I sprinted further down the corridor, to the next barricade. It was getting darker. I shut the ebony door, and then looked to either side of me to see what I could use to lock it with. There were two archways, gated with iron portcullises. From one came the scent of soaking cow hides, mud and blood, and a hideous shouting voice.
I flinched. ‘I don’t want to. Brix, I can’t.’
Footsteps sped along the corridor on the other side of the door. Numyra was already through. Her shouts – narrating my lists, chanting my ditties as she came to them – were scarcely muffled.
‘If it hurts you,’ said the Brix-ghost, ‘it will hurt her.’
I grasped the iron and shoved the portcullis open. A pool of oily black tar flowed out, voices echoing wherever it touched me.
Stupid little whelp. Why can’t you do anything right?
Hide, then. Hide. Like a whipped puppy.
The stuff stuck to me, like smearing pitch. I gasped, dipped my hands in it and put it between me and Numyra.
The village dumps you here to eat my food, and you can’t even remember to take a hide out of soak when I tell you. Are you even listening? Are you deaf as well as witless? You’ll never amount to a pile of goat shit.
‘It’s a lie,’ the Brix-ghost said. I nodded, and became aware I was sobbing.
But I had to grab another handful of the hateful stuff, had to cover every inch of the ebony door in that searing humiliation.
Worthless little son of a whore.
Don’t you run away from me! Don’t you dare run away from me!
Anguish cracked across my leg and I went down, terror rolling over me, a fiery tide. I pressed my dripping hands to the door.
From somewhere far away, I heard Numyra cry out in pain.
Then silence. Maybe she had given up.
‘Brix,’ I said. ‘You think she’s gone?’
THUD.
Not gone. I watched the pitch dissolve, bit by bit, as Numyra threshed her way through the memories, sorting, tearing, running. She was moving a hell of a lot faster than I could hide.
THUD.
‘Brix.’ I glanced sideways.
No Brix-ghost. Nothing. I had lost that, too. But when I looked down, I cradled the Empty One against my chest, gems in its sockets, sightless black eyes staring up at me.
I clutched it to me, turned to flee deeper and found myself facing a different sort of door.
This one wasn’t made of ebony. It was made of steel, thicker than I’d seen in any prison. From the crack underneath it glowed a throbbing red light. Slowly I edged towards it, hand outstretched. Could I hide inside? What on earth did I have locked up in there? What piece of myself was so bad that my mind had decided memories of the tanner were better?
My fingertips brushed the metal at the same time that I heard the humming.
Not humming. Buzzing. Vibrating.
I backed away.
Nowhere left to go.
THUD.
The ebony door slammed open behind me, and Numyra’s soul strode in to stand in front of the steel. I knew it was her soul because she was still somehow wearing her untidy robes, although she looked about nineteen, and spotty. It must have been how she thought of herself. After all, this wasn’t my memory of her, it actually was her consciousness wandering around in my head.
For the first time it occurred to me to wonder how my soul appeared. Eight years old, maybe.
‘Don’t open it,’ I said.
She kicked the door. ‘This is where it is, isn’t it? Whatever secret you’ve been fighting so hard to protect?’
‘No.’ I wrapped my arms around the doll. Whispers rose off the gold like steam. Are you going to get me my soul? Could Numyra not see what I was carrying? Wasn’t information about the doll what they wanted? Much simpler to extract a soul than it is to put it back.
Numyra put a hand on the door. The buzz grew painful, a hurricane of wings. Could she not hear it? Couldn’t she feel the roaring anger pounding on the metal?
No.
This was what I couldn’t let them find. This was what Jaern had seen in my head, why he had given me to them. You won’t control me forever, Cricket.
‘Please don’t open it,’ I said. ‘You’ll die. It’s not my memories in there. You have to believe me. Wake me up and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know; I’ll tell you about Acarius, about the doll, what I’m doing in your caravan, everything, just—’
She snorted, put her hands on the latch and pulled.
The bees spilled out and stung. They spun, a scarlet tide of claustrophobia, a hurricane of rage, pain, horror, pride – and a towering, unholy frustration.
A memory I didn’t recognise reached out and whipped me across the face, a shouting, desperate voice: I’m giving you eternal life. Just take it!
