Shadowborn
Page 13
“Dyan.” She pointed.
He wove through the crowd until he found the squad leader holding a firm seat on a young thoroughbred that had more spirit than sense; it was Boris’s favorite horse. He should have asked after the baronet, but too late now. Trotting at Dyan’s stirrup, Ishmael pointed out his course. He would fall out across the field, keeping level with Dyan and his squad until he was out of range of sonn. Anyone he found, he would bring up the rear.
I should do something about my cursed legend, he mused as he scrambled over a stile and angled his path across the new-mown field. Anyone thinking to attempt this ought to be told he’s daft, and tied up and thrown into one of the sick carts for his own good. Stranhorne would have plenty to say, though a man who’d torch munitions in his own cellar was hardly one to condemn. But Stranhorne’s trap had shifted a balance; Ishmael could feel it in the air. The rain had lightened to a drizzle and was almost warm, and he could sense very little of the Shadowborn’s former strength.
On the far side of the field, he followed the wall until the corner and the gate, opened the gate, and slid through, onto the manor grounds. He moved as quietly as he was able at that speed. He could still hear the retreat: not even abject terror could keep quiet that many horses, carts and carriages, injured men and women, children and infants. But he could also hear the hiss of the wind through drying stubble, the chirp and flutter of an early rousing bird, the flap of a tarpaulin weighted down under stones—all the ordinary sounds of the area. The wind was in his face, blowing from the manor, so it would not betray his presence. Though with the heavy reek of smoke and munitions, he would be hardpressed himself to smell anything before he came on it.
He knew the manor grounds, having spent a number of enjoyable nights training with the twins and cadet members of the troop, trying to teach them how to move silently and with the minimum of sonn, and how to place and number others in the dark. In addition, he had a perfect, and unwelcome, lodestone in the form of the Call. All he needed to do was keep driving himself away from it and keep from thinking that its strength made his leaving the retreat doubly foolish. With a momentary lapse in concentration, he might well find himself walking southwest.
He had the choice of following the wall of the manor or coming directly across the warning field. He chose the latter; the wall would be shelter, but would also restrict his direction of retreat. He wondered if he should regret that decision; the dry sticks were soaked, but he still had to navigate over sliding stones, crunching gravel, and deadfalls deep enough to break his leg, if he missed being impaled. The wind was blustering and shifting, pushing and lifting the smoke and stinging ash, and when the smoke shifted away, he could smell violent death and the beginning of rot. He stepped carefully around the crumbling edges of a pit occupied by several wolves. One struggled weakly on the stakes that pinned it, and a second was gnawing on the carcass of one of its dead companions. A few yards in, he came across the first of the Shadowborn brought down by the fire from the manor, more wolves, the first scavvern—a young one, by its growth—and one of the flying Shadowborn, crumpled and broken-backed in death. Who might that have been before? . . . Some thoughts were simply best not had. The wind shifted, and he shielded his face against the ash, trying not to cough, until it was done playing with him. Not far now. He moved forward, listening ahead of him, listening through the muffled crackle of the fire, the creak of heated stone, for the sound of voices, even for the sound of moaning. To his right, a wolf howled out its pain, and several more answered. He could no longer hear the retreat, and he was stricken by the sense that should he also throw back his head and howl into the emptiness, none of his own kind would answer.
He did not know when exactly he gave up hope, but it was gone by the time he reached the southwest corner. He could not even have said where the bricked-up entrance had been without going right up to the wall and examining where the stones lined up one atop the other. There was no breach in the wall, no place for Xavier Stranhorne, Erich, and the men and women with them, to have escaped.
He forced himself to move. He had less than two hours before sunrise, and he dared not linger around the manor. Even if there were nothing more dangerous than the dead, the snow and the battle might have scattered or silenced the wildlife he was used to using as a sunrise alarm. And he would not be safe to sleep out now, with the Call gnawing on him. It would be ironic if he were to be caught by the sun, after all these years.
