Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 17
Dozha’s laugh was hollow. ‘Were, old man. Were.’
Ymat coughed to announce his return, and he handed Dozha a large leather pouch so loaded with five-and-ones that the seams were stretched and it bulged like Tet’s stomach.
Tet could see how poor his freedom had made him. The gems had long since been exchanged for coin, and there were likely to be none left now. But he said nothing. He would have paid more if he’d had to. The White Prince would soon have grown bored, and he was a man who took time and pleasure with his cruelties. Tet hadn’t yet known true suffering at the Prince’s hand, and he knew it. He shuddered to think what more could have been done to him.
Finally, sated, Tet slowly wiped one side of his mouth with the inside of his sleeve and leaned back. He could taste blood in his mouth where the recently-healed tear had opened again. It mingled with the salty-sweetness of the chicken and his stomach threatened to revolt. But the feeling was distant, dampened as though it was an echo of something that had happened before. It wasn’t a time slip, though. Tet frowned, the edges of his vision blurring slightly.
There was something in the wine, he realised belatedly, some medicine or poison that numbed his skin and left him hollow, only half-aware.
‘And.’ Ymat coughed again, his fist a delicate curl that he peered over. ‘There was also the matter of my own reimbursement for certain measures I was forced to take at great risk to my personal safety.’
‘Of course,’ Tet slurred, but his stomach sank like a sack full of stones. How much will I have left after this? Had he been freed from starvation in a pit simply to starve under the stars? How the gods must be howling with laughter, if they could see this. ‘Look, you begged for freedom, and we gave it to you. Enjoy it.’
‘The clockwork horse will suffice,’ said Ymat, and Tet choked.
‘Ah,’ he said, once he’d swallowed the blood filling his mouth. ‘Shoom, what is that going to leave me?’
Ymat looked uncomfortable. ‘There was a hill-pony—’
‘Hast, and how am I to afford her stabling?’
‘I will keep her with my own herds until such time as you can collect her,’ he said.
Tet felt a momentary pity for Ymat’s grooms, but at least Hast would be safe and with her kind. I will go make my apologies to her as soon as I can.
‘You also have a satchel of clothes, including a few of those I had ordered for you as Ohtet Maynim; a seven-string lute in the hill-tribe style, and this.’ He held up a small leather pouch like a maiden’s limp hand. ‘It should see you through until – until your fortunes change.’
Ah well; ill-gotten wealth, gifted by the gods. It was never really mine to hold on to. Despite his priest-mage upbringing, Tet couldn’t help the little pang of loss. In a short time, he’d grown accustomed to wealth. It had made everything so easy, painless. No wonder the temples discouraged it.
It was not the wealth that truly concerned him now, but something far more important. Under his ribs, the numbness spread like dead fingers moving through water. Tet avoided the implications with another question. There was something else he’d been worried about. Someone else. ‘Laketri?’
Ymat closed his eyes as though in pain. ‘A waste, that. I won’t be able to use her again.’
Tet swallowed down his rising nausea and closed his good hand into a fist. It was true that he’d barely had time to know her, but now she was a victim to the schemes he’d agreed to. Her death lay with Tet as much as it did with Ymat Shoom.
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ Tet said softly. What else was there to say – condolences from him would be like ashes rubbed into an open cut.
‘As am I. She’s a smart girl, but the prince knows her face now.’
Wait. ‘She’s not dead?’
Ymat waved one hand as he frowned. ‘The girl has a lucky streak river-wide. No. She’s not dead. Gone back to selling pots, whatever good that does me.’
Tet breathed a little easier. That Laketri still clung to life – had returned to life – cheered Tet more than he’d like to acknowledge. If she had the chance, perhaps then so did he. And she was a tenuous link to the Underpalace. She’d known things. ‘Selling pots?’
‘A waste, I know,’ Ymat said. ‘Though she’s remarkably good at it, for all that. Has a shop in Orphan Street now.’
Their conversation ended as Dozha stepped forward to heft his own sack of coin and set to hiding it carefully under his traveller’s coat, checking that the weight of it wouldn’t hinder him as he returned to whatever dark passages lead him back to his underworld. Tet’s time with him was done.
