Game of Towers and Treachery (The Shadow's Apprentice Book 2)

by Harper Alexander

  “I don’t know what you think you saw, Despiris–”

  “A violent struggle to transition between minds. Erratic behavior as you try to come back into yourself. You nearly jumped from your balcony railing, for the gods’ sake.” At a flicker of alarm in the noblewoman’s eyes, it occurred to Despiris she might not even have known that. “Were you even aware that you hiked up your skirts and climbed up onto the rail, and teetered on that deadly precipice as if courting the thrill, and spread your arms to jump as if you could fly…”

  Lady Verrikose had gone pale, and Desiris knew she had her.

  “Do not think I missed your display of shock the last time you settled in to reach out to Shangar’s mind. The distress as you ricocheted right back into yourself, and rushed frantically to watch the other beasts disperse. What I’m not quite sure about is whether you sent them out to catch the beast you couldn’t, or if you stirred their restlessness past the point of no return as well, and lost your grip on an entire fleet of stir-crazy beasts. But rest assured, I am here to get to the bottom of it, and if you let me, perhaps I can help. Otherwise I take this obviously alarming matter to the king, and you lose all standing as a Shadowhunter.”

  For a long moment, Lady Verrikose resisted. She was stubborn. Proud.

  But Despiris was right – the woman had lost control, and the need to contain the situation, to cling to her reputation in the grand scheme of things, won out. For the first time since Despiris had known her, a margin of shame crossed the beastress’s face. Gaze cheating to the snow-dusted balcony, she relented.

  “There is a phenomenon that occurs,” she confessed, “when you stay too long in a mind not your own. You run the risk of losing yourself, as I’ve alluded to in a previous dialogue. The longer you stay, the more distinction between minds blurs. It’s called ‘melding’. If you fully meld, you get stuck. To avoid this, I withdraw in small increments every so often. Reset. Start fresh. Not often enough, it would seem, which is the reason for the…overlap that you’ve witnessed. It would also seem that…while I can still muddle through the overlap and find my way back to myself…the beast is not so sure-footed.”

  She was still putting it delicately, tip-toeing around the issue. “Meaning…?”

  “The beasts were born from stone, blank slates to be molded, shaped, by whoever commanded them. They are malleable. Impressionable.” Refusing to wither with guilt but clearly uncomfortable, Lady Verrikose forced herself to meet Despiris’s gaze. “More so, I’m afraid, than I thought. I have spent so many consecutive hours in Shangar’s mind, influencing him to hunt… The coercion has now become his natural instinct. His only thoughts are of hunting. And unfortunately, in the increments that I do not possess him, he has been…continuing my agenda. But without the exactness – the direction – that I provide. He…is not discriminating between targets.”

  Alarm – then horror – slung through Despiris at the implications. “Did he hurt someone?”

  Tears of remorse glittered unshed in the noblewoman’s dark eyes, belying a heart somewhere deep down. “A little girl.”

  The horror surged. Swelled. Nauseous, Despiris forced herself to continue the line of questioning. “How badly?”

  “She’s alive. But in his possession. I don’t…I don’t know what he will do to her.”

  It was so much worse than Despiris had imagined. And too pressing to waste a single moment more on the details. “What are you waiting for? Get back in his mind. Make him release her.”

  “I…I can’t.” Was the exquisitely composed noblewoman stuttering? “Don’t you think I’ve tried? A determined hunter I might be, but I’m not a monster. I’ve tried to return to his mind. I’ve been grazing the edges of melding too closely, able to spend less and less time inside him with greater consequences each time. As soon as I enter his mind, now – I feel myself slipping.”

  “I don’t care. He could be doing anything to that girl. You might be her only hope. Get back in his mind.”

  “I can’t. It is like drowning. Awakening beneath the waves, sinking quickly away from the surface toward the abyss, unable to breathe–”

  “Try.”

