The Tainted City

by Courtney Schafer

  “No.” Something in his tone jerked my head up.

  Red magelight flared beyond him in the darkness of the alley, revealing Ruslan. Melly stood before him, Ruslan’s hands resting on her small shoulders. Her amber eyes were wide in silent appeal, fear printed on her heart-shaped face. Her red hair was loose in a tangled cloud, and a silver torc set with blood-dark rubies and etched with jagged sigils circled her throat.

  Every muscle in my body locked. “No!”

  Ruslan smiled at me in pure, malicious anticipation. Kiran was watching me, his face pale and set. He’d known Ruslan was here. I snarled at him, “You lying bastard! You said she was safe!”

  A muscle jumped in his jaw, but he didn’t reply.

  Fear and despair stormed through me, my body trembling. Thinking felt like trying to walk a ridge in a howling wind. Ruslan couldn’t cast against me. But if I attacked him, he’d hurt Melly. She could try and fight him with the Taint…but that torc around her neck must be some blood magic version of a painbender charm. Using the Taint was far easier than casting magic, but it still needed concentration. I’d learned long ago just how impossible it was to lift or shove or fly in the midst of pain so bad you couldn’t breathe. Besides, even if she dumped an entire pile of rubble on Ruslan’s head, it wouldn’t do much more than piss him off.

  “Dev?” Melly’s voice was thin. “He says he won’t hurt me if you obey him.” I could tell she knew better than to believe it. She’d always been clever. But the confusion lurking in her eyes tore at my heart. She knew me only as Liana’s friend, a friend who treated her and all Red Dal’s Tainters with equal, casual affection. She had no idea why a blood mage had singled her out, or why I’d care.

  “It’ll be okay, kid.” Because that was the lie you had to tell, even when we both knew it wasn’t true.

  Ruslan’s smile widened. Kiran said to him, “The spy is dead.” It sounded like a warning.

  “A pity.” Ruslan considered me. “After your previous defiance, I should tear the child’s heart from her chest. Yet you are the least of my enemies. I will stay my hand from the girl and seek a different path for revenge if you cooperate in my hunt for more important prey.”

  Did he really think me so dumb as to believe he’d leave Melly alone? Still, I’d buy what time I could. “I’ll cooperate.”

  “Then move not a muscle.” Ruslan glanced at Kiran. “Hold the child. I will search his memories and learn what he knows of traitor and killer.”

  The minute Ruslan had what he wanted, Melly would die screaming. I had to think, had to stop him—

  I blurted out, “Try it, and you break your vow. After my last little chat with Kiran, the Alathians cast a binding on me. They didn’t want him digging their secrets out of my head. The minute you start mucking about in my memories, their spell will kill me, and your vow is broken. So don’t even think about getting grabby.” A total lie, but one I hoped Ruslan would find plausible. Especially if he could sense the killer’s binding in me.

  Ruslan’s lips drew back from his teeth in a brief, silent snarl. One hand slid to the torc on Melly’s throat. “Speak, then, and quickly. Who is the traitor?”

  “Wait,” Kiran said abruptly. “Ruslan, how can we be certain his answers are true? A truth spell will harm him if he resists, and break your vow. But if we take him before Sechaveh to question him, either Lizaveta or one of Sechaveh’s mages can cast in our stead, and we can be sure of the information we gain. Also…if we take him straight to Kelante Tower, it may help mollify Sechaveh over our failed strike.”

  I blinked, remembering the tornado of fire howling past. The destruction around us was Ruslan’s doing? I’d assumed the fire some new magic of the killer’s. If Ruslan would just listen to Kiran, take me before Sechaveh—I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity.

  I said to Ruslan, “Leave Melly alone, and I’ll gladly spill my guts to Sechaveh. You want revenge on Martennan, right? So do I—you know why.” I didn’t look at Kiran. I wasn’t such a fool as to try and counter the lies he’d swallowed, not with Melly right there in Ruslan’s hands. “The traitor is someone Martennan cares for. Exposing this treachery will hurt him, more deeply than any casting of yours could do. So ask yourself…which of us do you hate more?”

  Ruslan fingered Melly’s torc, his eyes cold with calculation. She shuddered under his touch. Her breath quickened, her gaze flicking from me to Kiran, and her hands fisted.

