Silviu the Thief (The Hero's Knot, Book I)

By D. Alexander Neill

"Good plot, good characters...I will definitely read the next book in this series!"

Raven has certain unique skills, and they've helped him to survive on the fringes of a civilization that has no place for his kind. When he uses his powers to do more than merely survive, however, he unwittingly thrusts himself into a world where it seems that most people want to control him, and use his skills for their own ends. Forced into the shadowy realm of spellcraft, runes and ancient magic that lies just behind the thin facade of the modern world, Raven struggles to navigate the narrow road between warring factions of sorcerers, delving deeper into his unknown past, discovering the true nature and scope of his unusual talents, and learning how to wield them - not only to survive, but to shape his destiny, and that of the world around him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Alexander Neill
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780988142152

D. Alexander Neill

D. Alexander Neill is the nom-de-plume of Donald A. Neill. A retired Army officer and strategic analyst, Don is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada (D.E.C. 1986 and BA 1989), the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (MA 1991), and the University of Kent at Canterbury (Ph.D. 2006). He began writing fiction as a creative outlet in Grade 6, managing to overcome devastating reviews of his first novel, which he wrote in 2H pencil in seven taped-together college-ruled notebooks. He initially chose the fantasy genre because he was sucked into it at the age of 11 by the irresistible double sucker-punch of The Hobbit and Star Wars, never managed to escape, and eventually gave up trying. He intends to branch out into other fictional fields of endeavour, but will always return to Anuru, where – Allfather willing – there will always be at least one more story waiting to be told. Don has been married for 20 years to a Valkyrie, and has two children, both of whom resemble her in temperament and, fortunately, looks.

Book preview

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SILVIU THE THIEF

Book I of The Hero’s Knot

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by D. Alexander Neill

1st Edition

© Copyright D. Alexander Neill, 2012

ISBN 978-0-9881421-5-2 (Smashwords Edition)

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License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

Books by D. Alexander Neill

Prologue

Silent as a silver ghost, more elusive than morning mist, the thief sidled along the marble-clad wall, slipping between bustling patrons with a confidence born of long practice. None heard or saw him; or if they did, they dismissed him as something inconsequential, unworthy of notice. No one noticed that he had his hands in his pockets.

Had anyone been asked afterwards to describe what they had seen, no two observers – if any of the bank’s patrons could be said to merit the term – would have offered the same depiction. The fellow wasn’t tall, they might say, but neither was he short. He was of average build, neither thick-bodied nor excessively lean; and he was fair (but not too fair), with the ubiquitous sandy-coloured hair, and clothing that...that...but there, their accounts would falter.

He stepped into a shadow and became part of it. He was no master of disguise, to be sure; his skills – and they were many and varied – lay elsewhere. But he did have a certain talent for rendering himself inconspicuous. Much of his handiness in that area came from within, and from a lifetime of living on the periphery of society, avoiding as a matter of habit the social intercourse that structured and defined the better part of the lives of the men and women scurrying past him, rushing from the door to the cashier and back to the door again. They fascinated him – if only because he could not comprehend what it was about their frantic scuttlings that fascinated them.

As was his wont, he found himself a poorly-frequented spot, an out-of-the-way lurk against one wall – a perch from which to survey the whole of the happenings unfolding before his eyes. He spent a great deal of time watching other people; even when he was not planning to worst them, he liked to scrutinize their movements, their habits and interactions, as though they were an alien species. In a way, they were; he often felt that he was as much an outsider among disinterested natives as any pith-helmeted anthropologist studying the tribal interactions of gorillas or bonobos in the deep jungles of distant lands.

At length, though, mere observation palled; there was work to be done. He had long since selected his target: an older woman, one of the tellers working apart at a separate window, with deep lines of boredom and loneliness etched into her otherwise dreamily impassive visage. Hands deep in his pockets, fingers working against the silver tokens hidden there, he waited until her last client had departed, and then approached her. She scarcely noticed him until she looked him full in the face, and then she started a little; they always did when they finally saw past the gray blur of anonymity that he cultivated, and caught sight of his eyes.

