by Gail Dayton
“How is this possible?” The president of the conclave—it was Prussia’s turn this term—chewed on his blond mustache.
“That’s what I want to know.” Harry propped his hands on his hips, glaring at the no-magic. “And what else I want to know is: If we didn’t do it, who—or what—did?”
Chapter 9
Amanusa gazed into the mirror at the dressmaker’s shop, unable to recognize the woman she saw. The eyes—the eyes were her own, and the sharp angle of her jaw. The rest…
When Amanusa had removed the many-times-folded paper from Jax’s belt that morning, the bank’s name written there hadn’t been in London, as she feared. A London bank might arouse the interest of the Inquisition. The account with Yvaine’s name on it was at a bank in Geneva, Switzerland.
The local banker was suspicious at first of a bedraggled woman in a grimy brown dress asking to draw funds from a foreign bank. But she spoke perfect Romanian as well as Viennese German, and told a story about being set upon by bandits in the mountains. Everyone knew bandits were thick in the mountains. Soldiers had come all the way from Budapest to hunt them down.
After the banker received a return wire from the Geneva bank with the amount of funds available to draw upon, he suddenly transformed into her smiling, fawning, exceedingly voluble servant. Amanusa withdrew a thousand Austrian marks, which made scarcely a dent in the million or so pounds sterling in the account. She wasn’t sure how much that many numbers amounted to.
The banker was happy to refer her to the best hotel, the best dress shop, the best restaurants in the town. He hoped she hadn’t suffered too much in the bandit attack, and wasn’t she lucky to be alive? Much luckier than the bandits who had been massacred in a mysterious, sorcerous slaughter by a villainously wicked witch.
Amanusa let the horror show on her face. The banker would expect her to be horrified as he regaled her with tales of fountaining blood and bodies lying without a mark on them. Though how one could get blood fountains and unmarked bodies both at once, Amanusa didn’t know, and wasn’t about to ask. She did ask about the witch. So she could know her and run if she saw her.
The sinister creature who’d committed the horrific crime—even though the victims were all outlaws and anarchists and doubtless deserved their fate, but not in such a terrible manner—was a giantess, apparently. She stood at least seven feet tall, with snow-white hair that stood out from her head in a wild tangle, eyes that burned the color of blood, and talons that could claw a man’s tongue from his mouth.
Shuddering with fear and horror that she could be seen in such a way, Amanusa encouraged the exaggeration. The less human this witch seemed to be, the less likely anyone would look at her. Amanusa couldn’t do anything about her height, but she wasn’t anywhere near seven feet tall. At least three inches under six, in fact. The rest, she could disguise.
And so she had rented a hotel room, paying in advance for a week, and she had ordered a bath. Crow complained outside the closed window, but a crow strolling about in a hotel room would be remembered, so she ignored his raucous complaints.
She inquired from the hotel staff about hairdressers who might also know about discreet face paint. The bruises left by the bandit attack were so disfiguring. Thank heaven the swelling had gone down.
Amanusa’s own natural pale blond was too close to the snow-white of the wild tales circulating, so that would change. While the henna rinse was soaking into her hair, Amanusa was measured for a new dress.
Now, in the early evening, she examined herself in the mirror while the seamstress fussed about, trimming stray threads and encouraging the skirt to fall properly over the hoops and starched petticoats. The hairdresser adjusted a few of the curls that had been tortured into Amanusa’s straight hair.
The bright scarlet of the dress actually toned down the shocking red of her hair, which perhaps was only shocking because she wasn’t used to it. The scoop neck of the blouse allowed the wide vee of the jacket collar to display all the creamy cleavage she had. More than she’d suspected, once the maid and the dressmaker’s assistants had laced her into the whaleboned corseting.
Atop her frizz of curls perched a delicacy of a hat produced by the dressmaker in case Madame might like the finishing touch. Makeup hid the green and blue of the bruises on her semitransparent skin, and made her appear a little brassy, a little not-quite-proper. Which was all to the good, because it made her look less like Amanusa.
