New Blood (15 page)

“Yes, Inquisitor Kazaryk.” The boy bobbed his head and hurried off, tripping over two chairs and a table leg before he got out the door, leaving his superior muttering darkly about “hinterlands,” “idiot apprentices,” “allocation of manpower” and other things Amanusa couldn't quite make out.

Then they waited. Inquisitor Kazaryk entertained himself by looking over the reports the apprentice had been writing. Jax paced, tossing out the occasional protest as if he thought he needed to keep his hand in, and scowling darkly at Amanusa every time he passed her. Amanusa stood in a corner near the door and tried to think herself small and unnoticeable.

She didn't get any smaller, but she thought she might be getting somewhere with the “unnoticeable” part, for when the youth returned with Captain Janos, a man just as lean, dark, and intense as Kazaryk, but taller, the pair of them scarcely glanced at her.

“I need your translation skills, Captain,” Kazaryk stated. “This man speaks only English, and while I speak five languages besides, of course, Romanian and Hungarian, I do not speak English. I am told that you do.”

The captain clicked his heels and gave a little bow, studying Jax with frank curiosity. “Do you suspect him of conspiring with the anarchists?”

“I do not care.” Kazaryk ground the words out between his teeth. “I am not hunting for anarchists. They are all dead, save for a few stragglers and women—”

“Dragos Szabo escaped.”

Kazaryk ignored the interruption. “I am after the
criminal magician who murdered them! Who knows where she has gone? Who knows what harm she might be doing, who she might be killing right this minute? The power she obtained from so many deaths—”

The deaths hadn't given any power at all, Amanusa thought, staying absolutely still in her corner. It made her nervous, the Inquisitor thinking that. What might the idea make him do?

“Yes, of course, Inquisitor,” Janos was saying with another, more respectful bow.

The Inquisitor gestured at Jax. “Now, if you would be so good, please ask this . . .
gentleman
. . . to be seated, and to identify himself and explain his reason for being in this town.”

Jax sat in the hard, spindle-backed chair Kazaryk placed in the center of the room. He planted his feet spread wide, hands on his thighs with elbows out, taking possession of the space in as arrogant a fashion as possible. He displayed nothing but confidence and disdain for the others' petty concerns.

Under questioning, Jax spun fables out of nothing, telling stories of workshops and weavers in towns with names too foreign for him to pronounce, much less recall. He had no business cards or paperwork from these places because none of their products or proposals had appealed, and he'd tossed everything away. Of course he couldn't remember the names of the men he'd met—they all had ridiculous, outlandish names like Kazaryk and Janos. Nothing sensible like Tottenham or Burke.

His answers to their questions remained just plausible enough to be believable and just vague enough to
keep them from tripping him up with details. Amanusa marveled at his ability to keep it all straight.

“What else do you want to ask?” Janos asked Kazaryk, dropping wearily into another chair.

It was late. Amanusa didn't know how late, but very. She was hungrier than she'd been when they reached town. Her feet hurt and her knees ached and she wanted to sit down. On the floor in her corner would do nicely, but she was afraid that any motion would bring the predators in the room whirling to pounce on her. She tightened and relaxed her sore muscles, hoping for relief, but it didn't help much.

“I begin to believe he is exactly what he appears,” Janos went on. “A stupid, arrogant English businessman who sees only what is beneath his nose, and then only if it is of personal interest to him.”

Jax looked tired, but less so than the two officials. His days' beard gave his jaw a ruddy shadow. The Hungarians just looked dirty, with their black beards growing in.

Kazaryk the Inquisitor smoothed finger and thumb across his luxuriant oiled mustache. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. I am not convinced to let him go. Not until every stone has been overturned. To search for magic, one must use magic.”

He pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat and flicked it open to check the time. He snapped it shut with a satisfied nod. “It lacks only ten minutes to midnight. Just enough time to prepare.”

P
REPARE FOR WHAT
?
Amanusa could see her alarm echoed in the tiny jerk of the military captain's head as Kazaryk called his apprentice back into the nearly empty room. Jax appeared just as relaxed and arrogant as before, but the taut flex of his hands where they rested on his knees betrayed his worry.

