Brother Thief (Song of the Aura, Book One) (12 page)

  
“Aye.” Gribly nodded ruefully, thinking quietly of his dream of Traveller… and, strangely, his gift. Could the two be connected? They must be.

  
“So,” the soldier prodded, “What exactly do you need from me?”

  
“If you succeed in this wild quest of yours, the Dunelord’ll be ready to listen to anything you say. I want you to tell him I’m innocent, and I want you to convince him to pay my way out of this dung heap of a city.”

  
“Tall order,” remarked Lauro.

  
“Yes it is. Can you do it? Can a simple messenger like you really get the ear of Dunelord Ymorio? That’s the question now, isn’t it?” The young warrior seemed to perk up at that, smiling with a knowing look.

  
“Oh, he’ll listen to me easily enough. It’ll be hard convincing him you’re not a demon bent on killing him, though… not once he sees your ugly mug.”

  
“You know,” said Gribly as he turned to leave the room and get some food for them both, “That was almost funny. Keep working at it, and you might sound like a normal person.”

  
He left without waiting to see the absurdly pleased smile on Lauro’s face.
Soldier?
The thief shook his head as he walked briskly down the hallway outside.
Aristocrats are the same everywhere, even in the south. Blast me if this messenger isn’t a nobleman’s son, sent to the army to knock the attitude out of him.
Rolling his eyes and chuckling to himself, he sneaked downstairs to demand food from the old pickpocket.

  
He had no idea how right he was.

Chapter Nine:
Unexpected Ventures

  
“WHAAHOO!!” Gribly whooped, soaring across the space between two houses. When he’d told Lauro about his plans yesterday for scouting out the Dunelord’s shrine, the young soldier had wanted to come. Now that he felt the full power of his gift, Gribly was glad he’d made up the excuses for the other lad to stay behind.

  
He landed on the roof of the next house, right where it began to curve upward into an onion bulb-shaped pointed dome. His feet instantly stuck to the grimy sandstone surface, and he vaulted to the top of the roof in three jumping strides. Gripping the long, pointed tip of the bulb-shape with his wide, dry palm, he swung in a full circle, taking in the view on every side. The homes of noblemen and favored merchants formed an infinite labyrinth around him on every side, and the sun cast a bold golden gleam on the whole world.

  
This is the life I was meant to lead,
he thought contentedly,
only somewhere else. Somewhere that appreciates me.
Gribly skipped down the other side of the rounded roof and leaped at least ten feet high, onto the square, flat roof beyond. It wasn’t hard at all; not when every bit of the walls and roofs and sand felt like it was part of his own body. The nearest live person was hundreds of feet below him, too far to notice.
Down there, I’m just a boy.

  
Up here, I’m a god.

  
Unbidden, the voice of the Aura named Traveller came back to him.
There are no gods.

  
Then I’m a bird,
he reasoned.
An eagle or bloodhawk that flies so high the other birds can’t see it. No one knows what I can do. No one knows how powerful I am!
To prove it to himself, he tried to walk across the side of the next wall he came to. It almost twisted his ankles off, but he was confident that with enough practice he could do it.

  
A glimpse of bronze caught his eye far below. Guards. He stayed crouched in the corner of one of the roofs for a while, just to be sure they wouldn’t see him, and his mind wandered back to Lauro.

  
It was abnormal how fast that soldier was healing. Only the day before he was barely able to walk, and today he had declared he could fight his way to the Dunelord if need be. It had taken several horror stories of what Blast Palace’s gremlins did to strangers to convince him it was safer back at the old pickpocket’s wine-house.

  
When he was sure there were no more guards below, Gribly continued his leaping half-flight from rooftop to rooftop, until he reached his destination: the Highfast Shrine, where the Dunelord and his household worshiped who-knows-whom. The Creator, perhaps? If any such being existed, Gribly hoped to find answers here- as Traveller had told him in the dream.

  
That
was his other reason for coming here and not bringing Lauro. He would help the messenger, yes, but he had motives of his own to follow through.
I’m still a thief, no matter who I’m stealing for,
he told himself, and smiled inwardly.

~

  
The Highfast Shrine was built entirely out of a white, stony substance that gleamed in the noonday sun. It was seamless, as if it had been built by giants who used the stone like sculpting clay. The dome at its near end was the highest structure in the city besides the Dunelord’s own palace, and by far the oldest. Whispered rumors overheard by the thief as he gathered news from those who had been there told that it had existed a thousand years before Ymeer was built. The rumors said that the entire city had grown around it, as thousands of pilgrims traveled there each year to worship, gape, take back relics, and, in some cases, settle down.

  
Superstitions,
Gribly had always thought.
Superstitions that no one believes.

