Lord of Secrets

by Breanna Teintze

  ‘You look like shit.’ Brix halted her horse next to mine and it started cropping grass.

  I glanced sideways at her. When we’d camped the previous night, Brix went to look for firewood and was gone so long that I had briefly wondered whether she had decided to take the emerald and slip away after all. She’d been quiet and preoccupied since she returned, and had spent most of the morning ignoring me. It was good to be talking again, even if it wasn’t exactly complimentary.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I feel like hell, so I guess I put on a good front.’ I sat with one leg hooked around my saddlehorn, trying unsuccessfully to get rid of the ache in my overstretched sinews. I really didn’t want to look at the village in the valley below.

  She studied me for a moment. ‘This is a pretty place.’

  I grimaced.

  ‘Not a pretty place?’ she said.

  Maybe it was, if you could look at it without memories. The little nameless village was a collection of stacked-log houses at the mouth of a narrow canyon, surrounded by pastures dotted with white bee skeps. Scarlet-flowered beevine covered the canyon’s walls in the spring and summer, supporting thousands of hives and the village’s honey industry. When Acarius first brought me home, I used to sit on the porch of his cabin and listen to the hum and tell myself it meant I was safe. Now it would never feel safe again.

  ‘Let’s get it over with,’ I said. ‘I want to get up to the cabin before nightfall.’

  ‘Cabin?’ Lorican said. ‘Acarius lives in a cabin?’ This was the first time he’d addressed me today. He hadn’t talked during the whole journey, except when it was absolutely necessary. That meant, I supposed, that he was still angry with me, touched in his honour that I’d dared to suspect him. Now he seemed to have spoken without thinking. His complexion darkened by a shade.

  I still didn’t know what to make of him, though the fact that the Guild hadn’t reappeared for the last week was a point in his favour. I’d spent the whole trip jumpy as a rabbit, struggling to discern whether my creeping, paranoid sense of being observed was due to someone divining for me, the way Jaern kept making sly remarks, or just the fact that I hadn’t slept a full night since we left Ri Dana.

  ‘What,’ I said, with some malice, ‘Acarius never told you?’

  ‘There’s plenty about you that he never told me,’ Lorican said, and any sense of satisfaction I had evaporated. Why had Acarius been talking about me with Lorican in the first place?

  We passed through the village and into the stand of trembling poplar that lined the entrance to the canyon. The creek chuckled along the canyon floor, and just before the big, lichen-streaked rock formation, I was supposed to be able to see the lightning-blasted pine.

  ‘So what are we doing?’ Jaern said. ‘I thought we’d be stopping in that village, but now we’ve left even that semblance of civilisation behind.’

  I didn’t want to talk to Jaern. The necromancer had been a constant headache for the seven days since we’d left Ri Dana, fighting every request and forcing me to make it an order. I’d confirmed, again and again, that something about carrying his soul made it so he had to do as I said. There was no point to his resistance, except pure spite.

  There. It was the same dead tree, albeit half-swathed in stinking beevine. I slid down off my horse, moved to the tree and began stripping the beevine away.

  ‘We are disabling the wards,’ I said.

  ‘Wards?’ Brix hunched in her saddle, watching Jaern and looking faintly repulsed. ‘Like the ones in the temple?’

  ‘No, luckily,’ I said. ‘These aren’t prayers. They’re more like locks, to keep intruders away.’ I yanked down the last of the vine and the sigils came to light, under my hands. A beautiful and well-crafted spiral carved into the dead wood, just as I’d left it. ‘Still, I’d rather not step into the spell.’

  Jaern snorted. ‘I’d think not.’

  ‘Why?’ Brix looked from the necromancer to me. ‘What does it do?’

  I brought my paints out of my satchel and checked to see which colour had the most left. Blue, as it turned out. Blue holds its shape better and typically makes for more potent incantations, but it’s also more irritating to the skin than red or green. Better to use it up scribing on a dead tree.

  ‘It conjures a swarm of mosquitoes, as a first step,’ I said. ‘Most people don’t keep going, once that happens.’

