“Well, not exactly—”
He cut me off with the wave of a hand. “This way I don’t have to worry about offloading it. I just nick what I’m paid for. No fences, no City Watch catching you with your pants down. Honest work.”
I couldn’t imagine even the most desperate watchman wanting to see Benny with his pants down.
“You’re a regular saint, Benny. What’s it got to do with me?”
He looked extra shifty, which for Benny, who made a career of looking shifty, was some achievement.
“This thing I’m being paid for. It might be a little … cursed.”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair. It creaked and sagged. Kind of like me. As favours went, this could have been worse. Half of my work involved dealing with curses of one type or another. I had my lines that I wouldn’t cross. I wouldn’t lay a curse. That wasn’t what I was in this for. And you couldn’t pay me to hurt someone with magic. I would defend myself if I had to, but I would never be so desperate as to sell my talents in that way. You also couldn’t pay me to raise the dead, but there were completely different reasons for that. In my job, I had to be clear about my lines, because one step led to another, and soon you couldn’t even see the lines you’d left behind you. But break curses? I could do that in my sleep.
Curses weren’t hard to lay. It only took a scratch of magical talent and a bit of a bad temper to place a curse. Most weren’t particularly sophisticated or robust — boils, sour milk, clumsiness, that kind of thing — and most would pop spontaneously after a while. A curse laid by a properly trained mage could be a lot more dangerous and have more severe consequences, but it wasn’t much more difficult to deal with. The magical structures that sustained a curse were delicate. Use a scalpel of magic in the right place and the curse would collapse like a cut spider’s web.
“Fine,” I said. “Pass it over.” Then maybe I could finally get to bed.
Benny’s eyes flicked away, and he rubbed a hand over his rough brown hair.
“Ah. That’s the problem, see? I haven’t got it.” He licked his lips nervously. “It’s up there in Thousand Walls.”
Well, I thought as every last ounce of energy drained out of me. Fuck.
Chapter Two
Thousand Walls, which was properly known as Silkstar Palace, was the home of Carnelian Silkstar, the wealthiest merchant in Agatos, possibly on the whole continent. Oh, yeah, and he also happened to be a high mage, which put his magical abilities about as far above mine as his palace was above my shoddy apartment.
Thousand Walls perched on the top of Horn Hill, scarcely spitting distance across Sien’s Stand Plaza from the Senate building. Horn Hill wasn’t a part of the city I visited often. I had an issue with a certain Countess whose own palace stood not far from Thousand Walls, but even if I hadn’t, Horn Hill wasn’t the kind of place for someone like me.
The hill rose from the centre of Agatos, sloping hopefully upwards for over a mile before plunging back down in a sheer cliff called the Leap. I had spent plenty of time peering at Horn Hill from every angle, and I still didn’t think it looked anything like a horn, but what did I know?
Benny’s suggestion that I should help him steal from Thousand Walls was stretching any debt I might owe him, and he knew it.
I would like to be able to tell you that, as a mage, I could do whatever I damned well pleased in this city, but the truth was that I was tolerated only as long as I didn’t stick my long nose too far into the wrong business. Step out of line, and there were plenty of people who would happily slap me down. Carnelian Silkstar would slap hard. He wouldn’t kill me — the Ash Guard didn’t tolerate magic being used for murder — but there was a whole lot of pain and misery that fell short of death, and I wasn’t keen on any of it.
Anyone else, and I would have told them where to stuff their debt. But Benny and I had been friends for almost twenty-five years, and when I left my mother’s house (or was kicked out; we still differed on that one), Benny had been there to help me.
“They paying you well for this?” I asked.
“Five gods,” Benny said, a little sheepishly.
I whistled, not able to stop a brief surge of envy. “Someone really wants it.” You could buy a good chunk of the Warrens with five gold crowns.
Benny grinned. “And with both of us together, how can we possibly fail?”
Which was exactly the point where I should have put a stop to the whole thing.
Instead, I said, “All right. But you’d better have a good plan.”
As it happened, Benny did have a plan, but he didn’t deign to share it until we were nearly at the top of Horn Hill and it was too late for me to back out.
The Corithian Steps cut back and forth up the eastern flank of Horn Hill to emerge close to Thousand Walls, neatly avoiding Agate Way, which ran the length of the hill, and the palaces lining it. It was a steep, almost precipitous climb in places, and it didn’t do my ankle any favours. By the time we were three quarters of the way up, my ankle was flaring with every step, and I had to wave Benny to a stop.
Cursing, I bent over, hands on my knees. If I had been a more powerful mage, this ankle wouldn’t have bothered me. We mages were luckier than most when it came to injuries. When we slept, we absorbed the raw magic around us, and it helped us heal. Unfortunately, while any cuts and bruises I got healed fast, and even broken bones knitted, that was as far as it went for me. When it came to damaged tendons and ligaments, I was no better off than anyone else.
I lowered myself carefully to the paving and looked out over the city while I waited for the throbbing to subside. High, white walls punctuated with blue shutters rose on either side of us, making the Corithian Steps feel like a canyon. From here, I had a pretty good view over the eastern part of Agatos. Below, the Royal Highway paralleled the side of Horn Hill at a distance of about a hundred yards, a river of people, carts, and carriages marking the boundary between the Middle City and the Grey City. From up here, in the bright sunlight and with a bit of squinting, the Grey City — itself divided in two by the Erastes River — looked almost white.
“You all right, mate?” Benny asked. “Something up with your eyes?”
“Just catching my breath.”
I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to break into a high mage’s home, either.
“You need more exercise,” said Benny, a man whose only exercise involved finding ways into rich people’s homes and making off with their valuables.
“I need more sleep,” I said, giving him a meaningful look, which he ignored.
The city of Agatos occupied one end of the Erastes Valley, squeezed between mountain ranges. Beyond the Grey City, the valley wall rose steeply, but that hadn’t put off the citizens of Agatos. The houses just continued, stacked nearly on top of each other. That part of the city was known, with an admirable lack of imagination, as the Stacks.
Eventually, though, the mountains grew too steep and the city ended. Above it all, the temple-like façade of Ceor Ebbas looked back across the city.
I straightened, testing my ankle. It still hurt, but I would cope.
“Are you going to tell me your plan before we actually break in?” I asked, buying a few more seconds to recover.