Rogues Read online

  “That day, with the vomit in my purse and the fit you had upstairs and the doll hanging from the light?”

  “The vomit was me because you weren’t listening to me. You weren’t leaving. The doll too. Also the razor-blade tip in the floorboard that sliced your finger. That’s actually an idea inspired by ancient Roman warfare. Have you ever read—”

  “No. The screaming you did? You sounded so furious.”

  “Oh, that was real. Susan had cut up my credit card and left it on my desk. She was trying to wall me in. But then I realized you were my way out of that stupid house. I need a grown-up to do anything, really: Drive a car, get a hotel room. I’m too little for my age. I’m fifteen but I look like I’m twelve. I need someone like you to really get around. All I had to do was get you to take me out of the house, and you were done. Because you know you’re not going to show up at the cops. I assume someone like you has a criminal record.”

  Miles was right. People like me didn’t go to the police, ever, because it never turned out well for us.

  “Turn left up here to catch the freeway,” he said.

  I turned left.

  I took in his story, turned it over, and inspected it. Wait, wait.

  “Wait. Susan said you cut off your cat’s tail. You told me it was a manx …”

  He smiled then.

  “Ha! Good point. So someone’s lying to you. I guess you’ll have to decide which story to believe. Do you want to believe Susan is a nutjob or that I’m a nutjob? Which would make you feel more comfortable? At first, I thought it’d be better if you thought Susan was the crazy—that you’d be sympathetic to my plight, and we’d be friends. Road-trip buddies. But then I thought: Maybe it’s better if you think I’m the evil one. Maybe then you’re more likely to understand I’m in charge here.… what do you think?”

  We drove in silence as I viewed my options.

  Miles interrupted me. “I mean, I really think it’s a win-win-win here. If Susan is the nutjob and she wants us gone, we’re gone.”

  “What will she tell your dad when he gets home?”

  “That depends on what story you want to believe.”

  “Is your dad really even in Africa?”

  “I don’t think my dad is a factor you need to worry about in your decision-making.”

  “OK, so what if you’re the nutjob, Miles? Your mom will have the cops on us.”

  “Pull over at that parking lot, the church.”

  I looked him up and down for a weapon. I didn’t want to be a body dumped in an abandoned church lot.

  “Just do it, OK?” Miles snapped.

  I pulled into a shuttered church parking lot on the edge of the highway entrance. Miles leapt out in the rain and ran up the stairs and under the eaves. He pulled his cell from his blazer and made a call, his back to me. He was on the phone for a minute. Then he smashed the phone to the ground, stomped on it a few times, and ran back to the car. He smelled disturbingly springlike.

  “OK, I just called my nervous little stepmom. I told her you freaked me out, I’m sick of the house and all her weirdness—her habit of bringing in such unsavory people—and so I ran off and I’m staying at my dad’s place. He just got back from Africa and so I’ll stay there. She never calls my dad.”

  And he smashed the phone so I couldn’t see if he really called Susan or if he was just playacting again.

  “And what will you tell your dad?”

  “Let’s just remember that when you have two parents who hate each other and are always working or traveling and would like you out of their lives anyway, you can say a lot of things. You have a lot of room to work with. So you really don’t need to worry. Get to the highway and then there’s a motel about three hours on. Cable TV and a restaurant.”

  I got on the highway. The kid was sharper at fifteen than I was at twice his age. I was starting to think this whole going legit, thinking-of-others, benevolent thing was fer the berds. I was starting to think this kid might be a good partner. This tiny teen needed a grown-up to move in the world, and there was nothing a con girl could use more than a kid. “What do you do?” people would ask, and I’d say, “I’m a mom.” Think of what I could get away with, the scams I could pull, if people thought I was a sweet little mom.

  Plus that Bloodwillow convention sounded really cool.

  We pulled into the motel three hours later, just as Miles had projected. We got adjoining rooms.

