2012-08-In the Event of My Untimely Demise (3 page)

Don’t call me dear, Luma wanted to say. “At any rate, we have each spoiled the other’s attempt to follow Jordyar. I suggest we part, with no hard feelings.”

The priest bowed deep, and went on his way.

Luma signaled to her brother Ontor, who for several minutes had been standing across the way. He’d appeared in her peripheral vision, sauntering down the street, looking for her. Seeing her occupied, he’d dropped into a pose, engaging in conversation with loitering dockworkers.

It never surprised Luma to see one of her siblings appear out of the blue like this. Her sister Iskola could see from afar, and whisper into distant ears. Wherever she was in Magnimar, one of the others could always find her.

Ontor required no further instructions. Adopting a languid lope, he pushed off after Rieslan.

Iskola’s spells didn’t permit them to communicate with one another, so Luma would find a rendezvous and wait. She ambled for the closest of the Derexhi haunts, a spot named after its proprietor, Chanda, who specialized in bream broth and walnut bread. Luma claimed the darkest corner, where Chanda, unbidden, brought her soup, half a loaf of the bread, and a bowl of sea snails in red garlic sauce. Luma paid Chanda the usual premium for a lengthy stay and settled in.

An hour later, Ontor slid into the seat across from her, a sea snail bowl already in one hand and a half-filled ale flagon in the other. “You’ll be happy to hear I was also deemed too much a black sheep for the Vitellus job.”

Family politics could wait, Luma decided. There was a mystery to solve. Even if the answer was that there was no mystery at all. “Where did he go?”

Ontor threw his head back, dropped a sea snail in, and swallowed, pleased with his show of downmarket manners. The stevedores filling the restaurant ate the same way. “He’s staking out a hovel down in Rag’s End. Waiting for someone to show. Since I have no idea of the situation, I figured I’d come and collect you, and we’d check the place out together.”

Luma dunked a final bread crust into the remnants of her broth.

Ontor wiped ale-foam from his lips. “That was a hint, by the way. A request for context.”

Luma briefed him on the case to date: the prearranged, posthumous assignment; the widow and her pleurisy story; Jordyar the dwarf and then Rieslan the river-cleric and their tangled, treacherous history with Aruhal.

Ontor gobbled the rest of his food. “So you reckon this Rieslan knows where Jordyar is staying, and, having lost him in Dockway, has gone there to wait for him?”

Luma hadn’t so reckoned, but would have, given one more moment’s thought. The two half-siblings set out for Rag’s End.

∗∗∗

As ramshackle as its name suggested, Rag’s End stretched out before them as an expanse of hovels and shanties. Luma and Ontor strode with dispatch past a crowd gathered for an impromptu match between a mastiff and a crab spider half again its size. Sensing a form of authority approaching, the bettors hunched and turned their faces away. A jagged laneway sloped gently into a depression. As Ontor led Luma down its length, a gathering fog grew from scattered wisps to an obscuring mass.

At the end of the cul-de-sac a two-story structure held itself with lordly remove from the surrounding shacks. To its left, a cloud of flies buzzed around a heap of rotting trash. Piles of rubble, wood and masonry mostly, formed an unintended fence around the building’s right side.

“That’s where your old duffer was waiting,” Ontor said.

Luma peered into the twilight. There was no immediate sign of Rieslan now. Lamplight issued from an open window facing the debris wall.

“He’s either gone in,” Ontor whispered, “or gone entirely. But someone must be in there.” He wasn’t so much stating the obvious as asking: do we go in and see?

In reply, Luma nodded. Hunching, the two of them covered the distance to the wall, and then to the side of the house.

Luma let in the citysong, hearing the whispers and shushes of the billowing fog. Cozened by her spell, it pooled around them, its protective mantle blending naturally with the mist flowing through the neighborhood. They could see into the house, while anyone looking out would see only swirling vapor.

Inside Luma saw two familiar individuals, and two unfamiliar.

Jordyar sat atop a wooden table, picking at his rotting teeth with his fingers. Rieslan slumped in a chair, shoved in a corner. Ropes bound his waist, arms, and ankles. Wet blood reddened his goatee. His divine charm, with its rat and raft motif, swung from a rafter, a good twenty feet away. Without it, Luma knew, he wouldn’t be able to shape his appeals to the realms beyond, and would receive no magic from his god.

