Trapped

by James Alan Gardner

  But you don’t walk out on a Spark, even when she’s leading you into danger. So we all proceeded to Nanticook House’s front gate.

  The gate was wrought-iron, glossy black without a hint of rust. Sheets of wood had been fitted into the gaps between the iron bars, held in place by wires. The sheets were so thin, Impervia could have put her fist through them, but they weren’t there as defense—just preventing gawkers from peering into the grounds.

  Warwick Xavier must like his privacy.

  Dreamsinger didn’t bother to check if the gate was locked. She just made a gesture, her hands glowed red, and the wrought-iron frame flopped inward, as if its fittings had vaporized.

  The gate didn’t make much noise as it fell—with the gaps between bars filled in, it was like a sheet of light wood toppling over in a carpenter’s shop, its descent slowed by air resistance. Nothing more than a breezy whump when it hit the ground. The sound still carried a short distance, but there was no one inside close enough to hear...no one anywhere along the gravel drive leading up to the house. No guard dogs either; with soot from the house’s fireplaces filling the air, the dogs probably couldn’t smell us, and by luck, they were all out of sight on the far side of the building.

  The driveway was long and wide—over a hundred meters from the gate to the house and broad enough for two oversized carriages to pass each other comfortably. Xavier might be antisocial, but Nanticook House could accommodate guests if necessary. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised the Smuggler Chief had plenty of room for carts moving in and out; on occasion, the place might be as busy as a freight warehouse.

  No carts were in evidence tonight, but something was definitely afoot. Every room on the ground floor showed lights, and not just a candle or two: the place beamed with lampfire, as if Xavier was hosting a dance-ball for everyone in Dover-on-Sea. No music played, however, and no gabble of conversation reached our ears as we drew near the house; I could see no movement through the windows.

  Brightly lit houses are seldom so quiet. And when they are, it makes me nervous.

  For a while, it looked like Dreamsinger would prance straight up to the front portico and tug on the bell. I think she considered it; she stopped on the stoop for a full count of ten—not, as far as I could see, listening for tell-tale sounds or using some sorcerous clairvoyance to peer through the door, but simply debating how brazenly she wanted to handle the situation.

  While we waited, the Caryatid produced a flame from somewhere and began passing it back and forth nervously between her palms. Sister Impervia assumed what she called a “natural” stance—perfectly balanced, knees slightly bent, hands free at her sides—which is to say, a martial artist’s attempt to look nonthreatening while still poised to dislodge your skull with a spinning hook kick. As for me, I’m sure I did something that showed my friends I was jittery as a Junebug, but I was trying to look nonchalant.

  In the end, Dreamsinger was struck with an attack of discretion. She suddenly wheeled from the door and started to circle the house: moving quickly, peeking into every window we passed, but staying far enough out into the darkness that people inside couldn’t see us.

  We saw nobody in any of the front rooms; not a guard, not a servant, not even a parakeet. The decor looked costly but soulless—a lot of dark pine furniture and nondescript china on plate-rails. Each room (and there were a lot of rooms) held a single objet d’art: always a portrait painting, always undistinguished and always in murky colors, as if the painter had once seen a Rembrandt but could only remember it had dim lighting. None of the rooms showed any particular purpose; they were all generic parlors/drawing rooms/sitting rooms/lounges, rather than serving a recognizable function like a dining room, bedroom, or study. They were, in other words, strictly for show—the sort of rooms a real family would soon subvert with doll houses, billiard tables, and piles of Aunt Miriam’s embroidery.

  The side of the house was more promising than the front, with an honest-to-goodness kitchen and even two women at work. One woman was big, blonde, and bready, extracting the guts from a turkey. The other looked more decorative: young, slim, as dark as Impervia, and dressed in a short tight uniform designed for the pleasure of male viewers rather than the practical performance of scullery work. Still, she was diligently kneading a wad of dough, pushing it around the counter with experienced efficiency.

  I wondered why these women were working at 3:45 in the morning...but maybe Xavier kept his whole household on smugglers’ hours. Work at night, sleep by day.

