‘Plenty of idealistic idiots out there,’ Makesh said, easily. ‘But my boys more or less make hash of them. We’ve always prided ourselves on safety.’
‘I think we’re getting distracted.’ I drained the wine. The empty cup would give me a reason to get out of there. I had to stay focused. Whatever Brix’s reasons for not outing me immediately, I couldn’t depend on them to continue. I got to my feet, less than gracefully. ‘As I said, I need to inspect the merchandise, and I’m getting a little tired of this delay.’
‘Of course.’ He clapped. Quick as blinking, the tent flaps opened and Gedion appeared. ‘Gedion will take you to your quarters and see that you have everything you need to freshen up, while I locate the shipment you’re interested in. The Guildlord has an entire wagon of goods – it’ll take a little time to find the correct box.’ He smiled at Gedion. ‘Gedion knows how to make our guests welcome in the meantime. Don’t you, Gedion?’
The mercenary grunted in a fashion that was not particularly welcoming. He held the tent flap for me and then started off through the camp, striding at a rapid almost-trot. I did my best to memorise the maze of shacks and pavilions we passed. My best was awful. It took all of my attention just to keep up with Gedion.
I couldn’t have gotten drunk that quickly, could I?
Eventually we arrived at a patched, nondescript tent. It was a decent size, though by no means as palatial as Makesh’s. Gedion waited, staring pointedly at me – probably so I couldn’t wander off. I had no idea what I was going to tell Jaern and Lorican, but I had no choice. I went inside.
I halted. The interior of the tent was pitch-black.
‘You’re very considerate,’ Jaern said, ‘but you can take a few steps without putting your foot on anybody’s face.’
‘Or the sarcastic son of a bitch in the room who’s got spells scribed could make a light,’ I said.
‘Is that an order?’
I would have kicked him, if I knew where he was. I couldn’t afford to let him in my head again, and he knew it. ‘Screw you.’
A pause. Then, sweetly: ‘Is that an order?’
I snorted. ‘Where’s Lorican?’
‘Tending to the horses. Presumably sleeping near them. Hells, maybe they picketed him, who knows.’ He pronounced a set of runes, easy, like sighing. Soft white light throbbed into being. It was the same spell he had used earlier, scribed around his wrist like a bracelet. He sat cross-legged about six feet from me, against one wall of the tent. An untouched plate of food and bottle of wine sat beside his knee. He gestured with the lit hand. ‘The slavers seemed to think that someone from our party needed to stay with our things and he was beginning to bore me.’
My jaw tightened. ‘We’re enchanting random slavers, now?’
Jaern shrugged. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Well, get him back,’ I snapped. I dug through my pocket for my last dregs of paint. ‘I don’t have time to talk. They’re going to call me soon to “inspect” the doll and we need to be ready to act when they do. It’s going to be more difficult to get out of the camp than we thought. I need to scribe, so you can keep your tongue between your teeth.’
‘I suspect I’ll be rather more effective at damaging slavers than you will, if you ask for my help,’ Jaern said. ‘But first we need to discuss what you’re going to do about the woman.’
I managed to keep from freezing. My heart thumped in my ears. ‘What? How did you—’
‘I told you earlier. I did spells of my own while you were scrying for the doll.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You think I was going to let a child like you take charge of my destiny? You think I haven’t done a little divining while you were carousing with the caravan master? I know she’s here, I know you’ve seen her and I know you’re distracted.’ He tilted his head to one side. ‘And so you’ve got to make a decision about her.’
‘There is nothing to decide. She’s nothing to me. I’m nothing to her.’ Saying it out loud was like lancing some dark, ugly infection inside of me. ‘She left me, do you not understand that? I trusted her, she left, I’m never going to see her again and this whole conversation is a waste of time.’
He sat there for a minute, his maddening half-smile fading into something I didn’t recognise. If it had been anyone else, I would almost have said it was pity.
‘It’s worse, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Than a death. Realising when someone just doesn’t want you anymore. Or maybe that they never wanted you at all. It’s worse than losing them the other way.’
