Thousand Walls, which was properly known as Silkstar Palace, was the home of Carnelian Silkstar, the wealthiest merchant in Agatos, possibly on the whole continent. Oh, yeah, and he also happened to be a high mage, which put his magical abilities about as far above mine as his palace was above my shoddy apartment.
Thousand Walls perched on the top of Horn Hill, scarcely spitting distance across Sien’s Stand Plaza from the Senate building. Horn Hill wasn’t a part of the city I visited often. I had an issue with a certain Countess whose own palace stood not far from Thousand Walls, but even if I hadn’t, Horn Hill wasn’t the kind of place for someone like me.
The hill rose from the centre of Agatos, sloping hopefully upwards for over a mile before plunging back down in a sheer cliff called the Leap. I had spent plenty of time peering at Horn Hill from every angle, and I still didn’t think it looked anything like a horn, but what did I know?
Benny’s suggestion that I should help him steal from Thousand Walls was stretching any debt I might owe him, and he knew it.
I would like to be able to tell you that, as a mage, I could do whatever I damned well pleased in this city, but the truth was that I was tolerated only as long as I didn’t stick my long nose too far into the wrong business. Step out of line, and there were plenty of people who would happily slap me down. Carnelian Silkstar would slap hard. He wouldn’t kill me — the Ash Guard didn’t tolerate magic being used for murder — but there was a whole lot of pain and misery that fell short of death, and I wasn’t keen on any of it.
Anyone else, and I would have told them where to stuff their debt. But Benny and I had been friends for almost twenty-five years, and when I left my mother’s house (or was kicked out; we still differed on that one), Benny had been there to help me.
“They paying you well for this?” I asked.
“Five gods,” Benny said, a little sheepishly.
I whistled, not able to stop a brief surge of envy. “Someone really wants it.” You could buy a good chunk of the Warrens with five gold crowns.
Benny grinned. “And with both of us together, how can we possibly fail?”
Which was exactly the point where I should have put a stop to the whole thing.
Instead, I said, “All right. But you’d better have a good plan.”
As it happened, Benny did have a plan, but he didn’t deign to share it until we were nearly at the top of Horn Hill and it was too late for me to back out.
The Corithian Steps cut back and forth up the eastern flank of Horn Hill to emerge close to Thousand Walls, neatly avoiding Agate Way, which ran the length of the hill, and the palaces lining it. It was a steep, almost precipitous climb in places, and it didn’t do my ankle any favours. By the time we were three quarters of the way up, my ankle was flaring with every step, and I had to wave Benny to a stop.
Cursing, I bent over, hands on my knees. If I had been a more powerful mage, this ankle wouldn’t have bothered me. We mages were luckier than most when it came to injuries. When we slept, we absorbed the raw magic around us, and it helped us heal. Unfortunately, while any cuts and bruises I got healed fast, and even broken bones knitted, that was as far as it went for me. When it came to damaged tendons and ligaments, I was no better off than anyone else.
I lowered myself carefully to the paving and looked out over the city while I waited for the throbbing to subside. High, white walls punctuated with blue shutters rose on either side of us, making the Corithian Steps feel like a canyon. From here, I had a pretty good view over the eastern part of Agatos. Below, the Royal Highway paralleled the side of Horn Hill at a distance of about a hundred yards, a river of people, carts, and carriages marking the boundary between the Middle City and the Grey City. From up here, in the bright sunlight and with a bit of squinting, the Grey City — itself divided in two by the Erastes River — looked almost white.
“You all right, mate?” Benny asked. “Something up with your eyes?”
“Just catching my breath.”
I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to break into a high mage’s home, either.
“You need more exercise,” said Benny, a man whose only exercise involved finding ways into rich people’s homes and making off with their valuables.
“I need more sleep,” I said, giving him a meaningful look, which he ignored.
The city of Agatos occupied one end of the Erastes Valley, squeezed between mountain ranges. Beyond the Grey City, the valley wall rose steeply, but that hadn’t put off the citizens of Agatos. The houses just continued, stacked nearly on top of each other. That part of the city was known, with an admirable lack of imagination, as the Stacks.