She paid for the dress and the shoes and the hat and the parasol and the undergarments and the night-clothes and the carpetbag. She paid for the rushed alterations and the coiffure and the makeup and the manicure, then she added generous tips for everyone, including the dressmaker’s three assistants.
When everyone was gone, she looked at herself in the mirror once again and took as deep a breath as she could manage in the blasted corset. Magic hour.
Time to go forth and do battle like some primped and painted paladin to free her—not her servant. Jax was more than that. Her liege man, if she wanted to continue the imagery. Loyalty like his deserved loyalty in return.
So, she would rescue him from the Inquisition. She didn’t know exactly, how she would do it, but they’d muddled along all right this far. Something would come to her. Amanusa had great hopes for the “don’t see me” magic.
She used it to leave the hotel with its onion-shaped towers and gilt-painted lobby and crossed the square to city hall. Crow cawed at her from overhead, so he could see her, but she didn’t think anyone else did.
The bustle of the market was winding down in the late summer evening, only the food stalls left open to cater to the merchants and farmers packing up their wares. Amanusa paused to buy meat pirogies in case Jax was hungry. She was too keyed up to eat herself. Her working spell meant she had to simply take the pies and leave the coins. She didn’t dare let the magic go for fear she might not be able to do it again.
A few people bumped into her as she strode through the square. They stopped to stare, obviously startled by her presence. She assumed therefore that actual physical contact broke the magic, because those people were forced to notice her presence. After that, she kept her distance from everyone as much as she could.
Just inside city hall, she left the carpetbag and napkin-wrapped pies in an out-of-the-way corner, hiding them with magic. Then she breezed through the warren of offices in the gloomy, after-hours city hall to the room where Jax was being held. The room she’d escaped from last night.
The soldiers guarding it stood to either side of the door, making it easy for her to walk right in. As she shut the door behind her, she dropped her magic. Everyone in the room froze motionless while they stared at her and she stared back.
In the center of the room, Inquisitor Kazaryk and Captain Janos stood over Jax who sat naked, bound to a straight-backed chair, his face and upper body bloody and bruised. Off to one side, the infernal machine sat on a table. Something twisted inside her to see Jax so hurt. Something else thumped at seeing him unclothed. She ignored both thumping and twisting. First, get him free.
Jax’s blood had spattered both Janos and Kazaryk, the captain more liberally than the conjurer, for the military man had obviously been the one beating their victim. They had made some attempt to clean it up, but the blood of the innocent was still there, crying out to her. Amanusa reached out with insubstantial hands and gathered in the power it offered.
All three men stared in astonishment, even Jax who lifted his poor battered face to goggle at her. She knew the instant he recognized her, for his swollen eyes widened in shock—as much as they could—and his puffy mouth dropped open.
“Gentlemen.” Amanusa decided on English as her language of choice at the last minute. She simpered as best she could, and gave a little curtsy to offer better opportunity for the Hungarians to look down her décolletage.
“Imagine my surprise,” she said. “I come to this rustic little town to meet my husband on his business trip, and I am told you are holding him in custody. What
ever for?”
She pretended to notice Jax for the first time. Perhaps if they thought her stupid, they would suspect her less. “Oh, hello, darling. There you are.” She squinched her face into an idiotic frown. “Where are your clothes? Aren’t you cold?”
Jax matched her casual air, despite his inability to speak clearly, given the state of his mouth. “I’m sorry? Have we met?”
Janos apparently recovered from his shock. “Who are you? What are you doing here? How did you get in?” Spittle flew from his mouth as he wound up.
Amanusa curtsied again and held out a hand as if expecting it to be kissed. She’d watched the grand ladies and gentlemen when she was little. She knew how the upper classes acted. “It is a pleasure to meet you.” She actually got that lie out of her mouth, more or less smoothly. “I told you. I’ve come for my husband. As for how I got in—I simply walked in the door.”
Janos swore under his breath and stomped to the door, muttering about dereliction of duty, courts martial, and fool women who didn’t know how to keep their noses out of men’s business. He stopped when Kazaryk held up a hand.
“Keep her here,” the Inquisitor said, his voice sending a chill through Amanusa’s spine that threatened to crumble it.
