The bright sun was a bit too much for Veranix’s eyes as they left the ward building. He held his hands over his face as they started across the lawn. Delmin kept looking at him expectantly as they went on. Veranix finally relented and started talking.
“All right, to start with, I wasn’t raised in merchant caravans like I’ve always said.”
“You know, I always thought something wasn’t right about that story.”
“Really?” asked Veranix. “I thought I had worked it out pretty well.”
“That was just it,” Delmin said. “Anyone ever asked you a question about your past, you always had an immediate, intricate answer, and it was often repeated word for word. Like you were reciting a script.”
“Huh,” Veranix said. He didn’t realize that. He’d have to work on making his answers more natural.
“So, you grew up on the streets in Aventil.”
“No,” Veranix said, shaking his head. “I never came to Maradaine until I was fourteen, when I started school here. My father, however, was from the Aventil streets.”
“Was? He is dead, right?”
“I’m getting to that,” Veranix snapped. “Back then, the Aventil gangs were all united under one family, the Tysons. My father’s family.”
“All right,” Delmin said, nodding. “So what happened?”
They crossed under the shadow of the High University Tower, past the clock bells, and made their way toward the south lawn.
“He made enemies, and started a street war. So he ran out of town, changed his name, and joined a traveling circus. He worked as a trick shot archer, and then met my mother. She and my grandfather were contortionists, acrobats, and tightrope walkers. She . . . you never saw anything like her aerial baton show.”
“So you grew up in a carnival?”
“Circus,” Veranix said. “Going from town to town, archduchy to archduchy. That’s why I came up with the merchant caravan story; it was close enough to the truth. Anyhow, I grew up, learning both archery and acrobatics. And I was using magic, but I didn’t really realize it at the time. Not until Professor Alimen saw our show. He convinced me to come here to study, and my parents agreed. I didn’t know at the time that my father still had enemies in Maradaine.”
“So you came here, and they found him.”
“They found him, and tortured him, and killed him.” Veranix said, feeling the fire in his blood rising up. “They also captured my mother, and forced effitte down her throat until her brain was burned out. The only thing they didn’t know was why he had come back to town.”
“You,” Delmin said. “They don’t know you exist?”
“Not as a son of Cal Tyson,” Veranix said. “Veranix Calbert is a magic student who grew up in a merchant caravan. No connection at all to the Tyson family or the Aventil gangs. No one his enemies would notice or care about.”
“So then . . .” Delmin stopped, standing in the middle of the lawn. “What are you doing?”
“The one who did this is Willem Fenmere,” Veranix said. “He’s the crime boss of Dentonhill.”
“I’ve heard the name,” Delmin said cautiously. “Big businessman, importer.”
“He imports effitte,” Veranix said. “That’s the real core of his enterprise. So I go out there and shut it down. Shut him down.”
“How, exactly?” Delmin said.
“How do you think, Del?” Veranix said, getting up close. “I told you, my father taught me archery. My mother and grandfather, acrobatics and the staff. And here I’m learning magic. I’m putting all those skills to good use.” He turned away and looked across the lawn. “I think I see Kaiana over there.” He started walking again. Delmin caught up.
“How is she involved, exactly?”
“She helps me because she believes in what I’m doing,” Veranix said. “Her father was a soldier in the war. When he came back, he got hooked on the effitte until he burned out. She only has a job on campus because an old friend of her father’s felt sorry for her. We . . . found in each other a mutual hate of Fenmere and effitte.”
Kaiana was pruning trees along the southern edge of campus when they found her. The rains of the night before had made the day hot and muggy and her straw hat and linen shirt were wet with perspiration. As Veranix and Delmin approached, she dropped down to the grass below, her face angry.
“So you lived,” she said.
“Thanks to you, Kai,” Veranix said.
“Shut it,” she said. She eyed Delmin up and down. “So he’s brought you along for protection.”
