Salim took a deep breath and looked inward to the intuition that had carried him through so many tight spots, but even as he did so he knew the answer. Yes, he believed Khoyar was responsible. In a way, it felt like he’d known ever since their first meeting—something about the man’s manner had been slightly off. If Salim hadn’t been so focused on his own resentment of the priesthood as a whole—and on the problem of being saddled with a young noblewoman—perhaps he would have noticed it earlier. But now that it was out in the open, it felt right.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“Then you know as much as you can,” Calabast said. “And I wish you well.” He scanned the skyline, then made to turn away.
Salim felt a sudden and unexpected pang of regret. “You’re not coming with us? To see this through?”
The clockwork man stopped. “I have given you all the assistance I can offer.” His voice sounded even more hollow and metallic than usual. “You have traded heavily with the leaders of Axis, on both your superior’s name and the protean’s involvement. I have other responsibilities.”
“Of course.” One human trying to squeeze a few extra years out of life was hardly the caliber of transgression Calabast was designed for. Yet it would have been nice to have the metal warrior on their side. Without thinking about it, Salim stuck out his hand. “Thank you, Calabast.”
The machine looked at him for a moment, then reached forward and took the tiny, fragile human hand in his own.
“May your outcome be favorable,” he said.
Then he turned and began to stomp steadily down the street. When he was perhaps thirty feet away, he stopped and looked back.
“You know this cannot last.” Though travelers bustled all around them, Calabast’s words reached across the intervening space as clearly as if they were spoken in Salim’s ear. “One day, your name will reach the top of my list, and I will come for you.”
“And I’ll welcome it, old friend.” Salim’s voice was almost a whisper, but it didn’t matter. Calabast had already turned and continued his march down the avenue, the crowd parting around his enormous, armored shoulders like the wake of a boat.
Neila, still a little green around the gills but walking upright now, approached and stood at his side, watching their companion go.
“What was that all about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Salim said. “Just an old joke between soldiers.” He looked down and saw that he’d unconsciously put his arm around her. He turned the gesture into a comradely pat on the shoulder. “Come on. It’s getting late, and we have some shopping to do before we return.”
“Shopping?” The noblewoman’s voice was sharp. Now that she knew who was responsible for her father’s death, she was clearly eager to return the favor.
“Trust me.”
∗∗∗
Salim led them quickly through the crowded grid of streets. Neila was quiet for a long stretch, and Salim maintained his own silence, leaving her to her thoughts, which no doubt revolved around what she’d do to Khoyar when they finally confronted the man face to face. Salim hoped that the girl’s eagerness wouldn’t get her into trouble.
After several turns, they rounded a corner and found the shopfront Salim had been looking for, precisely as he remembered it. He stopped Neila and motioned toward the door. Over the entrance hung a traditional, pub-style board sign showing a modest stone-and-mortar well, its mouth disgorging a brilliant rainbow festooned with strange beasts and objects, from flaming swords to stag-horned rabbits. Beneath the image, the shop’s name shimmered in silvery writing that seemed not so much painted on as hanging in the air a hair’s breadth in front of the sign.
“‘The Well of Wonders?’” Neila looked to Salim. “What are we doing here?”
“Supplies,” Salim said. “I believe Khoyar has your father’s soul, but that doesn’t mean he’ll just hand it over when confronted. He doesn’t strike me as the type who would let something that important out of his sight—the protean basically said as much, in its way—but I suspect it’s been carefully warded. It might be sitting smack in the middle of his chambers at the temple, and we wouldn’t be able to find it.”
Neila showed her teeth. “You could make him tell.”
Spoken like someone who’d never seen torture firsthand. Yes, Salim thought, maybe I could. And maybe you’d spend the rest of your life wishing you hadn’t seen it. But what he said was: “Khoyar’s already risked everything he has on this plan. He might be the sort to take the knowledge to the grave, and then you’d be worse off than you are now. This way is easier.” Then he pushed open the door to the shop.
