging Tet’s eyes and making them squint and water. The mage was wavery with tears, but Tet could still sense the oiliness of his magic.
Tet blinked, and rubbed at his smoke-seared eyes. The mage didn’t wear the traditional mage-knots. Instead, his hair was left loose, the same as Tet kept his own now. He’d been made to cut his knots when the temple banished him and stripped his power.
Perhaps all might have been better if he’d died the night those mountain bandits had killed his family, and no nameless orphan baby had been left on the temple steps. Tet grinned mirthlessly. He’d become self-pitying in his pain, and he hated it. He wanted his old self back; a torrent of silent rage.
Soon.
He clenched his fists and tried to hold on to that slight flicker of anger. It gave him back something of himself. If his own magic weren’t so limited these days Tet wouldn’t be wondering if some show-off brat was his contact with the Monkey. He wouldn’t be ready to put all his meagre faith in a Southern sorcerer’s trick.
The sorcerers of Utt Dih were not true mages. They were cooks. The sorcerers worked with bodily humours and herbs, mixing them like wives preparing a stew. And despite his contempt for them, here Tet was, waiting on one. The Monkey in his turn thumbed his nose by sending a rogue mage as a contact. Look, see what we think of mages – errand boys and tricksters, maket pieces to move around the Grand Board.
The young mage rolled a cigarette one-handed and lit the tip from the headsman’s offered coal, then leaned back on the stump of his right elbow and blew out apple-scented smoke. As though he had finally noticed Tet’s observation, the mage slowly turned his head and stared back over the fire. His magic rasped against Tet’s own.
He probably thinks me weak, and he is not far wrong. I am weak. For now. Fate had stolen his name, the gods had cursed Tet and placed limitations on what he was capable of. They did not want another accident.
The mage grinned straight at him, his teeth orange in the dancing light. A moment later he angled his head to the tribesmen, pretending that Tet was no one.
Irritation spiked in Tet’s chest. The easy dismissal was a calculated insult. A mockery – you like what you see? You are intrigued? How pathetic you are.
‘You have seen the magicians of Pal-em-Rasha?’ asked one of the bearded older men of the caravans. ‘They are fine, in their way, though of course they cannot compare with men such as yourself. Still, I have heard of one turn a horse into a swan and ride off on it.’
‘Clockwork,’ said the mage dismissively. His accent was faintly Deniahn, though he was trying to hide it. To anyone in the caravan he would sound just like any other Vaeyane-born, but Tet had been a spy in the White Prince’s army; he was trained in accents and in the art of mimicking them and could hear the smallest flaw in the mage’s vowels, the little tells that gave him away. Under his competent Vaeyane lay the wide flat tones of the city of Pal-em-Rasha.
Tet frowned and wrapped his cloak tighter.
A girl, her decorated arms bright with silver and turquoise, leaned closer to the mage. ‘My grandmother told me the marketplaces there are filled shoulder to shoulder with men and women who can charm birds right into their hands, and rabbits from the fields.’ Her voice was high and worldly and she wore even more jewellery on her brow and down the curve of her ears. She was a walking treasury, bright as a full moon rising over the snow-faced mountains. Tet tended to pay women little attention, but he had seen enough of her to know she ranked high. A chieftain’s daughter. ‘She said Pal-em-Rasha crawls with magic.’
It was not exactly true, though mages always argued the distinctions.
The mage shrugged and took a deep drag on his apple-tobacco. ‘So it’s said.’
The older women were watching him with amusement, chewing at the ends of their carved pipes. One of them pulled her pipe stem free with a wet pop and coughed, fluid rattling in her lungs.
Everyone kept silent, waiting for her to speak. When her coughing fit had finally sputtere
‘Toys for a spoiled child,’ replied the mage, and there was a muttering of unease and nervous respect. A spoiled child. A very powerful one. The White Prince was a mythic figure who flaunted his clockwork beasts, his army vast, the lioness god at his back. He was not a good man to have as an enemy, and he made for a cruel friend. Some of his appetites were more subtle and quiet and human, but Tet had spent enough time following his army’s tracks through the snow to know how the prince grasped at innocence, playing with it before tearing it apart, like a cat trying to understand the workings of a cricket.
The mage’s lack of respect for the prince’s city of delights and mazements had quickened the crowd. They were eager to see what he could do that made him so dismissive of the demon prince and his toymaker.
Tet was curious himself, but content to let the travelling girls with their sweeping skirts talk the mage’s tricks from him with their lips and lashes. They would convince him to display his little wonders, and Tet would keep his silence.
The mage didn’t say much, but when he spoke, the crowd lapped forward. He would eventually give something away. An audience could be a terrible thing for a mage’s ego.
‘Where are you going?’ The moon-bright girl’s head was wrapped in the double-coned dressing of a virgin, but Tet figured that for a little lie.
Her sisters had already asked the mage where he came from and he had winked their questions away. He had a thief’s manner, devilish and appealing in equal measure. The world was easily seduced by boys with sly eyes and fox-smiles.
‘Wherever the world takes me,’ he answered, which was no answer at all. ‘Have you more tea?’
They poured for him, and their silver turban beads clashed and sang in their eagerness, and even the old women who shook their heads at his insolence did not stop them.
If he was any good at performing, he’d wait just a little longer. But not too long. One needed to judge the audience, reel them in, but not exhaust them. That was the way of the dance. Tet snorted. He was beginning to think like a priest-mage again.
