General Roaris stepped onto the lighter that waited, tied only by two light lines to bollards. It had a limp sail up, and no oarsmen; only a single veiled woman stood in the stern, under an awning.
The staff and the Noble Guards came aboard, even as the shouting above them rose to a fever pitch. Someone was hammering at the hall door to the kitchen corridor, and the hollow sound echoed off the stone walls of the canal.
Roaris raised a hand, and the veiled woman nodded.
The sail filled with wind even as a pair of Masran sailors tossed the lines into the lighter and stepped aboard.
With her sail suddenly and perfectly filled, the lighter coasted away from the dock—at first slowly, but gathering way as she moved.
Up on the Lonika Gate Bridge, a soldier shouted.
The lighter sailed along the canal. Smaller craft scattered to get out of her way, and a gondolier cursed, colourfully and long, as his beautiful boat’s black enamel was endangered by the bow wave that the lighter was throwing as she brushed past.
The soldier aimed his matchlock musket, but his dekark stopped the match.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said.
The soldier looked chagrined. “They’re getting away!”
The dekark shrugged. “Who is? General Roaris? Laddie, we have no idea what’s going on. Let’s not shoot anyone until we do.”
Aranthur dropped his guise as soon as the wind filled the lighter’s sail. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“And no one hurt,” he said.
Dahlia, dressed as a Noble Guard, had seldom looked so completely like what she was—a member of the oldest of families in the Byzas nobility. She was sombre, her lips pursed.
“We’re not done yet,” she said. “And Tiy is most definitely hurt.”
Aranthur looked back at Inoques, who was slowing the lighter for the turn into the open sea from the Long Canal. There was a fortification at the opening in the wall, and it was possible…
The lighter was in the midst of a dozen other vessels: gondolas, other lighters, a big canal-boat full of stone for building, and passenger boats.
“Everyone down,” Iralia called.
All of the Magi had shields ready to deploy, but to cast them was to give themselves away to watchers with the talent to see such things.
The fort gave no sign.
The lighter passed under the fort’s guns, but no alarm had been raised and none of them were run out. Aranthur looked up to see a soldier smoking stock in one of the embrasures. He waved.
He felt almost light at heart.
He knelt next to Drako in the bow. The man’s eyes were unfocused.
“Tiy,” he said.
Drako didn’t look at him.
Iralia knelt next to him.
“Shit. It’s not just that he’s been tortured,” she spat. “He has the darkness.”
Drako spat. A froth of tiny bubbles came to his lips.
He spat again, as if clearing his mouth, and his eyes flickered open.
“Not actually,” he muttered. “Gods, Iralia, have I mentioned how beautiful you are?”
Aranthur breathed again.
“Timos, the harbinger,” Drako said. “Gods…” He looked at Aranthur.
“You don’t have the darkness!” Aranthur said.
Drako swallowed and shook his head.
“Everything is falling into the hells. Roaris has the City, and the Pure took Kurvenos.” He blinked. “You came for me!” he said softly, and began to cry.
Aranthur was trying not to look at the man’s ruined hand, his bloated, beaten face.
“Of course we came for you,” he said.
Iralia took one of his hands—the right, which was swollen to a terrible size—carefully, tenderly.
“We’ll put you to rights…” she said.
“It’s too fucking late,” Drako said. “Kurvenos is dead. We’re doomed.”
Aranthur shook his head. He looked at Dahlia.
Dahlia smiled. “We’re not beaten yet.”
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BRIGHT STEEL
Book THREE of Masters & Mages
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if you enjoyed
DARK FORGE
look out for
BRIGHT STEEL
Masters & Mages: Book Three
by
Miles Cameron
The conclusion to the epic tale of Aranthur, the student who found himself caught up in an epic story about beginnings, coming of age, and how choosing to take one step towards violence can lead to a slippery and dangerous slope. After proving his mettle on the battlefield and discovering that war has no storybook endings, Aranthur must confront one last challenge, and the stakes could not be higher.
Prologue
Djinar had never in his twenty-two years been across the strait to Ulama, but he had become General Roaris’ most trusted courier, and he had no objection to the mission; he understood the stakes, how fragile their possession of Megara was, and the importance of communicating with their cells in Atti. When word came that the attack on the Sultan Bey had failed, he volunteered to go.
He also understood, better than most of his peers, how vital it was that they hang on. He knew how badly their Master had been defeated, first in Armea and then at Antioke; how the timetable had nearly been ruined. He knew, because he was an initiate of the first order, how vital it was that the Emperor be killed and how essential it was that the Sultan Bey be toppled. Out on the high seas, the Imperial Fleet was turning the tables on the pirates; at Antioke, another army sent into action by the Master was being ground to bloody pulp by that witch Tribane.
Djinar knew these things like articles of faith. He also knew that Verit Roaris was no longer himself, that his mortal frame had been seized by the Master because the man would not obey; Djinar knew it, and it filled him with fear, because he, too, had his own devices and desires, and he feared their discovery.
Disagreeing with the creature inhabiting Roaris’ body had been the stupidest thing he’d ever done.
