There were going to be questions. There was no hiding that. Benny had been broken out by a mage, and our friendship was hardly a secret. Ask around enough, and there would be witnesses to put me in the vicinity: the waiter at the coffee house, the group of men I had followed into the Watch headquarters, random, nosy passers-by. Someone was going to come asking questions. I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Instead, I headed for the Sunstone house and my date with a monster.
Chapter Eighteen
I had been hoping that the Estimable Sunstone’s injuries would keep him out of the picture. No such luck. All they seemed to have done was make his mood worse.
Instead of taking me to see Galena Sunstone, the servant who answered the door led me to the Estimable Sunstone’s office. He looked up as I was ushered in. His face showed a quickly suppressed flash of visceral hatred at the sight of me. Yeah, that’s right, I thought. You need me, and you can’t stand it. It gave me a perverse surge of pleasure.
The Estimable Sunstone closed the book he had been reading and slid it into the desk drawer. Its cover was faded green leather. I couldn’t make out the title, just a geometrical symbol worked with gold foil into the leather.
Long bandages emerged from under Sunstone’s jacket at his neck. He winced as he closed the desk drawer, then he picked up a folded sheet of paper that had been in front of the book.
“Your actions have caused this house a great deal of harm and cost,” he said.
I eyed him carefully. What was he trying? “My actions.”
“I have consulted the appropriate legal precedents, and I have confirmed that you are liable for substantial damages due to your negligence.”
I had to fight not to laugh at the absurdity of it. Legal precedents. Damages. After the day I had had, it was farcical. “Got a lot of case law about murder-ghosts, have you?”
He gestured with the paper. “This is a civil suit against you that I intend to file with the court tomorrow morning.”
Good luck with that, I thought. The only money I had was what his wife had paid me. It was a lot for me, but it wouldn’t cover his legal costs. So what was he really after here? I wondered whether I should just turn around and walk out or spend a few satisfying minutes telling him what I thought of him.
“However,” he said, “my wife believes you can get rid of our ghosts once and for all. She was impressed by your actions last night.” He winced again and touched the bandage at his neck. I wondered if he’d left it visible just for this moment. “I was less impressed. It dawns on me, though, that if you fail, you may suffer the same fate as our unfortunate priest.”
The prospect seemed to cheer him up, and I decided to take it as approval.
“So,” he continued, “I have agreed with my wife that if you dispose of these ghosts tonight, I will tear up this piece of paper and we will hear no more from you.”
Well, that was fucking generous. I was tempted to rip up the paper myself or set it on fire with a little spell. But I just wanted this over, so I said, “Sounds like fun. Shall we get on with it?”
His expression soured again, and he waved a dismissive hand. I gave him a grin I really didn’t feel and headed for the kitchen.
Galena Sunstone was waiting outside when I reached the kitchen, fingers twitching where she held her hands firmly against her stomach.
“You came.”
“You paid me.”
“Even so.” She glanced over her shoulder. Despite her heavy gold lip and eye paint, she looked tired and pale. I sympathised. I would rather not face up to that thing again, either.
You took the money. Now that I had her, though, I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity.
“I have a question,” I said. “What’s your connection to Carnelian Silkstar?”
She frowned, too quickly and too spontaneously to be faking it. “I… I have seen him at parties, of course, and other gatherings. Across the room, you understand.” She raised her chin. “My husband is a successful merchant, but we have not had any business dealings with Mr. Silkstar that I am aware of. I don’t understand. Does this have something to do with our ghosts? How could it?”
“Forget it.” I hadn’t expected it to be that easy nor the connection to be so straightforward. “Did you get the stuff I asked for? The arevena flowers and the charcoal?”
She nodded. “And our silver. It’s in the basement. My husband thinks you intend to steal it.” She didn’t phrase it like a question, but I could tell it was.
