by Traci Chee
She began to steal again, taking to pickpocketing like she’d never stopped. Thievery was easier with Illumination. With a flick of her fingers, she could topple a stack of tin plates or send a scarf flying in a nonexistent breeze, using the distraction to unpin jeweled brooches or snap strings of pearls.
She bought a horse a few days after leaving the coast and traded it for another a day later. Every town she passed, every merchant she crossed, she gave something up, until her belongings were scattered across southern Deliene like dandelion seeds in the wind.
On the last night, she rented a private room at an inn in Jahara and sat down before the little woodstove with her last four possessions lined up on the floor like letters.
The Book.
Nin’s lock picks.
Her green feather.
Archer’s worry stone.
Sefia opened the stove’s iron door, and a puff of heat kissed her cheeks. With a sigh, she lifted the packet of Nin’s old tools to her nose, inhaling the smell of the leather. It smelled like nights spent stargazing at the rail of a ship, like hours running traplines in the Oxscinian jungle, like sweat and dirt and the pickling solution Nin used to treat hides.
Unrolling the case, she plucked out the tools, which she’d drop into the Callidian Strait on the ferry to Corabel. Then she fed the case into the stove.
Dark stains like bruises appeared on the oiled surfaces, and there was the smell of charred leather. She watched the case shrivel until it was as hard and black as charcoal.
Dashing tears from her eyes, she plucked up the feather next, smoothing it with her fingers until it almost looked as it had the night Archer had presented it to her.
The fire ate it quickly, in a gasp of smoke.
Then Sefia picked up the worry stone on its leather cord. It flashed in the light of the stove, its black and gold rutilations sparking like fireworks inside the crystal.
Wiping her cheeks, she took a deep breath.
But she couldn’t give it up. Not this.
Placing the piece of quartz around her neck again, she closed the stove and pulled the Book into her lap. With her back against the side of the bed, she unfolded the waterproof wrapping and ran her fingers along the edges of the cover.
It might be years before she saw it again. If she saw it again.
The only thing she had left of her parents.
She traced the with one damp fingertip. The circle for what she had to do. Give it up. The straight line. For Archer. A curve for Nin. Two curves for her parents.
Lon and Mareah, whom she’d never see again after this.
Closing her eyes, Sefia found the clasps and flicked them open. The gilt-edged pages were smooth as satin under her fingers.
“Show me my parents,” she whispered. “One last time.”
Theft
Lon & Mareah
—SUMMER?
—Main Branch
—21 years ago
In the bedchamber, Lon was just pulling on his shirt when there was a knock at the door. Gulping down half a cup of cold coffee from the night before, he stepped around the books that littered his floor. He must have accumulated half the Library by now, studying Fragments late into the night, jotting notes on scraps of parchment while the electric lamps buzzed at his bedside. All in preparation for his and Mareah’s departure, as he concocted a plan to steal the Book and disappear from the Guard without a trace.
The knocking sounded again.
He managed to tuck in half his shirt before he opened the door.
Mareah stood there in full Assassin’s garb—all black, with her bloodsword at her side. Tanin hovered behind her, looking from Lon to Mareah with wide gray eyes.
The smile faded from Lon’s lips. Have we been found out?
“Good morning, Mar—” he began.
“Don’t use that name,” she snapped.
He closed his mouth with an audible click. He may have been discovered, but if Mareah was distancing herself from him, she hadn’t been implicated yet. She must have been summoned to escort him. Despite the circumstances, he felt flattered that the Guard thought him so dangerous.
“Director Edmon has requested your presence in the Administrator’s Office,” Tanin said, almost apologetically.
Goose bumps rose on Lon’s arms. The Administrator’s Office was buried deep in the mountain, below the primary levels of the Main Branch, so embedded in the rock that prisoners held there couldn’t be heard screaming.
The Administrator’s Office meant that whatever Edmon suspected of him, it was serious. Something worthy of the dungeons.
“What for?” he asked.
Mareah’s gaze met his for a fleeting second before she fixed her stare on the wall above his bed, where they’d hidden the key Nin had made them—a copy of the one Erastis wore around his neck.
We have been found out. Nervously, he ran his hands through his hair. They weren’t ready. They hadn’t made a cast of Director Edmon’s key yet. They didn’t even know where he kept it.
Whatever happened next, he had to trust Mareah.
Tanin led the way down the corridors, deeper into the mountain, down spiraling staircases and slanted corridors. The carved columns, statuary, and fine silk carpets of the upper levels disappeared, replaced by faceless walls and stone floors. The passages narrowed. The air grew cold and moist.
Every so often Tanin glanced over her shoulder, a wrinkle between her brows.
Lon wished he didn’t have to worry her. Tanin had been like a younger sister to him and Mareah ever since her induction. He’d tutored her. He’d snuck out at night with her, exploring the mountainsides by starlight. But when he and Mareah left the Guard, they’d have to leave her behind too.
At last they reached the Administrator’s Office, a cylindrical stone room with electric bulbs flickering along the windowless walls. To their left, a metal door led to the laboratories, where the Administrators conducted experiments and took down notes over cauldrons and glass beakers. To their right lay the entrance to the detention center.
