I pushed myself to my feet as carefully and as unthreateningly as I could. Captain Gale had already proven she could beat me senseless even when I had my magic. She would fillet me if I tried anything. I didn’t want to give her any excuse.
“If this is about the Ash—” I started.
“It’s not.” The mention didn’t seem to have improved her mood. “But we’re going to get to that.”
I grimaced as I straightened. My shoulder ached from the fall. Add it to the tally. There were still some bits of my body that weren’t battered like a cheap sausage, but the day wasn’t done yet.
“So what, then?” I had probably broken half a dozen laws since the last time we’d met, but none that should concern the Ash Guard.
Irritation twitched across Captain Gale’s face, as though I should know but was treating her like an idiot.
“There’s been another murder.”
“A murder?” My mind jumped to Uwin Bone, killed in the Wren’s warehouse in the Tanneries and discovered by yours truly three days ago. But the Wren would have disposed of the body — he didn’t want the attention any more than I did — and anyway, Captain Gale was already grinding on.
“Less than an hour ago. Pretty close to here.”
“I was in the bath,” I protested.
If she had told me she had been in the bath, that would have taken the wind right out of my questioning, but apparently, she was less distracted by thoughts of me naked.
“You’re linked to the victim,” she said. “Again.”
I was? I frowned. Not Mica, not Sereh. They were both here. Benny? My heart thumped suddenly in my chest. No. Shit, no! Not Benny. My mouth was dry. But who else could it be? She had to mean him, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Benny could not be dead. He was hidden. He had Ash. He was my friend. My only real friend. I could hardly see or breathe. The world spun away from me. Blindly, I reached out for the wall and staggered into it.
“It wasn’t—?” I croaked.
“It was the Estimable Larimar Sunstone. Until recently, your employer.”
I slumped in relief. Shit. Not Benny. Thank all the twisted gods. I let out a laugh. Captain Gale’s eyes hardened even further.
“We found him in his offices. What was left of him. The top of his skull was in the street outside. Punched right through the window and the shutter. Frightened the literal shit out of passers-by, apparently.” She took a step closer. “Exactly the same method as before. Ripped into pieces by something with really, really big claws.”
The same as Imela Rush, Uwin Bone, and the priest of Gwillan-Whose-Light-Shines-on-the-Few-Not-the-Many.
“That’s impossible,” I whispered. I had got rid of the ghosts. I knew I had. I had destroyed their anchor. Every hint of them had been gone. There was no way back from that. No mage or priest could raise a ghost that had lost its anchor. In the end, death was death.
“You were identified sitting in the coffee house opposite his offices all morning. Scoping the place. When Sunstone left his office, you got up and followed him.”
And I thought I had been so surreptitious. It was a good lesson. There was always someone better than you.
I took a settling breath and straightened again. “But I didn’t kill him,” I said as calmly as I could. “I wasn’t there an hour ago.”
“Yeah, yeah. You were in the bath. Did anyone see you?”
“I don’t know what kind of baths you take, Captain, but I prefer not to have spectators.” I said it with a grin to show I was joking.
Not a twitch. I really was in trouble.
“Lowriver,” I blurted. Shit. Captain Gale had me off balance. I should have said it right away. “Enne Lowriver. She’s one of the Countess’s mages. I saw her arguing with Sunstone up in the Stacks just this afternoon.”
Her face remained as hard as granite. “You have proof?”
“Well … No.”
“I’ve given you every chance,” Captain Gale said. “No one else in the Guard thought you were innocent. They wanted you put away. I thought maybe, just maybe, there was something more going on. Now we’ve got three bodies.”
Four, I thought, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say it.
“You played me for a fool.”
“Meroi,” I said. “Come on...”
“Don’t. Don’t you fucking dare. You’re under arrest. Try to run. Just fucking try it. Give me an excuse.”
Depths!
