The Tainted City

by Courtney Schafer

  “The confluence that’s about to burn out in some magical explosion?” I demanded. “Tell me you can break this…link, binding, whatever the fuck it is!”

  A tinge of his usual contempt crept into Stevan’s voice. “Did I not say the magic is unknown to me? It’s highly dangerous to try and break a binding without understanding it first. But a binding so strong can’t be cast without either willing participation of the subject, or blood to key the spell, and a trace amount wouldn’t be enough. If you want the binding broken, be honest: who in this city holds your blood?”

  “Oh, hell.” I struggled upright. “Avakra-dan.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  (Dev)

  Avakra-dan’s alley was as dark and silent as the depths of a crevasse. “A little help?” I asked Marten and Stevan. “Pello took my glowlight charm.” I sure didn’t want to risk touching the wrong spot on her warded door in the darkness.

  I’d reluctantly explained my bargain with her to Marten and Stevan while we fought our way through shouting, frightened crowds in Acaltar’s streets. Marten had listened in silence, but Stevan made enough acid comments about my idiocy and deceitfulness for both of them.

  Marten’s rings glowed softly silver, enough for me to see the copper plate amidst the grime on Avakra-dan’s door. I scratched gently and stood back. Nothing.

  “I say we break the wards, Marten.” Stevan’s face was all hard angles and shadows.

  “Just be ready for trouble,” I said. “Avakra-dan’s untalented, but still. If anyone can fight a mage, it’s her.”

  Marten flashed a grin at Stevan. “See what fun you’ve been missing, cooped up in the Arcanum? Come, then. Under my lead…” He and Stevan stood shoulder to shoulder before the door, their hands hovering over the surface. Marten started a low, sonorous chant. Ward lines burst to life beneath the dirt, glowing a lurid purple.

  Stevan joined Marten, at first in perfect unison. Then his rich baritone diverged, sliding over and under Marten’s voice in a pattern that diverged further with each repetition. The wards flared brighter, until I had to shield my eyes. A final searing flash made me hiss and duck, even as the wards went dark.

  Marten and Stevan fell silent. They exchanged a swift, grim glance.

  “You sense it?” Marten asked. Stevan nodded.

  “Sense what?” I asked.

  “Death,” Marten said, and opened the door.

  The light of his rings illuminated three eyeless, mutilated bodies dangling upside down from the ceiling. Their feet were impaled on hooks meant to hold charm amulets, their mouths gaping in lipless screams. Blood still dripped from their wounds to pool deep on the floor.

  I choked and put my arm over my nose. No matter how many times I saw the killer’s handiwork, I couldn’t help but feel sick to the core. Marten and Stevan slid into the room, their rings glowing and their eyes intent. I jerked my gaze from the corpses, half fearing to see the killer lurking in some shadowed corner. If these deaths happened during the quake, he’d been here not a half hour ago.

  The charms on the walls had all melted and fused into lumpy, gleaming runnels of metal that coated the stone like an icefall. On the bloodstained, blackened desk sat two copper strongboxes, their lids open wide, their wards shattered. One still held a minor fortune in coin and gems. The other was empty but for a few scraps of paper.

  Didn’t take a scholar to realize the empty strongbox had held her blood-marks. I grimaced, thinking of mine in the hands of the killer. Best case, he’d used up all my blood in casting the mystery binding. Worst case…what other spells might he cast on me?

  That wasn’t all I had to fear. From the looks of this, I’d lost all chance of finding a charm strong enough to protect Melly. Then again…I peered at the corpses. Two men and a woman, their ruined features obscured by gore, their bloodsoaked clothes coarsely woven and lacking in sigils. Yet the woman was too lean of build to be Avakra-dan.

  “Avakra-dan’s not here,” I said. “But she’d never have left her den with clients inside it. She had to have been here when the killer came. Maybe he took her somewhere, along with her blood-marks.” I pointed at the empty strongbox. “But if he’s the one who cast the binding on me…why? And how the hell did he know my blood was here?” Bren’s voice came whispering in my head. Seems one of your foreign friends doesn’t like you much…

  Stevan circled the corpses to examine the back wall. The stone there was adorned by tattered, reddened hangings instead of melted charms. “Look.” He pulled aside a hanging to reveal a second door, scribed with both concealment and protective wards. “These wards are undamaged but inactive. Someone released them, and not long ago.”

