Taellaneth Complete Series Box Set

by Vanessa Nelson

  “I am sorry,” she said. “An assessment is necessary to understand our enemy.”

  “I understand. Will you let me know what you find?”

  “Of course, svegraen. The living need you more.”

  He ducked out of the room with a nod to Kester, standing watch just inside the door.

  “Is he as powerful as Nuallan?” Kester asked.

  “I do not believe so.” She crouched by the nearest body, trying not to see the face distorted in a final scream. “None of Miach and Elias’ warriors have their power. Even if he had drained both cadres, he would gain little from it.” She paused, tilting her head to the four dead set slightly apart from the others. Ferdith’s warriors. Four of them. The cadre had been on watch on the shore, not on the island. It was possible that they had their magic intact when they died.

  “This was mostly done for his amusement, then,” Kester summarised, lip curling in disgust.

  “How did he hide this so long?” Arrow wondered. “This is a small community.”

  “There are likely to be animal corpses in the forest on the mainland,” Kester answered, voice harsh. His face was tight when she looked across. “This is not the first time the White Guard have seen this kind of killing. For sport. Too many Erith would be noticeable.”

  “But no one keeps count of the animals,” Arrow finished the thought, stomach tight. She thought of the clearing where they had come through the mirror and wondered if there were dead creatures buried around it, their last moments alive in screaming agony at the hands of the Gardener.

  “He needs killing,” Zachary said, coming in to stand beside Kester. “No one who enjoys death this much should be allowed to live.”

  “I agree,” she said, attention caught by something on the body. She reached into her messenger bag and pulled out her gloves.

  “Do you need more light?” Kester asked.

  “Not just now. Thank you.”

  She very carefully, very gently, straightened out the warrior’s arm and hissed a breath at what she found, coming to her feet and stumbling back, clamping a hand over her mouth to hold in nausea.

  “If you are going to be sick, do it outside,” Zachary suggested. “The smell in here is bad enough.”

  She swallowed, hard, eyes prickling with tears, and nodded once.

  “He harvested skin.” Kester was kneeling by the body now, amber bright in his eyes. “The others?”

  “I have not checked yet,” she answered, voice choked. “Excuse me.”

  She ducked out of the room, back to the opening they had come through, and barely made it to the fractured earth before she threw up. Zachary was right. The smell inside was awful. So much worse for him, and the Erith, than for her.

  The sky overhead seemed unchanged. Blue, with traces of white clouds. Apart from the deep gouges in the earth, the island also seemed unchanged. The air was fresh, full of the warmth of summer, a slight breeze drying the tears on her face as she tried to work up the courage to go back inside, to do what was needed. There were five bodies. She had only partially examined one.

  She lifted her face to the sun and shivered. She could be back in the human world. The wonder and power of the heartland had faded. The breeze was just a breeze. There was no trace of the heartland in the air. Or in the soil.

  “The heartland is gone.” Willan was at the opening, face drawn. “There is nothing there.”

  “We need to stop him,” Arrow said, and brushed past the mage, going back to the bodies. They could not afford her weakness.

  All five bodies of Miach and Elias’ warriors had a wide strip of skin missing from the inside of their right forearm. Willan and Gilean speculated as to what the reason might be. All the explanations were grim.

  The four bodies of Ferdith’s warriors were different. No skin had been harvested. They had been tortured in a similar way, blood drained. There was nothing to show, from the dead, whether they had access to their magic when they died. There was no taint on their bodies, either.

  Her eyes were burning, stomach a tight ball of pain, by the time she had finished. The Gardener had access to blood from nine warriors. Drawn unwillingly. Even if the warriors had not had access to their magic, or been powerful in magic, it was a vast resource for a magician using unclean magic.

  She silently repeated the Prime’s words as they rejoined the others. The Gardener needed killing.

  CHAPTER 25

  Her head lifted, eyes flaring with silver. The Gardener. The basement. The dead and the wounded.

