I sighed and pulled out a chair. “You know I will.”
“Yeah. Sorry, mate. I’m just getting antsy. They won’t let me go.”
“You are accused of trying to rob Carnelian Silkstar.”
Benny spread his arms wide. “I told them I wasn’t anywhere near Thousand Walls.”
“You did?” I was always taken aback by Benny’s ability to lie so shamelessly.
“They don’t believe me!” He sounded genuinely offended.
“I wonder why that is.”
“Beats me, mate.”
I gestured to the opposite chair as I sat, and Benny joined me at the table, leaning close. I held up a finger for silence then let my eyes lose their focus so I could see the magic around us.
There! Thought so, you cheeky bastard. Incredibly thin purple threads reached into the cell, scarcely thicker than cats’ hairs, but spreading throughout the room. The mage outside was listening to every whisper.
I could cut the threads or just smash them aside — the spell was delicate — but not without our friend noticing and coming back with something more blunt and forceful. Instead, I drew in raw magic and began to carefully shift the threads, one at a time, bending them away from us to create a void around me and Benny. Like I said, I wasn’t a powerful mage, but I did have the fine control that other mages lacked. A mage like the one sitting out there would probably expect me to try to block him by force. When you’ve got a big club, you don’t even think of picking someone’s pocket.
Sweat rolled down between my eyes and dripped from my nose. This was harder than it looked. One slip, and the mage would be on me like a watchman on a free pastry.
Not too much.
There. That would have to be enough. I let out the breath I was holding and beckoned Benny closer.
“Keep really, really quiet,” I whispered, still watching the purple threads for any vibrations that would indicate that they had picked up my voice. They were still.
“What’s going on, mate?”
“Silkstar’s got one of his mages listening in on us. As long as we keep our voices down, he won’t be able to hear us. I think we’ve been set up, Benny. Someone booby-trapped that ledger knowing I would trip it. They used it as cover to kill that Master Servant, and they had the Ash Guard standing by to take us in if we survived.”
“Fuckers!” Benny exploded. My unfocused eyes snapped to the purple threads. One vibrated, just slightly.
“Shh!”
Hopefully, the mage would just take it as a heavy breath.
Benny winced, but he didn’t look any less furious.
“Someone wants me dead, Benny.”
He cocked his head to one side, the anger gone as quickly as it had appeared. “You sure?”
“Of course!”
“I mean you, you personally, Mennik Thorn, shitty mage.”
I frowned. “Does it matter? They set us up, Benny. We were supposed to die. If we’re going to get you out of here and keep me away from the Ash Guard, we need to find out who did it.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, it matters. Because if you start thinking it’s all about you, you’re going to head off like a fucking charging bull in the wrong direction. Chances are, no one gave a toss about you one way or another. Sometimes, you’ve got to accept that you’re just the bug the cartwheel rolls over. Let’s be honest, in the overall scheme of things, Silkstar’s Master Servant probably means more to Agatos’s powerful men and women than a broke, freelance mage from the Warrens.”
“Well, thanks. Now I feel so much better.”
“Yeah, well. Most of us don’t mean shit to that lot. My point is, we need to think about who wanted that Master Servant dead and why.”
I focused my eyes again — all that unfocusing got to be a bit of a strain — and glanced around. How long would it take for this apparent silence to become suspicious?
“Whoever hired you has to be in on it,” I said.
“Nah. I got the job from Uwin Bone. He’s one of the Wren’s brokers.”
I leaned back, suppressing the urge to laugh. “Full House.”
“You what?”
“We’ve managed to get ourselves tangled up in the business of all three high mages. There’s Silkstar’s dead servant, us pretending we were sent by the Countess —”
“That one’s on you.”
“And now it turns out you got the job from the Wren. It’s hardly mid-afternoon. Imagine what we can manage by sundown.”
Benny looked perturbed. “Now that you mention it, they’ve not even given me my lunch yet. That’s poor standards, that is. Anyway, Uwin’s just a broker. He matches jobs to people. It doesn’t mean the job came from the Wren.”
