Taellaneth Complete Series Box Set

by Vanessa Nelson

  The warriors had to drop their wards to engage at close quarters, simply tearing the guns out of human hands, the ‘kin moving with the White Guard as though they had fought together for decades.

  Arrow let the warriors go ahead, knowing she was more of a hindrance, making her way through the chaos, careful to keep out of the way of the blades as the magicians tried to defend themselves. Kester was beside her, his own blades ready. She stopped involuntarily when they got past the ring of magicians and she could see what was in the centre of the garden.

  The few plants that had been there had been uprooted, tossed aside, making way for a large, uneven circle of pale sand. Beside the sand was another pile, also carelessly discarded. Not plants this time. Bodies. A pile of limp, tangled limbs, the uncertain light catching expressions frozen in horror and dismay. The dead that Arrow could see were all wearing the Collegia insignia.

  “He killed his own people,” Kester murmured.

  “He sent some to the surjusi realm to be sacrificed,” Arrow reminded him, stomach clenching with dismay, nausea rising. The grey weight of the recent dead pressed around her. Too many gone. And too many of them young.

  “What in hell is he doing?” Dorian hissed, snapping Arrow’s attention from the dead to the living.

  The Magister was on his knees in the sand, working rapidly on a huge, complex spell pattern. His once-white robes were spattered with blood, hands coated in it, blood smeared to his elbows. He was dragging a small cauldron with him, into which he dipped his hand and continued to mark the runes onto the sand, muttering as he worked.

  Trusting the warriors and ‘kin to deal with the magicians and their weapons, Arrow moved forward onto the sand circle. The Magister did not look up, frantically working to complete the spell.

  “You have made several mistakes,” Arrow pointed out. She was suddenly tired. Exhausted, the press of the dead and the weight of her body almost more than she could bear. He was trying to make another portal spell. The sword was alert at her back. No surjusi actually in this world, then, just the badly formed shape of a portal spell and the discoloured trace in the Magister’s personal signature.

  “I do not make mistakes,” the Magister insisted, continuing to work. A pair of humans who had been in the shadows behind him abruptly lunged forward. Arrow stepped aside, Kester coming between her and the attackers. They fell moments later, Kester’s movements sure and swift. He knelt beside the bodies for a moment, checking they were dead, before rising to stand beside Arrow.

  The Magister had not noticed the deaths.

  He was speaking as he worked, muttering almost under his breath. “We have been too long under the tyranny of the Erith. Too long. We will not be oppressed any more.”

  Arrow’s sword pulsed again as she stepped forward and she paused, reassessing the Magister. He seemed an ordinary human and yet she could see the odd trace in his magic, and the sword had never been wrong before.

  He shuffled further around the circle, dipping one of his hands into the metal cauldron and daubing more blood on the ground. The other hand clutched for a moment at something under his robes, the muttering continuing, before he dipped that hand in the cauldron again and continued his work.

  “What do you have there?” Arrow asked, moving forward to stand inside the spell circle, crouching until she was level with him.

  “Not your business. Erith witch.”

  Arrow choked back an unexpected laugh. No one had ever thought she was Erith before. Before the heartland’s healing.

  “You are trying to make a portal spell. Very badly,” she told him. “That makes it my business.”

  “Not your business. None of it is. He’ll see to you when he’s here. You and all the other arrogant devils.” The hand, painted with blood, clutched at his robes again. Arrow’s sword pulsed as the Magister gripped whatever was under his robes. She slid the sword out of its scabbard, eased the point forward to the man’s chest to the place that the object was hidden.

  “Did he gift you something?” she asked, curious, following her instinct.

  “It’s mine. Mine. Not yours.” He batted the sword away, flat handed, careless of the blade’s edge. The sword flared, silver blinding for a moment, reacting to the blood.

  “I do not think you should have it.”

  Even as she spoke, a shadow detached the dark under a nearby tree. Arrow turned with an odd sense of familiarity. With everything else that had happened she had almost forgotten. Back in the cellars, with the inky twist of an active portal spell hanging in the air and the pile of remains against the wall, a figure had come out of the shadows, sent a pulse of power towards her, and shoved her into the portal.

