The Tainted City (3 page)

“When?” Gedavar demanded. A good question. I held my breath, waiting.

Talmaddis eased back on his heels. “For a spot so far from a city or the border, they’ll need time to target a translocation spell…” He dragged a shaking, mudsmeared hand across his brow. His rings had changed from silver to dead black. “A few hours, no more.”

Gedavar raised a fist, as if he’d strike Talmaddis if he dared. “Twin gods curse you, man! The blacklights are red. Those men have minutes to live, not hours.”

I shuddered. Men suffocating in darkness, begging for help that wouldn’t come…damn it, I couldn’t let this stand. I leaned around Gedavar.

“What’s this shit about waiting, Talmaddis? You need more power to cast? Then take more! There’s plenty of life here.” I swept an arm at the oxen, at the ferns trailing beside the cliff seeps.

Talmaddis matched my glare. “I’m no blood mage! In Alathia, our magic is fueled by our own energies. We do not steal life from others.”

“You’re going to let those miners die, all for your gods-damned principles? For fuck’s sake, nobody’s asking you to torture men to death! Who cares if you kill a tree, or an ox? Kiran could—”

“Kiran ai Ruslanov spent years training to work blood magic,” Talmaddis snapped. “Do you think it’s so easy? I haven’t the faintest idea how to raise power as a blood mage does without either destroying myself or everyone in this gorge.”

The haulers in earshot were staring at me as if I’d confessed to trafficking with demons. Rural Alathians took an even more jaundiced view of magic than the Council. They nattered on about how the use of magic poisoned a man’s soul and invited the gods’ anger. Even an officially sanctioned mage like Talmaddis was viewed with deep distrust. Foreigners like me who smuggled illegally powerful charms through the Alathian border were considered little better than plague-carrying vermin. As for blood mages, who even in Arkennland had reputations worse than Shaikar’s devils…the miners thought the Council’s policy of execution far too lenient a fate.

Jathon spoke from behind me. “No choice but to dig our men out, then.” He gripped Gedavar’s shoulder. “Go tell the minemaster. I’ll organize a crew.”

The anger leached from Gedavar’s face, leaving it drawn and old. “Aye. But you haven’t seen the cave-in. It’ll take days to get through, even if we use blasting powder. My Rephet and the others…well.” His throat bobbed in a hard swallow.

“Wait,” Jathon said. “The Broketurn junction, you said? An air shaft slants in at the tunnel split. If we lower a powder charge down and blast through to the trapped side, they’ll have a chance at good air until the mages come.”

Gedavar pointed to a jutting prow of rock high and to the side of the mine entrance. The prow’s underside was a stair-stepped series of overhangs. Water dripped from cracks green with moss. Beneath one overhang lay a round black mouth. “With the haul rope downed, not even the laddermen can reach that shaft.”

Jathon turned. His dark eyes met mine. My fists clenched behind my back. Gods all damn it, I should’ve run.

You still can,
an inner voice whispered, in the sly tone of my old partner Jylla.
Say you can’t help, the climb’s too hard. Accidents happen in the mines. Those men knew the risk, and you owe the Alathians nothing. You won’t get another chance like this again.

Of the two of us, Jylla had always been the clever one. Doubtless that’s why she was living in luxury in Ninavel instead of slaving away in this muck pit. Yet I couldn’t shake the image of Gedavar’s nephew, dying by inches in darkness, all because I’d taken his place. If I hadn’t climbed, if Talmaddis hadn’t expended precious magic saving me…maybe Talmaddis wouldn’t have been too drained to help.

“I can reach the shaft,” I told Jathon. “But I’ll need pitons this time.” I wasn’t such a fool as to think I could climb a serious overhang unaided on such rotten rock. Not to mention the risk of aftershocks after a quake so large.

Jathon clapped me on the back, hope bright in his eyes. “Gedavar, get a charge. We’ll save those men yet.”

Gedavar wore a dark, skeptical scowl, but he strode off, shouting to the men milling about the mine entrance. Doubtless he figured he’d nothing to lose.

“Have you any men who know ropework?” I asked Jathon. “I need a belay from the ground.”

“The cartmen work with ropes and pulleys. I’ll find someone and get you a set of those spikes from the supply chests.” Jathon hurried away.

Talmaddis was watching me. “You surprise me, Dev,” he said softly.

I barked out a laugh. “What, you thought I’d run?”