“Why would I do this?” I said, trying to keep my voice reasonable. I could feel panic twitching at me. “What possible reason could I have for going on a killing spree of people I hardly know or don’t know at all?”
She was silent.
I pressed my advantage. “You know I didn’t do this.”
“No, I don’t know it, and it wouldn’t matter anyway. You’re involved, one way or another. I can’t let you keep running around Agatos, causing chaos. And I know you stole my Ash.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about that,” I muttered.
Her face tightened again. She was going to hurt herself if she kept doing that.
I rubbed my lip, knowing it made me look nervous, but not able to help myself. I had to do something. I could feel the tension building in me, and this was better than suddenly screaming.
She did know I had taken the Ash, and she knew I knew that she knew. But I couldn’t admit it, because the sentence for that was death, no questions, no defence. Immediate execution. All I had going was that she couldn’t prove it and whatever it was that had held her back from reporting me so far. I wasn’t always a good judge of character, but I thought I had Meroi Gale pinned down. She didn’t want to arrest me over the Ash. There would be consequences for her. But she would do it if she had no other choice, no matter the cost. I had to tiptoe on ice here.
“I don’t know exactly why these murders are happening,” I said as calmly as I could, “and I don’t know for sure who is behind them, but I do know that they’re going to keep happening. Right now, whoever is doing this hasn’t achieved a thing. Whatever their plan is, it’s not done. What happens if you arrest me?”
I conveniently ignored the fact that she had already told me I was under arrest. For a moment, she seemed to, too.
“Then you go on trial for the murders. An Ash Guard trial. It’ll be fair,” she added, as though that was supposed to reassure me.
“And you’ll stop looking. You’ll move on to other jobs. Then someone else will be killed.”
I didn’t know how to make my point any more forcefully. Being arrested by the Ash Guard would be a solid wall slammed down in the way of everything. Yeah, I didn’t want to be imprisoned or executed, and I didn’t want Benny being found by Silkstar or the Watch. But I also didn’t want some other poor sod eviscerated by the ghost-beast. Unless Captain Gale was just lying to me, I hadn’t got rid of that thing at all.
And just this morning, you were congratulating yourself on what a hero you were.
Her fingers drummed on the hilt of her short sword. Her eyes stayed fixed on me.
There was nothing more I could say now. Anything else would just come across as pleading. It would make me look more guilty. I had said my piece. She had no reason to trust me. If I could have, I would have forced my sincerity into her head through sheer willpower. So I stood there, not resisting, trying to look dignified, letting her make her decision.
“Depths,” she sighed. She looked directly up at me. “If you are lying to me, if you are trying to string me along or trick me, I will find you and I will take you apart. Personally.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t wait around to let her change her mind. I headed off down the alley as fast as I could hobble.
“And, Nik,” she called after me.
I glanced around.
“If I see you again — if any of the Guard see you again — there won’t be any more second chances.”
I hadn’t been completely sure whether Sunstone had been a patsy, a conspirator in this whole thing, or both. I had known he didn’t have the magic to set the booby trap, but when I had seen him arguing with Lowriver, I had come to think that maybe he was involved in the murders after all, that he was seeking revenge on Silkstar for the loss of his wool contracts.
For the loss of contracts!
Had I even stopped to listen to myself? What an absurd motive that would be.
Except it wouldn’t. The wool trade had been his livelihood, his fortune, his position in society. People killed for a lot less. But now he was dead, too, killed by whatever the Depths that ghost-beast was.
Was it an accident, a loss of control? Or was it Lowriver cleaning house?
He had been involved. The coincidences were just too unlikely otherwise.
Uwin Bone had been killed because he was the intermediary between Benny and the person behind this — Sunstone? Lowriver? The Countess? Benny and I were the scapegoats. We had been supposed to die in the booby trap at Thousand Walls. If we survived, I was supposed to be buried by the Ash Guard and Benny by the City Watch. We hadn’t been, and if someone had been determined to investigate, they might have found the link between me and Sunstone. Now Sunstone had been ruthlessly removed, too. Every trail I followed, every thread I grabbed, was neatly cut off, leaving me falling.