  ‘And if they did, they’d find themselves sprouting hair in uncomfortable places and chased by hallucinations,’ Jaern said. ‘Elegant work, Cricket, if a bit simplistic.’

  Cricket.

  I took a deep breath and used it to keep my mind clear enough to scribe the deactivation runes. It was just an example of what had been at the top of my thoughts when he had managed to break into my memories. Jaern didn’t know anything except that I had a nickname. If I didn’t let him, he couldn’t use it to get under my skin.

  ‘And how are we going to get back out again, without sprouting uncomfortable hair?’ Lorican said.

  ‘They won’t be active again until I reset them. I just don’t like people mucking around in my business.’ And I hadn’t wanted any strangers up at the cabin, not even well-intentioned village folk. I scribed the last character, put my hands on either side of the spiral and spoke the incantation. It blazed faintly green, and then went dark. The ward was broken, for better or worse.

  ‘Why didn’t your grandfather take this kind of precaution?’ Jaern was controlling his horse with his knees, as much at ease as if we were sitting in a parlour somewhere discussing the weather. ‘Seems remarkably foolish. Did he not know he was being hunted?’

  I put my paints away without answering. It had been foolish, and it had been my fault. Acarius hadn’t had wards in place because he was expecting me to come home and he didn’t want me stumbling into them. Gods knew that I never would have seen the old man’s traps; he was too good for that.

  The road up to the cabin had never been very well maintained, but after six months of neglect, it was wildly overgrown. Soon I gave up on riding, and led my horse while I pushed my way through the undergrowth, keeping my eyes open for the other three wards I’d placed on the path and disabling them as I found them.

  Finally, as the afternoon stretched into evening, the canyon widened and the creek veered away from the road. We followed the stream until it became a pool fed by a tall, narrow cascade of white water. The horses wanted to stop and drink, but I pushed on, around the rocks that made the bed of the waterfall.

  There, in a wide half-circle of grass and wildflowers, sat the cabin. It was nothing but a little four-room affair made rather haphazardly of stacked logs with the bark still on. Two steps were caved in, and an abandoned birds’ nest hung skewed in the rafters of the porch roof. Beside the house was the trio of wizened, ancient apple trees that produced sour fruit every year. I loved all of it.

  Nobody else was looking at the cabin, of course. They were all gawping, even Jaern, at the building behind the cabin.

  ‘What,’ Lorican asked, ‘is that?’

  ‘The tower,’ I said.

  Brix dismounted, stiff. ‘Why is there a tower?’ She pointed at the pinkish basalt cylinder that stretched upwards for four storeys before it abruptly became a crumbling ruin, the remnants of its battlements jutting against the sky like broken teeth.

  The tower had been the reason that Acarius built the cabin in the first place, as nearly as I could tell. It was at least two centuries old, and had been constructed by some wizard of a past era. I had learned to scribe sigils by studying the old ones carved into its steps, and Acarius had his library on the lower level and his laboratory on the second floor.

  ‘To make my life more complex.’ I strode towards the cabin. ‘Come on, let’s get inside.’

  Acarius, being Acarius, had several caches in and around the cabin. A few of them were obvious, for piddly things like the silver coins he had used to buy eggs and beer from the village or the wine he had brought up the river twice a year. T
hose had been left open after his arrest, searched and pillaged by the Guildies like everything else.

  But that left the two secret caches, the ones I was fairly sure he didn’t know that I knew about. When I was fifteen, he had forbidden me to play with yavad and hidden his vials of the stuff behind a secret panel in his bedroom. It didn’t work; all it took was a few days of waiting until he was absorbed in his reading and some careful searching. Not that I really wanted the yavad, but I don’t like secrets.

  The front half of the house was the kitchen and a sitting room, with two bedrooms in the back. Small, and not particularly fancy. I walked into the sitting room and halted.

  Everything remained as I had left it months ago, when I had arrived to find Acarius gone. Everything, down to the familiar smell of pine sap and dust. I stood there, the warm sunshine on my back, and looked at the tatty sheepskin rug, the stone fireplace, the pewter dishes on the shelf above the rough table and chairs. Worst was the stack of books along one wall, with a pair of handmade spectacles resting on top.

