Shadowborn

by Alison Sinclair

  Balthasar, slightly startled at the question being referred to him, weighed it. His spirit rebelled against rejecting outright the possibility of negotiating and perhaps sparing lives on both sides. But years of torment by his brother, years of work amongst the oppressed and dispossessed of the city, and years of listening to and observing his social betters had all taught him that to many, negotiation was weakness, an invitation to further cruelties. He said, “Negotiation would only be productive if we had something they want—aside from our lives.” As food or slaves, he did not say; it stood implied.

  “I know,” she said, quietly. “That’s my thought, too. But—” Her hand strayed to her rounded abdomen, and she did not voice what else she thought.

  “As long as we can hold the manor, we stay,” her father said. “But we should lay the groundwork for a retreat, as Mycene says. I’ll get started on that. Laurel, I want you to rest. Hearne, you’d best get back to the surgery. I know we took casualties in the courtyard and on the roof. Strumheller, I’ve a request of you that will seem decidedly hypocritical, given the opinions I’ve expressed as late as last night. But we’re fighting for our lives, here. I want you to find that infiltrator—or infiltrators. If they’re Shadowborn or shape-changed or ensorcelled, you’ll be able to tell, if you come close enough.”

  Close enough to touch, he meant. Close enough to read, unconsenting and perhaps unawares. Ishmael had told Telmaine that that was contrary to the code he lived by. His face stoic, Ishmael got to his feet. “I can do that.”

  Ishmael

  Aside from the leadership and the vulnerable points, the points he would expect a Shadowborn to undermine were the roof, the entrances, the armory, and the munitions. Which had him roaming from rooftop to cellars like an unquiet ghost, three of Stranhorne’s troop dogging his heels for his safekeeping. The sense of Shadowborn magic had dwindled since the attack, but not gone entirely, and when he reached the roof, he realized why—the damp night had turned to sleet and wind, making him shiver with more than cold. He found Lavender and Jeremiah Coulter at the southwest corner, supervising the lashing down of one of the three cannon underneath an improvised shelter. Coulter stroked its flank as covetously as a horse thief might a prime mare, his misspent past having included a stint as a pirate’s gunner. Ishmael cautioned, “Y’realize that thing’ll deafen everyone on the roof and below.” That he knew from painful experience. He never wanted to be near cannon fire again.

  Coulter grinned. Lavender frowned through the rain dripping from her hat. “We’ll use it if we need it.”

  “Give me a head start at running first,” he grumbled. “A word, if y’don’t mind.”

  She let him draw her away. “This weather’s not natural,” he said, quietly.

  “I don’t need you t’tell me that,” she said. “I know by the queasy expression on your face.”

  He’d thought he was concealing it better than that. She smirked, reading his mind.

  “Boris said you gave him the talk,” she said. “Are you about to give me the talk?”

  “You don’t need that talk. This is another one. If y’hear the retreat, retreat. Y’understand?”

  “We’ll have to disable the cannon. . . .”

  Entirely sensible, with their enemies able to land on the roof and turn those cannon on the stairwell entrances. “If y’hear the retreat, y’won’t have much time.” Five stories down to the ground, and may the Mother of All Things—including of fiery young women with more courage than sense—guide her choice of a stair. He could imagine nothing worse than being down in the cellar with Stranhorne, knowing they must light the fuses, and knowing she was trapped above them. He still didn’t know whether Stranhorne had told her what he planned—it was time he did, for the sake of the people with her—but it was not Ishmael’s decision. “Promise me you’ll get your people down and clear. Spike or throw the cursed cannon off th’edge of the roof if you must, but do it fast. We’ll need you on th’ground to help with the breakout, and we don’t want you cut off.”

  “I promise. Now you promise me, no more one-man stands.”

  “Not my choice—”

  “No excuse,” she said, sternly. “You told me that yourself: y’have to think ahead, leave yourself maneuvering space. Promise.”

  He promised, and he meant it as sincerely, he supposed, as she did. Time and circumstance would determine whether one or both of them would be forsworn.

