Legacy of Kings (58 page)

She said nothing. They had discussed this at length in Coldorra and no one had come up with a better idea. Whatever fantasy she’d had that they would come up with an alternative at the last minute was fading along with night’s darkness.

“Siderea wasn’t trying to kill me in Tefilat,” he reminded her. “She wanted me taken prisoner. So it stands to reason that even if she manages to get the upper hand now, she probably won’t kill me immediately.”

“And if her plan was to torture you?”

She could see his jawline tense. “Well, then, that will succeed in distracting her, won’t it?”

Kamala started to open her mouth to say something, but he turned and put a finger to her lips. “Shh. No more.” He took off the silver ring he was wearing and placed it in her hand. It looked like the same ring he had lost in Tefilat; her hand tingled briefly as she held it, remembering Lazaroth’s poison. “I won’t be able to send a message to you without her detecting it. So you’ll have to gather the information you need from here. If I die, then launch the operation without hesitation, and let’s hope she is preoccupied enough with my death to give you the time you need.” He folded her fingers over the ring. “The others will wait upon your word, Kamala. I’ve arranged it with Salvator. You are the one who must tell them when to begin.”

“I will,” she said. Closing her hand tightly about the ring. “But only if you promise me that you’ll return safely.”

It seemed to her that a terrible sadness came into his eyes.

“I made this mess,” he whispered. “So long ago. Another lifetime. Now I must help clean it up.”

Stepping away from her, he glanced back at Salvator for approval. The High King nodded. Colivar shut his eyes for a moment and concentrated. The air directly in front of him began to shimmer, and a portal the size and width of a man formed. Without looking back, he stepped into it. The air rippled like water in the wake of his passage, then grew still once more as the portal vanished behind him. The small piece of bone fell to the sand behind him; Kamala walked over and picked it up, tucking it carefully into her doublet.

She knew that the odds of Colivar coming out of this alive were slim. Surely he knew it too. If he had been morati, she would have thought that he was resigned to his death. But such a state wasn’t possible for a Magister. So this was something more complex than simple self-sacrifice. A desperate bid for freedom, perhaps. A chance to cast off the shadows of the past, after so many centuries he could no longer remember what it felt like to live without them. The most rare and precious thing any man might fight to possess: a chance to start over.

Any man might be willing to risk his life for that. Even a Magister.

If she had believed that there was any god who cared about the welfare of Magisters, she might have prayed for Colivar. As it was, she could do no more than slide the ring onto her right thumb—the only finger it fit—and wait.

Siderea dreamt that the gods were angry at her. It was a dream she’d had before, but not one that usually worried her. If there really were divine entities in Jezalya who had an issue with her presence there, thus far they had proven too impotent—or simply uninterested—to do anything about it. By which she judged that her nightmares were merely nightmares, and had no greater significance.

But today’s dream felt different.

She woke up with a sense of dread that was both compelling and unfocused. As if she knew that something in her immediate environment was
wrong
, somehow, but didn’t know what. Lying still in her bed, she tried to focus on the feeling, to determine its cause. There didn’t appear to be anything amiss in the bedchamber itself, nor in the rooms beyond it, nor anywhere surrounding the palace. She reached out to her ikati consort to see if perhaps some agitation from that creature had bled through to her awareness, but the ikati queen was still asleep, her presence no more than a dull, warm weight in Siderea’s mind.

All seemed well enough.

And yet it was not.

Gathering her power to her, Siderea extended her senses out into Jezalya itself, searching for any anomaly that might explain her disquiet. For the most part the city seemed quiet. A local witch had been hired to keep rats away from the meat market; another was establishing travel wards on a merchant’s wagon that would urge thieves to choose some other target. Other than those few sparks of witchery, this dawn seemed as quiet as any.

It was not. She knew that.

Closing her eyes, Siderea summoned the nearest bird to come to her. A dove arrived at her window a few moments later, its iridescent blue wings identifying it as one of those she had received as a gift from a sycophantic merchant. She had set them loose in her gardens, knowing that there were few places in the hot, dry city for them to escape.

Gently she extended her consciousness into the small winged creature. It was a trick that was becoming more and more difficult over time; apparently her tie to a great predator made herbivorous birds loath to accept her essence. But she was practiced in the art, and soon she was able to slide her mind into the tiny creature, allowing her to direct its motions and see through its eyes. If a flutter of avian panic attended the action, it was not enough to distract her.

She headed out the window and began to fly over the city. Dawn’s light was just beginning to spread out across the heavens, which meant that the city was beginning to stir. She ignored all the people who were going about their normal business, searching for any pattern of activity that seemed out of the ordinary. But she could find none. As far as the residents of Jezalya were concerned, this morning was just like any other.

When she was satisfied that the rest of the city was functioning normally, she headed toward the House of Gods. The patina of residual energy hanging about the place made it hard for her to make out any meaningful patterns there. Traces of prayer clung to the ancient walls, along with the residue of countless rituals, some of them magical in nature. Spells had been affixed to many of the idols for one purpose or another, and foreign energies swirled and eddied about them. A minor spell worked in such an environment would be all but undetectable, and there would be no way to see it from a distance.

