Wedding Bells, Magic Spells

by Lisa Shearin

  “I know. There’s just no substitution for him being there,” I said. “Mago’s amazing at reading people, but Markus is the master. Especially since he knows all of the delegates personally.” He had something else Mago and Isibel did not—decades of experience doing just this. Mago knew only too well that a person could say one thing and mean another. Markus knew the person, too.

  Imala Kalis spotted me and came over to join us.

  Tam was in heated debate with the Caesolian ambassador. The Caesolian was a head shorter than Tam, but he wasn’t letting that stop him. Dakarai Enric stood nearby, scowling.

  That scene wasn’t the most shocking thing I’d seen today, but it came close.

  “The Caesolian ambassador found his spine?” I asked Imala once she was close enough. I had the sudden image of a tiny lap dog antagonizing a very angry werehound. This could get messy, and fast. Though at least it’d be over quickly, except for the cleanup.

  She glanced back at the scene. “And Tam’s about to rip it out for him.”

  “It looks like Dakarai wants to help. Two days ago the Caesolian wouldn’t stand on the same side of the room as Tam, and now he’s in his face. Should we stop him from committing suicide by Tam?”

  “I’m not going to stop him,” Imala said in the Caesolian’s general direction. “He deserves whatever he gets.” She took a deep breath to calm herself. It didn’t work. “It’s progress, but not the kind we’d hoped to have. As you can see, we are all growing increasingly frustrated.”

  “Did finding out about the spiders in the Void do this much damage?”

  “It certainly didn’t help,” Isibel said. “All of the delegates knew why they were coming here, and they agreed that it needed to be done—no one needed to have a weapon like the Saghred. But almost as soon as they got here, it’s as if they’ve changed their minds. It’s not merely the Rak’kari and the possibility of the Khrynsani being behind it or something larger. It’s as if every kingdom believes every other kingdom is out to get them. Paranoia is running rampant around here.”

  “And Tam does look ready to snap,” I noted. “Getting a bunch of humans to cooperate and sign a piece of paper is frustrating, but it’s nowhere near the level of stress Tam wakes up to every day. This isn’t like him at all. And it certainly isn’t like Dakarai. I’ve never seen him angry.”

  Imala stood utterly still. Only her eyes moved—quickly taking in everyone in the room, darting from delegate to delegate.

  I froze, too. Something was wrong. Imala knew what it was. I didn’t. And considering how intent the little goblin woman was, I didn’t think I was going to like it when I found out.

  “What is it?” I said without moving my lips.

  “You said it yourself—the people we know are behaving uncharacteristically, and those we don’t know aren’t acting as they should.” She hissed a curse in Goblin. “I may have been affected as well. As an agent, I’m trained to pick up on tampering; yet I didn’t see what was right before my eyes until you pointed it out.”

  “Tampered?”

  “With the delegates’ minds. Either by spell or drug. Tam would have detected a spell long before it got this far. That means we’re being drugged.”

  “How could that happen?” I raised my hands defensively. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re not just tired?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  *

  Tarsilia Rivalin was an expert on poisons, drugs, and other mind- or mood-altering substances. Basically anything that could be concocted to heal or harm, she knew all about it.

  Imala probably knew nearly as much as Tarsilia did about the drugs and poisons, but since she was one of the victims, she yielded that part of the investigation to Tarsilia. Still, it didn’t mean she wasn’t looking over Tarsilia’s shoulder in the hastily assembled lab Justinius had ordered set up for her.

  Imala being drugged along with the other delegates might have been the best thing that could have happened. She knew every symptom of every known substance used to alter behavior. While she probably could’ve diagnosed herself, Tarsilia’s guiding questions and keen observations would help get to the bottom of this a lot faster. Before long the two of them would be talking shop and sharing recipes.

