“We need to get your dad out of there today,” I said. Freeing him from the City Watch would be difficult, but we could do it. They weren’t set up for dealing with mages. We would have to be quick, though. The moment I used magic, someone would alert the Ash Guard. I didn’t want to be around when that happened.
Sereh’s look was still frighteningly cold. “What good is that? You said Silkstar would just track Dad down. You said that was why we shouldn’t get him out before. You can’t block a high mage.”
“No,” I said grimly. “I can’t.” I couldn’t even come close. He would smash through my magic like it wasn’t there. I knew of only one thing that could stop a high mage. “We’re going to have to get some Ash.”
A sound almost like a choke came from Sereh. I felt like copying her.
“Do you think the Ash Guard are just going to give it to you?” she demanded. “Do you know how much it costs on the black market? Even Silkstar couldn’t afford it.”
He probably could, but I took her point. The Ash Guard protected their source of Ash with a fury and fanaticism that no one in their right mind would go against. Even when they washed it off their skin, they did it deep within the fortress, re-gathering every flake, bit by bit. Being in possession of Ash was an immediate death sentence. Depths, I had heard a rumour that they even executed their own Guardsmen and Guardswomen if they lost their Ash. I doubted that was true. I hoped it wasn’t, because I liked Captain Gale and I didn’t want to get her into trouble. I certainly didn’t want her dead. But if Silkstar came looking for Benny, Ash was the only thing that would block the magic. Benny came first.
“I need you to go to the Ash Guard,” I said. “Leave a message for Captain Meroi Gale.” I ran through the timings carefully. “Ask her to meet me at Dumonoc’s bar at three o’clock — no, make it three thirty.” I pushed myself up, trying not to feel every bruise and cut on my poor, battered body. “Tell her I’ve got some information for her, but I want to keep it quiet. Say I don’t want people to know I’m talking to the Guard.”
I hoped that would be enough to ensure Captain Gale came carrying her Ash in a pouch, like she had before, rather than smeared on her skin.
“Uncle Nik?” Sereh said, turning as she reached the door.
“Hm?” I said, my mind already spinning the pieces of the plan.
“If this doesn’t work,” she said, softly, almost kindly. “If you don’t get Dad out, if you don’t free him, if this goes wrong. I’m going to kill you.”
Chapter Fifteen
My shirt was beyond ruined. The rip up the back had lengthened, and it was stained with blood, sweat, and dirt. Worse, it itched. I needed to concentrate for this next bit, and I wasn’t going to do it like this. Magic was difficult enough without constant distractions. I removed my cloak then balled up my shirt and tossed it into a corner of my bedroom, where it joined the shattered ruins of my furniture.
My bruises had started to heal while I had slept, and they didn’t hurt the way they had yesterday, but they had been too extensive and deep to mend completely, and my nose was still swollen. Mother’s enforcer had added a new selection of bruises, which were blooming nicely.
I pulled the shirt Captain Gale had given me out of its sink and hung it up to dry. It was still stained, but it was better than anything else I owned, and when it dried, the stains would be less noticeable.
Stop procrastinating. You don’t have time to piss about with household chores.
The truth was, I didn’t know if I could do this. It was at times like these that I cursed my own ineptitude as a mage. Could I have stayed with the Countess and learned more? Could I have been, like Sereh said, better? Good enough to not fail?
You’ll never know if you never actually try. Which was the point, wasn’t it? If I procrastinated long enough, I would never have to fail Benny. I could blame Silkstar, not my own inadequacies.
Depths!
I headed to my workroom.
My apartment wasn’t large. Once you took out my office downstairs, my bedroom, my little kitchen, and my cramped washroom there wasn’t a lot left. I had, however, set aside a small workroom for magic. Apparently, landlords weren’t too happy with the idea of the whole building being blown up or melted by spells gone wrong. I had lined the walls with apple tree wood, which had a remarkable ability to absorb and dissipate magic. There were more robust options, but not in my price range.
I could get Benny out of the City Watch cells. I might not have the power of a high mage, or even of Mother’s new pet, but I wasn’t a street conjuror or a dice nudger either. I had actual power. Physically freeing Benny was something I could manage. Doing it without several dozen witnesses noticing and before the Ash Guard could arrive was another matter.
There were three things that affected a mage’s abilities: the availability of raw magic, our ability to shape it, and the amount of power we could handle. There was always plenty of raw magic in Agatos, and I could show most mages a thing or two about control and fine detailing of spells. Where I fell down was in how much power I could draw in and use at any particular time. I was skilled, I was flexible, but I was weak. To get into the Watch cells and back out again with Benny, but without being seen, needed more power than I could provide. I reckoned I could hide a small chicken, or maybe a particularly well-behaved dog, but two grown men? Not a chance.
Luckily, that wasn’t the only way to handle magic. In the same way that almost any object — the stones of a temple, holy trinkets, sacred texts — could be invested by the touch or presence of a god, mages could also invest the right objects with magic. In simpler terms, we could store spells.