The bees swarmed into a tighter group, coalescing and then coming apart again, pulsing like a heartbeat.
I won’t forget about this. About you. I’ll never forget and you won’t escape me.
The group of bees almost made a human figure now.
‘What is that?’ shrieked Numyra.
People are always looking for something to worship. Might as well be me.
‘End the spell and get out of my head,’ I said. ‘Break the contact, now! This one isn’t a ghost!’
The remains of a slender young man stepped forwards. Or it might have been a girl; it was difficult to tell. Leathery brown skin, colourless hanks of hair clinging to a decaying scalp, upturned nose – or part of a nose – and a rough wool tunic over a body built of half-rotted bones.
But I knew the eyes.
‘Oh, Gray,’ Jaern’s soul said. ‘I’ve been a ghost for a long time, now.’
He took Numyra’s soul by the throat. I saw the horrified realisation cross her face, saw the blood start as the tips of Jaern’s fingerbones pressed into her skin. Her mouth opened. She drew breath to scream.
Then they were gone. Silence. Dark. Nothing.
Numyra was dead. Jaern was free. And the spell that locked me into my own head was still running. Without someone to erase the sigils, I was trapped.
I couldn’t wake up.
Twenty-One
But I did wake up.
I gasped, air filling my lungs with burning life. Pain squeezed me, but a good pain – the kind that went with a real body and real lungs, not the deepening pit of misery I had been swimming in. The blur around me cleared. The senseless buzzing in my skull retreated but didn’t die.
That buzzing. Wasn’t I supposed to do something about it?
And that damn screaming.
Was it . . . Makesh?
Somewhere, far outside myself, the spell changed.
Another voice chanted, at first so softly and rapidly that I couldn’t understand it. And a deeper one, panicky, fumbling – Gedion, incanting a binding spell, and doing it poorly.
The pressure of Numyra’s thumbs on my cheeks stopped. She shrieked and backed away from me, a ring of blood streaming down her throat like a macabre necklace, hands outstretched. The rune-carved bones on her bracelets burst into white light. By the time Gedion’s hands let me go and I could turn my head, I had regained enough control to recognise who was casting.
Brix.
Brix, still shackled, stood in the corner of the tent, shouting the runes on Numyra’s bracelet. A ball of blue fire pulsed above her head like a beating heart. I had just enough time to recognise the spell and drop to the ground, the tent pole shedding splinters into my arms, before the sheet lightning lanced through the yurt.
It hit Gedion first, a bubbling pillar of fire that nailed him to the earth. I shoved my face into my shoulder as deep as I could get it, eyes squeezed shut. The sickly-sweet smell of burned meat filled the tent. Heat flared against my back. Numyra’s shrieks abruptly went silent.
Then it stopped, silent except for the gallop of my heart and the ragged, fast breath of the woman who had just saved me. I opened my eyes.
The sheet lightn
ing spell had faded, but she hadn’t moved. The runes tattooed on her left foot glowed a dull, angry red, pinning her in place more effectively than even the shackle. Her eyes were fixed on the smoking lump that had, until a few minutes ago, been Gedion.
And . . . I could see through her.
She still stood there, and most of her was opaque, albeit trembling. But the hand she held out, the one she had used to manipulate the spell, flickered in and out of transparency, like a schoolboy’s idea of a spectre.
‘Brix.’ My words were still mush. I tried to scrape my chin against my own shoulder and wipe off the alchemical paint, but it wasn’t very effective. It would have to be her, not me. ‘You can reverse the spell on your foot by saying it backwards. I can’t say it for you with this stuff on my face.’ She didn’t seem to have heard me. ‘Brix,’ I repeated.
She blinked, slowly. ‘Corcoran?’
‘I’m here,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’
Brix pulled in her hand. ‘I’m stuck. Makesh ran . . . he’ll bring back guards . . .’
‘It’s the anchor spell on your foot.’ I swallowed. ‘It’s going to be all right. Say the spell backwards, like you used Numyra’s spell just now.’
She blinked. ‘That’s mad. Why should saying it backwards do anything?’
