by Kyra Halland
“But, madam, my instructions were –”
She pulled a ten-gilding piece from her duster pocket and handed it to him. “Wait here and count to three hundred. If I haven’t come out running for my life by then, you can go.”
He touched the coin to the brim of his cap in acknowledgment. “Yes, madam.”
Chapter 7
LIKE MOST OF the other warehouses in the area, the building Lainie had been brought to had a set of wide double doors on the front, facing the street, and a smaller entrance on the side; in this case, the side facing the empty lot. The double doors and the windows on the ground level were boarded up, but the side door stood slightly open. Lainie drew her gun and walked quietly to the door. Keeping out of view of the opening, she peered inside.
She had a clear view of the right half of the inside of the building. It was a single large room, lit by mage lights and oil lamps, mostly bare of furnishings except for some desks and chairs, like an office. Which made sense, if this was the Hidden Council’s headquarters. A dozen or so people sat at the desks looking at papers, a few of them speaking together in low voices. Most of the room was open all the way to the roof, two stories high; at the back, the upper part was closed in to make a second floor. A set of stairs came down from that upper level along the back of the right-hand wall. The left side of the warehouse was hidden from her view by the door.
Cautiously, Lainie pushed the door open and stepped inside. The people at the tables all turned to look at her, but no one seemed surprised or alarmed at her entrance. Of course they wouldn’t, if they were expecting her.
“Ah, Mrs. Vendine,” said a woman’s voice from the left side of the room. It was dry and throaty, and low-pitched for a woman. “You’ve arrived. Do come in.”
Still holding her gun at the ready, Lainie turned towards the voice. A raised wooden platform stood against the left-hand wall. Another dozen men, in fine, expensive-looking suits, stood on and beside the platform, whispering to each other as they watched her. Seated on the platform, as though to oversee everything that was happening in the room, was an elderly woman with pale skin and black-dyed hair, dressed in a gown of rich black fabric. Jewels glittered at her ears, around her neck, and on her fingers. Lainie walked closer, then stopped short as the world suddenly changed shape around her.
She knew the woman’s face, knew it even better than her own. It was her Pa’s face, if her Pa were an old woman –
“You’re my grandmother,” she said.
The old woman gave her an approving smile. “I told you she was a clever girl,” she said to the room at large. “I am known as Elspetya Lorentius, but, yes, I am also the mother of the man named Burrett Banfrey. It was always a great disappointment to me that after my own gift was discovered relatively late in life, none of my offspring were found to be likewise gifted. So, of course, I was delighted when I heard reports from the Wildings of an enormously talented young woman named Banfrey.” She looked intently at Lainie. “I see little of my son in you; you must take after your mother. It makes no difference; appearances aren’t important. It’s your gift that matters.”
Lainie stood silent, trying to grasp the truth of the woman in front of her. Her grandmother – the woman who had abandoned her family when her power was discovered, who had driven them out of their home – was involved with the Hidden Council? The leader, or one of the leaders, if her position on that platform was any indication. She had despised her Plain family; why would she now be working with a group dedicated to protecting Plains? Had she come to regret how she had treated her family? If so, that must mean she wasn’t the monster Lainie had thought she was.
Lainie holstered her gun. “You said you can help me find my husband.”
“Indeed.” Her grandmother gave her another satisfied smile. “As a matter of fact, I know exactly where he is.”
Lainie’s heart leaped, and hope bloomed warm and bright all through her. “Where?” she asked eagerly.
Her grandmother turned towards two men standing near the stairway, who were somewhat less well-dressed than the other men, though they also wore mage rings. “Dorovan.”
“Yes, madam,” one of the men said, as though he knew without being told what he was supposed to do.
The two men climbed the stairs and disappeared into the upper level of the building. Lainie’s heart pounded and her hands shook. Tears of joy and relief stung her eyes. Silas must be here. In just a moment, she would have him in her arms, safe and sound. A tread of steps and a strange, rhythmic clanking of metal sounded from the stairs, then Silas appeared on the staircase, the two men behind him.