  She was nerving herself up to use the Taint. I caught her eye, willed her, Don’t. She’d only provoke Ruslan into hurting her. If I could just get to Sechaveh, that was her best chance. I prayed, a silent, desperate litany.

  “You are right, akhelysh,” Ruslan said to Kiran. “We should be cautious. I will seek Sechaveh’s aid in the questioning. But before we take him to Kelante…” He looked at me, and my stomach seized at the renewed malice in his eyes. “Caution also indicates we remind him of the consequences of any attempts at escape.”

  He didn’t chant like the Alathians did to cast, didn’t so much as twitch a finger. But Melly wailed, high and shrill, and clawed at her temples.

  “It hurts, stop, please—” Stone shards rattled on the ground around her, skittered away to ricochet off the alley walls. She was shoving them blindly, unable to focus well enough through the pain to muster a proper blow at her tormentor. She fell to her knees, screaming.

  The agony in her cries cut me deeper than any blade. Ruslan watched me with hungry delight. I snarled at him, “You’ve made your point. Keep it up, and I’ll tell far more truth than you’d like.” I cut my eyes at Kiran, who was staring at Melly, his face gone chalk-white. Not that I thought Kiran would believe me straight off if I started yelling about him and Alisa, but it’d sure as hell trigger his curiosity.

  Ruslan’s eyes narrowed. Melly slumped, her shrieks dying into gulping sobs. I hurried forward and gathered her into my arms. She clutched at me and pressed her tear-streaked face into my shoulder, her thin body shaking.

  Kiran watched us, his face still bloodless, one hand pressed to the spot where Ruslan’s sigil lay beneath his shirt. I hoped Melly’s cries haunted his dreams so badly he never slept again.

  “We go to Kelante Tower,” Ruslan said. “Now. Carry the child if she cannot walk. If she dares again to use the Taint, she’ll reap far more than a taste of pain.”

  I helped Melly to her feet, muttering, “Just hang on, kid. I’ll get you free of this.” But it was a promise I was terrified I couldn’t keep.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  (Dev)

  “Think they’d give us some water?” Melly whispered, eyeing the guardsmen around us. They were Sechaveh’s men, his scorpion crest prominent on their shirts and the ends of their gold sashes. Melly and I had been herded into a waiting room near the top of Kelante Tower while Ruslan spoke privately with Sechaveh. It wasn’t the guardsmen we had to fear; it was Ruslan’s partner Lizaveta, who lounged on a divan near the door, her eyes never leaving us.

  This was the first I’d seen of her. She looked as beautiful and deadly as a demon from a tale. Jeweled pins studded her rippling sheet of black hair, her long-lashed eyes wide and dark in the perfect brown oval of her face. Crimson and black sigils patterned her indigo gown, and a barbed knife as long as my forearm hung from a black sash belted around her waist. The guards wouldn’t get within five feet of her, or raise their eyes from her sandaled feet when she spoke.

  “I’ll ask,” I told Melly. She was looking white around the mouth, her cheeks blotchy with dried tears and exhaustion. She’d refused my help on the long walk up to Kelante Tower, doggedly insisting she was fine. I’d let her regain a little pride, though I’d heard how her voice trembled. Until tonight she’d been boss Tainter in Red Dal’s gang, cocky and brash as only a Tainter at the height of her power could be. But Ruslan was enough to make grown men cower, let alone a kid who’d just turned twelve.

  I raised my voice. “Hey. The kid’s feeling sick—she needs water, unless you want her throwing
up on your fine carpet.”

  The head guardsman shifted his weight and glanced at Lizaveta. Her lush red lips curved in a smile that held the same cruelty as Ruslan’s. “Perhaps after your testimony,” she said. “It will encourage you to speak faster.”

  She wouldn’t be giving Melly any water after my testimony. She’d be helping Ruslan carve Melly into shreds, and she’d wear that demon’s smile the whole time. Unless I could convince Sechaveh to stop them. Nerves set my stomach jumping.

  I put an arm around Melly’s shoulders. “Here, sit down.” She let me steer her over to a cushioned chair. I dragged a second chair over and sank into it. Every muscle ached. Bruises blackened my skin, the gash on my left arm still a crusted mess of blood and grime.

  Melly perched gingerly on the edge of a cushion. She touched the torc around her neck, then jerked her hand down, grimacing. She leaned toward me and whispered, “Hurts when I touch the charm, and I don’t know where to strike to shatter it. Do you?”

