Ghost in the Maze

by Moeller, Jonathan

  She saw quite a few books on the history of Iramis. That city had burned beneath Callatas’s sorcery a century and a half past, yet Caina had seen the destruction in her dreams, shown to her by the strange spirit that had helped her in the Widow’s Tower. Now Callatas sent gangs of slaves into the Desert of Candles, searching for relics of the lost city.

  Caina did not know what that had to do with the wraithblood, with the Apotheosis.

  Perhaps she could find out in Vaysaal’s workshop.

  She took a step forward, and stopped.

  Several things seemed out of place. Dust on the carpet, driven into the fibers. The marks of heavy boots. A scratch on the gleaming wood of the shelves. Like a scabbard or a shield had bounced off the bookcase. And she had seen scratches upon the polished stone floor of the corridor.

  As if a large band of armed men had recently passed this way.

  That disturbed her. Vaysaal had been a Master Alchemist, which meant he had a guard of Immortals to watch over him. Though those Immortals had not saved him from the assassin that had taken his life. But the Immortals were usually quite good at defending their charges from assassins.

  Unless, of course, they had wanted the assassins to succeed. Certainly they had not returned to Vaysaal’s palace after the Master Alchemist had been assassinated.

  Something was off.

  Caina considered withdrawing. Agabyzus had counseled her against taking foolish risks, and perhaps she ought to heed his advice for once. Yet Vaysaal had helped the Grand Master to manufacture wraithblood. And Caina had never been able to look around a wraithblood laboratory without someone trying to kill her. Soon Callatas or the College would send someone to take charge of Vaysaal’s sorcerous tools.

  This was Caina’s best chance to learn more about wraithblood.

  It was worth the risk.

  She crossed the library and opened the door on the far wall.

  The inner courtyard yawned like a chasm beneath Caina. Nearly a hundred feet below she saw the Master Alchemist’s private garden, filled with strange, otherworldly plants, creations of his alchemy. Viridian blooms surrounded huge green pods the size of large men, and long roots curled and uncurled above the pods. It put Caina in mind of krakens, of long tentacles reaching out to devour unwary sailors.

  Best not to touch the strange plants.

  A narrow stone bridge crossed the inner courtyard, leading to the isolated wing. Caina felt sorcery radiating from the top floor of the wing, felt the power of arcane wards crackling around it.

  Vaysaal’s laboratory.

  Caina eased over the bridge, feeling the wards as she did so. Vaysaal had ringed his sanctum with spells to turn aside sorcerous attacks and to disrupt any divinations. Yet Caina felt no defensive wards, no spells to maim or kill physical intruders. Ricimer’s laboratory in the Widow’s Tower had been much the same. Perhaps the Alchemists did not have the Magisterium’s skill at such wards, or perhaps Vaysaal had trusted in his guards to keep spies away from his workroom.

  Foolish of him, given that Caina now stood before the door to his laboratory.

  The door was locked, but it was only the work of a few moments to release it.

  She raised a hand to open the door and hesitated. There was only one entrance to the laboratory, and it was only accessible over this narrow bridge.

  Making Vaysaal’s laboratory the perfect place to trap an intruder.

  Was this a trap?

  Vaysaal had been killed outside of the College itself, not here. While the Slavers’ Brotherhood wanted the Balarigar dead, Caina could not imagine the cowled masters assassinating a Master Alchemist simply to trap her.

  And yet the unease refused to go away.

  She was about to gamble, but that did not mean she couldn’t play with loaded dice.

  A row of shuttered windows stretched away from either side of the door. Caina grabbed the windowsill of the nearest one and pulled herself up. Then she moved to the next one, the muscles of her arms and shoulders straining, the courtyard with its strange garden stretching below her. One slip and she would fall and smash her head against the ground, which was likely a better death than what those strange plants would do to her.

  At the third windowsill she stopped, unhooked the coiled rope from her belt, and drove the grapnel between the stones of the wall. She left the coiled rope upon the sill. If necessary, it would allow her to make a hasty escape. Every floor of the palace had windows overlooking the inner courtyard, and Caina could swing down the rope and retreat through the windows.