Inside, the room was exactly as cluttered as Salim remembered it. Shelves along the walls and freestanding tables shoved about the room in no particular pattern were piled high with random objects. Salim spotted a few swords in the mix—one of them glowing a faint and unhealthy green—and a helmet with a brush-plume of fire instead of horsehair. For the most part, however, the clutter consisted of bottles and scrolls of all shapes and sizes, as well as bizarre items of unknown function: a compasslike device that floated in the air, a bundle of burning sticks revolving slowly in a glass box, a marble statue of a crab as large as a small dog. Only the bar-style counter at the far wall was clear of debris. Next to Salim, Neila gaped at the menagerie.
“No!” The voice that greeted them was high and raspy. “No no no no!”
There was a muffled thump, and then a tiny man was shuffling around from behind the counter. The deep blue hair slicked sideways across his balding pate, combined with his diminutive stature, proclaimed him a gnome, yet the normally bright, oversized eyes of his kind were squinted behind rectangular spectacles, nearly disappearing into the glowering wrinkles of his face. He wore an orange vest with numerous pockets, and each had a gold chain like those occasionally used for key rings, sometimes attached to the vest itself and other times seeming only to trail between items in the pockets. He moved with a significant limp, yet he clumped around the counter with surprising speed, aided by a claw-headed walking stick. This he now raised to point at the intruders, sending a little swirl of multihued electricity crackling out from the end in a spiraling cloud.
“No!” he said again, as if his point hadn’t already been made.
“Buskin!” Salim smiled and spread his arms wide. “How’s business?”
The little man scowled back at him, jowls drooping comically. “Fine until you came in.”
“Good, good!” Listening only to Salim’s tone, one would have thought the shopkeep had greeted him with the same enthusiasm. Salim reached out and picked up an object at random—a clear bottle with a teardrop-shaped stopper, its edges sealed with lead. Inside floated a tiny, preserved creature that looked like a gnarled tuber or root or some sort, with hollow eyes and a jagged little mouth. “Listen, Buskin, we need some help.”
“When don’t you?” the gnome snarled, but his voice was already fading from genuine anger to mere irritation. “And put that down!”
Salim did as he was instructed, respectfully setting the bottle back down among the others, then walked over and leaned on the wooden counter. Neila followed, eyes still wide as she tried to take in the vast stores of strangeness hanging all around her. Buskin was forced to scramble back around the bar, climbing up on a specially made stool so that he could keep both of them in view.
“What is it this time?” The gnome banged his walking stick on the edge of the counter with a loud clack. “And be quick about it! I have legitimate business to be about.”
Salim put on a hurt expression. “Buskin, when have I ever been anything but legitimate business?”
The gnome responded by making a rude noise. Neila was so astonished by this childish display from a businessman—and a clearly ancient one at that—that she laughed involuntarily. Her hand went instantly to her mouth, cheeks reddening, but the gnome looked over at her, and one side of his mouth quirked upward slightly.
“Serious business, Busk.�
�� All jocularity was gone now from Salim’s voice. “This woman’s father has been killed, and his soul kidnapped from the Boneyard. I’ve been tapped to get it back.”
The gnome frowned. “Serious business, indeed.” He made the spiral of Pharasma with the handle of his walking stick, the crystal trapped in its clawed end leaving a faint line of color in the air. “You have my sympathies, Lady. Yet I don’t know that I can locate a soul.”
“You don’t have to,” Salim said. “We already have, more or less. We know who has it, and suspect that he’ll probably have it nearby, but it’s undoubtedly heavily disguised. We need something that’ll let us see through any illusions and wards that might be concealing it.”
The shrewd shopkeeper’s gleam was back in Buskin’s eye. “It’s never easy with you, is it?” he asked. Yet he got down off his stool anyway. “Wait here. And touch nothing!”