  Marten opened the door and disappeared into the dark passageway beyond. He soon returned. “This leads to another alley. I saw no other bodies, and sensed no traces.”

  “Either she left with the killer…or perhaps she escaped him.” Stevan heaved Avakra-dan’s worktable aside, grimacing as his feet skidded in blood. Revealed on the floor were a series of copper rings set with clouded emeralds. The innermost ring’s gems had splintered to shards, dark streaks radiating outward from the holes where they’d been. “Power was stored here, quite a lot of it, but none remains now. Released from its reservoir without control, the raw magic would have reacted against the magic stored within her charms and destroyed them in quite spectacular fashion.” He waved a hand at the slagged metal on the walls.

  “So you think she breached the reservoir as a distraction, and ran.” That sounded like Avakra-dan, all right. I prayed she’d made it. Aside from any information she could give on the killer, or even my damn binding, I had to know if she’d found the charm I needed.

  “Perhaps a more thorough examination of that alley is in order.” Marten moved for the back door again, beckoning Stevan to follow.

  “Wait.” An old memory teased at me. Tavian’s office had held an escape route much like this one. You never knew when lionclaw addicts would get violent, and some of his clients had been highsiders, with access to seriously nasty charms. Yet Jylla had once told me his setup held a dual purpose. “Do you sense any active hide-me wards remaining in the room?”

  Marten frowned. “Hmm. It’s a touch difficult to untangle traces with the confluence still so unsettled, but…” He paced along the back wall, past more shredded hangings. “Something here, quite subtle.” He knelt and passed his hand over one of the broad stone blocks at the wall’s base, humming.

  The block shimmered. Hinges appeared, and a tracery of ward lines.

  Ha. She did have a bolthole. Set off a nice big distraction, open the escape route as a decoy, then duck into the bolthole, leaving your enemy to chase down the wrong direction—classic.

  “Someone’s inside.” Marten laid his palm flat on the false block. “Come out. Now. Or I will cast against you, and that paltry defensive charm I sense will not stop me.”

  Hinges creaked. Avakra-dan slithered out of the dark, cramped space behind the block, a heart-rot charm clutched in one hand. Her coarse mop of hair was singed half away, the skin of her face and arms a patchwork of raw, oozing burns and dried blood.

  “So kind of you to ask nicely.” Her black eyes settled on me, bright with anger. “Clever boy, to guess my bolthole. A bit too clever, yes? Shame about your blood-mark.”

  Did she mean something more than the binding the killer had already cast? I burned to demand answers, but I’d be a fool to show her how badly I wanted them. I’d make sure Marten and Stevan squeezed every last drop of information from her. But Alathian truth spells could be dodged, as Jylla had demonstated so well. Better to offer incentive first.

  “Bigger shame your business got destroyed, isn’t it? We’re hunting the viper responsible. Tell us what happened here, and you’ll have the chance for some revenge. But don’t think to bargain. Either you speak, or my employers will cast.” I tilted my head toward Marten and Stevan.

  “No need for casting.” Avakra-dan spread her hands palm-up, though she
didn’t drop the heart-rot charm. “I’ll gladly speak if it hurts that adesh-toi demonspawn. I was the middle of negotiating a deal with Jevis, here”—she grimaced at the mutilated woman—“and her guardsmen, when the air shimmers, and kaz! The demonspawn is standing there. One after the other, Jevis and her men are screaming and bleeding like slaughtered pigs, and the ground’s shaking like it’ll split open. I didn’t wait. I sparked my failsafe—better a fortune lost than my life. Khalmet’s hand, you’ve never seen such fireworks. A thousand charms burning out, molten metal raining down…”

  She heaved a bitter sigh, surveying the mess on her walls. I could practically see her tallying the lost coin. “The bastard didn’t like it much, I tell you. He may have a demon’s power, but he curses like any man. By the time the charms’ magic faded, I’d set my decoy and was tight in my bolthole, praying to Khalmet the quake wouldn’t crush me. I’ve a peephole in there. Not a great view, but enough. The demonspawn didn’t even try chasing after me. He just ripped out my strongboxes, shattered their wards, and grabbed my contracts. He took a flask from his robe, poured something red all over them—blood, it looked like, though I’ve no idea why he’d carry extra, when he was already wading in it. He spat and said, ‘All those who feed on the innocent will burn.’ The blood-marks flared up in blue flames like wardfire, and the contracts burned away, didn’t even leave ash behind.”

