Limits (15 page)

Two hours later she was beginning to change her mind.

They were sitting up on the straw-filled mattress, sharing the last of the wine. Sparthera was naked; Sung still wore a wide cloth belt. He had opened one of his bags and was showing her a variety of small trinkets. There were birds that chirped when you tightened a spring, a pair of puppets on strings, flowers made of yellow silk, and squares of bright paper that Sung folded to look like bears and fish. He was very drunk, and talkative.

“The immortal Sung and his family rule in the land of the Yellow River, a mountainous land far to the east. I was head of the family for twenty years. Now I have abdicated the throne in favor of my son. But I carried away some magic. Watch: I put a half-twist in this strip of paper, join the ends, and now it has only one side and one edge…”

Sparthera was restless and bored. She had come upstairs expecting to deal with a magician. She had found a cheap toymaker who couldn’t hold his wine. She watched his strong agile fingers twisting a scrap of paper into a bird…and wondered. His forehead was high and smooth, his face a little too round for her taste, but undeniably good to look on. It was hard to believe that he could be a complete fool. There must be more to him than cheap toys and bragging and a way with women.

He was rummaging in his bag again and she caught a glimpse of gleaming metal.

“What is that?
The box?”

“The pointer.
The key to Gar’s treasure.
A gift to set me on the road.”

“Gar’s treasure.
What’s that?” It sounded vaguely familiar.

“It’s a secret,” Sung said, and he closed that saddlebag and reached across for the other. And while he was turned away from her, Sparthera pulled a twist of paper from her hair, and opened it, and shook white powder into Sung’s half-empty goblet.

She didn’t use it all, and it probably wasn’t needed. Sung was on his back and snoring a few minutes later, long before the drug could have taken effect. Sparthera watched him for a few cautious minutes more before she reached into the saddlebag.

She drew out a silver box. There were pieces of jade and carnelian set in mountings on the lid and sides.

She was half-afraid that a spell sealed this too, but it opened easily
enough. The inside was lined with faded crimson velvet, and all it held was an elongated teardrop of tarnished bronze. There were tiny silver runes inlaid along the length of the dark metal.

Sparthera picked it up and turned it this way and that. It was thicker than her forefinger and just about as long. A conical hole had been drilled nearly through its underside.

The box was worth something; but was it worth angering a magician? Probably not, she decided reluctantly. And it certainly wasn’t worth killing for, not here. Bayram Ali would never allow such a thing. She would have to flee Tarseny’s Rest forever…and Sparthera had none of the tourist urge in her.

The same applied to Sung’s cloth belt. She had felt the coins in it when they made the two-backed beast, but it was no fortune.

Sung surely ought to be robbed. It would do him good, make him less gullible.
But not tonight.
Sparthera dropped the pointer in its box, closed it, and was reaching for the saddlebag when she remembered.

Gar had been Kaythill’s magician.

And Kaythill was a bandit chief who had raided the lands around Rynildissen City, a hundred years ago. He had lasted some twenty years, until the King’s soldiers caught him travelling alone. Under torture Kaythill had steered them to some of his spoils.
The rest?
A wagonload of gold and jewels had been stolen by Gar the magician. Kaythill and his men had been scouting the countryside for Gar when the soldiers trapped him.

Of course the King’s men searched for Gar. Some vital pieces of military magic were among the missing treasure. There had been rewards posted, soldiers everywhere, rumors…and Gar’s treasure had grown in the telling, had grown into legend, until it reached Sparthera via her father. She had been…six? It was a wonder she remembered at all.

And this trinket would point the way to Gar’s treasure?

Sparthera dressed hurriedly, snatched up the silver box and left the room. She hesitated in the hall, looking first at her trophy and then back at the door. What would he do when he woke and found the box missing? She had only seen him drunk. A magician sober and looking for lost property might be an entirely different matter.

She pushed at the door. It opened easily. He hadn’t lied then. She could come and go as she pleased—until dawn.

Sparthera hurried down the stairs and out of the inn. It was nearly mi
d
night and there were only a few jovial souls left in the common room. None saw her leave.

Patrols rarely came to the Thieves’ Quarter of Tarseny’s Rest; but in the Street of the Metalworkers they were common. Sparthera went warily, waiting until a pair of guards had passed before she began throwing pebbles at a certain upstairs window.

The window came alight. Sparthera stepped out of the shadows, showed herself. Presently Tinx appeared, rubbing his eyes, looking left and right before he pulled her inside.

“Sparthera!
What brings you here, little thief? Are the dogs finally at your heels and you
need
a place to hide?”

“How long would it take you to copy this?” She opened the box and held out the bronze teardrop.

“Hmmm.
Not long. The lettering is the hard part, but I do have some silver.”

“How long?”

“An hour or two.”

“I need it now, tonight.”

“Sparthera, I
can’t
. I need my sleep.”

“Tinx, you owe me.”

Tinx owed her twice. Once, for a pair of thieves who had tried to interest Sparthera in robbing Tinx’s shop. In Sparthera’s opinion, robbing a citizen of Tarseny’s Rest was fouling one’s own nest. She had informed on them. And once she had worked like a slave in his shop, to finish a lucrative job on time; for Sparthera was not always a thief. But Tinx had had other, more pressing debts, and he still owed Sparthera most of her fee.

The metalworker lifted his hands helplessly and rolled his eyes to heaven. “Will I be rid of you then?”

“Finished and done. All debts paid.”

“Oh, all right then!” He sighed and, still grumbling about his lost night’s sleep, went back inside to light some candles and a lantern to work by.