Administrators made sure all the Guard’s plans ran smoothly. Among other things, they were tasked with crafting poisons for political assassinations and interrogating prisoners.
And sometimes those interrogations involved torture.
Letting out a slow breath, Lon approached the wooden chair in the center of the room. Opposite him, Dotan, the Master Administrator, sat behind a table. He was as dark as molasses and as thin as a rail, his clothing neatly pressed, a tiepin piercing his silk cravat.
Tanin’s Master had always unnerved Lon. His tranquillity, maybe, how unmoved he was by others, even as he was skewering them with spikes.
In contrast, Director Edmon, pudgy and jittery as a pudding, paced back and forth along the left wall, his shoes tapping on the rough floor. He was an effective if not visionary leader. For a long time, Lon’s greatest wish had been to succeed him.
But that had changed as soon as he’d been left alone with the Book.
“I don’t know how to say this, Lon . . .” With a sigh, Edmon halted. “Erastis found something while studying the Book last night.”
Lon’s gaze flashed over Edmon’s embroidered coat, wondering where he kept his vault key. “Oh?” he said, trying to sound nonchalant.
Giving his lower lip a pull, the Director scowled. “We know what you’re planning to do.”
Briefly, Lon met Mareah’s gaze, as impenetrable as a black sea.
“Come now. You have plans to steal the Book, don’t you?” Edmon pressed. He glanced at Dotan, who blinked once, the whites of his eyes seeming to glow. “It’ll be better for you if you talk.”
“Try to make me,” Lon said. “We’ll see how you do.”
“How could you do this, Lon? We had such high hopes for you.” Edmon stuffed his hands in his po
ckets and resumed pacing. “I’m afraid I—”
Mareah moved so quickly Lon barely saw her strike. With a wave of her hand, she whipped the Director against the wall, knocking his words back into his mouth.
The Master Administrator stood, raising his arms.
But Mareah was faster. For decades, they’d been training her to be faster.
She grabbed at the air. Dotan’s face hit the tabletop. He slid to the floor unconscious.
“Go,” Mareah ordered through gritted teeth. “Stop Erastis from telling anyone else. I’ll meet you in the Library once I have the second key.”
Lon glanced at Tanin, standing there like a lost little girl, and nodded.
As he raced from the room, the Apprentice Administrator finally found her voice. “Mareah, what are you doing?”
• • •
With a twist of her fingers, Mareah slammed Edmon’s head against the wall and let him drop, stunned, to the ground.
“Are you mad?” Tanin grabbed the collar of Mareah’s shirt. “Stop this!”
Reaching across her chest, Mareah twisted Tanin’s hand away from her. The girl cried out in pain.
Inwardly, Mareah cringed. But Tanin had to be driven off. She couldn’t think they were still family, or she’d be branded a traitor as well and executed. With a wave of her hand, Mareah opened the door to the laboratories and palmed the air, sending Tanin staggering out of the room.
“No, Mareah, wait! Don’t!”
Flicking her wrist, Mareah slammed the door, leaving herself alone with the unconscious Master Administrator and the Director to whom she’d answered for so many years.
But this was what she had to do. For Lon. For her.
“Where’s the key to the vault?” she asked. Her voice was a wire. A garrote.
On his knees, Edmon shook his head.
“It’ll be better for you if you talk.”
He waved at the air. She dodged easily as bits of rock exploded behind her.
Tanin began pounding on the door to the laboratories, but Mareah held it firmly shut with the power in her right hand. With the other, she flung Edmon against the wall again. He struck it like a rag doll and collapsed. While he lay groaning on the floor, she turned out his pockets—empty.
Next she stripped him, ripping away his robes, his trousers, his underclothes, until he lay cowering and naked on the ground, his ample flesh quivering.
“Where is it?” Mareah asked.
The Director glared up at her with as much pride as he could muster.
So she tortured him. She didn’t have much time, so she did it quickly, in the most painful way she knew how.
She was no Administrator, but she knew a lot about pain. Her time as an Assassin had taught her that.
The room filled with Edmon’s screams. His shrieks and gibbering wet sentences. But no one heard.
No one except Tanin. The pounding and rattling on the door grew more and more frantic as Edmon continued to squeal. But Mareah was the finest Manipulator in generations. There was little Tanin could do against her.
Mareah jabbed and twisted, pulled and wrenched, until pieces of him separated and went splattering across the walls, the floor. Then she’d pause just long enough for him to shake his head.
No. He would not give in.
Then she’d go at it again, until parts of him were so mangled they were unrecognizable.
Finally, he yielded, pointing a broken finger at his discarded pile of clothing. “The waistband of my trousers. The key. Sewn in.”
While he lay on the floor, hands shaking over parts of him that were too raw to touch, Mareah found his trousers and flicked her fingers. The threads sprang apart, flinging buttons through the air.
There, exactly where he’d said, was the little skeleton key. She snapped it up in her palm. “I’m sorry it had to come to this.”
She drew her sword and stepped over the slabs of flesh and bone. The air hummed with the scent of metal, and she struck Edmon’s head from his body in one clean stroke.
