The Tainted City (22 page)

I gripped Lena’s wrist and spoke low and fast. “Stevan’s wrong. I’ve a theory, but I need proof. Tell Marten he’s got to distract Ruslan somehow so I can talk to Kiran.”

Lena’s frown deepened, but she nodded. At the door, Ruslan swept a hand through the air. Silver scrawls of wards blazed bright and then dulled. Mikail said something to Kiran as they followed him inside, and Kiran’s teeth flashed white in a smile.

I’d thought the task of freeing Kiran hard enough before. But how did you free someone who didn’t even know he was in bondage?

Chapter Ten

(Dev)

T
he foyer of the dead mage’s house fit right in with what I expected of a highsider. Jeweled tiles in the pattern of sigils decorated the polished, rose-streaked marble of the walls and floor. Brilliantly colored stained glass skylights were spaced along the graceful arch of the ceiling. Magelights sat perched on intricate Sulanian bone carvings. Despite the knots in my stomach, curiosity pricked at me. I’d never been inside a mage’s house in Ninavel. No Taint thief handler with any kind of smarts would risk sending his kids into one. Wards were one thing; those could be shattered or fooled with the Taint, if a Tainter was clever enough. Active casting was something else, and everyone in Ninavel knew it.

A short, scrawny man wearing Sechaveh’s scorpion crest waited for us at the end of the foyer. The blocky golden sigils of a sand mage marked his drab clothing. He had the brown skin of an Arkennlander, with a hooked nose and a kink to his dark hair that suggested he had some Sulanian blood. He looked older than usual for a Ninavel mage, appearing to be in his forties, and his skin had a jaundiced tinge in the unwavering glow of the magelights, as if he didn’t go out in the sun much.

“Good, good, you’re here,” he said to Ruslan. He had an abrupt way of speaking, half-swallowing the end of each word as if anxious to get to the next one. Glancing at Marten, he bobbed his head. “You must be Captain Martennan.”

Marten bowed, deep and formal. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

“I’m Edon,” the mage said. “Seranthine High Scholar.”

So this was the man Ambassador Halassian had thought was in charge. Despite his awkward manner, his dark eyes were sharp as they skipped between us. Maybe he played the graceless scholar the way Marten acted the cheerful shopkeeper, to set people off their guard.

Ruslan made an irritated noise. “Enough pleasantries. Report, Seranthine, and quickly.”

Like the guardsmen, Edon wouldn’t meet Ruslan’s gaze. “When the mage Jadin Sovarias failed to appear for his scheduled water duty, guardsmen were sent to investigate. They inquired here at the house and woke Jadin’s servant, an untalented man by the name of Torain ap Vedak. Torain searched the house for his master and found him dead in his workroom. The manner of the death appears…ah, violent. Not at all like the earlier deaths, you understand, which seemed clearly due to mishandled confluence overspill during upheaval events. But this…well. This is different. You’ll understand what I mean when you see the body.”

“The servant. You’ve kept him here?” Ruslan’s tone implied that Edon was in serious trouble if he hadn’t.

“Yes. Of course. He’s in the receiving room.” Edon pointed through the archway. “He seems, er…quite distraught. Obtaining a coherent report from him has proved difficult.”

“Perhaps I will have more success,” Ruslan said, with a glimmer of dark amusement. Beside him, Mikail’s stolid expression remained unchanged. Kiran, who had been watching Edon with wary curiosity, dropped his gaze. His shoulders gained a hint of tension.

His discomfort brought me a thread of hope. Whatever had happened to him, he knew Ruslan wasn’t all sunshine and roses, and he didn’t much like it.

Edon ducked his head to Ruslan and led us through the archway into a broad circular room chock full of statues and wrought-metal furniture. A heavyset man in a pale robe sat in one of the chairs, his head down and his hands twisting around each other in his lap.

“Torain,” Edon said. The man didn’t look up. Edon grimaced in annoyance and made a sharp gesture. Torain jumped, his head flying up.

He was terrified. His eyes were so wide the whites showed top and bottom, and his breathing was fast and ragged. At first I assumed it was Edon and Ruslan he feared. But his gaze skated right past Ruslan’s sigils to dart about the room as if he expected some hidden enemy to leap out and attack him.

