The Guild Secret (The Dark Ability Book 6)

by D. K. Holmberg

She slumped in her chair and looked up at Rsiran. He wanted to reach for her, but doing so might only make it worse. “I didn’t lose anything. That’s what you don’t understand, Brusus. I’ve gained something I thought I wouldn’t have. Something I didn’t think I deserved to have.” Her voice caught on the last part, and she swallowed. “And now my friend wants to give me a hard time about wanting stability?”

  “Ah, damn, girl. I didn’t want to make you feel bad.” Brusus came around the table and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “We want you to be happy. The Great Watcher knows that’s what you deserve after all you been through.”

  She pushed him away. “You think I don’t know that I don’t have the same to offer as others?” She spoke softly enough that Rsiran didn’t think she intended him to hear, but the words still pierced him. He wouldn’t have managed half of what he had accomplished without Jessa. “You think I don’t know that he doesn’t need me anymore? Now that he can use the knives like… like some sort of lantern, he doesn’t need me.”

  “He still needs you,” Brusus said. “Probably more now than before. Can’t let him get a big head and go running off on us, thinking that he needs to be the perfect guildlord.”

  “I can hear you,” Rsiran said.

  “You better hear me,” Brusus told him. “Otherwise, I would have wasted my words.” He patted Jessa on the arm. “Even though he needs you, doesn’t mean you have to be there for him. You have to find what drives you. That’s what Haern wants for you, and what he thinks your parents would have wanted, too. Now I think I’ve done enough for the night,” Brusus said, and turned to where Alyse made her way to the kitchen.

  “What does he hide?” Luca asked when Brusus was gone.

  “What do you mean?” Rsiran asked.

  “His eyes. He’s not as weak as he seems.”

  Rsiran smiled. How long had it taken him to realize how strong Brusus really was? It had taken his friend nearly dying in order for him to learn, and Luca had managed to detect it through simple observation. “There’s much about Brusus that’s not as it would seem,” he said.

  Jessa stood and pushed Rsiran’s hand off her shoulder. “And there’s just as much that’s exactly as it seems.”

  “Jessa—”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You don’t seem like you’re fine.”

  She started toward the door, tipping her head toward the flower charm she wore. “Well, I am.”

  She turned and left the Barth. Rsiran watched her leave, debating whether he should chase after her, but suspecting she needed time to herself.

  “You’re not going after her, Master Lareth?”

  Rsiran took a deep breath and turned back to Luca. “Just Rsiran,” he said.

  Luca took the Ilphaesn sculpture and cradled it in his arms. He tipped his head to the side as he did, listening to the song from the lorcith. What did Luca hear when he listened to the sculpture? When Rsiran focused, he could hear the steady sound—what Luca called the song—but nothing with any real intensity, and certainly not like he would have found in Ilphaesn. But it helped Luca in a way that nothing else really had.

  “Meet me at the smithy tomorrow morning,” Rsiran said, pushing back from the table. “We’ll continue to work on some finer forgings.”

  Luca flashed a smile and nodded. “Is there anything you’re working on that I can help with?”

  Rsiran almost told him that he didn’t really need help with anything, but that wouldn’t help Luca learn what he needed. The boy was now Rsiran’s apprentice, and he was determined to treat him better than he had been treated during his apprenticeship. Letting him work with and learn from lorcith was only the first step in the process, but it was a necessary one.

  “Brusus has been pushing me for a few things for the Barth. I think we’ll work on those together.”

  He left Luca to finish his meal and made his way outside the tavern. Once there, the cool air sent a shiver down his spine. He focused on the lorcith and heartstone Jessa wore and found her wandering along the shores. Shifting his focus, he listened for Haern, and found him in the same place he had before.

  Why would Haern not have moved?

  That troubled him, as did the strange argument with Jessa. He could work on one of the two more easily.

  Pulling himself into a Slide, he emerged in the small room where he had found Haern when he’d Traveled. When Traveling, there were none of the scents—the staleness of warm ale, the stink of sweat, a hint of dried jerky. Even his vision was different when Traveling, leaving him with a hint of bluish white light all around, as if the Traveling were infused with his ability with lorcith and heartstone. The windowless room had no light other than that which came from the bracelets Rsiran wore, and the sword he’d pulled from his sheath, but it was enough to see the room was empty.

  Rsiran focused on the sense of lorcith that Jessa had snuck into Haern’s pocket, and found it on a table, resting on its edge, with nothing else around it.

  Haern had known what they’d done. And now was gone.

  Chapter 18

  Waves crashed along the shore in a steady rhythm that had become comfortable to him in the time he’d lived in Lower Town. Moonlight filtered through the clouds, barely enough to light his way. Though Rsiran no longer feared the darkness as he once had, he still pushed a knife before him to light his way. Without that, he would have been more uncomfortable. A gull cawed overhead, but he couldn’t see it from where he stood on the rocks.

  Jessa moved in the distance, a dark shadow against the rest of the night. The lorcith in her necklace and that within her bracelets pulled on him, but he made a point of not getting too close, not wanting to anger her. If she needed her space, he would give it to her, but at the same time, she would want to know that Haern had disappeared.