“Silas!” Lainie started to run across the room to him, then she stopped. Something was wrong. Silas was walking hunched over, stiffly and awkwardly. The metal clanking sounded with each of his steps. She looked at his feet; they were chained together.
Silas, in chains… There had to be some kind of mistake. “What –?” she started to ask her grandmother, but words failed her.
The three men reached the bottom of the stairs. Guided by the other two holding on to his arms, Silas took a few shuffling steps into the room. The men let go of him and he sank down to the floor, his knees pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. He stared off into the middle of the room as though he didn’t even know Lainie was there.
“What –” Lainie tried again, still unable to put words to what she was seeing. She looked at her grandmother, hoping for an explanation.
The old woman gestured towards Silas with her right forefinger, which bore a gold ring set with a large dark purple gem. “Go on, girl.”
Lainie walked uncertainly over to where Silas sat huddled on the floor. He was rocking slightly back and forth and shivering. She squatted down in front of him. “Silas?”
He glanced at her, then his eyes slid away as he continued rocking. This close, she could see the cuts and bruises and the lines of pain on his bearded face and hear the faint noise he was making in his throat, like a scared animal. Pain twisted through her insides at the sight of him like this. She touched his face; his skin was strangely cool. “Silas,” she said a little more firmly.
Again, his dark eyes glanced at hers then shifted away, but she caught their gaze just long enough to see the raw, mindless fear in them. The gunshots were the least of what was wrong with him, she realized. “Silas,” she whispered. She extended her mage senses to try to make contact with him through his power, since she couldn’t seem to reach him otherwise – and felt nothing. Not a trace of his magic.
An awful realization slammed into her mind and knocked the breath from her lungs. She scrambled to her feet and faced her grandmother. “He’s been Stripped!” Hysteria swelled up inside her.
“Not Stripped,” her grandmother said. “We’re experimenting with a different technique, which should be reversible.”
It was her grandmother who had done this? “Why?” she asked, horror and despair tearing at her voice.
“I want you to help me with something. If you agree, I will return him to normal.”
“So it was you that took him!” The tight, heavy feeling in her chest got worse. She couldn’t breathe.
“Indeed.”
“But – I don’t understand – if it was me you wanted, why didn’t you take me?”
“Because if we had, we would have had an angry Siyavas Venedias at our door, wanting you back. Which would have been inconvenient, to say the least. And taking you both at the same time would have been difficult and dangerous. I had no desire to risk any more of my men in a fight against the two of you. Therefore, we decided to go after him alone, which served the twin purposes of neutralizing the threat he presented and luring you in.” Madam Lorentius gave Lainie another searching look. “Tell me, girl, did you have any idea what you were getting into when you took up with that man?”
“But…” Lainie said again. She struggled to make sense of this. “He’s on your side. The Hidden Council. What do you want me to do that you have t
o – do that to him to force me? What do you want me to do that he wouldn’t like?”
“We want you to help us establish mage control over the Wildings, under the rule of our group.”
The words dropped like rocks into Lainie’s mind, heavy and meaningless. It was wrong. Backwards. Like Silas helpless and in chains. “But the Hidden Council is supposed to protect the freedom of the Wildings and the Plain settlers.”
“Bah,” Madam Lorentius said. “That may have been the goal of the fools who started the Hidden Council. But, several years ago, I and a number of others became impatient with the lack of vision and initiative in the Mage Council’s hands-off policy towards the Wildings, so we began to make our own plans. The Hidden Council already had certain resources and information which would be useful for our aims, so, a few years ago, we began infiltrating it. Eventually, we took control of it as the facade behind which we would carry out our plans.”
Lainie felt sick. Don’t trust anyone, the message had said. It’s worse than we thought. It hadn’t been referring to mage hunters or the Mage Council, after all. It had been talking about the Hidden Council, infiltrated and corrupted. And Silas had had no idea.
