Noble's Honor (Changeling Blood Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  His two companions were more appropriately dressed for the weather, every inch of the men covered in cloth against a temperature they clearly weren’t used to.

  Asi bowed to me and then again to Coleman after exiting the car, taking in the trio of Hunters that just happened to be in position to watch the meeting while armed, with a small grin.

  “Ah, it’s good to see that the man I’ve sworn allegiance to isn’t a fool,” he told me. “Lord Kilkenny.” He turned to Coleman and offered his hand. “And I believe this is Captain Damh Coleman of the Wild Hunt, yes?”

  “Yes,” the Hunter said coldly. He didn’t take the proffered handshake. “We’ve got a prefabricated army barracks set up for you and your people.”

  Asi glanced past us to the green not-quite-tent set up behind the house.

  “It’ll serve,” he said cheerfully. “It’s not a windowless basement, after all!”

  “Your eventual quarters in the house are currently, well, lacking in such amenities as floors and walls,” I told him. I’d spent several hours learning how to fold space with Oberis after lunch, but the space I’d created currently resembled a hole in the basement wall.

  It would, once I was done, have windows. Right now, it looked more like a cave with concrete walls.

  “My home is ash and I’m currently in an old enemy’s emergency shelter,” he pointed out. “Even a tent is an improvement, and I’m familiar with the US Army’s prefabs. It’ll be warm enough.”

  “Says the man who isn’t even wearing a T-shirt in minus eight,” I replied. “How are you planning on getting your people here? We don’t exactly have a bus service, and we can only run so many vehicles in and out before people start asking questions. It’s a quiet street…but I’m not sure it’s that quiet.”

  “Since I doubt your Hunters are prepared to ferry my people around just yet, we’ll filter them in over the next few days,” Asi explained. “We’ve got four vehicles between us, but that’s not enough to move everyone.”

  “Make it work,” I ordered. “Coordinate with Coleman; he runs security. That means he’s in charge around here if I’m not here.”

  “I understand completely,” the asura said with a nod. “We will need to prove our loyalty and trustworthiness. We were foes until very recently.”

  “And the speed you switched sides is making me very twitchy,” Coleman told him.

  Asi closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.

  “Seventeen generations, Captain,” he said very, very quietly. “That is how many generations of my descendants were in our fortress when the Masked Lords burned it down. My children and their children and their children for seven hundred years. Gone. Dead. Murdered by our shared enemy.

  “I swore fealty to Jason Kilkenny, but I would hunt this enemy regardless. I will have blood, Captain Coleman.” He opened his eyes again, and for a single instant, I almost pitied the Masked Lords.

  “I will wash this world in blood if that is what it takes to avenge my children. But I think a more targeted approach is wise, so I join you in Kilkenny’s service.”

  Coleman nodded once, sharply.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t understand,” he told the older supernatural. “Just that it makes me twitchy. We’ll find them, Raja Venkat Asi. Together.”

  “I know we will.” Asi sighed sharply. “I know we will.”

  17

  There were enough people coming and going from the house—we were going to have to come up with a better name at some point—that someone interrupting me while I was folding space to expand the basement was inevitable.

  “Hold on one moment,” I said to the person who had knocked on the doorframe behind me. My focus managed to hold through the interruption and I concentrated. Move this piece of the Between here, fold a layer of Force there, twist here and…

  Everything popped into place with a suddenness that still surprised me, and the section of unfinished basement I was working on was twice as large. Another five hundred square feet of bare concrete was now squeezed into the underground space of the house.

  That done, I turned around to see who had interrupted me. I was not expecting, I had to admit, one of Talus’s goblins.

  A moment later, however, I recognized her.

  “Hello, Lan Tu,” I greeted her. Lan Tu was in the service of the Magus MacDonald, one of the handful of servants he’d taken on after his magically augmented Enforcers had betrayed him.

