Shadow Magic (53 page)

“Oh, you’re awake!” Caius said, as if Lord Temur were a guest he’d invited for dinner and not a man he’d just spent the better part of the day torturing with visions and mind tricks and bastion-only-knew what else.

“Been awake for a while now,” I said, feeling uncomfortable again in the face of all this pretending that everything was normal. Everything wasn’t normal. Fiacre was going to string all of us up by our privates before we could get a word in edgeways—but, knowing Greylace, the little nut would probably enjoy it.

“That’s very good,” Caius said, slinking over to stand on the other side of my bed like a viper waiting to strike. “Perhaps then he can tell us what’s happened to our esteemed head of proceedings.”

“Fiacre?” I asked, confused again and liking it about as much as I always did. “Isn’t he with Josette?”

Caius shook his head, not looking away from Lord Temur, though I had to admit the warlord looked about as baffled as I was by the new revelation.

“She’s still looking,” Caius explained. “She wanted to come in and ask Lord Temur himself whether he had any thoughts, but the poor dear has a temper much the same as yours, Alcibiades, and I felt it best—well, I may have persuaded her just a touch, just the
slightest
touch—that it would be the best for everyone involved if I was the one to do the questioning.”

“Wait,” I said, “hold it there. You did
what
to Josette?”

“Please try and focus on the larger picture, my dear,” Caius said,
clasping his hands like he was some kind of saint and I was the troublemaker.

Lord Temur closed his eyes again and moved to sit up. I stood the moment he shifted, one hand against my sword just in case he did something stupid. He didn’t seem like the type to make a move—too much prudence and all—but you never knew what a man was capable of after he’d been tortured. I saw Caius’s hand creep into the fall of one of his long sleeves, too, so I knew that he’d been thinking the same thing I had.

It turned out we were both wrong. Either Lord Temur was confident in his expectation of rescue, or he wasn’t the sort of warlord who carried around poisoned arrowheads or daggers, or anything else that clumsy.

“This is news to me, as well,” he said. “You say that your head of proceedings, Fiacre… He is nowhere to be found?”

“Not in his rooms, nor the meeting rooms,” Caius said. He hadn’t taken his hand out of his sleeve, even though I’d sat back down. “He wasn’t seen going into the city, and he wasn’t seen at breakfast. I happen to know that breakfast is his favorite meal, even without traditional Volstov fare, so I find it all quite unsettling news.”

I started to get a really bad feeling as Caius went on, listing all the places that Fiacre should have been but wasn’t.

“Have you looked in the gardens?” Lord Temur asked. “He holds great affection for our fireflies, and can often be found there in the early evening.”

“Well, you’ve just been making friends with
everyone
, haven’t you?” I exploded, even though I wasn’t the one conducting the investigation, and I probably should’ve waited for Caius to say it was my turn, or whatever. I was done doing things this way. I’d tried being diplomatic, and that hadn’t worked, and now what? It was all just some crazed Emperor’s ruse to get us here,
spy
on us, then trap us here indefinitely. I could feel the bars of the cage sliding into place and I hated it.

The whole thing was ridiculous.

“This is ridiculous,” I said, because I had to say something as Caius and Lord Temur both were staring at me. “This whole time,
he’s
probably been watching us and reporting back to the Emperor with bastion knows what. How we like our tea and how many fried dumplings I bought at that stand and how many steps it took to get from the theatre
district to the artists’ alley. Did you tell him about all those prints we looked at, Lord Temur? The ones that called him out for the brother-hunting madman he is? Or did you tell him about the play, and how his brother what’s-his-name is some kind
of folk hero
now that he’s gone and declared him a traitor? How about how many people booed when
his
player got up onstage? Does he know it’s common opinion that he’s about as good as a raving, conniving lunatic who—”

“Alcibiades,” Caius said.

I shut up. So much for not talking. I was so angry I could feel my face turning red like a lobster in boiling water.

