Nothing ever went according to plan.
When I pushed through the door into my office, Galena Sunstone was perched right on the edge of my sagging couch. She was sitting upright, but something about the tension in her back told me she’d been waiting here a while.
Depths! What did she want? I couldn’t deal with any more anger and recriminations. I had failed with her ghosts, but I had bigger things to worry about. I hadn’t been the one who had triggered whatever it was that had transformed them. That had been the priest of Gwillan. She could take it up with what was left of his body.
Her perfume filled the air like spilled vinegar. It made my sore nose itch. I held back a sneeze. She turned to look at me as I came through the door. There was something odd about her eyes. They had that clouded-over appearance of frozen, winter puddles. She had been taking something, and I didn’t think it had been strictly medicinal.
She stood, smoothing her dress and small jacket. It didn’t help. She looked like I did after a hard night’s maging, all creased and stained. I could hardly criticize. I looked like a rag doll caught in a tug of war between two stray dogs. But I had never seen Galena Sunstone look like that before.
“Mr. Thorn—”
“I don’t have time,” I interrupted her. “I’m sorry things went wrong, but I told your husband it wasn’t easy to get rid of ghosts.” Particularly not ones that behaved like that. “I have work to do.”
Her tongue slid across her gold lip paint, coming away with a smear. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I need you, Mr. Thorn.”
I stopped, eyeing her. She looked nervous. Shit. She’d better not be coming on to me. That was a complication I did not need.
“And I need you to leave.”
She didn’t move. I wondered if I was going to have to manhandle her out the door.
“I’m scared,” she whispered. “That thing … Those ghosts … No one else will help. I’ve asked at every temple in the city.”
It was a decent sob story, but I had heard better, and it wasn’t the most flattering thing to be told that you were the literal last choice after everyone else had said no.
“I told you. Move house. You can afford it.”
She stiffened so much I thought her spine was going to snap. “It is my home, Mr. Thorn. I will not be chased out.”
I could sympathise with that. I wasn’t looking forward to being evicted tomorrow morning, either. That still didn’t make it my problem. I would save my sympathy for people who couldn’t afford to buy my entire apartment with their loose change. I shrugged.
“I am prepared to pay you a very large sum of money, Mr. Thorn.”
Shit!
She pulled a small cloth bag from under her jacket and tossed it onto my desk. It made an unnecessarily loud thump as it landed.
I opened it. Most of the time I was paid in pieces or oars. This bag held shields. I even saw a crown in there. Lady of the Grove. That was a lot of money. A lot of money. That would be my rent for the next year. No eviction, no sleeping homeless on the street.
And it would take time I didn’t have.
Damn it all to the Depths.
I took the bag and locked it in my safe, shoving a handful of pennies into my pocket on the way. Everyone had a price. I guessed I’d just found mine.
“I won’t be there early,” I said. “I have another job to do first, and I’ll have to prepare for yours. I need you to get every piece of silver you own and stack it in the basement. I’ll need arevena flowers — fresh, preferably — and charcoal, too.” I didn’t know how much good any of those would do — they had bothered the ghost-beast thing, but they hadn’t stopped it — but I would grab at any driftwood I could reach. “Then keep out of the kitchen and basement until I’m done. All right?”
“Thank you.” Her glassy eyes were wide.
“Don’t. Just go.”
She left slowly, almost drifting like a ghost herself towards the door.
I headed up to my workroom to grab the quartz egg, trying to bring my focus back to Benny’s rescue. Get it wrong, and I’d end up in the cell with Benny. We could be executed together. It would be the kind of thing poets would love, the bastards.
I was half way back down the stairs when I felt the deadening vacuum of Ash picking away at my magic.
I swore, stumbling back, and pushed the egg behind me, desperately trying to keep it out of range.
The Ash Guard had come for me. Cepra damn Galena Sunstone! She had slowed me down, given Captain Gale enough time to get backup and Ash. I wished I had never heard the name Sunstone. I cursed as I scrambled up the stairs. I tripped, slamming my knee into a riser, and rolled about in agony.
Still limping, I pushed further up. Maybe they didn’t have the building surrounded yet. Maybe I could get out the window at the back. It was a drop, but I could cushion my fall with magic, assuming they weren’t too close with that damned Ash. It would be just my luck to leap out and find my magic failing half way down.
I stopped.
Why were there no voices from downstairs? Why no footsteps pursuing? They must have heard my performance on the stairs. I could, when I let my eyes unfocus, see where the Ash was eating away at the raw magic no more than six feet away, but it wasn’t coming any closer.
