The Thief (13 page)

“It’s gone, magus.”

The rest of us continued to stare at the streambed.

“Magus.” Pol spoke more firmly, and this time we picked up our heads. Ambiades, Sophos, and I looked back and forth between the magus and his soldier.

“Yes,” the magus finally agreed, after a long moment of silence. “We’ve got to go. Ambiades, get the horses and bring them to this side of the stream. Sophos, see if any of those other horses are still nearby. We should have tied them up. If they have saddlebags, check to see if there’s any food in them.”

Three of the horses were standing with ours—misery loves company—but the fourth one was gone, presumably back to its camp.

“There’s no time to catch it now,” said the magus. “We’ll have to go as quickly as we can.” He pulled himself onto his horse and looked one last time at the stream. “I don’t believe this,” he said.

I watched him until even I felt uncomfortable and looked away, as Pol, Sophos, and Ambiades had done. He’d had the stone for a day and lost it; I should have been pleased. Five days earlier I would have been delighted to imagine what it would be like for him in the court of Sounis when he went back to his king and told him the gamble had failed, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. I told myself it was because I was wet from wading in the stream. Or it may have been that I was afraid of the people who would be coming soon to find out what happened to the lieutenant and his three men.

“All right,” said the magus at last. “All right. Let’s go.” But he still didn’t turn his horse away from the stream. In the distance we heard a shout. The stray horse had been found, but the magus sat, unwilling to give up. He looked at the streambank and the trees around him, as if for landmarks, as if there were some hope that he might return to the place to search again. My nerves communicated themselves to my horse, and it sidled and blew underneath me.

Finally the magus dragged himself away. We turned our horses down the track and kicked them into a gallop. The magus rode beside me, still looking stunned. I don’t know what the others were thinking; I was concentrating on my riding. This was no time to drop behind or, worse, fall off the horse.

When we’d covered some distance, we turned into the trees and rode more slowly for almost an hour until we came to another open path.

“They’ll track us,” Sophos said, looking over his shoulder.

“We’ll have to keep ahead of them,” said the magus. I swiveled my head around to look at him. He sounded almost cheerful. He looked cheerful.

“A little danger adds spice to life, Gen,” he told me.

I was stunned at his recovery, and it must have shown. “I’ve had some time to think, Gen. The stone itself isn’t important. Now that we have seen it for ourselves, as well as having the description, and we know
that no one else can produce the original, we can make a copy.”

How someone could have held that stone in his hand and then say it wasn’t important, I didn’t know. I almost expected lightning to strike him dead.

“What about the fact that the stone is supposed to carry its own authority?” I snapped. “You’re supposed to look at it and know that it is Hamiathes’s Gift.” We’d all felt that, I’d thought, by the banks of the Aracthus.

But the magus had an answer. “That will be dismissed as superstition,” he said confidently. “We’ll manage just fine.”

All of my work could be thrown away. He would
manage.
I gritted my teeth.

The magus turned to speak to Pol. “We’ll follow this track into the cultivated groves, then cut through those toward the main road. If they haven’t seen us, we might hide in traffic; if they have, we’ll swing back under the olives and use the maintenance paths as much as possible.”

“What about food?” I asked. My tone nettled him.

“I guess we’ll try to get something in Pirrhea tonight,” he said vaguely.

“Tonight?” My exasperation pierced his bubble of false cheer.

“I’m sorry,” he snapped, “but I can’t pull food out of the sky for you.”

“You’re not going to pull it out of Pirrhea either,” I
said. “What do you plan to do, knock on a door and say, ‘Excuse us, there are four of the Queen’s Guard dead, soldiers are searching every road for us, and I’d like to buy a few loaves of bread and some dried beef, please’?”

“And what do you suggest, O oracle of the gutter?”

“I suggest that you should have brought food for five people with this miserable traveling circus of yours. Alternatively, you should have left Useless the Elder and his younger brother at home!”

“He’s not my brother.” Ambiades was offended.

“That,” I snarled at him, “was a figure of speech. Now shut up.” He jumped in the saddle as if he’d been slapped. I turned back to the magus. “How do you propose to get food?”

