The Republic of Thieves (90 page)

THE BOY
is gone, the man is twenty-five, the man is … lost.

Sometimes he is in the dead gray place. His legs refuse to move. His hands feel like crippled lumps. His tongue throbs with a phantom pain, an electric tingle. He is trapped on a bed as though nailed to it. He cannot remember how he came to be in this place. He sobs, panics, tries to claw his way to freedom with his missing fingers.

Only the smell of the lake relaxes him, the cool fresh scent of the water, the occasional piquancy of dead fish or gull shit. When the wind blows these things to him he can bear the confusion and the torture of the dead place.

When the wind is wrong the shadows around him pour something cold and bitter down his throat, and he goes into the darkness cursing them wordlessly.

THE LAKE
air blows through the dead place. He takes it in as though no other air will sustain him. It is night; the darkness is offset by the light of a single lamp. Everything is strange; he feels a buoyant force inside his chest, something rising through him like bubbles in a spring. The room is clarifying, as though layer after layer of gauze is being removed from his face.

The light stings his eyes; the new clarity is unnerving. There are shadows moving near the light, two of them.

The man tries to speak, and a strangled wet moan startles him. It takes a moment to realize that the noise is his own, that his tongue is a scrap of cauterized stump.

His hands! He remembers Camorr, remembers steel coming down, remembers the shared pain of Vestris’ last moments washing over him in unbearable waves. He remembers Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen. He remembers Luciano Anatolius.

He is the Falconer, and the air in the room is heavy with the smell of the Amathel. He is alive and back in Karthain.

How long? He feels stiff, light, weak. Significant weight has vanished from his body. Has it been weeks, months?

Nearly three years
, whispers a soft voice in his head. A familiar voice. A hated voice.

“Mnnnnghr,” he rasps, the best he can do. The frustration comes on like a physical weight. He can sense the currents of magic in the room, feel the strength of his mother nearby, but his tools are missing. The power is there to be wielded, but his will slides from it like sand off smooth glass.

I’ll take care of it for both of us
.

Cold fingers of force slide across his mind, and the impotence, blessedly, is lifted. He feels the words as he crafts them, feels them going out to her, mind to mind, his first orderly communication in … three
years
?

THREE YEARS!

As I said
.

Camorr …

Yes, the Anatolius contract
.

How badly was I injured? What did they do to me?

Not enough to cause your present condition
.

The Falconer ponders the import of these words, flips desperately through his memories like the pages of a book.

A dreamsteel model of a city. Its towers falling into flat silvery nothingness.

Archedama Patience, in the Sky Chamber, warning him that he is headed into danger.

Steel rising and falling. Cauterizing heat, white bolts of pain in his mind unlike anything he has ever imagined. Vestris, dead. Before the blade can come for his tongue he tries to work the spell of pain-deadening, the old familiar technique, but on the other side of it … not welcome relief. Fog, madness, prison.

Now see it all
.

Patience speaks a word, and something comes loose in his mind. A patina cracks over an old memory, revealing the truth within the shell.

Archedama Patience. The night of his departure, a brief private audience. She warns him again. Again, he scoffs at the transparency of her ploys. She speaks another word then, and the word is urgent and irresistible. The word is his name, his true name, uttered as the cornerstone of a spell. He is bound to it, then made to forget.

You … you did it
.

A subtle compulsion. A trap. An irrevocable order sleeping in his mind until the next time he used the art of deadening pain.

YOU did this to me.…

You did it to yourself
.

YOU DID THIS TO ME!

I gave you the chance to avoid it
.

NO. THE CHANCE TO SHOW MY THROAT
.

Your arrogance again. Can’t you see that you were a problem in want of a solution?

AND YOUR SOLUTION … ASSASSINATION. FAR FROM HOME
.

I suppose that’s the only honest way to look at it
.

I’M YOUR GODS-DAMNED SON!

I wear five rings. You put yourself on the wrong side of them
.

