All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  Brana fared better. There was a thump and a squeal of pain from Andolon—­Brana had gotten the knife away from him and used it to pin the fop’s arm to the ceiling of the coach. He then started hitting Andolon in the stomach with a series of rapid jabs. “Ha!” the gnoll growled. “Take it!”

  “Brana!” Artus yelled, his arms quivering.

  The gnoll’s ears swiveled toward his friend, and seeing the knife about to fall, he put his feet against the opposite side of the cab and drove himself forward in a lunge that knocked Artus and himself out through the door of the moving coach. They hit the cobblestones hard and rolled, Artus knocking over a group of children and Brana winding up in an apple cart. The world spun for a moment as stars danced in Artus’s eyes and he struggled to get back his breath.

  Eventually he sat up. The Quiet Man hadn’t pursued them, apparently—­or had he? Artus looked around at the crowd, trying to spot him. It was hopeless. If he was here, he and Brana would never be able to tell.

  Somebody helped Artus to his feet. It was Brana, who had somehow replaced his shroud. The crowd of onlookers dispersed shortly thereafter, with one or two ­people saying they should report that coach to the Defenders. Artus smiled his thanks but his heart was racing too fast to come up with something to say.

  He sat on the curb and Brana sat next to him. He had no idea where he was—­somewhere overlooking one of the harbors. The mazelike streets of Saldor all seemed the same to him, and every angle on the harbor looked alike. He guessed they were both lost.

  Brana turned his golden eyes to Artus and whimpered in gnoll-­speak, “I want to go home.” He leaned forward, nudged Artus’s shoulder with his forehead and gave his hand a little lick.

  Artus looked out across the harbor and at the forest of masts that glowed red-­gold in the light of the setting sun. Thousands upon thousands of ­people, all of them far from home, brought here by the promise of gold. Thousands upon thousands of ­people, all hoping to get home—­the only place where gold really mattered.

  Artus put his arm around his adopted brother. “I want to go home too, Brana.” For once, though, he realized he wasn’t thinking of Jondas Crossing, or of his family farm, or of his mother. He was thinking of Tyvian in the common room of a roadside inn, his feet up beside the fire, sipping a glass of wine. He thought of laughter over roast rabbits caught on the road, the smell of Hool’s fur after a light rain, and the gleam of Tyvian’s smile in the lamplight.

  Home.

  CHAPTER 21

  JUSTICE UNDONE

  Petrification had not been and was not painful, not in any physical sense. It was cold and dark. Time seemed to both collapse and expand at equal rates—­a moment could be a year, a year a moment. There was no way to tell. Myreon felt no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue. She was adrift in the abyss of her own memories.

  At first she remembered her life well: her time as a little girl in her family vineyards, ducking and hiding among the trellises, all of them pregnant with the heavy weight of ripe grapes. She remembered the smell of spring rain, going to the river for the Festival of Arrival and dancing around the maypole. She remembered the panic of the fire—­the sound of her uncles shouting, and the sight of the bandits, blades bare, as they ran among the storehouses.

  And afterward: poverty in Saldor. Bereft of home and family, her father drifted from job to job, often working on the river. She remembered a stay on a riverboat for a year, hauling goods from Freegate to Saldor, sleeping with her father in a tiny bunk meant for one man, the sound of his breathing in the night after a long shift poling the boat around shoals. The smell of tar and sweat.

  And afterward: Her attending school in Saldor. Years of study—­history, religion, natural philosophy, magecraft, mathematics. Her teachers smiling at her. Then the Arcanostrum.

  Those eerie spires loomed large for Myreon in her dark exile. She remembered learning as an initiate, being famulus to Lyrelle Reldamar, attaining her first mark and being accepted as apprentice, remembered earning her second mark and being granted her staff. She remembered Archmagus Lyrelle taking the time to congratulate her just before she, herself, was set to retire; she remembered sipping tea in that incredible woman’s chambers, talking about her future.

