She tested the balcony door and, for the first time, found it locked. Luma ducked down to work on the latch with the tip of her dagger. Its simple mechanism resisted her less-than-expert touch. Instead she dug at the grout around the pane of glass nearest to the latch. When she had peeled away as much of it as she could get at, she tapped the pane with the dagger's pommel. It came partway loose, allowing her to stick her hand in and turn the latch to the open position.
Luma went to Randred's side. The outline of his body under the bedclothes was a shrunken memory of his former self. A dull wheeze rattled in his throat. She took his hand in hers, hoping in vain to wake him. Abandoning the effort, she placed her thumbs on his eyelids and, in turn, delicately raised them. The whites had gone sallow; in his brown irises floated strange purple flecks.
This was no ordinary malady.
A nauseating thought gripped her. If her siblings had been willing to kill her to mask whatever plot they were hatching, surely they'd have to do the same to Randred. He was the sharpest of them all—and if he stumbled onto their mysterious scheme, he'd find a way to stop it. Unless they removed him from the equation, too.
Luma inspected the contents of a clay water jug which rested on a side table. She sniffed the water, then poured a few drops of it onto her palm and tasted it.
Moving back to Randred's bed, she began her invocation to the city's long history of poisoners and poisonings. It wailed of Red Mantis assassins, of murderous business partners, of wives who dripped doses into the ears of brutal husbands.
The liquid's toxicity buzzed in her palm. Concentrating, she tried to discern its type. No further answer presented itself. That fact itself was revealing: the poison was rare.
She deepened her connection to the city, reaching for a magic of greater power. She could fix this. With the power of the citysong, she could convert the poison in his body to an inert liquid, something that could then pass harmlessly through his system. She dug into her trickbag and found a lump of charcoal, then raised it over her father's chest, entreating Magnimar to aid her.
Luma held her breath as the energy gathered from the city flowed from her, through the little lump of cinder and into her father.
He stirred not at all.
Luma clenched her teeth so hard her jaw ached. It was worse than she'd thought. They'd clearly been dosing him in small amounts over many days or weeks—perhaps since he first began to physically falter. Nullifying the small quantity currently polluting his blood would do nothing to reverse the damage he'd already suffered. That kind of healing lay beyond her gifts.
The door popped open, revealing Yandine in a robe of violet silk, her hair piled in a net atop her head. A plum dropped from her hand, rolling across the rug to stop at Luma's feet.
Luma tilted her head, indicating the sickle at her hip. "Step into the room," she said.
Yandine froze. "You."
"Step into the room."
"You're dead."
"It would be the worse for you, were I deceased and standing here giving you orders."
"Don't hurt him," Yandine said.
"Why would I do that?"
"You haven't tried to wake him, have you?" She shuffled on slippered feet past Luma, to Randred's bedside. "He's so much worse than when you saw him before. Clinging to life." Yandine's gaze darted from husband to stepdaughter. "Dear. How did you ...?"
"Survive being stomped by an iron golem?"
Yandine shrank from her. "Something's not right with you."
"Lower your voice, Yandine."
"Get away from me!" she shrieked.
Luma bowled at her, spinning her around, clamping a hand on her mouth. Yandine went limp in her arms.
With a bang, the door flew wide. In a saffron blur, Ulisa flowed into the room, hands held like twin bird beaks.
Luma grabbed her sickle in time to keep her at bay. "You were asking how I survived, Yandine. It's a good question, because your daughter here, and the others, did their best to murder me."
Ulisa kicked at her; Luma turned aside from the blow, blunting its impact.
"Not in here!" Yandine cried.
With a table behind her, the wall to one side, and the bed to the other, Luma was hemmed in. She rebalanced her sickle, leaving it to Ulisa to take the next shot. "Is that news to you, Yandine? And if it is, what do you think they've done to your husband?"
Ulisa feinted right, then came at her from the left, whirling around her. Unfazed by the lack of maneuvering room, she directed a hard kick to Luma's breastbone. Luma staggered back, striking the side table and knocking the jug to the floor.
