Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 3
‘Ai,’ said the old woman, standing in the doorway with her steaming bowls. ‘And where has he got to, I wonder?’
The tribe paused as one, all looking to the moon-bright girl’s caravan. It was a fine thing, the sides painted with the little fire-throated birds sacred to her family tribe, and it glowed in the bright dawn light.
Tet sucked on the stem of his pipe and waited.
‘Yoh!’ The girl yelled from inside. The sound of clattering followed, and she flung the door open. Her hair was loose, the fine dark curtain of it swinging almost to her knees. ‘Robbed!’ she screamed.
There was a distinct lack of silver on her person. She raised her hands, and the wide sleeves of her blue sleep-dress fell back to reveal naked arms. Every bangle was gone. Her necklaces too. Even her lobes, stretched from the weight of hoops and hanging beads, were denuded.
Tet blew out twin flowers of smoke. What a thief, indeed. And what magic he must have used for her to not notice as he stripped her of her wealth. Even Tet hadn’t realised the extent of his thievery. He’d moved without a single clink of silver. A good mage.
An excellent thief.
‘I was robbed!’ she cried again, and pulled at her hair. ‘The mage, where is he?’
The travellers muttered, some of them turning to look at Tet with hard eyes. Ah, it was time I was leaving them anyway. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug and took the pipe from his mouth. ‘He was no friend of mine.’
‘So says a thief protecting a brother.’
The headsman had never liked him. ‘I have travelled with you for five and three days, and not once have I taken anything that was not freely offered. Has Nanak changed her laws of hospitality?’
‘Hospitality?’ The chieftain stalked nearer.
The girl had begun to wail. A wordless howling noise the likes of which Tet hadn’t heard in many years. It was a temple cant, and he winced.
‘Even a guest can outstay their welcome,’ said the headsman.
Tet raised his hands. ‘Indeed. As have I. My apologies. But I stole nothing.’
‘He’s right,’ said one of the younger men. ‘We cannot blame the acts of one on another. Besides,’ he glanced at the girl, ‘Tet-Vitash invokes the penalty on thieves.’
Tet-Vitash. Tet shivered. The girl was much more than just a headsman’s virgin daughter, she was also the witch of their tribe. Given to the gods. No wonder she had a caravan to herself. While it was true that she was far weaker than either the mage or Tet, he still should have seen it earlier. Distracted, that was his problem. First by pain, and then by black eyes and darker magic.
Her howls had taken on a more familiar tone. She was speaking to the gods, and most specifically to her own – the silver-moon dog Vitash. What a curse it was too. Perhaps if the mage had known what she was, he would not have been so quick to choose her as his victim.
‘Leave,’ said the headsman.
There would be no morning millet and tea for Tet. He bowed to the chieftain and collected his satchel, bedroll and his painted lute. The free-dogs and the red oxen were the only ones who watched him leave.
The flint-pouch weighed heavy. Tet’s price for silence. Against all the treasures the mage stole from the girl, he doubted this was anything more than a trinket, but he was still burdened with it. His time with the people was over; Pal-em-Rasha and freedom waited.
MARKED
Dawn light streaked red and gold through the trees and across the dead grass, slowly warming the frosty air. The caravan fell behind Tet as he limped, swinging his right leg, his hand guiding the twisted thigh. He could keep this pace for an hour, perhaps, before he would be in too much pain to walk further.
Along the Green Road to Pal-em-Rasha there were always a few hostelries and Tet hoped to see one before sunset. He’d saved enough coin while guesting with the travellers to pay for a bed and buy a horse.
Tet smoked while he walked, musing as thin grey streams billowed from his nostrils.
Perhaps not a horse. A dun hill-pony. After that, he would have little enough coin left from his soldier’s pension, and now the Monkey expected to meet him in a rich merchant’s inn. He had already made oblique mention of Tet’s ability to slip free of his name and remake himself as occasion demanded it. It was a curious thing for a complete stranger to know about Tet, and it prickled the edge of his sleeping fear.
