“Yes,” Brand said flatly.
Addam said, “They are young. Single. Neither has been promised into an alliance with an opposing court. There is no reason that they couldn’t be together. It’s strange, but it does not mean they tried to hurt me.”
“Addam,” I said. “They didn’t want anyone to know they were together.”
“Perhaps it is not as secretive as that. Ella has been taking day trips to our Westlands compound. I recall wondering about the sudden interest. They may have just been spending time together, privately—not necessarily secretively.”
“In the Westlands?” I echoed. “On day trips? Addam, doesn’t that seem a little extreme to you?”
“Ella’s been . . . I guess the word is chafing under Aunt Diana’s watchfulness. We pretend that Aunt Diana is tutoring her, though we all know Lady Justice believes Ella requires caretaking. Ella’s been demanding more independence lately—taking shopping trips on her own, taking these day trips out to the compound that the Moral Certainties share. I know the Westlands can be a dangerous place, but the paths there are secure, and the compound is very well protected.”
“So are bear cages,” Brand said. “So are nuclear power plants. That doesn’t mean you step inside one to knock boots.”
Addam’s eyes, that unusual shade of burgundy, grew pinched. “She goes with an armed guard. Though . . . I admit I am concerned. She can be very impressionable. I wouldn’t want to think Michael is taking advantage of that.”
Brand said, “Rune gave you the speech. Aren’t you listening? Don’t you understand why seeing Ella and Michael together makes a lot of the pieces fall into place?”
“There are pieces?” Addam said, almost smiling. He saw the look on Brand’s face. The smile failed.
And then a stinging spray of seawater splashed into my face. The ship’s deck tilted under a wave and sent me stumbling into a pile of tarred rope. Brand and Addam weren’t there, of course—which only made sense if one particular thing was happening.
“Whose memory am I about to tear my way out of?” I demanded furiously.
“Apologies,” Lord Tower said from behind me. “It was a convenient way to talk.”
My anger trailed into ellipses. Lord Tower stood at the prow of a ship, in this memory of his, which I’d been mentally pulled into. And he was young. Younger than I’d ever seen him, including after a rejuvenation treatment. He was dressed like an old-fashioned naval officer, under a punishing equatorial sun.
Barefoot Spanish sailors darted around us. On the horizon was an approaching crescent of land. Massive tropical trees teemed at the water’s edge.
It was a very good memory construct. The sailors actually noticed me—or, at least, they noticed something like me that made sense in their ghostlike context.
“Be honest,” I said. “Did it occur to you to try my cell phone? Even a little?”
“Matters are very serious, Rune,” Lord Tower said.
I shut up.
“This is where I met its kind once,” he said, and pointed absently toward land. “I was trying to see if I could recall anything that would help. You must come to the Pac Bell. Now. There is nothing more urgent.”
“You know about Rurik,” I said. “The recarnate that’s been after me. Don’t you?”
“I do.”
“And you know what Rurik is.”
Lord Tower said, “He’s a lich.”
“A lich.” I shook my head. “Liches are a myth.” Worry prickled my skin like a burn.
“Come to me,” he said, and then he kicked me out of his temporal lobe.
The South Bridge in Edinburgh was built to span the thousand-foot Cowgate gorge. Completed in 1788, the nineteen-arch viaduct had extra floors and over a hundred vaults, making space for cobblers, smelters, milners, and cutlers.
It was, metaphysically speaking, cursed from the start.
First, they demolished three slums to make way for the project. Slums have always been a fertile ground for deep psychic residue. Then, the city rushed the construction and wound up with an architectural design that lacked sunlight, healthy air circulation, and sanitation. To make matters worse, the neighborhood’s oldest resident was chosen to be the first to walk the bridge. The resident, an old woman, died days before the event. Due to political shenanigans she made the crossing in her coffin.
By the turn of the century, the vaults had become a nest of red-light districts, cheap taverns, and poor immigrants. A fire in 1824 killed dozens of Highlanders and Irishmen; and the infamous serial killers, Burke and Hare, allegedly murdered over seventeen people in the vaults and sold their bodies to a local medical college.
