Cara didn’t try to gawp around for him, thank Khalmet. She strode on, though her hands fisted tight. “What if Jylla’s right, and he’s working for the killer?”
The thought of Naidar’s shadow marking him out for a bloody death in the Aiyalen Spire had the skin of my neck crawling. Wouldn’t be long before the markets started shutting down until dawn. He might be waiting ’til the crowds thinned to make some move. But I had one advantage Naidar didn’t, for all his magic.
“No shadow man can follow me if I take to the walls,” I said. “If he does work for the killer, this could be the best chance for a lead yet. I’m signaling the Alathians now.” I tapped my fingers in the pattern Marten had taught me on the gold band circling my wrist, and felt the metal warm. “Once you’re clear, I’ll scramble up and lose him, then turn the tables and do a little shadowing of my own.”
“Dev…” Reluctance was all over Cara’s face.
“
Please,
Cara. Best thing you can do is to get to the embassy and tell Ambassador Halassian what’s happening here.”
Cara grimaced, but she jerked her head in a nod.
“When we cross behind that spice cart, split off down that alley,” I told her.
We passed behind battered shelves redolent with cinnamon, cardamom, and anise. Cara cast me one stricken, burning glance, and disappeared into the alley’s darkness.
I strode on, heart pounding. Thank Khalmet, the shadow man did too. Two streets down, I ducked down a slit between two wineshops. The walls loomed above me, ten stories tall, the stars glittering high above.
I didn’t dare wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I brushed my fingers over the wall and found a mortared crack. Right as I pulled up, a voice spoke from behind me.
“
Assilia kora meit,
” it said, in heavily accented Varkevian. A rush of wind as hot and violent as a sandstorm tore me from the wall. I hit the rough stone of the alley floor hard enough to knock every wisp of air from my lungs.
Dazed, my head ringing, I tried to roll to my feet. Nothing happened. My muscles burned and tingled as if pierced by a thousand tailor’s needles, and wouldn’t respond to a single one of my desperate mental commands.
Hands gripped my shirt and yanked me up. My back slammed against the wall. Magelight flared to paint the walls with sickly green. The cleft-chinned miner loomed over me. Behind him stood a woman whose belted gray dress was marked with purple sigils of a style I didn’t know. The magelight gleamed from a thick triangular crystal held in her upraised hand.
Oh, fuck. None of the charms I carried would do much good against active casting, even if I could move to reach them. How long until the Alathians came? If I’d ever needed their help, it was now. At least Cara was clear. I squinted at the light of the alley’s mouth. A steady trickle of people passed beyond. None of them looked our way. Every streetsider in Ninavel learns fast and early to keep clear of shadow business.
“Now here’s a sight to gladden a man’s heart,” said a male voice whose mocking familiarity stopped my breath. Pello slid into the magelight. His mop of curls was hidden beneath a woven cap, but his sharp-chinned, coppery face was as sly as I remembered. “The resourceful outrider, helpless as a newborn kitten.”
I tried to speak and managed only an airless wheeze. Pello grinned at me, his dark eyes glinting. Khalmet’s hand, what was he doing mixed up in this? Back in Alathia, he’d claimed to work for Sechaveh. That must’ve been another lie.
“Well?” Pello asked the mage. “Did he signal anyone before you struck?”
The mage said, “He carries an active signaling charm, but I dissipated its magic the moment he triggered it.”
Shit. Cara would tell the Alathians, but it’d take her a good hour to reach the embassy. Far too long, if Pello and his pet mage had anything truly nasty in mind.
The mage had spoken with all the bored impatience of someone stuck doing a distasteful but necessary job. She must’ve been paid to help Pello ambush me. But paid by whom?
“What of his other charms?” Pello asked. “Shaikar only knows what he’s carrying.”
Irritation twisted the mage’s round face. “Don’t concern yourself, shadow man.” She leaned around the miner to clamp a hand on my shoulder. I braced myself for some awful manifestation of magic. Instead, in clipped tones, she proceeded to tell Pello exactly what charms I carried and where I’d hidden them. The thick-muscled miner kept me pinned to the wall as Pello dug every one of my charms out of their hiding places and dropped them into a sigil-marked cloth bag.
When he had them all, he handed the bag to the mage. She intoned something else in Varkevian. The sigils on the bag burst into violet flames. When the flames faded, the mage turned the bag over. A powdery cloud of ash drifted out to mix with the sand and grime coating the alley’s stone.
