New Blood (18 page)

“And so—” Janos's sinister pacing brought him closer to her. “You know nothing of the magician who put the seal on the case holding the machine? A woman, perhaps? A crone?”

The giggle bubbled out of Amanusa, escaping the churning cauldron of hysteria in her gut. “Women can't be magicians, silly.” She got her eyelashes to flutter after a fashion. Then the perfect solution to—to
everything
hit her. She was surprised she didn't stagger with the impact.

She simpered at Jax. “Didn't you tell them, darling?”

Jax's eyes widened, and he shook his head in a tiny signal. Which Kazaryk of course caught. He pounced. Exactly as Amanusa intended.

“Didn't he tell us what?”

“You are
so
clever, Bertie. I don't know why you insist on keeping it such a secret. I'd wager there's no one else in the world who can do what you can.” She looked at Kazaryk, who was so obviously in command, even a dim woman could catch on. “He did it himself, he did.”

Jax widened his eyes even more. Or he tried. His eyebrows went up. Amanusa knew he was furious with her. Kazaryk apparently took it as dismay that she'd spilled Jax's secret.

Amanusa gave her liege man a bland look, then blinked her eyes slowly, once, hoping he'd catch on soon. “Well, you did,” she said. “You took my blood to make the spell.”

Now Kazaryk's and Janos's eyes went wide with shock and horror, while Jax adjusted his expression for blandness. He was so crimson and swollen with bruises, so scarlet with blood that any expression was difficult to see.

“Of course . . .” Kazaryk hissed, evil satisfaction rising on his face.

“B-but if he's a blood magic sorcerer,” Janos stammered, “why has he not acted before now?”

“Because all of the blood spilled has been his own, you idiot.”

“Blood of innocents,” Amanusa said.

“No use denying it any longer. Blood of the innocent,” Jax agreed, throwing the first words of a spell out for her to catch. He began adding the other words of the spell. “Blood of the helpless, crying out for justice—”

The Inquisitor and his tool began to back away, the conjurer's eyes rolling from side to side, as if he could see the magic build in power with every word Jax spoke. Amanusa didn't know the spell, but Jax did. Jax couldn't control the magic, but Amanusa could. Her lips moved, repeating it silently.

She blocked the path to the door, sealing it against the men with a swipe of her shoe, smearing the blood she'd stepped in on the door's bottom edge. The locking spell took only a moment, a brief whispered word in the midst of the justice spell Jax was building for her.

He was careful with it, confining it to this room, to those who had actually spilled innocent blood or caused the spilling of it. Amanusa fed power into the words until she could feel it throb around her, ready to burst. Janos was already whimpering.

“Blood of my blood,” Jax called out, his voice strong without shouting. “Answer my call. Do my will.”

The two men screamed as their bodies convulsed, bruises blossoming on their skin. They fell to the floor, into the blood spattered there, and their screams
rose in pitch. The Inquisitor's pain seemed magnitudes greater than Janos's suffering, and the captain suffered greatly. Amanusa asked Jax about it as she crouched to untie his hands, ignoring the shouts and pounding on the door.

“Because I didn't confine the spell to justice for
my
innocent blood alone,” Jax said, bending to free his ankles. “Find my clothes, will you? They should be in here somewhere.”

Amanusa blushed—he seemed more a man and less a victim with his hands free—and hurried to obey. His clothing had been piled in a corner behind him. The lining was ripped from his frock coat, but all else was wearable.

“I myself am not so very innocent, after all,” Jax went on. “So I made my blood stand for all the innocent blood these men have shed. Their own blood knows what they have done. And that is why Kazaryk suffers more than Janos. Captain Janos is merely a brute. Kazaryk is a torturer. He enjoys the pain of others.”

Jax had his shirt and trousers on but not fastened. He refused to let Amanusa assist him, so she took his ruined frock coat and spread it over the corroded machine-thing, rolling it up inside. She tucked up the tails, folded down the collar, and tied the sleeves together to make a handle to carry it. Even wrapped, she didn't know how far she could carry the nauseating thing. She had to poke one of the dangling metal arms back inside, but finally she had a more-or-less tidy bundle.