Eventually the vaults were abandoned and filled in with rubble, where they stayed hidden until the Arcanum bought and translocated them into underground paths beneath the busy traffic of the Pac Bell neighborhood.
I didn’t tell Brand and Addam about the lich. They hadn’t heard the conversation between Lord Tower and I—all of that had happened in thoughts, not reality. I only mentioned Lord Tower, his summons, and the Spanish ship. Past that, I was still wrapping my brain around the reality. It was not an easy task—not when you consider the number of real boogeymen that we already knew walked the earth.
As we crossed under the city’s financial district, conversation was kept to a minimum. Brand gave a few terse instructions and settled into his hypervigilant bodyguard mode. Addam was still upset by our conversation.
Morning rush hour filled the South Bridge tunnels with all manner of people who didn’t give a shit about my problems. There was something reassuring about that. A werelion and a were-dire-wolf in man-shift forms growled in each other’s beard stubble. The crowd parted for a Minotaur laborer as he stomped his way to work. A businessman in a thousand-dollar suit sobbed openly into a cell phone while staring at a map directory and asking about street corners.
The tunnel was lined with restaurant shops and stands. They filled the moody stone arches with cantrip lights, roasting coffee beans, and the click of metal against porcelain. The sight of an espresso cart nearly filled my eyes with tears. I said, “Need it.”
“You need sleep,” Brand said over the muffled wail of emergency vehicles moving through the traffic above our heads. “You’re dead on your feet. Why the hell couldn’t the Tower just meet us at Half House?”
“Maybe he forgot the way,” I said. “It’s been ages since he’s swung by for a barbecue or a ballgame.”
Brand gave me a sour look.
“He’s the Tower, that’s why,” I said. “I’m going to get a coffee. I love coffee. I miss coffee.”
Brand pulled out his phone. “I’ll check in with Queenie.”
I walked away from them. Addam joined me at the kiosk. He said, “May I buy you an espresso, Hero?”
I sighed. “This hero business. Are you pretending you don’t know who I am?”
“Am I?”
“Addam, you know who I am. You used my name with Ella.”
Addam shrugged. “Lord Tower is my godfather. You are his protégé. It’s not so unlikely I’d know who you are.”
I almost laughed, because it was such a slick way of avoiding the fact that every scion knew who I was. I was a walking object lesson. I was what happened when a court wasn’t strong enough to protect itself.
There was a young woman in line ahead of us. She had pale-blue skin and wings made of snow flurries. I brushed melting flakes off my cheek. Addam murmured, “Snegurochka. Russian snow maiden. Very rare.”
“Is she part of your court?”
“No, her kind is from Kostroma. Russia’s European plain. My family has Siberian connections. Irkutsk, mostly.”
“Quinn doesn’t have an accent.”
“Quinn has only briefly lived outside the city. I was born in Irkutsk, and lived there for many years while New Atlantis was built. My older brother Christian sounds like me.”
“I haven’t met Christian yet,” I said. “He’s been in the hospital for a
while, hasn’t he?”
“And Ella may have put him there? Is that where this is leading?”
“Yeah,” Brand answered from directly behind me.
Even I jumped a little. Brand gave me an angry look. “That’s right, you didn’t fucking see me. Coffee isn’t sleep, Rune.”
Addam gave Brand a look that, if not pissed, wasn’t pleasant either. I moved up in line and placed my order, distracting them.
Addam said, a moment later, “You suggested that Ella and Michael being involved—romantically—made sense.” Addam turned so that he was looking at me too. “What does that mean? What sort of sense?”
“I know your sister is manipulative,” I said, “but is she cruel? Genuinely cruel?”
“Manipulative is a strong word,” Addam hedged.
Brand made an exasperated sound. “Are you fucking interested in anything we have to say?”
“I . . . No, she is not cruel. She is . . . easily influenced, and she is very obsessed with her personal standing, but she is not cruel.”
