An Atlantean Aspect is a difficult thing to describe.
A particularly powerful magic-user can look different—distorted—when strong emotion is upon them. My eyes, for instance, glow orange. But Arcana—real, ruling Arcana—are the closest things to gods on this planet. They must have fearsome Aspects—it’s a survival mechanism, like a predator’s coloring or the ruff of a wolf. There are stories of Arcana becoming burning bushes, scorpions, and F5 funnel clouds. I saw Lady Lovers turn into a faerie with hornet wings and overactive pheromones. I’ve heard that the Hanged Man’s aspect has made brave men piss blood.
I saw the Aspect of my father only once, and even then just out of the corner of my eye. The only thing I remember was a pillar of light so bright that it left an afterimage for hours.
Many scions of the newest generation don’t have Aspects. A lot of academics cite this as evidence that the Atlantean race is in decline. I disagree. Just because most scions don’t turn into jabberwockies or lightning bolts when they’re pissed doesn’t make them weaker, it just makes them children of a different world.
Younger Atlanteans can’t afford to have one foot in Atlantis’s past. We are no longer separate from the human world. Blending in has become our survival mechanism.
The attack came as I returned to my rooms.
It was a clever, twisted bit of spellwork. The magic wound its way past all my adrenaline responses and sent me into an immediate, drowsy trance. I changed course in a daze and wandered in a direction not of my choosing.
The soles of my shoes scuffed the tiles as I passed through well-appointed, heavily guarded hallways. None of the guards stopped me or acknowledged my fugue. I climbed a set of red-stone stairs, which ended in an arched hallway flanked by empty suits of armor. The armor, scored with blade marks and mace dents, lacked the spit and polish of pampered antiques.
At the end of a hallway, a man called to me.
I went toward him and smiled when he reached his hands toward my neck.
“It shouldn’t be this easy to influence you,” Lord Tower said. “You need to practice your resistance techniques.”
Then his face froze and he looked down.
I poked my sabre, transmuted into dagger shape, into his belly.
“At least you didn’t banter before the killing blow this time,” he said lightly.
I transmuted my sabre blade to wrist-guard form and shook it over my fist before it firmed. “For the record, I even knew it was you doing the influencing. You’re too proud. You need to muddy up your magical signature with mistakes and flaws.”
“Indeed. I have sangria upstairs. Will you join me?”
I followed him through a set of rooms that were twice the size of mine. The Enclave owners famously parceled out Arcana apartments equally, but the Tower’s old job as the monarchy’s chief spy and torturer gave him unspoken privileges. The things he did in private produced unsettling acoustics, which were best kept to their own wing.
A cool, dark stairway opened onto an unshaded rooftop terrace. The Tower had summoned—literally summoned, ripped right from the ocean in big, messy chunks—seven water elementals that served as his security. They prowled the rooftop, glistening and rippling under the strong summer sun. White sand, plant life, and shell fragments swirled under their skinless surfaces.
One of them handed me a glass of sangria, and I saw a tiny fish dart up its forearm. It left behind fingerprints made of wave foam.
“I’ll have your report now,” the Tower said. He sat down on a reclining patio chair—the word perched also came to mind. He was barefoot again, but he had traded in pajamas for a bathing robe made of Atlantean grass silk.
“I guess this means you’re aware I saw Lady Justice?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. “Was it productive?”
“Instructive, at least.” I took a minute to bring the Tower up to speed. He was a master poker player with very few tells. Except for a stillness when I mentioned the psychometric impression in Addam’s office, I didn’t know if any of my investigation was news to him.
“What will you do next?” he asked.
“Talk with Christian Saint Nicholas. I want to learn more about his illness. Him being sick, and now Addam missing?”
He peered at me. “You suspect Ella Saint Nicholas.”
“She raised some flags.”
“You’re aware it is very unlikely that she’d be able to dispose of both her older brothers without being discovered.”