  Mago was not amused when I told him someone had been messing with his emotions. And as I talked to my cousin, it became obvious to me that there had to be a drug involved. Nothing got under Mago’s skin, and if it did, he dealt with it in a calm and rational way. My cousin was presently neither calm nor rational.

  In the meantime, Mychael and Justinius agreed not to tell the other delegates anything until we knew for sure what had happened—and depending on what we found out, maybe not even then. Tarsilia said that if we found the source, we could remove it and everyone should return to normal fairly quickly, or at least not get any worse. Of course, how long that took depended on what the substance was that seemingly all of the delegates had ingested or come in contact with.

  Justinius was ultimately in charge of the peace talks, so he could—and did—call an early stop to that day’s deliberations, citing what he called a need to step away from the table, regain your composure, and remember that you’re adults and representatives of your kingdoms. He didn’t quite word it like that, but I knew the old man; he wanted to.

  Whatever the drug was, it had to have been introduced when all of the delegates were together, which meant inside the citadel chamber. It would’ve been impossible to get to all of the delegates otherwise. That conclusion made Mychael just as angry as the delegates, since it implied that one or more of his Guardians was involved. Mychael refused to assign any blame to his men until he had irrefutable proof.

  “The room is guarded day and night,” Mychael said. “At the end of each day’s deliberations, it’s locked and secured. And should a delegate need to retrieve paperwork after hours, they are guarded and watched.”

  He ordered an immediate review of the surveillance gems mounted in each corner of the room to record the talks. The gems recorded all night as well for security purposes, and our review began after the talks concluded late yesterday afternoon. The elven and goblin delegates said they had begun to feel particularly short-tempered by mid-morning today, pointing to the drug being introduced into the room overnight.

  Each day’s procedure in the chamber was the same. At the end of the day, everything was left exactly as it was with the exception of the trash, which was emptied and burned in the citadel’s incinerator, and the refilling of the inkwells and paper supply at each delegate’s place. We watched as around nine o’clock last night an elderly, black-robed man went to each place and refilled the wells, replaced the pens, and replenished the paper.

  “Those robes look familiar,” I said.

  “He’s a Scriptorium employee,” Mychael told me. “Niall Reeves has been on the staff for nearly forty years. He keeps the entire citadel stocked with ink and paper.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking; I let my arched eyebrow do it for me.

  “And no, he can’t be bribed or blackmailed. Drugs or mind-tampering could be possible, but he’s not adding anything other than ink to the wells. Niall isn’t involved in making the ink; he only delivers it.”

  “We’ve all been taking notes and passing messages,” Tam said. He showed us two of the fingertips on his right hand. They were stained with black ink. “And the pens are leaking. I noticed it this morning.” He scowled. “Yet one more thing to piss me off.”

  Mago, Isibel, Dakarai, and Imala looked down at their own hands. All of them had ink stains on at least one of their fingers.

  “It’s the ink,” Imala said with absolute certainty and no small measure of rage. “And he replaced the pens with ones that leak. They didn’t leak before this morning.”

  I’d never heard her so angry. Part of it was obviously directed at the culprit, but she had to be furious with herself. Detecting poison was part of her job. One didn’t get to
be director of the goblin secret service without being an expert on drugs, poisons, and their uses.

  “You were drugged, too, Imala.” I told her. “If it was the ink, you couldn’t have known.”

  “I should have known. More to the point, I was expecting an attempt, vigilant against it, and yet it still happened. To me.”

  “The Khrynsani dumped hundreds of monster spiders into the Void and completely shut down mirror travel. Between that and trying to talk sense into people like Aeron Corantine on a daily basis, how were you to know your anger came from being drugged?”

  “Raine, you have to understand that we take every precaution against poisons or drugs,” Tam said. “Daily, lifelong precaution.”

  “Daily and lifelong?”

  Tam shrugged. “We’re goblins, surrounded by other goblins. It’s necessary.” He half grinned and lowered his voice even though Imala was standing right there. “When we find who did this, may I suggest giving them to Imala for five minutes in a closed room? She’ll find out everything we need to know.”