But the magus had had a moment to think and had arrived at the obvious solution. “You,” he said, “are going to steal it.”

I threw up my hands.

Pirrhea was an old town. Like many, it had outgrown its walls and was surrounded by fields and farmhouses. I walked through kitchen gardens, harvesting whatever my hands found in the dark. I dropped what I gathered into a bag I had taken from a shed at the first house I passed. Once I got too close to a goat pen and the occupants bleated at me. When no one came out to check on them, I went in and collected two cans of goat milk from the settling shelf. I was thirsty as well as hungry
and drank one of the cans while I considered burgling someone’s kitchen for leftover bread. I decided against it. Stale bread wasn’t worth the risk, but I did slip into the henhouse of the largest home I passed, to wring the necks of three chickens. I dropped them into a second bag and left town.

The magus and the others were waiting for me in the trees on the far side of an onion field. I hadn’t been keen to risk my neck for them. There had been recriminations of uselessness as we rode. Ambiades hadn’t liked it when I’d suggested he should have been left home. I pointed out that he’d been no help at the ford. He pointed out that I had climbed a tree. I pointed out that I had no sword. He offered to give me his, point first.

When I’d left the others in a rare grove of almond trees outside town, the magus had told me he’d give me an hour, and if I wasn’t back by then, he’d find the town center and shout “Thief!” at the top of his lungs.

In the dark he hadn’t been able to see the contempt on my face, but he could hear it in my voice. “Be sure to shout ‘Murderers! Murderers!’ too,” I said.

His answer had followed me as I walked away. “I’ll make sure that we all go to the block together.”

Everyone looked sadly at the chickens when the magus said there was no time to cook them. Pol tied them to his saddle, and we headed off into the dark, eating handfuls of raw vegetables and crunching grit in our teeth.

“There’s a livery stable on the main road at Kahlia,” the magus said. “We can steal a change of horses there.”

I choked on the spinach I was chewing. “We can what?”

“It’s another two hours’ ride if we push the horses.” He went on, ignoring my interruption. “We can find a place to camp by the road. There are enough travelers that we won’t be noticed. We’ll get a couple of hours’ sleep. Pol, you could put the chickens into the fire, and then we’ll get the horses and ride on. We should lose them when we cut away from the main road, away from the Seperchia’s pass to Eddis. They won’t expect that.”

“You are going to use the same trail back home? Why not just ride for the main pass?” Ambiades asked. “It’s closer, isn’t it? And once we’re in Eddis, we’re on neutral ground.”

“Once we get to Kahlia we’d be closer to the main pass,” the magus agreed. “But they’ll have all the roads blocked, and I’m not sure we could sneak through. The land around the pass is mostly open fields. They won’t expect us to cut back inland, and we should slip by them.”

“I think the main pass would be better,” Ambiades said hesitantly, giving the magus one last chance.

“It’s not your job to think,” the magus told him.

Ambiades tossed his head, and I thought he might say something, but he didn’t.

“About those horses…” I said.

“You’ll do your best, Gen,” said the magus, “and if your best isn’t good enough, we’ll all—”

“Go to the block together,” I grumbled. “You said that before.”

No one said anything more until we stopped on the road just outside Kahlia. The magus was as optimistic as ever. Pol seemed to take everything in stride, and Sophos didn’t know enough to be frightened. Only Ambiades was as nervous as a cat too close to a fire. Sophos had forgotten that he was keeping his distance from his idol, and he tried to chat with Ambiades as they unsaddled the horses, but Ambiades didn’t answer.

Pol kindled a fire in a traveler’s fire ring and cut up the chickens to cook. The fire ring was just a circle of stones mortared together. There was one every fifty yards or so on the roads outside large towns. They were built for the merchants who stopped their packtrains outside towns to camp. There were several packtrains camped near us that night, and smaller groups of travelers with just one wagon or no wagon at all. It was warm enough that a tent or a blanket roll would do. There were a few guards posted, but they weren’t watching for us.

