Thief Mage, Beggar Mage, page 33
And now Tet stood cloaked in shades and shadows, using his weakened magic as easily as though they’d never been parted. He walked through the crowd and no person noticed him deeply wrapped in his power. Tet stayed far from the prince though.
The White Prince was with Kani, holding her hand like a metal ring about the foot of a bird, and his clockworker with their wide-brimmed hat and their fall of white veils stood near him; a movable pillar.
Kani was well-protected by her proximity to the prince. He thought her no threat.
All Tet had to do was wait and remember the route Dozha had drawn on the sloped wall of the attic room with charcoal. It was an easy enough thing for him and he passed the time imprinting the image into his head, following the passages in a prophetic dream.
Dozha would call him once he had the prince’s breastplate and then they would have to hope that the gods would not be able to sniff Tet down before his work was done. A grass-head of hope, easily destroyed. His heart quickened, and he trembled with a fever of fear and excitement and anticipation.
Soon all his magic would be his again, completely, but until that moment, Tet had to be patient; watch Dozha play his part and charm the prince, whispering promises into his ear, sweet and poisonous while the musicians played songs from fallen empires.
The White Prince ran his fingers down Kani’s throat, tilted her head so that he could press vicious kisses against her neck and mouth, consume her tongue.
Tet kept himself still, and tried to see only the figment of Kani, and not the truth of Dozha. The crowds throbbed around him, their voices a murmur, a moan. The dim stars spilled milky, adding their light to the soft globes the clockwork birds carried this way and that.
The party reached its climax and the music softened and slowed. Women and men drifted off back into the night, their deals made, their alliances strengthened or clean-broken as a twisted arm.
Dozha and the prince had gone now up to the apartments hidden in the heart of the labyrinthine passages. Only a few dregs still remained, and Tet spotted Ymat Shoom, his hands waving as he conducted some new enterprise, blackmailed another idiot.
Tet looked right at him and Ymat saw nothing.
Merithym.
The voice snaked through Tet’s head like the whisper of a lover. Dozha was where he needed to be, and all that was left was for Tet to play his part in Sinastrillia’s stratagem. Slowly as a man walking in his sleep, Tet raised his chalk-hand and touched it to the beetle. The clockwork thrummed, eager, and he pressed, fingers cracking the stone carapace against his chest as though the trinket were nothing more than the hollow egg of a thrush. It broke into his skin, the magic spiralling in like the drills of glass-winged cicadas. The power flushed through Tet’s flesh, sloshing through his blood: a liquor, potent and sweet and fiery.
Tet closed his eyes against the fading stars, the fading party, and stretched his magic open, feeling the world spill around him in a bright quilt of potential. He could touch the minds of men like soft bumbling moths, the cool tooth-sharp mind of the dragon far below in the underground river, the firefly emotions of the gods scattered throughout the city. Here was the truth Sinastrillia tried to make him understand – that gods were no greater than men. They burned brighter and fiercer, they tore through the universe robed in magic and power, they snapped at each other, at men and monsters.
But humans built towers.
We spread our seed through the ripe earth and we swarm across the crinkled ground. We stretch our little wings and though our lives are brief, we change the face of the world.
We build towers.
And the gods are out of time.
Tet remembered what it was like to stretch out his mind until it touched the edges of time, like a wasp in a soap bubble, until the great stone door in his mind cracked along its seams and split open to the darkness and the chaos behind.
He took a breath so deep it never ended.
A wasp sting, a movement that was precise and controlled and nothing like the unleashed rage of his youth. The stone door opened, wide as the mouth of hell, and the universe froze in place. The last of the music snapped silent, and slowly Tet opened his eyes to a world caught in amber. The air vibrated against him but Tet walked through it as though the strange consistency of this timeless frozen universe was his true element, and he a little fish pulled from a hook and thrown back into the river.
