The Thief (12 page)

Sophos came over the ridge behind me, bringing a bundle of brush. “Where is everybody?”

“Looking for you.” I explained that they thought he’d drowned.

He sat in huffy silence for the next half hour until the magus came up the riverbank from downstream. When he saw Sophos, he stepped back around the
curve in the bank and must have waved to Pol because both of them reappeared.

They sat down beside us, and Sophos, staring straight ahead, said pointedly, “I swim very well.”

“Is there any dinner?” I asked.

So we ate and waited for the river to disappear. I had moved away from the fire to sit in the dark. Sophos moved with me.

“Gen,” he asked, “can you hear the river coming inside the temple?”

I thought about my panic on the previous two nights. Maybe my ears heard what my head didn’t understand. “I don’t know,” I had to answer, and told him about the panic. I told him about the sliding stone door blocks as well.

“Do you think,” he stammered, “there’s some…body in the maze with you?”

I wished he hadn’t so obviously substituted “somebody” for
“some
thing.” Not that I thought ghouls and ghosts were real, but they were easier to believe in when standing in a cold, dark, wet hole in the ground.

My third night in the maze I remembered to pick up the pry bar, lying abandoned in the entranceway to the maze. Then I went directly to the corridor through the middle of it. I searched fingertip by fingertip every stretch of its inner wall from one end of it to the other, and then as nearly as I could tell, I circled through the
maze to the far side of the same wall and searched it, too. It took most of my night, and I found nothing. I went to the pool in the back of the maze and waded through it, bones occasionally crunching under my feet despite my care. I searched the rear wall of the maze and again found nothing.

As I searched, Sophos’s unspoken words came to haunt me, “…something in the maze with you?” I broke off every few minutes to look over my shoulder and cursed Sophos for bringing up something I didn’t want to think about.

The flame in my lamp sputtered once, and the panic swept down on me. I went back to the middle corridor and stood there while the panic rolled over me, sweeping and pushing me toward the exit of the maze. I knew that there was still time before the maze filled, and I refused to admit defeat. I planted my feet and actually held on to the rock for support. I intended to find Hamiathes’s Gift, and if I couldn’t, or if as I suspected, it was not there to be found, I told myself that I might as well drown. What, after all, was there to go back to?

The panic receded, and I looked at the wall in front of me. There were bulges of rock and ripples where it had flowed and hardened, but there was no crack or fissure that would reveal a doorway or conceal a hidden spring. I searched through the middle section of the wall until frustration made me swear out loud and swing my pry bar against the solid rock.

I hurt my hand. The pry bar landed, ringing like a bell, on the stone at my feet. I was lucky it hadn’t bounced off the rock and hit me in the face. I turned around and sat down against the wall, nursing my sore hand and wiping the tears off my face. The panic was gone, but I was still tempted to try to make my way out of the maze. I don’t know if I could have left then or not. I didn’t stay because I was trapped; I stayed because I was too stupid to go. Maybe all the owners of the bones in the back of the maze had been drowned by their own stubbornness as well.

I was facing the giant piece of obsidian, and I wondered how many had sat there before me. The Hephestial glass was beautiful, reflecting the light of the lamp that was sitting beside me. My own reflection was there as well, distorted by the bumps and ridges in the obsidian. I watched the image of the burning flame for a moment, thinking again how much like a window at night the glass was, reflecting the houselights when the world was dark, keeping the world on the far side of the glass invisible. How much like a window—or like a door.

I stood up, forgetting my sore hand. The piece of obsidian was easily the size of a double doorway, although veins of solid rock ran through it. I brushed my hands over the slick black surface and pressed my nose against it, trying to see through. There was nothing but blackness. I picked up my pry bar and, holding my breath, slammed it into the glass.

The pry bar rebounded, chipping free a small chunk of the obsidian. I turned my face away and swung again harder. Larger pieces of glass broke off, and when I turned back, there were long cracks radiating in a star shape from where the point of my pry bar had struck, and there, where the cracks intersected, was a little hole no bigger than a button. I pushed my fingertip through it, careful of the sharp edges, and wiggled it in the open space on the other side.

