Noble's Honor (Changeling Blood Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  “We don’t use anything like that,” he admitted. “But…it might work. There’s even more ways to bar our tracking magic than there are to block a Wizard’s Sight.” He shook his head. “Hell, a cold iron nail in your shoe is enough to thwart us if you know what you’re doing.”

  “We could try it,” I suggested. “We have, what, three Hunters with the Gift of Tracking?”

  “Including me,” Coleman agreed. “Let me see.”

  He rose and walked over to me, putting his hand on my shoulder. I felt a warm tingle of power run through his hand as he focused his gift, trying to trace the link between myself and the spear my father had bound.

  Coleman stood there and the rest of us were silent for at least thirty seconds, then shook his head.

  “That is a very clever idea, Ms. Tenerim,” he told Mary. “It’s something I’m going to have to experiment with in general; we’ve never thought of trying to acquire things that belong to the target for tracking. We usually just, well, start where they were and follow them from there.”

  “Did you get anything?” I asked.

  “I can tell the link is there with my Gift,” he said. “I can feel it, but I can’t trace it. Part of it is that I don’t have any practice doing this. As I work with this method of Tracking, I think I might be able to do more, but part of it is also that the other end is shielded.”

  “You know what the answer is, then,” Asi pointed out. “If a Hunter cannot Track it, but the concept works… you need a Power, my lord. Preferably a Wizard—and if the Wizards are as furious with the Masked Lords as you say…”

  “Then MacDonald may well help us,” I agreed. “And if he isn’t willing to help us for that, he still owes me a boon for saving his life.”

  I took Mary’s hand and squeezed.

  “He’ll help,” I told her. “And you may have just given the key to finding these bastards.”

  “That’s good,” she replied. “Because for a moment there, I thought I was embarrassing myself for nothing!”

  The guards at the “side entrance” to MacDonald’s Tower were different this time. Lan Tu’s brother, Skavrosh, was in command. He shared his sister’s height but wore a crisp business suit and black veil—and was carrying a meticulously maintained AK-47.

  He was the only goblin there today, though, and his two fellow guards were both dog shifters from Clan Fontaine.

  I recognize them both and was surprised to see them. Clan Fontaine’s Alpha had betrayed the Wizard and the city’s Covenants, joining a conspiracy to kill off MacDonald in exchange for the promise of being made Speaker.

  Only part of the Clan had actually been involved in that, I supposed, but the presence of Fontaine shifters among MacDonald’s security staff suggested the Magus was more forgiving than I was.

  “Lord Kilkenny,” Skavrosh greeted me, with a small bow. He kept his eyes on me as he bowed, and his finger was right next to the trigger guard of his rifle. His job was to keep MacDonald safe. There would be no risks taken here.

  “I need to speak with Magus MacDonald,” I told the guards. “It is urgent.”

  “The Magus is in conference,” Skavrosh told me, his black eyes unreadable above his veil. “But you can go upstairs and wait. The constructs will bring you coffee so long as you don’t leave the waiting area.”

  And if I left the waiting area, well, my best guess was that MacDonald had at least as many armed retainers in the Tower as I had at the house.

  “I can wait,” I confirmed. “But this is important.”

  “I trust you on that,” he told me. “That’s why I’m letting you wait for him instead of telling you to come back later, eh?”

  Despite the growing collection of random supernaturals in his employ, MacDonald still kept his secretarial tasks and general housekeeping in the hands of magical constructs. No mortal would have been able to tell that the collection of near-androgynous blonde women running the Tower weren’t real humans unless they saw enough of them together to realize that they were all very similar.

  I had more than enough exposure to pick them out by now; plus, my own gifts allowed me to sense the presence of the invisible constructs also in MacDonald’s recently renovated waiting room. I knew that the two “decorative” cabinets in the room contained an extensive array of weapons tailored to fight almost any supernatural in existence.