  Imala smacked him.

  “Where does the ink come from?” Dakarai asked Mychael.

  “The Scriptorium, as does the paper.”

  “Where do they get it?”

  “The Scriptorium has a staff that makes all of the Isle of Mid’s paper and ink. With the college being here as well as the Conclave, we go through a lot of both. It’d cost too much to have it shipped in. We make our own.”

  “A few centuries ago,” Imala said, “a court noble attempted to kill the goblin queen’s secretary with poisoned ink. The noble was found out before the poison reached fatal doses in the secretary’s body. The secretary swore off ink.” Imala slowly smiled in a show of fangs. “He used blood instead—collected from the noble who had attempted to poison him. We goblins adore irony.”

  Jeez. Tam was wrong. It wouldn’t take five minutes for Imala to extract a confession from the culprit. She could do it in less than one.

  Chapter 25

  I was going to the Scriptorium. I had a letter from the archmagus giving me permission to search anything and everything I thought necessary to find out who had done this and how, and to make them stop by arresting them and taking them back to the citadel with me. Though “letter” was a misnomer. Justinius had written it more as a formal order and handwritten command, complete with the midnight blue seal of the archmagus giving me complete access to the Scriptorium and all of its employees.

  The letter might get me inside without question, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath on it.

  The Scriptorium’s chief librarian, Lucan Kalta, hated my guts. Professionally and personally (he believed in being thorough). The last time I’d walked in here with a permission note—a letter giving me access to certain books—Lucan Kalta had found a legal loophole as a way around it. Like I said, thorough.

  Which was why I was taking his older brother, Vidor, with me.

  I’d had an up-close and unpleasant encounter with Lucan Kalta within days of arriving on the Isle of Mid. He didn’t like me then, and I thought it highly unlikely that he’d warmed to me since. His fiefdom was the Scriptorium, a massive repository of nearly every magic-related book, scroll, or stone slab. He didn’t like me because I’d defied his authority in front of his staff. The rule I broke was stupid to begin with, so I’d seen nothing wrong with going around it.

  Now I was walking into his territory with six armed Guardians—seven, counting Vegard—wanting to question the members of his staff. The Guardians were mainly security for me, but they’d be prepared to step in if needed if we located our suspect and either he or she tried to make a run for it or fight back using magic. My magic wasn’t exactly what you could call dependable; it could also be deadly, neither of which we wanted to advertise right now.

  For the icing on the cake, I couldn’t tell Lucan Kalta anything more than that a crime had been committed and that one of his staff may have been involved.

  Oh, that was going to go over well.

  Vegard was acting in Mychael’s stead. The letter covered that, too. Cuinn had needed to see Mychael about an issue with the rift to Timurus, and Justinius was smoothing ruffled feathers with the Caesolian and Nebian delegations.

  I was the last person who wanted to go into the Scriptorium and kick what I was sure was going to be a hornet’s nest. I didn’t do diplomacy and neither did Lucan Kalta.

  But as a seeker, I had to go.

  With my pre-Saghred seeker skill set, I had to touch an object either belonging to or recently touched by a person to be able to track them. Or know a person really well.

  Now, I could find out more, with less.

  The ink had been made in the Scriptorium, and Tarsilia had confirmed that there were substances that could be introduced into the bloodstream through the skin to cause the symptoms that the elven and goblin delegates were exhibiting.

  All of those substances were goblin.

  Yet another attempt to sabotage the peace talks and frame the goblins.

  *

  The Conclave Scriptorium was located at the center of the college campus, a massive granite building rising four stories above ground and descending I had no clue how many stories under it. In addition to being the largest and most complete collection of books, scrolls, tablets, and anything else you could write, scratch, or engrave words on in the Seven Kingdoms, it stank to high heaven, magic-wise. Before my first trip inside, I’d been told that spending too long in the company of the Scriptorium’s contents could send a sensitive into magic overload that’d make your worst hangover pale in comparison. Nontalents did most of the book retrieval in the stacks. The reading rooms were separate. Only certain mages were allowed to spend time in the stacks themselves.