Yet as soon as she approached the ancient temple, she realized that the source of her disquiet was indeed here. For a brief moment she worried that it might be coming from within the House itself (what if the gods really
were
angry with her?), but as she circled the plaza, she was able to make out a place nearby that seemed to resonate as if a powerful rite had just been performed there. It was within a small copse of trees that flanked the prayer plaza, the only place within sight where a man could hide himself . . . or his magic. She circled the area warily at first, looking for any sign that the perpetrator was still present, but apparently the place was empty. So she settled her avian body on an upper branch of one of the trees and folded its wings, preparing to concentrate all her attention on the task at hand. Then she reached within her soul for power, molded it into a spell of inquiry, and cast it out over the area. She could not pick out any personal traces of the person who had been here while possessing another creature; the focus required to maintain control of its body detracted from her ability to focus her power on fine details. But the spell he had performed here was another thing. The kind of magic that could tear a hole in reality was not easily obscured, and the metaphysical scar that it left behind when it closed was something no well-trained witch could mistake. She could not tell who had made it, or what kind of power had been used, but its purpose was clear.

A portal had been conjured here.

She withdrew her mind from the dove, hearing it squawk in surprise as its body was suddenly returned to it. For a moment she lay still upon her bed, considering the ramifications of what she had just experienced. Though she had established wards all over the city to warn her of any foreign magic being used, she had not done so in the area immediately surrounding the House of Gods. Such a spell would have been triggered ten times a day by the priests and pilgrims who performed their rituals there, becoming effectively worthless. So the conjuration of a portal right next to the House of Gods should not have triggered any of her metaphysical alarms, and it should not have awakened her from sleep. Something else had done that. Had someone tried to get through her personal defenses? Perhaps whoever had arrived through the portal?

Don’t jump to conclusions,
she warned herself. Many a powerful witch had died as a result of misreading such situations; she did not intend to join their ranks.

She sent out a spark of power to awaken one of the palace witches, a young woman named Hameh. By the time the girl arrived, Siderea had put on a silk dressing gown and had applied a whisper of magic to smooth out her sleep-tousled hair. No one in the palace was ever allowed to see her at less than her best; that was part of her mystique. The same could not be said of the young woman, who was rubbing the sleep from her eyes as she responded to the summons.

“Milady.” The witch bowed deeply in the southern style, hands before her forehead. “How may I serve you?”

“A portal was used outside the House of Gods. I need to know if one of our own people was involved. And I need to find that out discreetly, Hameh. Can you do that for me?”

The girl bowed again. “Of course, milady. Though if you really need discretion, I’ll have to wait a bit. If I wake up the city’s witches to ask them questions, they’ll know that something’s amiss.”

“That’s fine.” Siderea wasn’t happy about the delay, but there were other avenues of investigation she could apply while waiting for Jezalya’s witches to wake up.

After the witch departed, Siderea called for her servants to come and dress her. Not because she needed help, or even wanted help, but because that custom was a standard part of royal protocol, and questions would be asked if she did otherwise.

In the distance the ikati queen awoke and stirred, wondering aloud at the agitation she sensed from her consort.
Are we in danger?
the creature asked.

Siderea hesitated.
I don’t know yet.

It was always possible that the portal wasn’t significant. Someone who had needed to leave Jezalya quickly had hired a witch to send him elsewhere. Someone who had wanted to visit the city hadn’t been in the mood for a long desert trek.

But magical transportation was costly enough that such things were never done casually. And a legitimate traveler would have no reason to depart from the one place in Jezalya where local energies would mask such a spell. Not to mention the fact that an innocent portal would not have awakened her from a dead sleep, no matter how many wards it had triggered.

Farther in the distance, the leading edge of the sun breached the horizon at last.

Nasaan awoke from sleep the moment the door to his bedchamber creaked, and he had a weapon in his hand by the time it was fully open. Battlefield reflexes. His visitor was clearly startled, and hesitated on the threshold. By the dim light of early dawn he could see it was one of the palace witches, a young woman named Hameh. Normally he wouldn’t respond well to such a furtive entrance, but this was someone he had entrusted with unusually discreet business. If she was coming to him at this hour of the morning, and was not even willing to knock on the door for fear of alerting the servants, she must have significant news.

Sheathing his sword in the hidden place beside his bed—another battlefield habit—he waved for her to approach him. “What news?” he asked, his voice pitched low enough that no one outside the room would hear it.

She offered a hurried gesture of obeisance. “You wanted to be informed if the Lady Consort did anything unusual.”

“Yes.”
Unusual
was a subjective term, of course, and he’d already had a thousand useless bits of information delivered to him by agents who thought they were doing him a favor. But he paid for it every time. Better too much information than too little. “What happened?”