The apprentice bustled around, moving the remaining chairs to the far corners of the room, and sliding the table out from under a window. Then he proceeded to chalk a large pentagram with a circle around it on the floor at the end of the room nearest the door, another circle around Jax's chair, and various runes and sigils Amanusa didn't know in other places. He ignored Amanusa and the converted medicine case completely, as if they were invisible, or additional furniture.

They hadn't opened the wooden box, or even asked what it contained, although the contents of Jax's pockets lay spread on the table no longer under the window—three crystalline rocks, two lengths of string, a small pearl-sided pocket knife, an empty wallet, a ragged handkerchief, and five coins—two Bulgarian, two Russian, one Turkish. Perhaps, being the sorceress, her “I'm not really here” thoughts were turning the officers' attention aside. If it was a spell, she shouldn't have left Jax out of it. She should have thought of it sooner.

The boy chalked one last symbol over the window
where the table had been, and hurried to join Kazaryk and Janos in the pentagram, too near Amanusa for her comfort. She took the chance provided by their movement to slide down the wall until she crouched cowering in the corner. Jax finally appeared apprehensive as he sat in his chair in the center of its chalk circle.

Kazaryk began to chant what sounded to Amanusa like nonsense words, but could have been Latin. Maybe with some Turkish mixed in. Or Greek. She looked up at Jax and found him looking back at her. Their gazes locked, held for a long moment, then he closed his eyes and let his head fall back. Amanusa hid her face behind her updrawn knees and wrapped her arms around her head.

She wished she'd been able to wrap some protective magic around the both of them, but there hadn't been time. And she didn't know any protective magic. She knew healing spells for after the harm was done, and she knew warding spells to keep people out, turn away their attention. She knew nothing that would protect from physical harm. Did blood magic even have those sorts of spells?

And if she had the spells and used them, could the Inquisitor conjure up some way to sniff them out? She'd thought from the first that the man was a conjurer. This confirmed it. Most conjurers couldn't work magic 'til after midnight. Or so Amanusa had been taught.

She could be as wrong about that as she'd been about sorcery. But since the Inquisitor waited until the clock in the tower across the square began to chime the hour before beginning his spell, she figured that much was truth.

Most Inquisitors were conjurers. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps because the spirits they controlled could snoop and spy into hidden places. Or because the time they spent communing with and controlling spirits separated them from ordinary human emotions. Kazaryk was as cold and emotionless a specimen as she'd ever seen. But that might be because he was an Inquisitor, not because he was a conjurer. He was the first magician she'd met with any real power. Szabo's pet conjurer didn't count.

Amanusa felt a faint presence, a whisper of
magic
across her thoughts. She clamped her arms tighter around herself, squeezing her eyes shut and whispering, “Don't see me, don't see me,” over and over again, too quietly for Janos, Kazaryk, or his apprentice to hear. She hoped.

Kazaryk cried out in surprise and triumph. Alarmed, Amanusa cracked an eye open and peered out beneath her left elbow. A bright blue glow wrapped around Jax, intensifying like a halo around his head . . . and at his groin. Amanusa felt a blush rising. Thank goodness no one was looking at her. The box containing the machine creature also glowed, but an amber gold rather than blue, and not nearly as bright.

Did the different colors denote different spells, or the different person who had worked them? Amanusa assumed the blue glowed brighter in those areas of Jax's body because that was where the binding affected him most—in his mind where Yvaine had deposited her storehouse of knowledge, and in his manhood where she'd stolen it away.

The Inquisitor suddenly slumped against his apprentice, panting and sweating as if he'd just pushed
a boulder up a very steep hill. The apprentice appeared to be expecting it, for he was braced and ready to catch the older man.

“What does it m-mean?” Janos stammered, staring in obvious awe and more than a little fear. “That glow?”

“Fetch the master a chair!” the apprentice snapped.

The captain hesitated, looking warily around the room. The nearest chair was just out of reach, outside the pentagram where the three men were crowded together.

