Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 28
The dragon shrugged. ‘A soul is a small thing, easily caught. That will not make you great.’ The fading gas light glinted off her teeth. The sound of the river swelled. ‘Your name, Tet-Nanak. With your name, oh, the things you would do, the kingdoms you would destroy, the kingdoms you would raise and the princes you would follow. I have watched the gods weaken and men grow stronger, and you were at the crest of it, of the changing of power. I’ve seen it all, in and out of time, and I know the way your river flows. With your name, you would be great, and I can give it back to you. If you would take the risk.’
BLOOD AND SHADES
Dragons did not tell jokes. Oh, they twisted the truth to amuse themselves, but actual humour was beyond them. Or they felt themselves above it. ‘How—’ Tet cleared his throat. ‘And how would you propose to do that? Have dragons suddenly become more powerful than the gods themselves? Are you in the habit of sending mages across the boundaries of worlds and back?’ As foolish as it was to provoke her, he was tired of being strung this way and that for another’s pleasure, as if he were a wind tile on the grand game between the gods and the dragons.
Sinastrillia’s tail flickered in irritation. Around her head, the filaments danced in eerie silver ribbons. ‘No.’ Her sudden curtness was more than enough warning.
‘I cry your pardon,’ Tet said stiffly. ‘I find with my approaching death, my patience for games has grown thin.’
‘I am not a tiger toying with a little crippled fawn.’ Her tail swished, the rasp of scale on stone. ‘There are few mages who would risk going to the land of the dead. I believe that you will take that chance. My child told me you are arrogant enough to think that you might be able to claw your way back to the living.’
Her child. Tet had spoken only to Kani about the idea of crossing over, retrieving his name from his dead parents – a thought only. As surreptitiously as he could, Tet wiped his hands against his trousers. The Princess Kani was Sinastrillia’s piece, and so was Dozha, and this Grand Board was far bigger than he had ever imagined. His mouth was dry. ‘Arrogant or not, I have no power now, as you pointed out. I cannot walk into death. Or have you found a way to call the dead back to life from the caverns of shadows? That would be a neat trick indeed.’
When Sinastrillia smiled, her teeth gleamed. Dagger-sweet in the light. ‘Not even the fading gods who cling to the last of their power can do that.’ She moved quickly, and Tet stumbled uselessly to avoid her. He was caught in her coils, her huge body wrapped around him like a vast scaled prison. A furnace burned below those tarnished scales. ‘But you are so very close to death, little mage. So close that I could take you into those caverns, and if you are strong enough, bring you back out. Still living.’
Tet swallowed. The heat from her body made his head swim. He was trapped, a little rat in the coils of a serpent. He imagined Sinastrillia eating him whole, head first. Pushing past the crushing fear, he spoke again. ‘And the twenty-one spirits, they would let me leave?’
She loomed her head over him and looked down. ‘Probably. They seem to like you. In the caverns, you will summon blood to blood, and ask the shades of your mother and father to call you by name.’
A terrible thought, to finally know his name – his true name – and then have to rely on the probably of a dragon to save him. To be alive but caught in the world of the dead. Or worse, if Sinastrillia’s magic failed and he was simply snuffed out of existence, and there was no cavern of shadows waiting for him, only a void so empty and immense that he’d be nothing more than a mote of dust trapped in infinity.
He thought of the dark of the White Prince’s prisons, those terrible weeks of lonely suffering, and imagined an eternity of it. That was the only other path left. At least what Sinastrillia offered was a spark of hope. ‘How will I speak with them?’ Them. His dead parents, people he did not remember.
‘You will need to ask the permission of the twenty-one. Best be polite. If they agree, you will give the shades of your parents some of your own life,’ she said. ‘Blood, to loan them a voice, for a while.’
More blood magics, though this was nothing like those Southern spells the Monkey had used. But the promise of his name and with it a chance to escape the end waiting for him. Whatever might happen, Tet could not refuse this offer. And when he came back he would have something to promise Kani in exchange for his soul. Perhaps I will make a good slave. ‘Yes.’ His voice cracked. ‘I will do it.’