Lord Temur folded his hands against the blanket like it was a table, and we were having another one of those diplomatic meetings, just the three of us this time. The only thing different I could see was that there was a ring of white flesh around Lord Temur’s mouth that made him look like he’d caught fever or a plague. Somewhere in his soul, tradition meant that he should kill me for what I’d just said about his Emperor; and, somewhere in his soul, he also knew I was right.

That shut me up good and proper.

“I was…” Temur began. “Rather I am, still, quite curious about Volstovic customs and culture.” He spoke slowly but firmly with his head held up. The Ke-Han had seventeen different ways to bow, but apparently none of those applied to torturers and kidnappers. “My interest led me to speak first with Lord Greylace and Margrave Josette, both of whom seemed to harbor a corresponding curiosity about our own traditions and habits. It was through their association that I also came to meet you, General Alcibiades, and, though I can hardly expect you to believe me under the circumstances, no machinations more complicated than that.”

His face darkened for a moment, and he looked at me.

“Of course, my lord Emperor is exceedingly clever at using a situation to his advantage if you will take my meaning.”

Caius made a noise like a hiss and sat down on my bed to look Lord Temur in the eyes.

“So while we were enjoying your very fine company, you were informing him of everything we said. Something like that?”

“It was my duty,” Lord Temur said. It was simple as that for him.

Maybe to the Ke-Han it was, and that was what I didn’t like about them. I respected th’Esar, but when he mucked it up it was our duty as
citizens to make sure he knew it, not serve him to the brink of madness and beyond.

I’d have spat on the ground if we hadn’t been inside. As things stood, I had to settle for snorting.

“Why tell us now?” Caius asked. “Of your own free will, even! I did a fine job on you, certainly, but there isn’t any… lingering control.”

A silence followed, during which I started thinking of all the things that might have been happening to Fiacre if Iseul the Stark Raving Mad was responsible for his being nowhere to be found. None of them were good things. All of them were shades darker than bad.

“You must understand,” Lord Temur said quietly, “that there are those of us who feel that matters have been taken quite out of hand. In understanding that, however, you must also know that our customs bid us do nothing but follow blindly, even in the face of such a leader as our Emperor.”

“That’s batty,” I said, disappointed because maybe I’d sort of almost got my head around
not
minding Lord Temur, only it turned out he was as crazy as the rest of them.

He shrugged.

“Those are our ways,” he said. “They may seem strange or unfathomable to you, but they remain very important to us.”

“But surely even someone as set in tradition as yourself, Lord Temur, must see that the Emperor has gone too far,” said Caius, spinning it a lot more delicately than I’d have done given the chance.

“Why do you think I’m allowing you to keep me here?” Lord Temur asked, giving us a look like maybe we were a little slow. “It is hardly an ideal place for confinement. Why, I might have escaped at least half a dozen times over now if I were not here by my own consent.”

“Now wait just a minute,” I said, and then stopped confusing the matter because it actually made sense.

Caius smiled—a thin little reptilian smile that made him look mad as the Emperor himself. Somehow I didn’t mind it as much on him.

“Well,” he said, like we’d all been having tea together, “I suppose this makes us comrades of a sort. How thrilling.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m really thrilled.”

“I am concerned for your Margrave Josette,” Lord Temur said after a moment, when everyone’d been thinking about all the people
other
than us they’d have preferred as comrades at that moment in time. “If
she asks too many questions about your leader, and if it
is
the Emperor who is behind his disappearance…”

“Fuck,” I said, standing up immediately.

Caius followed me with his lone eye cold and strange, catching me for a moment and holding me in place. As little as two weeks ago, he would’ve definitely taken something like that as sure proof of some kind of love affair—and if not that, then at least something to drive Josette crazy babbling about. But it was like we’d unleashed some kind of beast in him with his Talent, like the snake that had got into our Well and poisoned everything in the night. He was different.

It was eerie.

“I’ll keep a weather eye on our guest,” Caius said, smiling thinly. “You go and play the hero. Drag her back kicking and screaming if you have to, which I suspect you might. And do try not to attract any attention if you can, though I know that’s your specialty.”

I nodded, though I still wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about leaving Lord Temur in the custody of Caius like that.