“At this point,” I said, “I’m more aware that whoever took Addam is someone who has the resources to send a gargoyle after me. Back when you made me bait. Without telling me.”
“In my defense, I had no prior knowledge of the gargoyle.”
“You said you were trying to flush someone out. And then you said I should focus on family and business associates. Why?”
The Tower stared at a lump of fruit in his drink, then eyed me over the rim. “I suggested your involvement in a social setting. Addam’s partners were present.”
“You mentioned that I was looking for Addam?” I asked.
“Not quite. At one point, I mentioned that you did odd jobs for me. And at another point, I mentioned that it was strange that Addam hadn’t returned my call, and I was concerned. It occurred to me that someone with a guilty conscience might put those pieces together.”
I tried to think if any of the scions had seemed surprised to see me, or had been unsurprised that I was looking for Addam. I blew a raspberry through my lips, unsure. “Is this political, do you think? Some sort of break in the Moral Certainties? Is Addam splash damage?”
“I’ll certainly be paying attention to that possibility,” he said. “I’ll leave it to you to decide if there are more personal reasons at play.”
“Ella Saint Nicholas was in the social setting, wasn’t she?”
“She was,” Lord Tower said. “Be careful, Rune. The Moral Certainty courts are known as devout, which is a short step from fanatical. They dislike scrutiny. Be very careful.”
He opened his mouth to say more, stopped, and frowned. That was as much warning as I had.
A wave crashed over me. Foaming water tunneled up my nose and past my lips. It caught me on an exhale, which is all that kept me conscious. I was too confused to understand anything except the boldest of sensations—salt; the clear, sharp bite of cold water; Brand’s distant, sudden alarm; the painful squeeze of deep-sea pressure.
The pressure got worse and worse, a building cramp that turned my belly concave. Air bubbles seethed out of my mouth in a gasp. I flailed upward for air, but the water followed, an unbreakable, melting curtain between me and sunlight.
Just as quickly as it began, it ended. I collapsed into a choking kneel, surrounded in hissing mist. There were patio flagstones under my hands.
Hindsight came at a limp. I was still on the roof. I’d been attacked by a water elemental.
“The hell?” I coughed, shaking my head and staring up.
The Tower stood with both arms extended. Writhing streams of liquid gloved his hands. He turned to his remaining creations—which were not attacking—and preemptively turned them into explosive clouds of vapor.
I did not like that I hadn’t been able to protect myself. I did not like being saved.
“It was as if it was drawn to you,” Lord Tower said, staring at the rapidly drying puddles.
“Or,” I said, “we were just attacked.”
“Through the Enclave’s defenses? Through my own control? Impossible.”
“I see. So we’re blaming wild magic? Twice? In twenty-four hours?”
It didn’t get a rise out of him, but he did stare back at the destroyed elementals with sharper contemplation.
I crawled to the patio edge, grabbed the railing, and hoisted myself upright. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest to see Brand climbing the terraced walls between the beach and the roof, largely ignoring walkways and stairways while keeping me in his panicked line of sight.
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Behind me, the Tower said, “Rune.”
I looked over my shoulder.
Lord Tower said, “Find Addam.”
NEW SAINTS
That evening, Brand and I left Matthias in Queenie’s care and headed to New Saints Hospital, where Christian Saint Nicholas had been admitted ten days prior.
Brand took us by motorcycle. Early-evening rush hour hadn’t thinned enough to make it a quick commute. I took the time to review what we’d learned about Addam Saint Nicholas’s disappearance—which was a much quicker task than reviewing everything we hadn’t learned.
Addam was removed from his workplace by, or at the command, of Person Unknown. Person Unknown took Addam without any visible signs of a struggle.
Lady Justice said she’d have known if any of her children were hurt or in peril. So either her spell was defunct, or Addam wasn’t hurt or in peril, or Person Unknown was powerful enough to override or mask Lady Justice’s spell. Person Unknown also, presumably, had the magical spit to summon a gargoyle, as well as break through the Enclave’s and the Tower’s defenses to wrest control of the water elemental.
