Intrigues v(cc-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  And that was where things took a very odd turn indeed. Waking, the man was tough, ruthless, and utterly immoral. In his dreams, he was the victim. The man spent every night fleeing from or fighting with something he knew would destroy—had destroyed—everything he cared about. It had been Mags’ own memories that had colored what he had gotten from Temper, and turned the dreams more personal. In his dreams, he didn’t know what the thing was he fled from or fought. Temper, however, knew very well what, or who, it was. But since it was a dream, Mags had no way of controlling it, to see the situation through Temper’s eyes, so the shadowy hunter remained a mystery.

  It got even stranger once he realized that. He began to suspect that Temper was no mere hapless victim, but that he had given himself into the situation willingly. That he had sacrificed the very things he loved for the sake of power. And strangest of all, Mags got the impression that the very thing he fought was the thing he served.

  In fact, the thing he fought was the thing he himself most wanted to become. Or, perhaps, replace.

  No wonder he was insane.

  Mags wanted to feel sorry for him, and couldn’t. The man was, in every sense, a monster. The longer Temper remained at large, the more danger he posed, because Mags knew that he was tenacious; either out of fear of his master, fear of failure, open-eyed ambition, or a combination of all three, Temper would not leave a job until he was called off, or the job was completed.

  Aside from all that, this was, oddly, one of the most satisfying times of Mags’ life.

  He was doing something important. And yet, he was more free than he had ever been. He answered to no one except himself. And he had Dallen. Certainly he was living and sleeping rough. Certainly there were nights of an empty belly, days in the misery of a pouring, cold rain that would be followed by a night in the open hoping that someone would put a fire in one of the fireplaces served by his chimney pots. But if he succeeded, it would all be worth it.

  He was learning more about Haven than he had ever gotten from books, or even from Dallen. And since most of what he did was absorptive observation, he was learning far, far more about people than he ever dreamed possible. Those little glimpses he got of their unguarded thoughts were telling him more about what it was like to be someone who had a normal life than he would have under any other circumstances. It tended to “leak” over, too; more than once he found himself looking at things from two sides—the way “Mags” did, and the way a “normal” person did.

  And he learned that he was not as much of a freak as he had thought he was. He learned that most intelligent people seemed to spend their lives feeling as if they didn’t fit in, that almost all of them felt like strangers inside their own skins, even when among their own friends. All of them seemed to be lonely, more or less. Many, to his surprise, were certain that there was a terrible darkness inside them that would utterly revolt anyone that knew about it.

  Now, it was true enough that his situation was unique; he really was something of an anomoly. But he wasn’t alone in feeling like such a complete outsider that he might as well have been raised by wolves. It struck him as so very strange, and yet, maybe not so strange. All of these people were alone in their own heads, isolated inside their own skins. They didn’t have, never would have, what he had with Dallen.

  That made him both less alone and more alien than any of them. But then again, that was the case with all Heralds.

  :It’s a wonder we don’t all go mad,: Dallen said, sleepily. :Except we keep each other sane, I suppose.:

  :If yer sure ye’re not crazy, don’t that pretty much mean ye are?: he replied, and got a woozy chuckle.

  Days went by without so much as a hint outside of his sleep-time of Temper. He began to wonder if Temper had somehow detected him, and was now effectively shielding his thoughts.

  Or maybe that shadow he had sensed had, and was.

  That being the case, he was going to have to go back to scanning the crowds, using nothing more than his eyes.

  Or rather, other people’s eyes.

  He tried, briefly, to use animals, but there either wasn’t enough mind-power there for him to skim off what they saw, or else he just wasn’t in tune with them. But the more he practiced, the better he got at it, until he was able to see what was going on several blocks away.

  And that was how it happened that, three days after Dallen was moved back to his old stall, late at night as the inns emptied out, Mags thought he spotted someone familiar.

  It was not the hair, which had been cut roughly, nor the clothing, which was nondescript. It was a way of turning the head, of walking, betraying an arrogance that was only partly hidden. It was a barely contained force that made people give the man a wide berth.

  He sifted through all the surface thoughts as fast as he could until he came to the right ones. And he knew they were the right ones, because he sensed that shadow again, hiding them.

  But it was only partly successful. The shadow was keeping Mags from the direct connection that he had had before—but it couldn’t stop the man’s thoughts from leaking out over his rather fragmented natural shields.

  There was something about those shields... why should they be shattered like that? Most people that weren’t Gifted either had no shields, or were so strongly blockaded they might just as well have been lumps of stone. Mags got another impression, a feeling more than any actual information, that once upon a time, this man actually had possessed good natural shields, but something had fractured them, and now his surface thoughts were anyone’s to read. Mags could not imagine what circumstance could have done that. In his experience, shields could be brought down, or forced down, or destroyed entirely as the mind that created them was destroyed, but they couldn’t be shattered like that and then left in pieces.

  He reminded himself not to be distracted, and put his attention back on gleaning every tiny bit of information that he could from those thoughts.

  As the last time... Temper’s main emotions were immediate irritation with the people around him, layered over loathing. He really, really hated Haven and Valdemar, and the people who called Valdemar home. He desperately wanted to leave. Mags got glimpses this time of the place that the man considered home, proper, secure.

