Mistress of the Night (5 page)

"So where have you been, Jarull?" Keph asked. "Everyone's been wondering. For the last few days, you're all anyone's been talking about."

Jarull wrapped his arm around Keph and said, "Sailing a tempest of ale and wine, Keph, sailing a tempest!"

Drunk then. Jamil's human side gave him a turn of wit.

"If you've been drunk for five days," said Keph, "I'd have heard about it. You can't drink for a night without smashing something."

"I didn't say it was in Yhaunn, did I?" Jarull poked him in the ribs. "There are half a dozen festhalls in Ravens Bluff where I'm no longer welcome."

"You went to Ravens Bluff without me?" Keph glanced at his friend and narrowed his eyes. "Who is she?"

Jarull grinned and pinched his fingers together in front of his mouth. "I swore an oath not to say," he said. "But I can tell you this." His voice dropped. "She's dark, beautiful, meaner than my grandmother, and she likes her men big and tough."

He flexed his free arm and something sparkled on his fist. Keph reached out and grabbed his hand, pulling it closer. Jarull wore a ring on his middle finger, a twisted band of age-blackened silver set with a deep purple amethyst. The big man tugged his hand free before he could get a better look. Keph glanced up and raised an eyebrow.

"From your woman of mystery?"

His friend roared with laughter. "And that's not all!" He jingled a pouch at his waist and swung Keph around to face the nearest ramp descending deeper into the Stiltways. "Come on! Down to the Cutter's Dip. I'm buying. You've got a head start on me tonight, but I'll try to catch up. If we're lucky, Lyraene will come looking for you again!" He held out his fist.

After a moment, Keph grinned, then laughed as well. "If we're lucky!" he said, and bashed Jarull's fist with his own.

<& --- ---

It was natural that he and Jarull should have become friends, Keph thought as he staggered home in the gray half-light of pre-dawn. They had met at some party or another, dragged there by their parents. How many years had it been? Not too many. Just as they were both entering the age when rebellion began to be a real possibility, that was for certain.

Jarull was the only son of a merchant who had seen her half-ore husband ride away to meet his death on some outrageous adventure and was determined not to let her son follow in his footsteps.

Keph was the youngest son of Strasus "the Bold" Thingoleir—a wizard who had once stood toe-to-toe with a red dragon, meeting fire with magic until the monster had been blasted into cinders—and Dagnalla Irongard, first Strasus's rival in the Art and later his wife.

Brother of Malia, her proud parents' first apprentice; brother of Roderio, their second; brother-in-law to Krin Foxrun, who had won Malia's love in a mage duel fought over her honor; and uncle to Adrey Foxrun, already mastering cantrips at eight years of age; Keph was a tremendous disappointment to his magic-rich family.

Keph ground his teeth together in a fierce grin. Jarull's mother desperately wanted her son to stay by her side. Keph's parents would have been happy if their

Artless youngest son had just faded into the shadows.

Neither was likely to happen anytime soon.

He stumbled around a corner and across the small courtyard that lay before the Thingoleir family hall, Fourstaves House. Once it had been Twostaves House, named for the mages' staffs carried by Strasus and Dag-nalla, but when Malia and later Roderio had completed their apprenticeships, Strasus had given it a new name. Keph had heard that someone had suggested renaming it again, to Fivestaves House, once Krin had married Malia, but that his parents had refused, believing that it might offend the natural-born fifth member of their family. Keph snorted under his breath. Who had they been trying to fool?

Three black mastiffs with hides that gleamed like onyx rose from their haunches and growled as he approached the door.

"Bah!" he spat. "It's just me, you stupid chunks of rock!"

He strode up to the door guardians and stuck out his hand. Two of the dogs growled louder, but one leaned forward cautiously, touching his skin with its cold stone nose. After a heartbeat, all three dogs moved aside from the door and sat back in silence.

"Stupid...." Keph muttered and kicked at one in passing. He hurt his toe more than he hurt the stone beast.

The door opened easily at his touch and he walked through into the entry hall. The corridors of Fourstaves House were still silent at such an early hour. Keph limped, cursing with every step, across the hall and up the great, polished staircase that dominated it. At its top, he started to turn toward the south wing and the family's chambers, but paused and turned instead to look down the dark hallway of the north wing. Along that hallway, doors opened onto the laboratories and workshops of the five wizards. His hand clenched on the banister.