Luma swung her crescent blade at Ulisa; her sister flowed easily out of range, then back in. As they traded ineffective blows, Yandine sank to her knees, covered her face, and sobbed.
"What do you have to say for yourself, Ulisa?" Luma punctuated the question with a swipe of her blade. It caught Ulisa's sleeve, tearing it and tracing a superficial cut along the line of her ulna. "Nothing, as usual?""
Ulisa ducked low and, while Luma was still open, barraged quick, bent-knuckle punches at her kidney. Luma stepped back, pressing against the foot of the bed. Then she fell to the side, pulling Ulisa down with her, so that her shaved head smacked into one of the wooden globes that topped the bed's posts. As Ulisa scrambled back, Luma caught hold of her sickle and pulled the weapon to her. She brought it up, ready for a downstrike.
Yandine howled.
Ulisa's hand snaked up, slapping the blow aside, and Luma's blade cut a gouge across the face of a lacquered changing screen. Ulisa rippled to her feet, punching through the reach of Luma's weapon. The blow caught Luma square in the nose. She felt blood gush from her nostrils.
From the hallway came the sound of footsteps.
Luma positioned herself in front of the double doors and let Ulisa come at her. Her half-sister launched herself into the air, right foot outstretched. Luma flew back into the double doors, her falling body throwing them open. She swung wide with her sickle, nicking Ulisa's leg. As Ulisa struggled for balance, Luma shouldered into her, knocking her down, then kicked her in the face.
A pair of angled beams supported the balcony from below. Luma swung over its lip, then onto one of the beams.
She heard Arrus: "Where is she?"
Then Ulisa: "She hit an artery."
"Get Eibadon to seal it up, then."
Luma heard her brother's breathing as he stepped out onto the balcony. It soon receded. "We need Ontor! Where in the name of Abadar's pesthole is Ontor?"
Whispering a call to the city, Luma asked it to shroud her steps from trackers. A song of skulking feet and dull, fluttering moth wings chorused its agreement. Luma waited until all went quiet, then dropped onto the grass. Light spilled by swinging lanterns angled across the grounds. Elven heritage gave her the advantage: she could see without giving herself away like that. She dodged through the garden, staying clear of the moving light pools, and thus out of sight. A quick dive over the wall led to a sprint to her neighbor's gazebo, where she regained her breath and waited out the effort to find her.
Chapter Fourteen
Alabaster
Noole stood before a mirror, trimming his eyebrows with silver scissors, clad in a brocaded robe and a pair of thick wool socks. He thrust the fingers of his right hand into his armpit and then sniffed them. Wrinkling his nose in disapproval, he reached for the first of several ornate perfume bottles atop a dresser. He spritzed a cloud of honeyed vapor into the air, rejected it, and chose another bottle. This he used to generously douse his armpits and points below. He leaned forward to assess the state of his mustache. From an amethyst jar he swiped up a dab of wax, applying it with laborious care.
The room around him announced its owner's predilection for fussy excess. Velvet curtains fringed in gold swaddled the windows. Antique jars and vases, many in the fluted Hermean style that touched off a collector's craze a decade back, jostled for space on overfilled shelves. On the new Qadiran rug beneath Noole's feet,
intricately rendered roses battled one another for supremacy.
"I need your help," said Luma, climbing through the window.
Noole leapt into the air, reaching for a sword he wasn't wearing. His belt and scabbard hung on the back of a chair.
Luma fixed her gaze at a point above his shoulder. "Your robe ..."
The flustered gnome reached down and tied it shut. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"As I said, I require help, and thought of you."
Noole drifted indirectly toward his weapon. "Me? Why? You've got to get out of here. How did you find me?"
"You mentioned your lady admirer by name. I came to her manor to inquire about your whereabouts. Then I spied you through the window, saving me the trouble of asking."
"You stay away from Khedre." Noole stepped to the guest room door and locked it. "Her taste for danger is strictly of the aesthetic variety. Wait, aren't you dead?"
"How dead do I look?"
He cupped his hand around his chin. "You're different. But not in an animated corpse sort of way. But to the point: why should I agree to help you?"
