By a Thread

by Nyna Queen

  “Ah well, thanks, sugar,” Alex mumbled as she pulled the cloth around her, “I’m afraid my clothes are a mess.”

  “A mess they might be,” Blayde noted with a bow of his head, “and yet you wear them like a queen. But then, I’m most certain, an exceptional lady like you would look most magnificent in almost any kind of … thread.”

  Alex stiffened visibly, and Darken held his breath, but Blayde had already turned his focus to his niece and nephew. They studied him a little warily but didn’t seem overly afraid. He’d thought they would be more intimidated by the black Custodian, but perhaps after all they had been through this day, their capacity to be afraid was finally used up; and then, since he didn’t show any of his own tension, the would see no need to be afraid of him. Which didn’t mean that there was no reason to fear the man.

  “So, the lost little birds have finally returned to their nest.”

  “Bad news travel fast, it seems,” Darken muttered dryly.

  Blayde smiled, showing his teeth. “You know me. I’m a sucker for a good scandal. And there was, plainly spoken, no way around this one.”

  True words.

  Blayde crouched in front of Maxwell and Josepha, leaning slightly forward. “I am Blayde, the Custodian of the Pacified Zone and I assure you that no harm will come upon you as long as you wander inside my boundaries. Tonight, you shall sleep untroubled by worry or fear. You shall be my guests and receive the full scope of my hospitality.”

  “Does that include something to eat?” Max asked hopefully.

  Darken coughed softly, but Blayde just chuckled.

  “You must indeed think me a very poor host, talking and talking while my guests are exhausted … and starving!”

  He winked at Darken and rose. “There will be plenty of food. I don’t want to risk being accused of leaving my guests hungry. Whatever you need—rooms, showers, food—it shall all be provided. How does that sound?”

  Max’s eyes shone like stars.

  “That would be more than welcome,” Darken said.

  “But before we leave …” Blayde raised a hand. “You know the procedure. I must ask you to surrender all your weapons.” He looked at Alex. “It is customary policy that no visitor is allowed to carry any weapons within the borders of the Pacified Zone. Safety procedure. They will be, of course, returned to you upon your departure.”

  Two iron wolves silently stepped forward, presenting a big waterproof bag. Alex looked like she wanted to protest but Darken warningly shook his head at her.

  Pressing her lips together, she stepped forward and started pulling knives from her clothes. It started with her boots, her sleeves, the small of her back … Great Mother, that woman carried more steel on her than a wagon train.

  The last knife clinked into the bag and she stepped back with a sigh.

  “All weapons, Lady,” Blade said mildly.

  She stared at him for a second with big eyes. With a slight grimace, she reached into her pants in a way that made all males around her wince and then held up a small finger knife for all to see.

  “There. Satisfied?”

  Darken arched an eyebrow. “What? No rocket launcher?”

  The spider flipped the knife, pointing the tip at his throat before handing it over to the two stoic iron wolves. “Careful there, sugar. I can kick your sorry ass even without any of my toys.”

  “Found yourself a worthy opponent, eh?” Blayde’s voice rumbled with ill-concealed amusement.

  Avoiding a reply, Darken went to retrieve his own sword, but when he made a move to hand it over, Blayde stopped him with a wave of his fingers. “You may keep your sword this time—as a sign of my goodwill.”

  Darken bowed his head, but also arched his brows. “As a sign of goodwill—or rather to keep a closer eye on me?” He wasn’t quite sure, how they did it, but the iron wolves could trace any weapon inside the wards of the Pacified Zone.

  Blayde laughed softly. “Ah, my friend, if that was the case, I shouldn’t even let you into my peaceful home, don’t you think?”

  And as always Darken did wonder, why he was even allowed to enter the Pacified Zone, taking into account what he was, and what that entailed. All things considered, his sword was likely the least dangerous thing about him. Once asked about it, Blayde’s blunt answer had been: “You should know best that it is not the blade which makes a sword dangerous, but the hand that it guides it.” He didn’t think this was meant to imply that he, the man behind the blade, wasn’t dangerous, but it made him wonder if his welcome would be, indeed, any different, if he ever came in his capacity as a member of the Order.

