Kadka was glad for the backup, but that wasn’t going to help. “Not his men!” she shouted. “Is him they are after! Let him by!”
Indree didn’t hesitate—she had to have noticed the silver eyes. She drew her baton, stepped in front of Berken’s pistol to grab Klenn as he drew near, and shoved him behind her. Berken moved to join her, and they closed ranks before the charging guards. Berken fired at the scarred man, but Kadka could see his eyes flare silver even from behind, and the ancryst ball went wide. Which proved, at least, that he was under the effects of the elixir.
Berken drew her shortsword and advanced as Indree uttered a spell beside her. Coils of silver energy wrapped around both men’s arms. Apparently Klenn had been telling the truth about not fearing magic like some Belgrian nobles did—his estate didn’t appear to be warded against it.
Which was lucky for him, at that moment. Without magic on their side, Kadka didn’t like their odds against elixir-strengthened men, even three against two.
Berken closed on the scarred man while he was restrained, and buried her sword between his ribs. Just like his friend, he showed no sign that the wound mattered to him. With a heave, he pulled against the magical restraints until they shattered, his eyes growing brighter with every movement. But there was no sign of the silver flames that had consumed Thorpe’s men—it seemed Endo had improved the elixir somehow.
Indree focused her efforts on the bald man who hadn’t broken free yet, strengthening the grip of her spell. “I can’t hold both! You two handle that one!” With a flick of her wrist, she lifted the man and slammed him down against the floor.
Berken had pulled her sword free of the scarred man and was circling him warily; her eyes fixed on the bleeding wound between his ribs that he didn’t seem to care about at all. She was going to need some help.
“Is no good stabbing them,” Kadka yelled. “Have to try other way.” She reached them as she spoke, ducked low and slashed at the scarred man’s heel. Her knife bit deep, severing the tendon. The man lurched sideways and toppled, catching himself on his free arm. His sword lashed out, carving a circle of air around him to keep them at bay.
If they wouldn’t die, disabling them would have to do.
Berken got the message clearly. She advanced on the scarred man’s wounded side, where he was holding himself up with one arm. He couldn’t protect himself, though he tried to swivel and lashed his sword in her direction. She deflected it off her own, and with a neat stroke, slashed his wrist. His arm gave way, and he collapsed to the floor.
The man Indree held restrained was still struggling, had broken her magical bonds on all but the wrist of his empty hand. He strained toward her, slashing his sword at her chest. But she saw what they’d done to the scarred man. Sweat beaded on her forehead from the effort of holding him back, but she managed to utter a few more quick words in the magical tongue.
A razor-thin plane of silver force manifested behind the bald man’s calves, and slashed across. It looked like nothing more than a trick of light, but suddenly blood was spurting from the backs of his ankles. His legs buckled beneath him.
And then, at the same moment and with no visible cause, the life went out of both men. The scarred man slumped to the floor, utterly still; the bald man went limp in his magical bonds.
Indree released her spell, and her captive fell to the floor in a heap like a puppet with cut strings. “Well. That worked better than I expected.”
Berken stared at the fallen men, wide-eyed. “This… this is the elixir you spoke of?” she asked. Apparently Indree had told her the thing they weren’t supposed to tell her. “I stabbed that man. He shouldn’t still have been fighting. Are they…”
Kadka knelt beside the scarred man, felt his neck. She looked up at Berken with a nod. “Dead.” She didn’t understand why, when apparently mortal wounds hadn’t slowed them. “Is like… they know fight is over, so just give up life.” But she didn’t have time to puzzle it over just then; a more important concern occurred to her. “Klenn. He knows something.” She leapt to her feet. There was no sign of him in the room, but the door was still open from Indree and Berken’s entrance. She darted outside.
Klenn hadn’t gone far. He was cowering in the snow outside the door, his pupils wide with terror. Kadka grabbed him by the collar and yanked him back inside. With her free hand, she slammed the door shut behind them, and then shoved him up against it.
