Cold Iron (Masters & Mages)

by Miles Cameron

  Ghazala’s shop was across the street and perhaps six shops to the north. The jeweller, Rachman, was one storefront closer, and his shop’s interior blazed with arcane power in his enhanced vision.

  ‘We have company,’ Iralia said. ‘I’m calling for help.’

  ‘We can’t run – we’ll never have this chance—’

  She made a face. ‘I’m not running.’

  She drew a glittering, golden wand from her hair and broke it between her fingers.

  Aranthur was still looking at Rachman’s shop.

  And then he saw a burst of power at the edge of his vision.

  Iralia had just erected a shield that shone like molten gold in the darkness. A red missile burst on it.

  ‘So much for secrecy,’ Iralia said, and raised a hand. A river of crystalline light poured out of her hand.

  The other caster was faster than thought. He filled the air with red fire, and moved, passing like music.

  Iralia’s crystalline eruption seemed to pulse with the movement of the other caster, and every image of the man moving seemed to be outlined in her crystal – all this in a single beat of Aranthur’s heart.

  ‘Bitch,’ spat the other caster. He was not close – fifty paces away – and he was staggering.

  And from Rachman’s shop came a dozen men.

  ‘The Lightbringer isn’t here to protect you this time,’ Iralia said.

  Aranthur was already casting his first Safian spell. On himself. This time he was well fed and unwounded, although the wound in his gut immediately exploded in a lightning storm of pain. He staggered back against the tree as the spell racked him. Then the pain ebbed away and left him with the feeling that he was a god.

  He drew his sword.

  Iralia unleashed a net of white fire, and the Servant was caught. He tried to flee in the Aulos as he had the night of Aranthur’s wound, but he was caught in her net.

  He retaliated.

  Iralia screamed and stepped back, her arm covered in worms.

  Quicker than thought, Aranthur’s sword sliced along the worms and millipedes. They were real, physical, and poisonous, and he cut them away in one precise stroke. Then he pivoted on the balls of his feet and parried the first blow of a bravo behind his head. He reached out, faster than any mortal, took the man’s arm and broke it, reversing the bend of the elbow brutally. He snapped his heavy blade around the screaming man’s head and into the neck of the next victim, who fell without a word.

  Aranthur spun, now in the midst of them. He cut and cut, all his cuts rising from low to high, opening groins and arms and chins – blows that were difficult to follow in the poor light, almost impossible to parry or cover. He left Iralia behind, spun, cut, and then rolled over his own sword. He rose with an up-cut between the legs of his immediate adversary, who fell with a choked scream of horror.

  Aranthur was now behind the bravos, and four of them were down. One bravo had received a cut to the chin and was holding his head in his hands.

  There was an explosion of light and every pane of glass on the street of shops burst with the scream of a tortured soul as Iralia’s next working warred with the Servant’s.

  Aranthur’s enhanced vision followed the contest even as his enhanced body ignored the effects. His sword was relentless, and another adversary went down, his sword hand severed by an impossible stop-cut. Aranthur had time to wonder how many opponents he might take on in this state. The men he was facing seemed reckless, and his luck was running out like sand through a man’s hand. There were just too many.

  And then Ansu appeared.

  The Zhouian had a long blade in both hands, and his first blow beheaded one of Aranthur’s opponents. Five heads turned as one fell to the ground.

  Aranthur kicked the closest one in the leg. His enhanced muscles broke the man’s knee, sending him to the ground, never to walk again. Aranthur made a parry too quickly, and took a wound from the slower sword. His ripping back-parry cleared the weapon, and he stepped in, his point over the man’s shoulder. He caught it with his free hand and threw the man over his outstretched leg. He turned, but Prince Ansu had two of the last three. The last was running, his sword abandoned.

  ‘You could have just invited me to come with you,’ Ansu said with a smile. He seemed to speak very slowly, and Aranthur could just understand him.

  ‘I wish I had,’ Aranthur admitted.

  Ansu looked as if he didn’t understand.

  Aranthur glanced at Iralia. She was cloaked in golden smoke. Beyond her, the Servant was cloaked in red. Between them was a bewildering garden of flashing symbols, ropes of colour, and ribbons of other realities. Through this jungle of lethal arcana, pulses of saar and sihr lost their way, and each pulse seemed to add to the forest of unreality.