  “Fleur Maillot.” Arrow rose to her feet, and took a step towards the newcomer, away from the Magister.

  The figure paused before tugging back her hood, revealing the rounded face of the hotel’s deputy manager. Her business attire was covered by a long, full cloak made of what looked like velvet. Not very practical, Arrow thought.

  “How did you know it was me?” Fleur asked, surprised.

  “I saw you. When you pushed me into the portal,” Arrow answered, seeing shadows moving behind the woman. Shifkin, she thought.

  “And you’re interfering again.” The bland, professional exterior had been replaced with hollow-eyed intensity, one of her hands emerging from her cloak with a long, slender blade clutched so tightly her knuckles were white. It was almost comforting to have someone try to kill her so directly, Arrow thought.

  “Let me,” Kallish suggested from behind the woman. Not shifkin in those shadows, then. The warrior reached around and grasped Fleur’s wrist, hard enough that the knife fell to the ground before Kallish pulled the cloak off, tearing it into strips with a rending sound that made Fleur cry in protest before she was securely tied with the remnants of her cloak. “Velvet,” Kallish said in disgust. “Not the best choice. Still, it will hold her for now.”

  While the warrior had been dealing with Fleur, the Magister had continued his work, muttering to himself. Arrow moved back to crouch in front of him. He looked up at her for a moment, hand poised above his cauldron, blood dripping back into the pool.

  Shadows appeared behind him. The shifkin.

  “What’s he got?” Zachary asked.

  The Magister had not heard them approach, shrieked, rose to his feet and turned, legs tangling in his blood-soaked robes. He stumbled across one of the runes he had drawn, destroying it, into the centre of the circle and shrieked again when he saw the damage to the spell circle.

  “Look what you made me do. Ruined. It’s ruined.” He raised his hands, prepared to cast a spell.

  Arrow rose from her crouch, sword ready, and moved, the sword arcing in a smooth line, slicing a clean line from the collar to the hem of his robes, revealing a stained. sleeveless t-shirt and trousers that were as faded and old as the clothes Arrow had worn for years. The Magister shrieked again, sound grating Arrow’s ears, and clutched at the thing against his chest. It looked like a small piece of rock on the end of a metal chain. A rock that looked familiar.

  “From the demon realm,” she said, following the Magister as he took several shaky paces backwards, through the other side of the spell circle, destroying the runes he had placed there as well. “How did you get it?”

  “We all got them,” he told her, hand curling around the stone, a new layer of dark in his voice. “All of us. The chosen. The special ones.”

  “Weak minded fools more like,” Kallish commented.

  “Easily manipulated,” Kester agreed.

  They were moving with Arrow, following the Magister’s retreat. The ‘kin had moved, too, and were behind the Magister again, all three pairs of eyes lit with power and anger. Zachary leant forward, slender dagger in one hand, cut through the metal chain as though it were nothing, the bit of rock falling to the ground. Rose and Paul grabbed the Magister as he shrieked again, trying to reach the bit of rock where it lay on the ground.

&n
bsp; “No. No. No. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  Arrow took one pace towards the stone and stopped. The dark lick of surjusi power against her senses told her what it was even before the sword pulsed.

  “That should not exist in this world.” Zachary’s face was grim, eyes brilliant green as he looked up from the stone to Arrow.

  “No.” She agreed with him.

  “Can we send it back?”

  “No. Not without opening a portal,” she told him, sheathing the sword and wrapping her arms around herself. “But it can be destroyed. Cleansed first. Then destroyed. And this place needs cleansing, too.” She looked around the quiet garden, desecrated by the pile of bodies and the blood runes. Her heart hurt as she looked at the dead, the grey weight of their presence pushing on her shoulders. Innocents. Not deserving of the fate they had been dealt. Their lives given for the shoddy, unclean spellwork the Magister had been working on.