  
Now, though? He wasn’t so sure. Very few people worshiped anything, anymore… was that the reason so many things were going wrong? Was that why Vastion was no longer in control of the world? Was that why hundreds starved or died of sickness every year in Ymeer’s slums?

  
Gribly intended to find out.

  
The front of the Shrine resembled a sky-scraping, enormous round tower with a carved, flawless dome at the top. From the bottom of the dome, wide, swirling shapes of the same white stone corkscrewed out to form what looked like a titanic pillar of water, frozen mid-fall. The dome was a half-sphere, not like the onion-bulbs of the palace and houses of the rich. At its peak there had once been some sort of statue- its ankles were still there- but now there was nothing to say who the sculpture was.

  
There were windows in the dome, Gribly saw as he clambered to the edge of a high arena near Blast Palace. He could get in that way…

  
Between him and the shrine was mostly open space… hundreds upon hundreds of yards of it. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop, he made his way around to the mass of buildings directly behind the sacred edifice until he stood precariously on a crude sandstone gargoyle carved on the side of some nameless tower… a hundred feet from the Shrine roof, and almost ten times that distance from the ground.

  
That’s a long way,
his sense told him.
And the Shrine’s stone. It won’t stick to you fast enough when you hit it.

  
I can do it,
he assured that sense.
I’ve done it before. What could go wrong?

  
You’re going to be a bloody blotch on the street, that’s what!

  
Quiet
, he told himself.
It’s going to work.

  
Cautiously, he backed up on the gargoyle until his right heel banged up against the tower wall. In his mind he was tallying up all the things he needed to do for the jump to succeed.
As much room as possible?
He’d done that just now.
Concentrate?
He was pretty sure he was concentrating.
What about my gifts?
To test his power, he willed the sandstone under his toes to bend and stick. When he tried to move his feet, they wouldn’t obey. Good.

  
He needed to do this thing before his mind rebelled again. Without waiting any longer, he released the sand’s grip on his feet, took two long, leaping strides, and jumped off the gargoyle’s sandy head. The substance under his feet pushed off of him as much as he pushed off of it, launching him higher and farther than any poor mortal could possibly hope to leap.

  
Suspended for a few precious seconds between earth and sky, Gribly hollered in joy, for once not caring who heard him. Even though he was falling down and forward in seconds, the utter hugeness of everything around him made it seem as if he was floating in one place. Only the rushing wind around his body and on his face told him he was about to crash headlong into solid stone.

  
He hadn’t leaped far enough. He was going to miss the edge of the roof by several yards.

  
“No!” he barked, but it was too late to do anything. It was too late before he had even jumped. In half a second the rear wall of the Shrine had filled his whole vision and he slammed against its side- nowhere near the top.

  
But it wasn’t what he expected. The wall
looked
like marble, but it
felt
like sand. It was impossible for him to put into words what the difference felt like to him, other than that his gift worked on the wall. It actually
worked
. Instead of bouncing off the hard surface and falling to his death, his feet and hands sunk slightly into the smooth whiteness. It was like a rock dropped into almost-dry mud: he stopped, but only after sinking an inch.

  
Before Gribly could even begin to consider that he was somehow still alive, an electrifying wave of energy pulsed through his veins from the marble-sand beneath him. The stone, or whatever-it-was, was
alive
. Or almost. In the next few seconds the thief realized that he was no longer sinking- he was climbing, climbing without thinking, and climbing faster than he had ever thought possible.

  
His gift- the Shrine was powering his gift! In twenty seconds he had cleared the edge of the roof and crouched at the end of the thin, flat area that ran from end to end of the Shrine’s rear building, with the flawless roof sloping down sharply on either side. He turned while squatting, and in one sweeping glance covered the whole structure with his eyes.

  
Hesitatingly, he put his palm down flat on the marble-sand. Power surged up his arm and into his body, tingling where his feet touched it in a different place.

  
Change,
he told it.
Serve me.
It did. It molded into a roundish glob under his fingers, and soon he held a perfectly round, perfectly hard sphere of the stuff in his hand. He had scooped it from the Shrine itself.

  
Everything made unexpected sense.

  
People like ME built this!
He realized.
Men or women with the same gifts as me must have shaped the sand and stone before anyone else lived here! Just like I did to Old Murie’s grave, they did to a whole mountain of sand!

  
He put the glob of marble-sand back where it belonged and flattened it out. It wasn’t perfect, but he doubted anyone would see or care about the difference. With the exhilarating feeling produced by touching the Shrine, he was soon crouched low and scooting along the roof towards the great dome ahead of him.

  
They must have been so powerful,
he thought,
so strong and skilled! I can only shape sand a little- maybe they were able to do the same to rock! It’s almost as if they made their own kind of earth… their own element, and used it to build this place. Unbelievable.