  She paused at the end of the rock and turned toward him, the metal on the chain she wore lighting her face, giving a faint glow in the distance that he might be the only one able to detect. She didn’t move, but he knew she saw him.

  When he Slid to her, emerging a step away, she leaned toward him and wrapped him in a hug. “It took you long enough.”

  The comment stole from him what he needed to share with her. “I thought you wanted time to yourself. After what Brusus said—”

  “I wanted time, but you should know that you have to be a part of it. Besides, Brusus spoke the truth. What do I have, now that I’m not a sneak?”

  “You’re still a sneak.”

  “Really? When have I needed to use that particular skill since I met you?”

  Rsiran could think of several ways that she had managed to use it, but that wasn’t what she was really asking him. “Is that what you want?”

  She let out a frustrated sigh. “I don’t know. I want to have that sense of purpose, that thrill that I had that comes from getting someplace that you’re not supposed to be. It was never about taking something, not for me at least. It’s always been about the challenge.”

  “You can still challenge yourself.”

  “Really? When you can take us wherever we need to go? No lock stops you, Rsiran. In that way, my ability as a sneak is useless.” She sighed again. “So I need to find something else, only I don’t know what it is. You’ve got your smithy, and now the guild, and all these things going well. I’m happy for you—for us—but…”

  “But what?” he asked.

  Jessa turned away and skipped a rock out over the cresting waves. When she spoke, her voice came out thin and strained. “I… I can’t be the doting wife if that’s what you want.”

  He laughed before cutting himself off when Jessa glared at him. “Who said that’s what I want?”

  The glare changed over to hurt. “It’s not?”

  “The doting, not the part about the wife.”

  She punched his shoulder and then let him pull her toward him again. “When I returned to Elaeavn—when Haern brought me back—I thought I knew what would become of me. That I would work
with Brusus and Haern on different jobs as a sneak. But everything has changed.”

  Rsiran laughed, and she punched his shoulder again. “You’re just now realizing that?”

  “When have we had the time to think about anything? Between Josun using you, and then the Forgotten and Venass chasing after you, we’ve been running. Now… now you can have a measure of peace. You can lead the guild and whatever happens outside the city becomes less of a real threat.” She shrugged. “I finally have the time to think about what’s going to happen to me. What will I become now that everything has settled?”

  “But it’s not settled, not for me. Danis is still out there. Venass is the same threat that they were before. When we stop them, then we can think about those things.”

  “Eventually, we’ll defeat them. You have to know that.”

  Rsiran wasn’t as certain as Jessa about that. The past few times he’d faced Venass, he had barely escaped. There was a reason he hesitated racing after them again. Until he understood how to avoid a shadowsteel attack, he wasn’t sure it was safe for him.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  She sniffed. “You’ve defeated them. They might attack again, but they know what you can do, the abilities that you have and the fact that you were able to stop him. They won’t risk attacking again soon.”

  “I don’t think that’s as true as we would like,” he said. “Venass… They will find some way to stop me. If it’s something like that shadowsteel sphere or something else”—he thought of the way he was nearly trapped while Traveling—“the longer we wait, the more likely it is that they’ll be able to overwhelm whatever my abilities can do. Then what? We need help and without Haern—”

  “What about Haern?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Gone? Can’t you follow the coin I slipped into his pocket?”

  “I can.” Rsiran pulled the coin from his pocket and held it out to her. “If he had it with him. Doesn’t have his bracelets, either.”

  “Damn him,” she said. “How long ago did he disappear?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve been keeping tabs on him, though, haven’t you?” she asked. “You’ve been watching him?”

  “When I Traveled to Haern the last time, he was still in the room.”

  “When was that?”

  “This morning.”

  “Take me there,” she said. Jessa pushed away from him and jumped the rocks closer to shore. Rsiran Slid after her before Sliding her into Haern’s small home.

  Once again, the smells struck him first. They were stale, the scents of a place that had been heavily lived in. Jessa held her nose, scanning the room as she did.

  “Not here,” she said.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But you also said he was here this morning. That gives him nearly a full day.”

  “With Haern, he could get pretty far in a single day,” Rsiran said.

  “Not as far as you.”

  “No, but if Haern doesn’t want to be found, then we’re not likely to find him.”

  She leaned over the wooden table. In the light coming off the knife he held suspended in the air, he could see a faded stain and a stack of pages resting on it. A pair of dice was set atop the pages. Jessa lifted the top few pages and began rifling through them before setting them back down. She moved on to the trunk at the end of the bed and flipped it open. Inside were neatly folded clothes, a couple of steel knives, and the strange black shirt that he’d seen him wearing in the past.

  Jessa lifted that out and held it up. “He wouldn’t have left this.”

  The fabric of the shirt seemed to push away the light from the knives, making it look impossibly black. “What is it?”

  “This is from when he was still an assassin. There’s something about the fabric. Without Sight, you probably can’t make out the ways that it practically draws in shadows.”

  “I don’t need Sight to see that,” he told her.