Eventually, though, the mountains grew too steep and the city ended. Above it all, the temple-like façade of Ceor Ebbas looked back across the city.
I straightened, testing my ankle. It still hurt, but I would cope.
“Are you going to tell me your plan before we actually break in?” I asked, buying a few more seconds to recover.
Benny nodded. “Fair enough. It’s the Feast of Parata.”
I waited a minute for the rest of it, but Benny didn’t add anything.
“You know that’s not actually a plan.”
“Sure it is.”
The Feast of Parata was a public holiday. I had forgotten about it because freelance mages didn’t get such things as public holidays. Most of the temples in the city would be throwing open their doors to welcome worshippers into whatever festival of naked cavorting, hallucinogenic smoke, bloody animal sacrifice, or all three that got them feeling holy. Those citizens who considered themselves particularly pious would open up their houses, too, in the hope that some of the worship would rub off. Carnelian Silkstar was a follower of Belethea, the goddess of bees, and he would certainly be showing off his shrines and obscene wealth.
“We’ll be able to walk straight in,” Benny said.
“Along with several hundred other people.”
“Which is why no one will be watching us.”
I shook my head. “I have no idea how you’ve avoided the executioner’s spear this long.”
“Lucky, aren’t I?”
One of us had to be. I was tired. I was dirty. I certainly smelled. My ankle was killing me. I didn’t feel lucky.
“He’s going to have dozens of guards there precisely to stop people stealing things,” I said. The more I thought of it, the worse Benny’s plan sounded.
“The way I see it, it’s not stealing if your mark’s rich. It’s taxation. Just saving the Senate the bother of gathering it. I should be getting an award.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever actually paid any tax?”
“I’m not answering that one.”
I looked towards the palaces at the top of Horn Hill. I could only just glimpse them through the gaps in the high walls.
“I don’t know, Benny.”
His eyes tightened. “You promised.”
I had, and promises mattered between us, irrespective of Benny’s multi-dimensional tally of debts and favours. We had grown up in the Warrens, poor kids of poor parents in an area the City Watch avoided like a seeping wound. I had been five, Benny just turned six, when we’d met, and we had had each other’s backs ever since. I had never known my father, and even back then my mother had had ambitions for me that I hadn’t shared. Benny’s parents, meanwhile, had had almost no interest in him. Benny had already been drifting away from them when we met, and by the time he was nine, he had left home completely. You didn’t survive in the Warrens unless you had someone you could trust implicitly. I wasn’t going to break that after all this time, no matter what.
“I just thought you’d have a better plan,” I said.
Benny’s face broke into a grin again, the tension slipping from his shoulders like a shadow in the midday sun.
“I don’t need one. I told you, I’m lucky.” Which didn’t fill me with as much confidence as he probably thought. “Anyway, I’m not a mage like you. But if you want to turn us invisible or, you know, mind-control the guards or something, be my guest.”
“Not bloody likely.” Even if I could manage such things, Carnelian Silkstar was a high mage. If I touched magic within a hundred yards of him, he would know.
There were three ways to make a lot of money in Agatos: politics, crime, and commerce, although some would argue they were basically the same thing. The city’s high mages had them pretty well sewn up. The Countess controlled politics, the Wren ruled the underworld, and Carnelian Silkstar had most of the city’s trade grasped in his greasy little hands.
Benny shot me a happy smile. “I guess that means we’re doing it my way after all. So, what are we waiting for?”
Yeah, I thought bitterly. What are we waiting for?
Once, Horn Hill had been crowned by a fortified keep that jutted up from the edge of the Leap like a big ‘fuck you’ to anyone approaching from the sea. Over the centuries, the walls and the keep itself had been torn down and Horn Hill given over to a much bloodier purpose than war: making lots of money for very few people.
The story went that, four hundred and twenty-six years ago, Agate Blackspear had sailed into the harbour, seen the Erastes Valley stretching out before him, and announced in a ground-shaking and undoubtedly very manly voice, “I shall build a city here, and it shall be the greatest city on Earth.”
