Lightborn

by Alison Sinclair

  She heard Floria’s hand scrabble in the hatch. “Thank you,” she breathed.

  Telmaine set her back against the paper wall, something she would never have imagined doing before last week, preferring the Lightborn to the Darkborn behind her. Vladimer had withdrawn to the door, his head angled to listen to the sounds outside. And there were sounds outside—men’s voices, speaking low as they passed by. Floria started to say something, and Telmaine hushed her sharply. She did not need to expand on it, not to the vigilant. She heard footsteps whisper away on the other side of the paper wall, and was trapped in the dilemma of either risking speech or risking having Floria leave before Telmaine asked her what she must. She strained uselessly to sense what lay behind the wall, appalled at how, in a bare few days, she should have become so dependent on her magic.

  Vladimer sonned her, drawing her attention; when she sonned him in return, he beckoned her, commandingly. “Mistress White Hand,” she hissed, and then, “Floria?”

  From farther away. “Telmaine?”

  “Please get a message to Balthasar. Tell him we spoke. It’s very important.”

  “Telmaine—what’s been happening? I heard a terrible sound a while ago—a booming, and voices screaming from the street—”

  “I have no time,” she breathed. “I have to go.” She followed Vladimer into the small antechamber, and waited while he listened at the door until he was satisfied. Then she followed him out, revolver in her hand. The spreading of the ashes, the leaving behind of her jewelry, those signaled the depth of his planning, the gravity of his masquerade. He meant to leave, and he meant to take her with him; that, for the moment, was sufficient.

  Just before the heavy double doors, he turned right, and unlocked the small side door, opening it on a spiral stairwell that breathed coldly and moistly of underground. He started down it, moving carefully on steps that were dipped with centuries of wear. She went after, silently until the question became pressing, “Vladimer, where are we going?”

  “I told you: the Borders.”

  He had not told her—but she let that pass. “Kip said there was no underground connection between the city and the palace.”

  “Did he?” Vladimer said, sounding almost amused.

  “And even if there were, it’s miles to the station.” He could never walk it, even healthy.

  He did not answer. They emerged in catacombs, storerooms of the old, underground palace, now occupied only by moldering crates and barrels of supplies long forgotten. Between vast stone pillars and beneath immense buttresses, she followed him. If he had brought her here to murder her, she would never be found. If she shot him now, she might never find her way out. One or the other, or both of them, would slowly rot. Immolation seemed the less obscene fate now.

  He reached a gnarled wall, felt in his pocket. She hitched the revolver, but he only produced a piece of metal, with a hook on the end, dug it into a hole in the stone, and pulled. Stones ground on one another and drew apart. He slid through into the space beyond. She balked. His sonn caught her; before she could react, his cane was leveled, and if the tip wavered, at this distance he would not miss.

  “I cannot leave you alive,” he rasped. “Sejanus wants you out of the city, where you’d be unable to twist any ensorcellment over him.”

  “There is no ensorcellment!”

  “He doesn’t know that. Nor do I. The dukes will be satisfied with a heap of ash, but Sejanus wants you gone.”

  “And you gone as well?” she returned.

  “And me, too.” His voice so dull with pain she nearly pitied him.

  “We’re under the garden now,” he said, once more in control of himself. “It’s just a few hundred yards more. You might as well give me back that revolver if you’re not going to use it.”

  Lips compressed, she shook her head. He shrugged, one-shouldered, and stepped back to let her through.

  The few hundred yards felt like several miles. Her shoes had never been made for slippery flagstone, or for walking any distance, and she had neither coat nor shawl over her light indoor dress. Even when she pulled her gloves back on, her hands felt icy. She missed, acutely, the tiny weight of Balthasar’s love knot nestled against her throat. Back in the palace, was the evidence now being put before the archduke? When would they tell Balthasar—the children? She shivered and bit her gloved finger, tasting salt.

