Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 31
Of course Dozha knew what had happened to the girl. Tet pondered this while his one hand smoothed along Dozha’s left arm, stroking along from shoulder bone to elbow, from elbow to wrist, wrist to fingertips.
Dozha trapped Tet’s fingers with his, a small game in the endless night.
‘Do you not hate me for her death?’
Dozha did not answer.
Later Tet woke to a chilled room, and pulled the woollen blankets and silk covers up and over the curve of Dozha’s shoulder, and though he seemed barely awake, the mage slid one leg between Tet’s and said, ‘Should I?’
‘I think so, yes,’ Tet said, as the guilt clawed up his throat.
‘Will my hatred grant you absolution?’
The answer was silence.
‘Then no,’ Dozha said. ‘I will not hate you. Your guilt is your own choice.’
*
The morning lamps were lit, this time by a woman older than both mages combined, and they clawed their way out of sleep. If Tet had spent another night screaming, Dozha at least pretended not to have heard it. Tet’s skin was tacky, but he did not feel the gut-wrenching exhaustion of another night clogged with bad dreams.
He was sated, after all.
The old woman set out breakfast trays on the table and took the dead water-pipe away. When she was gone, Dozha sat up and the blankets fell from his shoulders. His hair had come unbraided in the night and it fell to his waist, black as the wings of cranes. He pushed it back with his one hand and before Tet could offer to braid it for him the way a lover might, he whispered. A zephyr lifted Dozha’s hair, dividing it as easily as a mother, and twisted the strands in place. ‘I’ll be busy for the next few days,’ he said. ‘You can rest here.’
‘I must return to Peniki’s,’ Tet said, thinking of how he needed to be able to use the flint-pouch, of Ymat’s man watching, and what he would report of Tet’s absence. He leaned forward to count the bones of Dozha’s spine, to press a kiss against the place where shoulder and neck met. When he drew back, Tet noticed a smear of white behind Dozha’s ear. It matched his unearthly hand. Tomb-marble white. The same shade as the White Prince, as that witch Kani.
Soon they were both dressed and Dozha called for yesterday’s sapling girl to lead Tet back home. Before they parted, he leaned close enough that only Tet could hear his whisper, as his hand slipped beneath Tet’s jacket, fingers tickling along the white undershirt. Tet felt a sudden visceral desire—not for sex, but to tell Dozha his name, to trust him entirely. It was a moth flit of emotion, a spasm. A name would not tie ribbons between them.
‘Shoom is growing impatient,’ Dozha said, ‘and I have to make my move soon – before the prince takes his new clockwork elephants into the war.’
A dangerous move. Tet thought of that body tied to the white donkey by its own entrails, the little clockwork hunting monsters sent out by the court toymaker. But he also understood the urgency. The prince was now completely beyond the control of the voices of men, of little city-speakers who tried to temper his excesses. Eventually, he would bring the whole world down in flames around him in Nyangist’s name.
Tet’s throat closed. This could be the last time he saw Dozha. ‘You will be careful,’ Tet said, instead of all the hundred other things he could, all the questions he was desperate to ask.
‘I’m always careful.’ But the smile that accompanied the words was tired, a little strained. ‘Tet,’ Dozha said, and pulled him closer, kissing him once, pressing his closed mouth to Tet’s like a benediction. He stayed like that for too long, their breaths mingling. Tet could feel the slight flicker of his eyelashes against skin, before he drew away. ‘When I was born,’ Dozha said, soft as goose down, ‘my mother called me Oshaketri.’
A daughter’s name.
AND NOW THE DEAD
The girl led Tet back down a new route, but he’d begun to layer these passages over each other like skins worn to translucency, and the map was growing in his mind, matching itself to the more complete map of the upper streets of Pal-em-Rasha. He was not surprised when his sapling guide took him to an area near where Tet had met the failed toymaker Yulikiya.
He tucked his white hand into his jacket so as not to draw attention, and found a small pouch secreted there. It had been returned to him as softly as it was taken, and Tet closed his fist around it.
