Thief of Destiny: The Collected Saga of the Panther Page 12

  "Back away from him," shouted Kosey, dropping his spear and shield to pull them apart. The knot of chaos subsided in a series of shoves, kicks, and curses as the two sides split in the middle over Manwe. Avoiding the violence of Voduni Calla's adherents, he was pulled to the rebel's side, held by the arms and neck.

  Kicking at Kosey as he approached, Manwe seethed. "How could you?"

  "What are you going on about?" Kosey demanded.

  Manwe drove himself forward in an attempt to free himself from the hold, choking on the stout arm looping his neck. "You damned them," he wheezed. "Look at them." He pointed accusingly at the ghouls that had risen before Calla’s fire, their black skin shimmering with a sick gleam before the light of the blaze. More than a dozen had risen to stand silent guard, their boiled eyes searching for whatever horrors the dead craved.

  Kosey glanced back at Voduni Calla, who had remained vigilant beside his fire and flanked by his followers. "Do away with them, Calla. Do it now."

  Voduni Calla approached the ghouls, mumbling incoherent verses as his eyes rolled back once more. The ghouls took notice of their maker before he finished his incantation. When the string of words from the mystic's mouth ceased they issued a great cry. Onlookers gasped as the victims woke from their ensorcelled state, alive again for one last moment. In terrified agony they fell, unable to mouth pleas as death's mercy took them.

  Manwe wriggled free of Kosey's men and walked away from the camp, the rebels, Voduni Calla, and the revolution.

  Kosey chased after him alone. "Manwe, please speak to me."

  “Walk away from me." He made for the shadows, hands bound to fists. “Do not utter a word.”

  Kosey grabbed his wrist. "You need to listen."

  Turning, Manwe leveled a straight kick at Kosey's chest, thudding his solar plexus. Knocked to his bottom by the blow, Kosey wheezed as his men came to defend their leader. He flopped over quickly and held up a hand, a pained order to halt.

  "You miserable bastards," Manwe shouted at them all. "Is this the freedom we wanted? Is this what we settle for?" He motioned to the dead ghouls lying in the dirt. "Is the dirt we battle for truly worth this?"

  "So the traitor reveals himself," cawed Voduni Calla. "Poison from the mouth of a snake!"

  Manwe spotted a stone near his foot. Plucking it from the earth, he launched it at his true enemy and sent the treacherous voduni down in a heap. Calla cried out in horrified shock as a trickle of blood dripped down the side of his hawk-like nose.

  Kosey found his voice, though he wheezed. "Nothing is simple, Panther." He coughed to clear his throat as he rose to his feet. "The Gypians are legion to we few, and there will be more. There will always be more."

  "So your solution is to let that bastard, that evil bastard, create abominations?" Manwe shook his head in disgust. "What of the savannah's children? What of their mothers? What would you tell them?"

  "That they will be free." Voduni Calla rejoined them, lifted to his feet by his men. Unable to walk, he let those scared youths carry him in their arms like some vaunted king, his full weight on their shoulders and necks. "We will all be freed by the gods, above and below us! Free of that slave city! Free of the lords who hold the whips!" He glowered at Manwe, his bloodstained teeth bared in the scant firelight. "Free of corrupt thugs like you."

  Seeing the people standing around his desecrated tree, Manwe knew the fear the Senate Consul had expressed to Cleon upon his sickbed was destiny. "Thugs like me," Manwe said in a half-hearted whisper, looking to Kosey. "A thug you and your priest have exploited."

  "He said that, not I," said Kosey. His hands held over the spot Manwe had struck him, he stood battered and bruised. "Please, Manwe. Do not leave me like this. Let us talk."

  "Would you have Toba covered in pitch and raised?"

  Kosey's black face slackened. "What?"

  "Answer me," demanded Manwe, no longer caring who saw his defiance. "Would you have let Voduni Calla raise your brother?"

  Kosey heaved at the question.

  Manwe pressed. "Would you let Toba be raised?"

  Kosey found his breath. "For my country and my countrymen, I'd let Voduni Calla raise me."

  Heartbroken, Manwe left without another word.

