Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 26
Damn that man and his network of spies. Dozha’s network of spies. Tet’s head began to throb. There were too many tangled threads and Tet had neither the time nor courage now to begin unpicking them to see what he was left with. ‘I’m tired,’ he told Peniki. ‘I think it best if I turn in.’
She gave him a candle to light the way up to his little attic room, and Tet took the steps slowly, feet dragging. Shadows chased at his heels, bouncing along the narrow walls like excited children. The night was back, and Tet needed to see if the dogs would come when he struck the flint.
The candle guttered and Tet readied the flint pouch before pinching the little flame out between his fingers and letting the darkness fall. He took a deep breath, and did not pray to gods who couldn’t hear him.
One strike, one spark, two, three, and the dogs filled the attic, their tea bowl eyes bright as suns. Tet’s heart flamed with relief and a fierce desire to see Kani again. Perhaps tonight he would be able to convince her to give him what he wanted.
NAMELESS, SOULLESS
The dogs did as they were bid; Epsi running off to hunt down more of the palace toymaker’s trinkets, Vitash prowling the streets on the look-out for Ymat’s men, to warn Tet if any came close, and Nanak....
Nanak might not be able to bring Tet his soul, but she could bring him the woman who held it and thought she dreamed herself into Tet’s own dreams.
It was many hours before Nanak returned, with no rider on her back.
‘Where is she?’ Tet’s mouth filled with copper, salt, despair.
Nanak whined, her tail thumping against the wooden boards.
Could Kani have simply disappeared? She might be a fiction, but she was still flesh and blood and bone. ‘You must find her,’ Tet hissed. ‘Bring her to me.’
The vast dog shuffled, turning about in place, her whines loud enough to make the timbers shake.
‘Hush.’ Tet glanced at the door. Peniki might be asleep but enough noise like this and she would be there soon. Or perhaps not. After all, she had left Tet to his screaming dreams and never came to check on him. It might be that she had written off his nightmares as simply the price of having a ruined soldier under her roof. ‘Try again,’ he ordered Nanak. ‘Kani is out there, and she has my soul. Bring it to me.’
Nanak faded away as slowly as melting ice; her huge eyes woebegone. They were the last things to disappear, and when she had finally left, Tet sat alone, skin turning cold and sweaty. Maybe Dozha had gone after Kani already, and that’s why Nanak couldn’t find her. Perhaps she was already a corpse. Strangely, Tet could feel no joy at the thought.
The first of the cockerels were calling at the fading stars when Nanak finally returned. This time she was not riderless, though Kani was not dressed in her customary finery. Nor was she dead.
She wore sleep trousers and a jacket in a simple cut made from raw silk and her hair was unbound, falling down past her shoulders. Her face was still immaculately made up with ivory paint, her eyebrows dark swoops inked darker and longer, ending in fine points, coal shadows smudged about them. She was alluring, her face a mask betraying nothing. Perhaps Nanak had caught her after one of the prince’s balls, or straight from his bed.
The pendant sat at her breastbone, and she had not yet removed her long black gloves.
‘Do you wear these even when you dream?’
Kani smiled slyly. ‘Do I dream?’
‘You must. For I can think of no way to magic a princess straight to me like a stolen soul.’
Her smile faded. ‘Whatever you may think, I am an honourable person. I did not steal your soul. It was given to me.’
True, though Tet doubted the prince would have given it to her so readily had he known exactly what it was. ‘But you asked for it.’
Kani slipped elegantly off Nanak’s back, then touched the dog with her left hand, stroking her huge ears, running her gloved fingers down the animal’s muzzle. ‘So I did,’ she murmured. ‘I knew it was powerful, I could taste your soul inside it, even if Lainn couldn’t.’
‘You call him by his name?’ It had been a long time since Tet had heard anyone call the prince anything but the White Prince, as if he were not a living man, but some great figure of history; a myth, not a mortal.
‘We are engaged.’
‘I heard. And you one step closer to stealing the breastplate for Ymat Shoom.’ Tet threw down the accusation and waited to see if she would respond to the bait.