He met her shocked stare; and as he did so, his fingers found a different sliver deep in the recesses of his pocket. A moment later her eyes had glazed over, and he made his proposal. A moment after that, he wended his way out of the building, his pockets bulging, and the so-called observers none the wiser.

Things went slightly awry when one of the banks patrons stumbled, jostling him and causing him to careen into – of all people – a security guard. This poor unfortunate had been day-dreaming, and was sufficiently on-edge that he drew his weapon, seeking a target. The thief had to quickly find another of the keepsakes hidden in his pocket, reach out with his thoughts, and seize control of the nervous man’s hand in order to ensure that when the gun went off a half-heartbeat later, the projectile went somewhere safe. The bandit breathed a sigh of relief, and made use of the ensuing frenzy to absent himself.

At that point, any normal thief would have made good his escape. But Raven was not a normal thief.

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The fellow had had odd-coloured eyes – and then he hadn’t.

That was the extent of the identification provided by the wild-eyed Securitas rent-a-cop about a half-hour after the uproar at the Broome Street branch of Delancey Credit. The rent-a-cop’s name was Quinn, and the rest of his testimony was of the sort seemingly designed to drive law enforcement officials to despair. The interloper that Quinn described was of average height and build; Caucasian (possibly); had a mop of hair that might have been black or brown or even dirty blonde; jeans; and a dark jacket. Leather jacket, or denim? Can’t say, officer. Was he wearing a hat? Can’t say, officer. Gloves? Can’t say. High tops? Cowboy boots? Glass frigging slippers?

Can’t say, officer.

When one of the cops had asked him with a sour smirk whether the perpetrator had been wearing sunglasses, he’d nearly offered the same reply before checking himself. The fellow hadn’t been wearing any sunglasses, in fact; of that much, Quinn was reasonably sure. After all, how else could he have known that the thief had had eyes of two distinctly different colours? That bit of information was received with a little more pleasure. Different-coloured irises were not a common trait.

But try as he might, Quinn couldn’t come up with anything else. To be fair, being questioned by a brace of testy detectives from the NYPD Major Crimes Unit hadn’t done much to soothe the security guard’s jangled nerves, particularly as they’d hinted at charging him with a fistful of firearms offences. In the confusion of the moment, after slamming bodily into the thief and seeing the strange, inexplicable things that he’d seen, Quinn had drawn his sidearm, a nondescript .38 calibre Colt revolver, taken careful aim, and put two rounds into the centre of mass of one of the bank’s potted palms. The first slug was still lodged in the tree’s thick stem; the second, after punching straight through the tough, fibrous wood, had shattered a polished panel of decorative rose quartz just below a clock and above a garbage can.

He recalled the incident with an embarassed wince. The flat crack of the bullets and the sudden whiff of burnt propellant had brought Quinn instantly back to his senses, and he’d found himself staring at the weapon as though he’d pulled a venomous snake from his holster. When questioned about the discharge – first by the branch’s fuming operations manager, and a few minutes later by the two MCU cops – Quinn had sworn up and down that he’d had the front post site centred on the robber’s chest before pulling the trigger. He couldn’t explain how he could have missed.

His vehement protests occasioned a glance between the two constables. The older, and taller, of the two was the first to respond. You think maybe we should frisk the ficus?

It’s a palm, the other replied sardonically. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t carrying.

In the end, given that the only casualties had been vegetable and mineral, they let Quinn off with a warning. Perhaps considering valour the better part of discretion, the bank gave him three days’ paid vacation. After all, if it had been a robbery, it certainly wasn’t a major one. After the tills, lockboxes and vault had been verified, all that was found to be missing was the sum of one thousand, three hundred and twenty-one dollars in small bills: the contents of the single deposit drawer behind the business banking wicket. According to the eyewitnesses to the crime (none of whose descriptions of the thief were any more fulsome than Quinn’s), the malefactor hadn’t been anywhere near that end of the branch. Suspicion might have fallen on Marlene Cleddik, the spinsterly business teller, save for the fact that nearly thirty years of unimpeachable service had made her synonymous with reliability and trust.