I said, “We’ve been trying to figure out what anyone would gain from your absence. We know that, with you gone, your interest in Moral Confidence goes to your business partners. That might seem like motive, but your interest in the company is nothing compared to your influence and court contacts, which they need. What we didn’t ask ourselves was this: What if one of your business partners got your interest in the company but didn’t lose the influence of the Crusader Throne?”
“Through a relationship with your sister,” Brand said. “And think about this. Why keep you alive? Why go through the considerable godsdamn effort of using a small army of zombies to hold you captive? In comfort? You had wine and fast food, for fuck’s sake. It’s fucked up. It’s two entirely different mind-sets.”
“As if,” I said, “Ella could only be convinced so far. Taking you? And increasing her standing? Sure. Killing you? Maybe she balked at that.”
It was adding up.
Christian’s illness and Addam’s absence were both nonlethal ways of giving Ella a straight line toward the heir scion seat.
Michael Saint Talbot wanted to move Moral Confidence into a riskier direction, but Addam had resisted.
Addam had just told us that Ella was chafing under the excessive care of her family, much like Michael chafed under his.
I said, “For what it’s worth, I really wanted it to be Ashton. He’s such a douche.”
“Ashton isn’t nearly as indolent as he pretends,” Addam said. His eyes lit as if this a better alternative. “Lord Strength is a stern man. He made Ashton train at a Wasteland camp. Ashton knows how to hurt people—he knows strategy.”
“He did a pretty crappy job of it in the hospital. And anyway, they learn how to fight there, not summon recarnates,” I said.
The barista cleared his throat to get our attention. Addam fetched my coffee for me. I started to follow, but Brand grabbed my funny bone in a pincer grip. He whispered, “What did the Tower say?”
“What do you mean?”
“Rune.”
“He thinks Rurik is a mythological monster. But you know Lord Tower, he’s high-strung. I’m betting we just have an ordinary-sized monster after us.”
“I hate when you’re sleep-deprived. Everything’s a bad fucking joke.”
We stood by a circle of potted plants as Addam rejoined us, handing me my caffeine. At the table next to us, an ancient man—wearing the motley of the Fool’s court—was reading the future with scalpel runes. As I watched, he accidentally laid open his thumb on one of the ceramic blades. He stared blankly at the blood and then fainted over his latte.
My nerves prickled. I didn’t know why. But my instinct was strong enough to have me tossing my coffee into the trash, to free up my hands. “We need to move.”
Magic surged. A rush of it, coarse and cold.
I turned in a circle, then twice, and on a third spin decided that it had come from behind us.
Another Revelry court member was shaking the unmoving prophet.
Noise above. More sirens on the roads overhead.
Had I heard sirens before?
And people. The flow of people . . .
Rush-hour foot traffic should have been moving in a predictably forward thrust. But I saw people standing in the middle of the corridor on phones, upset or excited. Members of the guarda were pushing their way toward the street exits.
“What’s happening?” Brand demanded to a guarda officer who was rushing by us.
“Out of my way,” the guarda said.
Brand grabbed the man’s shirt and swung him into a nearby wall. The man’s head bounced off stone. He said, “You can’t do—” and Brand snapped his head back again.
“Tell me what’s happening,” Brand repeated.
The guarda were our police, but they weren’t the city’s real power, and they knew it. They respected force.
The officer said, “People are dying. All over the place. Just dropping. They say it’s some spell, but no one knows.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to do with us,” I said weakly after Brand let the officer go.
“Maybe,” Brand said. He gave both ends of the corridor a look and said, “Backs to the wall. Be alert. We’re only two blocks away.”
We moved. The taste of magic didn’t fade. If anything, it now tasted like char. Brand saw the twist of my lips and picked up his pace.
“Can you feel that?” Addam whispered.
“Yes.”
“What is it? Is it a spell?”
“I think so,” I said, and then the sense of wrongness spiked, a kernel of god-awful flavor that had me gagging. I felt an awareness. No. More than awareness, more sentient than that. It was recognition. “Brand, I think Rurik’s tracking us.”
