“Is it . . . um . . . safe?” asked Huqin’s nephew. He was in his teens, and puberty hadn’t been kind to him. Not with that face, that voice, and those spindly legs.
“Hush,” Huqin snapped.
“No,” Tigzikk said, “the boy is right to express caution. This will be very dangerous.”
Tigzikk was considered the learned one in the group on account of his being able to cuss in three languages. Downright scholarly, that was. He wore fancy clothing, while most of the others wore black. “There will be chaos,” Tigzikk continued, “because so many people move through the palace tonight, but there will also be danger. Many, many bodyguards and a likelihood of suspicion on all sides.”
Tigzikk was an aging fellow, and was the only one of the group Lift knew well. She couldn’t say his name. That “quq” sound on the end of his name sounded like choking when someone pronounced it correctly. She just called him Tig instead.
“Tigzikk,” Huqin said. Yup. Choking. “You were the one who suggested this. Don’t tell me you’re getting cold now.”
“I’m not backing down. I’m pleading caution.”
Lift leaned down over the wall toward them. “Less arguing,” she said. “Let’s move. I’m hungry.”
Huqin looked up. “Why did we bring her along?”
“She’ll be useful,” Tigzikk said. “You’ll see.”
“She’s just a child!”
“She’s a youth. She’s at least twelve.”
“I ain’t twelve,” Lift snapped, looming over them.
They turned up toward her.
“I ain’t,” she said. “Twelve’s an unlucky number.” She held up her hands. “I’m only this many.”
“. . . Ten?” Tigzikk asked.
“Is that how many that is? Sure, then. Ten.” She lowered her hands. “If I can’t count it on my fingers, it’s unlucky.” And she’d been that many for three years now. So there.
“Seems like there are a lot of unlucky ages,” Huqin said, sounding amused.
“Sure are,” she agreed. She scanned the grounds again, then glanced back the way they had come, into the city.
A man walked down one of the streets leading to the palace. His dark clothing blended into the gloom, but his silver buttons glinted each time he passed a streetlight.
Storms, she thought, a chill running up her spine. I didn’t lose him after all.
She looked down at the men. “Are you coming with me or not? ’Cuz I’m leaving.” She slipped over the top and dropped into the palace yards. Lift squatted there, feeling the cold ground. Yup, it was metal. Everything was bronze. Rich people, she decided, loved to stick with a theme.
As the boys finally stopped arguing and started climbing, a thin, twisting trail of vines grew out of the darkness and approached Lift. It looked like a little stream of spilled water picking its way across the floor. Here and there, bits of clear crystal peeked out of the vines, like sections of quartz in otherwise dark stone. Those weren’t sharp, but smooth like polished glass, and didn’t glow with Stormlight.
The vines grew super-fast, curling about one another in a tangle that formed a face.
“Mistress,” the face said. “Is this wise?”
“’Ello, Voidbringer,” Lift said, scanning the grounds.
“I am not a Voidbringer!” he said. “And you know it. Just . . . just stop saying that!”
Lift grinned. “You’re my pet Voidbringer, and no lies are going to change that. I got you captured. No stealing souls, now. We ain’t here for souls. Just a little thievery, the type what never hurt nobody.”
The vine face—he called himself Wyndle—sighed. Lift scuttled across the bronze ground over to a tree that was, of course, also made of bronze. Huqin had chosen the darkest part of night, between moons, for them to slip in—but the starlight was enough to see by on a cloudless night like this.
Wyndle grew up to her, leaving a small trail of vines that people didn’t seem to be able to see. The vines hardened after a few moments of sitting, as if briefly becoming solid crystal, then they crumbled to dust. People spotted that on occasion, though they certainly couldn’t see Wyndle himself.
“I’m a spren,” Wyndle said to her. “Part of a proud and noble—”
“Hush,” Lift said, peeking out from behind the bronze tree. An open-topped carriage passed on the drive beyond, carrying some important Azish folk. You could tell by the coats. Big, drooping coats with really wide sleeves and patterns that argued with each other. They all looked like kids who had snuck into their parents’ wardrobe. The hats were nifty, though.
