Changes v(cc-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Mags stared at him as a plan, fully formed, exploded in his head.

  “. . . Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “ ’Cause Lena’d get mad at me if I kissed ye. Lissen—”

  He explained the whole thing. Lena and Bear listened, skeptically at first, then their eyes got bigger and bigger until he finished.

  “Now,” he demanded. “Poke holes in’t. Tell me what ain’t gonna work.”

  The two of them looked at each other. “I... can’t think of anything,” Bear said, finally. “Well, other than the fact you might get killed... that’s certainly a drawback.”

  “I’m countin’ on thet they seem t’ want me kickin’,” he pointed out. “So ’less they figger out what I’m doin’—or they change their minds—”

  “Or you misread them entirely,” Lena put in, her eyes round and a little tearful. “And they’ll just kill you!”

  He shrugged, with an indifference he didn’t feel. “They had a chance and didn’—”

  “That was once,” Lena pointed out. “The second time, they threw a huge great piece of wood at you when you were going at a full gallop! If you hadn’t been a Heraldic Trainee, and on Dallen, and had all that training, the weapons work and the Kirball stuff—”

  “Gotta chance it.” That pretty much summed it up.

  Bear took a long, deep breath. “All right then, do we split up, go gather all the Trainees, find that cousin, explain this to everyone, and—”

  Mags snorted. “ ’Ell we do. I may be crazy, but I ain’t thet crazy.” He squared his shoulders. “No. Now I go talk t’King an’ Nikolas an’ th’ Heir an who-the-’ell else is there an let them poke holes innit. Then iffen they like it, it’ll hev more’n a ghost of a chance.”

  ::Gennie, tell ’em I’m comin’,:: he said, gesturing to Lena and Bear and pulling open the door to the little Palace room where they’d been left to think. ::I gotta ideer.::

  Chapter 20

  They’d narrowed the spot where the Karsite agents had to be hiding down to a block—and it was pretty clear that there was something drastically wrong the closer they got. It was a middling sort of area, with a mix of cheap shops and houses on the outskirts of Haven. Not the sort of bad neighborhood like the one where Nikolas kept his shop, but shabby and populated by common laborers, the sort of place where you could have a pig or some chickens or even a cow in the yard and the neighbors wouldn’t complain because they had the same. You wouldn’t notice noise here, not even screaming, because the children were shrieking and babies crying all the time. But there were signs of trouble all the way there: broken shutters, a cart with a wheel off and people fighting over putting the wheel on, arguments everywhere you looked;. And the closer you got to that designated block, the more often the arguments had escalated into fistfights. Even the children weren’t playing; they were chasing each other with mayhem in mind or rolling in the street, squalling and tearing each other’s hair. Mags got a wide berth, though, because he was wearing Whites. Whites, and not Grays, for two reasons. The first, that the full Heraldic uniform gave him a little more protection from the altercations around him,and would give him a little more respect as he worked his way around the block. The second—

  Whites made him stand out here and would make him a very visible moving target.

  He worked his way from door to door, shop to home, exerting himself to form every word correctly, so he didn’t sound like someone easily dismissed. There was no trace of his accent in his speech, and he held himself as tall and straight as he could, copying, as well as he could, the Captain of the King’s Guard. Everyone answered him; the uniform got him that. They might snarl, or eye him belligerently, or look as if they would like to insult or even hit him, but they answered when he showed them Ice and Stone’s portraits and asked, “Have you seen these men hereabouts?”

  They were good likenesses. The same Herald who was going to help Bear with his bone model had made it, taking Mags’ memories and turning them into a double portrait. She was the one who worked for the City Guard and Constables, taking the images of criminals out of victims’ minds and drawing them. And Mags figured that the two men would probably have someone other than themselves answering the door—that Healer, provided they had the man sufficiently cowed to be trusted to do so, or someone they’d hired to run their errands, so they didn’t have to leave Amily. Every time he showed the picture, he was watching for the flash of recognition before a blanket denial; when he got it, then, following the plan, he would walk away and wait for them to go for the bait. Their door watcher would certainly go tell them that here was a Herald looking for them, and they would come out to deal with him. There would be a few moments before Ice and Stone realized who he was and went for a pursuit rather than just murdering him where he stood; those moments, he reckoned, were going to be the ones of highest risk. He had steeled himself for them. He was going to have to be... well... very, very good at dodging for what he hoped would be a very short period of time... .

  So when he knocked on another nondescript door and started to go into his speech, then looked up into the face of Stone himself, there was a single moment of mutual paralysis.

  The word he was going to say came out in a squeak, and he was certain that he was going to die, right then, right there.

  But he broke the spell first. And now, the long hours he had spent mentally rehearsing this plan, over, and over, and over, gave him the reactions of a ferret and put wings on his heels. He ducked, whirled, and ran.