  “What is it?” She had caught Zachary’s attention at least.

  “That room.” She strode out from among the dead and through the room with the living, where Miach and Elias were moving among their cadre, Orlis tending to them one by one. Arrow did not pause, continuing to the main chamber, where Serran was still settled against the wall, apparently quite content to sit still.

  “It is a workroom of some kind,” Kallish observed, looking around. “And a poor one. No shelves.”

  Arrow had been focused on Serran before, but saw Kallish was right, although the furnishing was strange. There was only a workbench, with a few wooden stools tucked under it, the surface almost bare, just holding a burner and some innocuous pottery jars, very like the ones that had been used to poison them. No shelves. No ingredients. No books of spells.

  Opening second sight she took an involuntary step back. The space was crawling with traces of old spells. Fragments that had broken when the spell had finished, or when the spell caster had made a mistake. The room was dominated by one magic user, over and over, even with the blazing residue of Serran’s translocation spell still hanging in the air. And underneath the after-effect of Serran’s spell were traces of another, more recent magic user in the space. One that seemed familiar, although Arrow could not immediately identify them.

  “Can we assume this is the Gardener’s workroom?” she asked aloud.

  “I think so,” Willan answered. “Who else would have access?”

  It was a good point.

  Arrow moved to the workbench, studying the spell fragments more closely.

  “This is the same person who put a spell on the Prime,” she added, reaching out in second sight and touching the ends of one of the spell fragments. Zachary made a low sound of acknowledgement.

  Arrow prodded the broken bit of spellwork again. Layers and layers of fragments cluttered the space. The Gardener had not bothered using cleansing spells. It seemed a common trait of magicians using unclean magic. “He has been working here for years.”

  “Blood magic,” Willan added, voice grim.

  “There is something else wrong here.” Arrow looked up from the bench at the walls around the room, still in second sight. As well as the fragments in the air, the surfaces were coated with dormant spells. Warding spells to conceal whatever the Gardener had done in this room. Nothing dangerous. Everything seemed complete, and yet she was sure there was something else.

  She came back to the world to find the others alert, also looking around. There were no obvious threats.

  “This seemed bigger from the shadows,” she commented, going to the nearest wall and making her way, slowly, along its length, running her fingertips along its surface.

  “Yes,” Kester agreed with her, weapon in his hand on that one word. “Much bigger. Twice the size.”

  “There is no concealment that I can see,” Willan commented. Not a challenge, simply a comment.

  “Duraner’s message.” Arrow’s skin prickled. Hidden. Secrets. She opened her second sight again, trying to see beyond into the shadows. Nothing obvious. There had been another word Duraner had said.

  “Gehthras.” She put her will behind the word. Something shifted in the second world. A subtle shiver. A twist of energy. She came back to the first world in time to see the apparently solid stone wall at the back of the room shivered into nothing.

  The false wall was gone, simply vanished as though it had never existed, revealing a space
at least as large as the workroom they were in, lit by faint glimmerlights that grew brighter as they watched.

  There was a narrow table set crosswise just behind where the false wall had been, marking the division between the spaces. The innocuous public space they were standing in and the far-from-innocent space beyond.

  Her attention snagged on the table. She did not want to look beyond, not yet. And it also looked familiar. She frowned, trying to remember where she had seen it before.

  The simple structure had three objects on its surface. A small tree, a bowl of water and a flame burning.

  With a start, Arrow realised that it was not the table that was familiar. The objects were the ones which had been in the tapestry room upstairs when they had come into the temple the first time. Symbols of the heartland. Which had made her sword react. The sword stirred even as she remembered that.

  “Stay back a moment,” she said to Kallish, reaching up and drawing the sword. She was not surprised when the warrior ignored her, keeping to one side as Arrow moved forward, approaching the table.

  “They were upstairs,” Zachary commented, drawing in a long breath, nose wrinkling. “Smell worse now.”

