by Gail Dayton
Just after sunset, they were on the road bound for the railhead at Nagy Szeben. They stopped when the full moon was at its zenith to catch a few hours of sleep. Amanusa slept. Jax stood watch. He slept when they caught a ride with a market-bound farmer and his aromatic wagonload of onions the next morning. The next night, they both slept, figuring it far enough from the mountain hideout. But when they reached the town, they discovered rumors ran on faster feet than theirs.
The sun was just tucking itself behind the mountain peaks when they reached the outskirts of Nagy Szeben, though Amanusa was certain it had been at least an eternity since noon and the last of their hurriedly collected foodstuff. But they hadn’t quite got into town proper when she gasped and ducked into the shadowed gap between two houses. Crow fluttered into a tree nearby and cawed a query.
Jax took another moment to realize where she’d gone and to follow. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him out of sight beside her.
“What’s wr—”
She cut him off with a hiss, then whispered “Look,” and pointed.
There, stalking down the center of the rutted dirt street as if he owned it and all he surveyed, was an Inquisitor. Which meant that though he might not actually own the street, he could do as he liked with it.
He could enter any building, destroy any property, slaughter any animal, arrest any person, all in his quest to root out illicit magic.
“Who is he?” Jax whispered back, catching at least a bit of her urgency.
“An Inquisitor.” Amanusa wanted to shake him for his ignorance. Didn’t he know anything?
“How do you know?”
“Look at him. He’s all in black, even his shirt and neck cloth. And he’s got the red badge on his coat. And a cockade in his hat.”
It was the bright red-feathered badge stuck jauntily to the brim of his shiny top hat that made Amanusa’s blood run cold. It meant the man was Inquisitor Plenipotentiary, a leader among the howling pack.
“That doesn’t mean he’s necessarily looking for you. If you behave suspiciously, they will suspect you. Act as if you have nothing to hide and they will see an honest citizen.” He scrutinized her from head to foot and glanced down at himself, then handed her the blanket-wrapped bundle. “I am afraid we can do nothing about the bruises on your face, and until I can tap your funds, we can’t do anything about your clothing. I recommend we trade roles. No one looks at servants. I will keep everyone looking at me, and no one will notice you.”
“B-but-you don’t speak Romanian.” Amanusa liked the idea of hiding behind Jax so much, there had to be something wrong with it. It was, at the least, cowardice.
Jax grinned at her. “All the better. I’ll be the mad Englishman on a world tour, with a local to translate for me.”
“But if I’m supposed to translate, won’t that make me noticed?”
“Hmm—you’re right. So you’ll be mute. Just carry the bundle, follow my lead, and we’ll breeze right past the nasty chap.”
Jax stepped out of the shadows and made a show of studying the flowers planted around the house in an attempt to brighten its raw, unpainted wood construction.
“Lilium variegata,” he said in a plummy voice. “Not that you understand, of course. Don’t know why I’m bothering. Education just rolls off a woman, you know. Like water off ducks. Useless. Well, I suppose some of it might soak in. Women do read, after all. But the things they read…”
He nattered on about the various flora they encountered as they continued down the road, disparaging the value of female education and making up Latin nomenclature. Amanusa knew he made it up because she knew some of the proper names. Jax sauntered past the deadly blade that was the Inquisitor. Amanusa kept to his shadow.
“Halt.” The Inquisitor’s voice sent horror racing down Amanusa’s spine and back up again.
Jax ignored him, strolling on as if he hadn’t a thing to fear. Or as if he didn’t understand Romanian.
“You!” The Inquisitor took two strides and caught Jax’s arm, hauling him around. “I said stop.”
“I say—” Jax removed his arm from the other man’s grip. “There’s no need to accost me like that. You only had to speak civilly to me. Talk sense, my good man. You can’t possibly expect me to speak the sort of gibberish the locals go in for.”
Amanusa had to stifle a sudden urge to giggle. It diluted her terror, but made it more difficult to play the stolid, beaten-down peasant.
