Previous Chapter: The Illusions of the Disillusioned
The Death Dream of the Thief
Lying comatose with blood seeping from his abdomen, the Thief found himself backward in time. City walls rose up like forests; the mingling scents of piss, wine, and hearth smoke greeted his nose like the familiar perfume of an old friend. He was walking down a street they used to call the Row—there was Skiv the fishmonger, the daily catch on display, a huge, red octopus momentarily catching his eye—and the Thief realized suddenly as he stopped to stare at the crimson sign for Bertha’s Beauties that he was not, at this time, the Thief. There were no scars on his face, no jagged X burned into the flesh of his right hand. The thought only occupied his attention for a half-second before it faded, and then he was sneaking through the thin alley between the whorehouse and the butcher’s building, a smile spreading across his young and handsome visage. There she was, sitting on a barrel in red stockings and a black corset, Red Ginny, with hair like fire and skin the color of creamed coffee, waiting for him as she always did. He bowed courteously; Ginny scoffed but curtsied in return. There was a flower in his pocket, a white lily, and he took it and presented it to her as though it were more precious than all the gold in the world.
“Why, thank you, sir,” said Ginny, taking it with delicate fingers. “Though I fear by accepting this gift, I will owe you a favor in return.”
“Indeed, my lady, my intentions are not entirely pure,” said the boy, seizing her in his arms. They kissed as though time was fleeting and they might not see each other again. He let her go and looked into her eyes, a drowsy happiness plain in their dark irises.
“Will you be ready in the morning? The Zanj leave on time. If we’re late, we will not make it,” he explained.
“What will it be like there? A paradise, perhaps?” she asked, smiling as though she knew it would be far from a utopia.
“There might not be as many brothels as one would like, but we’ll manage, somehow. The captain told me that they need strong men to cut timber and build roads. It won’t be hard to find a job that pays well enough to live in a place of our own. It won’t be like Capetia, where the rich feed off the poor and keep them in the gutter. Zarqu is a growing city, the new light of the world, they say. We just need to be brave enough to take the journey. You are brave, aren’t you?”
“Far more courageous than you, pickpocket,” she said, trying to reach his wallet. “What do they do to thieves in Zanj?”
“I’m not a thief, and I have no idea,” he said, a note of anger in his voice. “We will be new people there, you understand? I won’t be a pickpocket, and you won’t be a whore. We can be whatever we want to be. We’ll have that freedom. That’s the whole reason we’re doing this.”
“Yes, yes, don’t be cross with me, I tease, I tease,” she said. “You better go. I have one more customer.”
He frowned, but he knew that they’d need the money. As was his custom, he didn’t ask questions about her clientele. The boy that would become the Thief left her sitting on the barrel, still perfect moments later in his mind’s eye as he strode the Row, searching for some way to kill time.
He was lounging at the intersection, watching the great oxen pull carts up the avenue towards the Palace, when he saw the policeman strolling towards Alberto, a fellow thief. Alberto had been tailing a doddering gentleman who had mistakenly wandered through the Row and had somehow escaped being beaten and robbed, so it was the pickpocket’s intention to remedy that oversight in the crowded anonymity of Main Street. He had not seen the policeman, a tall, brawny man whose face wore a look of stark intensity that the boy knew meant trouble greater than the usual sort. Though Alberto was no great friend of his—they were competitors, after all, and there truly was little loyalty amongst thieves—the boy knew he owed Alberto one, for he had saved him of a beating in a similar circumstance, though he had demanded half a sovereign afterward, which the boy regretfully paid him. With that sovereign in mind, the boy cut through the crowd, reaching the policeman before he had reached Alberto. He wasn’t sure what made him do it—a certain arrogance, perhaps, that he would never be able to shed—but as he tugged on the policeman’s sleeve, his other hand went for his back pocket. The man turned; the boy moved behind him, a wallet now in hand. Looming above, a scowl on his face, the policeman asked what the hell was the matter.
“Sir,” said the boy, “it seems that I have your wallet.”
