“Who are you?” said Caina.
“You don’t remember?” said the master magus. “Well, we have never met. My name is Oberon Ryther.”
For a moment Caina could not recall the name, but then her alarm increased.
A few months past, she and Corvalis had gone to town of Calvarium to stop the Moroaica and her ancient enemy Rhames from claiming the Ascendant Bloodcrystal in the cursed ruins of Caer Magia. Rhames had been destroyed, and the Moroaica’s body killed again. But Martin Dorius, the Lord Governor of Calvarium, had aided Caina, and knew that she was a Ghost.
And the master magus assigned to the Lord Governor of Calvarium had been named Oberon Ryther.
“When I last heard your name,” said Caina, “you were in Calvarium, in Caeria Ulterior. A long way from here.”
“When I last saw you,” said Ryther, “you were calling yourself Rania Scorneus, and claiming to be a sister of the Imperial Magisterium.” He smiled. “Impersonating a magus carries the penalty of death, Sonya Tornesti. Knowledge of your crime might be of interest to certain men within the Magisterium.”
“Interesting,” said Caina.
“Oh?” said Ryther, tilting his head to the side.
“You didn’t attempt to arrest me,” said Caina, “and you didn’t denounce me before Lord Nisias. Which means…”
“Which means that Lord Nisias is a pompous fool,” said Ryther.
“Or,” said Caina, “that you intend to bargain.”
Ryther send nothing, a twitch going through his face.
“Come with me,” he said at last. “I would prefer that neither the Lord Governor nor his fools overhear us.”
Corvalis glanced at Caina, and she nodded. They followed Ryther toward the high windows that overlooked the bay, away from the other guests.
“Let us dispense with the games,” said Ryther. “I know who you are. I know you are both Ghosts. No one else would dare to impersonate a sister of the Magisterium. And I know why you’re here. It’s about the slave trading, isn’t it? All the abductions from the countryside?”
Caina said nothing.
“Do not,” said Ryther, “play games with me. It will end badly for us both, Ghost. I am in just as much peril as you, if not more.”
Caina hadn’t expected that.
“Why?” she said. “Are you fearful your illegal slave trading will come to light?”
“Hardly,” said Ryther with a grimace. “I care nothing for the slaves, nor for this miserable backwater of a province. But the First Magus, as you can imagine, is not terribly pleased with me. It would be politically convenient for him if I happened to disappear, and Decius Aberon has strong ties with the Kindred assassin families.”
“I’ve heard that,” said Caina. “So what do you propose?”
“A pact,” said Ryther.
“You’re mad,” said Caina, “if you think I would trust a magus.”
“And you are just as crazed if you think I would trust a Ghost,” said Ryther. “But trust is not required, merely mutual necessity.” He gestured in the direction of Nisias. “Your suspicions are correct. The Lord Governor is indeed heading up a ring of slave traders. He has been kidnapping both citizens from the town and Szalds from the countryside and selling them to his Istarish associates.”
The rage stirred within Caina. If Nisias Druzen was indeed aiding the slave traders, he was not long for this world.
“So,” said Corvalis. “If you know that Nisias is selling people into slavery, why have you not acted? You could report him to the Lord Governor in Marsis, or to the preceptor of the Magisterium’s chapterhouse in the city.”
“No, he’s not going to do that,” said Caina, pushing aside her dark thoughts. “The First Magus doesn’t like him. And if he causes the Lord Governor’s downfall, it will look like the Magisterium had a hand in it. That would annoy the First Magus. And if the First Magus is annoyed, Master Oberon Ryther is unlikely to live much longer.”
“I’ve heard,” said Corvalis, “that the First Magus has a temper.”
“Indeed,” said Ryther with a scowl. “But there is another option. Sooner or later that idiot Nisias is going to make a mistake and meet his downfall. But if the Ghosts were to remove him first, why…no one would suspect the Magisterium of his ruin.”
“So you want us,” said Caina, “to kill Nisias Druzen for you.”
Ryther smiled. He looked far too pleased with himself. “It is crude to speak so bluntly about such a delicate matter. But who am I to disagree with your conclusions?”