“No mage can trace the charms now,” she said.
I glared, fear and fury rising together. No chance of trying again to bring the Alathians, let alone using my boneshatter charm on Pello or the miner.
“Turn him around,” the mage said.
My muscles still wouldn’t obey me, nor would my voice. The miner yanked me around and shoved me face-first against the wall. A hand pulled the neck of my shirt down to expose my upper back.
Something cold and metal touched the base of my neck, right over my spine. Needling pain pierced my skin, like myriad fangs digging deep. The metal warmed to pulse unpleasantly.
Shit! They’d put a painbender charm on me. I couldn’t pull the thing off. It had legs like a spider’s that’d driven deep around my spine.
The miner swung me back around. Pello held out his hand to the mage. She dropped two thin gold rings into his waiting palm.
“It’s ready to be keyed.”
He pricked a finger and touched it to one of the rings before slipping the ring on. The metal at the back of my neck pulsed again. I took as deep a breath as my tingling muscles would allow, guessing what was coming next.
Sure enough, Pello held up a hand as the mage turned away. “Wait. I want to be sure this works.” He whispered a word and clenched his fingers.
Knives of fire ripped through every organ in my body. A scream tried to escape me, though all that emerged was a hoarse croak. Agony blurred my thoughts, my vision going dark.
Abruptly, the pain ended. I hung limp in the miner’s grip, my eyes burning and my chest heaving.
Pello watched me with a sharp, avid smile. “That’s for the crossbow bolt you put in my shoulder.”
It’d been Cara that shot him, not me. But she’d done it on my order. I mouthed a silent curse and spat.
He laughed and nodded to the mage. “Your part’s done.”
Her hands flexed like she wanted to cast something unpleasant on him. “Tell your employer my debt is paid.”
I sure wished somebody would mention just who that employer was. This all felt a little too streetside for Ruslan. Besides, whoever wanted me, clearly wanted me alive. That mage could’ve killed me on the spot with her strike. Maybe the killer thought I could provide him information that’d let him ambush Kiran and Mikail again and win this time.
The miner let go of me. I stumbled and fell, my legs still useless. The miner scowled down in disgust. “How long before he recovers from your strike? Look at him. We’ll have to drag him the whole damn way to the meet.”
“Not my concern.” The mage strode out of the alley, taking the magelight with her.
The miner sighed and knotted a fist in my shirt to heave me back up to my feet. “Mages,” he grumbled to Pello. “Raving assholes, every one.”
“You have no idea,” Pello said, with a depth of bitterness that set me wondering all over again. Whoever his employer was, he didn’t seem thrilled about it. “Quit whining and start hauling.”
The miner half-dragged, half-carried me toward the street, Pello pacing at his side. The tingling in my muscles slowly faded, but I let my feet drag. While I wore the painbender charm, I couldn’t run, not unless I could get the control ring away from Pello first. If he thought me too weak to do anything, maybe he’d get careless.
At the alley’s mouth, Pello edged out ahead to survey the street beyond. I let my hand swing out and scrape against the corner, hard enough to rip a shred of skin from my knuckles and leave a barely-visible smear of blood. Maybe nobody would see a stain so small, even the Alathians, if they ever came hunting. Still, it might be enough for a mage to use in a tracking spell.
As the miner hauled me along progressively darker and emptier streets, I couldn’t help thinking of the horribly mutilated corpses in Aiyalen. Every spine-chilling tale I’d ever heard of demons ran through my head.
But when we finally ducked down another dark alleyway and they pulled me through a warped and stained metal door into a lantern-lit room, it wasn’t some aloof mage who waited there amidst the crumbling stonework.
“About time,” my former employer Bren snapped. “What, did you decide to go drinking along the way?”
He was a tubby Arkennlander in his late fifties, with a moon-round face and a generous mouth. Tonight he showed no trace of the jovial amiability he pretended with his clients. His stance was unyielding, his dark eyes cold and deadly, betraying the ruthlessness that made him Acaltar’s best and longest-lived smuggling boss. The miner dumped me onto the cracked stones at his feet.
“The snatch needed to be quiet.” Pello fished the second painbender ring from his pocket and handed it to Bren. “We had to wait until he slipped off and tried to lose Jasin. Besides, you’re not the one paying me in this. You don’t call the game.”
