Blood and Ivory-A Tapestry Page 13

  "I hadn't his taste for truce-breaking. Besides, this isn't worth any man's life."

  She dropped the zircon into Patches' hand.

  "So you really did it," said the younger thief, awed, regarding the stone. Then she gave Jame a wary, sideways look. "Still mad at me, aren't you?"

  "Mad? Why? All you did was let the other 'prentice thieves goad you into swearing that I could crack Polyfertes' treasure room. Well, I have. Your honor is safe, and so is my reputation—for once without bloodshed."

  "Oh well," said Patches vaguely. "No omelets without broken eggs."

  Jame turned on her. "Remind me, if you please, what happened to Scramp, your brother, only three months ago."

  "He challenged you to rob the Tower of Demons," said Patches, squirming. "The demon nearly made fish bait of your soul, but you got away with the Peacock Gloves."

  "And then?"

  "Scramp's master disowned him."

  "And then?"

  "Scramp hanged himself. And then," said the pug-faced thief, rallying, "you gave me the Gloves so that I could buy my way into the Thieves' Guild."

  "And that, I suppose, puts the egg back together again. You don't understand, do you? I might as well have put that rope around your brother's neck myself. As for tonight, couldn't you see that the other 'prentices were setting you up—and me, too—exactly the same way they did Scramp? If you ever put me in a situation like that again, we're through; I'll be damned if I'm going to cause another death in your family."

  With that, Jame turned on her heel and walked away.

  She had gone quite some distance into the bustling labyrinth that was Tai-tastigon before the haze of rage lifted, leaving her ashamed. Why had she torn into her young friend like that? Patches had meant no harm, either by accepting the challenge in the Talisman's name or by speaking lightly of spilt blood. She was simply a child of the streets, with neither time nor tears to waste on the dead. Jame had thought that she too had gotten over Scramp's suicide, but apparently not. Well, forget it. It was unprofessional to brood, and dangerous as well. Now she must report the evening's success to Penari, her master, whose instructions had made it possible.

  The Maze, Penari's home, was one of Tai-tastigon's marvels. The old master thief had had the huge, circular edifice built some fifty years ago, just before the final, impossible theft that had made his reputation forever. Then he had retreated into it with his prize, the jewel called the Eye of Abarraden, thumbing his nose at the entire city. Since then many thieves had tried to track the old master to his lair to obtain his secrets, but the Maze had defeated them all. Besides Penari, only Jame knew the key to its twisting ways, and even she entered them this morning with trepidation, remembering how the building's own architect had once lost his way here and never been seen again.

  Fortunately, the earthquake had done little damage . . . or so she thought until she finally emerged in the old thief's living quarters. These occupied the core of the building, a wide, seven-story-high shaft lit day and night by innumerable guttering candles and filled with the spoils of a lifetime. At the moment, virtually everything appeared to be on the floor. Icons, rare manuscripts, all the trinkets on the mantelpiece except for a solitary stone gargoyle, clothes, a shattered box with ivory inlay (formerly the resident of a high shelf), fragments of a roast goose. . Jame sighed. What a mess. But where was Penari?

  Molten wax splashed on the center table, followed by a shower of candles. Looking up, Jame saw that the huge chandelier had almost disappeared, lapped about in the folds of something white that undulated gently in the dim light.

  "Monster?" she said incredulously, staring. "You idiot, that chain is ancient! Come down before the roof caves in."

  The tablecloth moved. Jame threw it back and, crouching, found herself nose to nose with her master.

  "About time you showed up!" hissed the old man. "Are we alone?"

  "Why, yes—except for a forty-foot python suspended over your head."

  "Never mind that." Penari scrambled out from under the table. Erect, the top of his head came to her chin and his cloudy, nearly blind eyes stared first through her collarbone, then wildly about the room. "Not here yet, is he?" he demanded, a touch of his usual self—confidence returning. "Good! I've time to thwart him yet. Now, have you seen his gargoyle?"

  "I've seen a gargoyle," said Jame, bewildered. "Over there, on the . . . Why, that's odd. It's gone."

  "Gone," he repeated querulously. "Of course. It would be. Quick now, have you ever come across any bones in the outer passageways?"

  "Many time," said Jame, staring. "Rats, Monster's dinners, vhors . . . "

  "No, no—h u m a n bones. A skeleton, say, with a finger missing."

  "Bodies, yes, occasionally—when some fool wanders in and breaks his neck before we can escort him out—but bones . . . Wait a minute. I didn't exactly count phalanges, but did this particular skeleton have a medallion around its neck, a semicircle on a stem?"

  "Yes, yes!"

  "Well then, that would be Hervy."

  "Who?"

  "That's just what I call him," said Jame, with mounting embarrassment. "I came across him when you first sent me out to memorize part of the Maze and . . . well, he was such a clean-picked old gentleman that I used his bones to mark various passages. He's scattered all over the first level now."

  "Excellent!" cried the old thief, to her amazement. "But do you remember where you left his head? Yes? Then go fetch the nasty thing, boy, and we'll smash it into toothpicks. Hurry!"

