The Republic of Thieves (89 page)

“Why are you doing this to us?” said Locke.

“The Falconer,” she said.

“So revenge was the game after all,” said Locke. “Well, a
creature
like the Falconer deserved every second of hurt I ever gave him, and
fuck you
if you expect me to think otherwise!”

“You can’t understand what you took from him,” said Patience, her words hot and thick with scorn. “Your flesh is inert; magic is nothing more than the sound of the wind to you. You can
never
feel it, feel the words leaving you like fire, like arrows from a bowstring! To know that power welling beneath you and bearing you like a feather on a wind. You think I’m selfish for this? Cruel? It’s less than you deserve! Killing him would have been mercy. I’ve
killed
magi. But you stole his hands and his voice. You took the tools of magic from him and smashed him like a priceless work of art. You stole his destiny. The archedama Patience could forgive you. The mother and the mage
cannot
.”

“I refer you to my former statement,” said Locke, his voice trembling.

A heavy tread sounded on the stairs. Jean burst into the room, slamming the door aside without knocking.

“I don’t understand,” he panted. “I was just … You fucking did something to me again, didn’t you?”

“A brief slumber,” said Patience. “I wanted time with Sabetha, and then with Locke. But you might as well hear everything else I have to say.”

“Where’s Sabetha?” said Jean.

“Alive,” said Patience. “And fled, of her own accord.”

“Why do I—?”

“You’ve got nothing more I want, Jean Tannen,” said Patience. “Interrupt me again and Locke leaves Karthain alone.”

Jean balled his fists but remained silent.

“I’m leaving Karthain too,” said Patience. “Myself and all my kind. Tonight ends the last of the Five-Year Games, and our centuries of life here. Whenever the Karthani find the nerve to enter the Isas Scholastica, they’ll find our buildings empty, our tunnels collapsed, our libraries and treasures vanished. We are removing all trace of ourselves from Karthain down to the dust under our beds.”

“Why on the gods’ earth would you do such a thing?” said Locke.

“Karthain is the old dream,” said Patience. “It’s served its purpose. We have gathered strength, honed our skills, and collected the wealth we need to do what we must. There will be no more contracts. No
more Bondsmagi. We are retiring from the public life of this world. Never again can we allow such an institution as this to arise.”

“That … that danger you spoke of?” said Locke, unnerved and startled by the magnitude of the changes Patience’s words implied.

“There are things moving and dreaming in the darkness,” said Patience. “We refuse to risk any further chance of waking them up. Yet human magic
must
survive, so we must learn how to make it as quiet as possible.”

“Why run us through this damned election?” said Locke. “Gods, why not just put us in a room and tell us this shit and save us all so much trouble?”

“Wise members of my order a century ago,” said Patience, “foresaw our direction beyond a shadow of a doubt. We used our contracts to enrich ourselves, but they also made us arrogant. They fueled the impulse to dominate, to see our powers as limitless and the world as our clay.

“These wise men and women knew that a crisis would break, a time for blood, and the only way to win would be to achieve surprise. They envisioned a disruption of our ordinary lives so profound and yet so routine that it could conceal preparations for a fight when the time came. The Five-Year Games became a regular part of our society, a pageant and a release. But a few of us were always trusted with the original intention of the games, and the knowledge that we might have to employ it.”

“So it was all just … a monumental misdirection?” said Locke. “While we danced for everyone’s amusement, you sharpened your knife and stuck it in somebody’s back?”

“All those magi that I once described as exceptionalists,” said Patience. “All those brothers and sisters. I mourn them, even as I know there was no convincing them. They will stay in Karthain forever. The rest of us go on.”

“Why tell us any of this?” said Jean.

“Because I value your discomfort.” Patience smiled without warmth. “I described the conditions of your employment very succinctly. We are not vanishing from the world, merely from the eyes of ordinary people. Share our business with anyone and you are
always
in our reach.”

“Ordinary people,” said Locke. “Well, how ordinary am I, really? What’s the truth of all the tales you spun about my past?”

