Magic Steps (16 page)

“If you could have used the blood to track them it wouldn’t matter that they fled the inn?” Sandry guessed.

“Exactly,” Wulfric replied as they rode through the gate. “But without even the blood to help, and with them getting away clean like that

His grace is fair, but I think I’ll steer clear of him until, I have, some real progress to report.”

What they had forgotten was; that it was Lovers’ Day, Long, long before, a noble maiden and a cobbler had drowned themselves rather than let their families marry them to others. For some reason their festival was marked by music, dancing, and a parade. Sandry’s group had to muscle through the crowds. The din was worst in front of Rokat House itself, where the parade was passing.

The Provosts Guards on watch stood aside for Wulfric. He voiced the words that would break the magical seal on the door, though the sound was lost in the bang of cymbals and drums. When the wax seal crumbled away—the sign the magical seal had broken—Wulfric, Sandry, and Sandry’s bodyguards walked inside and closed the door behind them.

It was pitch dark in the entryway—no lamps had been lit. Sandry pulled her lightstone out so they could see. Its glow revealed smutches of darkness on the stairs, on the wall, and on the railing. Holding the stone up, she could see more smutches along the hall that led to the rear of the building on the ground floor. She guessed the killers had escaped that way on the morning they killed Jamar Rokat.

Even with a wall between them and the parade, it was still hard for her to hear what the provost’s mage was saying. Finally Wulfric put his mouth beside her ear. “Lets start with the worst of it this time, shall we?” He pointed upstairs.

Sandry nodded. She warned Oama and Kwaben to stay in the middle of the stair, and to sit on or touch nothing until she had told them they could. They nodded their understanding. Sandry and Wulfric each hoisted a pack of the supplies that Wulfric had brought for the job, and began to climb.

Unbelievably, the noise was louder yet upstairs. Someone had left the shutters open on a window that overlooked the street from the hall.

Wulfric draped a silk square over his hand and opened the outer office door.

“Ready?” he asked as he thrust it open.

She nodded and followed him, preoccupied with noting each and every place she could see unmagic smears. We’ll be at this till nightfall, she thought ruefully as she waited for Wulfric to undo the seal on the room where Jamar Rokat had died. Once that was done, he stepped inside and halted. Sandry almost walked into his back. She frowned, reached to tap his shoulder—and Wulfric fell forward. Kwaben grabbed Sandry and yanked her away, into the outer office. She went down with a surprised cry.

Kwaben and Oama, swords drawn, jumped over Wulfric’s body into the next room.

Sandry heard the clang of metal on metal and lunged to her feet, running to the open door. A man and a woman, both strangers armed with curving swords, battled Sandry’s guards.

“Mage, do something!” the woman shouted as she hacked at Kwaben. She was very quick. “Get us out of here!”

Once their basic studies were complete, all mages learned a few spells they could trigger in a hurry at need. Sandry used two of hers now. One raised a web of naked power between her guards and the strangers. The other sent a rope of magic snapping down the stairs. It blew open the front door, twined around the guards outside, and dragged them into the building.

Footsteps hammered up the stairs: her rope had worked, at least. Her web was not so effective. A hand with a sword in it darted through to slash at Oama; a hand with a dagger punched through next to the sword. The hands that clutched both weapons rippled with dark smears. Sandry could see a foot, a leg, a head as strangers attacked and retreated through her barrier. Riddled with the essence of nothingness as they were—as Wulfric had told Sandry their blood was—the strangers were able in part to reach through her power as if it did not exist.

Kwaben and Oama could not cross her web at all, but they could and did battle the pieces of the enemy that got through.

Something, a rising force of unmagic, surged on the far side of Sandry’s barrier. She thrust her web to one side. It yanked the strangers out of the way by pulling the parts not yet consumed by unmagic. Oama and Kwaben shifted with them, to keep fighting and to place their bodies between the enemy and Sandry.

Now the girl could see the rest of the room. Someone was against the far wall.

He knelt—no, that wasn’t right—he was on the floor, sitting, though she couldn’t see his legs. The darkness pooled with him at its heart, unmagic streaming from his eyes and mouth to puddle around him.

“Come,” he said. “Come away.” He giggled. “Dihanurs, come now!”