Not every thread. Not yet, at least. I still had Lowriver, and if I was lucky, she had no idea I had connected her to Sunstone. Clandestine meetings, a property in the Stacks that no one knew about. Follow the trail.
I would have to change tack, though. I had been racing about, bouncing off boulders and leaping off cliffs like I was invulnerable. That hadn’t been confidence or ability. It had been panic. I didn’t have the power or the influence to play that game. I had poked the anthill, and snakes had come crawling out.
I needed to return to my strengths. At my best, I was sneaky and underhanded, and my powers were subtle. Don’t go head-to-head with a giant if you can tie his shoelaces together and watch him trip.
I didn’t know what Lowriver’s shoelaces were, so to speak, but I needed to discover them. If I could find proof, hard evidence, then the Ash Guard would take her down themselves. And if she were only a hand puppet for someone else, I would find the hand up her arse and draw it out.
So to speak.
It was full dark by the time I made it back to the Stacks. Sunlight still painted the peaks of the mountains high above me in molten gold, but that only served to make the streets feel darker. There were no morgue-lamps here, and the only light leaking onto the cracked paving came from behind closed shutters. I settled into a dark corner and watched.
There were no wards on Lowriver’s bolthole, nothing to distinguish it from a hundred other rundown buildings around here.
Definitely trying to keep it secret. Any mage passing wouldn’t think to look twice.
There was no light in the house, either. I extended threads of magic, as fragile and frail as drifts of mist, into the building, like a blind cave insect brushing its way through the dark. Someone would have to be watching really hard to detect the intrusion. It was slow and frustrating — my magic kept disintegrating — but if someone was there, it would tell me.
They weren’t. The building was empty. I was doing no one any good lurking out here, and the longer I waited, the more chance I had of being discovered.
Screw it. I’m going in.
I took one last glance along the street, then hurried to the door. I tripped the lock with a brief spell, slipped inside, and locked the door behind me.
It was dark. The shutters were closed, and the feeble light that made it in was stretched too thin for me to be able to make anything out. I could smell dust and not much else. No sweat, no traces of old food or cooking, nothing to suggest anyone lived here. The room held that quality of open silence that only empty spaces possessed.
“Let’s see what you’ve been up to.”
I conjured a faint light. It was too weak to show anything other than shades of grey, but I didn’t need colour to see that the room was dusty and dirty. The plaster on the walls had crumbled and faded, but I had been wrong about the room being empty. A single chair had been pushed into a corner.
“What the Depths do you get up to here?” I murmured. I couldn’t imagine that Enne Lowriver came all this way just to sit in that chair and stare at the walls. Everyone needed to get away from it all from time to time, but there had to be better options.
A staircase against one wall led to an upper floor and down to what would be a basement on the street side, but which was probably open on the other; the hill was steep here.
Upstairs had a couple of rooms under the rafters, but they were as empty as the ground floor. I kept my eyes unfocused, my vision open to magic. It was a strain on the eyes, and it gave me a headache to hold it while still checking the rooms in the normal way, but I didn’t want any magical surprises.
There was nothing up here. Some bird shit on the floorboards where a loose shutter hanging from a broken hinge had let the local avian wildlife in. An old nest in the rafters.
Maybe Lowriver was a bird watcher.
I returned downstairs and kept going through the claustrophobic near-dark. My feet sent creaks through the dead air until I could imagine the whole place was some arthritic old sea monster hauling itself back to consciousness around me.
The basement had been the most likely option. There was an almost irresistible instinct to go underground when you were up to no good. Even dark mages in their ominous towers kept their most evil shit in the basement. Or so I had heard.
Even with my magical vision open and every sense straining, I didn’t notice the thread of magic until almost too late. I felt a brief tension then release, like walking into and snapping a strand of spider’s web. My subconscious grabbed the magic by both ends and held.
