by Julia Knight
“Aren’t you going to look?” he asked, not because he especially wanted her to, but he did want to know if she was going to stay calm or explode.
She slid him a glare from behind a fall of blonde hair and stashed the papers inside her shirt. “Cospel, how much money do we have now?”
Cospel came out of the shadows, where he liked to lurk. He jingled faintly. “Five hundred bushels. A few coppers as well, and I, um, I found this.” He held out a gold ring with a small blue stone in it. Vocho didn’t like to ask where he “found” it. In someone’s pocket or on their finger, probably. It wouldn’t be worth more than a hundred anyway.
Kass considered briefly. “It’s not really enough, but we don’t have much choice.”
“Enough for what? I mean, it’s enough to eat for a couple of weeks. What else do we want to spend it on?”
“Didn’t you listen to what Dom was saying? That bloody magician is coming, and the Ikaran king is looking for Reyen spies, probably us in particular. And here’s you with a magical bull’s eye on your back. I really don’t want that to be around when Sabates gets here. We either get someone to take it off, which will cost, or I murder you and leave you in the gutter for them to find while I escape. Which would you prefer?”
She smiled as she said it, but he couldn’t escape a little shiver. It was hard to tell if she was joking. She could kill him, especially if she caught him unawares or got lucky. He was almost sure she wouldn’t.
“We need another magician to take it off, Voch.”
Magicians, in Reyes at least, were as rare as lion’s feathers. He’d only ever met two, and that was two too many. They’d framed him for murder and almost got him to murder the prelate, and his own sister. He really didn’t want to be meeting any more. He wasn’t sure his nerves could take it.
“And what is Ikaras but one big university?” Kass went on. “Magicians aren’t banned here; they train them. We just need to find one that’ll do it for the money we have. That’s the tricky part. I had Cospel scope a few out. Far too expensive, at least the ones with any sort of good name.”
“I don’t like the sound of what you’re suggesting.”
“Neither do I, but there’s bound to be a few who are, shall we say, a bit less respectable.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better, Kass.”
“It wasn’t intended to. Your choice though. Sabates can find you again, maybe do something to you, through you, with that tattoo on your back. Or we find a back-alley magician to take it off. Then we’re well out of everything; we can go and find someone who wants to hire a couple of no-name ex-guild master swordsmen, wait for everything to calm down in Reyes, and when it’s over see if we can find a way back in. Or just stay out.”
Stay out–not something Vocho had ever contemplated, and he was pretty sure Kass didn’t mean it either unless she’d had a soul transplant overnight. The guild had been everything to both of them. Kass might be disillusioned with it, and so was he, a bit, but the fame, the adulation, the glory. He wanted all that back, every scrap of it. Being a no-name sell-sword wasn’t his idea of a good life. Still, Kass had a point. And life was all about risks, right? Had he ever worried about risks before? No point starting now then.
“All right. Let’s see who we can find.”
It didn’t seem very promising when Cospel led them down a dark alleyway. Ikaras was famed as the city of light–vast structures of glass covered all the bigger buildings, cut and sculpted and placed to reflect and refract sunlight so that it shattered over the whole city. Smaller buildings, individual houses, had their own, smaller glass partitions and sculptures set into the roofs, making smaller globes of mirrored light that encased them. Once the sun rose, everywhere was light, in the summer so piercing that the locals had developed a hat whose brim could be angled so as to shade the eyes. At night, light stored somehow in the glass glowed red and blue and yellow to light rooms and houses and streets, making the city look like a flickering, living beast from the hills that surrounded it. Even now, on a day when wispy clouds scudded over the sun, the brightness was blinding to one not used to it, and Vocho had to squint away the pain of the wine he’d had last night. Ikaras, city of light, was not a place for the hungover.
The building at the end of the alley had a glass structure on its roof–a delicate rose shape, but one that was sullenly dark in the sun. Other buildings along the way might once have had glass atop them, but most of it seemed to be underfoot, long shards and tiny pieces that tried, and failed, to shine. No glass on the roofs, so no lights in the windows, making the alleyway a black stain on an otherwise bright street. Out from the old city, the bits with shining glass, they were in a swampy suburb. Houses stood on stilts, plain wooden houses over trickling streams and sucking mud. In between the houses mangroves shouldered for space, and more than one crumbling house was half hidden by vines.
Finally Cospel led them to what looked like a thicket, with a narrow path into it, where a dog sunned itself and looked them over idly as it scratched out a flea.
“Are you sure about this, Cospel?” Vocho asked as they headed into the path, which looked more like an animal trail than anything else. Two paces in, the vines closed over their heads and Vocho had the oddest feeling they were watching him. “I mean, magicians can charge a king’s ransom for a single spell, so what would any decent one be doing down here? No madman is going to touch me, I can tell you that.”
Cospel shrugged in the green dimness and waggled his eyebrows in a complicated dance that probably meant something profound. “Not mad, sir, I promise you that. Well, perhaps. More sort of radical. I couldn’t even get in the university, and even if I could, we ain’t got the money for one of them fancy magicians. Not to mention that Sabates is a member of the university, like Kacha said, and we don’t want to be found, right? So I had to be a bit creative.”
