The Tainted City (45 page)

He trailed off with a glance at Avakra-dan. I heard the rest just fine: when the killer destroyed the confluence, it wasn’t just mages who’d burn. My hands clenched in frustrated fury.
All those who feed on the innocent
…what a pile of goat shit! Yeah, ganglords and their crews dealt with Avakra-dan. But so did plenty of others—streetsiders desperate for protection, or healing charms, or any manner of magical assistance.

“Twin gods, Marten!” Talm appeared in the main doorway, Lena at his side. They stared at the corpses in dismay. “What did the killer want here?”

“Your seeking spell failed.” Briefly, Marten’s face blazed with a strained, desperate frustration that matched my own.

“Pello is indeed veiled,” Lena said. “We could tell he’s in the city, but not where. Also, Ambassador Halassian passed on a message: Sechaveh claims he’s had no word from Pello since prior to Simon Levanian’s death. He assumed Pello dead or taken captive by us.”

Avakra-dan had hunched in on herself like a spider ready to squeeze back in a crevice, but her eyes glittered with interest. I turned to her. “You know every shadow man in this city. We’re looking for Pello: Varkevian-born, used to work out of Gitailan district. Any recent news of him?”

“Pello.” Avakra-dan smiled, sharp and sly. “I know him. Sechaveh’s man, is he? I always suspected he had a highside master.”

“The killer might’ve turned him,” I said. “So if you’ve news, tell.”

Avakra-dan shook her head, her smile gone. “Pello would slit his own throat before he’d work for anyone responsible for Nayyis’s death.”

I knew that name. “Benno’s murdered deathdealer?”

She nodded. “Nayyis and Pello were as close as oath-brothers. They came to Ninavel on the same caravan from Prosul Varkevia, back when they were a couple of scrawny teens. Or Pello was scrawny. Nayyis was already a fighter, whipcord tough and deadly as they come.”

A nice tale, but I wasn’t sure I believed Pello cared for anyone’s hide but his own. “You heard anything recent of Pello?”

“No.” But she said it awfully quickly, and her eyes had gone as hard as obsidian.

“She knows something,” I told Marten. “Ask under truth spell.”

Avakra-dan’s hand clenched on the heart-rot charm. I took a cautious step back. But she surrendered the charm when Marten demanded it, and stood in the sigil Stevan sketched on a hastily cleaned patch of floor. Over the sound of Stevan, Lena, and Talm’s soft chanting, Marten asked again about Pello.

Her mouth worked, and words spilled out in a faltering tumble. “Saw him two days ago. He came in, bought a painbender and two dragonclaws, and asked if I knew any charms that could protect against the Taint.”

I tried not to betray any reaction. Marten said, cool and clinical, “What did you reply?”

She spat. “Told him no, of course. No magic can do that.”

“What else passed between you?” Marten asked.

“I asked him if he knew who’d done for Nayyis, and if he was out for revenge. He wouldn’t answer, but I saw the hate in his eyes. He wants revenge, all right. Bad enough he’d eat his own soul for a chance.”

“Why did you wish to keep this from us?”

Avakra-dan sighed. “He paid me to keep silence about his visit, and said if I broke that silence, he’d see me in Shaikar’s hells if it was the last thing he did. With some men that’d be bluster, but not Pello.”

Before Marten could ask another question, I met Avakra-dan’s gaze and said, “The charm I asked you to seek—did you have any success in finding one?”

Every fiber of me prayed for a positive answer, but her teeth showed in a malicious, indigo grin. “No. Only a bone mage or blood mage could make so strong a charm, and they don’t deal with the likes of me. I’d thought a highsider collector might have one, but Khalmet wasn’t so kind. Given a long enough timeframe, I could’ve sent to my contacts down in Varkevia, but four weeks? I knew it a gamble from the start. Why do you think I wanted so high a failsafe?”

I stared at her, my throat closing tight. I hadn’t realized just how much hope I’d pinned on her finding a charm. Not until now, when it was crushed. The nightmarish corpses seemed to leer at me, the stench from them so thick I couldn’t breathe. Avakra-dan was watching me, and so was Marten. Vipers, both of them, cold and calculating, marking my weakness, figuring how best to use it…fuck. Fuck this, all of it.

I turned and shoved past dripping corpses. At the door, Lena broke her chant to say something, and Talm put out a hand. I elbowed them aside with a snarl. Let them cast against me. I wasn’t staying in that room drowning in blood and death one instant longer.

