The Hidden Illusionist Read online

  Prologue - The Watcher

  She watched the boys flee their home, their parents’ screams following them away from the village, haunting them as they hurried into a future as dark as the heart of the forest in front of them. Two brothers from a middle-class home, the older one dragging the younger one by the hand, neither of them knowing where to go, but just needing to escape.

  Later, she watched them in their first city as the authorities couldn’t house them, and nobody would feed them. No apprentices would take on boys without being vouched for, and this poor pair had no family anymore. She worried that something as banal as malnutrition would interfere with her plans, but she couldn’t help them. To do that would throw the whole thing off course.

  She watched them succumb to the seedier element of the city. She saw the older one steal his first penny buns, and she noticed the smile on his face when he knew he’d gotten away with it. He took shaky breaths, undercut with adrenaline, as addiction sprouted inside him.

  She watched them practice; the older boy in stealing, the younger one in illusionism. They adapted to their new life, forming a hard shell that their past couldn’t touch, until they’d lived so long in the squalor they couldn’t remember anything else.

  And even then, after everything they’d been through, they still couldn’t look out for just themselves; they changed their targets so they only stole from those who deserved it, and they made right every innocent theft they had ever committed. They stole to feed themselves, and any excess was given to the other homeless boys around them.

  But they never made real friends. They never stayed anywhere for long. They were convinced that someone was following them, that someone watched from darkened alleyways, from behind twitching curtains. And they were right.

  As she watched them for years, she began to like them, in her own way. And that was the most dangerous thing at all. For what she needed to do, she couldn’t afford to have affection.

  The more she watched, the more she was convinced; one of the brothers was special, and the other would kill her.

  Chapter One

  Dantis

  “This is my first torture,” said the man pacing around the room, “so you’ll have to give me a break. Bill usually does it but he’s sick, so you’re stuck with me.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do a great job,” said Dantis.

  The chords around his wrists and legs dug into his skin, and the chair stabbed into his back like the damn thing was made from spikes. Next to him, his older brother Ethan gazed around the room, no doubt weighing up every weakness in security. Give Ethan five seconds in a room and he’d have half its security figured out. Give him a minute and he’d have sized up every lock, window, and trap, as well as pricing the whole room contents up in his head. He always used to tell Dantis he was bad at math, but when it came to deciding whether things were worth stealing, he was a genius.

  This place was lavish for a torture room. A rug was spread across the floor, crimson with intricately woven threads of gold. Something like that would have fed him and Ethan for a year if they stole it. And if they sold it, of course. It was a big rug, and it wouldn’t have lasted a month if they ate it, but the stomach sickness wouldn’t have been worth the effort. Paintings of rich aristocrats covered the walls, and potted plants were in each corner, their sagging leaves aching for sunlight.

  How professional a torture room was depended on who was funding it, and how legit they were. You’d think the empire’s rooms, given their form of blade and magic tortures were legal and wielded in the name of justice, would have been nicer. Nope. Dantis had been tortured briefly once - an appetizer of a torture, if you will - and it had been the pits. Luckily, his brother had broken him out, and Dantis’s index fingernail had grown back in a few weeks.

  In private torture rooms, they made stuff look good. Plush recliners, gold-trimmed walls, and even if they weren’t that lavish, they were at least colorful and clean. Why? Because if a guy without a state license was going around torturing people, then it wouldn’t pay to have his secret torture chamber look like one, would it?

  The torturer was a tall man with spindly fingers. He was dressed too finely and was all too clean to be a torturer; this guy had never hurt someone in his life. He was a lackey, too scared to refuse his employer’s requests. Dantis didn’t blame him. From what he’d heard, Hawksby wasn’t a guy you crossed.

  He tapped twice on the east wall, and a painting slid aside to reveal a hidden alcove. Inside it were dozens of gruesome-looking torture implements; prongs, scalpels, mana-fueled torches.

  This had gone on long enough. Light flickered in Dantis’s palm, and he realized he’d cast an illusion; it was a dragonfly buzzing in his palm. He willed it away, and once it had vanished, he glanced at Ethan. Phew, he didn’t notice.

  He needed to get this under control. Anytime he got nervous, scared, excited, mana sparked in him, and webs of illusions spun from his fingers. It wasn’t exactly subtle, and he’d have to tell Ethan about it, eventually. If he wanted to get better he needed to practice, and he and Ethan spent so much time together that even twenty minutes of alone time were precious. He’d tell him soon. He didn’t know when, but soon, and hopefully Ethan would take it well.

  Ethan turned to him. “Guess it’s time to get started,” he said. “Thanks for trusting me, Dan. I know you said I was mad to get us caught on purpose, but it was the only way to get here. Hawksby keeps the soulgem locked down like it’s his daughter’s virginity.”

  “Mad? You can say that again. Let’s get this over with.”

  The torturer faced them, holding a set of prongs that Dantis didn’t want to imagine the purpose of. “You realize you are talking about this in front of me, right?”