  “Greetings, Lord Kilkenny,” she told me with a small bow. Her face was uncovered here, in supernatural territory, and the five-foot-tall goblin managed to be adorable even bald and with tusks.

  Or perhaps because she was bald and had tusks. It was hard to be sure.

  “I apologize for interrupting, I did not realize you were Working.”

  I could hear the capital W there. That was a Wizard’s phrasing, not a fae one, but I recognized it anyway. Lan Tu’s boss, it seemed, was rubbing off on her.

  “I am done for now,” I admitted. “I’m still learning this trick and it’s tiring. How may I help you?”

  “My trùm sent me to find you,” she said. “He wishes to meet with you at your earliest convenience.”

  Trùm was Vietnamese for boss or master or something like that. I’d only ever heard Lan Tu use it to refer to the Magus MacDonald—and regardless of my own new rank and power and the supernatural politics of the city, there was no question that Calgary remained Kenneth MacDonald’s city.

  Earliest convenience meant right now.

  “Of course,” I told her with a bow. “Do you have a vehicle here?”

  She looked surprised.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Give the keys to Coleman; he’ll make sure it gets back to the Tower. You and I are going a different route,” I said with a smile.

  Lan Tu clung tightly to my arm as we stepped out of Between into the one area of MacDonald’s Tower that wasn’t blocked against that kind of travel.

  There were ways around his barriers—I had a small vial of quicksilver, mercury mixed with heartstone, hanging around my neck that would allow me to overpower them, for example—but none of those ways were subtle.

  If someone bulled past MacDonald’s security, he’d know. And if they didn’t, well, there were two goblins and two kami in body armor with assault rifles guarding that entrance.

  “Identify,” one of the kami snapped in Japanese-accented English.

  “Jason Kilkenny and Lan Tu,” I told them. Even from several feet away I could feel the cold iron in their guns. They almost certainly were loaded with triple-kill rounds—silver, cold iron, and rock salt. Or possibly silver, cold iron and garlic distillate. There were a few versions of the bullets, depending on what your three most likely hostiles were.

  “Ah.” The kami guardian bowed. I could see the rippling aura of his other body shifting around him as he did. “Welcome to the Tower, Lord Kilkenny.”

  I winced.

  “I don’t actually hold that title,” I pointed out. I’d told Lan Tu this before, but the Wizard’s staff were apparently stubborn.

  “You are close enough for those who are not fae,” the kami told me with a chuckle. “Magus MacDonald is in his office. You know the way?”

  “I do,” I agreed. “Can you get Lan Tu something warm to drink? Between was a bit more of a shock to her system than I expected.”

  The goblin woman was shivering despite being dressed for outside in a Calgary winter.

  “We can do that,” one of the goblins, almost certainly a cousin, told me. “You should get to the Magus.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “But I want to be sure she’s taken care of.”

  If she suffered any side effects from traveling Between, that was my fault.

  “I am fine, my lord,” Lan Tu told me with a smile. “I appreciate the trip and the concern, but my master is worried. I have not seen him this afraid before—please, go to him.”

  Afraid? Magus MacDonald was a Power, a being capable of rewriting
reality around him at a level even other supernaturals could only dream of. What could scare him?

  “Very well.” I passed her over to her cousin and gave the rest of the guardians a nod.

  MacDonald’s office was on the top floor of one of the tallest skyscrapers in downtown Calgary, with one wall made entirely of windows allowing him to look out over his domain. The office tower was tall enough that we were actually looking down at the Calgary Tower and its touristy rotating restaurant.

  MacDonald had a heavy desk with the absolute top of the line in electronics, links to Fae-Net and presumably half a dozen equivalent subsections of the dark web. It was all shut down and dark right now, and the Wizard stood by the wall of windows.

  “My lord Magus?” I asked hesitantly.

  “Kilkenny. Come here,” he instructed.

  I obeyed. You didn’t argue with Wizards. I’d been known to occasionally whine at MacDonald, in particular, but I didn’t argue with him.