Turning my face again, I swung the pry bar over and over against the glass door until I felt something break loose and shatter on the stone floor. I looked and saw that a piece larger than an armored breastplate had dropped out and broken to fragments at my feet. There was dust in the air that stung my eyes. I lifted up my lamp to let light fall through the hole before me. There was no room beyond, but there was the space that my calculations had said must be behind the opposite wall of the corridor. I looked back for a moment, puzzled by my mistake. Then I looked again through the hole in the obsidian. There was a staircase, twelve steep steps, leading up. The room above was outside the range of my small light.

With more judicious taps of my pry bar I enlarged the opening between the veins of solid rock. Pieces of obsidian larger than platters broke off, and I lowered them carefully to the ground. Suddenly one tap of my hammer overcame the door all at once. The veins of
stone crumbled to fist-sized rocks, and a huge piece of glass slipped free and crashed down. Shards flew like missiles. I jumped back and covered my face with both arms. When the dust settled, I dropped my arms and looked through an irregular opening nearly as wide as a double doorway, to stairs that filled the space beyond. They were about eight feet wide, as the magus and my map had predicted. I had no idea, though, how they came to be on that side of the corridor, where the wall was only two feet thick.

I had dropped my lamp again, but it was still burning. I scooped it up and picked my way through the rubble of obsidian and stone and climbed up the stairs. The lamp was a round, fat one, a little longer than it was high, flat on the bottom, with two more flat spots on one side where I’d dropped it. It had a hint of a spout with a hole for the wick, but no handle. It sat in the palm of my hand, the brass growing warmer and less heavy as the oil inside burned away. There was very little oil left by then, and the lamp sat lightly. I held it above the level of my eyes so that it might cast its frugal glow ahead of me. There were no obstacles. I climbed with my eyes on the stairs, and so I did not realize until I reached the top and looked up that the room was filled with people.

They stood in a loose collection on either side of an open aisle. They were perfectly silent and none looked toward me, but it was impossible that they could be
unaware of my arrival. The obsidian crashing to the floor had made enough sound to wake the dead, but no one moved. I was in plain sight, but no one looked at me. Finally I realized that the only movement in the entire room was the movement of the shadows thrown by my light as my hand shook, and I began to breathe again. They were statues.

As I walked among them, I could see that their perfection made them unreal. Their skin was lighter or darker, but always unblemished, their faces symmetrical, their eyes clear. There were no scars, no bent limbs, no squints in those eyes. I wanted to touch the perfect skin, but I didn’t dare. I settled for brushing my fingers across the cloth of one robe. It was deep blue and had a pattern like running water woven into it. The man wearing it was tall. Taller than I was, of course, but taller than the magus as well.

Away from the aisle, toward the back of the room, I found the woman in the white peplos. I knew her now, even without her feather pen and scroll, and I smiled in recognition. She was Moira, who recorded men’s fates. How she had come to my dreams I didn’t wonder. I had found her image in the world, and somehow I thought all mysteries were explained.

I left her and turned toward the altar but found that I was mistaken. There was no altar. There was a throne, and sitting on it was the statue of the Great Goddess Hephestia. She wore a robe cut from deep velvet, its
reds darkest in the heart of its folds and brighter across the ridges. Her hair was held back from her face by a woven ribbon of gold set with red rubies. Resting on her knees was a small tray that held a single stone on its mirror surface. I stepped forward until I could reach to take the stone. Then, with my hand extended, I stopped, and was perfectly still as I watched the pattern of light on the velvet robe shift with the movement of a breath. My heart was like stone inside my chest.

This was not an image carefully made in imitation of Hephestia, amid a statuary garden of the gods. This was the Great Goddess, and she was surrounded by her court. My extended hand began to shake. I closed my eyes as I heard the rustle of cloth behind me, wondering if it was the midnight blue gown with the water pattern as Oceanus checked to see if I had left any dirt. I opened one eye and looked up at the Great Goddess. She looked beyond me, impassive, distant, not unaware of my presence but unmoved by it.