The alley outside Avakra-dan’s door was blessedly cool and dark. I leaned my back against stone and stared up at the stars. Anger ebbed to leave a black, dragging despair deeper than any I’d felt since the Change. Why had I ever thought an untalented man like me could take on Ruslan, or do a damn thing against the killer? Melly and Kiran both were one slip of Kiran’s tongue away from disaster, the city about to implode in death and chaos, and I felt so fucking
helpless.
What I wouldn’t give to be wandering the Whitefires, blissfully ignorant of all this!

The door scraped open. Probably Lena, come to offer more empty words of sympathy. I slid to a crouch, resting my throbbing head on folded arms. Maybe she’d take the hint and go away.

“Forgive the intrusion,” Marten said, quiet and serious. “We must talk.”

“Yeah?” I was so damn tired. “You here to tell me you’re cutting me loose?” That’s what I would do in his place. Between the killer’s binding and Ruslan holding Melly’s blood-mark, I was far too compromised now to be anything but a liability in his eyes. He’d bar me from the embassy, toss Cara out too, leave her and Melly at Ruslan’s mercy, and claim he was merely giving us freedom.

“No,” Marten said.

“Why not?” I asked warily.

He leaned against the wall. “Shall I tell you the answer you’ll believe, or the deeper truth you won’t?”

“Whichever,” I muttered.

“If I have a man whom an enemy might suborn, I prefer to keep him close under my eye, not send him forth where I’ll have no idea of his actions. But more than that…I brought you and Kiran to Ninavel. What befalls you here is my responsibility, and I do not take that lightly. I told you I would not abandon Kiran. The same is true of you.”

“You’re right, Marten. I don’t believe a word of that last.”

“I don’t expect you to,” he said, with a glimmer of his old cheerful humor. “I must know…you told Lena you wouldn’t help us further without Melly’s safety assured, but you didn’t know then of the confluence’s imminent destruction. Stevan will do his utmost to devise a solution for Melly, but in the meantime…will you help us hunt Pello? Regardless of his employer’s identity, it seems clear Pello knows something of the killer. Far more lives than Melly’s are at stake here—yours as well, if we cannot break your binding—and we have so little time.”

I wasn’t so callous as to ignore the cost if Marten failed. Faces flashed through my head. Liana, the other kids in Red Dal’s den, all my outrider and streetsider friends…They wouldn’t burn right off if the killer succeeded, but how many would die in the aftermath?

“I’ll help,” I said. “Though I’ve one thing I’ll ask in return.”

Marten shifted like he meant to protest. I said, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing that’ll cost you in either coin or magic. Just tell me this: what the fuck happened with this Reshannis to make Stevan so set against Kiran? I’m getting a little tired of watching you all dance around the topic every time Stevan drags it up.”

Marten stood silent long enough I thought he wouldn’t answer. But in the end, he said, “Reshannis was…a friend of mine and Stevan’s, from our days at the Arcanum. She had the strongest talent of us—ah, how her soulfire burned!—but the very strength of her magic made it difficult for her to mesh minds properly with a larger group, as we are taught to cast. Her frustration over the problem drove her to seek out other magical methods in secret. First in hope she might find something to help her…but when she saw what feats she could perform alone with forbidden techniques, she began pursuing the knowledge for its own sake.”

He sighed. “Stevan caught her casting. When he confronted her, she was agonized, remorseful…she vowed that if the Council would only give her a second chance, she would never again break Alathia’s laws. Stevan believed her. He reported the infraction, as we must, but he enlisted my help to testify on her behalf. Together, we argued for her…and the Council agreed to a probationary period rather than immediate sentencing. She was forbidden from the archives, restricted in her duties, and Stevan was to supervise her and report any signs of illegal casting. He thought he had won such a victory…”

“She didn’t stop casting, I take it,” I said.

“No.” Marten’s voice was devoid of emotion. “Later, she was caught again, this time by one of Stevan’s fellow arcanists, a woman Stevan cared for deeply. Reshannis tried to remove Vinalyn’s memory of what she had seen—she claimed, later, she never meant harm—but mind magic is terribly dangerous, and the casting went wrong. In the days afterward, Vinalyn’s mind crumbled, her personality and intelligence falling to ruin, and our best healers couldn’t stop the deterioration. Stevan was devastated. And furious, even after—after we saw Reshannis executed.”

The cool dispassion of his words cracked at the end, revealing pain as strong as any I’d ever wanted to hear from him. I couldn’t help a vicious little twist of satisfaction, even as I wondered exactly how close a friend Reshannis had been.

“I can get why Stevan would hate Reshannis, or even himself,” I said. “Why’s he mad at you?”