Bren spat something guttural in Varkevian. It sounded like an insult rather than a protest. I wondered who was calling the game—the killer?
Pello ignored Bren and bent over me. “Shame you never learned to play any part but a token’s. But you’re not the first man to be crippled by his loyalties.” His tone was mocking, but his eyes were dead serious.
My voice was finally working again. “Thought you worked for Sechaveh,” I husked out.
“Not anymore.” He said it flat and hard. Before I could frame another question, he said to Bren, “He’s all yours,” and slipped out, the miner on his heels.
“Bren? What the hell is this?” I shoved up, but only made it as far as my knees before Bren kicked me back down.
“Did you think you could cross me and get away with it?”
“Cross you? Other way around, wasn’t it? Who tricked me into trying to smuggle a blood mage across the border, without so much as a hint of the true risk? I finished your Shaikar-cursed job in spite of all you left out, and earned my pay as fair as you could ask for.” I’d nearly died about ten times over on that Khalmet-touched trip, and my survival was no thanks to him or his partner Gerran.
Bren clenched his ringed hand. Pain savaged me, blotting out thought. When it finally ebbed, I found myself lying curled at his feet, every muscle aching and my breath coming in hitching gasps.
Bren said, “You left out the part where you sold out Gerran and his entire operation.”
“Oh shit, the Council—” I blurted, before I could stop myself. “They arrested Gerran, didn’t they.” Marten hadn’t told me, damn him. Though I should have guessed it. At Kiran’s trial, the Council had questioned me under truth spell about my smuggling. They must’ve followed up on what I’d told them and ferreted out Gerran and his holdings. I hadn’t spared Gerran a thought until now, being more than a little preoccupied with other matters.
“Arrested him, confiscated the contents of his warehouses and all his accounts, and executed him,” Bren agreed. “He and I built our business over more years than you’ve been alive, you little shit. You have no concept of how much your big mouth has cost me.”
My stomach sank. I’d worked for Bren because he never went back on a deal, but that went two ways. Men who broke faith with him didn’t live long. The ominously dark stains on the room’s stone loomed large in my eyes.
“When a bunch of Alathian mages grab you and question you under truth spell because they’re all riled up over a blood mage crossing their precious border, you don’t have too much say in what comes out of your mouth. Look, I’m sorry about Gerran. But for Khalmet’s sake, I didn’t do it deliberately! I didn’t even know they’d grabbed him.”
Bren laughed, a grating chuckle. “Right. That’s why the first news I hear of you back in Ninavel says you’re errand boy to a gang of Alathian mages.”
“Did Pello tell you that? You know he lies like other men breathe.” News traveled fast in the city, but this was a little too fast. I’d taken care not to be seen streetside with anyone in an Alathian uniform. If I’d been recognized with them highside, that pointed to surveillance of either the Alathians themselves, or the specific sites where the killer had struck.
“Didn’t need a shadow man for that. Seems at least one of your foreign friends doesn’t like you much. Can’t imagine why.” Bren’s smile displayed far too many teeth. “Got a nice sigil-sealed letter telling me all about how you dance to the Council’s tune now. Before you try and deny it, I’ll have you know I did my own checking. You’re the cause of my woes, sure enough.”
“That letter wasn’t from any Alathian.” I wasn’t sure yet how Pello played into this, but I’d been wrong again about Ruslan. Practicality must have won out over sadism. He’d use Bren for the killing thrust, and never once break his vow. “Fuck with me, Bren, and you’re fucking with not just one, but an entire crew of mages.”
Bren snorted. “You think those Alathians will care if you vanish? They’ll find a new informant without blinking twice.”
“Oh, they’ll care,” I assured him. “Because they’ll assume I got snatched by the mage-killer they’re hunting with Lord Sechaveh. When they find the trail leads only to a streetside smuggling boss, you think they’ll just let you walk away whistling? They’ll be pissed at all that wasted effort and take it out on your hide.” Not that I believed Marten would bother to take revenge, but Bren wouldn’t know that.
“Luckily, you’re not the only one who can make deals with mages,” Bren said. “The trail won’t lead here.”
He spoke with complete certainty. Maybe Ruslan had promised him safety from retribution. Or perhaps he meant Pello’s mystery employer. Sweat slicked my palms. “Trusting a mage is like asking a scorpion not to sting, and you know it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking. You’d have had your pet mage kill me in that alley.”