Sparthera prowled restlessly about the tiny shop. She found means to make tea. Afterward she prowled some more, until Tinx glared at her and demanded she stay in one place. Then she sat, while Tinx sawed and filed
and hammered until he had a bronze teardrop; gouged grooves in the surface; pounded silver wire into the grooves; polished it, compared it to the original, then held it in tongs over a flame until tarnish dulled the silver. He asked, “Just how good are your client’s eyes?”

“I don’t really know, but by Khulm we’re running out of time!”

“Well, what do you think?” He handed her copy and original.

She turned them swiftly in her hands,
then
dropped the copy into the box and the original into her sleeve.
“Has to be good enough.
My thanks, Tinx.”
She was already slipping through the door. “If this works out…” She was down the street and out of earshot, leaving Tinx to wonder if she had made him a promise.
Probably not.

She stopped inside the front door of the inn. A moment to get her breath, else the whole inn would hear her.
Then upstairs, on tiptoe.
Third door down.
Push. It swung open, and Sparthera swallowed her gasp of relief.

The magician was still asleep and still snoring. He looked charmingly vulnerable, she thought. Sparthera pushed the box into a saddlebag, under a tunic. It cost
her a
wrench to leave it, but far better to lose a trinket worth a few gold pieces than to face the wrath of an outraged sorcerer. Sparthera had bigger fish to fry. She tiptoed out and shut the door. The first gray glow of morning was showing through the window at the end of the hall.

Sparthera stayed out of sight until she saw Sung mount his odd shaggy horse and start off down the King’s Way to Rynildissen. He seemed unsteady in the saddle, and once he clutched at his head. That worried her. “Khulm bear witness, I
did
go easy on that powder,” she told herself.

She found Bayram Ali counting money at a table in the common room. He looked up at her expectantly.

“Well? What did you find?”

“A few toys.
Some scraps of colored paper and an old silver box that isn’t worth the trouble it would get us.”

“No money?”

“Coins in a belt.
He never took it off.
There wasn’t much in it…not enough, anyway.”

Bayram Ali scowled.
“Very intelligent of you, dear.
Still, a pity.
He left this for you.” He tucked two fingers into his wide cummerbund and fished
out a pair of silver coins. “Perhaps you’ve found a new calling.
One for you and one for me, hmm?”

Sparthera smiled, letting her strong, even white teeth show. “And how much did he pay you last night?”

“Six pieces of silver,” Bayram Ali said happily.

“You sold me so cheaply? You’re a liar and your mother was insulted on a garbage heap.”

“Well. He offered six. We settled for eight.”

“Four for you, four for me, hmm?”

He looked pained. Sparthera took her five pieces of silver, winked, and departed, wondering what Sung
Ko
Ja had really paid. That was part of the fun of bargaining: wondering who had cheated whom.

But this time Sparthera had the pointer.

On a bald hill east of the village, Sparthera took the bronze teardrop from her sleeve, along with a needle and the cork from one of Sung
Ko
Ja’s bottles of wine. She pushed the base of the needle into the cork, set it down, and balanced the pointer on the needle.
“Pointer!
Pointer, show me the way to Gar’s treasure!” she whispered to it, and nudged it into a spin.

Three times she spun it and marked where it stopped, pointing north, and northwest, and east.

She tried holding it in her hand, turning in a circle with her eyes closed, trying to feel a tug. She tried balancing it on her own fingernail. She studied the runes, but they meant nothing to her. After two hours she was screaming curses like a Euphrates fishwife. It didn’t respond to that either.

Sitting on the bare dusty ground with her chin in her hands and the pointer lying in the dirt in front of her, Sparthera felt almost betrayed. So close! She was so close to wealth that she could almost hear the tinkle of golden coins. She needed advice, and the one person who might help her was one she had vowed never to see again.

A faint smile crossed her face as she remembered screaming at him, throwing his bags and gear out of the tiny hut they shared, swearing by the hair on her head that she’d die and rot in hell before she ever went near him again. That damned tinker! Pot-mender, amateur spell-caster,
womanizer
: his real magic was in his tongue. She’d left her home and family to follow him, and all of his promises had been so much air.

She’d heard that he lived up in the hills now, that he called himself
Shubar Khan and practiced magic to earn a living. If he cast spells the way he mended pans, she thought sourly, he wouldn’t be of much use to her. But perhaps he’d learned something…and there wasn’t anyone else she could go to. She stood up, dusted herself off,
bent
to pick up the bronze teardrop.

The sky was clouding over and the scent of rain was in the air. It matched her dismal mood.

What about her vow? It had been a general oath, not bound by a parti
c
ular god, but she had meant it with all her heart. Sometimes vows like that were the most dangerous, for who knew what wandering elemental might be listening? She leaned against Twilight, smoothing his tangled mane and staring out over his back at the rolling foothills and the mountains beyond. Life was too dear and Gar’s treasure too important to risk either on a broken vow. She took her knife from its sheath and started to hack at her long tawny hair.

Shubar Khan’s house, hardly more than a hut, was both small and dirty. Sparthera reined her horse to a halt before the door. She looked distastefully at a hog carcass lying in the center of a diagram scratched in the hard dry ground.

She had sworn never to speak his name, but that name was
Tashubar
. She called, “Shubar Khan! Come out, Shubar Khan!” She peered into the dark doorway. A faint odor of burning fat was the only sign of habitation.

“Who calls Shubar Khan?” A man appeared in the doorway and blinked out at her. Sparthera swung herself down from Twilight’s back and lifted her chin a little arrogantly, staring at him.