Circle of Enemies: A Twenty Palaces Novel

by Harry Connolly

  “Where have you been?” she asked me.

  “Finishing a job.”

  “Tell me about it when we get onto the freeway.”

  “What about Csilla? What about Talbot?”

  “Csilla is gone, back to wherever she goes. And we’re not going to see Talbot again. He’s out.”

  “Out?” I couldn’t hide my surprise. “I don’t understand. Why is he out? Because he ran?”

  “No,” Annalise said. “Because you said he was useless.”

  That wasn’t how I remembered it.

  I didn’t much like Talbot, but I hoped whoever caught up with him killed him quickly. “I don’t know, boss. The guy probably needs a little training. Hell, he could probably design the training. He might still be useful.”

  She grunted as though I’d made a good point. And that was all I could do for Talbot. Maybe she’d send word not to kill him. I hoped so.

  Annalise hadn’t told me where to go, so I got on the 10 heading east. She didn’t object. Maybe she didn’t care. As we rolled along with traffic, I told her everything that happened after she went through Lino Vela’s front window. The only thing I left out was finding the Book of Oceans inside the statue, the vision I had, and the fact that it was sitting in the thermos between us.

  By the time I’d finished, we were northbound on the 15, heading for Barstow. She told me briefly about her time with the cops. They’d been gentle with her from the first moment they’d fished her out of the bushes. She told them that she was trying to reach Steve Francois to convince him to donate to her foundation, and within half an hour they’d received confirmation that she did exactly that with her time. She gave them a statement and asked to be released. They let her go.

  I shook my head in disbelief. Even with her tattoos, she still got the middle-class white-woman treatment. Or did she have help from one of the spells on her body?

  “Boss,” I said. “What would you have done if we had found the Book of Motes? Or one of the other original spell books?”

  Her response surprised me. She sighed heavily. “That’s a hard question. The long-standing rule of the society is that anyone who finds one of the three original spell books is to bring it to the peers directly without ‘reading’ it first. All the peers would gather together and decide what to do.”

  “You wouldn’t want to check it out before you turned it over? Become a primary yourself?” She didn’t answer right away. “Boss?”

  “You’re damn right I would. I want to finish the job in Hammer Bay myself. I want to … We’re falling behind in this fight, Ray, because we’re losing focus and power by the year, while the predators are as dangerous as ever. But the peers want to decide as a group who should have access to it.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t think they’d let all the peers have a turn.”

  “I know they wouldn’t. A few of them don’t even think a woman can become a primary. They’re sure the visions would corrupt her and maybe damage the book. Also, aside from me, one Brazilian, and one Arab, the other peers are all white Europeans; they don’t trust the rest of us with that kind of power.”

  “What if you read it anyway, then gave it to them?”

  She sighed again. “Civil war? Again? The problem is that I believe in the work the Twenty Palace Society does. I couldn’t live with the terrible things I’ve done otherwise. But the society itself has become a nest of serpents. If I could do this work without them, I’d kill them all.”

  “I saw the letter you gave to Captain.” Dammit. I didn’t want to go there next, but the words had slipped out.

  “Who? Oh, our friend who took us to Canada? Is that why you’ve been such a crabby bastard? The letter was for her protection in case we were arrested, genius.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know this is leading somewhere, Ray. Get on with it.”

  “When I asked you if you wanted to become a primary …” You blinked. I wasn’t sure how to ask Annalise if she was frightened or uncertain, and it turned out I didn’t have to.

  “I hesitated. I know. Ray, what was that guy’s name? You know the one I mean.”

  I did. “Lino Vela.”

  “Lino Vela. As apprentices, we’re trained to attack rogues at the first opportunity. No matter where we are, or who’s in the line of fire, we go. Becoming a primary, having all that power, well, that would make things easier. But there’s a part of me that doesn’t think what happened to Lino Vela should ever be easy.”

  Well, damn. I knew she trusted me enough to share information, but not that she was ready to share this.

  She kept talking: “So, you asked, and I hesitated. But the answer is always going to be yes, because there’s too much at stake.”

  We drove in silence for a while.

  I needed to be careful with this next part. “What if we—I mean, just us two—went out to find one of those original spell books? What if you had the visions, and to hell with the society? You’d be a primary, right? Couldn’t you take over? Change the training? Couldn’t you just …” Wipe them out? I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Fight the whole society? Take on not just all the peers but the allies, too? Plus whatever rogues they decided to point at me? Without support? I don’t know. I don’t think so. And the society has financiers, lawyers, and investigators, too. They can strip away an enemy’s resources before a fight, if they know who they’re targeting, and they know me. I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea. I’d be happy to get my hands on a spell book just to keep it away from assholes like your—like Wally King. But if I became a primary, I think the Twenty Palace Society would kill me—would kill us both. And even if we won the fight, we’d lose the infrastructure of the society. As a primary I’d kick ass, yeah, but I’d need investigators to tell me where to go, and financiers to cover the bills, and so on. If we won, and I doubt we would.”

  “What if the peers got their hands on a book?”

  “Incredible power for the most vicious serpents in the nest. These aren’t men who worry about the job being easy; it’s already easy for them, because they love it. They love the brutality. They pride themselves on their willingness to kill. With society resources backing them, they’d have the world behind the world under their heel.”

  “You’ve thought about this.”

  “Of course I have. This is my life and my future. Either the society loses this fight and the world is overrun with predators, or I become a primary and lose a fight with the society, or the assholes become primaries and I get demoted to … what? Wooden man? Errand girl? None of them are good options, but the last one is the least awful.”

  “To hell with that.” I picked up the thermos and swirled the liquid. I couldn’t hear it over the rumble of the engine, but I could feel it slosh around. “Boss, here. I found the Book of Oceans.”

