‘Let us find him, whether he is living or dead.’ Garewin sat and reached out to the adepts on either side.
Hosh shoved his stool back, getting out of the way as the four linked hands to form a circle.
‘Aderumai ar sesfital dar orida nal Estinesh.’
The four mentors sat motionless, their eyes closed, intoning their incomprehensible enchantment.
‘Aderumai ar sesfital. Aderumai ar sesfital.’
The woman and the older of the two men began repeating the first phrase while Mentor Garewin and the other continued with the full chant.
‘Aderumai ar sesfital dar orida nal Estinesh.’
Mentor Undil’s voice rose to harmonise with the baritones on either side while Garewin’s resonant bass underpinned the whole.
Jilseth’s fists clenched with frustration. When a wizard worked a scrying, the results were there for all to see. What was this Artifice showing the mentors? Were they searching the city with their mind’s eye or were they sharing some vision of the Soluran, trying to see some clue to tell them where he cowered or lay dead?
At some unspoken signal, the four adepts released their hold on each other’s hands and opened their eyes.
Mentor Undil spoke first. ‘He’s in an accommodation house, a respectable one, in Blackpits Lane.’
‘With a green-painted door—’
‘—and cream awnings over its windows.’ The other mentors said in swift succession.
‘Where is that?’ Hosh asked meekly.
‘Close by,’ Corrain assured him before Jilseth could reveal her own knowledge of the city.
‘He is dead.’ Mentor Garewin’s vicious satisfaction sat oddly on the mentor’s well-groomed face.
Jilseth breathed a little more easily.
Corrain grunted. ‘We’d best not delay. We don’t want anyone else finding the body and raising a hue and cry to summon the Elected’s men. Not before we’ve searched his room and his effects for some clue as to his partners in this crime.’
‘We should inform the authorities of such malice at work in our city.’ The older mentor looked affronted.
‘Naturally, and now that we know where to find him, you can do that,’ Jilseth said quickly. ‘I’m sure we can learn what we need before the Elected’s men arrive.’
Corrain scowled. ‘We can deal with the carrion, Masters and Mistress, but we must ask more of your Artifice. We still have no idea who this man from Wrede might be. After today, I don’t believe he’s an enemy but I would hesitate to call him a friend. Regardless, we need to know who he is.’
Jilseth nodded. ‘Mentor Micaran was searching for this stranger with a questing enchantment which he’d learned from Guinalle Tor Priminale in Suthyfer—’
She was encouraged to see the adepts keenly interested in this revelation.
‘—but now that he is dead, his endeavours will be lost—’
Mentor Lusken, the younger man, raised an assertive finger. ‘Not necessarily, if we can pick up the thread of that enchantment swiftly enough.’
‘We need to know the specifics of this Artifice.’ Undil looked around the table. ‘Do any of us know Lady Tor Priminale sufficiently well to reach her thoughts over such a distance?’
‘I believe that I may.’ Mentor Parovil’s confidence encouraged Jilseth.
Garewin looked apologetically at Hosh. ‘I fear this would be the end of our work with you today.’
‘This is more important.’ Hosh was already on his feet. ‘I can help my captain and the lady mage.’
Though he looked at Jilseth with a wariness which surprised her. Regardless, she spoke up before Corrain could offer some objection or send the lad back to kick his heels in their tavern room.
‘We’ll be glad of your assistance.’ Whether or not Hosh could help was of little actual concern. After what had befallen Mentor Micaran, Jilseth wasn’t letting anyone with detailed knowledge of Archmage Planir’s concerns out of her sight. She could only hope that the Soluran had died before he could tell anyone what he had learned with his insidious Artifice.
Corrain’s nod of accord suggested that he knew precisely what she was thinking. He bowed to the assembled mentors. ‘We’ll bid you good day, Masters, Mistress.’
Garewin held up a hand to stop him leaving. ‘Where and when shall we meet to share what we have learned? We can hardly gather at Master Olved’s home, now that it’s a house of mourning.’
