The thief wasn’t just invisible, he was crafty with it. After the initial flight from the mesa, he’d made a good show of covering his tracks, or at least keeping to firmer ground when he could, so as not to leave any impressions.
Shadrak lost the trail more than he’d care to admit, but as he came upon the sparkling waters of the Chalice Sea, the ground grew soft and sandy, and the footprints were the kind a blind man could follow.
The only surprise was, the tracks went nowhere near the jetties and the boats that ferried people over to Portis. The scut had looped around the inland sea, bypassing the fishing town, rather than making a stopover. Either he had the stamina of a dwarf, or he was too scared to stop and rest. And if the latter, that made him wise as well as canny. He ought to be scared, with what Shadrak was planning on doing to him.
Still, it was a blessing, in one way. The stink of fish was rank, even from this side of the water, and the chances of running into the past were just as strong in Portis as they were in New Londdyr. Only, in Portis Shadrak ran the risk of being knifed in the back by some goon who thought he’d been ripped off, or by an ex-Night Hawk who blamed him for abandoning the guild and leaving a shogwit like Buck Fargin in charge. He couldn’t blame them for that. That dumb twat Fargin was the beginning of the end for the unified guilds. But there’d been no choice. Sometimes events moved too quickly, took on a life of their own. Some things just refused to be controlled. Apparently, Buck Fargin hadn’t made it through the last guild war. It would have been a miracle if he had. Most likely scenario: one of his own had garroted him while he was taking a piss.
Shadrak took the opportunity to wolf down some jerky, and then he was back on the trail, assuming, when there were no signs, that the thief would take the shortest route to New Londdyr.
At the first sight of Raphoe, largest of the moons, Shadrak made camp a stone’s throw from the road to Brink. He busied himself with setting a fire, adding deadfall to the kindling from his tinderbox. He’d ceased caring if it gave his position away; he doubted the thief would be looking back.
Truth be told, he’d ceased caring about the Witch Queen’s ring, too, but he knew that was on account of the tiredness that had set in from hours on the road. Come morning, he’d be fired up and ready to take back what was his—until he brought it to Pellor and sold it for a tidy profit. Who was he to question what a Stygian wanted with a dubious artifact crafted by the Witch Queen? A mummified hag, so they said. The last ruler of Thogani, the Desecrated City, somewhere within the nightmare realm of Qlippoth.
Shadrak shuddered and reached into one of his belt pouches for a weedstick he’d laced with somnificus. He’d not smoked before losing Kadee, and he’d scorned anyone who chewed or puffed on the drug. But Kadee had used it till she was black-eyed and vacant, like the rest of her kind, the Barraiya people back home on Urddynoor. Just another part of her he’d inherited, he guessed.
With the fire keeping off the bite of the night air, he sat back against the trunk of a spindly tree and took a long draw on the weedstick, letting the somnificus muddy his thoughts then slowly turn them to mist.
***
Next morning Shadrak was up before dawn, with only Ennoi, smallest of the moons, still in attendance. Stars were scattered in unobscured constellations, some of them winking, all of them sharp and cut clear as diamonds. It was going to be a cloudless day, which meant it would be stifling when the suns came up.
His cloak was damp with dew and something else that stank like the Abyss. The rustle of leaves in the treetop above where he’d slept told him it was squirrel piss. Sure enough, after he waited a while, one of the critters showed its twitchy little face, and Shadrak took a pop at it with a flintlock. It hit the ground, a bloody splatter where its head had been.
He skinned the squirrel and baked it on the embers of the fire. When he’d washed it down with a slug of water from his costrel, he kicked dirt over the charred wood and ashes, then set back out on the trail.
An hour later he was standing over the remains of another campfire. A flaccid wineskin lay discarded on the ground, and the air was redolent with dung. A quick survey showed him someone had done their business in too much of a hurry to bury it. The briefest of stopovers, then, but the thief was growing careless. He must have assumed Shadrak had given up the chase, but he was still keeping up a good pace.
Presumably there was a buyer waiting impatiently in New Londdyr, maybe the promise of a bonus if the ring was delivered in a timely fashion. Either that, or the thief was as uncomfortable around the Witch Queen’s handiwork as Shadrak was, and couldn’t wait to be shot of it.
Of course, a third possibility was that the thief wanted it for himself, that he was some crazed sorcerer who’d caught a whiff of the precious relic when it dropped into the hands of Jankson Brau. Fool if he was. Wizard or no wizard, he didn’t want to be messing with anything out of Thogani. If the Witch Queen left things lying around, it was as bait. Shadrak had said as much to the Stygian who’d hired him, but Stygians were a law unto themselves. The man had merely shrugged, and there had been a malicious glint in his eye.
Shadrak was about to move on when he noticed a crumpled scrap of parchment close to the fire. He crouched down and straightened it out. There was writing on it, stylish and cursive, but he only recognized one or two words. It was in Ancient Urddynoorian, the language used in official documents by the Senate. Other than that, the only types who had use for it were academics and sorcerers.
On instinct, he dropped it, in case it was some kind of magical trap or a page fallen from a spellbook; but when he looked again, picking out the few words he could read, he decided it was part of an essay, perhaps even a story.
The title was Nanus Domini. He knew dominus meant lord or ruler—he’d been told that’s where the common word “dominate” came from, so it had stuck in his mind. But was domini related? Some letters were only half formed, as if they had been rubbed away. In other places, entire lines were missing, with only a faded smudge to indicate where they had been.
A more pressing question was whether the parchment was worth anything. If by some chance he didn’t recover the ring, he stood to lose out on a wagon-load of denarii. He’d only taken the job because he was desperate. Destitute might have been a better word. All the real work was in the city, but with a price on his head, he’d avoided New Londdyr like the plague.
Until now.
Now, it was either risk everything, or starve to death within a month. Unless of course he made a habit out of eating squirrels. But even then, the bullets would soon run out, and there was no way of replenishing them. One flintlock was empty, the other almost, and the thundershot’s sole remaining cartridge was a long way from being full. Once that was used up, it was back to crossbows, if he could raise the money to buy one.
He shoved the parchment in his pocket and cut across country, parallel to the New Londdyr road. If he could shave off a few corners, maybe he’d get there ahead of the thief and watch the gates till he arrived. No one got in or out of the city save through its barbicans, and the guards wouldn’t open up for someone they couldn’t see. If the thief was going to reveal himself, that would be the time.
Of course, Shadrak had once escaped New Londdyr on an air-raft of Magwitch the Meddler’s making, but unless the thief could fly, he’d never get over the Cyclopean Walls. They were unscalable. Mortared tighter than a virgin’s crack, Big Jake used to say. Not that Shadrak would know, and not that he was ever likely to. Any half-decent woman wouldn’t look twice at an albino midget, and even the whores turned him away.