An Illusion of Thieves Read online

  “Come, damizella, hurry,” snapped Dumond.

  An arrow whizzed past my cheek.

  The painter reached for my arm with his fiery palm. I backed away, but the fingers that clamped my wrist and dragged me toward the dark opening did not burn. No living blaze charred my sleeve, though fire ripped through my veins, inflamed my chest, seared my lungs, charged the world with color. The faded hues of the temple took on the sunlight’s brilliance and washed together as if Dumond’s paint pots had spilled over my head. Magic.

  Glory! I felt invincible, enlightened, alive. Surely the secrets of the divine lay just beyond my seeing.

  “Blink, woman. Breathe.” The man spoke through clenched jaws and yanked my arm again. “Take another step. You’ll get us snatched.”

  I staggered forward. Squeezed my eyes shut. Released a breath, then opened them again. A grim Dumond stood one step below me on a stair landing, his color-stained hand latched to my arm. His cheeks and brow were ash gray and furrowed, his black eyes a wasteland.

  We had entered a square tower. Homely scenes of fountains, rivers, and ponds adorned the walls, seeming to glow of their own light. But between us and the opposite wall opened a fearsome plunge to unseen depths. The stair clung to the ancient walls, descending to a landing at each corner, like the one where we stood—a pause before resuming its downward path. Above us, bars of afternoon light fell on us from high, narrow windows and the sunny chamber where the stair had its origin. The Stair of the Well. We were still in the temple. Not three hours previous, I’d descended these very steps to hide the charm.

  “Get out the way, Romy!”

  Neri stood just behind me, holding open an oaken door that had no relationship to the stair landing.

  I stepped back, twisting my neck. To left and right, like a phantasm superimposed on the tower wall behind me, stretched a ghostly columned gallery, the image of the place we’d just left behind, stained with a purplish light.

  “Feeling his magic, eh?” My brother’s grin spoke his wonder.

  “Get the canvas!”

  Dumond’s spattered canvas was just visible through the doorway. Neri reached through, snatched it, and flung it to the metalsmith, then gave the heavy slab of oak a great shove.

  A purple shadow coalesced about the door and thick fingers plunged through the gap between door and jamb, transforming Neri’s good cheer into panic.

  Grunting with renewed effort, Neri shoved on the oaken slab. Dumond hissed and let go of my arm. Heat, color, enlightenment, and invincibility vanished. He squeezed around me and joined Neri, trying to push the intruding attackers back so the door could close.

  I snatched my knife from its sheath and slashed at the intruding hand and broad forearm. Flesh and tendon ripped. The blade grated on bones. I wrenched it out and struck again. Curses bellowed as profuse as the flowing blood. The mangled arm jerked back.

  With Neri’s ferocious growl, the massive door thudded shut. He shot a bolt which looked entirely inadequate just as the door shuddered with a massive blow.

  A second thud. The nullifier carried an axe.

  A third blow splintered the wood, a crack seaming the oak from the latch to the top.

  Dumond shoved Neri and me down the steps and slapped his hands on the door. “Sigillaré!”

  As suddenly profound as a punch below the breastbone, so did the door, its frame, and the ghostly gallery vanish, their removal significant and complete. Only the tower wall and the stair remained.

  “Come on,” said Dumond, heading downward. “There’s no going back.”

  “To leave the temple we must go up,” I said, standing firm.

  “But to retrieve the cause of all this, we go down,” insisted Dumond. “If we hurry, we can get out the lower processional door before they have all exits blocked.”

  “What do you mean, the cause? Did you come here to set off another explosion?” No matter this astonishing escape, I could not partner with a murderer.

  “I’m no assassin,” said Dumond. “I was finishing a piece of work over to a guildhall. On my way home I noticed one of my luck charms was abandoned here and thought to stop in and fetch it. But the streets are crawling with the damnable philosophists and their damnable praetorians and their twice-damned nullifiers. They must have sniffed traces on me and followed me in. Hounded me up here instead of where I was headed.”

  He squinted up at us. Understanding dawned. “The luck charm is yours.”