Except that he was right. The new Disciple was not a native of the Empire; he could no more imagine the politics of the City than peasants tilling the fields could. He was making mistakes…
These are foolish, dangerous thoughts.
Fear kept him strong and alert, or so he told himself. And the mission to the Disciple of Ulama gave him a chance to show his worth, so that his moment of insubordination might be forgotten.
He hired a fishing boat to make the trip across the strait, and the fisherman complained of the change in tides since the emergence of the Dark Forge, the huge rift in the heavens and in the shell of reality that signified the changes to come. Djinar, as an initiate of the Pure, knew a great deal about the Dark Forge, but he hadn’t known it was affecting the currents.
He listened until he grew bored of the fisherman’s ignorance of anything not relating to fish.
“Enough,” Djinar snapped at the end of his patience. “I hired you to sail, not to talk.”
The fisherman fell into a surly silence, but his efforts drove the little boat through the water, and although it took more than four hours, eventually he furled the sail, took to his oars, and brought them close in to the far shore where the reverse current ran, so that they seemed to float against the tide running in from the great sea visible under the rising sun, a sun which also gilded the prayer towers of the Sultan Bey’s palace and the majestic Temple of Light that dominated the heights of Megara to their right. Beneath the Temple of Light, the morning sun flashed on the Crystal Palace.
“A remarkable piece of vulgarity,” Djinar said aloud, on seeing its great windows.
The fisherman landed them on the beach at the edge of the immense wharf that dominated the Ulama waterfront. Built t
o accommodate the largest Attian and Megaran ships, it towered almost forty feet above the water, with slum streets concealed beneath the wooden wharves, where Ulama’s poorest denizens lived and died.
The beach ran straight up to the rows of shacks, built in safety as the Sea of Sud tide never rose more than a foot except in extreme circumstances; Djinar cursed, but after he paid the fisherman, he stepped over the side of the boat into the shallow water and waded up the beach past a man dying of bone plague.
“Disgusting,” he said, glancing at the dying man.
He made his way through the flotsam of the city, trying not to touch them, as if their poverty was a contagion that could infect him. He pulled on gloves and a Byzas aristocrat’s mask, and finally found a set of steps leading up out of the slums. He took them the way a drowning man might grab at a floating oar.
But at the top of the shallow wooden steps, he found himself almost across from the so-called Pantheon, the oldest temple in Ulama. He walked north as he’d been ordered, looking for the red chalk mark that would tell him all was well, and he found it, to his own satisfaction, brushed lightly across the belly of Potnia just outside the temple.
He reached up with false piety to touch the mark, her marble belly worn smooth by the thousands of pilgrims who had passed this way. The Master taught that all the gods were false; that there was no god but one’s self. But he encouraged outward signs of piety, because mimicry makes good camouflage.
Djinar turned east and began to climb the high ridge that ran through the town.
He was crossing a tiny square, the dawn now a fully realized day, the sun rising in showy splendour over the snow-capped mountains of central Atti, when the footpads struck. There were three of them, wielding iron bars stolen from a construction site; crude but fearsome weapons.
Djinar was not much of a Magos. Family connections had ensured he received the very best education at the Studion, but he lacked the connection to the sources of power that would allow him to cast complex occulta. All the same, he froze one attacker with a weak but well-formed command to the man’s nervous system and he fell like a toppled statue as Djinar got his long rapier clear of its scabbard.
He offered the slim weapon to one of the two remaining footpads, waving the blade at the man until he batted at it with his iron bar, hoping to break the tongue of steel.
Djinar slipped his blade under the heavy blow and stabbed the man in the throat, the needle point punching through his neck even as the point grated on his spine. As the man’s knees buckled in death, Djinar raised his wrist and stepped back as if bowing to a dance partner, which, in a way, he was. The corpse fell off his lowered point.
“Your turn,” Djinar said.
The remaining man trembled with indecision, the sort of low person—as the Master taught—who turned to crime from inner weakness. Djinar thought he might be doing the man a favour in killing him; even with the length of a blue-white blade shimmering through the sticky blood of his friend in front of his face, the criminal couldn’t decide whether to attack or run.
Djinar tapped the bar with his blade, a sharp snap that forced the bandit to move. He raised the bar, his eyes wide with fear.
Quick as a cat, Djinar thrust through one wrist and turned his own, so that the slim blade severed the tendons of the other man’s hand.
He screamed and dropped the iron bar.
Like a snake, Djinar struck again, withdrawing the blade and stabbing through his body, and then, as he folded forward, through one eye. The blade came out the back of the man’s skull with a pop.
“Goodbye,” Djinar said. “I suspect no one will mourn you.”
Djinar stepped back and saluted his two fallen adversaries with an ironic flick of his blade that sent drops of blood flying through the morning air. He started to wipe his blade on a dead man’s burnoose, and then shook his head.
“Oh dear,” he said.
He walked over to the man whose limbs he’d frozen and smiled, meeting the man’s open eyes. “I wonder if you can break my lock on you,” he mused. He put the point of his rapier against the man’s neck under his chin and pushed very slowly, and so discovered his puissance was strong enough that man’s life ended before he could break it. Djinar pushed the blade in very slowly, and then withdrew it.
