Lord of Secrets

by Breanna Teintze

  ‘You’re running a translation spell of your own,’ I said.

  The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. ‘Eh, some spells one wants running more or less permanently, especially if one is supposed to have divine omniscience. Language changes so quickly. Even with that pretty incantation glowing behind your ear, I doubt you could understand me if my spell wasn’t active. At any rate, that’s not interesting. When they locked me in here, the fifth Kaldien was on the throne of the Silver Court and Gerran Kej was the Lord Governor in the provinces. Who is it now?’

  The Daine kings across the sea all took the same name upon ascending the throne. The one sitting there now was, if I wasn’t mistaken, the twenty-ninth Kaldien. I calculated quickly, unable to escape an unwelcome jolt of pity.

  ‘Eight hundred years,’ I said. ‘And there’s no Lord Governor. Varre has its own king, Alastar.’

  For a split second he seemed disorientated. Then he shrugged. ‘So I’m nine hundred and fifty-eight years old. Will you get me my soul?’

  ‘I came down here for an artefact,’ I said.

  He spread his hands out sideways. ‘As you can see, the room is stuffed with them. Take your choice.’

  How had Acarius put it? ‘A child, of sorts,’ I said.

  ‘The child?’ Jaern spat the words. The air in the room changed, as though someone had sucked what little heat there was out of it. ‘Who told you to get that?’ I stepped backwards, startled by the sudden menace in his face. ‘Tell me.’

  Instead, I turned in a slow, painful circle, desperation building inside me. Jaern’s reaction made no sense if the artefact wasn’t in the room, but the only things here were gigantic bronze statues. I couldn’t even tip one over, let alone take one away.

  One at a time. I slowed my breathing, focused on the memory of Acarius’ voice, taking me through runic problems. Be systematic.

  It wasn’t Neyar, with her glowing ruby necklace and the head of a wolf – nothing about her could logically be interpreted as child. Not the sun-goddess Linna, reclining amid sharp brass rays, with coronas behind her head and hands. Not Farran, half-swallowed by his throne of silver-plated waves.

  Ranara was closest to me. Lady of Shadows. Mother of the Moon. I’d been avoiding her. When the plague had come to our village, my mother had wrung the neck of our last chicken and put the bird in the tarnished copper hands of the village’s shrine to Ranara. Three days later, she’d started coughing. A week after that, they put her in the ground.

  This version of Ranara was smiling. For one hot, red second, I wanted to put my fist through her lovely face.

  Instead, I made myself analyse the statue. In one hand she held a crescent-shaped brazier, and in her other she held a little gold doll to her breast as though to suckle it. A child, of sorts. I limped to her knee, reached up, stretching, and grabbed the doll out of her arms. It came easily, heavy in my hand.

  It was a well-crafted, gold-plated version of the idol I’d seen at the Fenwydd temple, the Empty One, and it was hollow, or I wouldn’t have been able to lift it. Behind me, Jaern’s breath hissed out between his teeth. When I turned, he had gone quiet, watchful. He didn’t seem like the sort of man who would fear much, but he’d lost some of his easy grace.

  I stepped closer to the witchlight, cradling the doll with two hands. The thing was even uglier now that I could see it properly, an empty-eyed nightmare that only looked vaguely like an actual baby. Under the layers of dirt, its gold skin crawled with innumerable tiny loops of runes. And it wasn’t just missing its eyes: there were sockets in its body as well, which looked like they corresponded roughly to the position of human organs. I put a fingertip in the thing’s lung-hole and a spring closed softly around my knuckle.

  As gently as I could, I freed my finger. I glanced at Jaern. ‘What fits here? And there’s a gate, back in the room with the statue of the three yavadis. Do you know how to lower it? The trigger should be in this room.’

  He grinned, with something approaching relief. ‘Of course I know. And no, it’s not in the sanctuary.’

  ‘Then where is it?’