His mouth pulled in a wry, weary smile. “You considered it, I’m sure. For not doing so—I thank you. If you save the trapped men…the Council will also be grateful.”

“So grateful they’ll let me go?”

Talmaddis looked down. I sighed. “That’s what I thought.” I glanced up at the twisted spars jutting outward from the gorge rim, all that remained of the pullwheel scaffold. “If you’re so grateful, tell me one thing. Are quakes this strong common in Alathia?”

I’d heard tell that the Arkennland side of the Whitefire Mountains had been plagued by earthquakes, way back before Lord Sechaveh built the city of Ninavel in the bone dry desert of the Painted Valley. When he’d offered mages the chance to work magic without law or restriction in exchange for supplying the city’s water, likely he’d asked them to stabilize the ground as well. Ninavel hadn’t endured a major quake since the mage war some twenty years back, when so much magic was thrown around it unbalanced all of nature. I’d only been a toddler at the time, but I’d grown up hearing the stories.

Maybe earthquakes were natural in Alathia. But if they weren’t, I had a terrible suspicion I knew what—or rather, who—might’ve shoved the world out of balance.

“No,” Talmaddis said. “Quakes so strong are not common.”

His hazel eyes locked with mine. Within them I saw the echo of my own dread, and the name neither of us wanted to say.

Ruslan Khaveirin. Kiran’s master, the strongest mage in Ninavel, and a vicious, clever bastard at that. Who’d want revenge not only on the Alathian Council for keeping his apprentice, but on me, personally, for crossing him. If he was casting spells in an attempt to rip apart the defensive wards that barricaded all of Alathia from foreign magic, I could well believe the earth might split and shudder in response.

And Kiran, kept under the Council’s thumb in Tamanath…the chill in my blood was nothing compared to the fear he’d endure when he realized Ruslan was coming for him.

I winced and shoved aside memories of a white-faced, desperate Kiran. I couldn’t afford to worry over him now. First I’d reach that air shaft, do my best to keep those miners alive. Then I’d think on Ruslan, and what I might salvage from the embers of my escape plan.

Chapter Two

(Kiran)

K
iran straightened on his stool and rolled his shoulders in an attempt to relieve cramped muscles. The sky beyond the high slits of the workroom windows burned crimson with approaching sunset. The labyrinthine chalk lines of his spell diagram had already grown difficult to read; soon further work would be impossible without additional illumination.

He eyed the inert crystal sphere of the magelight perched at the table’s end and set his teeth. Thanks to the binding the Alathian Council had cast on him, he could no longer cast even the simplest of spells. He’d grown accustomed to the constant gnawing rasp of the binding against his
ikilhia
—his soul’s fire, the source of his power—but not to the bitter ache of yearning every memory of magic brought.

The charm gleaming beside his slate seemed to mock him, mutely. A burnished vambrace of silver long enough to cover a man’s arm from wrist to elbow, the metal was encrusted with gemstones and etched with sigils. Even with his inner senses dulled by the Council’s binding, Kiran could feel the vast reservoir of magic bound within, a deep, soundless thrum that shivered his bones. The charm’s dizzyingly complex spellwork had allowed the blood mage Simon Levanian to walk through Alathia’s supposedly impassable border wards. Not just once, but on multiple occasions, with the Alathians none the wiser.

The Alathian Council had spared Kiran’s life on his promise he could decipher Simon’s spell and explain how he’d breached their defenses. More, they’d promised if Kiran could provide the knowledge quickly enough, they’d hear a plea for Dev’s release from the mines.

Frustration tightened Kiran’s throat. He laid a hand on the charm, once more seeing Simon’s magic in a dense, fiery scrawl across his inner sight. He was so close now to a full sketch of Simon’s pattern, but the last piece was by far the most difficult. How had Simon managed to stabilize the flow of the charm’s immense energies without distorting his spell into uselessness? All week, Kiran had sketched diagram upon diagram, struggling to find the solution. Yet his every attempt contained some fatal flaw.

After all he owed Dev, he’d sketch diagrams until his fingers fell off, if that was what it took. But if he wanted light to work after sunset, he’d have to ask Stevannes.

Kiran glanced at the far side of the workroom, where Stevannes sat before another broad table of polished cinnabar wood. The arcanist’s auburn head was bent over an array of slender malachite and jasper rods set within a charcoal sigil sketched on the table. Above the rods, the air rippled as if seen through heat haze. Occasional hints of viridian and indigo tinged the shifting air, reminiscent of the way Simon’s charm had stained the air with color as it revealed and penetrated the border wards.