  It wasn’t until I approached him that I realized he was holding a bottle of rum in his right hand, open and almost half-empty. MacDonald was apparently drinking—hard.

  “To forgotten times and remembered friends,” he said aloud before taking another swallow of the liquor.

  “My lord?”

  “Your war has spilled wider than I ever feared,” he told me. “To where it cannot be permitted to spread.”

  He couldn’t possibly mean…

  “Sandhya Patel has stood guardian over the River Ganges for five hundred years,” the Wizard told me. “She has been a neutral arbiter between deva and asura, colonizer and colonized, for all that time. She was one of the oldest of us, though far from the strongest.”

  “Was?” I asked. That was impossible. Mages did not die except by their own choice. Except…

  “Your Masked Lords apparently decided to test if their stolen sword could duplicate what the spear once did for them,” he said quietly. “Patel was the closest Power they knew they could locate. She has always been open to the people of the land she watches over. Her monastery is a point of pilgrimage for both mortal and supernatural alike.”

  He sighed.

  “Or was. It’s far enough out of the way that the mortal news hasn’t caught up yet, but every pilgrim there is dead. Mortals, supernaturals, deva, asura, fae…even vampires; Patel did not judge those who came to her so long as they observed the truce in her monastery.”

  “And her?” I asked quietly.

  “Murdered. Asi, it seems, can serve the same focal purpose as Esras did, and their ritual works as well against my kind as against the Powers of the High Court.”

  The office was silent.

  “We have a rule, us Magi,” he finally said. “If one of us dies, three of us descend upon the perpetrators. We destroy them. It has been made very clear over the centuries, and Patel is only the third of us to ever be killed.”

  “And?”

  “The Masked Lords knew of our rule,” MacDonald concluded. “They killed everyone, Jason. Anyone who might have been able to tell us who they were. Even if anyone had survived, we already know their masks block our scrying.

  “They have made enemies of the Magi and they do not care. What monster has incubated hidden in the structures of Court and Fealty? Are they not bound by their oaths as the rest of you are?”

  I sighed.

  “There are ways to break Fealty,” I noted. I wasn’t aware of anyone ever actually using them, but the mere fact that we knew they existed meant someone had. “I imagine the Masked Lords learned those first, long ago. Before any of this even began.

  “They have broken their oaths and shielded their crimes behind masks and magic. We already hunt them, Magus MacDonald. Any aid we can provide the Magi we will gladly give.”

  “Will it bring back our dead sister?”

  I let the office fall to silence again.

  “You know that is beyond even the Powers,” I finally told him. “We cannot do anything you cannot. If they can hide from your scrying, we can only find them in the same searches we have carried out since I was born. Our hope was to lure them into an ambush, but…”

  “But they found an alternative to Esras,” MacDonald murmured. “I must wonder, Kilkenny, if they will still come for you. For revenge, if nothing else.”

  “Then I will have surprises for them. I don’t believe the asura who have entered my service would miss the opportunity for their vengeance.”

  He snorted.

  “You must eventually bring those before me; you know this.”

  “I do. Right now, we’re working on making sure they have somewhere to live and that my people don’t kill them,” I admitted. “I’m guessing they didn’t present themselves when they first arrived.”

  Calgary’s particular set of rules said that everyone was presented to the Wizard when they arrived. That was how I had first met MacDonald, long before.

  The asura, though, had snuck into the city and hadn’t cared about our Covenants. They would learn them and obey them now. Fealty went both ways, after all, and if they broke Calgary’s rules, I would be held responsible.

  “I will give you leeway,” he told me. “The situation is unusual and you have earned that much trust. As for the Masked Lords…”

  “I will advise the High Court of what you have told me,” I said. “Anything we learn will be passed on. We would be fools to decline the aid of such powerful allies against our now-mutual foe.”

