by Martha Wells
The thing flung itself against the door. That was Madeline firing at it, she’s still in that room. Nicholas staggered, grabbed a broken chair. He had to distract it to give her time to escape.
Someone caught hold of the back of his collar and flung him away, back toward the outer door. He was outside, staggering on the pavement in front of the house, before he saw that it was Crack.
People were screaming, running. Nicholas tore himself free and looked through the door. He ducked back immediately. Dirt clods and shards of stone were flying out of the interior of the house, striking the steps and the court. Crack caught his arm and tried to drag him away. "She’s still in there!" Nicholas shouted, twisting his arm to free himself.
They both must have remembered the boarded-up window at the same moment and instead of fighting they were running for the corner of the little house, knocking into each other in their haste. Lighter on his feet, Nicholas reached it first and as he dug at the first board to rip it free he heard breaking glass from inside the room. She’s alive, she’s breaking in the window from inside, he thought, tearing down the board. Crack was helping, then Reynard was there, taller than both of them and able to get a better grip on the top boards, then Lamane caught up to them.
The last board came free and Madeline launched herself through the window and into Nicholas’s arms, the last glass fragments tearing at her clothes. Over her shoulder as he pulled her free he saw the body of the driver, lying in the open doorway of the room. One of the walls was bowed inward and as the lamp flickered and went out Nicholas heard the crash of the ceiling coming down. Then they were all running down the alley toward the street.
Nicholas realized Cusard wasn’t with them. He knew the old man had gotten out of the house. He had been right behind Reynard. He wondered if Cusard had panicked and left them; he would’ve thought Lamane would break before the old thief.
They came out of the alley into the street. The din from the carriage court was audible and people, a few tradesmen, a couple of puzzled prostitutes, were stopping and staring, though coach traffic was still moving. Others were standing in doorways or peering out windows. Nicholas saw Devis on the box of their cabriolet heading toward them, and behind the smaller vehicle Cusard driving his bulky wagon. More relieved than he liked to admit, Nicholas thought, of course, he went to warn Devis we needed to make a quick escape.
Nicholas pointed at the wagon and Lamane ran for it without further need of instruction. "What happened?" Reynard was asking Madeline.
"I cut the driver loose," she said. She had lost her hat and when she ran a hand through her disordered hair, forgetting for the moment her men’s clothing, the dark curls tumbled down to her shoulders. "I wanted to give him a chance. It couldn’t get in the door, but it started striking the wall and one of the beams hit him."
"Not here," Nicholas said, urgently. "Later."
The cabriolet drew even with them and they tumbled in.
"I never got a good look at it," Madeline confessed. "Did you?"
"No, it was too dark." They were a good distance from the ill-fated court, almost to the river. Reynard had told them how Crack had been thrown out the front door when the creature had first burst through the floor; the henchman had kept the others from running back down the passage, creeping slowly down it himself to retrieve Nicholas. And probably saved all our lives, Nicholas thought. If anyone had run into that room with a lamp, none of them would have had a chance. For someone who had been accused of killing several men in an unprovoked rage, Crack was awfully good at keeping his head in a crisis. It was too bad the judges at his trial hadn’t bothered to discern that fact.
Once they had crossed the river, Nicholas tapped on the ceiling for Devis to stop. They drew rein in an unoccupied side street and he stepped out of the cabriolet to consult briefly with the coachman and to tell Cusard and Lamane to break off and return to the warehouse.
He climbed back into the little vehicle, noticing for the first time he had splinters in his hands from ripping at the board-covered window.
Madeline had heard his directions to Devis and now asked, "We’re going to Arisilde?"
"Yes. We need to know how that thing found us." We need help, Nicholas thought. He settled back into the seat as the cab jolted forward. Cusard’s wagon passed them, Lamane lifting one hand in a nervous salute as the cumbersome vehicle turned down a cross street. Nicholas had to assume everyone who had been in the house was now known to Octave’s sorcerer; they had to keep moving until he could get Arisilde’s protection for them.
