Brother Thief (Song of the Aura, Book One) (10 page)

  
Yes, he did. He was up now, up on the top of the jagged stones, perched like some legendary monster of the night, poised to leap down on an unsuspecting world with fire in his claws: a shadow with wings of smoke that devoured everything. The Golden One had promised him that such would be his power, if he succeeded. And he knew he would succeed.

  
There! Off in the distance, a muted howling and screeching faintly reached his ears, punctuated with growls and bellows of a particularly disgusting nature.

  
They were coming. When next he met with the Sand Strider from Ymeer, there would be no escape for the urchin. The draiks were coming. They were answering his call. The Golden One’s commands echoed in his mind, reverberating off the inside of his skull like the thunderous voices of a thousand giants.

~

  
The first creature to answer the summons and reach him turned out not to be a draik at all. Instead, it was something far better.

  
As Gramling crouched on the edge of the rock, the night sky came alive above him, swooping down on wings darker than shadow and passing not a foot from his head. Like a dark comet, the creature collided with the ground and whirled around in a single motion. The perfect landing, made by the perfect beast of the air. It was a falconhorse, one of the few winged mounts in all the world, coveted by kings and denied to all who did not know their secret.

  
The creature glared at Gramling with eyes of fire. Its wings stretched out above it for twenty feet from tip to tip, leathery black and pitted with holes as if in the middle of rotting. Metal spikes were embedded in its head, and its teeth were far too large and sharp for a natural beast. Gramling smiled grimly. His master could have sent no clearer message. He had been given the best of the best with which to dispatch or capture the Sand Strider… failure would bear a penalty worse than death.

  
But I will not fail.

Chapter Seven:
Soldiers and Pickpockets

  
As soon as the sun’s first rays broke over the horizon, the storm subsided as quickly as it had come. Awake now, but still unwilling to do anything, the young thief stayed huddled in his shelter while the sun rose. The great fiery orb leaped up into the sky in minutes, drying the desert so fast that the wet ground quaked and cracked audibly. The sand he’d constructed around him grew whiter and whiter as the water was leeched from it, until it too began to crack.

  
Gribly rolled out from under it just as the entire structure collapsed in a spray of white dust. He wondered if it was because of the water, or because he had built it with his gift.

  
His gift. He had only used it when he had to, back in Ymeer, but now that he was using it more often it seemed to be… increasing? Spreading out? Getting more powerful? He wasn’t sure which was right. In any case, he could do more with it now.

  
Bending to the hard ground, he decided to test it. His fingernails bit into the hard earth, which melted away under his grip as if it were soft sand again. Then, slowly, he stood up again, willing the sand to do as he wanted. When he straightened his back and looked at his work, he had raised two thin pillars of hard yellow soil under his hands.

  
“Strange,” he mumbled, pleased at his handiwork. He kicked one of the stalagmite-looking-things down with his sandal, and it melted away into sand again. He took the second spire in his hands and bent it into a loop, willing it to become hard and immovable.
That ought to confuse the spine-geckoes for a while,
he thought to himself. Amused, he put a hand over his eyes to shade them as he gazed at the desert around him.

  
To the left and right, the land of Blast stretched out to incalculable distances. Here and there he thought he saw the gray smudges of a few lazy dust-devils, but that was all. He looked behind him: far off and to his right lay the sea of dunes that rose on either side of the road to Ymeer. Nothing extraordinary. What had the traveler fellow said in his dream? An adventure? Not likely.

  
Last and most reluctantly, Gribly turned back towards the city. Its four high walls pushed up from the desert as if they had always been there. They were the same color and texture as the land around them, with a tower at each corner built out of the same material. It was a strange sight from out here. Gribly had been outside the walls a few times, but never so far or for so long. He had never had a reason.

  
But what to do now? Old Murie was dead and he had buried her himself. He had nowhere to go except back to the streets, which was something he had promised himself never to do. He was a good thief and could make his living there, for sure, but most of Ymeer’s underworld were true criminals; hard-bitten, vicious men (and some women) he could never befriend or compete with.

  
Could he brave the desert? No, not a chance. Not unless…

  
An idea formed in his mind and quickly took hold of it. Gribly began the long, slow walk back to the city, pondering it.

  
Staying permanently in the city was too distasteful. Murie’s death had opened up an opportunity for him to leave, but he could never do it on his own. With the Royal Market still in full swing, he could return and live off what he could steal for days; then, when the foreign merchants left for their homelands, he could talk or buy his way into their company.
They
would be his ticket out. If they wanted service, he could provide it until they came to another city, then break free. If they wanted money… well, money was no object when you had broken into Blast Palace and survived.

  
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. His only trouble now was finding the road again and watering his parched throat. The sun beat down on him with unnatural fervor. It was always hot inside the city, but never like this.
It must be like the storms,
he decided.
Fierce inside, but far worse outside.