“Who are these men?” she demanded. “Why do they come after you?”
“I don’t know!” Klenn looked like he was on the verge of tears. “I promise you I… I haven’t done anything!”
Kadka shook her head. “Is not good enough. Told you already, we know you get Detehr on airship, set trap at crash site.”
“No, I… Chancellor Urnt asked me to talk to Detehr! He said it would be best from an old friend. I just asked him to come talk to Gerrolt in person, convince him not to go on a dangerous test flight. I swear!”
“What about the crash site?” Indree demanded. “The trap there. I have a list that proves you were the last one there before Tane and Kadka.”
“That was Urnt’s idea as well! He said a council member should have a look, and I was involved in the project, so… come to think of it, he did ask me to sign in for us.” Klenn went utterly white. “So I was the only one on record. He was using me to keep his name out of it. It has to be him! You must believe me, I had nothing to do with any of this!”
Berken had knelt on the floor to examine the bodies of the two men, but there she looked up with a frown. “The chancellor? He is one of the most influential men in Belgrier. He has no reason to work with an Audish mage against his own country.”
Indree nodded. “I certainly got the impression he didn’t like mages much. Why side with Endo?”
But Kadka was looking at Klenn, the way he trembled in her grip, terrified. And she remembered the realization she’d come to before Indree had contacted her. A scared old man. This was too big for him. “Urnt is here when I come,” she said. “And not glad to see me. These men come soon after, right when Klenn is about to tell me these things.”
“So Urnt could have sent them because he was worried about being implicated,” said Indree. “He hid his own involvement behind Klenn’s name, which left Klenn himself as the only one who still knew.”
“Yes!” Klenn bobbed his head urgently up and down. “He asked me about it, when he was here! He wanted to know if I’d mentioned we went to the site together to anyone, said it was best if no one knew. He said he didn’t want anyone to think the Kaiser had sent him to watch over my shoulder or some such thing, but I thought it was strange.”
“He definitely has the influence to put a lot of this in motion,” Indree mused. “But I wish I understood why. We need to—”
“Is this part of the magic elixir?” Berken interrupted, looking up again from where she knelt beside the bodies. She gestured at the corpse of the scarred man; his skin had already gone sallow and grey. “These men look like they have been dead for much longer than they have.”
Indree looked down at the bodies, and her brow creased. “You’re right. Do you mind if I use a spell to check something?”
Berken hesitated, and then sighed. “I suppose we are past that now. Do what you must.” Kadka was impressed—from a Belgrian, that was a big step. Whatever argument Indree had made, it must have been very convincing.
Indree’s eyes lost focus, staring down as if she was looking through the bodies and the floor beneath, to some distant place no one else could see. After a long moment, she frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“What?” Kadka asked.
“I’d expect their last memories to be of a few moments ago, but they aren’t. It looks like they’re in an alley by a tavern. They were off duty, and it’s dark, so it had to be last night at the most recent. I can’t see who attacked them, but the last thing they heard was someone speaking in the lingua. Which means they were killed by a mage.” Indree loo
ked up at Kadka, a clear dread growing in her eyes. “Endo’s not using the elixir on living people. He’s using it to animate the dead.”
Chapter Seventeen
_____
TINGA SWALLOWED HER fear, stuck out her chin, and tried very hard to look brave. “So you know who I am.” She managed to keep her voice from trembling—that was something. “Then you know I can’t just disappear. I’m with the Audish delegation. People will come looking.”
Thiamor furrowed his brow. “I have no wish to make you disappear. I want to ask you for your help.”
Tinga blinked. “What?”
“I assumed an Audlander would have sympathy for our situation,” said Thiamor. “Was I mistaken?”
“No, I…” Tinga paused, gathered herself, shook her head. “I do want to help. I just… didn’t think you’d be happy to find me sneaking around. How did you even know I was here?”
“I had a feeling when Mister Carver said you’d returned to the carriage,” Thiamor explained. “After we parted ways, I asked some mages I trust to check the common room, and make themselves approachable.”
