An Illusion of Thieves Read online

  With the thunderous fire inside me damped, the sodden bustle of the Beggars Ring afternoon returned in a terrifying rush. How close must a sniffer be to detect magic? Could Placidio somehow detect that we felt his magic and knew what it was? Such an education life had granted me, and not a scrap of it could help in matters of true importance.

  My confusion provided no answer to his questioning glance but the commonplace.

  “We can’t leave you here. I’ve a honey salve for the burn”—which was scarce more than a red-and-black roughness about the wound—“and I’ve been taught how to stitch a wound, though I’ve no practice.” Yet he wasn’t bleeding. “We could help you to your lodging or ours…”

  He heaved his big body into a semblance of sitting. “No. I’ll just rest here a while. Needs must postpone today’s lesson.”

  “Tomorrow will be soon enough.” I heaved a breath. “Placidio—”

  His hot, blood-streaked hand settled firmly on my arm, silencing me. His dark gaze spoke no threat, but serious intent. “I must ask you not to speak of this. It’s my old granny’s remedy. Wouldn’t dare try it on anyone else.”

  “I’ve a notion what this was,” I said, without averting my gaze. I could not let him mistake me, though I prayed the rain and gloom could mask the danger I spoke. “But I’m no surgeon or alchemist, and thank Lady Fortune, I’ve little experience of healing practices. Never in the world would I consider speaking of this incident, trying to explain it, or attempting such a thing on my own. But someday … Perhaps we can talk more next time you fetch Neri.”

  His returned gaze might have left gashes on my own skin. “Best not.”

  Slowly, he turned his attention to Neri, peering close as if seeing him for the first time. “What of you, lad?”

  Neri scowled at the ugly wound. “I’m thinking you did that just to scare me off or make me look stupid. If I mentioned it to anyone, they’d laugh. I won’t scare. I want to learn blade work.”

  If a man who had just smelled the odors of death’s halls and used a skill damned since the founding of the world to remedy it could possibly laugh, I’d name di Vasil’s coughing grunt just that. His head sagged to the wall at his back. “Believe me, boy, I’ve far better ways to scare you. Until tomorrow then.”

  I rose. “Come, Neri. I’ve work to do. The graces be with you, Segno Placidio.”

  I thought I heard a quiet “in your debt” as we hurried away. But when I glanced back Placidio di Vasil had vanished. He’d not just faded into the shadows. He was gone. We needed more lessons from him than blade work.

  * * *

  To my frustration, the astonishing incident behind the dyer’s yard did not birth any kind of intimacy with the swordmaster. Neri reported that Placidio was all business during their sessions and would permit no other conversation. When I invited the man to share a meal with us or to sit and rest a while, he always had an excuse. He needed to focus on Neri’s training, he said. He professed that he didn’t like to become too familiar with his students or their families, lest it taint his teaching. When I asked if his shoulder was healed, he said duelists believed it was bad luck to speak of injuries.

  I didn’t want to force it. A man who lived in constant danger had a right to make his own rules.

  Thus we moved forward. My days were spent writing. Wills and letters, leases and agreements. Writs of eviction. Records of debts and payments. Boring, tedious work, it left too much space for unwanted thoughts. Of the irretrievable past. Of the unimaginable future. Of some monstrous, looming anxiety I could not name. I discovered that mixing wine into my hawthorn seed tea dulled those intrusive thoughts while still permitting the concentration needed to accomplish the work.

  During the day I could pretend. That I was strong enough to build a life of my own. That I could convince Neri that if we worked at it, we could forget our curse and live without fear.

  Nights were far more difficult. I could not dismiss imaginings of Cino racked with coughing like the potter’s child down the road, or a starving Dolce allowing someone like Lawyer Cinnetti to have his way so she could eat. In the dark I ached for the sharp-edged brilliance of every hour I’d spent in Sandro’s company and the secure comfort of each night spent enfolded in his arms. At night I felt my mind dulling like neglected silver, and the murky intelligence of superstition and rumor replacing the complexities of history, politics, and grand intrigues.

  At night I saw the truth.

