Brother Thief (Song of the Aura, Book One) (2 page)

  
The mysterious traveler briefly alighted on the very top of the city's shale-stone walls, then kicked off and flew carefully down into the city beyond. When his feet touched the dusty ground, the wings on his cap folded inward and disappeared. He glanced around warily, making sure that none of the city's few wall-guards had seen him. They had not. The man slid into the shadows at the base of a little mud-daub house and was gone from sight.

  
As soon as he was sure that there was no chance of his being followed, the traveler halted, laid his staff up against the wall of a nearby house, and peeked inside his bundle. It had been some time since he had heard any sound from it. Inside was a baby boy, fair-cheeked, with just a bit of curling blond hair. He was cramped but alive, and sleeping soundly, as if he had forgotten all of the terrors of that night. At the feeling of cold air on his face, the baby woke and stared silently into the man's eyes.

  
“Hello, little child,” he whispered. “I've brought you to your new home. Welcome to the city of Ymeer.” The baby frowned, and such a serious look crossed its face that the man wondered if it understood him. He smiled and stroked the baby's face. “Sleep now, little one. Your life lies ahead of you.” At his words, the child fell instantly asleep.

  
The man smiled and continued on his journey through the city. In minutes he had found the house he was searching for. Checking once more to be sure he had not been followed, the man walked up to the door and carefully laid the bundled child on its step. He bent down, patted the baby on the cheek, then straightened his back, rapped sharply on the door with his wooden staff, and walked off into the night.

  
As he turned the corner and vanished from the street, he heard keenly the door open and a woman give a startled exclamation. He smiled, and hummed an old tune under his breath.

“When the king grows old and the world bleeds gold,

When all our hopes have come to grief,

Doubt not that we a savior need,

A brother and a thief...”

  
Anyone who could have heard him would have thought his song was nonsense. But it was much more than that.

  
“We will meet again, little one,” he whispered. “We will meet again, my little thief.”

  
The horseman had been called many names in his existence. The one he used now was
Traveller
. So be it... this would be the last of his travels, for a long time.

Chapter One:
The Little Thief

  
The city of Ymeer was unbearably hot in the afternoons, but Gribly didn’t mind. He’d been living in the streets all his life, and though he never stopped feeling the heat, he had long since learned how to ignore it. In his sixteen years he had learned many things, and one fact was that the desert’s heat kept people inside… as well as guards. Therefore, the perfect time for a thief to move around the city was always during the haziest, hottest part of the day. Gribly was one such thief, and a reasonably good one. This afternoon, he was looking for something to steal… something specific.

  
Brushing sandy-golden hair out of his face, the youth loped down one of Ymeer’s shadowy back alleys, quietly alert for any sign of the city guard- or anyone, really. Gribly lived in the slums, near the city’s north wall, and at the moment he was sneaking near the houses of the rich; an action that could net him a day in the stocks, if he was caught.

  
As he neared the end of the alley, Gribly heard a startled exclamation from somewhere high above him. The houses where he lived were for the poor; small and sloppy. It was different here; the lords and ladies of Ymeer dwelt in high, square buildings insulated from the heat. Outside, the houses looked like enormous square sandcastles; inside they were pictures of luxurious comfort… comfort that the young thief intended to have a piece of before the day was out.

  
Looking up, he could clearly see who had cried out. The tall houses on either side of him were close enough to block out the sun’s brightest rays. A girl was leaning out of a window several stories up, mouth open, seemingly surprised that anyone so dirty as Gribly could possible exist in her world of sheltered perfection. Her face was painted pale and her lips were red… unnaturally red. Her hair was silky and curled, and her dress was puffy and ornate.
Completely ugly,
Gribly thought. He made a face at her and the girl squealed; disappearing into her house again all excited and terrified of him.
Disgusting.

  
He heard her calling for someone- a maid, perhaps- but he wasn’t planning on finding out. With one last, contemptuous glance at the window, he slipped around the corner and away into another alley. It was unlucky to have been spotted so soon, but he doubted the girl would cause him any trouble. Just in case, he doubled back on himself two or three times before continuing on to where he wanted to go: the royal market. The heat stayed consistent, and he avoided the guards without much trouble until he got there.

  
Besides the fight pits or the dueling arena, the royal market was the only place in Ymeer or all of Blast worth visiting, in Gribly’s opinion. Most of the city’s poor had never seen it… but most of them were not thieves. Only once, Gribly had climbed those inner walls; he had sneaked in among the stalls and booths of a thousand exotic sellers and wares; he had seen the sights and smelled the smells of a hundred different lands he would never visit because of his low birth. It had been exciting all the same, and he had stolen several useful things, a magic oil candlelamp among them. Now
that
had been an interesting find.

  
In any case, he intended to peruse the royal market once more. He needed a healing balm for Old Murie back at home.

  
Ymeer was a bustling, dirty city by day, and a tomb-quiet, dirty city by night. Guards patrolled the streets at all hours, but that never prevented fights or drunkenness- it rather increased it. In such a place there was always the need for a healer and a sawbones, and no one sawed bones or patched cuts with more skill than Old Murie, the gypsy. She was an old woman; the oldest in Ymeer; and she was both greatly respected and greatly feared by the population at large. Children flocked to her: some to get help, but most to gape, and a few very stupid ones to hurl insults and mud.

