Wolfblade (76 page)

Exactly how they were going to deal with this, however, was something, right at that moment, Marla had no notion of. She turned to Lirena, falling into practicality, as she seemed to do every time she was confronted with a crisis. “Could you arrange to have the children fed, Lirena? They can eat in here with us. And send Elezaar down to me. I want a message sent to the palace, too. Damin is Lernen’s heir—an attack on him is an attack on the High Prince. The High Arrion will need to be informed, also. We’ll need the Sorcerers’ Collective to provide us with additional guards until we can get more of our own people here from Elasapine. For that matter, I might send to Krakandar for Almodavar. He’s the best there is and would give his life for Laran’s son.” Then she glanced at Starros and added, “And his own.”

“I’ll see to it,” the old nurse promised, looking at Marla with concern. “Are
you
all right, my lady?”

“Just a little shaken. I’ll be fine.”

Lirena handed Kalan to her mother, bowed arthritically and walked from the room, leaving Marla holding her precious daughter with the sick realisation that the past two years of relative bliss had abruptly come to an end. Someone had tried to kill her eldest son, which meant somebody didn’t want him to be the High Prince’s heir. She tried to run through the possible enemies of the throne in her mind, but the list started with Hablet of Fardohnya and finished with any number of abused and discarded slaves with a grudge against her brother—and considering the life he led,
that
number might be in the thousands.

Who could do such a thing
? she wondered.
Who could be heartless enough to order the assassination of a four-year-old child?’

She couldn’t imagine anybody being so callous. She could, however, imagine a limitless array of very painful and cruel things she would cheerfully do to the perpetrator of this crime when he was caught. And he
would
be caught. There was no question in Marla’s mind about that. She was the High Prince’s sister and had the resources of a whole nation at her disposal if
she decided to mobilise them. What was it Elezaar had taught her? One of his damn Rules of Power. Number Nineteen, if she remembered correctly.
Be merciful when it doesn’t matter—ruthless when it does
.

Where is the dwarf, anyway
?

Nobody threatened one of her children and lived to boast of it. Nobody.

And where the hell is Nash
?

A
fter two years in Greenharbour, Wrayan Lightfinger probably wasn’t able to claim he was the greatest thief in all of Hythria just yet, but he was certainly well on his way to earning that title.

Wrayan had chosen not to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a pickpocket. As Brak pointed out, there was far too much risk involved for too little reward. So Wrayan chose a career as a burglar, instead. Thanks to his family name and connections—Calen Lightfinger was a respected member of the Krakandar Thieves’ Guild, Wrayan discovered—he had been granted leave by the Greenharbour Guild to pursue his chosen career, provided they got twenty per cent of all his takings. Brak thought the figure offensive, but Wrayan accepted it philosophically as the cost of doing business here.

Besides, the alternative was to go it alone and risk a visit from the Doorman, resulting in broken kneecaps (or worse) as a warning from the Guild about the perils of freelancing.

Dressed in his dark Harshini leathers, Wrayan blatantly used his magic to aid him in his chosen career. He’d been uneasy about that to start with, questioning the ethics of using magic to enhance his criminal activities, until Brak reminded him, that by stealing anything he was honouring the God of Thieves. The Harshini never judged any of the gods as good or evil. Even the concept of right and wrong was a little bit foreign to them, so there was nothing he was doing that would particularly bother them. On the Feast of Jakerlon, the God of Liars, the Harshini spent the day thinking up the most outrageous lies they could imagine for the entertainment and amusement of their god. Or at least, they tried to. For a race to whom lying was not a natural skill, telling any falsehood was something of a chore for them. Still, any race that celebrated a liar and a thief with the same enthusiasm as it honoured the Goddess of Love wasn’t going to be offended by the judicious use of a bit of magic to stop a worshipper from being caught in the act of honouring his god.