  I’d met one of those mages for the first time in the Scriptorium’s stacks, also referred to as The Vault because that was what it felt like being in there.

  The mage had been Carnades Silvanus.

  It’d been entirely appropriate to have met Carnades in a place with such a name, considering he’d wanted me executed from the moment he’d met me until the instant of his death. He’d been tenacious, I’d give him that.

  Beyond the massive, iron-banded doors was a cavernous, cool interior lit by lightglobes recessed into the walls. The counter at the far end was a wall-to-wall monolith of black marble manned by librarians who looked less like academics and more like a robed line of defense for the precious books that lay beyond. There was a single opening in the center to allow mere mortals to pass into what Lucan Kalta considered his personal inner sanctum. As I had learned, nearly the hard way, attempting to leave with a book he didn’t want you to have had immediate and unpleasant consequences.

  I glanced up.

  No kid stuck to the ceiling this time.

  Lucan Kalta and his senior staff used the vaulted ceiling in the entrance hall as detention. Break a rule—like trying to take a book without checking it out—and you’d find yourself floating up to the ceiling. How long you were kept there depended on the severity of your transgression.

  Certain books weren’t to be checked out, others were kept separate because many students and mages weren’t qualified to get their hands on them for their own safety. The book I had needed fell into the former category. Rudra Muralin’s diary. Otherwise known as the book that helped save the Seven Kingdoms from enslavement by Sarad Nukpana and the Saghred.

  Lucan Kalta and I had ended up toe-to-toe at the checkout desk. Lucan didn’t want the book leaving the library. Mychael needed to see that book, and I was determined to take it to him.

  Mychael’s timely arrival had separated us before it progressed to a magic-slinging showdown. Though I wouldn’t have used magic; I would have gone with fists. Always lead with the unexpected.

  Oh yes, this place was just packed with fun memories.

  “Do not concern yourself about my brother’s lack of regard for you, Miss Benares,” Vidor said. “He doesn’t like me, either.”

>   *

  Justinius’s letter and his seal gained us an immediate audience with Lucan Kalta.

  His office was through the opening in the center of the monolithic checkout counter, then down a long, black marble–lined corridor to a predictably imposing pair of dark wooden doors.

  Vidor gave a sigh of contentment. “I’ve always felt so at home in my brother’s office.”

  I blinked. “You have?”

  “I’m a nachtmagus, dear. It reminds me of a particularly well-appointed crypt.”

  I snorted.

  A robed librarian sat at a small desk to the side of the office doors. The gatekeeper, no doubt. He looked as though he didn’t want to be here, either. I had to wonder if anyone did.

  “I’m Raine Benares. I’m here on behalf of the archmagus to see Chief Librarian Kalta.” I handed him the sealed letter.

  He accepted the letter, saw the seal, and a single eyebrow arched above the rim of his round spectacles. Then the other eyebrow rose at the sight of Vidor and the Guardians aligned behind us, giving the librarian the appearance of a startled owl.

  At least we’d made an impression.

  “One moment, please.”

  The librarian knocked twice and opened one door just enough to squeeze through. Minutes went by.

  “He’s making us wait,” I murmured without moving my lips. Kalta was probably watching us via spy crystal right now.

  “Yes, he’s being childish,” Vidor agreed. “That bodes well.”

  “It does?”

  “It means he knows he has no choice but to cooperate. This is his only chance to flex his muscles. My brother is taking what he can get.”

  Five minutes later, the door opened.

  Lucan Kalta stood in front of his imposing desk. The Scriptorium’s chief librarian was tall, black-robed, and spectrally thin. His already thin lips stretched to virtual nonexistence when he saw me.

  I gave him a smile without teeth or sincerity.