Thief of Destiny: The Collected Saga of the Panther Read online

  In the southwestern corner of the estate grew a large marula, one of the few trees the Gypians had left when they settled the city. Manwe stood on one of the uppermost branches, tying the long bandages of undyed linen around his wrists. Within them he tucked the tools of his trade, a long iron file worn with use and a few lock picks, delicate lengths of hardened copper bent into all manner of shapes. Hidden behind the wall of thick green leaves and golden fruit, he waited as a pair of guards marched by, lost in conversation.

  “Why are we here again?” the first one asked as he adjusted the crest of his helm. “We don’t need to be out here, not with all the treasure inside.”

  “Will you just shut up and march?” said the second man. “We have a few hours and then we can go home.”

  “But what about all these extra hands? We’ll have to split more of the pouch with them.”

  “Money’s money. I’d rather have three coins in my pocket than none.”

  The pair turned the corner of a thick hedgerow separating the middle of the garden. Manwe dropped from the branch and ran for the wall. His fingers found purchase on a window sill, and after pulling himself up, he drew his knife. He stuck the blade in the gap between two panels of wooden lattice and unlatched the bar.

  He slipped into a dark kitchen. The only source of light lay at the other end of the room, where a red clay oven lay open its mouth of embers.

  The lone door popped open, forcing Manwe to hide under a preparation table. A dark-skinned servant stepped inside, humming a pleasant tune. He stopped before the oven and raked the coals. After a moment more, he left.

  Manwe broke cover and approached the portal. Pushing it open a crack, he spied through the gap an empty hallway. He entered the hall and headed left.

  The silence of the night, the oily lines of smoke of the torches, the lack of guards inside Leomachus’ halls—none of it was right. There should have been sentries on patrol like the two guards outside had said there would be, but none appeared or stood watch outside the many rooms of the manor. Manwe came to a junction where the hall intersected another, a shorter passage that ended at an open vault.

  A stand made of white marble rose in the center of the small chamber, and upon it rested a familiar red satin pillow. Nestled in the middle, the Gem of Acitus shone in the light of the many oil lamps set on the single shelf built into the room’s walls, its green facets mocking and cruel.

  “This is clearly a trap,” Manwe said aloud. Men surged into the hall behind him, their spears at the ready. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they blocked the way, leaving no avenue of escape.

  “Not a trap,” said a strong, confident voice. A short man stepped into the doorway of the gem’s room, draped in a length of light blue cloth. Streaks of silver peppered his beard, and a dark mane framed a wide head and thick cheekbones. “For what wise man tries to capture a wild beast?”

  “And yet the beast has not been slain. The hunter has reasons for not releasing his arrow,” Manwe said, finishing the old Juutan axiom. “You must be Leomachus.”

  “And you are a grand thief, sir.” The merchant bowed with a flourish. “It pleases me to no end to meet you.”

  “You knew I was coming?”

  “Of course,” Leomachus said with a grin, his teeth too large for his mouth. “With the rumors of your rape of Gonius’ daughter and the disappearance of your fence, I knew it was only time before you came to my door.”

  “I didn’t rape that girl,” Manwe said.

  Leomachus entered the hall. “Oh, I know, but the promise of marriage to my third son is enough to keep the lie on her tongue. After all, such a stain on her reputation…” He came to stand before Manwe, his hands held out at his sides. “Would you like some wine?”

  “For a man so close to death, you’re a fine host,” said Manwe, tensed to attack.

  The guards in the hall shuffled, but Leomachus signaled them to stop. “I try.” The merchant waved for him to come along, and after a brief pause, Manwe followed.

  He and his host let the guards lead them to Leomachus’ grand sitting room in the middle of his manor, a common feature in most merchants’ homes. Fat pillows made of colored silk lay on the floor around a square table, and set on its polished face was a silver carafe and two goblets.

  “Please, sit.” Leomachus picked up the carafe. “It is actually quite cool in here tonight.”