  She climbed back to the narrow stone bridge, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

  And just as she suspected, she found herself in a wraithblood laboratory.

  It was a large rectangular room with a high ceiling. A massive mirror, ten feet by ten feet, rose from the center of the room. It gave off pale gray light, and Caina saw her shadow-blurred reflection in the glowing glass. She also saw the dead gray plains and rippling black sky of the netherworld through the mirror, and felt the potent sorcery that transmuted the sheet of glass into a Mirror of Worlds.

  Just beyond the gate she saw a massive steel spike driven into the ground of the netherworld. A thick coil of chains wrapped around the spike and led back through the gate and into the laboratory. There the coil split into hundreds of smaller chains leading to a ring of steel tables surrounding the mirror. Upon each table lay a naked corpse. Every last one was pallid and gray, their veins turned black. Each corpse bore a dozen spikes in their flesh, the slender steel chains dangling from them. The corpses’ wrists had been opened, and droplets of black blood fell from their wounds to land in metal troughs.

  Wraithblood. Produced from the corrupted blood of murdered slaves, charged with arcane power siphoned from the darkness of the netherworld.

  There were thousands of wraithblood users in Istarinmul. Caina wondered how they would react if they knew the drug had been created from the blood of dead men and women.

  She moved around the circle of steel tables, examining the laboratory in the dim light from the mirror. Caina had seen an apparatus like this before in the Widow’s Tower. She knew what it was. Yet she did not know why Callatas had created it. Perhaps some of the answers lay within this room.

  Caina spotted a staircase at the far end of the laboratory. Maybe Vaysaal conducted his private experiments down there, or simply maintained a second wraithblood laboratory. A massive wooden desk sat near the spiral stairwell, covered with papers, and a pair of bookcases rose to either side of the desk.

  Caina crossed to the desk and sifted through the papers. Many were letters from Grand Master Callatas himself, exhorting Vaysaal to greater production of wraithblood. The letters complained of Vaysaal’s laggardly work, pointing out all the slaves that Vaysaal had received to produce wraithblood. Perhaps Vaysaal had been embezzling from the Grand Master, keeping slaves for his grotesque art. If so, then Callatas himself might have ordered Vaysaal’s assassination, which explained why the Immortals had not saved him.

  But all that was only speculation. Caina started rifling through the desk’s drawers, looking for notes on alchemy or perhaps a notebook. If she could find a single hint of what Callatas intended with his wraithblood and his Apotheosis, then she would be one step closer…

  She felt a pulse of sorcerous power.

  Caina whirled, reaching for a throwing knife. But the laboratory remained deserted, and she saw no change from either the Mirror of Worlds or the rest of the ghastly apparatus. After a moment she realized the pulse of sorcery had come from the bottom drawer of the desk. Had she accidentally triggered a ward? It had felt like a ward, but different, more focused.

  She knelt and slid open the bottom drawer.

  It was empty, save for a wooden box. Caina opened the box, revealing a velvet cushion. Atop the cushion rested a bronze ring of curious design. It looked like a short chain of slender bronze plates, twisted together into a braided ring. The ring radiated intense arcane power, and Caina
wondered what it did. The aura felt like a warding spell – had Vaysaal created the thing as a protective talisman?

  She started to straighten up, and the ring moved.

  It uncoiled like a serpent, the polished bronze gleaming. Before Caina could react, the uncoiled ring sprang from the box and struck her left hand. She cursed in surprise and fury, reaching for the ring, but her left glove crumbled into dust at its touch. The coil of bronze scales wrapped around the third finger of her left hand, cold and hard and heavy.

  Caina felt the steady pulse of sorcerous power from the ring, and she braced herself for whatever sorcery it would unleash upon her.

  Yet nothing else happened. It had crumbled her glove into dust, but she felt no pain from the ring. The ring’s arcane aura remained constant, but as far as Caina could tell, it wasn’t doing anything. It seemed to be…waiting for something.

  But what?

  Caina did not want to find out.

  She grasped the ring and tugged it from her finger.

  But it would not move. It did not feel tight, and Caina pulled harder, but the ring remained motionless upon her finger. She grunted and tugged harder, but the ring would not budge. At last she gave up and examined the ring. She didn’t think it had done anything to her…but just because she didn’t notice the effects didn’t mean they weren’t happening.

