One of the morgue-lamps flickered. Mica sat abruptly upright. A split second later, I noticed it, too. A draining away of magic.
The morgue-lamps guttered and then failed.
Someone hammered on the front door.
Then a loud voice bellowed, “Ash Guard! Open up.”
Depths! I swore under my breath.
Mica turned on me, eyes wide. “Nik?”
I wet my lips. “Um. Yeah. This might be me.”
“What do you mean it might be you?”
“I, ah … I might have stolen some Ash.”
Mica stared at me. “For Pity’s sake! Why would you do anything so … so … so bloody suicidal?”
“It’s a long story. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She buried her head in her hands, and I was worried she was about to start tearing her hair out. Then she looked back up as the thumping resumed, her expression so like Mother’s that it almost knocked the breath out of me.
“Get out, Nik. Go out the back. I’ll slow them down.”
“How? You won’t be able to use magic.” I could feel the insidious weakness and absence that Ash brought. Mica could be a hundred times more powerful than me, but the Ash wouldn’t care.
“I’m going to talk to them, Nik. You should try it sometime.” She shooed with her hands. “Now piss off.”
I pissed off.
Mica’s house — palace, mansion, whatever — backed onto a carefully manicured courtyard of a garden, heavy with sculpted foliage and shaded paths. I burst into it, looking desperately for somewhere to hide. Up a tree, maybe, or in the bushes. I could even wriggle inside an urn. There was no shortage of options. Depths, there was room back here for half a dozen homes in the Warrens. A frivolous display of wealth and power in a crowded city. But wherever I hid, they would find it eventually. I hurried down a narrow path towards the back wall.
Mica’s attempts at delaying the Ash Guard weren’t gathering any stones. I could feel the influence of the Ash still eating away at my magic.
Just get out of here.
The back wall was high, but it was climbable. I scrambled up, swung a leg over, caught the too-tight trousers on a jutting stone, and toppled into the alley like a sack of onions.
At least no one was watching.
Or so I thought right until I raised my head and found myself staring straight at a pair of boots. I followed the legs up past a loosely fitting but suggestive shirt to see Captain Meroi Gale staring down at me.
“Fuck,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” she said with finality. “Fuck.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I pushed myself to my feet as carefully and as unthreateningly as I could. Captain Gale had already proven she could beat me senseless even when I had my magic. She would fillet me if I tried anything. I didn’t want to give her any excuse.
“If this is about the Ash—” I started.
“It’s not.” The mention didn’t seem to have improved her mood. “But we’re going to get to that.”
I grimaced as I straightened. My shoulder ached from the fall. Add it to the tally. There were still some bits of my body that weren’t battered like a cheap sausage, but the day wasn’t done yet.
“So what, then?” I had probably broken half a dozen laws since the last time we’d met, but none that should concern the Ash Guard.
Irritation twitched across Captain Gale’s face, as though I should know but was treating her like an idiot.
“There’s been another murder.”
“A murder?” My mind jumped to Uwin Bone, killed in the Wren’s warehouse in the Tanneries and discovered by yours truly three days ago. But the Wren would have disposed of the body — he didn’t want the attention any more than I did — and anyway, Captain Gale was already grinding on.
“Less than an hour ago. Pretty close to here.”
“I was in the bath,” I protested.
If she had told me she had been in the bath, that would have taken the wind right out of my questioning, but apparently, she was less distracted by thoughts of me naked.
“You’re linked to the victim,” she said. “Again.”
I was? I frowned. Not Mica, not Sereh. They were both here. Benny? My heart thumped suddenly in my chest. No. Shit, no! Not Benny. My mouth was dry. But who else could it be? She had to mean him, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Benny could not be dead. He was hidden. He had Ash. He was my friend. My only real friend. I could hardly see or breathe. The world spun away from me. Blindly, I reached out for the wall and staggered into it.
“It wasn’t—?” I croaked.
“It was the Estimable Larimar Sunstone. Until recently, your employer.”
I slumped in relief. Shit. Not Benny. Thank all the twisted gods. I let out a laugh. Captain Gale’s eyes hardened even further.
“We found him in his offices. What was left of him. The top of his skull was in the street outside. Punched right through the window and the shutter. Frightened the literal shit out of passers-by, apparently.” She took a step closer. “Exactly the same method as before. Ripped into pieces by something with really, really big claws.”
The same as Imela Rush, Uwin Bone, and the priest of Gwillan-Whose-Light-Shines-on-the-Few-Not-the-Many.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered. I had got rid of the ghosts. I knew I had. I had destroyed their anchor. Every hint of them had been gone. There was no way back from that. No mage or priest could raise a ghost that had lost its anchor. In the end, death was death.
“You were identified sitting in the coffee house opposite his offices all morning. Scoping the place. When Sunstone left his office, you got up and followed him.”
And I thought I had been so surreptitious. It was a good lesson. There was always someone better than you.
I took a settling breath and straightened again. “But I didn’t kill him,” I said as calmly as I could. “I wasn’t there an hour ago.”
“Yeah, yeah. You were in the bath. Did anyone see you?”