"One, so I'll depart with haste, leaving you to enjoy the ample charms of your Alabaster District matron, safe from interruption or scandal."
Noole crossed his arms. "And two?"
"You are a poet, are you not?"
"Quite a good one, as a matter of fact."
"What I pursue is poetic to the bone. I invite you to witness firsthand as this grand theme plays out on life's true stage."
"In exchange for my assistance?" Noole asked.
"Naturally so."
"So that I might find inspiration in it?"
"Should you wish," said Luma.
"Usually when the muse reveals herself to me, she is not carrying a sickle."
"I don't offer you the usual," Luma said.
"You've a flair for understatement, Luma Derexhi. Very well. I'll ask. What is it you pursue?"
"Vengeance."
∗ ∗ ∗
A line of modest shops and eating houses adjoined the city wall, across from the ostentatious manors of Grand Arch. Here servants ate cheap lunches and bought workaday supplies for their Summit masters. Butlers and cooks filled themselves on darkbread and ale at an open-air cantina, the Rag and Garter. They sat under the hot noon sun, griping about their masters. Luma sat at the end of a communal table, waiting for Noole. He showed himself a quarter-hour after their appointed rendezvous, patting down mussed and unruly hair. He took ale with his bread; Luma ordered sardines with hers. She began to recount in full detail the tale of her betrayal, but stopped when the tables filled. They rushed their food and departed, taking the slow way through the district so that she could tell the story unheard by other ears. Her account drew to a close as they neared Brewer's Dale, where Noole had found his squat.
"Wait," said Noole, "I have a question."
"Spit it out."
The gnome watched a fetching Varisian woman, her elegant figure betrayed by a dowdy servant's uniform, sway past. "First, the practical. If your siblings wanted you out of the way, why didn't they leave you to rot in the Hells?"
"Not sure," said Luma. "My guess? It left too many factors to chance. Under torture, I might reveal something that could sour their plan, whether I understood its significance or not. Although ..."
"Don't go silent on me now, Derexhi."
"It was only after the Hells that I put my foot down. Demanded to know what was going on, with the whole Khonderian business. And said that if they didn't tell me, I'd find out. I can't shake the feeling that they hadn't quite decided to do me in at that point. At least, not all of them had. Not until then. By standing up for myself, I tipped the balance."
"In favor of your own execution, you mean."
"That is what I mean."
"This won't do," said Noole.
"What?"
Noole slowed his pace. "You precisely enumerated every detail, from the layout of the room to the specifications of the unusual golem. But you left out any part of the tale that might interest a poet. That is the quid pro quo, is it not?"
"What did I leave out?"
"Your heart, Luma Derexhi. How you responded to each moment. Poetry is not just about the color of a sky or the ineffable beauty of a sylvan glade. Without emotion, a poem dies on the page."
"Perhaps I will have call to read some, one day."
Noole laughed. "Every page you've ever read has been a treatise—or worse, from the journals of cretinous Pathfinders. Hasn't it?"
Luma shrugged.
"Even when you tell me," said Noole, "of your beloved family heaving you into that device, willing to see you suffer the most excruciating demise imaginable rather than personally strike the killing blow, your words remain tactical, detached. If I am to continue on, you must say what you felt."
"Pain."
"That's not what I mean."
Luma hefted her sickle. "Follow me, gnome, and you'll see what I feel."
Arriving at Noole's old squat, they saw that its master had reoccupied the premises. A lissome girl in a maid's uniform beat at a rug, dust pluming from its surface. Footmen touched up a carriage, applying a fresh layer of gilded paint to its carven clamshells and curlicues.
No such signs of activity attended the manor across the road. To the disinterest of the Qadiran merchant's servants, Luma hopped its low wall, followed by Noole.
"And what do you hope to find here?" he asked.
"Why did my siblings try to dispose of me? They must be planning something they thought I'd try to spoil. Maybe they thought Khonderian was trying to spoil it, too."
"You believe they killed him?"