Salim and Neila did as they were bid, and the old gnome fell upon his stacks of items and began to rifle through them with decidedly less care than Salim had displayed, knocking over old books and jeweled daggers. One of the latter hit the ground and shot a brief burst of flame along the floorboards, which Buskin stamped out absentmindedly. At last he gave a muffled grunt of triumph and emerged from a chest of scarves and cloaks holding a glittering pendant.
Neila gasped. The emerald hanging from the chain was half the size of Salim’s palm.
“Here we are, then,” Buskin said. “A little cracked, and mayhap not as effective as it once was, but it’ll do the job.”
“What is it?” Neila asked.
“A seeing gem,” Salim said. “Hold it up to your eye, and any illusions are revealed. Is that right?”
The old gnome nodded, smiling—when he smiled, he looked like a half-sized version of someone’s kindly grandfather—then dropped the expression and pulled the gem back as Salim reached out his hand for it.
“What about payment?” the gnome demanded.
Neila reached for her purse, but Salim stopped her with an outstretched hand. “Don’t bother. You can’t afford it. And we don’t have to.” He turned to the gnome. “Ceyanan will pay. And we’re only borrowing it, anyway—we’ll send it back.”
The gnome snorted. “Most likely you’ll break it!”
“Then you’ll get full price, won’t you? Quit whining, old man. You’ll come out of this laughing either way, as always.”
The gnome harrumphed, but he handed the stone over nevertheless. Salim took it and tucked it away in a pocket inside the breast of his robe.
“I don’t suppose you’d agree to a trade?” The gnome looked pointedly at Salim’s sword. “There’s still a space in my collection for the Melted Blade, if you’ve changed your mind.”
Salim bit back a harsh reply and settled for resting his hand on the sword’s disfigured hilt. “You know the deal, wizard. The day the Lady of Graves takes pity on me, you’ll get the sword. Until then, you’re wasting your breath.”
“Bah!” The gnome spat on his own floor and waved a hand as if shooing a fly. “Get out, then! Thieves, the both of you.”
“Good to see you too, Busk.” But Salim was already moving toward the door, pulling Neila along in his wake. When they were both outside and the door had slammed behind them, Neila turned to him.
“You seem to know a lot of people here.”
He shrugged and looked toward the street, where a palanquin was going by carried by four emaciated men that might have been dead. “It’s a long story.”
“I’d like to hear it, once this is over.”
Salim looked back toward her. She was gazing at him steadily, and he found himself remembering how it had felt to have her next to him on the rim of the fountain, staring out over the city’s skyline. Her dress was smudged with dirt and grime from the Boneyard, and the panicked floating in the protean’s dissolving tower had removed any semblance of cohesion from her dark hair, which tumbled loose around her in a dark wave. Yet she still held herself straight and tall, and the look she gave Salim now was that of a child studying an insect. He suddenly felt too warm in his dark robes.
“Maybe you will,” he said. “But if you’re feeling ready, I think it’s time to return and pay our high priest a visit.”
The thought of surrendering herself to the gut-churning amulet once again was enough to break Neila’s gaze and drain some of the color from her cheeks, but she made no protest. “One more time,” she said.
“One more time,” Salim agreed. Through her exhaustion, Neila smiled up at him and took his hand.
Salim reached for the amulet, and then they were enveloped by the hot air of the Thuvian desert.
Chapter Thirteen
The Wastelands
Only it wasn’t Thuvia.
Something was very wrong. Salim had fixed his mind firmly on their destination, and had hoped they’d be deposited in the fields of Anvanory Manor, within sight of the big house. Failing that, he would have expected to appear somewhere in the surrounding deserts, or in the markets of Lamasara itself, surrounded by the smells of cooking kebabs and fragrant camel-dung fires.
Instead, they were in something like a desert, but not any desert on their world. Beneath their feet, the plain was cracked and rust-red stone, yet that was where any resemblance ended. The hills that rose in the distance didn’t look like mountains so much as tumors, festering lesions that twisted their way up out of the rock in fleshy mounds, their sides coursing with dark rivulets of pus. As Salim watched, one of them heaved spastically and settled again, like some great lung or heart attempting to beat. Above them, the black sky was filled with a howling torrent of red dust.
