Magic Below Paris Complete Series Boxed Set (Books 1 - 8): Trading Into Shadow, Trading Into Darkness, Trading Close to Light, Trading By Firelight, Trading by Shroomlight, plus 3 more

by C. M. Simpson

  Deal. He paused, but she could feel him thinking. It would also be a good neutral space for any classes the bugs might want to hold.

  You think that’s a good idea? Marsh asked.

  We’ll know when Aisha shows us what he’s taught her. Roeglin told her. Without a mental mage to help us, we’re kinda lost.

  And it’s getting dangerous, Marsh finished for him.

  “Marsh, we need your head out here.” Gustav’s voice interrupted their conversation.

  Happy hunting, Roeglin told her by way of farewell.

  Marsh blew him a mental kiss and blinked back to reality. She’d made her way through the tunnel to the entrance without registering a single step.

  Gustav had drawn them to a halt in a sheltered corner just outside. He watched as Marsh blinked her way to reality and focused. “You want to deal with this?” he asked.

  “With what?” Marsh questioned and then realized she should have known.

  Aisha wasn’t happy. She’d stopped in front of them. When she caught Marsh looking at her, she stuck out her tongue.

  “You wrecked my day,” she declared with all the righteous fury of a six-year-old whose world had gone severely wrong.

  Marsh raised her eyebrows. “I what?”

  “You heard,” the child snarled. “I had lessons.”

  “You had lessons with me,” Brigitte scolded. “Now I know why you’ve been so tired this week.”

  “Have not!” Aisha snapped. “Been fine. Been busy.”

  She said that last word with a meaningful glance at Marsh, and Marsh realized the child was having a go at her for having so much on her plate. She couldn’t help shooting a glance at Tamlin, and he cocked an eyebrow in reply.

  Smartasses! she thought but wasn’t successful in keeping it to herself

  Rude! Aisha retorted.

  “We’ll talk about this when we get back.” Brigitte’s voice was firm.

  Aisha shot her a dark glance, and Brigitte caught her gaze and held it. After a long moment, the little girl huffed a sigh and scuffed her foot.

  “Bien,” she agreed, and Marsh breathed a sigh of relief.

  She was going to have to ask Brigitte for pointers. The shadow mistress seemed to have ways of convincing the children to agree with her that Marsh had no idea how to tap. It made her wish she had a link with the shadow mistress similar to the one she had with Roeglin.

  “Shall we?” Gustav asked, his tone suggesting they’d kept him waiting long enough.

  There wasn’t a single word of thanks to either Marsh or Brigitte for talking Aisha down.

  Tamlin rolled his eyes behind the guardsman’s back, and Marsh stifled a smile. Mordan grumbled at them all and stalked into the nearest stand of bushes, where she disappeared from view. Perdemor and his siblings copied her, and Scruffknuckle bounded in their wake.

  Marsh nodded to Gustav. “We shall.”

  She led the way back out to the road and then to where the trade goods had been laid.

  They’d chosen a place equidistant between the Library’s walls and the cluster of ruins that marked the entrance to the mantids’ “nest.” A short track led off the main thoroughfare into what had been the ground floor of a set of shops or joined houses.

  The walls between each individual dwelling had long ago given way to decay, and only the stouter outer walls remained. The people from the Library had shaped the rubble into low stone walls and added stout lengths of wooden fencing.

  It wouldn’t stop raiders or a band of remnant, but it would slow them down long enough for anyone in the compound to seek shelter on one of the ledges created from the reinforced skeleton of the floor above.

  The druids from Ariella’s Grotto had done a first-class job of creating an area that was open and sheltered at the same time. The arrangement with the mantids meant that they didn’t need more than a space where goods could be left for the short time it took for the exchange to be made.

  Gustav’s people took the Library’s trade goods down to it just after the gates opened at dawn and returned at midday to collect what had been left in their place. Today was the first day something had gone wrong.

  Marsh muffled a snort. If she thought about it, they’d been lucky to have a whole week before something had gone wrong.

