The confluence moved in answer. The diversion spell took shape. But just as Lizaveta committed her will to casting, a silent explosion of energies battered the workroom wards.
Ruslan’s focus broke. The children!
His mind jerked free of Lizaveta’s, his attention jumping from the channels to the bedroom where wards had been forcibly breached. His akhelyshen were under attack, crying out for his aid.
The spell’s blazing latticework bulged and roiled. Energies burst from Lizaveta’s frantic grasp, primed to explode in catastrophic backlash.
RUSLAN! Her silent shriek carried all of her terror and fury, as she fought with every spark of her soul to master the magic about to destroy them both.
His mind snapped back into union with hers, and he threw strength to her unstinting. As he should have done in the first place, he ignored his akhelyshen’s cries and worked with desperate speed to help contain the disruption.
Lightning crackled off the backlashing channels, wringing a cry of agony from Lizaveta. Still she fought on, shredding and damping burning energies, struggling to stop the deadly wave from breaking. She yanked power from her own soul to fuel her efforts until her ikilhia sank to a guttering flicker.
The specter of death receded. At last, with all the channels scorched and dark, Lizaveta sank to her knees, hardly able to believe she had survived. Her head throbbed with a vicious ache, every nerve a bonfire of pain, but she was alive.
So was her mage-brother, though his ikilhia was as damaged and drained as hers. Instead of giving way to relief, Ruslan ran staggering for the door.
The children. Lizaveta struggled to her feet. She reached with sore, strained senses after Ruslan, and saw through his eyes as he charged into the breached bedroom.
Mikail and Kiran, burned and bleeding, crouched within a frail bubble of protective magic projected by a charm clutched in Mikail’s shaking hands.
Aram Inara Naavini faced them. The girl gripped a dagger that shimmered with lethal spellwork fueled by a strange, wild reservoir of magic—a reservoir far too powerful for so weak a mage to have bound into the dagger’s metal. A shielding spell of equal strength protected her body and ikilhia.
Naavini struck the dagger against the wavering barrier of magic from Mikail’s charm. He yelped a wordless, desperate cry, and poured his ikilhia into his scant protection. Behind him, Kiran braced small hands on his mage-brother’s back, sending a frantic stream of his own life through the contact to bolster Mikail’s failing strength.
Ruslan, exhausted, reached as far as his injured ikilhia would allow and ripped the life straight out of every one of their sleeping servants. He threw the scavenged power to brace Mikail’s shield, even as he hammered red magefire at the spell protecting Naavini.
“Who sent you?” he snarled, purely to distract her. Both he and Lizaveta knew the answer. The sharp yellow fire of the dagger’s spellwork had an all too familiar taste.
Simon. He had sought reservoirs of power in the Greenward Hills ruins. He’d forged a weapon and a shield from his discoveries, handed the charms to this catspaw mage, and sent her to strike down Ruslan’s apprentices just as they had killed his.
Naavini bared her teeth, still straining to pierce Mikail’s protection. “You think I’m nothing but a puppet! Yet I sought and found your enemy in Alathia, long before your spies even realized where to look. I was the one who asked him for the means to hurt you. For Davan and Marca’s sake.”
“Those names mean nothing to me,” Ruslan told Naavini, smashing at her protections.
Faint memory tugged at Lizaveta. A glimpse of dancers, bending and swaying like wind-whipped flames—
Naavini spat a wild laugh. “Of course you don’t know them! You and your stone-hearted mage-sister care nothing for those you kill. But Davan and Marca were my friends. The only people I met in this gods-cursed city who didn’t treat me as either a monster or a weapon because of my mage-talent. They offered me kindness and never once asked for anything in return. The bravest people and the best dancers I’ve ever seen, and your mage-sister slaughtered them like pigs!”
“You’re either mad or a fool,” Ruslan spat at her. His tattered ikilhia trembled under the strain of holding Mikail’s shield while simultaneously attacking Naavini.