  “There is taint,” Arrow confirmed, taking another cautious step forward. There was no crackle of static to suggest a surjusi presence, just the uneasy ripple along the spells in her sword.

  The tree and the flame were clear. The sword flared as she touched the tip to the bowl of water. In a change to the room above, there were drinking glasses next to the bowl.

  And all at once, Arrow realised how Duraner had been tainted, remembering the path the taint had taken through his body. Behind her, Undurat drew a sharp breath in, coming to the same realisation.

  “He would have thought it an honour,” Undurat said, voice harsh.

  “It’s just water,” Zachary commented, “even if it does smell bad.”

  “The bowl is old,” Arrow told him, the sword tip resting against the fragile glass. “Ancient, in fact.”

  “The tree and the flame are the same age,” Willan added, for the Prime’s benefit.

  Zachary’s brows lifted slightly and he tilted his head, studying the bowl as if he could tell its secrets just by staring at it. “The water isn’t special, then. It’s the bowl.”

  “It should be blinding in second sight,” Willan commented. “I have seen objects this old before. They were painful to look at.”

  “This is diminished,” Arrow finished for him. She shook her head slightly. “The taint is in the bowl. Not the water.”

  She heard more indrawn breaths from the gathered warriors. As long-lived as they were, the Erith still prized their history.

  “Do you need to destroy it?” Kester asked. His tone made it a question, not a challenge.

  “The taint is woven into it,” she answered. “Stand back a moment.”

  This time, they did.

  The banishment spell along the sword’s length flared in the first world, silver brilliant for a moment, and the twist of surjusi taint moved through the glass, visible in the first sight. Battle wards rose around them, the warriors with their hands on weapons.

  The glass fractured with a crackling sound that was far too loud for the size of the object, the inky dark of surjusi crawling into the light, caught at once by the sword, banishment spell blazing. Arrow set her will to it, repeating the spell aloud, and flinched at the shriek as the taint vanished into nothing.

  Splinters of glass littered the surface of the table and the stone floor underneath, shards bright with age and power.

  Willan moved to her shoulder, crouching to get a better look at the remnants. “An apprentice task, I feel,” he commented.

  It sparked an unexpected and welcome ripple of laughter around the room, a shared experience of warrior cadets and mage’s apprentices.

  The laughter died as quickly as it had risen, all attention turning to the workspace behind the table and shattered glass.

  The glimmerlights were are full strength now, revealing a mage’s workspace. Another workbench. Shelves against one wall, full of books and parchment and jars and boxes. Herbs, ingredients for spell working, hung from hooks suspended from the ceiling. There was a spell circle etched into the stone floor, the groove marking a perfect circle, big enough to hold an Erith lying prone. It might have been innocent once, the feel of the space almost as old as the bowl. It was no longer clean, the stones at the centre of the circle stained dark.

  A place to work unclean magic, where no one would hear the screams. No one would scent the blood.

  “He used shadows to conceal this?” Willan was not really asking. “He is not a shadow-walker.”

  “No,” Arrow agreed, pulse skipping as she remembered another magician using unclean magic who was not a shadow-walker. Nuallan had moved through the shadows with far more assurance than she had. “With the right knowledge, and enough power, it is possible to get into the shadows. Ask Seivella.”

  Willan sent her a sideways glance she could not interpret, and glanced past her shoulder. Perhaps seeking Seivella.

  “It is exhausting, but possible,” Seivella confirmed, voice clipped. “Not something I did by choice.”

  Arrow found that she did not want to look at the lady. Did not want to see whatever expression she was wearing as she remembered Nuallan, and the attempts that the rogue had made to kill both her and Evellan.

  Instead, Arrow moved forward, Kester and Kallish at either side, and stepped across the threshold where the wall had been, careful to avoid the broken glass.