Vocho narrowed his eyes as Cospel knocked on the door. “What do you mean, ‘creative’?”
“I think he means,” a voice said as the door opened, “that I am years ahead of my time.”
Vocho turned to see almost exactly what he hadn’t expected. The two magicians he’d seen close to before were serious, threatening even. The patterns that writhed on their hands were shapes of blood and death, and they had seemed matched by their faces. He’d seen one or two from afar, as far as bloody possible, around the university and all had held the same sort of menace.
This face was sunny and cheerful, and while there were patterns on her hands–Vocho took great care not to look too closely–there was no blood and death there. She was clearly a magician, the markings on her hands gave that away, but everything else was subtly wrong somehow, or at least different. She was short with a crop of dark hair framing a shrewd-looking face, and she, well, she’d never be called skinny, even by a liar of Vocho’s skill, instead being solidly formidable. Unlike other magicians, her dress was bright and colourful with flowers around the edges, and she radiated a sort of calm no-nonsense goodwill.
She looked him up and down like a horse dealer inspecting a nag for soundness. “I suppose you’re the one looking for the cheap fix. All right, come in. Make sure to wipe your feet.” She spoke in Reyen, not well but well enough and certainly better than Vocho spoke Ikaran.
She pushed the door wider and let the three of them in. Vocho wondered why she’d bothered asking them to wipe their feet–the place looked like a whirlwind had gone through it. Plants covered every surface, waving in a non-existent breeze, and again Vocho couldn’t escape the feeling they were watching him. Books lay scattered everywhere, loose sheets of paper hanging out of them or, in one case, stuck to the wall with what looked like blood. The markings that looped and spiralled on another wall were definitely blood, and the spot between Vocho’s shoulders began to itch.
“I thought you said she wasn’t mad,” he whispered to Cospel.
“I said perhaps,” Cospel whispered back. “And she’s all we can afford.”
Kacha shut t
he pair of them up with a glare and stepped forward to introduce herself. She didn’t get the chance.
“Kacha and Vocho and… and Cospel, wasn’t it?” the woman said. “What? I am a magician, you know. A proper one. As good as any up there in the university. Better, because I’m not stuffed so far up my own backside I can’t see what’s going on. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone who you are if you don’t tell anyone I’m still practising magic. One reason Cospel and I managed to come to terms, though he does drive a hard bargain. Now then.” She rummaged among some papers on the desk, wiped one hand absent-mindedly on her dress leaving a dark red smear behind and looked up again from under her fringe. “I’m Esti, Esti du Bellan. You’ve heard of me? No? Well, perhaps that’s for the best, all things considered. Right then, Vocho is the one with the problem, is he? Strip to the waist, please.”
“What? But we’ve only just met, and my sister is… Oh. Right.” Vocho withered in the face of Esti’s grin. He got his tunic and shirt off and shivered in the draught while Esti paced around him, tutting to herself and tapping a pen on her teeth as she looked at the spot between his shoulder blades, poked and prodded and pinched. It itched something fierce, but at least it wasn’t burning right now.
“Tricky,” she said at last to Kacha, as though Vocho wasn’t there. “It’s a real piece of work, that. I can do it, maybe, but it may require more unusual methods, and it’ll take some time. Good thing you came to me rather than the university. They wouldn’t dream of interfering with another magician’s work. Me, I have no scruples as long as the cash is right. Have you the money? Good. Half now, half when it’s done. There are things I’ll need to buy. There may also be things that money cannot buy, which you will have to acquire.”
Vocho shuffled his shirt back on and tried not to see how Esti’s mouth was twitching like she was trying not to laugh. He’d never felt less like Vocho the Great in his life.
The tattoo itched and nagged all the way back to their lodgings.
Chapter Four
Petri wasn’t sorry to see Licio and Sabates go. Bakar sent them off under a scorching summer sun with a retinue of guards and a farewell waved from inside–Petri wasn’t the only person not to have left the building in weeks.
He turned away from the window and back to the room of little cubicles, incongruous under the high, vaulted ceiling of what had been the old king’s ballroom. If Petri shut his eyes, he could still hear faint stirrings of the music they used to play, see ghosts of the dancers, smell the waft of mingled scents from the gardens outside the window, which had now been replaced with an orrery that clanked and ticked as the background to his every thought. Listening to the ghosts was far better than opening his eyes and seeing the inside of the cubicle that was sucking his life out.
“Egimont, stop standing there like a stunned mackerel and get to work.” His supervisor brought him back to the here and now. Odious, pumped-up prick of a man, lording it over his little domain worse than any noble had ever lorded it over anyone. “Just because you’re the prelate’s favourite doesn’t make you mine. So get on with it.”
Petri didn’t say a word but went to his cubicle and sat at his desk and tried not to think about just getting up, walking out of the door and leaving. Nowhere special in mind, just going, leaving everything behind–name, reputation, chains. Kacha.
Just thinking about her made him sweat, but it didn’t matter. He’d left her behind a long time ago, ruined his chance when he’d first lied to her. He wiped his forehead against the heat and tried to concentrate on the papers on his desk. Bakar had made his working life a living hell the last few weeks, more so than ever before.
