Lord of Secrets

by Breanna Teintze

  He shrugged and looked down at the black pendant, cradling it in his palm. ‘Why not? That brace annoyed me. You look better without it.’

  ‘But it isn’t possible,’ I said, through my teeth. ‘Any healing magic can only move pain, it can’t eliminate it. You need a goat or a rabbit or another person or something to absorb the damage. Where did you put it?’ I scanned him. He wasn’t grabbing at his knee or showing a glimmer of anything on his face except the fatigue that anyone would suffer after doing a spell of that magnitude. So he hadn’t taken the pain into himself. I looked at the witchlights, which were burning as merrily as ever. ‘And how is that still working? You did a ley-breaker. They should be out.’

  ‘Saints.’ He gave me a look of mock horror. ‘For that matter, how can you still understand what I’m saying?’

  I touched the place behind my ear where the translation spell had been. It was gone, nothing but a smear of paint, like the rest of my incantations.

  He held up the black vial. ‘This. This is where the pain went. Into this vial, into the entity inside. This is where the poison from my magic goes, if you’re curious.’

  Entity. A trickle of sweat, clammy, ran down the back of my neck. ‘What . . .’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, but if it makes you feel better, it isn’t a person.’ He tilted his head sideways. ‘As to the other questions, I won’t be able to explain until I know the state of the magic you were instructed in. I broke the ley on you, not me, for one thing. It will wear off in a couple of hours.’

  ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ I ran both hands through my hair. The sudden absence of pain, the weird smoothness and grace with which I could take steps, was almost as disorientating as the ache had been.

  ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘Get me out of here, and then I’ll help you get what you want from these people.’

  ‘You don’t know what I want.’ I walked to the soul vial and picked it up. I wondered what the red fluid was. Surely not blood, not if it was that bright after centuries in a bottle. Wine? An alchemical compound?

  ‘I don’t care what you want,’ Jaern said, his eyes following me. ‘If it’s revenge, you’ll find me a creative executioner. Anything less is easier.’

  If the vial really contained his soul, it was the only thing on the face of the earth that would have any hold over him. I had heard enough rumours to know that bonecrafters thought a soul had to be kept together to remain viable. Therefore, to break the vial would disperse the soul and kill Jaern.

  But I couldn’t kill him. I needed answers from him. And I couldn’t cast anything, not until the ley-breaker he’d laid on me was gone. Even if I could cast, his magic was so different to mine that I would be at a disadvantage in a duel, and he knew it.

  Although it didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I might know something he didn’t.

  ‘What does the doll do?’ I asked, and loathed the way the question made me sound like a fart-knocking Guild rat. I could figure it out myself, if I just had time.

  He gave an unpleasant laugh. ‘You already know what it does. Get me out, Gray.’

  ‘All I know is that my grandfather sent me to get it,’ I said. ‘You want me to help you, then explain.’

  He chewed at one fingernail with even, white teeth. ‘The doll is a host, a tool for soulwork. Without it, you’re left with slapdash half-measures, fumbling in the few minutes when death loosens the strings of the soul, rushing to get the soul into any available body before it dies. These cretins you’re worried about seem to know the rudiments of taking souls out. But that’s only half the trick of immortality, which I suspect is the problem.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘When someone has your soul, they can take advantage of the fact that you can’t die until your soul does. As you are demonstrating, they can drive a difficult bargain, get you to do and say things that you wouldn’t otherwise. Torture you in ways that would kill you, if you were in your body. The pain can be exquisite. Eternal.’ A flicker of deep, icy hatred passed over his face. ‘I imagine that’s why what’s-his-name told you to get it.’ His eyes caught mine, sardonic. ‘Not that he, or you, or Keir will know how to use it unless I tell you. So that’s the offer. Get me out, and I’ll teach you to use the doll, help you rescue your kinsman. I’m bargaining, infant. Don’t make me lower myself any further.’

