Ecstasy

by Jacquelyn Frank

  Trace actually smiled at that. “You were worried about me.”

  “Of course I was!” Magnus said gruffly as he gained his feet and paced for a short turn. “You can grow as independent of me as you like, Ajai Trace, but no matter how high in this world you place yourself, you’ll not escape your roots with me!”

  “I have no desire to do so,” Trace assured him.

  “Well, then, don’t act so surprised. It’s insulting. I have my reasons for not exposing my feelings in front of those who work with me, but you and I know the truth of it. At least, I should hope you do.” Magnus stilled with a deep sigh, looking steadily at the other man. “You are my son, Trace. Blood or no blood, you are my son. I fathered you for decades where you barely left my sight, and I will father you until you step into your final Darkness.”

  “I know, M’jan,” he acknowledged softly, giving his foster father a heart-touched acknowledgment. “Thank you for all you have done for us.”

  “Thank me when she is well, my son. She has a way to go yet.”

  Chapter 14

  Guin walked through the enclave quickly in search of Trace.

  He didn’t like to leave Malaya for any reason, especially after the second attack on Trace. The dreadful fact was that the streets of the commune could be littered with conspirators, and any one of those close to the upper government could find themselves unexpectedly dead. Every face he encountered, whether he knew them well or not, was shaded with threat in his mind. Since his mistress had not yet given him leave to investigate deeper, all he could do was remain as vigilant as possible.

  Guin took the main thoroughfare into the relay tunnel. An old mining shaft from over a century past, the cave entrance had been transformed into the smooth walls of a tunnel that transitioned the sparse exterior commune to the larger and more intricate interior.

  Here mine shafts and tunnels that had been exhausted in the search for precious metals had provided the infrastructure to the underground city the ’Dwellers had built of it. It went into the mountain range for miles, and each man-made passage that had been hacked roughly open had since been transformed by engineers and builders into ash-plastered and boot-blackened curves. They led into the naturally warmer belly of the earth, the one true blackness on the planet and the one place where the threat of light had been totally removed.

  As Guin strode through, he was crossing the equivalent of a biodome constructed under rock and stone. It had its own independent water supply from underground rivers and lakes, heated water from hot springs, as well as a supply from the freshwater Elk’s Lake that stretched out about a half mile below their elevation. With the exception of lights, every modern convenience that was not light emitting, or alterable into such, could be found. Plumbing. Electricity for heat. Even communications technology. It was not, perhaps, flawlessly provided and perfect in its supply/demand quotient, but it was close enough to keep them safe and comfortable. They had learned how to compensate for the rest with things like black fire or natural resources.

  There was only one place in the entire ’Dweller city where light could be found, and that was the hydroponics stations. They were set in the lowest and most distant sections of tunneling, and security limited access to it to both protect the products growing in it and those who might accidentally wander in during a “daylight” event. Timers did what Shadowdweller hands could not, and just to be certain, heavy doors sealed it all away. Tristan likened it to humans toying with nuclear power. It was dangerous and deadly, but efficient and necessary in its way. Despite the migrations, there were those who never moved from the city. Since there were so many to feed, and the ordering of supplies and moving them in were restricted by weather allowances, it made sense to be as independent of the outside world as possible.

  Despite what Malaya thought, Guin was not as well known as she assumed. She mistook Trace’s more congenial presence for Guin’s, when it came to that, at times. No one acknowledged Guin who wasn’t a guard, which was very different than all the calling out and waving that went on when he was beside Trace or either of the royals. Even the guard acknowledgment was about knowing who their master was, as opposed to anything of a friendly sort. Not that the bodyguard took any offense.

  Guin simply wasn’t the friendly sort.

  He chose his companions on very rare and careful occasions.

  At the moment, it was Trace he sought. The vizier had become increasingly distracted since the recovery of the blond half-breed girl, and now he was becoming increasingly scarce as well. Guin hardly understood the man’s behavior. Before Baylor’s attack, you could not have found another man more focused and dedicated to his work, except perhaps for the man who had raised Trace. Now, at a time when he was probably most needed, his attention was wavering. Not that he was entirely neglectful or anything. He just wasn’t there all the time anymore. Guin didn’t like change. Not in schedule, routine, or in people. It disturbed the careful plans and patterns he used to predict safety and the behaviors of others at any given moment.

  And why was Trace nowhere to be found today? If Guin had his guess, he’d be exactly where he had been every day this week.

  Sure enough, as he entered into Sanctuary, he found Trace in his usual spot, leaning against one of the polished columns edging the rear exit of the temple proper. Guin crossed the vast flooring in a clipped rhythm of steps, his boots as sharp as his patience was short these days. Between Trace, Malaya, and Tristan acting so out of logic and character, not to mention traitors milling about with sedition on their minds, who could blame him for being a bit on edge?