Wrayan travelled the flat rooftops of Greenharbour like a shadow, flitting
from one pocket of darkness to the next. With his magically enhanced Harshini senses, he knew when there were people in a room and if they were sleeping or awake. He could feel somebody coming down a hall long before others could hear them. No dog barked at his approach, no startled cat betrayed his presence. Even when his handiwork was discovered while he was still in the vicinity, the city guards never saw him, their eyes sliding over him as if he wasn’t really there—a useful trick Brak had taught him that required astonishingly little power.

He didn’t rely entirely on his magical skills, however. There was always a risk, however small, that someone from his former life might recognise him, so he regularly bleached his dark hair to lighten it and had grown a moustache to disguise his features.

Rather to his surprise, Wrayan discovered he enjoyed what he did. There wasn’t much risk involved, but there was a great deal of entertainment to be had watching those around him wonder how he managed to be so successful. He was living quite well, in rooms he shared with Brak in a boarding house on Lemon Street, a few minutes walk from the main markets in the merchants’ quarter. Their neighbours thought them cousins, staying in Green-harbour to squander the inheritance left to them by an elderly uncle.

Wrayan had wanted to go straight to the Sorcerers’ Collective and see the High Arrion when he first reached the city, but Brak had persuaded him not to. Although the former apprentice now remembered most of the details of his previous life, they still had no idea how Alija had been able to amplify her power the way she had. Until they discovered that, Brak thought it better if everybody continued to believe that the High Arrion’s apprentice was dead.

The deal Wrayan had with the Halfbreed was quite straightforward. Wrayan kept his bargain with Dacendaran—he remembered making it now—and kept them in relative style, while Brak, posing as a Fardohnyan scholar researching a book on the ancient Harshini kings, worked his way through the massive library of the Sorcerers’ Collective.

Brak knew what he was looking for. Andreanan, Sanctuary’s voluptuous librarian, had told him about some of the ancient scrolls the Harshini had not been able to recover from the Sorcerers’ Collective library before retreating into hiding. There were ways, she assured him, of amplifying even an Innate’s power temporarily. One just needed a little bit of raw power, the right scroll and the ability to read it.

Brak was worried about those scrolls, fearful they might fall into the wrong hands. Wrayan was pretty sure he didn’t give a fig about Alija, but the idea that a Karien priest might one day find a way to amplify his meagre power to a point where he might be able to hurt the Harshini was motive enough for the Halfbreed to keep looking for them as long as he had to. And he didn’t mind how long it took. Brak was almost immortal. He had the time to spare.

It was for Brak that Wrayan was going out across the rooftops again tonight; not on a mission to steal anything, but to investigate the house of Alija Eaglespike. An exhaustive search of the Sorcerers’ Collective library had convinced Brak the scrolls he sought were simply not there. He was guessing the next best place to look was Alija’s house. It was unlikely, he surmised, that she had memorised the spell back in her home in Dregian Province and simply invoked it when she was in Greenharbour. Such a spell was long and complicated and absolutely useless if you got so much as a syllable wrong. She had to have the scroll nearby, Brak reasoned, and the most logical place to keep it would be in her house.

“You know what to look for?” Brak asked, as Wrayan finished getting dressed. The Harshini leathers had never been cleaned the whole time he owned them, yet they looked as fresh as the day Brak had handed them to him in Sanctuary. They were dark, comfortable, silent in a way normal leather never was, and left him free to climb and run as if he was wearing nothing at all.

“Scrolls?” Wrayan suggested as he bent down to tug on his boots, which were made of the same strange leather as the rest of his clothes.

Brak glared at him.

“Locked away in a cupboard somewhere,” Wrayan added with a grin.

“Check for magical locks as well,” Brak advised. “If I were trying to keep something so valuable safe, I’d have them bound with every warding spell I could think of. Just don’t touch anything she’s warded magically.”

“Are they dangerous?”

“Are they
dangerous?”
Brak repeated with a baleful glare. “Have you learned nothing from me? If you trigger a warding spell accidentally, it might kill you, idiot! No wonder you were Kagan’s apprentice for ten years! It’s a miracle you’ve learned anything at all!”