“No,” said Caina.
Ryther scowled. “Why not? You are not the first Ghost I’ve had the misfortune of meeting. Your order never stops yammering about corrupt nobles and the grievous injustice of slavery. I thought you would leap at the chance to rid the Empire of a corrupt governor who deals with slavers.”
“We would,” said Caina, “but we don’t have proof that he is involved. We only suspect it. We know that slaves have been taken from Mornu, but we don’t know for certain that Nisias is behind it.”
“He is,” said Ryther, “and I can prove it. Break into his study, on the third floor of the mansion. The second drawer of his desk is locked and trapped, and it contains his ledger. His secret ledger, not the province’s official financial records. Get your hands on that, Ghosts, and you shall have all the proof you need to deal with Nisias.”
“That’s very helpful,” said Caina. “Too helpful, even.”
Ryther sighed. “What does it take to satisfy you? If I withheld information, you would accuse me of obfuscation. I tell you everything you need to know, and you are still suspicious.” He gave an irritated shake of his head. “Do with the information as you please.”
He stalked away, his boots clicking against the marble floor.
Caina stood in silence with Corvalis for a moment.
“Well,” said Corvalis after a moment. “That was interesting.”
“It was,” said Caina.
“You’re going to break into Lord Nisias’s study tonight, aren’t you?” said Corvalis.
Caina nodded.
“Ah,” said Corvalis. “Just as well that I had only one glass of wine.”
Chapter 2 - Disciple of the Moroaica
Caina feigned illness to leave the ball early, and returned with Corvalis to the Rusalka’s Kiss, Mornu’s finest inn. Tanya had told Caina about the legendary Rusalkae, the beautiful river spirits who drew unsuspecting men to their watery doom. It was a grisly name for an inn, but many sailors lived in Mornu, and Caina had found that seamen often had a black sense of humor.
Rather, she supposed, like Ghost nightfighters.
In their rooms at the Rusalka’s Kiss, Caina prepared.
She put aside her finery and donned black trousers, black boots, and a black jacket lined with thin steel plates to deflect knife blades. She secured daggers in hidden sheaths in each of her boots, and around her waist went a leather belt holding throwing knives, lockpicks, a coiled rope and grapnel, and a number of other useful tools. The strap of a leather satchel went across her chest, to carry any documents she found in Nisias’s desk. Her curved ghostsilver dagger went into a sheath on her right hip. Black gloves covered her hands, and a black mask concealed her entire head, save for her eyes.
Around her neck went a leather cord holding a man’s worn golden signet ring. Everything else she carried had a practical purpose, but the ring did not. Her father had once worn it, and it was all she had left of him.
She paused for a moment, looking at the ring. Eleven years he had been dead, for half her life. His death and her mother’s betrayal had led her to the Ghosts. That pain would never leave her…but it had been part of her for so long that sometimes she forgot it was there.
And if she had not joined the Ghosts, so many people would have died. Maglarion would have destroyed Malarae, and Kalastus would have turned Rasadda to ashes. Ranarius would have thrown Cyrioch into the sea, Mihaela would have unleashed an army of enslaved so
uls bound into living armor, and Rhames would have claimed the Ascendant Bloodcrystal and rebuilt the dark empire of ancient Maat.
Caina could take not credit for any of those victories. She would not. Luck and good fortune had been with her.
But if her father had not been murdered, if she had not joined the Ghosts, than all those people would have perished.
Yet Caina still wished her father was here.
“Something wrong?” said Corvalis, donning his own nightfighter grab. He wore black chain mail beneath a leather jerkin, his sword and dagger at his belt.
“Nothing,” said Caina. “Though we are about to break into the mansion of a Lord Governor of the Empire.”
Corvalis snorted. “Compared to some of the other things we’ve done, this is a pleasant afternoon stroll.”
He had a point.
Caina tucked the ring beneath her jacket and donned her shadow-cloak.
