Three more times was she forced to confront the Defenders, and each time the Fist of Veroth crushed their bodies and scattered their defenses. What its head touched was destroyed utterly. A Defender roadblock of two overturned wagons was reduced to flinders with one blow, its guardians scattered to the ground like bowling pins. Hool was an unstoppable juggernaut—humans fled before her wrath. Warning bells rang.
At last she caught scent of Artus. It was mixed with the smell of ash and fire, and she wondered if it was the fist throwing off her senses, but no—there was fire and ash ahead, too. She put all her strength into covering those last few blocks.
The Defenders had Artus tied, hand and foot, and were carrying him between two of them. A mage with a staff stood at the head of a column of seven or eight men in mirrored armor stained with dust and cinders. Her heart seized—was he alive or dead? Was she too late?
Then she heard the most blessed thing: Artus cursing. “Kroth take you stinking mirror men! I can walk, dammit! You didn’t need to bind my bloody ankles, you pack of filthy arses!”
Hool emerged from her hiding place, growling, “Let the boy go.”
The Defenders took up their weapons. The mage raised his staff. “Stand back, beast!” he said in a clear voice. “You are no match for me!”
Hool brandished her enchanted mace. “If you do not let him go, I will kill you all.”
The mage’s dark eyes widened at the swirling, molten head of the weapon. “My arts are quite powerful! I warn you!”
Hool got closer and the Defenders backed up, along with the mage. Then she noticed something—the flames at the tips of the magic spears were mere flickers, barely alive. The mage’s eyes were ringed with dark circles, his every step a labor, and his joints were stiff. These men were exhausted, their weapons nearly spent. The mage, if he could have worked a spell to hold her, would have done so already. They were no match for her, especially not with her weapon.
She found herself raising the fist, ready to strike, her legs tensing to charge and crush them all in one mighty blow—she had barely thought of it, moving as though by instinct. It would be the easiest thing in the world. What’s more, she wanted to feel the heavy thrum of the fist’s power as it was expended. She wanted to watch the shockwave of force as it destroyed them. She craved these things as she craved a good slab of antelope meat. She took a step forward.
“Hool?” Artus said. “Hool! Don’t do it, okay?”
“What?” Hool asked, advancing forward, swinging her weapon to and fro.
The mage invoked some kind of blast of white light, but Hool felt it rebuffed by the aura of the mace. Two Defenders charged, their pikes out. Hool knocked the first weapon aside and, spinning, brought her weapon into contact with the man’s shoulder. He disintegrated into a shower of charred gore and bone with a meaty THROOM! The second man was knocked sprawling by the shock wave. Hool kept advancing.
Artus’s voice seemed far away. “Hoool!”
Firepikes discharged, but their flaming bolts were drawn in by the swirling heat of the Fist of Veroth and it seemed to grow angrier in Hool’s hands. More restless. She struck another blow, and three men died for it, their bodies pulped beneath their shields. Hool snarled in satisfaction. Good—they deserved to die. She just didn’t remember quite why.
Men fled before her, and soon there was only a boy, bound hand and foot, cowering before her. The Fist of Veroth impelled itself aloft, ready to strike the final blow. Ready to secure her ultimate victory.
The boy was yelling at her. “Hool! Snap out of it!”
Hool’s nostrils flared—how dare he make demands of her? Some lowly human who smelled of—
“Artus!”
Memory came flooding back, and with it self-control. Hool dropped the enchanted mace onto the street; it landed with a heavy thump, embedded in the stone. Hool looked around her—she stood at the center of a blackened expanse of street, the buildings around her all sporting broken windows. The twisted, misshapen remains of several Defenders lay about the ground, unmoving.
“Dammit, Hool—what the hell got into you there? Kroth, I thought I was dead! You were gonna . . .”
Artus’s complaints were muffled by Hool’s fur as she picked him up and hugged him. After a time, she let him go. “I thought you might die.”
Artus nodded, incredulous. “Yeah, me too! Are you okay?”
