City of Night (70 page)

Hope was foolish. Longing, foolish. Sentiment, expensive in the extreme. She paid the price for these, now. Ararath was, as Jewel Markess had so strongly implied, dead.

Her face was a mask. There was no numbness in her, and what care she could take was turned outward, not in.

“My lord,” he said, turning toward her, his palms spread, “You can see that this—this mage,” he spit out the word as he turned toward Meralonne, who had not moved once since he had made his single, his singular, gesture, “bears me malice for reasons I cannot begin to—”

And then he stiffened. Amarais understood this as well; he had seen, at last, Jewel Markess and her den-kin.

The wall exploded.

 

Amarais stood unharmed by the fragments of stone and wood debris that flew out from the wall. Meralonne APhaniel, who stood at the center of the blast, was likewise unharmed; the same could not, however, be said of the mantel, which had been—moments before—priceless and irreplaceable.

Unseen by either the mage or the man who was not, and perhaps had never been, her brother, the painting of idyllic seashore had blackened to ash.

She looked past the shoulder of the Magi, to where Torvan now stood, and she offered him something akin to a smile. “I chose well, when I chose you.”

He wouldn’t hear her, of course; he would hear nothing but his own fear, his own concern for her safety. He had taken the risk of summoning the mage on nothing more than hunch, and Amarais knew well whose hunch it had been: Jewel Markess. The girl was white and silent; she and Carver all but clung to each other, although they did not actually touch.

Amarais should have felt fear; she felt none. Instead, something cold and sharp, a fury that she had thought long left behind in the streets of the holdings, in a childhood that she had stepped out of long before her debut, almost consumed her. What had she exposed, to be hunted in this fashion? What vulnerability had she revealed, that a powerful stranger might seek this audience, so certain that she would grant it, and alone?

It was the type of risk she
did not take,
and she had taken it for the sake of her past, and the younger brother she had once adored.

They would
pay
.

 

“Old man, do you think you are a match for me? Do you think that your magics and your pathetic human power will outlast
mine
? You’ve had decades, and I, eternity. But I will see you suffer before this is done.”

The gods were kind to the woman who was now The Terafin; the voice no longer resembled Ararath’s voice. The expression—what she could see of it, for the face was mostly turned from her—was not his. She could hone her anger at the masquerade because it was now so pathetically clear.

The imposter’s shoulders tensed, and his hands flexed, and once again, the room was bathed in the harsh glare of magical fire. She felt its heat across her exposed cheeks, her throat, the backs of the hands she kept idle by her sides. She heard, as if at a distance, the crack and the tinkle of glass.

“Well, well, well,” Meralonne replied, his lips turned in a half smile. “It
has
been rather a long time, and I do admit I’m rusty.” He took a step forward, and cleared the arch completely.

Amarais saw that Torvan was a step behind him—a step and an invisible wall; she heard the crash of his armor and saw him bounce; saw the brief agony of his expression, the widening of eyes, the turn of head as the Chosen understood that they
could not
follow the Magi. The Terafin was on one side of the divide that they had
trusted
the mage to build; they were on the other side, the wrong side.

She had lost some of her most trusted guards in the fight for the House. She had accepted their deaths, just as she had accepted that her own might occur at any time. But she had grieved.

Here, now, she understood that Meralonne APhaniel kept them out of the storm of magery. She understood, as well, that the imposter was trapped in this room. The only way out was through the mage.

Interesting.

The imposter stared through the transparent wall behind the mage, and then he spoke. “You have caused me trouble, little urchin. My war is with you.”

Jewel Markess was pale but resolute—either that or certain of the strength of the barrier that kept the Chosen out. She said nothing, and did nothing, but her hands clenched in the fists that Amarais herself avoided by dint of experience.

“Where is the real Ararath?” she asked. It was a mistake, and she knew it. It was a mistake, and it was hope. Hope was often just pain in another guise.

“He is our prisoner,” the imposter replied, turning, wearing Ararath’s face as if it were almost his own. “But if I do not return in safety, he will be a corpse within the day.”

“He’s lying!” Jewel shouted.

Amarais turned to look at the girl. “How is he lying?”

“Old Rath’s dead.”

“He will be,” the imposter said coolly. “But he is not dead yet. Do you think we would destroy so useful a bargaining tool, Terafin? This—” and he snarled as he gestured at Jewel, “has cost us much. We had hoped to take your house from within; it appears that we will have to accept destroying its leader.”

“A poor consolation.” But Amarais did not look at the imposter; she had not taken her gaze from the street child’s pale, determined face. Torvan had stepped behind the girl, had placed one mailed hand on her shoulder to steady her.

Jewel Markess. Ararath had loved her. Amarais knew it, and even thought she might understand why, one day; she thought to keep the girl until the moment that she did. For she saw a very real grief—and a very deep loss—in the girl’s stark expression, and it was a grief that she herself
could not
show. Not now, and perhaps not ever.

“Master APhaniel,” she said, cold now, “Who—or what—is this caricature?”

“I am your death,” the imposter replied, and there was a very real anger in the threat. Clearly he was not a man who was used to being disregarded. He lifted a hand again, and gestured, and she felt the ground shake beneath her feet; she saw, briefly, a shadow limned in blue light, as it struck at her, and passed around.

Whatever power the Magi had put into preserving her life held.

Perhaps, she thought, as she finally turned, caught by some shift in color, some strangeness in the imposter’s posture, he was not a man at all. In silence, she watched as the skin across his face stretched, thinned, and ruptured. Blood flew, and bits of flesh, as the creature discarded both the face—perhaps the literal face—of her brother, and the appearance of mortality, in one gesture.