  Manwe watched the wine flow, red and fragrant, as the merchant filled both goblets. “Where’s Toba?”

  Leomachus slid one of the goblets across the table to him as he sat. “I lost him.”

  Manwe felt his eye twitch. “You lost him?”

  “Please, don’t start,” said Leomachus, taking his first sip and swallowing. “If you hadn’t been caught by the girl, we wouldn’t be here now. Your shoddy work made this happen.”

  “I couldn’t predict that she would even be there. I’m a thief, not a bone-reader,” he said, gripping his knees. “And you have your gem.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I just saw it in that room.”

  “A fake.” Leomachus swirled the wine in his cup. “A good fake, as long it keeps those thinking I have the real one occupied. That girl who caught you was to be married off to the son of another merchant with the gem as her dowry. I know that merchant, and that old fool would’ve put it in a vault and leered at it until the day he died. I have better plans.”

  “And yet you’ve thrown the bauble out.”

  Leomachus snorted his disappointment. “Apparently Toba’s pockets were deeper than my men could dig through.”

  Disgusted by the Gypian’s flippancy, Manwe focused. “Why all this for a gem?”

  “It is more than just a gem, and you know that. The Gem of Acitus sat in the crown of my people’s greatest emperor. It is a part of our history, and for years it has passed through the hands of the merchants, treated as nothing more than a trinket to be traded and ogled. It could be used better.”

  “And you are the one who’d use it,” Manwe surmised.

  “You are smarter than most of your race, Panther.”

  “My race has nothing to do with my intelligence. So if not gold or honor, what more can the gem give you?”

  “Power.” His host refreshed his drink. “Imagine how grateful Gypus’ king would be if one of his citizens, a lowly merchant from this backwater city, returned one of history’s most prized treasures out of the goodness of his heart.”

  “He’d make you a lord, and not just in name.”

  Leomachus snapped his fingers. “Exactly. And this has brought me to felicity. You want your friend and the gold promised to you, and I can remedy those nasty rumors. All you need is to find that gem again.”

  “Toba has the gem on him. Is he alive?” Manwe repeated, stressing for a real answer.

  His host, and now his employer once again, looked over the rim of his goblet. “Whether he is alive is not the question you should worry about. What you should worry over is where he is.”

  To the native tribes that inhabited the savannah, it was called “The Mouth of the Mother.”

  A gaping void in the ground, many believed it led to a place between the living world and the land of the dead, where the gods welcomed the souls of good people before they were sent to their ancestors in a blessed realm. Those who led lives of vice and evil, however, were left tortured in its darkness, torn apart so their essence could be planted back into the soil, where they hopefully grew into something more worthwhile.

  Yet to the Gypians this hole was not a sacred place, but just another pit to throw criminals, whether they were dead or not.

  They gave it a simpler name: The Maw.

  Manwe stood at its edge. Dawn had not come yet, but even in the time between the last twinkle of the stars and the warming of the horizon, the hole seemed blacker than death, a portal to an abode where only the hellish reigned. He had hammered an iron stake into the earth a few feet away and tied to its head a thick rope, long enough to take
him to the bottom. He knew the legends spoke of endless tunnels, of the beasts that had fallen in and became more savage without the sunlight, and tales of weird magicks shamans had brought back from the shadows.

  He descended down to the stone floor of the mouth and pulled a torch from the band of his loincloth, along with his knife and a piece of flint. After a few minutes, the oiled cloth wrapped around the end of the stick caught fire.

  Scattered on the floor were the bones of the dead, touched by warmth for the first time in centuries. Shadows clung to the backs of mountains made of skulls, gathering in the voids of their eyes. It was then Manwe realized how great the space was around him, less the bottom of a hole, and more a cavern. Rock formations melted off the ceiling in glittering stalactites.

  “Toba?” Manwe called. He remained staked on the spot, waiting for an echo to return. Even the weight of the knife in his hand did little to calm the frantic beat of his heart. The rope still hung behind him, the last tether to the surface and the sun.

