Casket of Souls

by Lynn Flewelling

Thero raised a questioning eyebrow as he took the stone from Alec.

  Alec waited expectantly, hoping the wizard would divine something from it instantly. “A boy got this stone for a hog’s tooth. A little girl currently dying in the Sea Market temple got a sweet for a clay doll.”

  “Interesting,” Thero muttered, tilting the stone this way and that to catch the light.

  Rain lashed against the glass-paned dome overhead and lightning vied with the lamplight as he tried a few spells, then clutched it in his hand, muttering another under his breath. After a moment, however, he shook his head. “Ordinary quartz, imbued with nothing. It’s useful in a few spells, but it has no killing power.”

  A wave of disappointment rolled over Alec. He’d been certain this would be the key. “But there has to be something!”

  “I’ve never seen quartz that color,” Seregil noted.

  Thero shrugged. “It’s common in Skala’s northeast territory, near Isil.”

  “But not found down here on the peninsula?”

  “No, but you can get it easily enough. I’ve bought some from a stone dealer in Farrow Street.”

  “And you can’t read anything about the old man from this one?” asked Alec.

  “No, that’s one of the properties of the stone; it doesn’t take on the essence of those who handle it. That’s about all that makes it valuable, actually.” He held the crystal so it caught the light again. “It’s just the sort of thing a child would like, isn’t it? And sweetmeats.”

  “I’d like to know where our strange friends got it from,” Seregil mused. “If they bought it here, then the dealer might be able to tell us something. But if they brought them here themselves, then they may not be from the city after all. Is your man in Farrow Street the only one who sells these?”

  “I doubt it,” replied Thero. “I’ll make inquiries around the House to see if anyone gets their stones from somewhere else. As far as you know, is it always a trade?”

  “We only know of a few cases for certain, but it was a trade those times,” Alec told him. “I think that must be significant. Otherwise the ravens could just as easily buy or steal what they want, right?”

  Thero pondered that for a moment, clearly intrigued in spite of himself. The wizard loved a riddle as much as Seregil did. “Given the nature of the trades, it isn’t like for like,” he mused. “And apart from the quartz, none of the objects had any real value?”

  “Is a hog’s tooth used for any magic?” asked Alec.

  “None that I know of. And even if it were, you wouldn’t need to trade with a child to get what you could have for free from any butcher’s offal pile.”

  “So?” asked Seregil.

  “I’m not certain yet. If I had some other type of traded item, one that would hold an impression, I might be able to tell you more.”

  A heavy knock sounded at the door and Thero went to let Valerius in.

  “You’ve found something?” the drysian asked, tossing his wet cloak over a bench.

  “Alec got this from a boy who traded for it with some beggars called the raven folk.” Thero handed him the yellow stone.

  Valerius held it up to the light, sniffed it, then licked it. Shaking his head, he handed it back. “What am I supposed to make of this?”

  “You don’t sense anything from it?”

  “Nothing. It’s not poisoned, if that’s what you were thinking. And I suppose if it were cursed or bespelled, I’d be hearing about it from you, Thero.”

  “I sense nothing on it, but this kind of stone doesn’t retain impressions.”

  “You mean we went through all that for nothing?” Alec exclaimed in dismay.

  “No, Alec,” said Seregil. “We just need to get something else, and now we know how.”

  Thero rested a hand on Alec’s shoulder. “This is getting desperate. I know what this means to you, but the two of you have made inroads in both cabals that can’t be taken over by anyone else.”

  “What about Micum Cavish?” asked Valerius. “Maybe he could look into this raven business for you. He’s very good with the lower classes.”

  Seregil arched a wry eyebrow. “Do you want to tell Kari Cavish that we intend to send her husband into the south Ring?”

  “You don’t think he can handle himself there?”

  “Of course he can. But not alone. Bilairy’s Balls, Valerius, I wouldn’t go in there alone, and I doubt you would, either.”

  “Micum wouldn’t have to,” said Alec. “We could take turns during the day, helping Micum.”