The complexity and power of an instantaneously cast spell was limited by the talent of the mage. In theory, there was no actual limit to a stored spell, if you had the right object to store it in, the time to prepare and feed it, and the knowledge to get it right. The downside was that you didn’t have any leeway or flexibility. Once you had prepared your spell, that was what you had. If you needed something even slightly different, you were out of luck.
What I needed wasn’t an invisibility spell, as such. I didn’t even know if that kind of thing was possible. What I needed was for people to just … look away, to find us so uninteresting that even the dirt under their fingernails became fascinating in comparison.
It would have helped if I had had a week to prepare. As it was, this was going to be a bodge job.
I settled at my workbench and sorted through my collection of magically-susceptible objects.
Eventually, I selected a chunk of quartz, vaguely egg shaped, with a sheared-off end. It wasn’t ideal, but my samples were limited.
An imbued spell wasn’t so different from a curse — they both came from the manipulation of raw magic, and they both required the magic to hold its structure until it was released. Curses were cruder, being released on contact and being more susceptible to disruption. An imbued spell had to be stable and had to release its effects under the command of its user, sometimes instantaneously, sometimes over a period of weeks or even years.
I took my time constructing the spell and laying it over the quartz. The topography wasn’t ideal. Using mahogany or opal would have allowed my spell to be simpler, but you worked with what you had.
When I had finished outlining the spell, laying it over the quartz like a light-blue spider’s web, I started to feed in power. This was the hard part. Feed too much or too little to one part and the whole structure could collapse or warp into something entirely different. More than one trainee had ended up spattered over the walls from a malformed spell. It was all part of the fun of being a mage.
The quartz resisted, pushing back at the magic. It didn’t want to hold the spell. I fed in more, building the reservoirs at the vertices of the web.
Magic wasn’t really like that at all, of course. It didn’t have colour or any kind of geometrical structure. That was just the way I sensed it. Another mage might have heard it as a song, a duet between
the mage and the quartz. Me, I saw it as colours and shapes.
The quartz was still resisting. I drew in more raw magic, gasping at the pain that stabbed into my bruises and cuts, then threw it at the spell. The spell bent, shivered, and then shattered. The quartz spun off the table. I cursed, then picked it up and started again.
I needed more time. I needed to insinuate power into it slowly, opening channels to fill it, but that would take days, so all I could do was hammer at it and hope I got one of the hammer blows just right.
The spell broke again.
I slumped. I was covered in sweat, and not just from the growing heat of the day. This kind of work took it out of me.
“Nik?”
The voice behind me was so unexpected that I jerked up, banging my legs against the workbench. I had left my wards up, only allowing a pass for Sereh. I staggered to my feet, turning and gathering magic.
My sister, Mica, stood staring up at me with a horrified expression. She had been able to pass through my wards for almost a decade.
“What are you doing here?” I hadn’t seen Mica for a couple of years. She looked … different. Older, yes, but more controlled. More like Mother. I was shirtless, sweating, and bruised. There were better looking corpses in the city morgue.
“Just wait here,” I said, shouldering past her. It wasn’t the politest way to greet a sister I had scarcely seen in the last five years.
My new shirt was still damp, but I pulled it on, covering the worst of my injuries.
“What do you want?” I said, as I returned to the workroom. I knew I was being rude, but, Pity! Mica hadn’t visited me once since I’d left home. Her sudden arrival tweaked every suspicious nerve in my body.
“You look terrible.”
“Mother’s new pet isn’t gentle.”
I picked up the quartz and placed it back on the workbench.
“Enne Lowriver,” Mica said. “She’s been with Mother for three years. You need to be careful with her, Nik. She’s powerful.”
I had noticed that. She had swatted me twice, and she hadn’t looked like she was exerting herself either time.
“Is she a match for Mother?” I asked. I wanted to know exactly what I was up against.
Mica smiled, and just for a second she looked like that little girl from the Warrens who had followed me and Benny around.
“No one’s a match for Mother. The Wren is more dangerous. Silkstar is richer. But Mother is the most powerful high mage since the Godkiller.”
Then Mica’s face smoothed again, becoming blank and controlled. I had never understood how we could be related. Mica was the perfect model of a young Agatos lady, elegant, charming, and refined, as well as being one of the most talented mages the city had ever seen, while I looked like something dragged out of the bilges of a passing Secellian galley. We couldn’t have been more different. In everything but her temperament, Mica was Mother’s daughter. I didn’t know what I was.
“How about you?” I said. “Is this Enne Lowriver better than you?”
Mica cocked her head thoughtfully. “I don’t know. It’s never a good idea to show another mage the extent of your powers.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. Mica was on course to being a high mage sooner rather than later. If this woman was even close to her, I was doing a good job of making the wrong enemies.
I sighed. “Look. I appreciate the warning, but I’m kind of busy here.” This quartz wasn’t going to imbue itself.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Because I’m busy?” That was obtuse, even by a sister’s standards.
“To stop you doing anything stupid.”
Excuse me? “That’s kind of my speciality.”
Irritation crossed her face. “Don’t make everything a joke, Nik. Mother thinks you’re going to do what you’re told just because she told you to. I know you better.”
Five years without visiting, and then she turned up just to stop me rescuing Benny?