Agate’s clerks and scribes must have been working overtime for anyone to actually believe that goat shit, because there had been cities here for thousands of years, each built on the ruins of the previous, burying their memories, their histories, and their dead gods beneath the weight of stone and carefully crafted stories. Agate Blackspear had been just the latest in a long line of pirate kings who had seen the potential of Erastes Bay.
The prevailing winds across the ocean meant that ships were forced to anchor in the bay and there wait for the wind to change so they could sail through the Bone Straits to the Folaric Sea and the rich trade with the coastal cities beyond. If you controlled the only major port on the coast, well, think of the potential to tax all those waiting ships at the point of a sword. Agate Blackspear must have been rubbing his hands. Add to that the fact that the Erastes Valley marked the start of the Lidharan Road, the main trade route to the northern cities, and money washed through Agatos like shit through the sewers after a storm.
Over the centuries, whether Agate had actually said it or not, Agatos had become one of the great cities of the world. The Godkiller had secured his legacy, even if he hadn’t lived long enough to see it. Personally, I was glad he hadn’t. He sounded like a massive arsehole.
The Palace of a Thousand Walls covered a good chunk of the plateau of Horn Hill. I doubted anyone had ever counted the walls in Silkstar Palace, but they were impressive. Almost all of the internal walls were movable, capable of being swung or slid in and out of place to change the configurations of the rooms and the dozens of small courtyards hidden within. The house was supposed to reflect the honeycomb of a beehive in structure. I didn’t know if that was true, but I did know that Thousand Walls was a bloody awkward, ever-changing maze, and we had a good chance of getting lost in there and wandering around until we died of old age. The outer wall was solid stone and thirty feet high. It ran in a square that was a hundred yards to each side. Gold and blue banners draped the walls, embroidered with the Silkstar crest of a ship following a single star, topped by three absolutely gigantic bees. All I could say was that I wouldn’t have wanted to be on that ship when those bees came past.
The main gates of Thousand Walls had been thrown open and the internal walls had been slid back to provide a wide, direct passage all the way through to the central courtyard. There were guards at the gate and spaced around the roof, looking like Charo decorations in their frilly, matching Silkstar uniforms. The swords at their waists and the muskets in their hands looked anything but frilly and pointless. I might be a mage, but I wouldn’t be able to hold off that many armed men, even if their master didn’t decide to get involved.
“Pity, Benny. What have you got me into?” I muttered.
“What’s that, mate?”
I shook my head.
The guards were watching the steady stream of people passing through the gates, but no one was being questioned. Sneaking into the house itself wouldn’t be so easy, but that was Benny’s problem. And if he couldn’t get us in, well, that would free me from my part of the deal. The relief that rushed through me at the thought was followed by guilt.
You’re a shit friend, Nik.
It didn’t stop the relief, though. I wanted out, and no amount of arguing with myself would change that. This was not my kind of place. It triggered an aversion deep in the beast part of my mind that I couldn’t shake. I wanted nothing to do with the likes of Carnelian Silkstar.
The central courtyard was already packed and the heat of the day was becoming oppressive. The high walls prevented any hint of a breeze. An altar carved from a single block of honey-yellow amber stood at one end. Amber didn’t come in lumps that size, which meant that Silkstar had created it himself with magic. Bloody show-off.
Nobody was paying much attention to the altar, because in the end, an altar was just an altar, no matter how shiny and impressive it was, and whatever else you might say about the citizens of Agatos, they didn’t turn their noses up at a free meal. Tables had been set up around the courtyard, laden with honey-soaked treats. I’d noticed that most of the citizens who’d made their way to Thousand Walls were from the upper end of society, but that wasn’t stopping them stuffing their faces, and there were enough adventurous souls from the Grey City and the Middle City that Benny and I didn’t stand out.
Around the edge of the courtyard, beneath the occasional sneezing fits from the crowd, a constant, low hum rose from dozens of beehives. I could smell lavender and rosemary heavy in the still air. Clouds of bees lifted or settled, bringing nectar from the Missos flowers. Personally, I would have thought twice before covering the tables with honeyed snacks with so many bees around, but that’s religion for you. The crowd jostled around me.