  Jame went. Penari often left her speechless, but never more so than now. What did bones decades old have to do with a little stone statue that apparently moved about at will? Why was Monster, that venerable reptile, clinging to the chandelier, or his master, for that matter, cowering under a table . . . and would she ever get the old man to stop calling her "boy?"

  The light of her torch danced on the bare walls. Dark, dusty, narrow—it was always rather like being buried alive here in the outer passages of the Maze. She went quickly, pausing now and then to listen for the sound of claws on stone. Not long ago, the labyrinthine building had suffered from an infestation of vhors—large, vicious rodents with a tendency toward demonic possession—and she was not sure that she and the priest lent to her by the Brotherhood of Sumph (Pest Control Chapter) had dealt with all of them.

  Jame's destination was the intersection in the northwest quadrant of the Maze where she had originally found the entire skeleton. The bones were so old that she had never really thought of them as human remains and so had felt free to scatter them as she pleased, leaving only the skull undisturbed. She should have found it there now, but it was gone. Puzzled, Jame crouched beside the poor scraps of clothing that had survived time, rats, and her own meddling. Something glinted in the torchlight. She reached gingerly into the decaying rags and drew out Hervy's medallion. A semicircle on a stem . . . surely she had seen this emblem somewhere else, out in the city.

  Suddenly Jame stiffened. Someone—no, something—was watching her. Firelight leapt on the walls. Dust drifted down from an overhead beam. The silence pressed in on her, broken only by the distant sound of dripping water and . . . what? The whisper of claws on stone? Vhors hunted in packs. When the madness seized them, they swarmed up from the sewers, engulfing anything alive that got in their way, passing their insanity on to it even as they died. Medallion in hand, Jame rose hastily and returned to the central chamber, making several quick but wary side trips.

  "The skull is gone," she reported to Penari, "and so are many of the other bones. I didn't have time to check them all. Now, will you please tell me what's going on?"

  But the old man didn't answer. He heard her news in silence, then began to pace back and forth, occasionally stumbling over out-of-place objects. Jame watched him, perplexed. This wasn't the first time he had kept a secret from her, but usually he did so with a kind of glee, daring her to solve the mystery for herself. That had been part of her training. But now he had appare
ntly forgotten her presence altogether, and, for the first time since she had known him, he seemed to be badly scared. She was his apprentice, bound to him by law and respect. It was her duty to protect him, but from what?

  The medallion grew warm in her hand. She didn't want to leave the old man, and yet . . .

  "Sir," she said, "if you haven't any need for me here, I've an errand in the city."

  Penari didn't seem to hear her. She was well out into the Maze when his voice, shrill with defiance, reached her. "You can't have them, do you hear me?" he was shouting, not at her, not, apparently, at anyone. "They're mine, I tell you, mine, mine, mine!"

  TAI-TASTIGON, that great city, was wide awake now, shaken out of its predawn drowsiness by the tremors that had wracked it. The citizens of the night—thief, courtesan, and reveler—rubbed shoulders in the streets with merchants and craftsmen thrown prematurely from their beds. Pilgrims gawked at the damage. A fair number of these country-bred folk who know no better than to wander from their lodgings would not be seen again for weeks, if ever. Tai-tastigon the Labyrinth had swallowed even its own citizens before now, and possessed a floating, bewildered population of the lost whose patriarchs, some claimed, had been wandering the streets since the founding of the city.

  Penari's Maze was more sparsely occupied, but in others ways it resembled the Labyrinth all too closely: one, in fact, was the miniature of the other. This was the greatest of Penari's secrets that Jame had yet learned, and it still awed her that a single mind could have stored up enough information about the city, street by street, level by level, to have drawn up from memory its map to use as the floor plan. She herself had only mastered a fraction of the Maze so far, but she did know how to match points in the building with their external counterparts. This bustling street, for example, equaled that dusty corridor; here she should turn just as she would in the Maze; there, go straight . . . and so on and on until some thirty minutes later Jame arrived at the spot in the northwest quarter of Tai-tastigon that corresponded to Hervy's original position in the Maze.

  She was now in the heart of the temple district. All around her, chants and clouds of incense drifted out of open doors, fogging the air with sound and scent, while little troops of worshippers trotted past, some of them going backward in penance. Over the door of the temple facing her was the same emblem as on the medallion still in her hand. She saw, on this larger version, that the mushroom-shaped symbol was an instrument of some sort, marked with calibrations. She opened the door a crack and peered into the utter darkness of the sanctuary.

  "Hello! May I enter?"

  No one answered.

  For a moment she stood there, undecided. It could be very dangerous to enter the temple of a god not one's own without safe conduct. Then, on impulse, she swung open the door and stepped over the threshold. Immediately, all outside light vanished. When Jame groped behind her for the door, nothing was there.

  So much for thoughts of retreat.