  ‘Quaint,’ Jaern said. He moved into the room and reached for a book.

  ‘Don’t touch that,’ I snapped. ‘It isn’t yours.’

  The bees in my chest hummed and he stopped, watching me thoughtfully. It shouldn’t have hurt so much, seeing Acarius’ spectacles there. For a split second, I could believe he was going to walk out of the bedroom and snap at me for forgetting to wipe my feet.

  Brix came to stand beside me. She studied my face for a second before knocking her elbow against my ribs. ‘I’m hungry, wizard.’

  I tried to be exasperated, but the normalcy was comforting and I couldn’t keep from smiling. ‘My name is not—’

  ‘I’m hungry, Corcoran,’ Brix said.

  I was hungry, too. The vegetable garden was now rampant with weeds, but mixed with the grass and dandelions were self-seeded peas, new potatoes and asparagus. There was also some un-rotted firewood piled on the porch, so I busied myself building a fire. Jaern refused to help dig potatoes until I ordered him to. Carrying the necromancer’s soul had its negatives, but at least it kept a leash on him. When we had enough to make a decent meal, I left the others fussing with vegetables and went to the first cache.

  Acarius’ room was a wreck. I hadn’t been able to clean when I’d been there before, and there were still blood smears, broken furniture and a scorch mark on the braided rug beside the bed. At least the smoke smell had faded.

  I walked through the drifts of ruined clothes and blankets to the overturned desk. The Guild had taken everything that even looked important – all his diaries, all his papers – and had left nothing behind but an arrest warrant nailed to the front door and a giant red word scrawled across the bedroom wall in alchemical paint. I had torn the warrant down six and a half months ago, but I hadn’t had time to scrub the paint off.

  Lawless.

  I knew that it would be difficult seeing it again, but I wasn’t prepared for the blind rage that broke over me. Lawless. That was the sum of Keir Esras’ charges against Acarius, against the man who’d taught me every scrap of morality I possessed – my grandfather, who had lived with the superstitious, illiterate folk in the village below and had never tried to frighten them. Acarius, whose magical practice insisted on consent, on honesty, on privacy. Coming from Keir the bully, the murderer who was trying to build himself a rebellion, it was intolerable.

  The battered tin mirror still hung on the wall above where the desk had stood, its surface smeared with red paint. The hole in the log behind it held only a purse with a few copper coins in it and a tin medal depicting the crescent moon, the emblem of the goddess Ranara. Nothing was ever simple.

  I took the money, but left the medal. It had been my mother’s, and had been in this cache as long as I had been opening it. Her name was scratched on the tin in pitiful block letters, and it was the only thing I had of hers. I hadn’t thought Acarius would put it back in the cache. Not after I’d thrown it at him. Not after the things I’d said.

  Tell me who I am. Just tell me, what’s so bad that you can’t tell me? Damn this. Damn you—

  It wasn’t until the iron-heavy tang of blood flooded my mouth that I realised I’d been chewing on the inside of my cheek. I closed the panel, and then I had to stand there with my hand on it for a long time.

  ‘Holy gods,’ Lorican said, from behind me.

  I smeared the wet tracks off my cheeks and jaw before I turned. ‘I thought you were getting lunch together.’

  ‘I had no—’ He nudged the heap of torn clothes in front of him with one toe. ‘I didn’t know it was this bad.’ His eyes left the abomination on the wall. ‘You found it like this? How did they take him?’

  ‘It’s what we did – do,’ I said. ‘Help people who have magic problems, things that the Guild and Temples won’t look into. Like one woman who came to Acarius last year. Her husband knocked her around, she ran away from him and he hired divination to find her. Nothing illegal in the divining, but it’s quite illegal to write the hexes we placed to prevent him from finding and approaching her.’ I shrugged. ‘Sometimes people pay us. Sometimes they don’t. This last time, six months ago – well, the villagers weren’t able to be very helpful, but they said a group of people had come looking for Acarius, to ask him for help. They must have been convincing, and somehow they managed to write a trap spiral and lure him into it. Pinned him down.’ My eyes drifted to the floor where Lorican was standing, where the paint smear that had been bright six months ago had mellowed to a dull orange. ‘He got some spells off, I think; there was blood in multiple places.’

