The Tainted City

by Courtney Schafer

  Ruslan couldn’t ask him to take the life needed for the spell—the power had to be raised by the mage casting. Or did it? The mark-bond might very well allow Ruslan to siphon off and use any ikilhia that Kiran took.

  Kiran left the sunroom on leaden feet. If he believed in any of the gods revered by nathahlen, he would abase himself and pray in desperation. Let Ruslan not ask me to kill…

  Even if he was spared the choice tonight, he knew it would come, inevitable as the burning heat of highest summer. Better to pray for the easing of his strange reluctance, so obedience would be as simple as Mikail found it.

  * * *

  “Enough studying, little one. The time has come for a more interesting lesson.”

  Kiran looked up from a diagram of the channels needed for the third Akalic spell—an inventively nasty piece of magic meant to infest an enemy’s lungs with ravenous mites—to see Lizaveta standing in the workroom doorway. Her black hair was bound back by silver clasps fashioned in the likeness of star jasmine, her dress a clinging sheath the deep red of heart’s blood overlaid by a delicate lacework of black sigils. The silk was slit from one braceleted ankle to the curve of her hip, revealing an expanse of smooth brown leg.

  For once, Kiran wasn’t stirred by her beauty. His throat was as dry as the sand on his parchment, his mind a fevered tangle. He’d barely been able to concentrate on his spell diagram, too caught up in imagining one distressing scenario after another. Yet the sight of Lizaveta brought a welcome glimmer of hope.

  “Khanum Liza…” He abandoned his stool to kneel at her feet. “Thank you for swaying Ruslan to leniency. I haven’t the right to ask more, but can you not convince him to confine his punishments to me if I should…displease him again? It’s not fair for him to hurt Mikail…”

  Lizaveta drew him upright. She took his face in her hands, her dark eyes piercing his. “Do you plan on displeasing him, Kiran?”

  “I…I don’t want to, but…” He looked away, sick with the memory of the courtesan’s fear. “I don’t know if I can…can cast as an akheli should.” I don’t know if I can kill.

  Lizaveta gently but firmly turned his face back to hers. “You need not fear, Kiranushka. We all have our weaknesses; none are impossible to conquer. As your master, Ruslan will do whatever is required to ensure you prevail. It is perhaps a touch more challenging for him to help you overcome a flaw he does not share, but I think tonight will do much to help you. I promise you, he will not ask anything you cannot give.”

  The tide of Kiran’s worry didn’t retreat. “But if he did…please, khanum Liza! Mikail shouldn’t have to suffer because of me.” The horror of the carrion-beetle vision returned to tighten his chest. To think of his pain and panic magnified ten-fold…Kiran cringed.

  “He will not suffer, because you will obey Ruslan as you should, yes?” Lizaveta laid a soft finger on Kiran’s lips to halt another anguished plea. “You know I do not interfere with Ruslan’s decisions for you and Mikail once he has made them. You are his akhelyshen, not mine.” A little, rueful smile curved her lips. “I have not the patience to teach, or the strength to choose what is best for an akhelysh when they beg otherwise, as you do now. This is why I take none of my own. Instead, I get the far better bargain…I can enjoy you and Mikail as I please, without need to worry over discipline.”

  She kissed him, a deep, coaxing kiss that left him dizzied anew, though it didn’t soothe the roil of his stomach. She didn’t understand the depth of his dismay over harming nathahlen; none of them did. Otherwise, they wouldn’t assume he could so easily shrug it aside.

  “Come,” Lizaveta said softly. “Ruslan and Mikail await you.”

  He will not ask anything that you cannot give. Kiran had to trust that Lizaveta spoke truth. What other option did he have?

  She led him up the spiraling marble stairs that led to Ruslan’s primary workroom. With each step, his fearful anticipation crested higher. The spells he remembered casting had always been performed in lesser chambers, bounded by powerful shielding wards that muted the confluence energies to tame levels. Ruslan cast his spells in a chamber whose wards permitted full access to the immense forces of the confluence. Kiran had rarely been allowed to enter. He must have had more frequent access after the akhelashva ritual, perhaps even participated in Ruslan’s spellcasting…but the voids lacing his memories remained stubbornly empty.

  Ruslan waited before the chamber doors, Mikail at his side, the scarlet sigils embroidered on their black clothing a reverse image of Lizaveta’s gown. Kiran climbed the last steps, his heart thudding so hard he thought his chest might split open.