  She also remembered Tyvian. His damned grin—­so self-­satisfied, so confident. His face in pain, above hers—­the feeling of his lips, so hot they seemed to still burn her. She remembered the heat of a hundred suns coursing through her, raising her from the grave itself. What was the genesis of that power? She had always wondered. Now, with infinite time to think, she did not wish to think on it. The thought of it frightened her more than anything else; she pushed it away, only to have it rise again. It seemed as though Tyvian’s lips were always there, hot against hers, blowing life into her from the bottomless depths of his soul.

  As time went on, her memories bled into one another. There was Lyrelle at her family vineyard, purchasing wine from her father. There was Tyvian, an initiate in the Arcanostrum, like her—­he was thin and slight, but had the same wry grin, the same intelligent eyes. They never spoke.

  She saw the Dellorans on the riverboat, her father fighting them. She recalled seeing her uncles die at the hands of a bloody, nude Banric Sahand. She saw Hool at the Festival of Arrival, flowers in her mane, dancing to music she could only half hear. Fact and dream combined into a seamless flow of images and sensations, all of them dulled by the veil of her bodiless existence.

  And also that damned kiss. Always with that damned, stupid kiss.

  She found herself, all at once, missing the sound of her pumping heart. Missing her humanity. Would she be mad when she at last emerged from this prison? How long had it been? What would become of her?

  Focus, she cautioned herself. Control your thoughts or lose yourself. She had seen it a hundred times—­a warlock performing the Rite of Release upon a prisoner, and that person emerging listless, dumb, and blind. It took some months to recover themselves, and even then they were never fully restored. Many wound up on the streets of Saldor, halfhearted beggars panning for loose change. Most of those died within a year.

  That was not her. That would not be her. She ran herself through mental exercises, carefully filing and annotating her life into a little mental biography only she would ever see. The concentration it took was nearly unbearable. The human mind, she decided, was not meant to work like a library, ordering itself into neat piles. The harder she tried to cling to the threads of her memory, the more wildly they scattered.

  The case, she told herself, focus on the case.

  She thought of Gethrey Andolon, the Saldorian gentleman. A man in gaudy clothes, jewels embroidered into every surface of his doublet. A cane with a jade topper carved into a toad and wearing shoes with five-­inch heels, Myreon could still see his powder-­blue hair and his elaborate hats. Yes! Focus on him!

  For what seemed to be forever, Myreon lived and relived her investigation of Andolon. The mysterious cargoes that went missing without a trace. The bodies found in the river, tied only loosely to him. The frustration at knowing something was wrong, but being unable to prove it. She nurtured a hot, blazing anger toward him for as long as she could—­she would have her revenge, she told herself. He would face justice.

  But even that, in time, was not enough.

  Too much darkness now. Myreon could not remember the sound of her name in the lips of others. The world was fading. Everything seemed distant, abstract.

  Had there been a man named Gethrey Andolon who had wronged her? Myreon told herself it was true, but it did not seem so anymore. The perfumed man with his gaudy clothes and his sweaty palms seemed more like a caricature of a chapbook villain than a real person.

  She had begun to believe that there was no real light. There was no real time. Her dreams and memories had almost entirely faded, losing the vivid color that had once been their hallmark. The smell of spring rain and the
smell of tar and sweat merged together. Her father’s face became indistinct. Had she been able, she might have wept, but she could not. Even that was denied her here.

  With glacial slowness, she knew she was losing herself. Bit by bit, piece by piece, until nothing in the end would remain. Thoughts of vengeance seemed pointless, even if considered dispassionately. She was stone—­why not truly become it? Why torture herself with things that were no longer for her, no longer of her world?

  Maybe none of that had ever been real anyway. Maybe this was the world as it was meant to be—­quiet, dark, cold, unflinching. She could go on forever like this, just a mote in the stream of eternity, and what would be lost?

  Since there was no true pain, there could be no true suffering. There was peace at last.

  It remained this way for what might have been a moment or what might have been a century. Myreon wondered if she had been forgotten, but she could not, in truth, remember who there would be to forget her. It was just her. It had always been just her, alone in the dark and cold.

  Then, a light—­a real light, faint but pulsing ever closer. There was warmth building, starting deep inside. Boom-­boom. Her mind grew quiet before the noise, waiting. Boom-­boom.

