All That Glitters (22 page)

 

A
rtus dove into the panicked courtroom crowd, using his lanky frame to slide between poofy gowns and lacy collars and delivering sharp jabs with his elbows to anybody who didn't slide aside. Brana met him somewhere in the fray and pulled him to an open spot. “Where's Andolon?” Artus asked.

Brana aped a fair approximation of a shrug. “All gone. Run away?”

Artus scowled. “Doesn't sound promising. C'mon, let's get out of here.”

“Find Tyvian?”

Artus shook his head. “He's on his own.”

The smell of smoke was building in the chamber—­the pulpit where Tyvian had made his escape was now almost entirely on fire. A few Defenders were lobbing buckets of water up at it from the floor, but they were doing little more than slowing the spread. Androlli had taken command of the scene, barking orders from a pulpit and throwing spells around to slow the spread of the fire. For once Artus was glad to be forgotten.

Defenders tried to organize the crowd into a more orderly manner of egress. Artus and Brana kept their heads low, blending in with the masses as best they could and going with the flow out of the courtroom. Artus got a glimpse of Androlli scanning the crowd with some kind of magic, but whatever it was either didn't work or he wasn't looking for them anyway. Alarm bells were sounding. While everybody around Artus was nervous—­Brana included—­the spectacle of the chaos Tyvian had caused kept making him chuckle.

“You incredible bastard,” he muttered under his breath, grinning. “How'd you know I'd throw that spark-­crystal, anyway?”

Everybody was ushered out the main gates where, to most of the visitors' shock and indignation, their coaches were not waiting to receive them. Again, so-­called polite society made for a good cover for Artus and Brana, since every visible guard was receiving a piece of some merchant heiress's mind or being accused of ineptitude by Baron von Whoever. It was a simple matter to slip out into the street.

The question of where to go, however, was barely considered before Andolon's massive coach-­and-­four clattered to a halt in front of him. The door popped open and the Saldorian fop glared at them from beneath a hat comprised of a coiled, smoke-­belching dragon. “You two—­
get in
!”

Brana hopped right in, as requested. The shrouded gnoll looked over his shoulder. “C'mon, Artus—­ride!”

Artus looked to his left and right. Crowds of ­people had gathered along the streets to watch the ancient citadel of Keeper's Court burn. Troops of Defenders ran to help combat the blaze, and everywhere he looked there seemed to be another mage in mirrored armor marching around with a staff. If he stayed here, he was as good as stone himself.

Artus stepped forward, reluctant. Somebody made the remainder of his decision for him—­he was grabbed by the collar and hauled inside like a bale of hay by a strong hand. With a sharp whistle to the driver, Andolon ordered the coach forward.

Artus tried to figure out who had grabbed him—­not Andolon, surely. He squinted around the interior of the spacious cab. Brana was beside him, DiVarro and Andolon were squeezed next to one another on the other side, and across from him was . . . was a man. A man Artus couldn't fully see or rationalize—­a shadowy outline of black, hooded and sinister. Above the corner of his mouth was a small tattoo that Artus couldn't quite make out.

The unseeable man pressed a long double-­bladed dagger against the inside of Artus's thigh, less than an inch from his codpiece. Unlike the man, the pressure of the blade against his leg was something that he could perceive quite clearly. He held very still.

Andolon smiled at Artus. The smile was confined to his lips only. “I suppose you think you're very clever, don't you? Oh, bravo, boy—­well done. You've saved your master only to doom yourself.”

Artus looked at the knife and looked over at Brana. The shrouded gnoll had his head stuck out the window of the coach as they sped through the streets of the Old City, his arse wiggling back and forth in excitement.

Andolon tsked. “You'll be spilling your life's blood all over the inside of my coach long before your idiot brother can help you. And then, after you die, he'll be next.”

Artus licked his lips. “Look, I didn't know he was going to light on fire—­”

Andolon produced the notecard with Tyvian's handwriting on it. “Spare me, please.” Artus grasped at his vest pocket, eyes wide, as the fop chuckled at him.