  Ruslan took Kiran’s shoulders. “Tonight we work the true magic, akhelysh, the greatest endeavor to which a man may aspire. All else is shadows and ashes.” He pressed a kiss to Kiran’s brow; not passionate, but firm in benediction. “Lizaveta will help you observe.”

  Observe…perhaps Ruslan did not intend him to do anything more. Yet Mikail’s posture radiated tension, though his expression was as impassive as ever. Was he nervous merely because he hadn’t channeled for a spell of this difficulty since the one that had gone so badly wrong, or did he fear that Kiran might disobey an order?

  Ruslan put his palms flat on the doors. The ward lines coating the iron flared red, and the doors opened.

  Mikail and Ruslan had indeed been busy. A silver labyrinth of knots and spirals covered nearly the entire extent of the workroom’s stone floor. Kiran struggled to follow the pattern, but kept losing the spell’s shape in the intricacies of individual lines.

  Captivated by the spell, it wasn’t until Lizaveta tugged him gently forward that he thought to look at the anchor stone.

  A man lay spread-eagled on the waist-high chunk of onyx, his ankles and wrists bound with warded silver manacles tight enough to leave bleeding runnels in his flesh. A black hood inscribed with crimson sigils covered his face, but Kiran could hear the harsh, ragged sound of his panicked breathing. His naked body was thick-muscled and heavily scarred. A set of recent raw brands on his chest marked him a condemned man, sentenced to death by the merchants of Goranant House.

  Kiran’s stomach seized. A bloody haze stole across his vision, and he wavered on his feet, the room lurching around him. Deep in his mind, something stirred, black dread stealing up his spine.

  Across the room, Ruslan turned to look at him, sharply. In an instant his presence filled Kiran’s mind. Red light burned away the spreading darkness, layering calm over him like sand burying a ruin. Kiran’s vision cleared, his stomach settling, and Ruslan withdrew. Yet Kiran couldn’t look away from the man on the stone. What had he done to deserve Goranant House’s judgment? Had he stolen money from them? Killed one of their merchants? Whatever his crime, he couldn’t have anticipated this fate.

  Lizaveta interposed herself between Kiran and the anchor stone. “Don’t think on it, little one. In the end, death is death, whether it comes from a hangman’s noose or a warded blade. At least this way, his death serves a purpose.”

  Ruslan had said as much, many times before. Kiran took a shallow, shaky breath and allowed Lizaveta to lead him along the curve of the outermost channel line, heading for a clear space of floor encircled by the looping helix of a protective ward. She positioned him within the ward with his back to the anchor stone, and pulled a needle-thin silver blade from her sash.

  Kiran fought the urge to look over his shoulder at the bound man. He let Lizaveta take his hand and slice a thin, burning line down his palm. She cut a matching line down her own palm and clasped his bloodied hand tight in hers.

  The world faded around him, a subtle, lacy network growing to surround his mind and senses. Drop your barriers, little one, and wait for Ruslan…

  He did as she asked. His inner senses opened wide, the channel lines behind him burning bright and sharp in his head. Lizaveta, Ruslan and Mikail’s distinctive ikilhias stood out like tightly contained pillars of colored fire. The bound man’s life energy was duller, chaotic and uncontained,
the space around him stained with a dark, flickering energy that Kiran realized came from his fear. Underneath it all, the confluence heaved in a vast lake of fire. Great currents swirled in dizzying spirals, already sluggishly mimicking the channel line pattern in spots.

  Disorientingly, his perception shifted, as if he now stood beside the anchor stone as well as before Lizaveta. Startled, he resisted, only to feel soothing reassurance from both Ruslan and Lizaveta.

  The mark-bond—Ruslan was once again projecting his own perceptions into Kiran’s mind. The understanding helped Kiran adjust to the odd, doubled sense of the world. As Kiran’s resistance faded, Ruslan pressed deeper yet, until Kiran’s sense of self blurred.

  The knife hilt warm and familiar in his hand; the bound body on the stone before him merely a canvas to be viewed with concentrated, clinical attention. A cut here, a slow twist there, pain the instrument to spark the body’s dim ikilhia into a blaze powerful enough to harness the confluence’s currents…

  Faintly, Kiran heard screaming, but the sound seemed thin and distant, nearly lost under the power swelling to overwhelm his senses.