‘You said you would show us magic,’ said the moon-bright girl.
‘I did, but even the greatest of mages must digest first. A full stomach is not good for trickery.’
The old women laughed. They’d already seen him for what he was, but he winked at them and they knew they were all part of his show, and that he knew it too. It was a comfortable exchange. Only the girls were fooled, or willing to let themselves pretend so.
‘Drink, then.’ The girl’s annoyance was inches from boredom; the mage had to strike soon and impress them all with his flash and spark, or all his swagger would be wasted.
He set his tea bowl down between his feet and leaned forward. The flames patterned shadows across his black hair and his copper, wide-cheeked face. Under the cold stars, with the fire-light spilling over him, he had the eyes of a devil or a cat.
The travellers leaned forward with him; the signal given for their entertainment to begin.
‘Watch,’ he said, and dropped his voice. ‘Here, then.’ He flung out his one good hand, a sparkle of bright ash flying from his fingers, and a surge of magic slid over Tet’s skin, leaving him shuddering.
The flames jumped higher and turned a bright jewel-green. In that moment, as he cast the dust, the mage shifted. Or at least, he appeared to shift – true shifting was too rare and powerful a magic for some city-born gutter mage to actually use. At best this was trickery – oreshamin. He’d laid a shadow over his skin like an actor donning a mask of painted paper. Even so, this was real magery and Tet could almost smell it, sweet and cloying.
The travellers shrieked and drew back. The free-dogs howled and barked in their high voices.
There was no youth sitting by the fire, only the sinuous and familiar shape of one of the mountain dragons, its back arched, the fine filaments of its frill and whiskers flaring outward. The malachite scales flashed in the firelight and the illusion was so strong that Tet could hear the rumble of its breathing. Smell sulphur and burned millet, cinnamon, ash. The coiling dragon snarled once. It bared long yellow teeth, breathed out curling ribbons of smoke, and then was gone.
The mage opened his eyes wide, guileless as an infant. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Did I not say?’
The crowd clapped and laughed, and Tet took his pipe from his robe jacket, filled it with the dregs of his tobacco, and lit it.
Across the fires, the mage turned to glance at Tet again. The moment was a silver flash in the stream of time, frozen. The wind dropped, and the silence that followed was immense and black.
In all the universe, Tet was the only living thing. With a mutter of the old tongue, he coaxed a small flame, breathing a flutter of time into it, and drew on his pipe, tasting dead smoke, bitter and black.
The stars had stopped flickering and the threads of the faint clouds were still as rocks cast into the heavens. The sparks of the fire were frozen in place in a whirl of tiny embers. Tet wasn’t alarmed, though he knew he probably should be. Or, if not alarmed, perhaps terrified.
He’d become too tired for terror.
It had been happening more often, and Tet swallowed down the sickness that rose in his throat. There was nothing for him to do but sit and wait in the infinite stillness, feeling the darkness inside him spread, pushing at the stone door he held in his head to keep it at bay. Crack by crack, the void widened.
Soon the gods would come and restart the world, but until then there was only the emptiness of a universe without time. A reminder of what he’d done, and how it grew worse with every passing year. The stalls in time came more frequently these days and it took the gods longer each time to fix it.
Until then, there was only Tet and the well-black eyes of the mage staring into his own. Tet stood carefully, untangling his cloak from his legs, and limped around the sculpted column of fire, stepping between the skirts of women, over the free-dogs, until he was in front of the mage. The young man stared blankly ahead, motionless as a carving. Tet crouched, his ruined knee screaming pain through his entire body.
The two mages were close enough that the younger one could have felt Tet’s breath across his cheeks. Up close, the mage still looked young, but there was a strange ageless quality about him that made Tet suspicious.
If Tet knew the mage’s name, he could control him like a jointed puppet on silk strings. Could strip any disguises and spells from his skin to reveal the truth beneath. Could make him stand, tell Tet all his secrets like water spilling from a broken jug. Could make him dance through the still flames, perhaps even push him into another time and place. If Tet knew his name, and if he were powerful again.
Tet laughed softly at all his stupid, bitter regrets over the things he’d lost. With the very tip of his index finger, he touched the soft skin of the mage’s neck and traced up to the curve of his left ear. There was a tiny mark behind his earlobe, a smudge of oily white cream such as actors wore for the stage, and Tet wiped it away. This was the closest to intimacy he’d been in years, and it was nothing. It had been a very long time since he had trusted himself to more than a casual fuck with a stranger who would forget him as soon as the sun rose.
A flicker of shapes slid across the heavens, casting strange lights and shadows across the frozen landscape. Tet glanced up to see the vast, bright forms of Nanak, Epsi, and Vitash, joined by a host of other gods from all corners of the worshipping world. Magic tugged against his skin and bones as the gods worked at stitching the universe together again, layering second on intricate second, like a spider slowly rebuilding a web torn by a thrashing moth.
The great hound Nanak stared down with empty eyes bigger than moons, but she said nothing to Tet, and after a while, the gods faded, and the air felt lighter.
Time would begin soon. Tet left the frozen mage and returned to his place, wrapped his cloak around him as before and picked up his abandoned pipe. Without magic to keep the flame going, it had died again. ‘Vlam,’ Tet whispered, and the spark caught long enough for him to take another pull on the ox-horn stem.