  Her heart. She was coming back to herself. Her body was reverting to its flesh once again. Her sentence had passed.

  Her sentence had passed!

  The process seemed to take years. Every beat of the heart was a lifetime apart, every gradually increasing note of sensation took shape in a process that began with numbing cold, then a tingling, almost painful storm of sensory static, then, eventually, full and complete awareness. She was hungry. She was tired and sore. Her fingers were stiff and cold; the first time she bent them in who knew how many years was pure, blessed agony. Myreon found herself loving the pain, reveling in it.

  Then, at last, her face—­her lips (dry, cracked), her ears (the screaming noise of crickets, so cacophonous as to make her cover them with her stiff, unwilling hands), her nose (the smell of grass and roses and horse manure and river water), her eyelids (stiff and ready to open).

  She opened her eyes.

  There, leaning over her, his arms wrapped around her, was the face of . . . who? A handsome man . . . she thought she knew him . . .

  Tyvian Reldamar. Tyvian! When he smiled, his teeth were whiter than the stars above. “Hello, Myreon. Back with us, are you?”

  He was as she had never seen him, never imagined him to be—­filthy, wet, stripped to the waist like a common longshoreman. His torso was a tightly maintained core of smooth muscle crisscrossed with small scars, like the hull of a pirate’s sloop. He was warm and breathing. She knew that this was real—­the first real sensation she had experienced for three years. She opened her mouth to speak but no words could form.

  Tyvian rose, and she realized he was carrying her. “Don’t worry—­time enough to talk soon enough. Save your strength.”

  Myreon decided she didn’t need to speak. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled him close and kissed him deeply. Tears ran down her cheeks, fogged her vision. Even after the kiss had broken, she clung to the smuggler’s muscular neck like a woman drowning.

  She fell into a blessed sleep, years in the making.

  She did not dream.

  Morning sunlight and the smell of dusty linen greeted Myreon. The mattress beneath her was down-­filled, but beaten flat by years of use. The quilts seemed to weigh a ton; she was hot, sweat pooling in the small of her back. The sensation was glorious.

  The largest woman Myreon had ever seen leaned over her. When she smiled, it looked as though her teeth had been fighting with each other. Her dark eyes twinkled beneath caterpillar eyebrows. “Good morning, magus . . . oh, well . . . Miss Alafarr, I suppose.” The woman sighed. “Don’t seem proper, addressin’ you like that, do it?”

  Myreon groaned and searched for her voice. She found it; it creaked like a rusty hinge. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Maude, dearie.” Maude poured water from a clay pitcher into a wooden mug on the bedside table. Then, bizarrely, she planted a kiss on Myreon’s forehead. “Cripes, you’re hot as karfan under there!” She hauled off the heavy quilt with a single sweep of a muscular arm. Myreon felt like she could breathe again.

  “I told you she’d get hot, Maude.” The voice was a knife in her ribs. Tyvian.

  She sat bolt upright, fatigue forgotten. There he was—­sitting in a simple wooden chair, sipping tea from a cracked cup and weathered saucer. “You! What the hell are you doing here?”

  Maude chuckled. “I’ll leave you two alone, eh?” She gave Myreon a wink. “Give ’im hell, lassie.”

  Tyvian snorted. “Thank you, Maude.”

  Maude waved over her shoulder and pressed a small knot in a wooden support beam. A secret panel in the wall rotated open and she disappeared through it. After she had gone, the panel closed again. It was then that Myreon noticed the room had no other door.

  “Who is that woman? What are you doing here? Where am I?”

  Tyvian gave her a half grin. “That woman is Maude, an old friend. You are in a hidden saferoom in the basement of the Cauldron. You are here because this is where I took you after rescuing you last night.”

  Myreon blinked. Her thoughts were like congealed fat in a tube—­barely moving, barely working. “What . . . what did you do? My sentence . . . was it commuted?”

  “No.” Tyvian sipped his tea. “Well . . . in a manner of speaking. I commuted it by breaking you out.”

