Lightborn (14 page)

She took careful note of her surroundings as she approached. Her home lacked shrubbery or statuary, or ornamentation. The stone was polished smooth and fitted close, and the woodwork and shutters were a glossy gray that would show any crack. When she was a girl, she had pointed to the Mages’ Tower and whined about the drabness. A little later, her father had taken her with him to the death scene of a member of the Prince’s Vigilance. The assassins had entered via a shutter left unlocked by the artist hired to decorate it.

Years later, Floria had learned that her father had arranged the assassination himself, and why. Corruption within the Vigilance could not be tolerated.

She wondered why that memory made her feel so cold. Perhaps because she could envision one type of person who might be so trusted, and so skilled, and so ruthless, as to kill a prince in such a manner.

She unlocked her front door with care. Just inside was a decorative curtain, a silvery mesh that was another Darkborn invention. Push it aside in the usual way, and the links would fall into a new and recognizable pattern. But the pattern was undisturbed; the mesh had not been touched.

Nevertheless, something was wrong.

She slid past the curtain and moved silently to the archway of the large front room. The mesh on the windows was undisturbed. The open back and mesh of furnishings offered no cover. Carefully placed mirrors exposed hidden corners. Another gliding step took her to the archway to the smaller side room. Again, nothing anomalous.

Upstairs, then, pausing to slip her key from within her belt and disarm the traps on the stairs. She knew, as soon as she reached the first landing, what was wrong. The familiar smell was subtly altered by the scents of Darkborn furnishings and Darkborn furniture treatments. Habit made her pause on the landing to check all rooms before she turned toward the half-open door of her
salle
, the room that, via a paper wall, abutted the home of Darkborn Balthasar Hearne. Discipline kept her eyes from fixing first on the huge rent in the paper wall and the mesh that reinforced it; she glanced over the room entire, seeing nothing else anomalous, and then back at the wall. A flap, like a doorway, had been cut away, and now hung curled under its own weight.

“Balthasar,” she whispered. On three sides of the room, the mirrors returned her reflection, color drained to the verdigris pallor of a corpse.

Her reflection had its rapier in hand as it crossed the floor. There was enough light cast through the rent for her to live by, and more than enough light to burn any Darkborn to ash. She drew a deep breath, and stepped through, entering Balthasar’s home for the first and likely the last time. She noticed the mismatch of hues in the wood of the bookcase, the patched leather of the armchair, and the blank spines of the books. His utter sightlessness was borne in on her again. She took a deep breath and made herself look down at the carpet for the mound of fine gray ash amongst fragments of fabric and metal that marked a Darkborn caught by light. She saw nothing, except for dark stains of dried blood at the base of the wall. Here was where he had lain dying, the night two men came in search of Tercelle Amberley’s twins. More blood spatters helped her reconstruct the choreography of the attack, to which she’d been condemned to
listen
, until she had had the desperate idea of attacking with a blade of light, a torch shone through a tiny slit in the wall. . . . There was the patch where she had driven the needle in.

In the doorway to the hall, pain and weakness warned her that she could go no farther. Slowly, staring through the half- lit hall, remembering the prince’s dark room, she backed into the light. Balthasar
must
still be at the archducal palace, where she had suggested Ishmael di Studier take him, and his family, two—yes, two days ago. He must be.

She wiped her damp face with a sleeve, and turned to examine the damage. She would not have expected anyone to be able to cut through the wall, since on Telmaine’s insistence Balthasar had installed Darkborn-made mesh, as strong as metal came without magic. A heavy knife with a serrated edge had been used, with a powerful shoulder behind it.

The edges curled toward her. The cut had been made from the other side.

She whipped round, at no sound, only a sudden conviction that now must be the moment that someone would step out behind her. There was no one there.

Then the intruder’s object must have been to find, or to leave . . . something. Her eye went at once to the lights, blazing in their brackets. Of all the rooms in her house, this was the only one that had no window, was entirely dependent upon the enspelled lights, day and night.

