The Republic of Thieves

months?

Nearly three years, whispers a soft voice in his head. A familiar voice. A hated voice.

“Mnnnnghr,” he rasps, the best he can do. The frustration comes on like a physical weight. He can sense the currents of magic in the room, feel the strength of his mother nearby, but his tools are missing. The power is there to be wielded, but his will slides from it like sand off smooth glass.

I’ll take care of it for both of us.

Cold fingers of force slide across his mind, and the impotence, blessedly, is lifted. He feels the words as he crafts them, feels them going out to her, mind to mind, his first orderly communication in … three years?

THREE YEARS!

As I said.

Camorr …

Yes, the Anatolius contract.

How badly was I injured? What did they do to me?

Not enough to cause your present condition.

The Falconer ponders the import of these words, flips desperately through his memories like the pages of a book.

A dreamsteel model of a city. Its towers falling into flat silvery nothingness.

Archedama Patience, in the Sky Chamber, warning him that he is headed into danger.

Steel rising and falling. Cauterizing heat, white bolts of pain in his mind unlike anything he has ever imagined. Vestris, dead. Before the blade can come for his tongue he tries to work the spell of pain-deadening, the old familiar technique, but on the other side of it … not welcome relief. Fog, madness, prison.

Now see it all.

Patience speaks a word, and something comes loose in his mind. A patina cracks over an old memory, revealing the truth within the shell.

Archedama Patience. The night of his departure, a brief private audience. She warns him again. Again, he scoffs at the transparency of her ploys. She speaks another word then, and the word is urgent and irresistible. The word is his name, his true name, uttered as the cornerstone of a spell. He is bound to it, then made to forget.

You … you did it.

A subtle compulsion. A trap. An irrevocable order sleeping in his mind until the next time he used the art of deadening pain.

YOU did this to me.…

You did it to yourself.

YOU DID THIS TO ME!

I gave you the chance to avoid it.

NO. THE CHANCE TO SHOW MY THROAT.

Your arrogance again. Can’t you see that you were a problem in want of a solution?

AND YOUR SOLUTION … ASSASSINATION. FAR FROM HOME.

I suppose that’s the only honest way to look at it.

I’M YOUR GODS-DAMNED SON!

I wear five rings. You put yourself on the wrong side of them.

Well. He forces himself to lower his mental voice, to think coolly. There must be danger here. Why is she telling him this, revealing all after three years? You certainly fucked things up, didn’t you?

All I could foresee was that you were headed into serious pain. Therefore I assumed that you would be in extreme danger … that you would do the obvious thing.

Paralyze myself, you mean! And then it would all be over.

Except your opponents were … scrupulous.

Ah. Is this what scrupulous treatment feels like? Lucky, lucky me.

I told you, it’s not what I wanted!

You and your gods-damned prescience. Your snide little hints. The way you tried to control everyone around you with them. What good was it, if you couldn’t even see THIS coming at us? Tell me, Mother, have you ever managed to have a vision of your OWN future?

No.

Well, that must be pleasant for you. To be the only real person in your whole damned world, and all the rest of us puppets for your private stage. How does it feel NOW?

“It’s over,” says Patience, switching to actual speech. She is beside his bed now, looking down at him. “All of it. Your associates are dead. Archedama Foresight is dead.”

How?

“Irrelevant. You are the sole survivor of your faction. All questions between us have been settled. We’re leaving Karthain, entering the time of quiet as planned. You are my final item of business before I go.”

Come to kill me last? Come to bring an end to three years of cowardice?

“Part of me wishes you were dead,” she says. “Wishes you’d died cleanly, as you would have had you been healthy and abroad in Karthain tonight. I can’t imagine wanting to live on in your … condition. And I will end your suffering, if it’s what you desire. But I felt that I had to ask. I owe you at least this much.”

She points to the other figure in the room, a burly man, balding, with a black mustache that droops to the collar of his brown tunic. There are no rings visible on either of his wrists.

“This is Eganis, your caretaker.” She offers images and impressions, revealing to the Falconer how it has been for three years.

Eganis moving him, rolling him from side to side, turning him to avoid weeping bedsores.

Eganis feeding him, gruel and pap and milk.

Eganis emptying his chamber pot.

Eganis walking him, leading the doddering Falconer by a length of leather around his neck.

A mage of Karthain … leashed …

It was necessary to preserve your health.

Like a dog …

It was necessary!

LIKE A GODS-DAMNED DOG!

You’re the one who always sought to know the spirits of animals more intimately.

He sends no words, but an unrelieved outpouring of hatred so hot and acidic he sees her stagger before she can manage to gird her mind against it.

“You’ll understand when you calm down,” she says. “I’ll leave this house and funds for Eganis to draw on. Without hands or voice, you’re now effectively one of the ungifted, and you will never see any of us again. If you can find some reason to live, you are invited to do so. If you find the thought unpalatable, then I will … I will end the matter quickly and painlessly.”

I will accept nothing more from you for so long as I live. Not this house. Not Eganis. Not charity. Certainly not death.

“On your own head be it,” she mutters. “Eganis will stay. You’re a mute invalid with three rings tattooed on your wrist, and Karthain could soon be a very … interesting place for you.”

There’s no hell for you deep enough to suit my tastes, Mother.

Your ambitions and your researches were a threat to every living being on this world. Consider that, when you cry your tears.

Your TIMIDITY! In the face of the secrets waiting to be unlocked everywhere the Eldren set foot, you want us to stay ignorant and helpless … well, to hell with you. All the real power of the human race is squandered on people like you … the willfully small. You and all your fellow punch lines to Karthain’s worst joke. Five rings! Five prisoner’s shackles!