Which left Delancey with a loss so picayune that it would cost the bank more in man-hours to investigate the incident, and the flatfoots of the NYPD MCU with a crime that could not rationally be described as ‘major’, and that they would gladly have handed over to their brethren in less august sub-units of the force...save for one fact: as a matter of policy, all bank robberies were deemed major crimes – even robberies where the amount of money stolen was hardly enough to treat the bank’s assembled staff to a hamburger and fries. This meant that they would keep the Delancey robbery on the same list as the attempt that had been made on the Federal Reserve Depository a few months earlier. That had been a real robbery, complete with armoured cars, machine guns, a recoilless rifle (of all things), and significant casualties among guards, patrons and perpetrators alike. This was hardly on the same scale; but it was of the same kind, and New York’s finest believed in discouraging that sort of thing as a matter of policy. The would keep looking for the Delancey robber, they just wouldn’t look as hard.

At least this time they would have an advantage. None of the hundreds of witnesses at the Depository break-in had reported a thief with one grass-green eye, and another as blue as ice. It wasn’t so much the money, the two detectives agreed later on over a beer, as the fact that, this time, they finally had something to go on.

♦

Outside the bank, on a sidewalk decorated with a litter of Starbucks cups and frescoes of chalk, chewing gum, and old paint, there was a bench. Three horizontal planks of weathered wood set in stippled concrete formed the backrest, and atop the uppermost plank sat the raven, as secure and stately in his perch as the Lord Chancellor upon the Woolsack. No one noticed him: not the minor functionaries hustling by, tapping frantically at blackphones or eyeberries or earpads as they scuttled between meetings; not the flocks of ne’er-do-well ‘tweens jostling, smoking and cursing with the relish and facility of youngsters new-come to the mysterious savour of profanity; not the shop-keeps sweeping store-fronts, straightening signs, putting out new produce and taking in the old, or simply standing and staring balefully at the tittering teenagers; not the old women gathered at the corner, scratching feebly at lottery tickets like superannuated hens scrabbling for a kernel in some long-forgotten and irregularly frequented corner of the barnyard.

None of them saw the raven, but the raven saw them. He saw everything. He was the eye in the sky, the all-watcher; the shadow-at-noon, who could hide in a head-beam, scream and be soundless, and even make himself invisible when alone upon a bare and gas-lighted stage. Long practice at his craft had made him a master of the subtleties and secrecies of stealth, to the point where the pale, mundane world and its scuttling denizens seemed to flit by like jabbering actors on the television that he hardly ever bothered to watch. It was too like his everyday vistas; too similar, in that the poor players behind the glass spoke only to each other and never to him, never looked at him, never noticed or acknowledged him. The babbling box was a dim reflection of his life, save that in life the folk that passed him idly by were never so beautiful or witty or charming, never so poised or alluring or steely-jawed or clever or concise or clean. The box spoke of gritty dramas; but his day, from one dawn unto the next, was awash in the grit of the shadowy netherworld in which he floated like a dead leaf upon a stagnant pond. He needed no cinematic pretense of grit; the reality of the world ground upon him every day, paring away flecks of his soul like a joiners rasp upon dry poplar.

As he sat upon his perch, he found himself staring into the gutter, where the last wash of the evening’s rain carried the detritus of the city streets on its final journey, via the city’s churning bowels to the river, and thence to the bottomless maw of the sea. Dead leaves, cigarette butts, a half-crushed bottle purporting to have contained Krystal! Klear! Springwater!, a scrap of a campaign pamphlet promising change (although from what, and to what, was unclear; perhaps descriptions of the origin and destination had been laid out on the missing half of the appeal), a few fragments of a wooden pallet, the inevitable coffee cup-lids, all revolving slowly in the filthy rush, hurrying to the grate and the concrete pipe and oblivion. One of the pallet-bits caught his eye – a cracked and weathered chunk of wood the size of two fists, with a single long, rusty nail protruding from one end. The sight minded him of something, made him cock his head; tinctured with the rosy hue of forememory, the thing slid along down the sewer. He knew that it should have meant something to him, but he couldn’t tell whether it was a vision of something past, or of something that still lay ahead.

