Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 30
‘Not too much,’ Dozha said, and paused to take the pipe from Tet’s unresisting fingers. ‘Just enough to take the edge off. Seven-petal makes mages useless.’
‘And I am no mage.’ Tet’s mouth was filled with the ash and vanilla undertaste of petals. But I am, and with my soul returned, and my true name, even the gods will fear me. He remembered the little mountain dragon telling him that all the gods working together had not been able to heal time. A seed burst open, flame-flowered, new thoughts vining from it, growing a gleaming golden pattern of ideas. A plan so strange it could only have come from seven-petal. His fingers clenched briefly, a spasm, as though he clutched at some rope that would haul him out of darkness and into a new world.
Smoke layers floated around them like the ghosts of dragons, and Tet smiled grimly.
A CURIOSITY
For once, Tet would not have minded if time slowed to a honey-crawl, if it repeated that moment in endless golden loops. Fuck the gods and their ruined time, let the world end now. Dozha’s palm was a curse that left no mark, one that brought pleasure instead of pain.
He sighed. The agony was slowly melting from his tightened muscles. But he couldn’t hide his arousal; a half-mast stirring that chased after the warm pleasure of firm hands and sweet oils. What a fool I must look to this mage, this man years younger than me, powerful. The son of a dragon.
His face was hot, and Tet pushed his back down hard into the mattress, hoping to spark some distracting ache in the knots of his muscles, but the bed was too welcoming, and whatever reaction he had hoped for – this was not it.
Dozha made no comment, and Tet wasn’t sure if that was more or less humiliating than the alternative. Despite Dozha’s earlier warning to go slow on the seven-petal, Tet took a deep pull, filling his lungs with thick smoke. His head was wrapped in goat’s wool softness, cushioned from the hard angles and bright points of reality. Better this way, better to drown in sensation and disassociate myself from the lump of meat I live in. Instead, he could fall into a dream, that one where he’d grown up in his family’s tribe, where he was whole and healthy and had no magic. That one where he’d found love, a simple small thing that still somehow managed to smooth the rough skin of the world.
His eyelids fluttered closed, and he drowned. Here was his name – Merithym – like an anchor in the dream, and the person who lay next to him under the wooden arched ribs of their wagon, he had a name too. The dream strengthened, and Tet could smell the musk of raw silk from the South, the musk of love-making, the musk of the oxen outside. His fingers were twined in Tet’s, and Tet knew his name as though he had cut it into his skin with a toymaker’s scalpel blade. They whispered in the dark, and the gods did not hear them.
It was easier for Tet to lie to himself when his head was wrapped warm and soft with petal smoke, when the pain was leaching from him as though he were submerged in warmed fragrant oil, and the poison was pulled from his body like venom into amber.
Dozha’s hand slid higher, and Tet twisted slightly to deter him.
Stop dreaming, he told himself. Stop pretending. This was not what he would be allowed to have. The gods had spread his future out on their board like the little bones fortune-tellers used in the market, and this was not what they had given Tet.
Fuck the gods.
Fuck dragons and monkeys and mages.
Still no words between them, and Tet kept his eyes shut tight. Pretended that he was not himself, that he was not there. Instead, he clung to the world where he was that Other-Merithym, the one who should have been. He was just a skin sack of meat and bone; these little pleasures were simple, they brought no complicated humiliations. He sank into an imaginary prism of oil, let the golden liquid close over his head. The world slowed and softened even as heat threaded through his body in a mapwork of fiery lines that converged at his groin. He throbbed. He ached. A pain that was sweeter than any others.
Tet had no idea how late it was when Dozha was finally done with his legs. All he knew were these things: he had a name, his stomach was full, his brain was foggy with wine and petals like a cloud of blossoms blown from peach trees. His legs no longer hurt as much and he felt stronger, more himself than he had in years.
Drugged, content, Tet threw off the shackling armour of all the people he had been. For a moment, he was his true self. He opened his eyes to a world that was subtly rearranged, and if he were still powerful, Tet would have been certain that it was his own fantasy become real. He was Merithym, and Merithym was just a man alone with another man. With Dozha, who was also just a man beneath his skin of magery and Underworld princehood.
