He looked down at his twisting hands. “I don’t know how. I haven’t learned—”
I cut him off. “How about my mother? Any of her people?”
“I didn’t … I didn’t know who to trust.”
Because the mages who had taken Sereh had been the Countess’s mages. Fuck you, Mother. How did you let this happen right under your nose?
“Give me the pouch,” I said to Benny. When he handed over the Ash, I passed it to the frightened apprentice mage. “Take this to the Ash Guard headquarters. Tell them it’s for Captain Gale. Don’t tell them who you are. Don’t tell them who it’s from. Don’t tell them what it is. Don’t hang around. And take off that stupid mage’s cloak.” I leaned closer. “Fuck this up, let us down again, and I will kill you, raise you from the dead, and kill you all over again.”
With luck, this might at least get Captain Gale off my back long enough for us to face down Lowriver, and after that, well, maybe it wouldn’t matter any more.
With that cheering thought, Benny and I left Mica’s house behind and headed for Thousand Walls and our inevitable fate.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There should have been wards on the Silkstar Palace, brutal, unbreakable magic that I couldn’t have passed through without having every cell in my body ripped apart, but they were down.
“No guards on the roof,” Benny added, rubbing at his scraggly beard. “We should go over the top, down into that little courtyard I saw before, in through Silkstar’s private meeting room.”
“No point,” I said. “They’re expecting us. We’re not catching them by surprise.”
Benny eyed the front door. Benny wasn’t really a front door kind of person. He was more jimmied windows, picked side entrances, and lifted tiles. Using the main door was a professional affront.
“Could they be in this together?” Benny said. “Silkstar and this Lowriver?”
Because one of them wouldn’t be enough trouble on their own.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I didn’t seem likely. I had thought at first that Silkstar might have wanted to kill his own Master Servant if he had discovered she owed her position to the Wren, but I didn’t believe that anymore. “I don’t see Sunstone working with Silkstar after Silkstar took his wool contracts.” But then, Sunstone was dead. Could Silkstar have been playing him? Double crosses. Triple crosses. What the fuck did I know? “There have to be easier ways to dispose of your Master Servant than blowing up your study and letting the ghost of a beast god go rampaging around your palace.”
“Throw everyone off his trail, though,” Benny said.
“Or maybe Lowriver made a deal with Silkstar, blamed us, and promised to deliver us to him. Even if every high mage in the city is back there, it doesn’t change what we have to do.”
“Nah. It doesn’t.” Benny drew his dagger. “Come on.” He pushed the front door, and it swung open.
Not even locked, I thought.
The last time we had been here, on the Feast of Parata, the walls had been slid aside to clear a road through to the central courtyard. They had since been moved back. We now found ourselves in a plushly-dressed entrance hall.
“Which way?” I asked. Benny had always had a better sense of direction than me, particularly in the dark.
“Silkstar’s office, you reckon?”
I nodded.
“This way, then.”
The rooms we passed through were dark and silent. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this a household peacefully asleep.
“You know what I don’t get?” I whispered. There were morgue-lamps on the walls, but they had been turned down, so all we could see were the vague humps and mounds of furniture and stray lumps of Mycedan-tat. I didn’t want to announce our presence by conjuring a light. “Silkstar ruined the Estimable Sunstone. So the plan is, they kill Silkstar, Sunstone gets his wool contracts back and as a bonus gets to see his god. That makes sense. I mean, it’s fucked up, but it makes sense. But what’s in it for Lowriver?”
It bugged me. It was the one thing I still couldn’t understand in the whole theory.
Benny shrugged in the dark, a shadow moving in shadows, scarcely an arm’s length ahead of me, but almost too faint to see. “Power. Wealth. Status. That’s what it always is, if it ain’t revenge or anger. What difference does it make? She took Sereh. I’m going to stick a knife in her throat. She went after my kid.”
It still niggled at me. “She could be a member of the cult. Maybe she just wants to see her god, too.”
