Lightborn (11 page)

Tam looked weary. Mourning red drained his pink and freckled complexion and clashed with his ginger hair and brows. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, although she knew him to be at least a decade older than herself. To a high- rank mage, accomplished in healing, arrest of aging was almost trivial. The archmage was more than three hundred years old.

“Can you ensure we’re not overheard?” she said.

He sketched a tiny circle in the air. “Done.”

“Magister Tammorn,” she said formally, “the prince wishes to discuss a contract with you.”

Tam blinked. “Fejelis?” he said, surprising her by his ready use of the first name. “Did he say what?”

Could there be any question? “To find those responsible for his father’s death.”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“I recommended you as one likely to do a thorough job of it.”

“Floria—” He stopped, and gestured. “Sit down.” She did, tilting her rapier, and observing him closely. It was obvious he was disconcerted. The question was, why?

“There are mages contracted to the palace, mages whose contract Fejelis now holds.”

“Yes,” she said, “there are. But the way the prince died—I cannot see how magic could not have been involved. The prince—Prince Fejelis—asks that you visit him in the
salle
, at his usual practice time which is four of the clock.”

“Has he anyone else?” he said.

“No. I suggested you; he accepted it.”

Tam stared away into the distance. She did not even think he saw the Mages’ Tower, which even from here loomed immense on the skyline. “What do
you
know about the prince’s death, Floria?”

There was a stress on the pronoun that he surely did not intend to betray. Despite her certainty of her own blamelessness, despite the sunlight, she felt uneasy. Mages—unsettled—even a mage she had known since her father brought home the ginger-haired vagrant who spoke in monosyllables and refused to meet anyone’s eyes. What did he know that she did not?

She recited the same analysis she had given the prince.

“You are so certain,” he said, “that it could not have been done other than by magic.”

“The lights were discharged, dark, not removed, not covered, not smashed—even then the fragments would have continued to glow. Besides the prince, there were three people in the room, one a captain of the Prince’s Vigilance. Their—residues—were all exactly as I would expect them to be: prince and secretary by the desk, Captain Parhelion by the door, and the prince’s manservant readying the bedchamber. All the lights, in all the rooms—and there were seventeen of them—were affected at once, with no warning, no signs of a struggle or an attempt to flee.”

He was watching her with a disturbing intensity. “Are you certain that the three other men in the room with the prince were who you thought they were? Quenching leaves very little—just fragments of clothing and personal ornaments. You assume that the clothing was being worn by the people you expected to wear it.”

“If there had been anything anomalous, Captain Parhelion would have raised the alarm. If he had not been in his appointed place, the prince or the prince’s secretary would have questioned it. Tam, it was our routine.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “You think Helenja was involved?”

“Had it happened the morning of Orlanjis’s coming of age, there’d be no doubt. But to depose the prince now and elevate Fejelis—”

“You think Fejelis is unacceptable?” Tam said, in a neutral voice.

Less so than she had thought, she privately admitted, but it did not change the realities. “I give him six months, less if there’s a crisis. That’s for your ears only, Tam.”

The mage’s expression was in-turned. “What has been done with the prince’s rooms?”

“The residues have been removed, and the rooms were searched by members of the Prince’s Vigilance and the Palace Vigilance.”

“And yet you want me?”

“We missed this, vigilants and mages both.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “You did.” He stood. “I want to see his rooms.”

“The contract has not been signed.”

“Members of the Temple might be involved; I want to see the rooms.”

“Magister—”

“Mistress Floria, even
you
could be involved, being in the palace on the night.”

She let out her breath. “The prince wanted your involvement kept covert until the contract was declared.”

“It will be. But before I declare any contract, before I agree to do this, I want to see the rooms and speak to the prince.”

High in the Mages’ Tower, Tam leaned against the wall to catch his breath, feeling magic pushing at him like a blustering wind before a squall. he sent, needlessly, for the mage he had come to see already knew it. The courtesy was just another example—like his climbing the stairs rather than using power to glide up them—of the earthborn habits that caused the Temple to regard him with suspicion.