  At the far end of this bleeding of the Aulos stood the Servant. Iralia’s white fire net still had him, although there were great rents in it. Iralia was bleeding, and something was wrong with her posture.

  Her left hand was a blur of potentialities.

  ‘I go right, you go left,’ Aranthur said, as slowly as he could.

  Ansu flicked blood off his long sword in a crisp roll of his wrist and turned.

  Aranthur moved towards the shops. Although the street had no canal, many of the older buildings had loggia, as if there had once been a canal. Aranthur ran at the nearest, leapt, caught the decorative work at the top of the arch, and swung himself like a gymnast up onto the gallery.

  Across the street, Ansu attempted to slip between two of the flickering ribbons, and something brushed him. A talisman at his throat spat black fire, and he was flung five paces to lie at Iralia’s feet.

  Aranthur ran ten steps along the elevated colonnade and leapt the next gap. The Servant became aware of him and he raised a red hand. The black ball he threw was like velvet on a moonless night, but Aranthur was too quick, and the ball melted the thousand-year-old stonework of the balustrade behind him. He was already past, leaping to the next.

  The Servant turned, his head tracking Aranthur. Aranthur guessed he was the target of the next cast, and supernatural speed was not going to get him to his adversary in time.

  He threw his sword instead.

  It tumbled through the air. The throw was accurate enough, the tumbling of the blade unpredictable, and sword throwing was not something Aranthur had ever practised.

  The hilt struck the Servant’s arm and the blade clipped his knee. Neither was a debilitating blow, but the man’s concentration was ruined. A brief flare of red light marked his wrecked working as it imploded in unfinished logic, and Aranthur leapt.

  His leap was simultaneous with Iralia’s cry of ‘No!’

  He struck the Servant with his feet, bore the man to the ground, and was surprised by the speed with which the man rolled clear.

  Very much like the quickness Aranthur himself was riding. The Servant was enhanced, too.

  But his arms were moving oddly. Aranthur’s leap had broken something – maybe dislocated a shoulder or broken a collarbone.

  ‘You!’ Uthmanos said. ‘How can you be alive?’

  Aranthur threw a straight, Arnaut farm boy punch. Uthmanos was just as fast, but his arms weren’t working properly. Aranthur’s blow was no fight-ender, but he’d fought often enough. He threw a flurry of strong, simple blows, each one robbing the Servant of a little of his balance.

  ‘No!’ screamed Iralia.

  Aranthur’s hands were going numb. Striking the Servant was like fighting the kotsyphas, but the decision point was reached. He brushed aside a late defence, and his fist went past the Servant’s head as quick as one of Iralia’s crystal lightnings. Aranthur slammed the man into a mulberry tree head first.

  The tree cracked.

  The Servant’s neck was broken. Aranthur could see it.

  Uthmanos’ hand came up, like a priest of Draxos giving a benison.

  ‘So be it,’ he said. ‘I am but a servant, and those who come after me will—’

  A wall of go
ld exploded between Aranthur and Uthmanos. It was like a tapestry of transparent cloth of gold, figured with men and women, every one of them apparently alive, illuminated, moving …

  Aranthur stumbled back, his night vision wrecked.

  Iralia caught him. Her face was flayed. Blood ran from her cheek, an ear was gone, and her right arm was swollen and black.

  Light was growing in the Square of the Mulberry Trees.

  Iralia put Aranthur on the cobbles, turning his backwards stumble into a throw, and she threw herself on top of him.

  There was a single pulse of nothing. As if the world blinked.

  The golden wall held.

  Aranthur was deaf, and could not account for the weight on him, or the inability of his eyes to focus on detail. But light was growing around him. Iralia’s slight form lay over him; he remembered her throwing him to the ground …

  Without conscious direction, he reversed their positions, rolling over her.

  She screamed when his weight came on her blackened arm.

  Had she attacked him?

  He didn’t think so, and he rolled off her, reaching for her face with his free hand.

  She grabbed it with her left.

  ‘Open to me,’ he said.