Ymat Shoom’s mouth was half open as he pointed at a small clockwork bird. The woman he spoke with looked sour, her eyes narrowed as she calculated what she could win from Ymat. Like him, she wore city-speaker’s robes. If not Ymat, it might have been her or a thousand other minor players like her who tried to catch Tet in their fragile web.
The moth-wing minds of men might have stilled, but the raging fireflies were still out there and Tet had to move. The gods would find him soon. He could feel them waking, burning brighter. Perhaps they would try and restart time as they had before, or think it better to hunt him down first.
With his knees protesting every step, Tet raced through the web of passages Dozha had mapped out, following them with eyes-half closed, trusting in the remembered scrawl. The palace was a twisting knot, a tangle of mating serpents.
The only sound was the hard slap of leather boots on the Imradian marble, the tapping echoes from walls leafed in gold, and the harsh pant of Tet’s breaths. Another mind moved slow and deep below, a silver-dark gleam that put itself in the way of the fireflies converging on the palace. It took a moment before Tet realised that Sinastrillia had engaged the hunting gods, buying him more time in a timeless world. He laughed, and the sound cawed through the passages and up the towers. He followed the black wings of laughter, up and up, drawn to where Dozha and the White Prince were waiting for him.
*
The doors to The White Prince’s chambers were unguarded. Or at least, they were guarded, but the beasts were frozen in a perfect delicate balance like the spinning wheels and rods of the Clock of the Tower of the Floating University. Tet had to admire the intricacy of their craftsmanship. It pained him a little that there would never be a chance to talk mage-to-mage with the remarkable person who’d made these.
There were tawny gold lions and leopards cloud-marked, red wolves and even a small jade-scaled dragon. Their teeth were daggers, their fur made of individual silk threads stitched into metal as if it were woven cloth. Jewel eyes watched Tet, unmoving, and he reached out to touch the long fur of the clockwork toy nearest to the door. A red wolf, so life-like that Tet could almost believe he felt it breathing beneath his palm. He drew his hand away and stalked past the motionless guardians to open the door into the prince’s sanctum.
Frozen time was pressing against him. Tet understood what Sinastrillia meant about the cracks. They sliced in jagged angles. Everything was static for now, but the pressure was building behind it and Tet was enveloped in a sudden dizzying fear of what would happen if he was not able to soften these weak points and push them together like torn dough. He rushed through a series of rooms that opened one from another, a coiling spiral of boxes, and in the final room found Dozha and the prince.
The air in the room was splintered, fracturing frozen light in a strange rainbow. Each movement Tet made split time further, the universe shredding into a cold black emptiness.
I need to end this soon.
Dozha was still Kani, exquisite and imperious, and he made a beautiful statue. Tet kissed his cold mouth and pulled him out of one element into another, pulling him outside of the stalled river of time. Dozha woke like a drowned man, and stepped back, eyes wide in a flare of distrust. Then he blinked, shook his head.
‘You—’ he began, then cut himself off with a sharp rueful grin. ‘Sinastrillia said you could.’
The prince’s breastplate lay at their feet, unbuckled, gleaming like the inside of an oyster. On the front of it were two opals, each one the hand-span of a grown man. Wards were etched into them, and they glowed with a mage light older than anything else in this city. Older even than the prince’s gilded Pistil. His protection, the stolen eyes of gods.
It seems that I have always been a fool.
Dozha stripped off the long gloves still covering his arms. The right was revealed, a silver beauty that must have cost a small fortune. He pressed the top, and whatever magic and tricks kept it to the stump of his elbow released, and the metal arm dropped free. He caught it easily, well-practiced, and tossed the limb into the ship-wide bed where it lay like a dead fish.
Dozha gathered the prince’s precious armour and put it on over his embroidered robes. ‘You’ll have to do the buckles,’ he said.
Here then is my new emperor; a black-haired queen, a thief-prince, a shape-changing mage. Tet’s fingers trembled as he did the buckles. He would not lose him, not now. Not when he finally had found the sheath that fitted his steel heart. Around them time cracked and splintered, and the gods flared and flashed.
