Changes

by Mercedes Lackey

“Eh?” It was Mags’ turn to stare curiously.

  “Someone who . . . oh, I don’t know, was like Marchand, didn’t see any harm in blabbing everything he knew to someone who offered plenty of money—and, yes, by the way, under threat of Truth Spell, Marchand finally admitted that was what he’s been doing. I thought Master Bard Lita was going to die of a brainstorm right then and there.” Gennie smirked, then sobered. “But, what about someone who was taking bribes without thinking twice about it because he thought what was being asked seemed harmless enough. Then when the Karsites grabbed Amily, they needed a Healer, so they lured him to a meeting and grabbed him as well. Now he knows what’s going on, he knows he’s in over his head, and all he can do is try to keep Amily safe and pray we manage to figure out where they have her. Honestly? I think that’s the most likely.”

  They all looked at each other. “In that case, Marchand is our Bardic informant, and this Healer is the other plant they said they had,” Bear said. “We’ve filled in all the blank spaces. So . . . if that’s true, then who’s missing from the Hill, Healer-side?”

  “I’ll go interrupt the King and his emergency council,” Gennie said, standing up. “You lot see if you can figure out a way to find where Amily is, if they haven’t already.”

  Mags nodded, and they set aside the notes about Amily and her captor and picked up the ones about “the irritations.”

  Mags closed his eyes for a moment as the letters began to swim in front of them. Webs and vibrations and . . . it was all so complicated . . . .he wanted to sleep, but no, he couldn’t, he needed to . . .

  The images that the stone had put in his mind swirled there again. Vibrations. Irritations. Vibrations. Interference. Irrita—

  His eyes flew open just before he nodded off. ::What if thet stone was bein’ literal again?::

  ::That’s more likely than not,:: Dallen said after a moment.

  ::Then—all that fightin’ and squabblin’—thet wasn’t jest ’cause of th’ heat. It was ’cause them shields really are irritations!::

  He turned his mind to Gennie and gently “poked” her.

  ::Still talking. What?::

  ::Marchand there?::

  He sensed her bitter amusement. ::Being grilled like a fish. Why?::

  ::I need t’ know iffen them rats he was talkin’ to was meetin’ him real close t’ Palace.:: He remembered now something that the stone had said—or that he thought it had said—when he had fallen asleep in its room. That Ice and Stone were “irritations” because they were “near.”

  He waited impatiently for the answer, but he didn’t push things. It was one thing to be impatient, quite another to impose that impatience on someone else who was doing you a favor.

  ::He says he met with them almost every day. Lord Lascal and his family close up their manor in the summer and move to their estate. There’s only a skeleton staff and everyone around here knows their gardens are pretty free to roam in. That’s where they met.:: There was a pause. ::He says he thinks they were actually living in a guest-house on the grounds. Why?::

  Well . . . that figgers.

  Quickly, he explained what the stone had told him and his idea that whatever the stone did worked against the shields that the Karsite agents wore to act as an irritant to everyone’s temper.

  ::So we look for places where the worst fights are happening, and that’s probably where they are?:: she said. ::Right, I’ll pass that on. Good job, Mags. They just sent out pages to find out if there are any Healers missing from up here.::

  Ah, now there was another reason to be impatient. He got up to pace. “Iffen they thin’ we got a chance at findin’ Amily . . . might could be they kill this Healer an’ ’er t’gether,” he muttered, choking down his anguish at the mere thought. “So we gotta find ’em. Then we gotta get ’em away from ’er afore they figger out we ac’tually know they’re there. There’s gotta be somethin’ that’ll lure ’em out . . .”

  “Hell,” said Bear, looking extremely disgruntled. “There goes my plan. Well, it wasn’t a very good plan . . .”

  Mags looked over at him. “So? Mebbe we kin use part’f it.”

  ::Mags. Tell Bear that there is a Healer missing. Cuburn.::

  ::Oh thet’ll sit well.:: But after Bear got mad, this bit of information would probably give him some satisfaction. He told his friends what Gennie had said.