The thieves followed behind her, moving with reasonable stealth. They really weren’t that bad. Even if they didn’t know how to climb a wall properly.
They gathered around her, and Tigzikk stood up, straightening his coat—which was an imitation of one of those worn by the rich scribe types who worked in the government. Here in Azir, working for the government was real important. Everyone else was said to be “discrete,” whatever that meant.
“Ready?” Tigzikk said to Maxin, who was the other one of the thieves dressed in fine clothing.
Maxin nodded, and the two of them moved off to the right, heading toward the palace’s sculpture garden. The important people would supposedly be shuffling around in there, speculating about who should be the next Prime.
Dangerous job, that. The last two had gotten their heads chopped off by some bloke in white with a Shardblade. The most recent Prime hadn’t lasted two starvin’ days!
With Tigzikk and Maxin gone, Lift only had four others to worry about. Huqin, his nephew, and two slender brothers who didn’t talk much and kept reaching under their coats for knives. Lift didn’t like their type. Thieving shouldn’t leave bodies. Leaving bodies was easy. There was no challenge to it if you could just kill anyone who spotted you.
“You can get us in,” Huqin said to Lift. “Right?”
Lift pointedly rolled her eyes. Then she scuttled across the bronze grounds toward the main palace structure.
Really does look like a breast . . .
Wyndle curled along the ground beside her, his vine trail sprouting tiny bits of clear crystal here and there. He was as sinuous and speedy as a moving eel, only he grew rather than actually moving. Voidbringers were a strange lot.
“You realize that I didn’t choose you,” he said, a face appearing in the vines as they moved. His speaking left a strange effect, the trail behind him clotted with a sequence of frozen faces. The mouth seemed to move because it was growing so quickly beside her. “I wanted to pick a distinguished Iriali matron. A grandmother, an accomplished gardener. But no, the Ring said we should choose you. ‘She has visited the Old Magic,’ they said. ‘Our mother has blessed her,’ they said. ‘She will be young, and we can mold her,’ they said. Well, they don’t have to put up with—”
“Shut it, Voidbringer,” Lift hissed, drawing up beside the wall of the palace. “Or I’ll bathe in blessed water and go listen to the priests. Maybe get an exorcism.”
Lift edged sideways until she could look around the curve of the wall to spot the guard patrol: men in patterned vests and caps, with long halberds. She looked up the side of the wall. It bulged out just above her, like a rockbud, before tapering up further. It was of smooth bronze, with no handholds.
She waited until the guards had walked farther away. “All right,” she whispered to Wyndle. “You gotta do what I say.”
“I do not.”
“Sure you do. I captured you, just like in the stories.”
“I came to you,” Wyndle said. “Your powers come from me! Do you even listen to—”
“Up the wall,” Lift said, pointing.
Wyndle sighed, but obeyed, creeping up the wall in a wide, looping pattern. Lift hopped up, grabbing the small handholds made by the vine, which stuck to the surface by virtue of thousands of branching stems with sticky discs on them. Wyndle wove ahead of her, making a ladder of sorts.
It wasn’t easy. It was star
vin’ difficult, with that bulge, and Wyndle’s handholds weren’t very big. But she did it, climbing all the way to the near-top of the building’s dome, where windows peeked out at the grounds.
She glanced toward the city. No sign of the man in the black uniform. Maybe she’d lost him.
She turned back to examine the window. Its nice wooden frame held very thick glass, even though it pointed east. It was unfair how well Azimir was protected from highstorms. They should have to live with the wind, like normal folk.
“We need to Voidbring that,” she said, pointing at the window.
“Have you realized,” Wyndle said, “that while you claim to be a master thief, I do all of the work in this relationship?”
“You do all the complainin’ too,” she said. “How do we get through this?”
“You have the seeds?”
