When we reached the residence described in Sechaveh’s message, the courtyard’s iron gate was blocked by a line of guardsmen wearing Sechaveh’s scorpion crest. One stepped forward, a man whose shirt above his golden sash bore the flowing blue sigils of a wind mage. Marten showed him Sechaveh’s message, and after a quick exchange, the wind mage let us through the cordon.
The courtyard beyond was plain by highside standards, holding only a set of hardy citrus trees in marble planters spaced around a central mosaic worked in tiles of onyx and silver. The door to the house was closed and barred. Another two guardsmen stood before it, accompanied by a second wind mage, this one a woman.
“Sechaveh told me to expect you,” the wind mage said in a reedy voice. “But our orders are to bar entry to the house until his lead investigator arrives.”
So. Ruslan was coming. Funny to think that was actually good news. Behind Marten, Lena’s freckled face stiffened with resolve. Marten said genially to the wind mage, “We’ll gladly await Ruslan Khaveirin’s arrival to enter. But could you tell us a little of what to expect inside? Sechaveh’s message said the victim was another mage…the owner of this house, perhaps?”
The wind mage shot him a narrow-eyed look. “Yes. A cloud mage named Jadin Sovarias. I haven’t been inside myself, and know nothing more.” So don’t bother to ask, her scowl said.
Marten gestured in rueful acceptance and ambled over to examine the orange tree next to me. I muttered, “Quit dallying, Marten. Pretend you forgot something and send Lena and me for it.” My nerves buzzed with a mixture of excitement and worry. The thought of crossing wards as powerful as Ruslan’s made my palms sweat, even knowing he wouldn’t be lurking inside them.
“Not yet,” Marten said softly. “When Ruslan arrives, I want to see who’s with him. If he brings Mikail, that’ll mean one less possibility for a guard on Kiran…ah. Ruslan’s arrived—twin gods, the man’s soulfire glares bright enough to blind even through the gate wards.”
Marten straightened and strode to the courtyard’s center, Lena and the others falling into formation behind him. I edged up behind them, just enough to one side that I could still see the gate. I wanted to stay as much out of Ruslan’s notice as possible.
The outer gate swung open. Ruslan swept into the courtyard, resplendent in finely tailored clothes of bronze silk marked by jagged sigils. Trailing him, one on each side, were Mikail and Kiran.
Surprise hit me with the force of an avalanche. Kiran! I’d never thought Ruslan would be so arrogant as to parade him right in front of us. Ruslan must mean to force his obedience with the mark-bond, knowing it would upset and distract us. He could torment Kiran further in the bargain by making him face the man who’d betrayed him so thoroughly. I winced just thinking of the bitter rage Kiran would endure in seeing Marten.
Unlike Ruslan, Kiran and Mikail wore unrelieved black, their crimson sigils standing out in sharp relief on their shirts. I recognized the largest of the sigils; I’d seen it etched into the skin over Kiran’s heart. He’d told me it was Ruslan’s personal mark.
I dragged my gaze up from the sigils, dreading what I’d see in Kiran’s face.
My surprise deepened into shock. He looked…relaxed. His blue eyes were clear, his head held high, and though his skin remained startlingly pale, his face showed no hint of strain. I’d never realized just how much stress and unhappiness had always been visible in his demeanor, all the way from the first time I’d met him. Until now, when for the first time I saw him without it.
My first thought was the mark-bond. But Kiran walked with easy confidence, not the dragging jerkiness or the slow, dreamy movements I’d seen from him when Ruslan used their link.
Stevan hissed at Marten, “See? He’s been Ruslan’s creature from the first. He acted the lost waif only to spy on us.”
Marten’s black eyes narrowed, watching Kiran.
“That’s not true.” My whisper was equally harsh. Stevan was wrong. He had to be. I knew Kiran, damn it. Nobody could be that good an actor. Ruslan had to be controlling him somehow. Or maybe Ruslan had threatened him, forced him to put on a show? But he didn’t look under duress, or even drugged.
“Quiet.” Marten stepped forward to meet Ruslan, his expression settling into its usual good-natured mask.
