The Officer and the Thief Read online

  The door he’d just shut behind them was no longer there.

  “Now will you release me?” asked the thief. “I doubt it will be easy to navigate this place while restraining me.”

  Benen didn’t know where they were, but it wasn’t in the corridor of the Jewylle on Ilben police station. He hated releasing his culprit, but it was getting to be a bother holding his arms in place. Immediately when freed the thief pulled away, treating his arms gingerly as he brought them back around.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now, which of them are you? Bitez? Lister?”

  Benen stared at the man, shocked he was being spoken to like this.

  “Don’t tell me you’re only one of the cadets.” The thief looked Benen up and down. “You look a bit old for that. Never made the cut for a promotion?”

  “I’m the Assistant Detective on the Nevgeradel murder case and you oughta watch what you say, thief.”

  “Assistant Detective?” asked the man, looking Benen up and down again. He frowned. “You look a bit young for that.”

  Benen had had enough of this. He wanted to just tie the man up and leave the guy in the corridor while he went to find out what was going on, but he had no cuffs, no rope on him. He generally didn’t have most of his gear unless he was going out, and he’d been settling into a long night in with paperwork and tea.

  “Name,” he said instead. “This isn’t a request, thief.”

  The man leaned back against the wall, eyeing Benen, then sighed and glanced off.

  “Gus.”

  “Gus. That sounds believable.”

  “About as believable as Assistant Detective,” said the thief. “You may call me Gus.”

  “Well, Gus,” said Benen, narrowing his eyes at the man. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me what the hell that orb did, since you seem to know, and then you’re going to wait here while I deal with it.”

  “Unfortunately, that isn’t how this works.”

  “Yes, it is. Consider yourself under arrest, Gus, even if I’ve got nothing to cuff you with at the moment.”

  The thief grinned and pulled down his cowl, revealing dark hair. His green eyes sparkled with amusement, and Benen hated being the butt of a joke, especially one made by a criminal. He was beginning to wish he actually had fallen asleep at his desk, and this man had come and gone, with him none the wiser for it.

  “Under arrest for what? You can’t find the orb, therefore I haven’t stolen anything.”

  “Breaking into the station is enough.”

  “We’re not even in the station,” said Gus, and spread his hands. “Where do you think this is?”

  “Tell me or I’ll twist your arm again,” said Benen. “I can dislocate it, if you want.”

  Gus tsked at him again and Benen cringed. He’d moved on from wishing he’d fallen asleep at his desk to hoping he had—reality was off enough to feel like a dream. The only thing really throwing him was Gus—Benen doubted he could invent anyone like Gus so vividly, even in the depths of his mind.

  “Torture? For all you know, I get off on that, cadet.”

  The statement was so inappropriate Benen gaped at him. Gus ran a hand through his hair, fixing where the cowl had flattened it, completely unashamed and unafraid of how Benen would react. That this common thief would be treating him this way was utterly unacceptable. Benen grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him up against the wall.

  “I’m Assistant Detective Benen Trelayne, maybe you heard of me when you were scoping the place, Gus.” Benen growled the words into the man’s face, satisfied as he at least winced and tried to pull back a little. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I grew up on the streets—I know your kind. No amount of personality, no act, no flirting is going to get me to go easy on you. I’m still hauling your ass to the nearest cell, wherever that is. So don’t piss me off.”

  He let Gus go and backed off a step, watching as the thief brushed off his shoulders, ostensibly nonchalantly, but Benen noticed him twitch. He was nervous. Good.

  “Thought I would have already done that,” said Gus in a mutter. “Pissed you off.”

  Benen laughed, made sure to catch Gus’s eye when he looked up.

  “Keep going if you want to see me really angry.” He paused. “Not your kink?”

  “Anger isn’t as attractive as you people in the police force like to believe,” said Gus.

  “But torture is,” said Benen, meeting Gus’s grin with a glare.