I froze like a statue in a snowstorm. I didn’t dare move. Depths, I could hardly make myself breathe. If I thought about the preposterousness of the situation, this would go completely to shit. Pull too hard and the thread would break, hold too loose and it would slip through my metaphorical fingers. The more I focused on holding steady, the more shaky my control became.
“Calm,” I muttered to myself. “Calm.”
My arms were already starting to feel tired, even though this had nothing to do with my arms.
I let my consciousness follow the thread of magic. It disappeared into the walls, fading as it went, until I couldn’t make out the magic anymore. I couldn’t tell if it was an alarm or just a marker whose absence would show that someone had been here. Or another booby trap that would spread me across the walls.
I took a long, slow breath. I could feel an itch in that part of my back I could never quite reach.
Ignore it, idiot.
This wasn’t high-powered magic. It was subtle, fine-control stuff, the kind of thing I was supposed to be good at. Ever so carefully, ever so slowly, ever so delicately, I pulled, drawing the ends of the thread back together behind me.
Now was the really hard bit. I had to knit them together seamlessly.
I could hear Benny’s voice in my head as I stood there. You don’t half get yourself into a pile of shit.
“And whose fault is all of this?” I said to the empty air.
I trickled in magic, shaping it, gluing the thread back together. Sweat oozed down my face. I resisted the urge to wipe it away.
There. The ends were joined.
Let’s see if that holds.
I was pretty certain my heart had stopped beating. I knew I wasn’t breathing.
I released the thread.
It snapped back. I froze, ready to run, panic, whatever it would take. But the thread held.
All right! I was getting good at this stuff.
There was only a single room at the bottom of the stairs. Shuttered windows and a barred door led to some unseen alley or garden, or even the rooftop of the next house down. The wall behind me was solid rock, cut into the hillside itself. Against it was the only other piece of furniture I had seen: a low cabinet. The top had been wiped clean, as though something was sometimes set upon it.
I knelt and pulled the cabinet doors open.
Inside was a safe. Heavy bolts drove deep into the bedrock of the hill, and there was a ward on the lock.
Got you!
The ward was complicated, and it would give me a nasty shock if I tried to open the safe, but it wasn’t powerful. A ward that could cause serious injury or death would have been detectable from the street, and Lowriver was clearly going for secretive rather than deadly here.
It took me a good half an hour to dismantle the ward. I was never going to put it back exactly the same. The next time Lowriver opened this safe, she would know someone had been here.
With the ward down, the safe opened easily. Within the safe was an old stone box. It had been crudely engraved with a hunting scene in the deep woods, or so I thought at first glance. Although as I looked more carefully, I realised I couldn’t see what the men and women were hunting. And, indeed, they didn’t seem to be carrying weapons. If anything, they were fleeing.
I wasn’t here to admire the art. I placed the box on top of the cabinet. There was a residual magic to it. I didn’t think it was a magically-imbued item itself, nor some god-touched relic, but it had been near one for long enough to absorb some of that magic.
Very carefully, ready to throw up a shield if it looked like exploding in my face, I lifted the lid. I wasn’t being caught out twice.
The inside of the box was mostly box. There was an empty, slightly curved space smaller than my thumb in the centre, lined with thick volcanic glass to prevent leakage of magic. Whatever had been stored in here must have been powerful, given that the magic had leaked into the stone anyway, but it was gone now.
I was about to close the box when I saw the symbol carved into the volcanic glass on the underside of the lid. It looked a bit like a semicircle on top of a diamond on top of a dagger blade. Or possibly a pair of upside-down frog’s legs. I didn’t know. Maybe whoever had made this had had a thing about frogs.
What I did know was that I had seen that symbol somewhere before. I just didn’t know where. It prickled at my memory. Where in the Depths had I seen it?
The door upstairs opened with a bang, then a footstep creaked on the old floorboards. Light burgeoned above. Magical light.