  Guin was completely disgusted when Trace either didn’t notice his approach or outright ignored it, in spite of the fact that he came up directly behind him. Instead, the vizier continued to keep his full attention on the rear courtyard. As always, the scrawny little half-breed human was engaged in some useless activity or another, and Trace was just standing there watching her. He never approached her. Never even let her know he came there each and every day. He just stood and stared, thinking Light knew what, wasting time and focus best spent elsewhere.

  “The next time you let me come up on you like that, I am going to yell at the top of my lungs,” Guin threatened testily. “At least then she’ll know you’re standing here like some moonsick cub.”

  “Thank you for the warning. The next time you come up on me like this I will have to remember to run a dagger through your throat,” Trace responded dryly. Then, to prove his point, he reached down to slowly slide his blade back into the sheath rigged into his boot.

  Okay, now that impressed Guin. The bodyguard tried to remember seeing the vizier move. He realized that he couldn’t recollect any movement at all. That meant either he had been too busy grousing in his own mind, or the vizier had been armed all along. Since Guin hardly thought he could ever be that distracted, he realized the tanto had already been in Trace’s hand. That struck him as odd, considering where they were. Also, the vizier had grown up in Sanctuary. Why wouldn’t he feel completely safe here surrounded by memories and people from his boyhood?

  “Well, at least you aren’t as stupid as you are behaving,” Guin muttered. “Why don’t you go and say something to her? Why do you just stand here every day?”

  Trace turned his head very slowly and narrowed his eyes on the bodyguard. “Fine advice, coming from you,” he shot back.

  Guin felt a sickening rush of chill dread as he met the other man’s meaningful eyes. Well, he supposed he should have known better. After all, Trace didn’t advise the most powerful people in their world for no reason. It was his uncanny insights that had made him invaluable for years. The worst the war had ever gotten for their side had been when Trace was Acadian’s prisoner. They had been crippled those eleven months, like a powerful hunting beast suddenly losing a limb. They would have eventually learned to survive, but it would never be the same and it would have taken much longer than they could spare. Tristan’s plan to recover Trace, the moment they had learn
ed he was alive and being held prisoner, had been the most critical act of winning the war, in Guin’s opinion. Trace had not recovered fully from his ordeal until the war had officially ended, so it hadn’t been so much his contribution as it had been the morale change that had made the difference. But even injured to his soul with the horrors of torture, Trace had still played a critical part in the war’s final resolution and Malaya and Tristan’s assumption of power.

  That had been why Guin had started to call him a friend. That and the fact that despite eleven months at that witch’s mercy, Trace had never once given away a single piece of intel that would have endangered Malaya.

  That meant more to Guin than all the rest.

  “Fine. I’m a pot and you’re a kettle,” he muttered. “It isn’t the same, though. She isn’t untouchable and out of your league. If anything, you are out of hers. I mean, she’s just a half-breed, Trace. She isn’t even—”

  Yeah. That was stupid, Guin thought quickly as he found himself suddenly being shoved back into the huge antechamber behind them. He regained his balance quickly, though, pausing to rub at his chest where the vizier had struck him quick and hard.

  “You watch your tone, Ajai Guin,” he warned with a snarl and a pointed finger as he closed the distance between them rapidly. “I don’t care what they say about the way you fight, I will cut your heart out if I can find it!”

  Other than Xenia, Trace was the only one he would ever take a threat like that from remotely seriously. Again, he made Magnus the exception from that; however, the priest would never make a threat of that kind to anyone who wasn’t a Sinner. Guin was many things, but he was no Sinner.

  “Look, I only meant to stress it’s different from my situation, okay?” He backed up, taking a defensive posture, holding out a warning hand while laying another on the hilt of his blade. “Come on, Trace, you don’t even have your katana. What are you going to do, spit on me?”

  “And disrespect the temple? No. But anywhere else and I would have by now.” He moved forward again and Guin was forced to step back or engage him.

  “Don’t be so damn sensitive!” Guin barked in frustration. “We have better things to do than pick fights with each other!”

  Luckily, Trace was a creature of habit and logic. Both of those agreed with Guin’s point, and he stood down and folded his arms across his chest, though he still glared at him.

  “Why did you come down here?” Trace demanded.

  “I needed to clear some things up. I haven’t gotten to ask you for myself and I don’t trust secondhand accounts.”

  “Clear what up?”

  “The assassins at the post office.”

  “Oh.” Trace frowned at the memory and within seconds was turning to look back over his shoulder. Guin looked too, but all he saw was the half-breed girl parked on a lounge with a book in her lap. She was currently reading through her closed eyelids, which Guin considered could be mildly intriguing…for about half a second. What was the point in watching the half-breed sleep? “What about them?” Trace asked as he started to walk back toward the column he favored.

  “We never found the body of the one you killed. That means they dispose of their own dead so they don’t get tracked back. So I was thinking the assassin had to be someone noticeable.”

  “You think it was another senator.”

  “Maybe. Or something like that. I’ve been looking, but until session starts…Have you noticed any conspicuous absences?”