  Bear blistered the air with oaths for a good long time. When he finally calmed down, Mags gave him a level look.

  “Ye done?” he asked. “Cause iffen ye ain’t—”

  “I’m done,” Bear told him in utter disgust. “I should have guessed it would be him. There never was a more venal—”

  “Aye,” Mags interrupted. “Ye said thet. A couple’a times. What I wanter know is, what was yer plan?”

  Bear blinked at him, as the question took him by surprise, then shrugged.

  “Oh . . . it’s stupid. And if we did it, there’d be more carnage . . .” Bear sighed. “You know, how when a little one goes missing, you go around to all the neighbors and ask if they’ve seen her and could they help look? I was thinking if we sent out some of the Guard and all the Trainees with drawings of these bastards, or of Amily, or both, maybe somebody might have seen . . .”

  Mags stared at him as a plan, fully formed, exploded in his head.

  “. . . Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “ ’Cause Lena’d get mad at me if I kissed ye. Lissen—”

  He explained the whole thing. Lena and Bear listened, skeptically at first, then their eyes got bigger and bigger until he finished.

  “Now,” he demanded. “Poke holes in’t. Tell me what ain’t gonna work.”

  The two of them looked at each other. “I . . . can’t think of anything,” Bear said, finally. “Well, other than the fact you might get killed . . . that’s certainly a drawback.”

  “I’m countin’ on thet they seem t’ want me kickin’,” he pointed out. “So ’less they figger out what I’m doin’—or they change their minds—”

  “Or you misread them entirely,” Lena put in, her eyes round and a little tearful. “And they’ll just kill you!”

  He shrugged, with an indifference he didn’t feel. “They had a chance and didn’—”

  “That was once,” Lena pointed out. “The second time, they threw a huge great piece of wood at you when you were going at a full gallop! If you hadn’t been a Heraldic Trainee, and on Dallen, and had all that training, the weapons work and the Kirball stuff—”

  “Gotta chance it.” That pretty much summed it up.

  Bear took a long, deep breath. “All right then, do we split up, go gather all the Trainees, find that cousin, explain this to everyone, and—”

  Mags snorted. “ ’Ell we do. I may be crazy, but I ain’t thet crazy.” He squared his shoulders. “No. Now I go talk t’King an’ Nikolas an’ th’ Heir an who-the-’ell else is there an let them poke holes innit. Then iffen they like it, it’ll hev more’n a ghost of a chance.”

  ::Gennie, tell ’em I’m comin’,:: he said, gesturing to Lena and Bear and pulling open the door to the little Palace room where they’d been left to think. ::I gotta ideer.::

  20

  They’d narrowed the spot where the Karsite agents had to be hiding down to a block—and it was pretty clear that there was something drastically wrong the closer they got. It was a middling sort of area, with a mix of cheap shops and houses on the outskirts of Haven. Not the sort of bad neighborhood like the one where Nikolas kept his shop, but shabby and populated by common laborers, the sort of place where you could have a pig or some chickens or even a cow in the yard and the neighbors wouldn’t complain because they had the same. You wouldn’t notice noise here, not even screaming, because the children were shrieking and babies crying all the time. But there were signs of trouble all the way there: broken shutters, a cart with a wheel off and people fighting over putting the wheel on, arguments everywhere you looked;. And the closer you got to that designated
block, the more often the arguments had escalated into fistfights. Even the children weren’t playing; they were chasing each other with mayhem in mind or rolling in the street, squalling and tearing each other’s hair. Mags got a wide berth, though, because he was wearing Whites. Whites, and not Grays, for two reasons. The first, that the full Heraldic uniform gave him a little more protection from the altercations around him,and would give him a little more respect as he worked his way around the block. The second—

  Whites made him stand out here and would make him a very visible moving target.

