The Thief (14 page)

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “no trouble.” Except that I’d discovered that I was eager to divest myself of the gods’ attention as quickly as possible.

Sophos took the leading strap from my hands and led my horse away to be saddled.

Pol asked me, “Are you all right?”

I nodded my head.

He took me by the elbow and felt my body shaking. “Are you sure?”

I nodded again. How could I explain that this was a perfectly normal reaction for someone who has had a
careless prayer answered by the gods? The silence of the horses had been immeasurably more unnerving than the gods in their temple. Maybe because the stables had been part of my world and the temple had not. I don’t know. For the first time in a long while, Pol had to help me onto my horse.

We were only an hour away from Kahlia when a cold, damp breeze blew down my neck and I pulled up my horse to listen to the sound of the temple gong beating in the night.

“What’s that?” Ambiades asked when the others had also stopped.

Probably Aracthus, still doing his part, I thought. “The ostler woke up,” I said, and dug my heels into the horse underneath me.

By morning we had nearly covered the ground back to the mountain trail. The horses were exhausted, and our pursuers were so close that twice we’d seen them over our shoulders at straight places in the road. The ostler must have called out the town garrison without counting his horses first. We lost sight of the soldiers when we turned into the olive groves, but they remained close behind. As we twisted in the dark under the trees, we moved a little quicker than our pursuers, only because we knew where we were going and they did not.

The mountain rose so steeply out of the Sea of Olives that it appeared without warning as we came out
of the trees. Suddenly in front of us sunshine was falling on the piled rubble at the base of the cliff. The magus pulled up his horse and dismounted.

“Not many people know about the trail. If we can get up the cliffside before they see us, they might not know where we’ve gone.”

“Doesn’t Eddis begin here? Won’t we be on neutral ground?” Sophos asked.

“Only if there’re enough Eddisians to insist on it,” said the magus, and slapped his horse with the riding crop, sending it down the alley between trees and mountains, followed by the other horses. “Get moving,” he said to the rest of us.

“Not me,” I said, intending to find a safe hiding place to wait until the hunt flowed past. It was past time for me to be going my own way. Once they were free of pursuit, the magus and Pol might turn their attention to ensuring my return to Sounis and prison, and I wasn’t going back to prison, or to Sounis for that matter.

The magus was astonished. Then he was angry. “What do you mean, not you?”

“I’m not going back to prison or the silver mines or some other hole in the ground. I’ll take my chances in Attolia.”

“You think I would take you back to the prison?” the magus asked.

“You think I would trust you?” I answered, unfairly.
He hadn’t given me any reason not to trust him, but everyone remembered my comments in the mountains about the probability of a knife in the back.

“The Attolians will kill you just the same,” he said, “more painfully probably.”

“They’ll be too busy chasing you.”

The magus glanced over at Pol.

“You don’t have time to waste forcing me,” I pointed out.

He threw up his hands. “Fine!” he bellowed. “Go die on the swords of the Attolians. Be drawn, be quartered, be hung, I don’t care. Spend the rest of your life in one of their dungeons. What possible difference would it make to me?”

I sighed. I hadn’t intended to offend him. “Leave me a sword,” I said without thinking, “and I’ll do my best to slow them down.” I could have bitten off my own tongue, but the magus didn’t take me up on my offer. He snorted in disbelief and turned away.

The others followed, but Sophos turned back after a few hesitant steps. He awkwardly pulled his sword free from its scabbard and offered it hilt first in my direction. “It’s not any use to me,” he explained truthfully.

It was a beginner’s sword, lighter than a regular one but better than nothing. I took it by the blunt part of the blade just below the hilt and raised it to him before he turned to hurry after the magus, who had looked back once to snort in contempt before
disappearing between the boulders.

I chose a nearby boulder and climbed up the side of it. Once I reached the top, I was above the eye level of any passing horseman, and it was as good a hiding place as any. Any pursuers would ride by without being aware of me, unless of course I jumped down on them, waving a sword.

I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to suggest such a thing to the magus. I’d sworn to the gods from the king’s prison that I wasn’t going to embroil myself in any more stupid plans. Of course I hadn’t actually believed in the gods at the time, but why should I care what happened to the magus and his apprentices? I spent ten minutes sweating in the sun, reviewing all the reasons I didn’t like the magus and everything he stood for, and trying to ignore a grisly image of all of them being beheaded.

There was a jingle of bits, and several hundred yards away the Attolians appeared one by one from the cover of the trees. They paused to look at the hoofprints leading toward the main pass, then ignored them, riding directly toward the magus’s secret trail. They weren’t the garrison from Kahlia; like the soldiers we’d met earlier, they were dressed in the colors of the Queen’s Guard.