  Cautiously, she began to edge forward, hoping that this wasn't a sect that favored snake-pits. Then suddenly, as though an intervening corner had been passed, she saw what appeared to be a small, extremely detailed model of Tai-tastigon's Council Hall. Intrigued, she approached it. With each step she took, it grew remarkably, until, when she came up to its walls, they seemed every bit as high and solid as those of the original out in the city proper. Logically, the temple in which she stood could not have contained anything a tenth the size of this hall, and yet here it was. What was more, beyond it she saw another miniature structure—this time the Tower of Bats—and again approached to find it full-sized. This happened over and over until within a few minutes she had visited a dozen of Tai-tastigon's most notable buildings.

  There was even a full-scale replica of Polyfertes' mansion. Jame circled it curiously, noting that here too parts of the ornate facade had fallen. The worst damage, however, was at the rear of the house where the servants' hall had partially collapsed. Then Jame saw something move in the ruins. It was a hand.

  "Are you all right in there?" The hand had whisked itself back into a hole under a downed beam. Jame, peering in after it, saw nothing. "Hello?"

  "Hello!" said a muffled, petulant voice. "Kindly get off my calculations."

  Jame stepped back hastily. She had been standing on a set of mathematical figures drawn in the dust. The hand reappeared at a different hole, took several measurements with the now-familiar mushroom-shaped instrument, then added these numbers to those already on the ground.

  "If," said the voice, "you were to take that board there, balance it on this stone here with the edge under this beam, and push down, you might do some good."

  Jame complied, and a moment later a plump little man crawled out from under the rubble. "Well done. Thank ye," he said, brushing himself off.

  "That's odd," said Jame, surveying the ruins. "Earlier this morning I . . . uh . . . had some business at this house—the real one, that is—and the earthquake had damaged it, too."

  "Nothing odd about it," said the little man briskly. "Correspondences m'dear, correspondences. Naturally, the fall of one affects the other, and the same with cracks, crumblings, and other misfortunes. We even have a minor problem with pigeons. But see here: I'll show you what I mean."

  He set off at a trot, obliging a perplexed Jame to follow. They passed many more buildings than she had as yet seen, a fair number of them recently damaged. Then, rounding another of those invisible corners, Jame found a tall, familiar pair of windows looming up before her, gorgeously tinted and ablaze with light. The architect priest threw them open. With a deepening sense of unreality, she followed him out onto the windy balcony of Edor Thulig, the Tower of Demons.

  Tai-tastigon lay spread out far below them. Its streets hummed with life as the city's irrepressible citizens embarked on a new day of profit and pleasure. What was a mere earthquake to them? More untoward things happened in Tai-tastigon all the time . . . like stepping from the interior of one building onto the balcony of another blocks away. There to the northwest lay the Temple District. Jame was trying to pick out the architects' sanctuary—in which, a moment ago, she had been standing—when she noticed a dark scar cutting halfway across the entire district, a shadowy rift of downed buildings with shock lines reaching far out into the city.

  "It was that damned Arthan," said the priest, holding down wind-torn hair with both hands. "A wild hill-god if ever I've seen one. His fool priests never told him they'd moved his house into town, so when he happened to come untempled this morning, of course he panicked. The biggest city he'd ever seen before probably had one communal privy. Why, the imbecile almost got as far as this temple! If you think the damage he did out in the city was bad, imagine what it would have been like if he'd gotten his big feet in among these models."

  "You mean . . ."

  "Yes, of course. D'you think the correspondences only work one way? Oh, we had a merry time getting that holy half-wit indoors again, and what should happen the moment I get home? Polyfertes' blasted house falls on me! I keep telling the architect who built it that he puts too much sand in his mortar."

  Jame was leaning over the rail, staring down at the rose garden far below.

  "A long way to the ground, isn't it?" said the priest behind her. "One hundred and fifty feet at least, and the Talisman jumped from here with the Peacock Gloves during the last Feast of Fools. Now there was a theft!"

  "It wasn't from here," said Jame, still staring, surprised at how dry her mouth had gone. "It was from the south face down into the River Tone, which was quite bad enough, even at night, even without thinking. But there was no choice: the demon of the tower was a step behind me."

  "You? Penari's Talisman?" She turned to find the little priest beaming up at her. "Well, this is an honor. We old men like to keep up on the doings of you young Guild bloods. I do believe the Talisman has stolen more supposedly inaccessible trinkets than anyone since the days of her master. Why trinkets, by the way? I've always wondered about
that."

  "For one thing," said Jame, "whatever I steal becomes my master's property, and Penari has all the riches he wants. For another, the only time I did lift something valuable—the Peacock Gloves, in fact—the affair ended badly. A boy died. No, you wouldn't have heard about that," she said with a sudden, bitter laugh. "He was only a shabby little nobody named Scramp, whose envy nearly cost me my soul."

  "Good gracious!" said the priest, startled. "However did he do that?"

  "By daring me to raid the Tower of Demons. The other thieves put him up to it, of course. They've never forgiven me for walking out of nowhere straight into the city's best 'prenticeship."

  "And this boy?"

  "He was an outsider too, trying to buy their acceptance at my expense. I could see what he was doing, and why, but I couldn't make him stop. Then, when I had carried off the Gloves, he lost his head altogether and accused me of cheating. We fought."