  “How? What . . . what did you do?” Myreon threw the sheet off, only to realize she was only dressed in a thin cotton shift. She pulled the sheet immediately back over her. “In order to release someone from petrification, you need to access their Rite of Release in Keeper’s Court! You didn’t . . . did you?”

  Tyvian nodded. “I did. I broke in, stole your rite, and set much of the place on fire. A simple thank-­you will suffice.”

  “You’ve made me a criminal!” Myreon flexed her fingers.

  “To be perfectly fair, Myreon, you already were a criminal. Now you’re a fugitive.”

  Myreon found herself casting a spell before she knew it—­the Shattering burst from her hands with a thunderclap and reduced Tyvian’s chair to flinders. She rose from the bed and fairly flew across the room, tackling him. She had him by the shirt-­laces and started shaking him. “You son of a bitch! You miserable, self-­centered, insane—­”

  Tyvian put up his hands in surrender. “Myreon, Myreon—­how can you call me self-­centered? I just saved you!”

  She slapped him. “No! You are obsessed with me—­you are a sick, twisted psychopath! You heard I was helpless and couldn’t wait to charge in here to steal another kiss!”

  Tyvian put his hands behind his head. “I believe you kissed me, this time. We’re even. Besides, I’m not the one currently straddling the other’s body in my underclothes. Who, mademoiselle, is obsessed with whom, eh?”

  Myreon punched him in the chest and got off him. She wobbled on her feet and nearly fell, but Tyvian was there, holding her by the arm. She shook him off. “Don’t touch me. Get out—­I need some time alone. I need to collect my thoughts.”

  Tyvian shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to collect your thoughts with company.”

  Myreon’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “Allow me to remind you, Myreon: you are a criminal now. I am also a criminal. We two criminals are wanted by the Defenders, but that is only the first of our problems.” Tyvian held up another finger. “Second among our problems is that whoever framed you for the crime you so obviously did not commit will now know you are released, which means they will want you silenced.”

  “Gethrey Andolon.” The name felt foul in Myreon’s lips. She could still picture his stupid blue head and his ring-­studded fingers, going through his elaborate chara
de of not knowing what was happening to all his shipments of cherille and karfan and good Akrallian brandy, and on and on . . .

  Tyvian twiddled his third finger. “Gethrey is working with the Mute Prophets. The Mute Prophets own this establishment, and while Maude is a friend, Claudia—­her co-­owner—­is not. If I leave the room, Claudia or one of the employees herein loyal to her may see me, and then the jig is up.”

  Myreon glanced at the door. “I assumed this was a safe-­house of yours.”

  Tyvian shrugged. “Used to be. Now it’s more of a safe-­room.”

  Myreon waited for the punchline, but Tyvian merely looked at her with that stupid half smile, hands in the air as if to say Sorry. She considered the merits of punching him. “So, what—­we’re going to live here now? Is there anything more to the plan, or have the last few years rotted your brain?”

  “Years?” Tyvian laughed. “Myreon, you’ve only been petrified for perhaps six months, if that. It’s the twelfth of Kromonth, the twenty-­fifth year of Polimeux II. Ozday, if you must know. As for how long we have to stay here, I’d estimate no more than a few days. Then we’ll be more or less free to go.”

  “What do you mean? What about Andolon and the Prophets? What about the Defenders?”

  Tyvian smiled. “Don’t you worry about the Defenders. They were too busy putting out fires to even notice the lack of a single judge’s ledger, I’d wager. By the time they figure out I’ve sprung you and find out where we are, we’ll be gone. As for Gethrey, he only wants you and me dead because he’s worried we’ll ruin his plans. The solution to that problem is incredibly easy: we don’t ruin his plans. Once he succeeds, which I imagine will be soon, he won’t give a damn about us, and we can be on our way.”

  Myreon couldn’t help but gape at him. “ ‘We’? Who is ‘we’?”

  Tyvian Reldamar, inveterate lothario and blackhearted scoundrel, had the audacity to blush. “Well . . . I’ll need to collect Artus and Brana, of course. Hool, I expect should catch up soon. And then there’s, well, there’s you.”