Sandry tightened her web on the enemy, but they yanked free. They ran to the giggling man and sank in the dark pool before him. It was just like her dream, except they didn’t fight the unmagic. With it marbling so much of their flesh already, they simply melted into the shadowy depths.

Their mage looked at Sandry. “They have the salt,” he whispered, blackness rising around him. He toppled for ward, into the pool. Some force—the hunger of unmagic for true magic—dragged Sandry across the floor, toward that empty gap.

She screamed.

A hard arm wrapped around her waist and held on. The darkness sucked at her, trying to draw her into the pool. It was shrinking rapidly.

“Kwaben, help!” shrieked Oama as she clung to Sandry. They slid for an inch more; Kwaben stopped them. The unmagic vanished, leaving only a faint scum on the floorboards where it had been. Its grip on Sandry broke. She and Oama sagged onto the floor, panting.

“It was them, wasn’t it?” Sandry heard Kwaben whisper. “The Rokat killers.”

Sandry nodded. “Their mage called them Dihanurs, did you hear?” she said, when she could talk again. “They figured no one would search for them in a place where they’d already done murder, I bet.” Then she remembered. “Wulfric!”

Turning over, she broke out of Oama’s hold and crawled over to the provost’s mage. He lay in a pool of blood.

“Musta cut his throat as he came in the doar,” muttered one of the guards Sandry had dragged inside to help take the killers. They hadn’t been able to get by Oama and Kwaben as they fought. “Bled ‘im oat afore he knowed it.”

“Gorry, they’s fast,” someone else whispered. “T’nail the ol’wolf like that. I seen him turn a spell on a copper bit, he were that quick.”

Sandry rolled Wulfric over as tears streamed down her cheeks. She tugged her handkerchief from her pocket and tried to wipe the blood from his face. “Now you don’t have to tell Uncle any bad news,” she whispered.

A warm hand rested on her shoulder. It was Kwaben’s; blood ran over it in a thin trickle. “Lady,” he whispered sadly.

“I liked him.” Sandry let her handkerchief settle over Wulfric’s open and staring eyes. She wiped her own eyes on her sleeve and struggled to her feet.

“Let me see that arm,” she told Kwaben.

She was no healer, but it was easy enough to lay silk threads from her belt-purse across the shallow gash over his bicep and use them like stitches to pull the wound shut. With that done, the bleeding slowed. Oama wrapped the arm in linen, and it stopped completely.

Sandry couldn’t leave. There was the provost to be notified, and investigators to talk to. Waiting for them, she sat on a stool that bore no taint of the killers, and looked at the room. The Dihanurs had left their packs. That would give the Provost’s Guards more information about them, maybe. Sandry doubted that any of it could be used for tracking, if their very blood was so corrupted by unmagic that traditional spells didn’t work.

Of course these people would slaughter two children. The nothingness they used to slip by watchers and hunters was eating the Dihanurs, just as it had almost devoured the mage whose power came from it. It had taken enough of their life force away that Sandry’s magical web could, not capture and hold them. Next time her magic would probably be able to grip still less. Even, if she could, hold a.

small part of their bodies captive, how long would that last?’ And, how on earth could, that mage be captured?

The Dihanurs had to be stopped. Otherwise they would penetrate even the layered spells on the inner keep, where four families were hiding.

How to deal with that mage. How to deal with a mage and two killers who could reach through Sandry’s magical barrier as if it were a net with large holes

There was a scrap of shadow inches from where she sat. It could be worked like magic, or the killers would not be able to wear it as a cloak. She could work her own magic like thread, and the magics belonging to others. Could she do that with unmagic?

Steeling herself, she reached into the dark smear and pinched at it with her fingers. As she pulled her hand away, it followed in a long strand like a fine grade of fiber. Goosebumps rippled over her skin—the almost-greasy, almost-sticky, whisper-sense of it on her fingers was very unpleasant—but she did not let go. Instead she twirled the strand as she might a tuft of wool, testing to see how easily it would spin. The strand turned as her twist traveled through it, thickening, just as wool might.

She got to her feet. “Everyone out of this room, right now,” she said loudly.