That explained why it had gone so smoothly. Astra, I walked right into the trap thinking I was being clever. She felt so stupid. And worst of all, this would only convince Tane and Indree that she needed looking after. If I get out of this, I’m keeping the part of the story where I tricked everyone.
“But… why?” she asked. “What can I possibly do for you?” She still wasn’t sure what was going on here, and Thiamor’s reassurances didn’t do much to ease her nerves. Endo could have gotten to the workers, and his promises would have been appealing. But she’d learn more if she went along.
And she did want to help, if they were really asking for it.
“You can ask your friends to leave us out of their investigation,” said Thiamor. “And in return, I will give you the information you are looking for.”
That sounded like too good a deal to be true. “I want to believe you,” Tinga said, and then hesitated. Astra, am I really going to do this? If I say something he doesn’t like, I’m still locked in here with him. But she hadn’t snuck in for her own safety. She balled up her fists, gathered her courage, and barrelled on. “But if you know anything useful about the accident, you had to have been involved somehow, right? Why would you suddenly change sides? How do I know we can trust what you tell us?”
Thiamor just nodded. “A fair question. I think perhaps you should see what is at stake before you make your decision.” He stood from behind his desk. “Come. Let me show you some of what Richt will not.”
Tinga was curious enough to follow without argument. It gets me out of this room, and then I can always run if things start to look bad. She followed Thiamor out of his office and down the hall to another door, where he knocked politely.
A goblin woman with a weathered face and greying hair answered the knock, opening the door just a crack to peer up at him. “Vaelon? What is it?”
Thiamor gestured to Tinga. “We have a guest, Rikit. I am trying to show her what life is like here.”
Rikit squinted at Tinga a moment, and then nodded and swung the door all the way open.
The space inside was hardly larger than the Magebreakers’ office, but it housed what had to be two full goblin families, all of them wearing magical shackles on their wrists. A group stood in one corner, washing laundry in a small basin of filthy water. Several more were sleeping, and they’d crammed themselves into out of the way corners to leave the others room. There was no space for personal belongings, hardly any for furniture or comforts, and it was cluttered and dirty—without anywhere to put it all, tidying and cleaning would be largely futile.
Tinga stared, open mouthed. No one should have to live like this.
Rikit noticed her bewilderment. “Not what you’re used to outside, is it? This isn’t even all of us.” She gestured at several of the sleepers. “When they wake up, they go to work, and the ones working now come back to sleep.”
“All of them?” Tinga asked. Some of the sleeping figures were clearly children. She remembered the ones playing downstairs in the common room—she’d been appalled just to know they lived here.
“The young ones, you mean?” Rikit nodded. “They work. Less hours than the rest of us, mostly, but enough.”
Tinga’s chest felt tight. “I… we didn’t see any, in the workhouse.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” said Thiamor. “They knew you were coming. The children were pulled off the floor.”
“I’m sorry.” Tinga bit her lip, felt a familiar anger building in her chest. “This is inexcusable.”
“Sounds like she’s learned her lesson,” Rikit said dryly, glancing up at Thiamor. “If you’re done using us as an example, I need to get back to the laundry.”
“Of course,” Thiamor said. “I apologize for the interruption.”
Tinga stood there staring at the door for a long moment after Rikit closed it. She’d known about the workhouses and residences from her grandmother’s stories, known they were bad, but she’d never quite pictured how bad. Grandma Kirgi had always resisted going into detail—to shelter her granddaughter, Tinga had assumed, but now she wondered if it had just been too awful a memory to talk about. The non-magical in Audland didn’t have easy lives, but at least they weren’t slaves, packed shoulder to shoulder into rooms too small to fit them.
“I didn’t know it was like this,” she said to Thiamor. “I think you’ve made your point.”
“I wish that I had,” Thiamor said sadly. “But there is more.” He started down the hall again, motioning for her to follow.