“I’d hardly ask you to put it in the basement. I’d have it in a sack by the back door. I’m going to need food, the best you’ve got available.” I might as well get a good meal out of this before trying to deal with the murder-ghosts. Who wanted to die hungry?
“Is that part of the spell?”
“Sure. Why not? One more thing. I need everyone else out of the house. Your family, your servants, everyone.” This could go horribly wrong, and I didn’t want any more innocent deaths on my conscience.
Each time they had come, the ghosts had fled through the kitchen and into the cellar, and there they had faded. I didn’t know where they had started, but where they ended was more significant to them. It would be where they had died.
A ghost could have intent. It could have fear. It could have malice. But what it could not have was free will. A ghost was an echo of the trauma of a dying person. The Sunstone ghosts would repeat the same ritual until time faded whatever energy sustained them — something that only happened to the weakest ghosts — or someone got rid of them for good. If I could trap them in the basement, maybe I could figure out what was sustaining them and destroy it. Failing that, I would settle for disrupting them, so they didn’t return in anyone’s lifetime.
The cellar was used for desultory, half-hearted storage. This wasn’t the only cellar, even though it was nearly the size of my apartment, and the house was hardly lacking in space. Sadly, this didn’t appear to be where they stored the wine. A pile of old furniture had been stacked to the left of the stairs. The shelves that ran three quarters of the way along the right wall were filled with kitchen supplies, as were the free-standing shelves to the left. Behind those stood a pile of old tea chests and a couple of sacks of flour. The rest of the cellar was empty, and the flagstones hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. I doubted the Sunstones themselves ever came down here. There was plenty of room to set up my circles.
The Sunstone’s haul of silver was impressive. Cutlery, plates, bowls, cups, serving dishes, jewellery, and something I was sure belonged in a bedroom, even if I couldn’t work out what you would do with it. Hey, people were entitled to their private lives. There were even several stacks of silver coins, neatly arranged so that it was clear that they had been counted.
The ghosts would follow their predestined path as long as they could. My plan was to trap them in a circle of silver and then try to interrogate them. Contrary to common belief, you could communicate with ghosts. It was just that the answers they could give were severely limited. They were like flowers turning to follow the sun. You couldn’t have a conversation with them, but you could get a response if you shone the right light.
The key to this working was to leave enough of a gap in the circle for the ghosts to enter without being repulsed by the silver, yet small enough that I could seal it before the ghosts dissipated. A silver chain would have been best, but apparently the Sunstones’ kinks didn’t run that way.
The arevena and charcoal were probably overkill, but I had seen what that thing could do. Better overkill than be killed.
So I set up my three-quarter circle, placed the spare silver close to hand, and settled down with the best Galena Sunstone’s kitchen had to offer.
I had been waiting for three or four hours, sitting back against the shelves on the wall, dozing and relying on the ward I had set at the top of the basement stairs to alert me if the ghosts arrived, when floorboards creaked above me.
I started, suddenly wake.
Some idiot had snuck back in. The Estimable Sunstone, no doubt, or someone he had sent to check I wasn’t making off with his money. If they walked in at the wrong time, the servants would be cleaning blood and entrails off the walls for weeks.
Why did I have to work for morons like this? If they fucked this up, I wasn’t giving a refund.
I didn’t know how long I had before the ghosts put in an appearance. I took the stairs three at a time and burst through the door, ready to peel the skin off whichever stupid fucker had blundered in here.
I didn’t get the chance.
The first punch caught me blind. I spun around, stumbling, and shoved myself away from the wall, already swinging my mage’s rod.
Whoever it was stepped inside the blow, blocking my arm. The heel of a hand under my chin snapped my head back and my leg was taken away from under me. I hit the floor, my vision swimming and my head scrambled. I rolled and a kick helped me on my way. I reached for my magic, but another blow to my head sent my focus spinning away again.
Depths!
The point of a dagger touched me under the chin. I stopped moving. I blinked my eyes furiously until the shape above me coalesced out of my blurred vision.