“But it might. A job robbing another high mage. That has to have the Wren’s approval, right?”
Benny sucked his lips. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing he wouldn’t want to know about. Deniability, you know?”
“Great. But either way, your friend can tell me who paid for the job.”
Benny rubbed at his nose. “He’ll know. Doesn’t mean he’ll tell you.”
“Oh, he’ll tell me.”
Benny looked around, as though he expected the Wren to be watching from the corner.
“That’s a bad idea, mate. You lean on one of the Wren’s men, and the Wren will take it like you’re leaning on him. That doesn’t ever turn out well. Not even for you.”
I shook my head. “Benny, right now Silkstar is after our blood, the Ash Guard think we’re involved — which, incidentally, is probably the only thing stopping Silkstar squashing us like bugs — and the Countess is going to be pissed off if she finds out I used her name. What difference does one more high mage make?”
Benny eyed me. “You know that as well as I do. You grew up in the Warrens.”
I stayed silent.
“Fine. Fine! I arranged to deliver the ledger to Uwin at the corner of Bell Street and the Tanneries at last light. Just don’t do anything stupid, okay? Sereh would be gutted if you got yourself killed. She likes you. You’re family.”
The cell had been silent too long. I felt it a fraction before it hit: a lance of power from the other mage, designed to shatter the silence around us. I released my own magical manipulation and felt the threads snap back into the void I had created, like the pop of a bubble. The other mage’s magic passed through us, making my stomach feel like I was plunging down from the top of a swing. But he was too late. The silence I had created was already gone, and there was nothing left to break, nothing to indicate we had ever been speaking unheard.
Suck on that, mage boy, I thought. He might have been more powerful, but I had been faster.
Smiling, I eased myself out of my chair.
“Take care of yourself, Benny. I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”
“Yeah, mate,” Benny said. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”
I gave the other mage a wink as I left the cells and saw him stiffen.
Suddenly, I felt quite up in the world. I might have a bunch of high mages and the Ash Guard after me, but I’d won that one, and wins hadn’t come too easily of late.
It was still mid-afternoon. I reckoned I could get a good four hours of sleep before I had to meet Uwin Bone. After three nights in Galena Sunstone’s kitchen cupboard, I needed it.
I should have known better.
I didn’t know what time it was when I woke — it wasn’t night, I could tell that. But there was someone in my bedroom. Even while asleep, I sensed them. Now, I lay there in the shuttered dark, trying not to move or give any sign I was awake, while panic crawled and clutched at my stomach and chest.
This was bad news. Really bad. I had soaked wards into the very stone and wood of my apartment. They had taken me weeks of work, and they weren’t anything to be sniffed at. The Ash Guard could have walked right through, of course, but that would have taken the whole structure of the wards down, and I could tell they were still up. That meant there was another mage in
my apartment, and a powerful one, strong enough to part my wards without setting them off. There weren’t many who could do that. Mica. The Countess. The Wren. Fuck it! Surely not Silkstar, not so openly, not with the Ash Guard involved.
I forced myself to stay still, keeping my breathing slow and deep, despite the fear scratching its way up my nerves.
Slowly, as imperceptibly as I could, I drew in raw magic. I wanted to shriek at the tension. At any moment the other mage could attack. But I couldn’t move faster or they would notice.
Now!
I shaped the magic and flung it in a raging arrow at the hidden mage. The arrow was one of the Hundred Key Forms. It was easy and fast, but it wasn’t subtle. Whoever was facing me blocked the attack with ease. Force roared over me. If I hadn’t already been tumbling towards the other side of the bed, it would have thrown me into the far wall. Even in the dark, I saw the wall above me dent and winced at the thought of my body being crushed against it. As it was, I rolled across the floor, smacking my head against my chair. Stars spun across my vision.