  Ethan nodded. “Right.”

  He stood up. His chords fell to the floor, cut in the middle. Dantis couldn’t help but smile. Ethan could get out of anything; ropes, locks, prisons. He’d never studied in school, but after their parents were murdered and they’d be forced to go on the run, he’d devoted himself to mastering thief skills.

  When people talked about the thief life, they spoke like they were reading the blurb of an adventure book. Ask them to name three words they associated with thieving, and they come up with a combination of the following; gold, glamor, girls, guys, danger, charisma, adventure. And pirates.

  Not so in Dantis’s experience. Danger? Yeah. The scars on his back and the wanted posters in Rotterwell, Iswell, Wolfpine and Earle proved that. But girls? Guys? Charisma? Ethan had all the charisma, and he got all the girls, even if they didn’t interest him half the time.

  Gold – that was the key. Steal too much and you became suspicious, and you wouldn’t be able to buy a pint of beer without getting a guard’s cudgel up your arse. But steal too little, and it was potato stew morning, noon, and night for a month solid. He and Ethan still hadn’t mastered the tricky matter of how much to steal yet, and their latest jape was the most imbalanced of all. Still, it couldn’t be helped.

  Most thieves chose their profession for one of two reasons; either they couldn’t do anything else, or they thought it was easy. Want an easy job? Then don’t be a thief, otherwise your career will be short lived. Being a real thief meant practicing picking a certain type of lock hours at a time for days on end, only to start practicing on a new one when you mastered it. It meant learning to climb walls that had no grips, how to steal a purse from a beauty’s bag without her lunk of a husband catching you, and most importantly, how to run for your life.

  Ethan embraced it, whereas Dantis had always been the studious one, and sometimes he missed his old classroom and its books, and his aching fingers after hours of taking notes on the rise of the emperor. He even missed Guyser,
their old teacher who rewarded good work with a faint smile but pulled out his cane at the slightest hint of a transgression. Ethan had taken so many cane lashings that some days, he’d come home from school with his back scarred like a fishing net.

  Ethan could be great when he put his mind to it. The problem was he hardly did it. It was only after they’d fled their home that he’d had to work hard at something. If he hadn’t learned how to pickpocket and steal, they’d have been dead long before now.

  The torturer stared, wide-eyed. He bolted toward the door at the end of the room, but Ethan caught him. He punched him in the ribs, pushed him to the ground, and then kicked him in the face.

  He crossed the room and grabbed a dagger from the alcove. Then, he stood with his foot on the torturer’s chest.

  “When the eyes of suspicion cast dart tides, doth glimpse the evil that in the moonlight rides…”

  “What are you doing?” said Dantis.

  “I told you about this! I’m gonna read a poem when I kill people. It’s gonna be my thing.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Who cares? It sounds good.”

  “We can’t kill him,” said Dantis.

  The torturer groaned. “Don’t kill me. Please.”

  “Think he would have shown us any mercy?” said Ethan.

  He wouldn’t kill him. Ethan was many things, but he wasn’t a killer. Well, he had killed someone once; they’d slept under a bridge in Rotterwell, and Dantis had woken up to find a ragged old man stood over him, stinking of booze and wielding a knife. He could only manage to say “give me all your-” before Ethan ran his sword through his back.

  After he’d pulled the blade out and the man flopped to the ground, they’d buried him. Dantis insisted on it. It might have been sentimental to bury a man who’d tried to mug him, but he understood something about the man; he just wanted to survive. That’s all people wanted to do, at the end of it all. He was desperate.

  He and Ethan had never spoken about it again, and Ethan hadn’t been forced to use his sword since. So, he was no killer but he sure had a temper. If anyone threatened or ridiculed him, odds were they’d end up on the ground.

  “I have a son,” said the torturer.

  Ethan jammed the dagger into a loop on his belt. “Damn it. You’ve ruined it now. Great.”

  He punched the torturer in the face, knocking him out. After dragging him away from the door, binding his wrists and shoving part of a tablecloth in his mouth, he untied Dantis’s ropes.

  Dantis stretched his arms out. His wrist ached from how tight the chords had been. Handcuffs were great, before they had mechanisms, and mechanisms could be broken. Ropes troubled him. Ethan had tried teaching him how to slip ropes a hundred times, and he just couldn’t get it.

  “The soulgem’s out of here, and to the left. There should be a vault,” he said.

  Although he’d never been in the trader’s mansion before, Dantis knew it intimately. For two days straight, he’d pored over its blue print, which he’d stolen from the planning permission archives in Wolfpine library, until he saw the palatial layout every time he closed his eyes.

  Planning was his thing. While Ethan had tried teaching him to picklocks and steal purses, Dantis didn’t have the same flair. Give him a target and a timeframe, though, and he could make a plan to steal anything.