I was supposed to kill him. A useless man like Tet, with no magic, was meant to kill this mage who could turn him into a serpent with a single word. Tet looked away from Dozha and spoke instead to Ymat, ‘And my soul – what of it?’
Dozha paused in his fastenings, his quick fingers falling still as he listened.
‘We will talk of that later, Ohtet,’ Ymat said. ‘You must eat, rebuild your strength. I will fill you a pan of water for washing. That is all I can offer, I’m afraid.’ He glanced at the thief. ‘And you, your work is done, your coin paid. Be off.’
Dozha flashed him a sharp-toothed grin and bowed to Ymat. ‘Blessings of Sinastrillia on your house.’
‘Thank you very much, I don’t think,’ Ymat said with a shudder. ‘I’ll have no god’s luck, ill or good. Out with you. Out.’ He shook his head when Dozha was gone. ‘Sinastrillia indeed. More a curse than a blessing, these damn thieves.’
Tet stared at the closed door for a moment. Dozha was not the only person he’d met in this city who made free with the use of Sinastrillia’s name. Laketri. He filed the thought away, keeping track of Laketri and Dozha’s possible spider-silk connection.
*
Tet was cleaned, his wounds treated with salves and bandaged, and he was dressed in the plainest of his old clothes when Ymat finally reluctantly told him what had happened to Tet’s soul. Ymat had splinted the fingers of Tet’s left hand and poured him more drugged wine for the pain. It left him drowsy, but the throb was distant, and he was trying not to think on it.
‘He gave it to her,’ Ymat said from his seat on the low long couch, and held his hands wide in apology.
‘He? To who?’ The drug was slowly wearing off. The tiredness shed from Tet like papery skin, and he was itching to do something. To have his revenge against the White Prince, to get back his soul...and to make a decision about Dozha. He put that thought from his head. Dozha was a problem that could wait for a brighter day.
‘The Princess Kani. Prince Lainn gave it to her as a betrothal gift, or a thank you. One isn’t quite sure. He is playing this game in a most guarded manner.’
‘He plans to wed her?’
Ymat shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Who can say. The prince is not like other mortals—’
‘He’s just a man,’ Tet spat, ‘and not even a mage.’
‘And more fool you for believing that, Sai Maynim.’ Ymat scowled and folded his hands in his lap. ‘The truth is, for whatever reason, he has given it to that vicious bitch, and no thief in all of Pal-em-Rasha will go up against her.’
‘Dozha?’
Ymat shook his head. ‘He said she was too skilled a mage for him to make a move against.’
Skilled; she was at that. But so was Dozha. And therein was a puzzle. ‘Why does a mage as powerful as Dozha work as your contact?’ A stupid question that Tet knew Ymat would not answer, but the drug had loosened his tongue. ‘Why is he only a thief?’
‘Only?’ Ymat raised a brow.
Tet smiled thinly, his pain and good sense still hazed somewhat by the drugs in his food and the wine. ‘Fine. You know what I mean. Why has he not gone to the temples to study to be a priest-mage? Why live in the sewers under the city?’ And if he was not a priest-mage, who had taught him his skills?
‘Who can say. It is not my business to enquire after a mage’s training.’ Ymat stood. ‘And now, Sai Maynim, there is the matter of what you will do now before your death.’
That slapped Tet back to sobriety. ‘I will die?’
Ymat nodded. ‘An unfortunate reality. I can see no way of getting your soul back. But the process is slow – slow enough, and we have some little time. Perhaps circumstances will change, and perhaps the princess will grow bored with her trinket and we will be able to retrieve it. Until then, I am afraid you must reinvent yourself once more.’
Tet had expected as much. The prince knew him by his old name, and it would be an act of idiocy to keep it. ‘Give me until noon,’ Tet told Shoom, ‘and Ohtet Maynim will be as dead as if the White Prince had truly succeeded.’
*
By the time the sun was overhead and the day was as hot as it was going to get, Tet had a new name. He’d washed the cell dirt from his skin and cleaned the badly-healed six-point scar in the centre of his chest, squeezed out the pus, and scraped the wounds raw and healthy. Ymat had given him a paste to keep them clean, and the pine-scented ointment left his chest cold and greasy under its bandages.