This bold admittance of theft was a terrible idea, for policemen were not known to be understanding when it came to transgressions great or small. The Duke paid them to keep order, and order was kept by fear, intimidation, and the omnipresent threat of violence. Violence was the language of the city, and everyone spoke it, from small boys to strapping men to old women prowling around kitchens armed with rolling pins, eager to addle the brains of any prospective thief. The boy was very aware of this fact, and yet he acted with a smile, wearing a malicious grin that advertised his contempt for the city, for its laws, customs, and enforcement personnel. With dash he was across the street, waving at the policeman, taunting the man as he struggled to cross the busy avenue, encumbered by his lack of agility, which the boy was keen to use to his advantage. He waited till the policeman was almost within reach, and then he leapt up a wall like a monkey, using the guttering to pull himself up to the roof. As he turned to wave, something exploded against his head, nearly toppling him from his perch. It was an apple; the policeman had seized several pieces of fruit from a neighboring stall and was prowling around the base of the building, eyes making careful estimations regarding distance, velocity, and the boy’s aptness at dodging. The boy hurdled towards the next rooftop; the policeman followed on the ground after sending another apple his way. This continued for some time, the boy hopping from rooftop to rooftop, his pace quickening as shouts and projectiles came his way. After about half an hour, he circled back towards the Row, confident that he had lost his pursuer. He could never show his face on Main, for the policeman would be looking, but that didn’t matter; he was going Zanj to be a worker, leaving his thieving past behind. To hell with you, Capetia, he thought, you were never good to me. Perhaps after he left, the Galvanians would invade and burn half the city down.
As he descended to the street, he suddenly wondered what sort of wife Ginny would make. Would she tend house, wash linen, prepare meals? What degree of domesticity could he expect from a whore? He knew what people like himself expected from their wives—hot meals, children, and an almost slave-like obedience—but he couldn’t see himself stumbling home after a hard day’s labors, a stony-faced patriarch, demanding conformity to the rituals of home and hearth. The whole thought experiment sent a tremor of unease through him which reverberated far more than the threat of an infuriated policeman. He stopped before Bertha’s Beauties and stared up at the sign as though asking it to predict the future.
A Zanjman walked past, a lean man dressed in a buccaneer’s clothes, tricorne hat tilted to one side rakishly. He could tell that the man was from Zanj because his skin was black, darker than the boy’s. The pirate noticed his staring and paused, displaying his white teeth like a flag of surrender. With a wave, he called the boy over.
“You’re a handsome lad,” he said as the boy approached. “Who’s your father?”
“I don’t have a father,” replied the boy, his eyes showing defiance. He was as tall as the Zanjman, though not as heavily built.
“Your mother, then. What is her name?”
The boy did not answer. He was growing angry at the man’s ingratiating grin, which only appeared to be friendly; there was an insouciance to it that sickened his heart.
“Come, come—perhaps I know your mother, eh? Maybe I am your father, hah!”
The boy’s face wore a disgusted look as he tried to get away, but the man caught his hand. His grip was strong; he could feel thick callouses formed from hauling rope.
“Where you going, boy? You thinking of coming to us? You can leave bastards from port to port like your old man. We need a cabin boy. I promise, we don’t bite. At least, not those of us without teeth.”
“I’m going to Zarqu to do an honest man’s work!” yelled the boy, surprising himself at the ardor of his words. The evil smile of the pirate widened, while his eyes narrowed to thin slits.
“There’s nothing honest about you, that’s plain to see. What are you, a pickpocket, a thief? This is a thief’s hand that I feel in my own—it’s got the right sort of slick slenderness to slide into a pocket and out again. I hate to break it to you, boy, but there are plenty of thieves in Zarqu—so many, in fact, that they’re not letting any more in.”
He let the boy go, laughing to himself as he walked away. The boy suddenly had a mad desire to rush the pirate and plunge a knife into his back, but he had no blade on him, and he had already committed one egregious offense. He doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know who I am, he thought. Distraught, he pushed the door open to the whorehouse and stumbled into a chaotic scene.
