But her three-inch sample had grown a foot and a half overnight. Shoulders slumping, Mahliki sneered at the vine and walked around the lab, using her lantern to light others.
“If it’s any consolation, I’m stuck with my problem as well,” came her mother’s voice from the doorway.
They had eaten breakfast together. Mother had mentioned that she planned to watch Mahliki like a hawk to ensure she actually ate, having heard of meals being ignored during the previous two days. Of course, Mother’s resolution had lasted only until she grew distracted by her own project, the decoding of some intercepted message that she had uncovered the night before.
“I know,” Mahliki said, “and I appreciate you coming down to take another look in that encyclopedia.” Mother called the black sphere she had uncovered from the ancient tunnels twenty years earlier a “repository of knowledge,” but Mahliki had always found that title cumbersome. Nor could she pronounce the name for it in the ancient language. “I thought there might be something on the world where they came from, specifically what the night and day and seasonal cycles are like, if they had those things at all. If we can’t kill this plant, maybe we can at least figure out what makes it go dormant and buy ourselves some time.”
“I will look.” Mother slid onto a stool near a counter and pushed back a set of scalpels—little good they had done so far—to make room for her notes and the sphere. “Though I do wonder at the plausibility of creating an eighteen-hour-long night if we find out that is what’s required. With the plant now occupying numerous square miles, we can’t simply lock it in a dark closet.”
“I know, but if that’s what it takes, we can figure out a way to make it work.” Mahliki believed her words, though she doubted darkness alone would solve the problem, especially not when her sample had continued to grow overnight. At the moment, it was snuggled up to the half-melted ice block in the vivarium with it. Cold obviously didn’t damage its tissues either, at least not any degree of cold she could manufacture.
A knock came at the steel door a moment before it opened. Father strode in past the two guards who were busy bowing and thumping their fists to their chests for him. He had taken to wearing a pistol and a long dagger, even around the hotel, but at least he had been looking better in the last couple of days, less tired and headachy.
“Good morning, ladies,” Father said, walking over to kiss them on the cheeks. He lingered beside Mother, clasping her hand in one of his—not the one she was using to tinker with the sphere. “I had meant to catch up with you at breakfast, but your dining was not a leisurely one, I hear.”
“Mysteries to decrypt, and plants to kill,” Mahliki said. “One can’t tarry.”
She made light of their morning’s work, but in truth, she was disappointed in herself for not having a solution yet. Father might have come to visit to be supportive, but he probably also wanted to know what he could do to speed the process along.
“Indeed not,” Father said, pointing to the vivarium. “Find anything that harms it yet?” He asked it casually, his elbow leaning on the table behind Mother, but the intensity in his eyes belied that calm. He had to be dealing with thousands of complaints, fielding thousands of idiotic suggestions, and worrying that the entire city would be devoured by the plant in the first few months of his presidency.
Mahliki hated that all she could say was, “Not yet. Sorry.”
“I’m only taking an hour or so away from decrypting the note to look up a few things for her,” Mother said. She didn’t sound defensive exactly, but as if she wanted to let him know she hadn’t given up on her task for him. “It’s proving more difficult to crack than I thought, but I’ll get it.”
“I know you will,” Father said. “And the plant should be the priority, so any insight you can provide...” He extended a hand toward Mahliki.
“I know. I’m trying.” Mother’s eyes seemed tight. Maybe she hated not having a solution for Father too.
“I mistakenly put out two versions of a report on our likely headquarters relocation,” he said, winking at Mother. “If one reaches enemy hands and the other doesn’t, I’ll be able to narrow down the possibilities as to who our snitch might be.”
“Good idea,” Mother said.
“I wish Sicarius would return. I had Dak send out a few more men to keep an eye on possible suspects, but with Sauda compromised as it were, I doubt her house will be used as a mail drop any longer.”
“Compromised? Was she arrested?” Mother asked.
“She’s being held for her own safety—and for questioning. Apparently, enforcers aren’t yet comfortable going right out and saying they’re arresting warrior-caste people.”