A second, much younger man was also tied to a chair, this one positioned in the center of the room. Muscular and tanned, he would have been handsome, prior to the beating he’d taken. His face swelled and purpled; scorched holes in his tunic revealed burned skin beneath. Still conscious, the man seemed to be willing himself to pass out, and failing at it.

Over him stood a creased, leathery man dressed in a suede robe dotted with turquoise and agate beads. He wore a vest with no shirt beneath it, showing off the puffy muscles of a fit but elderly man. Greasy black hair hung straight from his scalp down to his shoulders. A long mustache drooped from his upper lip to his protruding clavicles.

He grunted at Jordyar, who approached him carrying a poker, which he held out at arm’s length with the aid of his thick hide glove. The mustached man spoke arcane syllables, evoking a cone-shape blast of flame, which flew from his fingertips to the poker. The poker’s iron tip glowed red.

“Please,” the prisoner sobbed. “I’m begging you.”

Jordyar hefted the red-hot poker. “You’re doing to this yourself, Gaval.”

Gaval shuddered. “I can’t tell you anything about it. Seriza never mentioned such a thing! And Aruhal—I barely spoke a hundred words to him my entire life. I’m just an apothecary.”

Jordyar’s partner—who had to be the sorcerer, Naphrax—turned to the terrified young man in the chair. “Tell us,” he said.

The dwarf advanced with the poker.

“Tell us,” repeated Naphrax.

“Need I remind you?” Naphrax asked his prisoner.

Tears further wet Gaval’s bloodied cheeks. “Of what?”

“Of what we know.”

“You’re wrong.”

Jordyar jabbed the poker in Gaval’s face. “You’ve replaced Aruhal in his comely wife’s bed, haven’t you?”

Gaval held his chin up. “I love Seriza, and Seriza loves me. That doesn’t mean I’ve heard of this treasure.”

“She spoke nothing of it?” Naphrax snorted.

Outrage stirred Gaval from his agonized stupor. “She and Aruhal had nothing. She’ll be better off with my takings, humble as they are!”

“Liar,” Naphrax spat.

Holding the poker out of sight behind him, the dwarf sidled up to Gaval, grimacing out a rotten-toothed smile. “What Aruhal did to us is not your fault, boy. But by standing in our way, feeding us ridiculous untruths, it becomes your fault. Don’t you see that?”

“How many times do I have to tell you?”

“If you won’t spill,” Naphrax said, “we’ll take the woman, and do the same to her.”

Jordyar pressed the glowing poker to the prisoner’s leg. Gaval screamed, the smoke of burning fabric giving way to the steam of blackening flesh.

At the window, Ontor looked to Luma, his expression asking: are we going to let this happen?

Luma waved him to silence, then reached into the citysong for the vein of venom that pulsed below the city’s skin. Magnimar’s settlers brought with them their Chelish tradition of settling affairs with arsenic, belladonna, and kingsleep. Luma took in this dark harmony and projected it outward, to the blood-spotted tunic worn by the howling Gaval. In this town, to hear that a man was an apothecary was to think not only of healing, but its opposite.

Luma’s magic-inflamed senses confirmed it: tiny speckles of poison dotted his tunic, were ground as grime into his fingerprints. She couldn’t tell what variety, with so little of it still left. But she would bet it was the kind that made an already sick man die from seeming natural causes–of pleurisy, say.

“We need him,” said Luma. With a turn of her head she indicated an opposite window, not far from the second imprisoned man, the cleric Rieslan. “It will help if you can get him free–that will make it three against two.”

Ontor nodded and was gone. Moments later she saw him appear at the other window. Jordyar once more laid the poker on Gaval, this time applying it to his chest. Naphrax watched with stoic attention. Fully occupied by Gaval’s shrieking and squirming, neither man noticed Ontor’s acrobatic contortions as he fit himself, legs first, through the tiny window. He dropped to the floor with a muffled thud that at last turned their heads, but only in time to see him draw his knife and slash open the ropes binding Rieslan. Then he bounded up to grab the holy symbol from the rafter, tossed it to the priest, and threw his knife at Naphrax. The spellcaster only barely managed to duck out of the way, yet the blade succeeded in interrupting his gesticulations and spoiling whatever spell he meant to cast.

Luma, meanwhile, shifted her awareness to another vault of the city’s memory. Her mind traveled to the spires and rooftops, from the heights of the Arvensoar barracks tower to the great stone snake encircling the Hippodrome. From the mystic vibrations of these structures she pulled out the countless times they’d been struck by lightning. Converting them from past thought to present memory, she brought into being a vertical bolt of blue energy. It materialized above the dwarf, striking the crown of his bald head. He sizzled and convulsed, the poker flying out of his hands.

