Thief of Light

by Denise Rossetti

  “No.” The Technomage looked up from her transplas notes. “You need to rest. The initial readings seem to confirm my hypothesis. You generate some kind of field. The question is whether it’s reflective, absorbing or simply a barrier. I need to do a triangulation.”

  Prue’s eyelids slid down. She levered them open again. “You mean . . . three . . . more times? Three?”

  The Technomage Primus patted her on the knee. “No, only two. The first is complete.”

  “Won’t . . . live . . .” Her tongue banged around in her mouth, numb and clumsy. “. . . through another, let . . . alone . . .” With a heroic effort, Prue peered through her lashes. The beamed ceiling blurred and swung. “Water . . . what was . . . ?”

  “Nothing sinister. Just a sedative.”

  “Oh,” mumbled Prue. “That’s all right then.” A black cottony wave swept over her, drowning the sound of her hollow laughter.

  35

  “Again,” said Bartelm. “And cut the volume. Barge in bellowing like that and you won’t need a doorbell.”

  Erik clenched his fists, concentrating fiercely. Gathering the Voice, he opened his mouth to—

  “Clear your mind first,” said a creaky old voice from a cocoon of blankets huddled in a big chair. “You’re trying too hard.” Calmly, Purist Nori sipped the last of the tisane from the cup cradled in her gnarled fingers.

  “I have to try,” Erik snapped. “If I don’t, Prue will die. Fuck, for all I know she’s—”

  With surprising strength, the old woman flung the cup at his head.

  Between one breath and the next, Erik’s hand flashed up and the cup stalled in midair as if it had been glued there. He was so astonished, his mouth fell open and the cup lurched toward the floor.

  “Keep it there!” snapped Nori.

  Instinctively, Erik did . . . something . . . and the cup steadied, hovering three feet above the flagstones.

  He heard Bartelm’s gusty sigh, but he didn’t dare take his eye from the cup.

  “For once, Nori, could we do something the orthodox way?” asked the wizard plaintively. “It usually works, that’s why it’s orthodox.”

  “The boy’s right,” said Nori absently. “No time.” She raised her voice. “Tell me what you see, Erik.”

  “A cup.” Sweat gathered on his brow, dripped into his eyes.

  “Unfocus your eyes. Squint if you have to.”

  “Can’t . . . too much.” The cup dropped, shattering with a delicate tinkle. Erik stared at it, fumbling his way to a chair. He sat with a thump. Gods, he ached as if he’d hoisted a full-grown milkbeast over his head.

  “Ah well.” Nori shrugged her bony shoulders. “Surprise only works once.”

  “I saw . . .” Erik wet his lips. “I thought I saw . . . lines, a shimmer. Like the time before. I don’t know.” He tugged at his hair. “Something.”

  The two old Purists exchanged a glance. “Orthodoxy, hmm?” said Nori with a twinkle.

  Bartelm cleared his throat. “We think your medium is the air, Erik. After all, it’s what you do every time you sing—shape the air to produce music.”

  “But there are other ways, not so loud.” Nori leaned forward, her rheumy eyes glittering in their nest of wrinkles. “Especially if you can see the flows. Here.” With a small huff of effort she bent to scoop up a small piece of china from the floor near her feet. “Try this.”

  Automatically, Erik caught it one-handed and placed it on the table. He regarded it dubiously.

  Half an hour later, he was still glaring at the fucking thing, urgency crawling under his skin, an itch he couldn’t scratch. He’d moved the shard a whole quarter of an inch sideways. His head pounded. “Give me a minute.” He strode out the door into the welcome cool of night, seething.

  The dark air was a soft caress on his skin, light spilling from the kitchen windows and across the path. The graceful rooflines of The Garden’s pavilions were silhouetted against the racing clouds, the Sibling Moons shining high in the sky. It had to be past three in the morning. Despite himself, Erik yawned. Rose and a couple of the boys had insisted on going to scout out the Leaf of Nobility, but they’d returned empty-handed and crestfallen. He’d sent them to bed, and sensibly, they’d gone.

  Gods, where was Prue? Was she waiting for him even now, every minute that passed without rescue sapping her confidence, her will to survive? Lord and Lady, don’t punish her for my sins. I can pay all by myself. He bit his lip until he drew blood.