Tet pressed his good hand flat against the throbbing mark, and pushed, hoping to feel some remnant of magery dancing under his palm. Nothing. The stone door in his head was still and cold, no sign that it had ever been anything but an image of ancient stone, leading to nothing.
Tet’s black hair was plaited into a long queue and coiled and knotted at the back of his head, in the military style of the armies of Pal-em-Rasha. It had taken far too long and was messy and badly-done, but his hands remembered the patterns as if it had been only yesterday the last time he’d braided and bound it back. He’d left the shaggy beard he’d grown underground unshaven. Ohtet Maynim, while not exactly a plump merchant, had been healthy and smooth-cheeked. This new man was poorer, gaunter, and the ragged beard made the hollows of his cheeks appear deeper.
Tet’s reflection in the polished mirror was unflattering. He’d lost the best of his youth to war and pain. His eyes were as dead as those frozen fields where he’d fought. Tet’s clothes were no longer richly brocaded, embroidered, watered silks covered with intricate paintings. Instead, he wore the grey and white of a peasant or soldier. On his belt, he’d pinned the one small medal he’d earned at the front. A red starling pin that was both common and unremarkable. No badges or sashes of rank.
He went back to the name Tet. A small and stupid act, perhaps, but it was the only name he had left to cling to, that made him feel like himself. Besides, it was a simple name. A peasant’s name. In all the languages spoken from the northern mountains right to the shining azure seas that beat against the ragged tooth of the southern lands, Tet had always meant child. To balance it, Tet had given himself the unlucky number six – the number of a child a starving family would have signed up into the army. A child who would have no future but to serve and die. Now in the language of the Deniahn he was Sektet Am. Am was was so common a family name as to mean nothing at all. It was the Deniahn word for person.
Tet had reinvented himself again, this time as the Number-six Child Person. A name for a nobody.
It was an acceptable disguise, close to the truth – as the best disguises were. Tet was a man returned from war, crippled and broken. He had no trace of magic to him. No money, no lands, no gods.
Tet attempted a smile at his mirrored face, and the sight of it saddened him. He had grown old as if responding to Dozha’s mockery. His lower lip was black and bruised around the tear. It would leave him a scar, of that he was certain. His broken nose had set a little crooked, and his eyes looked permanently bruised. His chances of looking young and handsome were long gone, slipped away while he wasted time praying to gods who used him like a game piece.
‘You look a different man than the one I met a few months ago,’ said Ymat’s reflection over his shoulder.
Without turning, Tet acknowledged the man’s presence. ‘A different man indeed.’ Carefully, he straightened the front of his short robe and shirt, then gripped the heavy edges of the robe’s neck. ‘Ymat.’ His fingers tightened. ‘You are certain Dozha will not steal the beetle back?’
‘Most certain.’
‘Perhaps if I speak with him, he can be persuaded.’
Ymat stared a long time before answering. The lines that bracketed his mouth had deepened these last weeks, and he had not shaved his head. The tattoos were hidden under a fuzz of grey bristle. He wore a long heavy robe of mustard gold, simple and un-embroidered. Perhaps he too felt frail and weak with his plan so gloriously destroyed. ‘And with what would you pay him?’
It was a good question. Tet slipped his right hand into his shirt to feel the pouch of coins tucked behind the wide belt. It was depressingly slack, the coins sliding against each other. The little he had would be enough to rent accommodation in the eastern part of the city for a few months, maybe more if Tet found a landlord foolish enough, but even if he sold Hast – a thought he preferred not to contemplate – Tet would still have nothing to offer Dozha. I know that, so why even bother?
Perhaps he needed to look into Dozha’s face and remember what it was he’d been cursed to do. For now, the gods’ curses meant nothing. They could not find him without his soul and Tet was under no compulsion. The ruined left knee still pained him and made him limp, but it did not grow worse with each passing day, and his right knee did little more than twinge in the coldest parts of the night. Nothing he couldn’t live with. With the curse lifted for the moment, it gave Tet time to breathe and think. And time was something he’d always been able to use to his advantage. A grim smile pulled one corner of his mouth. I’m not beaten yet.