“You know,” Andolon said, ­“people don't think I'm dangerous. I suppose it's my sense of fashion—­I enjoy a bit of whimsy in my dress, is all—­but just because I like bright colors and beautiful hats doesn't mean I'm some kind of fool to be pushed around.” He leaned forward and looked Artus in the eye. “Do you know I could have had you killed
at any time
? While you were following me to my ship I could have had your throat cut in an alley. While you were having grapes stuffed in your greedy little mouth, I could have poisoned you. While you were sitting in the bloody courtroom just now, my man here could have choked you dead and nobody would have noticed the body until after the trial.”

Artus licked his lips again. “What, and that's supposed to impress me? You wanna hear all the times I could have had
you
killed? There's a lot of them—­you might wanna take notes.”

Andolon sat back and laughed, clapping his hands. “There! That was pure Reldamar! I mean, not as clever by any means and clearly false, but
that's
my old friend talking. You have learned a few things from him, haven't you?”

“What do you want from me?” Artus tried to look at the man with the knife but found his eyes drawn away by the trees passing by the windows, by Andolon's stupid hat, by DiVarro's crystal eye. It was if there was nothing of the assassin to see.

“Where is Reldamar going now?” Andolon held up a finger. “And don't presume to lie to me, boy. This coach is in need of reupholstering anyway.”

Artus frowned. “I don't know.”

The knife pressed hard against his leg, cutting through fabric. Artus inhaled sharply and tried to sit up straighter, but the knife-­man pressed him back against the wall of the coach with his free hand. Andolon smiled. “Let's not do this, eh? I'm only asking you because you seem to be capable of speech. I can always just kill you and ask the moron.”

DiVarro, who had up until this point had his real eye closed and was muttering to himself, suddenly stirred to life. He cleared his throat. “Andolon, there's something—­”

Andolon rounded on him. “How are the markets?”

DiVarro frowned. “The timetable has advanced—­we can't wait for the pear shipment. The moment to strike will be tomorrow morning and no later. That wasn't what I was going to say. It's about the—­”

“Tomorrow? Tomorrow
morning
? You're certain Reldamar's escape will shake things up that far?”

While Andolon was distracted, Artus grabbed Brana by his illusory belt and tugged him back inside the coach. The gnoll had that stupid, wide-­mouthed grin on his face. “Lots of fish smell!”

Artus growled in gnoll-­speak,
“Brana, trouble—­get ready.”

Brana stiffened instantly and sniffed the air inside the coach. His head cocked to one side. “
Who?”
he snarled back.

Andolon froze in mid-­conversation. “I'm . . . I'm sorry, but were you just
barking
at each other?”

Artus took a deep breath. Was he actually going to do this? Really? His stomach started doing flips as he spoke. He desperately hoped his voice wouldn't crack. “You're finished, Andolon. Your plan will never work now.”

Andolon blinked and then began laughing. “Don't be ridiculous, boy—­my plan is
inevitable,
understand? The only thing that changes is the timetable. So what if I become the richest man in the West tomorrow instead of next week? There's nothing Reldamar or you can do to stop it.”

DiVarro tapped his employer on the shoulder. “Andolon, there's something you should know about the boy—­”

“Hush!” Andolon glared at the augur, then turned back to Artus. “Tell me where Reldamar is or die where you sit.”

Artus smiled. “You can't kill us here—­the Defenders' augurs will have already scryed it, and then you'll be arrested the next second.”

“Ha!” Andolon looked at DiVarro. “Do you believe this?”

DiVarro, though, had his eye fixed on Brana, who had a toothy grin from ear to ear and staring at Andolon. “Sir, the boy! He's a—­”

Andolon rolled his eyes. “Really, DiVarro—­the boy's grinning at me like an idiot. He
likes
me!” He turned back to Artus. “As for you, don't you think the Mute Prophets would have found a work-­around to Defender scrying by now?” He patted the walls of the coach. “Not only is my coach warded against scrying, but my half-­invisible friend here is
wholly
invisible to scrying. A Quiet Man's life and all his acts are unknowable to any augur anywhere, so if I want him to stab you both to death in my coach and dump your bodies in a gutter, the only thing the Defenders will ever find is your corpses.”

