Free The Thief Who Spat In Luck's Good Eye by Michael McClung

shape than Thagoth had been. Tumbled granite blocks and raw winter grass was all that remained. If the stones had not been obviously carved, I might have been tempted to believe it was some natural, if odd, meadow.
    No stone stood atop another in all that great space, save for an odd, low stepped pyramid in the center.
    “ Night is coming,” Holgren said. “Might as well camp here.”
    “ All right. I’ll look around and gather firewood.”
    “ Be careful. I sense the residue of old magics. Very faint, but best be cautious.”
    “ Any idea what this place was?”
    He shook his head. “No telling. So much was lost in the Diaspora. It might be Trevell, or Hluria, or one of a dozen other shattered cities.”
    As I wandered closer to the pyramid, I realized there was a large stone bowl at the top and, almost invisible in the daylight, a fire was lit in that bowl. I climbed the steps of the pyramid to get a closer look, already thinking that this place was inhabited, probably by the mule killers, and that we needed to get moving before they came back. But something was compelling me, more than my natural curiosity, and even as I was thinking how stupid it was, I was moving closer to that fire.
    A pale blue flame burnt in the bowl, feeding on nothing. Stone and flame was all. With a sense of disbelief that quickly transmuted to panic, I saw myself sticking my hand into the flame.
    The meadow and everything in it melted away.
     

Chapter 4

     
    I stood in the center of a great grey stone hall whose walls rose up into darkness. Dozens of staircases and hundreds of hallways stretched away in every direction and at impossible angles. I could not imagine what it would have taken to build such an edifice, beyond sheer insanity. Torches flickered wanly, imparting a dull, will-sapping gloom rather than honest illumination.
    The whole fantastic place reeked of age and abandonment—no not abandonment exactly. No-one had ever lived here, of that I was somehow sure. There was nothing about this place that I even remotely liked.
    “ A thief,” said a voice high above. “Nothing to steal here, I'm afraid. Any treasure you take from my halls must be earned, oh yes.”
    “ Who's there?”
    “ I ask the questions here, and you answer them as you can. I am the judge, and you are the judged.”
    “ I'm here to be judged?”
    “ You placed your hand in the flame. Therefore some part of you wishes to be judged. Some shame compelled you to do so.”
    “ You’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”
    “ Well, if you have had a change of heart, just walk out through those doors behind you. You might survive.”
    I glanced back. Massive black double doors beckoned, easily twenty feet tall. I turned back around.
    “ What happens if I just leave without being judged?”
    “ That depends on your undischarged guilt. In Hluria, the law has always been an eye for an eye.”
    I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “So you’re saying—”
    “ No more questions. It is time for judgment.”
    A light appeared on a staircase high above me, one that could only have been used by spiders and flies since most of it was upside down. Swiftly it began to descend, and all the while the voice spoke on, sibilant, insinuating.
    “ So many crimes,” it said, “so many to choose from. But you don't consider theft a crime, do you? Not a moral one. 'Take what you can from those who don't need it, and take punishment, if it comes, as punishment for stupidity, not wrongdoing.' Isn't that what your crippled teacher told you? Ah, but you'd rather forget old Arno, wouldn't you? All he did for you, all he taught you, and you left him to die in that shack in Bellarius.”
    “ What? It wasn't like that—” I hadn't thought of Arno in years. He'd been my mentor, more of a father than my father had ever been. He'd taken me in, showed me how to steal bread without getting caught. How to pick a lock. How to pick pockets. How to scam unwary