She resisted the impulse to run from the room. She moved her eyes over the mirrors, the racked weapons and equipment. All was as she had left it four days before; all was as she had always left it. Disorder did not become a vigilant, who should be able to notice the least anomaly. She thought once more of the misplaced shoe, and the dream.

The thought guided her across the landing, into her bedroom, past the undisturbed bed, and to a tall cabinet with mesh sides and fretwork doors. In it, she kept family ornaments and memorabilia, and her own collection of inconsequential treasures. With the hilt of her dagger, she hooked the handle and drew open the doors.

The box was gone, the ugly but well-crafted little wood and ivory box that Balthasar had given her for her fourteenth birthday. The box that she had dreamed she was taking to the prince. Everything else was there. Bed, bedding, night vest, side table—all were unchanged from the state she had left them in.

From downstairs came the soft shivering sound of the links of the mesh cascading into a new configuration.

Whisper-footed on the tiled floor, she crossed the bedroom to look out and down the stairs. A flicker on the floor, a shadow briefly cast by sunlight against the lesser lamplight. A pair of feet, shod in mourning red, moved toward the stairs.

She sprang for the
salle
, but too late. “Mistress White Hand!” The voice was that of Tempe Silver Branch, of the vigilants’ judiciary. Like the White Hands, the Silver Branches possessed a family asset, theirs the ability to detect lies in the spoken word. It was by no means as sure an asset as the ability to detect poison, Floria’s father had said. Nevertheless, Tempe held considerable influence. “Floria, we need to talk to you.”

There were three vigilants besides Mistress Tempe: Mortimer Beaudry, a captain she disliked, and two lieutenants. One she knew from the
salle
; his skill with a rapier equaled hers, although he was more temperamental and erratic than she. The other was unusually short statured for a vigilant, but had a reputation for mechanical artistry that some said approached magic. Talk? This was an arresting party, if ever she had seen one.

She locked the door to the
salle
as Tempe set her foot on the stairs. It would gain her only a little time, but that time should be enough. Two of the lights went into a mesh equipment bag, with a semiopaque sack over the outside. The first knock on the door interrupted her brief consideration of a third light, but the weight would hamper her. She slung the bag through the rent and dropped it on the floor.

“Floria?” said Tempe, from the other side of the door. “Why are you reacting like this?”

Everything she said would be weighed and judged through Tempe’s asset. She lifted down two of the four remaining lamps and pushed them into one of the closets. “Have you a warrant?”

“Do you expect one? Have you something to fear?”

Had she? Aside from a dead prince, an inexplicable dream, and a missing box.

“Floria, there are rumors around the palace that you visited the prince’s rooms last night.”

“You’re coming to arrest me on rumors?”

Within the door, she heard a click. A gap appeared between door and lintel. Fingers probed, blanching as they took the strain. The gap widened, opening on Tempe standing with the lieutenants flanking her and the captain at her back.

“Prince Fejelis ordered your arrest.” She held out a long, narrow, cream-hued fold of paper. “Read it, if you would.”

Her eye, drawn to the paper, caught in passing a glint of metal in the shadow of their bodies, as Captain Beaudry cleared a revolver.

She lunged through the rent into Balthasar’s study. Snatched up the bag and let her momentum take her through the door, across the landing, into the curtains across an alcove on the far side. She knew terror then, floundering against fabric that, in the half- light, was black as death itself. She rolled out of the alcove, curled around the sack containing the lights.

“Beaudry, what are you
doing
?”

A shot punched into the fabric above her.

“It’s not a death warrant!
Floria!
”

Floria scrambled out of the view of the doorway, holding the bag against her ribs, panting with the shadows. She swung her feet onto the stairs and, with a hand that slipped on the smooth uprights of the banister, heaved herself up.

