Page of Swords (The Demon's Apprentice Book 2)

by Ben Reeder

  “You’re not regulars, is all,” he said. “Why’d you send a messenger straight to her, but not me?”

  Dr. C nodded at me, as if giving me permission to answer for him.

  “Biladon Garnet recommended her by name. Your name never came up,” I said, adding as much disdain as I could and trying to keep the formal cadence of the Veil in my voice. “My Master wishes to have a thing of beauty on his arm while he is here.” It bugged me to refer to Synreah like that, but it made sense for the role we were playing.

  “A hundred trade ounces for an hour,” the pimp demanded.

  “Five hundred for the day,” Dr. C countered.

  I could see the greed in the little man’s eyes, and he looked to Synreah for a moment before he answered.

  “Until the hour before sunset,” the pimp agreed.

  Dr. C nodded and held out his hand. Laying on his palm was a square cut ruby, a little less than half an inch on a side.

  “That will be sufficient,” he said as the man plucked the ruby from his hand and waved Synreah over to us.

  Dr. C held his hand out to her, and she took it, then turned so that she was holding his hand and half-way wrapped around his arm at the same time. Everything about the move and her body language said she was completely his. Even covered mostly in a dark cloak, she made herself look hot. With a shrug of her shoulders, the cloak fell to the ground, and I got to see what she was wearing today. It looked like she’d taken a couple of pieces of fabric and turned them into a top and skirt without sewing anything. Her top was a blue piece that came down from the back of her neck, crossed over her breasts then went behind her back to turn itself into a bow. The skirt was the same color, just wrapped around her waist so that it was at an angle, higher on her left leg than on her right with a silver chain belt adorned with bandanas and cloth pouches on her hips. She wore a pair of blue canvas lace up boots that came halfway up her long calves, with heels that made me dizzy just to look at. They were laced with a paler blue ribbon. Her arms were wrapped in bands of blue that came up around her thumbs and crisscrossed starting at her wrists and going to her elbows, where she had them tied off to leave long streamers that flowed with her movements. She even had her hair done up with a blue band that ran up across the top of her forehead, and her tiny horns poked through it. I was sure she was violating some kind of fashion rule, but she broke it well.

  “It was good to hear from you again,” she said to me once we were out of earshot of her owner. Then she turned to Dr. C. “I am Synreah, and I’m yours for the day. Do you want me all to yourself, or did you plan on sharing?” She cast a hopeful glance at me and winked.

  Dr. C laughed and said, “The boy doesn’t need any distractions today.” She gave a mocking pout and made a sympathetic sound as she pranced along at his side.

  The ramp to the Shadow Gate dropped before us as we turned a corner. I avoided using the Shadow Gate when I could, and so did most people who didn’t have a small army of bodyguards or a wizard with them. It was on the north side of the Hive, and it was underground, so full sunlight never hit the place. There were things lurking around it that you didn’t want to run into on a sunny day, much less a red day like today.

  Dr. C just kept going, his staff tapping against the stone as he went. With each step, a light glowed brighter and brighter from the top every time the tip hit the ground. Things recoiled into the darkness of the side tunnels as we approached the iron gate the marked the entrance to the underside of the Hive.

  “Now that we’re inside,” Dr. C said warmly as we passed the gate, “I’d like to contract your services as a guide as well. Discreetly, of course.”

  Synreah’s grin was hungry as she hugged his arm.

  “I may be easy, but I’m not cheap,” she purred.

  “Neither am I. Let’s say we pay you the same today as a guide as I just paid for your services as arm candy?” he said as he held out another ruby of similar size to the one he’d paid her pimp with. Unlike the previous transaction, though, he actually put it in her upturned hand instead of making her take it from him.

  “Done,” she said. “I like a generous man,” she purred and pressed herself against him even further.

  My jaw almost hit the ground. He’d just dropped a thousand trade ounces in less than five minutes without blinking. I had no idea how much he had, or where he got it, but he was either a very good actor, or he was loaded. Maybe both. I was even more impressed with him than I had been after the display with the pimp. He’d waited to make the deal for her services as a guide, which also told me he knew how to be more subtle than most magi I knew.