  “What about Malthus and his friends?” asked Thero. “And the reprisals?”

  Seregil sighed. “The two sides may do the job for us.”

  “Have they tried assassinating you lately?”

  “Nothing so far. Perhaps word got back to them somehow that we aren’t so easy to kill. Or it was only Laneus sending them. With two failed attempts, I suspect that if the others come after us again, it won’t be by way of an assassin. Given what we’ve seen of the methods on both sides, it’s more likely to be some form of blackmail.”

  Valerius snorted at that. “What could they do to you that way? It’s not like either of you has a pristine character.”

  “I expect it would be something along the lines of another incriminating letter, like the one found with Laneus’s body.”

  “At least Korathan knows the circumstances of that one,” said Thero.

  Seregil frowned. “If too many more of those sorts of things come to light, he might just start to doubt all of us. Now, as for Micum, will you send one of your little messengers out to Watermead? Just tell him we have a job we need help with.”

  Thero summoned a tiny spark of blue light into being and said softly, “Micum, we need you in Rhíminee. Watcher business.” With that, he flicked his finger and the little light flew across the room and disappeared through the wall by the door.

  “What will you do now?” Thero asked.

  “We’re close, I think. All we need to do is get our hands on something that will hold an impression for you to read and we’ll have them.”

  Just then a frantic knocking came at the door, and what sounded like a scuffle.

  “Let me in, Thero!” a woman’s ragged voice cried out over the softer sound of a man’s trying to reassure her. The lock rattled and the door banged wide, framing Thero’s servant Wethis supporting a rain-soaked woman. She wore no cloak over her mud-spattered gown, and her black hair was plastered to her face and shoulders. It wasn’t until she cried out and rushed to throw herself sobbing into Seregil’s arms that Alec realized it was Eirual. Seregil caught her and they swayed together a moment before sinking to the floor in each other’s arms.

  “Oh, no. No!” Alec gasped. Eirual was too hysterical to speak, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind what had happened.

  “The lady arrived on horseback, insisting that she see you and Lord Valerius at once, my lord,” Wethis explained.

  “Fetch blankets and hot wine,” Thero told him. “Then find a nightdress and make up one of the guest beds.”

  Thero cast a fire in the workroom fireplace. They wrapped Eirual in blankets and Seregil held her in his arms before it. He coaxed a little of the wine into her, as well, and Valerius pressed his hand to her brow and murmured a healing. The hysterical weeping slowly subsided into sobs and then to tearful sighs.

  “Myrhichia is dead,” she managed at last. “She just closed her eyes and …”

  Seregil stroked her wet hair. “I’m so sorry, my love. So very sorry.”

  She looked up at the wizard and drysian. “Why couldn’t you help her?”

  Thero knelt and took her cold hand between his. “We tried, Eirual, but we haven’t found the cause yet. I’m sorry.”

  “My poor, darling girl.” Tears overflowed those sad violet eyes again and she sank against Seregil in a swoon.

  With Alec’s help he got her downstairs to Thero’s guest chamber and into bed in the dry nightgown. He rested a hand on her fo
rehead. “She’s feverish.”

  “That’s not unusual after such a shock,” Valerius explained when they’d carried the news upstairs. “I’ll see to it personally that she’s properly cared for.”

  “She can remain here, or I’ll have her taken home in a carriage, if she’d rather,” Thero told them.

  “Maybe we should stay tonight, too,” Alec suggested.

  “We might as well. Do you still have those spare clothes I left here, Thero?”

  “Yes, of course. They’re in the chest in the apprentice chamber.”

  Seregil and Alec stayed with Eirual, but though they slept entwined in each other’s arms again, there was still a cold space where Myrhichia should have been.

  THE following morning Alec helped Seregil escort Eirual home in a hired carriage. Leaning silently on Seregil’s shoulder, holding both their hands, she seemed to have no more tears left, but her cheeks were pale, her eyes dull with grief.

  Alec couldn’t think of any words of comfort to offer; his own sorrow was too raw, and he suspected Seregil felt the same, though he was concentrating on soothing Eirual.

