The Republic of Thieves (21 page)

“This we pray with hopeful hearts,” said Jean. He rose to his feet again. “Still scared?”

“Shitless.”

“Less chance you’ll make a mess on the table, then.”

“Bastard.” Locke closed his eyes. “Call them back. Let’s get on with this.”

JEAN WATCHED
, moments later, as Patience and Coldmarrow took up positions on either side of Locke.

“Unlock the dreamsteel,” said Patience.

Coldmarrow reached down the front of his tunic and pulled out a silvery pendant on a chain. At his whisper of command, pendant and chain alike turned to brightly rippling liquid, which ran in a stream down his fingers, coalescing in a ball that quivered in his cupped hand.

“Quicksilver?” said Jean.

“Hardly,” said Patience. “Quicksilver poisons the wits of those who handle it. Dreamsteel is something of ours. It shapes itself to our thoughts, and it’s harmless as water … mostly.”

The magi spread their arms over the table. Slender threads of dreamsteel sprouted from the shimmering mass in Coldmarrow’s hand and slid forward, falling through the gaps between his fingers. They landed on Locke’s chest, not with careless splashing but with uncanny solidity. Though the stuff ran like water, the flow was slow and dreamlike.

The thin silvery streams conformed to the black lines painted across Locke’s upper body. Steadily, sinuously, the threads of liquid metal crept across the design, into every curve and whorl. When at last the delicate work was complete and the final speck of dreamsteel fell from Coldmarrow’s hand, every line on Locke’s skin had been precisely covered with a minuscule layer of rippling silver.

“This will feel rather strange,” said Patience.

She and Coldmarrow clenched their fists, and instantly the complex tracery of dreamsteel leapt up in a thousand places, exploding off Locke’s skin. Locke arched his back, only to be pressed gently back down by the hands of the magi. The dreamsteel settled as a forest of needles.

Like the victim of a mauling by some metallic porcupine, Locke now had countless hair-thin silver shafts embedded bloodlessly in his skin, running along the painted lines.

“Cold,” said Locke. “ ’That’s awfully damn cold!”

“The dreamsteel is where it needs to be,” said Patience. She picked up the jar she had used to catch Locke’s exhaled breath and approached the candelabrum.

“Effigy, I kindle you,” she said, opening the jar and wafting it past the three candles. “Breath-sharer, I give you the wind of a living man but not his heart-name. You are him, and not him.”

She gestured with her right hand, and the wicks of the three candles burst into flickering white flame.

She then resumed her place at Locke’s side. She and Coldmarrow put their right hands together, fingertip to fingertip, over Locke’s chest. The silver thread that Patience had used earlier reappeared, and by deft movements Jean could barely follow the two magi bound their hands together in a cat’s cradle. Jean shuddered, remembering that the Falconer had wielded a silver thread of his own.

Patience and Coldmarrow then placed their free hands on Locke’s arms.

“Whatever happens now, Locke,” said Patience, “remember your shame and anger. Stay angry with
me
, if you must. Hate me and my son and all the magi of Karthain with everything you’ve got, or you won’t live to get up off this table.”

“Quit trying to scare me,” said Locke. “I’ll see you when this is over.”

“Crooked Warden,” murmured Jean to himself, “you’ve heard Locke’s plea, now hear mine. Gandolo, Wealth-Father, I was born to merchants and beg to be remembered. Venaportha, Lady With Two Faces, surely you’ve had some fun with us before. Give us a smile now. Perelandro, forgiving and merciful, we might not have served you truly, but we put your name on every set of lips in Camorr.

“Aza Guilla,” he whispered, feeling a nervous trickle of sweat slide down his forehead, “Lady Most Kind, I peeked up your skirts a little, but you know my heart was in the right place. Please have urgent business elsewhere tonight.”

There was an itch at the back of Jean’s neck; the same eerie sensation
he had felt before in the presence of the Falconer, and when the magi had tormented him and Locke in the Night Market of Tal Verrar. Patience and Coldmarrow were deep in concentration.

“Ah,” gasped Locke. “Ah!”

A metallic taste grew in Jean’s mouth, and he gagged, only to discover that his throat had gone dry. The top of his mouth felt as raspy as paper. What had happened to his spit?

