by David Hair
Cera hugged herself, her face troubled. ‘And then you “rescued” Solinde …’
‘Exactly. We found someone we thought was Solinde the night we raided Brochena. The body was unconscious – but a skilled shifter can maintain a form while asleep. I was amazed she’d survived the tower falling, but a well-shielded and lucky mage could do that. From then on Coin is in our hands and in danger of being unmasked, so she acted antagonistically to get sent away. I used a Chain-rune, which locked Coin into Solinde’s form, and suddenly she is helpless in the Krak di Condotiori, a place not even Gurvon could break them out of—’
‘And now we’re bringing Coin back here.’
‘If it is Coin, yes. This is only supposition, Cera, but if it is Coin, Gurvon will almost certainly try and free her.’ Elena frowned, thinking hard. ‘Perhaps we can use this to our advantage.’
‘How?’
‘We could use Coin as bait, to lure Gurvon out. If Solinde is truly Coin, I know ways of detection that no shapeshifter can stand up to. I will unmask her.’
‘What about Gyle and his agents?’
‘Gurvon will learn Solinde is here: count on it. For now I hope he remains ignorant, or else Lorenzo is in great danger.’ She chewed his lip anxiously. ‘Once she’s here, we’ll have maybe half a day before Gurvon finds out. If Solinde really is Coin, he will be forced to act.’
Cera looked increasingly sick, but she lifted her head. ‘Then what must we do – surround Solinde with an army?’
‘No – they’d just get in my way. A trained group of magi can kill by the hundreds. They’d all die, or be turned against us. I’d be more secure alone: in gnosis, a well-prepared defence can often overmatch the attack. If I can break Coin, then hold out against Gurvon until there is opportunity to display the shapeshifter at court, we can bring the whole nation in behind the shihad, and at that point, Gurvon may as well go home. We will have won.’
Cera looked at her, measuring. ‘You can do this?’
Elena smiled grimly. ‘I’ll have to leave the blood-rooms and prepare for her arrival. I’ll seal off the Jade Tower from the rest of the keep and prepare wards for holding Coin. My practise-room is ideal – the only entrance is from below, and I can ward the door to the lower room. If you and Timi stay there and the doors are warded, then no one can enter without your permission or mine.’
‘You, Solinde, Timi and me, alone,’ Cera repeated dully, her eyes unfocused.
‘Exactly! I can’t afford to leave you alone away from me while I’m doing the questioning in case Gurvon tries to seize you as leverage.’ Elena tried to sound reassuring. ‘I’ll station Lorenzo with you if you like.’
‘You and Lorenzo.’ Cera smiled wanly. ‘My protectors.’
*
The inner gates thudded open and four huge carthorses towed a prison-wagon into the courtyard. It was Sabbadai, 6 Junesse, and Solinde was back. If it really is Solinde.
‘Donna Elena!’ Lorenzo trotted his horse into the courtyard and her heart leapt, but his smile in return seemed forced. He looked tense and ill-at-ease as he swung down from the saddle. She longed to go to him, but this was too public; the members of the Regency Council were all here, perched about the square, watching with rapt eyes.
Lorenzo bowed formally. ‘What are the arrangements?’ he asked, his voice clipped with tension.
‘Bring her to Jade Tower,” Elena told him. She had been preparing it for holding Solinde – or a potent shapeshifter – all week. ‘Take her to the threshold only – I have set wards on the door.’
Lorenzo bowed again in acknowledgment and turned as the prisoner’s wagon rumbled up to the steps. Elena studied the waiting councillors, wondering if any of them owed secret allegiance to Gurvon. Pita Rosco was joking with Cera. Comte Inveglio stood with Godspeaker Acmed – that was an odd pairing. Don Francesco Perdonello was present, though she couldn’t remember inviting him. There was curiosity and hostility directed at the wagon: Solinde had betrayed them all.
The wagon stopped and guards unlocked the doors and pulled out a thin girl in a plain white shift. Her long golden hair was flat and greasy. Solinde’s manacles glimmered with power in Elena’s gnosis-sight, as did the Chain-rune coiled about her, the one she’d placed upon the princessa herself. Elena stepped forward and the girl’s eyes fell on her. They were bruised, as if she had been weeping constantly, and her glare was sullen.