“Captain Martennan. Good to see you are prompt,” Ruslan said. “You know of my apprentices, Mikail and Kiran ai Ruslanov.” He laid his hands on Kiran and Mikail’s shoulders. Kiran didn’t flinch from the touch. He looked straight at Marten and showed nothing more than a faint wariness.
“Of course,” Marten said, irony shading his voice. He bowed, carefully formal. The other Alathians didn’t. Stevan and Jenoviann had assumed expressions of cold, stone-faced politeness, but Lena and Talm were staring at Kiran, identical sharp lines between their brows.
Ruslan smiled, and I had to look away, unable to bear the mocking satisfaction in it. He’d seen our dismay over Kiran and he was enjoying the hell out of our surprise and unease. I did my best to imitate Mikail’s stolid calm. Fuck if I’d give Ruslan the pleasure of realizing just how thrown I was.
Kiran glanced at me—and blinked, his eyes twitching back to mine, then away.
Oh, mother of maidens! I knew that reaction. Most people did something similar when they first met me, thanks to my eyes seeming so out of place with my dark Arkennlander coloring. It was like they couldn’t believe they’d seen the color of my eyes right, and had to check again.
If Kiran didn’t recognize me…had Ruslan fucked with his memories? I got a flash of Kiran, white-faced from the pain of his broken arm on the Whitefires’ western slopes, saying, I don’t remember anything before Ruslan. He always said it was because my life only truly started when I came to him. But erasing the past of a kid too little to question it was one thing. Ruslan would’ve had to destroy Kiran’s memories going as far back as Alisa’s death last winter, maybe further. With that long of a gap, Kiran would realize his loss and be curious, even suspicious. Unless Ruslan had replaced his memories with false ones, somehow?
Maybe I was reading far too much into a brief instant’s reaction. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake in this. I refused to believe Stevan’s accusation, but there might be another explanation than lost memory. I prayed there was another explanation. If Kiran truly thought me a stranger, I was in serious trouble. I’d counted on his help, both for himself and to pry that coin out of Marten. I had to talk to him, discover the truth.
Marten was too far away for me to speak without Ruslan hearing. I eased toward Lena, who stood closest.
“Captain, you are welcome to engage in whatever investigative methods you see fit, provided you do not interfere with mine.” Ruslan spoke with the indulgent condescension of a den minder telling her youngest Taint thief he could help make dinner.
Marten awarded Ruslan one of his disarmingly bright smiles. I hoped Ruslan found all that casual cheerfulness as annoying as I always had.
“For our part, we ask only that you share your findings,” Marten said.
“Of course,” Ruslan said, in a tone that precisely matched Marten’s earlier irony. He strode for the house, Mikail and Kiran right behind him. The guardsmen hastily unbarred the door and backed away, as did the wind mage. Their bodies were tense and their eyes firmly fixed on the ground. Not even Sechaveh’s handpicked guards were immune to all the terrible stories about blood mages.
I gripped Lena’s wrist and spoke low and fast. “Stevan’s wrong. I’ve a theory, but I need proof. Tell Marten he’s got to distract Ruslan somehow so I can talk to Kiran.”
Lena’s frown deepened, but she nodded. At the door, Ruslan swept a hand through the air. Silver scrawls of wards blazed bright and then dulled. Mikail said something to Kiran as they followed him inside, and Kiran’s teeth flashed white in a smile.
I’d thought the task of freeing Kiran hard enough before. But how did you free someone who didn’t even know he was in bondage?
Chapter Ten
The foyer of the dead mage’s house fit right in with what I expected of a highsider. Jeweled tiles in the pattern of sigils decorated the polished, rose-streaked marble of the walls and floor. Brilliantly colored stained glass skylights were spaced along the graceful arch of the ceiling. Magelights sat perched on intricate Sulanian bone carvings. Despite the knots in my stomach, curiosity pricked at me. I’d never been inside a mage’s house in Ninavel. No Taint thief handler with any kind of smarts would risk sending his kids into one. Wards were one thing; those could be shattered or fooled with the Taint, if a Tainter was clever enough. Active casting was something else, and everyone in Ninavel knew it.