Tet struggled up until he was cushioned by a mountain of pillows, and Dozha was lamp-lit, copper and gold and black. He felt remade. His fears and doubts were cast off by the drug and by Dozha’s presence. It seemed natural to lean forward to taste the sweetness of seven-petal on Dozha’s tongue, to touch skin that shone like new honey.
Dozha drew back out of Tet’s grasp, and looked at him through lowered lashes. ‘Unexpected,’ he said.
‘What – this?’ Tet touched the mage’s face, briefly, and dropped his hand. ‘I’m also human, whatever your dragon thinks.’
Dozha laughed softly. ‘I know that, Tet. But I’ve had people watching you, and what they told me...’ He trailed off, uncertain.
Dimly, Tet considered being angry with Dozha for spying on him, but he couldn’t be bothered. They all watched each other, and gods knew he was doing his own hunting. Dozha was simply better at it – fast and sly like a little fisher-cat from the islands – while Tet had blundered about like a dog on the scent of a deer. ‘And what did these spies say?’
‘That you were a man with limited appetites.’ His hand spider-walked up Tet’s leg, and stilled just below the groin. So close. I no longer care about being rejected. Tet covered Dozha’s hand with his own and shifted it higher, half expecting him to pull free. Instead, the thief mage closed his hand firmly around Tet’s length, pressing heat through the soft material of his sleep clothes. A single pulse passed through Tet, like a wave of power at the first words of magic. He kept Dozha’s hand pressed in place. ‘I was raised a priest,’ Tet said. ‘I had to be.’
‘And you’re not a priest now?’
‘I’m done with gods,’ Tet said, and it didn’t pain him to say it, not like it would have only a handful of months ago. Perhaps being without a soul had warped him beyond all redemption.
‘Even so,’ Dozha said. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be the meal that sates you.’ He drew his hand free. His expression was troubled, and he looked half-angry. There was a rawness to that anger, an honesty that Tet found disconcerting.
‘You cannot be sure.’ Tet did not let his disappointment colour his voice. After all, Dozha was beautiful and powerful, a monster cut from red sandstone, and Tet was a mage who could do nothing, who stepped closer to death with each breath. He’d been a fool to think Dozha would welcome any advance.
‘Truly.’ The smile Dozha offered was weak, quickly gone. ‘I’m not a whole meal.’
Tet shrugged. ‘One arm, two. I do not care.’
This time Dozha laughed. ‘Oh that, no.’ He shifted forward like a cat wanting affection, and his jacket slipped from his shoulders. ‘I’ll humiliate myself, then leave, and you can feel better about being a mage with no magic.’ He was bitter. An aspect of Dozha that Tet had not been allowed to see before.
Tet couldn’t help reaching out to touch the thief prince’s naked skin, flawless, beaten bronze, sparking under the dancing flames of the lamps, and Dozha did not stop Tet as he stroked down his body. Tet’s heart bucked against his ribs, and Dozha’s echoed, the beat rattling under Tet’s palm. He pulled the jacket free.
Dozha’s right arm ended at the elbow. Before, Tet had assumed that he’d lost it in some accident, or even had it removed as a punishment, but his fingers traced over no scarring, no healed wounds. ‘You were born like this?’
‘Yes. A bitter disappointment to my mother, who was certain the rest of her spawn would be similarly cursed.’
‘Were they?’ Tet’s fingers encountered soft ridges on the skin, like weals.
‘No. In fact, all of my sisters and my brother turned out to be perfect and beautiful. Perhaps Nyangist was trying to make up for me.’
‘Ah.’ Tet paused on the deepest of the ridges. ‘What are these?’
Dozha shrugged back a little, out of Tet’s grasp. ‘I’ve tools for making certain jobs easier when I can’t rely on magic. They’re unfortunately painful to attach.’ He shuffled back on his knees, just the slightest, but it was a clear sign that this part of the exploration was over. ‘The marks will fade.’
Tet understood that he would hear nothing more about it, but he was uninterested in Dozha’s little jobs and thieveries right now. Instead, he trailed fingers down from Dozha’s collarbone, skirting one nipple and sliding lower down to his hip bone, catching it. Dozha did not resist when Tet pulled him closer, moved lower, untying the laces of his trousers and sliding his hand under the soft raw silk ready to meet heated skin, hard and hot as an iron brand.
