by Karen MacRae
Once the door was closed behind them, Lord Witheridge acted like nothing had happened, immediately getting Anna to experiment with some new rocks he’d had his uncomplaining assistant dig up while he watched through some new-fangled bits of glass he wore over his eyes. Seleste read one of the books Lord Edevan had assigned to her while the Shaper and Scientist gradually worked their way down the line.
“Disappointing, but unsurprising. This new coated glass is wonderful though,” the old man muttered as they discarded the final sample. “Mia?” he bellowed.
“Yes, milord,” answered Lord Witheridge’s lab assistant from the far end of the vast room.
“The rocks were a bust. More of these lenses I think though, please. Ideally on a lighter surface.”
“Yes, milord. I’ll get the lads onto it as soon as we’re out of here.”
“They show auras, don’t you know,” the Scientist confessed to Anna in a confidential whisper. “Never seen them before. Pretty. No idea how Vivienne and you Read all the waves and wiggles though.”
Anna laughed. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to Read them like Lady Braxton, but I’m getting better. While I remember though, Lord Witheridge, something interesting happened yesterday.”
“Yes?” asked the old man, peering straight at Anna with piercingly intelligent eyes.
“Something blocked me sourcing energy when I was in the mess. I couldn’t feel a thing, yet we know the ground is full of crystal.”
Lord Witheridge remained completely still for about three heartbeats then exploded into motion. He scurried over to the far bench and started rummaging through drawers. “Gabriele, help me find the old blueprints!” he shouted. “I know they’re in here somewhere.”
The secretary walked over to the far wall of bookcases and pulled down a thick file. “Here, milord. I believe you’ll find what you’re looking for in the fourth from last partition.”
“Excellent! Excellent!” the Scientist cried. He grabbed the file and sat at the nearest seat to flick through its sections. The secretary quietly moved over to the ransacked bench and began to put everything back in its place.
“Here it is! Limestone… quartz… no, no, it couldn’t be that… steel… granite… no… no, nothing.”
His Lordship began to pace, his arms waving in the air in time to his thoughts. “Of course! Gabriele, the plans for the refurbishment?”
The uncomplaining secretary went straight to another file on the immense bookcase. “The ninth section, milord,” he instructed as he handed over the file.
“Yes! There it is! What would I do without you, Gabriele?” The praised man blushed slightly and gave his master a short bow.
“It’s the flooring,” Lord Witheridge proclaimed. “Lady Braxton had it put in five years ago. She saw it on some foreign trip and had it shipped home. It has some intriguing properties, one of which is its durability. The mess floor gets more wear than any other place in the castle and workmen were forever replacing slabs. Now, what was it called… mmm… yes, here it is. Goodness, how does one pronounce that?”
“I believe it is shortened to navzdy, milord. It means everlasting,” intoned the secretary who’d taken down a third file as the Scientist had been talking. “You ran some experiments, milord. You might find the second section of particular interest.” He handed over the file and returned to tidying the mess his lordship had made of the paperwork.
“Memory gift,” Lord Witheridge said proudly to the astonished Shaper and assassin. “Never forgets a thing. Could be running the place but chooses to work for this foolish old man instead. Be lost without him.”
His head bent once again over his work, the secretary gave no indication he knew he was the topic of conversation, but Anna and Seleste could see his pride and his fondness for the old man in his aura.
Lord Witheridge’s eyes scanned the documents in the second section, getting increasingly excited as he read. He finished the last page and slammed the file shut. “Mia, as soon as we get out of here, I need ten samples from the mess floor.” The lab assistant nodded without stopping the experiment she was running at the furthest corner of the large room.
“Softening and reforming properties, milord?” she asked.
“Precisely!” the old man answered, his face beaming. “She’s a wizard,” he laughed. “As long as it’s science, she always knows what I’m going to say before I say it… That was very informative, Anna. Thank you. Now, I wanted to update you regarding the maps. The correlation between crystal and gifts worked out to be zero point eight seven. Can you imagine? And if we take out Healing, it came in at zero point nine two!”