There was a murmur of voices behind me, but I made out no words. In the corner of my vision a figure moved forward. I hadn’t seen him before, though I should have looked. His skin was not black like the Nimbians’. It was a deep brownish red, like fired clay, like that of the ancient people who’d left their portraits on the walls of the ruins on islands in the middle sea. His hair was dark like his half sister’s, but her hair reflected the light in flashes of gold and auburn; his was
black like charcoal. His face was much narrower, his nose sharper. On one cheek was a lighter scar of a burn mark, shaped like a rounded feather. He was smaller than the other gods, dressed in a tunic of plain gray.

“You have not yet offended the gods.” Eugenides, the god who had once been mortal, spoke at last. “Except perhaps Aracthus, who was charged to let no thief enter here. Take the stone.”

I did not move.

The patron of thieves came closer. He moved to his sister’s right hand and laid his own across it.

“Take it,” he said. His words were strangely accented, but not so very different from my way of speaking. The magus was not there to tell me how it compared with the language of the civilized world. I had no difficulty understanding the god’s instruction. I just couldn’t move.

My nerve had failed, I suppose. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of the retribution of lightning bolts that might follow. It was religion that had seeped into my childhood without my knowing it. The thought of stealing something from the Great Goddess was too awful to contemplate, and I could not do it.

Neither could I turn and flee. I was a little surprised at how stubborn I was turning out to be, but I wouldn’t leave without the Gift. It mattered too much. Distantly I heard the swish and rattle of small stones as the water began to flow down the riverbed overhead, but I
remained as immobile as the gods that I had mistaken for statues. Only my eyes moved as I looked from the small gray stone of the tray to the hand of Eugenides, to his face. And then, because I thought that if I were dying, I would do something that very few had done since the world was made, I looked again into the eyes of the Great Goddess, and for a moment she looked back at me. That was enough.

Released from my paralysis, I leaned forward a little further and plucked the stone off the mirrored tray. Then I turned and I ran. With the sound of water roaring in my ears, I ran for the staircase, past the gods, who watched impassively. I lifted my head only once to look for Moira, but she was hidden in the crowd.

When I reached the staircase, I jumped the first two steps and stumbled down the rest. I thumped against the wall across from the bottom step and dropped my lamp. I didn’t stop to pick it up. After three nights in the maze I didn’t need it. Brushing my hands against the walls, one with Hamiathes’s Gift clutched in its fist, I ran on. When the wall on my left ended, I turned left, then right, and right again, then left, and left again, and splashed toward the doors which I had wedged open and which had again closed. I imagined Aracthus somewhere making a gesture, forcing a little more water through the bluff to move my blocks. He might yet succeed in trapping me. The water coming through the grille in the door washed against my legs, six inches
deep. How many thieves, I wondered, had reached this point and still drowned? Would my bones end in the pool at the back of the maze? Would the obsidian door be restored and the Gift returned to its mirrored tray?

If I had dropped my tools, they would have disappeared into the water, but I did not fumble. The water beyond the door was twelve inches deep, and it was almost two feet deep before I reached the next door. I worked the lock and stepped back as the water forced the door open. In the antechamber the water was waist deep, and the waves made by the water thundering down in a solid pillar from the hole in the ceiling were as high as my chest. The pillar carried a glint of moonlight from above, but the chamber was as dark as the maze. I slid cautiously around, close to the walls, but I slipped at the top of the stair leading to the outer door and slid down underwater until I was pinned, unable to breathe, against the stone door.

I fought to turn over, to get some purchase in order to lift my head, but the river held me on my back, head down. I scrabbled with my hands but could find no leverage to move my body against the force of the water. The river foamed around me. I ran out of air. Darkness that was deeper than the river swallowed me up.