Hool glared at the Fist of Veroth, which stood cooling in the center of the street, awaiting a wielder. “She lied to me,” she said at last. “This was what she wanted. She wanted me to be a monster. But I’m not. She is wrong.”
“Who?”
Hool’s lips curled back. “Tyvian’s mother.”
Myreon grabbed Tyvian by the shirt and dragged his torso out over the edge of the roof. She stood over him, shaking him up and down. “You son of a bitch! You lied to me! I should . . . I should kill you! Tell me what the plan is! Tell me, or so help me Hann, I will drop you to your death, you scum!”
Tyvian, strangely, seemed unmoved. His initial surprise degraded into that same damned infuriating smile. “Been talking to Xahlven, have you?”
Myreon spat in his face. Her arms trembled from exhaustion. “Don’t smile at me, Reldamar—your brother explained everything to me. You’ve been behind this the entire time, haven’t you? You even arranged to have me framed—you had me turned to stone just so you could swoop in and rescue me! And to think . . .” Myreon found tears welling in her eyes. She blinked them away—they only made her angrier. “I ought to kill you right now!”
Tyvian spoke carefully and slowly. “Myreon, I want you to think about this. I didn’t do this. I am not behind this plot. I have not been lying to you.” He held up the ring for her to see. “See this? I couldn’t do that to you if I wanted to.”
“All these years—all these years of your vicious little plots!” Myreon was full-on crying now. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold Tyvian like this. She felt her fingers slipping from his bloody shirt lapels. “I am so tired of your lies, you miserable spoiled rich boy bastard!”
Tyvian nodded. “You’re right. I’m a liar and I’m spoiled and, yes, I am, quite literally, a bastard. But Myreon, this is how my brother works—he uses people, and he’s even better at it than I am. You stormed in there and confronted him, and he told you the absolute most effective thing to get you off his back—he played you, not me.”
“How do I know?” Myreon blinked her eyes, trying to see Tyvian’s face clearly. “How can I possibly know?”
Tyvian heaved a heavy sigh, even though he was slipping ever closer to falling off a church roof. “Because . . . well . . .”
“Tell me!” Myreon roared at him. She was barely holding him by his fingertips.
A tear leaked from Tyvian’s eye—from Tyvian Reldamar’s eye—and when he spoke, his voice sounded wooden, as though he could scarcely make it obey him. “When I found you beneath Daer Trondor—”
“Don’t you dare!” Myreon spat. “No!”
Tyvian grabbed her by the wrists. “You were dead, Myreon! Dead, you understand? It nearly killed me to know that! I didn’t think so then, maybe—I was too caught up in things—but it’s bloody true! I . . .” He paused, his voice nearly cracking, “I couldn’t live with myself to know you had died. I couldn’t.”
Myreon barely found her voice. “Why?”
Tyvian looked her in the eye. “Because . . . because you are the best person I know.”
Their hands, slick with sweat and blood, slipped from one another. Tyvian slid off the roof with a shocked grunt. Myreon leapt to her feet. “No! Nooo!” She dove to the roof’s edge and reached out with all of her Art. On the fly, she inverted a feyleap and thrust it at Tyvian, stopping him mid-fall and propelling him up at her.
He arced, ungainly, up through the air, and then fe
ll into her arms. His weight pushed both of them onto their backs on the tile roof of the church. She found herself staring down into his eyes and found him staring up into hers. He gave her a shy smile. “Don’t look so horrified. This is hardly the first roof I’ve been thrown off today.”
Myreon grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him close. “You goddamned idiot!”
This time, for the first time, they kissed each other.
CHAPTER 30
ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING
Tyvian kissed Myreon more than once on that rooftop, which, in retrospect, was a bit of a tactical error. The sun would soon be rising and, therefore, the markets were about to open.
Myreon looked as though she had just committed a crime. “I can’t believe I just did that.”
“We. I was involved, too.” Tyvian looked across the rooftops of Crosstown. A fire was burning—probably starting near the Cauldron—that was eating a whole city block. Alarm bells were ringing from all over town. The swath of destruction Gethrey had wrought stretched out over several blocks as well. It seemed everywhere Tyvian looked and in every direction, chaos and fear was ruling the day.