  “Sleep tight,” Miles said. “Don’t leave in the night, or I’ll call the cops and go back to the kidnap story. I promise that’s the last time I’ll threaten you, I don’t want to be an asshole. But we’ve got to get to Chattanooga! We’re going to have so much fun, I swear. I can’t believe I’m going. I’ve wanted to go since I was a kid!” He did a strange little dance of excitement and went into his room.

  The kid was kind of likable. Also a possible sociopath, but very likable. I had a good feeling about him. I was going with a smart kid to a place where everyone wanted to talk about books. I was finally going to leave town for the first time in my life, and I had the whole new “mommy” angle to work. I decided not to worry: I may never know the truth about the happenings at Carterhook Manor (how’s that for a great line?). But I was either screwed or not screwed, so I chose to believe I wasn’t. I had convinced so many people of so many things over my life, but this would be my greatest feat: convincing myself what I was doing was reasonable. Not decent, but reasonable.

  I got in bed and watched the door of the adjoining room. Checked the lock. Turned off the light. Stared at the ceiling. Stared at the adjoining door.

  Pulled the dresser in front of the door.

  Nothing to worry about at all.

  Matthew Hughes

  For a down-on-his-luck thief on the run through a danger-haunted forest with only a few coins in his purse, finding a valuable magical object may be a stroke of luck. Or maybe not.

  Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, but has spent most of his adult life in Canada. He worked as a journalist, as staff speechwriter for the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia before settling down to write fiction full-time. Clearly strongly influenced by Jack Vance, as an author Hughes has made his reputation detailing the adventures of rogues like Old Earth’s master criminal, Luff Imbry, who lives in the era just before that of The Dying Earth, in a series of novels and novellas that include Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, Hespira, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Quartet and Triptych, The Yellow Cabochon, The Other, and The Commons, and short-story collections The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories. His most recent books are the novels in his urban fantasy trilogy, To Hell and Back: The Damned Busters, Costume Not Included, and Hell To Pay. He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews.

  THE INN OF THE SEVEN BLESSINGS

  Matthew Hughes

  The thief Raffalon was sleeping away the noonday heat behind some bracken a short distance from the forest road when the noise of the struggle awakened him. He rolled over onto his stomach, quietly drawing his knife in case of need. Then he lay still and tried to see through the interlayered branches.

  Figures scuffled, voices spoke indistinctly, the syllables both sibilant and guttural. A muffled cry, as of a man with a hand over his mouth, was followed by the sharp crack of hardwood meeting a human cranium.

  Raffalon had no intention of offering assistance. The voices he had heard were those of the Vandaayo, whose border was not far away. Vandaayo warriors left their land only for ritual purposes, and then always in groups of six, and never without their hooks and nets and cudgels. Their seasonal festivals centered on the consumption of manflesh, and if Raffalon had attempted to intervene in the harvesting now taking place on the other side of the thicket, the only result would have been to add a bonus to the part-men’s larder.

&n
bsp; He waited until the poor captive had been trussed, slung, and carried away, then waited a little longer—the Vandaayo might assume that where they found one fool in a forest they might find another. Only when he heard birds and small beasts resuming their interrupted business did he rise and creep toward the road.

  He found it empty, except for the possessions of the unfortunate traveler who was now being marched east into Vandaayoland. He examined the scattered goods: a scuffed leather satchel, a water bottle, a staff whose wood was palm-polished smooth at its upper end. With small expectation, he squatted and sorted through the satchel’s contents, finding only a shirt of indifferent quality, a fire-starting kit inferior to his own, and a carved oblong of wood about the size of his hand.

  He studied the carvings. They formed a frieze of human and animal figures, connecting to each other in manners that some would have called obscene, but which to Raffalon’s sophisticated eye were merely anatomically unlikely. In a lozenge at the center of the display was a deeply incised ideogram that the thief found it difficult to keep in focus.