  “So, what do you need guiding to?” she asked.

  “I need to find Dead Leo,” I told her.

  She nodded and looked at Dr. C.

  “You have the smell of true love on you,” she said and pulled away from him and stepped closer to me. “And you have the scent of budding love about you. You’re both going to be a temptation for me today, and I really hate resisting temptation.”

  She knelt in front of Junkyard and let him sniff at her hands, then pulled a red bandana from her belt and tied it loosely around his neck. “Now you look the proper rebel, like the human you chose,” she said as she stood.

  Without another word, she led us further into the underside of the Hive.

  Dead Leo’s place ended up being deep in the Hive, deeper than I’d ever been before. I tried to keep my eyes off Synreah’s behind as she guided us further and further into the alleyways and side corridors. Junkyard seemed to take to the bandana as a badge of pride, and trotted along beside me with his tail a notch or two higher. Between Dr. C’s staff and Junkyard at my side, anyone who saw us knew us for magi, but the cloaks and masks did their job well enough that no one seemed to recognize us. Even if they did, no one would say anything, either to our faces or behind our backs. Discretion was a commodity in the Hive, and silence was its chief export. Anyone who threatened those two things usually had a very messy death in their immediate future, most times a very public one, too.

  “How is it you know about this man without knowing where he is?” Dr. C asked as we wound our way between dark alleyways and shrouded figures offering drugs or illegal curses from under their cloaks.

  “He usually works with messengers and middlemen,” I told him. “Half the forbidden books and lore you can buy in the Hive have his mark on them, but he never sells direct. What we need today, though, he’d never sell a copy of, so I need to buy some time in his library. So, how is it you know how to handle yourself in a place like this?” I asked.

  “This isn’t the only shady market in the world, you know. Although it’s the biggest one I’ve seen in the U.S. I visited my fair share of them when I worked for the Sentinels as a troubleshooter.”

  “You were a Sentinel?” I asked softly.

  “I quit after three weeks,” he said calmly.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t stand my boss. But, I was good at what I did, so they hire me to freelance sometimes when they need someone to do undercover work.” Even as he said it, a brief flash of his memories played inside my head, of an argument between him and Polter, then just a wizard, and Dr. Corwyn a mage.

  “Like find a rogue warlock?” I asked.

  “No, Sydney was my mentor and friend. I did that on my own.”

  Synreah stopped and turned to face us. The building behind her was three stories tall, but the top story was gutted and the walls were an uneven line of crumbling brick, with the roof all but gone. I could see the red sky through the windows that faced the front of the building. A rickety set of stairs led up the side of the building, looking like they were still there more out of sheer stubbornness than any feat of engineering. A thick metal door sat in the middle of the lower story, and the lower windows were shuttered with metal panels. The windows in the upper story were covered with bars, and I couldn’t even see the upstairs door.

  “His place is upstairs,” she said, tiltin
g her head toward the upper story. “Stay close to the wall when you go up.”

  I gave her a longer look and wondered what kind of business she had with Dead Lorenzo before I headed up the steps with Junkyard at my side. I felt as much heard Dr. C on the steps behind me, and when I stopped at the heavy, iron-banded door, he was right beside me. Even under the mask, I could see his jaw was set, and his eyes were like cold steel. On my left side, Junkyard nuzzled my hand before he sat down.

  “I’ve got this,” I told him as I reached for the heavy knocker.

  “You’re my apprentice. It’s my job to look out for you. You’ve been trying to do all this on your own, and, too often, I’ve had to let you. Right now, I can look out for you and damn it, that’s what I’m going to do. Get over it.”

  I turned away a little and shook my head to hide the smile that was creeping across my face. It was kinda cool to have someone at my back that was a bigger badass in the magick department than I was. Even after six months living with my mom and having real friends, I was still getting used to the idea that someone might be there to come to my rescue. The reminder was nice. The sound of the knocker against the door didn’t sound so ominous with that thought in my head.

