All That Glitters (31 page)

 

T
yvian kissed Myreon more than once on that rooftop, which, in retrospect, was a bit of a tactical error. The sun would soon be rising and, therefore, the markets were about to open.

Myreon looked as though she had just committed a crime. “I can't believe I just did that.”

“We. I was involved, too.” Tyvian looked across the rooftops of Crosstown. A fire was burning—­probably starting near the Cauldron—­that was eating a whole city block. Alarm bells were ringing from all over town. The swath of destruction Gethrey had wrought stretched out over several blocks as well. It seemed everywhere Tyvian looked and in every direction, chaos and fear was ruling the day.

“Is that it, then? With Gethrey dead, will the markets crash?” Myreon asked, surveying the city.

“No. They'll be crashing anyway—­my brother would see to that, somehow.” Tyvian stretched, wincing at the wound in his leg—­which was only now reasserting itself after the ring had deadened it for him during his fight with Gethrey.

Myreon nodded. “We need to get back across town. But how?” She motioned to the chaos. “The Defenders will be everywhere. The Old City will be locked up tight as a drum.”

“Hey!” a voice called from below. Tyvian looked down to see Hool looking up at them. “Your blue-­haired friend is dead in this alley. Sorry.”

Tyvian grinned. “Good old Hool—­regular as the sunrise.” He then called over the side, “We're coming down. Did you find Artus?”

Hool's ears were laid back. “Yes. But he has a plan I do not like.”

S
aldor harbor was cloaked in mist in the predawn light. The boat Brana had secured was meant to be rowed by two ­people, which meant both Myreon and Tyvian were at the oars—­nobody else knew how. Tyvian's bandaged leg still screamed at him with every stroke, but they were making good time.

Artus was in the bow, keeping a lookout. “You sure they won't spot us?”

Myreon shook her head. “Relax, Artus—­even if the Defenders
could
scry over water, they're far too busy right now. The only challenge will be when we make the docks by the Foreign Gate.”

Tyvian turned his attention to the matter at hand. “So Andolon Gethrey to crash the market
today,
and probably laid the groundwork last night after you and Brana left him, Artus, but
before
he tried to kill me.”

Hool's shroud was back in place and she was sitting in the stern of the boat, her hands tightly folded in her lap. “So who do we kill now?”

Myreon shuddered. “Gods, I will never get used to your voice coming from that face, Hool.”

Artus snorted. “Wait until you see her hit somebody.”

Tyvian whistled to get everyone's attention. “Focus, dammit! We can't just
kill
anybody. The crash, I am sorry to say, is probably inevitable—­Gethrey was right about that. What we need is a plan to stop my brother from achieving whatever he hopes to achieve by aiding the crash, and we need it quickly. It's practically dawn, and once the markets open, things are going to get ugly quick.”

“Dock ahead,” Artus whispered. “Mirror men waiting for us.”

Myreon worked the Cloak of the Mundane to keep them all nondescript. All except Hool. When they arrived at the dock, she leapt out of the boat and confronted the lead Defender. She waved Tyvian's signet ring under the guard's nose. “I am a mighty sorceress, and if you don't let us through, I will turn you into a fish.”

The Defender took a good look at the statuesque Hool in the predawn light, took a good look at the ring, and did the mental arithmetic needed. His eyes bugged out. “Yes! Yes, archmagus, of course—­go right ahead!”

Moments later they were in a coach heading through the Foreign Gate and into the Old City. Hool pulled off the ring and threw it at Tyvian. “If we can't kill anybody, then what is the plan?”

Tyvian rubbed his temples. His mind was like a series of rusty gears at the moment—­the pain in his leg and chest and . . . well,
everywhere,
was muddling his thinking. Not to mention Myreon. He found he couldn't look at her without grinning like an idiot, and that nonsense had to stop right away. There would be time for it later, assuming they lived and made it out of the city undetained. Unfortunately, how they were going to do that remained a complete mystery to him.

Artus had his face screwed up in that frown he made when he was thinking too hard. “You said your brother was playing Andolon, right?”

Tyvian groaned. “Yes, Artus—­try to keep up.”