It was too late.
They arrived one after the other, like birds bursting through the high canopy of trees into the sun-bright sky: Epsi, Vitash, Nanak, Nyangist.
Three vast dogs, nothing like the little magic sendings Tet struck from sparks.
A lioness so huge she could swallow the stars.
And perhaps Tet was a mage who could burn the world to cinders, freeze the ash into a sculpture created solely for his own amusement, but he was not a god.
I’m just a man who knows my own name. He turned to Dozha, to Kani, to Oshaketri aand pressed a fierce kiss against Dozha’s forehead, another against his mouth, his cheek. Goodbye and goodbye. Dozha was protected by the White Prince’s breastplate, but it was still a thing of the gods and Tet didn’t trust that it would always keep him safe. He needed to be in a place where they could never reach him, or this whole farce would have been for nothing. If Tet failed now, then Dozha was as good as dead.
There was only one way that Tet knew for certain he could keep Dozha safe, at least for a little longer. No matter what happened to him after this day.
‘Run,’ Tet said, and used his magic to do something Sinastrillia hadn’t seen in her rivers and currents. ‘Oshaketri.’
Dozha’s eyes widened as Tet snapped the command into place. ‘Run, Oshaketri, run. Run south until you find me.’
With a force of magic that was almost sickening, Tet pushed Dozha into a new place in time where the gods would not find him, pushed him into a future where the gods were gone, and when Tet had lost him completely, Tet pulled all the strands of broken time together and into himself.
It would not be enough. Never, but there was one small thing he could do.
Sinastrillia had given him a gift and then asked a favour in return. For once, someone had not told him what to do, nor forced him into service with threats and chains. If Ymat had known my name he would have.
While Sinastrillia had used him as a game-piece, she had also allowed him at least the pretence of being a man who could make his own decisions. Tet grinned, a death’s head grimace of black humour. Well-played, dragon.
She’d known what he would do.
Tet was still a mage and he would one day be a great one. One that the world would remember. This was how he would fix what he’d fractured, how he would erase Dozha’s tracks from the hearts and desires of little gods. He took a deep breath.
‘I’m here,’ he said to the gods. ‘Come and get me.’ He’d dreamed their deaths in his seven-petal visions. Let them come to him.
Like a slow carnival, the gods moved in a pageantry of giant monsters, their power sparking through them in rainbow shimmers of light. Tet opened his arms as the gods drew nearer, their magic lacerating his skin, leaving cat claw trails of blood.
With a final scream of rage and triumph Tet sent his magic clawing into theirs, tangling it into the threads of his own power.
The gods, slow to understand, began to pull back, but Tet bit down harder, reeling the power of the gods through his own soul, feeling the strangeness of it crack his bones, boil his blood. And with their power, with his own, he gathered the shattered splinters of the universe and spun them to him, a magnet drawing in a scattered handful of iron filings. He was not a god, and time was not something men were meant to bring into their own skin. The cracked bones, the broken glass joints of Tet’s legs were nothing to the pain that rode his body now. He gritted his teeth, felt them shatter in his mouth, and he stitched and pulled at time until there were no more ruined edges and mirror-cracks and webs of brokenness.
He consumed the gods, and time was remade.
*
When time started again, Tet was emptied. Just a man. The power he’d had for a few long moments had all been used up to set right the things he’d done. Not only his power, but the gods’. They too had dwindled.
His head was a hollowed gourd, brittle and weak, and he lay where he’d fallen before the feet of a prince whose treasured protection had been whisked away; before weakened gods who would want their revenge slow. They might have been diminished, but they were not yet dead, and they would take Tet with them.
His fingers scraped the floor and even that small movement was enough to send sparks of agony through Tet’s entire body. The universe and all of time had left his nerves flayed, his insides torn. At least I saved Dozha. A blue-blackness swelled behind his eyes and he struggled against it.