  It was a sign of trust that there were no living guards in the room, though. There were faster and deadlier supernaturals out there than me, but my gifts were certainly capable of tearing open those cabinets and allowing me to steal weapons from them before the constructs could react.

  Instead, I took a seat in one of the comfortable chairs as a construct wordlessly brought me a coffee. With only me in the room, there was no pretense that the magical creation had actually bothered with the coffee machine. She handed me a steaming Starbucks latte—or at least a perfect duplicate of one, since this cup had almost certainly never passed within the walls of a chain coffee store.

  “Thank you.”

  The construct bobbed her head at me and I chuckled. The creatures weren’t alive or sentient by any measure…but they were more than mere extensions of MacDonald’s will, too, more capable of exceeding their programming than many thought.

  Treating them like people never hurt.

  “How long is the conference expected to last?” I asked the construct. They were sufficiently connected to MacDonald to have that information, even if the Magus was the only one who knew.

  “He is uncertain,” she replied. “The Magi discuss the death of one of their own. This will take some time.” She paused. “He suggests you get comfortable, Lord Kilkenny. We will bring you supper.”

  I sighed and nodded.

  “I appreciate it,” I told the construct. “I will wait for the Magus.”

  19

  I wasn’t entirely sure if the constructs had any skills that MacDonald didn’t. If that was the case, then the Magus was an incredible cook along with his many other talents. I’d been fed lesser meals at five-star restaurants.

  The good food and coffee helped while away the time as I waited for his conference to be finished, but I was still in the Wizard’s waiting room for over an hour before one of the constructs appeared out of nowhere.

  “MacDonald is available now. He’s waiting for you in his office,” the magical creature told me.

  “Thank you.”

  The construct set out to lead the way and I followed with a hidden sigh. I did know my way around the Tower now, but the constructs were…rather literal in interpreting their instructions.

  This one had been told to bring me, so it was going to bring me.

  MacDonald was sitting at his desk when I entered the room, his head in his hands and a coffee cup happily filling itself next to him. The cup finished filling and he grabbed it as I took a seat across him, and he took a long swallow.

  “Kilkenny,” he greeted me. “I apologize for the wait, but my brothers and sisters are…concerned. I was supposed to meet Oberis for supper three hours ago. Hopefully, he’ll forgive me.”

  MacDonald and Oberis were lovers, a situation that avoided conflict of interest only by careful actions on MacDonald’s part. I was pretty sure the Seelie Lord would forgive the Wizard missing a dinner, given everything going on.

  “It’s been a bad few weeks for us all,” I agreed. “I take it your fellow Mages have had no luck tracing the Masked Lords?”

  He grimaced.

  “We think of ourselves as near-omnipotent and -omniscient, gods among men who wield powers even few supernaturals can even begin to imagine,” he said bitterly. “We are neither used to nor graceful about being thwarted.

  “And you are correct. The Masked Lords chose to challenge us because they knew they could hide from us. There will be consequences for this in the end; we do not forget easily…but they have eluded us for now.”

  “That’s what I expected, even if I hoped for better luck,” I admitted.

/>   “Then why are you here, Kilkenny?” MacDonald asked. “I have neither the patience nor the time for idle chatter tonight. You waited an hour to see me, and there are demands on your time as well.”

  “We think we know how to find the Masked Lords,” I told him. “It didn’t work with the tracking abilities available to the Wild Hunt, but our tests suggested the idea was solid. We just didn’t have the practice and power to break through their defenses.”

  He lowered his coffee cup back to his desk and studied me levelly.

  “The massed power of the Mages has been bent to this task,” he pointed out. “What do you think we did not try? Did not attempt? Why do you think we failed but your help can make us succeed?”

  “Because I am linked to Esras,” I reminded him. “By blood and magic, that spear is connected to me—and I imagine it is kept close to their chest. Before, we didn’t want to find the spear. We wanted them to come to us.