W
HEN
I
WOKE, THE SUN
was up and the day was already warm. I was on the sandy bank of the Aracthus, my feet still in the water. The river lifted them and tugged gently, but not as if it still hoped to suck me in. It was moving quietly between its banks and seemed willing to make peace over the loss of Hamiathes’s Gift. At least that was my thinking as my eyes opened. A moment later came more sensible questions. Had I tried to escape the last maze at the last minute the night before and been trapped by the river, hallucinating everything else, the obsidian door, the gods, Hephestia, and Hamiathes’s Gift?

Altogether they seemed to make a likely fantasy that would fit well with my dreams during the past week. I wondered if I could have invented the cloth on Oceanus’s robe and the way it had felt, first satin cool and then velvet soft. My fingertips brushed against each other at the memory, and I looked down to see
what I held in my hand. Still caught in my palm after a night in the river was the poor, plain, gray-and-white spotted stone—Hamiathes’s Gift.

Covering that hand with the other, I closed my eyes and thanked Hephestia, and Eugenides, Oceanus, Moira, Aracthus, and every god and goddess I could remember. Then I pulled my feet out of the river and dragged myself up to where the sand was dry and lay down to sleep a little longer. The magus, Pol, and Sophos found me there. They had seen the stone door from the cliff lying in the clear water beyond the waterfall and had walked downstream with their packs in case they might find my body and give it a decent burial before turning toward home. I woke to find them standing around me.

“Well,” the magus said when I rolled over, “that is good news at least.” As I sat up, he leaned over me. “It is a great relief to my conscience that you are not drowned, Gen.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly. “We are alive and you are alive, so this expedition was at least not the disaster of earlier ones. If we failed to retrieve Hamiathes’s Gift, well, perhaps someone else found it first, or perhaps it was never there at all.”

I had meant to make him wait a little, but he sounded so bleak that without meaning to, I rolled my hand over and opened the fist so that he could see the Gift, resting on my palm.

His knees seemed to weaken, and he squatted down
beside me with his mouth open. I smiled at his wonder and my own delight. I was taken aback when he put his arms around my shoulders and hugged me like his own son, or anyway like a close relative.

“You are a wonder, Gen. I will carve your name on a stele outside the basilica, I promise.”

I laughed out loud.

“Where was it?”

I told him about the obsidian door and the stairway to the throne room, but I stumbled a little. When it came time to mention the gods, I passed over them. It didn’t seem right to talk about them in the light of day, with people who didn’t believe and might laugh. If the magus noticed, he didn’t comment.

“The river came down just as you said it might,” he told me. “And washed right across our campsite on the lower bank. So we owe you for our lives as well as for this.” He looked down at the stone he held in his hand.

“Is that really it?” Sophos asked. “How can you tell?”

The magus flipped it over so that he could see the lettering carved there, the four symbols of Hephestia’s ancient name.

“But it’s just a plain gray rock,” said Sophos.

“Do you have any doubts?” I asked.

“No,” Sophos admitted. “I just don’t understand why I am so sure.”

“In the story the other night,” I told Sophos, “when Hephestia rewarded Hamiathes at the end, she was
supposed to have taken an ordinary stone from the river and dipped it in the water of immortality.”

“So it is just a rock?” he asked.

“Not entirely,” said the magus. “Look carefully at it in the sun.” He handed it back to me. I bounced it a moment on my palm. It was a rounded oval and just the weight, I thought, to go in a slingshot. But I looked closer at the letters carved in the side of it and saw the sun glint off something blue at the bottom of the carving.

“It’s a sapphire,” I said, “at least part of it is.” I peered down the hole bored from top to bottom, then flipped it over and, looking closely, could see where the water had worn the stone smooth and uncovered a few blue flecks of the gem inside.

“There is a description of it in the scrolls of the high priests of Eddis,” said the magus. “Whenever anyone produced a stone, the high priest compared it to the scroll’s description. No one but the priest could read the description, and so no one ever offered a successful copy. Probably because someone who is already as wealthy and powerful as the high priest of Eddis is difficult to corrupt.”

“Or he’s corrupt already and doesn’t want to share his power,” I said.

“But you know the description?” Sophos said to the magus.

“Yes.”

