The Floodgate (29 page)

This was an unexpected addition to her assault, but she neatly folded it in. For nearly two centuries Kiva had scripted and adapted and enhanced her plan. A few lingering uncertainties remained, but she had already proven she could push beyond setbacks.

It was time for Halruaa to die. All that remained was the one wizard who could complete the destruction.

It was time for Akhlaur to return.

Tzigone warmed her hands over the campfire, rubbing them briskly to drive away the morning chill. She had not expected the Dhamari Exchelsor’s “little journey” to turn into a wilderness expedition.

She’d been a vagabond all her life, and there were few places in Halruaa unmarked by her footsteps. Unlike most Halruaans, she had even ventured into some of the lands beyond the mountain walls. However, she avoided the Nath, as did every sensible person she knew.

Oddly enough, Dhamari set a straight path for the northern foothills. Despite his protestations of travel inexperience, he had augmented Tzigone’s preparations with well-chosen supplies and an unusually large armed band.

Money, she told herself. If you had enough of it, you didn’t need expertise. Dhamari apparently had pots of money. He was a first-generation wizard, the pride of two families of wealthy merchants. His inheritance from his mother was a fortune in electrum mining, and his father’s people owned lands ideal for growing multicolored grapes for Halruaa’s fanciful wines.

Dhamari had told her stories of his family as they rode north. She would need to know such things if she decided to take the Exchelsor name, he told her gently. Tzigone listened, but she preferred the time they spent studying Keturah’s spells.

At least, that’s how she felt at first.

Tzigone’s unease increased with each passing hour. As they rode, Dhamari taught her spell after spell. They summoned wild cats, boars, and even a small band of goblins. The problem was, once the creatures came, they had to be dealt with. Last night a difficult spell had gone awry, and her song had brought an owlbear roaring into camp. Two of their escorts had died fighting the massive bird-thing. Tzigone blamed herself for the men’s deaths. To her surprise, their comrades did not.

When she was not learning spells, Tzigone moved freely among the warriors. Some of them had dealt with Dhamari before, and those who knew him best seemed to like him least. No one told tales or gave any direct complaint. Even so, after several days on the road, Tzigone was beginning to wonder if both she and Matteo had been mistaken about the wizard.

She poked at her morning campfire, coaxing the blaze higher. A small iron pot sat among the coals. The scent of herbs and mushrooms and root vegetables rose with the steam. The hired swords gathered around a larger fire a few paces away, using their knives and their teeth to tear strips of meat from the bones of roasted conies, mountain rabbits that were nearly as big as hounds.

The rich, savory smell made Tzigone’s stomach lurch. For some reason, she had not been able to eat meat of any kind during this trip. Calling creatures required a strange sort of affinity with them. Tzigone suspected that this would pass, but for the time being she stayed with herbs and greens.

“Can you keep strong on such food?”

Tzigone glanced up into Dhamari’s gently concerned face. She stirred the pot and lifted a steaming ladle. “Want some? It’s not bad.”

“Perhaps later. I have another spell for you.” He diffidently handed her a rolled scroll.

Tzigone flattened it out on her lap and studied it. It was a complicated spell, without doubt the most difficult she had ever seen. The incantation required elven intonations that would task her powers of mimicry. There was also an odd tablature that looked a bit like written music, indicating that the spell was to be sung. The melody, however, ranged down into the lowest depths of Tzigone’s voice and soared into regions she had never attempted to explore. At first study, the markings that choreographed the hand gestures appeared to be less orderly than the footprints left by the last staggering sprint of a beheaded chicken. At least half the runes were totally unfamiliar to her. She suspected that they were taken from a magical tradition very different from that of Halruaa. As she studied, though, the spell’s basic meaning emerged from the tangled mess.

Tzigone stared at the spell scroll in disbelief. Dhamari had just given her a spell to summon and banish the Unseelie folk!

She lifted an astonished gaze to his expectant face. “If you wanted me dead, you could have poisoned me before we left the city and saved us all some wear on our boot leather.”

He blinked and then frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“The hell you don’t! I’m just an apprentice. This spell would challenge a graybeard wizard.”