  “Now, though, finding the spear will bring us to them and we can unleash the vengeance they’ve earned upon them.”

  He studied me in silence.

  “You know that you can wield Esras yourself, right?” he said. “If we bring you to the spear, you become a wild card in this game. A potential threat.”

  “I can’t imagine the spear will make that much of a difference to me,” I replied. “It’s just a weapon, after all.”

  MacDonald chuckled.

  “So is the gift I gave you,” he pointed out. “But you are correct. We may be able to track the spear through you. We were so focused on hunting the Masked Lords themselves, we did not consider seeking their prizes. Potentially, we could also seek Asi through your new Vassal…but that is almost certainly shielded against this kind of magic.

  “Esras, however, is now useless to them. We shall have to see.”

  He rose from his chair in a single forceful motion.

  “Come with me,” he instructed.

  “Magus?”

  “This is my office, Jason Kilkenny. It is not my Working space.”

  I followed the Wizard through his Tower. Most of the spaces I’d seen in the building, outside of MacDonald’s own bedroom, were super-modern. The Tower was one of the newest, most modern buildings in downtown Calgary.

  MacDonald’s ownership of it was obscured through more trusts, pension funds, nonprofits and numbered companies than I could follow, but he owned it in its entirety. He lived and worked in the top half-dozen floors, and the company whose name was on the building had the rest.

  Passing through the chrome and glass, however, we eventually reached a section of wall that looked like it had been removed from a medieval castle. Glass, steel and plaster gave way to barely-worked stone and a large metal door.

  The door was doubly anachronistic. The wall looked like it came from the sixth century, the door looked like it belonged in the twelfth at the latest…and its locking system looked like it belonged in the twenty-fifth century.

  Multiple tiers of passive and active maglocks secured the door, and the key seemed to be an entire array of complex high-tech readers. My rough guess was that opening the door required a retinal print, a palm print, and a DNA sample.

  Except the man who’d installed it was a Wizard. Somewhere in all of that array of readers was probably a very simple switch that couldn’t be seen from the outside, because MacDonald simply looked at the door and all of the locks calmly opened.

  “Feel privileged, Lord Kilkenny,” he told me as he led the way in. “Less than a dozen living non-Mages have seen my Working chamber.” He chuckled. “Honestly, I’d be surprised if there are a hundred living non-Mages who have seen any Mage’s Working chamber.”

  The crudely worked stone of the wall gave way into smooth stone quickly. The entire chamber had been carved into a single cave, and I could tell that we were no longer in an office tower in Calgary.

  Or we were, but no one had lifted a fifty-meter-wide boulder up to the top of the tower. This space was as attached to the real world as Oberis’s Court or the extra rooms in the basement of my house.

  The sanctum had been moved over the years, but my guess was that it was attached to the wall that we’d passed through. It had probably once been a real cave, but that had been centuries ago at least.

  Lines of orichalcum inlay swirled across the space in symbols that were as far beyond me as rockets were beyond the cave-dwellers who’d invented fire. I could feel the Power pulsing in this place, but I could barely even begin to comprehend what MacDonald would need this for, let alone how it worked.

  “Take a seat in the center, Lord Kilkenny,” MacDonald ordered. Candles were materializing from thin air, already lit as he placed them around the room with a gesture. “Once you’re ready, we will begin.”

  He paused thoughtfully as he placed another ten candles.

  “I must warn you. This will almost certainly hurt.”

  By the time I had taken a seat in the center of the chamber, there had to be at least a hundred candles lighting up the room. There were no chairs or cushions, leaving me sitting cross-legged in the blank spot that all of the orichalcum lines seemed to lead to.

  “Good,” MacDonald said briskly as he made one more circuit of the room, checking candles and the lines of the runes. I couldn’t see what he was doing half of the time, but it looked like he was laying out other objects as well.

  All of this was significantly more effort than I was used to seeing put into magic—and not quite what I was expecting from seeing a Power work. This was more than a simple tracking spell.

