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

slower, to within a hundred feet or so of the tall golden domes of the Tabernacle.
    I heard a piercing shriek, unlike anything I had ever heard before. Waves of pain shot through me, and yet I could tell somehow that I had caught only the merest ripple of—of whatever it was.
    The hawk caught the full force of it. It was instantly dead. Its graceful flight turned to a boneless tumble, and it plummeted into the Tabernacle grounds. Then there was nothing but silence.
    I decided to avoid exploring anywhere near the Tabernacle.
     
    I was six months in Thagoth. I survived mainly on bark and grubs. Apparently the ancient Thagothians weren’t much for gardening because almost nothing edible grew in the city. There was a small date grove. I soon learned eating too many dates was rougher on my body than not eating any at all. I found and exhausted a stand of wild chok, and grazed on clover like any cow. Hunger dogged me like a debt collector.
    Holgren was in my thoughts often, try as I might to push his memory away. We had met years before when he hired me to help him with a job he had been hired for. However good a mage Holgren had been, stealth wasn’t his strong suit. Our abilities complemented each other. In time we’d made our professional relationship a permanent one. We’d even become friends. I’d lost other friends, other partners in my life, and while I suspect most of them were bound for one of the nine hells, I didn’t know it for certain. Not like Holgren. I thought about all the little things he’d do to aggravate me: the arch looks, the condescending remarks, or even more condescending silences. It only made me miss him more.
    I wandered over damn near every inch of Thagoth in the time I was there, except those buildings closest to the Tabernacle. I’ve holed up in vacant houses before, when I was too poor to afford a place to live or was avoiding one city watch or another. The feeling of emptiness was eerie, being surrounded by signs of life and habitation, being utterly alone. Thagoth wasn’t like that at all. It was much worse.
    House after house, building after building, stone piled on stone, all of it empty, devoid of the smallest sign of human occupancy. The only thing I found in Thagoth to show people had ever inhabited it, besides the buildings themselves, were a few shards of crockery. No frescoes enlivened any wall, no glass in any window, no furniture, no doors, no workman’s tools, nothing. Not even a child’s toy. Just building after empty building, and leaf-littered floors. Thagoth wasn’t a city at all; it was a vast stone skeleton placed there by the gods for the wind to play with.
    I slept. Sleep was freedom, sleep passed the time, and sleep conserved energy. That was the pattern of my months—sleep, forage, explore. In that order. Until sleep began to present its own difficulties in the form of dreams.
    At first they were innocent enough. I would dream of silly things: a birthday with honeyed oatcakes, an inn I once stayed at in Elam that served barley-stuffed mushrooms in wine sauce. I dreamed of food: leg of lamb, roast hare, boiled cloudroot smothered in butter and garlic, fried bankfish . . . I feasted in my dreams and starved all day.
    Slowly my dreams turned to something different.
    Murmuring, muttering, whispering, sharp cries, and long silences intruded on my dreams. I knew even in the midst of them that these things did not originate in any part of my mind or spirit. I crouched, and trembled, and woke sweating and cold despite the sweltering summer heat. Something was moving through my mind as I slept. I could feel its enormous power, and its agony.
    Was it Holgren, somehow reaching out to me? Did it have something to do with this place, the Tabernacle, or the death lands? I didn’t know. I just wanted it to stop. After these dreams started, I began to stave off sleep for as long as I could.
    I suppose that contributed to my going a little mad, the final straw. I’d been