“How can it get worse?” It was a rhetorical question; Tinga could think of several ways. Nothing was off the table now.
At the end of the hall they descended two flights of stairs, down to the second floor. Thiamor led her to a large room that looked like some sort of medical area, with poorly padded sleeping mats down both sides. An ogren woman walked up and down the aisle between, checking on people, stooping low beneath a ceiling that hadn’t been made for her kind.
Thiamor nodded at the ogren, but didn’t interrupt, just directed Tinga toward the back. Some men and women they passed by were recovering from injuries that must have been taken in the workhouse, but others had bruises and broken bones that Tinga could tell had been inflicted by hand, not by any artifice accident.
“The overseers sometimes feel the need to punish disobedience,” Thiamor said by way of explanation when he saw Tinga looking.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t know what to say, and she wasn’t sure she could have spoken if she’d tried. She knew, at least in theory, that there were places more terrible than this in the world—Estia, for one, where it was illegal for non-humans and mages to even exist, and capture meant being locked in isolation under terrible conditions, praying for exile instead of execution. But that was just something she’d learned at school. This was right in front of her eyes, and just then, that meant it mattered far more than some story of a far-off land.
At the back, in the beds furthest from the door, it got even worse.
There were perhaps a dozen of them, lying insensate in their beds, but all of them were conscious. Their eyes were open, staring—some flickered toward Tinga and Thiamor, as if responding to their movement, but she didn’t see any real awareness there.
“What… what is this? What happened to them?” A sinking horror filled her stomach. “Are they riven?”
Thiamor shook his head. “No. The overseers aren’t capable of that, thank the Astra. That would take a wraith.”
Or Thorpe’s machine.
“But it is not a great deal better,” Thiamor continued. “They are lobotomized.” He gestured at the bracelets on their wrists. Some of them appeared damaged, Tinga noticed. “The shackles that bind our magic are made to be difficult to remove, and when we try… this is the result. They are woven with spells to damage the brain when they are tampered with. If the bond to the Astra cann
ot be removed, the next best thing is to destroy the will to focus it.”
“But if they can’t cast spells, why keep them here?” Tinga wanted to scream. “They could at least return them to their families!”
“Because they are still feared,” said Thiamor. “Their magic is not gone, and if some brief moment of lucidity allowed them to focus their power… the people who decide such things chose not to risk allowing them among the public.”
“Spellfire, that’s… they can’t…” Tinga sputtered in futile, directionless rage. “This has to stop!”
“Now you understand, I think,” Thiamor said. “This is what we wished to fight against. When we were offered the chance, we took it without considering where it came from.”
“You’re talking about the Gerthine going down. You did sabotage it.” Tinga could hardly blame them, whatever they’d hoped to accomplish. Even if it was just to lash out at the people responsible for keeping them in this terrible place.
“Yes. I was contacted by a man who called himself the Architect. He sent a message with a relative of one of the mages held here. He had a plan to win our freedom, he said. All we had to do was make a few minor alterations from the plans we were given. The failure of the airship would sour diplomatic relations between our countries, and when talks failed, the mages of Audland would come to liberate us.” Thiamor sounded almost ashamed now. “He claimed he had a way to give our families magic. To create an underground force of free mages to help rescue us, and fight alongside Audland’s forces when they came.”
“That’s impossible,” Tinga said. At least, everything she knew about magic said so. But how would they know that in Belgrier? They don’t exactly send people to magic school. Her half-year at the University was probably vastly more education than anyone here had. “It doesn’t work like that, and even if it did, this man, your Architect… he is the last person who would give magic to anyone who doesn’t already have it. His name is Endo Stooke, and he wants to do to non-magical people like me exactly what Belgrier is doing to you. I understand why you listened to him, but he’s a monster. And I don’t think your people will benefit any more from his war than mine will. It’s just going to mean a lot of death on both sides. Belgrier isn’t going to get any nicer to mages when you’re at war with a nation of them.”
The Spirit Siphon (Magebreakers Book 4) Page 14