‘So I can hear.’ The man rattled his bowl hopefully at the sound of approaching feet, but the women passed, their faces stern and taut with worry. ‘The nightmares getting worse?’

  They spent the days alongside each other. Tet had confessed to him a little about his dreams, though he didn’t tell the old man what exactly it was he saw. ‘Something like that.’ At his feet, the begging bowl was empty but for the two coins he’d seeded it with. Not a single person had stopped to give him anything, not even out of pity. He was wasting the day.

  ‘You should go home,’ said the blind man. ‘Sleep. You’ll play better tomorrow.’

  ‘Will I? I could be dead tomorrow.’ The laugh he forced was hollow.

  Next to him, the man spat into the gutter. ‘Hush with your ill-talk. Go home.’ His concern was gone, replaced by irritation and hint of fear. ‘You are bad luck today, Am. Bad luck. Go sit somewhere else and plague them if you won’t go home.’

  Tet scraped up the two lonely coins and slipped the bowl into his shirt. His eyes ached, pulsing against the confines of his sockets, and his vision had gone blurry with strain. Everything around him was too loud – the screams of competing vendors, the angry murmur of barter, children thudding through the alleyways, and the distant bells of the towers, timed to excruciating accuracy by cogs and springs.

  His companion’s voice was grating. He had to sleep. And if the magician’s trinkets came for him, then so be it. Tet couldn’t stand guard against death every moment left to him. He staggered back home, and fell asleep with the sun still shining redly through the gaps in the slats of the roof and the howls of distant dogs ringing in his ears.

  *

  Tet woke without screaming. The night was thick as winter blankets, down-heavy and spun from black silk. All sound was tamped down, and even the distant screeching of the city’s cats was not enough to have dragged him from sleep. He lay very still, hearing only his own breathing, the faint rustle of the blanket as his chest moved.

  Nothing. Not a tok nor a scrattle. The toymaker would send something soon and who was to say it would be another beetle? The prince’s tame clockwork mage did not have a place in the court because of any lack of skill or imagination. They were a mystery and a monster. No one even knew what they looked like. For all he knew, Tet was the only living person besides the White Prince who had heard the toymaker speak in their soft, lilting voice. The toymaker made no public appearances without the veil. The White Death, the people whispered, but that was not a name. Tet wondered what the toymaker’s mother had called their new-born child, and what life had led them to tie themself to the prince. Were they simply another slave?

  If Tet were still a priest-mage, he’d not pay the toymaker any mind. Priest-mages had always considered the toymakers beneath them. But now he was only a man. And the prince’s toymaker a dangerous enemy.

  The dark was unrelenting. Tet’s skin goose-pimpled when he imagined what things prowled the streets looking for him. The toymaker could have sent anything. It would be small, unnoticeable. A moth of silver and silk, a copper snake, a mantis painted with jade enamel.

  Fears were always so much larger in the dark. The blackness gave them the room to grow that the sun did not. On a small table at the head of his bed, Tet had an oil lamp – unused for fear of wasting oil he could not afford to replace, but a little light would cast his terror away. Or reveal it.

  A man can fight only the enemy he sees. Carefully, Tet eased one hand out from the covers and felt underneath the low bed for the small satchel holding the last of his belongings. The straps slipped free under his fingers, and he tugged them loose. He fumbled until he found the ridged metal of the top of the flint pouch. It had been months since he’d thought of it, that long ago night by the traveller’s campfire when the thief mage had tossed him this in exchange for silence. The mage who had another face, one older and warier, one not shaded by magery. Dozha.

  Dozha had given this to him. It had once belonged to the girl-priestess of Vitash.

  Would his life have been better if he’d grabbed Dozha that night and held him fast, handed him over as captive to the headsman and his no-longer-virginal daughter? Would Tet have enjoyed that brief moment, the shock in Dozha’s eyes when the old man turned on him? Tet thought he might have, just as long as it took for a heart to beat once.

  Perhaps Tet would still have his soul. Though he would not have appreciated that fact. Anger clenched a hot fist around Tet’s throat and he choked on his own stupidity. Quickly, he pulled the flint-pouch free and opened it. Although matches and magic were his norm, he’d worked with tinder and stones and kindling since he was a child, and his fingers remembered. He sat up, slowly, moving closer to the little oil lamp.