  Mordan was circling the enclosure, the kits and the pup at her side. All four of them had their noses to the ground, their ears twitching as they took it in turns to lift their heads and survey the world around them.

  Humans, Mordan informed them, raising her head long enough to catch Marsh’s eye. Strangers.

  “Raiders?” Marsh asked.

  No. Prey.

  Marsh shuddered at the kat’s assessment. It was one thing when she classified people as “pride” or “pack,” quite another when she called them prey.

  I guess you can take the kat out of the Deeps, she thought, but you can never take the Deeps out of the kat.

  A sense of puzzlement came through her link with Mordan.

  I chose to come out of the Deeps, and I have never been a home for them, the kat informed her, and then turned her attention to the matter at hand. Their trail is clear.

  Looking at the ground in front of where the kat was standing, Marsh could see her point. Faint scuff marks showed where someone, or something, had passed. Following the bent stalks of grass, Marsh spotted the partial print of a shoe.

  A shoe? She bent and studied it more closely. Who in all the Deeps wears shoes out here?

  Even the farmers from Briar’s Ridge wore sturdy leather boots.

  Gustav came alongside her and stared intently at the ground. “Odd footwear for raiders.”

  “And remnant don’t wear shoes,” Tamlin, and hastily added as his sister opened her mouth to argue, “Not usually, anyway.”

  Aisha closed her mouth and scowled at him. Seeing the child’s grouchy face reminded Marsh of something.

  “Aisha, you want to scan for other minds?”

  Aisha’s face brightened. “People’s or everyone?”

  “How about you see what you can find and tell me what’s out there?” Marsh suggested.

  “Can I peek?”

  “Peek at what?” Marsh wanted to know.

  “Inside,” Aisha replied, and Marsh realized the little girl was asking permission to look into someone else’s mind without their permission—something Marsh kept telling her not to do.

  “Just this once,” Marsh agreed, and Aisha clapped her hands excitedly.

  Tamlin groaned and rolled his eyes. “You know you’ve created a monster, right?”

  Marsh figured that might be the case, but they needed to know who else was out here and why, and she didn’t think the people who’d taken the trade goods would tell them.

  “They went this way,” Gustav called from the edge of the trading area.

  He kept his voice soft, and Marsh felt Mordan’s approval of the man.

  He is not a bad hunter, for a human, the hoshkat informed her. If you did not already have a mate, I would consider that one a suitable candidate.

  Marsh’s face burned hot, and Gustav raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Never you mind,” she told him, and Aisha giggled. “And don’t you tell him.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Never you mind,” Marsh repeated, and changed the subject. “Which way did they go?”

  His lips crinkled with amusement, and he climbed the fence, jumping down on the other side. “This way.”

  Marsh followed and then watched as Mordan, the kits, and Scruffy leapt onto pieces of rubble on the inside and soared over.

  So much for keeping wild animals at bay, she thought and made a note to suggest removing similar blocks of rubble from close to the outside of the fence.

  Tamlin and Brigitte watched her climb the fence and then shadow-stepped past her to the other side.

  Smartasses.

  They chuckled. Aisha’s frustrated tone stopped them mid-laugh.

  “Like that,
huh?” the little girl declared. “Well, bien!”

  “Uh-oh.”

  Marsh didn’t need Tamlin’s murmur to warn her that Aisha was about to do something she might not like. She watched as the child stalked over to the stone wall and rested her hand against it.

  “Aisha…” she began, but it was too late.

  The stone parted beneath Aisha’s fingers, creating a gap large enough for the child to pass through.

  “What!” the little girl snapped, joining them.

  “You put that back the way it was,” Marsh ordered.

  “You say ‘please,’” the child shot back.

  Marsh sighed. “Fine! Please put that back the way it was.”

  “Okay,” Aisha chirped happily and skipped back to the wall.

  She laid her hand on the wall, and seconds later, there was no sign she’d ever made a pathway through it.

