What I lacked in skill I made up for in determination. I kept the hackbut steady and my glare as ferocious as any I’d seen on a ganglord’s deathdealer.
“Icelight. Now.”
The scholar scurried deeper into the storeroom. When he held out another jar, the label matched the script Teo had shown me.
I didn’t take the jar. “Find the oil of soleius.” With my right hand still a fat, throbbing lump, I wasn’t going to risk holding anything but the hackbut before I was ready to run. I was tempted to ask for arrowleaf for my hand as Zadikah had suggested, but I didn’t know the Varkevian script for it, and I was horribly conscious of time slipping past. I kept imagining Gavila and her kin charging straight through the collegium like an avalanche speeding down a mountainside to crush me.
The scholar pulled a fat flask off another shelf. When I checked the label, it looked right. I wished I could check the contents—Teo had described the smell and look of what I sought—but all the containers here were ward-sealed. Great for protection against leaking and breakage, not so great for a quick sniff of their contents.
“Put flask and jar into one of those satchels by the door.” There’d been a whole stack of battered but serviceable pouches on a table cluttered with empty jars and vials.
Moving along the shelves, the scholar peeked over his shoulder and quavered out, “I—I don’t understand. That charm you used to break the door wards is worth a fortune. You could have sold it and bought ten times the amount of icelight and soleius you’re stealing.”
This time, I wasn’t fooled by his timid act. Trying to suss out if I was a total moron, was he?
“Maybe this escaped your scholarly notice, but I don’t have time to fuck around selling charms.” Though I’d certainly considered it. Racing to reach the collegium, dodging phalanxes of armed guards and shouting, frightened residents, I’d been more than a little tempted to abandon my original plan. But I didn’t know Prosul Akheba like I did Ninavel. Finding a buyer for the wardbreaker and a merchant who sold rare herbs in decent quantities would take time that my gut insisted Kiran and I couldn’t afford.
We reached the storeroom doors, which I’d left closed. I didn’t hear any muffled yells or thumping of feet from the hall beyond.
The scholar stuffed flask and jar into a satchel and buckled the straps. His hands were shaking again; he almost knocked over a rack of empty vials with his elbow. “Will you at least tell me what’s happening outside? I know someone’s attacking, but who, and why?”
If I were in his place, I’d be a mess of nerves too. “The Khalat’s about to have a change of leadership, is all. It’s the Zhan-davi who’ve got to worry for their lives, not you Seranthines. The new ruling house will want to keep the profit the collegium brings.”
He jerked like I’d shoved a piton up his ass, and I realized my mistake. Either he was Zhan-davi himself—though his scruffy robe and his lack of charms didn’t exactly speak of a ruling house’s wealth—or he cared about somebody else who was. I should’ve known better than to say anything. I was tired and getting sloppy because of it.
“Put the satchel down and kick it over to me.” The ward-sealed jar and flask inside wouldn’t break unless a mountain fell on them.
He turned, satchel in his hands—and threw it straight at me. I dodged and squeezed the hackbut’s lever. It went off, all right; the blast about burst my eardrums. The shot didn’t hit the scholar but the rack of unsealed, empty vials beside him. They shattered, glass shards flying everywhere. He yelled and ducked. I threw the hackbut aside and snatched up the satchel.
Before I could get to the door, the idiot jumped me. We hit the ground with him clawing at my torso, trying to get at my belt knife. But while I might be no match for a desert-tough clan warrior, I was more than strong enough to beat the snot out of a city-soft scholar. I bashed my head into his nose, kneed him in the groin, and threw him off.
He scrabbled away in a frantic, crabbed crawl, blood pouring down his face. I didn’t follow. Tempting as it was to stomp him flat, that’d only waste more precious time. A hasty check of the satchel’s contents showed me jar and flask still safely inside. I slung on the satchel and dashed out the door.