  He worked his way from door to door, shop to home, exerting himself to form every word correctly, so he didn’t sound like someone easily dismissed. There was no trace of his accent in his speech, and he held himself as tall and straight as he could, copying, as well as he could, the Captain of the King’s Guard. Everyone answered him; the uniform got him that. They might snarl, or eye him belligerently, or look as if they would like to insult or even hit him, but they answered when he showed them Ice and Stone’s portraits and asked, “Have you seen these men hereabouts?”

  They were good likenesses. The same Herald who was going to help Bear with his bone model had made it, taking Mags’ memories and turning them into a double portrait. She was the one who worked for the City Guard and Constables, taking the images of criminals out of victims’ minds and drawing them. And Mags figured that the two men would probably have someone other than themselves answering the door—that Healer, provided they had the man sufficiently cowed to be trusted to do so, or someone they’d hired to run their errands, so they didn’t have to leave Amily. Every time he showed the picture, he was watching for the flash of recognition before a blanket denial; when he got it, then, following the plan, he would walk away and wait for them to go for the bait. Their door watcher would certainly go tell them that here was a Herald looking for them, and they would come out to deal with him. There would be a few moments before Ice and Stone realized who he was and went for a pursuit rather than just murdering him where he stood; those moments, he reckoned, were going to be the ones of highest risk. He had steeled himself for them. He was going to have to be . . . well . . . very, very good at dodging for what he hoped would be a very short period of time . . . .

  So when he knocked on another nondescript door and started to go into his speech, then looked up into the face of Stone himself, there was a single moment of mutual paralysis.

  The word he was going to say came out in a squeak, and he was certain that he was going to die, right then, right there.

  But he broke the spell first. And now, the long hours he had spent mentally rehearsing this plan, over, and over, and over, gave him the reactions of a ferret and put wings on his heels. He ducked, whirled, and ran.

  Stone’s grasping hands met on air. Mags was already gone. But not running down the street, oh, no. He’d already scouted his path: a dash to the opposite side of the street, up a rainbarrel, swarm up the drainpipe, and up onto the roof.

  Pause. Look back . . .

  Stone was just about to the barrel. Ice was three paces behind him.

  Holy . . . They were fast!

  Now it was fear putting wings on his heels. He couldn’t yet judge how quick they would be over the rooftops, where he had the advantage of being light. He had to keep them engaged in the chase and not thinking of anything else. No matter what happened, he had to keep them running after him long enough for Nikolas, Sedric, and a group of hand-picked Heralds and Guards to storm the house, take down any opposition, and get Amily out of there.

  That meant he had to stay just frustratingly out of reach. And he had to do it without being able to read their level of frustration.

  He scrambled over the rooftree, took a couple running steps down the other side, and leaped for the next house. He kept his breathing and his pace even—timing his breaths with his acrobatics. He could not afford to get winded. This one had a bit of flat roof, enough to make a good landing platform; his landing was solid, and he scrambled up the next roof using hands and feet. He didn’t have to look back now, he could hear them, hear their feet on the thatch, since most of the buildings here had thatched roofs.

  His heart was absolutely pounding—and if he hadn’t been able to hear them, he would never have known that they were there at all; they were completely “invisible” to his mind.

  A tiny sound behind him was all the warning he had that one of them was about to try something.

  He took a gamble and leaped sideways, hit the thatch on his shoulder, rolled down to the very edge of the roof, timing the roll so that his feet were under him when he got there and made a huge leap out into thin air—

  But he knew where he was, and his hands closed on a bar that had once supported a sign. He swung on it twice, then kicked for the balcony farther along the wall. Nothing fancy, and he barely made the catch, but make it he did, and he was off again, using a stanchion to get back up to the roof.

  There were still behind him, but he’d gotten a little breathing room.

  Then movement in the corner of his eye warned him something was going on. He risked a glance. Ice was on the next roof over, a flat one that was easier to run on, using that fact to get ahead of him.

  Aight. Two can play thet.