“Nah. That’s never all it is. Religions, cults, they’re just an excuse. She can say she wants to raise her Depths-cursed dead god, but it still comes down to the same thing. Power. Wealth. Status.”
Benny could be surprisingly wise when he wanted to be. Ambition was a hungry beast. Just ask my mother. Her ambition to be high mage, with all the power it brought, and her ambition for me to succeed her, had come close to breaking me. Maybe it actually had broken me. For Lowriver, there was ambition in her cult, ambition in the city, ambition among mages. She would be the cultist of Ah’té who could summon their dead god. A mage who could rise up to take the place of the slain high mage — and I couldn’t think of any way this was going to end between Lowriver and Silkstar other than one of them dead and the blame placed on me and Benny. They were both too powerful to be working nicely together. Power. Wealth. Status. Just like Benny said. Lowriver might dress it up as something else, but that would be the core of it.
Mica had been lined up to be Mother’s successor as high mage from the moment I had been discarded. So, Lowriver had decided to make another vacancy.
Benny motioned me forwards, and we crept into the next room.
Me, I had a different motivation in all this. Power repulsed me. Maybe I had my mother to thank for that. I just wanted this over. I wanted us safe. That would never happen unless Lowriver was dead or in the custody of the Ash Guard.
Somewhere in the dark, Lowriver was waiting, a tame god at her call and powers rivalling those of a high mage. I had Benny and a level of magical ability that had embarrassed my own mother.
There were too many rooms in this palace, that was the problem. Too many walls, too many doors, and too many places Lowriver could be waiting. If I tried to find her through magic, I would just be advertising my own position. I didn’t have the power to counter her or her god. The only reason I was still alive was that I had run.
This is stupid, really fucking stupid.
I was growing ever more tense. My thoughts were swirling faster and faster, inwards and down like a whirlpool.
You’re not good enough, you can’t do this. It sounded like my mother’s voice.
Benny glanced back. “You all right, mate?”
I nodded, even though I couldn’t tell if he could see me. I slowed my breathing, holding each breath before letting it slowly out.
Benny had reached a door. He indicated it with a tilt of his head.
“You smell that?”
I shoved the growing panic to the back of my mind and sniffed. Benny was right. There was something acrid and choking in the air.
“What do you reckon that is?” Benny asked.
“It’s not Ah’té, I know that much.” The ghost of the beast god hadn’t had a smell. Comes of being made of ectoplasm.
Benny straightened. “Yeah, well. If Sereh is on the other side, it doesn’t matter if it is. We’re going through every god, dead or alive, and every pissing mage in the city, right?”
“Right,” I said. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Benny eased the door open.
The smell washed through the doorway and over us. It was almost liquid in my throat, making me gag and choke. The air stank of piss, shit, and an unhealthy digestion, as well as blood, burned wood, and something else I couldn’t identify.
I squeezed my eyes and tried to only breathe through my mouth. Depths, that was vile. We stepped through into a big room. Large, immobile, regular ma
sses on either side disappeared into the darkness. I couldn’t see the far wall.
“Pity, Benny, what is this place?”
“You don’t recognise it?” he whispered. “It’s Silkstar’s office.”
Yeah. Now I did recognise it. The masses resolved themselves into desks, some pushed aside, one nearby toppled. It was still too dark to see details.
“It didn’t smell like this last time.”
Except it had, hadn’t it? This was where Imela Rush had been killed, cut almost through in four places, the first victim of the ghost of Ah’té.
Hadn’t they cleaned it? Imela Rush’s mother had said they had taken her body to the Lady. I took a step forwards, and my foot squelched on the carpet.
“Nik…” Benny warned.
I unfocused my eyes. The room was thick with magic, the roiling, churning remnants of spells thrown around, power strong enough to tear me apart if I had been standing in its way.
I took another involuntary step forwards. My leg hit something that was giving and flaccid. I jerked back, and in that moment, I caught a movement at the end of the room. I must have been drawing in raw magic without realising it, because I let it fly, shaping it into an arrow of magic that I flung across the space between us.