  “Consensual torture. And I never said it was for me. Only that it could be. You—”

  Benen was through with this conversation. He grabbed Gus by the shoulder, peeled him off the wall, and shoved him forward. Without his Turtledove II, he preferred to keep the criminal in front of him. Benen didn’t know what was going on, but if there was danger, he’d rather use the thief as a shield or a warning than give him the opportunity to stab him in the back. And the man probably had a blade on him somewhere. Benen debated searching him for it, weighed it against the fact that Gus would at least probably pretend to like it.

  “Walk,” said Benen, deciding if he kept an eye on Gus, he could delay searching the guy.

  “Which direction?”

  Benen pointed and Gus did as ordered without further objection. They went the way they’d come, back in the real police station, but the corridor stretched seemingly unendingly, still no doors or markers, just blank walls and scuffed floor. Benen felt something creeping up along his spine, the slow pull of fear, and pushed it away with anger.

  “Well?” he asked, glaring at Gus’s back. “Going to tell me what the fuck is going on here?”

  “We haven’t reached a junction yet. Interesting.”

  “I’m getting impatient, thief.”

  “Gus, please. May I call you Ben?”

  “No,” growled Benen. “We’re not friends, asshole.” Gus waved a hand in a flippantly dismissive gesture and Benen ground his teeth. “What junctions?”

  “It’s going to be difficult to convince me you actually are an Assistant Detective when you can’t manage to deduce we’re in a maze.” Gus paused. “Sir.” He said it like he was talking back to an unreasonable father, and Benen decided the man didn’t have a respectful bone in his body.

  He opened his mouth to tell Gus he didn’t need to convince a petty thief of anything but decided the better of it. The floor was beginning to slope down now, and the slow curve revealed an intersection of some kind. It was, as Gus had said, definitely mazelike, with one unbroken corridor stretching away to the left, another to the right. Benen moved forward, placed a hand on Gus’s shoulder as they came to the junction, and squeezed.

  “Don’t even think about bolting.”

  Gus sniffed loudly and tried to shrug Benen’s hand off, but he only caused Benen to tighten his grip. Benen dug his fingernails in a little, but the cloth protected Gus from the kind of damage he’d received earlier when Benen had gone after his ankle.

  “Why should I run, Trelayne? I need you. Which direction will you point me in now, I wonder?”

  “What d’you mean, you need me?”

  “Oh, just that we entered together, we will have to leave together as well. That’s how this works. Right, I’d guess?”

  Benen ground his teeth. He wanted to send them down the left just to spite Gus, just to keep the guy from giving directions, but the proper way to get out of something like this was to always follow the same direction, and as much as he wanted to deny the thief any ounce of authority, he wanted to get back to the real station more. After passing out he had no idea just how long they’d been gone, whether Thea and Raldina had gotten back, what they’d think. Definitely that he’d left his post, work only just begun. And Benen wasn’t going to let some damned thief get him into any more issues.

  “Right, and keep talking.”

  “I’m flattered you enjoy the sound of my voice so much. Is it the accent?”

  “Because those can’t be faked
. Underneath all that talk you sound like me, don’t you, Gus? From the underbelly of the city, where half your meals growing up are stolen.”

  Gus laughed. Benen shoved him. The next junction wasn’t far off and Gus took the right without asking.

  “The orb activated the maze. I hope that was obvious to you.” Gus turned a corner and stopped; a moment later Benen saw the dead end, just a wall. He stood back to let Gus turn around and pass him. “It crafts whatever your current surroundings are into the puzzle. If we had been in a garden, for example, the view would be much more pleasant at the moment.”

  “Not from where I’m standing. You look ill-fed and ugly. Not very good at thieving, I take it?”

  “Or what, I’d be wide like you?” Gus took the right again, the corridor directly across from the way they’d originally come. “I’m reasonably good, considering it’s an amateur pursuit. I would have certainly been in and out from your station in less than ten minutes if you could have simply had a little nap. I’ll have to consider the advantages to bringing that about myself next time.”