  On he went into the bowels of the earth. The way narrowed and widened, diminished and grew, never once a clear path even with his bit of light.

  Manwe did not know how far he had gone when he heard a drone beat in the distance. It wasn’t like the patting of a hand on stretched goat skin, but a knock, as if someone tapped a stick on a fence post. He went toward the sound. The passage snaked right for a long time before breaking hard to the left.

  Around the next corner shuffled feet. Manwe tossed his torch back the way he came and stood perfectly still, shrouded in total darkness.

  Four men carried a body by the arms and legs as they trod down the next hall. One of them, the leader, held up a torch to guide their way into the abyss. The white flames revealed his features, a brutish visage more apish than human, with his cheeks swollen and teeth sharpened to wedges.

  Manwe could have only guessed at their actual skin tones, which was washed by the torch to the color of gray chalk. He stalked after the four and their captive, staying far enough behind so his own footsteps were lost in the noise of their march.

  After a while they entered another cavern. Unlike the first, this one was not a space of pure darkness, but a wide cell lit by a great bonfire. Twenty men danced around the smoky blaze, hands above their heads as they spun and twirled in unison. A pair of percussionists on their own outcropping of rock banged ulnas on rows of skulls set out before them, continuing the rapid beat Manwe had first heard on the way to this hell.

  Three corpses swung from the ceiling, their faces bloated purple and red from strangulation. The front of their bodies had been sliced open, allowing their viscera to fall down in great strands to be chewed on by the savages. The four men carrying their unconscious prisoner dumped him near the bonfire. The flames illuminated his face.

  Toba, glassy-eyed and mumbling incoherently, convulsed in the throes of a horrified ecstasy. Powder covered his nose and mouth, a fine dust of yellow and green. A smaller man smeared in blood and dirt leapt from a hidden place and marched around him, his leering expression stretched wide as he paraded before the revelers. He held up the shard of a human rib in one hand, its point scraped into an edge. He shouted, and was answered by a chorus of disjointed chants.

  Manwe looked from this witchdoctor back to the bodies hanging from the cave’s ceiling, knowing what the creature had in mind. He slunk into the chamber and skirted around its perimeter, dodging behind wide stalagmites. The witchdoctor screamed as the drummers fell into frenzy, spinning on his heels with his cruel bone-knife high in the air.

  Manwe ducked behind another low rock formation and stepped into a dark patch between two rough columns of granite.

  The witchdoctor crouched over Toba. He raised his knife up one last time, shouting at the bodies above him.

  The drums stopped and the blade came down.

  Manwe bounded from the shadows, the edge of his knife blazing in the flames of the bonfire. Blood sprayed as he sliced open the witchdoctor’s throat, knocking the wretch to the side. He gathered Toba in his arms and broke past the masses circled around them. They chased after him into the passage, crowding the narrow channel. Manwe collided with and bounced off the walls and corners until he could no longer hear the screams and growls of the cannibals behind him. When the silence grew steady, he stopped, hunkered down in a tunnel to listen for any sound.

  Toba coughed, hacking bloody spit until it dribbled down his chin. “Manwe?”

  “Shush, Toba,” Manwe whispered, holding the fence’s face. He brushed a thumb across his chapped lips. “Keep still. You’re bleeding.”

  Toba shivered, his skin cold to the touch. “You came for me.”

  Manwe blinked, snatched back to reality. All worry of being caught, the darkness, the question of whether he would ever see the light again—it disappeared, replaced by his own failure. “I couldn’t leave you. I would never leave you.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Toba curled himself in Manwe’s lap. “I should have been more careful.”

  Manwe rocked him gently. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get you back to the light.”

  “I know you will.”

  They held each other until Toba gave away, his final breath a hiss. Manwe searched the corpse’s tattered tunic and drew out the gem. He brought Toba close and, for the last time, kissed the lips of the only man he had ever loved.

