Magic Without Mercy (8 page)

Looked like my lover picked a long, easy pain. He’d feel a slight muscle stiffness over the next few weeks probably. I always went for the short, hard pains, so I could stay on top of my game.

Then he drew the spell that would unlock the door.

I heard footsteps coming up the path behind us, and a child’s voice. “People are coming,” I said.

Zay flicked the spell at the wall of green, and a doorway opened. “In,” he said. “Shame?”

“Got it.”

Shame drew a nice, solid Illusion, a Disbursement spell biting at his wrist. I covered my mouth as the Illusion settled around me in rotted stink. Magic didn’t usually smell so bad. Yes, magic had been making me sick since we fought Leander and Isabelle. But seeing it with my bare eyes had only really started after I cast that spell on the Veiled, passed out, and hit my head. I didn’t know
why that had changed things so I could see magic and smell it as if it had gone rotten.

Maybe my other senses were making up for the fact that I couldn’t use magic. Maybe it had something to do with the poison in magic. Or maybe it was because I had a dead magic user sharing a corner of my brain.

Whatever it was that had changed magic, or me, to this level, it was getting annoying.

I walked through the darkened doorway to the platform at the top of the stairs, Zay right behind me and Shame right behind him.

Shame broke the spell, closing the door.

“Did they see us?” Zayvion asked quietly.

“No,” Shame said. He flicked on the light switch. “They were still far enough off, they couldn’t have seen us.”

In the low glow of the single lightbulb above us and smaller lights scattered beneath the stairs that spilled out below us, we each unpacked weapons. I went for sword and knives. Zay chose sword, and Shame opted for two guns.

“Let’s do it,” Shame said quietly. “Z, you taking point?”

“Yes. Allie, I want you to stay behind us.”

He stared at me for a long time until I finally said, “What?”

“I thought you’d argue about it.”

“I’ll stay behind you as we walk into the room. After that, all bets are off.”

He nodded. Shame tapped the tiles on his bracelet, then cast the softest Light spell I’d ever seen. Zayvion’s bracelet glowed slightly in the dark.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Three, one, five,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Third page,” Zayvion said, “first sentence, fifth word: ‘coming downstairs now.’”

“Seriously?”

“Look it up,” Shame said.

“No, I’ll take your word for it. The others will know what you meant?”

“They should,” Shame said. “They knew we were going to the Life well, and they have the books if they need to check. But they won’t have to with that simple code. There are a few we use a lot. That’s one of them.”

I had severely underestimated how good this code system was. Of course, if anyone from the Authority captured one of us, or all of us, and found the books, it wouldn’t take much to figure it out.

“How many people have it memorized?” I asked quietly as we started down the stairs.

“Me, Zay, Terric, Mum,” Shame said. “Probably not Victor or Hayden. But they have the book. They can look it up.”

Walking down the stairs took more time than I remembered, and my legs were already tired from our climb. Another indication that we were not at our best. I didn’t used to be this out of shape—or this worn down.

I didn’t know how Shame was managing.

We got to the bottom of the stairs. No goons. We’d been quiet enough, our soft-soled shoes on the wooden steps making no echoes against the walls, that I was pretty sure if there were people actually in the well chamber, they wouldn’t have heard us coming.

Zayvion stopped in front of the big double doors, and Shame stood shoulder to shoulder with him.

I stayed behind them, like I’d promised. And since I couldn’t throw magic, I resheathed my long knife, and pulled out the gun instead. I slapped a clip into it, and
Shame gave me half a glance over his shoulder. He was smiling.

Bastard.

Zay drew the spell to open and unlock the door. It looked like brass ribbons of magic spun out from his fingertips and clicked into five different places in the carvings on the doors.

The doors opened.

Magic lashed out, and wrapped us in an inferno of pain.

Z
ayvion broke the attack with a clean slice of his katana, chanting a spell for Impact that grew like a wall of bullets in front of him.

He pulled magic into the spell and sent it singing into the room.

Shame went with a more direct attack and unloaded his gun into the room while Zayvion pulled a Block out of the ground like a liquid net of energy around Shame, me, and him.

Yes, it smelled like hot hell. But since whoever in there casting couldn’t break the barrier, I didn’t care what it smelled like.