‘It will take much out of you,’ the dragon warned.
‘Still. Better a chance taken and lost than to sit here and wait.’
‘You are certain then?’
When Tet nodded, she told him to pluck one of her scales free. ‘Go on,’ she said when he made no move. ‘You will need it.’
Her scales burned, heat clawing through Tet’s fingers and palm, but he clenched his teeth and tugged at a single scale. Blood poured down his wrist. Each scale was a sharpened blade. The edges cut his hand down to the bone and he was about to give up when the scale tore free with a wet rasp.
‘Good,’ said Sinastrillia.
The gas lights went out, plunging him into sudden darkness. The dragon’s voice faded, sounding as though she was calling at him from across a vast river. ‘Do not let go of my scale.’
*
Tet found himself in a cavern, the walls glowing and pulsing like the skin of a luminous beast. The scale cut deep into Tet’s palm, hot and sweet, and the only sound was the steady trickle-plop of his blood as it ran down his wrist and to the floor. He looked down, taking slow, controlled breaths in Dragon Mountain pattern to stop himself from falling. The floor was white and powdery like a layer of fallen chalk dust. A few strides from him stood a stone no higher than his knees. The top of it was slightly hollowed.
Tet was in the entrance cave to the lands of the dead, and if he lived to walk out of it, he would have done something no mage had ever managed. He bared his teeth. So what? I have stopped time, and that was also something no one else had done. What good are great deeds if they achieve nothing worthwhile?
There were no ghosts of dragons waiting for him. No twenty-one First Men who walked between gods and humans, who wrote the world into a new shape with their songs. No spirits of the numberless dead. Unsteadily, he took a step forward and called the first of the dragons. ‘Mil,’ Tet cried into the empty cave.
Before the last echo had died, a shape began to form in the emptiness before him.
His heart stuttered.
The dragon was still a shade. Tet had expected that here in her own realm, the dragon spirit would be corporeal, but Mil was a vast green-black mist that flowed in and out of shape. One moment Tet saw a dragon, bigger even than Sinastrillia, and the next there was only a ribboning stream of swamp fog, twisting about in the winds of time.
She did not speak.
Tet’s blood poured down in a steady stream. He tightened his grip around the scale, cutting deeper, and forced himself to focus. I was a priest-mage once, I shouldn’t be afraid of spirits now. He dipped his head and bowed low, peering up to watch her reaction. ‘Great Mother,’ Tet said. ‘Forgive me for disturbing your rest, but I come looking for the blood of my blood.’
Mil said nothing.
Tet’s heart was beating slower with each drip, stepping closer to death, and now he was certain that there would be no return. Just as he was about to throw himself on his knees and beg, a head-shape appeared from the smoke and she nodded to the stone before Tet, to the little indentation at the top of it.
In a moment, he understood and went to hold his bleeding hand over the stone. The blood dribbled and splashed, black and sticky in this world between worlds.
The little trench filled. The fall of blood was hypnotic. The cavern began to chill, the warmth from the land of the living sucked away, and a freezing ache like ground glass crunched between Tet’s joints. Frost rimed the edges of the blood pooling in the hollow stone. His teeth chattered as he looked up from the offering.
The cavern had filled with ghosts. His blood grew slower, colder. ‘Blood of my blood,’ Tet said to the masses of shapeless grey figures. His hand was shaking and he pulled it back from the bowl. He clasped Sinastrillia’s scale against his chest. ‘I call the shades of my mother and father, I call them to me, by blood.’
For a moment, nothing happened, and he wondered if they’d already moved on, relinquishing the land of the dead to be born again, their memories wiped.
Finally, two spectres slid forward until they were hovering just behind the stone.
His heart hammered.
They studied his face with blank holes that served them as eyes. They were formless monsters, shadow shapes that might have been his parents, or might not. They were people Tet did not remember, and he felt a sudden pity for the child he’d been. He wanted to have memories of these grey shades, better ones than these. He wanted to remember cradle songs, and mother’s milk, and father’s hands. Not this.