Benny leaned in closer. “Try to look like you fit in.” He grabbed a handful of sticky pastries from the table and shoved them into his mouth. “Like this.”
“You’ve got honey in your beard.”
“Saving it for later.”
I shrugged. “Don’t blame me if you get a face full of bees.”
I still hadn’t eaten today, and my stomach was protesting. I waited until Benny was looking the other way, then scooped up a finger-sized pastry, stuffed it in my mouth, and wiped my fingers on my shirt.
There were guards at all the entrances to the actual house from the courtyard. How Benny thought we were getting past, I didn’t know. I hoped he didn’t have anything too drastic in mind. Drastic things tended to go wrong.
The first time Benny had got me into real trouble, I had been eight years old. There had been nothing mage-y about me then — I had been able to see magic, catch glimpses of it when staring into the distance or daydreaming, but I hadn’t really known what it was, and I couldn’t do anything with it. Benny, though, was already an accomplished thief. Or that’s what he’d told me. Like the idiot I had been, I’d told him to prove it.
This had been back when we had both lived in the Warrens, down by the docks. If the Grey City was the disreputable older brother of the White City, then the Warrens was the uncle that all the kids tried to stay away from during the Ebbtide Vigil.
Benny’s young pride had been hurt, so he’d decided to prove me wrong by breaking into one of the Wren’s warehouses in full daylight. We hadn’t made it five yards inside before we were caught. For some reason, maybe because my mother worked for the Wren, or maybe because he took pity on our absolute incompetence, he didn’t cut off our heads and use them as footballs. We did get a good kicking, though, which soured me to Benny’s schemes for a while, although it didn’t have much effect on him.
“Here he comes,” Benny whispered.
If I hadn’t already known what Carnelian Silkstar looked like, I would have taken him for an apprentice scribe or a bookkeeper. He was a small man with narrow, drawn-in shoulders, skin that was lighter than was common in Agatos, and thin brown hair. I certainly wouldn’t have taken him for one of the three most powerful people in the city. He could scurry past you on the street and you would never notice him.
Everyone noticed him now. He emerged from his palace at the head of a battalion of priests, clerks, black-cloaked mages, and a selection of weak-chinned young men who I assumed were his sons.
“I thought we were going to avoid him,” I hissed at Benny.
I would only have to let slip a trickle of magic and Silkstar would spot me. It was the Feast of Parata, and I was as welcome here today as anyone else, but once Silkstar noticed me, he would put some kind of trace on me. That was just basic common sense when a mage came into your home. I wouldn’t be able to break Benny’s curse without Silkstar coming down on me like a plunging hawk.
This was crazy. How had I let Benny talk me into this?
“Don’t worry, mate. We’re not going anywhere near him. He’s just the distraction.”
“Yeah, well, I’m feeling fucking distracted right now.”
Benny had better be telling me the truth. I didn’t care how much I owed him. I wasn’t going head-to-head with a high mage for any debt or favour. Suicide didn’t look good on me.
Benny was right that Carnelian Silkstar was a distraction, though. The moment he had emerged, heads had turned towards him and conversations around courtyard had died away, leaving only the hum of the bees, rising and falling and shushing like gentle waves on a pebble beach. Everyone was watching the procession towards the altar. The citizens of Agatos might be here for the free snacks, but it was polite to pay attention to the religious bit, particularly when your host could flatten the whole lot of you with a single twitch of his finger.
Benny plucked at my sleeve, drawing me back through the pressing crowd.
As Carnelian Silkstar reached the altar, Benny and I slipped into the shadows beneath the covered walkway that surrounded the courtyard.
Much as I hated to admit it, this plan of Benny’s was probably the best we could have come up with, no matter how crazy it was. Our other option would have been to come under cover of the night and pick the locks. But any mage worth the name would have wards around their house. Depths, I had wards, and there were plenty who would say I was a disgrace to the whole of magedom, the pompous gits. But right now Carnelian Silkstar’s wards were down. Even for a high mage, it would be frowned upon if he accidentally fried any of his guests who had just wandered off looking for a toilet.