The Inquisitor tried again, speaking another language. One Amanusa didn’t know. French, perhaps. It sounded rather nasal. Then he tried German, which Amanusa understood, and Hungarian, which she didn’t.
“Look, it’s no use speaking anything but English,” Jax said, putting on impatience. “Another sort of gibberish is still just gibberish. You’ll have to speak a proper language if you want to talk to me. Now if you’ll excuse me?” He touched his forehead in a substitute for tipping the hat he didn’t have and turned to walk away.
“You—” The black-clad menace pointed at Jax, driven to hand-gestures as well. “Come.” He beckoned, then made walking feet of his fingers. “With me.” The Inquisitor pushed Jax ahead of him.
Amanusa trailed behind as they marched down the street, Jax being propelled with the occasional shove. Crow followed too, a silent black presence flying from tree to tree, lamppost to lamppost along their path.
The Inquisitor marched along, ignoring Jax’s endless flow of words. The tone of Jax’s speech sounded as if he protested his detention, but the words were instructions for Amanusa, telling her how and where she should run.
She wanted to. Desperately. She longed to run away and hide until the danger was past. But she feared the danger would never be past, not as long as she remained near the mountains where Dragos Szabo—and the Inquisition—could find her.
Nor could she abandon Jax. He had given her the tools to achieve the justice she’d hungered for for so long. And when the magic had blown up in her face, due to her own mistakes, he’d rescued her. He had carried her for miles on his back. Leaving him in the hands of the Inquisition would turn her into the person she’d sworn never to become. The kind of person everyone believed a sorceress to be.
Besides, she was certain the Inquisitor knew exactly where she was, and if she didn’t come along, he would make certain she did. In ways she wouldn’t like.
Their little processional drew attention, gathering folks along the edges of the streets and on the sidewalks when sidewalks appeared, but they followed only with their eyes. Amanusa could read in all those watching eyes the relief that it was not them marching to the center of town under control of the Inquisitor Plenipotentiary. She was just glad that most everyone’s eyes focused on Jax in his splendid leather overcoat and scuffed kneeboots, skimming over her modest self with her bruised face and shapeless, drab, brown dress.
The Inquisitor took them to the center of town and marched them up the steps of the brand new city hall with its high, pointed towers, into a plain room at the back. A rawboned boy—surely he could not be so old as twenty—with an Inquisitor’s patch on the sleeve of his uniform coat, jerked to his feet from the small table against one wall where he’d been industriously writing, surprised by their entry.
“Go and get Captain Janos,” the Chief Inquisitor snarled. “The man speaks English, I believe.”
“Yes, Inquisitor Kazaryk.” The boy bobbed his head and hurried off, tripping over two chairs and a table leg before he got out the door, leaving his superior muttering darkly about “hinterlands,” “idiot apprentices,” “allocation of manpower” and other things Amanusa couldn’t quite make out.
Then they waited. Inquisitor Kazaryk entertained himself by looking over the reports the apprentice had been writing. Jax paced, tossing out the occasional protest as if he thought he needed to keep his hand in, and scowling darkly at Amanusa every time he passed her. Amanusa stood in a corner near the door and tried to think herself small and unnoticeable.
She didn’t ge
t any smaller, but she thought she might be getting somewhere with the “unnoticeable” part, for when the youth returned with Captain Janos, a man just as lean, dark, and intense as Kazaryk, but taller, the pair of them scarcely glanced at her.
“I need your translation skills, Captain,” Kazaryk stated. “This man speaks only English, and while I speak five languages besides, of course, Romanian and Hungarian, I do not speak English. I am told that you do.”
The captain clicked his heels and gave a little bow, studying Jax with frank curiosity. “Do you suspect him of conspiring with the anarchists?”
“I do not care.” Kazaryk ground the words out between his teeth. “I am not hunting for anarchists. They are all dead, save for a few stragglers and women—”
“Dragos Szabo escaped.” .