  It made a sick kind of sense. I knew Keir had been obsessively hunting necromancers, and, given his ambitions, it hadn’t been to prevent them from flouting the Charter. I knew he was hurting Acarius; that he’d almost managed to break the toughest and most stubborn man I’d ever known. Hells, I hadn’t understood until this moment how Keir had managed to capture a wizard as talented as Acarius, but if he’d taken out the old man’s soul—

  If this was true, I’d have to alter my plans, go against my grandfather’s orders. I couldn’t just hide the doll if it was the key to binding Acarius’ soul to him.

  The question was how. Jaern wasn’t going to tell me while he was inside the circle. He evidently had all the time in the world, and my time was running out. If saving Acarius’ life required making a deal with a necromancer, there was only one choice I could make.

  If I could find a way to keep the soul vial in my possession and get Jaern out of the circle, however, I could keep him leashed. I hoped.

  So I had to figure out how it worked.

  ‘This can’t be your soul,’ I said again, although I was sure by now that, somehow, it was.

  ‘My soul, some of my blood, a bit of my original heart and enough rennen to bind it.’ He was bored again, toying with the black pendant he held. ‘Basic necromancy.’

  ‘Rennen.’ I held the vial up to the light.

  ‘Alchemical preserver,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you the recipe, when you get me to the surface.’

  ‘Poison?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t see how a non-toxic substance can preserve and fill the binding function in an alchemical composite.’ Which was a lie, but there was no harm in letting him think I was slightly stupid. Especially given that I was about to do something tremendously stupid.

  ‘Rennen is made of beetle guts and distilled liquor,’ he said. ‘It might make a man drunk, if he drank enough of it, or puke, if he was allergic to beetles. And it fills the binding function, idiot, because of the magic put on it when it’s compounded, not because of its innate properties.’

  Which meant that I probably wouldn’t die from what I had in mind. Probably.

  ‘A soul in a bottle.’ I turned it over in my hands, expending some effort not to cringe. The bottle was weirdly warm, as though it held blood new from the vein. Or fresh piss, suggested the noisy part of my mind, the part that sounds like Acarius. I smiled. It helped me to keep from dry heaving.

  ‘I thought it rather a pleasing conceit at the time,’ Jaern said, dryly. ‘Now I’m less fond of it. Next time I expect I’ll choose a different container.’

  I raised my eyebrows in what I hoped was a look of half-witted wonder. ‘A different container?’

  The lily-skinned weasel had the gall to roll his eyes at me again. ‘There’s nothing special about that one. Anything that holds liquid works. It’s magic, not superstition.’

  ‘I see.’ I twisted the gold stopper open. I knew from experience that concentrating on not puking would be completely ineffective. Instead, I thought about Acarius, and what I’d say to him when I saw him again. I’d composed the speech a thousand times, always vacillating wildly between tell me who I am, dammit and I’m sorry. ‘Here’s to you,’ I said.

  The annoyed boredom on Jaern’s face fled. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Hells, I don’t know,’ I said, and put the vial to my lips.

  It tasted awful, of course. Worse than awful. It was like drinking blood tainted with lamp oil, and it burned all the way into my stomach. I had to concentrate to keep swallowing until the vial was empty, and then it took all I had to keep from vomi
ting the whole mess back up.

  Acarius. Think about Acarius.

  The cramping pain in my gut eased. Empty, the bottle was just a piece of thick glass. I looked at it and swallowed a mouthful of spittle – then two – just to be certain there were no vestiges of the soul clinging to my teeth.

  ‘Now.’ I belched. It hurt, and tasted like lamp oil again. I stuck out my hand, across the runes. ‘Provided that doesn’t kill me, I’ve just become your bottle. You can touch me and get out of that circle – and open the damn gates.’

  ‘Little—’ Jaern was staring at me. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘If you’re expecting sympathy from me, the fact that I’ve just swallowed a piece of your disgusting-tasting heart does not incline me that way,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  He grasped my hand and stepped over the runes. Once outside the circle he paused, as though he was waiting for something. When whatever it was didn’t happen, he smiled. ‘I’m damned. It worked.’

  ‘Yes.’ I pulled away from him. ‘We’re on a schedule, if you don’t mind.’