  She handed the shirt to him. “Feel it. If this came from Venass, is there anything that we can learn from it?”

  Rsiran turned the shirt over, searching for signs of anything that might help him know how Venass might have made it. “It’s not lorcith or heartstone,” he said.

  “And that’s the extent of your abilities?”

  “When it comes to this? Pretty much. I’m not a seamstress or a tailor.”

  “No, but you’ve got experience with strange qualities of things. I thought maybe one of your other abilities might be able to help you figure out what this is made from.”

  “What other abilities? I don’t have your Sight, or any of Brusus’s abilities—”

  She pulled the shirt from his hands, shaking her head. “No. You have much more than any of us. It’s time you stop thinking of what you can’t do and focus on what you can. You’re more skilled than any of us. Well, maybe not Brusus if he ever lets himself use all of his abilities.”

  “Or Della.”

  She nodded. “Della, too.”

  “And all the Elvraeth.”

  She punched him. “The Elvraeth wish they knew what you could do. Now. Is there anything from this that you can pick up?”

  “Like I said, it’s not heartstone or lorcith.”

  “And with your alchemist connection, is that all that you can detect?”

  He started to object, before catching himself. What if there was something more that he could determine from the shirt? There was no denying the fact that he did seem to have aspects of each of the talents of the guilds, including the ability of the alchemists to know the potential within metals. The shirt wasn’t one of the metals that he knew, but it did have a metallic sort of sheen to it. What if he could use his ability to determine something about the shirt?

  And if he could? How would that help them?

  He watched Jessa, and the hope she had in her eyes. Maybe it would do nothing. No—likely, it would do nothing. But Jessa wanted him to try, so he would.

  Rsiran shook the shirt out, and then started to push away the sense of lorcith and heartstone. They pulled on him, as if trying to draw him back, demanding his attention. Once, it had been easier to push away the awareness of the metals, but he’d become so attuned to them, they were practically a part of him. Sending the awareness of them away was like sending a part of himself away.

  Slowly, they became little more than a distant sense in his mind. He didn’t think that he could totally remove his sense of them, not anymore. He turned his attention to the shirt. If it was woven completely, he doubted that he would pick up on anything, but what kind of fabric had the ability to draw shadows and practically bend light? That was more like what some of the metals could do.

  Running his hand across the smooth fabric, he felt pressure against the tips of his fingers.

  He had never felt anything like it before. It was almost like the fabric resisted him.

  “I… I can’t,” he answered.

  She sighed. “It was worth a shot. That shirt is from before. When he worked with Venass. I thought maybe they used shadowsteel in it or something.”

  “And you wanted me to feel it?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not like it’s the same as those spheres.”

  “I think shadowsteel is something newer for Venass,” he said. “And if we can understand how they’re making so much of it, we might find a way to stop them. It’d be helpful to have Haern with us for that, though.”

  “Probably, but there’s nothing else here that might give us a clue,” she said.

  “No. So what now?”

  Jessa looked around. “I need to know if Carth found Haern.”

  Rsiran started to tell her that they needed to focus on Venass, or even on the guilds, searching for a way to unify them to oppose the Elvraeth. They had no time to look for Haern. But the set to her jaw and the determined look to her eyes were all too familiar, though he’d not seen them in a while. How could he deny her?

  “I’ll help,
” he said. “But there’s something I need to know about first.”

  She waited for him to explain, and then began nodding.

  Chapter 19

  The bar of shadowsteel encased in the remnants of his sword throbbed against Rsiran’s senses. Mostly, it came from the way the heartstone and the lorcith wrapped around it, fusing with the shadowsteel to make it harmless, but there was something about the dark metal itself that pained him.

  What would happen were he struck by shadowsteel? With his connection to lorcith and to heartstone, would he be protected in any way, or would the strange, dark metal damage him?

  Maybe that was why Venass had worked with it. If shadowsteel had managed to poison the Elder Trees, what would happen to him, a person somehow connected to the Elder Trees and the power they possessed?

  He Slid with the shadowsteel, out of his smithy and to the Hall of Guilds.

  It was late, well after midnight, but Jessa wasn’t going to rest while she worried about Haern, so he couldn’t, either. Losing Haern only reminded him that time was short and he needed answers.

  The Hall of Guilds was empty, though he hadn’t expected anything different. Blue and white light glowed everywhere, stronger than the first time he’d come, though that had been a time when he had snuck into the guild house, searching for answers that he would have found had he been willing to remain even a little while longer.

  Rsiran made his way into the wide, open chamber to the rows of drawers he’d found during that first visit. He closed his eyes, focusing as he had then. Was there anything in here that would guide him to what he needed? Even if there was, what he really needed was to find Ephram—

  “It’s late.”

  Rsiran turned to see Sarah standing in the doorway. She wore a low-cut white dress that swished across the floor as she walked toward him. “Is your father around?”

  “You came for Father at this time of the night?”

  Rsiran nodded.

  She smiled. “You really are a strange man, Rsiran Lareth.” She shook her head. “No. Father is not here. After what happened with the council, I’m not sure how excited he would be to see you, anyway.”