  We passed the kitchen silently, drawing no attention from either woman. Next door was a pantry and next to that, windows covered with cheap curtains—probably the servants’ quarters, with the curtains put up by the servants themselves to frustrate peeping toms.

  Since I couldn’t see anything in those rooms, I turned my eyes to the stables that paralleled the house across a gravel yard. Two four-horse coaches were parked in the open drive-shed; I wondered if Xavier had company, or if he’d simply purchased two carriages because they were cheaper by the pair.

  Finally, we reached the back of the house: the side overlooking the lake. There was little to see but a great crinkled blackness beyond the edge of the bluffs. At the mouth of the harbor below, a small lighthouse lit the water around its footings, casting a few meters of dappled dimness. Apart from that, the only hints of light on the lake were brief reflections of stars, caught for fleeting instants on vagrant ripples. The rest of the vista was dark and cold.

  In contrast, the rear of Nanticook House blazed with more lamps and hearth fires—just as many here as on the side facing the road. Yet the dining room was empty, the table bare. Beyond it was another drawing room, this one equipped with a bar: dozens of bottles on display, but no sign anyone ever drank from them. No hint that guests had ever pulled the chairs into a comfortable circle, or shoved furniture aside so there’d be room to throw darts.

  I was beginning to think Warwick Xavier just didn’t use the bottom floor of his house. Perhaps all life took place on the top story...yet there were no lights up there at all.

  The next room looked equally ignorable. I was moving along when I nearly bumped into Dreamsinger—she’d stopped and was gazing inside, her eyes narrowed. Once more I glanced into the house but saw nothing of note; yet the Sorcery-Lord was staring as if enraptured.

  I looked again at the house. Immediately my eyes shifted elsewhere: the lawn, the lake, the dark upper floor, any place but the room in front of me. Closing my eyes, I couldn’t even picture what was in there—just that it was utterly uninteresting, not worth my attention.

  Aha. This must be the “antiscrying field” Dreamsinger had mentioned while Twinned with Hump: an enchantment that made you believe the room was boring. Nanites inside my brain were playing games with my emotions and perceptions, perhaps raising my threshold of selective inattention whenever I looked in the room’s direction—suppressing visual input so that it never reached my consciousness.

  But Dreamsinger obviously could resist such trickery. She strode boldly forward, toward the room’s windows. Assuming it had windows. Whenever I tried to look, my gaze slid off. It was better to watch the Sorcery-Lord herself, to train my eyes on her beautiful Hafsah derriere. That kept me moving ahead, despite a growing emotional force that pushed me away, crying, “Don’t waste your time, there’s nothing here!” Then I passed through some invisible boundary, the edge of the antiscrying field; and I could see Dreamsinger in front of me, reaching out, her hand touching window glass.

  She whispered, “Boom.”

  The window exploded at Dreamsinger’s touch, blasting shards of glass into the room. It was a big window; it had lots of glass.

  The shards slashed like shrapnel into two brawny men who stood just inside. The men didn’t have a chance: they went down under the barrage, blown off their feet, sliced by glass splinters. One man collided with a heavy chair, drove it forward half a meter, then toppled off sideways...striking the floor at an angle that shoved
crystal daggers deeper into his flesh. Blood gushed from a severed artery—a fountain that lasted several seconds, then subsided to a pressureless drip.

  The other man landed facedown on the carpet, slivers of glass protruding from his back like needles on a porcupine. He lifted his arm feebly, reaching blindly for nothing. Beneath his tattered clothes, bony spurs pushed weakly from the raised arm, then retracted again in defeat.

  The spurs showed that Hump wasn’t the only smuggler with pointy augmentation. Not that the spikes seemed to do much good. The man in front of us slumped unconscious and continued to bleed from a dozen lacerations.

  Suddenly, I was grabbed from behind and thrown onto the muddy soil. “Idiot,” Impervia whispered, pressing her body against my spine. I opened my mouth to protest but was drowned out by an eruption of gunfire from inside the house. Oops. I’d been so busy watching men die near the window, I’d never looked farther into the room. There must have been more guards inside, beyond the blast radius of the glass. Now they were shooting in our direction: shooting at Dreamsinger alone, since the Caryatid had hit the dirt beside Impervia and me.