On the other hand, Magister Lukfer was entirely capable of dropping an importunate visitor down the shaft, intentionally or unintentionally. He had done that to Tam at the beginning of their relationship. Although that, Tam had concluded, was meant as the old bear meant when it greeted the cub with a cuff to test its spirit before taking it in its jaws to confirm its proper bearish taste. It was an initiation.

Even so, he braced himself before nudging open the broad, bronze door with a magical touch. Lukfer kept his rooms nearly as dim as a bear’s lair, disquieting to all, and painful to many, including Tam. His eyes fixed at once on the windows on the far side of the room, curtained though they were with a half-opaque fabric. Sweating, he crossed the length of the room to clutch and push back the curtains, drinking in sunlight. Only then could he acknowledge the man sitting in shadows.

Like Tam, Lukfer was a sport, born in a small desert village amongst people even more desperately poor and ignorant than Tam’s own mountain clan. Unlike Tam, whose powers had been bewilderingly slow to emerge, Lukfer had had touch-sense almost from birth. The unrelenting intrusion of the anger, fears, and suspicions of those around him had driven him mad before his fourth birthday. The Temple’s care had restored his sanity, but neither their efforts nor his had enabled him to control his power. By now, he should have been one of the high masters, occupying these rooms by right. Instead, he was the high masters’ ward, kept close so they could contain him, if need be. His living in shadows, disturbing as it was, bled off his power in constant healing effort.

Meeting Lukfer, knowing how much worse his own fortunes might have been, had been a salutary experience for the surly lout whom Darien White Hand had brought before the high masters. In the bright-lit amphitheater at the apex of the tower, Tam had stood scowling in disapproval at the opulence around him, studiously ignoring the discussion of his fate. He remembered the check in the deliberations, and the shocking sense of his bitterness and resentment, washing back against him as though from an emotional mirror. He whirled round to stare at the man who had floated above the stairs’ wide shaft: a hulk of a man, bald and dressed horrifyingly in black.

“So this is the new sport,” the man had said. His voice had startled Tam with its quality, a velvety rasp like a wolf skin taken in winter. “Sixth rank, maybe seventh, by the feel of him. Take good care of him, or you’ll have another like me.” To Tam, he said, “I’m Lukfer. You’ll hear about me; what’s not tripe is true. When you’ve some control, come and see me.”

And he had, despite what he had heard, and found a perilous teacher and a true friend.

“I need your help,” he said now.

Lukfer had been staring at him from the moment he entered. Eye and pointing finger converged unerringly on Tam’s pocket.
“What is that?”

He should not have been in the least surprised, though he had tried to shield the thing before carrying it into the tower. He drew out a small pouch and, handling it with his fingertips, set it down unopened on the wide arm of Lukfer’s chair.

“
This
—inside—was in the prince’s chambers.” He faltered, wanting to warn the other man, who suffered so from his sensitivity.

Lukfer’s eyes narrowed; magic pulsed; the pouch twitched and spit out its contents. The item skidded across the arm, stopped just before the edge.

It was a tiny, octagonal box, less than a palm span in diameter, such as the Darkborn used for blocks of scent. It was exquisitely carved in scrolls and sprigs of tiny flowers, but from unevenly hued wood and stained ivory. The craftsman capable of such carving should have rejected such unsightly variations. Had he been able to see them. It still smelled of sandalwood, but the magical aura of it was like a charnel stench. Lukfer’s massive body shuddered, his nausea threatening to overset Tam’s control. Reciprocity would have them vomiting their hearts out. “Sorry—” Tam snatched the pouch and brought it down over the box, as he would net a poison beetle. Lukfer’s black-gloved hand closed on his wrist. “Leave it.”

Tam gulped and, as Lukfer released him, backed away. From the door—as though that made any real difference—he watched Lukfer carefully remove his gloves to touch it with his bare hands. Tam swallowed harder.

Lukfer laid it down. “Now you can cover it.”

Bare hands gripping the arms of his chair, Lukfer watched Tam net the vile little thing with the bag and jerk the laces violently closed.

“Have a seat,” Lukfer said.

Tam toppled into a chair, sapped of strength by renewed exposure to the sense of
darkness
.