  If the power from the zhivnoi crystal had sung in his blood like a fine wine, the power Ruslan raised brought a dark joy nearly soul-shattering in its intensity. Kiran was dimly aware of falling to his knees, his head thrown back; he would have collapsed completely if not for Lizaveta’s grip. The yearning to taste that power firsthand rather than at a remove was so strong he might have lost all control and reached blindly for it, heedless of the dire consequences of disrupting the carefully channeled energies, if not for Lizaveta’s presence surrounding his mind. She held him within her magic the way she might hold carved crystal in her cupped hands, supporting and restraining at the same time.

  The power built, spiraling upward, filling the containment channels nearest the anchor stone until they seared Kiran’s senses raw, pleasure sliding over into pain. Again, Lizaveta was there, dimming the sensation, gently pulling him back.

  Blood slick on his hands, noticed only in caution lest the knife slip; the body’s ikilhia stoked to the highest level possible, about to collapse back in on itself and vanish: now.

  Ruslan’s blade descended one final time. The shock of the man’s death ignited the containment channels into a raging inferno, even as Ruslan released their wards. Power raced outward through the pattern, shaped and directed by Mikail, and pulled the fiery currents of the confluence into alignment, the energies enhanced a thousandfold. The spell blazed into shape, a construct of searing beauty and sure, inexorable power.

  Ruslan paused, gathering his concentration. And then he cast, exerting the full force of his will through the pattern, his entire being demanding his desired result; and the confluence bent the world to his desire.

  The sensation was intoxicating in a different, deeper way than the touch of power had been. Kiran felt with Ruslan the certainty that in this moment nothing was beyond his grasp, that no god imagined by man could match his absolute control over the world.

  As the spell took effect, it was as if Ruslan stood within the bloodied room in Aiyalen, a dark mist of mental energies swirling sluggishly around him. Delicately, carefully, Ruslan manipulated the mist, drawing out and rejecting everything that matched the mental patterns of the dead mages, all four patterns held simultaneously in his mind. The strain was immense, but Ruslan’s will and focus never faltered. Slowly, he molded the mist into a smooth, clouded chain. Ruslan released the dead mages’ patterns and gathered his concentration once more, focusing on the thought-chain.

  Wrenching transition; anticipation. Surprise is on my side, and these vipers cannot stand against me. Hatred; exultation. How shocked they look, when their bodies are torn apart. All their cursed magic made useless; a taste of the triumph to come. Soon all the vipers will burn and the old ghoul with them, the great wound in the mother-vein cauterized at last. I care not for the stains on my soul if I can free the world of their poison… But first, the destruction of the ghoul’s water source. Frustration; anger. Vaz-Kavash curse him and his soulless servants! Perhaps with enough of the vipers’ blood, I can devise a better method… Nervousness; tension. I have tarried long enough; already, the stone’s glow fades. Wrenching transition…

  The chain ended, the energies controlling the confluence currents fading, nearly used up. Ruslan’s concentration did not waver. Methodically, he fed the remnants of power back down into the confluence, smoothing its currents until no trace of the spell pattern remained.

  Kiran’s doubled perception vanished. The absence of Ruslan’s fiery strength left him disoriented once more, his body’s rhythms strangely disordered. He bent over his knees, sucking down harsh breaths and fighting to slow the runaway gallop of his heart.

  A steadying wash of shimmering violet slid through his body. Kiran climbed to his feet with Lizaveta’s aid and wiped sweat from his temples with his shirt sleeve. His heart might have slowed, but his mind remained fogged with confusion, thoughts jittering into vapor before he could complete them.

  A last tingle of magic made Kiran’s palm itch, as Lizaveta fed his body enough energy to heal the cut she’d made. She smiled knowingly at him, her eyes as dark and deep as the night sky.

  “You enjoyed your taste of real power, did you not?”

  Kiran flushed. Linked as they had been, she’d felt every bit of his desperate yearning and joy. He nodded, looking down.

  Lizaveta put her palm to his cheek, her touch cool against the heat of his skin. “There is no shame in it, Kiran. This is what we are. Ruslan speaks truly when he says there is nothing greater.”