Dozha had given him back the hire-coin. An admission of failure. More than that – much more, Dozha had also given Tet his true name. He said it under his breath. Oshaketri. It felt right. Wrong and right. Right because it was his name. That much Tet could tell. It made him more real.
Wrong, because it was the name of a first-born daughter. Tet did not like what any of this meant. Dozha had with one act both betrayed himself and won Tet’s trust, had shown him up. He had done something freely that Tet would never have done, and he knew it. Dozha assumed he knew Tet well enough to trust he would never use his true name – too burnt by his own dealings with men and princes to try do the same.
Or perhaps it had been a truly innocent, honest act. How was Tet to know what small loves Dozha had been allowed in his life, what pleasures he mistook for intimacy? He’d been honest enough to reveal himself. Or herself. Tet wondered how Dozha or Oshaketri or whoever he was saw himself, how they saw their own shape. Perhaps he shifted it as easily as he turned from man to dragon.
Oshaketri. By giving Tet this power over him, he had with one word revealed Tet’s true nature. Dozha had shown his honesty, and Tet’s lack.
He had also effectively withdrawn from the contract to steal back the oresh-beetle. Perhaps because he knew Tet would now be able to fulfil Kani’s bargain. Damn that serpent-hearted little shit. I don’t understand him or his motives. I need the full picture of Dozha and all I have are slivers of glass. When Tet put the shattered mirror together, what was he going to see?
He had an uncomfortable suspicion that he already knew, and he liked it little.
Now Tet was left with only one option to regain his soul, and with it his power. He had what Kani wanted, and such a simple trade it would be: his name for his soul. He would have his magery back. And Kani would have him on a leash. Was she the Emperor that Sinastrillia had seen in the currents of time?
What was to become of Tet once he was a mage again – there were gods hunting him down, and they would not be slow to deal out their punishments. Nyangist would settle for little less than his heart, of that much Tet was certain.
He was torn in so many directions. Threads were stitched under his skin, and each tied him to a different death and a different life. If Tet followed one, he must snip the others. And while the thread tying him to Dozha was silver-black and fine, it was also as easily broken as the silk of a spider’s web.
Kani at least offered him back his power, and perhaps he would find some other way to escape the teeth and claws of gods. Even if it was a madness spurred by too much seven-petal, a dream where he ate the damn things, power and all. Tet had his true name, and Dozha's, and Sinastrillia had told him that the power of the gods was passing.. The word of a dragon was a dangerous thing to pin his hope to, but it was all he had.
*
The day was still bright. There was no chance of using the flint-pouch now and Tet was not ready to go back to hide in his attic room. He bought wrappings to bandage his hand, then walked through the city until hunger drove him into a small Imradian restaurant. At a corner table, half-hidden in the shadows, Tet listened to the cant and rhyme of the servers and chefs as they spoke to one another in their native tongue. He immersed himself in it, trying to find the flow.
I’m already planning to run. With a grim acceptance of the kind of person he was, had always been, and would remain, Tet knew he had given up on ever returning Nanak’s eyes and freeing himself from her curse. He knew now that he would forever be a coward, crawling from the messes he made, as the curse slowly turned him into a mutilated wretch.
Dozha survived one-handed. Men came back from the war with stumps instead of legs. What was Tet afraid of? At the very least Tet could still play his lute and earn his coin that way. Just another beggar in a world lice-ridden with them.
Only, what hope could he have when Kani had him under her control, his name in her mouth like a word of power. There would never be a leash long enough.
Tet buried his head in his hands. Each way he turned, the threads knotted and tangled and he was tied tighter into an ending he did not want.
*
The afternoon sun sunk low. Tet had wasted his time picking at strange foods and softening his self-pity with pegs of cashew liquor. The shirring wave of sound from outside the little restaurant had grown louder, high as cicadas, and finally it was enough to pull him out of his self-pitying haze.
‘What’s going on?’ He motioned toward the servers who were standing at the open glass doors and chattering at each other, their dark hands jabbing the air.
One turned to him and sucked on his little paper tobacco twist, and grimaced. ‘Thief,’ he said.
