Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 19
*
His rented bed was very narrow. When Tet went to sleep, he lay on his back like a corpse and counted the threads of a million cracks in the oiled wooden ceiling beams. He counted the knotholes and the shadows. When the dreams came, he would sometimes think he was still awake.
Not for him the pleasant blankness of dreamless sleep, of exhaustion wiped away by night’s soft hand. Instead, he was trapped in a void, hung like a mote in a vast darkness. It was immense. Nothing pressed him in on all sides, swallowed his screams, forced him to stay still. If he tried to move, he was crushed smaller. This was what waited for him after death, Tet knew. This and worse.
Sometimes he woke to hear the last echoes of his screams and wondered how long before Widow Peniki threw him out.
That night was no different, Tet had fallen back into his nightmare like a child tripping off a cliff in a game, and the Nothing clutched him in its hard fist. His mouth was open, lungs crushed breathless, but all he heard was silence. It had given him a horror of growing blind or deaf like the other beggars in the market. Of being kept underground, gagged.
He screamed. And screamed. Even though he knew it was futile, Tet would be damned if he didn’t try something. Giving in to the Nothing, even if it was just a dream – and priest-mages would be the first to tell you that there was no such thing as just a dream – was giving in to an all-encompassing defeat. If he did not fight, Tet was throwing away hope, his soul, any chance at making something out of what was left of his existence.
The silence filled his throat, plugged his ears and nose.
Tik.
In the dream, Tet paused for breath and listened.
Tok.
Impossible. Since losing his oresh, all his nights had been given over to the grave’s emptiness and now here came sound, tapping into his head with the softest whisper of a dropping pin.
Again. Tik. Tok. Then faster tiktoktiktoktiktiktiktik until it ran into an almost inaudible scrabble. It drew closer, but there was nothing in the dark, nothing around him. Tet’s skin crawled and itched and he wondered if this was some new aspect of the nightmare, that from now on he would lie soundless and sightless and unable to move while grave insects consumed his living corpse.
He felt it. The prickle against his broken littlest finger, a needle-dig as something began to pinch its way up his ruined hand. This time when he screamed, sound replaced silence. Tet’s eyes flew open, and he smashed his head against the slanted roof above the bed. Pain blossomed from the top of his skull, folding his head in petals of aching colour. He closed his watering eyes for a moment and grit his teeth.
When he looked again, there was a thing on his wrist the size of a one-piece coin, working slowly upward, little legs jerking it along. Its carapace was a dim grey in the night. Tet jerked his arm hard against the sloping wall of the roof and smashed the thing clinging there. The shells cracked, splintering fragments of dust.
Doubtless, he’d be bruised all the way up his forearm from the force of the blow, but at least he’d killed the thing crawling on him.
‘Fool,’ Tet whispered to himself. ‘A beetle. It could have done you no harm.’ He was not one for killing, even the small things, and his reaction had been driven by dream-terror. Always, it was fear that made him destroy.
The crushed beetle had dropped to the ground and rolled under the bed. A flitter of guilt passed through him as Tet shifted on the narrow bed and rubbed at his arm, erasing the little marks of the beetle’s journey.
The first birds were already trilling uncertainly at each other, and soon the dark would lift into the silver-grey of morning. He lay back down, eyes open, and when Tet woke again, the sunlight was pink and gold, and the air was bright with the promise of frost.
After dressing in winter trousers and pulling a quilted short robe over his shirt, Tet knelt down to search out the remains of the beetle. The attic room was home to small things like woodlice and spiders, but he’d not seen a beetle that size in Widow Peniki’s house before. Even in the gardens, nothing grew that big.
His fingertips touched something hard and cold, and Tet closed his hand around it. It was slippery like a moss-covered stone pulled from a green pond. Not like a beetle at all. The unusual texture made him shiver, made his hand ache. Slowly, he turned it this way and that, staring at the thing that had been crawling on him in the dark.