  “You don’t understand–”

  “I understand that a life you endangered is worth more than your selfish fear that you might not make it out of this unscathed. But I promise you this…” Half-unsheathing her knife from her thigh scabbard, she let the gleaming threat show. “If you do not insert yourself back into that rampant beast’s mind right now… You won’t make it off this balcony unscathed.”

  Thinly concealing her fear with disdain, Lady Verrikose smoothed her skirts in preparation – to compose herself, or due to nerves, Despiris couldn’t say. But she complied, drawing a steadying breath before her lashes fluttered closed.

  It wasn’t more than a few moments before she came back out gasping.

  Trying to shake the clutches of the suffocating dark waters she’d mentioned.

  Falling forward to hands and knees, she retched, shaking her head. Her raven curls fell over one shoulder, brushing the balcony. “I can’t,” she maintained, voice a shaky whisper. “The eclipse is too great. We will meld if I am in his mind a moment longer.”

  Despiris felt her face harden, a grave wind chilling her heart even as her mind raced for solutions. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t – I don’t know.” Clear distress twisted the woman’s usually flawless face. “He’s moved since…since I last was able to focus inside his mind.”

  “Where was the last place you could clearly sense him?”

  “The smithy on Dublin Avenue. It’s where I sent the rest of them.”

  “Can you still safely penetrate the minds of the others?”

  “For now.”

  “Get the pegasus back here. I need a bird’s eye view of the city.” Despiris turned to approach the railing, anxious for her steed to arrive.

  “What will you do?” Lady Verrikose’s voice drew her gaze one last time over her shoulder. “If you catch him?”

  “Do you forget what happened to the first gargoyle you dispersed into the city, all those months ago?” Lady Verrikose didn’t respond, her grave silence answer enough. “Rabid beasts on the streets get put down. I suggest you don’t suddenly find your strength and humanity and attempt to reach out to his mind again.”

  16

  Snare and Slaughter

  “Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Those with delicate sensibilities are limited by what they are willing to do, what they are willing to expose themselves to. Embracing the grit of the world is part of what makes you untouchable.” – Tutelage passed from the Master of the Shadows to his apprentice.

  *

  The pegasus returned to the palace at Lady Verrikose’s summons, a raven-like speck against the distant slate-gray sky that rapidly morphed into a giant, regal mass of obsidian equine muscle. Its impressive wingspan sent a freezing gust into Despiris’s face as it drew up short at the last possible moment to land on the balcony rail. Delicately placing its hooves on the slight ledge, it stilled for Despiris to mount.

  Already waiting atop the rail, Despiris strode toward the beautiful beast, ducking under its head and grabbing a fistful of mane to swing aboard.

  Prancing beneath her seemingly to warn her to hold on, Keshgal took flight with a sudden, violent down-sweep of its wings. Gripping tight with her knees, Despiris twined her fingers deeper into the animal’s mane.

  Then they were off, over the wall and into the city, the palace shrinking quickly behind them. The frigid wind of the heights stung Despiris’s cheeks, quickly numbing her face. But exhilaration warmed her from the inside, flying over the city from the back of a glorious winged steed not an experience she would soon forget.

  They cut straight to the smithy, but there was no sign of Shangar. With little to go on, Despiris decided merely to scour the city by sector, hoping to get lucky.

  What else could be done? She could only hope a rampant gargoyle running a
mok through the streets would be easy to spot from above.

  Alas, she combed the city until dark, and then had to admit her bird’s-eye view no longer yielded more than vague shapes and flickers of shadow.

  Cursing her luck, she urged her steed to return to the palace. She would have to regroup. Go out again on foot.

  I think it’s time to admit you need to call on the royal guard for this. But would the king approve a widespread deployment into the city in the middle of a plague, when the quarantine order was in place?

  Despiris couldn’t say. But the gargoyle couldn’t be left on the loose to continue his violent rampage, and she was sure the king would agree.

  By an unexpected stroke of luck, however, it didn’t come to that. For when she arrived back at the palace, she found a gift waiting for her in the courtyard. Excessively chained as if he’d tangled himself in a huge steel spider’s web, the enraged, thrashing gargoyle was beginning to draw spectators.