She nodded, fishing in her pocket. Then in the other one. Then in her back pocket. Ah, there they were. She pulled out a handful of seeds.
“I can’t affect the Physical Realm except in minor ways,” Wyndle said. “This means that you will need to use Investiture to—”
Lift yawned.
“Use Investiture to—”
She yawned wider. Starvin’ Voidbringers never could catch a hint.
Wyndle sighed. “Spread the seeds on the frame.”
She did so, throwing the handful of seeds at the window.
“Your bond to me grants two primary classes of ability,” Wyndle said. “The first, manipulation of friction, you’ve already—don’t yawn at me!—discovered. We have been using that well for many weeks now, and it is time for you to learn the second, the power of Growth. You aren’t ready for what was once known as Regrowth, the healing of—”
Lift pressed her hand against the seeds, then summoned her awesomeness.
She wasn’t sure how she did it. She just did. It had started right around when Wyndle had first appeared.
He hadn’t talked then. She kind of missed those days.
Her hand glowed faintly with white light, like vapor coming off the skin. The seeds that saw the light started to grow. Fast. Vines burst from the seeds and wormed into the cracks between the window and its frame.
The vines grew at her will, making constricted, straining sounds. The glass cracked, then the window frame popped open.
Lift grinned.
“Well done,” Wyndle said. “We’ll make an Edgedancer out of you yet.”
Her stomach grumbled. When had she last eaten? She’d used a lot of her awesomeness practicing earlier. She probably should have stolen something to eat. She wasn’t quite so awesome when she was hungry.
She slipped inside the window. Having a Voidbringer was useful, though she wasn’t completely sure her powers came from him. That seemed the sorta thing a Voidbringer would lie about. She had captured him, fair and square. She’d used words. A Voidbringer had no body, not really. To catch something like that, you had to use words. Everybody knew it. Just like curses made evil things come find you.
She had to get out a sphere—a diamond mark, her lucky one—to see properly in here. The small bedroom was decorated after the Azish way with lots of intricate patterns on the rugs and the fabric on the walls, mostly gold and red here. Those patterns were everything to the Azish. They were like words.
She looked out the window. Surely she’d escaped Darkness, the man in the black and silver with the pale crescent birthmark on his cheek. The man with the dead, lifeless stare. Surely he hadn’t followed her all the way from Marabethia. That was half a continent away! Well, a quarter one, at the least.
Convinced, she uncoiled the rope that she wore wrapped around her waist and over her shoulders. She tied it to the door of a built-in closet, then fed it out the window. It tightened as the men started climbing. Nearby, Wyndle grew up around one of the bedposts, coiled like a skyeel.
She heard whispered voices below. “Did you see that? She climbed right up it. Not a handhold in sight. How . . . ?”
“Hush.” That was Huqin.
Lift began poking through cabinets and drawers as the boys clambered in the window one at a time. Once inside, the thieves pulled up the rope and shut the window as best they could. Huqin studied the vines she’d grown from seeds on the frame.
Lift stuck her head in the bottom of a wardrobe, groping around. “Ain’t nothing in this room but moldy shoes.”
“You,” Huqin said to her, “and my nephew will hold this room. The three of us will search the bedrooms nearby. We will be back shortly.”
“You’ll probably have a whole sack of moldy shoes . . .” Lift said, pulling out of the wardrobe.
“Ignorant child,” Huqin said, pointing at the wardrobe. One of his men grabbed the shoes and outfits inside, stuffing them in a sack. “This clothing will sell for bundles. It’s exactly what we’re looking for.”
“What about real riches?” Lift said. “Spheres, jewelry, art . . .” She had little interest in those things herself, but she’d figured it was what Huqin was after.
“That will all be far too well guarded,” Huqin said as his two associates made quick work of the room’s clothing. “The difference between a successful thief and a dead thief is knowing when to escape with your takings. This haul will let us live in luxury for a year or two. That is enough.”