‘Welcome back to Brochena, Princessa,’ Elena said levelly.
Solinde said nothing, wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Cera joined them, looking at her sister distantly. ‘Welcome back, sister,’ she said quietly. She waited. ‘Will you not answer me?’
Solinde stared at her feet, offering no contact or reply.
Cera sighed and turned to Elena. ‘You may take her.’
Elena stepped before Solinde and put a hand under her chin and raised it to her eyes. She stared through those eyes, letting the gnosis quest into the princessa’s mind. Fear … humiliation … anguish … sorrow … That was as far as she could go, here. Such surface thoughts might be genuine, or just a mask woven by a trained mind. She would have to break through to establish who or what she faced.
Cera turned and faced the gathering of counsellors. ‘Gentlemen, Elena will be dealing with this matter in Jade Tower. No one will be permitted to visit until I have her assurances.’ She held up her hand to forestall questions. ‘Elena says there is danger. This is her field of expertise. We defer to her.’
Elena grasped Solinde’s shoulder. As she started to march her towards the tower she heard footsteps clatter towards her and she looked over her shoulder. ‘No, Lorenzo. I must see to this.’
‘What is happening?’ He glanced up at the darkened tower. ‘Why your tower?’ His voice sounded unused, as if he’d been silent all the way from the Krak. He moved stiffly, without his normal grace. It must have been a long, hard ride back. ‘Will I see you tonight?’
Elena shook her head regretfully. ‘Sorry, Lorenzo. Tomorrow,’ and she strode on, pulling Solinde along in her wake. She turned to look at him before she shut the door, but she couldn’t read his expression. Inside the tower, she locked the door and then activated her wards. Solinde watched, her eyes narrowed. As the web of light faded from normal vision, she turned back to the girl and asked calmly, ‘So, Princessa, do I have to carry you up the stairs?’
‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Solinde demanded.
The voice is right, but the words are wrong. Solinde never spoke like that. ‘Upstairs, Solinde. Come!’
On the first-floor landing Elena glanced into the small ante-room. The door to the royal chambers was bolted and already warded, and Cera held the only key, which Elena had attuned to the wardings. Cera and Timi would spend the night in this room, safely within Elena’s control.
The top room had been cleaned and Bastido had been pushed next to the wall, where it sat brooding sullenly like a rejected pet. In the middle of the room was a smoking brazier. A couple of pokers had been left jammed into the coals and the tips were glowing red. There was a pallet bed, but Elena ignored it and led Solinde to the wall. She left the girl’s manacles on – they had Faid’s bindings on them – and attached them to a chain. Her own Chain-rune still confined her too.
‘What are you doing?’ the girl asked, her voice quavering as she tugged at her manacles. She began to cry.
‘This tower room has been sound-dampened so no one outside can hear you,’ Elena said in a deliberately bored voice.
Solinde stopped sobbing as quickly as she had begun.
Elena met her eyes. ‘If you are truly Solinde, then I am sorry for putting you through this, but I cannot take any chances with Cera and Timori’s lives.’ She sighed, this time genuinely weary. ‘I have questioned prisoners before. I don’t enjoy inflicting pain, but I’ll do it if I must.’
‘I am Solinde!’ The girl looked genuinely frightened, but that proved nothing.
‘Perhaps. I will soon find out.’ She got out a
coin from a pocket and flipped it in front of the girl’s face and watched as Solinde’s eyes narrowed. Elena smiled mildly, pocketed the coin again and then reached out to touch the girl’s forehead. She sent gnosis-energy pulsing through her fingertips and slowly removed her Chain-rune. She watched the girl’s reactions carefully, noting the faint relaxing of posture, the tentative flexing of hands, the inwards gaze of the eyes.
Ah – surely I am right?
‘So, Princessa.’ She half-turned and gestured towards the brazier and flames leapt in response. Elena planted her hands against the wall, either side of Solinde’s head, and stared into the girl’s eyes. ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to take one of those hot pokers you can see there and I’m going to press it to your belly. Your flesh will sear and cook, causing you agony unlike anything you have ever felt. I will use the gnosis to prevent your passing out, so that you feel everything. The pain will trigger responses you cannot control: you will void your bowels and bladder. You will scream like a host of demons. You will lose yourself entirely, and at that moment, I will know if you are truly who you appear to be.’