The madam was wrestling with a man in his knickers, who was shouting curses at her and Ginny, who sat crouched in the corner with her arms around her knees, sobbing. “She took my money, I get to do what I want,” the man kept repeating, his long, stringy hair falling about his eyes as he managed to wrench himself loose from the madam. He gave her a good kick, sending the stout woman to the floor, and then turned on Ginny, hitting her about the head and face with the palms of his hands. The boy saw the fire iron sitting next to the hearth and took it in his hands. He hit the man on the back of the head, the curved point of the iron making solid contact with the skull. Something unintelligible ushered forth from the man’s lips; he was driven to the floor, his body supported by trembling limbs, blood dripping down onto the worn wooden panels. The boy hit him again, this time hard enough that he did not rise from the floor. He would have struck him further if the madam had not seized his hands and pried the poker away. “Rankar save us, you’ve killed him,” she said.
The boy who would soon be the Thief did not have much time to ruminate about committing manslaughter, for the door opened just then, and in stepped the policeman. He never quite figured out how he had tracked him down. A not so reliable source told him years later that while wandering about looking for the boy, the policeman had stumbled upon Alberto, who was coerced into naming Bertha’s Beauties as a place frequented by the dark-skinned pickpocket. It was also said that one of the other whores ran to get a policeman after the conflict between the madam, the man, and Ginny spilled into the foyer. However, the Thief didn’t believe either of those tales. It was simply dumb luck, he figured, as well as the hand of fate, that led the policeman to Bertha’s Beauties at that moment in time. Unarmed, shocked, fatigued, and more than a little emotionally drained, the boy did not flee when the policeman clamped his steely hand around his wrist and led him away.
Capetia clung to conservative notions of justice and resisted efforts to reform their system in the manner of Matera and Zanj, both of which granted a man (and even a woman!) a trial founded on the liberal notion that a person was innocent until proven guilty. Capetia only granted a man a trial if he were a noble, with the purpose of the trial being to show the guilt of the accused, which was assumed. For someone of the boy’s social class, a trial was deemed unnecessary. The boy could not argue that the brothel patron’s death was unmeditated, for no one particularly cared. For the theft of a policeman’s purse alone he was liable to spend years in a labor camp. For the murder of a noble (Cassius was his name, the black sheep of a lesser house), the Labyrinth would be his fate.
The Labyrinth loomed large in the collective mind of the citizenry, who feared banishment to their depths more than any other punishment the state could deal out, including death. Imprisonment in the Labyrinth was, in effect, a death sentence, though the death it wrought was terrible, slow, and full of agony. A dense maze constructed long before the establishment of the Dukedom, the Labyrinth offered a half-life of constant darkness and crazed specters who prowled the skeleton-filled maze hungry, searching for fresh blood.
They fed the prisoners a small amount of slop poured through a plumbing system that drained out in two places close to the entrance. New prisoners mistakenly battled over the gruel, which would barely have kept a dog alive, let alone a man. Most of the condemned died of starvation, yet there were a few who lingered for years, hiding in the deeper places, feeding off rats and the bodies of the deceased. Their existence was theorized rather than proven, for they never spoke and moved quieter than mice, the distinctive crunch of bone emitting from the palpable darkness the only sound to which their phantom natures could lay claim.
They dragged the boy who would become the Thief towards the pit, two policemen pulling his limbs, their chief striding ahead, whistling as though he were taking a walk in the park rather than condemning a boy to a fate worse than death. The boy struggled, screamed, cursed, and pleaded, but they pulled him onward, their faces frozen in stony silence. They were putting an animal out of its misery; they were keeping the peace. It was not a job for soft men, and they thought of themselves as martyrs for the common good. The chief lifted the heavy doors and darkness spewed forth from the pit, along with the unmistakable odor of urine and a deep, throbbing utterance like the painful moan of a great beast. It is a mouth to hell thought the boy with horror. The chief read the look on his face and took hold of his shoulder, a gleam in his eyes.