Kani scowled. ‘Tell me your name,’ she said, changing tack.
Tet shook his head. ‘Even if I wanted to, I cannot. If you work for Ymat, then you know as much.’
‘Cannot, or will not?’
The words echoed in his head. Tet had said them himself just this night as the last of the fires lit the horizon, as he’d paid Dozha to bring him this pendant that was now only a hand’s breadth away. Tet stepped closer to Kani and rested one hand on Nanak’s head, stroking down so that he ghosted past Kani’s fingers.
Everyone in this game spoke in innuendoes, in carefully selected half-truths. Perhaps it was time to cut through the webs with an honest blade. ‘Believe me or do not believe me, but I do not know my name,’ Tet said. ‘I was orphaned, and I have only ever known the name the temple gave me: Tet-Nanak. All others are fictions.’
‘I cannot rule you with a name like Tet-Nanak,’ Kani said sourly, ‘and you know it.’
‘And I have no name to give you in exchange for my soul. If I had some power, perhaps I could get my name back—’
‘How?’ she snapped, her eyes slitted. ‘Who would know your name when you don’t?’
Tet swallowed. ‘The ones who named me.’
‘And they are dead.’
‘There’s no need to remind me of that.’ Tet steadied himself against the dog’s side. ‘I have pondered the problem of going to the land of the dead and asking them; after all, when a man is desperate...’
Kani blinked. ‘Only the dead go there, Tet-Nanak. What use would you be to me dead, or have you found a way to come crawling back from the caves?’
It was not as though Tet had any plan, just a numb hope that he would be the one mage powerful enough to simply smash his way between the worlds of living and dead and return unscathed. His shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. ‘Not— Not yet.’
‘Then we have no bargain.’ She lowered her hand and turned to look at him. Her eyes were slanted and large, her eyebrows like the wings of birds. Her nose was long and narrow. She was a handsome woman, despite the painted pale skin, and Tet wondered what she looked like stripped of all her false faces, her long gloves, and wardings. If she were just a woman and not a mage who held his life in her silken fingers.
‘Then I will die anyway.’ He was desperate. She had to give him his soul back. All she could do with it was torture him to a slow nameless death. Perhaps Kani was petty enough to think that fitting. She had not corrected him when he had suggested she worked for Shoom, and he gave voice to his fevered suspicions. ‘I cannot tell you my name, but I can promise to help you retrieve the breastplate Shoom is paying you for.’
‘You think you know everything, Tet-Nanak,’ she said softly, and her breath was cold and her hair was fragrant as seven-petals. ‘You would be wrong.’
It had been a desperate shot in the dark, and it had not met its target. ‘Give me my soul. Please.’ It was close enough to grab, and casting all instincts aside, Tet reached up and closed his hand around the oresh-beetle, willing the magic out from the stone and back into him.
Kani laughed and caught his wrist with her right hand. It was very cold and hard, and she crushed his grip easily. She was stronger than he could ever have imagined. ‘It will not work until it rests around your own neck, and you cannot take it from me by force, you know that. I must give it freely. And for now, you cannot meet my price.’
Tet was unable to see the wards on her skin, not now, but he could still feel himself being shifted back, pushed away. She let go of his hand.
‘Please, please.’ He’d prostrate himself and beg if he had to. He had no pride left, just the empty prospect of the approaching end. If the hounds didn’t find him soon, or the prince’s toymaker. It didn’t matter which, because the dark was still going to be waiting for him at the end.
Perhaps he could accept death if he knew he would at least go on to the cavern of shades to where his unremembered parents waited. Tet could face it then. But death without a soul would curse him to an eternity of nothing. No mage could face that knowledge and grin into the dark, uncaring.
Eternity was time broken. And broken. And broken again. A million fractured points of nothing.
‘Please.’ It came out a crushed whisper, and if Tet had still had magic now the whole world would be slowing around them, fumbling to a halt, such was the strength of his despair. ‘You are holding my death.’
‘And what is death if you cower in the dark, Tet-Nanak?” She stepped back and smiled slowly. ‘We should dance.’