  But she could worry about it later. One more look around the laboratory, and then she would escape. In the safety of the Sanctuary, she could find a way to remove the ring. After that …

  The clatter of armor was her only warning.

  Caina whirled as men in black chain mail and steel plate surged up the stairs from the laboratory’s lower level, scimitars and coiled chain whips in their armored fists. Every one of the men wore black helmets, their faceplates shaped into grinning human skulls. Pale blue light gleamed in the eyeholes of the skull masks, a side effect of the sorcerous elixirs the men had ingested. They were Immortals, the elite bodyguards of the Padishah and the emirs and the Master Alchemists, and the alchemical elixirs flowing through their blood made them stronger and faster than ordinary men. The elixirs also induced an insane lust for cruelty and a sadistic delight in pain. If the Immortals captured her, they would take days to kill her.

  Caina turned towards the door, ready to run, but the Immortals moved faster. Six of them blocked the laboratory door. More Immortals emerged from the stairs, weapons in hand, until a score of the black-armored warriors filled the laboratory. Caina had killed Immortals before, but it had been chancy. There was no way she could overcome twenty of them.

  Yet they made no move to attack.

  For a moment she contemplated running to the gate in the Mirror of Worlds, but that was madness. The Immortals could only kill her. There were things in the netherworld that could do far worse than that.

  A final man climbed the stairs to the laboratory, clad in the leather jerkin and chain mail of a mercenary soldier. He was in his middle forties, his balding gray hair close-cropped, his nose like the beak of a hawk. He had the cold, hard eyes of a hunting hawk as well, and faint scars marked his jaw. A scimitar and a dagger hung at his belt, and from his balance, Caina knew that he could use those weapons well.

  But she already knew who he was. The man was an assassin of Istarinmul’s Kindred family…and one of Grand Master Callatas’s men.

  “Anburj,” said Caina in a rasping, disguised voice.

  A smile flickered over the assassin’s hard face. “Good. You know who I am. But I did not know that it would be so very easy to trap you, Balarigar.”

  Chapter 2 - Smokeless Flame

  Caina took a step toward the wall. Neither Anburj nor his Immortals made any move to stop her. With all the exits blocked, they could kill her at their leisure.

  But they didn’t know about the rope dangling from the window.

  At least, Caina hoped they didn’t. If Anburj had stationed men in the mansion to watch her approach, they would have spotted the rope and taken it down. But Anburj and his men must have concealed themselves in the laboratory soon after Vaysaal’s murder. Caina had seen no signs of Immortals or Kindred assassins anywhere else in the palace.

  She took another step toward the window, and still the Immortals made no move to stop her.

  “A trap?” she rasped. “Are you so certain of that, Anburj of the Kindred?”

  “I am,” said Anburj, his smile cold. “Because I know who you are, Balarigar.”

  “Oh?” said Caina, her alarm growing. “Do enlighten me.” If Anburj had figured out who she was, then Damla and her sons were in danger.

  “The common vermin and the slaves think you are the Balarigar, a hero come to save them,” said Anburj. “The emirs and masters think you are a thief hoping to get rich. But I know exactly what you are. You are a Ghost nightfighter hunting for secrets. No other man would wear such a cloak. The Teskilati shall be wroth that I found you first.”

  “If I am a thief,” said Caina, “then perhaps I stole this cloak as well.” She felt a twinge of relief. Anburj had not figured out who she really was, had not even discerned that she was a woman. Damla and Agabyzus would be safe for now. But once Anburj killed her, he might return to the House of Agabyzus to hunt for any other surviving Ghosts.

  “I think not,” said Anburj. “A common robber could not have achieved some of the audacious thefts you have accomplished. The Ghosts have returned to Istarinmul, have they not? I thought we had exterminated every last one of the cockroaches, but more have scurried from the shadows. Tell me, Ghost. When you robbed and humiliated Master Ulvan, did his slaves aid you? When you destroyed the Widow’s Tower, who let you inside?”

  “No one,” said Caina.

  Anburj laughed. “No. You had help. We shall find the traitors and hang their corpses from the walls of the Golden Palace. Starting, I think, with you.”