“You want to smack him, I’ll hold his arms,” Delmin said.
“I’m so glad you two can be friends,” Veranix said. “Delmin Sarren, this is Kaiana Nell. Kai, Delmin.”
“It’s a pleasure to finally be introduced,” Delmin said.
“She’s been here the entire time you’ve been a student, Del,” Veranix said.
“Well, I know. But students never really talk to grounds staff, except for you, and we all figured you were just, well . . .” He stammered and gestured at Kaiana, his ears turning red.
“Just what?” Kaiana asked. She looked back and forth at the two of them, her eyes narrowing angrily.
Veranix held up his hands defensively. “Honestly, I did deny it. Vehemently.”
“Which really only made us believe it more, Vee.”
“Are you saying you’ve thought he’s been out at night because he was rolling me?” Kaiana said.
Delmin shrugged sheepishly and looked at the ground as if trying to avoid her hard stare. After a moment, he just said, “Sun’s awfully hot right now. Can we find some shade?”
“This is nothing,” Kaiana said, squinting up at the sky. “You boys spend too much time in the lecture halls.”
“Kai,” Veranix said, “I need to know where my things are. Especially that rope and cloak.”
“It’s always about your things, isn’t it?” she asked him. She stormed over to the carriage house. “I should have damn well brought you over to the ward with everything on you! Let you try and explain it!” She made it halfway to the carriage house before Veranix and Delmin started moving.
“Kaiana!” Veranix jogged after her. He reached her just as she entered the carriage house. As he went in after her, she grabbed him by his shirtfront and pushed him against the wall.
“Tell me you did something,” she said. “Tell me you did some damage out there.”
“I did,” he said. “I burned up a bag, and took a few hundred crowns of drug money.”
“Where did that go?”
“The Lower Trenn,” he said.
Delmin caught up, his eyes wide. “How many hundred crowns?”
“Quiet!” Kaiana said. She let go of Veranix’s shirt. “Did you—”
“I didn’t go in,” he said. “I was in bad shape at that point.”
“Right,” she said. She went over to the stables, to the trapdoor to the Spinner Run.
“A few hundred crowns, Vee?” Delmin asked in a quieter voice. “How, what . . . do I even want to know this?”
“When I’m out, if I take money from the sellers, I give it somewhere else. I don’t keep it.”
“You gave away a few hundred crowns?” Delmin said, his eyes half popping out. “How could you even . . .”
“That money is covered in blood,” Veranix said. “Blood and misery. I give it to the Ward, or the church, or somewhere else where it can do some good.”
“Well, then . . .” Delmin stammered. He went over and sat on a small wooden bench, rubbing his head. “I changed my mind, Vee. Go back to lying to me. This is all a bit too much for me.”
“Just wait,” Veranix said. “Don’t break your brain yet.”
“Too late.” Delmin looked around. “Where did she go?”
“Down into the Spinner Run,” Ver
anix said.
“The what?” Delmin asked.
“It’s an abandoned tunnel that runs from the carriage house to Holtman. Near as I can tell, no one’s used it for years.”
“Abandoned tunnel. Of course, I should have guessed.”
Kaiana reemerged from the stall, carrying a bundle of cloth. “I left the weapons down there.”
“That’s fine,” Veranix said. “I really just want Delmin to see the cloak and the rope.” She handed the bundle to him. He unwrapped it and took out the cloak.
“What is that?” Delmin asked.
“That’s what I was hoping you could figure out,” Veranix said. “It seems magical, but I thought that things couldn’t be enchanted with their own magic.”
“Well, no, that’s not entirely true,” Delmin said. “It’s just the understanding of how to do it is limited, and the risk a mage takes doing it is far greater than any value to making the thing. We don’t understand enough about the theory of how it’s done—”
“Then what is this?” Veranix asked. He held up the cloak and wrapped it around his arm. With a thought, he made his arm vanish from sight.