“Yes, son, that is the pit. The stories they tell, I know some don’t believe. But you are here, now, staring down into the bowels of hell. Did you think of this place when you stole that purse? Did you imagine what it would be like to rot in the dark when you brought iron down upon a nobleman’s skull? You didn’t, did you? You couldn’t have, you aren’t the type for reflection. Let me tell you, boy, that I’ve never cast any man into the pit who didn’t deserve it. Remember that while you’re down there. It is not my fault. The fault lies with you,” he finished, a note of triumph in his voice.
The boy who would become the Thief tried to back away, but the hand that had been on his shoulder was suddenly against his back, and he was falling, down, into the infinite blackness. He landed hard on the floor on his hands and knees, the thin shaft of light vanishing above. His last image was of the jagged X that they had burned into the flesh of his right hand, the ragged imprint of a thief. There was no need to brand him, for no one who was banished to the Labyrinth ever reentered civilized society, yet they had done it all the same. Had he never stolen that purse… the thought vanished as quickly as light had as a shuffling noise echoed through the darkness. Boney hands latched on to him and pulled the boy to his feet.
“What is it? How does it feel?”
“It’s a boy. Fresh, tender.”
“Better than the last one?”
“Yes… just a lad. A poor, lost little lamb.”
“Sad story. Feel its haunches. Give them a squeeze.”
A hand grabbed his buttocks, and he felt hot breath on the back of his neck. Something hit him hard on the back of the head and sent the boy staggering forwards into the arms of a skeletal creature who clutched at his chest, sinking its teeth into his shoulder like a vampire. Despite the utter darkness and the blood dripping down his neck, panic never set in for the boy. There were three of them, he surmised; one behind, one in front, and another to the right. This wasn’t the first time he’d been attacked in the dark. As soon as he felt the air move in front of his face, he brought his knee up and swung his left arm down. A cry ripped through the blackness, and the boy used the distraction to pull the thing that had wrapped itself behind him over his head. He took off then, crashing into walls, winding through passages, steering himself through the abyss with no sense of direction or thought to where he was going, for though there was no way to outrun the darkness, he would still try. Eventually he collapsed in an alcove, trying in vain to suppress his rapid breathing, listening intently for the sound of following footsteps. He didn’t know how long he stayed there—it could have been hours, maybe even days—for the longer one spent without light, the more time became an illusion.
Who am I thought the boy after eons in the dark, seeing shapes shudder and twist into grotesque blobs that taunted him in their formless majesty. What was a shape without anyone to see it? Shapes could be felt still, but what sort of image appeared in one’s mind when light was but a fading memory? It was startling how quickly he forgot. Soon there was no such thing as a person, only disconnected voices traveling across the emptiness. Sounds took on new dimensions, and after a while, he could calculate the distance between himself and whatever ethereal creature he was hearing. In this way, he avoided those that haunted the entrance.
For some time, he survived creeping in the sightless void using his ears and hands. There was not much to think about as his self vanished and was replaced by a thing that only thought in the language of necessity. He ate rats when he could catch them, lapped water from the cold stones, slept in high places, little nooks carved into the maze by unknown hands. His clothes became rags, his teeth loosened in their sockets, and his body lost much of its weight. Death was close at hand, reaching its boney fingers towards his skeletal shoulders, whispering to what remained of his conscious mind how nice it would be to not eat wriggling rodents or feel the constantly burning hole in his stomach.
When he heard the voice, he wasn’t sure whether it was real or if it was Death speaking to him in an airy, soft whisper that promised everlasting relief.
“You don’t have to be here,” it said, seemingly from above.
The boy looked around in terror. No one had spoken to him directly, not since they had dropped him into the pit.
“You are a thief. I can see the mark burned into your flesh.”
“You can see it?” asked the boy, feeling the mark on his hand.
“I can see your black skin and how it hangs off your bones like a dead animal’s hide,” said the voice with a shade of contempt. “I am not like you, nor am I akin to the ghouls that starve in this prison. The only reason I am speaking to you is that destiny hangs around your neck like a noose. Do you want to die, or do you wish to meet fate?”
“You know a way out of here?” asked the boy, incredulous.