Pity!
I shoved the box back in, closed the safe and cabinet, and stood, looking around. I couldn’t get out the way I had come in. I suddenly thought of the ghosts who’d been trapped in the Sunstones’ cellar by a barred door and murdered there.
That wasn’t happening to me. I would smash right through the door if I had to. I hoped I didn’t. It would hardly be subtle, and I needed a quiet getaway.
The footsteps crossed the floor above. Light grew at the top of the stairs.
Fuck it. I headed for the back door.
This time, I did miss it. My attention was diverted, and I was hurrying. When I ran into the second magical thread covering the back entrance, I was too slow to grab it. Both ends whipped away, and a screech stabbed through my brain like a nail. I staggered.
Magic rolled down the stairs towards me from the mage on the floor above. I threw myself to one side. The magic rushed by me and smashed through the back wall of the house, ripping the door out and sending it skittering down a steep alley.
That took care of my way out. I stumbled to my feet and followed the splintered door, sure that magic was going to hit me at any moment, scouring the flesh from my back.
Whoever had thrown the magic — Lowriver, I guessed, although I wasn’t looking back to check — must have wanted to see the damage she had caused, because, through the ringing in my ears, I heard feet thumping on the stairs. I put my head down, pumped my long legs, and sprinted down the alley.
Sprinted was a polite word for it. The alley was dark, uneven, and nearly vertical. I fell more than ran. I had no control of my body. It was all I could do to keep my feet, as cobbles slipped under me. I flailed, bounced off the high walls of houses on either side, and kept going into the dark. However this wild dash ended — a wall, the bottom of the hill — it wasn’t going to be pretty.
At any moment, the other mage was going to poke her head out through the wreckage, see my arse disappearing down the alley, and send something to warm it up.
I was going so fast, I almost didn’t notice the second alley branching off to the left. I threw myself to the right, bounced off the wall, and propelled myself back towards the side alley like a wildly kicked ball. I came close to overshooting, but I twisted my body, lost my balance, and careened into the corner of a house. My shoulder and my head hit stone. I dropped. Pain flared through my neck. My vision disappeared into a red haze.
Get up, Nik, you stupid prick!
Somehow, I shoved myself upright and down the side alley. All I could think was that I had to get out of sight before the other mage vaporised me. I wasn’t moving fast, but at least I was moving, and in the dark, I could soon disappear.
I hoped.
I also hoped I wasn’t going to have to use my right arm any time soon, because every step shot pain from my elbow all the way up to my neck.
I needed to throw up in a corner.
No time.
A wash of cold from behind made me stop and turn.
In the alley behind me, the figure of a little girl dressed in rags stood staring at me. She was white, tenuous, made of slipping ectoplasm: a ghost.
I just had time to mutter, “What the fuck?”
Then magic surged. In the blink of an eye, the ghost changed. It grew, twisted, erupted, and there was the ghost-beast filling the alley, massive shoulders pressed against walls.
“What the fuck?” I demanded.
I didn’t have any silver, charcoal, or arevena flowers to slow the beast, so I just turned and ran. Behind me, a roar shook the walls and rattled shutters. Paws pummelled the ground as the thing took off after me. I was hurt, damaged, but for just a moment, I didn’t feel a single one of my injuries. All I felt was bone-cutting terror. I didn’t know how that thing was here, but I had seen what it could do to people. I had seen the blood and the ruptured intestines. I had seen limbs hanging by skin. I had seen the shock and fear frozen on dead faces. We all died in the end, but I didn’t want to die like that.
The fear might be suppressing my pain and giving me a burst of energy, but that beast behind me was part wolf, and it was massive. In seconds, it halved the distance between us. It was going to catch me. Another couple of steps, and I could feel the hot air, the huff of its breath, the judder of the ground.