“Will you go see her?” Mother asked. Mahliki doubted she approved of the idea, but she was being careful not to let her feelings bleed through.
“I probably should, if only to get her side of the story, though I’ve already been informed by my new lawyer that this shouldn’t be a public event. I’ll have to figure out a way to sneak out in private.”
An image came to mind of Father making a blanket rope and climbing down from his window in the middle of the night. Silly. He would more likely make some mechanical contraption that would launch him from the roof with a parachute on his back.
Mother either didn’t have an opinion on this potential visit or had been distracted by something intriguing in her notes. Mahliki picked up a pencil and fetched a new chemical concoction to try on the plant. Time to get back to work.
Father looked back and forth between them. “Is there anything I can do to help? For either of you? I would gladly delay the fourteen meetings scheduled for me this morning if I could be of assistance.” He sounded hopeful. Mahliki wouldn’t want to go to all those boring meetings, either.
“Sorry, Father,” she said. “If it turns out that we need to figure out a way to make it dark in the city for seventy-two hours straight or some other impossible task, I’ll come to you first.”
“I used to appreciate the challenge of an impossible task, but there have been far too many of them of late.” He looked like he wanted to linger, but seemed to realize his presence, however benign he sought to be, applied pressure rather than offering support.
Mother sighed softly when the door closed.
“Do you feel it too?” Mahliki asked. Stopping a snitch might not be as important as stopping that plant, but she would like it more if someone else felt as beleaguered as she did. Mother always seemed so serene and unflappable in the face of catastrophe. Not this time.
“I am worried about him and sense that... the longer it takes me to figure this out, the more danger he is in.”
“Oh. Do you ever feel like...?” Mahliki chewed on the end of her pencil. “Never mind. I better get this test going.”
“You’re not good enough?” Mother suggested.
Mahliki shrugged. “Maybe. It’s not that I’ve never failed before—as you know—but there’s never been so much at stake. It’s frustrating and terrifying that I seem to be the person with the most expertise around—I’m not used to that, either—and Mother? I don’t have a clue as to what I’m doing. I’m just shooting arrows into the jungle and hoping one will land in the turkey dinner the family needs to keep from starving.”
“That is how many of us, even experts, must resort to solving problems at times.”
“What if I don’t figure this out? What if the only time it really matters, I fail?”
“He will still love you.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Mahliki said, “but... it’s his disappointment I guess I fear. And knowing that in failing, I don’t just fail myself, but I fail him and this entire city. Maybe this entire nation.”
“I understand,” Mother said. “I’m the one who decided to destroy that ship from within, remember? I don’t know how I could have foreseen this consequence, but perhaps I should have. If you fail, it’s only because I set the stage for you to do so.”
“Well, we’re a happy pair, ar
en’t we?”
Mother snorted.
Footsteps rang on the cement floor in the hallway, rapid footsteps. Raised voices, orders to, “Halt” echoed through the door.
Mahliki tilted her head, wondering who had charged down here so urgently to see her. Not someone reporting that the plant had breeched the basement, she hoped. Men with machetes had been keeping the sewers near the foundation clear of the vines.
“...have to get in,” a male voice yelled. “No time for...”
“I think that’s Sespian.” Mahliki ran to the door and opened it before her guards could bowl him to the ground—or vice versa.
“Mahliki,” Sespian blurted as soon as she stuck her head out. “Lightning kills the plant!”
“What?”
“We were out on the streets, and a crazy priest stood in front of one of the vines coming up out of a manhole and—I’m not quite sure how he managed this yet—called down lightning from the storm to strike the plant. It fried it. Just that arm that was sticking up out of the manhole—we went in and checked how far the damage extended—but it’s not growing back. It’s charred and dried up. You could kick the dead limb into pieces.”
“Lightning,” Mahliki mused. “High voltage electricity.”
“Was it a priest in a green robe, by chance?” Mother asked.