We strode into the room. No use hiding. Whoever was in there had already seen us, had already decided we were dangerous and worth the fry-by-magic, ask-questions-later treatment.

Screw that.

Shame dropped the clip and reloaded without breaking stride. He might have looked sick and exhausted before, but he looked like someone you would not want to fuck with now.

I caught the movement to the far left of the room. “Two men, left,” I said. “Three right.”

“Shame, left,” Zay said. “Allie, right.”

Zay heaved back and cleaved the spell he was holding with his sword, catching the magic of the Block in the black and silver glyphs that swirled down the blade. He yelled and swung again, this time throwing all that magic, like a spray of hot bullets, out to both sides of the room, where they struck and burned.

He ran to the right—so did I.

Not being able to cast magic was seriously pissing me off. But the anger was good. Anger, I could use.

I took the first man. Shorter than me, built like a brick shit house, he met my sword with an ax, and a handful of magic. The impact of both set my bones on fire.

Yes, I had the gun in my left hand. No, I couldn’t make myself raise it and shoot him.

Zayvion didn’t hesitate. He threw enough magic to kill an elephant. All three men dropped, and were still.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I was pretty much not all right. I was dizzy, nauseous, and in a lot of pain from that last attack I’d cleverly blocked with every bone in my body. I thought about listing my pains, but decided it would take too much lung power.

All I got out was, “Swell.”

He strode over to Shame. Not that he needed to. Shame had both men on the floor, flat on their backs unconscious, one of them, at least, bleeding heavily.

Shame stood over them, lighting a cigarette.

“Bartholomew’s,” he said. “Likely. Might be it’s time for a change of guards down here or for them to check in. We don’t know how much time we have left.”

Zayvion glared at the men. “One way to find out.” He crouched down next to the man who was very unconscious but very not bleeding. He moved his sword into his left hand—not a handicap for him, I knew for a fact;
I’d been on the sparring mats with him plenty—and placed the palm and fingers of his right hand against the guy’s forehead.

He spoke a word, and even though I didn’t know that word, I knew it was a Disbursement spell. From the glyph that flared in the air in front of Zay, and just as quickly flashed out, I knew it was a short, brutal pain he was going to pay for this magic.

Then he began whispering. Soft, sibilant, the words slipped out like a hush of rain. Zay said one last word. A glyph blazed bloodred in his hand, between his palm and the man’s forehead, and then sank into the man.

Even unconscious, the man stiffened. Even unconscious, he screamed.

Zayvion was still whispering, a rush of words, half-caught phrases, like someone had hard jacked an information stream into his head.

No, not information—Zayvion was reading, whispering, ripping through the man’s memories. Zay’s voice grew louder and he straightened his elbow, somehow pressing the spell deeper into the man’s brain, then twisting it like a knife.

The man yelled out again and went still. Unbreathing. Dead.

Zayvion drew his hand away. Inhaled, exhaled, and stood. He was sweating.

“So dead guy have anything interesting to tell us?” Shame asked.

“They were sent here by Bartholomew. Have been here for three days. Don’t know that he’s dead.”

“Well, that’s good news for us,” Shame said. “Did he know when his replacements were coming?”

“No.”

“And there’s the bad news, right on schedule.”

“You killed him,” I said a bit belatedly.

Zayvion arched a look at me as he knelt next to the bleeding man. “Yes.”

“You took his memories and killed him.” I felt like I was stuck in a loop. I mean, I’d seen Zayvion kill things, beasts that crossed through the gate of death, the Veiled, who were not really people anymore. But he’d put his bare hands on an unconscious man, sucked out his brains, and left him dead.

“Yes,” he said again.

“Why aren’t you paying the price?” I finally asked. “Death for a death, that’s what magic makes you pay. If you kill someone with magic, you have to pay the same price: death. Unless you have some weird Proxy setup I can’t see?”

Get enough Proxies linked up and you could spread the price of a death across enough people that everyone except the target would walk away. Hurt, but still walking.

“No,” he said. “No Proxies.”

He put his hand on the next man, and whispered a spell. I saw the harsh Disbursement flare again and Zayvion’s shoulders jerked back and down like he’d just stuck his finger in a light socket. He was breathing a little heavier now, but began whispering again.

