by Kyra Halland
She shrugged off her duster onto the floor and dropped her own hat alongside it, took off her gunbelt and set it on the bedside table, and wrestled off her boots. Then she flopped back onto the bed. She didn’t even know where to begin looking for Silas. There were more than seven hundred thousand people in Sandostra, and the city sprawled for leagues and leagues over the hills. And he might not even be in Sandostra; he could be anywhere in Granadaia. Or, even worse, they could have taken him on a ship and were now sailing across the ocean to anywhere in the world. She could ask after him at the place where people got on the ships, and backtrack along the road and question more people about if Silas and the hunters had passed by. But it would take ninedays, or even months, for her to search by herself, and in the meantime he could disappear to who knew where forever.
“Where are you?” she whispered to Silas’s hat, wishing he could hear her through it and answer her.
All she had to go on was Lord Yeredon’s suggestion that the people behind the breeding project and the ones who had hired Orl Fazar were responsible for taking Silas. To get him out of the way since the assassination attempt had failed, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure why they would have taken him alive. If it was true, it meant she was up against some very powerful and dangerous people. And in this strange land, she didn’t know anyone she could ask for help; she had no friends or connections and no one she could trust.
No one she could trust…
Don’t trust anyone. The messages Silas had told her about drifted into her mind. Take the girl…
Of course. The Hidden Council was on Silas’s side, and they knew about her. If she could use Silas’s Hidden Council message box to contact them, maybe they could help her. Assuming the Hidden Council still existed; those messages were proof enough that something had gone wrong there.
It was risky and might not work. But it was all she had right now.
She rolled off the bed and grabbed Silas’s knapsack from where she had stashed it in the wardrobe. She opened it and dug through his clothes, setting them aside to wash later, then came across an old pamphlet, creased and yellowed; On the Natural Equality of Man, by the foreign philosopher Pirs Abenar. This copy had been smuggled into Silas’s school when he was fifteen – the boy who had brought the pamphlets in had been Stripped in punishment – and Silas had read it many times over the years since then. It had partly inspired his decision to become a mage hunter in the Wildings, and he had even named his horse after the author. Lainie had to believe that Silas still held to the principles it set forth. No matter his fears for her, she couldn’t believe he really would have turned away from the ideals that meant so much to him and that had shaped his life. Careful of the pamphlet’s fragile condition, she gently laid it aside.
Way down in the bottom of the knapsack, she felt the magical pocket Silas had built into the pack. The pocket wasn’t hard to get into; it was mainly intended to keep Plains from discovering certain magical items he carried. A slight twist of Lainie’s power opened it, and she removed the square silver message box, a little smaller than her fist.
With the box was a leather wallet tooled with magical markings similar to those on the message box. It contained several pieces of paper about the size of her hand and a worn-down pencil. Lainie touched the pencil and paper with her mage senses and felt the spells placed on them; the magic was still active. She had watched Silas use his message boxes a few times, and it hadn’t looked that hard. She took one of the pieces of paper and the pencil and wrote, Respectful greetings, My name is Lainie Vendine. My husband Silas was shot and captured by mage hunters, but no one has claimed the bounty on him and the Mage Council doesn’t know where he is. Can you please help me find him? Thank you. Yrs Respectfully, Mrs. Lainie Vendine.
She folded the note the way she had seen Silas fold other messages, first one way then the other then into a triangle, then in half again. Had he spoken words while he did it? She thought he might have, but she couldn’t remember what they were. It probably didn’t matter; words were helpful in binding, shaping, and boosting spells, but they usually weren’t essential to making the spell work. She put the folded note into the silver box, touched it with the forefinger of her right hand to set it on fire as she had seen Silas do, and closed the lid of the box.
Now there was nothing to do but wait. Silas had always felt a tug on his power when a message arrived in one of the boxes, but she didn’t know if she would be able to feel anything. Maybe the box was bound to his power, like his mage ring. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all for her. She opened the box and looked in it; it was empty except for the ashy remains of her note.
Lainie’s stomach growled; she hadn’t even thought about eating since that early breakfast this morning. She went down to the restaurant for dinner, but found she couldn’t eat much, so she took some bread rolls, meat, and cheese back up to her room to make a sandwich later. When she got back to her room, the message box was still empty.
In the wardrobe, she had found a bag with a label on it saying Leave laundry outside door by the end of the fourth quarter of the day. It will be returned by the beginning of the first quarter of the next day. She looked at the clock in the room. It didn’t have numbers like the clocks in the Wildings that were imported from the foreign countries across the sea. Instead, it was marked into eight equal sections, the four on the top half painted with the movement of the sun across the sky, the four on the bottom picturing the moon and stars. She wondered if the clock’s movement adjusted itself to the changing lengths of the days and nights as the seasons changed.
The clock’s single hand was halfway through the day’s fourth quarter; there was plenty of time to get her and Silas’s laundry out for a proper cleaning. She stripped to the skin, put all of her and Silas’s clothes, including her dress from the dance and her duster coat, into the laundry bag, and wrapped the coverlet from the bed around herself. Staying well-hidden behind the door, she dropped the laundry bag into the hallway. Then she checked the message box again for a reply to her note. Still nothing.
