Now we were eyeing a narrower stone tunnel that turned as it descended and disappeared under a low lintel. This cistern was one of the things that had made Mycenae great back when Agamemnon was king. Fed by a spring, the Perseia, and accessible from inside the city walls, it allowed the Mycenae to hold out against any besieging neighbors.

In the United States there would have been a sign that said, “UNSAFE. KEEP BACK.” In Greece, there was just an entry in the Michelin Green Guide that said, “On the left is an entrance to an underground stair; its 99 steps bend round beneath the walls to a secret cistern 18m–59ft below.” What we wanted to know was whether the Perseia, after two thousand years, was still flowing.

The entryway was made of huge stones forming a narrow tunnel with a steeply pointed ceiling. It looked pretty sturdy, and I pointed out that I had a flashlight to deal with the dark. It was one of those penlights that a doctor uses to look in your eyes. My uncle had given it to me and I’d packed it for the trip feeling it might be useful. This was 1992, of course. We aren’t talking about an LED.

Off we went down the stairs. They turned just before the low doorway and turned again right after it and that’s when I discovered that those little pen-shaped things that the doctor uses to look in your eyes aren’t really useful at all in the pitch dark. At which point, sensible people would have turned back. The stairs were decaying into a long slide of rubble. The walls around us weren’t dressed stone anymore—they were same shape, but the tunnel was carved out of solid rock, just wide enough for two people to stand side by side with their arms locked around each other, the walls sagging toward each other to meet like a narrow tent over our heads.

Without the flashlight it was literally so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I know, because I held my hand in front of my face. With the flashlight, we had just enough light to see the stair under our feet and the next one down, so we kept going, arm in arm, me holding the flashlight at chest height and pointing straight down, one slow step at a time until I asked, “Have you been counting the stairs?”

Neither of us had been counting the steps and anyway it was sort of hard to know what constituted a stair when they were in such bad shape. I wondered how the Green Guide could possibly have known there were ninety-nine. We had no idea how much farther it was to the bottom of a cistern that may or not have been filled with water, and common sense finally reasserted itself. We picked up a rock and threw it into the dark. It went thud and not plop and we had our answer, no water in Mycenae, and we turned back. We had to go just as carefully up the steps, staring at the ground in the very dim light. We’d made it around the first turn and were squeezing through the low doorway when the loudest and most prolonged real-life scream I have ever heard ricocheted against the stone walls all around us.

We were in our tourist uniforms—white T-shirts, light-colored shorts. I was holding a dim flashlight in front of me, but pointed at the stairs beneath us. It illuminated us only from the neck down. As far as the German tourist at the top of the stairs could tell, there were two headless ghostly figures coming out of the dark—it’s no wonder she screamed. For one heart-stopping moment, I thought the walls might be collapsing, and then she said, “Oh, sorry!” and we all laughed. Later, she and her husband gave us a ride back to our hotel.

I wrote all about it in my travel journal that night and for obvious reasons (stupidity + terror) it stuck in my mind. Two years later, when I was writing The Thief, I got the journal back out, reread the details, and used them as the inspiration for the temple under the Aracthus River.

Credits

Cover art © 2017 by Joel Tippie

Cover design by Joel Tippie

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

THE THIEF. Copyright © 1996, 2017 by Megan Whalen Turner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First published in hardcover in 1996 by Greenwillow Books; first paperback edition, 2006; second paperback edition, 2017.

www.epicreads.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turner, Megan Whalen.

The thief / by Megan Whalen Turner.

p. cm.

“Greenwillow Books.”

Summary: Gen flaunts his ingenuity as a thief and relishes the adventure which takes him to a remote temple of the gods where he will attempt to steal a precious stone.

EPub Edition © March 2017 ISBN 9780061968525

ISBN 978-0-06-264296-7 (paperback)

[1. Robbers and outlaws—Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.T85565Th 1996 95-41040 [Fic]—dc20 CIP AC

17 18 19 20 21 PC/LSCH 10 9 8 7 6 5 3 4 2 1

Dedication

For Susan Hirschman

Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Author’s Note

Map

Some Persons of Significance

Knife Dance

Credits

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

HE WAS ASLEEP, BUT WOKE at the sound of the key turning in the lock. The storage room held winter linens, and no one should have been interested in it in the middle of summer, and certainly not in the middle of the night. By the time the door was open, he had slipped through a square hole in the stones of the wall and soundlessly closed the metal door that covered it. He was in the narrow tunnel that connected a stoking room to the hypocaust of a minor audience chamber down the corridor. The door he’d crawled through was intended to allow smoke into the storage room to fumigate the linens. Moving quietly, he inched down the tunnel to the open space of the hypocaust. Squat pillars held the stone floor above him. There wasn’t room to sit up, so he lay on his back and listened to the thumping noises, like drumbeats, as people hurried across the floor of the audience chamber over his head. They could only be looking for him, but he wasn’t particularly worried. He’d hidden before in the spaces under the floors of the palace. His ancestors had used the tunnels of the hypocausts to hide in since the invaders had built them to heat their new buildings hundreds of years earlier.