“Hells,” said Locke, arching his back. “Oh, this is … this is worse than cold.…”

The timbers of the cabin bulkheads creaked, as though the ship were being tossed about, though all of Jean’s senses told him the
Sky-Reacher
was plodding along as slowly and smoothly as ever. Then the rattling began, faintly at first, but soon the yellow alchemical lanterns were shaking and the shadows in the room wobbled.

Locke moaned. Patience and Coldmarrow leaned forward, keeping Locke’s arms pinned, while their joined hands intricately wove and unwove the silver thread. The sight would have been mesmerizing in calm circumstances, but Jean was far from calm. His stomach roiled as though he had eaten rotten oysters and they were clamoring for release.

“Dammit,” Jean whispered, and bit on his knuckles just as he’d promised. The pain helped drive back the rising tide of nausea, but the atmosphere of the room was growing stranger. The lanterns rattled now like kettles on a high boil, and the white flames of the candles flared and danced to an unfelt breeze.

Locke moaned again, louder than before, and the thousand silvery points of light embedded in his upper body made eerie art as he strained at his ropes.

There was a sizzling sound, then a whip-like crack. The alchemical lanterns shattered, spraying glass across the cabin along with puffs of sulfurous-smelling vapor. Jean flinched, and the Bondsmagi reeled as lantern fragments rattled onto the floor around them.

“I’ve been poisoned a lot,” muttered Locke, for no apparent reason.

“Help,” hissed Coldmarrow in a strained voice.

“How? What do you need?” Jean was caught in another shuddering wave of nausea, and he clung to a bulkhead.

“Not … you.”

The cabin door burst open. One of the attendants who had carried Locke on the cot stomped down the stairs, discarding his wet cloak as he came. He put his hands against Coldmarrow’s back and settled his feet as though bracing the old man against a physical force. Shadows reeled wildly around the cabin as the candle flames whirled, and Jean’s nausea grew; he went down to his knees.

There was an uncanny vibration in the air, in the deck, in the bulkheads, in Jean’s bones. It felt as though he were leaning against a massive clockwork machine with all of its gears turning. Behind his eyes, the vibration grew past annoyance to pain. Jean imagined a maddened insect trapped inside his skull, biting and scrabbling and beating its wings against whatever it found in there. That was too much; bludgeoned by awful sensations, he tilted his head forward and threw up on the deck.

A thin dark line appeared beside the vomit as he finished—blood from his nose. He coughed out a string of profanities along with the acidic taste of his last meal, and though he couldn’t find the strength to heave himself to his feet, he did manage to tilt his head back far enough to see what happened next.

“This is your death, effigy. You are him,” cried Patience, her voice cracking, “and not him!”

There was a sound like marrow bones cracking, and the three candle flames surged into conflagrations large enough to swallow Jean’s hands. Then the flames turned
black
—black as the depths of night, an unnatural hue that caused actual pain to behold. Jean flinched away from the sight, his eyes gushing hot tears. The light of the black fires was pallid gray, and it washed the cabin with the tint of stagnant graveyard water.

Another shudder passed through the timbers of the ship, and the young Bondsmage at Coldmarrow’s back suddenly reeled away from the table, blood pouring from his nose. As he toppled, the woman who’d been on the quarterdeck came through the door, hands up to shield her eyes from the unearthly glare. She stumbled against a bulkhead but kept her feet, and began to chant rapidly in a harsh unknown language.

Who the hell is steering the ship?
thought Jean, as the sickly gray light pulsed with a speed to match his own heartbeat and the very air seemed to thicken with a fever heat.

“Take this death. You are him,” gasped Coldmarrow, “and not him!
This death is yours!
”

There was a sound like nails on slate, and then Locke’s moans turned to screams—the loudest, longest screams Jean had ever heard.

PAIN WAS
nothing new to Locke, but pain was an inadequate term for what happened when the two Bondsmagi pressed him down and squeezed him between their sorceries.

The room around him became a whirl of confusion—white light, rippling air. His eyes blurred with tears until even the faces of Patience and Coldmarrow bled at the edges like melting wax. Something shattered, and hot needles stung his scalp and forehead. He saw a strange swirl of yellow vapors, then gasped and moaned as the silver needles in his upper body suddenly came alive with heat, driving away all concern for his surroundings. It felt like a thousand coal-red flecks of ash were being driven into his pores.