“Sorry. That sounded a lot more stupid than I meant it to be. I was just thinking . . . would she really risk anything so dangerous? She has children in the house.”

“Then the best that can happen is Alija will know instantly if someone tries to tamper with her wards.”

“I’d like to tamper with more than that bitch’s wards,” Wrayan declared, rising. He bounced on the balls of his feet a few times, feeling ready for anything. Odd how dressing in the Harshini Dragon Riders’ leathers made him feel invincible.

“Not tonight, lad,” Brak warned. “I just want you to have a look around and tell me if there’s anything there that’s warded or otherwise magically protected. If those scrolls are in her house, let’s find a way to get a close look at them without getting ourselves killed, eh?”

“If you insist,” Wrayan sighed, as if Brak was spoiling all his fun.

“I do,” Brak replied. “Now go. I’ll meet you at Fuller’s Basket when you’re done and you can tell me what you’ve found over a well-deserved ale.”

“I could tell you while I’m in the house, if you want.”

“Too risky. You don’t know if Alija will be home. And if she is, you don’t know if she’ll detect someone drawing on the source in her vicinity. She might even be able to pick up on any telepathy. In and out, Wrayan. Nice and clean. And no magic.”

Alija’s house was on the other side of the city, in the most exclusive part of Greenharbour. It took Wrayan more than an hour to get there, and then another hour watching the house, waiting to make sure everyone was asleep, before he judged it safe enough to go on. He was being unusually cautious tonight. He couldn’t draw on his magic to aid him for fear of alerting Alija to the presence of another magician, so he was going to have to do this the hard way.

It was almost midnight before Wrayan was finally satisfied that the entire house was asleep. A little stiff from being crouched for so long on the roof of a neighbouring mansion, he nimbly jumped across the small gap between it and Alija’s house and ran silently along the flat roof to the other end of the main wing. He reached the edge and leaned over, pleased to find a balcony a small drop below him, from which he could then swing across to the balcony beside it. That would enable him to check most of the rooms on the second floor without having to go inside.

He lowered himself over the edge of the roof and landed without a sound, then gently tested the diamond-paned glass doors that looked as if they led into a deserted sitting room. Not surprisingly, the doors were locked.

He jumped across to the next balcony, which accessed the same room as the first. The next one led into a bedroom, and this time the door was partially open against the heat of the muggy Greenharbour nights. He gingerly cased it open a little wider and slipped inside, halting just inside the door behind the curtains, reaching out with every human sense he owned to determine if the room was empty. After a time, he realised the room was humming with the deep, sonorous snores of the occupant, but he could sense nothing that felt like magic in the room, so he slithered back through the door and jumped across to the next balcony.

This room was also occupied, he discovered when he cautiously entered through the open door. Although wrapped in darkness, he could just make out low, intimate voices, talking in the dark. Holding his breath, Wrayan backed up cautiously. He was still behind the curtain, so the couple in the bedroom had no idea he was there, but it would take as little as a scrape of his boot to betray his presence.

“I should be getting home,” a man’s voice remarked softly.

Wrayan froze. He knew that voice.

“Don’t leave on my account,” Alija replied, with the languid tiredness of
a sated lover. “I gave Barnardo a draught. He’ll sleep like the dead until tomorrow’s lunch is served.”

“I know. But . . . well, I was thinking . . . maybe . . . I shouldn’t visit for a while.” The tantalisingly familiar voice sounded a little concerned.

A bit late for that suggestion
, Wrayan thought,
for a man obviously cheating with another man’s wife
.

“Why?”

“Things might get . . . a little awkward, that’s all.”

“You’d raise suspicion if you changed your routine now,” Alija pointed out reasonably.

Risking a glance, Wrayan opened the curtains a fraction. The man’s face was turned from him, so he couldn’t see who Alija’s lover was. But he knew that voice. It was driving him crazy that he couldn’t place it.