The Republic of Thieves

once. His mind is on fire with the thrill of power; now he has to be quick and certain, before Patience can bring her formidable skills into play, before any other magi can notice what’s going on.

One crow flutters and falls out of the night. The rest follow a heartbeat later.

Patience is on the pavement beside a warehouse, just passing under a swaying orange alchemical lamp. The first crow shoots past her hood from behind, brushing it, squawking and cawing all the way.

She whirls to see where it came from. The next dozen birds fly directly into her face.

Eyes, nose, cheeks, lips—there is no time to be merciful. The ball of sorcery-maddened crows pecks and claws at anything soft, anything vulnerable. Patience barely has time to scream before she is blind and on her back, flailing as more crows pour out of the sky like a black cloud given flesh.

She remembers her sorcery, and half manages a spell. A dozen birds flash into cinders, but a dozen more take their place, seeking neck and forehead, wrists and fingers. The Falconer presses Patience down to the pavement, the writhing flock a pure extension of his will, a crushing dark hand. Grinning madly, he channels a thought-sending to her, hurling his sigil against her shattered mental defenses, and then:

Is this weakness, Mother?

You never understood my talents.

The truth is, they never made me weak.

THE TRUTH IS THAT THEY GAVE ME WINGS.

The beaks and claws of the carrion birds are driven by human intelligence; in moments they have opened Patience’s wrists, pulped her hands, peeled the skin from her neck, torn out her eyes and tongue. She is helpless long before she dies.

The Falconer disperses his clouds of winged minions and sags against the window frame, gasping for breath. He has expended so much of himself.… He needs food. He must tear the house apart for anything useful. He needs clothing, money, boots.… He must be away as soon as he’s eaten, away from this nest of his enemies, away to recover himself.

“The time of quiet, Mother?” He hums the words softly to himself, savoring the eerie sensation of the dreamsteel vibrating in his throat. “Oh, I think the last fucking thing your friends are going to enjoy is a time of quiet.”

Hobbling uneasily, laughing to himself, he moves carefully down the stairs. First food, then clothes. Then to gather strength for the work ahead.

The long, bloody work ahead.

For Jason McCray,
one man who in his time
has played many parts.

AFTERWORD

I’m grateful to Simon Spanton for recommending Antony Sher’s autobiographical Year of the King, a book that didn’t so much directly influence The Republic of Thieves as whet my appetite to portray the players of the Moncraine Company from several angles I hadn’t previously considered. I hope that I may plead to enthusiasts of the theater, as I did to enthusiasts of all things nautical with Red Seas Under Red Skies, to remember that I have not sought to accurately re-create any particular tradition of troupe or performance from our own world, but to arrange selected elements of those traditions in a shape I found amusing.

I’m grateful again to Simon Spanton and Anne Groell for their long-suffering patience and support during a troublesome time; to my brilliant Sarah, who found something broken and helped put it back together; to Lou Anders, Jonathan Strahan, and Gareth-Michael Skarka, who coaxed work out of me when I badly needed to feel capable of it, and lastly to that person whose long correspondence kept me crawling forward in hope during the lowest, darkest point of my life: Thank you.

This concludes the third volume in the Gentleman Bastard sequence, which will continue with The Thorn of Emberlain.

SL

New Richmond, Wisconsin, 2008 – Brookfield, Massachusetts, 2013