A portal had been conjured here.
She withdrew her mind from the dove, hearing it squawk in surprise as its body was suddenly returned to it. For a moment she lay still upon her bed, considering the ramifications of what she had just experienced. Though she had established wards all over the city to warn her of any foreign magic being used, she had not done so in the area immediately surrounding the House of Gods. Such a spell would have been triggered ten times a day by the priests and pilgrims who performed their rituals there, becoming effectively worthless. So the conjuration of a portal right next to the House of Gods should not have triggered any of her metaphysical alarms, and it should not have awakened her from sleep. Something else had done that. Had someone tried to get through her personal defenses? Perhaps whoever had arrived through the portal?
Don’t jump to conclusions, she warned herself. Many a powerful witch had died as a result of misreading such situations; she did not intend to join their ranks.
She sent out a spark of power to awaken one of the palace witches, a young woman named Hameh. By the time the girl arrived, Siderea had put on a silk dressing gown and had applied a whisper of magic to smooth out her sleep-tousled hair. No one in the palace was ever allowed to see her at less than her best; that was part of her mystique. The same could not be said of the young woman, who was rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she responded to the summons.
“Milady.” The witch bowed deeply in the southern style, hands before her forehead. “How may I serve you?”
“A portal was used outside the House of Gods. I need to know if one of our own people was involved. And I need to find that out discreetly, Hameh. Can you do that for me?”
The girl bowed again. “Of course, milady. Though if you really need discretion, I’ll have to wait a bit. If I wake up the city’s witches to ask them questions, they’ll know that something’s amiss.”
“That’s fine.” Siderea wasn’t happy about the delay, but there were other avenues of investigation she could apply while waiting for Jezalya’s witches to wake up.
After the witch departed, Siderea called for her servants to come and dress her. Not because she needed help, or even wanted help, but because that custom was a standard part of royal protocol, and questions would be asked if she did otherwise.
In the distance the ikati queen awoke and stirred, wondering aloud at the agitation she sensed from her consort. Are we in danger? the creature asked.
Siderea hesitated. I don’t know yet.
It was always possible that the portal wasn’t significant. Someone who had needed to leave Jezalya quickly had hired a witch to send him elsewhere. Someone who had wanted to visit the city hadn’t been in the mood for a long desert trek.
But magical transportation was costly enough that such things were never done casually. And a legitimate traveler would have no reason to depart from the one place in Jezalya where local energies would mask such a spell. Not to mention the fact that an innocent portal would not have awakened her from a dead sleep, no matter how many wards it had triggered.
Farther in the distance, the leading edge of the sun breached the horizon at last.
Nasaan awoke from sleep the moment the door to his bedchamber creaked, and he had a weapon in his hand by the time it was fully open. Battlefield reflexes. His visitor was clearly startled, and hesitated on the threshold. By the dim light of early dawn he could see it was one of the palace witches, a young woman named Hameh. Normally he wouldn’t respond well to such a furtive entrance, but this was someone he had entrusted with unusually discreet business. If she was coming to him at this hour of the morning, and was not even willing to knock on the door for fear of alerting the servants, she must have significant news.
Sheathing his sword in the hidden place beside his bed—another battlefield habit—he waved for her to approach him. “What news?” he asked, his voice pitched low enough that no one outside the room would hear it.
She offered a hurried gesture of obeisance. “You wanted to be informed if the Lady Consort did anything unusual.”
“Yes.” Unusual was a subjective term, of course, and he’d already had a thousand useless bits of information delivered to him by agents who thought they were doing him a favor. But he paid for it every time. Better too much information than too little. “What happened?”
“She said that a portal had been conjured outside the House of Gods. She doesn’t know who’s behind it yet. I’m supposed to help her find out.”
Of course you are. The witches of the city didn’t trust Nasaan’s consort, so the djira wouldn’t be able to question them directly. “She doesn’t think it’s normal business? A local witch doing . . . well, local witch things?”
“She’s not certain yet, Sire. We are checking on that first. But I assume she would not be giving us secret orders if she didn’t feel there was a good chance it was something more than that.”
A portal.
He cursed under his breath as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed. A portal could be bad news. Someone might be in his city now who was not supposed to be here. Or else someone who normally lived here might be traveling secretly to other places. Either possibility could spell trouble for him. He had begun his own conquest of Jezalya by planting agents inside its walls, and any enemy worth his salt would do likewise. Just as any enemy worth his salt would know that a portal spell was uniquely conspicuous magic that might be detected by his witches. If someone was conjuring one now, it meant that time mattered to him more than secrecy.
Also not a good sign.
“Send word to the outlying tribes,” he told her. “Tell them to have scouts scour their territory and report anything unusual to me immediately. If a lizard so much as blinks in the wrong direction, I want to know about it. And have their men arm up and be ready to fight; there may be trouble in the wind.”