  She lay, her eyes locked on his. She blinked once, and then her defences opened. He reached in, just a tendril of power, to stop the bleeding from her face and ear. The arm was another matter …

  Her golden shield was wavering, and the light in the square was brighter than daylight. The other side of the street was on fire; most of the mulberry trees were afire. The one directly by them was half aflame; the half protected by the shield was still immune.

  ‘I can’t hold it.’ She clenched her jaw. ‘Aphres protect your servant.’

  Aranthur had passed her power before, and now he pushed it down their link, and she took it like a starving mongrel eating meat.

  The golden shield wavered and steadied. People beyond it were screaming.

  Something exploded.

  And then Kurvenos was there. Aranthur looked up and saw the Lightbringer standing by him, his staff moving with inhuman speed, twirling in his hand so fast that it appeared to be a circular shield.

  ‘I have it, Iralia,’ he said.

  Iralia let her working go with a sob of pain.

  The golden shield fell, and a burst of light and sound swelled, but Kurvenos’ staff was, almost literally, everywhere. The power was shepherded, herded, tamed, and reduced. What could not be contained was parried into the wreckage of the six houses across the street, already destroyed and burning.

  Iralia lost consciousness.

  Kurvenos lowered his hands. ‘I told her not to try the Servant in a public place,’ he said wearily. ‘I wanted him alive.’

  ‘He left us very little choice,’ Aranthur said tersely. He grabbed the sword lying under the tree. He could hear a little. ‘Can you save her?’

  Iralia lay on the ground, her beauty destroyed, ugly with blood and black swelling. The poison had begun to reach her neck.

  ‘I can cut off her arm,’ Aranthur said.

  Kurvenos turned and looked at him.

  ‘No,’ he said wearily. ‘I will save her, although others will die. What provoked this …? No, there is no time. I must trust you. Go!’

  Aranthur nodded, and ran for the jeweller’s shop, which looked like a blinded man, all its glass panes blown in by the combat. Householders and shopkeepers were stumbling into the brightly lit street. Men and women, naked or in simple sleeping robes, were bringing buckets and flinging them on the fires. A cat darted from a burning building, and dogs barked, whined, cringed … A man shouted for his daughter; a woman cried. Manacher stumbled from his shop, his mother in his arms. She had a shard of glass in her abdomen, and both of them were covered in blood.

  A man appeared at the door of the jeweller’s shop, wearing a cloak and a mask. He had a sword in his hand and he swung once at Aranthur, forcing him, even enhanced, to make a full parry. Then the man raised a puffer.

  The lock snapped, and Aranthur flinched, and then the man was running.

  ‘Aranthur!’ shouted Manacher.

  The running man …

  Aranthur pivoted and dropped to one knee beside his friend the leather-worker. He put his hands on Ghazala’s temples, and her eyes opened. He went in past her rudimentary defences, reached her blood flow, and steadied it. His own enhancement helped him, as everything in her body seemed to be slow and easy to control, but he was calm, icily calm, almost remote from the fire and death.

  He lacked the skill to knit her flesh, but he stopped the flow of blood around the wound.

  ‘Straight to an Imoter,’ he said. ‘My work will hold for perhaps an hour.’

  ‘Gods bless you,’ Manacher said.

  Aranthur had not time to consider the blessings or curses of the gods, and he launched himself through the door to the jewellery shop. The fleeing man had left it ajar.

  A man was stuffing a bag from a set of shelves in the middle of the shop. He turned and shot with a puffer. This time there was no misfire.

  Aranthur flinched away, placing a counter between himself and the puffer. The burn of the shot felt like fire along his left side. He rolled over it, landed, and the man had moved. But his movements were slow – he was casting, and Aranthur’s cut removed his pointing finger and thumb. And then Aranthur was on him, his hilt in the other man’s face, dropping him to the floor.

  He heard, or felt, the next man behind him. He turned, his sword rising into one of the simple breve gardes as his body straightened. He crossed his new adversary’s sword in the middle.

  The other man attacked, a simple beat followed by a murderous lunge, hard to see in the flame light of the fires outside. Aranthur managed a crisp circular parry. The two men went hilt to hilt, but Aranthur was faster, catching his opponent’s sword hand and pulling as he turned his hips, so that the other man went past him. He should have slammed into the counter, but instead he rolled over it with a lithe expertise that warned Aranthur that this was no bravo.