She turned, and held the eyes of the Provost’s Guards with her own. She had to convince them that she was a senior mage and in total control, or they would never let her do this. “You can’t see it, but the that lets those people get about unseen is smeared everywhere in here. It must be got up. That’s what Master Snaptrap and I came here to do. If you don’t want to track it all over Summersea, spreading gods only know what kind of ill power, then I’ve got to clean it up.”

“But there’s the investigators,” objected the most senior of the guards present.

He bore a corporal’s yellow arrowhead on his sleeves. “They need statements from you and from your guards. That’s how murder is looked into. There’s the mages, who will try to see what happened.”

“We know what happened,”Oama informed the corporal. “We were right here.” She looked anxiously at Sandry, who was digging in one of the packs Wulfric had brought. “You’d best do as she says,’ Corporal.” She drew the man’s ear down to her mouth, and whispered to him urgently.

From the pack, Sandry produced a. bolt of spelled white silk. It had already been, rubbed with the oil of at traction, so much so that it was already pulling the dark smears, from, her hands, arms, and the front of her gown onto itself.

She marched, out through the guards and into the hall with it. As she’d thought, the killers had kept’ to this part of the building—the marks they had left were confined to a small area

The hall that stretched toward the back of Rokat House and the stair that led to the third story were clean of unmagic.

Sandry threw the bolt of cloth into the long hallway, shoving it with her power.

It unrolled to its full length, giving off a heavy, flowery scent. “Walk or sit on that, and nowhere else,” she ordered the Guards. Returning to the packs, she found another such bolt, and spread it in the hall that led from the stair to the office. It moved as it settled over the smears of nothingness, pulling them from wood and carpet.

“I’ll be in here,” she told the Guards. They watched her with dismay. “Make sure the people who arrive know what I’m doing, and don’t bother me.”

Kwaben and Oama stood in front of the Rokat office, their faces mulish. “We are not going to leave you,”Oama told Sandry. “What if they come back?”

“Then keep out of my way,” Sandry advised them. “I have a lot of work to do in a hurry before you can so much as use these benches.”Oama nodded and made shooing motions at the Guards.

Next, Sandry found canvas bags stuffed with spelled cloth squares in the packs.

Placing one bag on the floor near Wulfric’s body, she forced apart the stitches that held it together. A second unvoiced command, and squares flew through the room in a blizzard of white silk. They raced to cover every spot where Sandry could see unmagic. Taking the second canvas bag into the outer office, she did the same thing there. One canvas bag remained; she ordered its contents into the hall, where they draped themselves over benches and windowsill, sopping up darkness.

Walking back past Kwaben and Oama, Sandry noticed shadow smears on them. Getting a few extra squares of silk, she rubbed them briskly over her guards, collecting all of the nothingness she could find. Once she had it, she called one of the linen bags in the packs to her. It came, unfolding itself as it did. It blazed with signs for protection and enclosure written onto the fabric in the same powerful oils that filled every fiber. Sandry let it hang in front of her as she dumped the cloths she’d used on her bodyguards into the bag. Oama shifted; when Sandry looked at her, she realized that both dark-skinned guards were pale. They were staring at her.

“What’s the matter?” Sandry demanded. “Why are you looking at me that’ way?”

To her surprise it was silent Kwaben who spoke. He said, “Lady, we knew you were a mage, but

Mostly you’re like a cat with it. You never let it show any more than you can help, I think because you know it makes folk nervous.”

“You only throw it around when you’re upset,” Oama added.

“I am upset,” whispered, Sandry. She plucked, the linen, bag from, the air and went back to the inner office to collect the silk in there. She had to keep after the squares, to make sure they gathered everything.

Wulfric had brought plenty of those cloths, and plenty of bags to hold all they collected. Sandry blessed him as she cleaned, and tried not to look at him. That was hard, particularly when she had to slip a magical weaving underneath him, as she had first done at the castle infirmary, to gather the unmagic hidden by his blood and his body.

When all her silk was used up, she had to stop for a few minutes and think. She knew there was more nothingness in the building from the killers’ earlier visit.

She couldn’t bear the thought of it lying about. Holding on to her last bag, the one in which she’d placed the two bolts of silk, she began to tremble. How would she get it all?