  A small panel about eye level opened and a pair of red-rimmed hazel eyes squinted out at us. “The Master doesn’t sell his books or scrolls, least of all to the Conclave. Look somewhere else!” It all came out in a well-practiced rush, in a reedy, high-pitched voice. He pulled back, and started to slam the little panel shut, but Dr. C held his hand out in the gesture I kept trying so hard to imitate, with two fingers up, his ring and pinky finger bent down and his thumb bent just so. My mystic senses tingled as I felt a spell zip past me, and the panel stopped moving.

  “Look at the boy, and tell me he works for the Conclave,” he ordered. “And whether your Master is going to be pleased when he learns that we spent a thousand trade credits elsewhere when we could have spent two thousand here.”

  The eyes reappeared at the opening.

  “Bold words, but empty,” the voice said, then the eyes blinked and went slightly unfocused. “Right you are about the boy, though. What do you want?”

  “A few hours among the stacks,” Dr. C answered. He held up his left hand and pulled a round cut emerald from the small pile of gems on his palm.

  The panel closed and the door opened. We stepped inside into a gloomy hallway that led straight back for about ten feet. The walls were almost completely covered in wards. Some I recognized, others I had to piece together from their component sigils. All of them were lethal, poison gases, spikes of telekinetic energy and frost wards. The reedy-voiced little guy we’d been talking to stood in front of us and held out his hand. Dr. C tossed the emerald his way casually, and I saw his hand snap forward and snatch it out of the air. As my eyes adjusted to the light, or, its absence, I could see that the little man wore a long, off white homespun robe with big, ink-stained sleeves.

  “I am Inamosa,” the little man said. “And I am at your service.” His face was gaunt and pale, and his mouth never seemed to close all the way. Brown hair ringed his skull, and I could make out the recent growth where he’d shaved it. He looked like one of the monks from some of the old books I’d read when I worked for Dulka.

  “I need a specific book,” I said as Inamosa led us to the door at the other end of the hall.

  He pulled a set of heavy keys from his pocket and started sorting through them.

  “Of course you do,” he said as he leaned with one hand against the door and stuck a key into the lock. The door creaked open, and he ushered us into another chamber. This room was furnished with a book-laden table that was flanked by a pair of leather-upholstered chairs that sat in front of a radiator heater. A love seat upholstered in red velvet faced the chairs. It was also better lit, with small clear globes scattered around it that each surrounded a single, bright flame, like an oversized candle. They hovered near the ceiling, and our host gestured at one. It floated over to hover over his right shoulder.

  “Which particular tome of knowledge do you require?”

  “The Medici Codex,” I said.

  He stared at me, and I was half afraid he was going to arch his back and hiss at me or make the sign of the cross.

  “You don’t ask for small favors, do you?” he finally said.

  “It’s worth it to you to grant this one,” Dr. C said as he held up a tiny diamond.

  Inamosa smiled and bowed his head regally before he answered.

  “Indeed it is. The boy only. You are still Conclave, wizard, and still too much of a risk to admit to the reserve shelves.”

  They traded glares until Dr. C nodded.

  “Chance, you’ll need this,” he said as he pulled a thick tube out of his pocket and tossed it across the room to me.

  I caught it and gave him a frown from behind my mask.

  “Is this . . . ?” I left the question unfinished.

  His response was a smile, a nod, and a wink. Up to something he was, I found myself thinking in Lucas’ painfully bad Yoda voice.

  Inamosa gestured for me to follow him, and led me through the shelves filled with scrolls, loose pages, heavy leather-bound books, slim volumes, and some even made of metal, with hinged backs. We passed one shelf that held several heavy, rune-covered tablets on thick pallets. We came to a spiral staircase that led into darkness. The floating ball lit the way down past the first floor, into a moldy-smelling sublevel that was filled with shelves that were faced with heavy wire mesh over iron-framed doors. I finally found myself at a dust-covered wooden table that was made of planks thick enough to hold small buildings up. A sheaf of paper sat to the right of the high-backed chair, with a green glass ink bottle and a handful of copper-nibbed dip pens on a bed of faded strips of ribbon. As we got closer, I could also see another globe set in a brass stand in the middle of the table.