But the corset wouldn’t let her crumble, helped her stiffen her spine and her resolve. What marvelous armor it was.
“Perhaps she knows the things we wish to know.” Kazaryk paced. “She hasn’t sense enough to consider whether her man wants us to know them. And if she knows nothing, perhaps a threat to her will convince him to admit what he has so far refused.”
Kazaryk clasped his hands behind his back and stared at her. Amanusa gazed blandly back. Her decade-long contest of wills with Szabo and his anarchists gave her the experience she needed now. Silly, she reminded herself. She didn’t need to be aloof as she had been in camp. She threw another simper at him.
“He claims not to know her,” Janos ventured.
“Of course he does. He would not want his wife falling into our hands. But even if he speaks the truth—which I doubt, because if she is not his wife, why would she brave this room? But if she is not, he is English. They are sentimental about women. A threat to her would still be useful.” Kazaryk pursed his lips. “Ask her about the machine.”
Amanusa continued to gather in the power that rose as blood oozed from Jax’s lip. Janos asked the Inquisitor’s question and Amanusa realized she had no idea what Jax might already have told them. Would it matter? They were hoping she might tell them different things. Would they believe her more? She didn’t know the best way to respond. Silly, she thought again.
“What machine?” She gave them a blank look, then turned as if just noticing the metal creature on its table. What had caused it to deteriorate so quickly? “This?” She made a disgusted face. “I have no idea what it is. Where did it come from?”
“Your husband had it in a locked case,” Janos said. “Locked and then sealed by magic. Where did he get it?”
“Ask her about the spell on the man himself,” Kazaryk interjected. Janos did so.
The lie she’d told the outlaws would do. “I told you not to quarrel with that magician in Ankara, or Istanbul or wherever it was,” Amanusa scolded Jax. “You see what his spell has done to you? Made you all grouchy and hot-tempered and stubborn, and now look where you are!” She pouted at him. “I should never have let you wander off into the mountains alone.”
Was that going too far? Or just far enough? The captain looked disdainful, so perhaps she’d found the right balance.
“What was this magician’s name?” Kazaryk asked and Janos echoed.
“Oh heavens, I don’t know. Mustafa Mumbletypeg. It could have been Ali Baba for all I know. He certainly seemed to have forty thieves in his employ.” Amanusa took a few flouncing steps toward Jax, stopping when Kazaryk’s scowl deepened.
“You were in Bucharest for how long?”
Now they were trying to trick her. It didn’t matter. She and Jax would be out of this makeshift torture chamber and on their way to Paris soon. Amanusa now held enough magic power to take out those forty thieves—or two torturers and a handful of guards. If she knew the spell to do it. These men hadn’t swallowed any blood, so the same spell that worked on Teo wouldn’t work here, would it? Would sorcery work better on conjurers than his conjury had worked on her?
“Six weeks.” She plucked the answer from thin air. “I was in Bucharest six weeks.” Which was approximately how long it had been—give or take a few days she’d lost track of—since Jax had stumbled out of the forest into her life.
“And so—” Janos’s sinister pacing brought him closer to her. “You know nothing of the magician who put the seal on the case holding the machine? A woman, perhaps? A crone?”
The giggle bubbled out of Amanusa, escaping the churning cauldron of hysteria in her gut. “Women can’t be magicians, silly.” She got her eyelashes to flutter after a fashion. Then the perfect solution to—to everything hit her. She was surprised she didn’t stagger with the impact.
She simpered at Jax. “Didn’t you tell them, darling?”
Jax’s eyes widened, and he shook his head in a tiny signal. Which Kazaryk of course caught. He pounced. Exactly as Amanusa intended.
“Didn’t he tell us what?”
“You are so clever, Bertie. I don’t know why you insist on keeping it such a secret. I’d wager there’s no one else in the world who can do what you can.” She looked at Kazaryk, who was so obviously in command, even a dim woman could catch on. “He did it himself, he did.”
Jax widened his eyes even more. Or he tried. His eyebrows went up. Amanusa knew he was furious with her. Kazaryk apparently took it as dismay that she’d spilled Jax’s secret.