  “There’s not going to be a next time for you. Guilty of murder, you’re executed.”

  “I mentioned this before, but perhaps you’ve forgotten. I haven’t murdered anyone. I suggest you look at Nevgeradel’s wife.”

  “Deceased. He was having an affair with the maid, though. And the cook. The stable man.”

  “Ah, everyone in his employ. I understand,” said Gus. He sounded bored. “I wonder, all at once? I suppose I wouldn’t be terribly surprised someone like him would call them all up to his room—”

  “Orb. Maze. Now.”

  “Certainly.” Gus shrugged. “I thought you’d care to unravel Nevgeradel’s demise, but that can wait. These walls are outrageously interesting.” He turned another corner, but this time there was no dead-end. “The orb is magic, no origin specifics, although Nevgeradel no doubt was trying to pass it off as a Greenen piece. I doubt he’d be hanging onto it himself—he’d be selling, he was a merchant.”

  Benen was sure now Gus knew much more than he was saying, and he hated the thief for it. Gus could talk around him, lead him in one direction or another, without a doubt someplace where the thief wasn’t guilty of murder or even theft. He gritted his teeth. He had a job to do, and there was no reason to trust a criminal, particularly one involved in the very case he was working on.

  “I don’t want your crumbs, and I don’t want to see where you’ll lead me with them,” he said, resisting the urge to start handling Gus roughly again as the man sighed enormously.

  “Then why bother asking me anything? You’ve decided I’m a liar as well as a thief and a murderer.” Gus stopped walking and turned back to meet Benen’s eye. For all his offhanded way of speaking, his eyes looked serious. “What I’m saying, sir, is that the orb has no provenance. No history, no origin, no story—no authenticity.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Its worth is in its intricacy and magic, but little is known about either of those aspects.”

  “Turn around, keep walking,” said Benen, waiting until Gus did so before continuing. “You’re saying you didn’t know it would take us to a maze. I find that hard to believe.”

  “I observed it was a maze. I deduced it magically formed everything off our surroundings at the time I activated it. It really did not take much effort.”

  “That I definitely don’t believe. If you’re so smart, you wouldn’t have let me catch you. You would have entered the station completely prepared to meet someone.”

  “I believe I already mentioned thieving is an amateur pursuit of mine. Ah.”

  Gus stopped so quickly Benen nearly ran into him. Glaring, he shoved the thief aside to have a look at whatever Gus was examining.

  A door stood before them, wooden and plain, in every way identical to one of the station doors except for one: it took up the entire end of the corridor. Frame ran along either wall, rimmed the ceiling. The door was so massive and peculiar it appeared ridiculous, caused Benen to close his eyes and open them again, confirm what he was seeing. Gus moved up to the wood and put a palm up against it.

  “Appears to be a normal door,” he said, and tried the handle. “Locked.”

  Benen had a try at the handle, keeping Gus in the corner of his eye. His nosebleed had stopped, the blood dried in his beard, but Gus wisely didn’t make a move on him. Benen generally tried to follow police rules and not injure culprits too badly, but alone here now he wouldn’t hold back from kicking Gus’s ass if the thief tried anything.

  The door held. Benen tried one, then all of his keys, even the master one laced with magic, but none took. He glared across at Gus.

  “If you tell me you don’t have tools hidden away in your clothes I’ll search you.”

  “Are you certain it’s wise to go through the door?” asked Gus. He almost looked nervous.

  Benen leaned back against the wall, eying him. “You tell me.” If the asshole knew something, he’d have to say it.

  “Well, it is possible that we’d lose our place in the maze. Imagine we entered, discovered a door on the far end of the room, and exited. Where would we be in the maze? What would prevent us from eventually finding just this door again? Choosing the same direction and backtracking assures us a way through.”

  “Unless we need to pass through rooms,” said Benen. Gus glanced away. “I’m not exactly new to the concept of puzzles, you know. And this one’s magic. I figure it’s a distinct possibility,” here he mocked the way Gus spoke, “this maze requires its participants to go through rooms to reach other parts of the maze. These rooms could conceivably be bridges to where we need to go. Cross the bridge or stay in the same loop of the maze forever.”