"Is that worth it?" Reynard said. He had only met the sorcerer a few times in the past years and hadn’t known Arisilde when he was at Lodun and at the height of his powers. "I mean, will it be of any use?"
"He was well enough today at Valent House when he destroyed one of Octave’s ghouls. We’ll just have to hope he hasn’t succumbed since this afternoon," Nicholas said, but thought fond hope.
"You think that thing is going to try again?" Reynard asked, watching him.
"It’s the safest assumption to make," Nicholas admitted.
Madeline glanced up from her contemplation of the dark street. "I think it’s the only assumption to make."
No word of the disturbance across the river had reached the Street of Flowers and the Philosopher’s Cross yet and all was as usual, colored lights lit over the market stalls and gay laughter and tinny music in the cool night air. Nicholas stepped down from the cab in the dark alley next to Arisilde’s tenement and immediately felt something was out of place. He turned to help Madeline down and she gripped his arm, her dark eyes worried. "Something’s wrong, can you feel it?" she asked.
He didn’t want to answer her. He waited until Reynard had climbed out of the coach and then he started for the door.
The concierge was gone again. Nicholas took the rickety steps two and three t a time.
Arisilde’s door was in the right place and he banged on it peremptorily. He glanced back as the others reached the landing.
He heard footsteps in the apartment, then the door opened to reveal Isham, Arisilde’s Parscian servant. For an instant Nicholas felt a rush of relief, then he saw the man’s face.
Isham had always seemed ageless, like a wall-carving on one of the temples of his country, but now he looked old. The dark skin of his face seemed to sag, showing the network of wrinkles as fine gray lines and his eyes were wretched.
Nicholas said, "What’s happened?"
Isham motioned for him to follow and turned back down the little hall. Nicholas pushed past him, stopped at the door to the bedchamber.
The low-ceilinged windowless room smelled of a bizarre variety of incenses, the tiny dresser and cabinet were crammed with books and papers, the carpet dusty and the wide bed disordered. Arisilde lay on that bed, a colorfully patterned coverlet drawn up to his chest. It was almost as Nicholas had left him last night, accept that now Arisilde wasn’t breathing.
Nicholas went to stand next to the bed. He touched Arisilde’s hands, folded across the coverlet. The skin was still warm. This close he could see Arisilde was still breathing, but it was a slow, shallow respiration.
"I fear he will die soon," Isham said bitterly, in perfectly pronounced Rienish. Nicholas realized he had never heard the man speak before. "The drugs he took, they make the heart weak. I think it is only his great power that keeps him alive."
"When did it happen?" Madeline asked from the doorway.
Isham turned to her. "He seemed well this morning. He went out, I don’t know where—"
"He was with me," Nicholas said. He was surprised at how normal his voice sounded. He touched Arisilde’s face and then, moving like an automaton, he lifted the eyelids and felt for the pulse at the sorcerer’s wrist. There had been times when he had wished Arisilde dead and thought it would be a welcome release from the torment the sorcerer put himself, and everyone close to him, through. But when he had stood in the doorway looking on what had seemed a lifeless body. . . . Maybe it�
��s not fear for Ari, he thought, bitterly. Maybe it’s fear for yourself. Arisilde was the last vestige of his old life. If he was gone, Nicholas Valiarde, sometime scholar and only son of Edouard Viller, was gone too, and nothing would be left but Donatien. "Have you sent for a physician?"
"I sent the person who watches the downstairs door for one, but he has not yet returned." Isham spread his hands, resigned. "It is late and he will have difficulty convincing anyone to come tonight. I would have gone myself, but I thought I would have even more difficulty."
As a Parscian immigrant, Isham would be lucky to get a decent physician’s servants to even open the door to speak to him, especially at this time of night. And the concierge probably knew only the local quack healers. Even an honest hedgewitch would be better than that. Nicholas said, "Reynard. . . ."
"I’ll go." Reynard was already moving toward the door. "There’s a Doctor Brile who lives not far from here. He’s not a sorcerer-healer but he’s a member of the Royal Physicians College and he owes me a favor."
Nicholas looked down at Arisilde again as Reynard left. "Was it the drugs?" he asked roughly.