  Leomachus rolled the girl onto her back, spreading her legs. Her bright white body gleamed in the light of the lamps, the ringlets of her hair black and glossy.

  For all his anger, Manwe stayed in the bedroom’s darkened eave and let them consummate their lust, allowing for one final moment of security. He had stolen into the house hours before—he could wait a bit longer to savor revenge.

  Gonius’ daughter, the same girl who accused Manwe of rape, rolled atop the ugly merchant, moaning about how much better the father performed than her husband. Leomachus laughed as he held her bucking hips. Their joined climax came in a wild and untamed gasp, and the two collapsed on the mattress.

  “Ah, my dear,” said Leomachus, a hand on her breast, “You truly are wasted on my boy.”

  “Waste not, sighed not,” she said, grinning lustily. “And you will still give me my part of the money when The Panther returns?”

  “If he returns. For all I know the heathen will never rise from The Maw’s darkness, lost like his idiot friend. Gem or not, I will be a lord one day, and you shall be basked in splendor.”

  “A lie is often sweeter than the truth.” She scratched her nails across his hairy chest. “Just remember our deal.”

  The pair talked a bit more until Leomachus, exhausted from his release, fell into a deep sleep. Creeping from the eave on hands and feet, Manwe snuck across the tile floor to the foot of the large bed. Gonius’ daughter let out a yawn and fell back into the crook of the merchant’s arm, humming a pleasant tune.

  Manwe sprung onto the bed, covering her nose and mouth with his wide hand. He cut Leomachus across the throat with his knife, slashing with confidence. The merchant choked on his own life, gurgling as his stained hands tried to cover the bloody smile. Eyes rolled back in death, and a last gush of air escaped in the bubbles popping in his throat.

  “Before, this was just thievery. I never harmed anyone for the sake of it.” Manwe wiped his blade on the girl’s skin, a streak of red across her white stomach. The girl flinched under the stroke. “You’ve made me do this.”

  He removed his hand from her mouth. Gasping for air, the girl wrenched away from the corpse beside her.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she wheezed, curled into a ball on the bed.

  “Kill you?” He shook his head in disgust. “Not today. All I care is that you tell them I did this. Tell them I will no longer come to steal their treasures.” Manwe slid off the bed and headed for the window on the far wall. “Tell them I come to steal their lives.”

  Manyara birds chirped in the trees, their red necks puffed out while they sang to welcome the morning. Man
we watched the orb rise from beneath the horizon. The light spread across the plains, an endless field forever dancing in the wild wind. In the birdsong he did not hear sweet melodies, but the beat of the cultists’ drums. He had left Toba’s body out on the plains, somewhere he hoped the spirit of his dead lover might find the way to his ancestors and a better light than the world where he remained.

  Manwe crossed his legs and leaned back against the base of the jackalberry tree, waiting for the rebels to arrive. They appeared not long after sunrise, armed with iron spears and bronze-faced shields. Rangy and with a hungered look in their eyes, the three of them slowly approached.

  The lead man, a tall and well-muscled youth stripped to the waist, called out. “Are you The Panther?”

  Manwe raised his gloomy eyes at him. “What’s your name?”

  “I am Kosey.” The man lowered his weapon. “I am Toba’s brother.”

  “What is the password?”

  “Hippo.”

  Manwe slowly rose to his feet and dusted his bare backside. “Thank you for meeting me.”

  Kosey smiled and gave a slight bow. “Toba has told me so much about you, and yet we have never stood face-to-face. I have been sure for a long while that this had to change. But tell me, where is my brother? I hoped to see him here as well.”

  Manwe looked to the rebel-leader’s two companions, one a short but fit woman, and the other a teen barely grown into his body. “I ask that your two friends stay back. My words are for you alone.”

  Kosey signaled to his friends, and they retreated.

  Manwe struggled to find the right words until they came, clear and cold. “Toba’s dead.”