By a Thread

by Nyna Queen

  When he’d moved, she’d snuggled closer to him in her sleep. It had caused the blanket to slip from her shoulder and that’s when he’d seen the dark hand-shaped bruises on her upper arm. He didn’t need to match his hand to it to know it was a perfect fit.

  The sight had provoked a heated uproar inside him, a subtle fear tingling along his nerves. He couldn’t recall it, but he had hurt her. What else had he done that he couldn’t remember? Had she stayed with him because he had prevented her from leaving?

  Deeply unsettled, he had fled out onto the balcony of the suite. The fresh morning air and the rising sun had cleared away the remaining shreds of mist, helping him defog the tangled mess of images clotting his memory. Slowly the pieces linked together in his mind.

  He relaxed a little. Apart from the moment he had pressed Alex against the wall, there was nothing in there that suggested that he had forced her into anything she hadn’t wanted to do. Quite the contrary.

  Feeling a soft pull, he’d turned and found Alex watching him from the bed, halfway covered by the sheets. Her body formed suggestive mounds under the blanket and her hair spilled over her naked shoulder in a golden waterfall. She looked sexy and beautiful and so erotic it took his breath away. Everything inside him tightened with need and desire.

  He thought he read admiration in her gaze, maybe even lust, so he walked over, slightly wary, not sure what kind of response he had to expect.

  Stopped. Waited.

  A word. A hint. In that moment he would have taken anything as an invitation. But she said nothing, and uncertainty flashed over her face. She looked … nervous, almost shy. Alex was rarely nervous. And she was never shy. Which made him wonder, if he had, after all, crossed some invisible line last night, he couldn’t remember.

  But before he could ask the question he didn’t know he wanted an answer to, his niece and nephew had barged in and there was no way to discuss this matter in their presence, not when he wasn’t sure himself, what those answers might reveal. Also, they had to deal with enough than to cope with the growing sexual tension heating up the room.

  Yet, when he tried to smooth out the currents, offering Alex some coffee, hoping to get some indication of her mood, she had turned back into the unapproachable snow queen, showing him the cold shoulder.

  Why? he wondered. Was his memory tricking him? Was she hurt after all? Was she just hiding it, too proud to admit to it? Or was she afraid of him now?

  Whatever it was, he knew he had done something wrong. And it was killing him that he didn’t know what it was.

  Darken reached the top of the stairs and closed those thoughts away for the moment. If he hoped to get some answers, he’d need his wits together right now.

  The main doors opened into a rounded entrance hall. After the bright sunlight outside, the inside seemed almost dark, dipped in cool, soft shades that clung to the smooth, heavy stones. Stairs on both sides wound up to a rotunda-gallery that circled around the whole entrance hall on the second level. To his left and right hallways protruded deeper into the building. Streams of light filtered through the high, arched windows, that some architect genius had arranged in a way that no matter how the sun stood, its rays would always illuminate the symbol in the middle of the dark stone floor, the arcane glyph for knowledge inlaid with mother of pearl, so that it glowed as if activated by magic.

  The back wall above the stairs showed an enormous relief made up entirely from darkness and light: the naked bodies of a male and a female entwined in obvious carnal pleasure, curving around each other, so that they formed a circle with their limbs, hands linked between them. The female was carved entirely from snow-white moonstone, while the male was made from ebony-black onyx. Despite the explicit sexual context, the whole composition was less erotic, but rather an enigmatic depiction of attracting opposites and unity. A careful dance between the light and the dark, between the gentle and the strong, between life and death. It was an exquisite piece of art; subtle, yet powerful in its implications.

  Acknowledging the fine craftsmanship, Darken slowly strolled deeper into the hall, while his eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom.

  To the left of the glyph waited a circle of golden arcane symbols with a diameter of about five feet. The petitioner’s circle.

