The Hidden Illusionist Read online

  Ethan felt the thief bug stir in him. Rune coins were worth a fortune. He’d stolen one once, but couldn’t find a buyer, and one trader reported him for trying to sell it. He and Dantis had ended up being smuggled out of town on a cart, hidden under two tons of horse shit.

  “Ah, the thief likes my coin,” said Glen. He flipped it in the air, turned on the spot, then let it land on his palm, before snapping his hand shut. “My grandfather gave it me. I’ll do you a deal. You can try and steal it from me, but when I catch you – and I will – I’ll cut your head off, hollo it out, and use it as a pencil holder.”

  His plans were dashed. He’d made a point to study every recruit in the guild, and he’d seen Glen around. After serving the guild for two years, Glen held the ‘senior’ rank, and with that came responsibilities. It was his job to keep an eye on Ethan, which meant day pass or not, there was no way he’d be escaping today.

  “Ethan?” said Bander. “The slightest hint of trouble…”

  ~

  Glen, four inches taller than Ethan and rivalling even Bunk, Yart’s bodyguard, in height, barely said a word as they travelled. He fixed his gaze on the distance, on the ever-increasing dot that was Wolfpine, as if a beacon beckoned him.

  “What are you staring at?”

  “Never you mind, Elliot.”

  “Ethan.”

  “Your name can be Baraclus the Fortunate, for all I care. Still hiding food under your pillow?”

  Ethan looked away. Even a fortnight into his guildship, he couldn’t shake old habits. If you see a chance for food, take more than you’ll need. Take anything that won’t spoil. With this thought, he’d hidden grains and oat biscuits under his pillow, much to the amusement of Reck, who uncovered them on one of his morning inspections.

  The stolen food might have tickled him, but what Reck found on the eighth day, didn’t. Reck, who gave Ethan’s bed a more thorough inspection than most, patted his pillow. He dug inside it, pulling out a meat knife.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “I’m no genius, but it looks like a meat knife,” said Dullzewn, watching with a grin.

  Ethan had stolen it out of instinct. On the streets, he slept with his sword at hand, and only closed his eyes when Dantis was next to him, on watch. He wasn’t used to sleeping in a room full of strangers.

  “Don’t let me find something like this again,” Reck said.

  In the last two days, Ethan had held back all his instincts. It was like holding back a desperate urge to pee. The more he tried, the more he thought about it. Would he ever get used to guild life?

  “Glen, let me ask you something.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Have you seen any guys in the recruit acting…I don’t know…strange? As in, they can do things they shouldn’t be able to?”

  “If you’re talking about Roycey and how he can fit a dozen oat biscuits in his mouth…”

  “I mean speed they shouldn’t have. Maybe strength to. Anything strange.”

  “Just listen to me,” said Glen. “Do yourself and me and favor, and don’t talk about this. Especially not on guild ground, okay?”

  “So you do know about it.”

  Glen gave him a shove. “I said don’t talk about it. I’m not just being an arse here, I’m helping you.”

  Great. Another guild yes man, scared to talk about anything Bander or Reck or any off the other instructors didn’t like.

  After walking hours down the mountain pass, the Wolfpine gates loomed high; black steel bars, in the center of which were an ornamental wolf, and an ornamental tree, which met when the gates closed. Guards were standing in turrets on either side, no more alert than an innkeeper on a quiet day.

  “Ho!” said one guard. “State your name and your business.”

  “Cut the shit, Dylan,” said Glen. “You enjoy this tiny scrap of power, don’t you?”

  Dylan, a guard who wore a chainmail around his head so his sunburned face peaked out like an oyster in a shell, laughed. “It’s the only bloody thing I get to do all day.”

  The winch creaked, and the gates swung open.

  Trade shops lined cobbled streets, and young boys and girls, employed by the vendors, advertised their wares. One girl held a basket of mana sticks, pieces of wood brushed with mana potion, which served as torches. A boy, wearing an apron covered in flour, tried to entice hungry passersby into his master’s bakery.

  People filled the streets of Wolfpine today, celebrating two festivals which were inexplicably held on the same day. One was the annual ale festival, while another was the bounty hunter’s collective celebration. Drunks and bounty hunters – great mix.

  Drunks from nearby settlements swarmed the town. Ethan loved ale festivals, but not for the beer. Ale festivals attracted drunks with bulging coin purses, and they usually drank so much amber they forget all pretense of guarding their money.

  Three young boys darted in and out of crowds. To a casual observer, it looked like they were boys playing a game. Ethan’s trained eye cast a different perspective. One boy, the gangliest of the three, was deliberately annoying the drunks, drawing their attention while the other two snipped coin pouches from belts.

  Amateurs. They’re being too conspicuous. He eyed the coin purses sagging from belts, and he felt restless. More than anything, he wanted to snag a few purses. It would be so easy…

  His fingers twitched. He ached to pickpocket something. Over the years it had become not just a means of survival but a compulsion. Only soldiers and drug abusers could understand the instant rush he felt after swiping something and getting away with it. That explosion of happiness that shot through him, but getting shorter and shorter each time, until he was stealing five, six, seven purses a day. Until he started targeting people who didn’t deserve it…

  He wouldn’t steal anything today. He clenched his fist to stop the twitching, and his scar burned. Uh oh. The black splodge had spread across more of his forearm. There was hostility in the Wolfpine air today.