Anna and Seleste looked blankly at Lord Witheridge as he continued speaking gobbledegook about sample sizes and outliers and cause and effect.
The secretary took pity on them. “It means they’re almost certainly related to each other,” he whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Gifted are born where there’s crystal. Not always, but nearly always.”
“Gabriele did find some holes in the birth records, but too few to affect the results so I’m confident in the conclusion,” his Lordship finished. He stopped abruptly to spin and face the Shaper. “One was yours, Anna. No record at all of an Anna Northcott being born in Straton. In fact, it appears that you were never registered. Gabriele?”
“I checked every register, Miss Northcott. For whatever reason, your name does not appear. I checked alternative spellings and birthdates in case of a simple clerical error but came up with nothing. It appears, therefore, that your name has been changed without alerting the authorities or that you were born outside of the Kingdom.”
Anna gaped. She’d always been Anna Northcott and she’d lived in Straton for as long as she could remember. She looked from the secretary to the scientist to her companion. All waited patiently for her response. She didn’t have one to give.
CHAPTER 33
S pider and Sy brought reinforcements with them. “Anna, I know you’ve met before, but let me properly introduce you to Beitris, Hew and Lachlan. They all hail from the isle of Dornie, right up at the top of The Kingdom. The wee one hiding at the back is Jimmy. He’s from Ionantis originally.” An enormous guard at the rear of the group raised a hand to wave hello, the grin on his face showing he took no offence at Spider’s teasing. Anna recognised the three guards who’d accompanied her to the hearing in the Great Hall.
“Nice to see you again, Miss Northcott,” Beitris told the Shaper.
“Aye, that it is,” added Hew and Lachlan.
“Please, call me Anna. All of you.” If it’s even my name, she added mentally, still thrown by her lack of birth registration.
“Lady Braxton’s expecting us and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting so let’s form up,” ordered Spider.
Beitris, Spider and Lachlan took the lead, telling Anna to get directly behind them. Ambidextrous Seleste moved to Anna’s left and the right-handed Lachlan took her right. The two giants, Sy and Jimmy, took the rear. Anna found herself jogging to keep up with the pace the frontline set and was grateful for all the drills Captain Laracy had put her through. She wouldn’t be able to keep this speed up forever, but she could probably manage a good few miles.
If the sound of marching feet and sight of drawn blades didn’t make any in their path question their routes, the look on the front row’s faces did. Staff scattered like chaff on the wind as the formation made its way to Lady Braxton’s office. Anna collapsed into a chair as soon as the door closed behind them.
“Ach, I’m sorry, Anna. We forgot your wee legs,” Beitris apologised.
“It’s… fine… I’m… a lot… fitter… already,” Anna replied between huge intakes of air.
“Aye, so you are,” Lachlan said with a completely straight face.
Spider, Sy and the other islanders guffawed. Even Seleste smiled.
“Hey! I didn’t say I was fit, just fitter!” Anna complained.
“We can see that, lass. Don’t mind Lachlan,” said He
w.
“For what it’s worth, Anna, we only tease people we like,” Beitris added. “It’s a Dornie thing. Woe betide you come across a Dornie who’s all stuffy with you. He’ll likely stick a knife in your back as soon as you turn it.”
Lady Braxton’s arrival stopped any further discussion of Dornie habits. She was followed soon after by seven guard pairings. They made short work of the debrief. Nine men had been investigated and followed where possible. Verified ill health had kept three from attending the oath meeting and two men were too young to be the man who had nearly knocked down John the cook. That left only four potential suspects: Captain Roscoe of the slimy aura, a domestic servant, an accountant and a gardener.
Lady Braxton put paid to the idea that intelligence from the converted spies might help narrow the list further. “They knew nothing of each other and they each had different drop sites where they left reports every two weeks. Obviously, we’ll follow these up, but there is nothing to help us with our current search.”