  He spun on his heel. Before I knew what was happening he had me by the throat, slammed up against the legs of the statue of Lord Farran, squirming against the spiny armour on the bronze shins. Jaern was strong – stronger than any human had a right to be. I wondered if I had been severely mistaken, and he really was a god.

  ‘Don’t ever do something like that again,’ Jaern said.

  I fought against the urge to squirm. Anything that looked like faint-heartedness would irritate him, and this time it wouldn’t be to my advantage. ‘Easy, bonecrafter. Don’t break your bottle. Pity to lose your soul to make a point.’

  For one blind, strangling moment, I thought it wasn’t going to work. He was going to kill me anyway.

  Then he released me. ‘And a clever bottle it is.’ He slipped the black pendant on its chain over his head and tucked it into his shirt. ‘You had some gems you wanted to collect, I believe.’ He shoved past me and climbed the statue of Farran, like a spider going up a wall.

  ‘You’re robbing your own tomb.’ I heard an odd kind of amusement in my voice, and shoved it downwards as quickly as I could. If I didn’t get a grip on myself, amusement was going to become hysterics. What had I done?

  ‘If it’s mine, then I’m not robbing.’ Jaern took a slender knife from a sheath at his waist and brushed grime from the god’s face. ‘Besides, gods can’t steal. Almost by definition, anything we do is correct. Convenient, isn’t it?’ He rapped the butt of his dagger against Farran’s nose. ‘They’re all like me, Gray. All fakes.’

  He’s lying. I considered the possibility and found, to my surprise, that I didn’t want him to be. Ranara let my mother die, hadn’t responded to any of my tormented childhood prayers, and I’d tried all the other deities before I gave up. None of them had saved me from even a single beating. The idea that there was nothing behind the statues was, strangely, less painful than the idea that they’d all found me unworthy of help.

  ‘How did you get to be a god, then?’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Well, people are always looking for something to worship.’ He inserted the tip of the dagger behind the blue jewel at the centre of one of the idol’s pupils. ‘Might as well be me. Besides, when you get to know what you’re doing with necromancy, people are always showing up asking you to bring someone back to life.’

  ‘Which isn’t how it works,’ I said.

  ‘For someone with such quaint morals you’ve got a remarkable grasp of reality.’ The sapphire slid out into his hand. ‘Of course that isn’t how it works. Once you let a soul slip away, it’s gone. But that didn’t stop them asking. After a while, it would have been stupid to ignore the opportunity, so I started saying I was a star, fallen from heaven.’ He rubbed a lock of hair between his fingertips. ‘Silver. The lie seemed to make sense at the time. People ate it up. Practically begged to be deceived. It was that simple.’

  He tossed the gem to me. I caught it and studied it while he climbed down. Like the first emerald I had taken from Neyar’s idol, this sapphire was carved with a single runic character, one I had never seen before. All of the gems were ridiculously large, big enough to buy opulence if sold to the right jeweller. I put the sapphire beside the emeralds.

  Jaern went around the room removing the left eyes of two more gods – a ruby and a diamond, respectively. When he handed me the diamond, he said: ‘I take it you’re not inclined to worship me. I really can teach you about magic, you know. Tell you secrets.’

  ‘I don’t worship anything,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘You all worship something. It’ll be entertaining, in your case, to decipher what. It’s been centuries since anyone surprised me, and you’ve managed it twice in the space of twenty minutes. Let’s go.’

  Just like that, he strode out of the place that had been his prison for the better part of a millennium, up into the darkness.

  And just like that, I pocketed the gems and followed him.

  Fourteen

  I could run. Gods, I could run.

  And it was a good thing, too, because the barmy pseudo-god whose soul was giving me heartburn started sprinting as soon as we were in the passageway. Bone chips spurted from under his toes. I followed, giddy with painless motion, with grace and freedom, pelting into the dark.

  ‘Illumination,’ I said, when the blackness closed around me. ‘I’d cast, but according to you, the ley-breaker takes two hours to finish.’

