The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids (16 page)

Chapter Thirty

“I suppose you’re coming with me, then?” I asked Holgren as we made our way towards the Necropolis.

“Well, it
is
on the way home,” he replied. He was smiling, but his hand was pressed against the wound in his side.

“Got any magic for healing?” I asked. My back was still on fire, and the gash in my thigh wasn’t much better. Both were going to severely restrict my mobility in a fight.

“Not my specialty, I’m afraid.”

“Any idea what to do about Heirus?”

“Well, you have two options, it seems. Give him the toad. Or make him take it.”

“I just wish I knew what he wanted it for,” I muttered.

Holgren gave a short chuckle. “What would the king of assassins want with a god-forged weapon, I wonder?’

“That’s just it,” I replied. “I hate to say this again, but you didn’t
see
him. I did. He doesn’t
need
any magic blade to be the deadliest thing on two legs. It’s not going to make him a better killer, Holgren. You can’t improve on perfection.”

“He obviously made an impression on you.”

I shrugged, and darted out to hail a hack that had just turned the corner. At least I wouldn’t have to walk the entire way to my doom.

~ ~ ~

The gates were open when we got there.

“Why don’t you go on home?” I asked Holgren as we walked in.

“I think I’ll stay with you.”

“There’s no point sticking your neck out. This isn’t your fight, never was.”

“So you’ve decided to fight?” he replied, avoiding my point.

“It’s just an expression.” We got to the hill, started climbing towards the Weeping Mother statue. It really was quite homely.

“I think I know you well enough now to say that you’re wrong. It’s become fairly plain that you, Amra Thetys, given the choice between fighting and capitulating, will pick a fight every damned time.”

“So you’re saying I’m stubborn.”

“Oh, yes, very much so. Contrary as well.”

“No I’m not.”

“Don’t look now, but you’re being stubborn. And contrary.”

“I know you are, but what am I?”

That got a laugh out of him. But it died away quickly and his eyes got hard. I followed his gaze.

Heirus was standing directly beneath the Weeping Mother. He looked bored, and impatient.

As we closed to the last few yards, he spoke.

“You have it. Give it to me.” He held out a hand.

“I have it,” I replied. “But I need to know what you’re going to do with it.”

He cocked his head, and a confused look flitted across his face. “You know I can and will kill you, yet you continue to behave as though your needs, your
questions
matter.”

“The question itself matters, not who it belongs to.”

“Why?”

“Because I know you don’t need this Blade to become more powerful. You are the most deadly man alive. So, Heirus, Red Hand, what do you intend to
do
with it?”

“An excellent question,” said the Arhat, who had suddenly appeared a few yards away.

~ ~ ~

“I told you to keep that one away from me,” hissed Heirus.

“And I told you he's not my dog,” I replied.

The Arhat approached. “So, Kingmaker, Godslayer, why not answer the question? You well know what will happen if the Blade is loosed. What do you want with it?”

“What I want with the Blade is none of your concern.”

“You know that is untrue. I am tasked with guarding it.”

“And you have failed.”

“Not yet.”

Heirus moved, and suddenly the Arhat had a knife in his gut.

“Now you have failed,” sneered Heirus into his face. That’s when Holgren broke the magical chain around my neck.

“Remember,” he whispered as it fell to the ground, “don’t kill yourself.” Then it hit the grass and everything changed.

With a thought, the world stood still. I looked around me, and it was like looking at a painting. Holgren stood, lips still shaped around the last sound he’d uttered. The Arhat stared into Heirus’s eyes, his face only just beginning to show the agony of steel in his intestines.

I made two knives appear and began to walk towards them. “Come on then, Red Hand,” I said and his head whipped around to me. “Let’s see how good you really are.”

He smiled and pulled his knife out of the Arhat. He actually saluted me with it. And then he flew at me,
still
a blur.

With a thought, I forced Holgren’s magic to match him, and met his thrust from a half-decent guard position, knocking his knife hand away to my left with my wrist and following it with a thrust of my own with the knife in my right hand. But he had already spun away.

“You cannot sustain such magic. Either the toll it takes will kill you or I will. You cannot win.”

I returned to the
Aquila
guard position, sideways to him, left arm and leg extended and right arm above my head, circling slowly, ready to strike from on high. It had been a long, long time since I’d been in anything like a formal knife duel. But you never forget. He was right, though; I could already feel the thirst building, as if I’d had nothing to drink for a long, hot day. He could just toy with me until I collapsed.