I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. My hand closed on my mage’s rod. I hammered my attacker from above with a blinding light show. It didn’t touch them, but it wasn’t supposed to. It was a distraction. I flung the rod and heard a grunt.
Ha! Mages practiced casting magic at each other all the time, but they didn’t expect their magical opponents to fling solid lumps of wood and obsidian at them.
I didn’t have time to enjoy my little victory. Magic punched me in the chest, knocking me back to the floor. And that was when I realised I had an advantage: whoever this mage was, they weren’t trying to kill me. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I had no such qualms. They had broken into my apartment and attacked me. I wasn’t going to hold back.
I waved a hand and my chest of drawers flew across the room. It shattered into a million splinters a couple of feet in front of my opponent. My clothes inside shredded into rags.
Mara’s piss! Maybe I didn’t have such an advantage after all.
Power grabbed me. It lifted me off the floor, slammed me into the ceiling, and held me there. I dangled, naked, my arms and legs pinned, as the pressure increased. I could hardly breathe. My joints screamed with pain as they stretched. I could feel the back of my head grinding into the plaster. I clamped my teeth to stop from yelling.
“Ready to settle down?” A female voice. Depths. This was humiliating. She had me stretched out naked, like a frog pinned to a board at the university. I wasn’t generally self-conscious about my body, but this I did not like.
“Yeah,” I ground out through the pain.
She let the magic go. I plunged to the floor, banging my head again, along with my arms and legs and other parts that really shouldn’t get banged around, not unless things are getting interesting in a different sort of way. I forced myself onto all fours.
“Shit!”
I wasn’t wealthy enough to have morgue-lamps — not many people in the Grey City were — and right now I wasn’t up to lighting my oil lamp or opening the shutters. Personally, I was happy with the darkness, but my visitor had other ideas. She conjured a day-bright light that made me shrink back. Needles of pain jabbed into the back of my eyes. I swore again and spat a mouthful of blood onto my threadbare rug. Squeezing my eyes to slits, I squinted up at her.
The mage was about my age and attractive, with a round face and the dark olive skin of an Agatos native. She looked supremely unimpressed. I had never seen her before in my life.
I grabbed my torn bed sheet and wrapped it around myself.
“It’s been five years since another mage gave me the time of day,” I said. “Now it’s mages, mages everywhere. I must be getting popular.”
“You’re not.”
Right. So it was going to be like that.
“I have brought a message from Senator Coldrock.”
Oh. Shit. And here was me thinking things couldn’t get any worse. I forced a smile. It was supposed to look confident, but what with the blood I could still taste in my mouth and the snot smeared across my face, I doubted it had the desired effect.
“And what does the great and powerful Countess have to say for herself?”
The woman’s expression tightened, making her suddenly look older. “Have a care.”
“Or what? You’re going to beat me up again?”
My heart was still hammering and my hands were slick with sweat. I suspected she could tell, because if anything, her expression became more contemptuous. The Countess’s acolytes tended to be fanatics. How Mica could work with such a bunch of glassy-eyed arse kissers was beyond me. The Countess’s acolytes took insults against her very personally. Still, I wasn’t going to be pushed around in my own apartment. Well, not any more than I had been already.
“Just give me the message and get out of here.”
“You can be useful —”
“Sorry. Is this the message?”
The mage’s eyes widened, and for a moment I thought she was going to smack me down again. But she just resumed.
“You can be useful. You don’t have much magical talent, but you do have a nose for trouble, and it’s sometimes useful to have someone around who can root it out.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t overestimate your usefulness. Stay out of the Silkstar business, or you’ll be swatted. You don’t have the power or the knowledge to handle it.”
“Should have stuck to my studies, huh?”
She snorted. “It wouldn’t have done any good.”
Well, that wasn’t very flattering. True, but not very flattering.
The mage leaned closer. “The Countess doesn’t want you getting in the way, and you are very good at getting in the way. Let the professionals handle this.”
“Fine. Message received. Now piss off out of my apartment.”