“Is that it, then? With Gethrey dead, will the markets crash?” Myreon asked, surveying the city.
“No. They’ll be crashing anyway—my brother would see to that, somehow.” Tyvian stretched, wincing at the wound in his leg—which was only now reasserting itself after the ring had deadened it for him during his fight with Gethrey.
Myreon nodded. “We need to get back across town. But how?” She motioned to the chaos. “The Defenders will be everywhere. The Old City will be locked up tight as a drum.”
“Hey!” a voice called from below. Tyvian looked down to see Hool looking up at them. “Your blue-haired friend is dead in this alley. Sorry.”
Tyvian grinned. “Good old Hool—regular as the sunrise.” He then called over the side, “We’re coming down. Did you find Artus?”
Hool’s ears were laid back. “Yes. But he has a plan I do not like.”
Saldor harbor was cloaked in mist in the predawn light. The boat Brana had secured was meant to be rowed by two people, which meant both Myreon and Tyvian were at the oars—nobody else knew how. Tyvian’s bandaged leg still screamed at him with every stroke, but they were making good time.
Artus was in the bow, keeping a lookout. “You sure they won’t spot us?”
Myreon shook her head. “Relax, Artus—even if the Defenders could scry over water, they’re far too busy right now. The only challenge will be when we make the docks by the Foreign Gate.”
Tyvian turned his attention to the matter at hand. “So Andolon Gethrey to crash the market today, and probably laid the groundwork last night after you and Brana left him, Artus, but before he tried to kill me.”
Hool’s shroud was back in place and she was sitting in the stern of the boat, her hands tightly folded in her lap. “So who do we kill now?”
Myreon shuddered. “Gods, I will never get used to your voice coming from that face, Hool.”
Artus snorted. “Wait until you see her hit somebody.”
Tyvian whistled to get everyone’s attention. “Focus, dammit! We can’t just kill anybody. The crash, I am sorry to say, is probably inevitable—Gethrey was right about that. What we need is a plan to stop my brother from achieving whatever he hopes to achieve by aiding the crash, and we need it quickly. It’s practically dawn, and once the markets open, things are going to get ugly quick.”
“Dock ahead,” Artus whispered. “Mirror men waiting for us.”
Myreon worked the Cloak of the Mundane to keep them all nondescript. All except Hool. When they arrived at the dock, she leapt out of the boat and confronted the lead Defender. She waved Tyvian’s signet ring under the guard’s nose. “I am a mighty sorceress, and if you don’t let us through, I will turn you into a fish.”
The Defender took a good look at the statuesque Hool in the predawn light, took a good look at the ring, and did the mental arithmetic needed. His eyes bugged out. “Yes! Yes, archmagus, of course—go right ahead!”
Moments later they were in a coach heading through the Foreign Gate and into the Old City. Hool pulled off the ring and threw it at Tyvian. “If we can’t kill anybody, then what is the plan?”
Tyvian rubbed his temples. His mind was like a series of rusty gears at the moment—the pain in his leg and chest and . . . well, everywhere, was muddling his thinking. Not to mention Myreon. He found he couldn’t look at her without grinning like an idiot, and that nonsense had to stop right away. There would be time for it later, assuming they lived and made it out of the city undetained. Unfortunately, how they were going to do that remained a complete mystery to him.
Artus had his face screwed up in that frown he made when he was thinking too hard. “You said your brother was playing Andolon, right?”
Tyvian groaned. “Yes, Artus—try to keep up.”
“Right, but how? Like, if he’s the one who put Andolon up to this, how was he doing it? With who?”
“It could be anybody.” Tyvian shrugged. “The Prophets, the Defenders, Andolon’s damned sister—anybody.”
Artus straightened. His face split into a grin. “It’s DiVarro.”
Myreon frowned. “What do you mean? Andolon’s augur? He’s in Xahlven’s employ?”
