Chapter Five
“Why have the thylacodons not eaten you?” Fix asked.
“Shhh,” Adunummu said. “Keep your voice down, please.”
“Munahim, watch the stairs,” Indrajit murmured. “It’s a good question, though, Conjurer.” He set Adakles on his feet. The Wixit stood and stared at the wall.
“You call me Conjurer and yet you wonder why the beasts have not eaten me?” Adunummu tsked. “You doubt my ability to conjure.”
“And yet you are chained to a post,” Fix said. “If you are so great a magician as to defend yourself against a pack of beasts that regularly kills men, how do you remain chained? Why not simply conjure yourself back to the upper floors of the tower?”
“Are you a conjurer yourself, then, to express such an opinion so confidently?” Adunummu asked.
Fix shrugged. “Every guild wants to obfuscate its own subject matter, to keep out the outsiders and protect revenues. Notaries, apothecaries, risk-merchants, all of them. Why should magicians be any different?”
Adunummu cocked his head to one side and curled his lip into a reckless smile. “Because it’s magic!”
Fix shrugged.
“Who will come down the stairs?” Indrajit asked. “If you don’t fear the thylacodons, what is it that gives you pause?”
“Perhaps you would care to unchain me, so that we may discuss these questions better.”
“As it happens,” Indrajit said, “I think we’ll leave you chained. At least for the minute.”
“You are cruel.”
“You are evading the question.”
“My apprentice has chained me here,” Adunummu said.
“You have an apprentice?” Fix asked. “Not a disciple-ordinary, third class?”
“I am trying to minimize my use of jargon,” Adunummu said. “As you seem to prefer.”
“You fear your apprentice,” Indrajit said. “That seems rather a perversion of the idea of apprenticeship.”
“Yes.” Adunummu nodded. “He is indeed a pervert.”
“Tell us more about this apprentice,” Indrajit said. “I am attempting to find a good apprentice myself. Perhaps your example of a bad apprenticeship will teach me valuable lessons.”
“Also,” Fix added, “tell us how you came to be chained. Which may have something to do with your apprentice.”
“It does, it does.” Adunummu nodded vigorously. “But perhaps you would care to give me some food first, to strengthen my storytelling capacities. Or perhaps you have water to spare.”
“We don’t have either,” Indrajit said. “We were walking on the streets of Kish only this morning, certainly not planning to come to Hith at all. We were not prepared with provisions.”
“Kish!” Adunummu’s eyes opened wide. “That’s a million leagues from here!”
“I gather that mathematics and geography are not part of the curriculum of the Collegium,” Fix said.
“What?”
“It isn’t a million leagues from Kish to Hith,” Fix explained. “I doubt it’s a thousand. A few hundred, yes.”
“Give a magician license for a little hyperbole,” Adunummu said.
“Hmm.”
“The apprenticeship,” Indrajit prompted the bound man. “Tell us how you came here.”
“You mean, how my apprentice came.”
“Ah, yes.” Indrajit nodded. “Also, tell us about the apprentice.”
“He’s fierce.” Adunummu writhed in his chains as if to communicate ferocity. “He came to me, starving and wastrel, in this desert place, seeking food.”
“This desert place, Hith,” Fix said.
“If you say it is.” Adunummu shrugged. “We magicians care little for the names and buildings and politics and fashion of the mortal world.”
“So you fed him?” Indrajit asked.
“I offered him food in exchange for his bound service as my apprentice,” Adunummu said, “which he accepted. But then he was a bad apprentice. He tried to learn magics beyond what I taught him, like a thief. And when he stole from me an item of great power, I confronted him.”
“What sort of magics?” Fix asked. “Conjuring? Druvash sorcery? Theurgy? Weather-witching?”
“Conjuring!” Adunummu snapped. “As you said.”
“But when you confronted him,” Indrajit continued the thought, “you were unable to defeat him. With his pilfered magics and his borrowed item of great power, he was able to put you here in this dungeon, chained to this post.”
“You see my tragedy.”
“I’m not sure tragedy is the genre,” Indrajit mused.
“Eh?”
“What was the item?” Indrajit asked. “A medallion?”