Well
. He forces himself to lower his mental voice, to think coolly. There must be danger here. Why is she telling him this, revealing all after three years?
You certainly fucked things up, didn’t you?

All I could foresee was that you were headed into serious pain. Therefore I assumed that you would be in extreme danger … that you would do the obvious thing
.

Paralyze myself, you mean! And then it would all be over
.

Except your opponents were … scrupulous
.

Ah. Is this what scrupulous treatment feels like? Lucky, lucky me
.

I told you, it’s not what I wanted!

You and your gods-damned prescience. Your snide little hints. The way you tried to control everyone around you with them. What good was it, if you couldn’t even see THIS coming at us? Tell me, Mother, have you ever managed to have a vision of
your OWN future?

No
.

Well, that must be pleasant for you. To be the only real person in your whole damned world, and all the rest of us puppets for your private stage. How does it feel NOW?

“It’s over,” says Patience, switching to actual speech. She is beside his bed now, looking down at him. “All of it. Your associates are dead. Archedama Foresight is dead.”

How?

“Irrelevant. You are the sole survivor of your faction. All questions between us have been settled. We’re leaving Karthain, entering the time of quiet as planned. You are my final item of business before I go.”

Come to kill me last? Come to bring an end to three years of cowardice?

“Part of me wishes you were dead,” she says. “Wishes you’d died cleanly, as you would have had you been healthy and abroad in Karthain tonight. I can’t imagine wanting to live on in your … condition. And I will end your suffering, if it’s what you desire. But I felt that I had to ask. I owe you at least this much.”

She points to the other figure in the room, a burly man, balding, with a black mustache that droops to the collar of his brown tunic. There are no rings visible on either of his wrists.

“This is Eganis, your caretaker.” She offers images and impressions, revealing to the Falconer how it has been for three years.

Eganis moving him, rolling him from side to side, turning him to avoid weeping bedsores.

Eganis feeding him, gruel and pap and milk.

Eganis emptying his chamber pot.

Eganis walking him, leading the doddering Falconer by a length of leather around his neck.

A mage of Karthain … leashed …

It was necessary to preserve your health
.

Like a dog …

It was necessary!

LIKE A GODS-DAMNED DOG!

You’re the one who always sought to know the spirits of animals more intimately
.

He sends no words, but an unrelieved outpouring of hatred so hot and acidic he sees her stagger before she can manage to gird her mind against it.

“You’ll understand when you calm down,” she says. “I’ll leave this house and funds for Eganis to draw on. Without hands or voice, you’re now effectively one of the ungifted, and you will never see any of us again. If you can find some reason to live, you are invited to do so. If
you find the thought unpalatable, then I will … I will end the matter quickly and painlessly.”

I will accept nothing more from you for so long as I live. Not this house. Not Eganis. Not charity. Certainly not death
.

“On your own head be it,” she mutters. “Eganis will stay. You’re a mute invalid with three rings tattooed on your wrist, and Karthain could soon be a very … interesting place for you.”

There’s no hell for you deep enough to suit my tastes, Mother
.

Your ambitions and your researches were a threat to every living being on this world. Consider that, when you cry your tears
.

Your TIMIDITY! In the face of the secrets waiting to be unlocked everywhere the Eldren set foot, you want us to stay ignorant and helpless … well, to hell with you. All the real power of the human race is squandered on people like you … the willfully small. You and all your fellow punch lines to Karthain’s worst joke. Five rings! Five prisoner’s shackles!

You would have been free to stick your hand into fire, if only the rest of us wouldn’t have to burn with you. Good-bye, Falconer
.

She departs, and the spell of thought-shaping crumbles in her absence. He is alone and voiceless with Eganis. The man looks at the Falconer, then slightly away, as though uncomfortable at seeing him with his eyes open.

“If you ever find the burden of your new life … too overwhelming,” the man mutters, “I am instructed … to offer you mercy. I have powders that can be taken in wine.”