He forgot the piece of wood as another bit of refuse caught his eye. Bobbing like an augury, the severed head of a doll floated by. Its hair was long, blonde and clotted with some unnameable flotsam, its cornflower eyes wide and staring, possibly with the shock of decapitation. They seemed to fix on him for a moment, and the raven felt the feathers rise and rustle along his spine. The tangled skein of his destiny had made him a pragmatist and something of a skeptic, and he had long since learned to believe only in that which he could see; but he had seen so much even in his brief time upon the earth that there was little left in the world in which he was not prepared to believe, at least until experience proved him wrong. He watched the detached head as it caught in an eddy, chilled to his slender, air-filled bones by its rictus of a grin, following its azure gaze with his own beady ebon eyes until chance freed it and sent it swirling down into the oubliette, racing along to join with the rest of the great city’s ills.

Disturbed by the portent, the raven worked his neck, easing tight muscles against the gathering of the dusk and the evening’s chill. His feathers rustled again, and a long coat settled heavily upon his shoulders. His coal-black visage lightened to something pale, even sickly; and black, pinpoint eyes broadened and changed colour too. Only his hair remained the same shade as before; an unruly midnight tangle that hung to his ears and eyebrows in a raffled rat’s-nest that hadn’t known a comb in recent memory, if ever. Legged and lanky now, he sat easily atop the wooden beam, not minding the hard edge of the rail as it dug into the back of his thighs through the thin and faded denim of his trousers. His feet, indifferently shod in runners that had once been white but were now an indescribable shade of old, were cold and damp, but that was nothing new. The cold and the damp were bonny companions, and Raven knew them of old, as most did who, like him, shunned the city’s clammy, grudging embrace.

The change came slowly, almost imperceptibly, as if no change were planned at all, until at last all was done. One instant, the raven; and the next, Raven the man, or nearly. He was by law a man, but still had a boy’s face atop a boy’s frame. The only manly things about him were the grim set to his lips and pale, jutting, beardless jaw; and the depth of knowledge in his eyes. Fortune’s grace generally kept curiosity away from them, and that was good; for if any had looked too deeply into those eyes, there might have been questions about more than just their obvious oddities.

A casual witness would be struck first by the fact that his irises were of two different colours: the right eye blue, the bright and piercing azure of ice beneath a winter’s sun; and the left eye green, as glimmering green as gleaming emerald, the green of deep, silent, river-washed forests. He knew what caused the peculiarity. Raven loved the march of the written word and spent long hours in public libraries, idly rubbing the runestone charm, polishing the worn, knurled silver between thumb and forefinger as he read, consuming printed wisdom with the appetite of a starving man, losing himself in the majesty of lore...at least until inattention made him careless and he allowed his disguise to fray, leading indignant custodians to expel him and his shabbiness from their august environs in a flurry of righteous imprecation. In one such foray he had researched his condition. The learned called it heterochromia iridis, and it was often associated with deafness or blotchy skin. Neither of those afflicted him; save when he altered it for anonymity’s sake, his entire body was as pale as his cheeks, while his aural acuity was almost preternaturally sharp, and always had been. As sharp as his oddly-coloured eyes, in fact.