“I have been offered a c-contract, by the prince, to investigate his father’s death,” he said. “M-Mistress White Hand brought me the message. The contract hasn’t been negotiated or formalized yet—I haven’t spoken to Fejelis—the prince; I don’t think anyone knows. I went by Isidore’s rooms first, wanting—wanting to see them as soon as possible. And I found
that
. There were other mages there, but—but they didn’t even seem to sense it. I didn’t know whether they were pretending or—but when I palmed it”—a skill he had mastered in his first months in the city—“nobody acted as though they noticed.”

Lukfer let out a breath. “Keep it that way. Now, open the curtains, would you.”

The curtain was stiff with disuse; it took a magical push to send it lurching back. A broad stroke of golden sunlight fell across the bloated figure in his chair. Beneath his olive complexion, Lukfer was ashen. Tam half rose. “Master, what is it? Are you all right?”

Lukfer waved his concern away.

Tam sat down, watching him worriedly. “That’s a talisman of some kind, isn’t it? Is it possible that that—is what nullified the magic in the lights?”

“You tell me.” That sounded more like his teacher.

In sudden horror, he snatched up the pouch and started out of his chair. Lukfer’s magic snagged him, making him stumble. “Boy,” Lukfer said, brusquely, “I thought of that; that’s why I had you open the curtains. There’s no magic so powerful as can quench the sun. Put it down.”

He did, hands shaking. “Master Lukfer, do you know
whose
magic this is?”

Lukfer watched him with an unreadable expression, eyes honey yellow in the sunlight. “If you mean to do more than pay lip service to that title, then decline that contract, and forget this ever happened. Will you do that, for both our sakes?”

“I—can’t,” he said.

“I tell you, as your master, that this concerns mysteries of the Temple that have nothing to do with a mage like yourself.”

“I’ve sensed this before. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve sensed this before.”

“Tam, as you love your life, let the matter be.”

“The f-first time I sensed it,” Tam pressed on, “was when the Rivermarch—that Darkborn district—burned. I was one of those called to put out the blaze, lest it spread. I felt it then. I didn’t realize that no one else had, not then. The second time was—a day or so ago, just after sunset, from the Darkborn district, the covered railway station. The third was with this box, here.”

“That, that was not the third,” Lukfer said.

“Not?” Tam faltered.

“There was at least one other.”

He had thought, when he finally heard the gossip about Lukfer, that Lukfer had said, “When you have control—” for Lukfer’s comfort. Only later did he realize Lukfer meant it for Tam’s safety, too. Though after the first few meetings, after he had met and passed Lukfer’s tests, and Lukfer had begun to relax with him, he had lost his fear of the older mage, and then he began to love him. But fearing or loving, he had never been able to lie to Lukfer.

“It was on Floria White Hand, too,” he sighed.

“Ah,” Lukfer said quietly, unsurprised. There was a long, long pause. “Have you ever visited the Borders?”

“The
Borders
?” he said, bewildered at the irrelevance. The Borders had been left to the Darkborn so long ago that hardly a trace of Lightborn remained, all their works swallowed by the land or dismantled by the Darkborn for the building of byres and field walls that had in their own turn gone to ruin. The only Lightborn who lived in the Borders were those who had gone to work for the Darkborn railroads and agreed to tend the track through the Borders—antisocial, miscreant, eccentric, fugitive, or simply desperate for work.

“Some years ago, I had reason to,” Lukfer said.

Tam remembered Lukfer’s absence, unique for him, but at the time Tam himself had been under punishment, exiled from the Temple, with his magic bound. Lukfer never had said why he went to the Borders; he did not say now. “Do you have any notion as to why Lightborn by and large do not live there?”

“I—when I thought about it at all, I assumed it had to do with safety from the Shadowborn. But what has that to do with—?” He gestured toward the talisman.

“Yet the Darkborn stayed, handicapped as they are by their blindness and lack of magic, to hunt these creatures and drive them back across the Borders. . . . I’ve exchanged a few letters with one of their Shadowhunters, a weak mage himself. You have heard of glazen, creatures that ensorcell men and then slowly devour them alive.”