‘What—’ Tet paused his hand.
‘A curiosity,’ Dozha said. ‘Are you satisfied?’
Tet pulled at the trousers, revealing Dozha’s truth. Slender as a finger and split down the underside like the cleft of a lily’s stem. A curiosity indeed. And, Tet suspected, an aspect of Dozha that he kept hidden from others, from everyone. So why show him now, and how was Tet to respond? He needed clean brutality; Dozha was not a coddled child craving pat words, false flattery. ‘And you charmed a witch of the caravans with this?’
Dozha snorted. ‘It’s a simple thing to keep the shape of a prick long enough to seduce a maid,’ he said. ‘But you know as well as I do that we have to return to the truth. No magic is permanent.’
Tet ran a finger along the cleft, to the tight bud of its head, and the stem trembled, made his own skin sing with answering heat. ‘The ultimate inadequacy of mages, we are always at the end, revealed.’
*
The lamps had drowned themselves, the room was dark grey and it afforded both a brittle armour. Tet explored his unbound mage, his thief-prince, every curve and angle of him, and let Dozha return his ardour in equal measure. They made space for each other in spaces that they had not realised existed. It was heat, and sweetness, and rage, and tenderness. Storms and sighs. Tet pushed against his constraints, kissed fiercely, and remade his nameless dream lover in Dozha’s image, until he could almost imagine the wagon’s wooden bows above him, smell the stretched material, feel the rocking of the bed beneath.
For a moment, he let himself feel something like desire, affection. Trust. As each breached each, and taught the other new dances.
Afterwards, Dozha lay against Tet, oiled fingers drumming on his rib cage. He said nothing. It was a strange and uncertain time for words, and Tet knew better than to talk of what they had done, what thin webs they’d spun between them now. Sex was another kind of magery, another way to gain a measure of control. It was not predictable – never knowing if the threads were going to be sticky and strong as the golden silk of an orb-weaver, or fragile as desiccated cobwebs. Mages didn’t trust to it. They trusted in names.
Tet was not so foolish as to think this baring of skin and mutual revelation of their vulnerabilities and brokenness meant that Dozha would do whatever it was Tet asked of him. No. And do I want that kind of power over him anyway? He knew exactly what it was like to have the whole world thinking that they owned him.
He was put in mind of Kani. Dozha hadn’t mentioned her or his progress in getting the beetle and Tet was loathe to bring it up directly again. His free hand stroked down the hills and valleys of Dozha’s spine, pausing in each small dip. His skin was velvet, furred like a white peach, and Tet considered waking him again just to taste him, lick the sweetness from him.
Dozha murmured, something sleepy and unintelligible.
‘Kani comes to me in her dreams,’ Tet said to the ceiling. Under his hand, Dozha’s muscles tensed. He was not sleeping, after all.
‘Does she now,’ he said after a long, gloomy silence had passed.
In a manner of speaking – certainly it was what she believed. It was safest to leave it at that. Tet had no desire to start explaining to Dozha about the flint-pouch and the dogs. Sex or no, he was not going to hand over every weapon he had to a man who could prove to be as false and deceitful as any other.
When Tet didn’t respond to his flat inquiry, Dozha pushed himself up onto the stump of his elbow and glared down at him. In the darkness, his eyes were black pools, no starlight reflected in their hidden depths. ‘Tell me about these meetings.’
‘Curious?’ Tet shifted, cupped Dozha’s cheek in his palm, ran his thumb along the curves of his mouth. The flesh was soft, still slightly damp. His skin smelled of a new musk now, the mingled essences of spendings, of oils and sweet wine.
‘Yes. Stop trying to distract me.’
‘She came to offer me bargains.’
Dozha breathed out, and his expression turned flat and wary, reminding Tet of a fox caught in the early morning light, uncertain if it had been spotted by an enemy or something worse. ‘For your soul?’
‘Yes.’ Tet should end this conversation now, silence it with kisses, and pretend that nothing more was said. ‘But they’re just dreams.’
‘I’m also a mage,’ Dozha said. ‘Or have you forgotten? Dreams are never just anything. Don’t talk to me like I’m some fool of a, of a pot-maker. What does she want of you?’