His game of shifting name and occupation, and even his entire appearance, was one Tet had learned after the gods cursed him. He was bound by them to return the Temple’s stolen Eyes of Nanak, now in the possession of the White Prince himself. Cast out from the temple, he could no longer be Tet-Nanak, priest and nameless orphan. Instead, Tet had to shoulder new identities, picking and discarding them as they were needed. Sektet Am when he had played soldier, and other names besides. Mostly these days he went simply by Tet.
Temple mages were uncommon outside of the mountains and there was no way Tet could have tracked the White Prince anonymously had he not cloaked himself in a new identity. The prince’s mistrust of mages was legendary. The White Prince had time only for toymakers, and in his seat of power, all other magics were forbidden. So, while Tet had been many things, the last and longest of them was a soldier in the prince’s massive army,
Not that he was much of a soldier. Just a man who could make maps, a man with a talent for languages who ended up in the wrong place at an inconvenient time. And now he was to be a merchant, it seemed. Tet spoke his new name out loud: ‘Ohtet Maynim.’ A southern Vaeyane family name – neither common nor uncommon. And there in the first name, the ubiquitous tet. The Monkey had a sense of humour.
All priests were tet, but so were all children.
The sun rose at his left, spilling long morning shadows across the road and Tet ticked through the things he would need to do. Whether he could afford it or not, the pony was a must; no merchant walked into the city of Pal-em-Rasha. Tet gritted his teeth. For now, let the Monkey think he had him on a leash. Tet could play the part of a patient man. Once he was free of the gods he would have time enough to deal with the Monkey, to reset the board in his favour.
The gods were the lords of the game-board, and men were nothing more than their pieces. And if Tet was not willing to follow the moves that the gods had decreed, what made this monkey think Tet would bow to a man?
It was past midday and Tet’s right leg was beyond agony when the low roof of the hostelry came wavering into view between the pine-sloped hills. If he stopped with so short a distance still to go, he knew he might very well never start again. ‘Come, come, Tet. You can walk and smoke at the same time.’ There was his little reward – a pipe from his dwindling tobacco to tide him over until he reached the inn.
While it did not kill the pain completely, Tet added a meagre pinch of seven-petal to the pipe-bowl and drew deeply on that while stumbling the worst of the downhill into the little valley. His supply of the drug was almost up; another reason Pal-em-Rasha called so sweetly; the voices of the seven-petal dens were rich as choirs.
The hostel was made of packed slate, grey with roadside dust. A few ponies in their winter coats huddled by one low wall. Tet glanced over them – thin, rangy, but they looked well-tempered enough.
A girl of fourteen or fifteen came to greet him at the door. Her face was slightly sulky behind her precise mask of hospitality.
‘You have beds free?’ Tet asked out of politeness, for the courtyard was empty.
The girl nodded and beckoned him to follow her in. A few minutes haggling, and Tet found himself in a small plain room, furnished with a pallet bed. It was a luxury. A cotton mattress after weeks on the ground was a blessing for his leg. The walls were white-washed, and the only bit of opulence was a brass lamp on a small, red-painted bench that also served as a table, and a travel-board of maket with half the pieces missing.
Tet stowed his lute and bag under the bench, washed his hands and face in the wooden bowl, and went to find the inn’s shrine. He still had a part to play, after all.
His performance as Ohtet began now. Tet made mental lists of figures, of market grain prices. He switched over to thinking in Deniahn, like a good little merchant belonging to the White Prince. Soon he would pretend a new religion, a whole new way of looking at the world. But before his transformation was complete, he had a final supplication to make.
The inn-mother was eager to show off and lead him to a small room near the entrance. The doorway was covered with a thick hanging carpet to keep out dust, and she lifted one corner and ushered him in.
‘Pray,’ she said. ‘And may all good things come to you.’ She left Tet alone with his gods, with the dust and the acrid taste of failure.
Unsurprisingly, it was a shrine to Nanak – the oldest of the gods, mother and hearth-warmer. A bronze statue of a sleeping hound rested on a stone plinth. Peace. She had one useless eye open, one ear cocked, though she was curled small, nose buried under her tail.