  The moment he stepped into it, the glyphs briefly flared, and the bronze sound of a gong chimed through the hall. Barely thirty seconds later a young, tow-haired woman hurried out of the arched hallway to his right. A girl, really, he corrected himself, since she couldn’t be more than a few years older than his niece.

  She wore a gray receptionist’s uniform with brass-colored cuffs and hems. To Darken’s knowledge, every newcomer who wanted to study or practice at the Academia had to perform some kind of official public service for a period of time. It was how the university was kept running without putting a charge on its members and thereby making the access dependent on wealth or family status like most other colleges and universities throughout the Republic did. Everybody could study at Blayde’s campus—as long as they honored the rules of the Pacified Zone and were ready to perform a service for the community.

  A stylized purple eye marked her forehead between her eyebrows. Another little augur? Well, well. Blayde certainly attracted them like bait the fish. It made him wonder, if behind their masks, some of Blayde’s iron wolves, were, indeed, females.

  When she spotted him in the circle, the girl balked a little, pale green eyes flickering from his gloved hands to his face and back. She caught herself quickly but approached him with more than a touch of wariness, stopping at what she probably considered a safe distance. Little fool.

  Darken clenched his teeth, trying to keep his expression passive. After traveling with Alex the last days he’d briefly been able to forget how people usually reacted to him.

  The reception girl’s lips split into what was likely supposed to be a smile but looked more like a tight grimace.

  “Welcome Enforcer,” she greeted formally. “How may the Academia be at your service?” To her credit, her voice was barely shaking.

  Slipping his hands into his trouser pockets, Darken said, “I’d like to speak to Master Farlow.”

  “To—to Barthi?” She blinked her jade eyes, visibly startled by such a mundane request coming from one of Death’s Servants. Then a line formed between her brows, as if it had just occurred to her that when one of them spoke of “talking” it might mean something a lot more final.

  Keeping his temper leashed, Darken inclined his head. “If he is available”

  She flinched, clearly not oblivious to the soft, warning croon in his voice.

  “I-I’ll check.”

  Obviously relieved to be able to bring a physical barrier between herself and him, she bolted behind the counter and grabbed a little ear-piece, studded with a milky crystal on the outer side. She put it into her ear with shaking fingers while channeling a spark of magic into the vis-a on her desk. The glyphs flashed in a short sequence.

  “Barthi?” She held a hand up to her ear-piece, sounding a little breathless. “Yes? Yes. Listen, Barthi, here’s a visitor for you. It’s …” She threw Darken a nervous glance and lowered her voice. “He’s a forfeit.”

  Darken felt a bitter smile tug at the corner of his lips. Name the devil, right? Well, he was already here.

  Whatever the person at the other end said, the girl’s eyes turned huge and she snorted a giggle. Then stopped abruptly and glanced back at him with a horrified expression, as if he could somehow feel insulted by that brief show of delight—and break her neck for it.

  A moment later, she pulled the earplug out. “He’s on his way down and will be here shortly.”

  Her fluttering fingers rummaged in a drawer in front of her, then she put a simple metal bracelet with a coin-formed disk engraved with a glyph on the counter, pushing it over toward the edge.

  “Your visitor’s bracelet, Enforcer.”

  Charged with magic attuned to certain areas, it would give him ac
cess to all publicly available areas, but not the restricted ones—unless, of course, his guide let him in.

  Darken glided over. The girl quickly busied herself with a stack of papers that needed no rearranging and he realized with a pinch that she didn’t want to touch him.

  Not surprising. Not surprising at all. Yet he couldn’t help remembering Alex’s fingers, running along his chest and his back, digging into his skin, her fist punching his shoulder, all the casual and not so casual touches they’d shared. She had no qualms about touching him. Not at all. At least, not before last night …

  Taking off his left glove, he fastened the bracelet himself and stepped back, politely pretending not to notice her relieved exhale when he retreated from the counter.

  “I’ll be jiggered!”

  Darken pivoted on his heels, spinning toward the staircase. A young man had appeared on top of the gallery. Tall, lanky, with scrubby sand-colored hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses, he was geeky in every sense of the word.