  His expert adversary stood up into the light of the fires outside.

  He raised his sword.

  ‘Sorry, old boy,’ said Tiy Drako.

  Aranthur lowered his blade slightly. ‘Drako?’

  ‘I came in the back,’ Drako said. ‘Iralia called us.’

  Aranthur stood in the shop, his feet on shattered glass, and contemplated everything he knew. Or thought he knew. He kept his sword point in line.

  ‘I’m not sure who is on what side, just now, old boy,’ he said.

  ‘Draxos’ hairy dick!’ Drako spat. ‘I’m your … officer!’

  Aranthur nodded, backing away slowly. Under the shattered glass were scraps of vellum; an odd thing to find in a jewellery shop.

  ‘If you distrust me, you distrust all of us! Iralia! Dahlia!’ Drako sounded calm and rational.

  ‘Just you,’ Aranthur said. ‘Tell me, Tiy. Did Kallinikos serve the Pure? Does Kallinikos Primos work for them?’

  Drako lowered his sword. ‘Yes. Your friend Kallinikos … came over. To us. But he wouldn’t leave the damn woman. And he entangled you.’ He nodded. ‘You don’t need to know. But his sister was always one of us.’

  ‘And his father had him killed.’

  Drako shrugged. ‘Or allowed it to happen.’

  ‘Or you had him killed to tidy up.’

  Drako nodded. ‘In a way, I like the way you think. But no. I was trying to keep you two apart because I still thought you were one of them. Or he was. Can we put up? I’m bent, but not bad.’

  Aranthur thought the mountebank’s voice had a ring of weary truth. He wanted to believe Drako.

  ‘Why did you tell everyone to back off?’ he asked.

  Drako was sheathing his sword. ‘I didn’t, old boy. I simply left you out of an operation. Dahlia and Sasan are in. You were out. Wounded, and personally involved. And meaning no offence, in ten days everyone will know what we’re doi
ng, but right now, you don’t need to know.’ He grinned in the firelight and looked like someone’s image of evil incarnate. ‘Despite which, you smoked out the Servant and Iralia nailed him. And this place …’

  He was flipping over shards of glass, and he used a kuria crystal to raise a magelight. Outside, the Fire Runners had arrived – an elite unit within the City Militia. They brought a water wagon and hundreds of buckets, and the street was full of organised chaos: shouts, orders; a dozen Brown Order nuns ordering women to form a line for medical attention; an Imoter station …

  Aranthur still had his magik sight on him, although it was tattered by the final exchanges between Uthmanos and Iralia. The sight itself seemed to have furrows burnt into it. But he could see traces of magik all over the shop.

  And under the floor.

  Suddenly the shop was full of light, as if the moon had risen from under the floor.

  Kurvenos stepped in. He was surrounded by light.

  ‘Iralia?’ Aranthur asked.

  ‘Will be healed,’ the Lightbringer said. ‘You still have a sword in your hand.’

  ‘He’s not sure he trusts me,’ Drako said, holding up a scrap of vellum, neatly cut and folded. ‘Occupational hazard of lying all the time, I suppose,’ he added, and shrugged at Aranthur.

  Kurvenos shook his head. ‘Stop it. People are dying out there. A building has exploded in the Angel and a dozen people are dead.’

  ‘Kallinikos Primos?’ Aranthur asked.

  Kurvenos nodded. And raised his hand.

  ‘They fight among themselves, the Pure. They have factions – some older than their allegiance with their precious Master. The Servant you two defeated was attempting to supplant the Duke of Volta, or that’s how we read it.’

  ‘By putting him down, we may just have helped Volta.’ Drako shrugged. ‘Whom the Emperor, on his name be praise, plans to pardon. See why we didn’t want the Servant dead?’

  Aranthur sagged.

  Kurvenos shook his head. ‘No. Victory is still victory, and Iralia paid a high price.’

  Drako made a clicking sound with his tongue.

  ‘We certainly have made the Master look this way,’ he said, as if this pleased him.