  “A word of warning to take along,” Blayde said quietly as the weapon bag was closed and carried away. “The use of weapons and any kind of undue violence under my roof is punishable by death or at least lifelong banishment. Just so there will be no misunderstandings. Now, Dariusz here,” he pointed to one of the iron wolves who looked exactly like the mask-hidden rest of them, “will bring you to the hotel.”

  The named man stepped forward and took off his mask, revealing a square face under short, ash blond hair. A stylized purple eye was tattooed between his eyebrows. An augur. Figured. For a guard that fought in dark and dust and that sniffed for hidden weapons it was most convenient to have one of the Seeing Eyes. His own caste wasn’t the only one that was marked so that people knew who—and what—they were dealing with.

  “Bring the Lady and the young ones straight to the restaurant,” Blade instructed him. “Darken and I will have a little chat. And if there is any complaint about their … attire, tell them that these are my personal guests. All their needs shall be seen to. Compris?”

  Dariusz saluted.

  Blayde returned his attention to all of them, yet despite his glasses, Darken had the feeling he was looking straight at Alex.

  “You’re in luck.” His lips parted into a sharp smile. “Tonight, we have steak on the menu.”

  DARKEN watched quietly as Alex, Max, and Josy mounted a procured cross-country style coach and the iron wolf called Dariusz drove them off toward the hotel building indicated in the distance by a spire of tiny lights dotting the darkness like little pins pricked into the dark velvet cushion of the night.

  The other zone guards vanished one by one, melting into the night like ghosts until only he and the Custodian remained.

  “They are all augurs,” Blayde said softly, as if picking up a conversation that had been interrupted a while ago, answering a question he hadn’t asked. Or, perhaps, he had, just not by saying the words out loud.

  Darken weighed that information. Augurs could see visions of the past, the present, and the future and they were extremely perceptive when it came to peoples’ best-guarded secrets. He’d always wondered why their presence made him so wary. Now he knew.

  When the coach had vanished from sight, Blayde picked up one of the torches his men had rammed into the ground and walked over to the nearest corpse. He rolled it over with his foot and squatted beside it.

  A low whistle emanated from him.

  “Now look at that. What have we here?”

  Sliding his discarded glove back on, Darken glided over and knelt on the other side of the body.

  It was the one whose undoing had been Alex’s throwing dagger. It still stuck out his left eye, producing a slow trickle of blood and jelly-like liquid. But it was the other eye that drew Darken’s attention. The cornea had already turned opaque and the conjunctiva was starting to blister and tear.

  Darken grabbed for the man’s wrist and held up his hand, inspecting the fingertips. They were necrotizing too, the skin and flesh peeling in layers already turning black.

  Blayde grunted. “Someone’s been tampering with this little puppy.”

  “That’s a high-grade military decomposition spell,” Darken said thoughtfully. “They are very effective, but also quite expensive.”

  He dropped the hand and wiped his glove at his knee. “They mainly use them on spies and soldiers working a
cross the country border, so that in case they get busted and killed their identification cannot cause a diplomatic incident or an excuse for war. The Order uses them regularly, and a couple of other military branches. However, these spells are connected to the regeneration cycle of the body and they have to be renewed in periodic intervals. See how quickly the tissue is decaying? In a couple of hours there will not be much left of this guy but bloody mush. I’d say this spell isn’t more than one or two months old.”

  Blayde frowned at the dead man. “A soldier?”

  “Maybe,” Darken said, although he had his doubts. “But anyone can buy a spell if he has the right kind of money and leverage.”

  “And knows where to ask the right questions.”

  “Precisely.”