She took another long bath, and tried to re-read one of the penny-thriller novels Silas had bought her in Windy Valley before the drive, and ate her sandwich, and checked the message box another half-dozen times, her stomach twisting into ever-tighter knots each time. The box remained empty. There were books on a shelf in the room; since she had already read all her penny-thrillers and they weren’t as exciting the second time around, she picked up one of these books. It was a collection of legends from the Islands, the fanciest book she had ever seen, bound in embossed leather worked with gold, with gold gilding on the edges of the pages and bright-colored pictures printed on glossy paper at the beginning of each story.
Lainie looked in the message box one more time, found it empty, then settled into bed with the book. Silas’s hat was still in its place on the pillow next to hers. “Do you miss him, too?” she asked, then laughed at herself, the laugh catching on a sob. She must be losing her mind, talking to his hat this way. She started reading out loud from the book, to keep herself company with the sound of her own voice and because it reminded her of those nights in their cabin when she had read to Silas. She almost felt like the hat made a connection between her and him, and maybe he could feel her presence through it and wouldn’t feel lonely and forgotten.
Finally, she fell asleep and had the same dream she did every night, where Silas was hit by one bullet after another and fell from his horse, and the hunters pushed her away with their attacks while she desperately tried to get to him.
* * *
AGAIN, LAINIE WAS awakened early in the morning by the light of the sun rising beyond the bay. The night of poor sleep had left her feeling groggy. Her heart racing, her stomach jittering with nerves, she checked the message box again. It was still empty.
A tight knot of frustration swelled in her chest, and she had to fight the urge to throw the box across the room or swear at it or pound it on the table, anything to make an answer to
her message finally appear inside it. She took in several slow, deep breaths to calm herself. It hadn’t been that long since she had sent the message; she should at least give her idea one full day to show results before she gave up.
The laundry bag was sitting outside the door of her room, filled with neatly-folded clothes which smelled fresher and cleaner than they had in a long time. She dressed in blessedly clean underclothes, pants, and shirt, then went down for breakfast. In the dining room, she helped herself to ham, eggs, pastries, and fruit, but could barely eat any of it.
She returned to her room for her coat and some money, checked the message box again and found nothing, then left the hotel and hired a carriage. She asked the driver where she could get information about passengers sailing on ships, and he took her to the central shipping office for Sandostra Harbor. There, after paying a fee, she was allowed to look through a huge ledger which contained lists of the passengers who had sailed in the last three ninedays.
She spent the rest of the morning poring over the lists of names, not sure what she was looking for and not sure if she would know it when she saw it. Each of the half dozen or so passenger ships that had set sail from Sandostra during that time had carried a number of men traveling without their families; on business, she supposed, looking at their titles and descriptions. She didn’t know the names of any of the men who had captured Silas, not that she thought it likely they would use their real names anyway, if they were involved in something the Mage Council wouldn’t approve of, and of course she didn’t expect to find Silas’s name entered on any of the lists. Silas Vendine, captured renegade mage… If only it could be that easy.
The man at the desk of the shipping office told her that the people she was looking for might have sailed on a cargo ship. Those lists were kept in separate logs, and Lainie searched through those as well. She didn’t find anything that stood out any more than in the passenger ship manifests; there were men listed as traveling on business alone or in small groups, but nothing that gave her any reason to think any of them might be the hunters. She was going to have to go to the docks and talk to the people working there, to find out of any of them had noticed a group of five men, maybe more, maybe fewer, with one or two injured men, boarding a ship.
The sheer enormity of the task weighed down on her mind. She would have to make sure she talked to every person who worked at every dock, to make sure she didn’t miss the one person who might have seen Silas. And then, if she didn’t turn up anything, there was still the whole city to look through, and all of Granadaia, which wasn’t as big as the Wildings but big enough… It would sure help if she could get a couple of people from the Hidden Council to search with her, but it still wouldn’t be fast or easy.
Feeling even more discouraged, Lainie returned to the hotel. The message box was still empty.
Fretting and worrying wasn’t going to make a message appear or pass the time any faster, she told herself. Looking for something better to do while she waited and figured out her next step, she went back downstairs to another room she had seen off the lobby, that had a small brass plaque on the door which said Reading Lounge. This room was furnished with big puffy couches, easy chairs, tables, and shelves filled with books that all looked as expensive as the book of Island legends Lainie had found in her room. The couches and chairs were arranged into small groups so that you could have a private conversation with a few friends or just read without being disturbed. Only two other people were in there, both of them reading newspapers.
Lainie sat down and picked up an oversized book from the low table in front of her chair. The book had floppy paper covers and a big picture of an elegantly-dressed woman on the front. Ladies’ Fashion Monthly, the cover said. Lainie flipped through the book; it was filled with black-and-white and colored pictures of fancy clothing, fancy houses, fancy children, fancy food, and fancy dogs, and short articles, like in a newspaper, explaining how to go about achieving all that fanciness. She came across an article about how to make a charming gift for a special gentleman by embroidering his initials on a handkerchief with your own hair. Maybe Silas would like that, if she could embroider his initials well enough that he could tell what they were.