“This place is older than anyone knows. It was not always a prison, though it was always a home for death. It was a temple and a tomb for those who wished to sacrifice their lives to something ancient, terrible, and worthy of their awe. When the Emperor came and subdued the remnants of their cult, he sent warriors, priests, and magicians down here to deal with what he dismissed as a monster, a brutish, barely-sentient animal. None of them came back alive, and the temple was sealed and transformed into a tomb where people could be thrown and never seen again. However, the thing that they feared was not trapped; it simply chose to stay hidden, resting, waiting for the end of this world and the start of another.”
The boy didn’t know what to say. He could feel the presence of the voice now, which lent an intoxicating quality to the air. He felt sleepy, lethargic, frozen in place. Every word seemed to hang in his ears.
“I have a gift for you,” continued the voice. “I have not given anyone a gift in a very long time. You are a thief, and a thief can only steal if he is not seen. No one will notice you when you do not wish them to; you will blend into the shadows, you will vanish in a crowd, you will disappear in an alcove, your presence fleeting and never remembered. Give me your hand, and I will give you this gift, but know that you will not be the man you were before. The noose shall tighten, and fate will take what it will.”
The boy felt his hand being seized by something cold and leathery. It touched his mark, and suddenly the darkness was lit by a faint gray light. For a moment he saw it, looming above, a menacing figure with the fanged face of a bat and huge wings that stretched to the ceiling of the cavern. Then it was gone, and he was alone, but the gray light remained, and he realized that he could see. He was the Thief then, though he didn’t realize it. Immediately he wandered through the maze, letting his subconscious guide him as he twisted through tight passageways that wound like the intestinal tract of a great monster. As he wove deeper into the maze, he encountered paintings on the walls, line figures wielding spears against bison and deer, dark handprints streaked beneath the drawings, possibly left in blood. The Thief stopped before a huge mural showing a winged beast towering over a crowd of supplicants, who cut their throats before the thing, which bathed in the pool of their shed ichor. Only then did he reflect on the nature of his gift—what price would he pay, accepting the charity of an eldritch horror? Fate was something he never dreamed of, something he wasn’t sure he believed in. But any price was worth being able to escape.
Suddenly the gray light gave way to the brightness of the moon, and the Thief found himself standing on the edge of a pool, looking across at a waterfall, the sky spread enormous above, the moon a great eye illuminating a new world. He scaled the side of the hole, his hands finding ledges, arms barely strong enough to pull, the taste of rodent on his tongue, motivating him upward. At last he stood on the earth again in the long shadow of an aqueduct, the city that had discarded him a mile in the distance, asleep and unaware of his resurrection. He stared at it like a spurned lover, a poisonous mixture of grief, love, and rage rising to his throat. Tears fell from his eyes as he realized he had believed that he was going to die down in the Labyrinth, his corpse picked apart by things that had used to be men. When he had wept his fill, he picked himself up and limped towards the horizon, leaving the past to lurk in the darkness, his future a jagged scar burning on his hand.
“Thief, can you hear me?”
She looked just like she had when he had thought she was a courtesan—auburn hair, emerald eyes, an oval face of perfect symmetry. Still, he called her “Ginny” as he awoke from the fever dream.
She scoffed, a look of disgust on her face. A strong hand gripped his shoulder and pulled him to his feet.
“Did you see anything? Or was there nothing but the void?” asked the barbarian.
“We stand in his blood, give him room to breathe,” said Fergal.
“He may need help to walk. I can mend flesh, but I cannot restore the lost fluids.”
Blinking, the Thief glanced around. Callimachus stood nearby, a visor pulled back on her head, a cutting torch in her hands.
“Your companions explained your intentions as soon as you left,” she said, putting out the torch, “so I accompanied them down with my gear, which I thought might come in handy if you needed assistance. Josun claims he can break adamant, and though he did bend Cassilda’s shackles, I had to use the torch to free her hands. You owe both of us your life and eternal gratitude, if I may say so.”
“I owe the Thief, and the rest of you as well,” said Cassilda. “There are Capetians here, and that witch Almagest was preparing to use me as a bargaining chip. Let us get the hell out of here before they come looking. I presume, Callimachus…”
“Professor Callimachus,” corrected the Northron woman.
