“Agreed. I can’t say I’m too excited about watching over a teenager. If she is anything like I was at that age, I’ll be wanting to throttle her every other minute for blundering,” Isador replied.
Charm glanced at her in amusement. “Blundering, eh? I can’t quite picture that from you.”
She made a half snort half laugh sound. “All teenagers are brainless, Charm, and I’m sure you were, as well. I fell in and out of love weekly, every time thinking he had to be the perfect one. And no matter how petty, every little thing seemed a disaster from a ruined dress to random gossip. It is all earth shattering to a girl at that age.”
“I can’t say I ever had quite that problem. I didn’t grow up in normal society. I trained from the day I could hold a dagger to my twentieth year. Perhaps that is why they kept me so busy with learning, so I wouldn’t have time to be foolish,” he replied. “By the time I left my home my only interest was gathering the coin to pay off my mentor for his training.” He scratched the back of his neck and smiled. “I probably should have gotten around to doing that before I was thrown into this prison.”
Isador gave a soft chuckle. “You are one of the oldest Immortals I know Charm. How did you evade that debt for so long?” she asked, her eyes still roving over the city they crossed.
He snorted in amusement. “I learned my lessons better than my mentor would have liked. Greed was one of his lessons. I decided I’d rather evade him than part with my well-earned hoard.” He spared a glance up at a ramshackle building that seemed ready to fall down at any moment and watched the child seated on the balcony. She couldn’t have been more than eight, and to see her out so late with no lights on behind her in the house made his suspicions rise. She could quite possibly be an informant for the guild. Children were low cost for them to maintain and easily ignored. He watched the child shift slightly and noted the sickly thinness of her stick-like limbs wrapped in flesh. She gave a weak cough that sounded thick and huddled closer to the building. Not eyes for the guild he decided, too weak and sick to be of use to them. He paused in his step and watched the child a minute longer. Isador stopped beside him and followed his gaze. She flicked a questioning glance to him. “I hate moments like this,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper. “If I give her food it won’t save her. If I give her money, she will be robbed. If I take her to shelter in a better part of the city, I will be noticed.”
“And if you heal her, you announce your presence, as well. Either by the magic being sensed or the girl telling the tale,” Isador finished.
“And yet if I walk away and leave a sick and starving child to fend for herself, what am I?” He asked with a sigh.
“Professional. We do what we do for the whole, not for the individual. We cannot save them all, Charm,” Isador replied.
He shook his head in disagreement. “It is the individuals that make the whole,” he said as he moved closer to the building. His eyes flashed over the structure and quickly found a way up despite the rot in the wood. With silence and skill earned over centuries, he scaled the building and dropped lightly on the balcony near the child. She did not even look up. He held his breath at the stench of the area, forcing himself to ignore it. There was death in the room beyond her and from the scent of it more than one body. The child was dirty and starved, her small face looking more like a skull than the living. There was no sign of the Veir plague, as he had feared at his first closer look. Still keeping to the shadows he moved past the child and into the apartment. The smell was too overwhelming to ignore. He felt his gorge rise and pushed it back down. There were three bodies lying haphazard across the room - an infant and another child perhaps the age of five. However, judging the age of a body that far gone was difficult. A grown woman’s body, presumably the mother, lay against the wall battered so badly he could still see signs of the wounds despite the decomposition.
He glanced at the two dead children and then moved back to the balcony for the third child. He could recognize the signs easily enough by each child’s different hair color. The woman had most likely earned her living in the alleys raising her skirts for whatever coins she could get. The children were a side product of that trade, often unwanted and rarely loved. The higher class whores could afford charms or magics to keep themselves barren, but a back alley whore had no such luxury. He wasn’t sure if the woman had died from her last beating or from some disease she had caught at the trade. He had seen this sight before, too often in fact. Given his trade, he often found himself in alleys, and when one needed information, whores were a wealth of knowledge. He knelt down and looked at the child, likely she had been half-starved before her mother’s death. In this part of the city, even if she had the strength to forage for food, there was nothing to steal. Her eyes were dull and lifeless she had given up hope.
“I’ll give you a choice,” he said, echoing words he himself had heard so very long ago, though he had been better off than this child. “I can give your life back, or I can end it quickly with no suffering. What would you have?” he asked.
She looked up at him and seemed not to comprehend him for a moment. She gave a slight shudder and coughed again, the sound deep in her chest. He waited patiently, hoping she would choose his first option. He had no taste for killing, but he would not leave a child to starve to death, cold and alone. If she hadn’t the will to live, he would send her as painlessly as he could onto the next life. “Why would anyone want to live here?” she asked in a wavering voice harsh from disuse.
“Because here is not the only place. Life is full of choices. In death, there is but one,” he replied.
“I don’t care about choices anymore; I don’t want any of this.” She turned her head away from him and slumped back against the wall.
