City of Night (72 page)

This, she thought, as she examined the fine veins in still hands, was triumph. This was victory. This hollowness, this loss. There would be no more reports, no more consecrated daggers—not from Ararath. His anger, his guilt, and his determination had, like the fires they were, consumed him. She bowed her head. But Meralonne had not yet finished.

“I believe I now know who his informant was.”

“His informant?”

“Yes. The seer to whom he would never introduce us.”

Sigurne was watchful. “This informant was at House Terafin?”

“Oh, yes. And I am certain that the demon had encountered her before; The Terafin, however, was not open to questions. Nor were her Chosen.”

“How are you so certain?”

“She was there. She was the reason that the Chosen summoned me, and if not for her intervention, it is my suspicion that we would no longer have this particular Terafin lord at the House.

“She is young, Sigurne. She is young.”

“But seer-born?”

“I cannot—yet—be certain of that.”

“Be careful, Meralonne.”

“I am always careful.”

“You always survive; it is not the same thing.”

“If she is a seer, she will also survive.” He rose. “I have been given permission to return to The Terafin, with my report, at the late dinner hour. If you desire it, accompany me.”

Sigurne was aware that the word permission, when used in this context, was inaccurate. “I . . . am not, tonight, up to such a difficult meeting, Meralonne. I trust that you will curb your tongue and your temper sufficiently that we will not lose the only essential ally that we have at the moment.”

He shrugged, his hair sliding over his shoulder and down his back as he reached for an ashtray that overhung the edge of one of Sigurne’s many shelves. Tapping the pipe empty, he said, “I am still retained by The House; I have been neither replaced nor relieved. Nor do I expect to be.

“I will speak with The Terafin, and I will report to you.” He rose then; his eyes were gray and dark; he was restless, and the whole of their conversation had not quieted him at all. He made the door, and then paused there, turning.

“It is not my way,” he said quietly, as if bowing with great effort to hers, “to mourn as you mourn, Sigurne. Ararath Handernesse saw clearly, and he did what he felt necessary. His life, and his death, were his to choose. Very few can say that, in the end, and I envy it—I do not grieve for it.”

She nodded. There was nothing else to say. She was not Meralonne. She could send a man to his death; she could, in fact, lift hand to kill one if it was required. In the end, there was no functional difference between the two of them.

But she yearned for Meralonne’s certainty. She yearned for his lack of sorrow, his lack of guilt, his lack of questions; they did not stop her, but they plagued her nonetheless, demanding their due.

And what due could she offer? In the end, his death was to be unremarked, and unremarkable; The Terafin would not expose her House in so public a fashion; nor would she subject Handernesse to the gawking and the curiosity of the idle. What remained of Ararath was scattered bits of flesh—or less, given Meralonne’s imprecise description of the magics used and encountered—within one room in the Terafin manse, and given the army of servants that any large House required, those would be cleaned up, disposed of as unnecessary and unwanted detritus.

That left memory.

There was no one to share that memory with; there would be no funeral, she thought. She could not suggest it to The Terafin without exposing her own hand in Ararath’s death, and even were she so inclined, she could not expose that without exposing far too much of the Order’s work to a woman who ruled. She rose.

The human need to share experience to give grief meaning was profound. It was twin to the need to share joy, as if by sharing either, they became real, as if they required more than one person to anchor them. She was long past the age where joy—or sorrow—could be shared in such an unfettered way, but she remembered, standing alone in the Tower she had made her life, the singular joy of one day in the North, in a land of snow made water by fire and flame, made red by blood and black by ash. It came to her, as a ghost and a reminder: the young woman trapped within the form and shape of the older one.

She lifted hands that were now wrinkled and pale, and as she did, she saw the grim final moments of the man who had taken her from her village, her family, and everything she had ever loved. They had called him the Ice Mage; they might have called him anything else, but it was a simple, declarative description for a stark people. He ruled; they could not bring themselves to call him Lord. Only Sigurne had debased herself enough to do that, and only when she had become a fixture within his abode: his apprentice. There were costs to defiance, and she had not—yet—become so bitter that life was worthless.

He had summoned the kin. He had trapped them with words and power, as he had trapped her with death and power, enslaving them both. And in her captivity, she had spoken long, and late, with the most significant of her fellow captives, nursing her hatred, her anger; exposing her fear and hiding all else.

It was forbidden, of course, this speech, this learning, the education she’d been given—the only education she had been allowed. How she had hated it: the books and the slates and the inks and the precise alignment of geometric figures in the unyielding stone. But she had learned. Then, and later, she had
learned
.

The Ice Mage, in his arrogance, had assumed that he would be her only teacher.

Sigurne had summoned the Southern Magi, with the aid and the deception of the lone, bound
Kialli
lord. They had come.

She, who now knew the danger that the
Kialli
posed, had nodded, grim and dark and pale. She did not ask what would become of the
Kialli
lord; could not bring herself to ask it, although she suspected it would have exposed nothing; he was—gods, he was—perceptive, cunning, treacherous. Had he used her? Yes. And she, him. Because their ends were the same.

I am summoned, little one. We will not speak again. Not now, and not after; I will go to the Hells, and you? You will wither and die, and where you go, we cannot see.
He had turned from her then.

He had turned, walked, his pace quickening, toward where the Ice Mage now gathered the whole of his forces: men in glinting armor, men in chain and fur, men with pikes and axes and swords; demon- kin, the lesser, and the great, their armor a natural part of the form the world imposed upon them when they returned to its folds. Only the
Kialli
lord had enough control, enough will, to force his form to conform to
his
desire; he looked almost human.