The problem was that our list of suspects didn’t exactly ring with masterminds. Between Ashton, Geoffrey, Michael, and Ella, there were more than enough red flags to warrant a second look—but none of them had what it took to break through Lord Tower’s safeguards. They just didn’t.
So how does someone without the aptitude to best Lord Tower, best Lord Tower?
They contract with someone who is powerful enough.
I couldn’t shake the memory of what I’d sensed in Addam’s office. That tinfoil-aftertaste sense of corruption. A stench like that usually came from a What, not a Who. There are plenty of evil beings in New Atlantis ready to barter away their power in service of others. Our history is full of greedy Atlanteans whose eyes were bigger than their souls.
The bike slowed. Brand parked two city blocks away from New Saints. Since there was a coffee shop on the corner, I made no protest.
As Brand eyed the surroundings in a slow three-sixty, I pulled out my wallet. It was upside down and sent loose change clattering to the pavement. When I straightened from picking it up, I saw that Brand was staring at my ass. I decided to feel flattered.
He said, “I know you’ve been bitching about your weight gain, but, honestly, I wondered where it was all going. Now I see. That is one magnificent ass. But maybe you should start jogging with me.”
I stalked into the coffee shop. Brand caught the swinging door before it hit him in the face. He said, either oblivious to or disinterested in my pique, “I overheard someone the other day say that people didn’t need to do cardio because people three hundred years ago didn’t have treadmills and they got along just fine. Can you believe that shit? People three hundred years ago also didn’t have dishwashers, laundry machines, grocery stores, or running water. Their entire fucking day was a little more complicated than moving their fat fingers toward the remote control. We—”
“Stop talking,” I said.
He caught the look on my face. “I called it magnificent.”
I placed my order and elbowed toward the barista counter. “What I don’t understand is why one of Addam’s business partners would want to harm Addam,” I said. “Geoff was right. Even if Addam is arguing with them about their investments—even if they want to take bigger risks like Michael Saint Talbot does—Addam is still far more valuable to them alive.”
“If he dies, his shares revert to the surviving partners. That’s a lot of money.”
“Sure,” I said, “but the value of those shares isn’t even close to what Addam’s continued contacts and influence are worth. Addam is their link to the Crusader Throne. It doesn’t make sense that any of them would want to remove him.”
“Unless something’s going on we don’t know about. And maybe it’s not them. Maybe Addam’s sister is involved. She’s third in line for the throne, and now Addam is missing and Christian is in the hospital.”
“But how does she think she’d get away with it? Justice may not protect, but it reacts. With a mother like hers, how could Ella get away with killing both older brothers?”
“Because Ella’s confident that no one will be able to prove anything,” Brand guessed.
I thought about that.
If Person Unknown had a way to screw with Lady Justice’s spell or Lord Tower’s control, then it wasn’t a huge leap to say they could cover their tracks—at least enough for plausible deniability.
I said, “Here’s another thing. Say they’ve hired muscle. Say Ella, or whoever, has hired a practitioner very skilled at magic—or contracted with something skilled at magic. If this hired muscle has the power to break through Lord Tower’s controls, why the hell am I still alive?”
“Because they weren’t trying to kill you,” Brand said. “Think about it. Lord Tower didn’t even believe at first that someone seized control of the elemental. He thought it was an accident—that the elemental just went haywire. And the guarda blamed the LeperCon gargoyle on a fluke of wild magic. Maybe someone is just testing boundaries, or checking how well protected you are, or seeing how annoying you’re going to be.”
“Oh, I’m plenty annoying.”
“You are,” Brand said.
“Maybe this isn’t hopeless. We know more than I thought we did.”
“Rune, we just tried to eliminate seventy-five percent of the suspects, leaving behind an anorexic woman whose aunt has to cast a glamor to keep flies from settling on her. We know shit.”
I pulled the wrapper off a straw and said, “This is why most of our assignments don’t involve anything more complicated than you shooting something and me setting fires.”