‘Eh?’ Tet bristled, his drunken mind turning the unexpected answer to an insult.
The man sucked viciously on his cigarette again and spat the rest of his sentence out with the smoke. ‘Some fool thief, caught in the Pistil. He was caught by the monsters. The White Prince is displaying the body now.’ He muttered something to his colleague, and the younger one continued, softer, slower. ‘He wants to show the people of Pal-em-Rasha what will happen to those who think they can go against him.’
Dozha.
Tet threw a handful of Dozha’s hire-coins on the table, enough to pay for his drinks and meals many times over, and ran out past the staring servers and into the heat-wet streets, following the drone and trumpet of the crowds. He wove through the massed people, pushing his way past bright silk shoulders, through the heat of bodies, the shimmer of gold and brass and white teeth like stars.
The death-procession wound through one of Pal-em-Rasha’s grandest streets and though this parade mimicked the stomp and finery of the prince’s engagement procession, it had none of its solemnity, none of its grandeur. Ignoring the pain whipping through his legs, through his heart, Tet pushed his way to the front of the crowd, cold sweat slicking his back, his sides.
What was left of the body had been crucified on two wide planks. The cross was held high by marching soldiers. Tet couldn’t tell if the corpse had one arm or two. All its limbs had been chewed into ragged red and bone-splinter stumps and the entrails hung like tired bunting in loops of pink and grey. The face was a grinning skull. All meat eaten away.
The only thing that remained to give the body any identity of its own was the black flag of its hair, long and dark and bright as crane’s wings. The body was marched past Tet, towards the lowering sun, and the crowd followed it like the tail of a snake.
Tet stood in the emptying streets, sound buzzing in his head, his hands clenched. Sweat ran down his face. His skin felt as though it no longer belonged to him, his hands the body parts of a stranger. The noise of the processions faded, replaced by the screaming of the striped geese passing overhead, echoing over the towers and domed roofs of the city. The streets stank of ox and meat, sweat and smoke.
Bells rang in a nearby store, and the murmur of trade returned as people went back to their day-to-day world. Tet stumbled forward like a man caught in the suck of a dream-tide, following the tug of strange currents. His feet lifted without his command. His head was empty, thoughts fine as dust. I cannot think. There was nothing for him to hold on to, to understand. A black ache settled into him, fat and cold as a coiled pit-viper.
It took Tet a while to catch up again with the crowd, and longer still before he was able to fight his way clear to where the corpse was now hoisted on display in the temple square. Nyangist’s domed halls were rubble and ash, but this was still a sacrifice, and the priests and lions were there to see the blood drop slow and cold onto the thirsty stones.
Tet waited for the sun to shed its crown and the crowds to thin before he was brave enough to get a closer look at the body.
It was even harder now to tell anything about the corpse. People had spat on it, thrown spoiled fruit and handfuls of fire-blackened pebbles gathered from Nyangist’s fallen temple. Even the black hair looked ragged, like the pennant of a conquered enemy.
I can’t tell if it’s him. The corpse looked to be the right age. Tet glanced around. The square was far from empty. It was not as though he could check to see if the thief sported a curiosity. Laughter spilled out of him. A cold flat sound in the green-black of the lengthening shadows. Tet clapped his hand over his mouth and made himself breathe slowly. The smells of the city became overwhelming, making him want to fall to his knees and puke.
This is the first pattern, the one we call Dragon Mountain Breath, came the voice of the abbess, and Tet remembered the cold halls of the temples, the steady breaths of the priest-boys. Calm. Silence. Power.
Finally, he was able to reach forward and touch the cold skin. He could not smell seven-petal and incense and skin-sweet-sweat and almond oil. There was only the metallic tang of blood, the putrid sweetness of shit and death.
It could be him. But it could also be anyone else. Tet held on to that. Dozha was a mage and no mage should die like this, like meat.
Because Dozha was clever, and cleverness shouldn’t be rewarded with this sewer-ending.
Because he was not dead. He had wrapped himself in shadows and shifting shapes, and he knew that the way to the prince was guarded and he wouldn’t take a stupid chance.
