The Thief Who Spat In Luck's Good Eye Read Online Free

him or me or the fool’s errand we were about to embark on, but I was in a foul mood that morning. Later, I thought about every little detail of the ride—the smell of Holgren’s soap, the low mutters the driver occasionally made, the clop-clop of horse hooves on cobblestones, and then the muted thud of them on the dirt of Jacos Road—I thought about all the insignificant details and wondered if I would have done anything differently, had I known what was going to happen.
    The hack dropped us off in the middle of farmland. The morning fog had burned off during the ride. It promised to be a warm, sunny day.
    The grove Holgren had decided upon was more than a mile distant. The only way to reach it was through fields of waist-high plants. I have no idea what they were, but they smelled horrible and attracted insects in droves. I made Holgren carry two of the packs. By the time we got there most of the morning had fled. I was sweating profusely and had half a dozen uncomfortable insect bites. Holgren seemed unaffected. I dropped my pack and took a long swig of water, cursing all mages silently.
    “ Why don’t you rest for a few minutes?” he said.
    I glared at him. “Why don’t we get on with it?”
    “ All right.” He reached into his pocket, drew out a short length of red yarn and lay it as straight as he could in the grass before him. “A concentration aid,” he explained. He shouldered one of the packs and turned to face the yarn. “Stand next to me,” he said.
    I put the second pack on my back and held the bulky third under one arm, uncomfortably. I wanted to have one hand free, just in case. I moved over to his right side. Our shoulders brushed.
    “ Not too close. Perhaps a few inches’ distance.”
    He bowed his head then. He took deep, slow breaths. There was nothing gangly about him now—he was in his element, working with powers I had no ability to understand. His face took on something of the look of a bird of prey: fierce, wild, beautiful. The familiar chill that accompanied his use of power crept up the back of my neck. A breeze sprang up, and the grass swayed, then flattened as the breeze turned into a gale. I looked down at the length of yarn and it was pulled taut, as if by invisible hands. It thrummed as the wind ran across it—and then it was gone.
    In its place stood a pearlescent, faintly glowing rectangle perhaps three feet wide by eight high.
    “ You must go first, quickly. I will follow.” His voice was strained.
    I took a deep breath, and plunged through.
    It was not a pleasant sensation. I have no words to describe it—suffice to say a body was not meant to exist in whatever nether world or space between worlds that doorway was made up of. The feeling was mercifully brief.
    The first thing I saw was jungle. I smelled death, the putrid stench of corpses. I took two gagging, stumbling steps forward, caught a glimpse of rust-red, stone columns just ahead of me. Then something small, brown and hideously fast whipped past my head.
    Behind me, Holgren screamed.
    If I hadn’t been burdened with two packs, I could have gotten a knife out in time, could have skewered the thing before it reached him. I told myself this, and sometimes I believed it. It might even have been true. As it happened, I did pin it to a tree with one forceful, desperate throw. It squirmed and hissed and made a high shrieking noise that drilled through my eardrums and reverberated painfully in my head.
    It was just too late.
    The creature had struck Holgren on the cheek—just a shallow little gash, but he screamed and screamed, as if he’d been run through. I dropped the pack I’d been holding, grabbed him by the shirt front, and dragged him stumbling toward the stone columns I’d glimpsed. Around us the bloated, waxy foliage writhed, as if in agony or expectation. I pulled Holgren after me, as fast as I could go through the dense vegetation. He was still screaming. The rumbling cough of some predator sounded not