Andolon sat back, folding his arms. “There—­now what do you think of that, boy?”

Artus grinned. “Sounds like that kind of warding works both ways, don't it? Brana,
sic 'em.
”

Brana took off his shroud. At that moment it became very evident what Brana's “goofy smile” actually represented: a hundred fifty pound gnoll bearing every single tooth in his large snout.

Then all hell broke loose.

Brana lunged for Andolon but was intercepted by the Quiet Man, who would have put his knife in Brana's eyeball had Artus not grabbed his knife hand. Brana's jaws latched onto the Quiet Man's arm and bore down—­there was a snapping noise as the arm broke, but no scream.

Andolon, eyes wide in panic, fumbled for something around his neck but thought better of it. Instead, he pulled a slender dagger out of a sleeve and worked at stabbing Brana, who was forced to release the Quiet Man in order to dodge in the tight confines of the coach.

All DiVarro did was scream, but even then his face didn't alter much from its perpetual frown.

Artus, though, didn't have time to think about the augur for more than a fleeting second. The Quiet Man was on top of him, a shadow made real, the knife bearing down at his chest with all the man's weight. Artus brought his knee up to try and push him off, but the space was too tight and he couldn't find any good spot to kick. All he could do was press both his hands against the wrist of the Quiet Man and try and hold him off. The Quiet Man, though, was stronger and heavier. The blade inched downward, slowly, until it was grazing Artus's chest.

Brana fared better. There was a thump and a squeal of pain from Andolon—­Brana had gotten the knife away from him and used it to pin the fop's arm to the ceiling of the coach. He then started hitting Andolon in the stomach with a series of rapid jabs. “Ha!” the gnoll growled. “Take it!”

“Brana!” Artus yelled, his arms quivering.

The gnoll's ears swiveled toward his friend, and seeing the knife about to fall, he put his feet against the opposite side of the cab and drove himself forward in a lunge that knocked Artus and himself out through the door of the moving coach. They hit the cobblestones hard and rolled, Artus knocking over a group of children and Brana winding up in an apple cart. The world spun for a moment as stars danced in Artus's eyes and he struggled to get back his breath.

Eventually he sat up. The Quiet Man hadn't pursued them, apparently—­or had he? Artus looked around at the crowd, trying to spot him. It was hopeless. If he was here, he and Brana would never be able to tell.

Somebody helped Artus to his feet. It was Brana, who had somehow replaced his shroud. The crowd of onlookers dispersed shortly thereafter, with one or two ­people saying they should report that coach to the Defenders. Artus smiled his thanks but his heart was racing too fast to come up with something to say.

He sat on the curb and Brana sat next to him. He had no idea where he was—­somewhere overlooking one of the harbors. The mazelike streets of Saldor all seemed the same to him, and every angle on the harbor looked alike. He guessed they were both lost.

Brana turned his golden eyes to Artus and whimpered in gnoll-­speak,
“I want to go home.”
He leaned forward, nudged Artus's shoulder with his forehead and gave his hand a little lick.

Artus looked out across the harbor and at the forest of masts that glowed red-­gold in the light of the setting sun. Thousands upon thousands of ­people, all of them far from home, brought here by the promise of gold. Thousands upon thousands of ­people, all hoping to get home—­the only place where gold really mattered.

Artus put his arm around his adopted brother. “I want to go home too, Brana.” For once, though, he realized he wasn't thinking of Jondas Crossing, or of his family farm, or of his mother. He was thinking of Tyvian in the common room of a roadside inn, his feet up beside the fire, sipping a glass of wine. He thought of laughter over roast rabbits caught on the road, the smell of Hool's fur after a light rain, and the gleam of Tyvian's smile in the lamplight.

Home.