“Where are we?” Neila’s shout was muffled by the wind.
“I don’t know!” Salim called back. Except that he was afraid he did. He’d ventured into the lower planes before when necessity commanded, but never without adequate preparation. This could be Hell, or the Abyss, or the wastelands of Abaddon, where the Four Horsemen ruled over flocks of shrieking daemons and waited for the chance to ride forth and devour the world. It didn’t matter—all that mattered was getting them both out of there. Fast.
“I thought you were taking us home!”
“It’s not exactly like driving a cart, girl!” But there was no time to argue. Salim looked down at the amulet, studying the spiral inscribed in its black stone. There was no way to tell why it had taken them here this time. Even under perfect conditions, there was always a chance that the magic would simply send them traveling sideways toward some unknown destination, and he’d already expended a great deal of energy today. And then there was the possibility that the protean’s weird, distorting aura had somehow twisted the magic, but that—
Neila screamed. Salim whirled, the amulet forgotten.
Behind them, less than thirty feet away, the plain was split by a jagged chasm perhaps a hundred feet across, its long arms stretching crookedly away toward the horizons like a lightning bolt. On the far side, a cracked rock face dropped straight down out of sight, its craggy sides wetted here and there with dark trickles emerging from between the stones.
Two creatures were clambering out of the trench. They were shaped vaguely like men, but stretched out and skeletal. Through their reddish, leathery skin, which wept with a sheen of slime, Salim could see every bone and tendon of their thin frames. Their hands were long claws, but it was their heads that killed any illusion of humanity once and for all. Below dead black eyes, needle teeth slanted outward from an underslung jaw. Above them, the smooth bone of the skull swept backward and up in a single thick, pointed horn.
As quick as Salim turned to look, they were out of the crevasse and crouched at its edge, all barbed elbows and thrashing, glistening tails. One of them held a long-bladed spear easily a foot taller than Salim, manipulating it as lightly with one bony hand as if it were a stalk of grass. The other licked at its dripping talons, showing the humans its too-wide smile. The spear-wielder coughed something hawklike and grating, and the other responded
with a laugh of tearing metal.
Then they moved.
The girl’s instincts were good. Neila’s sword was out of its sheath before Salim had finished reaching for his own, and she stepped forward again in that textbook lunge, the point of the thin rapier driving straight for the demon’s heart—and then sliding off with no more effect than if she’d stabbed a brick wall. As the sword broke contact, it sizzled, the slime of the creature’s body etching the blade with trails of blackened rust. The weapon might be finely crafted Taldan steel, but Salim knew all too well that no mundane edge could reliably pierce demon flesh. The creature casually batted the blade wide and reached out with one oversized claw, seizing Neila by the shoulder and dragging her forward.
Damn it, the creatures were fast. Salim’s sword was in his hand now, hilt warm and basket curled around his knuckles, the blade’s fierce desire to kill singing in his blood. Yet already the demons were toppling backward over the cliff, catching themselves easily with strong claws that dug into knife-edged stone. Each creature slung itself out over that edge with only a single hand, one demon carrying its spear, the other holding Neila loosely in the crook of its corrosive arm. The girl met Salim’s eyes once, mouth open in a scream that disappeared into the howl of the wind, and then both demons and Neila were gone from view.
Salim charged.
There was no time for anything else. In his youth, his instructors had tried to teach him to fight with his head, to know with perfect certainty which strike would drive home before he began to move. It had been difficult, but in the end, he’d finally mastered that coolness, the ability to detach and become the Rahadoumi ideal—a creature of perfect reason, even in battle.
It wasn’t until years later that he realized it was all bullshit. The calm was necessary—rage made you stupid—but anyone who thought too hard about a fight eventually lost the draw to someone who didn’t bother. If you wanted to stay alive in his business, your best bet was to move, and figure out what you were doing while you were already in motion.
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