“You should look at the painting I brought for Sabetha.” Patience tapped the wrapped object leaning against the wall behind her. “I’m leaving it here, though in a day or two it will be nothing but white ash. It’s the only portrait of
Lamor Acanthus
ever painted during his life. I ought to tell you, the likeness is impeccable.”

“A simple answer!” shouted Locke. “What am I?”

“You’re a man who doesn’t get to
know
the answer,” said Patience, and now her smile was genuine. She was shaking with the obvious difficulty of containing her laughter. “Look at you. Camorri! Confidence trickster! You think you know what
revenge
is? Well, here’s mine on you. Before I was Archedama Patience, I was called Seamstress. Not because I enjoy needlework, but because I
tailor to fit
.”

Locke could only stare at her, feeling cold and hollow to the depths of his guts.

“Live a good long life without your answer,” she said. “I think you’ll find the evidence neatly balanced in either direction. Now, one thing more will I tell you, and this only because I know it will haunt and disquiet you. My son preferred to mock my premonitions, but only because he didn’t want to face the fact that they always have substance. I shall give you a little prophecy, Locke Lamora, as best as I have seen it.

“Three things must you take up and three things must you lose before you die: a key, a crown, a child.” Patience pushed her hood up over her head. “You will die when a silver rain falls.”

“You’re making all this shit up,” said Locke.

“I could be,” said Patience. “I very well could be. And that’s part of your punishment. Go forth now and live, Locke Lamora. Live, uncertain.”

She gestured once and was gone.

JEAN REMAINED
at the door, staring at the gray-wrapped package. Finally, Locke worked up the nerve to seize it and tear away the cover.

It was an oil painting. Locke stared at it for some time, feeling the lines on his face draw taut as a bowstring, feeling moistness well in the corners of his eyes.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course.
Lamor Acanthus
. And wife, I presume.”

He made a noise that was half dour laugh and half strangled sob, and threw the painting on the bed. The black-robed man in the portrait looked nothing like Locke; he was broad-shouldered, with the classically dark, sharp aspect of a Therin Throne patrician. The woman beside him bore the same sort of haughty glamour, down to her bones, but she was much fairer of skin.

Her thick, flowing hair was as red as fresh blood.

“I’m everything Sabetha was afraid of,” said Locke. “Tailored to fit.”

“I’m … I’m sorry as hell I got you into this,” said Jean.

“Shit! Don’t go wobbly on me now, Jean. I was as good as dead, and the only way out of this was to go through, all the way to Patience’s endgame. Now she’s played it.”

“We can go after Sabetha,” said Jean. “She’s had half an hour, how far could she get?”

“I want to,” said Locke, wiping his eyes. “Gods, I can still smell her everywhere in this room. And gods, I want her back.” He slumped onto the bed. “But I … I promised to trust her. I promised to … respect her decisions, no matter how much it fucking cut me. If she has to run from this, if she has to be away from me, then for as long as she needs, I’ll … I’ll accept it. If she wants to find me again, what could stop her?”

Jean put his hands on Locke’s shoulders and bowed his head in thought.

“You’re gonna be fucking
miserable
to live with for a couple of weeks,” he said at last.

“Probably,” said Locke with a rueful chuckle. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, we should case this place and pack everything useful we can lay our hands on,” said Jean. “Clothes, food, tools. We don’t have to go after Sabetha, but we’d best have our asses on the road before the sun peeks over the horizon.”

“Why?”

“Karthain hasn’t kept up an army or maintained its walls for
three hundred years
,” said Jean. “In a few hours, it’s going to wake up to discover that the only thing keeping it protected from the world at large has vanished during the night. Do you want to be here when
that
mess breaks wide open?”

“Oh, shit. Good point.”

Locke stood up and looked around the room one last time.

“Key, crown, child,” he muttered. “Well, fuck you, Patience. Three things must you kiss before I let you spook me for good. My boots, my balls, and my ass.”

Locke pulled his boots on and followed Jean down the stairs, impatient to have Karthain at his back and slowly sinking into the horizon.