Kazaryk ignored the interruption. “I am after the criminal magician who murdered them! Who knows where she has gone? Who knows what harm she might be doing, who she might be killing right this minute? The power she obtained from so many deaths—”
The deaths hadn’t given any power at all, Amanusa thought, staying absolutely still in her corner. It made her nervous, the Inquisitor thinking that. What might the idea make him do?
“Yes, of course, Inquisitor,” Janos was saying with another, more respectful bow.
The Inquisitor gestured at Jax. “Now, if you would be so good, please ask this… gentleman … to be seated, and to identify himself and explain his reason for being in this town.”
Jax sat in the hard, spindle-backed chair Kazaryk placed in the center of the room. He planted his feet spread wide, hands on his thighs with elbows out, taking possession of the space in as arrogant a fashion as possible. He displayed nothing but confidence and disdain for the others’ petty concerns.
Under questioning, Jax spun fables out of nothing, telling stories of workshops and weavers in towns with names too foreign for him to pronounce, much less recall. He had no business cards or paperwork from these places because none of their products or proposals had appealed, and he’d tossed everything away. Of course he couldn’t remember the names of the men he’d met—they all had ridiculous, outlandish names like Kazaryk and Janos. Nothing sensible like Tottenham or Burke.
His answers to their questions remained just plausible enough to be believable and just vague enough to keep them from tripping him up with details. Amanusa marveled at his ability to keep it all straight.
“What else do you want to ask?” Janos asked Kazaryk, dropping wearily into another chair.
It was late. Amanusa didn’t know how late, but very. She was hungrier than she’d been when they reached town. Her feet hurt and her knees ached and she wanted to sit down. On the floor in her corner would do nicely, but she was afraid that any motion would bring the predators in the room whirling to pounce on her. She tightened and relaxed her sore muscles, hoping for relief, but it didn’t help much. , “I begin to believe he is exactly what he appears,” Janos went on. “A stupid, arrogant English businessman who sees only what is beneath his nose, and then only if it is of personal interest to him.”
Jax looked tired, but less so than the two officials. His days’ beard gave his jaw a ruddy shadow. The Hungarians just looked dirty, with their black beards growing in.
Kazaryk the Inquisitor smoothed finger and thumb across his luxuriant oiled mustache. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. I am not convinced to let him go. Not until every stone has been overturned. To search for magic, one must use magic.”
He pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat and flicked it open to check the time. He snapped it shut with a satisfied nod. “It lacks only ten minutes to midnight. Just enough time to prepare.”
Chapter 8
Prepare for what? Amanusa could see her alarm echoed in the tiny jerk of the military captain’s head as Kazaryk called his apprentice back into the nearly empty room. Jax appeared just as relaxed and arrogant as before, but the taut flex of his hands where they rested on his knees betrayed his worry.
The apprentice bustled around, moving the remaining chairs to the far corners of the room, and sliding the table out from under a window. Then he proceeded to chalk a large pentagram with a circle around it on the floor at the end of the room nearest the door, another circle around Jax’s chair, and various runes and sigils Amanusa didn’t know in other places. He ignored Amanusa and the converted medicine case completely, as if they were invisible, or additional furniture.
They hadn’t opened the wooden box, or even asked what it contained, although the contents of Jax’s pockets lay spread on the table no longer under the window—three crystalline rocks, two lengths of string, a small pearl-sided pocket knife, an empty wallet, a ragged handkerchief, and five coins—two Bulgarian, two Russian, one Turkish. Perhaps, being the sorceress, her “I’m not really here” thoughts were turning the officers’ attention aside. If it was a spell, she shouldn’t have left Jax out of it. She should have thought of it sooner.
The boy chalked one last symbol over the window where the table had been, and hurried to join Kazaryk and Janos in the pentagram, too near Amanusa for her comfort. She took the chance provided by their movement to slide down the wall until she crouched cowering in the corner. Jax finally appeared apprehensive as he sat in his chair in the center of its chalk circle.