I told myself one more time as they passed beneath me that the only reasonable thing to do was to wait until they passed, so I could sneak down the far side of
the boulder and disappear into the trees. Then I jumped onto the shoulders of the second rider from the front. The other horses were moving too quickly to stop, and as I hit the ground on top of the Attolian, I saw a hoof land on the turf several inches from the end of my nose. The Attolian struggled up on top of me, just in time to be hit by a following hoof. The horse came down as I scrambled away on all fours, dragging Sophos’s sword. I’d managed not to stick the Attolian, his horse, or myself. I got to my feet and ran.

Once I was among the olives I could move faster than the men still on horses, and I was well ahead of those who’d been thrown. I was heading for a patch of dry oaks I’d seen from the clifftop ten days earlier. The oaks grew low to the ground, and I counted on their tightly packed leaves to hide me. Without dogs, the pursuers had little chance of dragging me out and I could stay undercover until nightfall, then disappear in the dark.

The solid mass of oak trees was visible between the trunks of the olives, and I was slowing down, trying to pick the best place to dive into the cover of their leaves, when a second party of horsemen appeared and cut off my escape. Unable to outdistance them for long, I swung back toward the mountain, hoping to get among the rocks, where I couldn’t be ridden down. If I could climb the cliff face, and if they didn’t have crossbows or, gods forbid it, guns to shoot me with, I might get away
or at least surrender without being killed first. I pounded across the hard-packed dirt under the olives, and some small part of me that should have been thinking something more sensible noticed that my strength had returned since I’d left the king’s prison.

I made it to open ground, but my pursuers caught up with me just before I reached the rocks. A horse moved in front of me, and I had to turn to avoid it. There were horses everywhere, and shouting. Everyone seemed to be shouting.

I
HEARD THE TUMBLERS CLICKING
as the guards unlocked my cell door before opening it to wave the magus in. Without turning my head, I could see him silhouetted in the doorway with Sophos beside him. Once the door was closed and locked behind him, the cell was dark. I lay quietly and hoped that he hadn’t seen me.

“Magus?” Sophos whispered.

“Yes, I saw,” the magus answered, and my hopes sank. I heard him taking small, careful steps across the floor. When he got close to me, he squatted down and reached out with his hands. One of them brushed my leg and then my sleeve and followed it down my arm until he touched my hand very quickly, to see if I was warm and alive or cold and dead.

“He’s alive,” he told Sophos as he put his hand back over mine and squeezed it. It was meant to be comforting.

“Gen, can you hear me?” he whispered softly.

“Go away.”

In the dark he found my face and pushed the hair that had been lying across it out of the way. He was very gentle. “Gen, I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t answer. Only a short time before, I had floated to the surface of the pain that had swallowed me up. I didn’t care much about his apology.

Sophos kneeled down beside me in the dark. “How did you get here?” he whispered, as if the guard were lurking outside to hear the prisoners’ conversation.

“They had a cart.”

The magus snorted. His fingers left my face, and I felt them lightly touching the front of my shirt where it was stiff with dried blood. “Don’t,” I said. My voice was wispy and thin. I tried to pull myself together and started again. “Just leave me alone. I’m fine. Go away.”

“Gen, I think the bleeding has stopped. I’ve still got my cloak. I’m going to see if I can wrap you in it.”

“No,” I said, “no, no, no.” I didn’t dare shake my head, but I desperately didn’t want the magus to try to wrap me in his cloak. I didn’t want his cloak. I didn’t want him to put his hand beneath my head and lift it to slide Sophos’s fancy folded cloak underneath, which is what he did first. When he didn’t notice the bump under my hair at the base of my skull, I gave up protesting. The pain washed back over me, and I sank into it. The last thing I heard was the magus arguing with a guard about clean water and bandages.

When I woke again, there was a gloomy light coming through the cell’s barred window, and I could see Sophos hovering. My shirt had been opened, and I was wrapped in white bandages. The magus must have won his argument.

Sophos saw me looking cross-eyed down at my chest and said, “He told the guard that you could always be killed later, but if you were dead, you couldn’t be questioned by anyone but the gods.”

That was comforting. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

He came to sit cross-legged beside me. I was lying on his cloak and wrapped in the magus’s. “They came an hour ago and took the magus away,” he said. “Pol and Ambiades are dead. The queen’s soldiers were waiting for us at the top of the cliff. Ambiades had told them about the trail.”

He waited, and when I couldn’t think of anything to say, he told me, “We saw everything from the top of the cliff.”

Hence the magus’s apology.