She’s not a fool, Lizaveta warned him, recalling Naavini’s careful maneuvering during their first conversation. The girl had known exactly what bait she offered. Limping hastily for the bedroom, Lizaveta cursed her own complacency in taking Naavini’s oaths. She should have ripped through the girl’s defenses and searched her mind then and there.
Regrets were of no use. Lizaveta reached the open doorway. She took a shuddering breath and strained her mage-sight to scrutinize Naavini’s shielding spell.
Naavini looked down her knife-blade at Mikail, who’d fallen to his knees despite Ruslan’s infusion of power, and Kiran, whose eyelids fluttered, his strength nearly spent. “Do you little vipers know my mistake? I thought your master cared about you. I was sure he couldn’t keep his focus with you screaming for his help. But he and his mage-sister care only for themselves, first and always.”
Mikail’s bloody face twisted in a fierce, certain smile. “Your mistake was in thinking us weak,” he panted. “Ruslan knew we could hold until he came to save us.”
Ruslan had known no such thing. Stop splitting your strength by shielding the children, Lizaveta snapped at him. Gather all the power you can and strike where I show you. She flashed him the location of a pinprick flaw she’d discerned in Naavini’s protection. If you breach her shield, I’ll handle the rest.
Don’t kill her, Ruslan replied, grim. I wish to search her memories. Also, I wish her death to be slow.
That, Lizaveta could agree with. Blackness floated around the edges of her vision; she forced consciousness to hold, ignored the red-hot needles piercing every muscle, and readied herself to bind Naavini’s mind and magic.
Ruslan abandoned Mikail and struck with all the force he could muster. The magefire hammering Naavini’s shield brightened to blinding levels. Lightning sheeted through the room as Naavini’s shield fractured. Her dagger plunged down.
Lizaveta whipped tendrils of power through a gap and locked them tight around Naavini. The girl fought—not to break Lizaveta’s hold, but to tear apart her own ikilhia and escape into death.
Naavini should never have had a chance against an akheli. But the disaster in the workroom had so savaged Lizaveta’s ikilhia that she found herself losing the battle. Naavini’s soul was dissolving through her grasp, and she could not hold it—
Ruslan, help me!
Ruslan was not listening. He was caught in a desperate fight to stem the damage from the spelled dagger plunged deep in Mikail’s chest. Kiran, sobbing, threw power born of anguish into his stricken mage-brother.
Furious, Lizaveta caught at Naavini’s fading consciousness. Go into death, then, with the knowledge of your failure. Not only do I live, but the one mage who could possibly best me will die like you. Ruslan and I will recast the spell. The sky-stone will strike, and nothing will be left of Simon Levanian but cinders.
Ragged, defiant laughter echoed back. Go ahead. Before I ever came to you, I told Sechaveh you’d found Simon in the Greenward Hills. I showed Sechaveh your treatise. Kill Simon with the sky-stone, and Sechaveh will know you defied his edict.
Naavini was not lying. Truth blazed from the shreds of her soul. This plan was all her doing, no one else’s. Simon had given her the dagger and shield in hope she could kill Ruslan’s akhelyshen, but he’d known nothing of any sky-stones, nor had the least clue Naavini intended a plan that could result in his death. She’d played to Simon’s assumptions, just as she had to Lizaveta’s, and fooled him as thoroughly.
The full extent of Naavini’s cunning hit Lizaveta like a spear to the heart. The girl had arranged a defeat for them with every possible outcome. If Ruslan had ignored the attack and successfully helped Lizaveta ca
st, they would have roused Sechaveh’s wrath and lost the confluence. Even now, Lizaveta was left with the choice between losing the confluence and losing the chance to strike down Simon—and that was no choice at all. If Sechaveh was watching for defiance, she dared not touch the sky-stone.
Naavini’s bitter jubilation swelled. The best part is, with Simon alive, you’ll keep right on believing he’s your only real danger. But so long as you keep slaughtering people like cattle, I’m not the only one who’ll seek your death. One day, someone will find your weakness, and you will fall.
The last scraps of her ikilhia slipped away. Lizaveta slumped against the wall, surrendering for a moment to agony and exhaustion.