  The kid had guts, just like her father. I eyed the jagged sigils on her torc. Red Dal taught his Tainters how to read ward patterns and identify the spots where physical damage would disrupt their magic without causing a deadly flare-out of magefire. We’d learned how to safely break the common sorts of charms, too; but blood magic wasn’t common.

  “I don’t know the sigils,” I whispered back. “Blood magic might mean the charm’s too strong to shatter. It’s sure as hell not safe to try. I’ll get you out of this, Melly.”

  She gave me a look that said she wasn’t at all certain I could pull that off. “Dev…why did the blood mage take me?”

  I drew my hands over my face, wearily. I didn’t want to have to explain the entire mess, but she deserved an answer. “Because…because I was friends with your father. He was an outrider, like me. He got killed on a convoy trip some years back, but when he was dying, he asked me to watch out for you, in his stead. I promised him I would—vowed it in Suliyya’s name.” Yeah, and what a disaster I’d made of that vow. All I’d ever done was drag her deeper into danger.

  Melly said, “My father? But…why would he care? He didn’t want me. If Red Dal hadn’t taken me in when my mother died, I’d be dead too.”

  Red Dal told all his kids that. Nobody wanted you but me. I saved you, because I saw you were special. For most Tainters it was even the truth. The gods knew no family had come looking for me when I Changed, and my price had been cheap.

  “Your father did want you,” I said. “But he and your mother didn’t get along.” That was one way of putting it, given that Melly’s mother had conceived her specifically to blackmail Sethan. “Then when she died, you were only a toddler. He had to work in the mountains, and couldn’t afford to pay someone to care for you. So he gave you to Red Dal, thinking that after you Changed, you’d be old enough to travel the Whitefires with him.” No need to tell her what a naïve idiot Sethan had been.

  “He never came to see me,” Melly said, scowling. “Not like you.”

  “Red Dal wouldn’t let him.” I’d heard from Liana that Sethan had tried once, not long after Melly came to the den. Red Dal had warned him: come again, and you’ll be dead before sunset. No handler wanted his Tainters to have divided loyalties. Red Dal had tolerated my sporadic visits to the den after Sethan was dead, but only because I’d long been friends with Liana. I’d always taken care never to single Melly out, or breathe a word of my connection to her.

  “Your father loved you,” I told Melly. “A lot.”

  “I don’t care,” Melly said. “Red Dal’s my father now.” And then, in a choked whisper, “I want to go home.”

  New pain seized me. I couldn’t bear to tell her that even if I saved her from Ruslan, she’d never return to Red Dal’s den. “I know.”

  The door opened. Ruslan strode in, Mikail and Kiran at his heels. Melly and I both tensed.

  Ruslan said, “Sechaveh is ready to question him.” Behind him, Kiran’s face was as blank as Mikail’s; but unlike Mikail, he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

  Lizaveta rose from the divan. “Shall I cast to ensure he speaks truth, brother?” Her slim fingers caressed her dagger, anticipation gleaming in her eyes.

  Oh, gods. I gripped the chair arms to stop myself from bolting.

  “No,” Ruslan said shortly. “Sechaveh insists his pet Seranthine should perform the spell.”

  If I’d been standing, I probably would’ve toppled over from relief. As it was, I relaxed my death grip on the chair and sent up a swift litany of thanks to Khalmet. I hoped I could take Sechaveh’s insistence as a sign he remained deeply pissed at Ruslan. I’d need all the help I could get when the time came to try a bargain.

  Lizaveta didn’t take her hand from the knife. “Then I’ll keep watch on the child for you while you attend the questioning.”

  My relief vanished. Keep watch…mother of maidens, let that be all she did! But I had little enough leverage here. She wouldn’t kill Melly, not until Ruslan was certain he’d squeezed every last bit of information from me. I had to cling to that.

  Ruslan nodded. “Mikail, Kiran, you will return to the house and work on the spells we discussed.”

  “Yes, Ruslan.” Kiran said it in perfect unison with Mikail. He hadn’t once looked at me, but I knew the true reason Ruslan was sending him from the tower. He didn’t want Kiran anywhere near me while I spoke under truth spell.

  Ruslan pointed at me. “Bring him.” The guards moved in.

  I stood and said to Melly, “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  Her fingers locked white on a cushion. But her spine straightened, and she ducked her chin in a nod. My heart hurt all over again; I’d seen that same determined courage a thousand times in Sethan.