“You have exceptional talent-“

“And astonishing beauty,” she interrupted, mimicking his tone. “But for argument’s sake, let’s say I can cast this. What then? Wasn’t the owlbear enough excitement for you? For them?” she concluded furiously, waving with one hand toward the surviving members of their guard.

Dhamari lifted a placating hand. “I do not intend for you to summon the dark fairies,” he protested mildly. “That is not the point at all. It would not only be foolish but redundant. They are here already. Have you not heard them?”

She hesitated, then nodded. The strange, compelling song, distant and faint, had haunted the edges of night for three days.

“These hills are strange and fey,” the wizard went on. ‘The veils between the worlds are thin in Halruaa-few places in all the world provide more portals into distant places. The Unseelie folk are around us. Knowing that I have brought you into a dangerous area, it would ease my mind tremendously if you could cast the spell of banishment.”

“Why is that necessary? Can’t you do it?”

He sent her one of his small, wistful smiles. “I do not have Keturah’s talent and defer to the wizard whose voice held the laraken.”

Tzigone didn’t like flattery, but neither could she deny the practicality of Dhamari’s words. So she let him tutor her in the preliminary spell, one that would enable her to read the runes. He gave her a ring of translation so she would pronounce the strange elven words properly.

As she murmured the words over and over, the morning breeze seemed to grow colder. Her arms prickled with gooseflesh, and the warm cloak Dhamari had draped around her shoulders didn’t help. Tzigone let him build up the campfire, but she didn’t expect it to improve matters. She was not chilled by the relatively thin mountain air but by the sound of her own voice.

The spell frightened her, even at this early stage of its casting. Since it was meant as a banishing, this was, as Matteo would say, logical. Tzigone didn’t suppose that the Unseelie folk could be cowed by some minor magic. The magic felt twisted, though, and somehow wrong.

Throughout that day and the next she studied the spell, though her vision swam and her head throbbed with the effort of wrapping her mind and her will around the convoluted magic.

By the second night, the flicker of the campfire made the runes dance on the page. Tzigone kept at it, spurred on by the faint, mocking echoes that tossed from hill to hill-the unholy music of the Unseelie folk.

Far to the south, Basel Indoulur paced the garden of his Halarahh home. He’d expected Tzigone back days ago, and he cursed himself for granting her permission to leave the city with Dhamari Exchelsor. Tzigone considered the wizard harmless, and Basel trusted her judgment. Her candor, however, was less than total.

Nor was Basel blameless on this score. He could have spoken to Tzigone of her mother, and he did not. He had not told her of Matteo’s visit, or suggested that the young jordain had urged Tzigone to contact Dhamari as a means to save him, Basel, from the follies of fatherly instinct.

The irony-layers and layers of it-was almost overwhelming.

With a sigh, Basel left the garden and made his way up the tower’s winding stairs to the apprentices’ floor. He had given Mason and Farrah Noor a day’s holiday from their studies. There was no one to ask why he felt compelled to stop by Tzigone’s room.

He missed the troublesome little wench. He enjoyed her quick mind and impish spirit, and he loved her as he would the daughter he should have had-might have had, if the council had not intervened. Instead, he had been turned out like a bull into a pasture containing an idealistic and single-minded heifer. In the eyes of the law, in any way that truly mattered, Basel’s wife was dead-destroyed by her own dedication to the good of Halruaa.

The wizard’s gaze fell upon the door to Tzigone’s room, and the past disappeared from his mind like a windblown candle. The door was slightly ajar.

Basel’s eyes narrowed. Tzigone always left the door open. She was accustomed to open spaces and could not sleep unless every door and window was flung wide. The wizard edged closer. The sounds of a furtive search came from within the room, then a gasp of astonishment.

Despite his size, Basel could be quick and silent. He reached into his spell bag for a small iron nail and eased himself into the room. His hand flashed in a quick circle as he spoke a single, arcane word. The nail vanished, and the intruder froze in the act of whirling toward him.

Basel paced into the room for a closer look at the would-be thief. The woman was of medium height and extraordinary beauty. Her hair was a glossy blue-black, her features delicate, her curves lavish. She wore a pale blue robe-an attempt at disguise, no doubt. A startled expression was carved onto her immobile face, and a medallion swung from her still hand.

The wizard’s heart quickened as he studied the trinket. That was Keturah’s talisman! There was no magic left to it other than the memories it evoked. No doubt Tzigone had left it there for safekeeping rather than risk losing it in her travels.

Basel tugged the chain from the woman’s frozen fingers. Her trapped eyes followed his movements and glazed with despair.

He recognized the woman as Sinestra, a minor wizard married to one of the Belajoon brothers. The family was a well-established wizard line, and they held considerable wealth and respect in the king’s city. What would prompt a pampered young wife to thievery?

More curious than angry, Basel released the holding spell with a flick of one hand.

The woman exploded into action, throwing herself at the talisman in Basel’s hand. “Give it to me! It’s mine!”

He deftly sidestepped, and the intruder tripped and fell facedown on Tzigone’s cot. Her muffled oath was both pungent and familiar. Basel had heard it from Tzigone, and from her mother before her.

His heart skipped a beat. “Who are you?” he breathed.

She sat up and tossed a pinch of powder into the air over her head. The sparkling bits caught and hung in the air, then melted together to form a thin, shimmering sheet. This floated down, molded itself to her, and disappeared-leaving a very different woman in her place.

Her features were not as delicate as Basel remembered them, and time had dimmed her eyes and blurred the lines of her face.

Basel stared in disbelief at the faded image of a woman he’d thought long dead. Although he’d mourned her for over a dozen years, his heart did not respond to her with joy.

“Keturah?” he said, not quite believing it “That’s what we wanted them to think, wasn’t it?” Memory flooded back. “Of course! You’re Keturah’s friend, the lady who helped her escape a near capture!”

“Friend, yes,” the woman said. Her lips twitched into a brief and bitter smile. “Lady, no.”

An old story came back to him. Shortly after her marriage to Dhamari, Keturah had traveled to Basel’s home city of Halar in the company of an Exchelsor merchant band. One of the hired swords had laid rough hands on her-and lost them up to the elbows to her defensive magic. Her indignation grew when the caravan master explained that the mercenary had mistaken her for the camp doxie. A few words with the woman convinced Keturah that the “doxie” had not chosen this life. She had insisted that the woman be released in her care, and she had given her employment in her tower, and quietly trained the woman’s magical gifts.

“A courtesan can still be a lady, regardless of the circumstances of her birth or her profession,” Basel pointed out.

“Courtesan!” she scoffed. “That’s still putting it too high! My mother could claim that title. She was a wizard’s mistress. Guess what that makes me?”

“Illegitimate or not, if you know your father’s name and lineage, you are guaranteed certain rights and a wizard’s training.”

“Oh, I know the name, but he was married into a powerful family and didn’t wish to embarrass them. So I was sent away. I was handed over to a merchant’s company as a sort of movable entertainment.”

The enormity of this revelation stunned Basel into silence.

Any words that came to mind only trivialized such betrayal.

After a moment Sinestra shrugged. “An old tale, badly told. Whatever you’re going to do to me, get on with it.”

“All I require from you is an explanation. Why did you come here looking for Keturah’s talisman?”

“I didn’t. I came looking for your apprentice.”

Basel studied the woman. She was already reverting to her enchanted appearance: her hair was darkening to black, and her skin was no longer sallow but golden and smooth. He had worked on such cloaking spells before. “If I’m not mistaken, the spell you wear is Keturah’s.”

“I don’t have that much talent,” she agreed. “It’s a permanent spell. Nothing will touch it but the powder Keturah gave me, and you can bet I don’t use that very often! The medallion was mine, though, in a manner of speaking. I bought it for Keturah. She was a good friend and a generous mistress. I kept every coin she gave me toward the day when I could repay her.”

Something in her tone set off warnings in Basel’s mind. “Why did you think that would be necessary?”

Sinestra’s face-now fully reverted to its young and beautiful form-twisted with frustration. “I can’t tell you.”

“I see,” mused Basel. “Perhaps you can tell me what you wanted with Keturah’s talisman?”