  She leaned forward as though to kiss his lips, and at the last instant faltered and brushed his cheek instead. He could not kiss her back—it would not have been proper, even if he had been willing to intrude further on her thoughts—but he brought up his gloved hand and cupped her cheek. “Please try to stay out of trouble.”

  He wanted to pull Coulter or one of the senior troopers aside and order them to make sure she did retreat, but knew she would be rightfully furious with him, instead of merely irritated, as her fleetingly sour expression attested. She wasn’t a teenage enthusiast anymore, and she deserved the same respect he would give any fighting man or woman. Maybe it was as well that he’d never had a daughter. . . . He made his circuit of the men and women with her, trying as best he could to sense any additional aura of Shadowborn over the miasma rising with the rain. Trying too hard, the fierce pain in his chest warned him. He had no choice but to sit down on the wet gravel and pass off the spell as momentary dizziness from his injured arm. He went down the western stair, deliberately using the busier stair so that he met as many people as possible. Imogene’s tits, he could only hope his movements were as unpredictable to any Shadowborn trying to evade him—assuming they’d even bother—as to himself.

  Laurel was resting, on her father’s orders, in a curtained corner of the ballroom. Neither her father nor she had wanted her to go back to her rooms, he because he wanted to be sure of her whereabouts in a crisis, and she because she had the opportunity here to listen. She whispered her suspicions of two groups who had passed her; he promised to check them.

  The baron himself was in the side gallery with several of his troop, stooped over the relief, reviewing the route and deployment for a retreat. Ishmael circled, attentive to any recoil of the men and women he passed or any perturbation of his senses, but nobody shifted more than simply yielding him room. Stranhorne stopped him as he made to withdraw. “Raining again?” he said.

  “Aye. Cursed near sleet.”

  By the tucked-in corner of Stranhorne’s mouth, he understood the implication. He moved with Ishmael to the doorway. “Can we expect relief by sunrise?” he said, quietly.

  A sensitive question, Ishmael admitted. If they didn’t, he would not know whether the enemy had cut them off or Ishmael had failed in his duty to prepare for his own decease and the transition to his brother’s rule. He had thought he planned well, but had never imagined the transition happening in the midst of such emergency, where a speck of grit in the mechanism could produce a fatal stall. And his marred relationship with Reynard was a more than a speck. Noellene had been right: he had owed Reynard a full account, whether in person or in a letter—even though he might be certain that Reynard would believe not a word of it. But when events taught Reynard otherwise, then he would have that information.

  Too late to regret that, either. He said, “Troops have been on th’alert or on the move all summer. Reynard’s had the ducal order, and he’s had Hearne’s account. If the rider reached th’station, and the telegraph wires aren’t cut, then they’ll be moving fast as they can. Reynard’s no trooper, and he knows t’stay out of the way. And even if he doesn’t, Noellene will set her hand to it.”

  Stranhorne smiled at the mention. “She will, that.” He was fond of Ishmael’s sister, and she of him, though not fond enough to marry, much to the vexation of Reynard’s then wife. She had schemed for Noellene’s respectable send-off from Strumheller. After Reynard’s divorce, Noellene had settled in once more as chatelaine, and seemed likely to stay there. Notwithstanding her dainty beauty, citified airs,
and expensive tastes worthy of Lady Telmaine herself, Noellene understood the Borders defense as well as her brothers. If Reynard needed spurring, she would apply the spurs.

  “So, t’answer your question, I’m hopeful of it.”

  “But we should plan to hold out for the day,” Stranhorne finished for him. “If we’re not forced to retreat. Any hint of Shadowborn—inside?” he appended.

  “Truthfully, be difficult for me t’tell, but I’m on it. Where’s Mycene?”

  Mycene and his men were in the courtyard, having reinforced the squad guarding the main gate during the worst of the attack. The Shadowborn had again made targets of the leaders, more successfully than on the roof. The defenders’ mind-set had been too slow to shift from thinking of Shadowborn as unreasoning beasts capable of savagery but not tactics. Stranhorne probably owed the integrity of its north gate to Mycene and his men. That is a less uncomfortable notion than hitherto, Ish thought, slightly amused at how differently they greeted him, having now met Shadowborn for themselves. Mycene was no friendlier, since he still had every reason to suspect—or maintain the appearance of suspecting—Ishmael’s involvement in his fiancée’s death. However, Ishmael doubted he would ever again liken the profession of Shadowhunter to that of rat catcher, as his father had done more than once in Ishmael’s hearing. Ish exchanged nods with Mycene’s men and words with Mycene, noted they were down to eight, and accounted for three wounded—one seriously and two of whom they expected back shortly—and the hapless di Banneret, who knew no better than to eat sausage from a street vendor’s cart.