 

P
etrification had not been and was not painful, not in any physical sense. It was cold and dark. Time seemed to both collapse and expand at equal rates—­a moment could be a year, a year a moment. There was no way to tell. Myreon felt no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue. She was adrift in the abyss of her own memories.

At first she remembered her life well: her time as a little girl in her family vineyards, ducking and hiding among the trellises, all of them pregnant with the heavy weight of ripe grapes. She remembered the smell of spring rain, going to the river for the Festival of Arrival and dancing around the maypole. She remembered the panic of the fire—­the sound of her uncles shouting, and the sight of the bandits, blades bare, as they ran among the storehouses.

And afterward: poverty in Saldor. Bereft of home and family, her father drifted from job to job, often working on the river. She remembered a stay on a riverboat for a year, hauling goods from Freegate to Saldor, sleeping with her father in a tiny bunk meant for one man, the sound of his breathing in the night after a long shift poling the boat around shoals. The smell of tar and sweat.

And afterward: Her attending school in Saldor. Years of study—­history, religion, natural philosophy, magecraft, mathematics. Her teachers smiling at her. Then the Arcanostrum.

Those eerie spires loomed large for Myreon in her dark exile. She remembered learning as an initiate, being famulus to Lyrelle Reldamar, attaining her first mark and being accepted as apprentice, remembered earning her second mark and being granted her staff. She remembered Archmagus Lyrelle taking the time to congratulate her just before she, herself, was set to retire; she remembered sipping tea in that incredible woman's chambers, talking about her future.

She also remembered Tyvian. His damned grin—­so self-­satisfied, so confident. His face in pain, above hers—­the feeling of his lips, so hot they seemed to still burn her. She remembered the heat of a hundred suns coursing through her, raising her from the grave itself. What was the genesis of that power? She had always wondered. Now, with infinite time to think, she did not wish to think on it. The thought of it frightened her more than anything else; she pushed it away, only to have it rise again. It seemed as though Tyvian's lips were always there, hot against hers, blowing life into her from the bottomless depths of his soul.

As time went on, her memories bled into one another. There was Lyrelle at her family vineyard, purchasing wine from her father. There was Tyvian, an initiate in the Arcanostrum, like her—­he was thin and slight, but had the same wry grin, the same intelligent eyes. They never spoke.

She saw the Dellorans on the riverboat, her father fighting them. She recalled seeing her uncles die at the hands of a bloody, nude Banric Sahand. She saw Hool at the Festival of Arrival, flowers in her mane, dancing to music she could only half hear. Fact and dream combined into a seamless flow of images and sensations, all of them dulled by the veil of her bodiless existence.

And also that damned kiss. Always with that damned, stupid kiss.

She found herself, all at once, missing the sound of her pumping heart. Missing her humanity. Would she be mad when she at last emerged from this prison? How long had it been? What would become of her?

Focus,
she cautioned herself.
Control your thoughts or lose yourself
. She had seen it a hundred times—­a warlock performing the Rite of Release upon a prisoner, and that person emerging listless, dumb, and blind. It took some months to recover themselves, and even then they were never fully restored. Many wound up on the streets of Saldor, halfhearted beggars panning for loose change. Most of those died within a year.

That was not her. That
would
not
be her. She ran herself through mental exercises, carefully filing and annotating her life into a little mental biography only she would ever see. The concentration it took was nearly unbearable. The human mind, she decided, was not meant to work like a library, ordering itself into neat piles. The harder she tried to cling to the threads of her memory, the more wildly they scattered.

The case,
she told herself,
focus on the case.

She thought of Gethrey Andolon, the Saldorian gentleman. A man in gaudy clothes, jewels embroidered into every surface of his doublet. A cane with a jade topper carved into a toad and wearing shoes with five-­inch heels, Myreon could still see his powder-­blue hair and his elaborate hats.
Yes! Focus on him!