  Stone’s grasping hands met on air. Mags was already gone. But not running down the street, oh, no. He’d already scouted his path: a dash to the opposite side of the street, up a rainbarrel, swarm up the drainpipe, and up onto the roof.

  Pause. Look back . . .

  Stone was just about to the barrel. Ice was three paces behind him.

  Holy... They were fast!

  Now it was fear putting wings on his heels. He couldn’t yet judge how quick they would be over the rooftops, where he had the advantage of being light. He had to keep them engaged in the chase and not thinking of anything else. No matter what happened, he had to keep them running after him long enough for Nikolas, Sedric, and a group of hand-picked Heralds and Guards to storm the house, take down any opposition, and get Amily out of there.

  That meant he had to stay just frustratingly out of reach. And he had to do it without being able to read their level of frustration.

  He scrambled over the rooftree, took a couple running steps down the other side, and leaped for the next house. He kept his breathing and his pace even—timing his breaths with his acrobatics. He could not afford to get winded. This one had a bit of flat roof, enough to make a good landing platform; his landing was solid, and he scrambled up the next roof using hands and feet. He didn’t have to look back now, he could hear them, hear their feet on the thatch, since most of the buildings here had thatched roofs.

  His heart was absolutely pounding—and if he hadn’t been able to hear them, he would never have known that they were there at all; they were completely “invisible” to his mind.

  A tiny sound behind him was all the warning he had that one of them was about to try something.

  He took a gamble and leaped sideways, hit the thatch on his shoulder, rolled down to the very edge of the roof, timing the roll so that his feet were under him when he got there and made a huge leap out into thin air—

  But he knew where he was, and his hands closed on a bar that had once supported a sign. He swung on it twice, then kicked for the balcony farther along the wall. Nothing fancy, and he barely made the catch, but make it he did, and he was off again, using a stanchion to get back up to the roof.

  There were still behind him, but he’d gotten a little breathing room.

  Then movement in the corner of his eye warned him something was going on. He risked a glance. Ice was on the next roof over, a flat one that was easier to run on, using that fact to get ahead of him.

  Aight. Two c
an play thet.

  He swerved toward the other roof, the very one that Ice was about to leave; Ice was so intent on getting ahead of him that he didn’t notice what Mags was doing. He made a leap for the next roof to intercept Mags—

  —except that Mags was leaping for the roof he had just vacated, landing and sprinting back in the direction he had just come from. Doubling back threw both of the men off; by the time they recovered, Mags was two roofs ahead.

  Now he took just a moment to get a good look at them, and guage their intentions.

  Without stopping, of course.

  He leaped for the next roof, landed and rolled. Looked over his shoulder as he sprinted for the next.

  Still comin’—

  This one would be a two-footed landing and an upslope scramble. He got a second look as he crested the ridgeline before he slid down the other side.

  No weapons. No obvious ones, anyway. Probably knives somewhere on them, but they weren’t going to throw knives at him on a run like this, even if they did want him dead. Odds were he’d dodge it under circumstances like this one, no matter how good they were, and no one with any sense throws his weapon away, even if he has a second or a third.

  Well... thet’s—

  ::Mags!:: Dallen called. ::They have her! She’s safe!::

  That was possibly the best thing he had heard in a year.

  And that meant he was free now to go to the next—and far more risky—part of his plan.

  He angled his flight so that Stone got a chance to cut him off; he skidded to a halt on the edge of his roof, stared for a heartbeat, then dashed between them and hurtled over the side.

  There were balconies there; he caught the railing of the highest, got his feet on it, bounced off, and let go. Caught the railing of the second, bounced off. Let go. Dropped down to the street, rolled to break his fall, and ran like a scorched stoat back in the direction he had come from.

  This was a big risk. He knew they could run faster than he could on a flat and level surface. He just had to hope that they would take enough time getting down from the roof that they wouldn’t be able to catch him.

  He had to be street level for this. So did they. He could not risk them getting even a glimpse of what waited for them.

  Just before he reached the square in front of the house they had taken, Dallen dashed out of a side street, decked out in his Kirball gear. Mags grabbed the saddle on the run, jumped, and bounced into it. And as the two of them turned on a penny-bit to face the two Karsite agents, he was in fantastic position to see their faces as they skidded to a halt and saw what was waiting for them.

  All of the members of the four Kirball teams. All wearing Whites.

  All wearing his face.

  Now pick a target t’kill, ye bastards.

  Corwin’s cousin, the illusion-making Herald, was out here somewhere. When Mags had asked, “If we’re dressed alike, kin ye make some’un look like me?” the cousin had snorted and asked “How many?”

  Because there would have been the chance that, when they realized they were trapped, Ice and Stone would go for a kill. But not if they couldn’t tell which of their captors was the one they’d been told to capture.

  The shock froze them long enough for the Heralds and Guards who had rescued Amily—all but Nikolas and Sedric—to close their escape route behind them.