‘We will meet at the Prefecture,’ Mentor Parovil declared with absolute authority. ‘We will share what we learn and then the Prefects and the Elected must be informed, before day’s end. A mentor of this university lies dead.’
Jilseth could see this was not negotiable. She would have to find time before they met later to bespeak Planir and let him know what had happened as well as asking what he wanted her to do next.
‘Very well, provided you have Artifice to foil any attempt to eavesdrop on our conversation through aetheric magic?’ She looked around the adepts. ‘I can baffle mundane eyes and ears with elemental wards against sight and sound.’
Mentor Lusken nodded. ‘We can do the rest.’
‘Then we will leave you to your magic.’ Corrain jerked his head towards the door in unmistakable command.
Jilseth was torn between the need for haste and her disinclination to let him think that she was his to instruct. She compromised by having the final word, letting both Caladhrians precede her out of the room.
‘Let’s meet at the Prefecture at the last chime of the day. That should give us sufficient time to learn what we can.’
With a final bow, she hurried after Hosh and Corrain who were already halfway down the stairs to the floor below. She had barely caught up with them before they were making their excuses to the liveried door ward.
‘You won’t be admitted without a mentor or the lady mage,’ the black-liveried man warned them as he opened the outer door.
‘Of course.’ Jilseth smiled at him as she followed them out onto the steps.
‘Halferan!’ she called sharply to halt Corrain’s swift descent. ‘A moment!’
‘Why?’ He stood ready to challenge her.
Jilseth chose her words carefully. ‘Now that I know the Soluran is dead, there is some particular wizardry which I can work to learn exactly who he had dealings with before he came to Col. That will be the quickest and most certain route to knowing who’s behind this plot against Hadrumal. But I must have certain things if I am to work this spell. I need oil and a vessel sturdy enough to hold it when it’s heated.’
She expected the Caladhrian to demand some explanation and braced herself for his revulsion at the notion of necromancy.
Instead he unbuckled his sword belt and handed the weapon to Hosh. ‘Go to Blackpits Lane and start knocking on doors if there’s more than one house matching the mentors’ description. You go—’
‘I know where it is,’ Jilseth assured him.
Corrain nodded. ‘Then I’ll see you there as quickly as I can.’
‘Yes, Captain.’ Hosh quickly secured the blade at his own hip.
‘Baron.’ Jilseth wasn’t finished with Corrain yet. ‘I must have oil pressed from nuts or seeds or olives, nothing that’s come from an animal. I cannot use dripping or lard.’
‘Very well.’ Corrain nodded impatiently and strode away.
Jilseth watched him go, still surprised that he hadn’t insisted on knowing why this might be essential for her wizardry.
‘This way.’ She turned to Hosh and led him westwards across the square. As they rounded the corner, she offered him a friendly smile. ‘You are looking well, truly.’
‘Thank you, Madam Mage,’ he said guardedly.
She waited for him to say something further, to ask some question. When neither was forthcoming, she concentrated on finding the lane they were seeking by the most efficient path which she could recall through Col’s byways.
It should hardly come as a surprise, Jilseth reflected, that Hosh would be chary ar
ound mages. Like Corrain, he had seen the corsair island destroyed at first hand, caught between Hadrumal’s vengeance and the Mandarkin’s savagery. The lad hadn’t been anywhere near a wizard since he’d returned to Halferan and handed that arm-ring to Velindre. Since coming to Col, he’d only met Master Olved and he was hardly the warmest of mages.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Blackpits Lane, Col
33rd of Aft-Winter
HOSH WAS GLAD the captain had given him his sword. Keeping one hand on the hilt and using the other to stop his hood falling victim to the gusting wind meant that he couldn’t succumb to temptation and explore his broken face with curious fingertips.
Had the magewoman truly noticed a difference? Was there an improvement beyond the easing of his pain? Surely Jilseth had nothing to gain by a kindly untruth. Besides, in Hosh’s experience, wizards didn’t deal much in kindness.
He stole sideways glances whenever they slowed for Jilseth to make certain of her bearings. Hosh still struggled to reconcile her modest height and unremarkable appearance with his mum’s tale of the magewoman’s astonishing spells wielded in Halferan’s defence in that last stand against the corsairs, before her magic had concealed their escape.