One day, someone will find your weakness. Lizaveta knew just what that weakness was. Gritting her teeth, she forced aching legs to propel her to Ruslan’s side.
She had failed, but her mage-brother had succeeded. The dagger was gone from Mikail’s chest. His ikilhia was dim but whole, his wounds healed, though he lay sprawled unconscious on his bed. Ruslan sat beside him, head bowed low. The red blaze of his soul had guttered to faint embers. At his feet lay Naavini’s dagger, now nothing more than dead metal, its spellwork gone.
Kiran stared at Naavini’s lifeless body. When Lizaveta picked up the dagger, he caught her sleeve, his blue eyes huge in his tear-streaked face. “Did you really kill her friends? Is that why she wanted to hurt us?”
Ruslan stirred. “A ridiculous lie. Mages are not friends with nathahlen. Did I not tell you, Kiran, that we use criminals as fuel for our casting? No one misses such brutish creatures. This foolish mage was merely jealous of our power. But as you see, she could not match it.”
We nearly died, Lizaveta sent at him, sharp as a stab. Anger beat in her like the wild throb of the confluence. How, how could Ruslan have let his focus lapse? His error had spared them Sechaveh’s wrath, but that wasn’t the point.
She had been so certain her mage-brother would never fail her. Yet tonight, he’d almost killed her.
Ruslan shut his eyes. I won’t ask you to forgive me. My mistake was inexcusable, but it will not happen again. His own fury had crystallized into black determination. Simon will die for this. I no longer care where he hides or what we risk.
It matters to me! We must not lose the confluence. Besides, this was not Simon’s doing. Lizaveta showed him all she’d learned from Naavini. You must control your anger. If Naavini could not have our deaths, she wanted your rage to cripple us.
Ruslan grunted in harsh dismissal. The girl is nothing. Lesser mages and even nathahlen may be cunning, but what does it avail them without power? She could never have touched us without Simon’s help. He is our true enemy.
Yet Lizaveta remembered Naavini’s bitter certainty that another like her would come. Even if Lizaveta found it hard to believe other mages might possess Naavini’s bizarre combination of intellectual genius and irrational attachment to nathahlen.
I too want Simon’s death, she told Ruslan. But we must not let desire for revenge drive us to rash action.
I will not be rash, Ruslan said, each word as hard and cold as glacial ice. Sechaveh will not see my hand. But I will see Simon dead, even if I must risk my own destruction to achieve his.
That was not reassuring. Lizaveta wrestled down anger and worry and set a hand on his shoulder. “Rushenka, you’re exhausted. Go and rest, so you may recover your strength and recast your wards. I’ll watch over the children.”
It was a measure of his depletion that he did not argue. He summoned one last spark of magefire, watched with narrowed eyes as Naavini’s body burned to ash, and stumbled out the door.
Lizaveta’s body cried out for sleep, but her will was adamantine. The pain of her wounded ikilhia was nothing she couldn’t endure. She hugged a sniffling Kiran, soothed his fears, helped him cuddle up beside Mikail and slide into exhausted slumber.
She looked down at the sleeping children, her hand clenched tight on the handle of Naavini’s knife.
The girl had not been mistaken in her assessment of Ruslan. Mikail and Kiran were his weakness, and a terrible one. Lizaveta still shuddered to think how close she had come to dying. This, after centuries without a single moment of fear.
She should kill the boys. Here, now, while Ruslan was so drained he was dead to the aether. She’d make their death quick and clean; she had no desire to see them suffer. She could make it seem as though an accomplice of Naavini’s had come and overpowered her in her injured state. Ruslan would continue to blame Simon, and never think to suspect her. After all, her grief would be real. They were lovely children.
But might the deaths of his akhelyshen shatter Ruslan’s hold on his temper and destroy his judgment? Lizaveta turned the knife over in her hands, torn. Which was the greater risk?
Her mage-brother was a quick study. He might already have learned his lesson. But if he had not...
Still holding the knife, Lizaveta made a silent promise to the boys’ sleeping faces: You will not be his death or mine. Any further glimpses of dangerous weakness in Ruslan, and she would kill, no matter his attachment to the children.