Of course, we still had to get past the guards, and that was where partnering someone as fundamentally dodgy as Benny came in handy. Benny knew a good chunk of the other dodgy citizens of Agatos. He wasn’t much use with the criminals and frauds in the upper echelons of society, the likes of Carnelian Silkstar, the various priesthoods, or the Senate, but for your common or garden scumbags, Benny was your man. So I wasn’t at all surprised when Benny sidled up to a couple of the guards with a familiar nod of the head and a whispered, “All right?”
The religious part of the event was getting into full swing. Priests were wandering about, tossing handfuls of flowers into the crowds, which had the dual effect of raising the hum of the bees from the hives and setting at least a dozen people sneezing. I kept one eye on the happenings in the courtyard while watching Benny’s dealings with the other.
In the Warrens, we called a silver coin a ‘watchman’ because it was the traditional amount it took to bribe a member of the City Watch to look the other way. From the clink of the purses Benny slipped to the guards, Silkstar’s men worked to higher standards.
The moment the purses were out of sight, the two guards appeared to get religion, because they developed a singular focus on what was happening at the altar. Benny beckoned to me, and we slipped inside Thousand Walls.
The interior of the Silkstar Palace was furnished in the style I liked to call Mycedan-tat. The island of Myceda lay three hundred miles to the south of Agatos, just off the coast of Corithia, and specialised in delicate sculptures made from gold, silver, precious jewels, and rare tropical woods. They were considered the height of classy sophistication across most of the civilised world. That was why, when the fashion reached Agatos, the wealthy merchants and senators immediately set about duplicating it, except instead of sticking to the small and delicate — which people might not notice — had instead commissioned great, hulking copies that loomed tactlessly over everything. So, the now-famous Mycedan-tat style had been born. No one would be able to miss just how much wealth and how little taste the owners had. And as a typical piece weighed as much as a fully grown bull, they were nearly impossible to steal without a team of men, a hefty wagon, and several mules. It also meant that Benny was after something more unusual.
“Lady of the Grove,” Benny swore as we entered a lavish sitting room. “Look at this place!” His fingers rubbed unconsciously together.
“You’re only stealing what you’re being paid to steal these days,” I reminded Benny. “Going up in the world, remember?”
“You’re no fun, mate. This way.”
Foolishly, I assumed Benny knew what he was talking about.
If you were of a masochistic frame of mind, you could do some fairly complicated mathematics to show how many rooms Thousand Walls could have if it really did have a thousand walls, and the answer was, I didn’t know. I was a mage, not a mathematician. But within a few minutes of following Benny from over-decorated room to over-decorated room I had come to the conclusion that there were an awful lot of them and that Benny had no idea of his way through.
I grabbed his arm as he started across a small, darkened kitchen with strings of garlic hanging like skeletal, arthritic fingers from the ceiling.
“What exactly are we looking for?”
Benny glanced shiftily from side to side. On principle, Benny was the kind of man who wouldn’t admit to owning a candle even if you caught him halfway down the stairs on the way to the loo with the candle clutched in front of his face. I had seen him avoid several convictions for burglary by the simple expedient of lying so shamelessly that no one quite knew what to do with him. After a moment, though, he slumped slightly.
“It’s a ledger, all right?”
“A cursed ledger? Why would anyone put a curse on a ledger?”
“I don’t know, do I? It’s an old one, anyway. Maybe someone he cheated got pissed off.”
Except Carnelian Silkstar was a high mage and he could break a curse easier than clicking his fingers. More likely, the curse was there to discourage his minions from poking around. His mages should be able to break the curse, too, of course, but recreating it again in such a way that Silkstar wouldn’t be able to tell the difference was high mage-level magic.
The ledger must contain some of Silkstar’s business secrets, and it made sense that one of his rivals would try to steal it.
“Let’s bloody find it before they finish up out there and catch us in the act,” I said. Waves of exhaustion were washing over the back of my mind, and only a seawall of terror kept them at bay. I just wanted this over.