  The dark responded, whispering and closing around him, wreathing and dancing.

  He struck.

  One spark.

  Two.

  Three.

  And the room filled with light.

  NANAK, VITASH, EPSI

  The cramped attic shone bright as morning. Three sets of glowing eyes stared back at Tet from the narrow floor space.

  Milk eyes.

  Night sky eyes filled with stars.

  Emerald eyes.

  Tet’s heart battered against his ribs, even though the creatures looking back at him were not clockwork automatons made from metals and furs and powered by spit and magic. They were not the long-limbed hounds of the hunt, who brought down their prey like hungry ghosts.

  They were neither real nor machine, real nor imaginary. They lit the room like votive candles. They are not gods, was all Tet could think, over and over. If they were, he’d be dead.

  Three dogs sat watching him patiently, their eyes round as tea bowls. They flickered in and out of sight like a play of lights behind an oiled paper screen, but as Tet’s breathing slowed, they grew solid. He could feel the heat of their bodies. They glowed brighter.

  Unreal. Sendings, avatars, or neither? He’d never seen the like before. Tet had spoken with the gods, and these were not them. The three dogs were part of a witch’s treasure, as unbelievable as that was.

  The priest-mages were men and women of power who had learned the ability to speak the tongue of beasts and dragons, the first language of the world. They could command animals and men, turn the weather and dry the rivers. Some few could send ghostlike avatars into the world, or shape the dreams of living things. The most powerful could change their very shape, the shapes of others.

  Stop time.

  But mages did not set the gods to work, nor make mimicries of life the way the toymakers did with their clockwork machines.

  These dogs before him were the work of a mage of considerable power. If Tet were still able to feel the traceries of mage-work, he was sure he’d taste it on the air like iron grit, feel its static energy course through his body.

  Three dogs. Three pieces of power, cut loose and given life. They were pieces of a mage’s soul living on after death. Oresh-things. A strange terrible magic; no temple-trained mage would ever have done something like this. It went against the law of all gods, against everything the priest-mages held sacred. Abominations.

  And now they are mine.

  The smallest dog could have fit into Tet’s satchel, though it looked nothing like the little sleeve-dogs that wealthy men like Shoom kept. Instead of the flattened face and the long fur, the dog was a hunting hound in miniature, long legs and whip-thin tail. Its short fur gleamed golden. The little beast blinked green eyes, and raised its muzzle to howl. The sound was thin and distant, a far-away call of another world.

  Tet grinned. He would give them names. Mock the gods who hunted him down.

  Epsi, for the smallest.

  The middle dog was silver as a polished button, his dark eyes filled with constellations. Easy to give this one a name. Vitash. The hound didn’t howl, but he bared his long teeth in a grin that was not altogether friendly.

  Such blasphemy was unlikely to go unpunished, though stacked against all Tet’s other failings, it seemed minor at best. Childish, perhaps. The spite in him rose. If these were avatars or sendings of the gods, he’d be dead already – what did it matter if he was spiteful about it. Tet looked to the largest of the hounds. She will be Nanak, after the god of my childhood.

  The dog was the size of a mountain pony and took up half the room, even sitting. Her copper-red fur moved in a wind Tet couldn’t feel and her eyes were brilliant as the rising stars. She was solid as a mountain mastiff. The fur at her head darkened almost to black, and her great plumed tail curved over her back. The hound was nothing like the temple statues. Instead, this Nanak was more like something remembered by a child in a nightmare – half comforting, half terrifying.

  Nightmares. Visions. Perhaps I truly am going mad. Tet let out his breath slowly, expecting the spectral hounds to disappear like a phantasmagorical remnant of the dream that had woken him. Slowly, he edged his right hand down to the knee where Nanak had left her star-burn. Under his palm, the scars felt as though they were moving, rippling. It was only his imagination, but that didn’t stop the burn of awakened pain.

  The three dogs watched him.

  How did one command abominations? You name them and make them your own. It wouldn’t take magic to do this. Only the relinquishing of a life-time’s training.