  When Vladimer halted, she nearly collided with him from behind. The underground passageway continued, but he was stooping beside a low grille, and struggling one-handed with its mechanism. She let him struggle until it was plain that he was making no progress, and then silently offered her right hand to partner his left. Between them they got the grille open. On the far side, there was a long step down. He offered his sound hand to steady her as she slithered through, and accepted her bracing arms on his own descent. She sonned around herself in amazement. They were but a few steps from the edge of an underground canal. To their right, in a bay, a dozen flat-bottomed riverboats, like the ones she had played in in her youth, nuzzled the stone pier. Vladimer said, “Give me the cursed gun. You’ll need both hands, and I don’t want it going overboard.”

  She hesitated, and finally yielded the revolver. He checked it by touch, and returned it to its holster. Nothing in his face suggested that he thought of using it here and now, on her. He directed her to cast off the lead boat—“You’ve two sound hands”—while he climbed carefully in and settled himself by the tiller. The moment the line slipped free, the boat began to move on the current. To his barked, “Jump!” she tossed the line before her, hitched up her skirts, and leaped, landing low and light, gripping the gunnels. The boat rocked, and settled. He said, “Good. Take up the pole, and help keep us straight.”

  Useless to protest she had not punted a riverboat for years, and then only on her boy cousins’ rare sufferance. She knelt in the bow and tilted at the walls, nearly losing her seat on occasion, but he had a practiced hand on the tiller, and as the current caught and began to carry them, their course steadied, and she drew the pole back in.

  “Come back here,” he said, sliding off the seat to sit on the floor, without relinquishing his grip on the tiller. “The canal runs parallel to the creek for a mile or so, and there are open grilles to level the water. At this time of day there’s enough light coming through to burn us.”

  Bent low, she clambered over the seats. “Tarpaulins, under that last seat; get two out and cover us.” She dragged out the heavy, waxy sheets, and struggled to unfold them. He released the tiller only as long as he needed to shift his hand to grip through the tarpaulin, then had her draw it over his head. Her heart beating quickly, she shrouded herself as well. She heard the crackle of waxed fabric as he shifted, his breathing harsh with the discomfort of moving. “Don’t talk; we might be heard. And don’t move until I say.”

  Huddled under the heavy fabric, breathing her own exhalations, she fought panic. Perhaps he felt the same, for it was he who broke the silence, in a rasp. “First day I ever spent in the open under tarp, it was with Ishmael di Studier, trussed like a roast for the pot because he didn’t know if I was friend or enemy.” It was a sketch that begged a story, but if Vladimer had hoped she would ask him, she determined to disappoint him. But speculation was distraction from panic, and the notion of Vladimer bound and helpless, quite consoling. In the stuffy warmth of her own body heat and exhaled air, she grew calmer and then drowsy with broken sleep and strain.

  She jumped awake to a foot prodding her through the stiff tarp and the sound of spattering water. “Are you dead, woman? If you’re not, take the pole. There’s a confluence just ahead that we need to negotiate.”

  “Is it—?”

  “Yes, it’s safe, but in half a minute it won’t be. Move.”

  She struggled from under the tarpaulin and crawled to the front of the boat, taking up the pole. From ahead, she could hear bubbling water. Sonn resolved a ceiling lower than her standing height and close parallel walls that ended in a vo
id a dozen boat lengths away. Vladimer raised his voice. “The current will take us to the right. Brace us so we don’t collide with the walls. If we swing too wide, fend us off the far side of the canal. And sonn ahead for obstructions.”

  She gasped, and readied her pole, feeling the boat quiver with the first turbulence. Current snatched at the bow. Vladimer snapped, “Brace!” and she jammed the pole into the looming wall, scrabbling to find purchase with her feet. “Don’t stall us!” Vladimer said. “Push us forward!” Feet jammed against the side of the boat, gloved hands slipping, she strained, trying to convert her brace to a forward push. The boat lurched, wobbled, turned slowly out of the side channel into the main. “Sonn front!” The channel was wide, much wider than the creek tributary, and its ceiling was higher than she might reach, standing—should she be foolish enough to stand. They were moving briskly enough that if an obstacle snagged them unawares, they might capsize. She could swim, but not well, and Vladimer had one arm unusable.