‘This way.’ Jilseth led him down a lane of shoe-makers’ workshops.
Then again, Hosh reflected, Anskal the Mandarkin had looked like some pathetic beggar; stunted, starveling and filthy. His savage, selfish magic had been as astounding as it had proved appalling. The wizard had held life as cheap as any of the corsairs. More cheaply.
Even corsairs as vicious as Ducah with his murderous sword, or as crafty as Nifai with his overseer’s whip, had been loyal to their allies. Time and again, Anskal had let one of the mageborn Archipelagans whom he had enslaved die an agonized death simply to see the survivors learn a brutal lesson.
What magic was Jilseth planning to work with a corpse? Hosh didn’t even want to speculate, thrusting ghastly imaginings away. As he followed her dutifully across another brick-paved square, he wished, now that he could be sure of privacy in his own thoughts, that Mentor Garewin or one of the other Col adepts knew some Artifice to uncover this dead Soluran’s secrets.
Artifice’s softly spoken enchantments were so quietly reassuring. Over these past few days in the Red Library, there had been no garish, eerie magelight crackling out of nowhere in harsh, unnatural colours, or blinding whiteness as menacing as lightning from a storm cloud and disappearing just as swiftly.
Adepts were no different to anyone else. That was to say, Hosh allowed, these mentors who were healing him had a marked aptitude for scholarship which few folk would share, as well as sharper wits than any five in a hundred met in a marketplace.
But they hadn’t been born with arcane abilities to steal away the air that a man needed to breathe, to summon up water to drown someone where they stood or fire to burn them alive. Artificers couldn’t open up a gaping chasm to swallow someone whole, closing up the earth again to leave no sign that someone had been murdered.
Hosh had heard any number of such stories in Halferan’s tavern, tantalizingly terrifying as well as comfortably set in long-lost days of old. But now he had seen such magic for himself, along with the guardsmen from Halferan, Antathele, Licanin and Tallat. The tales now spreading like fear of spotted fever along Caladhria’s highways and byways were rooted in reality with dates and places and names.
‘That must be the rooming house.’ Jilseth halted at the end of a short lane curving down a shallow slope.
There was only one building matching the mentors’ description; four storeys with a row of seven windows on the upper floors and a wide double door in the middle at street level. Though Hosh reckoned his mum would quibble over calling this respectable accommodation. The green door was in sore need of new paint and the cream awnings over the windows were stained with soot and weighed down with dead leaves.
‘How will we know which room he’s in?’
Jilseth waved that away. ‘I’ll know, unless there’s more than one corpse under that roof, but I’m sure that’s unlikely.’
Hosh fervently hoped so. ‘Should we wait for the—for the baron?’
‘Let’s see if we can get inside first.’ The magewoman started walking towards the green door so Hosh was forced to fall into step behind her, one hand on the captain’s sword.
As Jilseth knocked on the door Hosh peered through the grimy glass pane beside the weathered wood. Seeing the rooming house’s keeper bustling down the tiled hall, he hastily retreated.
The housekeeper opened the door in an apron so stained that Hosh’s mum would long since have given up hope of boiling it white and cut it up for rags.
‘Good day to you?’ The woman’s greeting clearly included a demand that they explain themselves.
‘Good day.’ Jilseth inclined her head politely. ‘We are here to see Master Estinesh, a Soluran residing here.’
Hosh stood behind the magewoman, doing his best to keep his face obscured. For a change, he was more concerned that the housekeeper would see his apprehension rather than gawp at his injuries. If this woman escorted them to the Soluran’s door, surely she would find his dead body? What would the magewoman do about that?
He had no chance to ask as the housekeeper led them along the mud-smeared hall and up the scuffed and dusty stairs. When they reached the second floor the slatternly woman knocked on the third door facing the front. ‘Master Estinesh?’
‘Enter!’
Hosh couldn’t conceal his start of surprise at hearing that peremptory bark from within. Thankfully the housekeeper had her back to him.
