Master of Crows (18 page)

His eyes closed.  He told himself the residual effects of her Gift sliding over him—through him—brought on that embrace.  But he didn’t believe his own lies.  He kissed her because he wanted her, because he admired her.  Because he wanted more than just the ethereal essence of her lingering on his tongue once her Gift withdrew.  He’d kissed her on impulse, lured by the tempting curve of her lips and the slight feel of her in his arms.  He’d expected her to retreat from his onslaught.  Gentleness was not in his nature, and he was desperate to taste her.  But she hadn’t recoiled from his rough embrace, responding instead with a passion to equal his own.  Only a small inner voice stopped him from taking her to the bed, lowering his breeches and climbing atop her.

Spy.  Cumbria’s means to trap you.

Silhara put out the coals in the
huqqah
.  He always listened to that voice.  It had saved him countless times.  A quiet woman who missed nothing and remembered everything might well catch him in a heresy guaranteed to get him hauled before a Conclave tribunal, especially if she took on the role of lover as well as apprentice.  So far, he’d been lucky his clashes with Corruption had been confined to his bedchamber—a room Martise had not yet entered.  He’d seen the lurking suspicion in her eyes when she asked if he thought the avatar reborn.  If she ever witnessed Corruption’s brief possessions of him, he was damned.  He’d have to kill her to protect himself, and he now recoiled at the possibility.

Outside, the sun still bathed the west in streaks of red and orange, but Neith’s hallways were already swallowed in darkness.  Silhara passed through their shadows as he strode to the library.

Silhouetted in the light of candles, Martise bent over a page of notes, scratching away furiously with her quill.  She glanced up when he entered and offered him a tentative smile.

She held up a sheaf of parchment.  “I’ve found more on the ritual, what fed its power.  The hill where they trapped Amunsa was sacred ground, a pocket of Old Magic still existing outside the Waste.”

He dragged a stool next to hers and sat down.  His nostrils twitched.  Orange flower and mint.  Gurn had filched his perfume stores again and given a fragrance to Martise.  His lips curved.  His servant could be quite the charmer.

He took the paper and scanned the writing.  “Ferrin’s Tor is such a place.  The shepherds who graze their sheep there swear the ewes that eat the grass growing on the hill bear the healthiest lambs with the best wool.  Anything more on Birdixan?”

“A little, though I can’t decipher the meaning.”  She handed him two more sheets from her stack.  “Each time Birdixan is described as invoking power against Amunsa, this symbol is included next to his name.  None of the other mage-kings have that symbol—or any symbol for that matter—by their names.  Near the end, when Birdixan dies, the symbol no longer appears.”

Silhara read the translated text and frowned.  Like Birdixan’s name, the symbol, an interlocking pair of cubes bisected with lines, was familiar.

“I’ve seen this somewhere.  On a temple wall or tattooed on a priest.  You don’t recognize it?”

She shook her head.  “No.  I can only guess it isn’t Helenese.  They favor more curving designs.  This is square and very angular.  The script of the Glimmer peoples is a series of squares and lines.  I can read and speak four dialects of Glimming and have never come across anything like this, so I hesitate to make a comparison.”

Silhara stared at the symbol.  “Birdixan here is described as a southern king.  I think it’s more than a coincidence the symbol and this unsung king are reminiscent of the far lands.”  He read more.  One passage caught his eye, a sentence almost unnoticed in the ritual’s florid descriptions.  Birdixan “swallowed” the god before the ritual even began.  Unease crawled across his soul on spider legs.

He rose from his seat.  “I have some Glimming tomes.  Mostly obscure poetry.”  He winced.  “Horrible stuff, but my mentor liked it and collected every bit he could get his hands on.  Maybe it will help.”

They worked in silence for the next three hours.  Martise’s lamp dimmed, and Silhara, nauseated from reading several pages of saccharine odes to whiny, over-pampered women, put aside his books and rubbed his eyes.  Martise still hunched over the table, scribbling.  She paused, lowered her quill and shook the stiffness out of her hand.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Nothing worthwhile unless you’re interested in family lines.  I’ve translated at least twenty generations of ancestors for three of the kings.”  She gave him a tired smile.  “They were a prolific group.”

Silhara stretched in his chair and stood.  “When you have a dozen wives and a few hundred concubines, you can expect to sire herds of children.”  He came to stand before her.  “We’ll work again tomorrow.  Are you ready for your lesson?”