  Despiris dismounted in one fluid motion as Keshgal’s hooves touched down in the courtyard, cautiously approaching the bound beast. A knife buried up to its hilt in the beast’s chiseled thigh tacked a note to his form, the parchment half-soaked in violet blood.

  A trio of guards had assembled around the spectacle before Despiris arrived, but none seemed eager to penetrate an obvious ‘safe bubble’ around the beast. Guttural growls and frosty whuffs of breath deterred anyone from nearing, those agitated sounds of warning and bulging muscles making even the thickest chains appear flimsy.

  The same hesitance stayed Despiris for a heartbeat, the instinct to stay clear of such a beast too strong to ignore. But she was willing to bet she knew who had strung the thing up, and if Clevwrith could wrangle him, she sure as hell could too.

  Besides, what had she been planning to do when she found Shangar in the city? Wring her hands from a distance and ask him kindly to return to the palace?

  No. She’d always known it would likely come down to wrangling. And although she’d no wish to tangle with a gargoyle a second time, she hadn’t thought twice about the risk of diving into the fray, because a little girl’s safety was at stake. And anyway, if she’d survived once, she could survive again.

  The girl.

  Where was the girl?

  Despiris surveyed the courtyard just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, but there was no sign of any girl.

  She had to get to that note.

  Steeling herself against the fear tremoring just below the surface, she pushed through the assembled guards. Shangar strained against his bonds as she approached, a low snarl melting the snow beneath his snout. The hairs on her arms stood on end, her whole body tensing as she slowly closed in and crouched at his side to retrieve the note.

  Slowly wrapping her fingers around the knife hilt so as not to jostle it, she yanked it free as soon as she had a good grip. A ferocious cry of pain tore from the beast’s mouth, but his restraints kept him from contorting to gnash his fangs at her. Still, she flinched, eyeing him with mistrust.

  Well, you really converted him, didn’t you, Lady Verrikose?

  Rising carefully, Despiris backed a pace away and slid the bloody missive from the blade. It was sealed, unsurprisingly, in black wax featuring the Shadowmaster’s emblem. Breaking the seal and flicking it open, Despiris scanned Clevwrith’s elegant script.

  It would seem the Master of the Shadows had once again thwarted his reckoning, but this time, he’d taken full advantage of the irony and done it as a favor to the crown, restraining and returning their feral beast before it went on a rampage and did irreparable damage.

  The girl, he had treated and returned to her family. A detail that might have been alarming to some, but Despiris knew his skill. Short of major surgery, he could treat most ailments as seamlessly as any trained healer.

  Swirls of snow gusted through the courtyard as the other beasts swooped suddenly in to land. Obviously Lady Verrikose had caught wind of the macabre spectacle returned to her doorstep, and had called the others home. Glancing up from the note, Despiris found the beastress watching from the sidelines alongside the other spectators, lurking in the shadows behind a pillar that supported a second-tier balcony.

  She would be lucky if the king didn’t catch wind of this now. It would be the talk of the palace.

  There was no use treading delicately around the subject now.

  Despiris pointedly stared in the noblewoman’s direction, exposing her in the shadows. “Lady Verrikose. Please join me.”

  Unable to avoid the spotlight, Lady Verrikose flicked a curl out of her face and drew on her mask of composure to respond, sweeping her skirts aside and coming proudly out from behind the pillar as if she’d never been using it for cover. Her long crimson train dragged through the thin layer of snow that stuck to the courtyard flagstones, leaving a clear path in her wake.

  To the noblewoman’s credit, despite looking as pale and frightened as the rest of the onlookers a moment ago, she drew alongside Despiris within range of the beast.

  Despiris handed her the note so she could read it for herself. “You will be glad to know the situation is contained. I am assuming, however, there is nothing further you can do to calm the beast? Considering our…previous discussion?”

  Lady Verrikose glanced over the note at the chained beast, barely hiding a pained grimace. Shangar’s hateful black eyes stared back at her. Crazed. Feral. Accusing. Saliva dripped from his bared fangs as he panted into the quiet, exhausted from straining against his bonds.