So I attacked.

I pushed the magic even harder, and came in with a showy feint to his eyes with my right while I drove my left down toward his groin. He jumped back, and back again, and gave me a shallow slice across the back of my left hand for my trouble.

“I could have had your thumb,” he said, and I knew he was right.

I was good with a blade. He was much, much better.

When the cramps started I couldn’t think what they were for a moment. Then I realized they were hunger pangs; hours, days perhaps of hunger compressed into an instant. I gritted my teeth against them, and the aching flesh of my back, and the ragged gash across my thigh, and pushed the magic once more, and flung my right hand blade. I was hoping—praying, really—that once it left my hand it would not suddenly slow.

It didn’t.

It took him in the throat. He hadn’t even tried to block it.

His eyes got wide. His mouth sagged. He made choking sounds.

And then he pulled my knife out of his neck and laughed at me.

There was no hole in his neck. There wasn’t even any blood.

I sat down on the grass and put my head in my hands.

“Can I have my toad
now
?” he asked.

Chapter Thirty-One

“Kerf’s balls.” I looked up and he was just standing there, smiling at me. Behind him, to my right, the Arhat was still dying by inches, a crimson stain spreading ever so slowly across the saffron robes over his stomach.
Why didn’t you change forms? It might have given you a chance
. But he wasn’t ever going to answer that question now.

I glanced behind me to my left, and there was Holgren, hand still raised from breaking the chain, infinitesimally moving back to his side.

I let go of the magic. The Arhat fell to his knees, then rolled onto his side. He was gone. Foolish boy. What had he hoped to accomplish?

Holgren came to stand behind me, and I could feel his power. He’d summoned up some sort of magic, and it was making the little hairs on the back of my neck fairly twist and jump.

I dropped my forearms on my knees, considered the cut Heirus had made across the back of my hand, instead of taking my thumb. Beads of blood had formed along its length.

Blood.

“You want the toad?” I asked him. “There’s still one more I think you’ll have to go through.”

“Who? The mage?”

I shook my head, and wiped the back of my bloodied hand across the emerald cemetery grass. “They say you should never, ever spill blood in the Necropolis,” I told him.

“Oh, really?” he replied. “And why is that?”

“Because the Guardian will notice. And investigate. And it’s got a nasty disposition.”

“Oh, I do,” said a voice like a thousand tombs yawning open. “That I surely do.”

It sounded as if the voice had come from above. I glanced up, and the Weeping Mother statue stared back down at me. She had changed.

There was no pity or compassion in that badly carved face now. It had been replaced with cruelty, and madness. A cold, cold wind started up, and the light bled out of the sky.

“Who shed blood here in this sanctified place?” she asked, “and whose blood was shed?”

“My blood,” I replied. “His knife,” I said, pointing at Heirus who, I have to say, wasn’t looking all that bothered.

“I do not ask the
living
,” she told me with contempt.

And the tombs opened, and the dead poured forth.

I looked down the hill and saw Corbin walking towards me. Behind him were the three armsmen, and a whole host of the dead I neither knew nor cared to.

“Who shed blood?” asked the Guardian again, and half a hundred fingers, in various states of decomposition, pointed at Heirus.

“Whose blood was shed?” And the fingers moved to point at me.

“Don’t forget him,” I said, pointing to the Arhat.

“His blood has not yet fallen.” The Guardian replied.

“Well that’s splitting hairs.”

“Rules are rules.” She turned to face Heirus. “By what cause or right do you spill blood here?”

He sniffed. “An oath forsworn.”

“What oath?”

“This one promised to bring me the statue she holds in her shirt, but refuses to give it up. Thus is she forsworn.”

That massive head swivelled back to me. “Is this true?”

“I said I'd bring it, not give it to him!”

“Now who is the splitter of hairs? Tut-tut.” She shook her massive finger at me, then looked at the gathered dead. “Who here witnessed this oath?”

A dozen mouldering hands raised. Including, I noticed, Corbin’s. He had come to stand beside me.

“Thanks a lot,” I told him, and he shrugged.

“Here is my judgment,” said the Guardian. “The woman, being known to the honest dead, and having her blood spilled where it should not be, may go free.” Pause. “
After
she gives up what she agreed to, here on this sanctified ground.”

Bloodied, near-mad with thirst, aching with hunger and my wounds, I swore in disgust and pulled the hated toad from inside my shirt. I threw it at Heirus’s feet.