“I don’t know what kind of baths you take, Captain, but I prefer not to have spectators.” I said it with a grin to show I was joking.
Not a twitch. I really was in trouble.
“Lowriver,” I blurted. Shit. Captain Gale had me off balance. I should have said it right away. “Enne Lowriver. She’s one of the Countess’s mages. I saw her arguing with Sunstone up in the Stacks just this afternoon.”
Her face remained as hard as granite. “You have proof?”
“Well … No.”
“I’ve given you every chance,” Captain Gale said. “No one else in the Guard thought you were innocent. They wanted you put away. I thought maybe, just maybe, there was something more going on. Now we’ve got three bodies.”
Four, I thought, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say it.
“You played me for a fool.”
“Meroi,” I said. “Come on...”
“Don’t. Don’t you fucking dare. You’re under arrest. Try to run. Just fucking try it. Give me an excuse.”
Depths!
“Why would I do this?” I said, trying to keep my voice reasonable. I could feel panic twitching at me. “What possible reason could I have for going on a killing spree of people I hardly know or don’t know at all?”
She was silent.
I pressed my advantage. “You know I didn’t do this.”
“No, I don’t know it, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. You’re involved, one way or another. I can’t let you keep running around Agatos, causing chaos. And I know you stole my Ash.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about that,” I muttered.
Her face tightened again. She was going to hurt herself if she kept doing that.
I rubbed my lip, knowing it made me look nervous, but not able to help myself. I had to do something. I could feel the tension building in me, and this was better than suddenly screaming.
She did know I had taken the Ash, and she knew I knew that she knew. But
I couldn’t admit it, because the sentence for that was death, no questions, no defence. Immediate execution. All I had going was that she couldn’t prove it and whatever it was that had held her back from reporting me so far. I wasn’t always a good judge of character, but I thought I had Meroi Gale pinned down. She didn’t want to arrest me over the Ash. There would be consequences for her. But she would do it if she had no other choice, no matter the cost. I had to tiptoe on ice here.
“I don’t know exactly why these murders are happening,” I said as calmly as I could, “and I don’t know for sure who is behind them, but I do know that they’re going to keep happening. Right now, whoever is doing this hasn’t achieved a thing. Whatever their plan is, it’s not done. What happens if you arrest me?”
I conveniently ignored the fact that she had already told me I was under arrest. For a moment, she seemed to, too.
“Then you go on trial for the murders. An Ash Guard trial. It’ll be fair,” she added, as though that was supposed to reassure me.
“And you’ll stop looking. You’ll move on to other jobs. Then someone else will be killed.”
I didn’t know how to make my point any more forcefully. Being arrested by the Ash Guard would be a solid wall slammed down in the way of everything. Yeah, I didn’t want to be imprisoned or executed, and I didn’t want Benny being found by Silkstar or the Watch. But I also didn’t want some other poor sod eviscerated by the ghost-beast. Unless Captain Gale was just lying to me, I hadn’t got rid of that thing at all.
And just this morning, you were congratulating yourself on what a hero you were.
Her fingers drummed on the hilt of her short sword. Her eyes stayed fixed on me.
There was nothing more I could say now. Anything else would just come across as pleading. It would make me look more guilty. I had said my piece. She had no reason to trust me. If I could have, I would have forced my sincerity into her head through sheer willpower. So I stood there, not resisting, trying to look dignified, letting her make her decision.
“Depths,” she sighed. She looked directly up at me. “If you are lying to me, if you are trying to string me along or trick me, I will find you and I will take you apart. Personally.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t wait around to let her change her mind. I headed off down the alley as fast as I could hobble.
“And, Nik,” she called after me.
I glanced around.
“If I see you again — if any of the Guard see you again — there won’t be any more second chances.”
I hadn’t been completely sure whether Sunstone had been a patsy, a conspirator in this whole thing, or both. I had known he didn’t have the magic to set the booby trap, but when I had seen him arguing with Lowriver, I had come to think that maybe he was involved in the murders after all, that he was seeking revenge on Silkstar for the loss of his wool contracts
For the loss of contracts!
Had I even stopped to listen to myself? What an absurd motive that would be.
Except it wouldn’t. The wool trade had been his livelihood, his fortune, his position in society. People killed for a lot less. But now he was dead, too, killed by whatever the Depths that ghost-beast was.
Was it an accident, a loss of control? Or was it Lowriver cleaning house?
He had been involved. The coincidences were just too unlikely otherwise.
Uwin Bone had been killed because he was the intermediary between Benny and the person behind this — Sunstone? Lowriver? The Countess? Benny and I were the scapegoats. We had been supposed to die in the booby trap at Thousand Walls. If we survived, I was supposed to be buried by the Ash Guard and Benny by the City Watch. We hadn’t been, and if someone had been determined to investigate, they might have found the link between me and Sunstone. Now Sunstone had been ruthlessly removed, too. Every trail I followed, every thread I grabbed, was neatly cut off, leaving me falling.