  She stared at me silently for a moment, trying to judge if I was being serious or if she was going to start breaking my bones for playing a prank. I pushed the thermos at her, and she took it. She screwed off the top.

  “Oh” was all she said.

  I laid my hand over the top. “You’re not going to go back on everything you just said, are you?”

  She gently moved my hand away and looked into the bottom of the thermos for another few seconds. Then she screwed the cap back on and held the thermos in her lap. “You bastard.” She sounded almost as though she wanted to laugh. “You goddamn son of a bitch. You’re really good at this job, aren’t you?” I shrugged. “Where are you driving us?”

  “East,” I said.

  We drove to Barstow in the dark, and I switched to the 40. “The Mohave Desert?” Annalise asked.

  “Can you think of a better place to hide the Book of Oceans?”

  “Death Valley.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Don’t be annoying, boss.”

  “We’re going to hide it?”

  For a moment, she sounded unsure of herself. I hadn’t thought that was possible. “You sai
d it wouldn’t be safe for us to use it, and I sure as hell won’t give it to the serpents. I have a better idea.”

  We took the 40 to the 95. The sign said that Las Vegas was 103 miles away. As we passed the freeway entrance sign for the westbound on-ramp, I made note of the odometer. We counted off a random number of miles, then pulled onto the shoulder.

  “Shovel’s in back,” Annalise said.

  We climbed out into the darkness. I couldn’t see a car in either direction.

  There was a shovel mounted on a rack in the back of the van. Only one, though. I knew who would be using it. I took it down and followed Annalise into the desert.

  We walked at least a quarter mile away from the asphalt before Annalise pointed at the ground. “Here.”

  I dug a shallow hole. She tossed the thermos in without hesitation. It was long life and power beyond anything I could imagine, but I shoveled dirt over it. Annalise picked up a rock as large as a beach ball and set it down to mark the spot. Then she found two more large flat rocks, each the size of a trash-can lid, and laid them beside the beach ball.

  “I think we’ll be able to find it now, boss. If we have to.”

  She nodded. We started back to the van. No other cars passed by on the road. “Ray, this only works if we trust each other. You understand? Because either one of us could come back later and move that thermos. Either one of us could cut the other out.”

  “Boss, if I wanted to cut you out, I wouldn’t have handed you that thermos. The truth is, I need your help. It’s not enough to hide the Book of Oceans from the Wally Kings of the world—or from the other peers, either. There are two more books out there, and I don’t trust anyone with that power—”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Not even the two of us. I don’t think we’re ready for it.”

  Her answer was quieter this time. “Because of what you did in Washaway. And Lino Vela.”

  “Yeah. We will be ready for it, someday, but not yet. Like I said, stashing one book isn’t good enough. We need to hunt down the other two.”

  “That’s all, huh? Just go out and find them?”

  “That’s all.”

  “And what then? You and I form a new, kinder, gentler society?”

  “Yes. We clean the serpents out of the nest. This whole legion-of-brutal-killers thing isn’t working. It’s a losing strategy. We can do better.”

  She didn’t respond, and I couldn’t read her expression in the dark. We returned to the van.

  “Ray, this is incredibly dangerous. You don’t even understand how dangerous it is. You’re just my stupid wooden man.”

  “All they think about is their limitations,” I said to her.

  “Don’t throw my own words in my face—”

  “Some things should never be easy.”

  “Dammit, Ray! I’m the peer and you’re my wooden man! You belong to me!”

  “I know I do, boss. You’re in, though, right?”

  “Fuck, yeah.”

  I started the engine and pulled onto the highway. It took a long while to get up to speed. “Where to, boss?”

  “Straight through to Vegas,” she said. “You look like you could use some sleep. Then we’re headed east. You’re going to the First Palace. The peers want to meet you.”

  “Um, really?”

  I wasn’t sure if I should be pleased about that or not, so I changed the subject. “Can you convince the society to work with Talbot? He’s an asshole, but he saved my life.”

  “I’ll make a call. It probably won’t do any good, but I’ll call.”

  “Damn. He was really looking forward to living a century or three.”

  “Not everyone earns a golem-flesh spell.”

  I turned to her. “What?”

  “Not everyone earns that spell,” she snapped, annoyed at having to repeat herself. “Especially in the last few years. Only older peers like Csilla can even manage it anymore.”

  I touched the spell Csilla had put under my left arm, the one that healed me when I ate meat. Annalise had called that mark golem flesh.

  For once, she understood my expression. “Didn’t I explain that part?”

  “Jesus.” I wasn’t sure what to say. I was going to live to be, what? Five hundred? Older? “How long until I talk gibberish like Csilla?”

  “Gibberish? She was telling you the secrets of the universe.”

  Be sure to check out the first two novels

  of the TWENTY PALACES series,

  Child of Fire and Game of Cages!

  CHILD OF FIRE

  Ray Lilly is the lowly driver for Annalise Powliss, a high-ranking member of a secretive group of mage hunters known as the Twenty Palace Society. When Annalise is injured on a mission, Ray must carry on in her stead and defeat a powerful sorcerer who is sacrificing dozens of innocent lives. As if that wasn’t tough enough, Ray only knows one spell! Can Ray best the virulent wizard and destroy the source of his inhuman magic?

  “Excellent reading … delicious tension and suspense.”

  —JIM BUTCHER, author of The Dresden Files

  GAME OF CAGES

  A small town in the North Cascades is the site of an unholy auction in which a shadowy group of wealthy collectors gathers to bid on a dangerous creature that could exterminate all life on earth. Ray Lilly is assigned only as backup to the Twenty Palace Society investigator, but all hell breaks loose when the creature escapes and Ray, armed with his single spell and a mean left hook, is forced into survival mode.

  “Will enthrall readers who like explosive action and magic that comes at a serious cost.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)