There were rituals to be followed, incense and lamps lit, prayers to be said in thanks and greeting. Instead, Tet shuffled to take a seat on an offering pillow and stretched his leg out so he could massage the aching knee. The muscles were leather strips wound on iron rods. He would not kneel before any gods now.
‘Ah,’ Tet said conversationally to the sleeping statue. ‘It has been a while. I have nothing to give, but I came to say my thanks for keeping me alive this long at least.’
Nanak was still not speaking to him. Tet decided on a little honesty. ‘I can’t do it, you know.’ He had begged free of this duty-curse a thousand times, but the gods didn’t care. Still, he thought, might as well try one last time before taking the last steps toward the Monkey and his ritual-oresh. After Tet went that way, he would never be welcome as a mage of the temple again.
If anything, he was more likely to be burned for a heretic.
The muscle began to ease under his ministrations, or perhaps the seven-petal had finally done its work. ‘Find someone else,’ Tet said to the sleeping dog-idol. ‘Someone younger and stronger. How am I to even have a conversation with a demon-prince, let alone persuade him to give back your eyes?’
His previous attempts to get close to the prince had failed. The White Prince was protected on all sides; not only by his army, but by his court clockworker and their beasts, by a labyrinthine system of unmapped passageways, and – the rumours went – by a magical breastplate that kept him safe from all physical harm. Even if Tet were to get close, he would not be able to use magery against him, and his mapmaker’s skill was of little use in a palace guarded by machine monsters.
The shrine room was dark, windowless, and filled with the hanging smoke of old incense. ‘I can’t do it,’ Tet said again, softer. Set me free, take my burden away, forgive me.
The gods had punished him for his part in their loss – they had ravaged Tet’s magic and body, and set him an impossible task. They expected him to fail. All the begging probably only amuses them, Tet thought, though it didn’t stop him.
The shadows around Nanak shifted and thickened and Tet couldn’t help the momentary leap of hope. Perhaps now, finally, so many years after she charged him to bring back her eyes, and after all his failure, perhaps now Nanak would finally speak and erase his pain.
‘Tet-Nanak,’ said the shadows. Echoing and empty.
And Tet frowned.
This was not the voice of the stars, of the great mother hound who suckled the first priests of men. Nor was it the bright-sun voice of Epsi – the hunting dog who had taught the People to bring down the great mountain antelope with their golden pelts and coiled horns.
Shit. Tet grimaced, and bowed his head.
‘Fortuitous,’ said Vitash, and threaded through the dog-god’s voice was the howling of the virgin priestess Tet had left far behind him. A possession-sending. He shivered. This was not what he needed now.
‘Oh, priest of my sister-wife,’ Vitash said. ‘There is a boy of your type – a mage – and he has stolen my bounty.’
This Tet knew, and as far as he was concerned, it had nothing to do with him. But it was not wise to tell gods their business.
‘I set you now to his trail. Bring me back his head and I will reward you a thousand-fold.’
The howling faded, and the shadows blurred at the edges.
Damn it all. Warily. Tet raised his head. He kept his tone respectful. ‘I am no longer much of a mage.’ If a man who had never had a name could ever be a true mage, which he doubted. Instead, he had been an approximation. And now he was even less than that. Not for long.
‘So? You have the mind of a mage, all tricks and slyness. You have done impossible things before. You will find him.’ The voice curled and echoed, chasing itself about the small room.
‘I cannot.’
The smoke grew heavy, the air crushing. The shadows lengthened, turning the room as dark as the inner depths of a cave. ‘You...can...not?’
Carefully, Tet edged backwards, feeling his way along the floor. ‘I am already cursed by Nanak,’ he pointed out. ‘I must complete her order before I can start a new path – surely you must understand?’ Even as the words spilled, Tet cursed his stupidity. Never try and bargain with gods; he knew better than that. They were far stronger than mages, and unlike men, they had no room for subtlety and deceit. They were powerful and simple. And that made them incredibly dangerous. One did not argue with beings who saw the world only in black and white, and could crush a man like a screaming infant beneath the wheels of a caravan.