  Grinning widely, he made his click-clocking decent and stopped in front of Darken, holding out his hand.

  “Darken Dubois-Léclaire.”

  “Not by name,” Darken replied mildly as he took the offered hand.

  “But by temper. Or so I heard. That was a nice little speech your brother gave on the freedom of education last week—though I’m still hoping he might loosen up a little on the boundaries of genetic research.”

  “I’ll bring it to his notice,” Darken said dryly.

  The young man chuckled and then waved a hand at the receptionist. “S’up Carlene?”

  Interestingly enough, the girl’s neckline had moved down a couple of inches since he’d turned and somehow Darken had the feeling her nervous fiddling, for a change, had nothing to do with him.

  “Hi, Barthi.”

  The kiddo winked at her and then returned his attention to Darken.

  “So, what can I do you this time, Forfeit? Testing a poison sample? Breaking a stone-enforced sigil spell, perhaps?”

  “I need to use the Amplificum.”

  Bartholomeus blinked his eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “Not one for the small requests, are you?”

  Darken allowed himself a sparse smile. “And that surprises you since …?”

  The kid let out a martyred sigh. “Yeah, right. Oh, well. Follow me.”

  THE Amplificum was located in a restricted area in the laboratory sector of the campus that was off limits for visitors and required special access authorization. Bartholomeus didn’t blink an eye as he swiped his bracelet against the receiver and led Darken into the lab at the end of the corridor that housed the Amplificum.

  It was an intricate machine—half technique, half magic—whose construction was so expensive that it had probably cost about as much as the whole rest of the Pacified Zone taken together, including Bladye’s hotel. There was another one like this at the Research Center of Galthea’s University of Arcane Studies, one at the Guardaí Headquarters in Corona, as well as one at the Order’s main chapter in Yst. Yet all those were directly or indirectly under state control and their activities and output were meticulously monitored and recorded.

  Which meant that he would have had to come here in any case after delivering the children at their parents’ home. Who’d have thought that their little pursuit would finally play into his hands?

  Barthi stepped into the rectangular room and raised a hand, activating the bright laboratory lights. He moved over to the control panel and ran his fingers over the levers with almost affectionate gentleness, setting it up for use.

  The kid was a true child of science, with heart, mind, and soul. With his mere twenty-two years he had already graduated in not only one but two major degree courses at prestigious colleges—applied physics and magical practice as well as biochemistry—and, en passant, finished minor degrees in mineralogy and archeology because he’d needed to “stimulate his mind” in his free time.

  With this exceptional genius of his, he could have been a made man in no time and sure enough, he’d received several offers of leading-edge enterprises and public corporations that would have tempted any ambitious young upstart. But Bartholomeus had turned them all down and decided to go into free research instead, without a supervisory board or compliance officer dictating his every move.

  Unfortunately—for them—the leading universities all declined his planned projects as too experimental and too daring, so he’d finally found his way into the Pacified Zone, where he was free to tinker around as long as no test subject was harmed against their consent. And that’s where Darken had met him two years ago.

  “Alrighty-right.” Barthi stepped away from the console and held out an expectant hand. “What have you got for me?”

  Sliding a hand into an inner pocket of his black coat, Darken extracted a small transparent zip-bag and flipped it up for Bartholomeus to see. It contained five tiny, carefully wrapped, and magically sealed packages.

  Breaking the sigils with a tiny spark of magic, he opened the zip and one by one set them onto the preparation table.

  Bartholomeus wiped his glasses on a tip of his shirt and leaned closer. “You always bring me such fine gifts, Forfeit.”

  A moment later, though, his forehead turned into a frown, as he passed a probing hand over the contents. “How old is this?” He picked up the first package and peered at it closely. “At least three days, I’d reckon? Hardly any residue left.” He glanced up and sniffed. “Another day or two and there will be nothing left to pull out of this. Might be too late already.”