  “Are you ready?” he finally asked.

  “As I can be. What should I expect?” I asked.

  “That depends on how strongly our masked friends have secured the spear,” MacDonald admitted. “This might be very quick and simple, rendering all of this preparation unnecessary.”

  “Or?”

  “Or it could be long, complicated and painful,” he told me. He passed me an orichalcum bowl and a silver-bladed knife. “I need some of your blood in the bowl, then place it at the convergence of the lines.”

  I’d been expecting something similar. Not that it made cutting my hand to bleed into the bowl any more fun. I healed faster than humans, but not nearly as fast as many supernaturals.

  It took a few seconds for the cut to clot over, by which time I’d hopefully dripped enough into the bowl. Wincing against the pull of the clot, I put the bowl where MacDonald had indicated and then leaned back.

  “Now. Wait.”

  Power filled the room. MacDonald was often an unassuming man, and it was easy to forget you stood in the presence of the one of closest things available to a god.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t in a room with a man. I shared the chamber with a Presence, an entity older and more unknowable than anything a mortal would ever meet. This wasn’t the first time I’d been around a Power in full form, however, and I swallowed the urge to scream and run.

  His magic wrapped around the room. Candles flared brighter and orichalcum lines glittered like the rising sun. The energy spiraled through the Working chamber…and then struck me.

  The blood in the bowl in front of me started to hiss and steam, and a moment later, heat flashed through my body as my own blood warmed under the magic.

  For the first few seconds, it was merely uncomfortable. It rapidly progressed to burning throughout my entire body, my entire circulatory system heated far beyond what a human or inhuman body was designed to stand.

  And still power flowed through me and the runes grew brighter. Unconsciously, I flung my hand out into the air. The clot broke under the heat and the gesture, and more blood splattered out and stopped in midair.

  A spinning circle formed of my own blood took shape, a glowing portal into another place, but it showed nothing. Just an iron wall.

  “Hold,” MacDonald barked. “Do not let it go.”

  I’d thought I’d been burning up before. Now fire flashed through my body as the Magus focused all of the incredible m
ight of a Power of the world on me. The Working chamber amplified his strength, and his magic hammered into me again.

  And again.

  And again.

  I coughed hard and realized I was spitting up blood. Steaming blood that spattered across the spinning disk in front of me.

  The iron wall shattered. Whatever shield had barred our way failed in the face of the strength of the link my father had forged and the power MacDonald was pouring down that link.

  I could see Esras.

  It was…surprisingly plain. A shaft of dark brown ash held an old iron spearhead, a wide leaf shape with a smaller cross-blade in the center. There was no rust or marking on the blade, though, and it seemed to glow with a soft golden light.

  The view pulled back slightly, revealing that the spear sat in a display case surrounded by bulletproof glass. Even my untrained eye could pick out the alarms and laser tripwires around it, and MacDonald pulled the vision back farther.

  It was inside a vault of some kind. It wasn’t the only item in the vault, but it clearly held pride of place. I barely had time to register that the vault contained anything else, though, before the Magus kept drawing the view back.

  There was a reason for that. Esras had distracted me momentarily, but fire continued to burn through my veins and I realized that I was reaching the limits of my endurance. If we didn’t actually locate the spear, the spell might well kill me.

  I only had the tiniest glimpses after that as the pain swept through me, but the view kept drawing back until it was a bird’s-eye view of some kind of structure

  Then the spell ended…and I collapsed forward into a pool of my own blood.

  20

  I woke up in an unfamiliar bed with someone washing my face.

  “Be calm, be calm,” Lan Tu’s familiar accented voice said as I started to move. “You’re recovering, but rest.”

  I exhaled and let her finish washing the caked blood off my face before I opened my eyes. The room looked much like I expected: the kind of medical suite assembled by people with money and no desire to visit a hospital.