“Um, yes, Professor Callimachus, I presume you would be willing to fly us out of here on your airship? Provided that we can climb these stairs and reach the courtyard without any further difficulties.”
Cassilda snapped her fingers and a green firefly materialized. Callimachus stared in amazement before reaching a hand out to touch the will o’-the-wisp, which deftly moved out of the way.
“A hinkypunk! I feel like a child. What is the mechanism behind its conjuration? Look how it behaves, almost as though it is sentient! You magicians must be privy to principles that we in the Republic have forgotten. Will you share your secrets with me, sorceress, if I let you abscond to the sky?”
“Oh, most certainly!” replied Cassilda, winking at her companions. “I will tell you all that I know of the forbidden magical arts.”
“Then it is agreed,” said Callimachus. “I will hold you to your promise.”
As they reached the top of the stairs, a contingent of soldiers rushed past, their armor rattling noisily, shouts and screams echoing down the hallway. If the soldiers saw the company, they didn’t seem to care who they were or what they were doing, for their attention was focused on the commotion happening further into the castle. The company were nearly to the courtyard when something stumbled out in front of them like an animal, causing all to freeze in their tracks. It was man on all fours, dressed in the uniform of a Beaune soldier, blood dripping from his breast where a broken spear was embedded. The man, however, did not seem to care about his mortal injury; he swiveled his head around as though it were on a loose spindle and stared at them with passive eyes. Hairs stood up on the back of the Thief’s neck, for the man’s movements and mannerisms were profoundly unnatural and possessed a disturbing amount of clumsiness and painful elasticity, giving the impression that the soul which controlled the body hadn’t much familiarity with moving on the mortal plane. Slowly, a grimace crept over the creature’s face. It pointed a broken thumb at Fergal and bared its teeth.
“Envious monster,” it spat in a harsh voice. “Doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know what it does. Soulless, stinking thing of lies and half-truths. You can’t get it back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”
A spear flew and pierced the creature’s head, snapping its neck backward. A hiss issued from its throat, gradually transforming from a moan into a laugh. Its left arm grasped its head by the hair and pulled it straight so that it could look at the company with leering eyes.
Yet Josun was already on the move. He grasped the spear and put his weight into his pull, tearing it from the skull of the monster. The head did not survive further distress, and most of the skull along with its innards splattered to the floor in a red, fleshy heap. A ball of fire hit the creature, tearing its left arm from its body. A second blast removed the remaining arm, but still it crawled forward, smearing its wasted body on the tiles, leaving a long, bloody streak in its wake. Josun leaped aside, and they watched as it crawled down the hall, unwilling to surrender to death.
“There is a necromancer here,” said Cassilda, her voice tinged with fear.
“Someone explain what that was,” asked Callimachus quietly.
“A dead body reanimated by a demon. Such sorcery is forbidden under the pain of death.” The sorceress looked shocked as though she could hardly imagine such a thing. “I didn’t know that anyone knew how to perform such terrible magic other than…” she trailed off, unable to finish her thought.
“Let’s leave now,” said Fergal, eyes on the bloody floor. The words the demon had said to him had left the Aiv shaken. They did as he suggested, winding down another hallway before entering the courtyard. There were soldiers everywhere, shouting orders, running up stairs, lighting torches, and carrying boiling caldrons of oil. It was as though they had entered another time and world, one at war. Archers stood on the walkways shooting arrows out into the darkness; the smells of blood and fire were thick in the air. One soldier stopped and glanced at them. Half of his face had been cleaved in by a mace. All the soldiers, they suddenly noticed, were sporting fatal wounds or obvious deformities.
“Harlot,” it said, staring at Cassilda. “Black-hearted bringer of chaos. He is searching for you.”
All the soldiers turned their gaze towards the company. The Thief felt his stomach clench into something small and unrecognizable.
“We are going to die,” said Fergal, voicing everyone’s thoughts.
Next Chapter: The Necromancer
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