  “You’re just lucky you didn’t break the fence,” Tamlin told her. “Evan would have been really disappointed.”

  Aisha’s face fell.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she answered, and hurried back to scramble up the wall and check the fence for damage.

  “Not broken,” she reported back, sounding relieved.

  Marsh studied her. “What other minds did you find?” she asked.

  Aisha put her hands on her hips. “What lifes did you find?” she challenged.

  Marsh raised an eyebrow. The kid was all attitude this morning!

  Tamlin laughed. “Yeah, shadow mistress, what did the shadows reveal when you asked them?”

  Marsh fixed him with a glare. “I thought I’d leave asking the shadows up to you,” she answered, and his jaw dropped open.

  Gustav snorted. “I just want you all to hurry up and tell me what’s out there. The longer you delay, the more of a head start they get.”

  Marsh and the children all rolled their eyes in unison.

  “Fine, then,” Aisha said and walked up to the warrior. “Make sure I don’t fall over.”

  She sounded so much like Marsh that Gustav stared at her, but Aisha didn’t wait for his reply. Instead, she sat down beside him, leaned on his leg, and closed her eyes.

  Marsh followed her example, although she did it from where she was standing, and she kept her eyes open. She might not have been able to sense other minds, but she could sense other life forces, and she’d done it enough to keep an awareness of her surroundings while she did it.

  Well, she was working on it. She swayed and sat on a chunk of concrete. Tamlin snickered, but he chose another piece of rubble to sit on before he searched the air around him for what it might also touch.

  “We should have done this at the trade table,” he observed. “We might have been able to see what they looked like.”

  Because the air too held memories sometimes. Marsh registered the light breeze touching her cheek and doubted they’d have had any luck. The air on the surface was much more unstable than the air on the ruins

  It would be quicker if we continued the hunt, Mordan grumbled, and Marsh had to agree.

  While she had sensed a myriad of small lives around them, she had found nothing as large as the kat’s and nothing that resembled a human’s life.

  “Nothing,” she informed them just as Tamlin spoke.

  “Nothing here, either.”

  “Something that way,” Aisha announced, pointing west of the Library. “Maybe people, but I can’t hear them. They’re too far away.”

  “Which way do the tracks go?” Marsh asked, and Gustav shrugged.

  “They took to the rocks,” he admitted.

  Mordan huffed out a sigh They went… she started, but Scruffknuckle bounced past with a happy yap.

  He stopped long enough to sniff the ground at Gustav’s feet, jumped up on a nearby rock and cast about again, and then leapt down to the stony ground on the other side. With a brief dip of his nose, he bounded into the ruins.

  “Pup says that way,” Gustav declared, scrambling after him.

  Mordan didn’t dignify that with a reply, and the others followed.

  I wonder how far they went? Marsh thought as Aisha laid her hand on the rock and had it move aside rather than having to climb over.

  She said nothing, just let the child catch up and walk alongside her.

  “Are we going the right way?” she asked as they crossed an open space leading to a ruin several floors high.

  Aisha nodded, her blue eyes solemn. “Up dere,” she answered, dropping back to baby speech as she always did when she was worried.

  “You know how many?”

  Aisha frowned and shook her head.

  “Rocks make it hard,” she explained

  Marsh searched her link with Mordan and discovered the child was right. The link was there, but it wasn’t as strong as it usually was.

  “Stay with me,” she ordered and hurried to relay the news to Gustav.

  4

  Borrowed Items and Disrupted Plans

  Gustav crouched in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. He was waiting for Marsh, even as Mordan was making her silent way up the staircase, her two kits in tow.

  “What took you?” he whispered when Marsh and Aisha settled in beside him. Aisha tucked in close to Tamlin and Brigitte.

  Marsh ignored the question. “Aisha says up.”

  He nodded. “Kat does, too.”

  Marsh glanced after the kat and was in time to see her tail disappear onto the landing above.

  “How far up, Aysh?” she asked.

  The little girl screwed up her face, closing her eyes to concentrate.