  That difficulty caused Raffalon’s mouth to widen in pleasure. The object had magical properties. It would surely command some value in the bazaar at Port Thayes, less than a day’s march in the direction he was headed. Thaumaturges came thick on the ground there. He turned the item over, to see what if anything was on the other side. As he did so, something faintly shifted inside.

  A box, he thought. Better. He rotated the thing and examined it from several angles, but found no seams or hinges or apparent means of opening it. Even better, a puzzle box.

  The day was improving. For Raffalon, it had begun with a flight into the forest in the cold dawn, with only two copper coins in his wallet and a half loaf of stale bread in his tucker bag. There had been a disagreement with a farmer as to the ultimate fate of a chicken the thief had found in a flimsy barnyard coop. Now it was midafternoon, and, though the chicken had remained in its pen, the bread had been eaten as he marched. He still had the coins and had acquired a box that was valuable in its own right and might contain who knew what?

  The satchel could also be useful. He slung its strap over his shoulder after throwing away the shirt, which was too large and smelled of unwashed body. He uncorked the bottle and sniffed its contents, hoping for wine or arrack but being disappointed to find only water. Still, he tucked it into the leather bag, and, after a moment, decided not to take the staff as well, even though there were steep slopes ahead, the land rising before the road descended into the river valley of Thayes—he was better with a knife if he had time to draw it.

  As he walked on, he studied the box and noticed a worn spot on one corner. He pushed it. Nothing happened. He rubbed it, again without result. He tried sliding it, this way and that. He heard a tiny click from within. A sliver of wood moved aside, revealing a pin-sized hole beneath.

  Raffalon had no pin, but he had the knife and a whole forest made of wood. He whittled a twig down to the right size, inserted it into the hole, and pushed. A plug of wood on the opposite side of the box popped out. When the thief applied pressure here and there, suddenly the carved side of the box slid sideways a small distance and revealed itself to be the top of the container that moved on a hidden hinge.

  Inside was a lining of plush purple cloth, with a hollowed space in the middle in which rested a carved wooden figurine the size of his thumb. It had the likeness of a small, rotund personage, bald and probably male, with head inclined indulgently and mouth formed into an indulgent grin. Raffalon took the carving out, the better to examine it.

  When his fingertips touched the smooth wood, a faint tingling passed along the digits, into his palm and through his arm, growing stronger as it progressed. Alarmed, he instinctively sought to fling the thing away from him but found that his fingers and arm refused to obey him. Meanwhile, the tingling sensation, now grown into a full-body tremor, reached its crescendo. For several moments, the thief stood, vibrating, in the middle of the forest road. His eyes rolled up into his head and his breathing stopped, his knees locked, and it seemed as if a strong wind passed through his skull from left to right.

  Abruptly, the sensations ended and he had control of his body again—except when he tried once more to throw the carving from him. His arm obeyed him, but his hand did not. The treacherous extremity closed tightly around the smooth wood and all of Raffalon’s considerable will would not cause it to open.

  Meanwhile, he heard a voice: We had better move. When the Vandaayo are ahunting, it does not do to lollygag.

  Without much hope, the thief spun around. But there was no one there. The words had formed in his mind, without the involvement of his ears. His hand now opened and he addressed the object nestled comfortably in his palm. “What are you?”

  It is a long story, said the voice that spoke in a place where he was accustomed to hear only his own. And I lack the energy to tell it.

  Raffalon agreed with the sentiments about lollygagging. He set off again in the direction of Port Thayes, his gaze sweeping left and right as far up the forest track as he could see. But he had taken only two or three steps when his legs stopped, and he found himself turning around and returning the way he’d come.

  The other way, said the voice. We have to rescue Fulferin. In Raffalon’s mind, an image appeared: a tall, lanky man in leather clothing, with a long-jawed face and eyes that seemed fixed on some faraway vista. The thief shook his head to drive the unwanted image away—rescuing mooncalves was not on his itinerary—but he struggled without success to regain control of his lower limbs.