  It was... nothing like he had expected. It was like a huge Guard barracks, if the barracks themselves had been run by a fanatic for order and rules and had been the size of a city; very regimented in every way, very disciplined. Rigid. There were few recreations, and those few were strictly controlled. Every aspect of life, from infancy to old age, seemed to be dictated by the handful in power, and the one aspiration that everyone had was to rise to become one of those that made the rules. You were told what to do, what to believe, what to learn and what to think, and no deviations were permitted.

  That was the impression that Mags got, anyway. Small wonder the cheerful chaos that was life in Valdemar revolted this fellow to the core. To his mind, to live without a rule for everything was to live like an animal.

  He was moving off, and soon he would be out of Mags’ mental reach. No hope for it. Mags would have to follow.

  It was dark enough that Mags felt safe in discarding his disguise altogether, pulling off his eye-wrap and the wax, leaving his bowl and staff behind so that he could hurry to catch up to the man before he got out of the distance at which Mags could keep picking up those surface thoughts.

  At first, Mags thought that he was going to return to wherever it was he and the others were hiding. That thought was uppermost in his mind, although Mags got no sense of where that might be, and he was walking away from any of the areas that Mags had thought likely.

  But then, something else, another goal began leaking out.

  The object. The thing he had lost. Now Temper knew exactly where it was. Tonight he was going to get it and he was only killing time until he reckoned it was safe enough to go after it.

  Just as he thought that, Temper turned his head to look over his shoulder and his eyes fell dire
ctly on Mags—who fortunately, was limping along, looking not at the man, but at the ground, the better to concentrate on following Temper’s thoughts. He fought the urge to freeze or hide and kept on walking, as if he, too, had a place to go and wanted to get into it.

  He saw himself through the man’s eyes. Sensed instant analysis.

  And, while he tried not to cringe in fear, he sensed instant dismissal. To this man, the wretched creature that was limping along the street behind him posed no sort of threat. This was one of the poorest of the poor, in rags, filthy. Undersized, and carrying no weapons. Of no consequence.

  Mags heaved a sigh of relief as the man went on to examine, analyze, and dismiss everyone else around him. He hadn’t recognized Mags from the Collegium, and he didn’t realize he was being followed.

  That was when Mags sensed the cutpurse who was hiding in the alley ahead; then sensed that the thief had spotted Temper. The surface thoughts of the thief, desperation crossed with greed, alarmed Mags, and he stopped, bending over to fumble with a shoe while he tried to figure out what was going to happen, and if he could do anything about it.

  The would-be thief was a boy, not a man, a boy no older than he was. A boy with a master to answer to, and who, so far today, had nothing to bring back to him. Coming back meant a beating or worse, and no supper. The boy looked at Temper with the eyes of a hunter amd saw good clothing, a man well-fed, with no obvious weapons. That was enough; the thief made his decision. Before Mags could even think of something to try and stop him, the boy was moving.

  His was the cut-and-run style, rushing at the victim from under cover, cutting the bands of the belt-pouch, and dashing off with it. Effective only when conditions favored a swift escape, it was well-suited to a night-thief, and to thefts where crowds thickened and thinned again, hampering pursuit.

  The boy thought he had such conditions—night, the alley, and a half a dozen escape routes on the other side of the street.

  He was wrong.

  The man heard the running footsteps; his instincts all came alive, and an unholy glee came over him.

  The rest was a blur to Mags, caught as he was between the thoughts of the cutpurse and the thoughts of Temper. Temper threw off such violence that it rocked Mags back on his heels, but it was precise and calculated violence, and an acute pleasure in what he was about to do that was very nearly pain in and of itself.

  The man moved at the last minute; the boy’s outstretched hands missed the tempting purse. There was a moment of anger and bewilderment on the part of the thief as his hands closed on air.

  Then a flash of terrible pain and incredulity.

  Then nothing.

  And in the street ahead, all that anyone would have seen was the thief make a rush, the man step aside, and the thief falling to the ground as if he had stumbled. Except the thief didn’t get up again.

  Temper passed on, leaving the cooling body of the boy in the street. It happened that quickly. One moment the thief was alive, the next, dead.

  Mags could scarcely believe it; shaken to his core, he sought for Dallen, but found only that haze that meant Dallen was heavily drugged, and nothing would rouse him.

  He recoiled from Temper’s thoughts, as the man savagely reviewed the three steps he had taken to break the boy’s neck with the pommel of his hidden dagger, so as to leave no obvious signs of violence on him for the Watch to find. Temper lingered lovingly over each move, each sensation, culminating with the climax of the weighted pommel striking exactly the precise point where the skull joined the spine, the single point that would kill the cutpurse instantly—lingering over the feel of the butt-heavy dagger in his hand, the solid impact with the skull, the sight of the boy sprawling just a little ahead of him, momentum taking what was already a corpse into a slide on the street. It was a perfect kill. Nothing could have been better—except, perhaps, if he’d had the leisure to strangle the thief with his bare hands.