Charm closed his eyes and slowly drew his dagger with loathing. It had barely cleared its sheath when the child jolted slightly and slumped farther back against the wall, sliding over to rest limply against the balcony railing. He looked up sharply to find Isador perched neatly above him as silent as the shadows around her. She stepped down off the railing and calmly drew her throwing knife from the child’s eye. She cleaned it with detached efficiency and put it back in its sheath at her waist. She looked down at the child’s body and then to Charm. “If putting Symphony in charge of this world stops this sort of thing, I’ll fight tooth and nail to see her crowned.” Her voice was flat and level with no emotion whatsoever.
Charm gave a slight nod and watched her for another long moment before standing. Some individuals he had met had that ability, to shut off everything inside. Isador was apparently one of them, for he himself had never mastered the skill. He could no more shut off his emotions than he could stop breathing. “I’d burn the place if I thought it wouldn’t take this entire district down. Let’s get out of here, the smell is too much,” he said trying to sound as calm as she did.
“I always wondered why you joined the Fionaveir, Charm. I finally have my answer. You may be greedy and unscrupulous, but you do have heart,” Isador said with an approving nod. She dropped down from the balcony and quickly disappeared into the shadows.
Charm smirked and took one last glance at the child. Only an orphan could truly relate with another orphan he mused. His mother hadn’t been a whore, though, and he had never known her. He hadn’t watched her die as this child had watched her own mother waste away. His had been a victim of rape and had died by her own hand soon after his birth. He wasn’t sure which was worse, watching a parent die or knowing your life caused their death. He had heart, that was true enough, but it was selective where it found mercy. That was part of the reason he had so readily accepted this assignment, though he wouldn’t bother telling anyone. From the information he had on the girl, she was an orphan as well, and unlike the waif before him, she had chosen life. So he would do everything in his power to ensure she kept that life. The NightBlades and High Lords are damned. He had no mercy for them, not a drop of it, and if he did his job correctly she would never even b
e aware she had a guardian angel. He smiled at the self-given title. It was an ironic thought. The smile still in place, he dropped down to join Isador. They had much to do before their new charge arrived.
Chapter 7
Sanctuary
“So what you are telling me is the teachers at the Academy are not even real people?” Her tone was incredulous. They were on the third hour of everything he could possibly think to tell her about the Academy. The rules had been covered in the first hour, and then they had moved onto the Academy grounds, which she was sure could not possibly be as large as he described.
“No, what I said is, most of the teachers are constructs,” Christian clarified, his voice full of his seemingly endless patience. “The ones for the more elite classes, such as Arcane Arts, Chemistry, and Arcanetech are actual people.”
His posture abruptly changed and he sat up quickly and pulled hard on the steering of the ship, bringing them into a sweeping descent. The maneuver caught her so off guard that she nearly fell out of her seat before she managed to sit up fully and cling to the chair arms.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she demanded in a panic stricken voice.
He gave a laugh in response and a huge smile. With one hand, he indicated the view screen. “Watch and you will see.”
She stared at in bewilderment and turned to gaze at the view screen. With a start, she realized they were barely five feet above the black waters of the ocean. Night had long ago fallen and she had ceased watching the view screen at all, but she was sure they had been much higher. How had he managed to dive the ship so far and so fast?
Her frantic thoughts froze as a massive form loomed up on the view screen. She thought it was a cliff at first until it turned its head to regard them. As they rushed closer details became clearer. The massive form’s serpentine body was adorned with thickly scaled skin, combined with a huge fanged mouth big enough to swallow the ship. The creature gave a bellow that shook the interior of the ship and Jala felt her chest tighten in terror. Her hands dug into the arms of her chair and she fought back the urge to scream. “Oh, Fortune, what are you doing? Fly away from it, not into its mouth! Oh, Fortune! Oh, Fortune!” Her voice was somewhere between a gasp and a scream and she realized she was babbling. She abruptly clamped her mouth shut and noticed he was laughing. He was about to feed them to a gods-only-knew what kind of creature that was, and he was laughing.
At the last possible moment, he pulled the ship around, bringing it under the jaws and through a twining loop of the creature’s body and back into the air. She wasn’t sure if it had been her imagination or not, but she truly thought she had heard the creature’s jaws slamming shut. She slowly turned to look at him, with her jaw dropped open and her eyes huge. “What in Fortune’s name was that?” she demanded.
“I wasn’t sure if you had ever seen a serpent before. I doubted you had. They aren’t usually this close to Sanctuary, so I decided to show off a bit and show you something at the same time,” he replied through his dying laughter. He raised his eyebrows at her a couple times and gave another chuckle. “Oh, Fortune, indeed.”
She glared at him and slowly released the death grip she had on the chair. He was entirely too amused. “You could have given me a bit of warning,” she snapped in annoyance.
“Didn’t want to ruin the surprise, and if he had dived before I got there I would have looked rather foolish,” he replied, oblivious to her annoyance. “Not sleepy anymore are you though?”
“No, not at all,” she admitted. “Traumatized perhaps, but certainly not tired.”
“Oh come now, it wasn’t that bad. I would think a follower of Fortune would have more of a sense of adventure,” he teased.
She gave him a light glare in response. He gave her another roguish smile, and she felt her glare fading.
“Look,” he said, pointing back to the view screen.