Not every thread. Not yet, at least. I still had Lowriver, and if I was lucky, she had no idea I had connected her to Sunstone. Clandestine meetings, a property in the Stacks that no one knew about. Follow the trail.
I would have to change tack, though. I had been racing about, bouncing off boulders and leaping off cliffs like I was invulnerable. That hadn’t been confidence or ability. It had been panic. I didn’t have the power or the influence to play that game. I had poked the anthill, and snakes had come crawling out.
I needed to return to my strengths. At my best, I was sneaky and underhanded, and my powers were subtle. Don’t go head-to-head with a giant if you can tie his shoelaces together and watch him trip.
I didn’t know what Lowriver’s shoelaces were, so to speak, but I needed to discover them. If I could find proof, hard evidence, then the Ash Guard would take her down themselves. And if she were only a hand puppet for someone else, I would find the hand up her arse and draw it out.
So to speak.
It was full dark by the time I made it back to the Stacks. Sunlight still painted the peaks of the mountains high above me in molten gold, but that only served to make the streets feel darker. There were no morgue-lamps here, and the only light leaking onto the cracked paving came from behind closed shutters. I settled into a dark corner and watched.
There were no wards on Lowriver’s bolthole, nothing to distinguish it from a hundred other rundown buildings around here.
Definitely trying to keep it secret. Any mage passing wouldn’t think to look twice.
There was no light in the house, either. I extended threads of magic, as fragile and frail as drifts of mist, into the building, like a blind cave insect brushing its way through the dark. Someone would have to be watching really hard to detect the intrusion. It was slow and frustrating — my magic kept disintegrating — but if someone was there, it would tell me.
They weren’t. The building was empty. I was doing no one any good lurking out here, and the longer I waited, the more chance I had of being discovered.
Screw it. I’m going in.
I took one last glance along the street, then hurried to the door. I tripped the lock with a brief spell, slipped inside, and locked the door behind me.
It was dark. The shutters were closed, and the feeble light that made it in was stretched too thin for me to be able to make anything out. I could smell dust and not much else. No sweat, no traces of old food or cooking, nothing to suggest anyone lived here. The room held that quality of open silence that only empty spaces possessed.
“Let’s see what you’ve been up to.”
I conjured a faint light. It was too weak to show anything other than shades of grey, but I didn’t need colour to see that the room was dusty and dirty. The plaster on the walls had crumbled and faded, but I had been wrong about the room being empty. A single chair had been pushed into a corner.
“What the Depths do you get up to here?” I murmured. I couldn’t imagine that Enne Lowriver came all this way just to sit in that chair and stare at the walls. Everyone needed to get away from it all from time to time, but there had to be better options.
A staircase against one wall led to an upper floor and down to what would be a basement on the street side, but which was probably open on the other; the hill was steep here.
Upstairs had a couple of rooms under the rafters, but they were as empty as the ground floor. I kept my eyes unfocused, my vision open to magic. It was a strain on the eyes, and it gave me a headache to hold it while still checking the rooms in the normal way, but I didn’t want any magical surprises.
There was nothing up here. Some bird shit on the floorboards where a loose shutter hanging from a broken hinge had let the local avian wildlife in. An old nest in the rafters.
Maybe Lowriver was a bird watcher.
I returned downstairs and kept going through the claustrophobic near-dark. My feet sent creaks through the dead air until I could imagine the whole place was some arthritic old sea monster hauling itself back to consciousness around me.
The
basement had been the most likely option. There was an almost irresistible instinct to go underground when you were up to no good. Even dark mages in their ominous towers kept their most evil shit in the basement. Or so I had heard.
Even with my magical vision open and every sense straining, I didn’t notice the thread of magic until almost too late. I felt a brief tension then release, like walking into and snapping a strand of spider’s web. My subconscious grabbed the magic by both ends and held.
I froze like a statue in a snowstorm. I didn’t dare move. Depths, I could hardly make myself breathe. If I thought about the preposterousness of the situation, this would go completely to shit. Pull too hard and the thread would break, hold too loose and it would slip through my metaphorical fingers. The more I focused on holding steady, the more shaky my control became.
“Calm,” I muttered to myself. “Calm.”
My arms were already starting to feel tired, even though this had nothing to do with my arms.
I let my consciousness follow the thread of magic. It disappeared into the walls, fading as it went, until I couldn’t make out the magic anymore. I couldn’t tell if it was an alarm or just a marker whose absence would show that someone had been here. Or another booby trap that would spread me across the walls.
I took a long, slow breath. I could feel an itch in that part of my back I could never quite reach.
Ignore it, idiot.
This wasn’t high-powered magic. It was subtle, fine-control stuff, the kind of thing I was supposed to be good at. Ever so carefully, ever so slowly, ever so delicately, I pulled, drawing the ends of the thread back together behind me.
Now was the really hard bit. I had to knit them together seamlessly.
I could hear Benny’s voice in my head as I stood there. You don’t half get yourself into a pile of shit.
“And whose fault is all of this?” I said to the empty air.
I trickled in magic, shaping it, gluing the thread back together. Sweat oozed down my face. I resisted the urge to wipe it away.
Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel Page 27