  Walker though . . . There was still Walker and the assassin. A sweet wind swirled by, bearing the heavy purple scent of dark roses. Erik’s nostrils flared in appreciation.

  He blinked. Purple? Well, hell.

  Eddies of air, limned in a deep burgundy violet, drifted by, flirting with the moonslight. Deliberately, Erik blurred his vision, the way the Purists had taught him. The color intensified, marking the passage of the light breeze.

  Right.

  With infinite caution, he raised his arm and pointed at a leaf that lay on the path, uneasily conscious he must look like a complete idiot. You, he thought fiercely. Now.

  The leaf quivered. Then it rose, floating upward in a gentle spiral, the way leaves did. Erik squinted through his lashes. Ah.

  The faintest of glimmers supported the leaf, so nearly transparent that if he moved his head, even slightly, it disappeared.

  Experimentally, he made a tugging motion with his fingers. The leaf jerked toward him as if on an invisible string. Erik smiled with grim satisfaction. Well, a string that was visible to him, a tether made of air.

  Fine. He could do this, he could do anything—for Prue. Narrowing his gaze, he concentrated on focusing his will.

  The leaf lurched and fluttered down to the path. Shit!

  Shuffling footsteps, the slow tap-tap of a cane. “You can’t force it, son,” said Purist Nori from behind him. “Magick is the gods’ gift. It comes from the heart, not the intellect.”

  Erik turned to stare down into her face. “You mean it’s instinctive?”

  The old woman folded her knotted hands on the head of her cane and shrugged.

  “In essence.” Purist Bartelm came to stand at her shoulder. “Mind you, that’s not permission to throw discipline out the window. Nor scholarship.”

  A heavy wooden table revolving in the air, a miscellany of objects circling above his head like crazed planets. The single silver cuff coming to rest against the corpsebird’s neck, touching that horrible scrawny skin . . . Remembering it, the hair stood up on the back of his neck. For a few moments there, he hadn’t been completely sane, the power of his emotions reducing him to a bundle of knee-jerk reactions, all of the most primitive sort. He’d no longer been a man, but a creature made of Magick.

  Abruptly, he couldn’t wait to be gone, to be doing. “Then I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” he said. “If I’m angry enough, it . . . the power . . . will come.” It felt so patently ridiculous, he couldn’t say the word out loud. Magick.

  “That’s not quite what we meant,” said Bartelm immediately, but Nori just shrugged again.

  From out of the darkness, a soft, deep voice said, “I have the assassin.”

  Three heads jerked around.

  Soundlessly, Walker stepped from the shadows into the light. There’d been no footfall, no sense of movement, nothing to indicate his presence. Gods, the man was uncanny. His slashing cheekbones were flushed, his clean-cut mouth curved in a cruel smile. “It took some doing, but Mehcredi’s safe in my House of Swords.”

  Nori cackled. Walker said nothing.

  Erik took a pace forward. “She talked?”

  “Yes.” Again that hunter’s smile. But then his dark brows drew together. “She didn’t know much. She was contacted by a man wearing the livery of an upper-class servant and directed to come here to The Garden.”

  “Here?” Bartelm’s eyes widened.

  “To Clouds and Rain. Where she met with her employer. She thinks it was a man, but he manifested as a bl
ack cloud.”

  “Dark Arts,” murmured Bartelm.

  Walker ignored him. “He gave no reason, but he wanted Erik dead. The fee was twenty credits, reduced to fifteen after the fuckup with Dai. The man came to Mehcredi a second time in a dream. At both meetings he hurt her in order to ensure her obedience.” An infinitesimal pause. “Also for the pleasure of her pain.”

  Fuck! Erik’s pulse boomed in his ears like a mighty, rushing wind. What would such a man do to Prue, with her bright-eyed courage and her sharp tongue? He clenched his fists so hard his nails dug into his palms. Shit, what was the bastard doing to her right now?

  “Why—?” He had to stop to moisten his lips. “Why did she take Prue? And how?”

  “Mehcredi hired two thugs, but you weren’t there and they couldn’t find you, not in time. When Prue wouldn’t tell them where you were, the assassin panicked. She decided Prue was better than nothing.” A flash in his dark eyes. “She fought the way I’d taught her, but the assassin used a stupefying drug.”