Jilseth shot a warning glance over her shoulder, one finger raised to her lips as she gestured with her other hand towards the room’s closed door. As the housekeeper turned the knob, the door opened.
‘Oh!’ Jilseth dropped a handful of coins.
Even allowing for the bare floorboards, the noise was so loud that Hosh was sure some magic was doubling their clatter.
‘Let me help you.’ The housekeeper stooped low, sharp-eyed and scooping up fallen silver like a hen pecking corn.
‘Thank you.’ Jilseth fluttered helpless hands at the same time as giving Hosh a meaningful glare and jerking her head towards the half-open door.
He quickly went to stand blocking the housekeeper’s view as the woman straightened up to hand Jilseth her money. Though Hosh didn’t dare turn to see what might lie behind him.
‘Thank you, and please, take something for your trouble.’ Jilseth pressed a coin into the woman’s hand. At the same time, the magewoman pushed Hosh into the room and closed the door so deftly that she cut off the housekeeper’s thanks in mid-sentence.
Hosh stared at the table beneath the window where the Soluran sat in a chair, as motionless as any shrine statue.
‘It’s an illusion, like his voice.’ As Jilseth looked up from counting her coin, the unmoving figure vanished.
Hosh looked around the meagre lodging. Plastered walls were bare of decoration and no rug softened the floorboards. Apart from the table and chair, only a small clothes press stood beside the door and the narrow bed which would preclude a couple sleeping together in any comfort, whatever else they might do on the lumpy mattress.
A dead body appeared amid the rumpled sheets and blankets although the Soluran wore breeches and shirt rather than night clothes. Hosh became aware of an unpleasant odour, something between a sick room and an infant’s soiled swaddling. He recalled how slaves had lost control of bladder and bowels when he’d seen them flogged to death on the galleys.
‘He lay down to work his Artifice in comfort,’ Jilseth observed. ‘That is fortunate. If he had fallen to thrash on these floorboards someone could well have complained about the commotion and discovered him. It seems he died hard,’ she added with some satisfaction.
Hosh looked at the man’s bitten lip, blood clotting on his chin. What would the housekeeper have thought if she had discovered the Soluran’s corpse? That he had suffe
red some seizure as he slept?
Perhaps Artifice wasn’t so kindly a magic. Could anyone tell if some murderous adept was responsible for an unexpected death? At least it was plain to see when wizardry killed someone.
‘Good.’ Jilseth was by the window, looking into the street. She gestured at the door and Hosh heard the solid click of the lock securing itself. ‘Wait here.’
Before Hosh could ask what she intended, the magewoman vanished. He had barely blinked in astonishment before she reappeared with Corrain at her side, her hand on his shoulder. The captain was cradling a battered cooking pot with a broad-necked flagon inside it, its stopper secured with a lumpy smear of wax.
The captain acknowledged Hosh with a nod and jerked his head towards the door. ‘Don’t let anyone in.’
‘I don’t imagine we’ll be disturbed,’ Jilseth said drily. ‘Mistress Housekeeper won’t wish to account for the silver she pocketed from the floor.’
‘What—? Never mind.’ Corrain abandoned his own question, contemplating the dead Soluran on the bed, his expression bleak.
‘At least you won some justice for Master Micaran,’ Hosh ventured.
‘Much good that’ll do his family. He’s still dead,’ Corrain said harshly.
Shrugging that off, he turned to Hosh and pointed to the clothes press. ‘Search that while I search the body and the bed. Madam Mage, see what’s in his cloak pockets if you please?’
He jerked his head towards the Soluran’s cloak lying draped over the chair before he stooped over the corpse and ripped the dead man’s shirt open.
Hosh opened the clothes press and pulled out clean shirts and under linen. He shook the garments but there was nothing hidden within their folds. He did the same with the man’s breeches, searching their pockets for good measure. Nothing. Hosh examined the two jerkins hung on the back of the door inside and out, running the seams and hems through his fingers.
‘Madam Mage—’ He turned to Jilseth, similarly checking the cloak for anything stitched within the cloth.
Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) Page 34