“Wow,” Delmin said. He looked at Veranix, and the blank spot where his arm should be. “Well, that’s not the cloak. That’s you.”
“Me? Are you sure?”
“I may be worse at practical magic than you, but I’m pretty good with sensing numina flow. That came from you. It’s just the cloak is more . . . wait a minute.” Delmin stared into the space around Veranix for a moment. “The numina flow around you is intense. Are you drawing any in right now?”
“No,” Veranix said.
“You’ve both lost me,” Kaiana said. She picked up the leather notebook from the bundle and started thumbing through it.
“Well, it’s like . . . but that’s impossible.”
“Like what?”
“Napranium.”
“You’ve mentioned that before, from the lecture the other day.”
“Where you fell asleep. Anyway, napranium is supposed to act like this, drawing numina to it, and being very receptive to magic affecting it. But it’s a metal. And it’s really rare.”
“Maybe someone can make a cloth, or create a fiber that acts like napranium,” Veranix suggested.
“Maybe,” Delmin said. He took the rope and looked closely at it. “Or, perhaps . . . Napranium is a very soft metal, too soft to make weapons or armor. However, if someone could hammer it as thin as thread . . .”
“And use it make the cloak and the rope?”
“Theoretically, yes.” Delmin frowned. “It would be practically impossible, though. The amount you’d need, and the skill to do it. I don’t think it exists in Druthal. The only ones who could possibly do it, who have the mystical knowledge, are the Tsouljans. Or—”
“Poasians,” Kaiana said harshly. “Right?”
“Right,” Delmin said, looking very confused. Kaiana looked over at Veranix, and everything clicked in his head.
“Of course,” he said, looking at the cloak. “Fenmere already had the smuggling operation to bring in effitte. If someone wanted to smuggle something else Poasian here, he’s the man to use!”
“Now you’ve lost me,” Delmin said. “Can you explain all that? Where exactly did you get these things?”
Veranix sighed and sat down on the bench next to Delmin. “I stole them from the gang boss of Dentonhill. It was a delivery that I thought was going to be effitte.”
“No, really, where did you get them?”
“Really!”
“He really did,” Kaiana said, still looking through the notebook.
“This is the craziest conversation I’ve ever had,” Delmin said, burying his thin face in his hands. “Go back to the Poasian thing.”
Kaiana looked up from the notebook. “Effitte is made from a plant resin. The plant only grows on a few Napolic islands. Paktphon is one of them.”
“This part I know,” Delmin said. “Paktphon is a Poasian-controlled Napolic island, which used to be Druth until the end of the war.”
“It used to be called Bintral.” Kaiana said. “It’s where I was born.”
“Oh,” Delmin said. “I’m sorry. I mean . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kaiana said. “The point is, the process of making the plant resin into effitte is a Poasian one. It’s done only on Paktphon.”
Veranix nodded and added, “Fenmere, the Dentonhill boss, smuggles it into the city. Has for years. He has his whole network in place to get it from Paktphon to Maradaine.”
“Fenmere, right,” Delmin said. “That would be the crime boss who you stole these from.” His voice jumped up almost to a squeal. He was up from the bench, pacing wildly around the hay-strewn floor.
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Veranix said meekly.
“Fine,” Delmin said, calming down a little. “You know what, Vee? I’m just going to willfully pretend I don’t know about all the elements of this that I don’t want to think about. Crime bosses, smuggling, and you being, apparently, the master thief of the University.”
“I’m not—” Veranix objected.
“Hush!” Delmin said, holding up a trembling finger. With gritted teeth, he forced each word out with careful deliberateness. “I don’t care about that! Instead, I’m just going to focus on this rope and cloak, which I’m only theorizing might be made with napranium, and for the purposes of this discussion, any hypothetical origins of them are only speculation for the purpose of pure scholarly conjecture.”
“All right,” Veranix said, trying not to crack a smile. “So, theoretically, a Poasian craftsman could get enough napranium, and spin it into thread, and weave that thread into a rope and a cloak.”