“We can rule out the accountant from Davy’s testimony though, Lady Braxton. He made no mention of a man with a patch over one eye and there is no way he would have missed that.”
“The others?” the spy mistress asked.
“No way to tell, milady. Other than the Iliyeth uniform, the files show the three to have no standout features and I’m sure Captain Roscoe would have the sense to blend in better if he were the Compeller.”
“I’ve been unable to glean anything of particular relevance from our records or from our would-be murderers, however, there may be a witness. All eight guards in Holding have explained that they lunch together at the Soldier’s Return on every Fifthday they are off duty. They claim there are usually ten in attendance which means we are missing two guards. They may have seen or heard something.”
“What about the smell that disturbed Luciado, Lady Braxton? Could that help narrow things down?”
“I considered that, Anna. Unfortunately, Captain Roscoe uses a pungent oil on his leathers, the servant uses cleaning agents on a daily basis and the gardener uses treatments and medicines on his plants. Any could be the smell that scared Luciado. And, no, before anyone asks, I will not make that poor child suffer any more by making him sniff the various options.”
Lady Braxton was handed a slip of paper by an assistant who’d slid silently into the room. Her face showed it was bad news. “Two guards have been found in the river. They were a mass of stab wounds and their throats were cut… It appears the witnesses have been taken care of.”
In a small studio in town, the guards’ executioner carefully cleaned and sharpened his knives. He muttered to himself as he worked. “This will not do, Bojek. You are going to have to do better, Bojek. I am unhappy with your progress, Bojek. You fail repeatedly, Bojek.” He fell to the floor and prostrated himself before his imagined assessor. “I’m sorry, master. I will do better. I will do your bidding. I swear. Nystrieth is God. I am yours, master. I am true only to you. Nystrieth is God!”
He lay still for several minutes then sat up abruptly, grabbed the knife he’d cleaned so assiduously and jammed it down through his other hand, pinning it to the floor. His face lit up in ecstasy. “Nystrieth is God. I am true to my master. Nystrieth is God….” He pulled the knife from his hand and struck downwards again. He cried out with pain and joy before chanting himself to sleep. He awoke refreshed some thirty minutes later and pulled the knife from his hand with another grunt of pleasure. He had a new plan. God was truly great.
Bojek washed and dressed with the same attention to detail he’d paid to his knife, taking care to avoid blood spots on his outerwear. He added a thick coat of his special oil to both sides of the wound on his hand, working it deep into the crevices left by the blade. The agony was delicious. It would keep him alert and focused: a reminder of the pleasure he could afford once he completed his current mission.
He bound his hand in clean linen as he reviewed the map that had taken him nearly a year to draw. He practised routes in his head. When he made a mistake, he smacked the bandaged hand against the table and began again. It helped kill time until the shift change at the castle. It was the best time to leave or arrive. The guards were dutiful, but one familiar face in a sea of many with a name they were not looking for would always pass. It was easy, when you knew the right people.
He looked around the room to check he’d packed everything of importance. He would not be returning. He would leave his bag with his contact in town and get to the bridge early. There’d be plenty of opportunity to bump into colleagues while he pretended to enjoy feeding the ducks on the moat. He’d issue orders at random. Someone might have more luck than the other morons he’d chosen and they would help to confuse the Shaper’s friends.
A middle-aged woman left the studio and made her way through town. She looked like a housekeeper or perhaps a cook given the bandage on her hand. She was entirely unremarkable and drew no second glances. Two men saw her leave the apartment from their hiding place but paid her no attention. It was only when a gust of wind blew from her to them that one’s face wrinkled up and his head snapped round to follow her path.
“It’s him,” whispered Sy. “It has to be him.”
“What? Where?”
“Did you not smell it?” Sy asked in wonder, his eyes locked on the spy.
“How many times have I told you that is a stupid question?” Spider grumbled. “We’re not all born with a dog’s snout.”
“The skinny brunette with the bandaged hand. I’ll keep eyes on her… him while you get the others. Be quick.”
