It wasn’t at all difficult. There were never more than a handful of these “special” rooms in an inn, and all were on the top floor, just below the servants’ attic rooms. All he had to do was wait until a post-assignation meal had been left discretley at the door, swing in through a hall window, stuff his shirt full, and scramble out again. It never took him more than a few moments. And to be honest, these little feasts were so extravagant he doubted that much was missed.
He did not use that talent for roof exploration in the poorer quarters, however. There were plenty of souls who lived there that were far better at it than he was, and most of those people had sharp tempers and sharper knives. No, he kept to the ground, to the shadows there, finding places he could hide and listen.
It wasn’t pleasant. The alleys here were only cleaned by rain, and it was a good thing he had a strong stomach.
Although he caught a few, brief whispers of Temper, somewhere off in the distance and never for long enough to get an idea as to direction, never again did he feel the full force of Temper’s thoughts, except in sleep. He slowly came to understand that as he had suspected, these actually were Temper’s nightmares, not his.
And that was where things took a very odd turn indeed. Waking, the man was tough, ruthless, and utterly immoral. In his dreams, he was the victim. The man spent every night fleeing from or fighting with something he knew would destroy—had destroyed—everything he cared about. It had been Mags’ own memories that had colored what he had gotten from Temper, and turned the dreams more personal. In his dreams, he didn’t know what the thing was he fled from or fought. Temper, however, knew very well what, or who, it was. But since it was a dream, Mags had no way of controlling it, to see the situation through Temper’s eyes, so the shadowy hunter remained a mystery.
It got even stranger once he realized that. He began to suspect that Temper was no mere hapless victim, but that he had given himself into the situation willingly. That he had sacrificed the very things he loved for the sake of power. And strangest of all, Mags got the impression that the very thing he fought was the thing he served.
In fact, the thing he fought was the thing he himself most wanted to become. Or, perhaps, replace.
No wonder he was insane.
Mags wanted to feel sorry for him, and couldn’t. The man was, in every sense, a monster. The longer Temper remained at large, the more danger he posed, because Mags knew that he was tenacious; either out of fear of his master, fear of failure, open-eyed ambition, or a combination of all three, Temper would not leave a job until he was called off, or the job was completed.
Aside from all that, this was, oddly, one of the most satisfying times of Mags’ life.
He was doing something important. And yet, he was more free than he had ever been. He answered to no one except himself. And he had Dallen. Certainly he was living and sleeping rough. Certainly there were nights of an empty belly, days in the misery of a pouring, cold rain that would be followed by a night in the open hoping that someone would put a fire in one of the fireplaces served by his chimney pots. But if he succeeded, it would all be worth it.
He was learning more about Haven than he had ever gotten from books, or even from Dallen. And since most of what he did was absorptive observation, he was learning far, far more about people than he ever dreamed possible. Those little glimpses he got of their unguarded thoughts were telling him more about what it was like to be someone who had a normal life than he would have under any other circumstances. It tended to “leak” over, too; more than once he found himself looking at things from two sides—the way “Mags” did, and the way a “normal” person did.
And he learned that he was not as much of a freak as he had thought he was. He learned that most intelligent people seemed to spend their lives feeling as if they didn’t fit in, that almost all of them felt like strangers inside their own skins, even when among their own friends. All of them seemed to be lonely, more or less. Many, to his surprise, were certain that there was a terrible darkness inside them that would utterly revolt anyone that knew about it.
Now, it was true enough that his situation was unique; he really was something of an anomoly. But he wasn’t alone in feeling like such a complete outsider that he might as well have been raised by wolves. It struck him as so very strange, and yet, maybe not so strange. All of these people were alone in their own heads, isolated inside their own skins. They didn’t have, never would have, what he had with Dallen.
That made him both less alone and more alien than any of them. But then again, that was the case with all Heralds.
:It’s a wonder we don’t all go mad,: Dallen said, sleepily. :Except we keep each other sane, I suppose.:
:If yer sure ye’re not crazy, don’t that pretty much mean ye are?: he replied, and got a woozy chuckle.
Days went by without so much as a hint outside of his sleep-time of Temper. He began to wonder if Temper had somehow detected him, and was now effectively shielding his thoughts.
Or maybe that shadow he had sensed had, and was.
That being the case, he was going to have to go back to scanning the crowds, using nothing more than his eyes.
Or rather, other people’s eyes.
He tried, briefly, to use animals, but there either wasn’t enough mind-power there for him to skim off what they saw, or else he just wasn’t in tune with them. But the more he practiced, the better he got at it, until he was able to see what was going on several blocks away.
And that was how it happened that, three days after Dallen was moved back to his old stall, late at night as the inns emptied out, Mags thought he spotted someone familiar.
It was not the hair, which had been cut roughly, nor the clothing, which was nondescript. It was a way of turning the head, of walking, betraying an arrogance that was only partly hidden. It was a barely contained force that made people give the man a wide berth.
He sifted through all the surface thoughts as fast as he could until he came to the right ones. And he knew they were the right ones, because he sensed that shadow again, hiding them.
But it was only partly successful. The shadow was keeping Mags from the direct connection that he had had before—but it couldn’t stop the man’s thoughts from leaking out over his rather fragmented natural shields.
There was something about those shields... why should they be shattered like that? Most people that weren’t Gifted either had no shields, or were so strongly blockaded they might just as well have been lumps of stone. Mags got another impression, a feeling more than any actual information, that once upon a time, this man actually had possessed good natural shields, but something had fractured them, and now his surface thoughts were anyone’s to read. Mags could not imagine what circumstance could have done that. In his experience, shields could be brought down, or forced down, or destroyed entirely as the mind that created them was destroyed, but they couldn’t be shattered like that and then left in pieces.
He reminded himself not to be distracted, and put his attention back on gleaning every tiny bit of information that he could from those thoughts.