“Right, but
how
? Like, if he's the one who put Andolon up to this, how was he doing it? With who?”

“It could be anybody.” Tyvian shrugged. “The Prophets, the Defenders, Andolon's damned sister—­anybody.”

Artus straightened. His face split into a grin. “It's DiVarro.”

Myreon frowned. “What do you mean? Andolon's augur? He's in Xahlven's employ?”

Artus shook his head. “No, no—­Xahlven
is
DiVarro. It's a shroud.”

Tyvian cocked his head. He felt the wheels beginning to turn. “Wait—­how do you know?”

Artus pointed to his eye. “That crystal thing he's got, right? That's the same as Carlo's, isn't it? It's supposed to see through anything, right?”

“Yes? And?”

Artus grinned. “He never noticed that note you slipped me, now did he? Or, if he did, he didn't tell Andolon nothing about it—­that either means he don't have a working crystal eye
or
he wasn't working for Andolon at all.”

Tyvian thought back to his conversation with Xahlven on the floor of the Secret Exchange. He remembered Xahlven watching DiVarro intently and even working some sorcery on him. Tyvian had assumed it was an augury of some kind—­spying on DiVarro—­but DiVarro hadn't been
doing
anything at the time. He was just standing there.

He had been a simulacrum!

“Dammit, Artus,” Tyvian breathed, “I think you're right! It all makes sense now—­Xahlven was feeding Gethrey the precise information needed to crash the Secret and Mundane Exchanges all this time. Gethrey assumed the vast sums of money he probably paid DiVarro were sufficient to guarantee his loyalty, too. Gods, it's the perfect cover.”

Artus grinned. “Not too shabby, eh?”

Hool snorted. “That doesn't help us. I hate this.” She groaned and adjusted her dress—­an act that made Myreon laugh out loud. Hool scowled. “I hate humans.”

Tyvian looked at Artus and Myreon. “I think I have an idea.”

Artus frowned. “You gonna tell us about it?”

Tyvian smiled, nodding. “Oh yes, Artus—­everybody is going to hear all about it,
especially
you. You still have that good pair of eyes in your head?”

Artus smiled. “Sharp as ever, boss.”

“Good—­for this to work, all of us need to be
perfect.
”

B
y all outward appearances, Gethrey Andolon was a man busy transcending himself. The oceanic floor of the Saldorian Exchange and its armies of sharp-­eyed, early morning traders had become a constellation of moons orbiting around the gravity of his wealth. His surprise offer of karfan beans had been well-­received, but when he started selling silk and
cherille
, the floor had exploded with activity. Everybody knew he was up to something, but nobody knew what it was.

The chaos of the last few days—­the Specter of Reldamar—­had distilled itself into something ineffable and yet inexorable on the floor of the Mundane. There was a kind of panic in the air, and Gethrey Andolon—­the most successful trader the Mundane had yet known—­was at the center of it. He stood on a stool among a sea of faces, all waving paper tags in his face with the marks of their houses and masters. He took orders carefully, a self-­writing quill recording them. He was hemorrhaging goods like a man about to go bankrupt, and the exchange sensed that if they didn't get a piece of it now, they would regret it later—­they were guiding Andolon's wealth like a great ship, and, like good pirates, they were going to get that ship into port and strip her down to her planks.

Of course, none of them knew that Gethrey Andolon was now several hours dead. And also none of them knew that there were commodities flooding the market had been planted by Andolon himself, guaranteeing the price would drop. They thought they smelled blood, and they were right. They just didn't know the blood was theirs.

As all this happened, the swirl of activity was being closely monitored by the Secret Exchange, who also were in the midst of a panic of their own. Their auguries were reading massive volatility in the markets—­so much that some were swearing the prophesies were wholly unreliable, the result of an unnaturally high Fey ley and the mysterious appearance of a glut of goods on the Mundane. For the first time in ages the old sorcerous families began to realize the risk they were exposed to in the case of a mistake. Soon, mage by mage, the Secret Exchange began to slide into a downward spiral of sell-­offs and panicky trades.

On the lips of every man and woman on the floor of either the Secret or the Mundane was one name:
Reldamar.