  Inamosa reached across the table and put his thumb against the globe, bringing it flickering to life. He gestured to the chair, then turned and wandered back among the bookshelves. I took the seat, and Junkyard laid down with his head on my feet.

  A few minutes later, a heavy tome bound in some kind of black leather slid into view, pushed by a gaunt gray hand with blackened nails. Junkyard came to his feet when I started and came around behind the chair. I turned in the chair to face the newcomer, and tried to keep my cool. Standing over me was the corpse of a round-faced man in elaborate robes. A heavy gold crucifix dangled from his neck, and the smell of grave mold crept into my nose as he stared at me with milky white eyes. This had to be Dead Leo.

  After a few-second-long eternity, his head turned slowly to look at Junkyard, then rotated back toward me. His dead-eyed gaze pinned me to the seat.

  “Strewth, your familiar spirit fears me not,” he croaked out finally. “’Tis passing strange. Moreso that he’ll have aught to do with thee, with thy warlock’s taint.”

  “He uh . . . normal people treated him like crap,” I found myself explaining.

  Every part of me wanted to be away from this dead thing, away from the power that kept him animated, that made my skin almost literally crawl. But if he was talking, the smart part of my mind, the part that regularly tricked my monkey brain into doing stupid shit, could convince itself that this was a normal conversation and ignore the part where he was supposed to be not walking around above ground and talking to me.

  “I was the first person who was nice to him, I think.”

  His dry forehead wrinkled a little, then his lips split into a smile that made me look away before I heaved breakfast on his robes.

  “My most sincere apologies, my young friend,” he croaked from a few feet away. “I forget that to the living, I am naught but a cadaver that moves and speaks, an abomination before God. But I had to know who else sought out the Codex of the Medici. For centuries, it lay forgotten in my collection, and now, two seek it in less than the span of one year.”

  Something about the way he said the name of t
he book sounded odd, as if we saw the same book in two very different ways. But what he said made my mouth work faster than my brain.

  “There was someone else who wanted to look at this book?” I asked.

  “Aye, though I can not speak his name,” he answered.

  He put a little emphasis on the last word, as if that specific thing was important. I gave him a wolfish grin as I thought about what he could tell me. Proper etiquette was that I could ask three questions and still be considered polite. If I wanted to push it a little, I could ask one or two more, but I figured I didn’t really want to piss off the really old dead guy.

  “Did he come during the day or at night?” I asked, and he lifted a paper-thin eyebrow.

  “During the day.”

  “Did he have a pulse?”

  “When he first rang at my door, he did.”

  “How long ago?”

  “After the Feast of St Dominic.”

  “And why are you letting this information . . . slip?” I asked, wary of a trap. Technically, I was still playing by the rules, since I wasn’t asking a question about the same thing . . . well, not exactly.

  “I felt the wyrd upon you as soon as you entered my home. And a thing I have not felt in a great many years . . . one of Samson’s line has touched you. I may be an abomination before God, but I still may be the instrument of His will betimes.”

  He turned and limped into the darkness, and I still didn’t hear him move. I reached down for Junkyard’s back, and told myself he was nervous at watching me hold a conversation with a walking corpse, and he needed to be reassured and calmed down. He looked up at me as if he was checking to see if I was okay, and I gave him a mock serious look.

  “Scaredy cat,” I said.

  He wagged his tail and gave me a big, slobbery grin before he went back to his spot under the table. If I was more reassured than annoyed by his head on my foot, I wasn’t talking. My shoulders twitched as I turned to the book. It was hard to keep from looking over my shoulder to make sure Dead Leo wasn’t going to come back and do something hideous and deforming to me. I was sitting in a creepy dead guy’s basement, reading a forbidden tome, and I’d just had a conversation with said creepy dead guy. What was there to be paranoid about? I tried not to think about the fact that Dead Leo had also walked away from me in a different direction than the stairs.