  If Khalmet was kind, maybe that meant I didn’t have to fear further spellcasting…but I knew better than to count on it. Marten and Stevan both wore deep, thoughtful frowns.

  Avakra-dan continued. “After that, the room went black and the ground stilled. I couldn’t see a cursed thing, so I waited, in case the demonspawn remained. Just when I’d scrounged up the guts to crawl out, my door wards flared. I stayed put, and you broke in.”

  “You call him demonspawn,” Marten said. “What did he look like?”

  Avakra-dan shrugged. “Male, around your height, not heavy, amber eyes…hard to say more. He wore a Kaithan tribesman’s gabeshal robe, near every inch of skin was covered. I’ve no idea of his ancestry or age. I did spot metal on the back of his left hand, extending up into his sleeve. The metal was set with an opal and filigreed like some kind of charm, but it looked dark like iron, and iron can’t hold power.”

  “Interesting.” Marten drew Stevan and me aside, and said softly, “Dev, perhaps your binding isn’t intended as a strike against us directly, but happened as a mere side-effect of our enemy’s apparent crusade against Ninavel. He may hate ganglords as much as he does mages. If he binds the clients of dealers in deadly charms to the confluence, in similar manner to the vows that bind Ninavel’s mages…”

  He trailed off with a glance at Avakra-dan. I heard the rest just fine: when the killer destroyed the confluence, it wasn’t just mages who’d burn. My hands clenched in frustrated fury. All those who feed on the innocent…what a pile of goat shit! Yeah, ganglords and their crews dealt with Avakra-dan. But so did plenty of others—streetsiders desperate for protection, or healing charms, or any manner of magical assistance.

  “Twin gods, Marten!” Talm appeared in the main doorway, Lena at his side. They stared at the corpses in dismay. “What did the killer want here?”

  “Your seeking spell failed.” Briefly, Marten’s face blazed with a strained, desperate frustration that matched my own.

  “Pello is indeed veiled,” Lena said. “We could tell he’s in the city, but not where. Also, Ambassador Halassian passed on a message: Sechaveh claims he’s had no word from Pello since prior to Simon Levanian’s death. He assumed Pello dead or taken captive by us.”

  Avakra-dan had hunched in on herself like a spider ready to squeeze back in a crevice, but her eyes glittered with interest. I turned to her. “You know every shadow man in this city. We’re looking for Pello: Varkevian-born, used to work out of Gitailan district. Any recent news of him?”

  “Pello.” Avakra-dan smiled, sharp and sly. “I know him. Sechaveh’s man, is he? I always suspected he had a highside master.”

  “The killer might’ve turned him,” I said. “So if you’ve news, tell.”

  Avakra-dan shook her head, her smile gone. “Pello would slit his own throat before he’d work for anyone responsible for Nayyis’s death.”

  I knew that name. “Benno’s murdered deathdealer?”

  She nodded. “Nayyis and Pello were as close as oath-brothers. They came to Ninavel on the same caravan from Prosul Varkevia, back when they were a couple of scrawny teens. Or Pello was scrawny. Nayyis was already a fighter, whipcord tough and deadly as they come.”

  A nice tale, but I wasn’t sure I believed Pello cared for anyone’s hide but his own. “You heard anything recent of Pello?”

  “No.” But she said it awfully quickly, and her eyes had gone as hard as obsidian.

  “She knows something,” I told Marten. “Ask under truth spell.”

  Avakra-dan’s hand clenched on the heart-rot charm. I took a cautious step back. But she surrendered the charm when Marten demanded it, and stood in the sigil Stevan sketched on a hastily cleaned patch of floor. Over the sound of Stevan, Lena, and Talm’s soft chanting, Marten asked again about Pello.

  Her mouth worked, and words spilled out in a faltering tumble. “Saw him two days ago. He came in, bought a painbender and two dragonclaws, and asked if I knew any charms that could protect against the Taint.”

  I tried not to betray any reaction. Marten said, cool and clinical, “What did you reply?”