It was a wondrous thing, black as night and lighter than the finest silk. The Ghost nightkeepers created them using a secret method, fusing shadows with the silk of spiders. The cloak weighed nothing at all, and it blurred and merged with the shadows, allowing her to move through the darkness with great stealth. Additionally, so long as she pulled up the cowl, the cloak shielded her from both spells of divination and mind-controlling sorcery.
The cloak had saved her life more than once.
Corvalis donned his own shadow-cloak. It transformed him into a hulking, silent shadow. He moved with just as much stealth as she did, but he had learned stealth in far grimmer circumstances. His father had sold him to the Kindred assassins as a child, and they had brutalized him into an efficient, skilled killer. Yet he had left the Kindred to rescue his sister and had joined the Ghosts.
“Corvalis,” said Caina.
She stepped closer, lifted their masks, and kissed him long upon the lips.
“That was,” said Corvalis when they broke apart, “unexpected.”
“I love you,” said Caina.
“I love you, too,” said Corvalis. He grinned. “Let’s go break into a Lord Governor’s study.”
They donned their masks and departed the Rusalka’s Kiss.
###
It was a cold, damp night, a thick mist rolling off Mornu’s harbor. In the gloom Caina could just make out the glow of the lighthouse, but saw little else. That was good - the weather would make it all the easier to enter the mansion unseen.
The Lord Governor’s residence sat on a hill overlooking the town, fortified by its own low wall of gleaming white stone. It resembled a townhouse in the Imperial capital, complete with a colonnaded arcade and a peaked roof of red clay tiles. A watchman stood guard at the gates, but it was a simple matter to avoid him, jump the wall, and make their way to the mansion proper.
Lord Nisias did not seem the sort to bother himself unduly about security. Which was odd, if he was kidnapping people and selling them to slavers. Perhaps Varia Province’s distance from Malarae had made him complacent.
If so, he would pay for it tonight.
Caina slipped the rope from her belt, unhooked the grapnel, and threw it. The rope uncoiled, and she felt the grapnel catch upon the clay tiles of the roof. She tugged it a few times, making sure the rope would support her weight.
Then she nodded to Corvalis. He vanished into the shadows behind a bush. Caina took a deep breath, gripped the rope with her gloved hands, and scaled the wall.
The plan was simple enough, and they had used it before to good effect. Caina would break into the Lord Governor’s study and retrieve his records from the trapped drawer, while Corvalis kept watch from the mansion’s grounds. If he saw any signs of alarm, he would create a disturbance, and Caina would escape in the chaos.
But she did not think that would be necessary. The mansion of even a minor lord in Malarae had a dozen guards, locked and barred windows, even sorcerous wards shielding the entrances. Lord Nicias’s residence had none of those things.
Again she wondered at his complacency. A man breaking the Emperor’s laws and consorting with the enemies of the Empire usually took greater care. Perhaps Nisias was simply a fool. Or perhaps Ryther had set them upon the Lord Governor’s trail for reasons of his own.
Caina intended to find the truth.
After a moment she reached the third floor and braced her boots against the wall, her arms tight with strain. Caina was grateful for all the long hours she had spent practicing the forms of unarmed combat. The climb had been difficult, but nonetheless well within her strength.
She hung motionless for a moment, considering the Lord Governor’s study. It occupied a solar with tall, high, shuttered windows built in the Imperial style. The shutters could be opened, but given the chill and damp weather of Varia province, Caina wondered if Nisias ever bothered.
She drew a dagger and slipped the blade into the gap between the shutters. A simple tug of the blade popped the latch, and the shutters swung out. Caina went over the sill and into the solar, her boots making no sound against the floor. The windows had not been locked, and she saw no signs of mechanical or sorcerous traps.
Very strange.
Either Nisias was one of the dumbest slave traders Caina had encountered, or he simply wasn’t involved.
Or Ryther had sent her here for another reason.
Caina kept the dagger in her left hand and went to the desk.
It was a massive slab of polished Ulkaari oak. The drawers were large enough that Caina could have hidden herself within them, if she squeezed. Had Nisias felt like it, he could have concealed corpses within them.