“He keeps babbling about Jadin’s death being the work of demons, even under truth spell.” Edon’s expression turned clinical. “The only remotely useful information I’ve had from him is that he claims to have heard and seen nothing unusual prior to finding his master, and none of the wards on the workroom door were activated.”

Demons. Not a total surprise; Torain’s dark curls and coppery skin marked him as Varkevian in ancestry, and all the southern countries were big on demons. Varkevians in particular had a whole vast pantheon of them, all beautiful as the morning and vicious as rabid sandcats, if you believed the stories. Which I didn’t. I half believed in Khalmet, Suliyya, and some of the other southern gods worshipped in Ninavel—but gods were one thing. I’d never bought the idea that demons lurked around amusing themselves by poisoning souls and savaging men. I’d seen plenty of men die, but never in ways that couldn’t be accounted for by god-touched bad luck or simple human evil.

Like Ruslan’s. He was studying Torain, arms akimbo. Torain still seemed oblivious to his regard. Probably it was a completely new experience for Ruslan to find himself considered the lesser of two evils. It was certainly beginning to make me more than a little uneasy about what we’d find in the dead mage’s workroom. Some of the demon tales I’d heard around convoy campfires outdid the stories of blood mages.

“Show me the body. I’ll question the
nathahlen
afterward,” Ruslan said.

“Whatever you prefer,” Edon said. “I’ll remain here and, ah, finish my own interrogation. You’ll find the body in the workroom. The wards remain inactive.” He pointed at a metal door bracketed by heavy curtains on the room’s far side. A filigree of copper ward lines covered the door, which in my mind had begun to take on a distinctly sinister aspect. Especially with Edon’s clear reluctance to go back in himself.

Ruslan only looked thoughtful. He moved to the door and pulled it open. He paused, silhouetted against a cool glow of magelight; and then he continued inside.

A sharp, coppery stench of blood rolled out through the open door, chokingly strong. I gagged and hastily turned it into a muffled cough, fighting down the terrible memories the smell triggered. I refused to show weakness in front of a whole roomful of mages.

Kiran and Mikail glanced at each other, one quick unreadable look, and followed Ruslan into the workroom. Kiran’s shoulders still held that slight tension, but he walked in with the same easy confidence he’d shown outside.

A sign that he didn’t remember Alisa’s death? Surely if he did, he wouldn’t be able to waltz right into what smelled like an abbatoir.

The Alathians didn’t look too happy. Marten’s face had closed up into a careful blankness, Lena’s freckles stood out stark against her skin, and Talm looked near as haggard as he had at the mine. Even Stevan’s mouth thinned. But we all moved forward until we could see into the room beyond.

Yeah, there was a dead guy inside. Very dead. Jadin Sovarias lay face up, sprawled naked in a black pool of blood. Clotted gouts of gore streaked the table behind him and spattered the walls. Ragged slashes like giant clawmarks ran the length of his torso, exposing raw, glistening things I didn’t want to look at too closely. His mouth was open in a silent scream, his lips flayed away so his teeth showed grotesquely white. And his eyes…his eyes were gone. Charred holes backed by the sickly gray of brain matter were all that remained.

My gorge heaved. I swallowed, hard, and yanked my gaze from the mutilated mess on the floor. No wonder Torain was out of his head with fear. The burned eyes, the slashes…the scene could’ve come straight from the tales of the Ghorshaba, the supposed nastiest demons of the bunch.

When the Ghorshaba decided to play, they never killed only one person. No, they always killed everyone in the household, drawing it out over a couple days to make it more fun. Torain hadn’t blinked when faced with a blood mage because he believed he was a dead man regardless.

In the stories, we would be too, for entering before the demon was done. A cold trickle of fear curled down my spine. Damn it, I didn’t believe in demons. Surely spells could produce injuries every bit as horrible in the hands of a mage like Ruslan. But if some mage really wanted to imitate the worst tales of demonkind, we’d made ourselves targets the moment we stepped in the door.

* * *

(Kiran)

Kiran surveyed the blood-smeared workroom, fighting not to betray the rebellion of his stomach. He and Mikail had used both fresh and preserved blood in childhood spell exercises. More, he knew real magic involved death—and presumably, since he’d been through the
akhelashva
ritual and come of age, he’d cast spells that were more than exercises. Hadn’t he? The gaping voids in his memories refused to answer. The sight of the horribly damaged body on the floor continued to nauseate him, his chest so tight he could barely breathe.