Captain Meroi Gale.
Shit.
It seemed like she didn’t need Ash to take me down.
“You stole my Ash. I should kill you right here.”
It hurt just to pull words together and force them out. “Aren’t there laws against that?”
Her face didn’t soften. “Not for me.”
I tried a smile, but there wasn’t a trace of her previous friendliness on her face.
“Of course I didn’t steal your Ash. How could I?” I didn’t dare speak above a whisper in case the point of the knife skewered me.
She jabbed it in anyway. I felt blood trickle over my throat.
“Don’t fucking lie to me, you shit.”
I moistened my lips. “Watch.”
Slowly, carefully, so she didn’t get the wrong idea, I drew in raw magic and let a glow build around my hand.
“If I had your Ash, how could I do that? And I’m a mage. Ash is the last thing I want around me.”
She hauled me up with her other hand, keeping the point of the knife at my throat. She was strong. Even if I’d had warning, even with my magic ready, I doubted I could have taken her.
“I don’t know why you stole it,” she said, “and I don’t care.” That scar across her face that sometimes made her look like she was about to grin didn’t anymore. It made her look like she would cut my throat. She’s Ash Guard, you idiot. What did you expect? She was a mage killer. I was a mage. Did I think we were going to be sending each other flowers? “You are going to get it back to me, whatever you’ve done with it, or I will gut you like a cheap fish.”
There was fury in her eyes, but also some other emotion I couldn’t identify. She shoved me against the wall. My head bounced off it, sending sparks spinning across my eyes again. Why couldn’t people leave my head alone? I didn’t have much going for me. I couldn’t afford to lose what was left of my brain as well.
With a last hiss, Captain Gale turned away from me and stalked off through the house.
She hadn’t reported me to her superiors in the Ash Guard. Why not? I didn’t think it was because she liked me. There was something else going on here. What exactly was the penalty for an Ash Guard captain who lost her Ash?
I didn’t know if that gave me leverage, and I wasn’t going to test it unless I absolutely had to.
I watched her go, then turned and headed back down the stairs.
The cellar was quiet and dark. Galena Sunstone had left me a lamp, but it wasn’t enough to illuminate the whole room. No matter where I placed it, there were shadows in one corner of the cellar or the other. I wasn’t normally scared of the dark, but then I wasn’t normally waiting for ghosts who had, to my knowledge, brutally killed at least three people.
Captain Gale had knocked me off balance. The guilt and the regret at what I had done in stealing her Ash ate at me. I didn’t know if that was because she had given me the benefit of the doubt when she had no reason to and then I had betrayed her or just because I had kind of fancied her, but I couldn’t shake it.
In the flickering light of the lamp, the three-quarter circle of silver looked too thin and flimsy to protect me against the fury of the murder-ghosts. A single brush of a foot could break the circle open and let them come at me. I knew, theoretically, that ghosts couldn’t touch silver, but then I also knew that they couldn’t rip people apart, and I had watched the priest carved into slices upstairs like a Charo pie.
Maybe my old tutor, Scholar Longstream, at the university had been wrong. Maybe this was the ghost of a soul rider. The scholars were wrong about enough when it came to magic. I could deal with a soul rider, alive or dead.
It’s not a soul rider. You know that.
Perhaps it was my imagination, but the silver part-circle looked narrower than before.
You’re scaring yourself, Nik. Snap out of it.
I let my eyes unfocus. Raw magic drifted like green mist around me. There was no indication of shaped magic, nor of the white ectoplasm of the ghosts.
I released a breath.
The ghosts would come, repeating that same mindless ritual they performed night after night, fleeing from some long gone attacker until they reached the cellar and faded again. Or not, if I was quick enough to trap them.
I finished off the last of the food Galena Sunstone’s servants had set out and settled back down to wait.
Despite my nerves, the exertions and lack of sleep over the last few days — not to mention the beatings I had taken — overcame me. I dragged a sack of flour over and sank into an uncomfortable sleep propped between the sack and the shelves.