The corridor beyond was empty. Moonlight flooded the hall from unshuttered windows high in the marble walls. I raced past inset carvings of thick-leafed trees and flowering herbs, heading for the staircase that led to the tower’s outer doors. My mind was already jumping ahead to the problem of how to downclimb off the Khalat with only one working hand. Getting over that first blank section of cliff would require a rappel and a swinging traverse…
I reached the tower stair and skidded to a halt. Pounding up the steps were five clanfolk, their wrists and palms glittering with charms. Among them were the wizened oldster who’d traded me and Kiran the poisoned water, and that fox-faced bitch Gavila.
I reversed course so fast I nearly lost my footing, but they saw me. Eager howls echoed off the marble. I sprinted back down the hallway, summoning my memory of Yashad’s maps. I had to lose the black-daggers before I tried to get back down the cliffs; that first rappel wasn’t going to be a speedy endeavor.
I dodged left down a side corridor, right down another, and pounded down a set of stairs that ended in an open arch. The high-walled courtyard beyond held a giant alabaster sculpture of a woman standing on an open book with her cupped hands raised high. I raced around the sculpture, praying the damn courtyard had an exit and not just a statue.
There—a warded gate! I snatched for the wardbreaker in my robe. The charm couldn’t have much magic left, but I didn’t need much. The gate wards were only a thin scrawl of lines barely visible in the moonlight. I could’ve shattered them in a heartbeat in my Tainted days.
My questing fingers found nothing in the robe’s inner pocket. Fuck, where was the charm? I pawed at myself, frantic, feeling for metal—and remembered the scholar clawing at me as we’d rolled on the storeroom floor.
He hadn’t been going for my knife, but my wardbreaker. Probably hoping he could use it to sneak out of the Khalat and save his own skin. That goat-fucking little weasel!
Like a plunge into icy lakewater, I saw with sudden clarity just how strung out I really was. I’d heard of this happening to outriders caught in storms high on the Whitefires’ peaks. Tired, injured, they started making mistakes. Sneaky ones, so small each error seemed trivial, but one after another, those mistakes nudged them on a path leading straight into Shaikar’s hells.
No matter how inevitable that fate, every outrider I knew would fight to change it until their last breath, and I was no different. I leaped at the wall beside the gate. Plenty of cracks between the stone blocks, but the fingers of my right hand wouldn’t close. I grabbed hold with my good hand and pulled up, but the moment I tried to reach for a higher hold, I fell off.
No other way out of the courtyard, and the black-daggers had already reached the stairs. Their yells were echoing out the arch. I had mere instants before they found me.
I ripped open the satchel, grabbed the jar of icelight powder, and tossed it high. I might not be able to climb, but there was nothing wrong with my aim. The jar clinked safely into the statue-woman’s cupped hands some twenty feet overhead. I did the same with the flask of soleius oil. If I made it past the black-daggers, I could circle back for the herbs, but fuck if I was going to let Gavila take both them and me.
I barely got the satchel back on before the black-daggers poured out of the arch. Their cries spiraled higher as they spotted me. I twisted and jinked and weaved with all the speed I possessed, trying to dodge through them and reach the arch, but it was no good. The five of them cornered me with the coordinated, deadly efficiency of a direwolf pack, and then Gavila and the oldster hung back while the other three jumped me. They were no scrawny scholars. Mere heartbeats later I was face-down on the stone with my arms pushed up my back right to the breaking point.
The oldster ripped the satchel off me and pawed through it. He said so
mething sharply guttural to Gavila.
She gripped my hair and yanked my head up. “Where are the herbs you came to steal?”
I spat out, “This is the biggest mistake you’ll ever make. Remember how my friend killed your kin just by touching them? He’s a blood mage, Gavila. You fuck with me, and he’ll make sure you and your entire clan die in agony.”
She grinned at me like a sandcat ready to play with its catch. “Your friend is clever, I’ll give you that. The red-horned hunters sought him tonight, did you know? Yet Shaikar sent me a vision not an hour since…” She caressed the bronze loops of the devil-ward charm at her throat. “It seems he escaped onto unhallowed ground.”
I felt like she’d dropped a boulder on me. The red-horned hunters after Kiran? Mother of maidens—but she’d said he escaped. I had to cling to that. What of the others? I cringed to think of Raishal, Veddis, and Teo dead, but it was worse yet to picture Kiran stuck alone in the desert, no healer to help him, getting sicker by the moment, maybe deciding he had no option but to contact Ruslan. My body quivered with the urge to fight the bastards sitting on me, futile though I knew it to be. I’d only end up with my arms broken.
