The Tainted City

by Courtney Schafer

  “Gods all damn it!” I slammed a hand against the wall.

  Anxiety tightened Lena’s face. “It doesn’t mean we can’t help Melly. If there’s a way to protect her, Stevan can find it. Truly, Dev, there’s no man alive who’s more skilled with defensive magic.”

  I knew a charm that might be powerful enough to protect Melly. The one I’d asked Avakra-dan to find, in hopes it could save Kiran. The Alathians had one, back in Tamanath—but even if Marten requested the Council send it, it’d take too long to reach Ninavel by courier, and the Council would never agree to release the border wards and cast another translocation spell for my sake.

  I’d have to go to Avakra-dan again. Check on her progress, and offer her more coin—offer the moon, if necessary!—to get another one of those charms. In the meantime…

  I said to Lena, “Go tell Marten, and be sure he’s clear on this: either he gets Melly safe, or I’m done helping him. But first, call Red Dal back. Tell him you mean to bargain with Ruslan for the use of Melly in your research, and until then, you want to be sure she stays undamaged. No more jobs for her or you’ll fry his ass. Give me that comfort, at least.”

  “You should return to the embassy with me and speak with Marten yourself.” Lena’s brows were drawn, her arms folded.

  “I need to go warn Cara, and I’m not waiting one more instant to do it.” I headed for the door, reaching for the copper band of the twin-seek charm on my bicep.

  Lena blocked my path. “If Ruslan is moving against you, you shouldn’t go alone.”

  I gave an acid laugh. “He’s not moving against me, is he? Just my friends. I know Ruslan’s kind. He’ll want to see me suffer. No fun in torturing a dead man.”

  “Ruslan is not the only enemy we have to fear,” Lena said.

  “You mean the killer? Seems to me that if two blood mages got their asses kicked fighting him, you wouldn’t fare much better. Hell, I’m probably safer solo than with one of you by my side. The bastard could’ve killed me easy as breathing in Naidar’s house, but it was Kiran and Mikail he went for.”

  Her worried frown didn’t change. I said, “Look. You’ve still got to question Red Dal about what he knows of missing Tainters. But this blood-mark is bad enough. If Ruslan finds Cara before I do, I’ll—I’ll—” The very thought was enough to stop my tongue, another wave of panic rolling over me.

  Lena reached as if to offer comfort, her eyes soft with sympathy. I backed, and she dropped her hand, her fingers clenching. “All right. But don’t wait to spark your signaling charm, should you notice anything odd. The last time you left to walk the streets alone, we found you in a bloodsoaked, ruined workroom about to attack a blood mage with your bare hands. I’d greatly prefer to avoid a repeat performance.”

  “Me too.” Though in honesty I’d embrace any risk, no matter how insane, if it meant I could get Cara and Melly safe.

  * * *

  I’d never had a more welcome sight than Cara hurrying toward me through a group of drunken miners staggering between taverns on Vasalis Street. The miners whistled as she dodged past. Some turned to watch with sloppy, appreciative grins, but none accosted her, warned by her scuffed outrider leathers and the charms glinting on her lean, muscled forearms that she was no easy slip. The crimson light from the taverns’ burning firestone charms gave her pale hair a bloody cast. Her jaw was set, her face shadowed, yet she looked as beautiful to me as a mountain morning.

  I caught her up in a hug, an avalanche of relief burying all else. “Cara, thank Khalmet. You’ve got to leave the city, right away. You’ve got to run—”

  “Wait, what?” Cara twisted free of my grip. Her eyes widened, searching my face. “Oh, fuck. What’s gone wrong now?”

  I poured out the latest litany of disaster in a low-voiced rush, even as I drew her onward. I didn’t mean to stop until we reached the stableyards just inside the city’s sandstorm wall. This late at night, most would be barred and warded until the hour before dawn, but I knew a few whose owners would rouse readily enough for a bit of extra pay. I wanted Cara on a horse galloping out the Whitefire Gate as soon as we could arrange it. But it near killed me to see the depth of horror in her eyes when I explained what Ruslan had done, and why.