The captain of the Queen’s Guard and his men had been waiting on the mountainside. No doubt they had had more men stationed at the entrance to the Seperchia Pass, but the captain had gambled on the magus’s leaving Attolia the way he had come in. When Pol and the magus boosted Sophos over the lip, he’d seen their boots, but he’d been dragged onto the clifftop
before he could shout a warning. There had been nothing the magus and Pol could do but follow with Ambiades. When the captain of the guard had asked where I was, the magus, still angry at me, had said, “Saving his own skin.” Stretched flat on top of the boulder, I was easy to see from above.

“He’s planning an ambush,” said one of the soldiers, and raised a crossbow.

“The queen wanted them all alive,” the captain reminded him.

“Then don’t bother to shoot him,” the magus said bitterly. “He’ll hide there until you climb down to arrest him.”

“He’s armed,” said the captain, and he cupped his hands to his mouth to shout a warning to his men but lowered them when the magus fluttered one hand in dismissal. “The only thing he can do with a sword is steal it or sell it.”

So they stood and watched me turn an orderly hunt into a knot of fallen horses and wounded men. The captain swung toward the magus, who was clearly stunned, and then changed his mind about what he was going to say. “Not what you expected?” he asked in wry tones.

The magus shook his head, watching me as I ran for cover.

“My men will cut him off,” the captain assured him as I disappeared under the olives.

“He’s done for,” said Ambiades when I was chased back into the open by the horsemen. “Good riddance,” he added as they bore down on me.

“Shut up, Ambiades,” the magus said.

“They’ll have to dismount to get him,” said the captain.

“They won’t have any trouble,” the magus had said sadly, not knowing how strongly my father had desired me to become a soldier and not a thief.

“I’ve never seen someone win against that many men,” said Sophos, sitting on the cold stone floor beside me.

“You still haven’t,” I pointed out. “Tell me about Ambiades.” I didn’t want to talk about the fight at the base of the mountains. Something unpleasant had happened. I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. I didn’t want to.

But Sophos wouldn’t be distracted. “No, I suppose not. But you wounded two of them, and I think you killed the last one.”

My eyes closed. That was what I hadn’t wanted to think about. I hadn’t intended to kill anyone, but I’d panicked when I’d seen swords on every side.

“We saw you run back into the open,” Sophos went on mercilessly. “Why didn’t they ride you down?”

“Too many rocks,” I whispered. I was tired. “And they were riding farm horses. They only step on people by accident.”

Only four of the soldiers had dismounted at first. I’d chopped one of them on the forearm, then disarmed another and gotten my sword tangled in his hilt. I wouldn’t have been able to free a longer sword, but I managed to pull Sophos’s clear in time to stop a thrust from someone on my left. Training that I thought I’d forgotten turned the block into a lunge, and I’d sunk the sword into my opponent, certainly killing him. It had felt no different from stabbing a practice dummy. I was so horrified that as he fell away from me, I’d let the sword slip out of my hand. I hadn’t wanted to be a soldier. I’d become a thief instead, to avoid the killing. See where that had gotten me.

A light push from behind had forced me forward a half step. When I looked down, my shirt was lifted away from my chest like a tent, with a half inch of sword poking through a tear in the cloth. The point must have entered somewhere around the middle of my back but had slanted to come out near my armpit. I remembered very clearly that there was only a smear of blood on the steel.

“We thought you were dead,” Sophos told me.

So had I. My knees had folded. Things were muddled and awful for a long time, and when I opened my eyes again, I was lying on my back and the sky over me was perfectly blue. The blue was all I could see. I must have been on a cart, but its sides were out of my sight. There was no sign of olive trees or the mountains. If it
hadn’t been for the jolting as the cartwheels turned, I could have been lying on a cloud. People still seemed to be shouting, but they were very far away. They were important people, shouting about me. I heard the king of Sounis and the queen of Eddis and other voices I couldn’t identify. I thought that they might be gods. I wanted to tell them not to fuss. I wanted to explain that I would be dead soon, and there would be nothing left to fuss over, but the cart must have hit a particularly severe bump. The blue sky above me turned to red and then to black.

Sophos dragged me out of the memory, asking, “Who taught you to fight like that?”

“My father.”

“Was he very angry when you turned out to be a thief?”

I thought of the fight when I’d torn up my enrollment papers for the army. “Yes.” Still, we’d gotten much closer once the matter was settled and done with. “But he’s used to it now.”

“You should have been a soldier,” Sophos said. “You were better than Ambiades ever was. I think that’s why he said, ‘Good riddance,’ again, and that’s when Pol—” Sophos stopped.

I opened my eyes to see that he was crying. He scrubbed his sleeve across his face to wipe away some of the snot and tears. I hadn’t wanted to think about
what had happened at the bottom of the cliff, and Sophos hadn’t wanted to think about what had happened at the top.