“Shame?” I said quietly.

Shame was in mid-inhale on the cig. “Mmm?”

“Is he going to kill him?”

I didn’t know why it bothered me. It shouldn’t. Bartholomew’s men would have killed me in a second. Killed Zay. Killed Shame. Done more than that. They would have turned us inside out if they got the chance. They had just tried to kill me, all of us, as we walked in here, as a matter of fact.

Shame exhaled and threw the cigarette to the ground. “Likely, yes. He’s in a mood, that one.”

I kept my mouth shut while Zayvion dug through the man’s mind. He took his hand off his forehead and then pulled his knife. One quick stroke and the man wasn’t breathing anymore.

Zay stood, stalked over to the three men on the other side of the room. One was dead already—gunshot. He put his hand on the other two men’s foreheads, digging through their brains with magic. Then snapped their necks with brutal efficiency.

“Check the well,” Zay said, a rough edge to his voice, as if he’d just been yelling his lungs out instead of whispering the brains out of people.

“Crazed rogue Closers,” Shame said. “Gotta love them. All business, no manners.” He clapped his hands together once. “Let’s get to this, shall we?”

I just stood there, staring at Zayvion. His eyes were hammered gold, no pupil at all, his jaw set as if trying to hold back a scream. It wasn’t fury that boiled beneath that expression—it was madness.

Too many minds,
Dad said softly.

What? You mean he Closed too many minds?

It wasn’t just Closing,
he said.
He was sorting through their memories, their knowledge, their lives. Four lives in just a few minutes is like trying to suck the ocean down in one gulp. He would have caused himself less pain if he’d just Closed them.

“Zay?” I said, walking toward him.

He locked his jaw, his nostrils flared, and he shook his head once, as if just hearing his name hurt. He managed to take a step away from me.

“Ah-ah, leave him a bit,” Shame said. “He’s got some sorting to do.”

Shame had knelt and taken off his boots and was stuffing his socks into them.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, glad to have
something else to focus on, but also wondering if he had gone as crazy as Zayvion.

“Checking the wells,” he said. “What the hell do you think I’m doing?”

“Getting naked for no reason?”

“While that is always a pleasant option,” Shame said as he stood, “there’s no time for naked. Yet.” He tipped his head down, inhaled, then exhaled, as if setting himself to a heavy weight. He paced across the floor, working a very slow counterclockwise circle toward the center of the room where the patterned woodwork flowed into the symbol that marked where the well of magic swelled far below.

I’d seen him walk this way once before, back at the Blood well, moving as if he were walking on rice paper and trying not to tear it, as if there was a far-off sound that he could hear. It was meditative, a pure focus on magic that didn’t flare and move like most magic. No, this was more like Shame attuning to magic, making himself a grounding rod, a tuning fork.

But every step he took drew something from the floor, leaving behind black scorch marks. Death magic. He was drawing energy from the floor. Maybe even from the well or the earth around and above us.

Was he tasting the magic? With his feet?

Shame inhaled a quick breath in a soft
ah
as if he had just figured a lock. And then he strode straight to the center of the symbol, faced the door we’d come in through, and lifted his arms above his head, shaking his wrists a little so that his coat sleeves settled comfortably.

“Step back a bit,” he said.

I did so.

Shame called magic from the carvings in the ceiling, drawing it down around him like a very light rain. Except the rain didn’t fall all the way to the ground. It got to
about shoulder level, and then a pulse of light in the center of his chest—the stone that Terric had accidentally embedded in Shame to keep him alive—absorbed the magic.

After a couple seconds, Shame drew his hands down and traced a Disbursement glyph. He was going with a short, quick pain. The Disbursement glyph flared and wrapped up his arm, hugging there like a purple leech and digging deep. I figured it was muscle aches.

He drew a glyph for Open, which hovered about three feet in front of him. He poured just a small bit of magic into it, and before the glyph was completely closed, he pulled a line of it with him as he turned to face the wall. He repeated the Open glyph, caught the edge, keeping it open as he turned, connecting it with the next glyph, turned to the next wall, did the same, and repeated the process on the last wall.