She heard footsteps in flight down her own stairs next door, all stealth abandoned, and a step in the study behind her. They had divided their numbers, thinking to cut her off. She fell, more than ran, down the stairs. At its foot she took the briefest moment to choose between front door and side door to the tiny garden—and heard someone stumble on the shadowed landing above and begin to scream for light. She herself was close to the limit of her endurance of shadow and pain, hardened though she was by vigilant’s training, and her own explorations of her limits. Those explorations told her she had no more
time
—she grabbed the front door handle, tore open the door, let in the streaming sunlight that made the gray unfinished wallpaper beautiful, and the well-varnished parquet radiant.

She staggered down the steps into the deserted street. At the curb stood one of the products of the Darkborn’s obsession with machinery, Baron Strumheller’s chemical coach, abandoned in his flight days ago. She passed it at a run, angling across the road to a shadowed lane that Darkborn traveled freely and Lightborn, seldom. She prayed that there had been no new construction since the last time she had explored these lanes. The next street, too, was Darkborn, with only a few passersby. She plunged across the road, down another lane, onto a street that bordered a park. At this time in a late summer’s day, the shadows of the bordering trees had spread halfway across the grass, and the park goers had followed the sun. She dodged into the shadow, across the grass, and down the steps into the moist, thick shadow of one of the creeks that laced the city. Stopped, gasping, to drag the translucent covering off the mesh, and release the full strength of her lights. She could not hear any pursuit. Few Lightborn came down here, even in daylight, while the trees were in leaf. But the boardwalk—a fashionable stroll for the Darkborn at night—led upstream to the gardens of the archducal palace itself.

T
elmaine caught herself drowsing, not for the first time. The coffeepot on the table at her side was cold, the thin sandwiches dry and unappetizing. Balthasar’s lower-class tastes had affected her, she thought wryly; she liked her sandwiches cut thick, with abundant moist filling, each a meal in itself.

She stood up in penance for her lapse, and began to circle the library again. Unlike the ducal summerhouse, the city palace had never been a place for childish exploration and games of hide-and-seek, even for the children of dukes. So she had not previously been in the botanical library. It smelled of resin and dried flowers. Three walls were shelved from floor to ceiling, to house old monographs and journals from natural-history societies. The fourth wall was given over to a bank of small drawers, each containing desiccated samples of leaves, flowers, or seeds. When this was all over, she
must
arrange permission for Bal to visit, even if she would not see him again for days. When this was all over . . .

The archduke had retired hours ago, and was deep in an untroubled sleep. She supposed a man with his cares had to learn to set them aside, or let care wear him out. Vladimer had been sleeping and waking throughout the day, his vitality marred by his wound. Around her, the palace was sunk in its daytime lull, only the day staff awake.

Throughout the day she had been thinking about magic.

Ishmael had been deeply concerned about the hazard her untrained power posed to others and to herself. Should she do harm, she would come to the attention of the Lightborn mages, who, being far more numerous and powerful, determined the use and abuse of magic on both sides of sunrise. Then she risked having her magic, and perhaps her mind, destroyed.

But if they were so
cursed
all-knowing, Telmaine thought, where were
they
when the
Shadowborn
ensorcelled Lord Vladimer? Where were
they
when the Shadowborn set the firetraps that killed those men in the warehouse and nearly killed herself and Vladimer at the station? Or since the victims were Darkborn, were their fates a matter of indifference to the Lightborn?

Ishmael would have helped her, had intended to help her work with her strength, even at a remove. He had not realized how dangerous the use of
any
magic would be to him. Perhaps—as Bal would say—he had not
wished
to realize it.

But when Malachi Plantageter’s agents had seized upon him for the murder of Tercelle Amberley, he had given her a gift, overextending himself to convey to her his understanding of his own magic. She had not yet fully unwrapped that gift; it lay, warm with that dimming-ember sense of him, quietly in her mind and magic.

As did the far more malevolent bequest of the Shadowborn mage she had fought at Lord Vladimer’s bedside. Not even Ishmael knew all the details of that encounter; not even he knew that the Shadowborn had begun to impress upon her his structure of his
own
magic at the moment at which Ishmael killed him. She could feel
that
also in her, like some obscene seed.