Stabbed
, he thought, clenching his teeth and swallowing a scream.
This is nothing. I’ve been stabbed before. Stabbed in the shoulder. In the wrist. In the arm. Cut, smashed, clubbed, kicked … drowned … nearly drowned. Poisoned
.

He cast his memory back across the long catalog of injuries, realizing with some deeper and still vaguely sensible part of his mind that counting inflictions of pain to take his mind off the infliction of pain was both very stupid and very funny.

“I’ve been poisoned a lot,” he said to himself, shuddering in a paroxysm born of the struggle between laughter and the hot-needle pain.

There was noise after that, the voices of the Bondsmagi, and Jean—then creaking, moaning, slamming, banging. It all went hazy while Locke fought for self-control. Then, after an unguessable interval, a voice penetrated his misery at last, and was more than a voice. It was a thought, shaped by Patience, whose touch he now instinctively recognized in the word-shapes that thrust themselves to the center of his awareness:

“You are
him
 … and not him!”

Beneath the hornet-stings of the dreamsteel needles, something
moved inside Locke, some pressure in his guts. The quality of the light and the air around him changed; the white glow of the candles turned black. Like a snake, the force inside him uncoiled and slid upward, under his ribs, behind his lungs, against his pulsating heart.

“F-fuck,” he tried to say, so profoundly disquieted that no air moved past his lips. Then the thing inside him surged, frothed,
ate
—like tar heated instantly to a boil, scalding the surface of every organ and cavity between his nose and his groin. All of those never-thought-of crevices of the body, suddenly alive in his mind, and suddenly limned in pure volcanic agony.

Stop oh please oh please stop just let the pain end
, he thought, so far gone that his previous resolution was forgotten beneath sheer animal pleading.
Stop the pain stop the pain—

“You are him … and not him!” The thought-voice was a weak echo above the cresting tide of internal fire. Coldmarrow? Patience? Locke could no longer tell. His arms and legs were numb, dissolving into meaningless sensory fog beyond the hot core of his agony. The Bondsmagi and everything beyond them faded into haze. The table seemed to fall away beneath him; blackness rose like the coming of sleep. His eyelids fluttered shut, and at last the blessed numbness spread to his stomach and chest and arms, smothering the hell that had erupted there.

Let that be it. I don’t want to die, but gods, just let that be the last of the pain
.

The outside world had gone silent, but there was still some noise in the darkness—his own noise. The faint throb of a heartbeat. The dry shudder of breath. Surely, if he were dead, all that business would have ended. There was a pressure on his chest. A sensation of weight—someone was pushing down on his heart, and the touch felt cold. Surprised at the amount of will it required, Locke forced his eyes partly open.

The hand above his heart was Bug’s, and the eyes staring down from the dead boy’s face were solid black.

“There is no
last of the pain
,” said Bug. “It always hurts. Always.”

Locke opened his mouth to scream, but no sound moved past his lips—just a barely perceptible dry hissing. He strained to move, but his limbs were lead. Even his neck refused to obey his commands.

This can’t be real
, Locke tried to say, and the unspoken words echoed in his head.

“What’s real?” Bug’s skin was pale and strangely loose, as though the flesh behind it had collapsed inward. The curls had come out of his hair, and it hung limp and lifeless above his dead black eyes. A crossbow quarrel, crusted with dry blood, was still buried in his throat. The cabin was dark and empty; Bug seemed to be crouching above him, but the only weight Locke could feel was the cold pressure of the hand above his heart.

You’re not really here!

“We’re
both
here.” Bug fiddled with the quarrel as though it were an annoying neck-cloth. “You know why I’m still around? When you die, your sins are engraved on your
eyes
. Look closely.”

Unable to help himself, Locke stared up into the awful dark spheres, and saw that their blackness was not quite unbroken. It had a rough and layered quality, as though made up of a countless number of tiny black lines of script, all running together into a solid mass.

“I can’t see the way out of this place,” said Bug softly. “Can’t find the way to what’s next.”

You were twelve fucking years old. How many sins could you have—

“Sins of omission. Sins of my teachers and my friends.” The chilling weight above Locke’s heart pressed down harder.