“I wonder what it is like?” he asked the morning air. “Death?”
He cleaned his blade, and sheathed it in time to pass two veiled women going to the well. He bade them good morning, and smiled when one started to scream.
At the top of the seemingly endless steps, he bought a cup of water from a water seller and savoured it, then walked away from the Sultan Bey’s magnificent walls and headed south, as he’d been ordered. He found the signs he expected, marks low to the ground in orange chalk, and he followed them through a maze of alleys between the high garden walls and the homes of the very rich. Eventually, when the sun was bright in the sky, he found the gate he sought: yellow with red trim, and a crouching lion in gold. He knocked, and a well-dressed gardener admitted him and took his name.
It can’t be this easy, he thought.
But it was. In moments he was summoned, and he climbed to the exedra, the long balcony of a summer palace. He could see through the windows to the apartments within, a dozen rooms for women, and then a long hall through which he was led into the hall. It was richly hung with silk carpets and a man sat on a dais, cross-legged on pillows with a naked sword across his lap. There were servants along the walls and a courtier or two, or perhaps they were more valued servants, leaning against the marble pillars that supported the roof over the nave of the hall.
Djinar bowed.
The man on the dais inclined his head.
“My lord, I bring you—” Djinar looked up and saw the deadliest of his enemies standing in the shadows behind the dais. His hand went to his sword.
“Hold,” the lord of the hall said in accented Byzas. “He is no threat.”
“No threat?” Djinar asked. “He is our greatest foe.”
The lord smiled. “Look!” he said. “The serpent has no fangs.” He waved at the figure behind the dais, and the man didn’t even blink.
“Gods,” Djinar breathed, fascinated. “We heard he was dead!”
The lord had a good-natured laugh, a fatherly one, and he laughed it. “He very much wishes he was dead. Instead, he will serve me forever.”
Djinar noted that the Attian lord said “me” and not “The Master.”
“I heard that your attack on the Sultan Bey…” Djinar met the man’s eyes and hesitated. His laugh was so at odds with his eyes that the words died in Djinar’s throat.
“It was unsuccessful,” the lord admitted. “This busybody made too much trouble.” He laughed again. “He will have to serve me for many years to balance the chaos he created in one hour.” The lord shrugged. “Never mind. You have a message for me, syr?”
“From the Disciple of Megara,” Djinar said, taking a sealed parchment cylinder from his bag.
“Even here, in my own house, you should not say such a thing,” the lord counselled. He broke the seal with his thumb, and began to read.
The sword across his lap moved. It almost seemed to crawl or writhe like a snake, and Djinar flinched.
Tell me a thin voice said. It was like the ringing of tiny bells or the vibration of a lute string, and the hair began to rise on the nape of Djinar’s neck, as if a haunting had crossed his path, or one of the fae.
“Interesting,” the lord said. His smile was now quite unfeigned. “Your master speaks highly of you.”
Djinar knew a moment of relief. “I’m sure I’m unworthy…” he began.
“Brilliant, ruthless, a true believer. Have you truly memorized Precepts of a Life of Power?”
“I have,” Djinar said proudly.
“But you have almost no talent for the art,” the lord said.
Djinar sighed. “None,” he said.
The lord smiled. “We live in wonderful times,” he
said. “The Old Ones are about to be released back into the world, and life will return to its natural rhythm; the weak shall be slaves, and the strong shall be like gods.” He raised his terrible eyes to Djinar. “Do you wish to have the powers of a great Magos?” he asked, his voice mild.
“Of course!” Djinar said. “More than anything!”
“How splendid,” the lord said. “And how very convenient.” He raised a hand, and the sword seemed to vibrate.
Later, it occurred to Djinar that the sword was laughing.
Four soldiers grabbed his enemy, still frozen in his grey robes—as if paralyzed—behind the dais. They dragged him out into the light, and Djinar could see he’d been both defeated and subsequently tortured; the man’s nails were ripped from his fingers, and his mouth bled where his teeth had been ripped out.
“We broke him,” the lord said. “Not even Kurvenos, the great Magos, the Light Bringer, could withstand us.” He laughed his happy laugh. “Now I have most of his secrets and, best of all, access to his power.”
Kurvenos stood unmoving. Only his eyes betrayed his terror, his horror, his despair.
“When I took him, I knew he would make the most powerful Exalted ever created,” the lord said. “But I needed a pilot for this mighty warship, someone of impeccable belief… and lo, your Disciple sent you to me.”
“Me?” Djinar choked. “Exalted…”
“What is life but the lust for power?” the lord said, quoting from the Master’s book of maxims. “Prepare to have more power than you ever dreamed.”
Djinar screamed as he met Kurvenos’ eyes, and the soldier’s hands seized him.
Because, even as the lord and his acolytes began their chant, all Kurvenos’ wounded eyes held was pity.
if you enjoyed
DARK FORGE
look out for
THE RED KNIGHT
The Traitor Son Cycle: Book One
by
Miles Cameron
Twenty-eight florins a month is a huge price to pay, for a man to stand between you and the Wild.
Dark Forge Page 45