  Kiran turned to look at the anchor stone. The condemned man’s body had vanished, burned away to nothing in the blaze of power his death had generated. But dark stains dulled the stone’s glossy surface, and Ruslan’s great silver knife lay on top, the blade black and clotted with blood. A fever-chill passed over Kiran. He wanted with an ache so deep it left him breathless to stand in Ruslan’s place, to have all that glorious power at his own command. Yet to slice a helpless man open, to deliberately cause and prolong pain…the knife firm in his hand, blood welling from flayed muscle…Kiran choked and wrapped his arms around himself.

  “Are you all right?”

  Kiran dragged his gaze from the anchor stone to meet his mage-brother’s worried gaze. Strain still pulled at Mikail’s face, his sandy hair lank and sweat darkening the collar of his shirt.

  “I’m fine,” Kiran said, hating the weak, thin sound of his voice. Mikail didn’t look convinced. He said something quick and low to Lizaveta, who picked her way over darkened channel lines to where Ruslan stood, his head bent and his chestnut brows drawn in a deep, thoughtful frown.

  When she touched his shoulder, Ruslan started. He took her hand and glanced at Kiran. “Forgive me, akhelysh. Thinking on what we learned, I forgot how unsettled your mind yet is, after your accident. A problem easily solved…”

  Blessed, cool calm filled Kiran to smother both yearning and revulsion. He sighed in relief, and Ruslan smiled.

  “What did you learn?” Mikail looked between Ruslan and Lizaveta in eager inquiry. A channeler needed to devote all his concentration to maintaining the spell pattern. Mikail had probably only gotten a vague impression of the thoughts revealed by the spell.

  Ruslan looked at Kiran. “Well, akhelysh? What information did we glean from our quarry?”

  Kiran struggled to order his mind. Though his emotions had calmed, his thoughts still felt dismayingly scattered, the flame of his ikilhia oddly erratic. “He uses the blood of his victims in some fashion, though I don’t see how blood from the dead can support any significant spellwork…” Even old blood could hold power, true, but far less than metals or gems. “Whatever his method of magic, it cannot be sustained for long; he was concerned about it running out. He cursed with the name Vaz-Kavash, like it was a god’s name, but I’ve never read of that god in the southern or eastern pantheons. That implies he’s not Varkevian, Sulanian, or A
rkennlander by heritage.”

  “Vaz-Kavash is the name certain Kaithan tribes give the lord of dust and bone, the carrier of dead souls,” Lizaveta said thoughtfully.

  Ruslan nodded. “That combined with their myths about ghouls makes me think our quarry is Kaithan by birth. But his heritage is far less important than the implication of his attitude toward mages. Hard as it may be to believe, I suspect our quarry is nathahlen.”

  “Not a mage?” Mikail sounded stunned. “But…how can that be? Mere charms can’t provide such thorough protection against defensive magic. Even the Tainted cannot stand against mages as this man has done.”

  Kiran had to agree with Mikail. “I don’t see how an untalented man could have survived the strike I cast against him in the workroom this morning, let alone disappear as if by will.”

  Ruslan shook his head, slowly. “I share your confusion, akhelyshen. If he is merely a mage’s catspaw, then that mage is far cleverer than I had imagined to cover his participation so well. The man whose thoughts we heard believes himself the architect of these attacks.”

  “How interesting.” Lizaveta traced a finger along her slender silver blade. “A nathahlen enemy…we have not been threatened by such a one in countless long years.”

  “A threat we must remove soon.” Ruslan’s tone was far heavier than Kiran would have expected. “Sister mine, I fear my pessimism is confirmed. The deaths and attempted disruption of water magic are secondary to our enemy’s main aim: the destruction of the confluence.”

  “The confluence?” Kiran stared, shock piercing layers of calm. “‘The great wound in the mother-vein, cauterized at last’…that’s what you think he means? How could he possibly hope to do it?” That incredible sea of magic, so wild and deep that even the spells of the akheli left no more than ripples on its surface…Kiran couldn’t imagine how any mage could seriously affect it, let alone a nathahlen.

  “It has happened before,” Ruslan said. “Far from here, and with a confluence much smaller in size…but I have seen it done.” His eyes held Lizaveta’s, sharing some memory that turned their faces strange and ancient, a brief glimpse of the centuries that lay beneath their unchanging vitality. “A confluence exists because a balance of forces within the earth restricts the usual flow of magic, instead causing it to pool like water in a cistern. Disrupt those forces enough, and the magic will burst free to seek new paths, in similar fashion to spell energies when a channel pattern is too weak to control their flow.”