Mags hesitated, then asked the question that had been haunting him.
Mags heaved a sigh of intense relief.
Mags chuckled quietly, and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter17
EVERY day, Mags set up in one of five places where he thought that the foreigners might be hiding. It wasn’t at all difficult to get himself established; he had learned something about the beggars just by things Dallen warned him to be careful about. Now that he was out here, he learned a lot more by catching their surface thoughts. Mostly what he figured he needed to do was set himself up in such a way that he didn’t annoy them. They could be surprisingly competitive, so he needed to make sure they saw him as nothing like a threat. He hadn’t realized that part until he came to set up among them during the day; he had been lucky his first night, setting up quite by accident in a quiet spot that none of them wanted. Now he had to be more careful.
And after dark, he prowled some of the darker corners of Haven, keeping to the shadows, just in case, against his own judgment, the foreigners might have taken shelter among the poor and the criminal. But by day, and even into the night until the inns closed their doors to anyone not paying to stay the night, he haunted his five districts, moving once around noon and rotating them so that he never visited the same one twice in a row.
The Constables of the five areas he frequented got to know him—he called himself “Trey”—and looked out for him, which was good, because he wasn’t an aggressive beggar. Most beggars called out their sad stories to passers-by, and made a great display of their infirmities. Mags, obviously, did not, because the one thing he did not want to do was to draw attention to himself. As a consequence, his takings were fairly meager. On the other hand, he never once got into a fight with one of the other beggars. Usually those fights were verbal, but not always. Besides, he couldn’t afford either the attraction or the distraction that a fight would cause.
The Constables always saw to it that he had a decent midday meal at least, but things would have been very lean indeed if he had not resorted to a combination of theft and scavenging.
Now, it would have been dissembling to say that he only stole from those who deserved getting stolen from—but he really was in a good position to determine those who did deserve a bad turn, and most of the time he managed to be no more than an inconvenience or an embarrassment. And one thing was absolutely true: he never stole from anyone who couldn’t afford it.
And at any rate, it was never anything worse than snatching a bit of food—usually by nipping in through a hall window at an inn and helping himself to meals left at the doors of people who had hired the room for reasons other than a place to sleep. In short, he stole from men entertaining women who were not their wives in private and very expensive rooms. He never took money, although the opportunity presented itself, nor other property, though that came within reach of his fingers even more often than money. He had discovered he had a positive talent for scampering about on rooftops, which, considering how much of his life had been spent underground, was supremely ironic.
It wasn’t at all difficult. There were never more than a handful of these “special” rooms in an inn, and all were on the top floor, just below the servants’ attic rooms. All he had to do was wait until a post-assignation meal had been left discretley at the door, swing in through a hall window, stuff his shirt full, and scramble out again. It never took him more than a few moments. And to be honest, these little feasts were so extravagant he doubted that much was missed.
He did not use that talent for roof exploration in the poorer quarters, however. There were plenty of souls who lived there that were far better at it than he was, and most of those people had sharp tempers and sharper knives. No, he kept to the ground, to the shadows there, finding places he could hide and listen.
It wasn’t pleasant. The alleys here were only cleaned by rain, and it was a good thing he had a strong stomach.
Although he caught a few, brief whispers of Temper, somewhere off in the distance and never for long enough to get an idea as to direction, never again did he feel the full force of Temper’s thoughts, except in sleep. He slowly came to understand that as he had suspected, these actually were Temper’s nightmares, not his.
And that was where things took a very odd turn indeed. Waking, the man was tough, ruthless, and utterly immoral. In his dreams, he was the victim. The man spent every night fleeing from or fighting with something he knew would destroy—had destroyed—everything he cared about. It had been Mags’ own memories that had colored what he had gotten from Temper, and turned the dreams more personal. In his dreams, he didn’t know what the thing was he fled from or fought. Temper, however, knew very well what, or who, it was. But since it was a dream, Mags had no way of controlling it, to see the situation through Temper’s eyes, so the shadowy hunter remained a mystery.
It got even stranger once he realized that. He began to suspect that Temper was no mere hapless victim, but that he had given himself into the situation willingly. That he had sacrificed the very things he loved for the sake of power. And strangest of all, Mags got the impression that the very thing he fought was the thing he served.
In fact, the thing he fought was the thing he himself most wanted to become. Or, perhaps, replace.
No wonder he was insane.
Mags wanted to feel sorry for him, and couldn’t. The man was, in every sense, a monster. The longer Temper remained at large, the more danger he posed, because Mags knew that he was tenacious; either out of fear of his master, fear of failure, open-eyed ambition, or a combination of all three, Temper would not leave a job until he was called off, or the job was completed.
Aside from all that, this was, oddly, one of the most satisfying times of Mags’ life.
He was doing something important. And yet, he was more free than he had ever been. He answered to no one except himself. And he had Dallen. Certainly he was living and sleeping rough. Certainly there were nights of an empty belly, days in the misery of a pouring, cold rain that would be followed by a night in the open hoping that someone would put a fire in one of the fireplaces served by his chimney pots. But if he succeeded, it would all be worth it.
He was learning more about Haven than he had ever gotten from books, or even from Dallen. And since most of what he did was absorptive observation, he was learning far, far more about people than he ever dreamed possible. Those little glimpses he got of their unguarded thoughts were telling him more about what it was like to be someone who had a normal life than he would have under any other circumstances. It tended to “leak” over, too; more than once he found himself looking at things from two sides—the way “Mags” did, and the way a “normal” person did.