‘Drink,’ he said, softly.
The spectres bowed their heads to the blood and lapped at it like dogs, though Tet could see no tongues nor mouths. When they rose, the shapelessness drifted off them like scraps of cloud, and they stood revealed; mother-mine, father-mine.
Tet found he had no words he could say to these strangers.
It was his mother who spoke first. She was young. Younger than he would have thought – barely older than Laketri – and it pained him. Had Tet been her first babe, held and suckled and loved before she’d been butchered? And his father, no older than his wife, though he had a stocky mountain man’s build, and a face round and sweet and open.
It was his mother Tet looked most like, he realised with a strange shock. Though he had his father’s black eyes, straight brows. Both of these familiar strangers dead before they had a chance to raise him, to live their little lives in the caravans of Vaeyane, where Tet should have grown up herding the red oxen and chasing the free-dogs and learning to ride mountain ponies and to draw a bow to shoot shining arrows into the sun.
Tet had not only outlived his parents, he’d grown older than them.
‘Speak, voice-of-the-living,’ his mother’s ghost said. ‘What can we dead give you?’
‘My name.’ It was all he could say. The breath had been punched out of him. He was empty. Before, his parents had been abstractions; a sad story, but distantly unreal. Now they had faces.
‘Merithym,’ they said together and the name was so right, so right, so right that it filled Tet, syllables became wires dug through his skin and bones, holding him up straighter. It swam in his blood, it dripped on the chalk-powder floor, it beat in his head with each pound of his heart.
‘Merithym,’ they said again, and Tet dropped the scale from his numb hand and fell backwards out of the light and into the dark.
*
‘I almost thought you would not return.’ Sinastrillia’s hiss-flicker voice curled around Tet’s head, and he tasted snow and blood. His hand throbbed, in a dull distant way. ‘Did they tell you what you needed to know?’
Carefully, he turned his head and spat blood onto the stone. He’d bitten his tongue as he fell. ‘Yes,’ Tet said. His voice was weak, ragged. ‘They did.’
‘Good.’
Now that he was coming back to some kind of life, Tet found himself burning with unexpected heat. Sinastrillia had kept herself coiled about his prone body, her silver-sharp sides making an impenetrable wall of protection or imprisonment.
‘I only helped you for one reason,’ she said.
Of course. Does she think I’m surprised by this? Tet wanted to laugh. Instead, he sat up and cradled his aching hand against his chest. The wound had healed, the blisters from touching the dragon were gone. But he’d not been left unchanged. The whole of his right hand, from wrist to fingertips, had turned a glowing white like the powder-walls of the caverns of the dead. A faint scar bisected his palm, but even that was fading. Tet flexed his fingers, and an echo of pain sparked across the palm, then died.
‘You will set time right, mage,’ said Sinastrillia. ‘I lay this on you—’
‘Please.’ He made a hollow sound, an empty-water-pot sound. ‘I do not think I can take more curses and compulsions.’
Sinastrillia huffed and uncurled so that Tet was freed, her gas-lamp eyes golden in the greyness. ‘I do not curse. I do not lay spells of compulsion. I merely ask, as one who has done you a favour. Set right what you have broken.’
‘That’s all?’ The laughter died. It was not what he’d thought Sinastrillia would ask. Tet had been expecting some other treasure to steal, or to burn some other temple, perhaps poison Shoom, or— Or I do not know what I thought, but it wasn’t this.
‘Such a small task,’ Tet said, half-mocking. But the sound of his true name beating in his head was a drum that drowned out arguments. He struggled to his feet. ‘I don’t even know exactly how I managed to break time in the first place, let alone how to heal it.’ If it was even possible – such a huge task that it would take every scrap of magic he’d ever had. Sinastrillia had given him back his name but at an impossible cost. ‘I cannot.’
His name screamed through his thoughts: Merithym, Merithym, Merithym.
Sinastrillia managed to look as sad and troubled as a dragon could. Which wasn’t very, but was still disturbing enough in itself. Her voice lowered. ‘You will do it, mage, because in the river of time I have seen the current where you do.’