"I don’t know." Isham shook his head. "When he came back today he seemed tired, but not sickly. He was pursuing his researches, so I went out. When I came back, I saw that he was in bed, with the lamps extinguished." Isham rubbed the bridge of his nose, wincing. "I didn’t notice at first. I thought he was sleeping. Then I felt the spells, the wards and the little charms, start to fade and grow cold. Then I came in and lit the lamp, and saw."
Nicholas frowned. "You’re a sorcerer too?" he asked the old man. "I didn’t realize. . . ."
"Not a sorcerer. I am interlerari, for which there is no proper word in Rienish. I have some gift of power and I study the gift of those greater in power than I, so I may teach. I came here from Parscia to study with him." He looked up. "I sent a wire to you at Coldcourt but they told me it would not be delivered until later tonight. Did it reach you so soon?"
"No, we were already on our way," Nicholas answered, and thought, How many years have you known Isham, and yet not known him at all? Had he been that single-minded?
For a while there was nothing to do but wait. Not long after Reynard left the concierge returned empty-handed, unable to convince even one of the local quacks to come. "They know what he is," the man explained with a shrug. He had a thick Aderassi accent and a philosophical outlook. "I tell them he’s a good wizard, only a little crazy and not in a bad way, but they’re afraid."
Nicholas had tipped him more generously than he had originally intended for that and sent him to the nearest telegraph station with a coded message for Cusard at the warehouse. If Arisilde could no longer protect himself, Nicholas didn’t want to leave him unguarded. His own presence here was dangerous enough.
Madeline and Isham had gone into the other room and Nicholas sat alone on the edge of Arisilde’s bed until an unfamiliar footstep startled him. An older man in a dark greatcoat carrying a doctor’s bag stood in the bedchamber’s doorway, eyeing the poorly-lit room somewhat warily. Then his gaze fell on Arisilde and the wariness changed to a professional blankness. Stepping into the room, he said, "What does he take?"
"Opium, mostly, isn’t it?" Reynard said, following the doctor in and glancing at Nicholas for confirmation.
Nicholas nodded. "And ether."
The doctor sighed in weary disgust and opened his bag.
Nicholas waited tensely through the examination, leaning on a bureau in a far corner of the room. Isham had moved quietly to assist the doctor and probably also to keep a cautious eye on what he did to Arisilde, but Nicholas could tell Brile seemed more than competent. Reynard came to stand next to him and Nicholas asked, low-voiced, "How did you get him to come here?"
"Threatened to tell his wife," Reynard answered casually.
Nicholas regarded him with a raised brow. "Well, no, not really," Reynard admitted. "He was attached to my regiment and caught a bullet when we were in retreat from Leisthetla, and I stopped to throw him over the back of a donkey, or something, I can’t recall, so he feels he owes me a favor. But the other makes a better story, don’t you think?"
"Occasionally I forget that you’re not as debauched as you’d like everyone to believe," Nicholas murmured.
Reynard pretended to seem disturbed. "Keep it to yourself, would you?"
Brile sat back, shaking his head. "It’s not the opium. He doesn’t have the signs of it. Oh, I can tell he’s an addict and that it’s destroyed his health, but it’s not what’s causing this, or at least it isn’t directly responsible. This is some sort of seizure or catatonia." He looked up at them. "I’ll need to send my driver to my surgery."
Reynard nodded. "Write down what you need and I’ll take it to him."
More waiting, that meant. Nicholas walked out, into the main room, unable to hold still for another moment.
The curtains torn down during Arisilde’s fit the other night had been replaced and a fire was burning, but the room still seemed cold and empty. Madeline was sitting in front of the hearth, near a writing desk overflowing with paper, books, pens and other trifles. She looked up as Nicholas came in. "Well?"
"He says it doesn’t appear to be the drugs, at least."
Madeline frowned. "I’m not sure whether to be cheered by that or not. It doesn’t leave us with any comfortable options. Could it have been Octave and his sorcerer, attacking him as they did us?"