  At night, I omitted the hawthorn tea and let wine drive me to oblivion.

  Placidio’s arrival in the mornings lit the only spark of curiosity in me. His magic was a mystery and a wonder. Such power. So clear, so clean, so … huge, it had felt. It reminded me of an evening a few years previous, when Micola and I shopped in the Market Ring. We’d seen a man hauled away in wire rope, accused of sorcery. Bystanders said he had run around the night market creating music from fire—each torch, lantern, or cookfire sounding like a different instrument.

  When red-robed investigators of the Philosophic Confraternity questioned the witnesses, most said the sound was like the screeching of wounded animals or the wailing of demons. But a few insisted it was a clear and glorious harmony that made them forget they were tired or hungry or unhappy. The philosophists ordered their praetorians to beat those few, and warned them to come to the Academie for proper cleansing. I’d assumed the demon sorcerer had mesmerized them and only those who spoke of screeching heard true. What if I’d been wrong?

  “Neri,” I said one night as I sat in the dark with my wine flask, “when you use magic, does it feel the way Placidio’s did, like fire and color and … clarity?”

  “Aye,” he said, drowsy. “Something like. Not quite so grand, but like.”

  “I didn’t know it could be like that. Mine feels like a nest of cold vipers deep inside. When I touch them they squeeze out droplets of venom that infest blood and bone. And always I’m left with chills and an aching head. I thought that’s what everyone experienced—the evil of it.”

  “Never felt evil from the magic. The thieving … I knew that wasn’t righteous, but I’ve never understood why everyone believes the magic itself’s so wicked. Maybe when someone uses it to burn a village or bury a quarry, it’s the person who’s evil, not the magic.”

  My mother believed any person carrying the taint was evil.

  We had lived near the sea when I was small. While Mam nursed my brother Primo, Da would sit me in his lap and tell me the gods-and-heroes tales he loved. I adored those hours. I felt safe and special, his voice booming in my chest as he held me. He prided himself on his excellent recall of every tale he’d ever heard, and he wasn’t so burdened with worry then as later on when his work could not keep pace with the infants that kept coming. But young as I was, I wasn’t fond of the stories themselves, much preferring birds and cats and small, adventurous girls to evil monsters and righteous bloodshed.

  Sometimes Da would let me tell him a story. Delighted, I would solemnly pronounce that I would speak the Lay of the Desperate Thief or The Mountebank’s Journey to Leviathan’s Lair, only the desperate thief would be a hungry crow trying to steal a pie from Sallichi the baker’s window, and the mountebank a clever fox who prowled a stream bank in search of a talking fish. Da would frown and tell me to speak the story correctly, pretending to be offended at my silliness. But his arms around me would say different and when he didn’t think I saw, his lips would twitch and almost smile.

  One stormy night though, Mam laid Primo in his basket and asked Da what was that idiot story he was telling me.

  “The Hunt of Karylis and Atladu,” he said. “A sea storm at night requires a tale of the mighty Atladu.”

  “Atladu is not a cat!” she snapped. “And why would he be hunting a frog in company with a swan?”

  “No, no, woman. That’s one of Romy’s tales, not mine.”

  It wasn’t merely that Da was confused. He told three different stories that night, swearing he told them as he always did—ye
t all turned out to be nonsense stories of cats and birds, of scorpions that sang and trees that walked. His horror, when he looked at me and realized that he could not recover the right words, no matter how he tried, had felt just like the earthshaking that had flattened half our village and collapsed our roof.

  I couldn’t recall what using the magic felt like as I stole my father’s stories, but I well remembered him saying, “Virtue save us, ’tis only demon magic would do such a thing.”

  And I well remembered how my howling mother snatched me from his arms that night, dashed into the rain and sleet, down to the black, churning sea. I kicked and screamed as she held me down in the cold water. As the salt waves choked and blinded me, she screamed, “Demon, demon, demon,” and squeezed my neck.

  Da dragged me away from her. He carried me home mumbling, “Unrighteous woman. Unrighteous to slay your own blood.”