Naphrax started to cast a spell at her, but Rieslan, holy symbol clutched between gnarled fingers, came up behind him, chanting. He shoved his hand past the sorcerer’s vest and onto his bare skin. A swirl of angry energy shunted from the old priest’s fingers into Naphrax’s breastbone. The sorcerer staggered back, clutching his chest, his arm going stiff.

A wolfish look came over the priest. “That sluggish heart of yours can’t take another of those. Can it, Naphrax?”

“I should have killed you in Kaer Maga,” said the sorcerer, sweating.

“I should have killed you in that awful tavern, the moment we met,” said Rieslan.

Jordyar, his clothes still steaming slightly, staggered and reached for his axe, positioning himself for a lunge against Ontor. Luma called down another lightning bolt, striking him as before, and he dropped to one knee, panting.

Luma crawled through her window, a few last tendrils of summoned fog purling away from her. “Are we done here, gentlemen?”

Naphrax still hadn’t caught his breath. “He hasn’t told us.”

Ontor cut Gaval’s bonds.

The freed prisoner rose, quaking; Luma indicated his soiled trousers. “You terrified him. You think he wouldn’t have sold out the widow in a heartbeat, if he thought it would spare him?”

Gaval struggled to form words. “I take exception to—”

Luma cut him off. “This is not a good time for you to talk.”

He hung his head.

“My brother and I,” Luma said, “are leaving, with Gaval. He and I have a separate matter to discuss. What the three of you do is of no concern to us. You have nothing to gain from further hostilities, and would not prevail. Are we agreed, or shall I punctuate that with a lightning bolt?”

“Agreed,” grunted Naphrax. The others said nothing, so, each holding one of the quaking man’s arms, Luma and Ontor withdrew–through the front door, this time.

“Where do you live, apothecary?” Luma asked.

“Above my uncle’s shop, in Vista.”

To the southeast lay the Seerspring Gardens, where they could hire a hansom, and get him to his home in the Summit.

“So,” said Luma, “let me guess. When you began to console her, Seriza was not yet a widow.”

“I would never…” Gaval tried to pull away, but she held him tight, as did her brother.

“If we ask her neighbors how often they saw you around before Aruhal died, will they tell the same story?”

Gaval slumped into her. “Very well. But I beg your discretion. Calumnize me all you like, but spare the lady’s reputation.”

As they crossed an intersection, Luma saw a lurker one street down, paralleling their progress. She stopped and waved Rieslan over. The river-priest hesitated, then complied, his gait sheepish. “Never was much for sneaking,” he said, joining the others.

“That was Aruhal’s job,” said Luma, moving on. “Your old comrades have patched up their grievances, it would seem.”

Rieslan fell into step, at her elbow. “It won’t last. Are you sure you haven’t guessed where the treasure is?”

She shook her head; lying was easier when confined to gesture alone. “When did the four of you have your falling out, precisely?”

“We learned to hate one another long before the Demonsweald. But it was after we captured the reliquary that Naphrax and Jordyar decided it would be better if Aruhal were cut out of the deal.”

Luma raised her faint auburn eyebrow. “And you had nothing to do with that?”

Rieslan made a sour face. “Let’s say, I absented myself from discussions.”

“A sin of omission, then.”

The old priest laughed. “My god hungers for the last breaths of the drowning. His moral demands are flexible.”

“And how did they inform Aruhal of the new arrangement?”

“With axe and spell.” The priest’s chuckle suggested that it hardly needed saying.

“One more question,” said Luma. “Who researched this treasure? Aruhal?”

“Another correct surmise, my dear.”

They parted with him at the gardens, and rode with Gaval in the cab. As soon as he was seated, the tortured man passed out.

“You were good back there,” said Ontor.

Nothing phases Ontor—not even death.

If only the others had seen it, thought Luma. Maybe Ontor would tell them. She considered asking him to, but knew it would spoil the effect.

Arriving at Derexhi House, Luma went straight to the library, which smelled of leather, wine, and her father’s olibanum cologne. Muttering curses at Randred’s haphazard reshelving habits, she hunted until she found the folio labeled “Acts and Legends of the Holy.” Giving silent thanks for its alphabetical arrangement, she found the entry for the holy warrior Lovag, whose reliquary had so muddled her assignment. To Ontor she read aloud: