Shadowborn (44 page)

Vladimer and the men seemed unperturbed. They were planning, fighting verbal campaigns, just as her brothers and their friends had on those interminable summer journeys to and from the estate. All it wanted was her sister, Merivan, at her side, fingers poised to pinch should Telmaine try to join in the boys’ talk.

Ishmael,
Telmaine thought irritably,
would not spend all this time talking about it.
Ishmael was practical. Ishmael would prepare his weapons, settle his people, and then go to sleep. Let Vladimer work himself up to a pitch—she had the sense that this was the way he was—Telmaine would emulate Ishmael. She shifted until her head was more or less propped against the inner wall, shoulder hunched uncomfortably, and breathed slowly, remembering Balthasar’s efforts at hypnotizing her before the girls were born. When this was over—and she must believe it would be over, somehow—she would delight in doing something as commonplace and removed from magic as having another child.

She became aware of the smell of lemon tea, drifting pleasantly through the reek of men going to war, though that was there, too, both in her dream and out of it. Ishmael was sitting on the floor of a train carriage, cleaning his weapons. She could sense great heat coming from him, furnace heat, as though he had been newly cast in clay and set out to cool. He was slow to lift his head when she spoke to him. And the weapons were strange. Was there such a thing as a two-barreled gun? It could not be safe, pointing both ways. He lifted his head, sonned her with a terrible regret, quite unlike any expression she’d known on his face, and pulled the trigger. She watched him fall away, as the man on the platform had fallen, the dart from Vladimer’s cane in his belly. She touched her own abdomen and felt her hands sink into the wound he had made in her.

A man’s voice said, “M’lady, are you all right? ”

She was back in the carriage, her face wet with tears. One of the men handed her a handkerchief that was clean and well made, but had the smell of too much laundering. She nodded her gratitude nevertheless and dabbed her face. “Bad dream,” she whispered. They murmured understanding, though she was sure they did not.

“We’re nearly there,” said the donor of the handkerchief. “It’s gone sunrise.”

After Ishmael had
gifted
her—tried, through mind-touch, to convey to her his accomplishment in magic, she had found herself dreaming his dreams, running through the Shadowlands, fighting remembered battles. But even when he was held in prison, in peril of his life, his dreams had not threatened her or himself, or despaired.

Or burnt so, with magic.

If she understood one thing, it was that he needed help. She could not endanger these men by using magic in such close confines and with only a train’s siding between themselves and daylight, even if she was certain that this time, Vladimer would not miss his shot. Nor did she particularly want to die. She knotted her gloved hands, one in the other, and endured the last, interminable minutes as the train paused before Stranhorne Crosstracks to let their Lightborn guard disembark, listening to the shouted exchange between Lightborn outside and Darkborn inside. Balthasar would be heartened by the vulgar ease of it.

Unlike Strumheller, Stranhorne Crosstracks had an enclosed platform with doors that could be operated from safety. Vladimer, of all people, was the one to pause to help her down—only to lean close and say, “What do you sense? ”

What she sensed was . . . overwhelming. People—Darkborn—closely packed on the platform, beneath the platform, outside, across the tracks. Thousands of them in the near vicinity, hurt, grieving, fierce, resolute, afraid, uncomprehending. She staggered, and he had to steady her.
“Shadowborn?”
he hissed.

“
No
, not that.” In all that shocking miasma of Darkborn emotion and suffering, there was no taint of Shadowborn. “Just Darkborn. Many, many people.”

“Come with me, then. And tell the Broomes’ party to follow.”

Tentatively she did, knowing that Phoebe Broome definitely did not approve of either her presence here or her use of magic, but she drew no rebuke. Vladimer set out confidently across the warped and pitching boards of the platform, toward what proved to be a stair, metal steps laid over crumbling stone. He had been here before. He threw back over his shoulder, “One of the first settlements to reestablish itself after the Sundering. It has a number of underground warehouses and cellars, mainly used for storage and protection against raids before, that sheltered Darkborn immediately after.”

She remembered his guided tour of the archducal palace in Minhorne, as they went together to interview Floria White Hand. She did not wish to be ungrateful, but she hoped this was not more of the same; Vladimer’s choice of anecdote tended toward the macabre. “Did Ishmael tell you about these? ”

“Maxim di Gautier, while raiding the palace’s private libraries . . . After the Sundering, the Stranhornes extended the tunnels between the chambers and opened up more. It’s quite extensive. If Stranhorne had to retreat, there’d be no better place to retreat to.”

Telmaine, remembering Shadowborn fires, said nothing to that. She could sense the mages coming down quickly behind them. “Where are we going? ”

“Where I expect we’ll find whoever’s in charge.”

Planking and matting marked out a thoroughfare through the crowded underground space beneath the platform. Planks and stone blocks had been assembled into rough dividers and furnishings, allowing adults to sit and sick and tired people to lie, while children weaved and scrambled between the groups in a running game of troopers and Shadowborn. The clear thoroughfare was, of course, irresistible. Three urchins pelting along it would have plowed into Vladimer and Telmaine but for Farquhar Broome’s intervention. Deflected, they tumbled into the laps of a group of men playing cards, who reared up with roars and cuffs. In a belated flurry, sisters and mothers rushed to the rescue. Vladimer shamelessly left the altercation to evolve, and led them through a tunnel under the railway tracks.

Perhaps I do not need to worry about fire,
Telmaine thought, smelling the damp.