  ‘I am Tet,’ he said, and the three magic dogs stared, huge eyes unblinking. ‘And so I name you, and call you mine. Nanak,’ he said, and the largest dog shifted, turning her charcoal-dark head ever so slightly as her claws ticked against the wood floor. Her fur smelled like camp-fires and forests.

  ‘Vitash.’ Tet extended his hand, fingertips brushing the second-largest dog and claiming it. ‘Epsi.’ The third, his hand drifting over its smooth head.

  This was human magic. Mountain magic. Old magic. The priestess Tet-Vitash of the Travellers could not have known she owned such a treasure or she would never have allowed herself to be robbed of it. Her little flint-pouch must have been a relic handed down from witch to witch, its power unknown and forgotten. And Dozha – he’d definitely had no idea what trinket he’d handed on to Tet. It had been a throw-away gift. A token.

  And now it was a secret only Tet knew. ‘What can you do?’ he whispered. A joyous hammer beat against his ribs. At his darkest, his most hopeless, he had been saved. Magic. Tet wanted to whoop, to shout out, to fill the air with his human voice. The terrible joy spread through his body, and Tet grinned. His chest ached as though it was about to split, so great was his relief. He spoke again, louder this time. ‘What can you do for me?’

  The dogs did not answer, and their unblinking stare dampened Tet’s excitement. A cold sweat prickled along his back, and he waited warily. Perhaps he was wrong and they were just flights of the imagination with no more power than the torn wing of a butterfly.

  Tet tried to converse with the hounds again, his voice soft and controlled. ‘Do you understand the words of man?’

  Nanak, Vitash, and the tiny Epsi nodded together, once.

  That at least made this easier. Tet allowed himself a nervous smile. Now to find out the boundaries of their power. Perhaps he’d have no need to burn down a temple in exchange for the whereabouts of one man, or go powerless against a mage princess with a despotic prince on a leash. ‘Will you do as I command?’

  Instead of answering, the dogs all looked to one another. Finally Nanak gave him a half-nod. An answer with reservations. Tet took it to mean they would do as he asked, provided it was within their power. His spirits sunk a little. What could three ghostly dogs do?

  ‘There’s a breastplate which the White Prince wears—’

  Nanak barked low and shook her massive head.

  It had been a weak chance. If the breastplate could be magicked away then someone would have done it long ago.

  Next to her, the smaller Vitash bared his long teeth in a row of skinning knives bright as frost. Silver spittle hung from his black jowls, and he whined deep in his throat. Eager. The moon dog, god of the night hunt. And next to him, bright as the fallen sun, Epsi, the day-hunter. Epsi growled, and small as he was, Tet was certain the dog would tear the throat out of any living thing he could.

  Were Tet some other man, he’d ask them to kill.

  Three dogs, three names. And perhaps my debts would be settled. The White Prince, Dozha, Kani. Instead, Tet looked to his hands trembling against his thighs, and knew he would not. The prince was kept safe behind his breastplate’s wards, but as for the others.... he couldn’t.

  In cold blood, he could not do it. He might have been a killer, but he was not a murderer. Even now. A feeling of ice water running out of a cracked earthen pot left him, and Tet warmed from the inside out.

  The realisation of this moral line that he would not cross was freeing. Even if the god Vitash wanted Dozha’s head, Tet would not be able to do it. While it was true that he’d killed before, it had never been a purposeful act. He would not be defined by murder. He was – or had been – a priest of Nanak. Under all the lies and the masks, he was still at heart the boy who’d been named Tet-Nanak, and the priest-mages of Nanak were never bound to kill.

  Perhaps if murder were out the question, a conversation was not. Tet shrugged. It couldn’t hurt to try. He wouldn’t risk a meeting with an outright enemy, but he had been trying to get a message to one particular mage for long enough. ‘Bring me Dozha,’ he said, expecting nothing.

  Nanak flicked out like a fallen star, leaving him alone with the two smaller dogs.