Nicholas shook his head. "I don’t think so. If Arisilde had fought a battle, we would have known it." The entire city would have known it. No, he could see what had happened all too clearly. Arisilde had had a disturbing episode last night, then today, when he had seemed so much better, he had used his power as casually as when he had been a student at Lodun. "He hasn’t been in the best of health for years, and after everything else he’s done to himself, I’m afraid his body has just . . . given out." Isham was probably right in that it was only Arisilde’s power keeping him alive.
Reynard came into the parlor and a moment later Isham followed. Nicholas asked, "Well?"
Reynard shrugged. "Brile said he’s not getting any worse, but he’s not getting any better, either. There’s no immediate danger and there’s nothing else he can do tonight."
"Which means he doesn’t know what to do."
"Exactly."
Nicholas looked away. We need a sorcerer-healer, he thought. One that won’t ask difficult questions. One that isn’t afraid to tend a man who is probably far more powerful than he is and with a history of illness and instability. It was a tall order. He said, "Isham, we have good reason to believe we’re being pursued by another sorcerer. That’s why we came, but we can’t chance leading an enemy here with Arisilde in this state. I’ve set some men to watch the building and I want you to keep me informed of anything that occurs."
"I will do this," Isham assured him. "In what manner are you being pursued?"
Madeline had been turning over one of the books on the desk, her brows knitted in thought. "I think someone may have cast a Sending on one of us."
Nicholas frowned. "Why do you say that?"
"I know we weren’t followed there, yet it found us so quickly. And there was just something about it. . . ." She glanced up and saw that he was regarding her skeptically, and glared. "It’s only a feeling. I feel it to be so. I can’t give you a hard and fast reason, all right?"
"Yes, but—"
"It is easily settled," Isham interrupted. "I can do a throwing of salt and ash to ascertain if this is the case."
As Isham lit two of the lamps above the mantelpiece, Reynard said, "I’m sure I don’t really want to know this, but what is a Sending and why do you think it’s after one of us?"
Madeline didn’t respond immediately, so Nicholas answered, "A Sending is a spell to cause death. A sorcerer fixes it on a specific person, and then casts it. It exists until it destroys its target, or until another sorcerer destroys the Sending." He looked at Madeline. "I didn’t know they
could take on corporeal forms. I always thought they came as diseases, or apparent accidents. And I thought the victim had to accept some sort of token from the sorcerer before he could be made a target."
Madeline shook her head. "That’s true now. But Sendings are old magic. Hundreds of years ago, they were far more . . . elemental."
"Very true," Isham agreed, lifting an embossed metal box down from one of the shelves. "Three hundred years ago the satrap of Ilikiat in my native land had a sorcerer cast a Sending against the God-King. It was not necessary to send a token to the God-King, and indeed it would have been impossible to get such a thing to him through the defenses of his own sorcerers. The Sending destroyed the west wing of the Palace of Winds, before the great Silimirin managed to turn it back on the one who cast it. But that was three hundred years ago and sorcerers are not what they were then, for which the Infinite in its wisdom is to be thanked."
"Why not?" Reynard asked.
Isham had opened the box, taking out various glass vials. He started to clear a space on the table and Nicholas and Reynard helped him lift down the piles of books. The old man explained, "Such profligate outpourings of power can only come from bargains with etheric beings. Fay, for example. And such things have been shown to be more deadly to the bargainer than to any of his enemies."
Isham swept the dust off the table with his hand and began to lay out a pattern of concentric circles, using ash from the fireplace and various powdered substances from the glass vials.
Quietly, not wanting to disturb the old man’s concentration, Nicholas asked Madeline, "But what makes you suspect a Sending?"
She sighed. "If I knew, I’d tell you."
Isham finished the diagram and now took a water-smoothed pebble from the box and placed it gently in the center of the lines of ash. He motioned them to gather around the table. As Nicholas stepped forward he saw the pebble tremble. When he stood next to the table, the pebble rolled toward him, stopping at the edge.
Brows drawn together in concentration, Isham nudged the pebble back to the center of the diagram. "It seems it is a Sending, and it is focused on you." He picked the pebble up and rolled it between his fingers. "What form did it take when it appeared to you?"