‘You’re insane – Cera will have you beheaded!’
Elena gestured, and one of the pokers flew to her hand. Great Kore, let me be right …
She showed the girl the glowing tip—
—in an instant the princessa’s face changed. She issued a throaty snarl as she lunged and snapped with pointed, glistening teeth suddenly inches long. Breakthrough! Elena had been half-expecting something of the sort and darted to one side even as a barbed tongue erupted from the girl’s mouth and shot at her. It hit her shields and retracted.
The snapping face hissed and snarled impotently, the tongue flailing, as arms and legs suddenly corded with muscle strained against the manacles. The manacles sparked as binding runes prevented the shapeshifter from getting free, although Elena saw her trying desperately, her limbs becoming fluid, though never quite enough for her to pull herself free. The shifter spat in frustrated fury.
Elena spun the poker in her hand. ‘Coin, I believe?’ She spoke a spell of Negation to disrupt the prisoner’s morphic-gnosis, and reinforced the magical bindings. The shapeshifter’s attempts to escape became weaker. Her shift was torn and bloodied by the gore discharged as she tried to alter herself – but she could not get free.
The prisoner subsided into sullen defeat and the muscles of a few seconds before wasted away, revealing a new body: thin, pinched and strangely genderless. Lank red hair was plastered to a bony skull and pallid eyes glittered under delicate brows. Elena swiftly cast a renewed Chain-rune, locking the new form in place: this was the prisoner’s real shape, and the last face Fernando Tolidi had seen.
‘You are in so much trouble, bitch,’ the prisoner whined.
‘Not as much as you are.’ She held the red-hot poker tip to her prisoner’s eyes, close enough for the heat to make her cringe. ‘What can I call you?’
‘I am Coin,’ the shapeshifter conceded, looking away.
Coin, the legendary shapeshifter: male or female, ageless: a perfect affinity with one of the most demanding and exacting of all gnosis studies – the sort of perfect affinity you had to be slightly insane to even possess. Reputedly too expensive to hire, and connected all the way to the top. The very top.
‘What are you doing here, Coin? How could Gurvon afford you?’
The – girl? boy? woman? man? – scowled contemptuously. ‘My patron wished Gyle’s mission to succeed. I was a gift to Gyle for the duration of the mission.’
An imperial connection, then. Elena dampened the fear that thought brought and concentrated on her prisoner. Coin might be a master shapeshifter, but appeared emotionally brittle and completely terrified of physical harm, of pain. Elena sighed in relief; she’d been dreading having to torture the truth out of some close-mouthed fanatic. Coin looked willing to speak with little more coercion.
‘I need to know everything about you, Coin: who are you, your name, your gender. How old are you, who were your parents – what can you do and not do? And where is the real Solinde?’
‘You touch me with that and my patron will carve your soul for all eternity,’ Coin hissed, eyeing the glowing poker with terrified bravado.
‘That won’t help you much, though, will it?’ Elena raised the poker and pushed it to within an inch of Coin’s belly. ‘Knowing it’s just you and not Solinde has removed any remorse I might feel – so speak—’
Coin eyed the poker, sweating profusely, trembling in the manacles. Her voice shook. ‘My mother will kill you!’
Your mother?
Coin tried to clam up, facing Elena defiantly, but was unable to look away from the glowing metal.
Elena was still loathe to actually harm Coin, but she thought a little humiliation might be all it would take …
She reached out and wrenched at the torn shift, which ripped away easily, revealing an emaciated body and unmistakable, if tiny, breasts. Elena blinked, her eyes drawn downwards to a shrunken penis with no scrotum, and the pubic mound beneath it instead strangely slitted.
Great Kore …
The shifter was neither male nor female; Coin was both.
A hermaphrodite – no wonder he or she is capable of both genders … Sol et Lune! And then, almost unbidden, she found herself feeling a great wash of sympathy: What must it do to you, a deformed thing with pure-blooded gnosis—
Elena turned away, shaken. There were freak-shows in Rondelmar where people with birth defects were paraded for entertainment, but this sort of defect on a mage – the implications were horrible.