  “No. Not yet.” Trace finally turned his attention to the conversation and to Guin. “And I injured the other one. I was looking for a while to see if anyone favored their side, but after a couple of days they would have healed.”

  “If that. The scar will last a while, though. That’s good thinking. But here’s my thought. How many assassins use dipped blades, do you think?”

  “How should I know? You and I don’t exactly have Shadowdweller underworld connections, Guin.”

  “Well, since the end of the wars and you passing those laws about murder penalties, assassins don’t announce their trade anymore. But you have to suppose certain tricks are common with those from certain guilds. In the wars, we always knew the Siyth clan by how bloody they would leave the kill.”

  “And the Svedde clan always strung theirs up,” Trace added thoughtfully. “So how do we find out which assassins’ guild uses poisons? As you say, they no longer announce themselves, and they certainly won’t announce themselves to us.”

  “I can find a way around that, I think.”

  “So that has me asking, once again, why are you here? What do you need me for?”

  “I need you to tell me exactly who knew you were going into Shadowscape that day.”

  Trace frowned as he thought about it, and not for the first time.

  “Everyone in the Sanctuary RV. They were the only ones who knew why and when and where. Anyone else who watched Magnus fetch me would have had to make an extremely wild guess, considering I was still fresh off euphoria. But…”

  “But?”

  “But there were only priests and handmaidens there,” he said as he turned back to look at the sleeping blonde once more.

  Suddenly, everything clicked in Guin’s mind. Trace’s long visits down to the temple, his in-hand dagger, all of it. He wasn’t just mooning after the girl, he was protecting her. Trace believed someone in Sanctuary was a traitor.

  “Who was there? Be specific.”

  Trace listed everyone quickly, again proving he had thought this over many times already.

  “And Magnus, of course.”

  The look Trace shot him said he had total faith in the loyalties of his mentor. Guin was inclined to agree, but he didn’t have the luxury of being certain of anything without proving or disproving it first. It was simply the methodical way to do it, and the only way he could ensure Malaya’s absolute safety. Especially when he considered the access the priest had to the Chancellor. No one save himself, Tristan, and Rika had the access Magnus did.

  And no one was quite so deadly, either.

  The fact of the matter was that the priest was a trained killer, and he had trained others to do the very same thing. The man before Guin was his best example. It was true, there was usually a higher calling for those he trained, and all of Magnus’s work was the work of the gods, but it wouldn’t be the first time in the long history of their people when a zealot’s mind had turned good works into a personal and warped crusade. In all truth, Magnus was the leader of a powerful army of men and women, all with special gifts and all in charge of the education of most of the city’s young people.

  Darkness and Light spare them if Magnus ever decided to turn on them with that power at his beckoning.

  Guin highly doubted anything of the kind, of course. He had spent the past fifty years in close quarters listening to the man’s wisdom as he had counseled Malaya through the most difficult times in her life. He couldn’t claim a single instance where Magnus had tried to control the mind of his young charge rather than let her control herself. It was one of the things that had come to change Guin over these last decades. He had been a man of very little faith in anything but his sword until Malaya had found him and shown him her world, where so many outstanding people were working together to make a better place for their breed on a planet overrun with humans and light.

  Trace was wrong about one thing, though. Guin knew much more about assassins and their workings than he was given credit for. Some things had changed, but others never would. The guilds would probably always exist and they would always kill for a price or their own cause. It was one of the remaining thorns in the new regime’s side. Guin had no doubt that if anyone could defeat the ancient brotherhood it would be these people, but it wouldn’t change traditions, codes, and people who had been around since time was time.

  “If you don’t mind, I am going to work my way through that list of names, though I may need your help with it. You know this world far better than I do,” he acknowle
dged, glancing up and around at the temple ceilings and their gleaming tiles.

  “I did. Not so much now. Time has gotten away from me, Guin. It’s playing nasty tricks, too. When I was raised here, I would have sworn that the touch of corruption could not ever breach these walls. I guess I just assumed that because Magnus was so highly placed both here and in the royal confidence, it was still impossible.”

  “Magnus’s weight of power and responsibility may be the very reason why this has escaped his notice. He spends more time counseling the royals and their entourage since the recovery after the war than he does here. With good cause. It did a lot of damage to morale and spirits, as you are well aware.”

  Trace ignored the reference. “Even so. Magnus trained most of these people. I know what that is like. I can’t imagine ill and wickedness coming out of such devotion and discipline.”

  “People change. Times change. And every single man and woman in here comes from a clan, Trace. They say you can never shed the grains of your birth, nor your loyalty to your clan.”

  “Is that what you think?” Trace queried. “That this is a clan-motivated uprising?”

  “I told you, I will dismiss only what I can disprove. Until then, everything and everyone is under suspicion to me. Present company excluded.”

  “Yes, I doubt I’d poison myself,” he retorted dryly.

  “I’ve seen everything, so that wasn’t what excluded you.”

  “What does?” came the astounded query.

  “Your girlfriend over there,” Guin said, surprising him visibly.