  Their street-level escape-route—

  Mags saw what was coming in the tensing of their muscles and the sudden flick of their eyes to the right.

  Then they moved impossibly fast. They had dashed across the square and were halfway up a building before anyone had a chance to move.

  But Gennie screamed out the signal. “Mags! Pip!”

  Because he’d planned for this too. These men were no good to them dead, and since those shields prevented Mind-magic from striking them unconscious, there was only one nonlethal way to take them down. His hand was already on the Kirball stick as the Fetcher-boosted-and guided ball came screaming at him from the side.

  Now he let out every bit of his fury at these bastards and stood up in the stirrups and smacked the ball with every bit of strength he had.

  Pip’s ball wasn’t going quite as fast, so Mag’s ball—still being guided by one of the Fetchers from the other teams—hit Stone in the back hard enough to momentarily paralyze him. He dropped off the building like the stone Mags had named him for, with Ice falling a moment later.

  They hit the ground and were swarmed by Heralds and Guardsmen.

  Mags jumped off Dallen’s back and ran for them. By the time he got there, they were trussed hand and foot with so many separate bindings that you could scarcely see their clothing.

  It was over. It was finally over. Now he would have his answers. Now they would all have their answers.

  He pushed his way in to stand next to Stone, who glared up at him, the black eyes still opaque, still unreadable.

  “We know who sent ye,” he said, with quiet menace in his voice. “An’ we know why. What we don’t know—what I don’t know—is why me? Why’d ye come after me? I ain’t anythin’ but good at a game.”

  Stone stared at him, face impassive. And then, suddenly, his expression changed—from impassive to resigned.

  What?

  Mags sensed the shields stir; sensed them—poise to strike! Dallen threw his strength between the shields and Mags, but Mags knew that he wasn’t the target—

  He had no time to do anything but fling himself on Stone, frantically tearing at the man’s garments in a futile effort to find that talisman before—

  —Stone’s eyes rolled up into his head as the shield contracted suddenly, viciously, around his mind, like a hand crushing a grape—

  —it was too late.

  Stone just... snuffed out, heart and breathing stopping immediately as his mind vanished. Ice followed a heartbeat later.

  —And they were left with two rapidly cooling bodies, far too many questions, and no answers for any of them.

  EPILOGUE

  “Heyla,” Mags said softly, as Amily’s eyelids fluttered, and she finally woke up.

  She smiled up at him. “Heyla,” she said. “Is it good news or not so good news?”

  “ ’Tis all good,” he said, sitting down at her bedside and taking her hand in his. “Ever’thin’ went jest like Bear wanted. ’E says not t’worry thet ye cain’t feel nothin’. One’a th’ others figgered out how t’shut some pain stuff off fer a liddle so’s ye kin git some sleep. He says ’tis better nor givin’ ye Bear’s nasty drinks.”

  She just smiled sleepily, then her eyelids drifted shut.

  Mags continued to hold her hand, savoring the momentary peace. Nikolas had already looked in on his daughter, and been satisfied, and everyone else seemed to have agreed to leave Mags alone with her for a while.

  And Mags was not particularly eager to leave.

  Outside this room, there was more activity going on than the Palace had seen in quite some time. Mags knew about only part of it, and not a huge part, either.

  Marchand was already on his way to a permanent assignment as the Bard and Chronicler for a Guard Headquarters at the Iftel Border. He was never to be allowed to leave—under house arrest for the rest of his life. Lita had wanted to burn his Gift out and send him to real imprisonment, but Truth Spell wielded ruthlessly could not prove him to be anything worse than foolish and greedy. Cuburn was on his way to a similar fate, as the permanent Healer-in-residence to prisoners at Greyscarp Prison. He was never to be allowed to leave either, and the only difference between him and the prisoners he cared for would be that there were no bars on his windows.

  Security at the Palace and Collegia—well, it was not going to be anything like the same. Someone had sent down to the Ambassador to the Shin’a’in to try to find out if they had ever heard of anyone who was at all like Ice and Stone. If the little hints that Mags had picked up were even remotely true, there were sleeper-agents of their own on the Karsite side who were going to be activated with
the sole purpose of discovering how the Karsites had found these men, and perhaps where they came from.

  The bodies had been carefully preserved and were going to be delivered to a Karsite border post—a very unsubtle message that the best that Karse could send was no match for the people of Valdemar.

  Sedric had been assigned to study the stone, because no one had ever guessed it was semialive. That was fine with Mags; if he never had to “talk” to it again, it would be too soon.

  Working on the assumption that it was only a matter of time before more of these mysterious assassins turned up in Haven, pretty much everyone had decided that getting Amily ambulatory and trained to defend herself should be a priority right along with reinforcing Palace security. So Bear and his team had gone into intense and detailed practice—so much so that the actual work on her leg turned out to be anticlimactic. Everything had gone well; the result was everything anyone could have wanted.