I took several slow breaths to release the tension in my chest and slow my pulse. The Ash Guard would know I could feel their presence. Why would they give me the chance to flee? This didn’t fit together.
I hesitated. Something else was going on.
This was how I got myself into trouble. I couldn’t leave things alone. They itched at me.
They’re waiting for you down there, you idiot, I told myself. They know you’re dumb enough to come down. They know they don’t even need to bother chasing you. Get out of here while you still can.
I couldn’t.
I wasn’t completely stupid. I returned the quartz egg to my workroom where I hoped the apple tree wood on the floor and walls would isolate it from the effect of the Ash. Then, I cautiously made my way back downstairs.
By the time I reached my office door, my magic was gone. It was hard to explain the absence of magic to someone who had never had it. It felt like walking naked into the midst of the cannon and musket fire of a battlefield, but without the advantage of putting everyone off their aim with your dangling bits. You were vulnerable in a way you weren’t used to feeling, and it was frankly uncomfortable.
There was no one in my office. Not on the couch or by the desk or waiting behind the door to smack me over the head. Where were they? Out in the street? Surrounding the building? Why?
A half choke, half gulp drew my attention to the couch. I took a couple of steps forwards. On the floor, pressed up against the side of the couch, almost invisible in her stillness, was Sereh.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
She was supposed to be waiting in the alley, ready with the Ash to shield Benny’s escape from any prying mages. Something must have gone wrong. My heart thudded as my mind ran through the possibilities, each worse than the one before. They were onto our rescue attempt. They had moved the execution date up, and we were already too late.
Instinctively, I reached for magic and felt nausea again under the influence of the Ash.
Sereh looked up. The dark skin of her face was streaked with tears. I froze. I hadn’t seen Sereh cry since she’d been a baby.
“What is it?” If someone had hurt her, I was going to tear this fucking city apart and let the Ash Guard try to stop me. I should never have sent her out there alone. Benny would kill me, and if he was already dead, he would come back and fucking haunt me. That ghost-beast-monster would have nothing on Benny’s fury.
You stupid turd! I had said I would keep Sereh safe. I hadn’t even tried.
But she didn’t look hurt. I took a step closer. She still had the Ash, which meant that no mage could have harmed her and the Ash Guard hadn’t tracked her down.
There were plenty of dangerous things in Agatos that weren’t mages or the Ash Guard.
“I can’t do this, Uncle Nik,” she said. Her voice was often a whisper, but this time it seemed drained of something vital. I stopped.
“What is it?” I said quietly.
Her face crumpled. A sob escaped, and her hand shot up guiltily to cover her mouth.
“It’s too much.” She squeezed her eyes shut and more tears slid from her eyes. “Dad. Everything. I can’t do it.”
It took me a moment to process what she was saying, and then guilt hit me like a runaway carriage. What the Depths are you doing, Nik?
I had been thinking of Sereh as a miniature psychopath, but she wasn’t. She was just an eleven-year-old girl with an overdeveloped need to protect her father and an unnerving way with a knife. I had been treating her like she was a block of stone and expecting her deal with things even I wasn’t dealing with.
My mistake could have fucked this whole thing up.
I crossed to her and crouched, careful not to touch her. She might be fragile, but she was still the most dangerous person I had ever met, and that included the three high mages.
“We’re going to sort this out,” I said, although I had no idea how. “You can stay here. I can do it on my own.” I would have to leave the Ash somewhere and hope no one discovered it. I would have to come back for the spell. It would make everything tighter and increase the risk of failure. But I couldn’t put her through any more of this. “You could even go and stay with my sister until this is all over.” Mica was a sucker for hard-luck cases. She would take Sereh in, and no one would fuck with her there.
Sereh shuddered and her eyes hardened. I didn’t see her move, but her knife was suddenly in her hand.
“He’s my dad.”
I could see her pull herself together through an effort of pure will. I recognised that. It had been how I had kept going so many times when I had still been living and training with my mother. And because I knew it, I knew exactly how brittle a thing it was. The wrong hit, and she would shatter into pieces.
I studied her face, the drying, forgotten trails of tears, the hardness in her expression. I wasn’t going to be able to dissuade her, not without breaking her.
“All right,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Same plan.”
With growing apprehension, I watched her unfold herself then head out, her back stiff, her shoulders squared, and her movements uncharacteristically jerky. I swore under my breath.
You just had to make this tougher, didn’t you? I told myself. You just had to.