The years of vagabondage and Shadowhunting saved him. Thought might be dulled by exhaustion and loss, but instinct was not. He heard something—a breath, a muted growl, the breaking of a wet stick—or smelled something, the sweat or breath that, rank though it was, meant something was living. At its very limits, sonn caught the shapes flowing along the south face of the manor, toward him, along the narrow, quiet band between the wall and the first layer of gravel.
Exhaustion was swept away by adrenaline. He shot, four times, to howls, and turned and sprinted along the base of the wall. He had no cover or vantage here, and if they were to come at him in numbers, he needed the gates and the gate towers, for cover, a vantage, a chance to reload. He could not hear movement behind him, for his own pounding effort and tearing breath, and, having committed himself to run, he dared not twist to sonn. And there, the northwest corner, the wall around the courtyard, the turn—
The foul chill of Shadowborn magic rolled over him. Ishmael switched direction on a stride, zigzagging away from the wall, across open grass toward the road. He heard and felt the rasp of a wing close overhead, pivoted, and swung with the staff, fouling its swoop. It grounded gracelessly, and he shot it even as it spread its wings, then plunged back into the dubious shelter of the wall. Back against the wall, he sonned wolves closing in on him from the direction of the road itself.
No chance to reload. He caught the first on the road, switched guns, and shot the second on the embankment and the third on the road. Four more shots left. Two wolves in the lead from the side were dealt with, but there was more movement beyond them. Two rounds in the chamber, and eighty yards to the gate. He coiled to run, but even as he did so, from the direction of the road came a whimper, the very sound he’d heard a dog make, decades ago, just before a Shadowhunt—only the third he’d ever been on—turned into the bloodiest disaster he’d ever been in, barring this.
“The size of three stallions crossed with your worst nightmare,” he had said to Ferdenzil Mycene. This scavvern was only somewhat larger than a cart horse, but that made it all the faster. It rolled forward on the knuckles of its long forearms, and as it reared to strike his sonn caught the hard echo of its talons and the envenomed spur on its wrist.
He shot it in the center of its mass. It reeled but did not fall; scavvern were cursed difficult to drop with a single shot, whatever his legend said. He dropped the staff and steadied his revolver two-handed, readying his last shot, knowing he’d have to try for a pith. Then it would be staff and knife work for as long as he lasted.
A woman’s voice said, “Ishmael di Studier!” He sensed a surge of Shadowborn magic, as potent and vile as any he’d known, and the Call itself, like a steel cable, wound round his spine. The staggering scavvern, the milling wolves, and he were suddenly moving as slowly as if caught in winter honey. Only a small adjustment was necessary in his aim. A man shouted from behind the wolves, “Ariadne, look out!”
The woman screamed, “Lysander, no!”
Ishmael fired, and a second shot echoed his. He grunted at the punch in his belly, then agony briefly voided his mind of all capacity to reason and locked his jaws on a howl. His legs buckled, spine split, or as nearly as made no difference. He slithered down the wall and flopped facedown in the mud. The scavvern, toppling, barely missed him, sluicing him with mud from its fall. Half-smothered, mud filling his mouth, he remembered how, drunk, maudlin, and smelling nothing but the reek of the city, he had prayed to be able to mingle his ashes with Borders earth. Mud would do—his father would no doubt deem it
fitting. He was bleeding hard, bleeding out, but he could still hear the approaching splashes of the mage and the man who had shot him. He could sense her foul power gathering around him. Well, they were welcome to his sorry carcass, but he’d make doubly sure. He reached into his magic.
Five
Balthasar
The sense of falling was brief, and ended with a hard landing on tiled floor. Balthasar’s knees bore the impact, and the pain left him braced on knees and elbows, dizzied. Magic, he thought, this has to be magic. But to what end?
“Yes,” he heard the boy gasp out, “I did it. It’s so easy. It’s so easy!” he half wheezed, half screamed “You lousy bitch, it’s so easy.” Then he slumped down on the floor, head on his arms, shuddering with reaction.