  “It’s my fault, I know it.” I side-stepped around a charmseller’s cart. Old childhood habit had me checking blurred, dim images of the market crowd behind us in the polished metal of dangling amulets. “I should’ve gotten Melly clear before I said one word to Kiran. He and Marten were so damn sure Ruslan wouldn’t think me a threat, but I should’ve known better. I’ll fix this—I’ll get Melly safe if I have to sign my soul over to Marten to do it!—but you need to run for Alathia.” Ruslan didn’t have Cara’s blood, and Kiran had once told me untalented souls were so dim they were nearly impossible for a mage to distinguish without something to key on. If she rode hard, she’d have a good chance of crossing Alathia’s wards before Ruslan could find her.

  A bare-chested Sulanian teenager with beaded braids hanging to his waist slid up to us. “You two look in need of relaxation. Bad times like these, you want Tanit’s pleasure house! Jennies for a bargain price, trained in all the arts of love, glad to teach a lovely pair like you a few new tricks—”

  Cara turned a glare on him that set him scampering backward. “Dev, I can’t just run for Alathia! Bad enough to abandon you with Melly in such danger. But I’ve been working on finding passage for Gevia’s cousin Keni, and Brant’s widow Salvys with her twins, and Jasso—you didn’t hear, but he broke a leg a month back climbing for carcabon stones—hell, all our friends who haven’t the coin right now to leave the city. If I run, they’ll be stuck here. Water rations went up to fifty kenets a liter today, did you know? People say there was a near riot at the Gitailan cistern. A bunch of streetsiders too poor to pay tried to force their way past the guardsmen at the cisternhouse gate. The guardsmen triggered the defensive wards, and thirty people died. Things’ll only get worse, and you know it.”

  I’d heard the dark edge to the crowd’s mutter, the absence of laughter. People stood in tight clumps, their eyes wary and their hands clutching charms. “If you stay and Ruslan slices you into screaming ribbons, that doesn’t help them either.” I angled for another look at the shifting eddies of people behind us, this time in the murky glass of an ironmonger’s shop.

  Cara pinched the bridge of her nose. “What if I go to the embassy? You said their wards are strong. Hell, you said Jylla’s hiding out there. If I stay there, not only could I still help Keni and the rest, but I can keep an eye on that backstabbing bitch for you in the bargain.” I opened my mouth, and she held up a hand. “Don’t give me shit about Marten. He’s already got enough to leash you ten times over. One more hostage won’t matter.”

  I slowed. “Fine, the embassy. Run to the Dawnfire Tower, fast as you can. Go by the roofs, not the streets.”

  “You’re not coming with me?” Cara stopped dead.

  “Keep walking,” I said, in a sharp whisper. “No, I’m not. We’ve got a shadow man trailing us, and he matches the description Jylla gave. I’m going to draw him off while you run.” It’d taken me longer than it should have to notice, between talking to Cara and the dim light of firestone charms and shop lanterns, but now I was certain. A man whose night-dark skin spoke of Sulanian blood, who had muscular arms, a topknot of tightly curled hair, and a narrow, cleft-chinned face…he wore the copper-stained coveralls of a miner and moved casually, sometimes appearing to stop and talk, other times ducking into market stalls as if making purchases. But he’d stayed with us the whole length of the street, and as Jylla had said, his eyes were quick.

  Cara didn’t try to gawp around for him, thank Khalmet. She strode on, though her hands fisted tight. “What if Jylla’s right, and he’s working for the killer?”

  The thought of Naidar’s shadow marking him out for a bloody death in the Aiyalen Spire had the skin of my neck crawling. Wouldn’t be long before the markets started shutting down until dawn. He
might be waiting ’til the crowds thinned to make some move. But I had one advantage Naidar didn’t, for all his magic.

  “No shadow man can follow me if I take to the walls,” I said. “If he does work for the killer, this could be the best chance for a lead yet. I’m signaling the Alathians now.” I tapped my fingers in the pattern Marten had taught me on the gold band circling my wrist, and felt the metal warm. “Once you’re clear, I’ll scramble up and lose him, then turn the tables and do a little shadowing of my own.”

  “Dev…” Reluctance was all over Cara’s face.

  “Please, Cara. Best thing you can do is to get to the embassy and tell Ambassador Halassian what’s happening here.”

  Cara grimaced, but she jerked her head in a nod.