I couldn’t keep myself from meeting his eyes. I hadn’t heard pain in his voice before. The sound of it didn’t make sense. I suppose the question must have been obvious in my expression, because he answered it.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I lost someone. Nobody begins necromancy for any other reason.’
Abruptly I could almost see him, centuries back, before he looked like something sculpted, when he was still a normal half-ugly man. And then, what? Keening by a fresh grave? Listening to footsteps leaving? Something left a cut deep enough that nine hundred years hadn’t dulled the sting. I wondered if his eyes had been black then.
‘You can’t get them back,’ I said.
He shrugged again. ‘Well, in a sense you can, even if they’re not dead.’ He paused, ran the tip of his tongue along his alabaster lower lip. ‘But what you get back is never what you lost. I’ll give you that.’
‘You don’t understand.’ The words twisted their way out before I could close my mouth on them.
‘On the contrary. I’m the only one who understands.’ He had gone quiet, flat as an underground pool. ‘How old were you, when you scribed your first incantation?’
‘Twelve,’ I whispered.
‘And then you knew what you were born for. Then it suddenly made sense why none of them made sense, with their heads full of women and money and drink. People see the world and think it’s made of wind and rock and water, when really it’s made of spells and words. Our words.’ He crossed his arms. ‘So what are we going to do about the woman?’
Maybe it was something in the wine, or his soul squirming around inside my head. Maybe it was just that I was too tired to keep fencing with him.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
He studied me. ‘How many of them can I have?’
I blinked, certain I had misunderstood. He had said it in the same flat tone. He hadn’t even moved. ‘What?’ I said. ‘How many of what?’
‘The others, the traders and their hired muscle. You want to keep her – very well, as you will it. One can’t argue with taste. But the others. I asked how many you’ll allow me to have.’
‘Have.’ My mouth went dry as I said the word. Was he talking about taking slaves?
His teeth showed again, cold, a skull’s grin in a statue’s face. ‘Keep.’
It clicked then. My mind seethed with the chatter of walking bones, with the lazy shuffle of the bodies he’d animated back in Ri Dana. He wasn’t talking about taking slaves.
‘You have to stop interfering.’ He leaned forwards, sudden hunger blazing in his eyes. ‘You have my soul, for the moment, so you can control me. I find that distasteful. As, I suspect, do you. We don’t have to be at odds. It’s very little I ask for. Just . . . let me go. I can get her back for you, and then we can get the doll together. I promise.’
He was lying. I knew he was lying. Even if he wasn’t, I knew I couldn’t allow what he was talking about. ‘No.’
He grimaced. ‘I thought you objected to slavery. How much is she worth, then? Why not let me have these misbegotten flesh-sellers?’
Because it wasn’t just the deaths. There was no guarantee he would stop after he killed the slavers, and he had promised me her. Even your average love charm is a vile thing when it works, wiping out the personality and leaving empty space in a warm body. Odds were Jaern had something worse planned. This was wrong.
But what if it’s not? What if it’s all right? You’ve got a god, sitting here,
asking to give you everything you want. Why not just let him?
I blinked again. ‘No.’
‘Careful.’ A low, red current of anger wound through his voice. ‘I’d rather do it this way, with your help. Don’t force me to take steps that neither of us will enjoy.’
‘I’m not talking about this anymore. We need to get to Lorican and then – what—’ The room went fuzzy. I tried to step away from Jaern and staggered. ‘What’s wrong with me? What did you do?’
‘If I was doing this, you’d be cold on the damn ground.’ Jaern came to his feet so quickly that I didn’t see him move. He caught my elbow, steadying me, almost anxious. ‘A better question would be what you did. Did they give you anything to eat? Drink?’
I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again. It didn’t do anything for my vision. ‘Almonds. Wine.’
‘And you obligingly drank it?’ Jaern’s face was close to mine, grim. ‘Idiot. The caravan master must have known you weren’t who you claimed to be.’ He stepped away carefully, as though I might tip over the moment he took his hand off me. ‘Stay on your feet.’