  In the temple district of Tolivius' dingy metropolis stood a place dedicated to the Goddess of Love, one of the few Gypians gods more becoming than the tyrannical Adias Cloud-lord or the violent Myrm, a dread god whose bloody words had justified the enslavement and death of Manwe's people. Carved of pink marble and held up by smooth yellow columns that shone bright in the morning rays of sunshine, he paid it little attention other than a tired sigh as he entered the alley cut between it and the next temple.

  The cobblestone lane descended in a set of stone steps that led to an olive wood door. Knocking twice on its surface, Manwe waited for the viewing hole to slide open. When it did a few moments later, a woman's bright azure eyes blinked a few times at him, filled with a troubled curiosity.

  "Manwe?" Magera asked. "Is that you?"

  "May I come in?" he asked, averting his gaze.

  "What is the goddess' sec—oh, bloody hell, does it matter?" The priestess unbarred her door and let him in. His shoulders slack and exhaustion weighing his eyes, Manwe stood there in the doorway, unable to take a step forward.

  Magera laid a bare hand on his shoulder. A beautiful woman no younger than thirty, she carried a motherly air that transcended her silken garments, a blue shift that covered her large breasts and a loin cloth she belted to her hips with a chain of linked golden rings. Her blonde hair seemed to glow in the light of the oil lamps strewn around the altars and small shelves in the room. "Manwe, what's wrong?"

  He looked at her, quiet to the question as the guilt of the past years caught in his chest, a knot of shame when he realized he had been fighting for such a long time. Tiredness reared again and he covered his eyes with his hand.

  "I..." Manwe began, but paused. "I'm so sorry for coming here. I didn't know where to go."

  "You came to where you'd be welcome." Magera pulled him in by the hand and shut the door behind him. "We were expecting you anyway."

  Manwe furrowed his brow. "We?"

  "Yes." She motioned him to follow deeper into the temple undercroft. "He was quite insistent that you'd come here sooner or later."

  Manwe followed Magera into the next room, the space where a fervent orgy would have been taking place if not for the early hour of the day. Instead, six bodies slumbered on the mats in the dim chamber, men and women entangled together after long hours of love-making and worship to a deity who asked nothing more from her followers than that. Beyond this place was another door that led to a darker hall cut from the bedrock the temple's foundation rested upon, which went off to the right and left. Doors set on both sides of the passage opened to a series of empty bed chambers, small hideaways for wealthier patrons who could afford the privacy. These doors remained ajar, readied for newcomers.

  Save one.

  Manwe knew who lay behind it. "I don't have any money to pay you," he told Magera. "I don't know when I'll be able to."

  "Manwe..." She took his sinewy arm in her hands and stroked the black flesh. "If the goddess of love cared only about coin then I'd be a pimp. This is a house of love and you are loved. You are welcome here as long as you can walk through my door."

  The first thing Manwe saw when he opened the door to the bedroom was a small oil lamp resting on the bedside table, its wick burning bright as it hung over the side of the clay bowl. The ruddy light illuminated the white cotton linens of the bed centered in the middle of the floor in a soft color, a simple set complete with two plush pillows and a faded blue blanket.

  Cleon sat in the center of that simple mattress, propped up on his bandaged hands with his legs out in front of him. His smile widened when Manwe opened the door the rest of the way. "Well, hello there."

  Slouching where he stood, Manwe did not offer a match to the sorcerer's pleasantness. "When did
you get away from the manor?"

  "Oh, I left not long after you did." His thin face halved in a shadow cast by the lamp, Cleon's playfulness ebbed. "What troubles you, Panther? What happened?"

  Manwe softly closed the door and leaned against it, rubbing the heel of his hand against his right eye, trying to steady his voice as an answer formed. "I went back to my home after I left you. There in the night I came across..." Giving in to the torrent of emotions he had forbidden himself to feel since fleeing the savannah, tears formed at the edges of his vision, blurring the scant light in the room.

  Cleon rose from the bed and limped to the door. He led Manwe by the hand, sitting him down on the edge of the bed before kneeling down on one knee. "What happened?"