  Though a stiff-necked servant of the law, Da refused to slaughter his own child. Instead, he moved us to Cantagna lest someone else had noted my perversion. Hiding us in the crowded Beggars Ring, he taught me to read, and made sure I knew the thing I must never do—tell a falsehood while touching someone’s flesh, lest my evil magic corrupt a mind. He and Mam seeded one child after another as if to make up for the flawed thing they had brought into the world. But he never told any of us another story, never held any of us in his lap. And he never remembered his god stories. Not that night; not ever.

  How was it possible such evil as magic could heal a poisoned wound or save a decent man’s life? It was as if the world I understood had reversed itself, as profoundly as it had on that night by the sea.

  “Neri.”

  “Mmm.” So not yet asleep.

  “When Placidio lay there dying, before you spotted his bag, I was going to ask you to use your magic to find it. Could you have done that? Would you have?”

  “Certain, I could and would have done. Whyever would I let him die if my magic could do aught to prevent it?”

  It was easy for me to forgo magic in the name of safety, because my talent felt like a disease, and did nothing to balance the wickedness of corrupting a mind. But if Neri’s magic was like Placidio’s … if he could learn to be careful and use it only for important things when there was no alternative … do good with it … why shouldn’t he? Why would it feel so marvelous to him if it was so dreadful? Maybe it was something broken in me that made my magic so awful.

  “I have to deliver some eviction notices to Notary Renzo tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “I’m thinking—just this once—we might try what you suggested. I could hide your luck charm and let you find it. Only I’ll hide it somewhere you’ve never been. If we were ever to face something like Placidio’s situation again, in a strange place, we ought to know if you could manage it.”

  The breathless dark told me he was still awake, though he didn’t answer for a long while. “Romy, are you drunk again? Seems we’re going through a barrel of wine every—”

  “Maybe a little drunk,” I said. “But I just … I need to know.”

  Where did the true evil lie? In the intent, or in the magic itself, or in the soul that made use of magic?

  8

  YEAR 987: LATE AUTUMN

  The city bells rang the evening anthem as Neri and I entered the Temple of Atladu and Gione, a towering ruin in a blighted area of the Market Ring. A rumble of distant thunder gave warning we oughtn’t stay too long.

  “Have you ever been here?”

  Neri’s nailed boots clicked on the faded mosaics of the rotunda. “Nah. Mam said it was cursed. Or haunted. She were always spooked about something.”

  “No ghosts here,” I said. “It never housed the dying as the wool house did. This was built in a prosperous time.”

  I told the story in the words it had been told to me, back when I was eighteen and the mosaic of history, myth, and art had come alive for me. “In those peaceful days, some came to believe that the Unseeable Gods had returned at last and merely awaited our notice. The hopeful built temples like this one all over the Costa Drago, tall spare structures that shaped the light. They filled them with artworks that rejected the forms of common life in favor of the ethereal and sublime.”

  I pointed up to the astonishing dome, its soaring windows bereft of glass. Peeling frescoes revealed only bits of once-brilliant color.

  “They added fountains and channels to carry Father Atladu’s waters, and orchards and gardens to honor Mother Gione and her bounteous earth. They designed labyrinths to prevent demons from infesting the space. But just as the temples were completed, the plague struck. Wave after wave of disease scoured the world over a span of seventy years. By the time the last body was burnt, the Costa Drago had lost half of our people, and no one believed in benevolent gods anymore, seeable or unseeable.”

  Indeed, in the recovering world, merchants and bankers like Sandro’s family had found more profitable concerns than myths and superstitions and gods who could not bother to make themselves known. The temples of the Unseeable Gods fell to ruin.

  “I was brought here once to see the art,” I said, pointing to a bronze relief that depicted a willowy Gione tending a forest, while the unnaturally tall and slender Atladu bathed her with rain. “The style is very different than that of modern artists, who imagine true muscle and bone beneath the skin. Both are beautiful, but—”

  “He brought you here,” said Neri, no more interested in the elegant sculpture than he was in the dust piled in the corners. “Il Padroné.”

  “Yes.”