The City Watch headquarters, beneath the sheer cliffs of the Leap, was an intimidating place. Heavy, discoloured white walls rose three storeys, broken only by barred windows. Two watchmen stood beside the solid wooden doors, watching the open plaza. Stalls had been set up around the plaza, against the cliff, but none of them too close to the headquarters. The Watch would have plenty of time to retreat behind the doors and hunker down if anyone should try to storm their building.
Not that I was planning to run screaming at them waving a spear or musket. We mages were sneakier than that.
I had left my mage cloak behind — there was no point in drawing unnecessary attention — and now I waited in the shade of a coffee house awning on Bad Luck Way, watching people come and go across the plaza. The spell in the quartz egg could take me to the Watch building unobserved. Depths, I could probably dance across the plaza with my underwear on my head and not be noticed under the influence of the spell. But I only had a minute of it, and I needed to save it for as long as I could.
Someone cleared their throat behind me. I craned around and saw a waiter hovering behind my shoulder.
I raised an eyebrow.
He straightened. “You must order if you are going to sit there.”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
“Even so.”
Arsehole. I leaned back easily. The waiter wasn’t as tall as me, but he was more muscular. Either the coffee here weighed a lot more than it should, or he spent too much time exercising in front of a mirror. I could take him with magic if I had to, but I couldn’t afford a scene. Galena Sunstone had paid me well. I could afford a coffee. Depths, I could probably afford the whole menu. But when you were used to being poor, you resented any unnecessary cost, even if you temporarily had money.
“It would be rude to order before they arrived. I don’t like being rude.” I shifted slightly to face the waiter more fully and treated him to a wide smile. He recoiled. I guessed a split lip, swollen nose, and bruises didn’t inspire confidence.
I’m nice, I projected. I’m reliable. I’m a desirable customer.
Some mages claimed to be able to influence thoughts with their powers, a wave of the hand in front of someone’s face to change their mind, but I certainly couldn’t, and they couldn’t have been that good at it, because they had never managed to influence me to believe it. The waiter’s eyes dropped to my stained, wrinkled clothes, and his lips curled in distaste.
This wasn’t working, and it was drawing attention. That was exactly what I didn’t need. I reached into my pocket and slapped a couple of coins on the table.
“Torian coffee. No spices.”
With a barely disguised sneer, the waiter scooped up the coins and retreated.
My stomach really didn’t want coffee right now. It was too tight, and I was too tense. I just wanted to get this done. I turned my gaze back to the plaza.
Come on. All I needed was … yes. That. Three men had emerged from a nearby alley and were heading for the City Watch headquarters.
I pushed away from my table, jumped to my feet, and hurried away from the coffee house.
“Hey!” the waiter called after me. “What about your coffee? What about your friend?”
“I guess he’s not coming,” I called back.
The men I was after were fifteen yards ahead, and while they weren’t rushing, they were definitely heading for the Watch building. As casually as I could, I used my longer stride to close the distance on them. My plan was to apparently join the group, staying a pace or two behind, so I wouldn’t stand out, then slip anonymously away under cover of the spell. I knew where Benny’s cell was, and I knew how long it would take to reach it. I had a spell prepared to spring the lock, and if everything went according to plan, I had enough time left afterwards to spirit the pair of us out of sight before the spell wore off.
Because everything always went according to plan.
I caught up with the men by the time they reached the middle of the plaza. One of them gave me a curious look over his shoulder. I replied with a confident, friendly nod.
Just going the same way you are. Nothing to worry about.
My attempts at mental manipulation weren’t any more successful this time, because he frowned.
“Just heading for the Watch.” I indicated my clothes and my bruises. “I got attacked.”
That must have been enough to convince him, because he turned back to his friends.
Maybe there was something to this mind stuff, after all. As long as you said it out loud with a sufficiently confident tone.
The watchmen on the door didn’t pay any attention as I followed the group in. We joined a short line in front of the main desk.
I licked my lips nervously. The men I had followed in might not remember me well enough to give a description, but the watchwoman on the desk would be another matter. Watchwomen and -men were trained to observe and remember. There were tricks to it, and any member of the Watch would pin me like a bug on velvet: tall, dark-skinned, thin, bruised. There was a reason they were called watchwomen and watchmen. When Benny went missing, it wouldn’t take a genius to associate that description with Benny’s mage friend.
Here goes.
I let a little magic slip into the quartz egg, triggering the spell. Magic spread from the egg like a sudden mist springing up on the water of the bay. I let my eyes unfocus. With my magical vision, I saw a shifting aurora of colour centred around me, but reaching through the room, enveloping everyone around me. My eyes wouldn’t stay on it. In a blink, I was out of my magical vision.