‘Dozha,’ Tet repeated. ‘It’s an unusual name.’ Tet had to speak with him. Dozha must know something of the foreign mage Kani – if he was afraid of her. Perhaps if Tet asked the right questions, he would learn a way to get his soul back.
‘It is rather,’ said Ymat. ‘I believe it is in the tongue of the Underpalace.’
The cant of thieves and assassins. It was not as if Tet had occasion to learn it. He knew little more than a few thief signs, and that only from years in pursuit of the thief who took the opals. They were not a trusting people by nature.
‘It means dragon,’ said Ymat. ‘And if that is not warning enough, then consider that if the dragon of the Underpalace will not go against the Princess Kani no matter what I might offer him, then you are more foolish than I believed possible. Drop this fancy of yours. Go to your death with some dignity.’
‘I will wait.’ Tet straightened and turned to face Ymat. ‘Perhaps there will be a change in my luck, and I will not need the help of dragons or thieves.’
‘Or of old, fat men who have their fingers in all the millet bowls,’ sighed Ymat.
‘Or them,’ Tet agreed, and for the first time he felt a little good humour. He was not dead, not yet, and while his luck had always run strange, that didn’t mean it had always run ill. He had done terrible things and lived. Dragons spoke to him, gods cursed him, but Tet was still alive.
He would find out everything he could about this Kani. Tet would take a beggar’s bowl and limp through the market, play his lute for drunken courtiers, go to the Dream of the Seven-Petals and listen to the visions men had, he would find Dozha and ask him what he knew. Determination straightened Tet’s spine and soothed the old pain in his legs. Ymat had given him hope, whether he knew it or not. ‘Thank you, Ymat Shoom.’
‘I only wanted the clockwork horse,’ Ymat said, waving one hand. ‘Now. Once you have found a place, you must make no move to contact me. I will send word to you if I hear anything.’
He could have simply taken the horse, and they both know it. This was about having Tet in his debt. If Tet regained his soul, Ymat would have more than just the magic bindings to control him, he would have bought Tet’s loyalty. And he knew who Tet was, how powerful he’d been. And whatever had gone wrong in Ymat’s plans, Tet was certain that he still wanted to get his hands on the prince’s magical armour. ‘And the breastplate?’
Ymat smiled tightly. ‘There are other snakes in this city, Sai Am, and I will have the White Prince’s protection away from him one day. I am a very patient man.’
BEGGAR MAGE
Tet found a room to rent in the eastern precinct of the city, far from the convenience of the largest trade-markets and the wealthy merchant streets and the moneylenders, and far from any place that the White Prince would ever go. His landlady was a ghost-faced woman with black hair pulled back from a face gone old too early. She was from the southeast of Utt Dih, and her husband was long dead. She still wore the clothes of her country in a kind of silent defiance, and the long robes that wrapped over her body were once brightly coloured and threaded with silver, but they had faded, and dust had sapped all the jewel-bright tones from her silks.
She offered him a dusty, cold room at the top of a narrow building in the southern style. The roof was slanted against the rain and snow, but instead of the high arched openings Tet was used to, she had tried to bring sunshine into her house with wide windows.
Their slatted shutters only brought in the cold and the wind, and with them, the inevitable orange dust. She kept a flock of flightless ducks, and the yard reeked of their shit. The thick chalky stench overlay everything else. The rent was low, but she demanded two months in advance, and after that Tet had almost nothing left.
The woman had led him up a narrow flight of steps, the wood creaking and musty, releasing spores with each footfall, to the very top room of her house. The room itself was large enough only for a simple bed and a place to set Tet’s trunk. The sloping roof made it impossible for him to stand straight except in one small area. This room will turn me into a hunchback. At least it was high above the ground, and the sun and air came through the holes in the roof. Tet was certain that if he still had a soul he would sell it again not to be underground.
‘You were a soldier,’ she said to him in her feeble old woman’s voice. It came incongruously from her plump mouth.