A short, scrawny man wearing Sechaveh’s scorpion crest waited for us at the end of the foyer. The blocky golden sigils of a sand mage marked his drab clothing. He had the brown skin of an Arkennlander, with a hooked nose and a kink to his dark hair that suggested he had some Sulanian blood. He looked older than usual for a Ninavel mage, appearing to be in his forties, and his skin had a jaundiced tinge in the unwavering glow of the magelights, as if he didn’t go out in the sun much.
“Good, good, you’re here,” he said to Ruslan. He had an abrupt way of speaking, half-swallowing the end of each word as if anxious to get to the next one. Glancing at Marten, he bobbed his head. “You must be Captain Martennan.”
Marten bowed, deep and formal. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
“I’m Edon,” the mage said. “Seranthine High Scholar.”
So this was the man Ambassador Halassian had thought was in charge. Despite his awkward manner, his dark eyes were sharp as they skipped between us. Maybe he played the graceless scholar the way Marten acted the cheerful shopkeeper, to set people off their guard.
Ruslan made an irritated noise. “Enough pleasantries. Report, Seranthine, and quickly.”
Like the guardsmen, Edon wouldn’t meet Ruslan’s gaze. “When the mage Jadin Sovarias failed to appear for his scheduled water duty, guardsmen were sent to investigate. They inquired here at the house and woke Jadin’s servant, an untalented man by the name of Torain ap Vedak. Torain searched the house for his master and found him dead in his workroom. The manner of the death appears…ah, violent. Not at all like the earlier deaths, you understand, which seemed clearly due to mishandled confluence overspill during upheaval events. But this…well. This is different. You’ll understand what I mean when you see the body.”
“The servant. You’ve kept him here?” Ruslan’s tone implied that Edon was in serious trouble if he hadn’t.
“Yes. Of course. He’s in the receiving room.” Edon pointed through the archway. “He seems, er…quite distraught. Obtaining a coherent report from him has proved difficult.”
“Perhaps I will have more success,” Ruslan said, with a glimmer of dark amusement. Beside him, Mikail’s stolid expression remained unchanged. Kiran, who had been watching Edon with wary curiosity, dropped his gaze. His shoulders gained a hint of tension.
His discomfort brought me a thread of hope. Whatever had happened to him, he knew Ruslan wasn’t all sunshine and roses, and he didn’t much like it.
Edon ducked his head to Ruslan and led us through the archway into a broad circular room chock full of statues and wrought-metal furniture. A heavyset man in a pale robe sat in one of the chairs, his head down and his hands twisting around each other in his lap.
“Torain,” Edon said. The man didn’t look up. Edon grimaced in annoyance and made a sharp gesture. Torain jumped, his head flying up.
He was terrified. His eyes were so wide the whites showed top and bottom, and his breathing was fast and ragged. At first I assumed it was Edon and Ruslan he feared. But his gaze skated right past Ruslan’s sigils to dart about the room as if he expected some hidden enemy to leap out and attack him.
“He keeps babbling about Jadin’s death being the work of demons, even under truth spell.” Edon’s expression turned clinical. “The only remotely useful information I’ve had from him is that he claims to have heard and seen nothing unusual prior to finding his master, and none of the wards on the workroom door were activated.”
Demons. Not a total surprise; Torain’s dark curls and coppery skin marked him as Varkevian in ancestry, and all the southern countries were big on demons. Varkevians in particular had a whole vast pantheon of them, all beautiful as the morning and vicious as rabid sandcats, if you believed the stories. Which I didn’t. I half believed in Khalmet, Suliyya, and some of the other southern gods worshipped in Ninavel—but gods were one thing. I’d never bought the idea that demons lurked around amusing themselves by poisoning souls and savaging men. I’d seen plenty of men die, but never in ways that couldn’t be accounted for by god-touched bad luck or simple human evil.
Like Ruslan’s. He was studying Torain, arms akimbo. Torain still seemed oblivious to his regard. Probably it was a completely new experience for Ruslan to find himself considered the lesser of two evils. It was certainly beginning to make me more than a little uneasy about what we’d find in the dead mage’s workroom. Some of the demon tales I’d heard around convoy campfires outdid the stories of blood mages.
“Show me the body. I’ll question the nathahlen afterward,” Ruslan said.