He pulled his gaze from the corpse and focused on the energies that swirled through the room. With his barriers up, it was like looking at a blurred charcoal sketch instead of a detailed color painting, but he could sense enough to make him frown in confusion. The thick, sullen power of violent death filled the room, ebbing slowly. Underneath, the deep pulse of the confluence permeated the house just as it did the rest of the city. But he sensed no residue of any other magic, defensive or otherwise, aside from the faint, fading traces common to a room where spells were regularly cast. If not for the corpse on the floor, he would have sworn no significant magic had been performed within the room for the past several days.

“His personal wards are untouched,” said the Alathian with the wiry ginger hair and hard gray eyes.
Stevannes
; the name floated up to his consciousness from Ruslan’s binding deep within, accompanied by a twinge of inhibition.
Cast no spells to harm him.

Kiran forced himself to look at the body again. Powerful defensive charms glittered on the man’s wrists, their silver clear and the gems sparkling and whole. If the mage had used them and been overpowered, the metal would be blackened and the gems shattered.

Ruslan flicked a contemptuous glance at the dark-haired leader of the Alathians. “None of the wards or charms in this room have been used.”

Kiran knew that tone well. Ruslan had little patience with those he considered fools. Kiran hesitated, then nerved himself up to speak, his curiosity too great for him to remain silent.

“How is that possible?” He kept his voice low, but the Alathians all turned to look at him.

To his relief, Ruslan’s answer was calm. “You feel no magical residue, and this confuses you, yes?”

Kiran nodded. He glanced at the Alathians. Ruslan made a slight encouraging gesture, and Kiran went on. “Why would his defensive wards not trigger, with an attacker casting such lethal magic against him? And why do we not feel traces of the attacker’s spellwork? Wouldn’t such a powerful spell leave residue?”

“Ordinarily, yes. But there are ways…” Ruslan turned a hand palm up. Feeling the Alathians’ eyes on him, Kiran knew why Ruslan wouldn’t elaborate. “While speculation might be interesting, it is unnecessary. We can find out easily enough what happened here.” He waited expectantly, as if Kiran and Mikail were in a lesson.

“By casting a
zhaveynikh
spell,” Mikail said.

“Exactly,” Ruslan said, the word warm with approval.

Dismay seized Kiran. He didn’t recognize the spell name, didn’t know how Ruslan might discover the truth of the man’s death—proof of all he’d lost.

Ruslan caught his gaze. Kiran twitched in surprise as Ruslan’s mind touched his, deep at the core of his
ikilhia
where the mark-binding link lay.
Death gives power, Kiran. While that power remains, it can be manipulated to produce a scry-vision of the originating event. In design, the spell is similar to those you cast in childhood to create simulacrums.

Simulacra spells, Kiran remembered. They required more delicacy than power, fine control of the spell essential to its success. Yet even so, to shape a scry-vision from the miasma of energies in the room, Ruslan must require the assistance of channels.

“You intend to cast a channeled spell,” Captain Martennan said, echoing Kiran’s thoughts. His voice was flat, his round-cheeked face gone hard.

Mocking amusement gleamed in Ruslan’s eyes. “Have no fear for your delicate sensibilities, Captain. This death is yet recent enough to taste. I have all the power I need, right here.” He flicked a hand at the savaged corpse.

They are afraid of real power
, Ruslan had said. If Martennan was afraid, he hid it well. His black eyes showed only distaste. Ruslan had warned Kiran to be wary of Martennan in particular, and now Kiran had seen the man, he understood why. Despite Martennan’s polite speech and apparently sunny disposition, something about him made Kiran profoundly uncomfortable.

Equally discomforting was the way the
nathahlen
with the startlingly green eyes kept staring at him. No name had come to Kiran from Ruslan’s binding, though he felt the same warning inhibition against casting as he did for the Alathian mages. Ruslan had mentioned in passing that the Alathians had hired a local man as a guide and informant. Still, Kiran was surprised Ruslan’s binding included a mere servant. Strange, too, that the Alathians hadn’t hired someone older, with more experience. The green-eyed guide looked only a few years Kiran’s elder, and his callused hands and rough clothing seemed more suited to menial labor than Ninavel’s embassies. Kiran thought it odder yet that the Alathians had brought a
nathahlen
with them into the dead mage’s workroom. Still, what did he know of Alathian customs?