  He waved a dismissive hand. ‘The important thing is that you’ve got living flesh on your bones. A creatlach is entertaining, but they are limited.’ He walked to the edge of the circle of runes closest to Neyar and stood with his arms folded, his toes a fraction of an inch from the curve of the characters. ‘You can see it from here, the red stone at the centre of her necklace. It should just be a matter of—’

  ‘Is it stones?’ I held up the doll. ‘Two of them would have been in the eyes of the mosaic at the beginning of the maze, but I think someone already removed those. Where are the other four?’ I gestured towards the closest statue, whose eyes were glittering, rune-carved sapphires. All the statues had precious stones for eyes. ‘Stones like those, maybe.’

  He glanced at it and then away, uninterested. ‘I don’t bargain with idiots.’

  This was getting tedious. I had seen nothing else that could have been the artefact Acarius wanted, nothing unique enough to justify crawling into this hole. This madman knew how the doll worked, and he knew how to get out of the maze. He had to.

  And I wasn’t going to stand there and let him call me an idiot.

  I took a grease pencil from my satchel, bent and wrote a quick spiral of runes on the floor. If he wouldn’t tell me which of the gems in the statues were the ones I wanted, I’d find them myself.

  He walked towards me. After a moment he gave a quiet chuckle.

  ‘Gods,’ he said. ‘I do like you.’

  ‘How comforting.’ I stood on the spiral and pronounced the runes.

  He listened, as though to someone playing a violin. The spiral lit, and my vision changed. Some of the objects in the room took on a subtle purple glow, the ones he had been thinking about. It was a mild telepathy spell – a more direct one invites resistance and is, in any case, physically debilitating – but it should have been enough to show me where the gems were.

  Only it didn’t. One statue after another flared with colour and then faded. The bastard was thinking about every statue in rapid sequence.

  ‘That’s only really useful if the other party doesn’t know how the spell works,’ he said. ‘Although your version has some clever distinctions. Are you going to get me my soul?’

  I broke contact with the spell. ‘Someone went to a lot of trouble to put you inside what looks like a fairly impervious prison circle,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t argue in favour of letting you out. Whatever that red gem is – because it isn’t your soul – it’s the key to breaking the circle. And I’m not going to get it for you.’

  ‘Of course it’s the key to breaking the circle,’ he said. ‘You have to have a soul to cross the barrier. A simple enough trap, but I made the mistake of trusting my apprentice.’

  ‘You can’t separate bodies and souls,’ I said.

  He raised a platinum-coloured eyebrow. ‘Of course you can, infant. What do you think a dagger to the throat does?’

  ‘Fine, if you want to nitpick.’ I walked around the circle towards the statue of Neyar, taking care not to touch the runes on the floor. ‘You can’t separate a soul from a body and put it into something else. That makes no sense.’

  He matched my pace from inside the circle. ‘It actually makes no sense that souls are attached to bodies in the first place,’ he said. ‘It’s very odd, if you think about it – why don’t trees have souls, for instance? – but it’s no more odd that you can move one around than it is that they exist in the first place.’

  ‘If your soul isn’t in your body,’ I said, ‘how are you in your body?’

  ‘Saints, how are you in your house without becoming part of the house?’ He tilted his head sideways. ‘I’m my soul. This body is something I use, but without the proper rituals, I don’t join with it any more than my soul joins with the glass of the vial. This is primary stuff, Gray. Don’t they teach young wizards necromancy anymore?’

  I didn’t like the s
ound of my name in his mouth. I halted at the foot of the dry reflecting pool and began searching the ground for spikes hidden among the charnel litter.

  ‘Necromancy is forbidden by the Mages’ Guild,’ I said. ‘Was there a Guild, when you were locked up?’

  ‘A guild?’ He spat the word, disgusted. ‘What, like they have – had – for

  brewers?’

  ‘My feelings on the topic exactly.’ Time was running out. Brix and Lorican would be in the dark by now. I had to figure out a way to make Jaern tell me what I needed. If I got his ‘soul’ in hand, maybe I could think of some way to use it as leverage. ‘Much as I hate to agree with them about anything, however, I have to admit to finding necromancy unpleasant. You have to get the bones and tissue to work with from somewhere. How many corpses did it take for you to build that little bone army?’