And if she or the Countess thought I was leaving this alone and abandoning Benny, they didn’t know me at all.
Chapter Six
When I finally looked up again, the Countess’s acolyte was gone. Her light faded, leaving me in darkness. I scrambled around until I found some underwear and trousers. The underwear had splinters in it. I shook it out, pulled on the trousers, and crawled to the window to throw open the shutters. The sun had already set over the mountains, but when I leaned out and peered south, I could still see its light glittering on the waters of the Erastes Bay.
My bedroom was a wreck. Everything had been smashed. If I hadn’t known what it was, I wouldn’t have recognised my chest of drawers. One wall and the ceiling were dented and cracked. I hoped they would hold, because I couldn’t afford to repair them and I was avoiding my landlord until I could pay my rent. My bed was split almost across the middle. I dragged the mattress off. At least that was mostly intact.
I searched around until I found a shirt that was vaguely clean. My mage’s cloak seemed to have survived without any real damage. Damned thing. I shook off the plaster, wood dust, and the splinters. I would have to put up with looking like a twat, because I needed something to cover my shirt, which had a rip down the back.
On the plus side, the Countess didn’t seem to know I had used her name to get to Silkstar. Otherwise, that could have gone a whole lot worse.
I was already running late as I made my way along Bell Street. The fight (well, fight might have been too kind a word for it) with the Countess’s acolyte had left me sore and bruised, and by the time I had dragged myself out of my apartment it was almost dark. Every step of the mile-and-a-half walk from the Grey City to the Tanneries just seemed to highlight a different bruise. Hurrying was out of the question.
Once, a hundred years ago, tanneries had filled an entire district above the docks in the southwest corner of the Warrens, and the foul smell of decaying flesh and urine had lain like an unwelcome and persistent smog over the lower city. When the wind blew the wrong way, the smell often reached the Upper City and Horn Hill, and sometimes even the summer palaces in
the hills of the Erastes Valley. That was quite unconscionable to the wealthy citizens of Agatos, who thought stenches were strictly for the poor. So Agatos’s rulers had put an end to most of it. Now the majority of Agatos’s leathers came in by ship from Dhaja or Pentath or down the Lidharan Road, the great trade route from the northern cities like Rannoni and Khorasan. As long as it was someone else’s problem, the great and the good of Agatos were happy.
The district wasn’t what it once had been, but there were still a few small tanneries in operation. The stink of a tannery as you approached it was a disgusting, acrid, biting wall of smell, but it was a familiar one from my childhood, and it always brought back memories. You could tell someone who hadn’t grown up in the Warrens from the bundles of fresh mint pressed against their nose when they passed this district. Benny and I used to dare each other to see who could get closest to the tanning pits without throwing up. When Mica had been old enough, she had trundled after us on her little legs and kept going even when she was streaked with her own vomit. Mica had always been a determined kid. Of course, my mother had found out, and that had been the last time we had played that game.
I wasn’t going so close to the tannery pits this time, and a good thing, too. I’d done enough throwing up today, and this outfit was already on the wrong side of respectable.
The Tanneries end of Bell Street was on the way from nowhere to nowhere. It was where the city tossed up its hands and resigned. After all the elaborate planning, graceful plazas, and elegant homes, there was this leftover, swept into the corner.
But that didn’t mean it was deserted. It was the kind of place where a certain type of person came to lean against a wall, hands in pockets, for no discernible reason. Benny and I had been that type of person for a year or two when we’d been kids, right up until I’d started training as a mage and Benny moved on to if not better, then more dubious things. I still didn’t know why we’d done it. In retrospect, it hardly seemed like entertainment.
There wasn’t much light in the Tanneries, certainly none of the morgue-lamps that illuminated the better parts of town, just a few gas lamps on corners, even fewer of which still worked, running on the gases produced from the remaining tannery pits. But eyes soon became accustomed to the dark, and there was ambient light from the city and the night sky.
Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel Page 7