Her expression was far less enthusiastic than when they first started to work with her Gift.  She sighed.  “Yes, though I’m afraid it will be a waste of your time.  What good is a Gift if you can’t use it for spells?”

He understood her frustration.  They’d worked on her control of her Gift since their return from Eastern Prime.  She’d been successful in summoning it and directing its emergence.  However, he remained puzzled that none of the spells she attempted worked.  Her recitation was flawless, her execution as good as his, but nothing happened.  They’d tried every type of spell.  Movement.  She still couldn’t levitate.  Fire and water invocations.  The fire burning cheerily in the library’s hearth didn’t even flicker when she tried summoning the flames.  And the water remained in the goblet.  Silhara even encouraged her to sing, bracing himself for the inevitable abuse on his ears, just in case her voice had improved and her Gift was spell singing. After a few notes, he stopped her, certain that whatever magic her Gift controlled, spell song wasn’t it.

She stood up to face him, her shoulders slumped with weariness.

“Don’t sulk,” he said.  “It doesn’t flatter you.”

His caustic remark worked to snap her out of her melancholy.  Her gaze dropped to the floor, but her shoulders were stiff, as if she restrained the urge to slap him.

Silhara smiled.  “We’ll try something different tonight.”

She gaped at him when he pulled out his boot dagger and ran the blade’s sharp edge over his palm.  Blood ran in trickling paths over his hand, sliding between his fingers to drip on the floor.  He held out his stained hand to her.

“Heal this.”

Untroubled by the blood, she took his hand, holding it between hers.  Her callused palms were warm on his skin, stroking.  He listened as she recited one healing spell after another.  Her eyes closed in concentration.  So focused on trying to invoke something that might heal his wound, she lost control of her Gift.  Instant heat suffused Silhara’s body.  Undiluted magery seeped into his pores, his spirit, even as his hand ached and blood dripped from his fingers.  His Gift swelled within him, feeding off her power.

Martise, beguiled by her Gift as much as Silhara, raised his hand and placed it on her chest above her breast. The heartbeat against his bloodied palm echoed the one thudding in his head.  Though he’d distance himself from the allure of her Gift, he was bewitched by how it transformed her.  Her appearance didn’t change.  The same pointed chin and small nose, russet hair and pale mouth.  But all were enhanced, embellished and made beautiful by her magery.

He almost succumbed to temptation, to slide his hand over her tunic until he cupped her small breast.  Luckily, the sting in his palm kept him clear-headed enough to fight down his desire and pull his hand away, leaving a red smear on her skin and a broken bond between them.  Her moan, strained and stuttered, worked its own magic on him.  She might as well have reached out and stroked his cock.

She opened her eyes, saw his hand still bleeding.  Her shoulders slumped.  “It didn’t work.”

“No.  For all that your Gift can swat gods and liches like they’re mice in a cat’s paw, it doesn’t work with spells.”

He stared at the blood on his palm and the smear across her skin.  A marking of territory, a claiming, no matter that she’d placed his hand there in the first place.  And while focused on healing him.  A powerful need too hold, to proclaim that this pale woman, with her prosaic features and extraordinary spirit, was his gripped him suddenly.

Terrified by his feelings, Silhara spun away and strode to the door.  “We’re done here,” he said over his shoulder.

Her tone was plaintive.  “But your hand…”

He paused but kept his back to her.  “Is still bleeding.  You can’t heal it.  Go to bed, Martise.”

He left, slamming the door behind him.  The occasional plop of blood droplets striking the floor accompanied him as he pounded downstairs.  The door connecting the great hall to the kitchen crashed against the opposite wall.  Gurn’s domain was blacker than a crypt, but Silhara found his way unerringly to the cupboard housing the servant’s bottle of Peleta’s Fire.  He swept cups off the shelves until he found a large goblet and poured himself a generous portion of spirits.  His curse was loud and vicious when he banged his knee on the bench against the worktable and sat down.

The Fire lived up to its name, scorching a path from his mouth to his gut.  Silhara’s eyes watered.  “Bursin’s balls,” he wheezed and tipped the goblet back for another molten swallow.  He drained and refilled the cup to the brim, uncaring that the morning would see him trying to claw his eyes out from the pain.