“The spirit is gone,” the boy said scornfully. “A chair!”

“The glow,” Kazaryk gasped out when the chair had been brought and he was lowered into it, “means that the man and the wooden case have both been be-spelled.”

Amanusa unwrapped herself enough to examine her own definitely not-glowing hands and arms. Why didn't she glow too? Because she was the worker of the spells and not the one bespelled? Or because con-jury and sorcery didn't mix? Maybe the conjurer's spirit-servant wasn't powerful enough to see past her warding thoughts.

“It is obvious now,” Kazaryk was saying, no longer gasping, though his voice was still weak. “The case had to have been bespelled, or we would already have searched it. Ask him what is in it.”

“Nothing you'd be interested in.” Jax set his jaw when he replied to the captain's translation. “Machinery.”

“Open it.” Kazaryk flicked a finger at the box.

Captain Janos was the one who moved, still rolling
his eyes as if searching for spirits. He paused before touching the box. “Will the glow—?”

“It is harmless. Merely a visual marking of magical workings inside this room. And look. Already it fades.” With the help of his apprentice, Kazaryk sat up straighter. “Open it.”

Jax glowered when Janos knelt beside it. “That's private property,” he said. “
My
property.”

Janos ignored him as he flipped the latch and took hold of the handle to lift the lid. The whole box came off the floor. Janos pried at the lid, then hit it and tried again. The case refused to open.

Amanusa was impressed with herself. She'd had no idea her spell would work so well.

Janos got the apprentice to come hold the bottom while he tugged at the lid. The box remained shut.

“Never mind.” Kazaryk waved a hand. “Obviously, the spell is sealing it shut. Order the Englishman to unlock it.”

“Can't,” Jax said, folding his arms. “Had a magician seal it. I won't be able to open it 'til I have another magician break the seal. Which I won't do 'til I'm back home safe in England.”

Kazaryk sighed when Janos translated Jax's defiance. “Very well. I'll simply have to open it myself. But not tonight. Lock him up—”

“On what charges?” Janos dared interrupt to ask.

The Inquisitor looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.

Janos flushed. “The man is
English,
” he protested. “You have no idea how much trouble their embassy can make if we don't have some plausible excuse for detaining one of their citizens.”

“Then arrest him for smuggling and for working prohibited magic. That ought to satisfy them.” Kazaryk waved to his apprentice who came to lift him from the chair.

“What magic
is
prohibited?” Janos asked, as if wondering how much worse it might be than what he'd witnessed tonight.

“Whatever the Inquisition says is prohibited.” Kazaryk leaned heavily on the apprentice as he limped from the room.

Janos thought for a minute, then made a “that makes sense” face as he went out the door, leaving a pair of guards standing in the hall. Maybe they truly had forgotten Amanusa's presence.

She dropped her bundle and scurried past Jax to the window at the far end of the room, and peered out. No escape that way. Two more soldiers stood guard, one directly beneath the window.

“Here.” Jax was on his feet, whipping his belt from the belt loops.

“We can't get out this way,” Amanusa hissed, not wanting anyone to hear her and remember her presence, if they'd forgotten it. “Guards.”

“Take it and go.” He held the belt out to her. “The information to access the bank account is in the pocket where I kept the lancet. Walk out the door. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. Just get the money and take a train for Calais. Or Paris. Paris is better. You can disappear in Paris if they decide to follow you.”

“I'm not leaving you,” Amanusa insisted, refusing to examine the reasons why she was so adamant. “I need you.” He had all the sorcery locked away in his head. That was it.

“You need to stay alive. You're more important than I am.” Jax seized her hand and put the belt in it.
“Go.”

She glared up at him several more long moments, but he was as stubborn as she. “All right, I will.”

Because it had finally occurred to her that she could more easily get him out if she were free, than locked up in here with him. Amanusa buckled the belt around her waist where the brown of the leather lost itself in the brown of her dress and sagged to drape loosely over her hips. She shouldered her brown blanket bundle, and turned back when Jax spoke her name.