  In return I heard elegant, rapid-fire syllables being rattled off like a man would shout an order for venison at an inn. Light burst around me, and I recognised the constellation room. The skulls in the niches were blazing with blue fire. Jaern stood in the middle of the room, drunk with elation.

  ‘I haven’t been in here for eight hundred years,’ he said. ‘I could kiss you. Which way are we going? You said you had people down here.’

  ‘Friends,’ I said.

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘Which way?’

  I pointed, and he started walking.

  He cast while he moved, producing an exotic band of light that circled one of his wrists. I couldn’t keep myself from making mental notes. His magic was fascinating – different, yet hung on the same structure as my own. I recognised some of the syllables, for instance, but where was his spell scribed? Certainly nowhere on his body that I could see, and yet by all the laws of magic, I knew it had to be written somewhere. He could have been wearing a piece of jewellery, but the light from the magic should have been centred where the sigils were, not on his naked wrist.

  We travelled with what seemed like dizzying speed when contrasted with the way I had limped down the passage the first time. When we burst into the room with the yavadis statue, the first thing I saw was Brix on the other side of the bars, staring anxiously into the dark. My heart turned over.

  ‘Gray?’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.’ The words tumbled out. For reasons I didn’t want to analyse, I needed to wipe the fear off her face. ‘Open the gate,’ I said to Jaern, and went to the cross-hatches. ‘How are you both?’

  ‘Better now that you’re back alive.’ Lorican rose from where he had been sitting against the wall. His eyes found Jaern and his relieved smile fled. ‘Who is that?’

  I glanced back at the necromancer. He was squatting beside the statue, running his fingertips along the carved base and to all appearances, enjoying himself vastly instead of doing as he was told.

  ‘He’s the god Jaern, sort of,’ I said. ‘I found him at the centre of the maze.’

  ‘What?’ Brix moved back from the gate.

  Sometimes genuine telepathy would be so convenient. Talking in front of Jaern could get awkward. ‘What matters is he can get the gate open. Trust me.’ I had meant it to sound confident, but it wasn’t. It was almost a question.

  Brix exhaled. ‘I do. But you’re going to explain, and soon.’

  Until the tension in m
y shoulders released, I didn’t realise how certain I had been that she’d say she didn’t trust me.

  Lorican’s eyes hadn’t left Jaern. ‘Lad,’ he said, quietly. ‘Whatever trouble you’re in, whatever you had to promise him to make him free us, we’ll get you out of it. Did you find what you need for Acarius?’

  Suddenly, confronted with Lorican’s kindness, I realised that it was going to be difficult explaining why I had thought it would be a good idea to imbibe someone else’s soul. I wasn’t entirely sure that getting me out of this situation was even possible. I flushed. ‘I found it.’

  Lorican gave me a small, tense smile. ‘Then we can figure the rest of it out.’

  ‘Infant,’ Jaern called, from across the room. He wiped his hand on the leg of his trousers. ‘Are you going to give me something to scribe with?’

  What had happened to his green ink spit, or whatever it had been that he used to scribe on my forehead? I walked to him, pulling the grease pencil from my satchel as I went. Jaern took it, scribed a few quick runes and then pronounced them before kissing one of the yavadis statues full on the mouth. The runes – and the statue’s lips, under his – blazed red. The gate fell back into the floor with a shriek. Lorican and Brix moved out of the dead end at a speed just shy of running.

  Brix halted beside me. ‘Gray—’

  I stepped backwards. I wanted to know she was safe, but I knew, abruptly, that I couldn’t tolerate it if she touched me. Even a hand on my sleeve would be too much. Nobody trusted me except Acarius. Why did Brix? Why did it matter so much whether she did?

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

  No.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. Jaern was watching, and I wanted to get out from under his observation. Hells, for all I knew, carrying his soul around inside me let him watch me in other ways.

  ‘Your leg seems better,’ Brix said.

  And how was I going to explain that? ‘It is.’ I turned to Lorican. ‘Ready to leave?’

  He nodded, although his attention was still on Jaern. ‘Aye, it’s too far underground for my liking. Let’s get out of here.’