“Do not worry about my well-being,” Lord Temur said.

I snorted again. “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I won’t.”

The hallways of the Ke-Han palace were as serpentine as ever, and the mirrors reminded me like always that no matter what we did, we were being watched. Those were the same halls Fiacre had been walking hours ago for all we knew, feeling safe and cocky as any blue-blooded diplomat had to in order to put on a good show of it. I was a soldier and, for once, that made me feel less like a fox in the henhouse and more like I was in my element. Though if the Emperor really had gone mad, I wasn’t skilled enough with a sword to best him one-on-one—barring divine intervention or, more likely, a sizable portion of foul play.

Things were grim, simple as that. We didn’t need signs like a Ke-Han warlord up and changing sides on us to tell me
how
grim, either. I didn’t take to being held captive—though who did? It was tighter than the Basquiat in the narrow halls with no windows, and Fiacre’s room was quiet from within.

The guard in front of his door watched me coolly with eyes trained beyond emotion. None of that’d ever sat well with me because I had no talent for it, but I cleared my throat and tried, anyway, to be polite.

“Did a woman come by here?” I asked. “The Margrave Josette?” I
gestured vaguely as to her proportions—about this high, this wide, hair this long—and the guard pointed soundlessly down another hall.

“The menagerie,” he said, and bowed as low as if I’d been a visiting emperor.

It all felt so unclean. That was the trouble. Caius sitting on Lord Temur, mirrors winking at me from the corners, and that guard watching me all the way until I turned the corner.

Just walk slowly, Alcibiades
, I told myself.
Everything’s fine. Everything’s all right. You just want to look at the striped cats. Who doesn’t like a good striped cat? No harm in visiting the zoo now and then, seeing the native wildlife
.

And a little bit of sunlight would do me a spot of good, too.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting when, at last, the palace opened up into its private gardens. Maybe I was preparing to burst in and rescue Josette from the hands of ten, maybe twenty, expressionless Ke-Han guards, dragging her off to wherever it was Fiacre was being kept. I didn’t realize how I’d steeled myself for combat until I turned a corner past some giant white-blossomed tree to find her watching the tigers. There wasn’t even a single assassin lying in wait for her—though that didn’t mean I was going to give Greylace his dagger back anytime soon.

“Have you come to rescue me?” Josette asked, giving me a look over her shoulder that signified, as always, she wasn’t exactly impressed.

I cleared my throat. “Fiacre’s missing,” I said, coming close enough to her to whisper.

“It would seem so,” Josette said. “But don’t worry. It’s not as though I’d kick up some kind of idiot fuss trying to find him.”

“Greylace says I should drag you back kicking and screaming, if I have to.”

Josette laughed. “I’ll save my kicking and screaming for a few other choice inhabitants of this palace,” she replied.

“Well,” I said. All my nerves were on fire—waiting for a storm that was about to come, with the clouds too far off in the distance to gauge the precise timing the deluge would erupt. “Would you do me the honor of escorting me back to my quarters?”

“Why, General,” Josette said. “I never suspected you of having any manners.” She heaved a deep sigh then, her face tightening as she watched the tigers, too sleepy in the heat to even pace back and forth. I
could sense a little of what she was thinking, at least in the barest outline of a metaphor, because bastion damn me if those cats didn’t remind me just a little of myself. There was even a baby one, all white; no use saying which
that
one was.

Right. No use thinking about it.

We walked back through the quiet hallways together, and as we walked, I felt like we were heading deeper and deeper into the belly of a winding beast—one great big snake made out of formality and sliding doors and cypress wood and mirrors. The deeper we got, the less of a chance there was we’d have any way of slicing our way out again.

I was half-expecting Lord Temur and Caius Greylace to be gone by the time we returned to my chambers, whisked away by the guards like they were just cleaning the place up. Josette and Caius and I had been cockeyed to the point of being blind, so caught up in the problem with the letters that we hadn’t reported our findings higher up along the diplomatic chain. And now, we were separated from the rest of the group, the age-old and generally effective tactic of divide and conquer.