For what seemed to be forever, Myreon lived and relived her investigation of Andolon. The mysterious cargoes that went missing without a trace. The bodies found in the river, tied only loosely to him. The frustration at knowing something was wrong, but being unable to prove it. She nurtured a hot, blazing anger toward him for as long as she could—­she would have her revenge, she told herself. He would face justice.

But even that, in time, was not enough.

Too much darkness now. Myreon could not remember the sound of her name in the lips of others. The world was fading. Everything seemed distant, abstract.

Had there been a man named Gethrey Andolon who had wronged her? Myreon told herself it was true, but it did not seem so anymore. The perfumed man with his gaudy clothes and his sweaty palms seemed more like a caricature of a chapbook villain than a real person.

She had begun to believe that there was no real light. There was no real time. Her dreams and memories had almost entirely faded, losing the vivid color that had once been their hallmark. The smell of spring rain and the smell of tar and sweat merged together. Her father's face became indistinct. Had she been able, she might have wept, but she could not. Even that was denied her here.

With glacial slowness, she knew she was losing herself. Bit by bit, piece by piece, until nothing in the end would remain. Thoughts of vengeance seemed pointless, even if considered dispassionately. She was stone—­why not truly become it? Why torture herself with things that were no longer for her, no longer of her world?

Maybe none of that had ever been real anyway. Maybe this was the world as it was meant to be—­quiet, dark, cold, unflinching. She could go on forever like this, just a mote in the stream of eternity, and what would be lost?

Since there was no true pain, there could be no true suffering. There was peace at last.

It remained this way for what might have been a moment or what might have been a century. Myreon wondered if she had been forgotten, but she could not, in truth, remember who there would be to forget her. It was just her. It had always been just her, alone in the dark and cold.

Then, a light—­a
real
light, faint but pulsing ever closer. There was warmth building, starting deep inside.
Boom-­boom.
Her mind grew quiet before the noise, waiting.
Boom-­boom.

Her heart. She was coming back to herself. Her body was reverting to its flesh once again. Her sentence had passed.

Her sentence had passed!

The process seemed to take years. Every beat of the heart was a lifetime apart, every gradually increasing note of sensation took shape in a process that began with numbing cold, then a tingling, almost painful storm of sensory static, then, eventually, full and complete awareness. She was hungry. She was tired and sore. Her fingers were stiff and cold; the first time she bent them in who knew how many years was pure, blessed agony. Myreon found herself loving the pain, reveling in it.

Then, at last, her face—­her lips (dry, cracked), her ears (the screaming noise of crickets, so cacophonous as to make her cover them with her stiff, unwilling hands), her nose (the smell of grass and roses and horse manure and river water), her eyelids (stiff and ready to open).

She opened her eyes.

There, leaning over her, his arms wrapped around her, was the face of . . . who? A handsome man . . . she thought she knew him . . .

Tyvian Reldamar.
Tyvian!
When he smiled, his teeth were whiter than the stars above. “Hello, Myreon. Back with us, are you?”

He was as she had never seen him, never imagined him to be—­filthy, wet, stripped to the waist like a common longshoreman. His torso was a tightly maintained core of smooth muscle crisscrossed with small scars, like the hull of a pirate's sloop. He was warm and breathing. She knew that this was real—­the first real sensation she had experienced for three years. She opened her mouth to speak but no words could form.

Tyvian rose, and she realized he was carrying her. “Don't worry—­time enough to talk soon enough. Save your strength.”

Myreon decided she didn't need to speak. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled him close and kissed him deeply. Tears ran down her cheeks, fogged her vision. Even after the kiss had broken, she clung to the smuggler's muscular neck like a woman drowning.

She fell into a blessed sleep, years in the making.

She did not dream.

M
orning sunlight and the smell of dusty linen greeted Myreon. The mattress beneath her was down-­filled, but beaten flat by years of use. The quilts seemed to weigh a ton; she was hot, sweat pooling in the small of her back. The sensation was glorious.