Adunummu hesitated. “A bracer. A jeweled bracer.”
“Tell us more about the apprentice,” Fix said. “Maybe we can go upstairs and defeat him for you. What sort of man is he?”
“I told you, he’s bad and a thief.”
Fix sighed. “I’m not asking about his moral character. Is he a Wixit? A Pelthite? A Zalapting? Is he of your same race? We need to recognize him, if we’re to defeat him.”
“For you,” Indrajit said. “Defeat him for you.”
“I have a question,” Munahim said.
“Is anyone coming down the stairs?” Indrajit asked.
“No,” Munahim said.
“Good,” Indrajit said. “Stay focused.”
“But my question—” the Kyone insisted.
“Later,” Indrajit said. “Shush now.”
“Does the Wixit not talk?” Adunummu asked.
“He’s a former enemy,” Indrajit said. “He dared go against us, and we used our formidable powers to defeat him.”
“Are you wizards also, then?” Adunummu asked.
“After our fashion.” Fix shrugged.
“You were about to describe your rebel apprentice,” Indrajit reminded the prisoner.
“He’s big,” Adunummu said. “He has a head something like a walrus, with tusks and whiskers and a thick, blubbery neck.”
“He sounds frightening,” Fix said. “I’m impressed you were brave enough to take him in.”
“I am a conjurer of renown,” Adunummu pointed out.
“Go on.”
“He has a big chest and shoulders. One arm ends in a hand like yours or mine. The other ends in a flipper.”
Fix looked to Indrajit with raised eyebrows. “What race of man is that? Any ideas?”
Indrajit cleared his throat. “Let me consult my magical lore. Perhaps it’s the one-handed Siskaloo, teeth like downward daggers?”
“Sounds right to me. And does the magical lore tell us anything else about the Siskaloo?”
Indrajit considered. The Siskaloo only had the one epithet. “In the Epic, the Siskaloo lives in a tower near the sea.”
“Epic?” Adunummu asked.
“Sounds right,” Fix said. “How is the Siskaloo defeated?”
“He isn’t,” Indrajit said. “He knows and sees many things, and he’s not defeated.”
“Who are you guys?” Adunummu asked.
“Good question. Who are you?” Indrajit asked.
“Adunummu the Conjurer,” Adunummu said.
“Liar,” Fix said.
“I have a question,” Munahim said.
“Okay,” Indrajit told him. “You can ask your question now.”
“Why don’t you have a flask on a chain around your neck?” the Kyone asked.
“There it is,” Fix said. “Because you see, Munahim, this is not the conjurer Adunummu.”
“Yes, I am,” the chained man said.
“You’re the bad apprentice, if you’re anyone in the story,” Indrajit said. “Which I suspect you are, because it’s easier to tell a true story and switch your role in it than to make up a new story entirely. So tell us your name.”
“Also, what did you come here to steal?” Fix asked. “Was it the bracer? Or was it the flask on the chain around the conjurer’s neck?”
“What are you going to do to me?” the prisoner asked.
“That’s a very good question,” Indrajit said. “We’re still thinking about it.”
“Personally,” Fix said, “I’m just as happy to kill you. But my partner here has a soft heart. So if you keep him happy, he’ll probably want to let you live.”
“Who are you guys?”
“No no, we’ll get to that,” Indrajit said. “Tell us your name, or we’ll have to name you ourselves. And then we’ll be calling you something embarrassing, like Hey, Stupid.”
“My name is Shafi,” the chained man said. “I’m a thief.”
“You heard of the wealth of the conjurer and you traveled here to rob him,” Fix said.
“No, I was shipwrecked, while on a voyage from the Free Cities to Boné. I’m not sure where we are. That part is true. As you said, it’s easier to keep a story straight in your head if it’s mostly true.”
“You were shipwrecked and saw the tower,” Indrajit said. “Did you offer yourself as an apprentice?”
“I even did that. I was hungry.”
“But once you had eaten,” Fix concluded, “you decided you’d like to try your luck stealing something and running.”
“I was a thief before I got here,” Shafi admitted. “It seemed like an easy snatch-and-run job.”