Caina felt a twinge of unease at the thought, and then went to work on the drawer Ryther had indicated. As the magus had warned, it was trapped with a fiendish mechanical device, one that would unleash a spray of poisoned needles on anyone who attempted to force the lock. Fortunately Halfdan had taught her to pick locks long ago, and Caina’s time as a Ghost had given her a great deal of practice. She pried aside a wooden panel on the side of the drawer and jammed the intricate gears and springs that powered the trap. Then she slid a pick into the lock, probing for the tumblers. After a few moments, the lock clicked, and Caina slid the drawer open.
A single massive, leather-bound ledger rested within the drawer. Caina lifted it toward the dim light leaking through the window and turned the pages. Nisias Druzen kept careful, detailed records. He listed every slave his hired thugs had kidnapped from the province, their age, their health, and how much money he had obtained from their sale to the Istarish slavers.
It was even in his own handwriting.
Caina shook her head in disgust and closed the ledger. Nisias had condemned himself with his own hand. She would return to Corvalis, and together they would plan a fatal accident for the corrupt Lord Governor.
She tucked the ledger under one arm, turned, and stopped.
Something smelled…wrong.
Caina tugged her mask down far enough to uncover her nose and sniffed the air.
She smelled blood.
Her eyes swept the solar. Had she cut herself on the trap, perhaps on a blade smeared with numbing poison so she would not feel the wound? No, if she had lost enough blood to smell it, she would have become light-headed by now.
Which meant the smell was coming from somewhere else.
There were two other doors in the solar. One opened in the corridor, leading to the other rooms on the mansion’s top floor. The other was on Caina’s left, and if the mansion had been built in the Imperial style, it led to the Lord Governor’s private rooms.
She saw a dark puddle spreading from beneath that door.
Blood. Freshly spilled.
Caina hesitated. One part of her mind argued for retreating back down the rope and enlisting Corvalis’s aid. Another part urged her forward at once.
She glided forward, careful not to step in the spreading blood, and put her ear to the door.
Nothing. Utter silence.
Caina tucked the ledger into her satchel and
opened the door, dagger ready.
Beyond she saw a well-furnished sitting room, dotted with overstuffed chairs and gleaming tables. Wooden shelves held books that looked as if they had never been read, and busts of long-dead Emperors and nobles. The intricate Anshani carpet was thick and soft.
A dead woman lay by the door, her blood soaking into the carpet.
Caina stepped over the blood and examined the woman. She looked like a Szaldic townswoman of middle years, her face lined and her hands callused from years of work. Blood soaked her neck and the front of her dress, her glassy eyes gazing at the ceiling, her face slack.
Her right hand clenched a bloody dagger, and a disturbing thought worked its way into Caina’s mind.
The dead woman had cut her own throat.
She had cut her own throat so violently that she had almost decapitated herself. That meant she had stood there, sawing away with the dagger, until she finally collapsed from blood loss.
It was a terrible way to commit suicide.
Unless she had been forced to do it.
Caina touched the dead woman’s forehead. It was still warm, and the blood had not even begun to dry. Most likely she had killed herself while Caina had still been climbing the rope up the wall.
But why?
She heard a muffled groan, and raised her dagger.
A half-open door stood on the far side of the sitting room. Caina crossed the room and pushed the door open the rest of the way. Beyond she saw a bedroom dominated by an enormous four-poster bed. Two more corpses, a man and a woman, lay upon the floor, daggers clutched in their hands, their throats cut.
Lord Governor Nisias Druzen lay upon the bed, still wearing his finery, his eyes staring unblinking at the ceiling. For a moment Caina thought that he was dead, that he had also slashed his own throat. But his chest rose and fell, and the skin of his neck was unbroken.
He was alive…and stared at the ceiling while two corpses bled out around his bed.
Disturbed, Caina moved closer. Nisias made no reaction, and Caina bent over him. The appearance of a hooded shadow holding a dagger would get a reaction out of most people, but Nisias only blinked. He did not move, did not try to defend himself.
Jonathan Moeller - The Ghosts 09 - Ghost in the Surge Page 2