  “When we cross behind that spice cart, split off down that alley,” I told her.

  We passed behind battered shelves redolent with cinnamon, cardamom, and anise. Cara cast me one stricken, burning glance, and disappeared into the alley’s darkness.

  I strode on, heart pounding. Thank Khalmet, the shadow man did too. Two streets down, I ducked down a slit between two wineshops. The walls loomed above me, ten stories tall, the stars glittering high above.

  I didn’t dare wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I brushed my fingers over the wall and found a mortared crack. Right as I pulled up, a voice spoke from behind me.

  “Assilia kora meit,” it said, in heavily accented Varkevian. A rush of wind as hot and violent as a sandstorm tore me from the wall. I hit the rough stone of the alley floor hard enough to knock every wisp of air from my lungs.

  Dazed, my head ringing, I tried to roll to my feet. Nothing happened. My muscles burned and tingled as if pierced by a thousand tailor’s needles, and wouldn’t respond to a single one of my desperate mental commands.

  Hands gripped my shirt and yanked me up. My back slammed against the wall. Magelight flared to paint the walls with sickly green. The cleft-chinned miner loomed over me. Behind him stood a woman whose belted gray dress was marked with purple sigils of a style I didn’t know. The magelight gleamed from a thick triangular crystal held in her upraised hand.

  Oh, fuck. None of the charms I carried would do much good against active casting, even if I could move to reach them. How long until the Alathians came? If I’d ever needed their help, it was now. At least Cara was clear. I squinted at the light of the alley’s mouth. A steady trickle of people passed beyond. None of them looked our way. Every streetsider in Ninavel learns fast and early to keep clear of shadow business.

  “Now here’s a sight to gladden a man’s heart,” said a male voice whose mocking familiarity stopped my breath. Pello slid into the magelight. His mop of curls was hidden beneath a woven cap, but his sharp-chinned, coppery face was as sly as I remembered. “The resourceful outrider, helpless as a newborn kitten.”

  I tried to speak and managed only an airless wheeze. Pello grinned at me, his dark eyes glinting. Khalmet’s hand, what was he doing mixed up in this? Back in Alathia, he’d claimed to work for Sechaveh. That must’ve been another lie.

  “Well?” Pello asked the mage. “Did he signal anyone before you struck?”

  The mage said, “He carries an active signaling charm, but I dissipated its magic the moment he triggered it.”

  Shit. Cara would tell the Alathians, but it’d take her a good hour to reach the embassy. Far too long, if Pello and his pet mage had anything truly nasty in mind.

  The mage had spoken with all the bored impatience of someone stuck doing a distasteful but necessary job. She must’ve been paid to help Pello ambush me. But paid by whom?

  “What of his other charms?” Pello asked. “Shaikar only knows what he’s carrying.”

  Irritation twisted the mage’s round face. “Don’t concern yourself, shadow man.” She leaned around the miner to clamp a hand on my shoulder. I braced myself for some awful manifestation of magic. Instead, in clipped tones, she proceeded to tell Pello exactly what charms I carried and where I’d hidden them. The thick-muscled miner kept me pinned to the wall as Pello dug every one of my charms out of their hiding places and dropped them into a sigil-marked cloth bag.

  When he had them all, he handed the bag to the mage. She intoned something else in Varkevian. The sigils on the bag burst into violet flames. When the flames faded, the mage turned the bag over. A powdery cloud of ash drifted out to mix with the sand and grime coating the alley’s stone.

  “No mage can trace the charms now,” she said.

  I glared, fear and fury rising together. No chance of trying again to bring the Alathians, let alone using my boneshatter charm on Pello or the miner.

  “Turn him around,” the mage said.

  My muscles still wouldn’t obey me, nor would my voice. The miner yanked me around and shoved me face-first against the wall. A hand pulled the neck of my shirt down to expose my upper back.

  Something cold and metal touched the base of my neck, right over my spine. Needling pain pierced my skin, like myriad fangs digging deep. The metal warmed to pulse unpleasantly.

  Shit! They’d put a painbender charm on me. I couldn’t pull the thing off. It had legs like a spider’s that’d driven deep around my spine.

  The miner swung me back around. Pello held out his hand to the mage. She dropped two thin gold rings into his waiting palm.