‘Why should saying it forwards do anything, if you know so much about runic sub-types?’ I said – or slurred. ‘Anchors are weird, unique spells – if they were unbreakable, why would Makesh need shackles?’
She said the runes backwards, one at a time, and they went dark against her skin. She moved rapidly behind me to grab the knife sheathed on the remains of Gedion’s belt. Then came a thud when she dropped it, before doubling the hem of her shirt over her hand and picking it up like a pan off the fire. ‘I’ll get you untied.’
‘The knife was still hot.’ My stomach flopped. ‘Brix, you just . . .’
‘I know what I did!’ She squatted beside me, grabbing at my elbow with the transparent hand and yanking my bound wrists towards her. ‘Why did you have to do it, Gray? Gods!’ She sawed at the rope with frightening intensity. ‘You can be so stupid! It’s not even here. I don’t even have the doll anymore. I had to give it to the Guildlord. You need to get out of here right now. You weren’t supposed to come after me, you—’
‘Why did you save me?’ I said.
The rope parted under her knife. I brought my numb wrists around in front of me and rubbed my hands against my knees, trying to get feeling back into them. Brix stayed crouched beside me.
‘I couldn’t just let them . . .’ The ferocity drained from her voice. ‘You were supposed to hate me. I wasn’t supposed to see you again.’
The circulation returned to my fingertips with painful crawling, as if ten thousand ants had taken angry residence there. I rubbed the goop off my face. ‘Look, I understand that none of it was real for you. But all of it was real for me, Brix. And even if you don’t . . .’ I swallowed, as if I could get rid of the bitter taste of this truth. ‘You should know what kind of person I am,’ I said, hoarsely. ‘You should have just asked me. You should have let me help.’
‘Even if I don’t what?’ She stared at me.
‘Nothing.’ I began to think about standing up, if only to get further away from the choking, cloying stench of blood and burning. I wasn’t sure I was sober enough for my legs to hold me.
‘What, Corcoran?’
I scrambled to my feet, and only kept them for a second before I stumbled back to one knee.
She followed, shackle clanking as she did so. ‘You think I wanted to hurt you? You think I had a choice?’
‘Let’s not get confused,’ I said. ‘I’m the one who’s got the right to be pissed off, remember? I’m the one who got left in a damn prison circle, alone, to figure out the whole thing, alone. Don’t start scolding me about choices.’
She licked her thumb and rubbed it against my chin, removing the smears of alchemical paint I had missed. For some reason this wasn’t disgusting, and I kneeled there and let her do it. ‘If you had just stayed away from me, you would have been safe.’
‘Safe,’ I said. ‘Like you kept your sister safe?’
She froze, her hand – the transparent one – still on my face. ‘What do you know about my sister?’
‘I’m not an idiot,’ I said, ‘or at least not about magic. I divined for the doll, and I got you, talking about her, a flask . . . I thought you’d go to her, if you could. That was the morning after you left, by the way; I hadn’t hit the place yet where I thought you were maybe just selling me for money, like a normal mercenary.’
She flinched, and I paused, ashamed. I’d been trying to hurt her, and I had succeeded.
‘She’s alive,’ I said. ‘She’s in Cor Daddan, the same place where they’re holding Acarius – or at least she was.’ I caught her hand and held it as she pulled me to my feet, looking through the spectral fingers. They felt warm and real enough, and gods, now I could smell her hair.
I cleared my throat. ‘The flasks, I’ve only ever heard that was a myth. People whose bodies can expand and contract, be confined inside a bottle – this is really how it happens? This is why Tirnaal don’t cast spells themselves?’
‘It’s a sin,’ she said. ‘Casting, I mean. The old people say it’s a sin, that the reason we become unreal enough to be imprisoned is punishment for using magic, when the gods meant us to be vessels to enable the magic of others. Too much magic won’t kill us, like it will you. It just makes us unreal – even the toxicity others dump into us will, eventually. They fill us up with all their bad feelings, all the poison, until we . . .’ She looked down at her transparent fingers. ‘Then they put us into a djinn’s flask. We’re awake the whole time we’re in torpor, Gray. Trapped, unable to move, unable to breathe, to think. It’s not like sleep. It hurts.’ She licked her lips, her chest heaving with quick breath. ‘Anka thought we could escape the Karrad temple where we worked, risk doing a few spells, get away before we went ghostly. But they trapped her, sold her vial to Makesh and . . . and Keir came to the temple and told me what I would have to do to get her back. Help capture an outlaw wizard, a necromancer who’d turned against the Guild. Simple. How was I supposed to know it would be you?’