A beetle, yes. It was bigger than he remembered – a sparrow’s egg of a beetle, the carapace shimmering blue and gold. The colours moved across the wing cases like rainbows on oil. The body was crushed, fine cracks splintered through the carapace, and the black spiked legs were twisted at unnatural angles. Warily, Tet pressed a fingertip to the crease along its back, and the case parted; the wings unfurling like glittering sails. Fine wire threaded through the almost translucent material. The wings were dead, but Tet was familiar enough with the concept of clockwork magery to know that they would have been used to recharge the creature’s tiny heart. They would have drawn on sun and warmth and body heat to power the magic keeping it alive.
Under the open wings lay the intricate clockwork inners, with cogs small as spiders’ eyes, the butterfly proboscis coils of its springs.
Tet’s heart stuttered, and he quickly smoothed the creature shut and wrapped it in a scrap of cloth before tucking it into his belt. It could be anything; a mistake, a message from Ymat, or something more sinister.
Clockwork magery was an intricate business – marrying magic and science. And it was no cheap matter to hire a clockwork mage or to buy one of their trinkets. Their work was the realm of rich men.
A handful of months ago Tet could have closed his eyes, breathed into the First Pattern, and known in an instant what this thing was supposed to do; if it came from friend or enemy. But now all he had was the throbbing ache of a remembered organ, long gone. He had a cold stone door in his head, and a space behind his heart that echoed the hollow thumping, that reminded him of everything he’d lost. First, he’d lost his name before he was even old enough to know what it was that he’d lost, and then his magic. And even if Tet found some way to get his oresh back, he would always be constrained by his lack. He should have been able to do the things Dozha did seemingly without effort, to shift his skin and walk like a ghost. Instead, all Tet had was brute force, no subtlety, no perfect control.
The things I could have done if I had my name. Tet laughed bitterly. No wonder every damned princeling and spyling wanted his name for themselves. He must look like an expensive toy set just of reach. Tempting and wasted.
And now, there wasn’t even the raw power left to have value to anyone. Without magic Tet was half a man, floundering in a sea that other men learned to swim as children. Tet felt papery; creased and thin. His time was running out and the grains of it slid under his skin and through his bones. With each passing hour, he could feel the shadow of his death drawing closer.
Ymat had said not to go to him, that he would contact Tet if he had any news. But the beetle did not feel like something from Ymat Shoom. While it was true that Ymat did have the clockwork mage Sai Tiger on a leash, this work didn’t seem like his. In comparison, Sai Tiger’s work was crude and simplistic. This was the work of someone else. And the only people who could tell Tet what this beetle was meant to do were the clockwork magicians themselves. None of them kept businesses in this poverty-stricken quarter and it would be madness to walk into their street of wonders, near the Floating University. If one of them had sent this beetle, Tet could be walking straight into the bright jaws of a trap.
Few toymakers were good enough to create something this fine, and their ability would mark the fabric of the thing as clearly as a stamp. It might be worth the chance of going to one of the men or women who had failed their training and been expelled from the University. They would have information, but not skill enough to have set this thing on him.
Tet no longer looked like the man who’d ridden on a clockwork stallion to the gates of the tower, who swaggered about the town, throwing coin like grain for hens. He’d be safe. Beetle tucked away, Tet strapped his lute to his back and slipped downstairs to where Peniki was already sorting through her reeds and leaves, laying them next to each other on her porch in order of length.
‘Good morning.’
‘Off early today, are we?’ she said, without looking up from her work. Her nimble fingers selected a handful of long-bladed narrow leaves and bent them in half to begin her braiding.
‘Some things I need to see to.’ Tet paused, one hand pressing against his belt, to the dead beetle behind it. ‘Are there any clockwork magicians in the eastern precinct?’
She laughed harshly, a donkey bray. ‘Are you a fool?’
Tet smiled innocently back, though it took him a moment to remember how to do it. ‘It was a fool’s question, I admit.’
‘There are failed toymakers.’ Her hands wove, her fingers pinched and pulled and threaded.
Exactly what he needed. ‘Where would I find these tinkers?’