Gavila said, “But Shaikar and his children are cleverer by far than any mortal mage. Days before the hunters were loosed, my dreams sent me here. Right where I could gain the perfect lure to draw your friend back into their reach.”
“You think a blood mage like him gives a damn for the life of a man like me?”
Gavila’s head tilted. “It wasn’t you I meant. He needs the herbs you came for, and badly, or you would never have taken such risks to steal them.”
I could’ve ripped out my own tongue. Another mistake, just when I couldn’t afford any more. “Good luck finding them. You think I was dumb enough to work alone in this? Those herbs are already on their way to the desert.”
The oldster said to Gavila, “He was seen heading for the storeroom with a scholar. An initiate healer.”
“Find that healer,” Gavila ordered the oldster. He hurried off.
I thought at the scholar, Take that, you thieving weasel, but part of me felt a little sorry for him. I’d probably have tried the same trick in his place. Hopefully he had the sense to get out of the Khalat fast enough the black-daggers wouldn’t find him.
Gavila let go of my hair. “We’ll find the herbs. You, I have another use for. I hear you come from Ninavel. Perhaps you were born there, yes?” She lifted the devil-ward charm off her neck and leaned toward me. I wrenched against the hands holding me and nearly blacked out from pain. The clansmen sitting on me weren’t giving an inch.
Gavila yanked my head up again and set the charm to my forehead.
Deep in my mind, something twitched in the dead void where the Taint had once lived. New shock flooded me. I strained for that phantom ember, my heart pounding. With the Taint, I could rip these warriors right off of me, I could—
Gavila pulled back the charm. The bronze loops were glowing faintly as if heated from within, though the metal had felt cool against my skin.
“I thought as much,” she said. “Tonight has been a good hunt indeed.”
The void in my head was perfectly, devastatingly dead again. “What do you want with me?” But I was afraid I knew. I remembered the Tainted children Vidai had killed to fuel his power. The demon in the cirque had said, Some of you rats born on our threshold have souls scarred by our fire, enough that I can touch you, use your lives as timbers.
Gavila only grinned, exultant and mocking, and barked out a command to the men holding me. They bound my arms with wire that itched and tingled as it dug into my skin, warning of a warding charm.
They dragged me to my feet and marched me back through the healers’ tower and out into the collegium’s main courtyard, which was still crowded with scholars. The Seranthines all melted back from us with frightened little cries, as if the black-daggers were a gang of fucking blood mages.
I was still wearing my scholar’s robe. If the Seranthines thought I was one of them, and I could shame them into action…
“Cowards!” I yelled. “Only five of them and a hundred of you—”
That earned me a blow hard enough to make everything go red and hazy for a while. When my head cleared, I found myself being dragged through the elaborately carved arch that marked the edge of the collegium’s grounds. No scholars around now. No more chance to yell, either. The black-daggers had cut off my scholar’s robe and bound a gag in my mouth.
The wardglow on the outer walls had died, but the leaping red glare of ordinary fire surrounded the Zhan-davi’s towers, accompanied by a clamor of celebratory yells. If the Khalat wasn’t Yashad’s already, it soon would be.
“Gavila!” Zadikah strode out from between two squat, darkened towers. Gavila stepped forward to meet her, knife drawn, a charm glittering in her other palm.
“Zadikah. Should you not be celebrating your victory?”
Had she come for my sake? Stupid of me to hope, but I couldn’t help it.
Zadikah halted just out of Gavila’s reach. “I want to know why you helped provide our victory. What did this man’s enemy offer you to make you lick his boots so eagerly?”
Gavila frowned at Zadikah like she was an errant toddler. “We serve only Shaikar. Had you bothered to listen to Nasham, she told you what reward he will grant us. But you were ever a stubborn fool.”
Zadikah’s teeth showed. “I never thought you were a fool, yet here you are. You’re being used, Gavila. Not by gods but by some rich Ninavel sivayyah seeking advantage. What honor lies in that?”