  The house was closed in mourning. Word had been given out that Myrhichia had died of fever.

  Seregil gave Eirual his arm and helped her up to her bed. As he pulled the coverlet over her, she caught his hand. “Who would want to kill poor Myrhichia? She never harmed a soul!”

  “I don’t know. But they’ll pay, I swear to you.”

  Her dark eyes met his. “The Cat. Will you speak to him? I’ll give anything!”

  He kissed her brow. “I will. And he won’t take a penny of yours for avenging her, I promise you.”

  She gave a tremulous sigh. “I wish I could thank him myself.”

  He gave her a fond smile as he stroked the hair back from her cheek. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Not even after all this time?”

  “No. He won’t change.”

  Hyli and a few other girls came in to sit with her. Alec and Seregil took their leave and went to Myrhichia’s room.

  The velvet drapes were drawn and candles had been lit. Coils of sweet smoke rose from an incense burner hanging from the ceiling to cover the smell of death.

  Myrhichia had been laid out on her own bed. The women of the house had bathed her and dressed her in a white silk gown. Her hands were folded on her breast; the gold sesters on her eyes glittered like tears in the flickering light. Devoid of cosmetics, her pinched, waxen features lacked any semblance of life, and when Alec touched her hand he found it stiff and cold. The young woman who’d so sweetly ushered him into the soft give and take of real lovemaking was gone. A sob caught in his throat at the memory.

  Seregil put his arm around Alec’s shoulders and pulled him close. “We did all we could, talí.”

  Alec shook his head angrily. “Not enough! If we’d caught that old man—”

  “I’m sorry. I swear to you, we’ll find out what happened and avenge her. But we have a duty to keep Elani and Klia safe. We can’t do anything more for Myrhichia now.”

  He held Alec and let him cry for a while, then handed him his handkerchief. “Come on, talí. Work’s the best thing for us now.”

  Alec wiped his face and nodded. Taking his dead friend’s hand for the last time, he whispered, “By Illior, Myrhichia, I swear I will kill the one who killed you!”

  Seregil was grim as they headed back to the Orëska for their horses.

  “How often has the Cat helped Eirual?” Alec asked.

  “Oh, three or four times, over the years. Small jobs, except for one. I hunted down a man who murdered one of the girls. Strangled her in her own bed. It was early in Eirual’s career and she didn’t have the influence she does now, so the bluecoats didn’t waste much time trying to find him.”

  “Sort of like how no one seems to care about the poor with the sleeping death.”

  “Yes, very much like that. Then again, I don’t suppose the very poor care much about the doings of the rich, either. The gulf is too wide. Not many have been on both sides of it, as we have.”

  They visited Thero’s Farrow Street stone dealer, but the man hadn’t had dealings with any strange folk.

  “Have you had many people buying this particular kind of stone before?” asked Alec, showing him the one he’d bought from the boy in the Ring.

  “Wizards, mostly, and dishonest jewelers.” The merchant examined the stone closely. “This isn’t one of mine. In fact it’s better than anything I have here. You could cut this one and pass it off as citrine or beryl. Maybe even a yellow sapphire.”

  “Do you know anyone else who sells them?” asked Seregil.

  “Only Mistress Elein, in Bank Street.”

  They made that their next stop, but it was a dead end, as well. The woman was as certain as the other dealer had been that she’d have remembered anyone that fit the raven folk’s description selling a stone that pure.

  “So they could have brought them from wherever it is they came from.”

  “Or bought them from some street vendor in any one of the markets,” Seregil replied with a sigh.

  They returned to Stag in time for the evening meal and found Micum waiting for them in the kitchen. He’d come dressed for nightrunning, in homespun clothing and mud-flecked boots, with a small pack at his feet. Rain droplets still beaded his long moustache and his mane of red-and-silver hair.

  They carried their supper upstairs to eat in private and Seregil laid out the circumstances surrounding the sleeping death and the loss of Myrhichia.