The Falconer glares at the man until he shrugs and leaves the room.

NOW THE
Falconer notices the autumn cold. He feels it like an ache in his too-thin body. Disgusted, he rolls to his left and attempts to stand on his own two feet.

Success, but only just. Gods, he moves like a man of ninety! His hips ache and his legs seem too stick-thin to bear him, but they do, awkwardly. The Falconer chortles disgustedly at the creaky hop that passes for his walk.

There is nothing useful in this prisoner’s chamber. A bed, a chair, a lamp, a chamber pot. The next room is larger, furnished with a library of several dozen volumes and a small basin. The Falconer hops wistfully to the basin, knowing what he’ll see there. Dreamsteel is ubiquitous in mage households, a decoration and an amusement. The pool is inert to him, dead as water, and the frustration makes him shudder so hard he nearly falls over.

Lips trembling, he prods the silver pool with the remnants of his right hand. He needs fingers, flexible fingers! Then this steel could take any shape required at the press of a thought. When he was five, he could move the metal with a wave of his hands and a single word. Fresh heat rises in his cheeks, and for an instant he hates what he has become so fiercely he actually considers the powders offered by the caretaker.

The surface of the dreamsteel ripples in a place where he isn’t touching it.

The Falconer leaps back, heart hammering, piteously loud in his weak chest. Gods! If his eyes are tricking him … if he
didn’t
actually see that, he tells himself he’ll
demand
the powders. His teeth are rattling from excitement as he bends back over the basin. He touches the severed stumps of his fingers to the liquid and stares at it, mustering all of his willpower from its long slumber, all of his fury, all of his inhumanly honed focus and desire. Beads of sweat pour down his forehead.

He shudders with a yearning so profound his breath comes in gasps.

Hair-thin strands of dreamsteel creep onto the stump of his right index finger. Then thick drops, then a tangible curving line. He feels power like a vibration along the silver edge. His grip on the energy of sorcery. His focus. Hot tears drench his cheeks, and his chest heaves like a bellows.

In a minute, he has crafted a single silvery finger, and the process gains speed. With one finger to direct the currents of magic, it is easy to craft a second, even easier to craft a third. Before he can believe it, the Falconer is staring in awestruck joy at a half-metal hand, held together by the trivial flexions of his will—four silver fingers and a silver thumb.

His wail of relief and joy is so loud and undignified that Eganis comes running from below. The man’s eyes widen.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

There’s no need for the old device, the playing of a silver thread back and forth. The Falconer’s hand will now do the job itself. He flexes his mirror-skinned fingers, makes a brush-off gesture toward Eganis, and the caretaker falls gasping to his knees.

The Falconer has power, but it is weak and vague. He needs a voice.
Some
magic only makes him more desperately thirsty to have it
all
back. Thirsty! The very idea … and yet, why not? What can caution possibly do for him now? He takes the dreamsteel basin in his new hand and tilts it into his mouth; the metal is cool and strangely salty. It pools beneath the stump of his tongue, slides in tendrils down his gullet, and there he holds it, shapes it, not as a tongue but as a thin resonant surface, vibrating half with sound and half with magic.

Eerie noises like hissing laughter fill the room as he fights to master the dreamsteel, to align it perfectly, to gild his throat.

“EGANIS,” he booms at last. The voice is cold, the words like metal grates sliding shut. “So, you would have offered me mercy, Eganis? YOU … offer ME mercy?”

“Please,” the caretaker coughs, “I meant you no harm! I’ve taken care of you!”

“I refused you as a gift.” The Falconer seizes the basin and hurls it at Eganis, spilling the remaining dreamsteel over him. “My mother should have sent you away.”

He moves his silver hand and speaks in his silver voice. The dreamsteel comes alive and crawls over Eganis, rolling toward his neck.

“No! Please, I can serve you!”

“You will serve me. As proof of concept.”