Among Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page B

a Jarkman, which meant he could read and write old dialects and modern foreign tongues, as well as produce forgeries and copies when the need arose. He was also a master scribe who ran a penman’s shop in the cordon next to my own. It was a big operation, with more than a dozen apprentices and journeymen working under his unforgiving eye. Baldezar would never sell you the contents of a trust, for that was what he considered the papers assigned him to be, but he’d happily knock off a forgery or copy of anything you brought to him.
    The shop was bright and busy when I entered. The windows in the walls and the sliding panels on the roof had been thrown open to admit the morning sunlight. Tall, slanted desks covered the main floor. Most held an original page and the copy in progress side by side, but a select few played home to acts of individual creation. At these desks, the most skilled scribblers and illuminators plied their work. Each page, each line, was history in the making, art in progress.
    I took a deep breath, savoring the smell of ink, paint, paper, and chalk. For me, this was the aroma of knowledge, of history, and I loved it. It didn’t matter whether they were copying histories or inventories; as far as I was concerned, there was magic in the air.
    “A bit early for you, Drothe,” said a voice off to my side.
    I turned to find Lyconnis coming toward me, a bundle of parchments in his meaty hands and quiet humor in his eyes. He was taller than I—not hard, that—and built more like a farmer than a scribe. Broad shoulders, thick limbs, heavy neck, and an open and trusting face that always made me feel vaguely uneasy. I’m not used to being around blatantly honest people.
    “Late night?” asked the journeyman scribe.
    “Does it show that much?”
    “Afraid so.” Lyconnis gestured toward the back of the shop. “We can pull a stool over to my desk if you’d like—I’ve finished another chapter of the history.”
    “The one on the Fourth Regency?”
    “Is there any other?”
    I licked my lips. It was tempting. The Fourth Regency was one of those periods in imperial history where legend met reality; where the recurring rule of Stephen Dorminikos was truly challenged for the first time; and where the first subtle cracks began to show in our emperor’s sanity.
    By that time, the emperor had been on the throne in one incarnation or another for more than two hundred years. True, it wasn’t the six-century mark we had recently observed in Ildrecca, but his selection by the Angels to serve as our perpetually reincarnating emperor had been well established. He was the Triumvirate Eternal, the ruler whose soul had been broken into three parts so that he might forever be reborn as one of three versions of himself—Markino, Theodoi, and Lucien—each version following the next by a generation, to watch over the empire. So the Angels had decreed, and so it had been.
    But that didn’t mean everyone had to be happy about it.
    Like the rest of us, Stephen Dorminikos had started out mortal, and that fact wasn’t lost on people. If a man could be born—and even reborn—so the reasoning went, he could die, too. And he had—several times, in fact. And so the emperors had created the Regencies— appointees who ruled whenever one of the incarnations died before the next one could be found. In the case of the Second and Third Regencies, the gaps had come about through foul play and court intrigue; however, during the Fourth Regency, it had been a bout of the plague that killed off two incarnations of Stephen back to back. Innocent enough, and an eventuality the empire had long been prepared for, which was why the chaos that had followed was so surprising.
    With two versions of Stephen dead, someone—no one quite knew who—had got to wondering what would happen if all three versions of the emperor were dead at once. Would he be able to come back? Save for the first time Stephen had died and gone to the Angels,