Beneath his hands, Balthasar felt dry tiles, not wet flagstone. The air was chill, but no rain fell. He could smell the dust and dried-flower scent of a house long closed up, though that was overlaid by a faint odor of rot, like neglected kitchen refuse. He turned his head away from Sebastien and softly cast, resolving an ornate arch over a doorway. To the left, another arch and stairs . . . the interior of a house.
He knew this house: it was in Minhorne. His brother had brought him here once, bragging of the scam that had ruined a man and laid his property in Lysander’s hands. Perhaps it was justice that the house had been Lysander’s own ruin. When he grandly gifted it to his inamorata, Tercelle Amberley—though her family owned half a dozen houses much finer—it provoked that last, fatal quarrel with his mistress, a possessive, volatile young actress. Which ended with her dead and Lysander sobbing in Balthasar’s room, pleading for the help of his fourteen-year-old brother in smuggling the body out of the city, to leave for sunrise.
Help that Balthasar had, to his everlasting regret, given him.
This would be the house that Tercelle had fled to after she left her twin sons with him—the house Telmaine and Ishmael had traced her to. It was also the house she had died in, murdered, surely, by the Shadowborn.
“Get me something to eat,” Sebastien said, faintly, into his arm.
In the kitchen, Balthasar exchanged his soaked jacket and waistcoat for an overlarge but thick servant’s vest he found hanging on a peg. He retrieved bread, hard cheese, chutney, and honey from the pantry, not trusting the prepared meats, and made sandwiches sweet and savory. Also in the pantry were bottles of light beer, familiar to him from his student days, though that label was well beyond his budget then. Opening a couple of bottles hardly constituted a debauch, and the beer was probably safer than the water.
The boy had crawled over to the carpeted stairs and was sitting on the lowest step, head in his hands. He cast a wavering sonn over the tray as Balthasar laid it on the step beside him, but promptly seized a sandwich with each hand, eating alternate bites and swallowing almost without chewing. Balthasar had seen street urchins gorge so when set before food.
He had no appetite himself, but he knew he needed food to counteract the shock and hypothermia. He doggedly worked his way through a honey sandwich, each ashy bite washed down with beer. Turning the bottle in his hands, he supposed he should be glad to have no illusions that drink could rid him of his memories, because he understood as never before the desire to crawl into bottled oblivion.
“Why?” he said at last. “Why all this? Why Tercelle? Why Stranhorne?”
Sebastien shook his head. “You’re better not to know.”
Ignorance had not spared him before this. “Where is my brother?”
“Dead.”
There was venom in that tone, enough to mark it as wish more than truth. Balthasar therefore did not answer it with conventional regrets. “And your mother?”
“Dead.”
“She must have been a strong mage.”
“I don’t want to talk about them,” the boy said. He lurched back against the stairs, pulling at the waistband of his breeches. “I feel sick. I’ve never lifted before.”
The magical mode of transport, an instantaneous transfer between places. His sister, Olivede, had described it to him, though it required at least sixth-rank magic to achieve, and Olivede had not the strength. She had said more than once how glad she was to be spared both the burdens and the temptations of high-rank magic and not be other than she was—a skilled physician and reliable third-rank healer.
He turned over in his mind the scene he had witnessed just before they had come here. “Who is the woman you mentioned, who would have called you?”
“You shouldn’t ask so many questions,” the boy said.
It did not quite mute Balthasar, just thickened his tongue and made speaking laborious. He ate half a cheese sandwich and finished his beer, feeling the slight detachment that came with beer quickly drunk. The boy sipped distrustfully at his bottle.
Balthasar tried again, “Why are we back in the city?”
Sebastien shrugged. “Orders.”
Balthasar set down the bottle. “I’m going to try to light the stove,” he said. “I’m soaked through. And—”
Sebastien’s stiffening, his astonished gasp, interrupted him. The ground beneath them shook. An immense concussion cleaved the night. Balthasar came to his feet, swinging his head to try to fix the sound. He recognized it as an explosion, a huge one, larger even than the disaster of several years ago at one of the distilleries. But there were no factories in that direction, only more rows of streets, parkland along the river, the river itself, and the estates on the far side. He heard a bizarre screaming whistle from overhead, and then, from his left, another, lesser explosion.