  The bounty hunters didn’t look as happy in their celebration. Some stood in groups, each of them wearing a different kind of mask from bird-like ones with protruding beaks, to black ones with glowing bat eyes. Their clothing was dark and dull to a man, all except for one hunter, who wore a white skull mask and had a rather fetching yellow shawl over his shoulder.

  Bounty hunting was a profession every kid in the Fire Isles dreamed of, until they grew up and realized what it meant. There was no glory in it. It usually meant months of travelling from place to place, since the wanted criminals usually didn’t want to get caught, always alert, never being able to relax. The emperor constantly updated bounty hunter regulations, meaning that the hunters always needed to spend gold on new gear to keep their licenses. It was just a reason to tax people, of course, but hey, what could they do? Stop hunting murders, and become scribes instead?

  In Wolfpine, the street vendors, with their portable stalls, had taken advantage of the latest bounty hunter fad – mana blades. These were normal daggers, except their blades were infused with spells, adding elemental damage to their attacks. Some of the vendors would be con merchant, and the layer of mana of their daggers would be thin and wear off after a single use. This seemed strange to Ethan; if you were gonna con someone, why con groups of people whose sole job it was to track people down?

  At the far end of town, beyond the drunks, the stalls, the bounty hunters and the whores, was the Wolfpine black rock, rising from the ground like a craggy finger pointing up at the gods. Tributes lined its base, and amidst all the flowers and the hand-written notes, there was a tiny wicker statue of an alchemist. He was too far away to see it, but he knew it was there, because he and Dantis placed it there when they first got to Wolfpine. They weren’t superstitious – mum and dad brought them up to know bullshit when they saw it – but they hadn’t been able to help themselves leaving a tribute.

  One man, a ragged, mud-covered elder tugging a goat along with him, saw the hero emblems o
n Ethan’s and Glen’s shirts. He smiled and walked over, dragging his animal. Up close, he spat on the ground, then tried to coax his goat to do the same. “Bastards,” he said.

  “What’s his problem?” said Ethan.

  “You heard about the folks going missing?” said Glen.

  Ethan had, but he couldn’t remember where. “What’s that got to do with the guild?”

  “The mayor commissioned Bander to find out what was happening. Paid two thousand gold up front. He put our best investigators on it, but they’ve turned up shit-all.”

  “Kidnappers tend to do their best to make it a secret.”

  “Yeah, but people don’t trust us no more, all the same. Works both ways. Since the old mage bastard got here, the mountain’s been a no-go for townsfolk. Bander said people can’t petition us for help directly anymore; they have to wait for our monthly appearances in town.”

  “Isn’t the whole point of the guild to help people?”

  Glen held up his hands, tipping them as if they were weighing scales. “Help…money…help…money.”

  “Heroes? Pah,” said a passing woman, holding the hands of a chubby child.

  “Didn’t I kill the roaches in your cellar, you ungrateful cow?” said Glen. He turned to Ethan. “Listen. I’ve got an errand to run, okay? I’ll be an hour. Can I trust you not to fuck off somewhere and leave me in the shit?”

  “Where are you going?”

  Glen tapped his nose. “Never you mind. Here’s the money for your scar, and extra for an ale. If I don’t see you back here in exactly an hour, I’m going to ram my scimitar up your arse.”

  “It’s a date,” said Ethan.

  Glen skipped away, heading across the main street of town, passed potions shops, smithies, a book store and a leatherworker, before disappearing down a side alley out of sight.

  Weird. Where he’s going? He had half a mind to follow Glen and find out. Dantis always said information was power. He meant it a different way, of course, but Ethan took the point; know something other people don’t, and you had power over them. Glen was up to something.

  Was that really a good idea? Here he was, left to his own devices in Wolfpine, with his senior chaperone gone on a personal errand, and gold in his pocket. Fate couldn’t have played him a kinder hand.

  He could find Dantis. But how would he get there? No caravans went to the lava fields; what would be the point? Nobody in their right mind traded with the Brotherhood. He could buy food and try and make it on foot, but the journey would take weeks, and the guild were sure to catch him. They’d cast him out, and who knew what the justice system would do with him after that? He wasn’t so stupid he didn’t know he’d gotten an easy ride.

  Damn it. Guilt was a new emotion for Ethan, but it hit him again and again lately. Dantis was in the lava fields, and Ethan was in Wolfpine. Dantis was going to go through a fire trial, and Ethan was going for a beer. If only he could get news about him. Even a scrap of a rumor would make him feel better.

  He headed through town, approaching the throng of drunks. A group of men wearing dungarees danced in a circle, arms interlinked around each other, faces flushed from beer. One man’s gold pouch hung by the tiniest of threads. Steal me, it seemed to say, with each jingle as the man danced. Take me. If someone makes it so easy, it’s only fair you rob them!