Artus shook his head. “No, no—Xahlven is DiVarro. It’s a shroud.”
Tyvian cocked his head. He felt the wheels beginning to turn. “Wait—how do you know?”
Artus pointed to his eye. “That crystal thing he’s got, right? That’s the same as Carlo’s, isn’t it? It’s supposed to see through anything, right?”
“Yes? And?”
Artus grinned. “He never noticed that note you slipped me, now did he? Or, if he did, he didn’t tell Andolon nothing about it—that either means he don’t have a working crystal eye or he wasn’t working for Andolon at all.”
Tyvian thought back to his conversation with Xahlven on the floor of the Secret Exchange. He remembered Xahlven watching DiVarro intently and even working some sorcery on him. Tyvian had assumed it was an augury of some kind—spying on DiVarro—but DiVarro hadn’t been doing anything at the time. He was just standing there.
He had been a simulacrum!
“Dammit, Artus,” Tyvian breathed, “I think you’re right! It all makes sense now—Xahlven was feeding Gethrey the precise information needed to crash the Secret and Mundane Exchanges all this time. Gethrey assumed the vast sums of money he probably paid DiVarro were sufficient to guarantee his loyalty, too. Gods, it’s the perfect cover.”
Artus grinned. “Not too shabby, eh?”
Hool snorted. “That doesn’t help us. I hate this.” She groaned and adjusted her dress—an act that made Myreon laugh out loud. Hool scowled. “I hate humans.”
Tyvian looked at Artus and Myreon. “I think I have an idea.”
Artus frowned. “You gonna tell us about it?”
Tyvian smiled, nodding. “Oh yes, Artus—everybody is going to hear all about it, especially you. You still have that good pair of eyes in your head?”
Artus smiled. “Sharp as ever, boss.”
“Good—for this to work, all of us need to be perfect.”
By all outward appearances, Gethrey Andolon was a man busy transcending himself. The oceanic floor of the Saldorian Exchange and its armies of sharp-eyed, early morning traders had become a constellation of moons orbiting around the gravity of his wealth. His surprise offer of karfan beans had been well-received, but when he started selling silk and cherille, the floor had exploded with activity. Everybody knew he was up to something, but nobody knew what it was.
The chaos of the last few days—the Specter of Reldamar—had distilled itself into something ineffable and yet inexorable on the floor of the Mundane. There wa
s a kind of panic in the air, and Gethrey Andolon—the most successful trader the Mundane had yet known—was at the center of it. He stood on a stool among a sea of faces, all waving paper tags in his face with the marks of their houses and masters. He took orders carefully, a self-writing quill recording them. He was hemorrhaging goods like a man about to go bankrupt, and the exchange sensed that if they didn’t get a piece of it now, they would regret it later—they were guiding Andolon’s wealth like a great ship, and, like good pirates, they were going to get that ship into port and strip her down to her planks.
Of course, none of them knew that Gethrey Andolon was now several hours dead. And also none of them knew that there were commodities flooding the market had been planted by Andolon himself, guaranteeing the price would drop. They thought they smelled blood, and they were right. They just didn’t know the blood was theirs.
As all this happened, the swirl of activity was being closely monitored by the Secret Exchange, who also were in the midst of a panic of their own. Their auguries were reading massive volatility in the markets—so much that some were swearing the prophesies were wholly unreliable, the result of an unnaturally high Fey ley and the mysterious appearance of a glut of goods on the Mundane. For the first time in ages the old sorcerous families began to realize the risk they were exposed to in the case of a mistake. Soon, mage by mage, the Secret Exchange began to slide into a downward spiral of sell-offs and panicky trades.
On the lips of every man and woman on the floor of either the Secret or the Mundane was one name: Reldamar.
It was during this financial panic that Tyvian Reldamar, dressed in a long cloak of forest green and leaning on a cane, disembarked from a coach and stepped onto the floor of the Mundane. He was flanked by two women—one a stunning beauty with auburn hair in a green dress, and the other an intimidating blonde marred with ash and soot.
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