And he smashed the phone so I couldn’t see if he really called Susan or if he was just playacting again.
“And what will you tell your dad?”
“Let’s just remember that when you have two parents who hate each other and are always working or traveling and would like you out of their lives anyway, you can say a lot of things. You have a lot of room to work with. So you really don’t need to worry. Get to the highway and then there’s a motel about three hours on. Cable TV and a restaurant.”
I got on the highway. The kid was sharper at fifteen than I was at twice his age. I was starting to think this whole going legit, thinking-of-others, benevolent thing was fer the berds. I was starting to think this kid might be a good partner. This tiny teen needed a grown-up to move in the world, and there was nothing a con girl could use more than a kid. “What do you do?” people would ask, and I’d say, “I’m a mom.” Think of what I could get away with, the scams I could pull, if people thought I was a sweet little mom.
Plus that Bloodwillow convention sounded really cool.
We pulled into the motel three hours later, just as Miles had projected. We got adjoining rooms.
“Sleep tight,” Miles said. “Don’t leave in the night, or I’ll call the cops and go back to the kidnap story. I promise that’s the last time I’ll threaten you, I don’t want to be an asshole. But we’ve got to get to Chattanooga! We’re going to have so much fun, I swear. I can’t believe I’m going. I’ve wanted to go since I was a kid!” He did a strange little dance of excitement and went into his room.
The kid was kind of likable. Also a possible sociopath, but very likable. I had a good feeling about him. I was going with a smart kid to a place where everyone wanted to talk about books. I was finally going to leave town for the first time in my life, and I had the whole new “mommy” angle to work. I decided not to worry: I may never know the truth about the happenings at Carterhook Manor (how’s that for a great line?). But I was either screwed or not screwed, so I chose to believe I wasn’t. I had convinced so many people of so many things over my life, but this would be my greatest feat: convincing myself what I was doing was reasonable. Not decent, but reasonable.
I got in bed and watched the door of the adjoining room. Checked the lock. Turned off the light. Stared at the ceiling. Stared at the adjoining door.
Pulled the dresser in front of the door.
Nothing to worry about at all.
Matthew Hughes
Matthew Hughes was born in Liverpool, England, but has spent most of his adult life in Canada. He worked as a journalist, as staff speechwriter for the Canadian Ministers of Justice and Environment, and as a freelance corporate and political speechwriter in British Columbia before settling down to write fiction full-time. Clearly strongly influenced by Jack Vance, as an author Hughes has made his reputation detailing the adventures of rogues like Old Earth’s master criminal, Luff Imbry, who lives in the era just before that of The Dying Earth, in a series of novels and novellas that include Fools Errant, Fool Me Twice, Black Brillion, Majestrum, Hespira, The Spiral Labyrinth, Template, Quartet and Triptych, The Yellow Cabochon, The Other, and The Commons, and short-story collections The Gist Hunter and Other Stories, 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, and The Meaning of Luff and Other Stories. His most recent books are the novels in his urban fantasy trilogy, To Hell and Back: The Damned Busters, Costume Not Included, and Hell to Pay. He also writes crime fiction as Matt Hughes and media tie-in novels as Hugh Matthews.
For a down-on-his-luck thief on the run through a danger-haunted forest with only a few coins in his purse, finding a valuable magical object may be a stroke of luck. Or maybe not.
THE INN OF THE SEVEN BLESSINGS
Matthew Hughes
The thief Raffalon was sleeping away the noonday heat behind some bracken a short distance from the forest road when the noise of the struggle awakened him. He rolled over onto his stomach, quietly drawing his knife in case of need. Then he lay still and tried to see through the interlayered branches.
Figures scuffled, voices spoke indistinctly, the syllables both sibilant and guttural. A muffled cry, as of a man with a hand over his mouth, was followed by the sharp crack of hardwood meeting a human cranium.
Raffalon had no intention of offering assistance. The voices he had heard were those of the Vandaayo, whose border was not far away. Vandaayo warriors left their land only for ritual purposes, and then always in groups of six, and never without their hooks and nets and cudgels. Their seasonal festivals centered on the consumption of manflesh, and if Raffalon had attempted to intervene in the harvesting now taking place on the other side of the thicket, the only result would have been to add a bonus to the part-men’s larder.
He waited until the poor captive had been trussed, slung, and carried away, then waited a little longer—the Vandaayo might assume that where they found one fool in a forest they might find another. Only when he heard birds and small beasts resuming their interrupted business did he rise and creep toward the road.
He found it empty, except for the possessions of the unfortunate traveler who was now being marched east into Vandaayoland. He examined the scattered goods: a scuffed leather satchel, a water bottle, a staff whose wood was palm-polished smooth at its upper end. With small expectation, he squatted and sorted through the satchel’s contents, finding only a shirt of indifferent quality, a fire-starting kit inferior to his own, and a carved oblong of wood about the size of his hand.
He studied the carvings. They formed a frieze of human and animal figures, connecting to each other in manners that some would have called obscene, but which to Raffalon’s sophisticated eye were merely anatomically unlikely. In a lozenge at the center of the display was a deeply incised ideogram that the thief found difficult to keep in focus.
That difficulty caused Raffalon’s mouth to widen in pleasure. The object had magical properties. It would surely command some value in the bazaar at Port Thayes, less than a day’s march in the direction he was headed. Thaumaturges came thick on the ground there. He turned the item over, to see what if anything was on the other side. As he did so, something faintly shifted inside.
A box, he thought. Better. He rotated the thing and examined it from several angles, but found no seams or hinges or apparent means of opening it. Even better, a puzzle box.
The day was improving. For Raffalon, it had begun with a flight into the forest in the cold dawn, with only two copper coins in his wallet and a half loaf of stale bread in his tucker bag. There had been a disagreement with a farmer as to the ultimate fate of a chicken the thief had found in a flimsy barnyard coop. Now it was midafternoon, and, though the chicken had remained in its pen, the bread had been eaten as he marched. He still had the coins and had acquired a box that was valuable in its own right and might contain who knew what?
The satchel could also be useful. He slung its strap over his shoulder after throwing away the shirt, which was too large and smelled of unwashed body. He uncorked the bottle and sniffed its contents, hoping for wine or arrack but being disappointed to find only water. Still, he tucked it into the leather bag, and, after a moment, decided not to take the staff as well, even though there were steep slopes ahead, the land rising before the road descended into the river valley of Thayes—he was better with a knife if he had time to draw it.