  Which made him think of the wounded, and wonder how Balthasar Hearne was holding up. He shied from entering the dining room, ward for the most seriously wounded. Arrant cowardice, he knew. He would have found it hard even when Stranhorne’s prohibition against using his magic was on him, and now, now that he knew he was no longer able to help, he faltered at the door, at the sounds of murmurs and groans and of someone—a woman? a young boy?—sobbing brokenly.

  As he stood there, a woman made to push past him, and he recognized one of Stranhorne’s housekeepers, a sharp-tongued, sharp-witted woman who was an exacting manager for her portion of the staff. He could rely on her to know exactly who was doing what and where. He caught her arm. “Dr. Hearne, Dr. Balthasar Hearne—could y’please tell him that I’d like a word with him?”

  “But, Baron,” the woman said, startled, “he hasn’t returned since he left with you.”

  Balthasar

  Balthasar followed the orderlies carrying the stretcher for his last case into the ballroom to assess the next, and found Ishmael standing inside the dining room–turned-ward, hands pushed deep into pockets and shoulders hunched. “I need a quick word,” the baron said, curtly.

  “Is it your arm—”

  “Nothing medical,” said the baron, his expression strangely unreadable. “Nothing needing done here. I just need a word.”

  Balthasar’s first thought was of Telmaine—that Ishmael had sensed more from Telmaine. That thought had him untying his apron even as he truthfully protested, “I don’t have long. I shouldn’t leave at all.”

  “A moment—that’s all I ask.”

  Balthasar trailed Ishmael’s hurrying heels across the ballroom, up the east stairs. Ishmael brusquely deflected attempts to accost him with a “Later” or “Ask the baronettes.”

  Their room on the fifth floor was in use. Ishmael steered him to one on the second that was now largely cleared of furnishing and carpets, except for a dozen beds bare of mattresses. He recognized the packs propped against the near wall as belonging to members of Mycene’s troop—this was where the troop had been billeted. The beds themselves would have been stripped of their mattresses to hold refugees and wounded.

  “Have—Is it Telmaine?” Balthasar said as soon as the door closed.

  “Telmaine?” said Ishmael, startled. “What about Telmaine?”

  Not, then. “Have you found an infiltrator?”

  Ishmael smiled. “In a manner of speaking.”

  Balthasar felt the heart within him chill, as though he had suddenly gained the sense of Shadowborn magic that Telmaine had described. That smile was no expression of the man he knew, for all the cast of face and the scars were the same. Sweet Imogene, he himself had warned Ishmael of just this eventuality. But, tired and caught up by the false Ishmael’s urgency, he had let down his guard, missed the clues of the lapses in accent and Ishmael’s failure to show concern for Telmaine—indeed, now he thought of it, Ishmael’s expression down in the ward had been wrong, oblivious to the suffering around him. Balthasar had been caught by the very ruse he had warned others against.

  He swallowed and said, “This cannot possibly work. Ishmael himself is in the manor.” He prayed this was still so, but surely the Shadowborn could not have caught Ishmael off guard.

  “I know he’s about, curse him,” the Shadowborn said, hands fisted. “But it already has worked.”

  On him, for whichever reason the Shadowborn wanted him. “I’ll be missed,” Balthasar said, steadily. If the Shadowborn killed him and took his form, only Ishmael would be able to tell—until or unless the Shadowborn found himself faced with a chloroformed patient on a surgical table. The thought in itself was bleakly cheering; the prospect of how far the Shadowborn might go in his masquerade, sickening.

