Three Thieves, One Needle

There were three of them on the desert road that morning, and each one had stolen the compass from the one before, and not one of them had yet worked out that the compass had arranged the entire thing. The compass did not point north. That was its trick, and its curse, and the reason it had been stolen six times in a month. It was a small heavy thing of tarnished brass, older than any kingdom currently standing, and its needle pointed not toward any direction but toward whatever the person holding it most needed to find. Not most wanted — the compass was very firm about the distinction, and people learned the distinction the hard way. It pointed toward need. And need, as all three of the travelers on the desert road were in the slow uncomfortable process of discovering, was rarely the thing a person had set out to look for. The one currently holding the compass was Renna, a thief of considerable reputation and a self-regard slightly larger than the reputation deserved. She had stolen it two nights ago from a sleeping man, very cleanly, and she was extremely pleased with herself, and she had spent both days since following the needle in the cheerful certainty that it was leading her to treasure, because Renna needed treasure, Renna had always needed treasure, Renna's entire understanding of herself was built on the foundation of needing treasure. The needle was leading her, in fact, due east across an empty desert toward nothing she could see, and this was beginning to wear on her good opinion of the device. The one walking ten paces behind Renna, pretending not to be following her, was Osric — a former temple scribe, soft-handed and anxious and badly dressed for a desert, who had stolen the compass from a market stall a week before Renna stole it from him. Osric did not want treasure. Osric wanted, with a quiet desperation he had not admitted aloud to anyone, to find a particular person, and he had been following the needle toward that person until Renna's clean and humiliating theft had left him following Renna instead. He was not a thief by nature. He was a man trailing the only object in the world that knew where his need lay, and hating every step of it. And the third of them, walking openly behind both, neither hiding nor hurrying, was an old woman who gave her name as Hesper and gave nothing else. She had stolen the compass first — months ago, from a place she did not discuss — and she had let it be stolen from her, on purpose, because Hesper had used the compass long enough to learn the thing the other two had not. She had learned that the compass did not simply point. The compass gathered. It pointed each holder toward their need, yes — but it had a deeper habit, an older one, and the deeper habit was this: when several people who all needed the same destination came near the compass, it did not pick one of them. It pointed them all, and it bound them, and it would not let the binding loosen until every one of them had arrived. Hesper knew, therefore, the thing that Renna refused to consider and Osric had not dared to hope: that the three of them were not three travelers who happened to share a road. They were one journey, wearing three faces, and the compass had stolen itself from hand to hand down the length of a month for the single patient purpose of assembling exactly this trio and aiming it. Renna stopped, that morning, at the top of a dune, and turned around, and glared at the two figures who had been not-following her since dawn. "Right," she said. "Enough. You — " the soft-handed one — "have been three paces behind me for two days, and you — " the old woman — "have not even had the decency to pretend you're not. I have a compass. It is mine. I stole it fairly. And it is pointing me to treasure, and the two of you can find your own." "It is not pointing you to treasure," said Hesper, mildly, sitting herself down on the warm sand with the air of a woman who has had this conversation before and expects to have it again. "It has never once pointed anyone to treasure. It is pointing you toward what you need, girl, and I would gently suggest that a person who needs treasure quite as badly and as constantly as you say you do has, somewhere underneath the treasure, a different and much larger hole that the treasure has never managed to fill." She smiled, not unkindly, at Renna's furious face. "Sit down. All three of us are going the same place, whether we like each other or not — and we are not, at present, going to like each other. The compass arranged that too. It finds it makes the journey faster."