  “Not the next floor. Maybe the one—two?—after it.”

  Dan, did you get that?

  The kat sent agreement over their link. It was fainter than it should have been, given how close she was. Marsh nudged Gustav.

  “The building is interfering with mental magic,” she informed him. “We’ll need to rely on our other senses.”

  “You mean, like a normal person?” he asked, the hint of a smile on his lips.

  “Something like that,” she told him and shifted away. “Is this the only way up?”

  “That’s what the kat seemed to think,” Gustav replied. “She made a circuit of the ground floor before she decided on the stairs. I got the impression there was only one way up.”

  Marsh hoped he was right, and slowly made her way up to the next level.

  Her link to the kat was clearer there, and she breathed a soft sigh of relief.

  Dan?

  I am this way, the kat replied, and Marsh got the impression of a corridor to her left and then another staircase. She stopped and focused on becoming one with the shadows.

  “Where’d she go?” Gustav’s whispered confusion drifted after her.

  “Shadow-walking,” Tamlin told him, adding wistfully, “I wish she’d show me how.”

  “I thought you could already shadow-step,” Gustav said.

  “No, shadow-walking,” Tamlin repeated. “She becomes like a shadow herself. One of the monastery’s scouts taught her how.”

  “Do you think she’d show me?”

  “She could, but it wouldn’t mean you could do it.”

  “I’d like to try, anyway,” Gustav told the boy. “That could come in handy.”

  “We can ask her,” Tamlin answered as Marsh drifted out of earshot.

  Refusing to think about how she was going to teach the pair of them how to shadow-walk, she focused on the corridor ahead. It wasn’t long before she heard other voices.

  These were hushed and anxious. They were also unfamiliar.

  “I don’t think we’ve got anything,” came one hoarse whisper as Marsh drifted through the corridor.

  It sounded like an older man, perhaps someone around Gustav’s age, or Master Envermet’s. It was hard to tell. Marsh forced herself to focus on remaining one with the shadow. She needed to get closer.

  Her targets remained oblivious and continued talking.

  “So, why’d y
ou take it, then?” The woman sounded around the same age as Aisha’s mother, but sharper-tongued and a lot less patient.

  The man gave an impatient grunt. “Look at us! We’re not thieves. We’re starving!” His voice softened. “And I was sure we’d figure something out.”

  The woman glanced up just as Marsh drifted through the door. “Well, figure it out fast, because we’re not alone.”

  Marsh chose a patch of shadows on the other side of the room and stepped into the darkness of the corner, vanishing from view. It was hard to remain blended with the shadows, and Marsh nearly lost her grip on them as she stepped clear.

  To her surprise, the people in the center of the room kept their eyes fixed on the doorway, their bodies tense as they listened to the dark. Marsh listened with them, and finally registered what they’d picked up, before—the soft sound of footsteps coming down the hall.

  “Get the door,” the man murmured, but the woman shook her head.

  “It’s too late for that,” she replied and laid a hand on the shoulder of the young woman crouched beside her.

  The girl shrugged it off, frantically digging through her pack.

  “Maybe if I can find something to offer them so they won’t be mad at us.”

  The man snorted, nudging the pile of shrooms stacked to one side. “Somehow, I doubt it.”

  “Well, you didn’t have to take them all,” the woman sniped. “It’s not like we’re going to be able to carry them far.”

  He sighed. “I was figuring we’d cook most of them before we left and eat a few more. There aren’t that many.”

  Marsh wanted to disagree with him. They’d taken three crates of shrooms. It didn’t matter how hungry they were, or what they cooked them into, the woman was right: they were probably not going to be able to carry everything they’d taken.

  He didn’t look like he was in the mood to listen, though. His eyes flashed angrily, and he curled his hands into fists. He didn’t argue, however. Instead, he moved so that he stood between the two women and the door.

  Others moved out of the corners of the room, and Marsh realized the group was bigger than she’d thought. Three younger men came out of an adjoining room. None of them was armed beyond the short, stout lengths of wood they carried.