  Sometimes, Ethan tried to get involved in the planning, but Dantis didn’t let him. Maybe it was an ego thing, but he loved having a robbery go well, and knowing that the plan was down to him. He couldn’t fight, he was adequate at best in his thief skills, but he could plan a job.

  “This way,” he said. He opened the door. He glanced at Ethan, who rubbed the oil-black scar on his wrist, then looked around, waiting.

  “Anything?” said Dantis.

  “We’re good. Left, you said?”

  Despite being underground, the hallways of the mansion were bathed in light cast by mana torches on the wall. Dantis traced his fingers along the rich wallpaper as he followed the hall left, before stopping at a door. He pushed this one open.

  This was nothing like the torture room. It was dark and humid, with fleshy walls that seemed to throb in the heat. He swore he could hear them breathing. Ahead, sitting in a glass case, was the soulgem. It was pure crimson, misshapen with jagged edges, surrounded by a mist-like glow.

  Ethan approached it first. “I can’t believe this actually worked. Just think, Dan, no more sleeping in basements, no more stealing…”

  A buzzing filled Dantis’s mind. It was sharp, so much so that it hurt. Then, a voice spoke, drifting toward him from the soulgem.

  The cataclysm is coming…Lord Tula awaits.

  “You okay?” said Ethan.

  Dantis’s pulse fired. He wanted to get the gem and get the hell out of there. “I’m fine.”

  The ancient city sleeps, Dantis. It waits for you.

  The gem knew his name? Everyone knew what soul gems were; lost souls encased in crystallized mana, trapped there forever. He knew they sometimes channeled words into people’s minds, but they weren’t sentient. How did it know his name?

  “Dantis?” said Ethan.

  “The gem…it’s speaking to me.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “It was talking about a cataclysm and some ancient city.”

  “Just relax, Dan. You need to have a little faith in yourself.”

  Dantis tried to shake off the soulgem’s voice echoing in his head. “Right.”

  Ethan touched his black scar. It had spread wider across his wrist now, which it only did when there was trouble. He spun around, toward the door. “Someone’s coming. Grab the gem, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  ~

  When they went out of the vault and into the open air, Dantis got a surprise. It wasn’t that the landscape was slowly moving by; he already knew that the trader’s house was built on the back of giant beetle. He knew that the gigantic animal was large enough to build such a place on, and tame enough that the trader could command it to travel wherever he felt like relocating his house to.

  The surprise was the security that had filled the courtyard. This wasn’t right - they weren’t supposed to have mind-wyrms and cogmen. That was a level of security reserved for emperors and politicians, but this place was a rich trader’s house. What did he need with brain-manipulation dog-insect hybrids and men clad in impenetrable armor?

  Ethan tapped him on the shoulder. “Two cogmen patrolling the east wall.”

  Dantis nodded. “That’s the west wall.”

  “East, west, who’s keeping track? I’m not a weather vane. That’s where he keeps the gem, isn’t it?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  The merchant’s palatial estate was half-prison-like, half luxurious. Watchtowers built from crisscrossed metal struts dwarfed the bleached walls that surrounded the grand home.

  Guards were sitting at the top, holding lanterns that cast glows in the night, reflecting on the bulbous armored cogmen below who pounded back and forth. The ground trembled under their feet.

  “I don’t know how Hawksby puts up with the noise,” said Ethan. “The cogmen are louder than the damn beetle.”

  “They use ‘em to guard military outposts. Must cost a fortune. I expected defenses, but nothing like this.”

  “It means they’ll tear our arses in half. Tell me there’s another plan?”

  Dantis nodded. His plans called for two or three alternatives. He pointed to a wall with a walkway that ran for fifty meters. Guards patrolled the walkway holding leather leashes, with muscled, dog-like creatures with funnel-shaped heads straining at the ends. They didn’t have eyes, but their nostrils were large enough to stick a fist into. They had slimy skin instead of fur. That’s why all the guards wear gloves, then.

  “So, it’s the cogmen or the mind-wyrms?” asked Ethan. He tapped the hilt of his sword out of habit. The faster he tapped, the more trouble they were usually in.

  “At
least we’ve got a choice, I guess.”

  “We’re fucked.”

  Dantis showed him a round, smooth ball, like a marble but with a jelly-ish quality to it.

  “This is supposed to be for the vault mechanism, in case we couldn’t trick our way inside. It’ll deal with the cogmen, but I wasn’t expecting mind-wyrms. I don’t see how we can get out without them noticing. Get within a certain distance, and they can sense our brain waves.”

  Dantis rubbed his forehead. It was damp, which meant something had gone wrong. He knew it wouldn’t be an easy robbery, but this level of defense? Nothing in his research suggested it.

  He should have known. When Ethan told him about the robbery, he’d sensed something off about it, like a finger jabbing his brain, but he’d let Ethan sway him. Ever since their parents died, he’d let Ethan make all their decisions. If Ethan said it was time to leave a town or city, Dantis followed no matter how blistered his feet were.