“At first it was difficult,” Madam Lorentius went on, “because of the dedication of certain mage hunters who were loyal to the original purposes of the Hidden Council. Hunters like Venedias. Before any of our plans could come to fruition, one or another of those nuisances interfered and ruined them. Then, in the course of another one of our operations, Arbrey Carden informed us that he had discovered a young Wildings-born woman with power, whom he believed could locate more of that black ore he was procuring for us.”
“Carden. You’re the ones who were bankrolling him.”
“Yes. He was one of our operatives, but as time went on, he became more interested in his own ambitions. He concealed certain information from us, such as the name of the young female mage he had found. I’m sure he meant to use that information to gain leverage over us. Venedias did us a favor by eliminating him; he had become more trouble than he was worth.”
“My brother died because of Carden.” Because of their grandmother’s plans. The tight knot inside of Lainie grew even more painful.
“Indeed. I didn’t know you had a brother. Did he have power as well?”
The question made Lainie’s vision briefly blacken with rage. “What difference does it make? He’s dead because of you! And Orl Fazar – You have someone on the Mage Council working with you, and that’s who sent him to murder Verl Bissom and Garis Horden and Silas, because they were loyal to the old Hidden Council.”
Madam Lorentius smiled smugly. “Correct. You are a clever girl indeed. I believe you’ll make me very proud.”
Lainie wondered who that ally on the Mage Council was, if it was one of the mages who’d been there the other day. Had one of them sat there, listening to Lord Yeredon insist they didn’t know where Silas was, while knowing all along exactly where he was and who had taken him and why? And, of course, that contact would have been feeding the Mage Council exactly the information Madam Lorentius wanted them to have, and no more, in those “reports” that really came from her own people.
“Our Mage Council contact knew Orl Fazarias from some other matters they were both involved in, and recommended his services to us,” Madam Lorentius continued. “I believe Mr. Fazarias told you about the breeding program.”
Lainie remembered too well Fazar’s attempt to rape her and then to convince her to bear his children. The memory made her feel even sicker. “Yeah. He did.”
“My associate at the Mage Council has been working with that project for many years now. It’s of special interest to me, as it promises to be extremely helpful to me in achieving my own aims. In fact, several people involved in it are in this very room today. They’ve been looking forward to meeting you. We had hoped that Mr. Fazarias would continue the experiment during his time in the Wildings, but his mission was cut short. However, shortly before his death, he did reveal the name of a young woman of extraordinary power whom he intended to take as his mate. Imagine my delight when I realized she was the very same young woman Carden had described to us, and that she was my own granddaughter! It’s a pity that Fazarias died before he was able to beget the next generation of hybrid mages upon you. I suppose it was Venedias who killed him.”
The sick, sharp pain of disgust and betrayal in Lainie’s heart and stomach got worse. But why should she feel so betrayed? This was the woman who had left her own daughters with no other option but to go to work in the whorehouses. It should be no surprise she would want her granddaughter to be raped for the sake of her own ambitions. “No, it was me,” Lainie said. The hard satisfaction of being able to claim responsibility for Fazar’s death did little to make her feel better.
Madam Lorentius’s dark, penciled-on eyebrows rose. “Indeed. Very impressive.”
Lainie didn’t want to talk about Fazar any more. “What about Oferdon? Was he working for you, too?”
“Amis Oferdon? No, he wasn’t one of ours. However, our operative who was carrying out some missions for us in the Bluecloud Mountains came across him as he lay dying of demonsalts cravings, and was able to get some information from him before his death. He had some very interesting things to say about your talents. I was pleased to have news of you; we had lost track of your whereabouts after the business in the Bads.”
Another piece fell into place. “Was it your idea for the Ta’ayatan to call up those dark powers and drive out the other clans in the mountains?”