We all slept, except Pol. The magus woke me before he woke the others and gave me careful directions how to get through town to the livery stable near the opposite gate.

“Bring the horses out there. Pol will be waiting for you. The rest of us will be up the road with the saddles.” He seemed as carefree as Sophos, but he didn’t have Sophos’s excuse.

“Do you have any idea how impossible this is?” I asked him.

He laughed. “I thought you said you could steal anything.” He gave me a shove on the shoulder and started me down the road.

“Things,” I hissed to myself as I walked, “don’t make noise.”

The moon was still up, and there was enough light to see the road in front of me. When I got close to the town walls, I could see by the light of lanterns burning by the gates. They were open. They probably hadn’t been closed for years, but there was a guard in the archway.

He was supposed to be watching for suspicious people—like me. I couldn’t think of a plausible excuse for coming into town at such an hour, so I avoided the problem altogether by circling away from the gate and climbing over the wall out of the guard’s sight. I dropped down into someone’s backyard, then worked my way between buildings until I found a wide street that I hoped was the one the magus had mentioned in his directions.

I hurried through absolutely empty intersections, listening at every corner for the footsteps of the watch,
but I met no one. I was on the right street, and I found the livery stable and the inn next to it without trouble. Both were closed for the night of course. Wooden shutters were pulled over the windows of the inn, and the gates to the courtyard were closed. I listened again for the watch, and when I heard nothing, I pushed open one gate after lifting its post off the ground so that it wouldn’t scrape. The post fit into a gap between the flagstones so that the gate wouldn’t swing closed again.

When I peeped into the stable, I found the ostler asleep in his chair at one end. Good luck for me. Not only was he asleep, but I guessed by the empty bottle on his left that he was drunk as well. I collected five leading straps from a peg over his head and slipped down the row of stalls, looking into each one at a sleeping horse. I picked five that I thought were mares and woke them with a whisper. I clipped the straps to their halters, and then I opened all the stall doors, carefully so that there was no squeak, starting with the one farthest from the ostler. The horses lifted themselves to their feet. Puzzled at being disturbed at such an odd hour, they made small noises of inquiry, none loud enough to wake the ostler.

When all the stall doors were open, I went back to my chosen five and led the first one out. As I led her past the stall of my next choice, I leaned in to twitch the strap hanging from that mare’s halter. She obediently followed her stablemate out of the stall and down the
row. The other horses came out in the same way. Soon all five were in a line, and the horses left in their stalls were leaning out of their stalls, wondering what they were missing.

I was at the door of the stable, looking out at the stone-flagged courtyard where the horses’ hooves were going to sound like the crack of doom. I looked back at the sleeping ostler. He would sleep through the noise only if he were very drunk indeed, and there was no way to know how much had been in the bottle when he started. There was an obvious solution, but I was a thief, not yet a murderer.

I sent a hasty prayer to the god of thieves that the horses would keep quiet and that the ostler was blind drunk; then I shuffled around until I had all five leading ropes in my hands and drew the horses out.

The silence was so profound that I turned back to make sure that the horses were following. It hadn’t occurred to me that the gods that I’d seen silent and unmoving in their temple might still be taking an interest in me. I almost bumped into the mare directly behind me. She threw up her head in surprise but didn’t make a noise. I stepped backward, and she followed. The iron shoes on her hooves struck the flagstones soundlessly. The other horses came as well. Afraid that I’d been struck deaf, I backed out of the courtyard. Behind my horses came the others from the stable.
They slipped through the gates of the inn and disappeared like ghosts down different streets. When the ostler woke, he would have to search the entire town before he would know that five of his charges were missing.

At the town gate I found Pol standing over the body of a guard.

“Did you kill him?” My lips formed the words without speaking.

Pol shook his head. Like the ostler, the guard was asleep. Pol took four of the horses, two leading straps in each hand, and left me just one to lead up the grass beside the road, between two houses and then out across the fields. We reached the cover of some trees and found the other three waiting.

“Was there any trouble?” the magus asked, and the spell of silence burst with a pop.