  Military spells, guardaí imposters, fake news. There was something bigger behind this. Something he didn’t yet fully appreciate. But he would. Oh, he would. And if he did …

  Blayde cocked his head to the side, watching him from behind his shaded glasses. “Someone’s got an unhealthy interest in your family and he’s playing with no holds barred.”

  A game. A threat. Darken felt a sweet, gentle, familiar chill running up and down his body. If someone was looking for a killing field, well, he’d make dead sure to provide it. Having an issue with his brother he could understand—making enemies was the price of being high in politics—but dragging the children into this had made this game personal. Very, very personal. And they would soon see that he could be a very passionate player.

  Taking out a miniature recordare memorandi, Darken quickly captured images of the dead body, starting with the man’s eyes and fingers.

  He looked at Blayde. “Ready for the dirty work?”

  The huge black Custodian shuffled his dreads and huffed. “That one never gets old, does it? Oh, well. Let’s do this.”

  Together they stripped the corpse in a practiced routine, scanning the body, taking pictures and samples and going through his clothes.

  They did the same with the other bodies. Or what was left of them. With chilled professional approval, Darken noted the violent efficiency with which the iron wolves had incapacitated the remaining mercenaries; no more slaughter than necessary, but they had made sure that these men wouldn’t rise again.

  All of the men had the same spells in place but some of them were older and worked a little slower. Darken took all their samples, though he wasn’t sure if any of them would be preserved long enough to be of any use. But he knew someone who might be able to identify them even without prints and samples if he provided enough supplementary material. If anyone could do it, then it was him.

  When he reached the last corpse, he spotted something behind his right ear. Using his thumb and forefinger, he turned the man’s head. There was a little tattoo of a dagger piercing the center of a rose. He’d never seen it before, but that was neither here nor there.

  He motioned for Blayde to come over. “Ever seen this symbol?”

  Blayde leaned over and pursed his lips. “No. I haven’t. And it galls me to admit it.”

  Darken almost smiled. Blayde savored information like other people savored the taste of a fine wine and not knowing something never sat well with him.

  He carefully took a memora of the tattoo as well and then stored the recordare in his coat.

  After that he went through the man’s pockets but like with the others there wasn’t much to find: a handful of coins; a muesli-bar; a couple of spare weapons. He stored them all but suspected that they wouldn’t find any fingerprints on them. The nature of the dec-spell was to mask the genetic structure while the person was alive and in case of death to putrefy the whole material. These spells were so expensive because they worked. He’d had the questionable pleasure of using such spells before on certain spy missions that brought him into Tharsis’ borderland and while applying them felt like shaving off a couple of layers of skin, they delivered what they promised.

  In one jacket he found a torn slip of paper with part of a blue logo on it starting with a “T.” Darken had no clue what it was but pocketed it in one of his small transparent bags all the same. In a breadcrumb chase like this, anything could be of vital importance. And if not, well, then he’d just pocketed a piece of rubbish.

  Blayde rocked back onto his haunches, balancing on the balls of his toes and rested his chin in his hands. “What do you want me to do with the corpses? Freeze them up for the law enforcement?”

  Darken considered it for a moment, but then shook his head. Too many secrets. Too many connections.

  The law enforcement was dancing to someone else’s tune and when it came down to it, they already had a handful of conserved bodies stored in the morgue of Bhellidor. He doubted a couple more would enrich the results of their pursuit. If anything, it would give the instigators a chance to detach themselves from these men and prevent that these bodies would lead back to them. And who knew? Maybe being in the dark about the fate of a couple of their mercs would make whoever was behind this sweat enough that he made a mistake and thereby invited himself to a feast at Darkens. And he would make sure to be a very accommodating host.

  A cold, vicious smile curved his lips as he turned to Blayde, and he knew that his eyes were glowing with a deadly promise. “Do you still have your dogs?”

  Blayde’s smile was just as vicious. “Oh, I do. And they always appreciate a little extra treat.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ALEX reached for her hotel room door, just when Darken stepped out of the adjoining room and gently closed the door behind him.