‘My name.’ Tet dropped his hand. It was an act of surrender, though he wondered if Dozha realised it.
Dozha managed a twitch of a smile, forced and awkward. His eyes stayed hard and deep. ‘And do you plan on giving it to her?’
‘I can’t,’ Tet said simply. What was once the truth was now a lie, but Dozha didn’t need to know that. Not yet, not until Tet was sure he could trust him. ‘I don’t have one to give.’ A laugh jolted out of him, as unexpected as a robin bursting from a bush. ‘Maybe she should have tried seducing me instead – I would at least have had a cock to bargain with.’
Dozha shoved at him. ‘Fuck off, old man.’ He sat up, drawing his knees to his chest. He stared off to the shadows of the underground room. Tet could just make out the furrows of his brow, but little more. Strands of his hair had escaped from his neat plait, and he looked almost vulnerable. A strange and uncomfortable thing. Tet saw the child he might once have been, damaged, turned out of his family for things he had no control over. Tet had no idea what paths had led to Sinastrillia taking the mage child as her own, raising him to be her thief-prince. What it might have been like for Dozha to be a human brought up under the talons of a dragon.
Tet’s heart stuttered, and he cursed himself for falling to sentiment. Dozha was no longer a child, and he was a dangerous man to have as an enemy, and perhaps, even more dangerous to have as a friend.
Dozha turned his head suddenly and Tet was stabbed by the brightness of his eyes, like a little moth pinned, still fluttering, to cork. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Dozha said. ‘You were supposed to have been great once. How did you do powerful magic with no name to guide you?’
‘Maybe I was not as great as people have led you to believe.’
‘Shoom believes it. More so, Sinastrillia does.’ He frowned and lunged forward to grab at Tet’s newly disfigured hand. His grip was tight enough to make Tet wince. ‘What did my mother want of you?’
‘She wanted to offer me something.’ Tet sighed. ‘Another bargain. Bargains on top of bargains.’ He closed his eyes and said softly. ‘You’re hurting me, Dozha.’
‘She gave you your name.’
A thorn-prick of caution jabbed at Tet. ‘And tell me how a dragon would do that,’ Tet said. ‘How would she even know to offer?’
Dozha released Tet’s chalk-white hand. There was silence, then. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I am not used to...’ A feather-touch on the white fingers, Tet’s hand lifted, the soft warm wetness of a mouth. He kissed Tet’s fingertips, nipped at the base of the thumb. An apology with something that could be a playful warning. A reminder that they were not just two men, but two men of power, and already they were giving too much to each other.
He pulled Tet’s fingers from his mouth. ‘What will you say the next time you see Kani in your dreams?’
If Tet looked at Dozha, he would not be able to do this next thing, this last test. But was Tet testing Dozha or himself? Or was he testing a woman who wasn’t even in the room, a figment they had created between them? A third corner in a triangle, a mannequin who was nothing more than a collection of masks and magic. Tet squeezed his eyes tighter, until behind the lids in the watery darkness an explosion of fireworks began to play. Perhaps he owed Dozha a truth, even if it was a foolish risk. ‘I will tell Kani that I have back my name. That I am ready to bargain.’
He opened his eyes.
Dozha nodded.
He would say nothing, and neither would Tet. Already they had spoken too much truth between them. There could be no more of that. Tet closed his fingers around Dozha’s and dragged him back down.
*
After, because they would not talk of names and power again, Tet asked something from the prince of the Underpalace. ‘The girl who came to kill me,’ he said softly into the dark. ‘Why did you send her?’
Dozha didn’t move when he answered. His breath tickled against Tet’s collar bone. His words hummed against Tet’s skin. ‘I didn’t send her. Shoom hired her, maybe to test you. I don’t pretend to understand the fat man’s mind.’
‘She died,’ Tet said.
Dozha sighed, damp and warm. ‘We know. And it was her decision to take the contract and she was bound to whatever end it brought her. We also have honour in the Underpalace,’ he said. ‘We serve out our contracts to the best of our abilities, and if we fail, we return the hire-coin. We don’t steal from our clients.’ He was quiet for a little while, before saying, ‘But you gave her a sacred funeral and honoured her. It’s more than others would have given.’