‘Me?’ A short, bitter bark of laughter broke from me. ‘Brix, I worried about you. I would have done anything I had to in order to get you that money, and you didn’t even need it. How would it have mattered if you knew who I was?’
‘Because,’ she said. ‘You weren’t like other wizards – you didn’t make any damn sense. You took my tracker off. The money did matter. Until you offered it to me, I thought my only chance to help Anka was to stay with you, draw the Guild to you. When you said you’d pay me, I thought maybe I could be rid of Keir, buy my own and Anka’s freedom. Makesh isn’t loyal to Keir, doesn’t care who’s paying him if they’re paying enough. I thought forty pieces of silver—’
‘Did I not get it fast enough for you?’ I said. ‘Is that why you didn’t trust me enough to ask me to help?’
‘Stop it.’ She had gone pale. ‘Stop talking like I was on their side. They only used me in the first place because they thought a Tirnaal woman might make a good shield if you cast a spell. Keir was afraid of you, kept talking about how dangerous you were, how you’d broken his nose before. They thought you’d cast immediately if you saw him or Halling first. I was supposed to be a distraction. I thought you’d hurt me. I was disposable, do you not understand that?’
I didn’t want to understand this. I didn’t want to have it made plain how stupid I had been. ‘You don’t have to explain. I’m not—’
But she kept talking. ‘After Deeptown I was going to tell you about Anka, but I had to do it without being overheard by Lorican, or gods forbid, Jaern. I couldn’t get you alone. And then . . . I carry a speakfar spell, and binding sigils. They always mark us with spells that they can use to control us. You . . . you saw.’ Her voice had gone dull. ‘Keir used my ink to contact
me, just before we got to the cabin. He told me Makesh didn’t have the vial anymore, and showed it to me. I could feel it in his hands, Gray. I could feel her, hurting. No amount of money would have helped. All he wanted was the doll, and you said you needed it for Acarius. I knew I couldn’t ask you to give it to me.’ She stared at the ground. ‘He was with the caravan himself when I met up with them, two days after I left the cabin. He was supposed to have Anka’s flask with him, trade it for the doll. He laughed. Stood there, and told me I was a fool to think that he’d bargain with me, after I’d hit him in Fenwydd temple.’
‘Why did you hit him in the temple?’ I couldn’t keep from blurting out the question. ‘When did it start – the jail? The damn barn?’
‘Yes,’ she said, miserably. ‘They knew you were in the barn, something about divining for the Temples book you stole. I had the tracker on. At first I was just supposed to make it easier to catch you, let Halling bring you to Keir to be questioned, but I couldn’t stand there and let him hurt you. And then things just kept happening, you kept figuring out ways to get away—’
‘I kept being a fucking idiot,’ I said.
‘Corcoran, I’m sorry.’ A tremor passed over her lips, and her hand still gripped mine.
A dark, cool lake of ease spread in the middle of my chest, and I knew what she was doing. Slowly, I realised I had to be damn careful.
‘Let go of me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t ask you to take on any of my toxicity. I’m not Keir Esras, experimenting with magic I don’t want to feel.’
‘You’ve got to let me tell you that I’m sorry,’ she said, fiercely.
She was sorry for tricking me. And she had tried to make it right. But she had nothing to say about whether the rest of it – the firelight, the one glory-filled kiss – had been real. A bright ribbon of pain seared its way through me, and I realised I had been hoping. Again.
‘Fine. You’re sorry.’ I twisted away from her fingers. ‘I’m not interested in forgiving you, so it’s irrelevant. When we’re out of this, we never have to see each other again.’ I swallowed, but it didn’t help. I was a liar, and a fool. Underneath the ache and the anger, I still wanted her. ‘Let me see your shackle.’
Lord of Secrets Page 25