“Whatever you prefer,” Edon said. “I’ll remain here and, ah, finish my own interrogation. You’ll find the body in the workroom. The wards remain inactive.” He pointed at a metal door bracketed by heavy curtains on the room’s far side. A filigree of copper ward lines covered the door, which in my mind had begun to take on a distinctly sinister aspect. Especially with Edon’s clear reluctance to go back in himself.
Ruslan only looked thoughtful. He moved to the door and pulled it open. He paused, silhouetted against a cool glow of magelight; and then he continued inside.
A sharp, coppery stench of blood rolled out through the open door, chokingly strong. I gagged and hastily turned it into a muffled cough, fighting down the terrible memories the smell triggered. I refused to show weakness in front of a whole roomful of mages.
Kiran and Mikail glanced at each other, one quick unreadable look, and followed Ruslan into the workroom. Kiran’s shoulders still held that slight tension, but he walked in with the same easy confidence he’d shown outside.
A sign that he didn’t remember Alisa’s death? Surely if he did, he wouldn’t be able to waltz right into what smelled like an abbatoir.
The Alathians didn’t look too happy. Marten’s face had closed up into a careful blankness, Lena’s freckles stood out stark against her skin, and Talm looked near as haggard as he had at the mine. Even Stevan’s mouth thinned. But we all moved forward until we could see into the room beyond.
Yeah, there was a dead guy inside. Very dead. Jadin Sovarias lay face up, sprawled naked in a black pool of blood. Clotted gouts of gore streaked the table behind him and spattered the walls. Ragged slashes like giant clawmarks ran the length of his torso, exposing raw, glistening things I didn’t want to look at too closely. His mouth was open in a silent scream, his lips flayed away so his teeth showed grotesquely white. And his eyes…his eyes were gone. Charred holes backed by the sickly gray of brain matter were all that remained.
My gorge heaved. I swallowed, hard, and yanked my gaze from the mutilated mess on the floor. No wonder Torain was out of his head with fear. The burned eyes, the slashes…the scene could’ve come straight from the tales of the Ghorshaba, the supposed nastiest demons of the bunch.
When the Ghorshaba decided to play, they never killed only one person. No, they always killed everyone in the household, drawing it out over a couple days to make it more fun. Torain hadn’t blinked when faced with a blood mage because he believed he was a dead man regardless.
In the stories, we would be too, for entering before the demon was done. A cold trickle of fear curled down my spine. Damn it, I didn’t believe in demons. Surely spells could produce injuries every bit as horrible in the hands of a mage like Ruslan. But if some mage really wanted to i
mitate the worst tales of demonkind, we’d made ourselves targets the moment we stepped in the door.
* * *
(Kiran)
Kiran surveyed the blood-smeared workroom, fighting not to betray the rebellion of his stomach. He and Mikail had used both fresh and preserved blood in childhood spell exercises. More, he knew real magic involved death—and presumably, since he’d been through the akhelashva ritual and come of age, he’d cast spells that were more than exercises. Hadn’t he? The gaping voids in his memories refused to answer. The sight of the horribly damaged body on the floor continued to nauseate him, his chest so tight he could barely breathe.
He pulled his gaze from the corpse and focused on the energies that swirled through the room. With his barriers up, it was like looking at a blurred charcoal sketch instead of a detailed color painting, but he could sense enough to make him frown in confusion. The thick, sullen power of violent death filled the room, ebbing slowly. Underneath, the deep pulse of the confluence permeated the house just as it did the rest of the city. But he sensed no residue of any other magic, defensive or otherwise, aside from the faint, fading traces common to a room where spells were regularly cast. If not for the corpse on the floor, he would have sworn no significant magic had been performed within the room for the past several days.
“His personal wards are untouched,” said the Alathian with the wiry ginger hair and hard gray eyes. Stevannes; the name floated up to his consciousness from Ruslan’s binding deep within, accompanied by a twinge of inhibition. Cast no spells to harm him.
Kiran forced himself to look at the body again. Powerful defensive charms glittered on the man’s wrists, their silver clear and the gems sparkling and whole. If the mage had used them and been overpowered, the metal would be blackened and the gems shattered.
Ruslan flicked a contemptuous glance at the dark-haired leader of the Alathians. “None of the wards or charms in this room have been used.”
The Tainted City Page 17