Addam said, “But the guarda told us people were dying. How is that tracking us?”
“I don’t know. Brand, something’s going to happen. Something’s closing in on us.”
Brand rammed through the crowd, shoving indignant, clueless people out of our way—people who had no idea they were bowling pins for whatever was rolling after me. Ahead I spotted the huge, modern stairway that led toward the Tower’s block.
The lights overhead began to flicker, a five-second strobe made all the more dramatic by a keening wail that echoed off the pitted rock walls.
To our left, a woman screamed. She’d thrown herself to her knees. Next to her was a jaundiced man, coughing like he had pottery shards in his lungs.
The coughing stopped. The woman screamed louder. I don’t think she saw the black air swirling from the man’s dead eyes and slack mouth. I did, and I knew what it was.
A spectre. A violent, summoned spirit; a day-walking ghost. The spectre came together into a smoky humanoid shape and surged above the crowd.
I touched my mother’s cameo. A fractal burst of light blazed around my body. I peeled the Shield off me and molded it into a ball. I hurled the ball at the approaching spirit.
The creature and my spell collided. The Shield slid around the spectre like a bright oil spill. I could see it thrashing inside the bubble, its phantom claws trying to bunch and tear the spell under gaunt, crooked fingers.
I focused on my wrist-guard. The metal became warm and malleable, and slid over my knuckles. Next to me, Addam released a spell from one of his own sigils. I felt the magic snap and push against us. Telekinesis. A very versatile magic, and completely useless against an angry spirit.
“Ten o’clock!” Brand shouted.
I hadn’t even seen the second spectre soaring down the passageway.
I had three spells. One of them was tied up in the first spectre; the second would bring the tunnel down on our heads; and the third, Fire, had possibilities—if I could stall for the time it would take to release and shape it. Fortunately, my training had taught me this: everything was a weapon.
I said a simple light cantrip and anchored it to the flat of my sabre hilt. I swung the sabre at the rushing spectre.
My arm sank halfway into the spectre’s head. My skin shredded, deep furrows rimmed in gray frost. I forced my willpower into the light cantrip, which blazed within the monster’s fleshless darkness. The spectre shrieked and shot upward, more startled than hurt.
That gave me time to run a thumb over my white-gold ring. The Fire flushed out—hot enough to make the frozen blood stream from my arm wound.
The spectre pinwheeled along the gothic arches, gathering itself for another dive. The crowd scrambled away. Addam, his hands and arms covered by a blurring rush of power, cleverly forced tripping hazards from our path with bursts of energy.
I shouted, to anyone listening, “Cover your eyes!”
The duration of a sigil spell is linked to the potency of its use. I could make Fire last over five minutes—nearly an eternity in a fight. Five minutes of Fire, though, wouldn’t destroy a spectre.
But a fifth of a second?
I manifested Fire and shrank it into a space no bigger than the head of a pin. Just before the spectre dove into me, I triggered all of it, every bit of the spell. A small sun burned in my palm.
The spectre died in a roiling explosion. Smoke rose to the ceiling with an underbelly of flame.
“One o’clock, nine o’clock!” Brand snapped.
The first spectre was beginning to tear free of my Shield bubble. And down the corridor, over the heads of the panicked crowd, six more spectres soared toward us.
I said, almost numbly, “Run.”
We bolted for the stairway. Outside, we could alert the Tower, and the people in the tunnels wouldn’t die of bad timing.
Screams and hoarse shouts transitioned into the sounds of rush-hour traffic as we emerged in the middle of a sidewalk. The Pac Bell was half a block away. We made it as far as the next cross street when I felt the tainted presence of the spectres behind us.
“Get help!” I yelled at Addam. He turned and ran for the Tower’s building.
Brand had knives in his hands. Both were made from volcanic glass inscribed with coral. Behind us, six spectres—no, seven, my Shield had failed—were circling above the South Bridge stairwell.
The Last Sun Page 17