Chapter Nineteen
I jerked awake an hour or two later as an electric buzz shot through my hands and up my arms.
For a second, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. Then I realised: my ward had been tripped. The ghosts had arrived.
I climbed stiffly to my feet as the first trickle of cold brushed against my skin. Without my magical vision, I would have seen nothing — maybe a faint dawn-behind-the-mountains glow at the top of the stairs, but no more. But when I unfocused, I could see the ectoplasm as tentacles of fog twitching, stretching, and fading down the stairs, like the ghost of a giant squid feeling its way in the murk of an ocean. It was all a metaphor, anyway. Ectoplasm was a type of magic, and if I had heard magic as music, I suspected it would have been a discordant whisper on strings or a brush trembling across cymbals.
I dropped my magical vision to watch the ghosts descend. They were in a hurry, looking back — scared, I thought — holding hands, the man leading the woman by a step. I heard the faint echo of running feet.
I stepped aside, letting them past. They didn’t notice me. Why would they? In whatever scene they were reliving from hundreds of years ago, I hadn’t been there.
The cold that washed over me was accompanied by the kind of fear that made me want to turn and run, too. I had sensed fear upstairs in the kitchen, but nothing like this. They had become more afraid as they had fled. My instincts had been right. Whatever had happened to them, it had reached its climax here.
I had got the circle of silver right, too. They didn’t even slow as they rushed into it and drifted to a halt.
I didn’t have long. The ghosts might have been on a predetermined path, but finding their way blocked, they would try another route to reach their destination. I had heard scholars at the university argue, over drinks, about whether ghosts were simply scripts ready to be acted out, unchanging, on some metaphysical stage or whether they were the actors themselves, able to change their lines and directions if the whim came upon them. As far as I could tell, none of those scholars had willingly come within half a mile of a real ghost. I grabbed the pile of remaining silver and hurriedly completed the circle.
The moment I was done
, the cold and the fear cut abruptly off, and the ghosts lost their sense of urgency. They pressed towards the far corner of the cellar, but the silver sent them drifting back again.
I took the chance to study them closer. They were both young, probably not much older than twenty, although it was hard to tell, what with them being partially see-through. The woman wore a knee length dress with serpentine patterns embroidered into the sleeves. The man was dressed in that ridiculous style that had been popular two hundred and fifty years ago, where his trousers ended halfway down his calves, leaving an inch or two of bare skin before the heavy boots. I was glad that had gone out of fashion before my time.
Their clothing was decent quality and clean, but not expensive. Leaning closer, I noticed the same ram’s head emblem embroidered into the cuffs of their sleeves that was carved above most of the doors of this house. Sunstone servants, then, employed by whichever Sunstone had lived here back then. Both still looked scared, throwing glances over their shoulders, but with nowhere to flee, there was something mechanical about it, as if they were repeating the motion because that was what their fragmentary memories required of them.
Just showing beneath the woman’s sleeve was a spiral band made of gold — or some metal supposed to look like gold; bronze perhaps — reaching upwards from her wrist presumably to her elbow. She was due to be married, then. The spiral band was a custom already falling out of fashion a couple of hundred years ago. It would have been a family heirloom, handed down to her, or a piece borrowed from someone wealthier, certainly not something she could have afforded as a servant. If the young man was wearing a matching item, his longer sleeve covered it.
I unfocused my eyes to see the couple with my magical vision. The white, ectoplasmic magic was entirely confined within the circle. Trails of it tested the invisible barrier and withdrew.
The ghosts had been passive when the priest had trapped them upstairs, but when he had tried to exorcise them, they had become filled with an overwhelming power, and I had scarcely been able to slow them with all the charcoal, arevena, and silver I had had. Nervously, I walked a circle around them, tracing another barrier of charcoal dust around the silver, then adding a third made of the flowers.
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