Gavila was way too much the fanatic for this to work. But if Zadikah could just give me an opening to run, then even bound and gagged, I’d make the most of it.
“What of your honor?” Gavila demanded. “This man and his friend murdered your kin. Anki, Sovvaj, Hadak, Varan, Jaidash—their bones lie bleaching in the sun, their lovers and children wailing for vengeance, yet you merrily help their killers as if your clan-brothers’ lives meant nothing.”
“Anki dead?” Zadikah blurted in pure, unguarded surprise. “How?”
I shut my eyes, cursing Gavila, cursing myself for not telling Zadikah more about the black-daggers’ attack when I could’ve had a chance to explain properly.
“You didn’t know?” Gavila was all shocked sympathy. “Ah, Zadikah. I think you were the one being cruelly used.”
“How did they die?” Zadikah’s knife hand trembled with tension. “These two sivayyah are no fighters. You can’t expect me to believe they could kill five strong warriors. Unless—” She checked, a quick breath. “Kiran warned me his amulet bears a kill-strength warding. Oh, I see it now. You ordered them to take the amulet from him, didn’t you? You greedy little nybadduk—”
“No,” Gavila said, hard and flat. “We took nothing. We were careful not to maim them, touched none of their possessions—and this Kiran you speak of, he ripped away five men’s lives in a heartbeat. He is a mage, Zadikah. A murderer and a liar, and you have left him with your precious Teo.”
The clansmen holding me muttered darkly in agreement. I worked frantically at the gag with my tongue, trying to dislodge it enough I could speak.
Zadikah took a lurching step back. “Kiran can’t be a mage. I attacked him myself, held a knife to his throat, and I yet live.”
“Because he needed you,” Gavila said, all sweetness again. “His friend was ill, in desperate need of a healer, and he dared not cast lest he bring the children of Shaikar to his scent.”
“Kiran is sick,” Zadikah said. “Without the herbs Dev came to seek, he’ll die. What mage would let himself die without casting?” But her voice was strained, her shoulders stiff. She was starting to believe.
If I could just get this fucking gag off, I could tell her that Teo was in danger all right, but not from Kiran. Gavila had set the demons on his trail, knowing that everyone Zadikah loved was right there with him, without a care for who might die. I tried to yell as much, but coul
d only manage a string of gargled noises.
Zadikah’s burning gaze settled on me. But when she spoke, it was to Gavila. “If Kiran is a mage, then you’re ten times the fool I thought you. You invite ruin. Not just for yourself, but all the clan.”
Gavila said, serious again, “I know it. But great rewards do not come without great risk. I know you don’t believe I’m god-spoken. But you wish to keep Teo and your other friends safe, yes? I can ensure this, if you will only listen to me.”
Zadikah crossed her arms. “Go on.”
Oh, gods. Gavila would turn Zadikah against Kiran, and he wouldn’t know to be wary. I shook my head wildly, heaving against the clansmen’s grip, uncaring of pain.
Gavila snapped an order at my captors. They dragged me away across the darkened square, for all I tried to fight them and yell through the gag. Zadikah didn’t look once at me. Her head was bent to Gavila’s. All I could do was pray that Khalmet would favor Kiran, if he wouldn’t favor me. Yet all I could see was the image of outriders lost in a storm, mistakes building up like soft, deadly snowflakes to bury them.
Chapter Eleven
(Kiran)
Kiran woke, cold, his muscles cramped. The sun was rising, the sky a blazing tapestry of crimson and gold. For a bleary moment he couldn’t think why he was lying on a broad, barren summit of stone without even a blanket.
Memories surfaced, vivid and terrible. His head rang with Veddis’s final scream. Kiran shot upright, his ikilhia flaring wild in reaction.
But no summons pulled at his body, no magic swirled in the aether. The world beyond his barriers felt as calm and silent as the cool morning air. Looking out over spires and mushrooms of rock tipped with the sun’s first fire, he saw no hint of demonic hunters, not even a wisp of fog. He sensed two sparks of nathahlen ikilhia, quite close: Raishal and Sivyan were curled back to back under a single blanket beside Teo’s pack.
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