His face stretched, his jaws lengthening until they were almost as long as her forearms. His teeth elongated and sharpened, his eyes grew longer and narrower, sliding to the sides of an almost reptilian head. His skin was ebon, in the lights of this room, and he looked as if he belonged in the wreckage.

He opened his mouth, and he
roared
. Dragons, if they had ever existed, must have sounded like this, and she felt the earth shake at the sound. But the roar stretched, thinned, and broke, shifting over seconds into a sound of pain. He spoke, now, in a language that Amarais had never heard, and gods willing, might never hear again.

“Master APhaniel,” she said, both sharply and loudly, “Cease this! We need information!”

“I’m trying,” the Member of the Order of Knowledge said, through gritted teeth.

So, she thought. The imposter served a different master, and that master was not interested in offering any information to either House Terafin or the Order of Knowledge. The creature’s screams grew louder, and the sound of syllables, less, until all that existed was pain.

She stood, she bore witness. She might have paled, but she did not otherwise flinch or move.

Across the divide, Jewel Markess did not fare as well. She was young, and untried, and she cried out in the end, in pain, in compassion, and in horror. Horror for the creature who had, no doubt, been the death of the Ararath they had both known.

Having learned this lesson years in the distant past, she watched as Meralonne APhaniel struggled, not to defend himself, but to hold what remained of the creature. His hands shone, gold and bright, and that light enveloped his face and his chest; beads of sweat formed across his brow as he labored while the creature screamed. Shadows and darkness grew around the creature, some counterpoint to the light of the Magi, but it grew, to Amarais’ eyes, more quickly, and it felt more solid.

In the end, Jewel Markess screamed as well; her companion was rigid and utterly silent, although he had long since ceased to watch.

And in the end, Meralonne APhaniel snarled and staggered, and the light in his hands lessened and dimmed as the creature, surrounded by shadow, dimmed—and faded from sight.

 

“Jewel,” The Terafin said.

Jewel Markess blinked at the sound of her name, but her gaze did not travel to the woman who had called her back. Amarais watched her, and for the moment, only her. She knew that the girl’s slow gaze would travel across the wreck of the mantel, its sharp splinters and broken boards pale where the dark, gleaming surface had been broken by a single blast.

She would look at the carpet, and at the walls; she would look, in the end, at what remained in the room’s center: blood, scraps of skin, discarded flesh.

Ararath’s flesh.

Morretz will be angry,
The Terafin thought. She glanced at her hands and noticed that they were bleeding. Noticed, as well, that the fall of light against the floor had changed. The windows, she thought. So much power.

And yet a few men with hammers might accomplish the same goal, without the conceit of magic.

The girl turned, and was sick.

The mage was unconcerned; Amarais thought he had not noticed. He stepped into the room’s center, and into the spread remnants of what might have been a corpse. Only when he moved did Alayra and Torvan follow, and they passed him as he bent, their footfalls absorbed by the ruins of carpet, flesh, and stone dust.

Amarais nodded to Alayra, but it was a brief, almost cursory gesture. She watched Jewel until the girl had straightened. Her den-kin came to stand by her side; he was pale, but not notably more so than her own Chosen.

Alayra did not return the nod with a salute; she did not mar the silence with words. Words were not needed here. They were aware of the risk that the mage had taken, and they were also aware—and would always be aware—that they had not occupied
these
positions when the creature masquerading as Ararath had decided to attack.

But they would be aware, just as she was aware, that had it been entirely in her hands, they—and the mage, whose presence had proved so necessary—would not have been here at all.

Amarais walked over to where the mage now crouched. “Is this human?”

He did not fail to understand the question. “Yes. These remains are human.”

She nodded; it was the answer, in the end, that she had expected. It was not, of course, the answer she wanted. There were other questions to ask. She might start with:
What was that?
She might start with:
Why was he here?
She might demand the whole of the truth:
Whose flesh? Whose human flesh?

She did none of these things. Instead, she turned from his side, and she walked between Alayra and Torvan as if they were pillars or columns, and not witnesses.

She needed, and wanted, none. “Leave me.”

“Terafin—” Alayra began.

“That was not a request.” The hands that she had managed to keep at her sides bunched, at last, into reflexive fists. Ararath, had he been alive, would have recognized the posture.

“Leave me. All of you.” She looked out of the window, and the ruins of the beveled glass, with its missing panes, its twisted lead, seemed the perfect frame for her, at this moment.

She heard their retreating steps; they were slow. Only one man approached her, and she knew who it must be; she did not even spare him a glance; the sky held her gaze.

“Terafin, I will repair to the Order and begin my report. On the morrow, I shall deliver it to you.”

Enough of this game had been played at the mage’s behest. “You may return this eve, after the late dinner hour.” It was not a request.

Nor was he foolish enough to interpret it as such. He did not argue; he did not offer excuses. Instead, he bowed; she saw the shift of his robes out of the corner of her eye.

“Jewel. After the middle dinner hour, I would appreciate your company. I will send someone for you in your quarters. Please be there.” She turned, then, from the window, and she met the girl’s dark eyes.

Her face was still pale, still white with distress; she was still sickened, but she did not attempt to hide it, or otherwise acknowledge it. Her eyes were, even at the distance that separated them, reddened.

But she did not say the words aloud. She said nothing at all, but offered Jewel Markess, and only Jewel, a glimpse of her unmasked and unguarded expression. She could not say why.

Jewel in turn offered what anyone else in this manse offered: obedience and silence.

 

Morretz came an hour later. She had not moved anything but her hands; they were clasped, loosely, behind her back.

He came to her carrying a cloak, and in truth she felt chilled; the air of Scaral was cold, and the windows did not deny it passage; nor did fire burn in the grate, to otherwise warm the room.