It shattered on something I couldn’t see. I staggered, dropping to one knee, feeling the wet stickiness soak through my trousers.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” a voice called from the other end of the room. “With your heritage, I had expected more.”
Yeah, well. The speaker hadn’t been the only one. I had spent most of my life with people expecting more from me.
Light burst from the ceiling, illuminating the room. It blinded me for a second as my eyes struggled to adapt.
“Lady of the Grove,” I heard Benny mutter.
I blinked my vision into focus.
We were in Silkstar’s office, like Benny had said, and we weren’t alone. Half a dozen men in black mages’ cloaks sprawled across the green carpet between the rows of flanking desks. Although ‘sprawled’ wasn’t really accurate. They had been brutally torn to pieces, sliced through by gigantic claws and thrown aside. Parts of bodies lay everywhere. Even saying there were half a dozen men was only a guess. My brain tried to count limbs, but my eyes slid away. There was blood up the walls, on the ceiling, soaking the carpet black. The stench of ruptured bowels made my stomach rebel.
You stood and fought. Against a beast god. Idiots.
I pulled my eyes away from the dead men. At the far end of the room, Lowriver sat on Silkstar’s altar of a desk, sprawled comfortably back, legs kicking casually over the edge. Below her feet, Silkstar’s decapitated head stared blankly at me.
“Guess she ain’t working with Silkstar after all,” Benny muttered.
My spear of magic hadn’t even ruffled her neat hair. Pity! She is so out of your class.
“Practised that pose in front of the mirror, did you?” I said.
Anger twitched Lowriver’s face, and I used that moment of distraction to throw more magic, not at her this time, but at the desk under her. I intended to smash the desk and dump her on her arse. Even the most powerful mage could lose concentration and be vulnerable for a moment.
My magic didn’t even reach the desk. She dismissed it with a casual flick of her fingers.
“You’re pathetic.” She slid off the desk. “No wonder you were such a disappointment to your mother. You know, my one worry in this whole thing was that no one would believe you were capable of magic like this, even with your family blood. I should have chosen someone more impressive. Too late for that, now, I suppose. At least you were stupid enough to come here. I really thought I was going to have to hunt you down.”
I gathered in magic and used it to lift a desk and throw it at her. It hit an invisible obstacle and crashed to the ground. I couldn’t get close to her. She wasn’t even trying.
Benny took a step to the left. His hand whipped out, and a knife flashed across the room towards Lowriver’s eye.
It stopped dead two feet from her. She tilted her head, as though examining it. Then it shot back the way it had come. Benny dodged, but not quick enough. The knife thudded into the meat of his shoulder, and he grunted. There wasn’t much meat on Benny, and I was sure it must’ve hit bone, but his expression didn’t change. It was cold, flat, and dangerous.
“My turn?” Lowriver said.
She lifted a hand, and fire blazed towards us. You didn’t have to use a hand for that spell, but it always looked more impressive. I didn’t have time to appreciate her style. I summoned a magical shield, angling it, just as the fire hit. The fire deflected upwards off the shield in an unending stream. Plaster shattered, and flames played over the painted ceiling. The force of the fire was incredible. Despite the shield, heat battered my skin. Sweat sprung from my pores and evaporated. My eyes watered painfully. I poured everything I could into the shield, but it was crumbling. Lowriver wasn’t even exerting herself. She was watching me with an amused smile.
She’s just playing, I realised. She could kill us both in a single second. We couldn’t win.
“We have to get out of here,” I hissed at Benny. The ends of my fingers were blistering from the heat. I had hoped we might catch Lowriver by surprise or sneak Sereh out unseen. That wasn’t an option anymore. I had known Lowriver was powerful. I just hadn’t realised how powerful. High mage powerful. “Get some backup. Mica. Mother. The Ash Guard. Anyone.”
Benny’s jaw jutted, and I was sure he was going to refuse. Then he scurried back to the door, and I followed, holding the disintegrating magical shield behind us.