  But the way seemed clear. She risked sonning behind her. Vladimer was hunched painfully in the stern, still gripping the tiller. “Lord Vladimer—”

  “Attend—front. In two miles—we pull off. So don’t—go to sleep on me.” She realized, after a disbelieving moment, that he meant it in jest, delivered through gritted teeth though it was.

  She crouched in the bow, sonning ahead until her neck and head began to ache from the strain. At irregular intervals a spatter of droplets doused her from above. Vladimer, she noticed, was using the tarpaulin to spare himself. At last he said, “We are coming up on the station docks now. There’s a bay on the right. Tell me ‘one’ as soon as you sonn it, and ‘two’ as it’s within a pole’s reach. Do it smartly. I didn’t intend these boats to be handled by two people alone.”

  She acknowledged him, voice husky. “One . . . two.”

  “Fend off ahead!” and he forced the tiller over, sending them straight for the wall that split the main stream from the bay. The force of the rod striking the wall nearly tore it from her hands. “Bring us right!” Vladimer shouted, as the stern began to swing round in the current. He abandoned the tiller and scrambled forward to grip the wall one-handed, lending his strength to hers. Slowly, grindingly, the boat scraped past and into the gentler current of the bay. Vladimer half sat, half fell against one of the middle benches.

  She sonned around them. They were drifting in calm water. On the far side, only five or six boat widths away, a series of steps led down to the water’s edge, each wide enough to receive a single boat, separated by a wall with iron rings at various levels.

  If Vladimer had not fainted, he was close enough to it to be of little use. She poled them toward the steps, and retrieved the wet bow rope from where she had thrown it. But for one impossible knot, she managed to untangle it, and leaned from the bow to capture the iron ring and thread the rope through it.

  Behind her, Vladimer noted in a tone of remote interest, “We’re taking on water.”

  Their last collision had split boards, and they were indeed taking on water. Their exit was graceless and urgent, accomplished by crawling onto the stone steps. She left Vladimer propped against the stone block while she retrieved his cane from the half-sunk boat.

  “I think,” she said, “your evacuation plan still needs work.”

  He made a sound at the back of his throat that indicated agreement, possibly even amusement. She pulled him to his feet, and up the steps, finding a grille not unlike the one they had negotiated on the way out. He let her ply the key and pull away the grille, alone. She scrambled up the waist-high step, and helped him haul himself up, which he did in teeth-clenched misery.

  “How far do we have to go to the station?” she said.

  “We can’t . . . not until sunset,” he said. “The day trains are not running. There are rooms. . . .”

  The rooms, off a side tunnel and up a short flight of stairs, were appallingly primitive and an utter delight. A small central sitting room with four bedrooms, each containing several narrow beds with chests and cabinets with clothes, carefully folded and preserved with sachets of flowers. Telmaine, with her wet skirts dragging around her ankles, nearly sobbed with relief at the scent of them.

  “How long has this been here?” she said, rummaging for something that might fit.

  “The underground aqueduct . . . is as old as the city itself,” Vladimer said, leaning painfully in the doorway. “When this leg of mine made me realize I hadn’t allowed in my plan for anyone who couldn’t walk the distance—I had it reopened.”

  “And what did you do to the workmen?” she said, tone biting. Plainly, Vladimer’s intent was to have an escape route for the archduke and his family, and for that, secrecy was essential.

  “Selectivity, good pay, and intimidation,” Vladimer said, taking no apparent offense at her implication. “Change,” he ordered, “and join me.”

  What she wanted to do most of all was sleep. No, what she wanted was him to sleep, so that she could relax her guard, think what to do next, where to go. He seemed set on taking her with him, to the Borders. One man and one woman against an invasion: what new madness was he planning? She pulled on a sensible traveling dress made for a woman slightly taller and fuller-bodied than she, but still a passable fit.

  She found Vladimer at the table central to the sitting room, a dry jacket thrown over his shoulders and a corked bottle and glasses in front of him. He sonned her and drew his breath in sharply, his expression going taut with shock and then anger and finally a strange, wounded ambivalence. She had not thought to wonder whose dress this might be, but if he had first arranged this egress years ago, then—gossip had had Vladimer in love with his brother’s wife. Before she had spent time in his company, before she had brushed his mind, she would not have believed it of a man with his reputation, but the Vladimer who had revealed himself to her was capable of intense loves and hatreds.