  “Agreed.” Dorian nodded. He and Juniper had been keeping out of the way of the Erith and ‘kin. A wise move. But they had seen, and heard, enough. His eyes were on the rock on the ground. “That’s from the demon realm?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “When he quietens down, we can ask him,” Zachary suggested, gaze travelling to the Magister. Stripped of his robes he was just an elderly human in a saggy t-shirt and trousers with a hole in the knee. He was tied, securely bound at hands and feet by the ‘kin, tears running down his face as his eyes moved from the ruined spell circle to the bit of rock.

  “He said others,” Dorian said. He looked dazed. “How do we find them?”

  “Start with her,” Arrow suggested, pointing towards Fleur. “She was there when the portal was opened.”

  “She is not registered with the Collegia,” Dorian observed. His face tightened. “I wonder how many more there are.” Unregistered magicians, he meant. “The Collegia is supposed to be a place of learning. Sharing.” He clamped his jaw shut.

  Arrow had no words to offer, so stayed silent.

  Kallish and Kester had roughly searched Fleur and came back with another metal chain with another bit of rock at the end of it.

  Zachary’s mouth was lined with white as he looked at it.

  “We’ll need to strip search the ones back at the Abbey. And the others here,” Zachary said.

  “The sword will know,” Arrow added. She felt parchment-thin, as though everything had been taken out of her and laid out somewhere, far from where she was. Her body seemed weightless, the sore feet in the borrowed boots a distant annoyance. Sleep. She needed sleep.

  “Another time,” Kester suggested, in Erith, voice soft. “The shifkin can search,” he suggested in common tongue, directing his words to Zachary. “You are not drawn to the dark as the Erith and humans can be.”

  Arrow wanted to bury her head in his shoulder and cry. The rock was so close to her, the trace of surjusi power a drift against her senses. Her skin was crawling with revulsion, and at the same time she could feel, as the faintest echo, the wriggling delight of the barb that had worked its way into her heart, and remembered the feeling of standing in the surjusi fortress with the vast power of the realm there underneath her hand, waiting to be used.

  “Get one of the others to deal with it,” Arrow told Kallish, holding herself very still. The warrior raised an eyebrow at her, question in her dark eyes. “It is not safe for me. Not yet.”

  Kallish nodded, coming to stand a little closer to Arrow.

  “I am not that tempted,” Arrow said dryly.

  “I did not think you were,” the warrior answered, voice mild. “But you have stood alone too long.”

  The unexpected support, delivered in such a dispassionate tone, closed Arrow’s throat and she had to blink against the sudden sting in her eyes. Kester was at her other side, close enough that she could draw in the familiar trace of cardamom and citrus. She had never noticed Kallish’s personal scent, catching only the faintest trace of weapons oil.

  ~

  Her eyes landed on the sand circle. It had been spread in a thin layer and had been disturbed in places.

  She was moving forward before her brain had caught up with her instincts, Kester and Kallish keeping pace with her.

  “What?”

  “There is something underneath,” she answered Kallish absently, kneeling on the ground by the closest disturbance and brushing sand away with her hand. There was no fresh blood here. It was just sand. At least, her mind knew that. Her skin prickled with unease at being so close to the blood runes. Unclean magic. Sticky and corrupt.

  Then she saw what she had uncovered and realised she was not reacting to the blood runes.

  Underneath the sand was a stone surface, and etched onto that ancient runes, shallow channels in the stone, filled with what looked like resin but she knew was not.

  “There is a blood circle under here,” she said, mostly to herself.

  “We need to uncover it all,” Kallish said.

  “We need to record the scene first,” Zachary objected. He shrugged slightly at Kallish’s glare. “The human authorities will need good evidence of what’s happened here.”

  Arrow let them argue over her head, uncovering the rest of the single rune. It must have taken an age to prepare. The stone was a large, flat, flagstone, the rune carved with skill and precision.

  “Why would anyone do this?” Zachary asked, crouching opposite her, his eyes brilliant with anger and power.