"I have no better theory." They reached the manor's back steps. Luma peered in a window. "Your suspicious squatters have decamped," she said. She tested the servants' entrance door. "Are you any good with locks?"
Noole straightened his shoulders. "What do you take me for?"
She bent down to probe the keyhole with her dagger tip. "I only asked."
"It's painters who are thieves, not poets. Should you need someone stuck with a rapier, I'm your fellow."
Luma set aside the dagger in favor of a throwing knife and its thinner blade.
Noole turned to keep watch. "And what makes you think my squatters have anything to do with this? Whatever ‘this' is."
"They might or might not, but it's a place to start. It's what Khonderian was inquiring into when he was murdered."
"He was likely looking into a dozen matters," said Noole.
"Did he react with any special interest when you told him about these squatters?"
"Possibly. Not unlike you, Khonderian was a hard read."
"Blast it," said Luma. She set the knife down, stepped back, and kicked the door in.
The squatters had left little trace of their presence. Luma ran her finger along a mantel; it came up clean. "As unwanted guests go, they were oddly tidy. It looks like they even dusted the place."
"Overfascination with cleanliness is the first sign of a diseased mind," said Noole, stepping into the kitchen. "Here's something," he called.
Spots of red and blue paint dotted the kitchen table. As Luma watched, Noole knelt to gather plaster fragments swept beneath the legs of a raised larder cabinet. Taking them to the table, he assembled them into a whole.
It was a medallion, as one might attach to an armband or shield. Against a blue field were marked seven simple symbols, arranged in a circle: a moon, a spire, an axe, the sun, a skull, the head of a hawk, and a swirl.
"The Shoanti gang emblem," Luma said. "Each marking represents one of the seven great wild clans. The citified barbarians here in Magnimar array all of their emblems together, symbolizing their unity against us."
"The squatters didn't look Shoanti," said Noole.
"We have to be sure."
"I don't suppose you maintain contacts among the savages?"
Luma wrapped the plaster fragments in a handkerchief and placed the
resulting bundle in her trickbag. "I had recent dealings with them, let's say."
"That doesn't sound good."
"The meeting may be difficult," she said. "I'll go, and meet up with you later."
Noole surveyed the contents of the larder. "Now you're mistaking me for a dancer. No true poet is a coward."
"Very well."
"But if we are to swagger into a den of cutthroats, I suggest we reinforce our numbers."
"There's no one else I can call on."
Noole twitched his mustache. "You may be friendless, but I'm not. A recent acquaintance may tip the odds our way. He calls for careful handling, but we may need what he can do."
"I don't like the sound of that."
"In fact, the two of you may have already met."
∗ ∗ ∗
Luma kept watch for city guards as she and Noole headed up the western spur of the Avenue of Sails. Clicking abacus sounds joined the citysong as they approached the carpeted shops of the Vista district. Noole called a halt before they got there, stopping before the grounds of the Iomedaean temple. A procession of old soldiers slow-marched through the warrior goddess's martial columns, banners flapping and trumpets blaring. Noole directed Luma to a landmark opposite: the Founder's Flame. A pedestal rose from a bronze bowl filled with green oil. A nimbus of fire enveloped the pedestal, changing shape according to an arcane rhythm. Occasionally the entire bowl ignited, or the flames changed color, cycling rapidly from yellow to orange to violet to blue. A ring of marble benches, set at a safe distance from the heat, allowed citizens to sit and contemplate the display. Noole beckoned for Luma to take a seat.
"He comes here most days, about this time," Noole said. "Unless you're in haste to confront the Shoanti ..."
"Allay my doubts again."
Noole plunked himself down. "There are two of us, against the five in your squad alone. Each of them famed for his or her fearsome prowess. Then there are Shoanti barbarians, and, oh yes, the lord-mayor's men and the city guards are after you, too. Have I left any enemies out?"
"Allies require trust."
"And you have no more of that to give? Understandable." Noole held out his hands, basking in the heat given off by the flame fountain. "Though you're trusting me, for a reason both slender and compelling: you need someone. As that someone, I'd be derelict if I didn't say that you need more than one sword behind you."
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