“What magic powers did Adunummu use to stop you?” Indrajit asked.
“Or what ancient technologies?” Fix suggested.
“None. I doctored his wine to make it stronger, so he’d sleep through anything I did. Then, while he was sleeping, I tried to remove the bracer. And he woke up.”
“No magical powers at all?” Indrajit felt disappointed.
“He hit me very hard.”
“Perhaps there are no magical powers,” Fix said.
“You have personally been healed by Druvash sorcery,” Indrajit said.
“By Druvash art,” Fix agreed. “Whether or not it was sorcery is an interesting question.”
“And here we are, hundreds of leagues from Kish, a distance we leaped instantaneously, walking through a door.” Indrajit shook his head. “And you’re going to tell me you don’t believe in magic?”
Fix spread his hands. “Some things that look like magic are just craft that we don’t understand.”
“But you rendered that Wixit an idiot,” Shafi said. “You’re magicians yourselves.”
“Ah, sad,” Fix said.
“What’s sad?”
“You’re not just a thief,” Indrajit explained, “you’re a stupid thief. We’re not magicians. The Wixit came like that.”
“But someone made him an idiot,” Shafi said.
“Good point.”
“I concede that it sounds much more romantic to do battle against Adunummu the Conjurer than against Adunummu Who Can Take His Liquor and Also Hits Pretty Hard,” Fix said.
“Good. In the Epic, I’ll definitely make him the Conjurer, regardless of how this works out.”
“In either case, we need the flask.” Fix glared sternly at Shafi. “Adunummu does wear a flask around his neck, doesn’t he?”
Shafi nodded. “He talks to it, caresses it like it’s a woman.”
“Perhaps in the Epic he can also be Adunummu the Insane,” Fix suggested.
“Perhaps he is talking to a demon in the bottle,” Indrajit suggested.
“Or he thinks he is.”
“But the real question,” Shafi said, “is, how are you going to get me out of these chains?”
“Easiest thing is to rip your arms off,” Fix suggested. “The Kyone can do it.”
“Hey,” Shafi said.
“So Adunummu put you down here to give you a horrible death,” Indrajit said. “Maybe you could scare away the thylacodons for a while by shaking your chains or yelling or something, but sooner or later you’d fall asleep or be weak from starvation, and then they’d eat you. Is that about the size of it?”
“Yes. I was thinking, if you had some grease, like some nice animal fat or butter, you could coat my wrists and that would probably be enough for me to slip out.”
“I told you,” Indrajit said. “No provisions. But there’s another question to ask, which is, what can you do to help us get Adunummu?”
“I can choose not to yell to alert him to your presence,” Shafi said.
“We can solve that problem by killing you,” Fix said. “You really don’t want to push us very far down that road.”
“Or just gag you,” Indrajit countered.
“See?” Fix said. “Softhearted.”
“I can help,” Shafi said.
“Now we’re talking.” Indrajit nodded to encourage the thief. “What would you suggest for a plan?”
Shafi considered. “I could scream like I was being eaten by thylacadons. Then when he came to collect my bones, we could jump him.”
“Only he might not collect your bones at all,” Fix said. “He might find your screams unpersuasive. He might be perfectly happy leaving your bones down here forever, unwitnessed.”
“I could tell you what I said to persuade him to take me in,” Shafi said. “Then you could make a similar appeal.”
“Surely, he would find a band of three armed men asking to be his apprentices suspicious.” Indrajit shook his head. “What else?”
“That’s all I can think of.”
“What if we wait until dark,” Fix suggested, “and then you lead us to where the conjurer sleeps?”
“I . . . would rather not,” Shafi said.
“Because you’re afraid he’d capture you and put you back in this pit,” Indrajit said. “With the bird of freedom in your hand, you don’t want to trade it for anything uncertain that might be in the bush. You want to run away while you can.”
“Yes. For that reason.”
“But remember that we might not let you go at all,” Indrajit pointed out. “And if you help us get what we need from Adunummu, we won’t stand in the way of your taking that bracer you wanted.”
Shafi slumped in his chains, then nodded slowly. “Agreed.”