Amanusa gave her liege man a bland look, then blinked her eyes slowly, once, hoping he’d catch on soon. “Well, you did,” she said. “You took my blood to make the spell.”
Now Kazaryk’s and Janos’s eyes went wide with shock and horror, while Jax adjusted his expression for blandness. He was so crimson and swollen with bruises, so scarlet with blood that any expression was difficult to see.
“Of course…” Kazaryk hissed, evil satisfaction rising on his face.
“B-but if he’s a blood magic sorcerer,” Janos stammered, “why has he not acted before now?”
“Because all of the blood spilled has been his own, you idiot.”
“Blood of innocents,” Amanusa said.
“No use denying it any longer. Blood of the innocent,” Jax agreed, throwing the first words of a spell out for her to catch. He began adding the other words of the spell. “Blood of the helpless, crying out for justice—”
The Inquisitor and his tool began to back away, the conjurer’s eyes rolling from side to side, as if he could see the magic build in power with every word Jax spoke. Amanusa didn’t know the spell, but Jax did. Jax couldn’t control the magic, but Amanusa could. Her lips moved, repeating it silently.
She blocked the path to the door, sealing it against the men with a swipe of her shoe, smearing the blood she’d stepped in on the door’s bottom edge. The locking spell took only a moment, a brief whispered word in the midst of the justice spell Jax was building for her.
He was careful with it, confining it to this room, to those who had actually spilled innocent blood or caused the spilling of it. Amanusa fed power into the words until she could feel it throb around her, ready to burst. Janos was already whimpering.
“Blood of my blood,” Jax called out, his voice strong without shouting. “Answer my call. Do my will.”
The two men screamed as their bodies convulsed, bruises blossoming on their skin. They fell to the floor, into the blood spattered there, and their screams rose in pitch. The Inquisitor’s pain seemed magnitudes greater than Janos’s suffering, and the captain suffered greatly. Amanusa asked Jax about it as she crouched to untie his hands, ignoring the shouts and pounding on the door.
“Because I didn’t confin
e the spell to justice for my innocent blood alone,” Jax said, bending to free his ankles. “Find my clothes, will you? They should be in here somewhere.”
Amanusa blushed—he seemed more a man and less a victim with his hands free—and hurried to obey. His clothing had been piled in a corner behind him. The lining was ripped from his frock coat, but all else was wearable.
“I myself am not so very innocent, after all,” Jax went on. “So I made my blood stand for all the innocent blood these men have shed. Their own blood knows what they have done. And that is why Kazaryk suffers more than Janos. Captain Janos is merely a brute. Kazaryk is a torturer. He enjoys the pain of others.”
Jax had his shirt and trousers on but not fastened. He refused to let Amanusa assist him, so she took his ruined frock coat and spread it over the corroded machine-thing, rolling it up inside. She tucked up the tails, folded down the collar, and tied the sleeves together to make a handle to carry it. Even wrapped, she didn’t know how far she could carry the nauseating thing. She had to poke one of the dangling metal arms back inside, but finally she had a more-or-less tidy bundle.
“You’re taking it with us?” Jax hissed with pain as he buttoned the last button on his trousers. “Hasn’t it caused enough trouble?”
“That’s why I’m bringing it. I don’t want it to cause any more trouble here. I want to turn it over to someone who will actually examine it to see what it is and how it came into being, and that won’t happen here. The Hungarian council is too busy ‘following tradition’ and tracking down unfortunate woods witches to bother with real danger.”
Amanusa used Jax’s blood spattered on his coat to seal a protection around it. It wasn’t as strong as her warding around the box, but she thought it would hold the bundle together and keep the machine’s magic-killing aura from hurting Ja—anyone.
“Sounds like the guards have brought a battering ram.” Jax draped his long leather coat over his shoulders.
“Then it’s time to let them in.” Amanusa touched her thumb to the blood on his cheek and dabbed it behind her ear where it wouldn’t show, if they did happen to get noticed. She spoke the words triggering the “don’t-see-me” spell and released the magic seal on the door.