  
Her appearance was strange enough. Greasy, stringy gray hair hung down in front of her face and in tangles at her back, covered in an elaborate shawl of her own stitching. Her clothes were too big, and though they had once been colorfully gaudy they were now so old that most of the color was leached from them. They hung from the old woman’s body like burial wraps, faded beyond recognition.

  
Old Murie walked with a limp and a hunch, an assortment of bags and bundles strapped to her ancient back, with numerous bits of odd, colorless jewelry swinging from her bent neck and arms. Her face reminded one of her clothes: not ugly, exactly, but worn beyond shape and usefulness. In days long gone Murie had been a pretty lady- now she was too old and tired to care about much more than her daily life of herbs, stitchery, droughts and medicines.

  
Gribly was her only exception. She had raised him ever since he had appeared on her doorstep as a babe, and he had repaid her by learning to steal the things she needed for her profession that were too expensive to buy. The healing balm he sought was one such thing, and though Old Murie was cautious about her adopted son’s sneaking, he knew that inside she was proud. Being a good thief was a respectable profession in the underbelly of Ymeer’s population.

  
And whatever else he might be, Gribly was an excellent thief.

  
Guards patrolled the tops of the inner walls that sealed in the royal market, but it had been so long since they’d had to deal with any real threat that they were usually asleep and always lazy. Nevertheless, before Gribly stepped out from his hiding place under the eaves of the tall houses, he scanned the battlements for any sign of movement. One could never be too careful…. As soon as he decided it was safe, the young thief looked both ways, then sped across the thin band of open street
 
towards the inner walls. His mission was an easy success, so far.

  
The hard sandstone walls stretched up infinitely above his head, but Gribly was not especially concerned: he had his secret.

  
“Speed. Silence. Stealth,” he recited to himself. An old pickpocket had given him the motto when he was eleven, and he had never forgotten it.

  
Slowly, shivering with anticipation, Gribly lifted his hands to touch the wall. Then things began to go wrong. The sound of tramping feet reached his ears from somewhere just past the closest bend in the wall. Guards. His eyes darted in all directions, looking for a sufficient hiding place, but there was nothing nearby. Thwarted but not afraid, he edged quickly along the wall in the opposite direction, hoping for opportunity to present itself.

  
Nothing. Soon he was nearing the gates into the royal market. Every survival sense in him was throbbing for him to flee, but something inside told him that this would be his only chance to get inside. If the guards were up and about so soon, there must be something special going on in Ymeer- a crackdown on the city’s criminals, perhaps. That would spell disaster for Old Murie
 
getting her healing balm.

  
Gribly continued on his course around the edge of the rounded wall, but in seconds he heard the frightening sound of booted footsteps again- from the direction he was headed for.

  
“Blast, blast, blast,” he growled, using the desert's own name as a curse. He was directly in front of the gates now, and with only seconds to act. Throwing his eyes upward and shielding them from the sun, he saw an unexpected way out. The gates were huge and solid, banded and hinged with spiked iron: impassable. But the gateway arch was just a smidgen too big; the gates were spiked at the top and didn’t fill up the space. If he could just climb up there…

  
Half a second before the two groups of guards stepped into view from either edge of the walls, Gribly slipped out of sight and into the recess where the gates stood. He stepped to the right edge, where the arch began at the ground and shot up straight before curving inward. It was time to use his secret. His gift.

  
The sandy-haired youth adjusted a saggy pouch hanging at his hip, then raised his arms and placed his palms on the sandstone where it was chilled by the gateway’s shadow.

  
Let it work,
he pleaded in his mind.
Let me climb fast and sure.
Then he slid his palms up as high as they would go, and pulled himself up after them. His hands stuck to the wall as if they were part of it, and his feet followed suit. He climbed up the sandstone arch hand over foot over hand, like one of the myriad of small desert spine-geckoes that ran about outside the city and sunned themselves on sun-baked stones on the sand dunes of Blast. Gribly had always felt a connection to the tiny, speedy creatures. When he had discovered his gift, the connection had become almost certain.

  
Gribly’s gift was climbing. He could pull himself up the wall of a house as easily as any gecko, and, if the mood took him, he could even scramble across ceilings like a spider. It worked on many, but not all surfaces: stones, sand, and mud were all stickable, and because almost every structure in Ymeer had at least one of the three, Gribly was able to venture almost anywhere he wanted without discovery. Even Old Murie didn’t know about his gift; she only knew that he had a natural talent for pickpocketing or “borrowing,” as she preferred to call it. Gribly’s gift was also his secret.

  
He had strung his pouch from his belt so that it wouldn’t hang down when he reached the top of the arch. After a tense minute of climbing he neared the summit, and with a few more steps and reaches he was hanging in the small space between the iron-spiked top of the gate and the very middle of the arch above it. With ease born of long practice, he took first one foot and then the other off the sandstone, placing them in the space between two of the gate’s spikes. His hands followed, and in an instant he was perched, curled up in a ball, on the very top of the great double-doors, looking down into the other side of the gateway.