“You're taking it with us?” Jax hissed with pain as he buttoned the last button on his trousers. “Hasn't it caused enough trouble?”

“That's why I'm bringing it. I don't want it to cause any more trouble here. I want to turn it over to someone who will actually examine it to see what it is and how it came into being, and that won't happen here. The Hungarian council is too busy ‘following tradition' and tracking down unfortunate woods witches to bother with real danger.”

Amanusa used Jax's blood spattered on his coat to seal a protection around it. It wasn't as strong as her warding around the box, but she thought it would hold the bundle together and keep the machine's magic-killing aura from hurting Ja—anyone.

“Sounds like the guards have brought a battering ram.” Jax draped his long leather coat over his shoulders.

“Then it's time to let them in.” Amanusa touched her thumb to the blood on his cheek and dabbed it behind her ear where it wouldn't show, if they did happen to get noticed. She spoke the words triggering the “don't-see-me” spell and released the magic seal on the door.

The soldiers in the hall slammed their makeshift battering ram into the door which splintered, and they stumbled into the room. Their cries of alarm and shouts for assistance layered under the screams of the condemned, and in the roar of noise and confusion, Amanusa and Jax slipped out of the room and out of city hall, picking up the carpetbag on their way out the front door.

She tried to help Jax across the square, but his torso was far more tender than his limbs. He could walk, and it hurt him when she put her arm round him. She confined herself to hovering.

As they climbed the platform to the train station,
Amanusa gradually released the magic hiding herself, so she wouldn't seem to appear out of nowhere. Keeping Jax close at her side so no one would stumble over him, she produced the tickets the boot boy had purchased for her that morning. It was last call for the last train of the day out of Nagy Szeben. The tickets secured them the last private compartment on the train. Overnight to Budapest, arriving just after noon. Surely the Inquisition wouldn't be able to organize a pursuit so quickly. Kazaryk wouldn't be capable of conjuring at midday. She doubted he would be capable of speech.

At the last moment, Crow swooped in through the open compartment window and took a perch on the overhead luggage rack with a mutter. Amanusa gazed out the window as the train puffed out of the station, watching the expanding uproar of the search for the escaped prisoners sweeping around city hall, catching up more and more of the passersby in its turmoil and confusion.

When the train was well away from town, she had the porter bring a basin of hot water so she could clean Jax up and tend his injuries. Just looking at him made her throat close up and her temper flare. They had hurt him and he was
hers.

After she finished her cleanup, she took one look at Jax's tightly closed fists and shallow panting and pulled her lancet from her pocket. She punctured a finger, waited for the blood to well up, and touched his cheek with the two smallest fingers of her lancet-hand, brushing gingerly against his swollen lower lip with her thumb. “Open.”

He obeyed instantly, watching her through slitted eyes as she slid her little finger into his mouth.

“I need to see how badly you're hurt,” she said. “I don't like you hurting.”

Jax rolled his tongue over her finger, once more turning the taking of her blood into a sensual event. Amanusa burned, and she wasn't sure it was all magic. She felt peculiar, even after she swept all the heat and all the magic into the droplet of blood. She pulled back, both physically and magically.

“If I might—” Jax caught her eye a moment before dipping his head in a seated bow. “I ask that you leave me my thoughts. They are too ugly for your eyes and ears.”

Amanusa gave a bitter laugh. “I doubt they could be uglier than mine. But yes, of course I will leave your thoughts to you alone. Everyone should have the right to be private in his own mind.”

His crooked, lumpy smile made her heart twist. How could he be so grateful for something so small?

While she waited for the blood to work its way into his bloodstream, Amanusa busied herself with bespelling the outrageously expensive train-supplied vodka into her healing potion. She'd done it enough times at the camp that while it required focus, it didn't require much time. Then she got out the pirogies she'd bought and offered them to Jax. He was grateful for the food, but insisted on sharing with Amanusa.

With her stomach knotted up so, she wasn't very hungry, but she took a pie. Jax wouldn't eat if she didn't at least pretend to. Something else disturbed her peace. Something other than Jax's injuries. She spoke his name. “Jax?”