She toyed with him. ‘I’ve told you I don’t dance.’
‘You may enjoy the world more if you did. Forget the confines of priesthood, embrace what small pleasures you have left. Life is shit, life is short, and life is nothing if you don’t enjoy the little things that make it worthwhile.’ Pal-em-Rasha’s market accent flickered below her words like a fish in a muddy stream. The flat vowels of the Deniahn people.
Tet grimaced. ‘And if we danced, would you give me back my soul?’
Kani grabbed the fur at Nanak’s nape and swung herself back onto her mount. ‘I’ll think about it.’ Her voice was not the haughty, throaty speech of the princess of Sinal. Kani was losing her grip on her fiction. ‘But I’m not a sentimental person,’ she said as Nanak faded, taking her away.
*
Tet lay on his back, blanket clutched between his fingers, as he tried to think of a way free. Around him, all his paths were narrowing and choking, leading him to an alleyway with a blank wall at the end. Nowhere to go. All his hopes rested on Dozha being able to get that beetle away from Kani, and that the two mages were not working together, opposite sides of the same coin that Ymat Shoom had flicked into the air.
Ymat had seemed annoyed by Kani’s existence in the palace, but what if that was all an elaborate act meant to fool anyone watching? Meant to fool Tet, perhaps. Tet knew the city speaker had employed more than one person to steal that damn breastplate and that he was not the first. But Ymat had also seemed adamant he would not be able to get the stolen soul back from Kani if she retrieved it.
And why was Ymat allowing Tet to live when he was nothing more than a thorn in his paw-pad? Perhaps the man meant to get the soul-beetle back and control him again. As long as Tet was still potentially useful to Ymat, the man would keep him in reserve. Just as a good maket player will keep the wind tile in a forgotten corner of the board until he has his arrows and caravans surrounding the towers of his enemies.
Tet’s eyes ached and he felt every bone-deep agony and scar burn. He needed sleep, or better, to step back into the smoke-quarter and take seven-petal again. Though the curse-scars were not worsening, the damage had already been done and the pain drove him through each day like a whip braided with bone.
He was tired.
Gods, he was tired. Every time Tet closed his eyes, he could feel the darkness, the thinness, closing in, unbearable. It was coming. His death was close enough to fill his mouth with the taste of coins and bitter herbs, sweet brown sugar placed on the tongue of a corpse. The void was waiting for him and he had nowhere left to run.
It might even be better if he simply walked into the White Prince’s court and told him everything he was able to, swear fealty to him and his endless war. Perhaps the White Prince could make Kani return Tet’s soul.
He laughed hollowly. As if that would happen. Everyone seemed to think they could control Tet’s magic if they could control him. Ymat knew what Tet could do. And Sinistrallia in the deep, she knew. Kani knew something. She’d seen it in his skin the way a true mage can sense another mage’s wardings.
The void swallowed Tet when he finally fell asleep, brain tumbling through the variations of strategies he could use to trick his soul out of Kani’s grasp.
*
Tet woke screaming, the dark chewing at his ruined legs while the birds called to each other in the back garden, and from downstairs came Widow Peniki’s voice as she berated the broom-seller. His skin was damp, sticky, and Tet sat up carefully, stretching out the twisted muscles that had spent the night clenched and frozen. Even his jaw ached. As the dawn warmed the air, he moved slowly, hunch-backed like an old man, and washed in cold water, wiping nightmares from skin.
A terrible weakness had set into Tet’s marrow and the pain was worse than ever. It made his head dizzy and empty and he breathed in sharp whistles through his teeth, willing his limbs to come back under his control. He was not old. In the traveller clans, Tet would be a man in the prime of his life, strong and fit and clever. Instead, he was reduced to this – a shuffling husk of the man he used to be. His future had been lost that night between Nanak’s stone paws when the thief stole her eyes. All the things the gods had taken from him battered behind Tet’s eye-sockets, and he wanted to weep.