Peniki finally paused, her hands stilling as she glanced up. ‘There’s only one near here,’ she told him. ‘You can find them on the Iron Ox road, there’s a shop there – it sells junk and broken clockwork. Yulikiya’s their name, but they’ll be no help to you if you want real clockwork. They can mend a little, but that’s all.’ Already she was squinting, calculating what coin Tet must have if he was looking for the services of toymakers.
Tet shook his head. ‘Thank you, I’m not in the market for trinkets, but I might have some scrap for them to buy. You have been most helpful.’ Tet dropped her a half bow and Peniki sniffed and went back to her work, a blush darkening her cheeks.
*
It was easy enough to find Iron Ox way, where the traders of scrap metal shouted and crashed and filled the air with the bright noise of copper and iron. A few even had signs proclaiming they worked with gold and silver, but in this dingy place, Tet found that hard to believe. Yulikiya’s shop was painted a deep bright blue like the sky on the hottest day and a sign hung in the open doorway, with a fine border of red around the painted name. The wood showed through the scarred paint on the walls, and the city’s dust had dulled the bright colours, but the shutters were propped open, so Tet peered in.
The interior was small, the walls lined floor to ceiling with planks to serve as shelves, cluttered with more dust and cups and platters and cogs and icons and idols and coils of wire and lengths of rusting metals. There was no order to what stood next to what. The only clear place was on the counter, and even that was taken up by a sprawled white cat with black ears and a few cloudy grey patches along its flanks. It gave him a desultory tail-twitch and yellow-eyed glare.
There was no sign of anyone else.
‘Yulikiya?’ Tet called softly. Perhaps they were in some back room.
The cat flattened its ears.
Tet was about to leave when a narrow door behind the counter opened and a person wrapped in layers of plain robes barrelled out, their arms filled with a mass of various metal artefacts. Their head was uncovered, the hair pulled back away from their sharp face, and over their eyes they wore ground glass lenses held in place with a wireframe.
‘What?’ they snapped. ‘Oh, wait. You’re a customer?’ They dumped the metal on the already overflowing counter with a crashing clatter. The cat didn’t so much as twitch.
‘Something like that,’ Tet said.
‘Well either you are or you aren’t. Which is it?’
Tet pulled out the beetle and cradled it in the curve of his palm. ‘Would you be able to tell me about this?’
Yulikiya squinted, then shuffled forward to lean across the counter. ‘Hmm.’ They frowned as they reached out to grasp Tet’s wrist to draw his hand closer. Their fingers were bony and metal-cold. ‘I could,’ they said, eventually. ‘But I’m not a charity.’
‘All I need is an answer, for that, you can keep the beetle.’
Their frown deepened. ‘That’s no small fortune you’re handing out,’ they said.
‘I’m not a thief.’
‘Never said you were.’ They peered at him through the glass, their eyes small behind them.
‘But you thought it.’ Tet balanced the beetle on the top of a pile of tarnished cogs and nails. ‘It came to me in the night, and that is enough to make any man curious.’
‘Or fearful.’ Yulikiya plucked the beetle up between forefinger and thumb and held it close to their face to examine it. After a few moments, they glanced at him and said, ‘What makes you think I know anything about this sort of thing?’
Tet shrugged. ‘Rumour.’
‘That old cat.’ They closed their fist around the beetle. ‘I was not weak,’ they said. ‘Whatever the rumours tell you. I have the skill of joining magic to metal.’
‘Your eyes.’
‘That.’ Yulikiya nodded. ‘I can make nothing for I have no skill for the fine work, for the details, and the craft demands an equal skill in both. My parents thought they would make money off me, sending me to the Floating University, but I was never able to keep up with my classmates. A year,’ their face twisted, ‘a year’s training from books I couldn’t read, holding tools to trinkets that were hardly more than blurs.’
‘A fickle god, fate.’
‘I don’t believe in gods.’ They smiled thinly. ‘What exactly do you want to know, Sai—?’
‘Am. Can you tell me what it was set to do?’
‘Of course.’
‘And who sent it?’