  The Sorcery-Lord made no effort to remove herself from the fire zone. As the shots continued, she stepped over the low windowsill and into the room itself. Bullets zinged through the air; a few passed through Dreamsinger’s crimson cloak, tearing several holes in it before the cloak was ripped to rags...but the majority of shots were directly on target, plowing straight into Dreamsinger’s body.

  The bullets had no effect; they never quite made contact. A violet glow had sprung up around the Spark Lord’s outline, like a fringe of indigo fire. Each time a shot hit the glow, the bullet was met with violet flame—a blazing hot flame that dissolved the chunk of lead into spittles of molten metal. Stinking smoke filled the air as drops of liquefied lead fell to the floor...but none of it touched Dreamsinger. She just stood with a placid smile, waiting for the barrage to end.

  Lying on top of me, Impervia whispered, “That glow around her...is it sorcery?”

  “No,” the Caryatid replied. “I’ve heard it called a force field. Projected by her armor.”

  “She’s wearing armor?” I asked.

  “What do you think she’s wearing, idiot?” That was Impervia again.

  “She’s wearing Kaylan’s Chameleon. Total coverage. I can’t see a square millimeter of who she really is.”

  “Vanity, vanity,” Impervia murmured. She shifted her body slightly against my back. “So, uhh, Phil...what do you see?”

  I didn’t answer.

  The shooting dwindled to an anticlimax of prissy little clicks: firing pins hitting on empty chambers. A woman inside the house growled, “For God’s sake, assholes, give it up. Xavier, will you please call off your dogs?”

  A grunting sigh. “You heard her.” An old man’s gristly voice. “Stand down...but reload.”

  Both the man and the woman spoke with accents: something Central European. Teaching at the academy, I’d heard lots of accents from my students—but those accents were all upper class. The people in Nanticook House sounded rougher...more ragged and throaty.

  “Warwick Xavier?” Dreamsinger asked.

  “You know who I am,” the man answered. A statement, not a question.

  “She’s a Spark,” said the unknown woman inside. “She knows everyone.” A pause. “Judging by the crimson armor, you’re the female Sorcery-Lord. Serpent’s Kiss.”

  “Serpent’s Kiss was my predecessor. I’m Dreamsinger”

  “Ach, such a fancy name,” said Xavier. “Fine women, always so pretentious.”

  Impervia slid off me. On hands and knees she peered over the windowsill, into the room beyond. The Caryatid and I joined her—like the comic relief in a Shakespeare play, the three of us poking our noses up in the background while more important characters played the main action downstage.

  Xavier stood beside the unknown woman at the far end of the room. He was white-haired, big-eared, stoop-shouldered, an imposing jowly man who might be as old as seventy, dressed in formal black-and-white; she was black-haired, fierce-eyed, sharp-boned, an imposing skeleton-thin woman in her early thirties, wearing gray silk pants and shirt, cut so loosely they seemed tailored for someone four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier. If Warwick Xavier was the Smuggler King, this woman might be his Queen or Crown Princess...either a wife half his age or his daughter. Maybe even granddaughter. Or perhaps she was his heir-apparent, ruthless in her own right and ready to take over as soon as the king showed weakness.

  Before Dreamsinger’s entrance, Xavier and the woman had been examining papers spread on a table—records, I assumed, of ill-gotten gains. Two gunsels stood nearby: big men who’d now holstered their pistols and stood with razor spikes bristling along their arms, ready to slash anyone who got too close. The sort of men who didn’t know when they were out of their depth.

  Dreamsinger ignored the enforcers. She gazed only at Xavier and the woman...smiling in what I thought might be recognition.

  “You’re a long way from home,” Dreamsinger said.

  It was the woman who replied. “I have many homes.”

  “And home is where the heart is,” Dreamsinger observed. “Or within a few kilometers. Which came first, dear sister? This operation or Feliss Academy?”

  “This operation, of course. I chose Feliss Academy only because I had an outpost nearby.”

  “Did your daughter know?”