Alathia’s foremost expert on defensive magic, Stevannes had made it all too clear he bitterly resented any interruptions by the Council’s pet blood mage to his own investigation into the breach of Alathia’s wards. He had a savagely sharp tongue at the best of times; and today his mood had been black from the start.

Yet success was so nearly within Kiran’s grasp. He squared his shoulders, resolving to hold his calm no matter what Stevannes said.

“Pardon the interruption, but—”

A staccato series of raps on the workroom door silenced him mid-sentence. Surely Kiran’s guard hadn’t come to collect him yet? Usually he was allowed to keep working so long as Stevannes remained, and Stevannes’s dedication was so fierce as to be disturbing. He worked hours that would put a blood-bound slave’s to shame, and rarely left before midnight.

Stevannes twisted on his stool to aim a swift, vicious glare at Kiran, and flicked a ringed hand at the door. The black lines scribed around the doorframe glowed briefly silver as the workroom’s wards released.

The door creaked open to reveal a slender, straight-backed young woman whose blue and gray uniform bore the copper braid of a lieutenant of the Council’s Watch.

“First Lieutenant Lenarimanas.” Stevannes’s glare vanished. He stood and bowed with formal precision. A wash of cerulean shot through the shimmering air above his table. “You’ve come to remove the blood mage?” He sounded hopeful.

Kiran gripped his slate. “Lena. It’s early yet, and I’m so close to completing this pattern. If I could just have a few more hours…”

Lena nodded to him, her brown face grave under its crown of dark braids. “You needn’t leave, Kiran. I bring a message for Stevannes from Captain Martennan.” She handed a sealed letter to Stevannes and came to peer at the diagram on Kiran’s slate. “You’ve made progress, then? The captain will be pleased to hear it.”

Stevannes snorted as he broke the letter’s seal. “Progress? Hardly. His spell diagram hasn’t changed a whit all week. All he does is dally over his slate and waste my time.”

Silence was always the better option with Stevannes, but Kiran couldn’t let the remark go unchallenged. Lena might be the closest thing he had to a friend in Alathia, even allowing him to call her by the short form of her family name, but she reported every scrap of information on his work to her superior, Captain Martennan, and through him, the Council.

“Deciphering these last power pathways is more difficult than I’d hoped,” Kiran said, carefully mild in tone. “Simon used a technique for them I’m not familiar with.”

Stevannes’s iron-gray eyes lifted from the letter. “You’re a blood mage, same as he was. Either you’re stalling, or you’re incompetent.”

“I’m working as fast as I can,” Kiran protested. “You can’t fault me for not instantly grasping Simon’s methodology. He wasn’t my master. His mind follows different paths than Ruslan’s. It’s not an easy task, to think like him—”

“Easy enough for you, I’d imagine,” Stevannes snapped. “All you blood mages think alike, seeking power without the least shred of morality. The Council should never have agreed to this farce of yours. Better to put down a rabid dog before it bites—”

“Stevannes.” Lena spoke with cool authority. Though she was only in her mid-twenties and a full decade younger than Stevannes, as Martennan’s first lieutenant she outranked even a master arcanist. “You know how important this work is, and you cannot think your insults are helping.”

Stevannes’s shoulders stiffened. “Why do you defend him? You know what he is.”

“I judge men by their actions, not hearsay,” Lena said.

“Hearsay!” Stevannes looked incredulous. “He raises power by murdering innocents. Not even he denies it.” He jabbed a finger at Kiran. “I saw the report Pevennar and Alyashen wrote after they examined him. Even with his power bound, he still steals life from everything around him. He’s not a man, he’s a parasite.”

“What?” Kiran’s slate dropped from nerveless fingers to clatter on the table. Six weeks ago he’d agreed to spend a day being poked and prodded by the healers in the Sanitorium in exchange for a scry-vision to confirm Dev’s fair treatment at the mine, but the healers had barely spoken to him. They certainly hadn’t mentioned anything like Stevannes’s claim.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t know,” Stevannes said. “You may have fooled Lenarimanas with your meek lamb act, but you don’t fool me.”

Kiran ignored him, looking to Lena. “Is what he says true?”

Lena sighed. “Yes.”

Kiran could only stare at Lena, mutely. The dissonant discomfort of the binding heightened until pain clawed along his nerves.