  He kept such thoughts off his face and out of his voice. “You came with Mycene’s men, didn’t you? You were the young man—di Banneret—who lent me a coat. A coat that was too big for me—and for you.” That was the inconsistency that had been nagging him, why a guardsman traveling light would carry a coat that did not fit him. Sweet Imogene, if he’d only remembered in time . . . “What is your name?”

  “My name?” said the Shadowborn, taken aback at the unexpected civility.

  Good; keep him off balance. “Do you not exchange names amongst your people?”

  That smile again, a triumphant malice in it. “We do. Oh, we do, and you’ll like learning mine. . . .” The Shadowborn abruptly moved with a crack of floorboards quite unlike Ishmael’s near-noiseless tread. Balthasar recoiled, his sonn ringing off the bones in the other’s skull as he pushed his face up to Balthasar’s.

  “Where are my sons, Balthasar Hearne?”

  I should have shouted out, Bal thought, while I still had a chance. A claw balanced his carotid pulse on its tip, and his mind went blank with terror. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Truly, I don’t know.”

  “You sent them away,” the Shadowborn breathed in his face. “Where to?”

  “I thought they’d be safer if I didn’t know,” Bal whispered in turn. “Can you not read the truth from me?”

  It was not a safe question, but an urgent one. He had thought the Shadowborn who had impersonated his brother, Lysander, claiming to be the father of the twins, had tormented him merely for the pleasure of it. But if not, if these Shadowborn could not touch-read, and if he survived to convey the information . . .

  The claw tip stroked downward; he clutched at his throat, but his fingers found merely a stinging gash and a trickle, not a gush or even a spurt of blood.

  “Truly,” he gasped, “I meant them no harm. Or their mother, either.”

  “What did she tell you about me?”

  “She said you had come to her in the daytime, traveling through the day. She was afraid the children would not be fully Darkborn. And they were—are—not. But they are also beautiful, healthy little boys, for whose safety I pray.”

  “But she was not safe,” the Shadowborn said, in Bal’s face. “She’s dead. So why should I care about your stupid prayers?”

  “I am deeply sorry about Tercelle,” Bal said. “But my prayers are my own. I would not dare to ascribe their value to anyone else. Much less a member of a people about whom I know virtually nothing.”

  “You think you know nothing about us?” the Shadowborn said, grinning savagely. Then the grin tightened, as at some mental or physical effort, and the bones of
it shifted. There was something intrinsically revolting about bone moving like muscle beneath the skin, but even if there were not, he had already met the phenomenon, lying pinned on Vladimer’s bedroom floor as his brother’s semblance warped to that of a stranger’s and the nails of his poised hand elongated to shredding talons. Ishmael’s face re-formed as a much younger but still familiar one. The young man—boy, no more than sixteen—smiled his older brother’s mocking smile.

  “Not such a stranger, am I, now? Uncle Balthasar.”

  The smile was there, the lips and narrow nose were there, but the cheekbones were more pronounced and the eyes more wide set. Lysander’s features, mingled with another’s. Mingled, as Balthasar’s were with Telmaine’s in their two small daughters.

  Balthasar broke for the door. There was no planning in it, simply a raw impulse of flight. The Shadowborn caught him on his first stride, arm around his chest. A callused palm slammed up underneath his jaw, pinning his mouth closed; fingers closed on his nose, blocking off all air. Bal bucked and thrashed, staggering with the Shadowborn, bringing them both to their knees. As they toppled, the Shadowborn twisted them both, throwing Bal down beneath him. Bal’s injured cheek ground into the floor. His head pounded with air deprivation; he convulsed with the urgent need to breathe. His head struck the Shadowborn’s jaw, and he frantically jerked it up again. The Shadowborn gasped out, “I am not letting you go. You will obey me.”

  And Balthasar felt the ensorcellment enwrap him, turn his muscles to meltwater and his will to . . . nothing at all. “Lie still,” the Shadowborn said in the boy’s voice, and he could not move, stripped of even the most primitive survival reflexes. He was all but unconscious when the Shadowborn released his mouth and nose and let him gasp in air.

  “You are my father’s brother,” whispered the boy against his ear. “You are family, and so you should love me. Love me the way you love your own children. And obey me. The way you would obey your God.”