  “Then you killed Vaysaal to get at me?” said Caina, taking another step closer to the window. A few more, and she could make a run for it.

  “Do not bother going out the window,” said Anburj. “It would be so very easy to push you from the ledge. If the fall doesn’t kill you, some of Vaysaal’s little flowers can keep a man alive for seven years in exquisite torment.”

  “Then you did kill Vaysaal,” said Caina

  Anburj snorted. “Vaysaal killed himself, the fool. He started ingesting wraithblood for his own use, and the Grand Master requires every last drop of wraithblood for his work. He paid my brothers of the Kindred to kill Vaysaal, and we obliged. But you, Ghost…I knew you would come here. For I know what you want.”

  “And that is?” said Caina, edging closer to the window. If she could keep Anburj talking, that would give her more time to escape. And perhaps the assassin might reveal some useful information.

  “Secrets,” said Anburj. “You want to know about the Apotheosis. I’ve studied you.” He stepped forward, his cold smile sharpening. “All those slavers you robbed? They were not chosen at random, were they not? They were cowled masters who sold slaves to the Grand Master. The Widow’s Tower? One of the chief wraithblood laboratories. Some of the survivors saw a man in a shadow-cloak fleeing the inferno. I know you were there. So when one of Grand Master Callatas’s chief lieutenants was assassinated…what a perfect chance to look around his laboratory, to learn something useful about wraithblood.” He waved a hand at the flickering Mirror of Worlds. “It was a gamble, to be sure…but here you are. Walking so obligingly into my grasp.”

  “You’re mistaken,” said Caina, taking one final step toward the shutter.

  “Oh?” said Anburj. “Why is that?”

  She lifted her left hand. “I came for this.”

  Anburj glanced at the strange ring and spat out a laugh. “Indeed? Then you truly are a fool at the end. So you found a pyrikon? What good will that do you, I ask? You will not leave this room alive. And even if you did, you would never live long enough to reach the Maze. The defenses would make certain of that.”

  “
Are you so certain?” said Caina.

  “Entirely,” said Anburj, gesturing to his Immortals. “Take him alive. Maim him if you must, but leave him able to speak. Before we grant him the mercy of death, he is going to tell us everything he knows.”

  The Immortals strode forward, chain whips ready in their hands. Caina had seen them use those weapons in Marsis, and she knew what they intended to do. The whips would curl around her arms and legs with enough force to break bone, and after they crippled her, they would interrogate her.

  There was no way she could survive that.

  She threw herself backward with as much strength as she could manage.

  Anburj snorted. “Fool! Take him before…”

  The shutters popped open, and Caina fell out the window.

  And as she did, she saw the gleam of the grapnel.

  Anburj and his men had not spotted her rope.

  Caina grabbed at the rope, the shadow-cloak billowing around her. For an awful, agonizing instant the rope seemed just out of reach, and she was certain that she would fall to her death. But her fingers tightened around the cord, and it uncoiled as she fell.

  Caina kicked out with her legs, her boots slamming into the stone wall below the window. The impact pushed her away from the wall, and she swooped like a clock’s pendulum over the garden.

  “Rope!” roared one of the Immortals. “He has a rope!”

  “Stop him!” bellowed Anburj in fury. “Now!”

  She heard a click and saw the gleam of steel as an Immortal raised a crossbow, and Caina reached the end of her arc. She swung toward the wall, a steel quarrel hissing past her ear, and saw that her momentum would take her near a closed window on the palace’s fourth floor. Another crossbow bolt hurtled past her to plunge into the garden. Caina braced herself as her swing accelerated, driving her toward the closed window.

  “Fool!” said Anburj. “Cut the rope!”

  The rope suddenly went slack in Caina’s fingers.

  She flung out her arms, and her right hand barely managed to grasp the windowsill, the rough stone rasping beneath the leather of her glove. For an instant she hung by her arm, grateful for all the endless hours she had spent practicing the unarmed forms and building up her strength. Her scrabbling boots found purchase on the wall, and she hauled herself up to the sill. Caina yanked one of the daggers from her boot and jammed it into the gap between the shutters, pulling them open.