Marten’s teeth gleamed white in a sharp, swift grimace. “Because on me, Reshannis’s casting worked.”

That was so far from anything I’d expected to hear that all I could do was boggle at him. “She…she fucked with your mind?”

Marten shrugged, deliberately casual. “Only a tiny casting. Apparently I’d seen far less than Vinalyn. Or so the arcanists said when they examined me.
 
But oh, I was furious, just like Stevan…”

He shook his head and sighed. “Reshannis ran. I was the one to hunt her down. But when I brought her to face the Council’s justice, the things she said…they haunted me, long after my anger had died to ashes. I believe now that if she’d been allowed to explore other methods of magic openly rather than in secrecy and shame, she could have found a more innocent path. She could have ended as a powerful asset to Alathia instead of costing us not only Vinalyn but herself. Stevan…disagrees with me.”

Well, that certainly explained a lot about Stevan. Maybe even about Marten, though it hadn’t escaped me how he spoke of even this Reshannis as a tool for Alathia’s use. I shoved to my feet.

“You want me to start looking for Pello now?” The question came out with about as much enthusiasm as if Marten wanted me to crawl through a viper pit. For all he was right about time being short, I felt more than half dead already, my body an aching weight and my head full of sand.

Marten said in wry sympathy, “I think we can give you the chance for a few hours’ rest at the embassy. I intend to first try a linked harmonic casting using every mage at the embassy, to see if we can pierce Pello’s veiling. You can sleep while we cast.”

I said slowly, “You realize blood magic might find him where yours can’t.”

Marten sighed. “I know it. If we haven’t found Pello by tomorrow evening, I will ask Ruslan’s help. But asking him to cast is the same as asking him to kill. I prefer not to do it unless I have no other option.”

Marten’s talk of casting brought another jittery spike of fear for Melly. Suliyya grant Kiran kept his mouth shut! And I’d pray to Shaikar himself if it meant Kiran came through with Melly’s blood-mark. For all Marten’s talk, I suspected Stevan would be far too busy casting in search of the killer to come up with anything useful on Melly’s behalf. No, Kiran was my last hope, now Avakra-dan had failed.

* * *

(Kiran)

Kiran hurried across the shadowed expanse of Ruslan’s courtyard, past trellises laden with fat white moonflowers and night-blooming jasmine. The house wards glimmered scarlet, their tracery of fading fire a remnant of the confluence’s most recent upheaval. Kiran could only hope that the disturbance hadn’t drawn Ruslan and Lizaveta out of Ruslan’s workroom. If Ruslan had realized his absence…his breath came short, the miasma of unease and confusion in his head growing so thick he could barely think.

He touched the door, threaded his senses through the outer wards—and nearly collapsed in relief. High under the house’s domed roof, Ruslan’s primary workroom remained wholly encased within a sun-bright blaze of shielding magic, the barrier intact and uncrossed.

Kiran dampened the door wards and eased inside the house. The foyer was dark and silent. If he were truly lucky, perhaps Mikail’s exhaustion had kept him asleep during the confluence upheaval, and he, too, might remain unaware of Kiran’s clandestine excursion. Kiran shut the door, getting a last glimpse of star-dusted sky around Reytani’s spires. Far distant across the Painted Valley, heat lightning flickered in silent staccato over the Bolthole Mountains, from a dark bank of clouds that were another sign of the confluence’s growing instability.

Kiran’s mind felt as unsettled as the choppy, heaving roil of the confluence. All the way home, he’d struggled to make sense of his supposed journey to Alathia, to no avail. He kept circling back to the same question:
why
had Ruslan and Mikail not told him of it?

He restored the door wards and tiptoed through darkened halls to halt outside Mikail’s door. Silence within, and he could sense Mikail’s
ikilhia
, a subdued, banked glow consistent with slumber.

He trembled on the edge of bursting into Mikail’s room and demanding answers.
You know I’d give my life for you,
Mikail had said. Never before had Kiran doubted the depth of their bond as mage-brothers. But how could Mikail have concealed something so enormous in its impact?

Mikail hadn’t done it lightly. The memory of his distress at Kiran’s questions spawned a new thought, chilling in its implications. Dev had claimed the damage to Kiran’s mind was deliberate. What if his memories had indeed been torn from him—not by Ruslan, as Dev had insisted, but the Alathians? If they had infiltrated his mind so deeply, Ruslan might well fear Kiran still bore some lurking binding. That would explain his determination to prevent contact between Kiran and anyone in the Alathians’ employ. But again, why would Ruslan lie to Kiran about the nature of his injury? Did he and Mikail trust Kiran so little now?