Sheathing her blade, Mareah waved her hand at the Master Administrator’s table. It flew across the room, barring the door to the laboratory where Tanin was still crying out for her to stop.
“Good-bye, little sister,” she whispered. Without a backward glance at Edmon’s corpse or Dotan, groaning on the floor, Mareah raced up the corridors toward the Library, where Lon was waiting.
• • •
When Mareah burst through the Library doors, Lon had pinned Erastis to one of the chairs and was kneeling in front of his Master, head bowed. Flicking the dead bolt, Mareah summoned a bound manuscript from the shelves and wedged it between the door handles. The covers bent. The pages creased.
Lon winced at the damage, but he didn’t stop her. “Did you get it?” he asked.
Mareah held up the key she’d taken from Edmon, which winked in the light, and strode to the vault.
“What have you done to the Director?” Erastis asked. “To the Master Administrator? To Tanin?”
Neither of them answered. Signaling to Mareah, Lon lifted the copy of Erastis’s key, which he’d retrieved from its secret compartment in his bedchamber.
As one, they inserted their keys and began the complicated dance of twists and turns needed to open the vault.
To the left. To the right. A pause. All the way around again.
Behind them, Erastis struggled against his invisible restraints. Mareah flung out her free hand, throwing him back in the chair. Lon let his hold on the Librarian dissolve.
The heavy steel door swung open.
From deep in the vault, a gust of cool air reached him, like an exhalation. He breathed in the faint odor of leather, paper, and stone.
There was a shout from the corridor. The Library doors buckled inward. Narrowing her eyes, Mareah thrust out her hand, stilling the movement.
But she couldn’t hold the doors for long.
“Go on,” she said.
Lifting his chin, Lon entered the vault. It was seamless, hewn perfectly out of stone, but all along the walls were glass cases with carefully preserved texts inside. Pages. Folios. Other talismans and sacred objects passed down from previous Guardians.
And in the center, inside a crystal case, was the Book.
He almost wanted to leave it. It was how the Guard kept tabs on the world, how they maneuvered people into place like pieces on a game board. It was how they were going to incite the Red War, which would unite the kingdoms and create an empire so stable it would last for centuries.
But with it, the Guard would be able to find them.
Stuffing the Book into a waterproof wrapping, he returned to the Library, closing the vault behind him.
Erastis tried to lean forward. He was begging now, twisting at his invisible bonds as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. “Please, my Apprentice, don’t.”
He was Lon’s teacher. His confidant. His friend. Lon hated to imagine what the Master Librarian would think of him after this.
“I’m sorry, Master.”
Lon raised his arm. With a twitch of his fingers, he sent the doors of the Library exploding outward in a cloud of rubble, splinters, and dust. The walls shook. Cracks appeared in the marble.
Waving her hand, Mareah picked up a sheaf of papers from the table and flung them into one of the electric lamps. The glass burst, and the papers caught fire.
“No!” Erastis cried.
She threw the burning pages into the bookshelves, where they flared, catching Fragments and Commentaries, eating decades of work in the space of a few seconds.
Erastis was free. He stumbled over his chair, his arms outstretched to quench the flames.
Lon almost wanted to go to him.
Then Mareah touched his elbow, and his grip tightened on the Book. In the hallway, Tanin and the s
ervants she must have summoned were struggling to stand, their bodies bruised, their faces covered with blood and dust.
“Ready?” Mareah asked.
Lon nodded.
They ran. Leaping over rubble and into the corridor, ignoring Tanin’s frantic cries. From the doors of the Library, smoke flooded the hall.
The chase was on.
CHAPTER 34
Full Circle
Ever since Lon and Mareah betrayed them twenty-one years ago, Tanin had tried to avoid the Administrator’s Office. The very smell of it—chemicals and decay—dredged up memories she would have preferred remain buried.
Edmon’s raw screaming and the tackiness of the varnished door under her cheek.
The flayed hunks of flesh and the shape of a broken tooth against the sole of her shoe.
The blood pooling inside the iris of Dotan’s right eye like wine filling a glass.
Mareah had been right. Tanin hadn’t wanted to see it. And now she couldn’t forget.
Plucking at the scarf that covered her scar, she crossed the Administrator’s Office, tiptoeing over the stone floor as if she could still feel Edmon’s viscera slick under her boots.
She stepped into the laboratory corridors, searching for Administrator Dotan.
Now that she had taken the measure of her allies and enemies, it was time to retake control of the Guard.
The Master Assassin, known simply as the First, was essential to her plan. She’d give him the opportunity to kill Sefia and the boy, who had murdered his Apprentice on the Current of Faith. He’d retrieve the Book for her. After that, she could turn him on Stonegold.
No one would know. Covering their tracks was what Assassins did best. And Tanin would be Director again.
Control of Everica would fall to Braca, the Master Soldier, who would remain loyal as long as she didn’t suspect Tanin of treachery.
But the First was out of reach for the time being. The only person who knew how to reach him was Dotan, her old Master, the Administrator with his poisons and contraptions and dungeons and spies.