‘Got an eyeful?’ Coin sneered defensively. ‘Excited, bitch?’
Elena turned back. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said honestly.
Coin’s face twisted with scorn. ‘Oh, really – how rukking humane of you.’
Elena wiped her brow, wondering, What must it be like, to be such a one? But there is too much at stake to feel pity, damn it. ‘Where is Gurvon Gyle?’ she asked calmly.
Coin spat at her and Elena hefted the poker, readying herself to use it, when she heard a voice call from outside the door, ‘Ella?’
‘Wait!’ she called, but Cera appeared at the door, holding her key. She froze when she saw the skinny naked body chained to the wall and realised that it wasn’t Solinde. Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Sol et Lune!’
‘This is the shapeshifter we hypothesised,’ Elena said quietly. ‘This is Coin.’
‘Then where is Solinde?’ Cera asked, as her eyes took in the strange being in the manacles. She shook her head disbelievingly.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Elena said, then added firmly, ‘Cera, I really don’t think you should watch this.’
Cera looked at her and then at the poker in her hand and backed away. Then she swallowed and folded her arms across her chest. ‘I should.’
Elena shook her head. ‘No – wait downstairs, please. If we can parade a shifter in front of the Dome-al’Ahm tomorrow, the whole of Javon will rise to shihad and Gurvon’s mission to keep Javon out of the war will fail irrevocably – not to mention the secrets this creature must know. It is too late tonight, but tomorrow you can show Coin to the people and they will be yours to command.’
Cera stared at her, clenching and unclenching her fists, her face white. ‘Will Gyle try to stop us?’
‘If he knows she’s here, almost certainly. If he doesn’t, all the better!’ She felt a bubble of triumph, but suppressed it. There was still the night to survive. ‘Are the men-at-arms in position?’
Cera nodded. ‘The courtyard is full of Nesti fighting men; all the entrances are sealed.’ She dangled the key. ‘Only I can admit anyone now.’
Elena nodded. ‘And Lorenzo?’
‘He’s downstairs.’ Cera’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Elena, are you and he more than friends?’
Elena glanced at her, unsure why this question had come up. It had the feeling of a test … ‘This isn’t the time or the place, Cera. W
e are colleagues, working to protect you and Timi.’
‘Really?’ Cera asked, her voice hinting at doubt.
Elena closed her eyes. I have no time for this. She opened them again and looked at Cera. I’ll tell her the full truth later. ‘Please Cera, I must question this creature now.’
Cera looked at Coin. ‘It would have been better had Corineus never lived,’ she said bleakly.
Elena bowed her head. ‘Sometimes I agree,’ she admitted.
Cera backed away with a distraught look and was gone.
Elena watched her leave, troubled by the exchange. I’ve put so much on her – too much. She is only eighteen, for Kore’s sake. But this will be over tomorrow. Once Javon is irrevocably tied to the shihad, the game is over, and nothing Gurvon can do will make any difference. He will be forced to concede and leave – and then I will leave too, so that any revenge is directed solely at me.
She turned back to the hermaphrodite, fighting her sympathy for this strange creature. ‘All right, Coin, it’s time to talk.’
The shifter eyed the poker fearfully, tears in its eyes, and whispered, ‘If you don’t hurt me, I will secure your safety. My patron can protect you.’
‘Really?’ Elena replaced the poker in the brazier and put her hands on hips. ‘All right then, I will allow you the chance to be honest with me. Tell me: who is this patron?’
‘Mater-Imperia Lucia,’ Coin said. ‘She’s my mother.’
Elena sat on the floor, her back against the wall, staring at the dying brazier. Coin, chained to the wall opposite, slumbered uncomfortably. She had draped blankets over the hermaphrodite against the cold, and to give her back a shred of dignity.
Great Kore, this is Mater-Imperia’s child, she thought again, still struggling to take everything in. Coin – initially named Yvette, despite the non-gender – was a secret child, known to only a discreet few. Most likely she was a deformed freak because she’d been conceived of incest: her father was Lucia’s now-dead brother Henri Fasterius; this family shame had been hidden deep. But Coin was a mage of huge but very specialised power, too valuable to simply dispose of.