  “It’s ready to be keyed.”

  He pricked a finger and touched it to one of the rings before slipping the ring on. The metal at the back of my neck pulsed again. I took as deep a breath as my tingling muscles would allow, guessing what was coming next.

  Sure enough, Pello held up a hand as the mage turned away. “Wait. I want to be sure this works.” He whispered a word and clenched his fingers.

  Knives of fire ripped through every organ in my body. A scream tried to escape me, though all that emerged was a hoarse croak. Agony blurred my thoughts, my vision going dark.

  Abruptly, the pain ended. I hung limp in the miner’s grip, my eyes burning and my chest heaving.

  Pello watched me with a sharp, avid smile. “That’s for the crossbow bolt you put in my shoulder.”

  It’d been Cara that shot him, not me. But she’d done it on my order. I mouthed a silent curse and spat.

  He laughed and nodded to the mage. “Your part’s done.”

  Her hands flexed like she wanted to cast something unpleasant on him. “Tell your employer my debt is paid.”

  I sure wished somebody would mention just who that employer was. This all felt a little too streetside for Ruslan. Besides, whoever wanted me, clearly wanted me alive. That mage could’ve killed me on the spot with her strike. Maybe the killer thought I could provide him information that’d let him ambush Kiran and Mikail again and win this time.

  The miner let go of me. I stumbled and fell, my legs still useless. The miner scowled down in disgust. “How long before he recovers from your strike? Look at him. We’ll have to drag him the whole damn way to the meet.”

  “Not my concern.” The mage strode out of the alley, taking the magelight with her.

  The miner sighed and knotted a fist in my shirt to heave me back up to my feet. “Mages,” he grumbled to Pello. “Raving assholes, every one.”

  “You have no idea,” Pello said, with a depth of bitterness that set me wondering all over again. Whoever his employer was, he didn’t seem thrilled about it. “Quit whining and start hauling.”

  The miner half-dragged, half-carried me toward the street, Pello pacing at his side. The tingling in my muscles slowly faded, but I let my feet drag. While I wore the painbender charm, I couldn’t run, not unless I could get the control ring away from Pello first. If he thought me too weak to do anything, maybe he’d get careless.

  At the alley’s mouth, Pello edged out ahead to survey the street beyond. I let my hand swing out and scrape against the corner, hard enough to rip a shred of skin from my knuckles and leave a barely-visible smear of blood. Maybe nobody would see a stain so small, even the Alathians
, if they ever came hunting. Still, it might be enough for a mage to use in a tracking spell.

  As the miner hauled me along progressively darker and emptier streets, I couldn’t help thinking of the horribly mutilated corpses in Aiyalen. Every spine-chilling tale I’d ever heard of demons ran through my head.

  But when we finally ducked down another dark alleyway and they pulled me through a warped and stained metal door into a lantern-lit room, it wasn’t some aloof mage who waited there amidst the crumbling stonework.

  “About time,” my former employer Bren snapped. “What, did you decide to go drinking along the way?”

  He was a tubby Arkennlander in his late fifties, with a moon-round face and a generous mouth. Tonight he showed no trace of the jovial amiability he pretended with his clients. His stance was unyielding, his dark eyes cold and deadly, betraying the ruthlessness that made him Acaltar’s best and longest-lived smuggling boss. The miner dumped me onto the cracked stones at his feet.

  “The snatch needed to be quiet.” Pello fished the second painbender ring from his pocket and handed it to Bren. “We had to wait until he slipped off and tried to lose Jasin. Besides, you’re not the one paying me in this. You don’t call the game.”

  Bren spat something guttural in Varkevian. It sounded like an insult rather than a protest. I wondered who was calling the game—the killer?

  Pello ignored Bren and bent over me. “Shame you never learned to play any part but a token’s. But you’re not the first man to be crippled by his loyalties.” His tone was mocking, but his eyes were dead serious.

  My voice was finally working again. “Thought you worked for Sechaveh,” I husked out.

  “Not anymore.” He said it flat and hard. Before I could frame another question, he said to Bren, “He’s all yours,” and slipped out, the miner on his heels.

  “Bren? What the hell is this?” I shoved up, but only made it as far as my knees before Bren kicked me back down.