The amethyst ring and a pouch full of coins weren't the only things Jarull had brought back from Ravens Bluff. As he and Keph had sat at their table in one of the

seediest of the Stiltways's seedy taverns, the big man had winked and said, "Don't think I forgot you, Keph."

His hand dipped into his belt pouch and he set a crystal vial on the table. Inside the vial, dark dust glittered like ground glass.

"What is it?" Keph had asked.

"It's called magesbane. Sprinkle a little where a wizard will cast a spell and he's in for a surprise." Jarull had given him a fierce grin, exposing sharp teeth. "Next time any wizard you know gets on your wrong side, you'll have something up your sleeve to turn back on them."

Keph stared, mesmerized, at the sparkling dust. "What does it do?"

"Nothing permanent," Jarull said, sliding the vial to Keph. "Give it a little try when you get home. I think you'll enjoy it."

Standing at the top of the stairs, Keph's hand slipped into his own belt pouch. His fingers curled around the crystal vial. Give it a little try when you get home. I think you'll enjoy it.

Roderio, Keph thought. When his father brought him home the day before after arranging for his release by the city guard, Roderio had passed by and simply shaken his head in disgust.

Keph turned and walked into the north wing of Fourstaves House. As he passed beneath the arch of the hallway, wards brushed against his skin like spider-webs. Through the years, Strasus had woven layer upon layer of protection over his home and especially over the dangers of its north wing. No one who wasn't supposed to be there could enter the wing. Strasus and Dagnalla had encouraged their children's curiosity, however, and Keph, like his brother and sister, had always been able to enter freely. Even after his lack of magic had become blatantly apparent, wards throughout the house continued to permit him passage, as if his parents secretly hoped it was just some phase he could still grow out of.

At the door to Roderio's laboratory, he paused again.

The door to Strasus's study was at the end of the wing.

For a moment, Keph considered changing the target of his vengeance. Part of the reason Strasus had been so angry at having to bail him out of jail was that it had pulled him away from the research that had occupied his time of late. The stone cliffs that surrounded Yhaunn were laced with old tunnels and crevices, another legacy of the city's quarry origins. Not a month before, explorers had pulled some ancient treasure out of one of those tunnels and brought it to Strasus. Keph hadn't been allowed so much as a glimpse of it, of course, but whatever it was, it had become an obsession to Strasus, an obsession that had spread to Dagnalla and Malia as well—and that left Strasus resenting every moment spent apart from his research.

Sprinkling a little of the magesbane around his father's study could be very satisfying.

Keph wrinkled his nose. No, he thought, Roderio first. Let's see what this dust does.

He pushed against the door of the laboratory and felt more wards sift over him. When the eerie sensation passed, he stepped through and closed the door.

Cool flames sprang to life in bowls around the room. In an open-sided case of glass, a lizard striped in bright green and blue stirred at the sudden light. Roderio's familiar. Keph hurried across to the case as the lizard lifted its head drowsily from the magically warmed rock with which Roderio pampered it. Before it could do more than look around, Keph drew a cloth of dark velvet over the case, plunging it into shadow once more. He heard a slow, reptilian sigh of contentment as the lizard sank back into sleep.

He let out a sigh of his own and looked around the laboratory at workbenches, vessels and braziers of various

kinds, books, scrolls
His eyes fell on a rack of jars and

pots, ingredients for the potions that Roderio was fond of creating. Books and vessels lay open on the workbench nearest the rack—Roderio was getting ready to brew some new concoction. Keph smiled to himself, went over to the rack and selected one of the jars at random. Setting it on the workbench, he popped off its lid and peered

inside. The jar held some kind of dried, crumbled moss. "Perfect," he murmured.

He pulled the crystal vial out of his pocket and worked out the stopper, then carefully sprinkled a measure of the magesbane dust into the jar. It seemed to meld into the moss—he had to look closely to be sure it was even there. Roderio wouldn't see a thing. He closed the jar and replaced it on the shelf. He started to replace the stopper on the vial as well, but stopped.