  Only with effort did my voice remain steady as I recalled the light in Sandro’s eyes as I embraced the beauty and despair of this place. No image, certainly no structure, had ever so touched my heart. On that day, here amid failed hopes of the sublime, Sandro first shared with me his vision of a city renowned for justice, prosperity, and beauty. “Gods, how I loathe this noxious, unending contest for power,” he’d said. “So much time wasted. Imagine a Cantagna invested with works as beautiful as this, but robust and real, something to inspire even those in the Beggars Ring to full humanity, as elegant abstractions never will.”

  He believed this fervently. Growing bold in our deepening intimacy, I had suggested that people—even Asylum Ring or Beggars Ring folk—were not children forever to be guided, and that they needed more than noble vision to replace their homes and businesses destroyed for his great projects. I could not but think of my three brothers who died trying to prevent the Shadow Lord’s servants from burning tenements for the new marble works and coliseum. Even then he heeded my opinions. It was after that conversation Sandro began his listening walks around the town in disguise. That was when I began to believe in his vision, as well as the man himself.

  “Will you ever tell me about him?”

  “No.”

  “Romy, I—when I took the rubies, I didn’t mean to ruin—to hurt you so.”

  I couldn’t say it didn’t matter. “There’s naught to be done about it.”

  “He knows about me. For certain?”

  “Yes.” At the least he suspected. But he could not arrest Neri as a sorcerer without admitting that he himself stood in violation of the First Law of Creation—the single eternal, immutable, unifying law of the Costa Drago—by ignoring those suspicions. Yet time could change that determination. Sandro was ever his own harshest judge—which did not mean he let the exactitudes of law or over-righteousness deter actions he deemed necessary or desirable.

  “Does he know about your magic? Is he going to come after us someday?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know.” The wishing dream that Sandro yet loved me and would fetch me back had long faded into wine-soaked despair. “He granted you a parole. For now, we should read that as a mercy.”

  Never in my hearing had Sandro questioned the extermination of magic users. He did not subscribe to the popular belief that every ill in the world could be laid at the feet of Dragonis’s descendants. And indeed when we talked of history, I learned how fear of ma
gic could fuel such accusations as easily as firm evidence. Yet our mountains still belched fire and ash or flowed with molten rock that could swallow cities, and the earth shook with fury that could destroy whole provinces or change the course of rivers, and no one could explain it. Sandro had come to the belief that the fear, jealousy, and corruption magic bred was a certain evil—and until someone could refute the beliefs that had driven us through millennia, the world was better off without sorcerers.

  How long had he known about Neri? I had believed I knew all his secrets.

  Only half a year since my exile, and Alessandro di Gallanos already felt as remote as Atladu and Gione. He seemed more like these fleshless myths than the man of muscle and sinew who had sat naked in my bed, hunched over parchment and pen, sketching his ideas for a theater where any citizen could hear poetry or plays or music. He had tossed his attempts aside that night. Laughing, he had kissed me and sworn me never to tell of his awkward scribblings, lest his detractors have him thrown off the Sestorale’s Commission on Public Artworks.

  Neri’s parole ensured we had to remain in Cantagna. To imagine the Shadow Lord would leave two sorcerers loose in his city forever, risking his own downfall if his connection to them ever became known, was idiocy. Unless he loved me. But that, too, was idiocy. He had made it clear.

  “So, are you ready to show me what you can do?” I snapped—harsher than I intended. “There are a hundred chapels, fountain rooms, vestibules, gardens, and labyrinths in this temple. Your charm is hidden in one of them. I brought it here this morning.”

  Neri held out his arm.

  As my fingers circled his bony wrist, he closed his eyes. His sinews grew taut. But I detected nothing else, even when he started walking. If there was a path to the charm, his magic would lead him down it. If not, the magic would allow him to pass through obstacles like walls of solid brick. I’d seen it.

  Neri and I had last played with magic together as children. The sister and three brothers born between us had shown no demonic taint. Da wasn’t sure about Neri until a day Mam threatened me with a beating for stealing a packet of cherries from the chest that was our larder. A distraught three-year-old Neri had walked straight through one of our stone walls to fetch the pits from the alley where he’d hidden them.