I strode across the kitchen and yanked open the nearest door.
I didn’t know who was more surprised, me or the Master Servant standing on the other side. She reacted quicker, though. There was a brief blink of startlement, then her head came up while I was still standing there, grasping the door handle.
“Can I help you, gentlemen?”
She had been well trained. Despite the fact that we were obviously not supposed to be creeping around the palace and despite the possibility that we might be dangerous, she didn’t flinch.
I couldn’t quite place her accent. It was Agatos, and she was clearly an Agatos native, but whether she was Grey City, Middle City, or Upper City I couldn’t tell. Her voice had been tutored to a neutral formality.
I cleared my throat. “We’re here to see Carnelian Silkstar.”
She didn’t move.
More than a grand house or palace, more than a seat in the Senate, more than magical powers, employing a Master Servant was the sign of status in Agatos society. There were never more than forty Master Servants in employment in the whole city at any one time, and they undertook years of rigorous training. They were notoriously trustworthy, efficient, and dedicated. I had absolutely nothing in common with any of them.
Only the tallest men and women were ever selected to train as Master Servants, and looking contemptuously down their nose at you was one of the first skills they learned. I was tall for a citizen of Agatos — like I said, I never knew my father, but I had always thought he must have come into the port on a boat from Secellia or Tor — but the woman in the doorway topped me by a full head, and she had that look-down-the-nose thing off pat. She was dressed in sweeping robes of gold and silver that bore Silkstar’s ship-star-and-giant-bees insignia.
“I can assure you that he has no appointments today.”
I cursed silently. Of course she would know. Her job would be to organise Silkstar’s life like cutlery in a drawer. Well, not like my cutlery.
Pull it together, Nik! The exhaustion was making me stupid.
You couldn’t intimidate a Master Servant. That was part of the deal. And they were almost impossible to fool. But I was willing to give it a go.
“We have a message from the Countess,” I said.
If you were going to lie, lie big. No one in their right mind would tell a lie like that. The Countess did not react well to having her name taken in vain.
Well, if you’re going to piss off one high mage, you might as well make it two. You could only die horribly once.
For the first time, a flicker of doubt crossed the Master Servant’s face, and I pressed my advantage. I raised an eyebrow. There were years of training, there were ridiculous levels of pay, and there was loyalty. But there was also stupidity, and it would take a suicidally brave Master Servant to interfere with the business of a high mage.
For a second, I thought she was going to say no, anyway. I thought she was going to deny the Countess’s supposed will simply so as not to inconvenience Silkstar. But then she must have realised that if it was important enough for the Countess to send a messenger today of all days, it was something Silkstar would want to be told.
You are in so much trouble, Mennik Thorn, I told myself.
“Follow me,” the Master Servant said, turning on her heel. I felt, rather than heard, Benny’s sigh of relief.
The Master Servant took us to a small sitting room with one wall swung back to let in the fresh air and light from a miniature courtyard. The smell of lavender and honeysuckle drifted in on the faint breeze, along with the murmur of the crowd in the main courtyard. Unsurprisingly, there was a beehive in the centre of the little courtyard, and I avoided looking at it out of an excess of caution. I was pretty certain a dead goddess wasn’t going to report me to Carnelian Silkstar, nor send her bees after me, but it never hurt to be careful.
“Wait here,” the Master Servant said.
Benny and I lowered ourselves onto the perfectly upholstered chairs. I thought the Master Servant did a wonderful job of not shuddering as we settled our dirty, sweaty, ragged selves onto cushions that were used to far more refined backsides than ours.
“This is a bit of all right,” Benny whispered loudly.
This time, the Master Servant’s jaw did tighten.
“I will see if Master Silkstar is available.” With a sharp nod, she turned and strode off, not hurrying exactly, but certainly not hanging around.
“How long do you reckon we’ve got?” Benny said when the Master Servant was gone.
“Not sure.” It wouldn’t take long for her to reach the central courtyard; unlike us, she knew where she was going. “Five minutes? You can’t hurry religion, but Silkstar’s going to want to know what was so important the Countess would interrupt him during the Feast of Parata.”