“Theoretically, I would think so.”
“So, these things can draw numina to them?”
“Yes, that’s what napranium does. But it draws it in a way that magnifies its flow. And the napranium itself is more susceptible to magical influence. Unlike dalmatium, which draws numina in and absorbs it.”
“That’s why I can control the rope,” Veranix said. He picked it up, and with a thought, formed it into a rising coil that wrapped around one of the upper beams of the carriage house.
“Right.” Delmin’s eyes went wide as the rope continued to slide around the beam like a great snake. “You could do that with a regular rope as well, I bet, just it would take a lot more effort on your part. Same with anything you do with the cloak.”
“Is that why these things do nothing for me?” Kaiana said, taking the cloak. She held it up, and creased her brow in concentration.
“Right,” Delmin said. “You’d have to be a mage to actually use either of these things. To anyone else, they’d just seem to be ordinary things.”
“Even a mage wouldn’t necessarily see anything,” Veranix said, letting the rope come down. “I couldn’t see the way the numina flows stronger.”
“You could feel it, I’m sure,” Delmin said. “And if you worked on training your magical senses a bit more . . .”
“Yes, you’re very good at that,” Veranix said. Delmin took the rope. The moment he touched it, it started to fly wildly around the room, lashing and whipping about. Kaiana dropped to the floor. Veranix dove out of the way of the hurling rope, and then with a blind grab, snatched the wild end. He took control over it immediately. It coiled itself and wound back to him. Delmin let go of his end with a startled cry.
“That . . . you . . .” Delmin stammered. He looked shocked and confused.
“Are you all right?” Veranix asked.
“Yeah, I think.” Delmin rubbed his hand. “That was like trying to hold on to a wild animal.”
“But it came from you, right?” Kaiana asked, slowly pulling herself up.
“It did,” he said, “It was like . . . the change in
numina flow was too much for me, and it just burst out. If you hadn’t . . . I don’t think I would have gotten control over it.” He looked hard at Veranix. “You really can handle that?”
“Wait a minute,” Kaiana said. “So these things, only mages can use them, but just some mages?”
“So it would seem,” Veranix said, taking the cloak from her and rolling it and the rope back into a bundle.
“What the blazes is a drugs-and-doxies dog like Fenmere doing with this?” she asked. “Even in a city this big, how many people are there who could actually use these things? How many in all of Druthal?”
“In the whole city, maybe a hundred,” Delmin said. “And I would bet my Letters every one of them, save Veranix, is a fully trained member of some mystical Circle.”
“Right,” Veranix said. “So, that means what? That a Circle is working with Fenmere, hired him to bring these into Maradaine?”
“The question is who are they, and why did they want it?” Delmin said. He creased his brow in thought. “And why a rope and a cloak?”
“That’s not the question,” Kaiana said. “The question is, since Veranix stole their things, what are they going to do next?”
Wordlessly, Veranix gathered the bundle and went down the hatch into the Spinner Run. He found the niche in the wall where his other gear was hidden and put the things in there. He went back up and closed and covered the door to the Spinner Run. Kaiana and Delmin watched him silently, bewildered.
“All right, Del,” Veranix said. “Can you sense any unusual numina flow with the things down there?”
Delmin looked around, his eyes staring into an empty middle distance. “No, I don’t think so.”
“What about in here?” Veranix asked. “I know we studied something about residual numina signatures leaving traces . . .”
“Right,” Delmin said. “I’m not exactly a bloodhound with this sort of thing, you know.”
“Residual what?” Kaiana asked, her face again full of anger. “Veranix, this is where I sleep! If you’ve—”
“I’m not sure,” Delmin said, interrupting her. “There’s traces from me, like I did magic in here, but nothing about it seems unusual. In fact . . .” He trailed off, looking around some more.
The Thorn of Dentonhill Page 13