  Temper loved this. This was how it should be. This was what he should be doing, not skulking around, trying to find the—to find the—to find the—

  Book! Mags realized as he finally “saw” what the man had been looking for all this time. He recognized it. He’d handled it himself, all unknowing.

  It was the book of poetry with the pictures of flowers in it that had been left behind when they vacated, kicked under a couch and forgotten in the haste to depart.

  The book of poetry. But—why?

  Temper had been working for moons to discover who had it, what had become of it. Without the book he couldn’t—he couldn’t—

  Before that thought could emerge, Temper’s goal swam to the forefront of his thoughts. The Palace. No... the Guard Archives. That was where their possessions had gone when everything possible had been gleaned from them. Temper had finally determined this, after weeks of finding where the Palace Guardsmen went on their nights off, and pouring wine down willing throats to lubricate them. Now he was heading for the Palace to get it back.

  And there was no way for Mags to alert anyone, not this far away. Dallen was sleeping like the dead.

  Now Temper’s thoughts were overlaid with agitation and anxiety, born out of the fact that the man knew he had orders, yet did not know what those orders were. In his world, following orders was of absolute importance, yet he could not follow the ones he had been given, because he didn’t know what they were. How could he not know what they were? That didn’t make any sense.

  The book—the book—

  What did the book have to do with all of this?

  Mags tried to think what on earth there was about the book that had escaped everyone. Every single soul that knew how to look for such things had examined it. There were no false covers, there was no invisible ink. There was no way for packets of orders to be hidden in it.

  So why—

  Mags didn’t dare pause, for Temper, acting with that terrible urgency impelling him, was making his way from shadow to shadow with a speed that Mags could scarcely believe. The only possible way Mags had of trying to contact anyone up at the Collegium was to stop and concentrate, but he didn’t dare stop. If he did, he’d lose the man; if he lost the man and couldn’t say where or how the man was going to get in, the only choice would be to rouse the Collegium. If he did that, Temper would see and know that he had somehow been exposed, and he would vanish again. All that Mags could do for the moment was to stick with him, and hope that once they were on the grounds he could get hold of someone to raise a quiet alarm and ambush Temper as he searched for the book—the book—why the book? Why that book?

  Then, like a gift, another set of images flashed across his mind and into Mags’ grasp. And suddenly Mags knew why he wanted it. The thoughts were carried on waves of frustration and despair.

  The book was the key to a cipher he, and the rest, were using to communicate with their superiors.

  It was nearly unbreakable too, unless you had the key.

  The key was simple enough. Every fortnight it would change to the next set of lines in the given poem. Letters of the alphabet were assigned to the letters in those lines. There were further complications involving maths that Mags barely glimpsed and which made his head spin, but the basis was the changing lines of poetry in that book.

  The irony was, since no one in Haven had had any idea that they were getting secret orders—from whom? Mags couldn’t tell, that wasn’t in Temper’s surface-thoughts—the orders probably could have been written plainly.

  The problem was, Temper and his cohorts had come to the end of the poem they were using. The last message gave the number of the page the next one would be on. But they hadn’t memorized that, so even if they had memorized all the poems in the book, the odds of then remembering which one was on which page was rather slim.

  And they couldn’t tell that to their masters. The message delivery all went one way. Nor was there any possibility of getting another copy of the book.

  Not without going home. And anyone going home to report such failure w
ould be killed. There was very little tolerance for mistakes; none at all for a mistake like this one.

  The man Mags called “Temper” slowed his pace.

  They were now among the homes of the well-to-do. There was great danger of being spotted here, there were many patrols of both the Watch and the Guard, and they were more alert to subtle signs of an interloper than were the ones down deeper into Haven, who watched mostly for overt violations of the law and crimes being committed openly on the streets. This was how Mags had gotten away with purloining so many dinners. Innkeepers and householders were expected to see to their own security. After all, there were only so many Watchmen and Guards, and far too many windows, doors, and roof-hatches.

  Ah, but here Mags had the advantage. He knew this part of Haven much better than Temper did. Now he could run ahead, while Temper only skulked—

  Or so he thought.

  To his chagrin and incredulity, he sensed Temper straighten, take a folded, sealed packet out of a pocket, and with that in his hand, stride confidently up the middle of the road. He was a man with a message to deliver, and no one was going to look at him twice. No, Mags would have to skulk; not even in the darkness was he going to pass as someone who belonged up here, as ragged and filthy as he was.

  At least he knew the area; he knew who had dogs, who had private guards, whether or not those guards were vigilant. So he followed Temper just out of sight, keeping walls and other obstructions between himself and the foreign agent, so that if Temper heard the sound of Mags’ bare feet on the pavement, he’d see nothing if he turned to look.

  He didn’t seem to hear anything, however, and Mags kept up a running, mostly inarticulate prayer that he wouldn’t.

  Mags was very aware of the nearness of the Palace, the looming walls that surrounded it, and that they were drawing nearer to it with every moment. There was an open space, officially designated as a park, between the last of the Great Manors and the walls around the Palace and Collegia.

  Here, the man paused; his mind closed to Mags’ as he searched intently for something. This was the back of the Palace, not far from Companions’ Field. There was nothing like a gate here; surely he wasn’t going to try and get over the wall!