  He snorted. ‘Hells, it’s not as though the original owners were using them. And it’s not as though I was the one who killed them. I didn’t even build all of them. Some of the originals were my apprentice’s work, animal bones set to guard me. They had to be repurposed. There aren’t any traps left around that pool, by the way. I wasted a number of creatlaches before I realised the wards ensure only someone with a heartbeat can get the stone.’

  I stepped into the dry bed of the pool with my good foot, dragged my numb leg after and paused. Nothing happened. The dull emerald eyes of the goddess still stared impassively at something over my left shoulder.

  ‘So.’ I moved towards the statue, cautious. I had no time, but I still couldn’t rush. Necromancers are unpredictable, always looking for new material to practise with. For all I knew, what Jaern really wanted was my sinews. ‘Are you going to tell me why your apprentice put you inside a prison circle? And how you can be nine hundred-odd years old?’

  ‘Undoubtedly he believed he had something to resent,’ he said. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘My morality seems to be less flexible than I had supposed.’ I stuffed the doll into my satchel; I had reached the statue now. I took a deep breath, bent my good knee and hopped. It took two of those before I could get a grip on the goddess’ lap. I used my arms and my good leg to clamber up. My dangling bad leg sent jolts of suffering through me every time it flopped at an awkward angle. The spell was failing; I wouldn’t be able to move without debilitating pain very much longer.

  I sat on the goddess’ lap for a moment, until I could get my breathing slowed from panting. ‘It does actually matter whether he resented you for something like sleeping with his wife, or for murdering a couple of villages full of people.’ The bronze grated against my backside, the grit of centuries sloughing off the metal. I got on to my knees, then inched around until I was facing the goddess’ belly. I grabbed the neck of her gown and pulled myself upright, balanced on my uninjured foot and studied the clean places my scrambling had made. Under the dust, the goddess was painted with runes in yellow ink. ‘Oh, hells.’

  ‘I did mention there were wards,’ Jaern said, sweetly.

  Time to start working on the necklace. The red stone resting at the hollow of Neyar’s throat came away in my hand. It wasn’t really a stone at all, but a thick glass bottle filled with red fluid. The stopper on top was made of gold, and dangling from it was a gold chain, as though it was an amulet.

  I shoved it in my satchel and took out the cup I use to measure reagents. It was the only thing I had on hand that might work. I jammed the edge of the cup against the corner of one of the goddess’ eyes, trying to pry the emerald out of its setting.

  Something tickled my ankles, as though I was walking through long grass. I glanced down to see tendrils of magic, its yellow light shaped like tiny snakes, working its way up my legs.

  ‘They’re just attracted to your pulse.’ Jaern stood as close to me as he could get without crossing the runes. ‘But they can be inconvenient. I’d get down if I were you.’

  ‘I need her damn eyes.’ I wriggled the cup and finally got the edge under the gem. A moment of effort, and it popped out into my hand. It was the right size to fit into a socket of the doll. I put it into my satchel, which was getting lumpy and heavy.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Jaern said. ‘You need one of her eyes, one of Ranara’s, one of Linna’s and one of Farran’s, not to mention the two of mine you said someone took from the mosaic. Get down, now, there’s a good lad. That metal contraption on your leg is confusing the serpents.’

  I took the goddess’ other eye, just the same. Call me mercenary, but I could think of several uses for an emerald the size of my thumbnail.

  The yellow snakes bunched around my injured leg, swarming over the brace. I had to figure out how to get down without my knee dumping me on to the floor eight feet below. A drop like that wouldn’t kill me, probably, but it could break my back. I swallowed and started to lower myself to my good knee, as slowly as I could.

  The snakes hissed and surged up my body to my throat, writhing, squeezing. I jerked backwards.

  For one sick, interminable moment I hung there in the air, arms flailing.

  And then I fell.

  Thirteen

  I must have yelled; my ears still rang when I realised I hadn’t hit the ground. Jaern was squatting inside the rune circle, mumbling under his breath, his arms spread out towards me. Beneath me hummed a cushion of magic, hundreds of dragonflies made of red light, hovering a foot above the cluttered floor.