‘It surprises me to see you here,’ said a voice so familiar and soft and spidery. It chilled Tet, and he turned slowly to look at Ymat Shoom. The Monkey was dressed in his city-speaker finery, in his embroidered white boots and his wide-sleeved robes of office. His bald head was shining with the swirls of indigo tattoos.
‘Should you be speaking to me?’ Tet asked. They were in the middle of a public square, and though he still wore soldier’s rags and his face was thatched with a scraggly beard, people might draw unpleasant conclusions.
Ymat lifted his hands palm-up in mute apology. ‘I hardly think it matters.’ His one sleeve bulged, and his pet monkey peered out. It was not grinning now.
‘What do you mean?’
Ymat took a small dancing step back as though Tet were a leper. ‘For what little it’s worth to you, I am genuinely sorry. I hadn’t meant for things to go this way.’
Tet looked about, expecting soldiers, expecting to be arrested and hauled before the White Prince before being torn to pieces by clockwork animals, before his corpse was raised in warning alongside this poor dead fool.
There was no one. No uniforms of the palace and no ornamental helms, no shining swords and muskets and shields.
Ymat frowned at his confusion. ‘Your death,’ he said. ‘It has settled on your shoulders. And I have not been able to retrieve your soul from that witch Kani.’
‘My death.’ It was not a question, but Ymat answered him anyway.
‘It’s in your eyes, the blackness.’
The square went red and sticky, covered in a layer of blood. Tet blinked, and Ymat Shoom was gone. The blood remained. Everything was still. The breeze caught a tendril of the corpse’s hair and Tet reached out to touch it. The hair was cold, stiff. The silence pealed around him as Tet waited for time to restart. The gods were fainter this time, hazier than the smog of distant cities. The strands of hair moved under his fingers as the breeze gusted and the world burst into chatter.
‘It surprises me to see you here,’ Ymat said.
This time. This time our conversation will be different.
Tet turned slowly to face him. ‘Does it? When you were the one who set me on this path?’
‘I did not mean for you to die,’ said Ymat. ‘I only meant for you and your soul to be parted for a few days.’
‘I’m not dead yet.’
‘Your death has settled on you,’ Ymat Shoom said, his voice suddenly lowered, gentle. ‘I can see the blackness of it in your eyes.’
Tet felt it. He’d thought it to be the weight of his despair, but now that Ymat had named it, he knew. Sinastrillia’s plan for him to go into the cavern of shades had pushed him closer to death, and Tet had reached that final border before time.
There was nowhere to run now.
‘There will be others,’ Ymat said. ‘Other plans I’ll have to make, other mages and thieves to hire.’ He looked tired. ‘Or perhaps, like you, I should also accept defeat. Be quiet and small and live out the life allotted to me. Wait for the White Prince to die of old age.’ He looked up at the sky as though he studied the hidden stars for futures. ‘It’s my right to retire after my years in service. The prince won’t even care. What am I after all, other than the youngest son of a minor family, with no chance to win land and influence in the art of war.’
Even the Monkey was giving up.
The city-speaker snapped his head back and stared at Tet. ‘It is time for you to set your affairs in order,’ Ymat said, and he was not unkind. He seemed genuinely concerned and Tet nodded, turned his face away from Ymat’s empty pity. His lead heart shrunk, dull and slow as a trinket made by a third-rate toymaker.
‘Don’t run from your death like a coward,’ Ymat said. ‘Face it. Have a good end. It’s all we have left to us.’
He was right. Tet knew it. Already he could feel his insides turning to putrefaction, and tasted the rot in his mouth. And if this body before him was Dozha’s, then what did death matter. ‘Please.’ Tet caught at Ymat’s sleeve with numb fingers. His tongue felt heavy and awkward, the words ill-shaped. ‘Look after Hast for me.’
Ymat paused, eyes searching. Finally he nodded. ‘It’s the least I can do, friend.’
A NAME OR TWO
Tet’s death crawled closer as he made his way home. There was no point left in pretending. He paid a rickshaw runner to take him right to Peniki’s door, uncaring of who might see him.
