I knew it was Tidehollow. I cannot mistake my birthplace for anywhere else in the Multiverse; the cavern slums below Vectis have a unique odor, compounded of mildew, rotten fish, feces, poverty, and despair. The air feels as if it’s been breathed already-as if the distinctive odor is actually the product of someone’s breath.
Everyone’s breath.
I stood exactly as I had in the crystal cave: two flesh arms, one large chunk of sangrite, and no clothing at all.
And it was raining.
There was no wind-there almost never was-and the permanent drizzle of condensate that is Tidehollow’s rain felt icy and tasted of mold. Thank Bolas for small favors; he’d put me in deep shadow on one of the twisty beast paths that serve for streets down here. He could just as easily have dropped me in the Grand Bazaar at noon. Or the Hegemon’s bedchamber. I took my reasonably surreptitious arrival as a sign that Bolas, so far, actually wanted me to pursue his preposterous mission.
Probably.
Dragons as a species tend to be of uncertain temper, and Bolas in particular is uniquely opaque. Guessing his intention in any given sphere is a hazardous undertaking. Even his practical jokes can blossom into deadly serious schemes, and what appear to be substantive projects can, as I had just learned, turn out to be elaborate pranks.
Though, I reminded myself, the fact that Bolas claimed the Seekers of Carmot had been a prank didn’t mean anything. With Bolas, nothing is ever wholly one thing or another.
He was playing some deeper game. He always plays some deeper game.
I suppose I am not entirely different. It struck me then, for example, that I should pay a visit to the Seekers, as I was in town anyway-which could be read as a flaw of sentiment, and perhaps it was. But that’s not all it was.
First: clothing.
It should have been a small matter to summon mana sufficient for an illusion of clothing. In previous days, when I’d had my arm, I routinely wore illusory clothing of such sophistication that it was, for all intents and purposes, real. It was solid to the touch and interacted normally with sun, wind, and weather. I could carry small items in my pockets, hang pouches from my belt, and I could fine-tune it to provide warmth in cold climates, keep me cool in warm climes, or even function as armor against physical attack.
But that had been when I’d had my arm.
Now to gather the mana alone was time-consuming and difficult, despite my proximity to the deep mana wells of the Sea of Unknowing. Binding myself to them to replenish my reserves actually fatigued me instead of reviving me. Clearly, my newly reduced capacity would take some getting used to. The chill drizzle intensified, as it often did through the evening, and I was already shivering.
Not far away, however, a line of seastone topped with sharp slate served someone as a fence… and it seemed this someone had been overly optimistic about the weather here, as several large tunics and one pair of breeches had been hung over the fence to dry.
The actual caverns of Tidehollow-about three-quarters of the slum’s total extent-afford considerable protection from the weather on the Sea of Unknowing, but in exchange one must live in a state of perpetual gloom and permanent damp. The exhalations of each cavern’s inhabitants inevitably condense on the stone, forming much of the drizzle that falls through every night. The owner of these articles had either forgotten them, or simply did not care enough to take them in from the rain. In either case, I had more need of them than did their owner.
But I could not make my hand close upon them.
I stood at that fence for an indeterminable interval; it seemed a very long time. I needed clothing, and here this was, laid out before me like an offering to honor my homecoming. There was not one reason in the Multiverse I should stand naked in the rain while in front of me lay perfectly appropriate clothing that had been forgotten or discarded here. Or abandoned. One might argue that I’d be doing these people a favor by helping them dispose of what they clearly considered to be trash.
It wasn’t as though I haven’t done worse. I’ve done much, much worse. Without hesitation. Many times. In my roster of criminal activity, this oh-so-petty theft would not merit even a glancing reference.
But still I could not make myself do it.
There at the improvised fence in the dark Tidehollow drizzle, I kept hearing my father’s voice. “They don’ has to want for them to take. Take is what they do. Take is their whole life.”
To take these pitifully ragged, nearly valueless scraps of clothing would somehow break a vow I didn’t remember swearing-a vow I’d made with all my heart. An oath sworn to my seven-year-old self.
Yes: I am sentimental, and sentiment is a flaw, and despite knowing full well how irrational it was, I found myself up against a wall of unexpected principle. I have never hesitated to steal from the wealthy, from the powerful, from beings who might crush me with a thought. Even my thefts from my own father happened only while he had absolute power over my life and my death. To pit my skill and wit against the greats of the worlds, with my life as the stake, is what gives my existence meaning.
To take from people who already have nothing is too vile, even for me.
I am not known for honesty, nor for fidelity. I don’t think I’ve ever made a promise I haven’t broken. Except, apparently, this one.
It seems that filthy little scrapper’s brat is the only person I’ve ever met whom I am unwilling to betray.
I may very well have stood there all night but for a woman’s voice, a harsh whisper in the darkness, that came from the dimly lamp-lit window of the stone hovel on the other side of the fence. “Hsst! Chammie! Theyz sumpin over th’ fence! Chammie, look!”
An infant began to bawl, and a large shadow filled the tiny window. “Hoy!” The shout was a man’s, hoarse and sudden and Tidehollow swampy. “Git out from there, sluice sucker! Garn! Fore I git out to shoo yer!”
For an instant I lingered, snared by memory. There had been a boy named Chammie among my gang of cave brats… Small, ginger hair, a cast in one eye, he’d fight anyone, anytime, any odds…
The shadow vanished from the window and reappeared rounding from the far side of the hovel, a pickaxe held high in both hands. “Garn! Git, you! Less yer after a taste a this!”
I faded back into the shadows, away from the fence. “Your clothes,” I said softly, astonishing myself. “Your clothes are getting wet.”
The shadow stopped, suddenly uncertain. “I come ‘crost th’ wall, I come back with yer blood on my axe,” he said, trying for a gruff warning but sounding as though he spoke more to bolster his own nerve than to shake mine.
And had he crossed that wall…
He would have found himself facing a creature beyond his darkest imagining. All his strength, his raw courage that brought him out into the dark to put himself and his weapon between his family and the unknowable dangers of night in Tidehollow, all his fierceness, all his love, all his skill… In the end, these would only be the why of his death.
And why is nothing at all.
“You’ll never see me again,” I said. “Take in your clothes.”
“Garn,” he said, gathering the tunics and the pants with one hand while the other still held the pick high, and his eye never wavered from my dark silhouette. “Git yerself gone.”
Having mana sufficient for a minor seeming, I wrapped shadows about myself and watched. I found myself, inexplicably, wanting desperately to talk to him-to ask if he’d been the Chammie I had known, to ask if he remembered the boy he and his friends had called Tezzeret… but Chammie is a name not uncommon in Tidehollow. Could this be the man who’d grown from the boy I’d known? The odds were ridiculously slim. I couldn’t even see if he had the ginger hair.
And if it was he, and if he did remember me… what then?
Would I tell him of my life, of what it’s like to be an artificer and a mage? A confidence trickster, a racketeer, and a slayer of bandits? Should I tell him of Nicol Bolas and how I had stolen the Infinite Consortium from the most powerful being in creation? Would I boast of walking worlds he could not imagine? And if I did, would he even understand, let alone believe me?