THE BOY IS
six. He stares at the Amathel, breathes the lake air, the wholesome scents of life and freshness. He stares at the glinting lights, the jewels in the blackness, the secrets of the Eldren scattered in the depths. The dock folk claim that fishermen in the water at night have been driven mad by the lights, have dived down toward them, pulling frantically, as if toward the surface, until they drowned. Or vanished.

The boy is not afraid of the lights. The boy has power the dock folk can only guess at. He feels a pressure in his temples when he stares out across the waters. He hears something lower and lovelier than the steady wash of the waves and the cries of the birds. The power of the hidden things calls to the power of the boy.

The boy knows the Amathel took his father. He has been told this, but he remembers nothing. He was too young. There is no memory to mourn. The lake of jewels means only life, beauty, soothing familiarity.

All these things. And the power that waits for his power to match it. To
reveal
it.

THE BOY
is four, the boy is ten, the man is twenty. His body shifts in this place. Sometimes he is whole, sometimes he is pleased, sometimes his memories are bright and vivid as paintings glowing with the fire of the gods in every speck of pigment.

Sometimes he speaks in a rich rolling voice. Sometimes he moves his hands and feels the fingers there, feels them brushing over surfaces and picking things up. He does not know why this pleases him, why he feels something like the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, why the joy is so bittersweet.

Sometimes he walks in a fog. His thoughts are wrapped in dull cotton. Sometimes he is on a street and he is confused. He is bound with rope, throbbing with pain, his hands and his mouth caked with blood. His own blood. The rain comes down and men are staring at him, studying him, afraid.

Sometimes he is gazing out across the Amathel, feeling the life of the bird for the first time. A gull, an elegant white thing, wheeling in tight circles. The boy feels its needs, its hunger, the elegant simplicity of the thing at the
center of it all
. The boy visualizes this as a wheel, a piece of clockwork, a logic circle turning without friction or remorse. Strike, eat, live on the wind.
Strike, eat, live on the wind
.

The boy moves his fingers to call up his untutored power. He reaches out and takes the life of the bird like a humming thread in the hands that nobody else can see, the hands of power his mother has taught him to use.

The bird is startled.

Its wings fold awkwardly. It plummets twenty feet and bounces hard off a rock, then plops into the water, fluttering and squawking agitatedly, lucky its wings aren’t broken.

The boy needs practice.

THE BOY
is ten. The boy has run across the hills and forests north of Karthain all night with blood in his mouth. The boy has crouched
in the center of a web, still as stone, with venom in his fangs and the faintest sensation of movement rippling across his fur, the air currents of prey fluttering ever closer. The boy has swept high into the sky, chased the sun, learned to strike, eat, and live on the wind.

“You must not,” his mother insists. His mother is powerful, his mother is teaching him her gifts, but she will not let him teach her his own.

“It is not highly thought of, among our kind,” she says. “You are a man! You will think as a man! There’s no room for a man in those tiny minds.”

“I share,” said the boy. “I command. I don’t feel small. If they really are tiny, perhaps I make them big whenever I go inside!”

“You will grow more and more sensitive,” says his mother. “You will tie yourself more and more tightly to them, do you understand? Their lives will become yours, their feelings yours. If they are hurt, you will share all their pain. If they are killed … you may be lost as well.”

The boy doesn’t understand. His mother tells him these things as though there were no compensations. The boy knows that he is alone, among all the magi his mother has presented him to, in his willingness to share the lives of animals.

There is no dissuading the boy. He has tasted life without regrets, life without remorse, life lived on the wind. It is what he is; he returns to himself after each communion feeling that part of the wild has come with, to live inside him.

His mother could make him stop. Even at ten, the boy knows what she holds over him, burns with shame at it. But she will not use it. She lectures and begs and threatens, but she will not speak the thing that would lock his will in an iron strongbox.

She cannot, or will not, but it doesn’t make the boy forgive her. He casts his awareness into hidden places for owls, ravens, hawks. He hurls himself into the sky carrying anger from the ground, and hot blood runs on his talons. He soars to forget he has legs. He kills to forget he has rules and expectations. He never shares this experience with anyone else. He goes alone to the woods, and dead songbirds fall like rain. When he is shamed in his studies or rebuked for his attitude, he remembers the blood on his talons, and he endures with a smile.