“Choke on it,” I said.

He bent down to pick it up, and Corbin whispered in my ear, voice slurred a little by decomposition: “When the time comes, do not let her have the Blade. We are her jailers as much as she is our Guardian.
Keep the Blade from her grasp
.”

Heirus held the toad up before his face. “Finally,” he said. Then he began to whisper words that stirred the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Kerf’s crooked staff,” I swore. “He’s a
mage
too?”

As Heirus spoke, the golden toad began to melt. The gold ran down his arm like mud and pattered on the grass, not in the least hot.

“Oh, that’s a nice trick,” murmured Holgren, and then all at once it was free, and that sickening feeling I’d felt when I’d tried to sleep with it in my hiding place in the wall suddenly beat down on me, on everyone there, living and dead.

Heirus held it in his hand, a shimmering, writhing thing that seemed to take on a hundred forms with each heartbeat, shedding cold blue sparks and jags of light that died out a hand’s breadth away from it.

He turned and smiled at me, gave me another mocking duellist’s salute.

“You asked me what I planned to do with Abanon’s Blade, thief. I will tell you. I will finally, finally exit this sorry world, and be free of it and all you mayflies. Farewell.”

Then he plunged the knife into his own heart.

As he crumpled to the ground, Corbin pushed me forward, shouting “Now!” in that creaky, slurred dead man’s voice. The Guardian was already reaching down to pluck the Blade from Heirus’s corpse. I turned the push into a lunge.

My shaking, bloodied hand got there just before her giant stone one.

And Abanon began to whisper to me, driving for a time all sense from my mind.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The next thing I can recall: I am stumbling, shambling. I do not trust my feet or my hands or my eyes. I do not trust my breath or the taste of my own sour spit. The Blade is talking, whispering, and it has terrible, terrible things to tell me. I try to drown it out “No. No no no no no,” I say, but it doesn’t listen to me.

I am not in the Necropolis. I do not remember leaving. But I remember the Guardian, furious, and Corbin telling me to go to the temple. I remember Holgren pounding the Guardian with his magics, distracting her so that I could escape. I do not remember what happened to either of them.

Just get to the temple. Bath’s temple. Just get to the temple, that’s what the small part of my mind is saying. The part that’s not being drowned by the hate, an ocean of bile pouring into my soul.

This is what the Arhat dealt with since he was ten years old? I will light candles for him in the temple of the departed. I swear it. I swear it. If I survive.

The Blade was shifting, shifting, now no bigger than a needle, now as long as a spear. I had to hold tight, very tight as it writhed in my hand.

And the Goddess’s Blade whispered to me all the way.

—all these people on the street. Kill them. They deserve it and it would be so easy. Humanity, cockroaches all, deserving nothing more than being trod underfoot. What vile, foul sacks of meat, their breathing and grasping and fornicating and defecating. Shoving food into their faces, shoving their genitals at each other, shoving out more wailing, hairless monkeys at every turn who grow and grow and do more of the same. A blight. This city is a blight, a running sore on the face of the world. Scour it. These maggots deserve extinction—

An unending monologue of hate. It was all in my own voice. And the worst of it was that most of me did not disagree. I knew I was nodding my head, even as my mouth moaned out its ‘no no no.’

—fucking wagon, see how it’s just been left there to block the street? Thoughtless, careless self-absorbed, self centered apes all of them, just left to block the street and it’s
in the fucking way
but it doesn’t have to be—

The hand that holds the Blade twitches and the wagon just disintegrates into dust, along with the horse that was hitched to it. “NO no no no,” I wail, and start to run.

What if a child darts out in front of me, or an old man blocks my way?

My natural impatience, magnified a thousand-fold, will be the death of—anyone. Everyone.

What if the sun shines too brightly in my eyes? What if I breathe a breath of less-than-fresh air? No. No no no. I can’t carry this burden. I’m no Arhat. I cannot hold this Blade.

I run faster.

I hug the Blade tight, lest I lose hold of it accidentally again.

Soon Bath’s temple appeared before me, and my ‘no no no’ gave way to relieved sobs.

But Bath turned me away.

~ ~ ~

Bath’s acolyte was waiting for me on the steps of the temple. His look was serene.

“My Master cannot accept this burden,” he said somehow through sewn lips.

“Oh, gods, please. I can’t. I can’t. I hate you. I hate him. I fucking hate him and I hate your fucking secrets you pile of stinking—” I slap my hand over my mouth.