  Grimly, the beastress disregarded him, meeting Despiris’s gaze. “There is nothing I can do.” She had barely gotten it out before Despiris acted accordingly. The woman’s eyelids fell quickly shut – in place of flinching – to spare her the repulsive sight of Despiris reaching for one of the guard’s swords and beheading the gargoyle on the spot.

  Violet blood splattered the snow as the blade rang against the flagstones. Despiris would feel the vibrations, and the meaty crunch that came before it, for a long time to come.

  But she had no doubt it would have been her head, or the noblewoman’s, swiped clean off by a vicious fist of claws, if the beast had been allowed to live.

  A moment later the beastress dared reopen her eyes, but could not bring herself to look upon the carnage.

  Despiris turned to the other creatures, glad they were there to bear witness. “Let it be known,” she warned them gravely. “For those of you who contrive to escape all other parties’ control, you will yield to my blade.”

  17

  Dominance, Doubts, and Decorum

  “You are questioning staying by my side, and that is the first thing that has scared me in my entire life.” – A revelation from the Shadowmaster, the night his apprentice switched sides.

  *

  Lady Verrikose was quick to escape the scene, slipping away to sulk in private as the guards moved in to clean up the corpse.

  But Despiris wasn’t done with her yet.

  After all, if she didn’t make sure one near-disaster had been enough to dissuade Lady Verrikose from continuing her reckless course, she’d be rendering a lot more mythical beasts extinct in the near future. And she wouldn’t put it past anyone obsessed with catching the Master of the Shadows to press on with drastic measures in spite of their better judgment.

  So she paid the noblewoman another visit. But this time, she had the decency to use the door instead of the balcony.

  Andreda answered the door. Which was a good sign, Despiris thought, because there had been no sign of the handmaiden during Despiris’s previous visit, suggesting Lady Verrikose preferred to use her powers in private – at least in the case of unsanctioned activity stemming from them. So she was probably up to nothing more scandalous than readying herself for bed.

  Indeed, when Andreda announced Despiris, the noblewoman appeared in a white satin and lace dressing gown and sheer, violet over-robe. She had that gaunt look that had afflicted her in the past from pushing herself too hard – hollow
cheeks and dark shadows under her eyes, her body willowy without the voluptuous skirt to add bulk.

  “May I come in?” Despiris asked before the beastress could try to worm her way out of another exchange.

  Tight-lipped, Lady Verrikose gestured for her to enter, and Andreda shut the door behind her.

  “Andreda, please ready my bath,” Lady Verrikose requested, sending the handmaiden to the other room. The noblewoman glided around to seat herself on one of two chaise lounges facing one another across a low bronze drink table.

  Despiris took the other. “I know it’s been a trying day, my lady, so I will say what I came for and leave you in peace.” She had two options when it came to abolishing the noblewoman’s agenda. She’d realized she could put a swift, permanent end to it simply by going back on her word and informing the king of the inexcusable treachery caused by the noblewoman’s gift. He would forbid all future exploits involving the beasts at once – perhaps even dismiss Lady Verrikose from court. But it felt petty to Despiris – the ‘tattletale’s way out’. It was much more her style to simply gain control of all the cards and players herself. “I have decided not to inform the king of this incident. As far as he will know, you made your efforts to locate and bring back the rogue creature, but the Shadowmaster beat you to it.”

  Based on the muscle that clenched in Lady Verrikose’s jaw, that would be humiliation enough. A demoralizing testimony that her powers might not be up to snuff.

  “I will keep the Shadowmaster’s note safe. No need to spread rumors that someone got hurt. I would hate to be asked to put down the remaining creatures simply because you made an unfortunate judgment call and converted one to a rampant beast. And it is not currently in my best interests to have his Majesty cancel the whole operation because it is doing more harm than good. I still have a shadow to catch. And I am not quite ready to lose the resources I am awarded in my position here.”