  An angled bar of light illumined Neri’s guilty face. “Mine,” he said. “Romy hid it here.”

  “Told you to keep it with you, didn’t I, boy? What good are luck charms when they’re not on your person? Bad luck, that’s what. If they’re left about, there’s a bit of the working tugs at me, so’s I can retrieve it. But it’s likely quicker if the lady—” He gestured for me to lead our party downward. “Move on. I swear I had naught to do with murderous explosions.”

  But I was still flummoxed by his admission. “You gave a child a magical charm? A charm that could attract a sniffer!” And I’d kept one in the Shadow Lord’s house for nine years and left it with his wife! “Are you mad?”

  “The charms deflect sniffers, lady witch. Mayhap that’s how the child grew up this far.” Dumond’s patience seemed near an end. “I happened to unlock my storeroom one night and found a boy nicking a silver bracelet. Then he leads me a chase through places he should’na been able to get through. Being a spit more clever than a boy with no more years than fingers, I caught him anyways. A sniffer would have had him right there. A sniffer’s not going to find any magic on the charm, even if it’s in his gods-cursed paw. But I worry the casting of it might lead ’em to me. That’s why we’ve got to fetch it. So … if you please.”

  He jerked his head to the downward stair.

  Still uneasy, I sped downward. All Neri and I knew of magic was gossip and rumor from those as ignorant as we were. And those tales were the same whether the teller sat in a Beggars Ring tavern or the Shadow Lord’s salon.

  A quick visit to Veitan the Gateward’s little statue and the charm was safely returned to Neri’s pocket. Dumond led us through a lower entry, where temple servitors had once come and gone, and devotees had assembled to carry water from Atladu’s spring up to the great hall.

  We soon cleared the temple precincts and scuttered through side streets into the bustling heart of the Market Ring. The atmosphere was subdued this evening. The cheerful cries of barkers, the back-and-forth shouts of hagglers, the bustle and laughter of folk nearing the end of the day had been replaced by frowns, sharp words, and furtive glances.

  The lamplighters were setting to their evening tasks. The twilit sky was clear. The thunder we’d heard in the afternoon must have been the explosion … magic.

  In the thickest part of the crowd around the noodle vendors, Dumond pulled us close together and lowered his voice. “I’ll make my own way from here. No need you being involved if someone does get the notion to follow me. Hold your power close. Whether these assassins were truly sorcerers or someone who wanted the deed blamed on sorcerers, the hunt is on tonight. People will die.”

  “So you’re truly not one of them.”

  “Trying to explode the Shadow Lord? Demonshite, no! Life’s troublesome enough.”

  “You said you were working at a guildhall … using magic?”

  “I use a bit of my talent time to time when it serves my business. Likely more than’s wise. But the surest way for one like us to get himself dispatched to the Executioner is to mess with the affairs of the mighty.”

  I was inclined to believe him. He’d seen what Neri could do years ago and not exposed him. I certainly wasn’t going to accuse anyone of assassination without more evidence.

  “Thank you, Segno Dumond,” I said. “We were playing a dangerous game. If our ignorance has put you at further risk, I’m sorry.”

  “You provided the time I needed to get out,” he said. “That was a brave thing.”

  “Didn’t
feel at all brave. Just desperate.”

  “Bravery results from desperation more often than we’d like to think.” Dumond’s gaze flicked nervously from passersby to each dark doorway and alley only to fix on Neri and me again, as if to read our bones. “Stay away from me. I don’t think they’ve a suspicion about who they were chasing. There’s only one more of my charms separate from its owner, and it’s in the same place it’s been for years now—a house I daren’t visit. But it’s unlike to draw a sniffer there, unless one of you can tell me different…”

  “Don’t know nothing of that one,” said Neri, quickly. Too quickly.

  Dumond’s eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. “Some day we’ll talk. Until then, no more games. And wear your charms. They’re charged with a drop of your blood. In your case, damizella, with your brother’s blood. Sniffers can always detect the use of magic and the energies left behind after it’s been done. But the power lives inside us even when we’re not using it. Dormant, you might say. Not all sniffers can detect that dormant magic, but some might, and the charms are supposed to obscure your … scent … if you want to call it that.”