“You know what? Fuck you and fuck the Countess and fuck the whole lot of you! Benny is my friend. You think I’m going to let him die so as not to inconvenience you and Mother? He was your friend, too, you know? When you were just an irritating kid trailing around behind us, I was the one who wanted to dump you and he was the one who made me bring you along. When you hurt yourself or got scared, he was the one who looked after you.” I took a step towards her. I was taller than her by a full head, and I was furious. “Get out of my house. Now.”
Mica didn’t move. “Come back home. Join Mother’s service again. Leave all of … of this behind before you get yourself killed.” Her pose was calm, but there was something else in her eyes, something more desperate. Was she afraid for me? Or was she so desperate to please Mother that she would try to persuade me even if it was the wrong move for Benny?
“Silkstar leaned on the magistrates to get Benny a death sentence,” Mica continued. “But he’s not the only one with influence. Mother can push back. We can have the death sentence revoked.”
I shook my head. “So he’ll just get his hands cut off, is that it? Just lose his hands. What does that matter, eh? Benny would throw himself in front of a bullet for me. Depths, he would probably do it for you, Gods help the daft bastard. I’m not abandoning him.” You don’t let your friends down. You don’t cut them loose.
Her eyes didn’t shift from mine. “I could stop you.”
And that was the truth that separated us. She could, and there wouldn’t be a thing I could do about it.
“Then you’ll have to,” I said quietly.
I turned back to my workbench, my skin prickling, waiting for her magic to seize me.
It didn’t.
“Damn it, Nik,” she whispered.
She came around the side of the workbench and picked up the quartz. She turned it over in her hands.
“This is useless,” she said.
I shrugged. “It’s what I’ve got.”
She shut her eyes, enclosing the quartz in her palms.
Mica didn’t see magic as colours in the way I did. She felt it. She had once described it to me as brushing against filaments in the air. I imagined it must be like walking through a constant dry rain. I had tried feeling it the way she did, hoping it would allow me to figure out why she was so much better at magic than me, but it wasn’t my thing. I saw it as I saw it. I let my eyes unfocus to watch her.
Mica breathed in, and the raw magic in the room collapsed on her like a thunderclap. The force of it sent me staggering. I think I would have fallen if I hadn’t already drawn in a bit of raw magic to support myself. A mage could never pull magic from inside someone else. I didn’t know why. Just one of the entertaining mysteries of being a mage. The raw magic I had taken was enough to keep me upright. Before I could properly recover, Mica channelled the entirety of the magic into the quartz. I saw the light-blue spider’s web burning with an intensity that hurt my eyes.
“Fuck me,” I whispered. I could have worked on it for a year and not managed that much.
She passed the quartz to me, and I took it gingerly, expecting it to be hot. It wasn’t.
“It will only give you a minute once you release it,” she said. “Don’t waste it.”
I still felt stunned. Mica’s powers had come on far more than I had imagined in the last five years.
“A minute?”
“That’s all it will hold.” She shrugged. “I told you it was useless.”
“Right.” And if I worked for the blessed Countess, I would have access to better. She didn’t have to tell me.
A minute would have to be enough.
“Try not to get yourself killed,” my little sister said. “I would miss you. I really would.”
In my time, I had come up with some good ideas, some bad ideas, and — to be frank — some bloody awful ideas. It was the source of my astonishing success, Benny liked to say, and this from a man who was more than familiar with the inside of a City Watch cell. But, I reflected a
s I settled at a small table in the shadows at the back of Dumonoc’s bar, planning to steal Ash from a captain of the Ash Guard had to rank right up there with the worst. Even Dumonoc’s happy greeting of, “Oh, just fuck off!” didn’t cheer me up.
There was no way this was going to turn out well. If Captain Gale didn’t catch us in the act, she would find out soon afterwards. I couldn’t even use magic to help me because of the dampening effect of the Ash.
I squinted into the shadows by the doorway where Sereh was supposed to be waiting, but I couldn’t see her. Either that meant she was doing her job or she had given up on my stupid plan and buggered off to deal with it herself.
I was so busy watching the door that I missed the figure approaching from the corner until he swung a chair across from the nearest table and seated himself.
“Afternoon.”
I started, then slumped back when I realised it was Squint, the Wren’s information broker.
“I’m kind of busy right now, Squint.”
He ignored me. “You getting some wine in?” He looked meaningfully at the empty table.
“I’m kind of broke.”
Squint waved over to Dumonoc, miming a bottle and a couple of glasses. Dumonoc spat on the floor and shook his head.
“I’m serious, Squint. I’m meeting someone.”
He squinted over the table at me. “Sooner we get down to business the better, then.”
I waited while Dumonoc slammed the bottle of wine and two chipped mugs onto the table. He shot me a disgusted look before stomping back to the bar.
I would say this for Dumonoc: his wine might be as sour as vinegar, and he might have an expression like a goat’s arse, but his cups were clean.
“I’m calling in that favour you owe,” Squint said.
I shot a glance at the door. Still no sign of Captain Gale.
“Can it wait?”
Squint shook his head. I was tempted to tell him where to shove his favour, but Squint worked for the Wren. If you tried to cheat Squint, you were cheating the Wren, and I had pushed my luck too far with him already.
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