  She spat. “Told him no, of course. No magic can do that.”

  “What else passed between you?” Marten asked.

  “I asked him if he knew who’d done for Nayyis, and if he was out for revenge. He wouldn’t answer, but I saw the hate in his eyes. He wants revenge, all right. Bad enough he’d eat his own soul for a chance.”

  “Why did you wish to keep this from us?”

  Avakra-dan sighed. “He paid me to keep silence about his visit, and said if I broke that silence, he’d see me in Shaikar’s hells if it was the last thing he did. With some men that’d be bluster, but not Pello.”

  Before Marten could ask another question, I met Avakra-dan’s gaze and said, “The charm I asked you to seek—did you have any success in finding one?”

  Every fiber of me prayed for a positive answer, but her teeth showed in a malicious, indigo grin. “No. Only a bone mage or blood mage could make so strong a charm, and they don’t deal with the likes of me. I’d thought a highsider collector might have one, but Khalmet wasn’t so kind. Given a long enough timeframe, I could’ve sent to my contacts down in Varkevia, but four weeks? I knew it a gamble from the start. Why do you think I wanted so high a failsafe?”

  I stared at her, my throat closing tight. I hadn’t realized just how much hope I’d pinned on her finding a charm. Not until now, when it was crushed. The nightmarish corpses seemed to leer at me, the stench from them so thick I couldn’t breathe. Avakra-dan was watching me, and so was Marten. Vipers, both of them, cold and calculating, marking my weakness, figuring how best to use it…fuck. Fuck this, all of it.

  I turned and shoved past dripping corpses. At the door, Lena broke her chant to say something, and Talm put out a hand. I elbowed them aside with a snarl. Let them cast against me. I wasn’t staying in that room drowning in blood and death one instant longer.

  The alley outside Avakra-dan’s door was blessedly cool and dark. I leaned my back against stone and stared up at the stars. Anger ebbed to leave a black, dragging despair deeper than any I’d felt since the Change. Why had I ever thought an untalented man like me could take on Ruslan, or do a damn thing against the killer? Melly and Kiran both were one slip of Kiran’s tongue away from disaster, the city about to implode in death and chaos, and I felt so fucking helpless. What I wouldn’t give to be wandering the Whitefires, blissfully ignorant of all this!

  The door scraped open. Probably Lena, come to offer more empty words of sympathy. I slid to a crouch, resting my throbbing head on fol
ded arms. Maybe she’d take the hint and go away.

  “Forgive the intrusion,” Marten said, quiet and serious. “We must talk.”

  “Yeah?” I was so damn tired. “You here to tell me you’re cutting me loose?” That’s what I would do in his place. Between the killer’s binding and Ruslan holding Melly’s blood-mark, I was far too compromised now to be anything but a liability in his eyes. He’d bar me from the embassy, toss Cara out too, leave her and Melly at Ruslan’s mercy, and claim he was merely giving us freedom.

  “No,” Marten said.

  “Why not?” I asked warily.

  He leaned against the wall. “Shall I tell you the answer you’ll believe, or the deeper truth you won’t?”

  “Whichever,” I muttered.

  “If I have a man whom an enemy might suborn, I prefer to keep him close under my eye, not send him forth where I’ll have no idea of his actions. But more than that…I brought you and Kiran to Ninavel. What befalls you here is my responsibility, and I do not take that lightly. I told you I would not abandon Kiran. The same is true of you.”

  “You’re right, Marten. I don’t believe a word of that last.”

  “I don’t expect you to,” he said, with a glimmer of his old cheerful humor. “I must know…you told Lena you wouldn’t help us further without Melly’s safety assured, but you didn’t know then of the confluence’s imminent destruction. Stevan will do his utmost to devise a solution for Melly, but in the meantime…will you help us hunt Pello? Regardless of his employer’s identity, it seems clear Pello knows something of the killer. Far more lives than Melly’s are at stake here—yours as well, if we cannot break your binding—and we have so little time.”

  I wasn’t so callous as to ignore the cost if Marten failed. Faces flashed through my head. Liana, the other kids in Red Dal’s den, all my outrider and streetsider friends…They wouldn’t burn right off if the killer succeeded, but how many would die in the aftermath?