“Yes, my sor—Amanusa?” He pushed himself straighter.

“At the outlaws' camp, when I lost control of the magic—how did I lose it? Why? What did I do wrong?” She stared hard at him. “I don't want to hear from Yvaine. You're in no shape to endure a visit from her, so if you feel her coming on, stop.”

He nodded, his mouth attempting a smile. “I believe that your magic controls hers now, especially with your blood in my veins again. Amanusa is my sorceress, no longer Yvaine. So when you say Yvaine shall not rise, she does not.”

“All right then. Yvaine shall not rise tonight.” Amanusa sat back in her corner. “So where did I go wrong? Were there words I didn't speak?”

M
ANY OF THEM
.”

Amanusa couldn't see the teasing twinkle in Jax's swollen-shut eyes, but she could hear it in his voice. She rolled her eyes at him.

“This evening, you used the words I spoke in the room to work the magic that freed us. Do you remember them?” He stared at the pie in his hand, then took a careful bite. He didn't speak again until after he swallowed. “When you call for justice, you must set limits. You have to say, ‘Justice for this crime and no other.' Tell it
which
crimes it is judging.”

“But doesn't the blood of the victims, the blood used in the spell, create those limits?”

“It can. But in the camp,
you
were one of those victims, and you are the sorceress. When you released
the magic, you called merely for justice, which allowed the magic free rein to do what it willed. Words have power, but you have to use them.”

“Just ordinary words? The conjurer used . . . strange words. Latin, or Egyptian. Something I didn't know.”

“For sorcery, ordinary words suffice. Yvaine experimented, using the old Latin and using only English, and the magic worked just the same. Better, actually, because the sorceress can enforce her will better if she knows what she's saying. You can also cry payment short of death, and tell the magic where to go when it is done. You forgot that as well, in the camp.”

Amanusa blinked at him. “Where can it go, besides into me?”

Jax sighed, shaking his head. “Did you not listen at all to the instructions Yvaine gave you? Or to the words of my spell tonight? The spell
you
used?”

“I was a trifle busy trying to hold onto the magic. They'd spilled so damn much of your blood, I had enough magic for the whole town.”

“Yes, well . . .” He took a deep breath. “The magic will
want
to go back into you. You're its . . . lodestar, perhaps. Its natural gathering place. And often, you'd be wise to let it return to you. But that much magic—you know what happened in the camp. If you need to conserve magic, or let it build, you're better off shunting the magic into me.”

“Oh yes, I could have carried you so easily down the mountain.”

“It's unlikely the magic would have knocked me unconscious. First, because I'm larger than you. And
I am—when I said that I was a magical instrument bequeathed by Yvaine to her apprentice, it wasn't a metaphor. A large portion of the magic worked on me, magic that transformed me into her blood servant, made it possible for you to use me to store excess magic.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Amanusa didn't like the idea of using a man—
Jax
—as a coal bin, or an oil tank.

“Some spells require more magic than you can contain in your own body. Though you, with your height, can contain more than Yvaine, who was quite small. I am given to understand that a wizard's familiar works in much the same manner.”

“Familiars are animals, not human beings.” She shook her head. She would learn about those “larger” spells later. Maybe. “But if the magic doesn't return to me, or to you, where does it go? Where should it go?”

“To rest. To peace. Especially if you are using blood from the dead, from a murdered victim. You should send it to find peace with the soul it belongs to. A murder victim's blood doesn't seek justice on those who did it no harm, but it still burns hotter than other blood, other magic.” He paused, his head lying against the high back of the seat, his legs sprawled wide.

“Your blood has reached my veins,” he murmured. “Already it eases the pain. I did not expect that.”

“Good. I don't like the idea of you in pain.” Amanusa moved to sit directly in front of Jax, dusting off spilled crumbs from her uneaten pie.

“You said that.” Jax lifted his head and peered at
her. “When you gave me your blood, you said it. Not as part of a spell. You just said it.” He pulled the rest of himself up to sit straight, staring at her. “The words alone were enough to focus your intent and create a spell.”