I couldn’t hurt it with my magic, but I was still a mage. I gathered in raw magic and used it like a paddle to scoop myself up and propel myself forwards. I felt my feet leave the ground like I’d been kicked in the back by a giant. Screaming, I tumbled over and over, as claws cut the air where I had just been. I hit the ground, rolling helplessly, cobbles punching into me. I gritted my teeth against the pain that hammered every part of my body and tried to regain my feet. The magic had thrown me thirty yards, almost to the end of the alley, but I could hear the beast still coming. Limping, the adrenaline no longer masking the pain, I kept moving.
Abruptly, the sounds behind me stopped. I turned. The beast was gone. Standing in its place was the ghost of the girl, watching me. Then, the ectoplasm drifted apart and disappeared.
Breath whooshed out of me. Relief left me weak. I bent over, hands on knees, suddenly shaking and cold in the warm air of the night. The ghost was out of range, too far from her anchor. She couldn’t follow any further, and whatever it might be, the beast was tied to the ghost. Without her, it couldn’t maintain itself. Every bruise and scrape screamed at me until I gritted my teeth, but I wanted to laugh.
You lose. Stupid dumb beast.
Ahead, not ten yards away, the pale figure of another ghost drifted out through a wall.
Oh no you don’t. Oh no you fucking don’t.
This ghost was of a man, middle aged and portly, with a drawn face.
I didn’t wait around for a chat. There was a garden wall next to me, the leaves of a date palm just visible over the top of it. I threw magic, shouting at the pain that stabbed into every injury. The wall collapsed, and I was leaping over the rubble before I even felt the surge of magic in the ghost.
The small garden was steeply sloped. Along with the date palm, a couple of citrus trees rose like enormous legs in the dark. Crops grew on narrow terraces. I tripped, tumbled over the terraces, crushing and uprooting someone’s livelihood as I went, and fetched up against another wall.
More bricks and mortar showered into the garden as the ghost-beast smashed through. I pulled myself up, watching it. Enormous wolf eyes stared down at me. Then it leapt.
Its arc carried it the full length of the garden. I darted to the side. It turned its body in the air, reaching for me, but its momentum carried it past. It hit the wall and carried on, leaving only rubble behind. The wall didn’t seem to hurt it — I wondered if there was anything that could — but it did knock it off balance. The creature’s limbs scrambled for grip as it smashed through another wall and dropped out of sight.
I took off at ninety degrees.
I had thought the creature was linked to the ghosts in the Sunstones’ cellar, but I had been wrong. Lowriver seemed to be able to use any ghost to summon it. She was raising ghosts, using them to manifest this beast, and sending it after me.
Ghosts strong enough to go drifting around all by themselves were rare, but faint remnants that could be raised for a brief time through magic before sinking again, well, Agatos was an old city, and there were layers of history, death, and trauma here. Search hard enough, and you could find a ghost remnant on any street.
Which was bad news for me.
I had raised a ghost or two during my mage training, but it had been difficult and slow. I didn’t know how Lowriver was managing it so easily, and I didn’t want to wait around to find out.
I burst through a gate, out onto one of the switchback roads leading down to the main city. My only hope was to keep moving quickly enough that I left each ghost behind before it was possessed by the beast. Ghosts could never stray far from their anchors, even the powerful ones.
A ghost rose ahead of me, and I changed direction again.
I wondered how long I could keep this up. Lowriver must be tracking me somehow, but surely she would run out of power eventually. Raising ghosts at a distance and sending the beast up through them couldn’t be easy, even for her.
Another ghost manifested in front of me, an old, bent man in a tunic. This one was too close for me to dodge, so I sent a jolt of magic into it, disrupting its essence before the beast could possess it. It burst into ectoplasm then was gone. I stumbled, bent over by the pain. Shit. I wasn’t going to be able to do that too often. I needed to get far away from Lowriver, somewhere she wouldn’t dare try this. Except I didn’t know where that would be. She had raised that thing inside Thousand Walls to kill Imela Rush. The presence of a high mage hadn’t put her off.