  She sat down opposite him, affecting to have noticed nothing. Vladimer pushed the bottle toward her and handed her the cork twist. Removing corks from bottles was not something a lady did, but she succeeded in extracting a mangled cork and carefully poured out two glasses. She had been afraid it might be beer, but it smelled, quite pleasantly and not at all headily, of early-summer cider. Vladimer produced a small medicine bottle and added a carefully measured quantity of its contents to his glass. She caught the familiar musty scent of a strong pain reliever.

  “You said there was a report of an invasion in the Borders, and that you intend to go there, and take me there. What do you intend us to do?”

  Vladimer leaned back, bracing his arm. “First, confirm the report. It may be wrong, or exaggerated.”

  “And if not? What can you and I do alone?”

  “Sejanus was not prepared to send reinforcements of the usual sort, at least not without more information. Which I fear might come too late. So I sent a message to Magistra Broome by daylight runner.” He paused, but the name had evoked her habitual blank response to any mention of mages and magic, born of long years of concealment. “I asked her to join me with as many of her people as would come.”

  She discovered then that the thought of meeting Darkborn mages openly no longer dismayed her. The worst, after all, had already happened. “What did you do to Phineas Broome?”

  Vladimer smiled, thinly. “What makes you think I did anything?”

  That smile, for one. “I tripped the lock by magic. Put you out by magic.” His lips tightened at the reminder. “He raised no alarm. Is he dead?”

  “No,” Vladimer said. “He listened to reason—or at least to my reasoning as to his motives for putting himself at Mycene’s service.” He paused, inviting the question, but she was cursed if she would oblige. “I believe, for all his claims of concern about threats from Shadowborn against the dukedom, he also intended to divert arms to his revolutionary colleagues. I was able to tell him enough to convince him I could make such an accusation stick, whether or not it was true. I bought his silence
with my own.”

  He sipped the cider, frowning at the taste, or maybe only his thoughts. “He insists that he went to Mycene after my interview with himself and his sister, because he was disturbed by your presence. . . .”

  She would rather not think about that interview, Phineas Broome, or the Shadowborn taint on her. “So you and I and Magistra Broome’s mages are supposed to do what?”

  “The Borders has a full standing force and as large a trained reserve as creative accounting allows.” Whose? Creative accounting was not likely to be one of Ishmael’s skills; the man was direct to a fault. “If they have proven unequal to the forces moving against them, then atypical reinforcements may better serve. In any case, it is quite certain we will be facing mages, and mages capable of ensorcelling people against their loyalties.” He flinched, as at a sudden assault of pain. Not physical, she thought; no, for if it had been physical, he would have turned to his drugged cider.

  “If Magistra Olivede Hearne comes,” Telmaine said, “you could send her to the palace. She is only third-rank, but she is Balthasar’s sister, and she has a great deal in common with him.”

  He reacted rather as she had reacted to the mention of mages. She saw the old mask of suspicion drop over his face. Already regretting her compassionate impulse—to this man of all people—she snapped, “For pity’s sake, Vladimer, my magic’s—what was your phrase?—trussed like a roast for the pot. I don’t need it to know how much you hate these orders, hate leaving your brother, even though he gave you no choice.”

  “No,” he said. “He did not.”

  If Sejanus Plantageter had dealt harshly with him, it was no more than he deserved. There were things she supposed he and she needed to say to each other, but she did not have the strength. “If there’s anything else, I expect it can wait for nightfall. We’re both tired. I’m going to get some rest.”

  She picked up her glass and left him sitting there, alone.

  Floria

  In the doorway, Floria halted at her first sight of the Mages’ Tower under the bright midday sun. Its flanks gaped. Its domed top was an irregular spire, the dome itself reduced to broken ribs. The carved upper balconies gaped like an old brawler’s teeth, and the tiling and reliefs were staved in or cracked. In the stillness of noon, a trembling haze of dust shimmered over the ruin.