  Hah. If Nanak the ghost dog could bring Dozha right to him, then there’d be no need to keep his word to Laketri, after all. No need to burn down temples and make himself more enemies. Finally, things were turning his way. He grinned in anticipation. Now he had other plans to make. He might once have gone to war for the White Prince, but Tet’s skill had never been sticking swords into people. He changed his face and learned new languages and he made his maps.

  I change my face. That was what it always came back to.

  Decision made, Tet nodded to Vitash. ‘I’ll need money.’ He almost laughed out loud. When had he become so much like common men, always greedy for coin? Then again, what good were abominations and blasphemy if they didn’t bring some luxuries. ‘Coin enough to build a new persona. Can you bring me this?’

  The silver hound simply disappeared. Tet hoped he found that reassuring rather than ominous.

  To Epsi he gave the command to hunt down the clockwork creatures the prince’s toymaker had sent after him. The little dog faded away.

  Tet stood alone in the middle of his dark attic room. The light had vanished with the three dogs, and he shivered, wondering what exactly he had set in motion. All the money in the world was not going to buy him passage away from death. A moment passed before Nanak returned as quickly as she had disappeared, warming the room like a circle of candles. His heart sank. She was alone. No sign of Dozha. The great dog sat down and whined. Tet had no idea what she was trying to say to him – perhaps it was beyond her to bring him a person, or perhaps Dozha was so well-hidden by his magery that even abominations couldn’t find him.

  There was still one more thing he could try. ‘Nanak,’ Tet said and the name stuck in his throat like dry millet. ‘My soul.’ He swallowed hard past the lump. If he could do this, he’d be whole again, but he’d also be at the mercy of the gods once more. ‘Please, bring me back myself.’

  It was a desperate chance. If the dogs could not bring him the White Prince’s mage-warded breastplate, what hope was there of this? But perhaps the oresh-beetle was nothing more than a discarded trinket, abandoned in the prince’s tower.

  Tet made a promise; a useless, desperate one. If the hound could do this one thing for him, he swore he would do something this time – something great, something worthy of being a mage. He would hunt down his own name, whatever it took. He’d be greater than the gods had ever dreamed. Tet had no idea who he made his promise to, but he felt the rightness of it. ‘Please,’ he said, a fierce whisper.

  The light vanished, and Tet was alone in the room again, one hand clutched around the stolen flint-pouch. From far away sounded a brief chorus of howls, like a pack of hunting dogs.

  *

  The night fluttered, filled with the soft silence of owls and the distant songs of the stars. The bells of the hours and the fighting cats. And the howling of Pal-em-Rasha’s slave-dogs. The sound deepened, becoming louder and wilder, and Tet filled with spreading doubt. Even on nights when the moon was fat as a basket of fish, the slave-dogs of Pal-em-Rasha didn’t make this much noise.

  He shivered, pulling his blankets closer around him. The dark had settled deep, catching on his skin like thorns. The howls sounded closer, shrill and insistent. It could be the three dogs he’d called up from the priestess’s flint pouch, but this sounded more like the hunts that the mountain travellers had when they chased the great bow-horned antelope of the cliffs down for their meat and fur. As a priest of Nanak’s temple Tet had never been on one of the hunts, but the mages of Epsi and Vitash would go, and as a child he’d stood at the gates and watched the free dogs and their men leave, and would meet them when they returned, the men struggling under the weight of one of the mountain antelopes.

  The head would dangle on a neck ripped open, the horns useless, eyes glazed over. The priests of Vitash would heap the entrails on the altars and cover them in glistening fat as an offering for the free-dogs.

  Tet knew exactly what those hunting hounds were capable of. His hands were stiff with cold, with fear, and he counted down the empty minutes, waiting for the siren song of the hunt to pass by and move to another part of the city. Though the stone door in his mind stayed closed, he found himself whispering the words of passing, they fell off his tongue like useless ash. No magic. No fire, no warding safety.

  Finally, finally, the howls began to fade and he unclenched his fists. Too close. If he was to have any chance at all, Tet had to get his soul back.

  His skin tightened with a feverish anticipation. His fingers twitched with the need to strike the sparks and call the three dogs again, to assure himself that they really existed and were not part of a cruel dream sent to plague him with hope. Tet twisted the skin on his forearm viciously. Nothing changed. He was wide awake.

 

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