Kazaryk began to chant what sounded to Amanusa like nonsense words, but could have been Latin. Maybe with some Turkish mixed in. Or Greek. She looked up at Jax and found him looking back at her. Their gazes locked, held for a long moment, then he closed his eyes and let his head fall back. Amanusa hid her face behind her updrawn knees and wrapped her arms around her head.
She wished she’d been able to wrap some protective magic around the both of them, but there hadn’t been time. And she didn’t know any protective magic. She knew healing spells for after the harm was done, and she knew warding spells to keep people out, turn away their attention. She knew nothing that would protect from physical harm. Did blood magic even have those sorts of spells?
And if she had the spells and used them, could the Inquisitor conjure up some way to sniff them out? She’d thought from the first that the man was a conjurer. This confirmed it. Most conjurers couldn’t work magic ‘til after midnight. Or so Amanusa had been taught.
She could be as wrong about that as she’d been about sorcery. But since the Inquisitor waited until the clock in the tower across the square began to chime the hour before beginning his spell, she figured that much was truth.
Most Inquisitors were conjurers. She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because the spirits they controlled could snoop and spy into hidden places. Or because the time they spent communing with and controlling spirits separated them from ordinary human emotions. Kazaryk was as cold and emotionless a specimen as she’d ever seen. But that might be because he was an Inquisitor, not because he was a conjurer. He was the first magician she’d met with any real power. Szabo’s pet conjurer didn’t count.
Amanusa felt a faint presence, a whisper of magic across her thoughts. She clamped her arms tighter around herself, squeezing her eyes shut and whispering, “Don’t see me, don’t see me,” over and over again, too quietly for Janos, Kazaryk, or his apprentice to hear. She hoped.
Kazaryk cried out in surprise and triumph. Alarmed, Amanusa cracked an eye open and peered out beneath her left elbow. A bright blue glow wrapped around Jax, intensifying like a halo around his head… and at his groin. Amanusa felt a blush rising. Thank goodness no one was looking at her. The box containing the machine creature also glowed, but an amber gold rather than blue, and not nearly as bright.
Did the different colors denote different spells, or the different person who had worked them? Amanusa assumed the blue glowed brighter in those areas of Jax’s body because that was where the binding affected him most—in his mind where Yvaine had deposited her storehouse of knowledge, and in his manhood where she’d stolen it away.
The Inquisitor suddenly slumped against his apprentice, panting and sweat
ing as if he’d just pushed a boulder up a very steep hill. The apprentice appeared to be expecting it, for he was braced and ready to catch the older man.
“What does it m-mean?” Janos stammered, staring in obvious awe and more than a little fear. “That glow?”
“Fetch the master a chair!” the apprentice snapped.
The captain hesitated, looking warily around the room. The nearest chair was just out of reach, outside the pentagram where the three men were crowded together.
“The spirit is gone,” the boy said scornfully. “A chair!”
“The glow,” Kazaryk gasped out when the chair had been brought and he was lowered into it, “means that the man and the wooden case have both been bespelled.”
Amanusa unwrapped herself enough to examine her own definitely not-glowing hands and arms. Why didn’t she glow too? Because she was the worker of the spells and not the one bespelled? Or because conjury and sorcery didn’t mix? Maybe the conjurer’s spirit-servant wasn’t powerful enough to see past her warding thoughts.
“It is obvious now,” Kazaryk was saying, no longer gasping, though his voice was still weak. “The case had to have been bespelled, or we would already have searched it. Ask him what is in it.”
“Nothing you’d be interested in.” Jax set his jaw when he replied to the captain’s translation. “Machinery.”
“Open it.” Kazaryk flicked a finger at the box.
Captain Janos was the one who moved, still rolling his eyes as if searching for spirits. He paused before touching the box. “Will the glow—?”
“It is harmless. Merely a visual marking of magical workings inside this room. And look. Already it fades.” With the help of his apprentice, Kazaryk sat up straighter. “Open it.”
Jax glowered when Janos knelt beside it. “That’s private property,” he said. “My property.”