“That one’s all on you, mate.”
“I didn’t notice you jumping forwards with any great ideas.” I squeezed my thumb and forefinger into my eyes to push away the tiredness that was threatening to overwhelm me. “You’d better know exactly where we’re going.”
“Not a clue, mate. His personal library, that’s what I was told.”
“Great.” I thought for a moment. “Silkstar is probably going to see us in his office, right?”
Benny shrugged. I decided to take that as agreement.
“His private library won’t be too far from that, and the Master Servant will have left us near the office.”
“Makes sense. Doesn’t mean it’s right, but it makes sense.”
“You’re all encouragement,” I said. “If you were to choose a door that looked like you really shouldn’t go through it, which would it be?”
Benny had an almost supernatural sense of things he wasn’t supposed to do and places he wasn’t supposed to go. There were three doors into the sitting room, including the one we had come through, but it only took Benny a second to point at a door upholstered in green leather.
“That one. No one wants me in there. I can feel it.”
“Then let’s do it.” I eased myself up, wiping my sweaty hands on the expensive cushions.
Benny was right. The door led to a long, wide room with desks down both sides, carpeted in the same green colour as the door. Silkstar’s clerks must have worked here, when they weren’t standing around watching him be religious. The double doors at the far end were closed and probably locked, but Benny went through locks like I went through a plate of cheese and olives after a long night’s ghost hunting. Or, my stomach reminded me, the way I would have if Benny hadn’t dragged me away before I had had a chance for breakfast.
A large desk stood in front of the double doors, facing down between the rows of smaller desks, so that anyone entering would be forced to approach Carnelian Silkstar like a supplicant in a temple. Maybe he just had a thing for altars.
Neat papers, pens, inks, and blotters decorated the clerks’ desks like little votive offerings to their master.
“Come on.” We crossed the office, and I waited while Benny made short work of the lock.
“Too easy,” Benny said. “Some people don’t even try to make it difficult.”
I pushed the doors open. Beyond was a short hallway with only a single example of Mycedan-tat half-blocking the way through. The walls on either side were solid marble. An inlaid cedar door opened off one side. I peeked through into a room with four comfortable chairs and a low table between them. Somewhere for more private meetings. Double doors had been thrown open to another small, private courtyard. I had to squeeze my nose so the smell of honeysuckle didn’t make me sneeze. I could hear the constant hum of bees.
“That’s not very secure,” Benny observed, nodding towards the open courtyard doors. “That’s just asking for someone to let themselves in.”
“Which might have been useful if we’d known about it before we started all this creeping around.” I shook my head. “Focus on the job.”
“What? I’m just making notes for next time.”
The only other door was at the end of the hallway. It opened into a library, and I felt a surge of elation for the first time. We had found it, and there was still no sign of Silkstar turning up to rip our skins from our backs and use them to cover his books. Maybe this plan really was going to work.
A desk stood in the middle of a rug on the marble floor, heaped with papers and worn books. A vase, holding freshly cut lavender, sat incongruously on one side. More fucking lavender. I didn’t normally get bad allergies, but this was place was a full-on pollen assault.
Red-painted shelves covered every wall except for a single barred, shuttered window, making the whole place look like a disused brothel. I was starting to doubt Carnelian Silkstar’s taste, or possibly his eyesight. An armchair sat beneath a morgue-lamp in one corner. The room smelled dry and old, with a hint of dust and crumpled paper and the taste of warm wood.
Half the shelves were filled with ledgers.
“Great,” I said. “So, which one is it?”
Benny scratched behind an ear. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”
At this point, nothing was going to surprise me.
That was what they called ‘famous last words’, right?
“You might want to hurry, too,” Benny added, helpfully.
I waved him into silence.
One of the first things a mage learned was to sense magic. If you couldn’t sense the magic around you, you couldn’t draw it to yourself and cast spells. Most mages could sense magic long before they started training, even if they weren’t sure what they were sensing.
I let my eyes unfocus and slipped into the semi-trance that allowed me to see magic.