Vitash growled, and the sound throbbed through Tet, turning his gut watery with fear. ‘Do as I have asked, little mage, or I will turn your other leg beneath you, and you will crawl on your belly like a serpent.’
Tet’s left knee blazed as though someone had just thrust a fire-heated needle through the cartilage, before the pain went out, as quickly as it came. He didn’t need to look to know there would be a mark like a crescent moon branded onto the skin.
Vitash had never been Tet’s favourite of the three. Tet’s breath hissed between his clenched teeth as he struggled to keep calm. The gods were powerful, but they could also be manipulated, he had learned. It just needed to be done very, very carefully. ‘As you say, I will do as you ask.’
The sending emanated smug satisfaction.
The gods had answered Tet whether he liked it or not, and set him on his final path. Whatever regret he might have had about going against them was snuffed out like a wick pinched between thumb and forefinger.
Tet had no intention whatsoever of hunting down the mage for Vitash, and less still of cutting off his head and bringing it back to the temple in offering. Let Vitash think I’m just his little game-piece, brainless and compliant. ‘However,’ Tet bowed his head in humility, and dropped his voice to the pathetic wheedle of a broken man, ‘Pal-em-Rasha is a vast city and a den of thieves. I would find him sooner for you if I have coin to cross the palms of informers.’
‘Men and their lust for money,’ said the god. ‘So be it.’
The shadows lifted, and the room lightened as Vitash departed back to whatever realm gods came from. The statue of Nanak remained motionless, fast asleep.
Useless.
The sooner Tet shifted the gods from his back, the better it would go for him. Let the Monkey name his price, Tet thought. It could never be as high.
*
Tet might have been pious once when he was still young enough to believe the gods had saved him. He wasn’t like most priest-mages who were taken to the temples as soon as it became clear to their families and village priests that they had power. Tet was merely the brat survivor of a hill-tribe caught and annihilated in the northern war. Some traders had found him orphaned among the corpses of his clan and brought him to the nearest temple. They’d given him as an offering. That was why Tet was not a priest of Epsi like most men. He was one of Nanak’s: a god of foundlings and old women.
He owed her. Her temple had fed and clothed and trained him, and in return one of his jobs as a young priest-mage had been to guard the great hound statues that were set high above the temples. It was never a task anyone took seriously. Even when Tet still believed Nanak had spared him from an early death so that he might one day do great things, he’d known the job of guarding the statues was merely make-work, something to keep the young men and women of the Temple from having the time to wander down to the camps of the travellers and indulge in a little sin.
The statues of the Temple of the Three Dogs stood higher than the buildings of the temple compounds. They were painted yellow-gold and silver-white and copper-red – another job that fell yearly to the young priests – and were adorned with precious and semi-precious stones. Each of the three statues had eyes as big as wagon wheels, made from a thousand jewels. Green-eyed Epsi of the hunt, with her flashing emeralds and topaz; Vitash, black onyx and garnet; and finally, blind Nanak with her opals and pearls.
At the centre of each of Nanak’s eyes was an opal a hand-span long, which flashed and shifted with all the colours of the snow. Scratched into the opals were the blessings of a priest-mage a thousand years dead. The runes were in the tongue of dragons, and they held that as long as Nanak watched over the temple, it would never fall.
No one knew who had built the statues, or who had brought such jewels to adorn them. In all the centuries of centuries that they’d stood, encrusted with riches, no one had actually attempted to steal anything from the statues. The guard duty was a temple formality. The students who had to serve their duty tended to do it drunk. At least millet beer passed the time.
Tet was not a creature touched by good fortune. He’d been twenty-five, and used to the task, and had given it as much thought as any of his fellows would. While he’d slept off several bowls of millet beer, dozing between the great paws of his god Nanak, a thief as soft as the mountain wind had climbed the back of the statue and taken the centre jewels from her eyes. The blind dog was made blinder, and in the morning the first of the outer walls of the temple compound began to soften, the stones crumbling into dust.