Sebastien jackknifed, leaping to land on his feet beside Bal. “Yes!” He punched air. “Yes, yes, yes. They’ve finally done it! That for your caution, Neill, and that for your power, Jonquil.”
Oh, sweet Imogene, Balthasar thought. Sebastien had said something about ensorcelling munitions. Was that a ship or ships blowing up on the river? But who should have been bringing munitions into the city? Had the dukes insisted on arming themselves as well, now that the order of six twenty-nine was suspended? He heard another crash, another shriek of passing . . . artillery? Were they at war—Darkborn against Darkborn? Darkborn against Lightborn? He turned his head again, checking his orientation. In that direction was the river, the artery of trade and communication, and on its far banks, the great city estates of several of the dukes, including Duke Kalamay, hater of Lightborn and mages. And in this direction was the city center, the Lightborn prince’s palace, the Mages’ Tower.
From outside, he could hear screams. If Lightborn walls had been breached, anyone caught outside would die, swiftly if the light were more than a glimmering, and slowly and in agony otherwise. He could not leave anyone to that, whatever the risk to himself. He lunged past the capering boy, turned the door handle, and found it locked. He groped one-handed for a key that was not there, still twisting futilely. Even in its light-tight frame, the door shuddered from another barrage, and then he felt a wave of unease and dizziness, followed almost immediately by an explosion in the air, and another, even greater one, to his right. Then the reverberations faded away, leaving only a deep bell knelling and no living sounds outside at all.
Magic, he thought. Magic enough even for me to sense. He heard a whimper behind him and turned to sonn Sebastien on the floor, arched and shuddering with a convulsion. He dropped by his side, examining him for signs of injury, signs of anything that might have triggered the seizure, then rolled him over on his side, bracing him there with knees behind his back, protecting his head from the tiles. He did not know the boy’s medical history; he might be epileptic, but from the coincidence, Bal had to suspect that this was magical. And if he were part of whatever had happened—as his triumph seemed to indicate—then he might be under attack by the Lightborn. Olivede, Balthasar’s principal informant in the ways of magic, was merely a third-rank mage, and a determinedly peaceable one at that. He had no idea what might happen should mages turn magic upon each other.
Even if he could run, he had nowhere to go in the light-polluted night.
Sebastien went limp, his head lying heavy in Balthasar’s cradling hand. “They can’t be . . . can’t be . . . ,” he whispered, drew in a whining breath, and began to convulse anew. Balthasar braced him, counting out the seconds. When the fit passed and did not immediately resume, he stripped off the servant’s vest and wedged it behind Sebastien’s shoulders, and bundled his wet shirt beneath the boy’s head. Then he ran in search of the household’s medicine cabinet.
To his surprise, he also found a full obstetrical kit, complete with forceps, anesthetic equipment, bottles of chloroform, and antiseptic. Initial, but not considered, surprise: Tercelle Amberley would have made alternate preparations for her confinement, had Balthasar turned her away from his door. His hands shook with chill and the intensity of his wish that he had done so, as he gathered bottles into a small pouch. But if the seizures continued, he would be able to anesthetize the boy.
When he reached the hallway again, Sebastien was lying curled up on his side, and for a moment of hideously conflicted relief, Balthasar thought he had died. Then he coughed, and the ensorcellment tightened like barbed wire. Balthasar knelt beside him, hand on his shoulder, sonning his face. “Sebastien?”
“They couldn’t—,” he whispered. “Couldn’t have been able to—”
Balthasar probed his head, eliciting no wince; felt his chest and belly, finding no tenderness; felt his pulse, finding it fast but strong. “Who couldn’t have been able to do what?” he said.
“Shouldn’t have been able to annul—”
Annul . . . magic in which the boy had invested his vitality? That might explain the seizure.