  “I wish it had not come to this,” MacDonald replied, turning back to the window and drinking more rum. “The wars of mortal men are dangerous enough, but if we turn the wills of Powers upon each other? I do not know what this modern world will make of that.

  “Or if it will even survive.”

  18

  Asi sank his face into his hands at the table as I filled my people in. Coleman, Asi and Mary were gathered around the kitchen table. Kristal was leaning against the kitchen island with a beer in her hand.

  “Patel was good people,” Asi said slowly. “India is almost as bad as Germany or Ireland for being a mixing point of supernaturals. Everything from deva and asura born there, to imported fae, vampires and kami. Efreeti from the Middle East, jianshi from China…there would have been a lot more supernatural bloodshed over the centuries without her. We needed that neutral person without ties to the rest who was powerful enough to enforce her arbitrations.”

  “And now she’s gone and the world is getting much scarier,” Mary said. “It’s been over three hundred years since a Magus was killed, Jason. The Masked Lords just took a scary step up in their actions…and it was a test.”

  “They’ve killed a Power before. They killed four of the High Court before,” I reminded her. “They’re branching out, but it’s not really a step up, per se.”

  “Except that no one challenges the Magi,” Coleman told me. “It’s one thing to challenge the High Court, who have a thousand other distractions to keep them occupied. The Magi have no such distractions. No courts, no responsibilities. If they decide to turn their powers to hunting someone down, there is nothing holding them back.”

  “It seems the Masked Lords aren’t worried.” I sighed. “It also seems they’ve recruited back to strength. As it was explained to me, their ritual required twenty-one participants of roughly the power of a Fae Lord, and only half of them escaped the war in Ireland.”

  “They can only have so many true Lords among their number,” Coleman said. “There aren’t that many Lord-level Fae in the world—maybe two hundred. Maybe.”

  “So, roughly a tenth of all Fae Lords have broken their fealty to the High Court,” I concluded. “At least. Anyone get the feeling there’s something wrong with our damn system?”

  “I wasn’t going to say it,” Mary said sweetly. “On the other hand, one of my Clan Alphas tried to wreck the city a year ago, so…we’re not much better, I guess.”

  “And they’re hiding themselves from the Wizards. That takes a lot of power in and of itself
, and they can only offload so much of that onto the Masks.”

  “I think that has to be their weakness,” Asi finally said. “If they’re shielding themselves always, that drains a lot of power. They have to have some safe zone, some place they can hide.”

  “That doesn’t help us much,” I told him.

  “Except you told us Asi was to replace another weapon,” he noted. “Why? Did they lose that weapon?”

  Coleman chuckled.

  “No. The fourth Power they killed last time was Calebrant, the Lord of the Wild Hunt. Jason’s father.

  “Esras was already linked to the Horned King and the line of Lugh. Calebrant’s last action was to make that link stronger. He bound the weapon to his bloodline so only his kin would ever be able to wield it.”

  “Which is a list that currently consists of myself and Ankaris,” I told Asi. “They have Esras, but they can’t use it without capturing one of us. Or, I suppose, literally getting their hands on a large quantity of our blood.”

  “That explains why we were supposed to deliver your entire body,” he noted. “I’m not certain that gives us anything useful, though.”

  Mary was looking thoughtful, then snapped her fingers.

  “Wouldn’t that be a sympathetic link?” she asked.

  I stared at her.

  “I’m not sure I follow, but please, go on,” I told her. No one else in the room seemed to know what she meant either, but I knew better then to dismiss Mary’s brain. She was probably the smartest person in that room.

  She flushed slightly.

  “I don’t have any power as you guys judge these things, but I read a bunch of fantasy and used to play D&D,” she admitted. “In those fantasies, if you have a sympathetic link—a piece of an object or a person—you can use it to scry even if the target is concealed somehow.

  “If you’re bound to the spear to such an extent that no one can wield it, surely we can follow that bond, can’t we?”

  I looked at Coleman.

  “Damh? You’re the most familiar with hunting with fae magic.”