“How?” I asked.

“My predecessor visited the high priest during a trip as ambassador to Eddis. He offered the priest a drugged bottle of wine and then looked through his library while he was unconscious. He didn’t think that the description of the stone was particularly important at the time, but I found it noted in his journals after he disappeared.”

I shuddered at the idea of poisoning a high priest. For that sort of crime they were still throwing people off the edge of the mountain.

“You’re wet, Gen,” said the magus, mistaking the cause of my shivers. “Get into some dry clothes and get something to eat. Then if you have the strength, I’d like to get at least partway across the dystopia. The rest of our food is with Ambiades.”

So I ate the last of the jerky. The bread was gone. Sophos filled a cup with river water for me and set it aside until the silt settled. I had once again lost the tie for my hair, so I asked Pol for some string. He offered me two pieces of leather thong, one longer than the other. I tied up the end of my braid with the long one and kept the short one to use later. Then we began to pick our way back across the dystopia, the magus wearing Hamiathes’s Gift around his neck. It had passed out of my hands only a few hours after I had stolen it.

When the sun got hot in the middle of the day, we
crawled into the shade of the tilted rocks and slept for a few hours. We reached the edge of the olive trees as the sun was setting, but we were still more than a mile above the campsite where we had left Ambiades. The sky was light as we walked south, but the groves were dark. Through the darkness we saw Ambiades’s fire blazing.

The magus shook his head. “He’ll have the fire watch out from fifty miles away.” He sent Pol ahead to put it out, or at least reduce the blaze, so that when the magus, Sophos, and I got to the clearing, Ambiades was over the first shock of seeing us return alive.

“I thought you were all dead,” he said. He didn’t admit that he’d kept the fire burning bright because he’d been afraid of our ghosts wandering back across the dystopia. While we were gone, he’d eaten most of the food, but the magus spared him any lectures, and we all went to sleep. I didn’t wake to see if anyone was keeping watch over me. I didn’t stir until the sun was up and I heard Ambiades moving around the camp, cleaning up the mess he’d made while we were gone. There was nothing for breakfast.

The magus intended to go down the edge of the Sea of Olives until we reached the nearest town to buy food for ourselves as well as some for the horses. “We’ll take a more direct route home. Now that we have the Gift, the quicker we go the better,” he said.

The horses must have been as happy as I was about the prospect of fresh food. The grazing was poor among
the dried-up grasses. We packed up and rode back into the olives until we came to the overgrown maintenance road that turned toward the distant Seperchia. We came to a wide, shallow stream. As our horses stepped into the water, a group of mounted men swung out from behind a patch of dry oak and brambles where they had been hidden. I saw that they had swords in their hands. I didn’t wait to learn anything else.

The magus and I were nearly knee to knee, ahead of the others. I dragged the reins of my horse over to one side, and it stumbled into the horse beside it. I brushed shoulders with the magus for just a moment and then turned the horse on its haunches and drove it with my heels back toward the trees on the streambank. As a branch passed overhead, I grabbed it, using my free hand, and pulled myself up into the tree.

By the time I was secure on a higher branch and could look down, Pol and the magus had their swords out and one of the attacking horsemen was already lying in the water. I watched as the magus proved himself to be a swordsman as dangerous as Pol. Between them they held the three remaining attackers. Sophos was behind them, twisted in the saddle, his back to the fight, trying to get his own sword out of his saddlebag. Ambiades was doing the same, but he’d had the sense to first run his horse onto the bank, away from danger. Sophos, looking in the wrong direction, didn’t know how close he was to being spitted.

I called his name, but he couldn’t hear me over the other shouting, which in retrospect I realized was mostly the magus and Pol yelling at him to forget the sword and hide in the trees. Pol was being drawn out by one attacker, leaving the magus to fight two men and Sophos still unaware of his danger. His attention was on his sword belt, which was caught in the buckle of his saddlebag.