I took an abrupt turn to avoid another ghost that drifted out of a house. Keep going down, towards the city, that was all I could think. Would she really risk sending the ghost-beast into the heavily populated markets and streets of the lower city? So far, she had tried to keep out of sight and pin all of this on me.
I kept running, choosing down whenever I could. I just had to get out of the Stacks, through the Grey City.
There were more people here. I heard gasps and shouts as they spotted the ghosts.
Then, at the corner of the street, fifty feet ahead of me, a ghost appeared, flickered, and disappeared again. I reeled to a halt, instinct making me step into shadows. What had happened? Was I finally out of her range or…? My arms and legs shook uncontrollably. My throat felt like it had been scraped with broken shells. My vision swayed, making me feel seasick.
Please let me be out of her range.
I wasn’t. The reason for the fading ghost showed itself a moment later, an Ash Guard patrol running past, heading up the hill. I felt the magic that sustained me fade, and if I hadn’t been leaning against the wall, I would have fallen. The Ash smeared on the Guards’ faces and hands leeched the magic from the air. Another ghost faded, the magic Lowriver had used to sustain it disappearing, too.
For a second, I seriously thought about handing myself in and telling them everything. Except I had no proof, and I couldn’t leave Sereh and Benny unprotected. Then it was too late, and the patrol were past.
Benny!
Why hadn’t I thought of it before? The Ash Guard weren’t the only ones with Ash. Benny had a whole pouch of it to hide him from Silkstar. If I reached him, we would be safe from Lowriver’s magic.
I cursed myself. Why had I insisted he didn’t tell me where he was going to hide?
I felt the magic begin to return. Through sheer willpower, I shoved off the wall and began running again.
Benny had started to tell me where he was going, and I had cut him off. What exactly had he said?
Focus, Nik!
Another ghost appeared, and I changed direction once more.
I needed a moment’s peace to think. I had asked Benny if he had somewhere to go, and he had said... Down by the market. That was it.
It wouldn’t be Mile End Market. Benny would stand out like a Brythanii in the mid-day sun in the posh part of town, and I doubted he knew anyone near Cheap Gate Market, either. That left the Penitent’s Ear. There were other, smaller markets around the city, but you wouldn’t describe them as ‘the market.’
So, near the Penitent’s Ear. Which, by my estimate, only covered a couple of thousand homes and businesses.
The ground levelled, and I realised with surprise that I had finally made it out of the Stacks and reached the edge of the Grey City.
On the flat, my exhausted legs felt twice as heavy. I had to get through the east of the Grey City, over the Tide Bridge or the Sour Bridge, then through the western part of the Grey City, before I would reach the market. Then what? How the Depths could I find Benny in that chaos of people, businesses, and small houses? He could be anywhere. I couldn’t even use magic to track him down because of the damned Ash I had given him.
Or maybe I could.
The thought gave my legs a new rush of energy. I increased my pace, dodging between the evening’s traffic.
There was raw magic everywhere in Agatos. It infused the air, the rocks, the plants, and the people, drifting, in my visualisation, as a green fog, rising from the ground, unimpeded by obstacles.
Except where there was Ash.
Ash killed magic. In a space of twenty feet around Benny, there would be no magic of any kind. If I could somehow fashion a spell that spread out and echoed back, like a bat hunting a moth, then I would be able to see where there was Ash.
I would have to be close, but I could do it, I knew I could.
The ghost-beast came out of a side alley like a charging bull. I felt the surging magic a split second before I caught the movement from the corner of my eye. I didn’t have time to run.
The momentary warning was enough to save me from its claws, but its shoulder smashed into me, throwing me from my feet and knocking me across the road. I hit a wall and slid down.
Screams sounded as people scattered. For a moment, the ghost-beast seemed confused by the noise and motion, and I took my chance. I cast a burning magical light right in its eyes and joined the fleeing crowd.