“Yes, Sire.” Her eyes were wide, and he could see the concern in their depths. Nasaan rarely asked his witches to expend their life-energy simply to deliver messages. If he was doing so now, that meant that he believed there might not be time to have a man on horseback do so in person. Or perhaps that he feared a trap might have been set for mundane messengers. “Shall I follow the Lady Consort’s orders after that?”
“Aye. But I want any information you gather to be brought to me first.”
His djira could stop an invading army in its tracks, Nasaan knew that. But she would only do so if it suited her personal agenda. And he was no longer certain how confluent that was with his own.
A man should not rely upon the aid of demons, he thought.
As soon as Hameh was gone, he barked out an order for his guard to attend him. The man entered with his hand on his weapon, and the first thing he did was look about the room for any sign of danger. Evidently something in Nasaan’s tone had made him think there was some kind of threat present in the bedchamber.
No man would risk conjuring a portal in the early stages of an infiltration, Nasaan thought. If some greater plan is being set in motion, its final stage is probably underway.
“Bring me my armor,” he commanded. “And tell my private guard to suit up and be ready to move out. Ask them to be as quiet about it as possible; I don’t want the city to panic. If anyone asks, it’s for a training exercise.”
Should he be more afraid than he was? Was it wrong of him to feel a rush of pleasure at the thought of combat, every bit as intense as the moment of release inside a woman?
I will kill someone before the day ends, he thought with satisfaction.
Colivar’s portal had brought him to a small thicket of trees at the edge of a plaza. Given how little light there was, he thought it unlikely that anyone had seen him arrive, but he bound a bit of sorcery just to make sure of it. It seemed to be unnecessary. In the distance he could hear the sounds of people starting to move about, but no one nearby was stirring. This corner of town was all but deserted.
Giving thanks for the foresight of Farah’s scout, he wr
apped a layer of protective sorcery tightly around himself and slipped out from among the trees.
Nearby, in the center of a great plaza, was a circular building with a dome of polished gold. That must be the House of Gods, home to the idols of the city. There were two priests at the door, ready to receive any visitors, but they looked only half awake, and his sorcery was not hard pressed to push them over the edge into true slumber.
A short distance away, a line of close-set buildings offered him comfortable shadows to slip into. Once he was safely away from the portal site, he molded some athra into a spell to find Siderea and sent it coursing out over the city. Whether it actually located her or not was irrelevant. He knew from past experience that she had good metaphysical defenses, and the subtle prodding of such a spell would not go unnoticed. Soon enough she would know that there was a Magister in Jezalya. And Colivar had left enough subtle signs for her to figure out which Magister it was.
He hadn’t told Kamala about that part of his plan. She would have declared him a fool, and rightfully so. Ramirus might even have forbade his doing it, which—barring a successful challenge to his dominance—he had the right to do.
But any other path was greater folly.
Colivar still remembered the trap that Siderea had set for him in Tefilat. He remembered it not only in mind but in his body as well; the pain of it was seared into the very substance of his flesh. If her defenses in Jezalya entailed something like that, he would not be able to approach her by surreptitious means. And while he was willing to risk imprisonment and even torture to aid Salvator’s campaign, being imprisoned and tortured by a mindless spell while Siderea went about her business undisturbed—perhaps even unaware that he was there—would accomplish nothing. If Colivar’s purpose in Jezalya was to distract Siderea, then he must somehow draw her attention to him. And he must know that he was drawing her attention, so that the next stage of the plan could be set in motion.
What better way to do that than to have her seek him out?
He watched as a small blue bird appeared, its bright coloration incongruous against the dull sandy hues of the surrounding architecture. It circled the plaza twice and then dipped low over the place where his portal had appeared. He found himself holding his breath, and only an extreme act of will kept him from directing his sorcery at it, to learn its purpose and identity. If it was serving as a conduit for Siderea’s power, establishing any kind of direct sorcerous connection might be dangerous.
He watched as the brightly colored bird circled the area once more, then headed back the way it had come, toward the center of Jezalya. A short time later two witches approached and headed straight for his arrival site. No doubt they had been sent to gather more information for Siderea. In bird form it would have been hard for her to read his traces clearly, but these two witches should have no problem with it. The mark of his sorcery was impossible to miss; even an untrained witch would not mistake its cold essence for anything else. They would know—and they would report to Siderea—that a Magister had come to Jezalya. And, if their skills were good, they would tell her which one.
So far, so good.
“You wished to see me, Lady Consort?” Nyuku was clearly pleased to have been summoned, but when he saw the grave look on Siderea’s face he grew wary.
As well he should, she thought. The time for games was over.