  It took every trace of self-control to steer away from the tantalizing pouch and toward the Last Giant, a Wolfpine tavern known for its crowd of gossipers. In the Last Giant, a beer would buy you all the rumors you could ask for. If anyone knew something about Dantis, it would be a drunk in the Last Giant.

  The Last Giant was built in the hollowed-out belly of a long-dead giant, whose legs went deep below Wolfpine, and who’s head had been weathered by time until its skull had barely any shape to it.

  Ethan remembered Dantis telling him about the giants. When man first came to the fire isles, there were giant corpses everywhere, a whole race wiped out by some cataclysmic event. Those were more superstitious times, and the first settlers ordered the giant bones to be buried out of respect until the isles were free of their corpses.

  Wolfpine wasn’t founded until years later, and an industrious business man bought the plot of land the giant corpse was half-buried in, and he built a novelty tavern in its bleached stomach. Some people refused to go in out of respect for the last of the giants, but most visits to town couldn’t help it. It was so unusual, and everyone wanted to say they’d gone into the belly of a giant and lived to talk about it.

  The aroma of wood-smoked meats drifted through the tavern, reminding Ethan he had the guild’s oat biscuit special to look forward to later. A long bar covered one wall, and a burly innkeeper was standing behind it, twisting the bottles of liquor on a counter so each label was aligned. Four middle-aged women crowded around a table, laughing and joking, and gulping from goblets.

  Ethan sized everyone up; one off the women had a money pouch hidden on the inside of her blouse, a man in the corner had a satchel strapped to his belt, but saw dust marked the leather. It was a decoy. He was probably part of the town guard, acting as temptation for would-be pickpockets. Only an amateur would fall for that.

  “Hey” said a pock-marked drunk when he noticed Ethan. “It’s Axel Wunder! Give us a song!”

  “That ain’t him. Too roughed-up. Look at ‘is face.”

  “What happened to Axel, anyway?”

  “He played here once,” said the innkeeper.

  There was a poster behind the innkeeper. It was a pencil drawing of a young boy with bushy eyebrows and freckles, and below it was the word ‘MISSING.’ Part of the poster peeled away, and behind it lay a more aged one, showing a different boy who had vanished.

  “Anyway,” said the innkeeper, “This fella’s no bard. He’s from the heroes’ guild.”

  A man to his right was sitting at a table with Dablo cards spread in front of him and a mana sphere perched on the edge. Lacking a fellow player, the man had rigged his sphere to pump mana into what would have been his opponent’s deck, so the mana flipped the cards automatically. The guy really needed to make friends, but it was ingenious.

  “Heroes guild?” he said, flipping over a card. “Can you call it a guild, anymore? More like a business these days.”

  A barmaid crossed the room carrying a metal tray of glass full to the brim with amber liquid. She had a shaved head, and the multitude of cuts centered around a particular part of her right hand marked her as a hobbyist archer.

  “Leave ‘em alone. Bander works hard.”

  “Another broad in love with Bander. The guy needs to step down.”

  “I’m not in love with him. He’s just a good man.”

  “He’s out for gold like the rest of ‘em. Look. Bander’s a thieving scumbag, and so’s this kid here. All of ‘em are.”

  Ethan bristled. He had no problem with being called a thief – it wasn’t a lie, was it? But Bander only had the guilds interests at heart. Money didn’t mean a thing to him; the guy had worn the same armor for what looked like thirty years, judging by how worn it was.

  He wanted to say something, but he remembered Bander’s words. “The slightest hint of trouble…”

  Ignoring the Dablo player, he looked at the other clientele of the Pony. It was your usual fare; guys drinking alone, guys looking to catch the barmaids eye, shadowy-looking guys whispering to each other….and then a hooded man sitting alone in the corner, covered in darkness.

  I’ve found my man. It was a well-known fact that hooded men sitting in shadowy tavern corners were a rich source of information. It was their job; you slipped them gold, you asked them questions, and the transaction was completed without learning each other’s names. The hoods and the dark corners were all part of the act.

  As he approached him, the tavern door opened. Three men clad in scorched metal armor entered, soot covering their faces. They looked like they’d been fighting a dragon. There was something familiar about one of them. He was short, squ
at, and his bald head had a tough look to it, as if he could charge through a wall.

  He eyed Ethan with such intensity he felt uneasy. The man used a cloth to wipe away sweat from his face, taking the soot away with it. When Ethan saw his face, he gulped.

  He’d stolen from this man years ago, in a town in the east called Rotterwell. The man was patrolling the seamstress sect, shaking the women down for money. Ethan swiped his pouch so he could give the gold back to the seamstress, after taking a coin or two for expenses, but his fingers weren’t as deft back then. The man had caught him. Surely he’s forgotten what I look like by now?

  Not wanting to take the chance, he left the Giant. The streets thronged with drunks signing songs from their hometowns, and bounty hunters eyeing them, their eyes seething with anger behind their masks. Prostitutes and gigolos catcalled from tent openings, and tavern boys scurried back and forth with tankards so heavy it took them both hands to hold them.