These orders were madness. Yet no one else seemed to see it, or if they did were too afraid to say anything. He looked up, and one of his co-workers was staring his way. Back to the papers, whose words seemed to swim in front of his eyes. He’d been torn in two ever since Licio had first recruited him to his cause. Now the split seemed to reach down past his soul and into his balls. Nothing he did would be right. The prelate needed… something. Deposing, retiring. Yet was Licio, with Sabates at his back, really any better? God’s cogs, no. What then?
He ran a hand through his hair and pinched the bridge of his nose. What indeed? He had no choice, and he thought perhaps this was where Licio and Sabates had wanted him all along–beholden to them for his life, just as he had always been beholden to Bakar. They’d promised him freedom then taken it away with the other hand. He glanced up again–the same woman hurriedly looked away.
What he needed was information, an ally. What he had was nothing. The only good thing he’d managed to do recently was get a note to Kacha. He’d had no idea who he’d get to take it, how he’d even get it out of the palace, but that ever-hated fate, or someone’s planning, had dropped the perfect vehicle into his lap. Narcis Donat Chimo Ne Farina es Domenech had arrived in the palace like a perfectly turned out, and secret, whirlwind. Petri had returned to his rooms a few nights ago to find the whole floor in disarray, men and women shouting, in one case weeping hysterically, and Dom sitting in the lonely chair in Petri’s room as though the world was something that turned about him.
“Ah, Petri,” he’d said with a dangerous smile. “Glad you could join me. Do shut the door behind you.”
It was, without a doubt, the same Dom that Petri had met as an ally of Kacha and Vocho. Yet this Dom looked sharper than swords rather than the bumbling fool of before. Still, that bumbling fool had managed to best Petri with a sword on more than one occasion. Petri shut the door quietly behind him and kept his hand ready, in case.
“You’ve done well for a man I last saw in the Shrive.”
Dom inclined his head. “And you’ve done well to stay alive for a man playing both sides for what he can get. But I’m not here to pay compliments.”
One step brought Petri across the mean width of his room. “No, I suppose not.”
“I’ve made sure we won’t be disturbed. Apparently some fool has put scorpions into some beds around here. Shame no one realises they’re the harmless kind. But I think you have something for me.”
“I do?” Petri couldn’t think what he’d have that Dom wanted. He wasn’t even sure who the man was, really.
Another smile from Dom, swift and sure as a knife in the dark. “You do. Maybe time for you to discover a thing or two. Who knows? You have a letter, I understand.”
Petri sat down on the narrow unmade bed. Last night he’d written a letter, long and heartfelt, to Kacha. Despite what Sabates had said, he’d not intended to send it, in fact had no way to send it… and now here perhaps was a way. But could he trust it?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Dom said into the silence. “You’re thinking, he works for who-knows-who but possibly a magician, and he probably can’t be trusted. Why should I give him my letter?”
Petri started because that was exactly what he’d been thinking. Dom ignored the movement, seemingly bored as he inspected his immaculate nails.
“Because,” he carried on, “Bakar is increasingly unhinged and sees enemies everywhere, even in his own household. I’m the only chance you have, and more than that, I’m a very well trained assassin. And you have upset a friend of mine very deeply. I do not like my friends upset. And yet, you still live. Why is that, do you think?”
Petri couldn’t think; that was the trouble. An assassin–a job title until recently held by Kacha. And here, in his room, yet not to kill him. And Kass–Kass had seemed to trust Dom, at least a little. Petri’s mind whirled, but his mouth settled on an answer before it was even fully formed in his head. “Because you don’t work wholly for Sabates.”
“Well worked out. Yes. I don’t work for him, though at present it suits me to let him think I do. I know that before long, when he considers it the right time, Sabates, or perhaps Eneko or maybe even Bakar might ask me to kill you. If that happens, then I might. Depending on what you do now.”
“If you can get in here, why don’t they ju
st hire you to kill the prelate?”
“You don’t need me to tell you how he’s keeping himself under wraps. Into the palace? Tricky but doable. Close enough to the prelate to kill him? Nigh on impossible at present. At least, not swiftly. That is what I’ve told those who asked, at least. Truth is, like Kacha, I’ve lost my taste for killing when there’s a better, easier way.”
“What do you want?”
Dom held up a packet of papers. “Your seal on this. I’ve read it. Very good. If anything will work on Kass, this is it. And it’s fair warning for her. I was pretty sure you’d do that, at the least. She might even believe you.”
“If you’re going to take it, why not just tell her yourself?”
Dom shifted in his seat and smoothed an imaginary crease in his immaculate tunic. “There are things she needs to hear that I can’t tell her, things only you can say to bring her back to where she belongs. I owe her, I think. No, I know I do. And Vocho, but mostly her. Please. Your seal, and then this uncomfortable interview can be at an end without bloodshed. Sad to say, I will kill you if I have to. I’d rather not, if only because I’d like Kacha still to be speaking to me.”
Petri didn’t think long. He took the seal out of his pocket, but wavered. “You’re doing this for Sabates?”