  Lorican put his hand over his mouth. ‘You’re sure it wasn’t his?’

  I didn’t answer. What was there to say? Of course I wasn’t sure.

  ‘Gray,’ Brix called, from the front room. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  I wasn’t, not anymore. But I knew I’d have to choke the food down anyway.

  When I went back into the sitting room, Brix was roasting potatoes and eating peas raw from the pods. She sat on a three-legged stool next to the fireplace, manoeuvring the potatoes out of the ashes with a long stick.

  ‘So?’ Brix said, her mouth full of peas. ‘Did you find the pieces you were looking for? Is the doll ready to put together?’

  ‘No.’ I sat down on the floor next to Brix’s feet, still trying to settle my emotions. Everything in this place reminded me of Acarius. Everything hurt. ‘They’re not in the cabin, which means they’re probably in the tower.’

  Lorican had followed me out of the bedroom, frowning to himself. Jaern, who was not eating, leaned against one wall and watched the room with flat black eyes.

  ‘Well.’ Brix dug around in the ashes with her stick and rolled a blackened potato towards me. ‘You should eat, then, and go look in the tower before the daylight’s gone. I’ll come with you.’

  They all came with me. I confess to feeling a vindictive sort of satisfaction when I led them to the wooden door of the tower, only to find it covered in carved sigils.

  ‘Son of a whore,’ Jaern said.

  Lorican glanced at him, and then at me. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Wards, keyed to me.’ I touched the centre of the rune spiral, where CORCORAN was carved in choppy letters, big as life. I hadn’t gone into the tower the last time I was at the cabin, being more concerned with following the obvious trail of the Guildies. But maybe that was a mistake – maybe Acarius had believed I’d find all this, months ago. ‘Anyone but me who goes through this door, as long as the wards are in effect, will suffer the consequences.’

  ‘Uncomfortable hair sprouting?’ Brix edged closer to the door.

  ‘No . . .’ I studied the runes. ‘Leprosy.’

  She jumped back. ‘Well, take the ward off.’

  ‘He can’t,’ Jaern said. ‘Whoever wrote this didn’t take any chances – he designed the rune spiral so that nobody could stick a sword in the boy’s back and force him to remove it.’ Reluctant admiration glittered in his voi
ce, brittle and bright as ice. ‘It’s not a ward, it’s a gods-damned gorgeous hex.’

  I pushed the door open and stepped into the tower, inhaling a mixture of tallow candles, parchment and rotting straw. The narrow windows, cross-hatched with steel bars, let in just enough light to be frustrating.

  I had never actually seen inside the tower cache. I had found the trapdoor that led to it accidentally one day, when Acarius had been long-winded about something – probably divination, always my worst subject. I was young enough to sprawl on my back, kicking my feet now and then when he wasn’t looking at me. My heels came down on something hollow under the scattered straw that gave a modicum of insulation against the cold floor.

  Acarius had paused, just for a moment, in the middle of his lesson. I managed to look as though I didn’t know I had just kicked a trapdoor. When I crept back later and pushed the straw away, I found a spiral of runes in red paint that covered the entire floor. Even at ten, I had known those runes were powerful, and I left it alone.

  A few inches from my feet was where the trapdoor should be. I dropped to my knees and began brushing the straw away until I got down to bare stone and wood. It didn’t take long to find the door. I got it clear and then sat back on my heels, studying the sigils and considering. The sigils weren’t the same as they had been when I’d seen them before. For one thing, they were scribed in green now. For another, they were keyed to my name, like the ones outside.

  He had been expecting them to arrest him, then. The sigils on the door outside could have been done quickly, but these would have taken days. He had been expecting me to find all this.

  Acarius had been studying Jaern before he was arrested. He had known something about the doll then. Had known, but hadn’t done more than take a couple of gems away so that nobody could easily complete the artefact. So nobody could use the artefact.