—miserable shit never meant to help anyone or anything his only secret is the terrible things he does to worshippers in a dark back room while his god watches—

He leaned forward and put a hand on my shoulder. I hated him for it. But then I hated him for everything.

“What do you imagine would happen if a god who knew all the secrets of the world, of creation itself, felt the hate that you feel right now? No, Amra; this burden cannot come to rest with Bath.”

“Then where?” I choked out. “I can’t. I can’t—”

“No,” he said gently. “You can’t either. But Bath knows a secret that he wants me to share with you.” And he leaned down and whispered in my ear.

He whispered for a long time, for all that it was a single word. The word was very long, and it was forged in the fires of creation. I say it was a word, because that’s how Bath chose to express it to me, but really it was a single, pure, undiluted concept.

No, it was not love. Love is not the opposite of hate. In fact, they’re closer than you might think.

What
is
the opposite of love, you ask? Or hate, for that matter? I have no clue. Bath didn’t share that secret with me.

What Bath shared with me was the undiluted truth of Apathy, the rat-fucking bastard, and it worked.

And what is Apathy? Best I can describe it is fatalism mixed with utter indifference. Things are as they are. Things will be as they will be. No point thinking about them, much less worrying. No point doing much of anything at all, as a matter of fact.

The acolyte whispered that terrible Word into my ear, and I collapsed on the steps like a puppet with cut strings.

The Blade poured its poison into my ear, and I no longer cared. Not about that, and not about anything else, either. Left to my own devices, I would have lain there on the steps of the temple until I starved to death or died of thirst. I was a motiveless shell. My body breathed, my heart beat, but beyond that I did nothing, because I was indifferent to everything. A mote of dust drifted into my eye and it was meant to be so. Blinking was futile.

Bath had pulled the Blade’s fangs. He’d also turned me into, essentially, a breathing corpse.

“My Master did bid you be careful of the Eightfold Goddess, Amra,” he said as he grabbed me under the armpits and began to drag me up the steps. “Well. Bath is the lord of secrets. He keeps them well. He will keep you well as well. What is another secret to Bath?”

He was dragging me up to the inside of the temple where, presumably, I’d disappear for good. Just another secret kept. Every blade needs a sheath.

Hate and apathy. The unstoppable against the immovable, and me being ground down in between. We were almost at the top of the stairs.

“Secrets are power,” the Acolyte whispered in my ear. “How does it feel to be powerless? Useless and used? A tool for powers far greater than you?”

I felt hate for him, then. No, I felt… not hate. Rage.

I felt rage. And beneath that, terror.

Against the lifeless nullity of apathy and the corrosive torrent of poison that was the Blade’s hate, rage blossomed in me. It burned and it cut and slowly made its way to my mouth as a scream.

I am no one’s tool.

The echoes of that awful Word he had poured into my ear burned away to nothing, to silence. The Blade’s vile whispering stuttered, stopped. The acolyte stopped dragging me and whispered a final time in my ear.

“Some secrets cannot be shared. Some secrets must be discovered.”

I lay there on the steps and gasped, trembling with rage. I felt I had to stay still, or I would burn the world down.

The Blade had stopped its ceaseless, restless shifting. It was a throwing knife now. Perfectly weighted for my hand. For the first time it addressed me directly.

I will be your tool. I was
meant
to be your tool. Use me, Amra.

“Shut up,” I told it. And it did.

The rage inside me screamed, inchoate, on and on. If I gave into it I knew the world would burn. I knew it. I could not let it slip its leash. Slowly, with great care, I sat up on the steps and looked at the acolyte.

“I know a secret or two as well,” I told him through clenched teeth. “Secrets have no power. Not by themselves. It’s the
control
of secrets that’s power. Control is power, isn’t it—Bath?”

He nodded. “Some secrets cannot be imparted. They must be discovered.”

“And if I had not discovered this secret? Would You have salted me away in some secret place, to absorb the Blade’s hate forever?”

“Yes,” he said, without the least hesitation.

“At least You’re honest.” I climbed to my feet and carefully started down the steps. I couldn’t look at the god of secrets. The rage inside me wanted to reduce him to ashes. A rage that was wholly human, wholly mine.

“What will you do with the Blade?” he called after me.

I kept walking, but said over my shoulder, “I could tell You it’s a secret, but really it’s just none of Your fucking business.”

His laughter followed me down the strangely deserted street.