Lizaveta settled into a chair and watched the boys sleep, her eyes burning and her heart hard, until at last Ruslan woke and sent a muzzy thought her way.
Are they safe?
Lizaveta set down the knife. “For now.”
The Tattered Prince and the Demon Veiled
- The Song of the Shattered Sands -
Bradley P. Beaulieu
In the western quarter of the Amber City lies a congested riddle of streets known as the Knot. There, a man named Brama walks, cloaked in the anonymity awarded to men who keep their heads down and their words to themselves. Years ago Brama would have refused to walk these streets, not without due compensation, in any case, and he certainly wouldn’t have called them home. He’d been a street tough then, a rangy gutter wren with the skill of a locksmith and the heart of a thief. He’d been brash, even bold, but no one would have called him brave. He would have laughed at the very thought of the Knot becoming familiar to him, but the wheel turns and times change. Brama is no longer the same man he was then. The young Brama wouldn’t even recognize him.
Truth be told, Brama could live in any quarter of the city he chose, but he calls this hellish place home for one simple reason: the Knot is populated by those who’ve learned to keep to themselves. To be sure, there are wolves as well as sheep. They prowl, preying on the weak, but Brama was never much of a victim, and only a fool would call him one now. If the pattern of scars over his face, neck, and arms aren’t enough to convince, his black-laugher scowl certainly is.
For his part, Brama doesn’t much care what anyone thinks of him as long as they leave him in peace. He exists, whiling away the days, nursing his dwindling fortune, wondering what the city and the desert gods have in store for him. He’s been in the Knot for nearly two years—me along with him—and he’s begun to wonder if the gods have forgotten him.
Surely the gods would not have forgotten a man like Brama, though they may have grown bored of his indolence, which would explain why, on this particular day, instead of heading toward his room above the tannery, Brama breaks his routine and heads down a back alley for the banks of the Haddah. Spring rains have returned to the desert, and the river is swelling. He goes to the place he favored when he was young and watches a group of children playing skipjack. One by one they sprint and leap from the bank onto a canvas held taut by their gleeful friends, bounce into the air, arms and legs flailing, and fall into the surging water below. Some of them he still recognizes, though they’ve clearly grown; others are new. Their laughs and their games make him feel as though he’s passed beyond the veil and now watches the world of the living, his feet forever rooted in the further fields. That’s what his father used to say happened to those who pine for their old lives. And he does pine at times, so much that it hurts.
Sitting in the shade of the embankment, hidden beneath
his cowl, he watches those gutter wrens the whole afternoon. He stands only when the children exit the water, still dripping, ready to depart en masse. How he wishes he could join them. How he wishes he could run the streets as he once did. But that was a different life. And he is now a different man.
As he turns to leave, he spots a girl watching the same group of children, pining, perhaps, as Brama was, for younger, simpler days. The girl is young yet herself. If she’s seen more than fifteen summers, I’m an innocent lamb set for slaughter. Red ribbons are braided through her hair, a common style in the city of late, and she wears the simple clothes of a lowborn Sharakhani girl, but there’s something odd about her. She stands tall, clasping her hands before her as a poet might before reading her lines. It’s unconscious, I’m certain, a tell as plain as one could be.
Perhaps aware of being watched, she turns and takes note of Brama, scans the riverbank and the plaza behind him with chary eyes, then rushes away. Even in this she has the posture and bearing of a noblewoman. But this isn’t the most interesting thing about her—to Brama or to me. It is the fact that, since the moment he spotted her, there were notes of light surrounding her. Like sundogs shining in a cloud-scraped sky, they shimmer, they glimmer. They brighten here and dim there. They move with her like the desert wind summoning demons from the sand as it gusts through Sharakhai’s tight and winding streets.
She glances back several times, but Brama chooses not to follow. He can see she’s scared, and who can blame her? The way Brama looks she’d be a fool not to be a little scared. Then she’s gone, lost down an alley. There’s a strange yearning that follows her absence. A deep desire for...something. Her presence? Foolish, Brama thinks. He doesn’t even know her. But then he wonders...
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 26