  The guards herded me after Ruslan, out the door and up a flight of carpeted stairs to the audience chamber. Inside, Sechaveh sat slouched in his stone chair, his lizard’s eyes hooded, his ringed fingers steepled before his chest. Just like the first time I’d seen him, he wore silken clothes in pale shades matching the room’s stone, though this time his neckcloth was the color of dried blood—the color eastern Arkennlanders used for mourning. Magelights set in iron sconces shaped like rearing scorpions cast a cool silver glow over the chamber’s marble floor. In the darkness beyond the windows, lightning still flickered over both the Whitefires and Boltholes. The blue fire within the obsidian rings before Sechaveh’s chair leaped and coiled in a manner far more agitated than I remembered; another bad sign for the confluence, no doubt.

  Edon shuffled out of the shadows, his manner as deceptively awkward as it’d been in Jadin Sovarias’s house.

  “Stand here,” he ordered me, and pointed at a spot on the chamber floor that looked no different than any other. I obeyed, all too aware of Ruslan’s basilisk gaze on me.

  Edon unslung a soft-sided, funnel-tipped pouch from his back and poured sand from it in a circle around me. The sand was a strange dull green in color, like it had some other mineral mixed in. He poured a second circle beyond the first and embellished it with odd little swirls and loops.

  Sechaveh watched in brooding silence, while Ruslan wore an expression of impatient contempt. A blood mage probably only needed a thought—or a dagger—to cast a truth spell. Sand mages like Edon were rumored to be only middling in power; though a middling mage was more than enough to ruin any untalented man’s day.

  I agreed with Ruslan on one thing: I wished Edon would hurry the fuck up. My gut was a mess of nerves, my blood buzzing in my ears. Gods only knew what Lizaveta was doing to Melly while I stood here. I ached to petition Sechaveh, but I had to prove my value to him first.

  Finally, Edon finished drizzling sand on the floor. He knelt and laid a single sapphire within the swirls of the outer circle. An azure flicker raced over the sand. The innermost circle turned a vivid, startling cobalt, matching the flames in the confluence charm before Sechaveh’s chair.

  Edon said, “If he lies, the innermost circle will turn black, and the second layer of the
spell will trigger to force the truth from him.” He glanced at me. “It’s not an experience you’ll enjoy.”

  “I’ve no intention of lying,” I said, with complete truth. Edon took up a stance to my left, his booted toes nearly touching the outermost line of sand. He shut his eyes and extended his hands.

  I felt nothing, not even prickles over my skin. Ruslan contemplated the sand circles, frowning. He said to Sechaveh, “I wish to test the spellwork before you begin.”

  Sechaveh waved a hand. I repressed a grimace. Test the spellwork, my ass. Ruslan wanted to see me suffer, even if Edon’s spell hopefully wasn’t as vicious as Lizaveta’s would’ve been. But I didn’t protest. Better if Sechaveh was wholly certain of my answers.

  Ruslan faced me and demanded, “Speak your name.”

  “Dev. Devan na soliin, if you want to get fancy.”

  The innermost circle stayed blue. Ruslan said, “Speak it again, and lie.”

  I eyed the sand around me and took a steadying breath. “My name is…Sethan ap—”

  The circle turned jet black. A vise crushed my skull. Agony sent words boiling out of my throat. “Dev! My name is Dev, Devan na soliin—”

  The sand regained its cobalt hue. Pain and pressure both vanished. I gasped for breath, running my fingers over my head to make sure it hadn’t split open. Khalmet’s bloodsoaked hand! The Alathians’ truth spells were subtle, a slowly rising tide that couldn’t be denied. This was about as subtle as a rockslide.

  Ruslan said mildly, “The spellwork appears adequate.”

  “So it would seem.” Sechaveh leaned forward to study me. “Devan na soliin. I hear you bring information that may help me end this threat to my city at last. I certainly hope so.” He glanced at Ruslan, his yellow eyes gone hard. “After the catastrophic mistake Ninavel suffered today, I’m quite eager for better news.”

  Oh yeah, he was still pissed. Thank Khalmet. I said, “Even if what I know isn’t enough for you to catch the bastard, it’ll point you to someone who knows far more.”

  “Ah yes,” Sechaveh said. “Ruslan told me you claim one of the Alathians is in league with my enemy. Speak now: who is the traitor?”