  “Pre-prepared spell,” Arrow answered. “I would need to see all of it.” There was a hard lump in her throat, pain in her chest. This garden which had looked so serene in the night air had been laid over horror.

  “You said blood circle.” Zachary’s senses were far sharper than hers. He would be able to smell the dried blood in the channels that made up the rune.

  “The spell is drawn already. You just need to spill some blood for power.” Arrow thought that was her speaking. The words seemed distant and unreal. The channels were shallow. Not much blood would be required. Perhaps no one had died to power the spell. Perhaps. She wanted to believe that, but there was a large pile of dead not far from her that suggested otherwise. The Magister and his followers had not hesitated to kill.

  “I know,” she said suddenly, looking up to where the Magister was sitting the in the ruins of his robes, mouth working at the gag.

  “What?” Kester crouched in front of her, carefully avoiding the blood, eyes keen.

  “The outfit. The one Saul wore. The one the Magister is wearing. I know where I have seen it before.”

  All at once everything was too much. Her stomach twisted. She hastily rose to her feet and stumbled a few feet away, throwing up under one of the bushes. It was depressingly familiar.

  She was kneeling on the ground, shivering in reaction, and found a silver flask held in front of her face. Also depressingly familiar.

  “There are too many dead here,” Kallish was saying over her head. “Now and in the past.”

  “Yes.” Kester agreed. Talking about her, she realised. Too many dead was an understatement. She could feel decades of death around her. The ground was saturated with it. She wanted to get up and move but her legs would not work. There was a warm shadow beside her. Kester. Not touching but close enough that she realised how cold she was. She drew in the scent of cardamom and remembered the flask he had passed to her. It contained peppermint tea. An unusual choice for any Erith to carry. She was thankful for it, the taste clean and fresh in her mouth.

  “There used to be a group. I think the human word is cult. They used human sacrifice to power spells,” she told them, not looking at anyone.

  “Those idiots?” Dorian sounded sceptical. “They were awful, sure, but spells?”

  “Explain,” Zachary said, tone one of forced patience.

  “Before we came here,” Dorian answered. “No one alive remembers them. It’s taught as part of our history. I know,” he said, clearly in response to Zachary’s expr
ession, “but some of our history is bloody awful and it’s important to remember that. Anyway. The cult. They used to bleed out their victims. Said they could communicate with their gods.” His voice faded toward the end and Arrow lifted her head to find him looking from the etched stone to the Magister’s robes. He swallowed. “Not lunatics, then.”

  “Possibly before,” Arrow told him. Her legs had some feeling in them and she managed to get back to her feet, swaying slightly when she was upright. “But here it is possible they found Saul.”

  Everyone looked at the flat stone.

  “Bring in the others. Record the scene,” Zachary ordered Rose and Paul, “then get that sand off. Arrow, we’ll need your help a bit longer.”

  “Yes.” She could manage that, she thought. A bit longer. There was a metal bench not that far away. She could sit there and wait until they were ready for her.

  Even as she moved across to the bench, she wondered how the ‘kin were going to get out of and then back into a building protected by mage fire.

  However they managed it, they did get out and then in again, a half dozen other ‘kin with them. Arrow sat on the bench and watched as the White Guard and ‘kin thoroughly searched the human captives, as another cadre arrived to take charge of the prisoners, as Rose led a team in filming and photographing the scene, placing a large sheet over the dead for now before they turned their attention to the sand circle.

  It was nearly dawn by the time the stones had been uncovered. A large circle of flat, square stones, each carved with a rune, each full of the dried blood of old sacrifices. And a sheet of polished slate in the middle, surface scratched from the sand that normally lay over it. It reminded Arrow of mirrorglass, even though it was not the same at all.

  “This needs to be destroyed.” Dorian was standing over them, face white even in the uncertain light, eyes damp. “This has no place here.”

  Arrow looked at the building around them, this garden set in the middle of the Collegia’s main quadrangle. Four stories of rooms for studying and learning. A few rooms for sleeping here, the rest in the other buildings that made up the complex.