She turned her attention to where he indicated and saw a vast glow on the horizon growing by the second. “That’s Sanctuary?” she asked in awe, her irritation completely forgotten.
He gave a slight nod. “She always looks better at night. At night, she is beautiful and you cannot see her scars.” His voice had gone low and thoughtful. He slowed the ship once they were close enough to make out the individual lights. “You can tell the quarters by what color the lights are,” he explained.
She stared down at the rainbow of lights below them. The city was shaped like an enormous wagon wheel, and the center was lit with pristine white lights. The area around it glowed with a rainbow of different colors depending on where one looked.
“Some of the sections are different colors, and others are simply yellow, and I see two that aren’t even lit up,” she said, looking to him for an explanation.
“The multi colored ones belong to Houses. See the blue and silver lights?” With his hand, he indicated a large area to the north, and she nodded. “That’s Morcaillo’s section of Sanctuary. The yellow colored ones are neutral quarters where the House that would have normally tended them has fallen. The two lightless quarters belong to House Dark of Oblivion and House Blackwolf of Glis. They don’t use lights because they aren’t needed there. The lightless one closest to my own quarter belongs to House Dark.” He was turning the ship toward the lights in the center of the city as he explained, and gradually they began to descend toward a perfectly straight row of white lights that seemed to stretch for a very long way.
“The lights are all magical, aren’t they? Why aren’t they needed in those two districts?” She asked the first of the hundred questions she had running through her mind.
“Yes, they are magical; most of Sanctuary runs on magic. The Dark’s don’t need the lamps because their part of the city is virtually deserted. They retreated back to Oblivion during their war with Merro. The Blackwolf’s section is dark because most of them are shifters and don’t need the lights. They see just fine in the dark.” He landed the ship and gave her a wink. “I have to get cleaned up quickly, and then we will head to the Academy and you can ask all the questions you want as we walk.”
She watched him go and leaned back in her seat. To her vast disappointment the view screen had gone black when he released the controls. She stared ahead at the darkened wall and tried to narrow down her questions to a reasonable few before he returned. There was so much she wanted to know, but she knew she would have to pace herself or she might find the end of his patience with her.
She was carefully choosing jewelry when he returned to the front of the ship. She looked up and watched him fastening the last buttons on a deep blue vest. She caught herself staring. He wore dark blue pants and polished black knee high boots. His silver silk shirt was flawless, seeming more like liquid metal than fabric, and the vest he was buttoning was covered in embroidery so fine she shuddered at the time it must have taken to create. His hair had been styled, as well. And she noticed blond highlights in the auburn that she hadn’t seen before.
He glanced up, and raised an eyebrow when he noticed her watching him. “Ready?” he asked.
“I’m so glad you were out of sorts when I met you, I don’t think I would have had the nerve to speak with you had you looked as you do now. You definitely look like a High Lord’s son now,” she said quietly, the jewelry forgotten for the moment. She had been talking to him for hours now, and all of a sudden she felt herself becoming shy. It made no sense at all. He was still Christian. Only the clothing had changed.
He smirked and pulled on a long deep blue leather coat that fit snuggly at the shoulders and flared toward the bottom, brushing lightly against the backs of his boots. “In that case, I’m glad I looked disheveled as well.”
“I’ll be ready as soon as I decide what jewelry to wear. I don’t even know what some of this is,” she admitted with a sigh.
He moved and knelt down beside her, resting easily on the toes of his boots with perfect balance and she tried to ignore how good he smelled. “Let’s see.” He began moving pieces aside and gla
nced at her dress and jacket a couple of times before selecting a slender amethyst choker and matching earrings. He dropped them in her hands wordlessly and moved a few more pieces before choosing a few rings and some silver bracelets. “That should do nicely. So, what in here are you unsure of the purpose of?”
With a frown, she held up a silver net with small black gems set at intervals where the wires crossed each other. “This,” she said. “There are two of them, and I have no idea what they are.”
He smiled and took it from her hands gently and turned it over to rest across the back of his hand. “It’s a hair net, you put this part on my hand across the back of your hair when it’s pinned up and fasten these clips just so.” He demonstrated the fastenings, and she nodded.
“I would have never figured that out,” she admitted ruefully.
He gave a shrug and stood. “I like your hair down, and if you choose never to use them you will hear no objections from me.”
She smiled and quickly donned the jewelry he had selected. She closed the trunks back up and stood slowly, looking down at them and then back to him. “Should we hire a coach or are you going to carry them with magic again?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow and waved his hands at the trunks, and they both disappeared. She stared down at where they had been and when she looked back up at him, he dropped two small dark stones in her hand. She looked down at the stones and back at him with confusion written clearly on her face.
“When we reach your rooms simply break the stones. They are called storage stones. It’s a temporary transport spell that will last for about eight hours,” he explained.
“Handy,” she said and examined the stones closer. By all appearances, they were simply well polished smooth black stones. They didn’t look magical at all. She glanced over at Christian, hoping he wasn’t teasing her and that the trunks were really inside the stones. If he was, she was going to look very foolish trying to break the rocks later.
The Elder Blood Chronicles Bk 1 In Shades of Grey Page 11