  Darken leaned against the side of the table and crossed one leg over the other. “I’m sure you can accommodate something.”

  Barthi tsked and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, muttering, “always asking for wonders.“ But at the same time he went over to a shelf containing various flasks of multicolored powders and liquids, fluttering his fingers as he ticked off the labels.

  “Lucky for you I might have something in stock that—ah, here!” He held up a tiny flagon filled with sapphire blue powder. “I developed this little catalyst for occasions such as this just a couple of weeks ago.”

  Darken hid a smile. Since it gave the kiddo a chance to show off, he was positive he’d get his desired results.

  “It won’t restore a completely ruined batch, though,” Barthi warned, as he walked back to the preparations table. With practiced movements, he emptied the contents of the five plastic wrappers into five six-inch culture dishes: a few crumbles of soft earth, snipping of grass, a bit of dirty water from a puddle, gravel, and, last but not least, a tiny piece of bloody flesh. Barthi hesitated a little over this one, but then continued the preparation without a comment.

  Darken watched quietly, not offering a comment either.

  Using a pipette, Barthi dribbled a bit of clear liquid into each culture dish. A sharp, acidic scent perfused room. It was a chemical mixed with a magically altered enzyme that digested the proteins and helped liquefy the material. Within seconds the batches turned into pink gooey liquid.

  “Okay. Let’s see.” Slipping on protective gloves, Barthi opened the flagon. With the tip of a spatula, he carefully scooped a tiny bit of the blue powder, added it to the liquids, and gently shook the culture dishes. “This should give the whole thing some added clarity—if my calculations are correct.”

  Darken snorted. “Your calculations are always correct.”

  The kiddo bent his head over the probes but couldn’t hide his pleased expression.

  One by one, Bartholomeus inserted the five culture dishes into five holding rings on radially installed metal rods.

  “There we go. Stay clear of the field.” He waved toward the recessed ten by eight yards rectangle in the floor under a matching ceiling in front of the machine.

  Darken nodded, all the well-behaved visitor. He could operate an Amplificum well enough himself—it required some technical skill and a little knowledge of chemicals, but apart from that
anyone with a magical talent could—but Barthi had a lot more experience and was more adept at the fine-tuning; also, he had to give the kiddo some consolidation for allowing him to use the machine at all.

  When all the culture dishes were in place, Barthi raised his hands and magic accumulated in the room, fueling the machine. The hairs on Darken’s arms started oscillating.

  Beams of white-blue magic shot from five anchor points on the floor underneath the culture dishes, passing through their glass bottoms and the liquid inside them, into the small faceted crystals positioned above them. These amplifier crystals were one of the reasons why the machine was so expensive. Since Arcadia had next to no gemstone-occurrences, most of them had to be imported from Tharsis, the country of precious stones, and Tharsis’ factors, knowing their position, charged lavishly.

  The crystals redirected the beams into a fist-sized blue diamond set in the center of the star-shaped construction above the amplifier crystals which bundled them and send them into the lens matrix inside the machine. The tiny lenses started to rotate, slowly first, then quicker and quicker until they were nothing but a whirl of spinning lights. A three-dimensional image snapped up in the marked area in the floor, shaped after the information extracted from the energetic memory captured in the samples. It was a shadowy image, tinted blue by the glow of magic, which reminded of an old halfborn movie picture, some parts smudged out and full of tiny holes.

  For a moment it brought Darken back to the little farm in Manor Creek County—quite literally. He stared at his mirror image crouching on the grass of the backyard, inspecting the ground.

  Slipping around the scene guards had been laughably easy, despite the scene being cordoned off and secured with armed posts. But then, that was what he had been trained for: to be a shadow, a ghost, a whisper along peoples’ backs that made them shiver, even after he was long gone.

  The bodies and the rest of what had been considered evidence had already been moved when he had arrived, but dark stains still marked the grass and various signs on the ground spoke of the violent struggle that must have taken place there not too long ago.