That was not remotely reassuring. ‘What else did you see in this current?’
‘Only this, that you will succeed where the White Prince will fail, and join the kingdoms from the Islands of Heaven to the towers of Ys. You will unite Vaeyane, Ganys, Deniah, Utt Dih, and Imradia and all their cantons and cities under one shining emperor.’
Unthinkable. Tet was a mage, not a builder of empires, and he had little time for those who wished such things. He looked down at his ruined white hand, like an after-echo of a ghost, a reminder of the unthinkable things he had done – stopped time, spoken to the dead. What was building an empire to that – men did it all the time. Still, I’m not one for running cities and kingdoms. ‘Me? I’m no ruler.’
‘Of course not,’ said the dragon. ‘That is for the Emperor who will come. You are the one who will stand at his side, feeding your magery to him until all these lands stand united. A great devil-king waits in the future, and I cannot see the true shape of him. All I know is that the lands will need to be strong to hold against him and that you will be part of that strength. Before that day passes, you must fix what you destroyed, or all the worlds end, and there is only nothingness.’
A strange vision and Tet did not like it. He couldn’t see how it was possible to be this mage who built empires if he first had to waste all his power rebuilding time. ‘Are there other currents?’
‘There are always other currents,’ said Sinastrillia. ‘But this is the only one where you live.’
THIEVES AND MASTERS
A girl barely out of her childhood, narrow and black as a sapling, was waiting for him outside the walnut doors. ‘Dozha said you would be tired, and I was to show you to a room where you can rest and make yourself comfortable.’ Her eyes flicked from Tet’s face and down to his chalk-white hand, his marble and milk hand, then back up to meet his eyes. There was nothing in her expression to show that it startled or disgusted her. Then again, she lives at the doorway of a dragon.
‘This way.’ She offered him no help.
He was glad of it. However feeble and wretched Tet felt, however jellied his bones and twisted his muscles, he did not want anyone’s pity. He had his name. Tet tasted it in his mouth, soft as the first bite of new bread. Merithym.
His face was wet. He’d been crying and not even known it. With his strange hand, he wiped the salt from his face before following the sapling girl through the corridors of the Underpalace. It was too late for him to return now to Peniki’s house; he was too tired and lost to even attempt it.
Let a thief break in and steal every coin and diamond I own. At least he hadn’t left the flint-pouch behind. Dozha’s little miracle gift. Tet had always assumed Dozha had given it to him as no more than a throw-away item, a minor payment for a moment of silence. But the dragon had called Dozha her child, and the end-game of gods and monsters was a long one. No matter how small and simple it might have appeared, there was more to every little thing Dozha did than Tet could have imagined. Everything was a lie chosen to ensure Tet’s passive cooperation.
Tet grimaced at this. Not everyone is a player using you as a tile-piece. He was assuming the worst. And that is how I will survive.
His guide took him to a large room far more sumptuous than he was used to after all the weeks living in the cramped attic room. It was richer even than the suite of rooms he’d rented in the garden house, though smaller. Despite the opulence, there was no forgetting that this was a cell deep underground. There was no scent of lime and orange sweeping in from tended gardens. No trickling laughter of fountains, nor the calls of geese as they flew overhead.
Instead, a silence soft as a sleeping cat draped over the room. No fires were lit, but the room was warmer than the tunnels outside. A bed wide enough for three stood in the middle, heavy with layers of thick woollen blankets and down-stuffed silk covers. The wool was dyed the scarlet of a sunbird’s breast feathers, and the silk was heron-grey.
‘Are you hungry?’ asked the girl as she turned back the covers, as though Tet were an honoured guest in a great garden house.
His last meal had been steamed bread bought from a woman at a roadside stall and Tet’s stomach was tight. Reminded now of its emptiness, it growled in dissatisfaction, and the sapling-girl grinned, her teeth bright as pearls. ‘I’ll bring you something.’ She paused from smoothing her hands over the sheets. ‘What was she like?’ she asked, her voice feather-drifting, dreaming. ‘The Mother.’