Huh.
Three seconds. I hoped this was working the way I wanted, because I didn’t have time to test it. Four.
It was suddenly hard to breathe.
Just do it.
I strode away from the line and headed for the cells, stepping around a watchwoman who was wandering across the passage. She shifted the other direction without looking at me.
This was actually working. Who’d have thought? Screw you, everyone who had ever said I was a crappy mage! All right, Mica had actually imbued the quartz, but I had designed the spell, and I would probably have got there eventually.
Ten seconds. Fifty left to go.
I stepped into the hallway that ran in front of the cells. A couple of watchmen sat at the table where Silkstar’s mage had been the first time I had visited Benny. I would have to extend the spell to cover both the door and Benny, or the watchmen would notice. The spell wouldn’t make me and Benny invisible. It simply made us too boring to notice. An obvious escape attempt could be enough to overcome it. When you’d been stuck guarding a cell for hours, you must fantasise about someone trying to escape. I didn’t want to end the day with a dozen spears jutting out of my body.
Fifteen seconds. I was already behind schedule. I hurried over to Benny’s cell and reached for the lock.
The cell was empty.
I stood there staring at it for too many valuable seconds. The cell had been cleaned and tidied. All signs of Benny were gone.
Idiot! Of course he wasn’t here. These cells were for those who had just been arrested or who were awaiting trial. Benny had been convicted. Condemned men wouldn’t be kept here. How did I not know that?
I should have got myself arrested more often.
Twenty seconds. Depths! There was no way to pause or stop the spell. It was running down, and there was nothing I could do about it. All I could do was get back out and think of another plan.
Except there was no other plan, not one I could pull off before Benny was executed.
He’s got to be somewhere.
An iron-studded door stood at the far end of the hallway, past the cells. It was thick and heavy, with a solid lock. What would you keep back there? Buckets and mops? Hardly. I wrapped the spell around the door, feeling the magic drain further, tripped the lock, and threw the door open.
Stairs led down into the dark and up to where light leaked beneath another door. Where would they keep condemned men?
It had to be down. The instinct of every gaoler was to bury convicted criminals, to put them in the darkness, to deny them the light. This place had to have a dungeon or underground cells. I didn’t have time for another mistake.
I stepped through, closed the door behind me, and conjured a faint light.
Thirty seconds.
If this led down to a cheese cellar, I was going to feel really stupid when they dragged me back out.
I smelled the cells by the time I was halfway down. The cells on the ground level had been clean, airy, light, and spacious. Apparently, those privileges disappeared when you were convicted. The stench of unemptied chamber pots hung like a fever in the stairwell. Agatos had had proper sewers for over a hundred years, but no one had bothered to connect them to the cells, because apparently impaling convicted prisoners on a spear or chopping off their hands wasn’t sufficient deterrent.
I hurried down the dark stairs, then through another locked door.
The stink inside was orders of magnitude worse. The gaoler sitting at a table at the far end, picking through the remains of a meal, seemed not to notice.
Forty seconds.
There were a dozen cells. A single morgue-lamp above the gaoler’s table shed enough green-tinged light to hide my own conjured illumination.
I crossed to the first cell and let my light spread inside. The man on the single bunk — a Kendarian sailor by the look of his sea serpent tattoos and his red-stained, beaded hair — shaded his eyes and squinted against the light.
Forty-five seconds.
The second cell didn’t hold Benny either, and neither did the third.
Fifty seconds.
In the fourth, I finally got lucky. I popped the door.
“Benny!” I hissed.
He looked around, confused. I took two quick steps into the cell, wrapped the spell around him, and grabbed his arm. The look of surprise on his weaselly face was almost worth the whole thing.
“We have to get out of here. Now.”
Fifty-five seconds.
Benny didn’t hesitate. When you were a thief and someone told you to run, you ran. Together, we raced out the cell and for the exit.
Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.
I felt the last of the magic trickle away. Mica had cheated me of two seconds.
“Hey!” a voice shouted from the far end, followed by the sound of a table being knocked over and a plate smashing on the floor.
Like an idiot, I glanced back and gave the gaoler a clear look at my face. He levelled a flintlock pistol. I grabbed Benny, and we slammed through the door into the dark stairwell. I heard the kick of the gun just as we spun out of sight.
I pushed the door closed, pulled in magic, and tried to lock the door again. It didn’t work. The lock resisted. I must have overdone it earlier and bent the mechanism.