I will not go to my death like this, giving in. No matter what. Tet shuddered. This time the White Prince would not leave him in a cell underground to starve to death. He would want the city to see what happened to those who go against him.
And I want them to see it too. Another bit of entertainment for the loyal citizens of Pal-em-Rasha, but for others a reminder that their prince was a demon. Those people would find their way to the Monkey, or to men like him.
Right to the end it seems I will work for Ymat. I hope the bastard appreciates it.
*
They cut out Tet’s tongue, because they thought it still mattered.
The White Prince wanted the city to watch Tet die. His clockworker would break Tet for him. They faced Tet with their toy beasts, their perfect beautiful beasts, and all across the temple square, the crowds were silent as the dead in the cavern of shades.
I am halfway there already. Over the heads of paltry humans were the looming shapes of the watching gods, thin and gossamer weak; the shifting smoke trails of the twenty-one First Men.
The toymaker walked closer, a pillar of fluttering white, and their creatures made a path for them, attuned to their every unspoken command. When they were so close that Tet could almost see the faint shape of them through the veils, they raised their hands and parted the material, enveloping him in their small white world.
There was only Tet, aching and thirsty and ready to die, and the broad moon face of the toymaker. Where the White Prince was sharp angles and handsome as a knife, the toymaker had a head like a puffball, her mouth a small slash, her nose just two flared nostrils. Only her eyes were like his; one clouded, one grey.
The sister-monster. Always loyal to her prince, always at his heel. The younger sister who had never died. Which just goes to show how much rumour is worth.
‘You stopped time,’ said the White Prince’s sister. ‘You stole my brother’s treasures.’
It was not as though Tet could answer her. Frothy blood dribbled from his mouth, itched down his chin.
‘It’s impossible.’ She pressed one hand to him and shuddered. ‘No, no, you have no magic. You are a nothing.’
Tet coughed in answer, and the whole of his body was racked as his broken ribs made every gasped breath torture.
She drew her head back, and a single wrinkle appeared at the centre of the smooth expanse of her forehead. ‘You are not a mage. Not anymore. So why are the ghost-dragons waiting?’ Confusion tripped through her voice. ‘The twenty-one First Men. I did not call them for you, but they came anyway.’
Of course they were waiting for him. They knew what he’d done, right there at the end, and so did the gods and the dragons. Even if stupid royal brats with candle-bright lives did not.
‘You humiliated my brother. Do not think I will make your death easy.’
I suppose it would have been too much to ask.
The sister’s veil closed and she drew away from him. Her clockwork beasts advanced and the sudden fear that grasped Tet’s heart almost made him try to call out for mercy. Not that he could make the words. Not that anyone would listen.
Tet raised his head and stared out into the waiting mass of people. Sunlight glinted off the clockwork animals, half-blinding him, and tears sprung to his eyes. He blinked furiously and tried to focus on something, anything that would help him through this. Tet sent his mind back to childhood, back to the patterns of the meditation halls. It brought a momentary stillness. Remember this, remember this, he wanted to scream it at the waiting masses. He clung to the shape of his name, his true name, and the way it had fallen from Dozha’s mouth like a blessing.
Laketri was in the crowd that gathered to watch the final tortures. Right at the front, like a beacon in a storm. She held her head high, unblinking. She was fiercer and more beautiful than a mountain leopard, and now Tet could see her resemblance to her sister-brother.
Ymat Shoom had also come to watch him die, but he did not smile, and even while they would flay Tet’s skin and crack his bones, Ymat would understand that the war was turning and the prince’s reign was almost over. Ymat had saved Tet from his first taste of death at the White Prince’s hand, though he could not save him from this one.
And though Tet had stolen the breastplate away from the prince and Ymat, he would at least die with one debt paid. The prince would fall, as Ymat Shoom had wanted
I am, after all, an honourable man.
In my own way.
Laketri raised a hand as the first beast stepped up to Tet’s stomach, and Tet kept his eyes wide, staring at Laketri’s fingers, still gloved in drying clay.