  Slowly, the sorcerer coaxed the story from Manwe between snatches of sobs. When the story finished, Cleon glanced into the shadowed corners of the room, his expression blank save for the horror in his eyes. He sat next to Manwe on the edge of the bed, still holding his hand as the silence emptied between them.

  Thumbing tears from his eyes, Manwe glanced in Cleon's direction. "What do you think?"

  Cleon puckered his lips and blew out a steady breath. He stewed on the question. "I've known sorcerers all of my life. Most were just academics, some soldiers, but I have known necromancers, though they are few and far between. The ones I've come across study the bounds of life and death to understand it, to shape it in ways that benefit their patients." The sorcerer shuddered. "But they'd never do what this Voduni Calla has done. They would never raise abominations."

  "Kosey let him do it," Manwe added. "Those ghouls were just boys."

  "That's the problem with revolutionaries. There is often no line they won't cross."

  Manwe widened his eyes at the point and considered all the things he had done to help his people's rebellion—the thefts, the attacks, the souls he had taken with his own blade. Shame welled in the pit of his stomach, a shame he wondered if he could exorcise from his soul. He thought of Toba, too—he questioned if the fence ever considered how far Kosey's devotion went, if he would have agreed with the horrid idea of raising the dead.

  Manwe spoke. "We cannot let this happen. The destruction that would happen if the Gypian army marched on Kosey and his rebels... Voduni Calla would not halt to raise our—his—enemies against themselves."

  "The land would be filled with the undead. No one would be freed." Cleon leaned forward, his elbows rested on his knees. "I'll have to inform the Senate Consul."

  "We'll have to inform everyone. The people of this city, the clans out in the savannah."

  Cleon's mouth curved upward. "We, Panther?"

  "Yes, you fool." Manwe scooted back onto the mattress and sank along its length, releasing the last two days of tension, pain, and frustration. Again the tears came, flowing free as he realized that everything had been lost. Lying there, he closed his eyes and wished that it was all just some terrible nightmare, one he would wake from when he opened his eyes back to the world.

  He nearly seized when Cleon rolled to his side and wrapped both arms around him. "What are you—?"

  "Quiet, Manwe," said the sorcerer. "You've lost enough today as it is."

  Caught in an embrace he dared not fight, Manwe let himself turn into Cleon and weep.

  THE END

  6

  The Free and the Damned

  Manwe stood there in the unlit bedroom, lost in darkness as he tied the last knot of his loincloth. He pawed the table next to the bed, patting the wooden surface until his fingers brushed the sharp edge of his knife. On natural instinct, he grabbed its handle. His eyes set forward toward the glowing outline of the door. Weak light seeped past the cracks as he stretched the tension from his shoulders.

  “I rarely have the other person run out on me first.” The man in bed rolled over and pointed at the unlit oil lamp resting on the bed stand, whispering as he did so. The wick, burned to a blackened nub, caught a long flame. The small light illuminated a sea of creamy blankets where a pair of rich brown eyes sparkled.

  “You cad,” Cleon whispered with a smile, sitting up on the mattress.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” said Manwe.

  “Where?”

  Manwe flashed a glare at his lover.

  Cleon chuckled deeply as he turned over, revealing his muscled contours to the scant lamplight. “You and I will have to get used to each other, Panther. You are now no better than a thief, and I, a compromised sorcerer who sees the cards falling down.”

  “And where do you think you will fall?” Manwe asked.

  The sorcerer’s perpetual smirk dimmed at the questions. “I’d like to think you and I would be the dashing hands.”

  Manwe smiled at the idea. “I’m going to go meet a friend in the city. He’s a good source to see where everyone is. I imagine everyone will be buzzing about last week’s battle outside the walls.”

  Cleon rubbed his eyes. “I guess I’ll go buy a new robe. What’s your favorite color?”

  Grabbing the handle of the bedroom door, Manwe lifted the bar and pushed it open. “I’ve never had time to have one. Surprise me.”

  Near the western walls of the city, right where the gates opened to the outlying farms and the savannah, a great market sprawled in a splotch of more well-to-do natives and a fair number of Gypians who made up the lower echelons of the merchant and service classes. Intermarried and dependent on each other, these multi-generational families lived at the outskirts of finer society, one foot in poverty and the other always at the edge of opportunity.