Madam Lorentius shrugged. “The situation already existed. We thought it presented some interesting possibilities for gaining a foothold in the Wildings, so we made a few… suggestions to move matters along.”
“And the drive. The mages who caused the storm in the Bottleneck.”
“Ours as well. I was displeased that they failed in their mission to take control of the herd, but what the lone survivor told me about you more than made up for their failure. For one thing, it revealed your location; we had lost track of you again after the incident with Oferdon and that tribe of savages. And I was even more delighted to learn how strong you had become and how skilled in using your unique powers. It confirmed the decision I had made long before then, that you are exactly what we need to achieve our aims. You are superior to the hybrid mages produced by the breeding project; not only were you conceived and born in the Wildings, you were raised there, eating food grown in the soil, drinking the water, breathing the air. The magic of the Wildings is part of your very being in a way it could never be for someone like Fazar. So, once we knew you would be in the area of the Gap, we sent hunters out to capture Venedias and lure you in.”
It all made a terrible sense, but there was one important thing Lainie didn’t understand. “Why do you want to control the Wildings?”
“Foreign scientists!” Madam Lorentius’s previously-calm voice exploded with hatred and rage. “They are why we must bring the Wildings under the control of mages! Did you know, girl, in the foreign lands where the scientists rule, they killed off all of their mages a century ago? The scientists could not compete with them – there are so many things that can be done with magic that the scientists could not come close to duplicating – so they killed them all, every man, woman, and child. They would have nothing and no one challenging their imagined superiority!”
Killed all their mages… No such thing as magic, Silas had told her the foreign shopkeeper had said. The scientists didn’t want there to be magic, so they killed all the mages. She and Silas never would have been safe in the lands across the sea.
“Their science and their people are already gaining a foothold in the Wildings,” Madam Lorentius went on. “If they become dominant, they will use their science and their weapons – like that foul thing you wear at your hip – to wipe out every last mage in the Wildings and then in Granadaia! To prevent that, we must make the Wildings into a mage stronghold so inviolable that no foreigner will
ever be able to come to power there. And, in the meantime, we must also ensure that those weak fools on the Mage Council cannot undermine our efforts.”
Horrified though she was, Lainie couldn’t help almost agreeing with her grandmother. The thought of foreigners invading the Wildings and Granadaia and killing all the mages sent a chill through her. She didn’t want mages to be killed at all, whether by foreigners or by the Wildings settlers; she wanted mages and Plains alike to be able to live safely and happily together. “What about the Plain settlers, that went there to be free from mage rule?”
“What do you care about them?” Madam Lorentius snapped. “They would have no more mercy on you than the foreigners would.”
Lainie had no answer to that. It was entirely too true. The memory of the hanging mob in Bitterbush Springs came to her, her frantic terror, the feel of the rope around her neck…
“In any case,” her grandmother went on, “those settlers have forgotten their proper place in the order of the world. Plains are by nature inferior to mages. The ones living in the Wildings will become our servants and laborers again, as the gods intended them to be, and the wealth of the Wildings will become ours as well, as it should be by right. And, lest you think I’m entirely hard-hearted, let me assure you that that order of things is only in the Plains’ best interests. They are incapable of governing themselves and knowing what is best for them. Under mage rule, they enjoy a security and comfort they could never achieve on their own. It is only mages, not Plains, who have the ability to make the best use of the Wildings and its resources for the benefit of all.
“So, you see,” Madam Lorentius continued, “it is only by taking the Wildings for mages that we can guarantee the future safety and prosperity, indeed the future existence, of the race of mages. When we’ve achieved our aims, you’ll be able to live in peace and safety with that man of yours. You’ll be able to hold your heads high and have the lives that should be yours by right. If you agree to help us, I will undo the block on his mind and power. As well, through my contact on the Mage Council, I will see that your crimes are pardoned, your marriage authorized, and Venedias’s fertility block lifted.”