They surfaced in a circular concourse like a smaller version of Bolingbroke Station in Minhorne, but Bolingbroke Station had been built in the last century, and this, by the rough stone and thick walls, much earlier. Most of the stalls along the outer and inner ring of the concourse were closed and boarded against the press of refugees, but some had had their boards and even their counters pried loose and carried away.

“Dear boy,” Farquhar Broome hailed from behind. “Where are we going?”

Vladimer pointed. “Up.” Overhead, Telmaine’s sonn could pick out the edge of a balcony and the hard echo of iron railings.

They made their way around the perimeter to the ascending staircase with some difficulty, since not everyone respected the corridor. They did Vladimer, though, when he put into effect his declared intention to press into service anyone he found sprawled across his path, with no respect for excuses. After the first three, a wave of warning ran around the perimeter and trespassers scrambled clear.

On the balcony, they found the defenders, some of whom were already asleep, sprawled on mats and bags and bundles, weapons close at hand. Those who were awake were cleaning and repairing weapons and armor, playing cards, gossiping, sharing rations and flasks and pipes, and otherwise taking their ease. After the underground shelter and the concourse, pipe smoke was fragrant. As they climbed the next flight of stairs, onto the floor under the cupola, the officers stayed behind to arrange for places for their own men.

Under the domed ceiling of the cupola, they found fifteen or twenty men around a round table where, in wet sand, someone had sculpted what Telmaine presumed was a relief of the land around Stranhorne, marked with a mixture of fine game pieces and roughly carved pegs. Lord Ferdenzil—no, Duke Ferdenzil Mycene—was leaning on the table with his elbows, and was short enough that it resembled a casual pose rather than a droop. He was haggard with exhaustion, something she could never have imagined possible. The tall young woman next to him, Baronette Laurel’s twin, was frankly propped against the table and arguing with him in a voice that croaked with overuse. Both turned to sonn the arrivals with open relief, though Mycene’s rapidly changed to a sour amusement.

“Mycene,” Vladimer acknowledged. “Baronette Stranhorne.”

“Vladimer Plantageter,” Mycene said. “This is a surprise.”

“Indeed. A word, Mycene, if I may.” He drew the other man off to the side. Telmaine felt a moment’s sympathy for Mycene: Vladimer would not have been her choice to tell a man his father was dead, especially given the rumors about Vladimer’s paternity and the enmity between Mycene and Vladimer. Her sonn caught Mycene’s motion as he lowered his head into a gloved hand and turned away. Since he had been her suitor, and one her family heartily approved of, she had used her touch-sense to tell whether she could love him. So she knew the resentment he harbored toward his vigorous, intensely competitive father. But it is the people of great greedy vitality, who consume so much of those around them, who leave the greatest hollowness behind.

The baronette said, “What’s happened? ” To Telmaine’s surprise, given the way they had been arguing, there was concern on her face.

“Vladimer is telling him that the duke, his father, is dead.”

“Sachevar Mycene? ” Lavender croaked. “How?

“Shadowborn,” Telmaine said. At least here there would be no contesting their existence.

“In th’city? ” one of the men said.

Vladimer, returning, saved her from questioning. Ferdenzil Mycene followed a step behind, though Telmaine wondered how much he would be hearing now. His expression was taut, dazed. She herself heard little of Vladimer’s report to the Stranhornes, and only slightly more of the Stranhornes’ report to Vladimer—given by a well-spoken man with a rogue’s face, introduced as the Stranhorne lawyer—once she heard they had had no word of Ishmael. The Stranhornes and their reinforcements had spent most of the night sweeping the area, collecting survivors, and killing roaming Shadowborn. There were rumors that the main force had established a redoubt east of Stranhorne.
I might,
she thought,
have told them that.
And if they thought to ask the mages, Farquhar Broome certainly could. So there was no need for her to stay. Quietly, and, she hoped, unnoticed, she eased back from between Vladimer and Mycene, holding her skirts out to stop them from whispering. A light cast of sonn sketched in the space under the cupola. Two heavy, barred outer doors, flush with the curve of the cupola, must lead outside, but four seemed to lead into interior rooms. She tried a door and found it locked. She was well able to deal with locks, having freed herself from the execution room before Vladimer found her, but that would entail magic and draw attention. The next door was unlocked. She opened it and slipped inside, promptly stumbling on a heap of blankets on the floor, perhaps set aside from the baronette or the duke. The air was stifling; the wall hot.
With the sun,
she realized, shuddering slightly.

But it would do. The door was reasonably solid and she had to assume it was light-tight. In case. She sat down at the high writing stool before the desk, pushing the flammable papers on it aside with a grimace of unease. Quickly, before she could think better of this, she recalled the sense of her dream, the sense of Ishmael in it. She opened her senses and reached out with her magic, trusting the affinity between them to make the connection, as it had between her in the city, him on the train.

<
Ishmael?
>

The blast of heat brutally broke her from the trance. Groping and wild sonn found nothing alight, nothing smoldering, no smell of smoke. Panting, hands to her bodice, she fought to calm herself. The heat had been on Ishmael’s end. Where his magic, and the vitality that fed it, had seemed like banked coals, now it seemed a furnace. It took all the love she had for him to open her thoughts once more.

Something stirred in the furnace, something familiar. She sensed it trying to articulate.

A cascade of impressions, and the heat of a monstrous magic, raging amongst those embers. she pleaded.

The heat was instantly snuffed. She thought, for an instant of dread, that he had exerted himself magically and died. Yet she had felt none of the terrifying draining and pain that had ended their previous conversation.

Her jaw set. How dared the woman, her social inferior, intrude.