  “Or passing through doors could reset the puzzle in its entirety!” Gus twitched a hand back down the way they’d come. He was definitely agitated now, but none of the Jewylle street accent Benen was familiar with seemed to be getting through. “Recall what happened when you shut the first door: it disappeared. We could emerge to a maze that has shuffled its corridors about and completely reconfigured itself.”

  “Is that true? How am I supposed to tell, Gus, if you’re lying to me or not? Maybe you don’t want me going through the door.”

  “Or maybe, maybe I do. You must at least admit what makes the most sense is to test your assumption—if, as you say, this is a small section of an even larger labyrinth, only accessible through that door—that one, specific, particular door, the first we’ve crossed—then confirming that will be easy. We simply run through all the other options and we’ll eventually find ourselves here again. If either of my theories are correct, however, we would still manage to find our way out.”

  “Unless your goal is to make me waste my time,” said Benen, tilting his head up a little as Gus gaped at him. Good, he should feel Benen was in control. “Maybe you have time to sit around scheming up places to rob, people to murder, but I’ve got a job, and I need to get back to it. We’re going through the door.”

  “You’re dooming us to wander this maze until we starve,” said Gus, but Benen rolled his eyes at him. “You most certainly are not an Assistant Detective. No such man would ever be so very…simple.”

  “Yeah, that wounds me. If you know something you’d better say it, otherwise pull out the lockpicks. We’re going through this door.”

  * * * *

  Benen didn’t care to turn his back on Gus, who produced two sets of lockpicking tools—one standard, one magical—but he held onto the magical ones while he watched the thief make an attempt with the regular. The feel of the magic through the thin cloth holding the set was strong and set his fingers to itching. Benen remembered a time when he was younger, when he’d thieved a bit himself. He would have loved a set like this then, infused with alarm-negation spells and who knew what else.

  But all that was behind him, even if his fingers responded to the allure.

  “Damn,” said Gus, leaning
back from the door and frowning at it. “Can’t get it.”

  “Try these but don’t try anything else,” said Benen, handing over the magical tools. “Where’d you come by a set so nice, anyway?” The lockpick kit Gus passed back to him was well-used, stained by the oil off the skin of those who’d broken into homes and businesses for generations. Despite the lack of magic, Benen felt something touching these, too. Nostalgia was dangerous in his profession, so he ignored it. “Steal it?”

  “It was one of my better purchases, actually, although it doesn’t seem to be working here.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake—let me do it.”

  Benen pushed Gus out of the way before the man could object, irritated and impatient now, so much so that he decided he didn’t care if the thief tried anything, Benen would make him regret it. He pulled out the standard set of tools, natural in his fingers, and tried the lock.

  He heard the click almost immediately. When he turned to glare back at Gus, the man was blinking at him in clear surprise.

  “I…was unaware you were trained in that,” he said, then smiled. He recovered quickly. “Ah, but you aren’t, are you? Your little remark about Jewylle’s underbelly—you’re like me, aren’t you? Common thief?”

  “Give me the other toolkit,” said Benen, holding out his hand. Gus did so without hesitation.

  “Now I certainly will never think you an Assistant Detective. How did you manage to become an officer at all?”

  “Cleaned up my life. You should try it,” said Benen, stepping back and nodding at the door. “Open it.”

  “I still think this is an immensely foolish—”

  “Gus.”

  He shut up, pulled open the door, and froze. Benen couldn’t hear anything from behind the door, couldn’t smell anything, either, but the darkness beyond the frame slowly faded out as light increased, like someone turning up the gas or magic.

  “Well? What is it?”

  “A study, or library,” said Gus, and pulled the door open wider. “I really do not think we should enter. There is no exit that I can see, and no way to know whether this door will open for us again. I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be tempted by things like this.”