Their face was guarded for a moment, but then they sighed and nodded. ‘It was sent to hunt you down, Sai Am, and it was sent by the finest clockwork magician in all of the city.’
That much he supposed was obvious from the detail of the work. A white-veiled figure bowed in his imagination and Tet breathed through the sudden flare of fear – perhaps he was wrong to be here. Someone was hunting him and here he was, leaving a shining trail. Damn all the gods. It could be any number of enemies. ‘And there’s no way to tell who it was who hired the maker?’
The thin smile fell away from Yulikiya’s face. ‘No one hires the prince’s toymaker. I think you know who sent this.’ They held out their hand, palm up, fingers like the petals of chrysanthemums. The beetle sat there, broken and gleaming. At the very heart of it was a tiny glass tube, no bigger than a grain of rice. ‘This will hold your essence,’ they said. ‘Some scrap of skin or such like.’
‘Saliva?’ Tet asked softly.
Yulikiya nodded.
Tet remembered the taste of the prince’s fingers in his rotten mouth, the honey and the heat. The prince knew he’d escaped. Of course he would. Those soldiers would have to tell him, even if it meant their death. Or he would finally have come to see Tet again – to offer him some last choice between death and pleasure. Tet drew in a deep shuddering breath. First the free-dog, and now this. While he could brush the first aside as a stray encounter, this was not so easy to dismiss.
He was hunted. And the prince would not take kindly to his escape. The trap was closing on him. ‘How long does it take a magician of that skill to create something like this?’
Yulikiya frowned, flicked the beetle with one chewed-to-the-quick nail. ‘It is fine work, but small. They could make something like this in two days, maybe three. Another day to set the magic in place.’ They squinted back up at him. ‘It depends on how eager he is to find you.’
And how eager was that? Tet did not like to think. The prince wanted a pet mage at court or he wanted him dead on a spike, and Kani wanted him out of the picture so she had no rivals. More than that – Tet had humiliated the White Prince by escaping. The prince did not like humiliation or losing, and he could draw out revenge like honey spooled out on a wooden spoon. He would not be kind.
‘You had best leave, Sai Am, and take your beetle with you.’
Tet hurriedly plucked the offending mechanism from Yulikiya’s palm. The clockwork beetle shivered as he tucked it back into place behind his belt. Even wrapped in cloth and crushed, Tet could imagine it coming to life again.
Tik-tok-tik-tik-tok.
Dogs and gods and clockwork hunters, and at the end of it all, a grinning death’s head.
I need more time. The thought of it had him laughing, softly, quietly, madly. If he had his soul, he could have all the time he wanted, but instead, Tet had nothing but his wits.
A PROMISE MADE
Tet was not going to wait for Ymat Shoom to make a move, or for his soulless body to finally turn to dust and ash. He had to do something. Though he’d already sold his handful of princely clothes and boots, that money was long gone and the pittance he made at the market was hardly enough to pay for meals. His infrequent attempts to work in Widow Peniki’s garden left him more tired than it was worth. His time with her would soon be up and he’d need to pay another month’s rent. Even when Tet had been a mage he couldn’t conjure gold from the air. What chance did he have now?
The White Prince was looking for him, and with his court toymaker at his disposal, it would not be long before some other trinket found Tet and he ended his days in a cage. If he was lucky.
Without Ymat’s help and with no way of tracking down Dozha, Tet had only one person in the city he could turn to. He’d avoided her before this – partly for her own safety, and partly out of guilt. Guilt and fear.
Tet packed his remaining bag neatly under the narrow bed and stowed his lute with it. The only things he took with him were the ruined beetle and the handful of useless coins he’d earned from the thieves in the market, and then made his way across the city on foot.
It took Tet a very long time, but he used the pain as a goad. He used it to remind himself that it was his own foolishness that had brought him here. His drunken negligence to his duties, his fear of punishment, his incomplete control on his magery. He’d used his namelessness as an excuse to hide from his own ability. Instead of acknowledging that he was powerful, he had pretended weakness so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences of power. Tet snorted. Great things were expected of great mages, and he did not want to be great.