“Mrs. Vendine,” a low voice, barely more than a whisper, said from beside her.
Lainie’s heart nearly jumped out of her chest. She looked; a man had taken the chair next to hers and was holding a newspaper open in front of his face. “Please do not draw attention to us,” he murmured. “The situation is perilous. We must be discreet.”
Lainie nodded and returned her eyes to her Fashion Monthly.
“We received your message. We believe we can help you. Tomorrow morning at the beginning of the second quarter, a hired carriage will await you outside the hotel. The driver will have been instructed to bring you to us.”
Relief bordering on joy filled her – the Hidden Council was going to help her! – then caution dampened the feeling. This man might be from the Hidden Council, but he was still a stranger. “Thanks,” Lainie said quietly. “But how did you find me?”
“Someone like you isn’t hard to track down. Beyond that, the less I say of our methods and resources, the better. As I said, the situation is perilous.”
If he had said they had traced her through the message box, she would have known he was lying. Silas had told her once that, unlike the Mage Council message box he had buried in the Bads, the Hidden Council box’s location couldn’t be traced. The man’s secrecy still didn’t sit well with her, but she supposed she understood the need for it. “Okay. Good enough.”
“I must go now. Do not move for a count of one hundred.”
Lainie nodded again and turned the page of the fashion monthly. She stared at the next article, something about making sweet little bows for your dog’s fur, and tried to imagine her big cattlehounds Bunky and Snoozer wearing bows. Snoozer was a male, so the thought was just silly anyway; Bunky, on the other hand…
When she guessed that a count of one hundred had gone by, she set the book down and looked. The man was gone.
* * *
THE FIRST THING Lainie did after the man left was ask at the front desk where she could buy a map of the city. The clerk had one there he could sell her for sixteen drinas; Lainie bit back her reaction to the outrageous price and paid it. If she was going to go off in a carriage hired by strangers to an undisclosed destination, she wanted to have some idea of where she was and how to get back to the hotel on her own. She passed the rest of the day studying the map, wishing the time would pass faster, and trying not to get her hopes up about how much help the Hidden Council could give her.
The next morning, Lainie again awoke with the sun. After a breakfast she was almost too nervous and excited to swallow, she made sure she had plenty of money, her map, her gunbelt and gun, and a generous supply of extra ammunition. The message Silas had received warning him not to trust anyone lingered in her mind. Though it had come from a member of the Hidden Council, she would take it to apply to anyone and everyone. She still didn’t like the man’s secrecy the day before, though she realized there were probably good reasons for it, or relying on transport provided by someone she didn’t know. But right now it was what she had to work with, so she would hope for the best while keeping her eyes open for trouble and her gun close to hand.
As promised, one of the little black-and-gold carriages was waiting out in front. A small red flag hung from it, indicating that it was already hired; carriages that were available displayed gold flags. Hanging back a bit, Lainie examined the driver, a faded-looking middle-aged man in the usual carriage driver’s black uniform. He looked harmless, but then, so had Oferdon.
“Madam Venedias?” he said.
Madam Venedias? That was her, Lainie realized. Warily, ready to react to the first sign of trouble, she climbed up onto the seat next to the driver. “I was told you would know where to take me.”
“Yes, madam.”
“There might be people following me
.”
“Yes, madam. I was warned to be careful of that.” He shook the reins and the horse started off.
They followed a complicated route through the city, up and down hills, doubling back and going in circles. It was clearly intended to throw off anyone who might be following them – and, maybe, to confuse her about where they were going. If that was the case, she didn’t want to show her hand by taking out her map – better to let them think she knew less than she did – but she did make sure to pay close attention to her surroundings. The palace on the hill and the Mage Council tower were constant reference points, and she made note of other prominent features along the way, like the intersection where five streets branched off of a circle with a flower garden in the middle, comparing them to her memory of the map.
The convoluted route eventually took them towards the northeastern corner of the city, where the Dostra met the bay, and into a run-down area filled with large, plain wooden buildings. The odor of old fish filled the air, along with a wet, salty smell. Other than wagons being loaded and unloaded in front of a few of the buildings and a couple of people walking about on business, the area was deserted. Most of the buildings had signs painted on them; one said, House of Mansarias, Coffee Importers. On one side of the warehouse, men were unloading large burlap sacks from a wagon which stood in front of an open set of huge double doors. The smell of coffee wafted over to Lainie as her carriage drove past.
The carriage pulled into an empty lot next to a warehouse with no sign painted on it, and stopped. “This is the place where I was to bring you, madam,” the driver said.
Lainie didn’t like it. She was dealing with the Hidden Council, Silas’s people, but the secrecy and the empty streets made her spine crawl. Out of habit, she checked again to make sure she had her gun, then climbed down from the carriage. “Wait here,” she said to the driver.