  The woman beside Xavier shook her head. “Rosalind is happier thinking she’s not completely under my wing. But I don’t send her to a school unless it’s close to my holdings...and wherever she goes, I follow.”

  Dreamsinger smiled. “Dear sister, she’s gone somewhere you can’t follow. Your daughter died several hours ago.”

  The thin woman—Elizabeth Tzekich, Knife-Hand Liz—caught her breath. That was all. Then she clamped her jaw tight.

  I saw no tears.

  Where Elizabeth Tzekich was gaunt, Rosalind had been plump—possibly in rebellion, the daughter fattening herself to look as little like her mother as possible. Yet the mother’s tight face, the way she suppressed all grief, reminded me of Rosalind concealing her own emotions: the careful hiding-behind-walls of a girl who’d given up making friends.

  Like mother, like daughter. And the fierce woman in front of us must have been Rosalind’s age when she gave birth to her child. How had that happened? A passionate elopement the way Rosalind had planned to run off with Sebastian? It wouldn’t surprise me. Then pregnancy, and who knows? I couldn’t imagine how a woman that young could create the Ring of Knives, but Elizabeth Tzekich had managed it. Not only spreading through Europe, but all around the world.

  Rosalind had moved from school to school and Knife-Hand Liz had moved from one Ring outpost to another. I wondered who led whom. Was the mother following the daughter just to be close to her? Or was Elizabeth Tzekich touring her assets, inspecting her lieutenants, streamlining operations, spending a few months in every branch office...and whenever she moved on, forcing her daughter to move too, shunting the girl into any school that was handy at the next port of call?

  Maybe a little of both.

  But she had kept her daughter near her. When Rosalind came to Feliss Academy, Mother Tzekich must have moved in with Warwick Xavier—Xavier, who was district manager for the Ring, in charge of smuggling and miscellaneous skullduggery. Had Knife-Hand Liz crept near the academy from time to time in hope of catching sight of her daughter? Or had she stayed away, never trying to see the girl but staying close in case something happened?

  In case the girl got in trouble. A mother wants to be there.

  But she hadn’t been.

  Tzekich asked, “How did Rosalind die?”

  Dreamsinger shrugged. “Perhaps an OldTech bioweapon. My brother is investigating.”

  “But it was murder?”

  “That seems likely.”

  “Who was responsible?”

  Dreamsinger cocked her head to one s
ide. “That’s my question for you. Do any of your enemies have bioweapons hidden in their vaults?”

  “Not that I know of—otherwise, I’d report the bastards for possessing banned substances. I’m a loyal subject of the Spark Protectorate.”

  Dreamsinger smiled. “Of course. Dear sister.”

  “So why are you here? Just to tell me my daughter’s dead?”

  “Oh no. That was an unexpected pleasure.” Dreamsinger smiled again. Such a sweet smile. “I came to ask Mr. Xavier about a boy who’s gone missing.”

  “I don’t know any boy,” Xavier said. His voice was tired; I suspected it wasn’t Xavier’s idea to be awake at this hour. Knife-Hand Liz had to be the one simmering with nervous energy, perusing papers long into the night.

  “Who is this boy?” Tzekich asked. Her voice was sharp; she obviously had guessed this was connected to Rosalind’s death.

  “The boy intended to elope tonight. These people...” Dreamsinger waved toward the three of us at the window. “They believe he chartered a fishing boat to go somewhere. I believe the boat’s crew would let you know what they were doing.”

  “Why would they?” Xavier asked. “It’s no business of mine if some brat runs away.”

  Dreamsinger waggled a finger in his direction. “But it is your business if a boat goes smuggling without permission. I’m sure you deal harshly with those who try to turn independent. To avoid such suspicions, any captain leaving port after dark likely sends you a note. Gentle master, I’m just taking a passenger somewhere, so please don’t break my knees when I get back.”

  Xavier looked surly, as if he wanted to deny Dreamsinger’s words. Tzekich slapped him hard on the arm. “For God’s sake, tell her anything you know!”

  The old man’s expression didn’t change...but he turned his scowl on Tzekich. “In the old days, we didn’t let outsiders deal with our problems. Your daughter is murdered? That’s our business, not the Sparks.”