The barista handed me my iced mocha with raised eyebrows. I took it, and we headed to the hospital.
New Saints had been translocated from North Brother Island, off the coast of New York.
Built in 1885, the former Riverside Hospital spent much of its existence as quarantine for the mentally ill and contagious. Riverside had been the home of Mary Mallon, an immigrant cook and asymptomatic carrier of the typhus virus. Riverside was also the site of the 1904 General Slocum disaster, in which a remarkably stupid sailor snuck a smoke in the ship’s linen closet, starting a fire. The burning steamer foundered on the shore of North Brother. Of the eleven hundred souls lost in the tragedy, many died in the hospital’s wards as doctors and nurses pulled burn victims from the wreckage.
Psychic residue is a potent, tangible source of power. And power isn’t good or bad, just like one body of water can’t be wetter than another. Healers are just as able to plug into the remains of tragedies as death ritualists are.
Atlanteans are, by large, a practical people.
Brand and I headed down a corridor whose diamond-shaped tiles were white and red. Around us, the hospital’s magical imprint flickered in and out of existence. Brand couldn’t see it, but I could. Translucent gray bars appeared on windows; ghostly cages sprang up around hospital beds; shoelaces vanished and reappeared on passing nurses’ shoes.
“Did the Tower say anything about Matthias?” Brand asked.
I blinked. “Do you want the Tower talking about him?”
“He told you he was going to look into Matthias’s family. I know Matthias wasn’t close with his parents, but he talked about that uncle. The uncle might want to know he’s okay.”
I thought about the look on Matthias’s face when I’d mentioned his uncle.
“What?” Brand asked, almost a growl.
“I’m not sure Matthias’s uncle was . . .”
“Was what?”
“A good part of his life.”
Brand stopped. I passed him. A ghostly mental patient in a straight-jacket flickered into existence between us.
“What does that mean?” Brand asked.
“Just that . . . I want to know more before we contact Matthias’s family. Okay?”
“Sure,” he said.
“
We’ll talk about it later.”
“Sure,” he repeated, but slower.
We stared around us, realizing that we weren’t quite sure where to go next. Brand said, “Wait here. I’ll get the room number.”
He strode away. Annoyance simmered through our Companion bond. He’d guessed that I’d guessed that Matthias was hiding something pretty damn bleak from us. And since there weren’t many taboo subjects between Brand and I, he’d soon realize I suspected that Matthias had been abused.
Someone pssssted me from a nearby hallway.
A young man curled his fingers around the corner and leaned into view. The teen had cowlicked blond hair and wore a music festival t-shirt that was two or three sizes too big for him.
“Can you come with me?” he asked.
I said, “Probably not. Do I know you?”
“Maybe? I can’t remember. I’m Quinn. I think people are going to die if you don’t come with me. It’s not far. I don’t know why we can’t talk here, but we can’t. The floor’s not right.”
He smiled at me as if what he said made perfect sense.
I said, “Quinn? Quinn Saint Nicholas? Are you Addam’s brother?”
“Come on!”
He took off at a trot, without even looking over his shoulder to make sure I followed. He hit a fork, frowned at his feet, and darted left.
Brand was still out of sight. He had his cell phone with him, though, and he’d know through the Companion bond that I wasn’t in trouble. “Shit,” I decided, and ran after Quinn.
I transmuted my sabre as I jogged. The metal wrist-guard stretched taffy thin and scraped over my knuckles, then hardened into hilt form as I flipped it over my palm. On top of that, my sigils were freshly loaded. If the boy was leading me into a trap, I’d roll into it like a tank.
The corridor opened into an acre of white marble ringed by Corinthian pillars. Overhead, a domed crystal roof was flushed with sun, producing an overall effect more like snow-blindness than illumination.
Quinn stood in the middle of the rotunda, looking around with a baffled expression.
“Why did we have to come here?” I asked. “Who is going to die?”
The Last Sun Page 9