  Ah, shit!

  After that Dariusz guy had driven them up to the huge hotel tower building that rose behind the hills in the distance, they’d been given the chance for a quick, superficial clean up in the hotel’s ground floor bathroom, before he’d guided them right into an extremely noble restaurant area, all folded satin napkins, shiny silverware, and oversized wineglasses.

  After a short—and slightly heated—discussion with the head waiter, they were assigned a private compartment; less for their convenience, she guessed, and more so that their attire wouldn’t spoil everybody else’s appetite. Not that she minded. A bit of privacy was most welcome, especially since their clothes were still dirty and bloody and, let’s face it, they reeked like troopers after an all-nighter.

  Darken joined them a short while later, appearing slightly irate.

  Since at some point Max was in serious danger of falling asleep at the table and dropping headfirst into his mashed potatoes, Darken had decided it was time for bed and insisted on bringing his niece and nephew up to their suite of rooms, while Alex had stayed and finished her steak—why, it was an exquisite piece, grilled just to the point: medium with a strong tendency to raw, exactly the way she liked it. Who knew when she’d get such prime food again?

  Afterward, and with many compliments to the chef, she’d ridden the full-glass elevator right up to the top floor, groggy and more than ready for a hot shower and a hat full of sleep.

  She wouldn’t have minded slipping past Darken, but it seemed the day wasn’t quite done with her yet.

  Turning around, Darken froze with his hand still on the doorknob, looking quite as unprepared for her presence as she felt for his.

  Alex nodded her head to the closed door behind him. “Kids asleep?”

  “Dead to the world.” A ghost of a smile played around his lips, despite the tiredness shadowing his eyes. “They practically fell asleep before their heads even touched their pillows.” He leaned forward a little, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Plus, there’s also a mild sedation spell circle around that room, though I’d appreciate it if you kept that little bit of information to yourself. I don’t want them to think that I baby them too much.”

  Heh! Afraid that someone might find out that the dead cold forfeit had a soft core beneath all that armor of fire? Well, they weren’t too different in that regard, he and she.

  “My lips are sealed.” Alex wink
ed and made a zipping motion with her hand along her lips, pretending to lock them.

  Her eyes wandered past him to the door, and she felt the strong urge to step in and make sure for herself that the kids really were okay. Which was ridiculous, of course. Apparently, they were as safe as they could be at the moment. And it wasn’t her business to be concerned about their well-being in the first place. She wasn’t their … anything, actually. Just a stray shaper who had accidentally popped up in their lives and managed to save them. A couple of times. Well, alright, that gave her some entitlement to be worried, didn't it?

  Alex realized that Darken was studying her carefully, as if he was trying to decipher what was going on inside her mind and she quickly looked away, giving their surroundings some critical scrutiny.

  Hhmm, let’s see: Gleaming cream marble floors inlaid with dark brown; silky wallpapers in white and anthracite with tasteful accents of maroon; modern lamps in frosted glass spheres; champagne bottles waiting on small, elegant tables …

  This place was like from the other side—the side of the society that was usually barred for her due to her disgraceful birth.

  Inspection finished she found Darken’s eyes still on her, regarding her with an odd, intense expression.

  They looked at each other. A strange kind of silence stretched between them. It made her realize that, for the first time since they had met, they were truly alone—if you didn’t count their brief excursion to Gomorrha’s wall.

  A trickle of a shiver went over her, and she swallowed, suddenly nervous. Why in the Jester’s name would she be nervous?

  Sticking her hand into her pocket, she fumbled for the keycard, wanting to get into her room as quickly as possible.

  Darken didn’t move.

  Her groping fingers grasped the card and she held it up, flicking the fingers of her other hand against it.

  “My time for the shower, I guess.” Why did she sound so breathless? She hadn’t even taken the stairs. “Before they send up the cleaning crew to see what’s that smell.”