Colours rose around me. Tendrils of green lifted from the floor like smoke. That was the raw, natural magic every mage drew on. The morgue-lamp was green, too, but focused and bright. Silkstar’s deactivated wards permeated every wall, the ceiling above us, and the floor below, seething heavily in unsettling black and red patterns. I shuddered. A single word from Silkstar would bring them to ominous life, and that would be the end of me and Benny. I forced myself to ignore them, along with the green mist and the morgue-lamp.
Magic didn’t have colours, of course. That was just the way I visualised it. I knew a couple of mages who sensed it as music, and even one who tasted it, although I had no idea how that could actually work. I did know it would have put me completely off my dinner.
I saw curses as white strands, enfolding objects like a dolphin caught in a net.
I turned slowly, letting my senses drift across the room. There was something cursed in the desk, but it was the wrong shape. A dagger, perhaps. I moved past it.
“That’s the one.” I pointed to a heavy ledger just to the left of where Carnelian Silkstar would sit. It was buried beneath a pile of papers.
“Go on, then.”
I shot Benny an annoyed look. A bit of appreciation wouldn’t have gone amiss. I wasn’t saying I was the only one who could have found the right book so quickly, but I was the only one whom Benny could persuade to do something this stupid for him. I swept off the pile of papers and dumped them into Benny’s hands.
“Hold these.” I intended to leave this library looking as untouched as possible when we left. The longer it took for Carnelian Silkstar to realise he had been robbed, the better.
I leaned closer. The curse was a work of beauty, one of Silkstar’s own creations, I was sure. It would take an accomplished mage to create something so delicate. Your average curse cast by someone untrained in magic might work, but it would be an unstable mess. This one would never break spontaneously.
“Speed it up, mate,” Benny hissed. “I can hear someone in the outer office.”
I swore under my breath and focused on the lace-thin net covering the book. Benny had uncanny hearing, and I had learned to trust him.
If I’d had more time, I could have figured out exactly what kind of curse this was — warts, an unpleasant seepage from unnamed orifices, a swarm of enraged bees, whatever. It was always nice to know what you were in for if you got it wrong. But time was one of the many things I didn’t have.
“Here goes,” I whispered.
There were people who thought that being a mage was all about talent. You were born a mage or you weren’t. If you had the talent, they would tell you, everything else was easy. The truth was more mundane. Yeah, you needed the ability, but on its own, talent was nothing. The hard bit was the training.
The first year of mage training sucked. Literally. The unfortunate trainee mage — me, to take a random example — spent every day learning to suck in the raw magic around them and release it again, over and over, until it became as automatic as breathing. When he (still me) had finally mastered it, he would move onto the really difficult part: shaping and transforming the raw magic into spells that actually did something.
That was why it took so long to become a mage. A trainee could spend years learning to shape magic through concentration and willpower, peering at (or listening to, smelling, touching, you take your pick) magic, then trying to replicate it, like building muscle memory, until it was instinctive, repeating the Hundred Key Forms (there were more than a hundred key forms; that was something they didn’t tell you, either, when you started), and then learning to combine the forms into ever more complicated structures.
The magic I needed to break the curse was one of the basic key forms. The Sharpness of the Sun, my tutors had called it. They did love their stupid names. Me, I called it a scalpel. It was a very fine, very sharp extrusion of magic perfectly controlled. Usually I wouldn’t worry too much about using careful work on a curse. A quick burst of magic, and it would be gone. But we were in Carnelian Silkstar’s palace. If I used more than a trickle, he would detect it, and we would be finished.
I licked my lips, drew in a tiny amount of raw magic, then reached out with the thinnest scalpel I could manage.
I wasn’t the most powerful mage out there, but to compensate, I had developed the kind of fine control that some more potent mages never did.
I was sweating, my hands were shaking from the tension, but I didn’t let the scalpel of magic waver as I slid it into the net and carefully sliced one of the strands of the curse.
For a moment the curse held, glistening whitely around the ledger. Then it collapsed, falling in on itself, and was gone.
I let out a breath, settling back on my heels. I had done it. No one had noticed. I started to grin.
And that was when the booby trap went off.