She spoke simply, because any attempt to elaborate on the truth would have lessened its impact: “Colivar is in Jezalya.”
His back grew rigid. His nostrils flared. Emotions stirred in the depths of his eyes that were probably not human in source. “You are sure?”
“There are remnants of true sorcery outside the House of Gods. What other sorcerer has business in Jezalya? And he left traces of his presence on the ground when he passed. He tried to disguise those things, making them hard to identify, but I’m as adept at ferreting out secrets as he is at hiding them.” When he said nothing she added, “You don’t look surprised.”
“I told you he would come to you. And that was even before you tried to entrap him in Tefilat. Now he has two reasons.”
“Yes. “ Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “You did say that.” Her tone grew disarmingly soft; any man who knew her well would recognize that as a warning sign. “You’ve said a lot of things about him, in an indirect sort of way. Hinted at mysteries enough to keep an oracle employed for a lifetime. And now we have come to the moment when that particular game is ending. I am going to be the one who writes the rules for this round.” Her expression darkened. “Why must he come to me? How did you know that would happen?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything.
“There is a hostile Magister in my city,” Siderea said harshly. “He’s not here for the scenery. So you will tell me what I need to know to deal with him, or so help me, all the gods in Jezalya will not be enough to guarantee you victory in my queen’s flight.”
Something black and cold glimmered in his eyes. His words were edged in ice. “That isn’t your decision to make.”
“Isn’t it? The fact that queens have always submitted to the strongest suitor in the past doesn’t mean that my queen will have to. Or that the contest can’t be fixed in other ways.” Her expression darkened. “I’m not one of your helpless little girls, Nyuku, who has never been anything more than the eleventh wing of a Souleater, too ignorant to question the rules of the game she’s playing. And I understand about the vested interest of my advisers as well, in choosing what parts of the game they will tell me about.” She could see by the look on his face that she had guessed right; they had been misrepresenting the queen’s flight to her, or at least withholding information. A dark satisfaction filled her heart as she thought to her ikati, You see? It is as I told you. “Don’t test me, Nyuku. You won’t like where it leads.”
If she’d been a man—or a woman whose favor Nyuku did not need—he might have responded in an acerbic manner. But he did need her, so he breathed in deeply to steady his spirit and said, “What is it you want to know?”
“Why will Colivar come to me? What drives him?”
“The same thing that drives the rest of us, my lady.”
“Us, as in . . . the riders? Why? He’s not one of you. Is he?”
A faint smile appeared, as if something about the question amused him. “He was joined to an ikati once, as we are. He shared in its hungers, as we do. And he will be drawn to the last living queen for the same reasons that we are, though he will doubtless come up with other reasons to explain it to himself. Human reasons. But those will be just excuses. It is the spark of the ikati that drives him . . . and perhaps the hunger to regain what he once lost.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “You’re sure of this?”
“Absolutely”
“And your personal issue with him?”
The brief flicker of hatred in his eyes was more eloquent than any words he could offer. “We have . . . unfinished business.”
He did not need to say anything more. She had seen enough men in rutting mode to recognize what kind of business they shared.
Let them fight over us, the young ikati whispered in her mind. It is what they want. It is what their blood demands.
It was apparently what Siderea’s blood demanded as well, for she could feel a rush of heat warm her loins at the mere thought of such a contest. “Very well,” she said. “I’ll give you a chance to finish your . . . business . . . before I deal with him.”
Nyuku scowled. “So I must spare his life again? With all due respect . . . aren’t we past that point?”
In truth, Siderea doubted that Nyuku could take Colivar. The rider might have the fire of ikati passion in his veins, but as far as she knew, he had never had any kind of magical training. All the athra in the world did you little good if you didn’t know how to channel it properly.
But she was not pleased with Nyuku at the moment. He had failed her in Tefilat. And while his masculine arrogance might be a
ppealing to a Souleater queen, it was starting to wear thin on her human nerves.
If he kills Colivar, he will serve my need in doing so. If he fails, then he will be dead, and another will take his place. Either is acceptable.
“Very well,” she said. “I will place no constraints upon you. If you’re capable of killing him, then do so. If you can’t, then I’ll deal with him myself. Either way,” she promised, “this will be Colivar’s last battle.”
How good those words sounded. And how gracious of Colivar to come to her city and give her the chance to say them.
For the first time that morning, Siderea smiled.
Something in the theater of war had changed. Ramirus could feel it. Nothing so concrete as a spell that he could point to, or any single phenomenon he could give a name to. Call it a ripple of potential. A subtle shift in probability. Things were being set in motion that had little significance on their own but that might set off significant events farther down the road. His divinatory sorcery could detect the greater pattern, but it could not put a name to its cause.
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