He pressed his head against the wall and leaned there. ‘You are not dead,’ Tet said softly. ‘You know where your soul is, you have a small fortune under your cot, you have a witch’s charm unlike any other.’ Tet ran through the litany. It all came down to one. I am not dead. Not yet.
It would be a lie to say the words strengthened Tet, that they poured healing and power into his trembling legs, but they were enough to goad him into moving forward. Ymat’s men were watching him, and he needed to keep up his pretence as Sektet Am.
Until either Dozha returned, or until he could convince Kani to give him back his own soul, Tet would have to keep playing his part. He picked up his lute and gave the carvings a quick polish, tuning the strings just to hear their sweetness, before he shuffled downstairs, knees protesting with every step. He had a job to do, songs to play, plans to make.
*
Night fell in velvet layers as Tet walked back home. He’d watched the crowd as he’d played, trying to see if any spies were around, but it was impossible to tell if a woman who paused to listen to a song, or a boy who tried to steal from a begging bowl, or a nearby market trader, or a beggar man with crooked arms and only one leg was in the employ of Ymat Shoom.
Or someone else.
It gave him a headache, this endless untrusting watchfulness, and now, as he limped toward Peniki’s house, he cracked his neck from side to side, trying to drive out the gathering tightness. The season was changing, Tet could feel it in the broken scarring of his bones. Soon it would be cold enough that another layer of pain would be added to the ones he already had.
Tet snorted as he pushed open the door. That was assuming he made it to winter.
Peniki was at her kitchen table, the lamp light smoothing the lines from the corners of her mouth, and she laughed at her guest, before gathering the two bowls and making a show of dishing him more food.
Ymat’s pet toymaker nodded at Tet, his mouth half-twitching into a sneer that was gone almost as soon as it arrived. The city-speaker was going to make no secret of having him spied on at all times. Tet greeted them both, turned down Peniki’s offer of a bowl of her food, and went up the narrow stairs. The only route in and out of his room was now being watched.
But Ymat couldn’t know about the dogs. Only Kani had seen them, and she believed she was part of a dream. At least, she wanted him to think that she did.
Tet had no friends in this city. When death came for him, he would be cast into the void and no one would miss him. He would be nothing more than a thorn, removed. ‘Hush your self-pity,’ Tet whispered, and opened his door.
Sitting cross-legged on his bed was a shadow, hunched, man-shaped. Tet’s first thought was that the White Prince’s toymaker had finally tracked him down, then the shadow spoke, and Tet’s shoulders slumped in a combination of relief and wariness.
‘Don’t make a sound,’ said Dozha.
Tet shut the door slowly, deliberately, then turned back to him. ‘I had no plans to.’ A flicker of anticipation shivered under his skin. Does he have it? Biting at the heels of that thought came another: how long has he been here, and what has he found, what has he stolen from me?
The darkness was thick as old ash and still smelled of the wood-smoke from the burned temple. Dozha had brought a new scent into the room – incense and seven-petal. Tet made no move to light his lamp; all he had to strike a spark was the flint pouch. He forced himself to smile so that Dozha could hear it in his voice. ‘Since you’re here, I don’t think it would be too much trouble to ask you to light the lamps.’
A snap of fingers, the word whispered too fast for Tet to hear properly, and the lamp sputtered into life. The flame rose, casting weaving shadows against the sloped roof. Dozha’s face burned out of the darkness, regal, his skin flawless as carved stone..
A trick. I could do this too, once. Though I was never as showy. Tet almost laughed at himself. Why lie, he’d had his moments of playing the game. ‘Did anyone see you come in here?’
‘Shoom’s man?’ said Dozha. He shook his head. ‘A clockworker, and a third-rate one, at best. He will not see me if I do not wish it.’
‘Ah.’ Tet down on the edge of his bed. It was that or a seat on the floor. Dozha shifted a little further down to make room, and in the golden dance of light he was beautiful, ethereal, and Tet found himself leaning in a little, just to taste incense, seven-petal.
Perhaps Dozha was enchanting him. Had Tet not set similar charms on Laketri to make the White Prince see her? ‘Did you get it?’ Tet forced himself to draw away.