“Yes, there was a whole crowd of them gathered for the event,” Sespian said. “And they had protest signs with them that mentioned a couple of gods. Twin gods.”
Mahliki couldn’t care less about a crazy priest or his religion. She was gazing around the laboratory and finding it depressingly absent in items that could produce electricity. She couldn’t imagine simply driving lightning rods into the lake around the plant and hoping for another storm. They would have to find a way to duplicate the energy in the sky. And she didn’t know how to do that. She knew people had ways of storing electricity—Father had some weird jar sitting on his desk back home, along with his quirky nautical instruments from times past—but creating it? An image of shuffling along one of the thick carpets upstairs and zapping an innocent guard with a static charge came to mind. Somehow she doubted that would incinerate the plant.
Mother stood up. “What were the names of the gods?”
“Oh, they were...” Sespian drummed his fingers on his thighs, then looked up, snapping them. “He called for us to worship Magu and Dagu.”
Mother stared at Mahliki. Mahliki tore her thoughts away from speculation on lightning. “What?”
“Magu is the god featured in that statuette that Rias’s first wife gave him.”
“So Sauda is working with those zealots?”
“A lot of people may be. This gives me an idea about that encrypted message,” Mother said.
“Good, but I’m more concerned about how to use this knowledge to kill the plant right now.”
“The priest implied he could get rid of it if he were given the presidency and his people were put into positions of power,” Sespian said.
“Right,” Mahliki said. “Let’s put that high on the list of things that aren’t going to happen today.”
“After that demonstration, he’s going to get a lot of popular support,” Sespian said. “I don’t know what mental sciences—or did they simply call it magic back then?—priests from that religion might have practiced, or if all that was hokum and we simply need to figure out how he attracted the lightning strike. Professor Komitopis? Do you know if that cult would have had that kind of power? Ah, Professor Komitopis?”
Mother wasn’t paying attention. She was bent over her notes again, with the sphere pushed off to the side.
Mahliki grabbed Sespian’s arm. “Let’s go tell my father. I don’t know about magic, but if anyone can make lightning naturally, it’ll be him.”
“No argument there,” Sespian said, letting her guide him out, though he did give a long glance back toward Mother as they left the room.
• • • • •
She was good. Very good.
Sicarius had known that from their first meeting at the cove on the lake, and a night trying to track the woman hadn’t changed his opinion of the fact; he had only come to respect her ability more, especially when she had murdered Lord Mancrest scant meters from Sicarius’s position. She had nearly murdered him as well. That tiny crossbow bolt... He hadn’t consciously heard its twang as it left the miniature bow, nor had he sensed her moving about in the brush, aiming at him. Only instincts had kept him from being struck.
He crouched now on another rooftop in the old, decrepit part of the city, only the rain and the early hour keeping the gang members off the streets. Their numbers were diminished in the aftermath of Amaranthe’s molasses flood the winter before, but it was still a dangerous area. Bold of a Nurian woman to acquire lodgings in a neighborhood surrounded by drug dealers and gang thugs, most of whom would shoot her on sight simply for being a stranger, never caring that she was a Nurian, but Sicarius doubted anyone here had seen her. Even the landlady had probably only received an envelope under the door to pay for the room. That is how he would have done it if were he on a mission in a foreign land.
What her mission was exactly, he didn’t yet know. He was a target, he felt certain, and wasn’t surprised—not only had he assassinated important persons on the Nurian continent, but it was possible the mage hunters themselves had a reason to loathe him, if someone over there had a long memory. But why kill Lord Mancrest? Something to discredit the president? By causing his first wife to be thrown in prison? If so, why the wife he hadn’t spoken to in twenty years? It would make far more sense to discredit Professor Komitopis.
Should he question her once he captured her? It seemed logical, but if she proved as dangerous as he thought she might, it would be wisest to simply kill her. To leave her alive to plot and counterattack... he might live to regret it. Or die to regret it.