  Erik’s eyes stung. She’d refused to give him up? She’d tried to protect him? Ah, gods!

  “You have the woman secure? Under guard?” asked Bartelm.

  “Yes.” Walker bared his teeth. “She’s mine to do with as I will. Don’t worry, she’ll pay for what she did to Dai.”

  The old man took Nori’s arm to usher her back into the building. “Come,” he said over his shoulder. “We need all the details.”

  The moment they’d taken the first few steps, Erik strode away toward the water stairs, breaking first into a trot and then a run. Walker’s skiff bobbed gently in the water, a pale, slender shape, double shadowed. The canal lay deserted, silent and mysterious, the water a black, shifting expanse, relieved only by the shivering glint of wavelets caressed by the moonslight. It smelled cool and briny, the sea breeze playing with Erik’s hair.

  Stepping into the little craft, he unhitched the tie rope and shoved off. The skiff rocked alarmingly when he picked up the pole, but he managed the first couple of strokes without tipping himself into the water. As the current carried him around the bend, he thought he saw Walker’s lithe figure, standing, hands on hips at the top of the water stairs. His body was outlined against the martial glow of the Brother, flaring red as it dipped toward the horizon.

  All Erik had to do was follow his nose. Gods, he’d been so preoccupied with his terror for Prue, he’d almost forgotten the corpse-marsh stink of rotting vegetation surrounding the Leaf of Nobility. As he grew closer, his nasal passages burned with it. Inga’s face, glimmering beneath the water, her eyes open wide, unseeing . . . Erik set his teeth, swallowing the bile that rose in his throat.

  He didn’t have a clue what he was going to do, but the heart of it was here, he was convinced of it. The corruption still lurked beneath this Leaf, as it had for the gods knew how long. But nothing had happened until he’d revealed it in public and then capped off the performance with a clear demonstration of just how stubborn he could be.

  With a gentle bump, the skiff grounded under the Processional Bridge. Very well, two stairs to the east. He had to start somewhere. Poling silently on, Erik tried not to inhale. The first water stair was obviously a private mooring, with some kind of pleasure barge tied to a large bollard. He snugged the little skiff in next to it, flung the rope over the overhanging branch of a widow’s hair tree and secured it.

  The tall gate of iron bars at the top of the stair was locked, but it presented no obstacle to an athletic man filled to the bursting with fear and rage and the first intimations of a power beyond his wildest dreams. Erik stretched and jumped. He hung for an instant, then tightened his grip and hauled himself over with a quiet grunt. Dropping to a crouch on the other side, he took stock.

  Nothing moved, only the barge creaking at the other end of its cable, the occasional flower trembling at the end of a branch.

  Even in the cool half-light of the approaching dawn, he could see this noblefamily’s garden had been sculpted to within an inch of its life. Every plant, no matter how insignificant, had been clipped, forced or constrained. The lawn was a velvet swathe, paths intersected at right angles, even the pond was a perfect circle.

  Cautiously, he sniffed. Faugh! Yes, that way.

  Beyond the pond, a small gate gave out onto the narrow alley he remembered. Erik latched it carefully behind him and headed east, his long legs eating up the distance. Drawing on his early walk-on roles as servants of various types, he projected the air of a man busy about his master’s business, with every right to walk where he pleased.

  Three minutes and two sprawling palazzos later, he stared without surprise at a familiar wooden gate, his head swimming with the intensity of the odor. He rested a hand on the cool wood and turned to stare at the luxurious dwelling behind him. A light flickered high up in a room under the roof, so someone was awake, but all the other windows gazed back at him with dark, blank eyes. Erik’s lip curled. How did they stand the stink?

  This garden was lovely, nothing like the other, all flowing curves that intrigued and delighted the eye, vaguely reminiscent of the Sibling Gardens surrounding the Library. If he survived this, he’d have to ask Walker if he’d had a hand in the design.

  Opening the gate, he gritted his teeth and walked down the steps toward the lapping water, now the color of pewter. He’d always known it would come to this, hadn’t he? It was horrible, but fitting.

  Where were the seelies? They were the only lead he had, his sole advantage in this cruel game of bluff.