  Past the flame and the tree, the air was thick with the flat copper taste of old blood, and the smell of charred flesh. Arrow’s stomach clenched, eyes travelling to the stained centre of the circle. More than one person had lain there, blood pooling onto the stone underneath.

  “No remnants,” Willan commented, face expressing his disgust, “that is something, at least.”

  “No skin and no blood,” Arrow added, forcing herself to calm observation. The Gardener’s harvest from the dead warriors had been taken elsewhere. Through the translocation spell, with whoever else had been in this space with him. She wished she had a better idea of how many people had been here. It had been impossible to tell from the shadows. It could have been twenty, or more. Even with Kallish’s full cadre, and the rest of them, the space was not crowded.

  “A safe box,” Zachary commented, breaking her thoughts. He was standing in front of the shelves, hands tucked into his pockets, examining the contents without touching. Too wise to casually touch something a rogue magic user had worked with.

  Arrow went to join him, apprehension coiling through her, and was relieved to see it was a simple, wooden box. Crawling with ward spells drawn by the same hand, with varying degrees of skill, by a magician that was tantalisingly familiar but who she could not place just now.

  The spells were clean magic, and simple to prise apart.

  She opened the lid of the box and frowned slightly.

  “Letters,” Zachary observed, looking over her shoulder.

  Not just letters. Letters on human-made paper, its smooth, bright surface quite different to the tone and texture of Erith parchment. In common tongue.

  “No address,” Zachary added after a moment, lip curling to reveal white teeth.

  “Another human conspiracy?” Xeveran asked the question slowly, as though testing the idea.

  “No. Erith and human,” Kallish decided, frowning as she tried to read over Arrow’s other shoulder. “The Prime told me, before we came to the island the first time, that he and the mage found an Erith letter.”

  Arrow’s brow lifted a fraction. She had missed that conversation, recovering from the effects of mirror travel.

  “That is not good,” Xeveran commented.

  “Are these safe to pick up?” Zachary asked Arrow.

  She took a long look at the box and the shelves in first and second sight. Outside the box, plain wards crackled in second sight, easily disman
tled.

  “Everything on the shelves is safe now,” she confirmed.

  The Prime, Xeveran, and Kallish took the bundle of letters across to the workbench and began sorting them through, laying them out in order, exchanging muttered comments as they did so.

  Arrow turned her attention back to the shelves. As well as the letters, there were books and parchments of Erith origin. Some ordinary spells, and some darker.

  On impulse, she dug into her messenger bag for the copies Rose had given her, the ones of the unclean spells that had been found in the Magister’s safe box, and compared them to the unclean spells the Gardener had kept, spreading the copies and spells out on the other workbench.

  Orlis arrived at the door a while later to find the room in near-silence, everyone studying the papers with fierce concentration.

  “Everyone is as healed as I can manage,” he told them. He was exhausted, face pale, dark smudges under his eyes, no amber left in his gaze. “It would be good to leave.” He was looking around with curiosity, nose wrinkling as he saw the spell circle.

  “We need to take these,” Kallish told Xeveran, and left him to bundle up the letters, damning evidence of an Erith-human conspiracy. “They were careful,” Kallish told Arrow. “There is no evidence about who the Erith is. Some vague clues. Nothing clear. The human seems to have been Merkel.”

  “What did you find?” Zachary asked Arrow.

  “The Magister’s blood magic came from the same place as the Gardener’s. They are the same spells, just written out on parchment.”

  “The same magician?”

  “No. I do not think so. The Gardener’s books are old. Not quite as old as the tree and flame, but old. The parchment is much more recent. I think the parchment was a copy. Easier to carry around.”

  “But it means that Erith and humans working unclean magic have had a far longer history than we imagined,” Iserat said.

  “Yes.” Arrow’s stomach twisted. It had been obvious from the spell circle found at the Collegia, but that had only been one piece of evidence.

  “Bloody magicians,” the Prime muttered, glaring at the books and copies. “Can we destroy these?”