“Mr. Field,” Lowriver called to Benny. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
The fire died away, and behind it, I saw Lowriver standing watching us. She wasn’t alone anymore. Hanging in the air beside her, suspended by magical ropes, immobilised, was Sereh. Her blue eyes were open and furious, but she couldn’t move.
As I watched, blood blossomed from a dozen points on Sereh’s body.
Benny went for Lowriver. One moment, he was motionless, the next he was crossing the room, blood-stained knife before him.
He didn’t make it. A magical blow kicked him back. Sereh screamed, Sereh who never let anything frighten or hurt her. It was a scream of utter despair.
I lost it.
There weren’t many things that would make me lose all control, but I had known this kid since she’d been a baby. She was family, and now she was helpless. I opened myself and sucked in raw magic. Then I threw it at Lowriver, unformed, boiling. I had never channelled power like this before. It raged through me. I felt blood vessels burst, muscle fibres tear, fractures race across my bones. I must have been screaming, but I couldn’t hear myself. My magic smashed into Lowriver’s defences, splintering them. I saw shock on her face, then I fell.
I must have been unconscious for a moment, because the next thing I knew, Benny was shaking my shoulder. “Get up!”
I couldn’t see. I wiped my hand across my face, and it came away red.
“My eyes are bleeding,” I whispered to no one in particular.
“Nik!”
I blinked.
Lowriver was still standing. There were burn marks on her clothes and a scrape on her cheek, but she was still standing. She had dropped Sereh, and her smile was gone.
“Hit her again!” Benny urged.
I couldn’t. Another attack like that would kill me. I would split, burst apart.
Lowriver sucked in raw magic. The whole room seemed to empty, like all the air was suddenly gone. With my magical vision, I saw the raw magic fill her, blazing like a midday sun. This was it. She wasn’t playing anymore.
Sereh rose behind her, as silent and smoothly as one of Lowriver’s ghosts. Her knife had appeared in her hand. It slid into Lowriver’s lower back.
Lowriver convulsed. She lost control of the raw magic. Her knees gave way, and she screamed. Then, she lashed out with a half-formed spell, knocking
Sereh back. She jerked out the knife in a gush of blood and another scream of pain. She clapped a hand over her wound, and as I watched, the blood slowed and stopped.
How the Depths had she done that?
Painfully, Lowriver climbed to her feet. From a pouch at her side, she pulled out what looked like a claw. It was smaller than my thumb and curved.
The relic of Ah’té.
I knew what would happen next.
Above the brutalised bodies of Silkstar’s mages, ectoplasm gathered. Ghosts of the dead mages.
Sereh had disappeared in the chaos, slipping off into the shadows in that way only she could.
I grabbed Benny by the shoulders, hauled myself up, and shouted, “Run!”
It wasn’t really running. More like painful, uncoordinated hobbling. We did have one advantage, though. The ghost of Ah’té was so big that it was going to have to go through the walls to get us, and there were a lot of walls in Thousand Walls. Possibly a thousand. Not all of them were brick or stone, though. Most of them were constructed of wood panels capable of being slid into or out of position. They wouldn’t hold the god long.
Benny swore and sputtered under his breath as he ducked through the first door and into the next room. There was no point in trying to hide anymore, so I conjured a light to stop us running into anything.
Behind us, I felt a surge of power as Ah’té possessed a ghost and its godly might manifested in the world. The wall behind us juddered and cracked. One moment it was bowing inwards, then claws longer than my arm cut through and ripped half of the wall away.
We staggered to the next door and shouldered it open, just as the ceiling came down behind us. Splinters, bricks, and plaster filled the space we had just vacated. Dust billowed up and out. I heard Ah’té smash its way through. We kept on moving.
Without silver, charcoal, or arevena, there wasn’t much I could do to slow the dead god, but the dumb bastard of a beast was doing a decent job on its own as it collapsed another wall on top of itself. I whacked Benny on his good shoulder to speed him on.
“I ain’t a bleeding mule,” he muttered.
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