He wiped away some more tears and, after a few deep breaths, continued quietly. “The magus told Ambiades that there was nothing to be pleased about, and the captain of the guard said yes, there was, and Ambiades just looked kind of sick at first, like the magus, but then he started to look pleased with himself. And then we all realized that he was the one who had told the Attolians about the trail up the mountain.”

I remembered the fancy tortoiseshell comb of Ambiades’s that had caught the magus’s eye. He must have wondered where Ambiades got the money to afford it. I’d guessed that Ambiades was in somebody’s pay and that from time to time he felt guilty about it, but I’d assumed he was taking money from an enemy of the magus’s in Sounis’s court. It hadn’t occurred to me, or to the magus, obviously, that he could betray his master to the Attolians.

“Ambiades started to say something, but then you screamed.”

I screamed?

“We could hear you from the top of the cliff when they pulled the sword out,” Sophos told me, his voice shaking—and I remembered. That was the muddled and awful part. I’d felt my life dragged out with the sword, but in the end my life wouldn’t go. It had
stretched between me and the sword. I think that only the power of the gods could have kept me alive, but my living was at the same time an offense to them. I should have died, but instead the pain went on and on. Dying would have been so much easier.

I shuddered, and the pain returned, stopping my breath. Sophos held me by the hand until it passed.

“Everyone looked down at you,” he said. “Then we turned to look at Ambiades, and he didn’t care. I mean, we could see that he didn’t care that you were dead. I don’t think that he cared about anything anymore, not about me or the magus or Pol. And Pol, he just put out one hand and shoved Ambiades over the edge. And then—”

Sophos stopped for another deep breath before he went on. “Then he went over the cliff, too, with two of the Attolians. The magus tried to get out his sword, but the soldiers knocked him down.”

Sophos pulled his knees up to his chest and rocked back and forth as he cried.

Moving slowly, I lifted one hand to his leg to squeeze it. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had liked Pol.

“I’ve known Pol my entire life,” Sophos said unevenly. “I don’t
want
him to be dead,” he insisted, as if his wishes should be granted. “He has a wife, and he has two children,” he wailed, “and I am going to have to tell them.”

I shuddered and closed my eyes again. The man I’d killed could have had no clue that he was facing a skilled opponent. He’d judged me by my novice sword and my size. I had taken him by surprise and killed him. I might just as well have stabbed him in the back in an alley. Did he have a wife and two children? Who would tell them that he was dead? The pain in my chest spread, until even my fingers ached, where the backs of them touched the rough floor.

After a long time Sophos whispered, “Gen? Are you still awake?”

“Yes.”

“The magus said that the bleeding stopped and that you would probably be all right. As long as you didn’t get a fever.”

“That’s good to know.” That way they could behead me.

The sun was setting when the guards brought the magus back. Its last light came directly in the small window and lit the opposite wall of the cell. The wall was made of the same yellow limestone as the king’s megaron on the other side of the Eddis mountains. I’d dozed on and off during the afternoon. Someone had brought food, which I’d told Sophos to eat.

“Gen, how do you feel?” the magus asked.

“Oh, fine,” I told him. My chest was filled with boiling cement, and I was hot and cold all over at the same
time, but I didn’t really care. I didn’t care much about anything, so I guess I felt fine.

The magus held his hand against my forehead and looked concerned. “Did you eat anything today?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yes,” he agreed, “that was a silly question. Did you get anything to eat, Sophos?”

Sophos nodded.

“Did you save anything for me?”

“No, I’m sorry.” Sophos looked guilty.

“That’s all right,” lied the magus. “I ate upstairs, while I was talking with the captain of the Queen’s Guard. Evidently Her Majesty is on her way to hear our story for herself.”

He settled himself on the stone floor and leaned against the wall, just outside my line of sight.

“We are in a slightly difficult position,” he said, and I rolled my eyes again. “I’m afraid that Ambiades was our only reliable means of convincing the Attolians that Hamiathes’s Gift was lost. You know what happened to Ambiades?”

“Sophos told me.” It was awkward to have a conversation directed to the side of my head, but turning to look at the magus wasn’t worth the effort.

“His father’s money must have run out, and he decided he’d rather be a wealthy traitor than an impoverished apprentice. Attolia paid him, and he had arranged for someone to follow us from the time we left
the king’s city in Sounis. If we moved too quickly, Ambiades was careful to slow us down.” We both thought of the food missing from the saddlebags.

“I owe you many apologies,” the magus admitted.

“They are all accepted,” I said. It wasn’t important anymore.

“The queen probably hoped to kill the rest of us quietly and send Ambiades back as a sole survivor. She is not going to be happy to have lost such a valuable spy, and with Ambiades dead, I’m afraid there’s no way to convince her that Hamiathes’s Gift fell in a stream.”