  As soon as he caught my eye, Jaern stopped muttering, the muscles in his neck taut. ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘You could have broken the vial. Now come here, give it to me.’ His hands curled, and he yanked the cloud of dragonflies towards himself.

  I fumbled for my satchel, but by the time I got my hand on the vial, I was inside the circle. He snapped his fingers and the magic cloud underneath me disappeared. I hit the floor with a thud. With my last bit of strength, I threw the vial as far from me as I could. It skittered across the floor, coming to rest in a pile of debris.

  ‘No!’ He lunged, but it was too late. He turned on me, twitching with rage. ‘Go get it!’

  ‘We’re going to bargain first.’ I started to sit up when I heard him growl a spell and a ball of white light smashed into my chest.

  I couldn’t move.

  ‘Bargaining is for peasants.’ He spat into the palm of his hand and dipped his thumb in it. It came away a bright green, as though he had a handful of ink. ‘You’re just going to agree.’

  ‘What—’ My face was going numb. My heart hammered against my sternum, pumping useless energy to my frozen body. ‘That wasn’t paralysis, what—’

  ‘Quite correct, it wasn’t.’ He smeared his thumb against my forehead, tracing a pattern I didn’t recognise, and pronounced it. A needle of agony drove itself into my head, so overwhelming I couldn’t even shriek. He was trying to crack my memories, to force his way into my thoughts.

  ‘By all the false gods,’ he whispered. As abruptly as it had started, he broke contact, staring at me wide-eyed, with a sudden hunger that made the breath seize in my throat. Then he blinked, as though waking himself, and used his sleeve to wipe my forehead clean. ‘Who is this Keir Esras person, that you spend so much thought on him?’

  Well, that was unexpected. I took several large breaths, searching through my mind to see what he had tampered with. The memories I had of Keir, obviously, but what else? Something about Acarius?

  ‘He kidnapped my grandfather,’ I said. ‘And tried to kill me. Why?’

  He pushed the collar of my shirt open and scribed something on my chest, below my collarbone. ‘We’re going to help each other.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question, from hoping I didn’t know.

  ‘Convincing you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Wait!’

  He smiled and pronounced the spell. The ley broke.

  The magic shattered, went icy against my flesh. The poison of all my spells whipped around me, mingling with the red knife of pain that shot
up my leg. It clawed through my body, pumping through my veins, throbbing at the edges of my vision.

  I was going to have a seizure.

  ‘No.’ The word choked me. ‘No.’

  His hand was on my knee, and he was chanting.

  The seizure stopped.

  Then, slowly, the pain began to retreat – all of it. First the toxicity, then the damage in my knee. I opened my eyes to find a jewel dangling in front of my face, swinging gently on a silver chain – the pendant from around his neck. As I stared at it, I realised it was a bottle, like the one I’d thrown away, only this held purple-black fluid. At the heart of the liquid spun a cloud of scarlet, pulsing.

  ‘What is that?’ I said. The spell Jaern had put on me had broken, too, although the witchlights still burned around us. I sat up.

  He still had one hand on my knee, holding the black vial with the other. My pain was gone now, but whatever he was doing went on. Blue light glowed under his fingers and twisted up what I could see of his arm.

  Something rearranged itself inside my leg. Tendons twisted, lengthened. As I watched, the bones shifted under the skin, straightened. It didn’t hurt. My gorge rose, but it didn’t hurt. ‘What are you doing to me?’

  He let go. I scrambled away from him, back outside the rune circle.

  He shifted position, sitting on the stone, breathing as hard as if he’d been running. ‘Proving my good faith,’ he said.

  I flexed my knee. This was like no numbing spell I had ever heard of. Not only was there no pain, there wasn’t even any awkwardness. I stripped off the ruined brace and got to my feet.

  It wasn’t numb. My knee had been . . . fixed.

  I didn’t move towards the soul vial. I didn’t understand what was going on. ‘Why? Why do that?’