It was during this financial panic that Tyvian Reldamar, dressed in a long cloak of forest green and leaning on a cane, disembarked from a coach and stepped onto the floor of the Mundane. He was flanked by two women—­one a stunning beauty with auburn hair in a green dress, and the other an intimidating blonde marred with ash and soot.

Tyvian stood there for a moment, letting the effect of his presence sink in, and then nodded Myreon and Hool forward before the Defenders could be called for. “Ready?” he asked them.

“Are you sure this will work?” Hool asked, staring down a few men who dared to gape at her.

Tyvian nodded. “Once Artus gets it to you, wait until they are at their most frightened, and then start buying things.”

“Which things?” Hool asked.

Tyvian shook his head. “It won't matter—­if someone makes an offer, just say yes and slap hands.”

Myreon, her eyes scanning the crowd for trouble, nodded in the direction of the man who was the spitting image of the late Gethrey Andolon. “There he is. Ready?”

Tyvian shot her a wink. “I've been ready my whole life for this.” He broke away from them both. “Keep a low profile until the proper moment, you two.”

They nodded; Tyvian made a beeline for the specter of his dead friend. The crowd parted around him as though he was still on fire. He wondered how many of them had been present to witness that. He wondered if it had been as impressive as he'd hoped.

“Gethrey” spotted Tyvian from twenty paces off. He doffed his absurd hat—­a miniature mountain with a working waterfall and field of wildflowers—­and waited for Tyvian to arrive. He gave Tyvian a winning smirk. Tyvian would have known that smirk anywhere.

“Hello, Xahlven,” he said, coming to stop a few paces away. “Still like to play dress-­up, I see.”

Xahlven grinned from beneath his shroud. He spoke loudly enough that everyone nearby could hear. “Plan to stick a dagger in my eye, Tyv?”

Tyvian smiled. “Much worse—­I came to talk.”

Gethrey/Xahlven didn't move, but something significant was happening to the ley of the room—­Tyvian felt chills and hot flashes travel up his spine; winds picked up and died. Finally, it stopped. “You're warded. Quite competently, too,” his brother observed.

Tyvian shrugged. “Mage Defenders are trained to fight other magi, first and foremost. You should have thought of that before you framed her.” He cocked an eyebrow at the traders surrounding them, who were looking on with intense curiosity even as they kept trading with one another. “Can they understand what we're saying?”

Xahlven shook his head. “They are hearing you threaten Gethrey Andolon with death—­that's all. Any moment now and the Defenders will be on you. Was there something you wanted to say before they drag you off?”

Tyvian fished Gethrey's amulet from around his neck and held it where Xahlven could see. “Oh, I'm not much worried about the Defenders just now, Xahlven. Sic them on me and you'll have a colossus rampaging through here—­I doubt you want
that
much chaos. You can't collapse the markets if the marketplace is collapsed, if you follow my meaning.”

Xahlven smiled tightly, which didn't look right on Gethrey's face. “Really, Tyvian—­that's rather violent, even for you.”

“Xahlven, you have no idea the violence I am capable of right now.” Tyvian dropped the colossus amulet. He eyed the crowd. Business was already taking shape—­whispers passed from person to person and courier djinns dispatched even as everybody kept an eye on them.

And while
nobody
kept their eye on Artus.

“Very well—­a private chat, then.” Xahlven snapped his fingers and the boiling human chaos of the Mundane fell away, replaced by a perfectly circular room with no doors. The walls were of polished ebony, the ground covered by a lush purple rug. There was a
couronne
board on a small table and two chairs. Xahlven stood across from him, shroudless, hands folded around his staff. “An illusion. To keep our conversation private. Everyone else will think we walked off, but they will forget where.”

Tyvian snorted. “Obviously. I'm not an idiot, Xahlven.”

“Really? That's a statement in need of justification, I feel.”

“This won't get anywhere if you keep insulting my intelligence. You're DiVarro and I know it—­you're behind the whole damned thing. You wanted me to believe it was Mother, but that doesn't wash.”

Xahlven nodded. “You always did have a hang-­up over mother. It was an easy enough diversion. It kept you out of my hair for a few days while I planned my counterstroke.”