Swearing, I stood up on my tree branch and rushed along its length. I threw myself facedown, lying mostly on the main limb and partly on the outer branches, and reached through the prickling leaves. All that I could reach of Sophos was his hair. I grabbed that and pulled him off-balance just as a horseman slipped between the magus and Pol.

Sophos fell face first off his horse, almost taking me with him. He landed in the mud with his horse between him and the fighting, and if he’d stayed down, he would have been safe, but he struggled to his feet, sword in hand, as the cursed horse moved away. He was left standing with his mouth open, looking at the lifted sword of his opponent.

I closed my eyes, but at the last possible moment he must have shifted his weight and parried the blow aimed at his head. His return to guard position was slow, and I don’t know what he would have done next, being too far off-balance to recover, but he didn’t need to do anything. As I opened my eyes, Pol slid his sword
into the man’s rib cage, nearly to the hilt. The man grunted and hung for a moment on the sword before he slid off into the water. There was another splash on the far side of the stream as the magus finished his opponent as well. I pushed myself upright on my branch and moved back toward the trunk of the tree.

There were four riderless horses, stamping around in the muddy stream. When their feet stopped crunching on the gravel and they stood still, looking confused, the magus was able to ask Sophos if he was hurt.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Good. Ambiades?”

“I’m fine.”

“Pol?”

“Nothing serious.” He was mopping up blood from a slice just below his elbow.

“And Gen? I see you found a safe place to wait while we were busy.”

I opened my mouth to point out that I didn’t have a sword to defend myself with, not that I wouldn’t have climbed the tree anyway, but instead I stared at him with my mouth hanging open like a horrified gargoyle. I pointed to his shirt. He lifted one hand, instinctively checking for a wound, before he realized. Hamiathes’s Gift was gone. He looked down at the neatly sliced leather thong lying over one shoulder. He ran his hand over it in disbelief, then felt frantically in the folds of his clothes. He checked the ridges in his saddle and
saddlebags before he jumped off his horse and waded into the stream, cursing. Pol and Sophos followed after him, but there was too much mud in the water by then. Nothing could be seen.

“What happened? What happened?” cried Ambiades from the bank. He was the only one of us still mounted.

“The stone, the cursed stone,” said the magus. “I’ve lost it in the fighting. Damn it, who the hell are these people?” he said, shifting a body off a gravel bank in midstream.

“Are they all dead?” Ambiades asked.

“Yes, they’re all dead. Get over here and help me with this one.”

They dragged the bodies out of the water, while I sat forgotten in the tree. I very carefully rebraided my hair and watched. When the dead men were laid out on the bank, the magus remembered me.

“Come down and help look,” he told me. He was distracted and was asking more than ordering.

Reluctantly I slipped down from the tree and stepped around the bodies. They were soldiers of the queen of Attolia. One of them was a lieutenant. He was young, and looked younger with wet hair stuck to his forehead and water beading on his face. He’d led the other horsemen as they rode down on us, led them no doubt onto the end of Pol’s sword.

There was one part of his uniform that hadn’t got
ten wet, with either blood or water, and its shape—a coleus leaf—caught my eye. After a moment I stooped to scoop a little water from the stream and dribbled it back and forth across the dry spot on his tunic. I soaked the image until it melted into the wetness of the rest of his uniform. The water was cold. It splashed on his neck and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone, but he didn’t mind, and he didn’t deserve to be marked with the coward leaf as he journeyed to the underworld.

When the mark was gone, I straightened up and noticed Pol watching me. I shrugged and wiped my hands on my pants, but my pants were muddy and my hands only ended up dirty as well as wet.

We left the bodies lying on the bank while the magus organized a search for Hamiathes’s Gift. Once the mud had settled, he had us stand in a line across the stream well below where the fighting had been. Staying in line, we worked our way upstream until he was sure we had passed the place where the stone would have dropped. There wasn’t enough current to have moved the stone far, but the stone was no different from any of the thousands of pebbles there on the streambed. Only the magus and I had held the stone. Ambiades had never even seen it. We’d stayed for almost a quarter of an hour, all of us staring at the gravel under our feet when Pol finally spoke up.