‘Makesh knew?’ My head was pounding now, but I forced myself to painstakingly follow the chain of logic. A wizard who can speak and scribe is dangerous, and I supposed an unlicensed wizard, unbound by things like the legality of bonewarp incantations, might seem particularly risky. So . . . what? Makesh had guessed that I wasn’t who I said I was, but he didn’t want to confront me directly? If he didn’t want to risk me getting a spell off, he’d want to neutralise me somehow. Dumping something in my wine would work. Maybe that was why I was having such a difficult time thinking in a straight line, why I couldn’t stop my emotions from bleeding everywhere.
‘Of course Makesh knew,’ Jaern spat. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s the only reason why he’d let the woman see you. He was presented with someone who was certainly not a Guild lackey, he knew Brix had been with a wizard and he was narrowing down your identity. Brix handed you to him.’
Fresh hurt sliced through me like a knife. I struggled to keep a grip on my focus. ‘If they’re waiting for me to go down, then we don’t have much time,’ I said. ‘Anything could be happening to Lorican. We need to find him. You said he’s with the horses? Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Jaern said, impatient. ‘I told you, I saw to that, and we don’t have time to waste on him, anyway. We can’t leave without my doll. Does my proposal still seem so wicked? Let me have Makesh and his people. Let me go.’
‘No.’ I held my ground, although I felt like retching. She handed you to him. I couldn’t stop and feel the new layer of pain, or I’d never get moving again. ‘I won’t leave anyone behind. We’re going to get the doll, we’re going to get Lorican and you’re still going to do as I say tonight. Nobody dies. We make no servants for the fake god.’
‘Fake?’ His face twitched. For a second I almost thought it blurred. ‘You won’t control me forever, Cricket.’
‘Nobody dies,’ I repeated.
He smiled. ‘Have it your own way. What would you have me do?’
It was impossible not to wrinkle my nose a little. I steeled myself, and made it an order. ‘I want you to divine for the doll and then take me to it. Then we go to Lorican and the horses and get the hells away.’
This time the buzz behind my breastbone rocked my whole body, thrumming in my teeth, vibrating in the hollows of my skull, Jaern’s trapped soul seething and twisting its way through me. He was getting stronger, and I wasn’t. I bent all my energy against him, with the abrupt concentration of panic.
It was enough. Barely.
He spat into his cupped palm and began scribing a spiral on the wall of the tent, muttering a fabulous variety of particularly filthy and creative profanity. When he had almost reached the centre of the spiral, he glanced up at me. ‘I’ll need a focus, you know.’
‘Use its name,’ I said. ‘Empty One.’
‘I want to be more bloody precise,’ he snapped. ‘When you use a name, infant, you get incorporeal visitation, not divining. Neyar’s teeth, you’re so ignorant. Give me my eye, the obsidian. It should have enough of the magic left on it to make the spell work. I’m damned if I’m going to do this twice.’
I didn’t bother to ask him how he knew about that. Almost nothing in my head was hidden from the Lord of Secrets anymore. I pulled the rune-carved black stone out of my pocket and handed it to him.
He put it in the centre of the spiral, held it with one thumb and finished the last few runes. Then he pronounced it. His permanent translation spell must have faltered a bit as he concentrated on his divination, the incantation he spoke slurring back and forth between one I recognised and guttural, ancient syllables, humming with raw power. His runes came to life, searing purple fire against the canvas.
He put his long, delicate fingers on the runes like a man playing a lute. His eyes had dropped half shut, dreamy with pleasure, glazed with whatever vision he was seeing.
‘Got you,’ he murmured.
Then he inhaled the spell.
There’s no other way to put it. He leaned forwards, nosing the air as if he was sniffing at the magic. The spell floated off the wall, into the air and up his nose, and I watched as his black eyes filled up with violet light.
‘What—’ I should have known by then that asking Jaern what he was doing was stupid, but I couldn’t stop the word. I had never seen anything like this – had never even heard of anything like this.