  
As he mused on the weather, the lad failed to notice how close he was to the road. He tripped over the raised pathway and fell onto his knees on the dusty lane. When he had regained his composure and stumbled to his feet, he found himself staring down the main road to Ymeer. It was much farther away than he’d thought.
How did I come so far last night?
It puzzled him that he could not remember, but soon his thoughts were taken up with another problem.

  
A single, pained moan wafted over the wind to him from farther up the road. He saw a dark shape like a man lying on the ground between him and the city, almost a quarter mile away. Frowning, he jogged towards it, wondering what idiot in all blazes would be sprawled out in the middle of the desert like that.

  
When he reached the shape, it resolved into the prone figure of a man in travel-stained clothes. Gribly rolled the fallen traveler onto his back, and stared. It was a young man only a few years older than himself, his face caked with dried mud and his hair a wild tangle of walnut-brown. He looked stronger and harder than Gribly had thought a youth could look, but weak moaning came from inside him, and his eyes stayed shut. It was odd, but none of it surprised the would-be rescuer more than the short stabbing-sword belted at the young warrior’s waist.

  
It occurred to him briefly that he could take the weapon and any other valuable thing the traveler might have, then run. But he knew he could never leave the young fellow to die- why, he might be in the same position if he hadn’t been able to use his gift last night. What puzzled him was how in Vast the warrior-boy had gotten here in the first place…

  
With a sudden rush, his dream of the mountain and Traveller came back.
This is the adventure, isn’t it?
he realized.
If I save this soldier, I’ll never be able to go back to normal life.
For a second he was scared. Then…

  
Normal life? There’s no such thing anymore. There never was.
Out loud, he said, “I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but I’m going to save your life. Then maybe you can tell me why my life is falling apart, eh? You’d better be worth it.” He grunted, trying to lift the young man off the road. He was heavy, blasted heavy. There was a pack of some kind on his back, but there was nothing in it except a letter in a language Gribly couldn’t read.

  
“All right Sleepyhead,” the thief grumbled, “I’ll have to bring you into town the hard way.” Gripping the muscled young soldier by the wrists, he began to drag him down the road.

~

  
By the time he lugged the soldier’s dead weight all the way to the city gates, the sun had made its way across half the sky. It was hellishly hot, and only the grit of hardened desert living kept Gribly from collapsing on the way. He could only wonder how the mysterious warrior had made it so far from… wherever he’d come from. By the time he made it to the gates, they were wide open and guarded. A caravan was coming out at a snail’s crawl: a bulky train of carts pulled by Rhine Horses and weighed down with packaged wares and colorful tent-cloth.

  
Gribly waited until the guards were distracted, inspecting the cargo of one of the carts, before he dragged his burden past them and into the city. He had seen inside one of the canopied carts, and it had held strangely shaped metal machinery like the contraptions he had seen inside the tent the day before. The thief had no wish to be recognized, if any of the merchants or their servant caught a glimpse of him.

  
At the rate he was going, it would have taken too long to reach his burned-out shell of a home. So instead, Gribly pulled the unconscious soldier a short way into the slums, to the corner where he knew the old pickpocket who trained him lived.

  
He wasn’t exactly
afraid
of the slums, but the time he had spent there in his childhood soured his memory and made him nervous ever to return. That was why he had stayed with Murie so long, and taken what he could from the houses of the rich. The streets in the outer city were lined with low, poorly built homes and shops. Thieves, brigands, and robbers lounged side by side with the common folk who were too poor to live anywhere else.

  
Keenly aware of the spectacle he must be making, Gribly stayed out of sight as much as possible. In and out of the alleyways he pulled his burden, past alehouses and sooty, tumbledown inns; past the low, round buildings where the destitute gambled away what small earnings they had on cock fights and death matches; past the houses of ill repute. Finally he made it to the old thief’s corner: the edge of two streets that intersected, where a group of burglars held sway over a small, cheap wine-shop.

  
A pair of burly, hairy men stopped him at the entry arch.

  
“What’s your business here, whelp?” one of them growled.

  
Gribly let go of the soldier’s hands, letting the body slump as he leveled his gaze with the men and replied. “I’m looking for the Old Pickpocket,” he answered.

  
The men sneered. “Costs yuh two bronze t’ see him now,” one of them growled.

  
“The blaze it does!” shot the thief, determined not to show weakness. “I know the old ‘un better than any!”

  
“Don’t matter if yer his own long-lost son!” snapped the bouncer, his face reddening with anger.

  
“Come now, Crutus,” someone said disapprovingly, “yeh wouldn’t hurt my own son, would yeh?”

  
It was the old pickpocket, poling himself through the door to the wine-shop on his long wooden crutches. His twisted, useless legs hung beneath him as he used the crutches to walk. A wiry gray beard splayed out from his chin as he grinned mischievously. Gribly barely suppressed a sigh of relief at seeing him.