The largest woman Myreon had ever seen leaned over her. When she smiled, it looked as though her teeth had been fighting with each other. Her dark eyes twinkled beneath caterpillar eyebrows. “Good morning, magus . . . oh, well . . . Miss Alafarr, I suppose.” The woman sighed. “Don't seem proper, addressin' you like that, do it?”

Myreon groaned and searched for her voice. She found it; it creaked like a rusty hinge. “Who are you?”

“My name's Maude, dearie.” Maude poured water from a clay pitcher into a wooden mug on the bedside table. Then, bizarrely, she planted a kiss on Myreon's forehead. “Cripes, you're hot as karfan under there!” She hauled off the heavy quilt with a single sweep of a muscular arm. Myreon felt like she could breathe again.

“I told you she'd get hot, Maude.” The voice was a knife in her ribs. Tyvian.

She sat bolt upright, fatigue forgotten. There he was—­sitting in a simple wooden chair, sipping tea from a cracked cup and weathered saucer. “You! What the hell are you doing here?”

Maude chuckled. “I'll leave you two alone, eh?” She gave Myreon a wink. “Give 'im hell, lassie.”

Tyvian snorted. “Thank you, Maude.”

Maude waved over her shoulder and pressed a small knot in a wooden support beam. A secret panel in the wall rotated open and she disappeared through it. After she had gone, the panel closed again. It was then that Myreon noticed the room had no other door.

“Who is that woman? What are you doing here?
Where am I
?”

Tyvian gave her a half grin. “That woman is Maude, an old friend. You are in a hidden saferoom in the basement of the Cauldron. You are here because this is where I took you after rescuing you last night.”

Myreon blinked. Her thoughts were like congealed fat in a tube—­barely moving, barely working. “What . . . what did you do? My sentence . . . was it commuted?”

“No.” Tyvian sipped his tea. “Well . . . in a manner of speaking. I commuted it by breaking you out.”

“How? What . . . what did you
do
?” Myreon threw the sheet off, only to realize she was only dressed in a thin cotton shift. She pulled the sheet immediately back over her. “In order to release someone from petrification, you need to access their Rite of Release in Keeper's Court! You didn't . . . did you?”

Tyvian nodded. “I did. I broke in, stole your rite, and set much of the place on fire. A simple thank-­you will suffice.”

“You've made me a
criminal
!” Myreon flexed her fingers.

“To be perfectly fair, Myreon, you already
were
a criminal. Now you're a fugitive.”

Myreon found herself casting a spell before she knew it—­the Shattering burst from her hands with a thunderclap and reduced Tyvian's chair to flinders. She rose from the bed and fairly flew across the room, tackling him. She had him by the shirt-­laces and started shaking him. “You son of a bitch! You miserable, self-­centered, insane—­”

Tyvian put up his hands in surrender. “Myreon, Myreon—­how can you call me self-­centered? I just
saved
you!”

She slapped him. “No! You are obsessed with me—­you are a sick, twisted psychopath! You heard I was helpless and couldn't wait to charge in here to steal another kiss!”

Tyvian put his hands behind his head. “I believe
you
kissed
me,
this time. We're even. Besides, I'm not the one currently straddling the other's body in my underclothes. Who, mademoiselle, is obsessed with whom, eh?”

Myreon punched him in the chest and got off him. She wobbled on her feet and nearly fell, but Tyvian was there, holding her by the arm. She shook him off. “Don't touch me. Get out—­I need some time alone. I need to collect my thoughts.”

Tyvian shook his head. “I'm afraid you're going to have to collect your thoughts with company.”

Myreon's eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Allow me to remind you, Myreon: you are a criminal now. I am also a criminal. We two criminals are wanted by the Defenders, but that is only the first of our problems.” Tyvian held up another finger. “Second among our problems is that whoever framed you for the crime you so
obviously
did not commit will now know you are released, which means they will want you silenced.”

“Gethrey Andolon.” The name felt foul in Myreon's lips. She could still picture his stupid blue head and his ring-­studded fingers, going through his elaborate charade of not knowing what was happening to all his shipments of
cherille
and karfan and good Akrallian brandy, and on and on . . .