  “But you use your skills,” I said, yearning to know more. First Placidio, and now this man—such magnificence at their beck. “This piece of work you were doing…”

  “… is none of your business.”

  “Then answer this at least. How many of us are there?” Meeting two sorcerers in the space of a few months after a lifetime without hinted that there were more than I believed.

  “Not a notion about that. Met a few through the years. Most are hidden so deep you’ll never find them, I believe. Some give themselves away—like they just can’t hold it inside anymore. A few just can’t hide what they are.” He jerked his head at Neri. “If they’re lucky they run into someone like me and learn better.”

  “We’ll be careful,” said Neri.

  Dumond nodded and quickly vanished into the nervous throng.

  The noise and stinks of the evening closed in around Neri and me as we hurried down the road to the Beggars Ring, every movement, every glance, every shadowed corner menacing. We didn’t breathe free until we had turned into Lizard’s Alley.

  Once behind our own door, Neri pulled cheese and sausage from our shelf and threw it on the table. I lit the lamp and poured us wine, but in the end I could only stare at the food. The enormity of what Dumond had done and the horror of seeing the sniffer’s finger pointed our way, like a carving knife ready to sever flesh from bone, churned my gut. Neri’s, too, I guessed. His eating knife tapped on the link of sausage as we emptied our cups.

  Only after a full hour had passed with no hammering at our door did we eat what we’d laid out. Even then, we didn’t talk. Neri curled up on his pallet. Work beckoned, but instead I doused the lamp, drew my knife, and wrapped myself in cloak and blanket, keeping watch for a dusty metalsmith who might decide he didn’t want a sixteen-year-old boy and his witchy sister to know his secrets.

  “You tried to steal a bracelet when you were six?” I said from the sleepless dark. “Whyever that?”

  “Wanted to have something pretty for you next time you came home. Thought it might make you stay.”

  For a moment, my composure fractured, threatening long abandoned tears. A good thing Neri couldn’t see it. He was no longer that innocent child, but an incautious youth. So I reassembled my resolve, and sniped, “Now you’re stuck with me.”

  “Aye,” he mumbled. And after a long pause, “Could be worse.”

  9

  YEAR 988: WINTER QUARTER DAY

  No sniffers showed at our door that night or those following. Even so, events at the Temple had frightened me. Neri, too, it seemed, for when I insisted we attempt no more magic, never mind curiosity or possibility, Neri didn’t argue. Rather, he devoted all his energies to his work with Placidio and the tasks I set him to earn the lesson fees.

  The swordmaster began actual sword training that month. Neri was much happier, though he confessed that the hated running, jumping, and climbing had helped him immensely. He kept it up between his lessons and the tasks he did for me. I hardly saw him. Over the month he must have grown a handspan and definitely put on muscle.

  With Neri so busy, I had to make more of my own deliveries. One sunny morning, I tidied myself up more than usual, as I needed to deliver documents to Lawyer Aventia. I was doing more work for her, as her client list had grown well beyond the young shipping heiress. Our exchanges had never gone much beyond Dama Ciosa’s teriaca, but I felt certain they could, if I could just take the first step.

  “I’ll have these back in three days,” I said, taking the new stack of contracts she offered.

  “Thank you, Romy. I appreciate your promptness as well as your fine work.”

  “Segna … it is such a lovely morning. I wondered if you might like to visit Kallinur’s—an excellent tea-seller just a few streets away from here. Perhaps you know it already. He serves a most excellent brew. Brought from Lhampur itself, I’ve heard.”

  Her glance flicked from my mud-stained skirt to my ink-blackened fingers and back to the painted box where she kept her coins. She carefully counted out my thirty coppers before answering. “I’ve recently taken on a new client—a gentleman of good family. He occupies a great deal of my time nowadays. So sorry. Fortune’s benefice, Mistress Romy.”

  A rime of frost stung my flesh. “And Virtue’s grace, segna.”