“What are you doing?” Benny demanded.
I took a breath and poured more magic into the lock. I felt something snap, then the door burst open as the gaoler slammed into it. It hit me full on the shoulder and the side of my face. I staggered back, tripping over the first step.
Just let us get away!
The gaoler had stuck his pistol back in his belt and drawn a knife instead. A knife might not seem much of a weapon compared to a pistol, but even an amateur could be dangerous with one, and this guy wasn’t an amateur.
The gaoler feinted, and Benny scrambled back. I could only see this ending one way.
I drew in raw magic, shaped it, and threw it at the man. It hit him like a bale of cotton being swung from ship. He flew backwards, cracking off the doorpost and windmilling into the space beyond.
I climbed painfully to my feet and crossed to the man. The side of my face throbbed.
The gaoler was bleeding heavily from the back of his head, and from the way he lay, his left shoulder was dislocated. I felt nauseous just looking at it. At least he was still breathing.
Benny knelt beside the gaoler. I almost didn’t notice what he was up to until it was too late. He had gathered up the gaoler’s knife. I grabbed his arm just as he placed the tip of the knife under the man’s chin.
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
Benny looked up. “He saw us. He saw you. We’ll both end up on the end of a spear. It’s him or us.”
“We’re not killing him.” He was just a watchman doing his job.
“It’s him or us,” Benny repeated.
I shook my head, sending needles of pain stabbing through my skull. “No. I could…” I trailed off.
“What? What can you do? Scramble his brains? Make him forget us? You’re not that good a mage.”
“Maybe I could.” The problem was, I couldn’t know for sure that it would work, and even if it did, it could cause irrevocable damage to his mind.
This fucking job wasn’t getting any easier.
Better to risk some damage than leave him dead.
And who did I think I was to make that decision?
Having a conscience was a bitch.
The mind was a complicated thing. No. That was too kind. The mind was a fucking mess, a convoluted tangle of overlapping impressions, ideas, emotions, and memories. It was a miracle that any of us functioned at all. Trying to erase the gaoler’s memory of our escape after the memory had already formed would be like trying to unpick a hundred particular threads from a storm-tangled fishing net without touching any of the others. It was beyond my ability, beyond even the ability of a high mage, I suspected, because this wasn’t about power. It was about the ability of a mage to track down and excise specific images and connections in dozens upon dozens of parts of the brain.
There was no point trying to remove the memory of the whole escape anyway. We weren’t going to hide the fact that Benny had escaped. The empty cell and beaten up gaoler would be a dead giveaway. What I needed was to take away his memory of me. That was easier. Kind of. It was only completely beyond my talents, not absolutely impossible.
Life with Benny was always so much fun.
I did my best to clear my mind. Sometimes, I thought the inside of my head was like a storm in the harbour: Everything was being tossed all over the place, and there was a constant danger of being hit in the face by a stray fish.
“Hurry it up,” Benny hissed, glancing at the stairs.
I glared at him. “You want to do this?”
He held up his knife. “It’d only take a second.”
“Just shut up and watch the stairs.”
I went back to smoothing the seas of my mind, one worry-wave at a time. Out went Benny’s knife, the Ash Guard, Sereh, my mother, the murderous ghosts, the blister on my little toe, Silkstar and the Wren, the murdered victims Imela Rush, Uwin Bone, and the priest of Gwillan, and my forthcoming eviction. In their place I formed an image of how I must have looked as I fled from then fought the gaoler. A mirror would have helped.
When I got the image as clear as I could, I stretched tendrils of magic into the unconscious gaoler’s brain, searching out memories that matched the image. When I found them, I sent delicate surges of magic to destroy them. It didn’t take much power, but the concentration I needed was exhausting, and memories crossed over. Parts of the memory of one door, for example, were shared with the memories of other doors. The memory of my very manly shoulders would be shared in some respects with the memory of Benny’s more scrawny ones. By destroying all memories of me, I would be destroying parts of other memories. I just hoped they weren’t anything important. The worry that constantly itched at the edges of my brain told me I was taking away the memories of his family, his lovers, his father, his children if he had them. I pushed the worries away. If I lost my concentration, I really would damage him.
At last, I rocked back, completely drained. I didn’t know if I’d caught all the memories of our brief conflict or whether I’d gone way too far, but it was the best I could do.
“You done?” Benny asked.
I nodded, too weary to reply.
“Good. So what’s the plan to get us out of here?”
Ah. I looked up at him with a pained smile and cleared my throat.
“Yeah,” I said. “About that…”