Sigurne, the Ice Mage did not summon; instead, he shut her in the height of his Tower, where the magical wards were the strongest, and windows that protected her from the wail of wind and the bite of winter death, lined the walls. She looked; she looked down.

The Ice Mage had his kin. He had his
Kialli
. They were, for that moment, his.

In the distance, fighting the drifts that were so high, and the ice that was often shining and thin, she saw a like army, but it contained no demon-kin, none of the strange and fearsome shapes of their limbs, their heads, their elongated faces. No: these distant men, who struggled against the simple fact of the cold that could kill, wore armor—or less—as they approached.

She held breath, then and now, against hope. Against its bitter breaking—for how could it stand? Men, against the forces that the Ice Mage now arrayed, had fallen before. Some quickly, if they were lucky, and some over the course of three long days, in which their screams and their cries broke against the stone of the Tower.

But she saw one, clothed in blue fire and blue light, rising into the pale azure of the perfect, and perfectly clear, sky. She saw the white of his hair—even at the marked distance of the Tower’s height—and she thought, although it was and must be the fancy of hope, she saw his expression, his exultation. She did not think, on that day, that he was human.

She did not think it now.

What had she thought he was, in that distant past? An Avatar. Angelae. Servant of the gods. He flew, and where he flew, there was death and a savage, cold joy: Meralonne APhaniel was a thing of the Northern Wastes, and yet . . . the kin died.

He came, at last, to the
Kialli
, and the
Kialli
lord bowed to him. It was not a bow demanded by the man who held his name; it was offered, a gesture of respect, a glimmer of . . . familiarity. And in his turn, the white-haired mage had bowed as well, and a red sword, a red shield had formed in the hands of the
Kialli
.

They fought, these two. Even the Ice Mage seemed momentarily forgotten, and Sigurne heard the demon roar his
name
above the din of endless wind, and she felt the name, and knew it. It was not a gift; it was a challenge, and the mage met it in perfect silence, with his blue blade, his wild, wild joy.

The
Kialli
died.

The Ice Mage died.

Sigurne?

She wept. She wept when her master’s head left his shoulders and his fires guttered and his creatures turned to ash that the winds would disperse until only story remained. She wept for her life, for what she had lost, and what she had gained, for
this
was victory: he had died. She would die, and she did not care, not then: the day was so clear and so bright and so beautiful, and everything she had
ever
wanted felt as though it had come to her in that moment.

She wept now.

Because it had not ended, not then, and it might never end while she lived. And because the joy of that day still lived, within her, the only bridge between her age and her youth, the fire that she touched when the days were shortest, the nights as dark and threatening as this one. She had lost family and friends and the whole of a life, before.

She had lost one friend today.

But he fought, as Meralonne said, and if death was victory—and she had faced that death, that certainty of death assuming it was
exactly
that—he had won an important battle. Not the war; not the whole of the war; that was in her hands, now, and in the hands of Meralonne APhaniel; it was in the hands, Sigurne thought, of a girl barely adult, and a woman who ruled the most powerful House in the Empire.

And it would be in the hands of the Kings.

She wanted to do something for Ararath. The best thing she could do for her family, in the end, had been to come South, to avoid the stigma of her shame shadowing her family’s name and life.

And the only thing she could do for Ararath now was to find the source of the demonic magic that threatened the City, and eliminate it. Convenient, she thought, turning at last back to the center of her small room. Convenient gift, which would be given regardless.

The Common in Scaral was at its least crowded, but even so, it was busy. Commerce of a certain sort did not stop for simple things like lessening daylight hours or inclement weather; nor did it apparently stop for loud, screaming arguments, although the foot traffic did as people formed semicircles at what they felt was a safe distance in order to watch.

Watching was, in its own way, an art, and many people who did choose to watch nonetheless observed very little; it was one of Haval’s chief complaints about a so-called audience, although if he were fair, it was also one of the things he most relied on. He glanced at the windows themselves, and from there, through the letters, laid backward so that customers might read the words on the outside. Many of the merchants who owned such storefronts in the Common rented them out. Haval had taken advantage of this, for he did not own this building, much to his regret. He had, however, been installed behind its well- kept facade for many years. His sign,
Elemental Fashion,
was still bold and still perfect, although that was more due to magery than his own care.

Hannerle had disliked the name, of course. She had desired to see
Haval’s House of Fashion
or something equally pretentious—and equally nondescript, in the end—and it was only the reminder that Haval did not wish to ever be known by name that had dissuaded her from this choice. She still did not like the alternative, however.

He frowned, although his hands still held needle and thread steady; he was beading, but the beadwork was both dark and minimal. Many of the current fashions adored by the young were lamentably spare, and while he appreciated the look, he did not appreciate the comparative lack of time and money it took to achieve it.

The needle stopped, although Haval’s posture did not change.

In the crowd that had gathered, men and women who were clearly actually busy enough that an argument—admittedly a colorful one on the edge of violence—could not hold their interest, were threading their way through the less- busy spectators. One of those men, Havel recognized instantly, even at this distance.

Haval did not stand or otherwise draw attention to himself, but he was now aware of every movement that man made. It was not difficult; there were very few men who wore their hair in an unfettered drape of that length. The Northerners often wore theirs braided. Not so Meralonne APhaniel.

He moved with relative ease through the gathering; his presence was such that people stepped out of his way, many of them without noticing that they’d done so
only
for the mage, and had, in fact, required a good deal of jostling for much larger and more annoyed men.