  He swerved toward the other roof, the very one that Ice was about to leave; Ice was so intent on getting ahead of him that he didn’t notice what Mags was doing. He made a leap for the next roof to intercept Mags—

  —except that Mags was leaping for the roof he had just vacated, landing and sprinting back in the direction he had just come from. Doubling back threw both of the men off; by the time they recovered, Mags was two roofs ahead.

  Now he took just a moment to get a good look at them, and guage their intentions.

  Without stopping, of course.

  He leaped for the next roof, landed and rolled. Looked over his shoulder as he sprinted for the next.

  Still comin’—

  This one would be a two-footed landing and an upslope scramble. He got a second look as he crested the ridgeline before he slid down the other side.

  No weapons. No obvious ones, anyway. Probably knives somewhere on them, but they weren’t going to throw knives at him on a run like this, even if they did want him dead. Odds were he’d dodge it under circumstances like this one, no matter how good they were, and no one with any sense throws his weapon away, even if he has a second or a third.

  Well . . . thet’s—

  ::Mags!:: Dallen called. ::They have her! She’s safe!::

  That was possibly the best thing he had heard in a year.

  And that meant he was free now to go to the next—and far more risky—part of his plan.

  He angled his flight so that Stone got a chance to cut him off; he skidded to a halt on the edge of his roof, stared for a heartbeat, then dashed between them and hurtled over the side.

  There were balconies there; he caught the railing of the highest, got his feet on it, bounced off, and let go. Caught the railing of the second, bounced off. Let go. Dropped down to the street, rolled to break his fall, and ran like a scorched stoat back in the direction he had come from.

  This was a big risk. He knew they could run faster than he could on a flat and level surface. He just had to hope that they would take enough time getting down from the roof that they wouldn’t be able to catch him.

  He had to be street level for this. So did they. He could not risk them getting even a glimpse of what waited for them.

  Just before he reached the square in front of the house they had taken, Dallen dashed out of a side street, decked out in his Kirball gear. Mags grabbed the saddle on the run, jumped, and bounced into it. And as the two of them turned on a penny-bit to face the two Karsite agents, he was in fantastic position to see their faces as they skidded to a halt and saw what was waiting for them.

  All of the members of the four Kirball teams. All wearing Whites.

  All wearing his face.

 
Now pick a target t’kill, ye bastards.

  Corwin’s cousin, the illusion-making Herald, was out here somewhere. When Mags had asked, “If we’re dressed alike, kin ye make some’un look like me?” the cousin had snorted and asked “How many?”

  Because there would have been the chance that, when they realized they were trapped, Ice and Stone would go for a kill. But not if they couldn’t tell which of their captors was the one they’d been told to capture.

  The shock froze them long enough for the Heralds and Guards who had rescued Amily—all but Nikolas and Sedric—to close their escape route behind them.

  Their street-level escape-route—

  Mags saw what was coming in the tensing of their muscles and the sudden flick of their eyes to the right.

  Then they moved impossibly fast. They had dashed across the square and were halfway up a building before anyone had a chance to move.

  But Gennie screamed out the signal. “Mags! Pip!”

  Because he’d planned for this too. These men were no good to them dead, and since those shields prevented Mind-magic from striking them unconscious, there was only one nonlethal way to take them down. His hand was already on the Kirball stick as the Fetcher-boosted-and guided ball came screaming at him from the side.

  Now he let out every bit of his fury at these bastards and stood up in the stirrups and smacked the ball with every bit of strength he had.

  Pip’s ball wasn’t going quite as fast, so Mag’s ball—still being guided by one of the Fetchers from the other teams—hit Stone in the back hard enough to momentarily paralyze him. He dropped off the building like the stone Mags had named him for, with Ice falling a moment later.

  They hit the ground and were swarmed by Heralds and Guardsmen.

  Mags jumped off Dallen’s back and ran for them. By the time he got there, they were trussed hand and foot with so many separate bindings that you could scarcely see their clothing.

  It was over. It was finally over. Now he would have his answers. Now they would all have their answers.

  He pushed his way in to stand next to Stone, who glared up at him, the black eyes still opaque, still unreadable.