A shuffle of movement at the door warned him he had a visitor.  He raised his drink in his injured hand, the goblet stem slippery against his fingers.  “Hello, Gurn.”  He struggled to shape the words around a swollen tongue.  “Care for a drink?”

The clink of cups rolling against each other on the floor and the hiss of fatwood lit at the hearth broke the answering silence.  A wavering light cast a corona over the table where Silhara sat.  He shielded his eyes from the candlelight and cursed.  “You couldn’t just sit in the dark with me, could you?”

Once his eyes adjusted, he lowered his hand to glare at Gurn seated across from him.  The servant gestured to his wounded hand and the blood on the table and goblet.

 Silhara swiped at the table’s surface with his sleeve.  “A test for my apprentice.  She failed.”  He raised the goblet and toasted the woman upstairs. Gurn started to rise, but was stopped by Silhara’s sharp command.

“Don’t bother.  I’ll take care of it in my chamber.  I want you to do something else for me.”

He finished the dram and reached for the bottle again, only to have Gurn snatch it out of his reach and put it back into the cupboard.

“I wasn’t finished,” he snapped.  Gurn’s expression was eloquent.  Yes he was.

Silhara tossed him the goblet.  “Fine.  I bow to territorial rights.”  He rose slowly, relieved the room spun only once before stopping.  Gurn watched him, a mixture of concern and mild amusement creasing his blunt features.

“I want you to go to Eastern Prime.  Bring back a girl from the Temple of the Moon.  I don’t care what she looks like, just make sure she’s small-boned, of a certain height.”  He measured with his hand.  The height was similar to Martise’s.

Any trace of humor fled Gurn’s expression.  His eyes narrowed, their brilliant blue flattening to gray.  He shook his head, hands slashing angry patterns in the air as he signed his refusal in no uncertain terms.

His own anger rising above his inebriation, Silhara crossed his arms.  “I’m not asking you, Gurn.  I’m telling you.”

The two men glared at each for a long moment.  Finally, Gurn growled low in his throat, kicked cups out of his way and pinched out the candle flame for good measure.  The door’s slam was thunderous in the unrelenting dark as he stomped out of the kitchen.

 “And a good night to you too, you sanctimonious bastard,” Silhara called after him.

It wasn’t his fault that Cumbria’s little spy had him tied up in knots.  Better that he use the bishop’s money to purchase a
houri’s
time for an evening.  No promises of the heart, no tangled emotions or vulnerability.  Only a business transaction in which a whore’s purchased favors would ease the consuming desire for the woman sent to betray him.

The Fire had taken full effect by the time he staggered to the door.  Disoriented by drink and the spinning dark, he walked once into a cupboard and then into the wall before managing to stumble into the great hall.  “Gurn, you prick,” he muttered, holding on to the stair’s rickety railing.  “I’ll kill you when I see you next.  With that candle you snuffed.”

Drunk and still bleeding, he managed to mumble the spell for witchlight, stagger up the stairs to his room without breaking his neck and collapse on his bed.  He yanked off his clothes, tangling his hand in his sleeve until he ripped the shirt to free himself.  The ceiling undulated, and he closed his eyes to keep from being sick. Sleep swiftly overtook him, followed by powerful dreams tainted with Corruption’s presence.

Martise, naked and vulnerable before him.  Images of him taking her in a myriad of ways, his cock sliding into her mouth, her cunnus, between her buttocks.  He moaned in his sleep, his uninjured hand moving beneath the covers to grip the base of his erect penis and stroke.

The god’s voice flickered over him like a serpent’s tongue. 
“She will be yours.  Use her in whatever manner pleases you.  Throw her away when you tire of her.  Countless more will be yours to command and use.  I can do this for you.”

The images intensified, coldly seductive.  She was servile and silent, never meeting his gaze while he took her, never returning a caress or begging a kiss.  Memory intruded on the god’s manipulation of his desires.  His mother, abject before a toad of a man.  The emptiness in her eyes.  The smell of urine.

The last broke Corruption’s hold on his dreams.  He froze, hand still curved around his cock.

His stomach roiled from a combination of the god’s invasive touch and too much Peleta’s Fire.  Blood clogged his nostrils.  He laughed, the sound slurred and thick.

“A common whoremonger now, Corruption?   Truly, you are the embodiment of divine wonder.”