‘My divining is somewhat more potent than yours.’ Jaern smiled again, and now the spell coated the inside of his mouth and nostrils, glowing, clinging to his tongue. ‘I can feel where the doll is as long as I keep holding the focus – the stone.’ He held up the obsidian, winking between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Like a hound on a scent. I can’t cast another spell without muddying this one, though. I hope you have a plan to get from here to there.’
I did. I didn’t fancy it much, but I did. I had just enough paint left, and I supposed I could wash and swallow the runes off the canvas tent as easily as I could a piece of parchment. I pointed at the bottle of wine on the floor. ‘Is that drugged?’
‘Probably,’ Jaern said. ‘Why?’
I laughed. It hurt, echoing in my head. ‘How,’ I said, ‘would you like to be invisible?’
*
Cold air gushed down the neck of my shirt as I stepped out of the tent, catching the tendrils of nervous sweat that had collected on my skin. Invisibility hurt more this time than it had before, maybe because I was still full of sedative. The magic throbbed like an old burn.
Jaern had exited just before me. He was mostly invisible too, just the faint violet glow of his own spell hanging in the air like a will-o’-the-wisp. Unfortunately, even a faint glow drew the eye at that time of night.
The first obstacle, therefore, was the man Makesh had undoubtedly placed to watch the tent. I shivered and stared into the darkness. I was betting Gedion or someone like him was close.
A spike of pain shot up my neck, twitching the muscles into a cramp. I squinted, concentrated on the air in my lungs. I had to push through the toxicity. The spell only needed to last a couple of hours, then I could get Jaern to break the ley and make it end.
Where was Gedion?
Only some of the tents had braziers, which seemed to indicate that they either belonged to important people or had expensive merchandise within. Our tent didn’t qualify as important, apparently, but enough ambient light reached us to make it possible to see there was no guard.
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ I muttered, then winced as the sound sent a jagged ache slicing through my head.
‘So many things with you don’t,’ Jaern said. ‘Are we going to stand here all night, peering?’
Maybe they had depended on the drug in the wine. If it was a slow-acting formulation, then perhaps they were waiting until I was down hard before attempting to tie me up or cut my throat. But there still should have been someone watching the tent.
Maybe the guard had stepped away to take a piss?
‘Come on.’ Jaern coughed, a spume of violet light bursting against the sky. ‘The spell won’t last forever. Do you want to have time to pick up your Erranter pet after we get the Empty One, or not?’
I shoved the uneasiness down. If I could just find the doll and get us out of there, everything would be all right. ‘Fine, lead the way.’
Jaern slipped through the dark in front of me, sticking to the deeper shadows behind structures. I kept my eyes on his will-o’-the-wisp, intent on not losing him. After all, it wasn’t as though I needed to worry about being seen.
A heavy kind of silence lay over the camp, broken only by the distant mutter of voices and the occasional burst of raucous laughter from a knot of people around one of the braziers north of us. Jaern paused three times, once to let a pair of slavers walk by, arguing over whose turn it was to supervise the cook in the morning, and the other two times to avoid a bow-legged guard making a lumbering, circular patrol that kept crossing our route.
The second time Jaern’s hand hit me in the breastbone, scrambled for my shoulder and then shoved me down behind a stack of food crates. I squatted in the mud, my eyes gritty with wine and exhaustion, vague dread twisting in me like a bellyful of eels.
‘This feels wrong,’ I whispered. ‘Why aren’t there more of them?’
‘Shut up,’ said Jaern. ‘Unless you want me to kill them after all.’
Then he moved again, and I had to follow.
A tide of blood pounded in and out of my ears, louder with each step. We were getting closer to what I judged must be the centre of the camp, where the more expensive merchandise would be kept, less vulnerable to a sudden raid.
I halted, skin prickling.
You’re missing something.
Jaern’s fingers closed on my wrist and yanked me forwards. ‘Don’t stop, or they’ll see me. We’re almost there.’
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