  The voice in his head said, You waste energy that you will need when we catch up to the Vandaayo. Another image blossomed on his inner screen: of half a dozen hunch-shouldered Vandaayo warriors, their heads bald, their ears and teeth equally pointed, their skins mottled in light and dark green. They jogged along a forest trail, two of them carrying a long, netted bundle slung between a pole.

  He did not try to dispel the vision but examined it with some interest. He knew no one who had ever had an unobscured view of the Vandaayo; invariably, those who saw them clearly and up close—as opposed to a brief glimpse at a distance before the perceiver wisely turned tail and sped away—saw very little thereafter, except presumably the butcher’s slab set up next to the communal cauldron.

  Raffalon knew what everyone knew: that they were a species created by Olverion the Epitome, an overweening thaumaturge of a bygone age who had meant the part-men to be a torment to his enemies. Unfortunately, the sorcerer had misjudged some element of the formative process, and his had been the first human flesh his creations had tasted.

  Strenuous and repeated efforts by the surrounding communities had managed to confine the anthropophagi to the wild valley that had been Olverion’s domain. But all attempts to enter the deep-chasmed vale and eliminate the monsters once and forever had ended in bloody tatters: the thaumaturge had not stinted in instilling his creatures with a talent for warfare and an unalloyed genius for ambush.

  Eventually, an undeclared truce established itself, the terms of which were that the local barons would not lead their levies into the valley so long as the Vandaayo left their towns and villages unmolested. The part-men could snatch their festive meat only from the road that passed through the forest on the west of the valley, and the trail that led over the mountains to the northeast. The locals knew the times of the year when the Vandaayo were on the prowl and avoided the thoroughfares in those seasons. Wanderers and drifters of the likes of Raffalon the thief and Fulferin the god’s man were welcome to take their chances.

  The image of the anthropophagi faded from Raffalon’s mind as his legs marched him to the spot where the victim had been taken. Without pause, he turned away from the forest road and plunged through some bushes, almost immediately finding himself on a game trail. He saw deer scat but also the splay-footed tracks of the Vandaayo, instantly recognizable by the webbing and the pointed impression made in the soft earth by the downcurved talon on
the great toe.

  The tracks led toward Vandaayoland. Raffalon also saw droplets of blood on a bush beside the trail. No sooner had he registered these details than he was striding along in pursuit.

  Within the confines of his skull, he said, “Wait! We must find a quiet place and discuss this business!”

  His pace did not slacken, but the voice in his mind said, What is there to discuss?

  “Whether it will succeed if you fail to gain my cooperation!”

  The man had the sense that the deity was thinking about it. Fairly said. It would drain my energy less. Let us find a spot out of view.

  The trail led them through a quiet glade bisected by a meandering stream. The thief saw a thick-strand willow, and said, “Here will do.” He ducked beneath the willow withes and sat on one of the gnarled roots, peered through the green screen until he was sure he was the clearing’s only occupant. Then he addressed the little piece of carved wood in his hand and repeated his original question: “What are you?”

  Less than I was, less than I shall be.

  Raffalon groaned. In his experience, entities that spoke in such a high-toned manner tended to have an acute regard for themselves that was inversely matched by a lack of concern for the comfort of those who minioned for them—indeed, even for their continued existence.

  On the other hand, his captor’s determination to rescue the unfortunate Fulferin betokened some capacity for consideration of others’ needs. Perhaps terms could be negotiated. He put the proposition to the piece of wood.

  I see no need for terms, said the voice, its tone maddeningly calm. Fulferin is in need of rescue. You are between engagements. One is a high imperative, the other mere vacancy.

  “Who says I am between engagements?”

  I have access, said the voice, to the vaults of your memory, not to mention the contents of your character. It took on a distant tone. Which scarcely bear mentioning. Fulferin stands in a better category.

  “Fulferin,” said the thief, “hangs in a Vandaayo net, and soon will be simmering in a pot—not a category aspired to by men of stature.”