What if Roderio didn't need the contents of that jar for his potion?

Cursing under his breath, Keph glanced over the books laid out on the workbench, but they were written in the flowing, elongated script used by elves. He couldn't read a word. He turned back to the rack and grimaced, then pulled down another half a dozen jars.

When he left the laboratory, less than half of the magesbane dust remained in the crystal vial but the chances that Roderio would be reaching for an ingredient treated with the dust were much higher. For good measure, Keph had even sprinkled a little of the dust into a couple of the vessels waiting on the workbench—to his delight, the dust vanished against glass just as easily as it had melded into the moss.

Let's see who's sneering tomorrow, Roderio, he thought as he staggered toward the south wing and his bedchamber.

Keph woke to the sounds of hideous screams and horrified shrieks. It took a heartbeat before a name passed from the shrieks to his brain.

Roderio.

He thrashed free of the bed sheets, jammed himself into a pair of trousers, and wrenched open the door of his chamber to peer down the hallway. Servants were crowded around the arch of the north wing, kept back by the wards. The sharp odor of acid stung his nostrils. Keph's heart jumped from his chest into his throat.

Snatching up a shirt, he pulled it over his head and charged, still barefoot, down the hall.

"Move!" he shouted at the milling servants. "Move!"

Maids and underbutlers leaped out of his way. He careened through the wards and into the north wing.

Roderio lay stretched out on the floor of the hallway, surrounded by those few trusted servants able to bypass the wards on that wing. Dagnalla cradled his head and Malia was kneeling down at his side. Keph stared at his brother. His face was blistered and red. Fragments of broken glass were embedded in the skin of his face and neck as well. His eyes, clenched shut, were the worst. Blood oozed out from under the lids. His upper robes had been ripped away, exposing his chest and arms—they were burned too, though not so badly as his face. One servant clutched scalded hands, while another was thrusting the torn robes away with a stick. Saturated with a bilious yellow-green liquid, the ruined fabric smoldered and steamed.

"All gods have mercy..." Keph gasped.

Malia glanced up at the sound of his voice. "He's alive, Keph," she said quickly before turning away again. She had two vials clutched in one hand. "Tilt his head, mother," she ordered.

Dagnalla arched her son's head. Malia pushed a finger between his lips and forced Roderio's mouth open. Pulling the stopper from one vial with her teeth, she poured a thick, pale blue liquid into his mouth, then pushed his mouth closed. Roderio swallowed convulsively and his body trembled, but some of the redness seemed to fade from his skin.

"Use the other potion," Dagnalla urged under her breath. Her face was pale. "That may be enough until a priest gets here to heal him properly."

Malia nodded and pulled the stopper from the second vial. The door to Roderio's laboratory stood open beyond them. Keph edged around his mother and sister toward it, his eyes fixed on the horrid sight of his brother's burned body.

"Keph!" said his father.

His voice broke the moment of terrible fascination. Keph looked up. Strasus Thingoleir stood in what was left of the laboratory. One gnarled hand held his staff in much the same way Keph would have held Quick in the face of possible danger. His other was spread wide in warning. His eyes were hard and stern. Keph swallowed.

"Father-"

"Just stay at the door. There's acid and broken glass everywhere." Keph blinked and Strasus pointed a finger at Keph's bare feet.

"Oh," mumbled Keph in surprise. "Right."

He surveyed the ruins of the laboratory from where he stood. Afternoon sunlight streamed through a window, lending an almost unnatural sharpness and clarity to the scene. The yellow-green liquid that had saturated Roderio's robes seemed to have splashed everywhere. Droplets smoked and steamed on the floor, on the walls, on workbenches—Roderio's lizard familiar crouched in its case, hissing violently at the acid that streaked the outside of the glass. A smear of the stuff marked where Roderio had been dragged across the floor and out of the room. The workbench that had been set up by the rack of jars and pots was flooded with it, the books of Elvish script so completely soaked that they were already shriveling and turning black.

Among the devastation on the bench lay the remains . of not one of the jars Keph had treated with the magesbane, but four. Of the two vessels he had treated, there was no sign. He could only guess that they had given birth to the shards of glass that littered the laboratory floor and pierced his brother's flesh.