Spider ran to the corner and was back with Beitris and Hew within moments. The guards strolled arm in arm, their long legs eating up the distance the spy had gained. Their body language, open uniform jackets and bare heads proclaimed them to be one of many off-duty couples enjoying an afternoon in town. Spider and Sy kept to the shadows a long way back. Their faces might be known to the spy.
The guards saw their prey dart down a side alley but continued past without looking. They signalled to the following men.
Spider ran forward and stopped directly across from the alley, squeezing into a space behind a large cart offloading bales of unworked leather. The spy was still in sight, but the alley offered no cover for any following him. He signalled the guards to take the next turning; if the spy turned left at the end of the alley, they would pick him up. He did a quick negotiation with the cart driver, borrowed his coat and cap and jumped into the driving seat as Sy crouched between the bales in the back
Bojek heard the cart rumble down the alley behind him but paid it no mind. He was nearly at the end and they couldn’t follow him up the next street. He’d be long gone by the time they ditched the cart. He wondered briefly how they’d known the woman was him but reasoned there were probably teams following anyone who came out of his address. It’s what he would have done, if he’d been them.
He’d known he’d alert suspicion by not turning up for that fiasco this morning. It was just as well he’d listened to his gut. She’d told him that her block couldn’t be detected. He, however, knew better. He’d been a loyal servant to his God Shaper since the beginning. She was merely a recent convert. Her lack of experience and arrogance would be her undoing.
CHAPTER 34
Alscombe
H utton slowed in his report as he considered his wording. “He spent the evening at home being, em, entertained by Lady Goldsmith. He acted dominant to her subservient, milord. There was a cat o’ nine tails, sexual violence and a lot of leather, milord.”
“You saw this yourself?” Lord Thornson hissed.
Hutton found himself blushing. “I did, milord.”
The Healer was enraged. That bitch would pay. Those green eyes were his.
“He spent the morning with Lord Goldsmith, hunting. I watched them bring in the catch. Three boar were still alive. He…” Hutton paused and gulped down nausea before continuing. “Milord, he joined in with the slaughter and butchery
. He slashed off heads and gutted the boar with his bare hands. He encouraged his group to join him in killing the wounded animals, ‘to relish the rush of hot blood gush over your hands, to glory in the power of life and death,’ he said.”
Lord Thornson shifted in his seat to cover his erection. “A dangerous man, indeed, Hutton. And since then?”
“Lunch at Christie’s, milord. Lord Goldsmith fell for the Kenna daughters’ ploy to get an introduction to Geraint. They were almost drooling as they watched him win at the tables and throw money around like water. Not knowing their pretty faces hide poor, bloodsucking hearts, he understandably extended an invitation to them to join the lunch party. Lady Goldsmith was not amused.”
The Healer allowed pleasure at Larry Goldsmith’s stupidity and Marissa Goldsmith’s discomfit to temper his blood lust. It was a small recompense for her tasting Geraint before him. “And?” he asked.
“Malik Brewcherrion was there, milord.”
Lord Thornson felt his heart almost stop. An image of two muscular male bodies entwined on silk sheets came unbidden to his mind: smoky, dark eyes and ebony skin meeting green eyes and pale, white skin. Equal in looks, equal in riches, equal in intensity. He could lose before he even began. He realised Hutton was still speaking.
“… disappeared before the third course, milord. I was unable to establish where they went.”
The Healer slammed his hands on the table, his usual composure devastated. “You moron. What do I pay you for? How could you lose him?” he shouted, his face purple with rage.
The investigator waited for his client’s rage to calm. “Milord, there is something else of interest. I managed to get close enough to establish the reason for the man’s visit to Alscombe. Brewcherrion will be unable to help him with it.”
Lord Thornson looked at Hutton’s calculating eyes and realised for the first time that he had underestimated the investigator. The man knew full well why Geraint was of interest. He would have to be silenced, once he was no longer useful. “And that is, Hutton?” he asked coldly.