  And then there were the poor. Those left out of this liminal class had stepped fully into the impoverished realm wasted in alleys and back streets of Tolivius’ market squares, smeared in mud and shit as they wandered lost. The saner ones were able to dress themselves in rags and soiled clothes, while some went fully naked, impaired by some physical deformity or malady of the wit. Those with the malady cried out from the gutter, begging in babbles and fragments of clear thought.

  Manwe knew better of them.

  Many of those who had “the malady” were talented actors too worn or ugly for Gypian playhouses, or the wrong race, leaving many of them to cobble together a decent living through graft and simple thieveries by pickpocket. They knew every bit of news commoners thoughtlessly spoke when they passed. Snatches of knowledge could quickly turn to full statements.

  In one particular alley Manwe found the particular beggar who owned it, an old snot named Legbas, who some spoke of as a fallen mystic who had been beneath the earth like the vodunis out on the beloved savannah, but Manwe knew better. The hunched form he found doling orders to his local toughs rested too upright for the cane he leaned upon, a practiced pose so effortless it could be missed.

  “Now this is how you get into the dairy down the street,” he proclaimed, adding an authoritative nod for effect. “The old Gypian who runs that dairy always leaves at noon to go meet his dark momma. While they are out noodling with each other he usually forgets to lock the back door. Mostly because he needs that herb the emperor of Gypus takes because otherwise his noodle stays wiggly. Go in there and steal five rounds of his finest cheese, bring half of a wheel back to me, and I’ll cut you a three sacks silver apiece. That cheese will sell very well at the local kitchens, and people hate that old lecher so no worries about getting handed later on. You got me?”

  The local toughs, a mix of western and Juutan blood, blinked hard before they nodded and marched away, with one of the uglier ones repeating the plan first.

  Manwe covered his mouth with a hand to muffle a laugh. “Memories.”

  “That ugly one might actually have a future in our traditions, Panther,” said Legbas, turning in the shadows. He tottered forward, leaning in as he closed the distance. “What you here for?”

  Comfortable in the cool alley, Manwe placed his hands behind his back—away from his knife. “I need information. I went under for the last few weeks.”

  “After you stole that necklace.”
Legbas smiled wildly. “Don’t try get one on me, boy. I told you to never do that.”

  “Yes, god,” said Manwe. “I have information to trade. I don’t need a job or something to pick up. I just need to talk.”

  Legbas made an odd expression, aware and focused, though a hint of burden furrowed his brow. The old beggar stood straight up, holding his cane in one hand like a club. “Who’d you want to talk to?”

  Manwe bounced on the balls of his feet, his heels lightly slapping the dry stone beneath them. He searched the bluing slice of sky above them, a crack in the limestone roofs that allowed for a piece of heaven to be seen—a fair blessing to those who lived in squalor. He noticed how the silver flecks in Legbas’ hair caught in the light.

  “The Five Fences, of course,” said Manwe. “The Songbird. Any of the vodunis who don’t like Calla. I have a feeling we would meet well after midnight.”

  “The Five Fences don’t like you.” Legbas’ smile broadened. “They won’t come around unless you prove yourself of grand taste.”

  He sighed at the insistence in the beggar-lord’s voice. “What would you all like?”

  Legbas laughed at the question. “You had any of that new sugar drink the Gypians are fermenting with coconuts brought from their port-towns?”

  “We get coconuts up here?” Manwe said, surprised at how cultured Tolivius had become in his absence.

  “Rich folk like having things to have them. Someone needs to use them, though,” Legbas pointed out, drawing an agreeable nod from Manwe. “Four cases.”

  “Four cases.” Manwe held his hands up. “I can carry one.”

  “You wanted to call the Five Fences, boy,” said Legbas. “I’m going to have to put a lot of work in just to get those black merchants in the same room as crazy vodunis. The Songbird is just not going to show up because Manwe the Panther has a sit-down. I haven’t even started to mention the story we’ll need to make this work.”