  Very softly, he began to sing, no more than a sweet, deep croon. A traditional ballad of unrequited love, one of his mother’s favorites. But this time, he watched out of the corner of his eye, pretending nonchalance on the off-chance he might convince himself. At first, all he saw was a glassy shimmer above the water, but when he hit and held a note in a melancholy minor key, the flow of air firmed, a narrow brush of transparent color laid out before him. Note after note, bar after bar, the streams multiplied, drifting and dancing in spirals, weaving together and splitting off.

  For a few precious moments, the stinking miasma of wrongness lifted.

  “Hoot?”

  Still humming, Erik glanced down. Bobbing in the water, a row of bug-eyed, whiskery faces stared up at the flows, entranced. There must have been at least a dozen of them. He gave a harsh bark of satisfaction, surprising himself with a gusty blast that sparkled with motes of strong orange.

  “Prue,” he said to his furry audience. “I have to find Prue.”

  Blue bodies flashed through the water. “Hoot? Burble?”

  Erik crouched and leaned toward them, holding out his hands. “You’ve got to help me. Where is she? Prue? Remember Prue?” With every particle of mental strength he possessed, he projected an image of her—her vivid little face, animated with curiosity and brisk intelligence, the honey-cream of her skin, those wonderful tip-tilted eyes, brighter even than the aquamarines she wore on her slim wrists, the fall of her shiny brown hair, gleaming with gold high—

  “Hoot!” A furry body arced out of the water and hit him in the small of the back with unexpected force.

  Before he could regain his balance, Erik tumbled forward, arms flying. The chill of the canal closed over his head as he sank, his clothes pulling him down. Fuck!

  Seething, he clawed his way back to the surface. “You stupid little shits!” he hissed as soon as his head was clear. “Why didn’t you wait? I was going to—Ah, fuck!”

  “Burble?”

  The seelies withdrew to a safe distance, large eyes watching him reproachfully as he floated on his back to haul off his boots and toss them onto the lowest step, followed by his jacket. He checked the long dagger sheathed at his waist. Still there. Good.

  Erik rolled his eyes at the circle of anxious, bewhiskered faces, the quivering snouts. “All right,” he said, treading water. “I’m sorry I yelled. Prue? Can you take me to Prue?”

  As one, they surged toward him. “Stop!” Erik held up his
hand, provoking a positive chorus of hoots and burbles. “I’m a land animal, remember? I need to breathe.”

  Relentlessly, he pumped his lungs full of hair, his chest expanding to what should have been bursting point—but wasn’t. As he inhaled a little more and then more yet, the air fizzed and sparkled in his blood, his body effervescent with power.

  Erik extended his arms to the sides. “Now,” he gasped, “Take me now.” Immediately, two of the biggest seelies barreled into his ribs, and he wrapped his arms around them, his fingers sinking into cool, silky fur.

  “Hoot!” said one.

  “Burble!” said the other.

  For all the world, it sounded like, “Hang on tight.”

  Erik’s tired grin became a startled grunt as they headed for the bottom at breakneck speed.

  36

  Prue stared at the ceiling, dry-eyed. Dully, she wondered how many hours had passed. The room was dark, save for the dim light of a single glowglobe, but she had the sense she’d slept for several hours at least. Thanks be to the Sister, the Technomage had removed the straps from her ankles so she could twist and stretch her lower body. The return of sensation to unused muscles had been agonizing, but she’d been ruthless, cursing under her breath as she contorted her body, testing the wrist restraints to their limits. Her life might depend on whether she could stand unaided—and run.

  Katrin must be frantic by now. Rose would be beside herself. As for Erik . . . She clamped her eyes shut and breathed through the pain. If I live through this, I’ ll . . .

  What? What would she do? Clenching her fists, Prue whispered, “I will reach for what I want and hold it fast. I will not doubt him. And I will not doubt myself. By all the gods, I swear it.” She needed to hear the words to make them real.

  It . . . it . . . it, the walls murmured back to her. The machine looming behind her hummed in counterpoint.

  If she strained her ears, she could hear the faintest ladylike snuffle coming from behind a plain, unpainted door off to the right. Her guess had been correct, the Technomage slept and lived down here. Prue shivered.