The blue-green eyes were unusual, and from time to time invited impudent stares, and so Raven worked hard to blur them. It was all a part of his daily ritual, the moment-to-moment attention that was necessary to blend in to his surroundings, to become a part of the drab and unremarkable backdrop that was the great, impersonal maelstrom of the city. As he sat atop his bench, balancing easily, watching the drama at the bank unfold before him, his hands were in the pockets of his long coat. Beneath the wads of folded bills that he had convinced the bewildered teller to give him were other, more precious things. In his left hand – the hand of guile, of base emotion, of trickery – he held the forcing charm, the runestone, working it between thumb and forefinger, warming the silver, unlocking its nascent force, tapping into the coiled strength within it and letting that strength flow up sinister wrist and arm, through shoulder and chest and heart and belly, into his lungs, breathing the power, tasting it. And all the while controlling it by conscious volition, shaping it with his thoughts, binding and constraining it; forcing the flow like crackling current down his right arm, into the dexter hand, the hand of strength and reason, the hand of shaping and of mastery, wherein lay the working charm.

Without looking, by touch alone, he had selected a single token from the score that lay jumbled in the depths of his pocket. He knew them all by touch, and knew which one he needed now, feeling the whorls and indentations with his fingertips, seeing in his mind’s eye the fading image of the tiny, grinning imp that hung head-down from the bent limb of witch hazel, sensing the shaping, the focus, that it vouchsafed the river of power coursing through him. It was nisse, the elf; the sprightly gamboller, the wight of the woodlands, the rascal of a thousand faces. Swift and tricky, the charm’s warm, slippery silver helped him work the magic, shaping it like clay, moulding it like the mass of water-slicked muck atop a potter’s wheel.

For the thousandth time, as he worked to forge the magic, panting and squinting, the image of the potter was replaced by another; by a vision of a smith, bare-chested and sweating, labouring at his fire-pit, shaping glowing steel into a lath by the knowledge of his craft and the strength of his arms alone. It was a simile more apt to Raven’s peculiar circumstance; after all, one could scarcely wound or kill one’s-self with an ill-wrought earthenware bowl, whereas the magic, like hot iron, could if mishandled wound or kill without warning or remorse. It had happened before, through inattention, and would doubtless happen to him again.

Like his form and features, his internal monologue went unnoticed by passersby. Imperceptibly, by inches, his hair lengthened, changing from black to blonde, snarling like a nest of snakes and working itself into a ponytail. His features softened, the nose changing from aquiline to pert, the chin and Adam’s apple receding, the crooked teeth aligning themselves, the lips thickening and turning red. High cheekbones vanished, replaced by dimpled chubbiness, a pattern replicated elsewhere on his body as certain places thinned and others thickened; while crow’s feet, a thick layer of rouge and a clumpy excess of eyelash thickener made for the sort of face men glanced at once and thereafter ignored. Finally, the long, drab coat, jeans and runners became a short, faded leather jacket, a calf-length skirt, and heeled boots.

Careful now, moving with fluid feminine grace instead of his usual lumbering stalk, Raven stepped down from the bench. He didn’t feel any different, not really; the trick of the nisse was only a disguise, a glamer, a cheat of the eyes. It was at best a half-change; the boot-heels, for instance, were higher and narrower than his normal footwear, and would trip him up if his concentration failed, but the rounded contours that graced his once-angular form were naught but smoke and shadow, a trompe l’oeil that would betray him if anyone so much as brushed up against him and felt the truth of bone and muscle behind the facade of soft, curvaceous flesh. He had to be careful to avoid physical contact when so disguised. He never wore the glamer of a woman on the subway.

With a final, deliberately incurious glance at the clot of police, investigators, employees and miscellaneous slack-jawed gawkers clustered outside the bank, enduring the cold and the beginnings of a sleety late-autumn mist for the sake of procedural drama, he turned away. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his illusory jacket. The wadded bills – twenties and tens mostly, just as he had requested from the dreamy-eyed, elderly teller that he had charmed into handing over the contents of her till – were not as warm as gloves (even illusory gloves) might have been, but they were a comfort nonetheless. He had places to go, people to whom to speak, and debts to pay, and the night was still young. Certain that there were no eyes upon him, Raven, cautious and painstaking atop his ill-suited heels, tottered carefully off into