It was only perseverance that had brought him to this rooftop from which he could observe a second-story window at the back of a tenement building, the shutters torn free long ago. Now and then, the grimy cotton curtain shuddered, but the cold breeze accounted for the movement, not anyone stirring inside. It remained drawn, as it had since she had dumped a chamber pot into the alley an hour earlier. When she had first arrived, she had climbed the old mason wall, its mortar gray and crumbling with age, and shimmied inside, barely stirring that curtain as she entered. At first, he had assumed she was there for another mission, but one did not bother to toss out the piss when one was there to kill someone. That one action told him that he had found her lodgings—and that she wasn’t aware that he had followed her.
After the senior Lord Mancrest’s assassination, Sicarius had been swift enough in racing out of the house to glimpse the woman sprinting through the garden and into the alley—before that, he hadn’t been positive the Nurian was a woman. There hadn’t been time to let Amaranthe know where he was going; he had simply followed.
In the beginning, she had been aware of his pursuit, and she had taken to the sewers, much as Amaranthe had done earlier. He had grown up in this city though and held a map of those tangled passages, some modern and some centuries old, in his head. He had taken a risk in splitting off to choose a shortcut, but it had paid off in the end. He had come out ahead of her in the subterranean maze, running in the shadows to her front instead of to her rear, and she, listening for pursuit from behind, had gradually slowed down, believing she had lost him. She had varied her path impressively and come up several miles from her final destination, choosing alleys and cutting through basements and across rooftops and once through a brothel. He almost had lost her once, but as night had faded and a storm rolled in, she had finally needed rest and had returned to this place.
Water dripped from Sicarius’s eyebrows and he wiped it away, lest it disturb his vision. When he was on the hunt, he was like a hound on the trail of prey and didn’t notice the weather, ignoring the way it plastered his hair to his head and soaked his clothing. All that matte
red was catching what he hunted.
Enough time had passed. She would have eaten and, after being up all night working, she would have lain down to rest. Now was his opportunity to catch her unprepared. To subdue her and ask questions... or simply to destroy a threat to him... forever. Were Amaranthe here, she might have had an opinion on the matter, a recommendation to spare the woman’s life or even try to turn her away from her nation, but Amaranthe should be back in the hotel, sleeping or perhaps rising by now. And worrying about him. Once he could have hunted for days without informing anyone of his whereabouts, but now... he regretted that she would grow concerned with his absence.
Sicarius went down the back side of the building, on the off chance that his foe was watching from behind those curtains. She wouldn’t have been able to pierce the deep shadows beside a chimney, where he had hidden for the last hour, but sliding down the drainpipe in front of her window wouldn’t have been wise. The route along the back of the opposite building took the window—and the tenement’s front door—from his sight for a moment, but it couldn’t be helped. He hurried into the alley, using the shadows to hide his approach. He stepped lightly past broken brandy barrels, piles of excrement, and men sleeping in alcoves, none of whom stirred at his passing, then climbed up the corner of the building and across to her window.
For a moment, he hung outside like a spider on the wall, his toes wedged in cracks in the mortar, his fingers finding equally shallow handholds. His ear to the cool, damp brick, he listened for sounds within. Nothing stirred. He inhaled in quick sniffs, checking with his other senses before proceeding. The aromatic alley almost overrode any subtler scents, but he detected a hint of bacon and freshly baked rice bread. An ambitious meal for an assassin who must be eager to get some rest. He had usually lived on dried meat bars on his trips. Perhaps the scents came from another window.
Sicarius eased closer until he could step on the window ledge. The rusty screws remained from the shutters that had long since been ripped free—or perhaps rotted free—and he used them for a last handhold, as he parted the curtain with his free fingers. He spotted the dilapidated wood stove that had been used to cook breakfast, a greasy pan still on top, and other signs of recent habitation: a familiar cloak, a leather satchel, a heavy crossbow—that wouldn’t have been the one she had used to shoot him—and what might have been a tool case, though this one probably contained weapons. Throwing knives or other blades.
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