One of the brothers peeked out the door into the hallway. He nodded, and the three of them slipped out. “Listen for the warning,” Huqin said to his nephew, then eased the door almost closed behind him.
Tigzikk and his accomplice below would listen for any kind of alarm. If anything seemed to be amiss, they’d slip off and blow their whistles. Huqin’s nephew crouched by the window to listen, obviously taking his duty very seriously. He looked to be about sixteen. Unlucky age, that.
“How did you climb the wall like that?” the youth asked.
“Gumption,” Lift said. “And spit.”
He frowned at her.
“I gots magic spit.”
He seemed to believe her. Idiot.
“Is it strange for you here?” he asked. “Away from your people?”
She stood out. Straight black hair—she wore it down to her waist—tan skin, rounded features. Everyone would immediately mark her as Reshi.
“Don’t know,” Lift said, strolling to the door. “Ain’t never been around my people.”
“You’re not from the islands?”
“Nope. Grew up in Rall Elorim.”
“The . . . City of Shadows?”
“Yup.”
“Is it—”
“Yup. Just like they say.”
She peeked through the door. Huqin and the others were well out of the way. The hallway was bronze—walls and everything—but a red and blue rug, with lots of little vine patterns, ran down the center. Paintings hung on the walls.
She pulled the door all the way open and stepped out.
“Lift!” The nephew scrambled to the door. “They told us to wait here!”
“And?”
“And we should wait here! We don’t want to get Uncle Huqin in trouble!”
“What’s the point of sneaking into a palace if not to get into trouble?” She shook her head. Odd men, these. “This should be an interesting place, what with all of the rich folk hanging around.” There ought to be some really good food in here.
She padded out into the hallway, and Wyndle grew along the floor beside her. Interestingly, the nephew followed. She’d expected him to stay in the room.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said as they passed a door that was open a crack, shuffles sounding from inside. Huqin and his men, robbing the place silly.
“Then stay,” Lift whispered, reaching a large stairwell. Servants whisked back and forth below, even a few parshmen, but she didn’t catch sight of anyone in one of those coats. “Where are the important folk?”
“Reading forms,” the nephew said from beside her.
“Forms?”
“Sure,” he said. “With t
he Prime dead, the viziers, scribes, and arbiters were all given a chance to fill out the proper paperwork to apply to take his place.”
“You apply to be emperor?” Lift said.
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of paperwork involved in that. And an essay. Your essay has to be really good to get this job.”
“Storms. You people are crazy.”
“Other nations do it better? With bloody succession wars? This way, everyone has a chance. Even the lowest of clerks can submit the paperwork. You can even be discrete and end up on the throne, if you are convincing enough. It happened once.”
“Crazy.”
“Says the girl who talks to herself.”
Lift looked at him sharply.
“Don’t pretend you don’t,” he said. “I’ve seen you doing it. Talking to the air, as if somebody were there.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Gawx.”
“Wow. Well then, Gaw. I don’t talk to myself because I’m crazy.”
“No?”
“I do it because I’m awesome.” She started down the steps, waited for a gap between passing servants, then made for a closet across the way. Gawx cursed, then followed.
Lift was tempted to use her awesomeness to slide across the floor quickly, but she didn’t need that yet. Besides, Wyndle kept complaining that she used the awesomeness too often. That she was at risk of malnutrition, whatever that meant.
She slipped up to the closet, using just her normal everyday sneakin’ skills, and moved inside. Gawx scrambled into the closet with her just before she pulled it shut. Dinnerware on a serving cart clinked behind them, and they could barely crowd into the space. Gawx moved, causing more clinks, and she elbowed him. He stilled as two parshmen passed, bearing large wine barrels.
“You should go back upstairs,” Lift whispered to him. “This could be dangerous.”
“Oh, sneaking into the storming royal palace is dangerous? Thanks. I hadn’t realized.”
“I mean it,” Lift said, peeking out of the closet. “Go back up, leave when Huqin returns. He’ll abandon me in a heartbeat. Probably will you, too.”