  Telling myself her answer was exactly the truth and no judgment of me was useless. I had seen the same hesitation, the same slight withdrawal, when I misinterpreted the pleasant interchange with some lady or gentleman at one of Sandro’s salons. Most of his friends and guests cared naught that I was his bound servant. But those others made their disapproval clear when I stepped beyond the unbreachable barrier between gentlefolk and whore—no matter how educated, how witty, or how beloved that whore might be.

  I retreated to Lizard’s Alley and drank a bit more wine before settling down to copy … something.

  * * *

  On Winter Quarter Day Neri and I set out early for our pilgrimage to Palazzo Segnori to fulfill Neri’s parole. The trudge upward through the city was a misery. A dreary cold drizzle had settled over Cantagna, the kind that made it impossible to keep anything dry or warm for days on end. Black pennons hung in sodden folds atop each gateway arch, as if the city were in mourning for the sun. No gossip we heard among the thousand others on their way to do quarterly business could explain the pennons, save a rumor that had spread only this morning—that this Quarter Day, even more than usual, was a day of righteous judgment. What did that mean? No one knew.

  The singularity of this rumor and the lack of competing gossip suggested it was someone’s very specific plan. The Shadow Lord was expert at keeping close-held secrets, and unless things had changed in half a year House Gallanos had an army of spies large enough to spread a rumor quickly and pervasively.

  Another possible source of a singular rumor was the Philosophic Confraternity. Since their founding, in the years before the Costa Drago could boast of even one great city, it had been the Confraternity’s goal to shape the world’s perceptions regarding magic and religious matters. They claimed to enforce the divine mandate to exterminate sorcery. With Philosophic Academies found in every independency of the Costa Drago, offering advanced education in philosophy, mathematics, history, and astronomy, they had developed a widespread web of agents adept in communications.

  Yet, there was more to the overwhelming unease of the day than weather, pennons, and rumor. Soldiers stood at each of the Ring gates.

  Lodovico di Gallanos, Sandro’s wicked uncle, had kept the eight inner gates—two on each of the four inner Ring walls—closed and guarded to ensure that citizens who had proper business were the only ones allowed to visit the upper Rings without special invitation. He claimed it would keep the lower orders in their places, reducing thievery and murder amongst righteous citizens.

  When Sandro became the Gallan
os segnoré after Lodovico’s assassination, his first public action was to appear before the Sestorale and recommend that the gates be kept open to all citizens at all hours. He argued that it would encourage healthy commerce between artisans, laborers, shopkeepers, merchants, and buyers. After generations of prosperity, his uncle’s few years as the House Gallanos segnoré had left Cantagna starving in all ways, he’d said. Not only from too many hungry citizens, but in business, art, and trade.

  Much argument ensued about Sandro’s youthful folly at recommending such an abrupt change, about Lodovico’s crimes and his murder and the possibility that open gates might encourage more such violence, and about the possible ways the Sestorale might wish to alter the workings of the city now Lodovico was gone. After an hour of listening, Sandro requested a few moments’ indulgence. He simply wished to remind the honored members of the Sestorale that payments on all loans from the House Gallanos bank would remain suspended for six months to help settle the natural unrest after such an abrupt change in the order of things. The Sestorale immediately agreed to his recommendation about the gates.

  The aftermath of this incident had many aspects.

  The people of Cantagna had rejoiced at the freedom to travel their own city as righteous men and women, and in the ten years since had come to think of free passage as their right.

  To one and all Alessandro di Gallanos had asserted himself as il Padroné. It was clear that the young Segnoré di Gallanos would not only restore the generous patronage of his father and grandfather, but would make amends for the aberration that was Lodovico.

  And among those who had thought to assume the mantle of il Padroné for themselves, deep-buried seeds of resentment burst and sent up tiny shoots.

  In the month since the magical explosion had killed not fourteen, but fifty-seven people, the blue-gray livery of the Gardia Sestorale had reappeared at the Ring gates. Two or three wardens stood watch day and night. They created no impediment to free passage, and citizens seemed to think it a reasonable precaution until the sorcerers who’d done the murderous deed were caught. But on this Quarter Day when black pennons drooped from the gate arches, the wardens at each gateway bristled with swords and spears and numbered no less than twenty.