  “Astellus carry her softly,” Micum said sadly. “If these raven folk are the same people who were attacking the Lower City poor, then Korathan’s quarantine must have driven them up here.”

  “So it would seem. Yet the first Kepi saw of them was up here.” Seregil absently tapped his pewter spoon on the edge of his untouched soup bowl. “We’ll have to set someone to watch at the Yellow Eel Street temple. If that little traitor who led us into that ambush really did make a trade, she might just show up there.”

  “I’d like to have had a word with that old man, too. I’d really like to know how he gave me the slip like that.”

  “So, what’s the job, exactly?” Micum asked as they settled over wine.

  Seregil smiled at the familiar glint in his old friend’s eyes. Micum grew more keen still as Seregil and Alec explained the complicated tangle of problems with the ravens and the noble cabals.

  “So it’s Alec and me for the Ring, then?”

  “I’ll go in with you sometimes, too, but it will always be with one of us. And only during the day,” said Seregil. “Micum, I’d like you to stay out of sight here when you’re not on the job. Alec and I will have to be seen at Wheel Street and around town.”

  Micum took out his pipe and tobacco pouch and set about preparing for a smoke. “That suits me fine.”

  The rainy weather continued for the next few days. Seregil and Alec were summoned once to the Palace to attend Elani, and spent the following night burgling Kyrin for fresh evidence. There was more gold in Kyrin’s secret room, but no new coded messages. Perhaps Klia had rooted that out, at least for now.

  They set Kepi to watch at the Sea Market temple, in case the boy who’d traded with the old man or anyone else with the sleeping death turned up.

  With the threat of quarantine hanging over their heads, Alec and Micum made their forays into the Ring slum. Alec wore his peasant-woman garb and Micum looked suitably disreputable in a dirty soldier’s coat and an eye patch. He went armed and they were mostly left alone. Though they found more people, mostly children, who claimed to have traded with a raven person, almost none of the descriptions matched. One had dealt with the old woman with the strange belt adornments, but no one had seen the old man. There was talk of a young woman in a ragged cloak, and the lame young man on a crutch, but none of the people they questioned were able to give much more of a description than that. No one remembered a tall swordsman hanging about.
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  Kepi soon turned up at Wheel Street again with news of a boy who fit the description of the one Alec had gotten the yellow crystal from. He’d been brought into the Yellow Eel Street temple, along with many others.

  “The merchants in the square are up in arms about it,” Kepi told them while having his customary meal in the kitchen under the fond eye of the cook. “They’re hollerin’ for quarantine louder every day ’cause folk are staying away from the merchants nearest there.”

  “Then we’d better hurry,” said Seregil.

  Alec and Seregil rode to the temple and found it ringed with angry people shouting at the priests and trembling acolytes.

  “You know we can’t turn away the sick,” the head priest cried. “Maker’s Mercy, good people, let them at least die in peace.”

  They shouldered their way through the crowd and into the temple. Once inside, Alec shook his head, looking at all the sightless sleepers lined up against the walls. The boy he’d gotten the stone from lay on a pallet near the door.

  Alec hunted out the drysian in charge. “Could I borrow two of your acolytes, please, Brother? I need to send some messages.”

  The two boys were quickly sent off, one with a message for Valerius, the other for Thero.

  While they waited he and Seregil made use of their time examining the stricken people, looking for marks of any sort, or anything else out of the ordinary.

  “Here’s something,” said Alec, kneeling by one of the little girls. “Look, someone’s cut a lock of her hair in the back. I saw that on another of the little ones over there, too.” He turned to the drysian woman. “Have you noticed that with any of the others who’ve come through here?”

  “No. But we deal in illness, not hair.”

  “Alec, look!” Seregil pointed to a child on the far side of the room.

  It was the little golden-haired washerwoman’s daughter and her mother. The child still lived.

  “That’s a few days longer than we expected,” Alec pointed out hopefully.

  “We can’t take anything for granted,” Seregil warned.

  The wizard and drysian arrived within the hour. The crowd had swelled but parted respectfully for Valerius.