Sourcethief (Book 3) (25 page)

"Kyrus, you never ... Oh, my dear, let me have
a look at you." Dogs underfoot, the old woman came up to Soria and looked
her over like a horse at the fair. Brannis saw Soria tense as Kyrus's mother
took her chin in hand. She then took Soria's hands and looked them over as
well. "Common laborer, though she's had a gentle time of it mostly. What
is it you do, dear? Ladies' maid, potter, seamstress? Those hands of yours have
seen real use, but you look well kept."

"Coinblade," Soria replied, smirking as
the woman (who was purported to be her oathmother) recoiled.

"Kyrus! What sort of woman are you bringing
around here?" Ma Hinterdale demanded.

"It figures he'd be mixin'," a voice came
from the far doorway, where Pa Hinterdale stood, sucking on the end of a
battered pipe. He looked every bit of an elderly Kedan: tall, but not so tall
as Brannis, wide shoulders and thick arms. His jawline was accentuated as he
gritted his teeth around the pipe."Figures he'd fall in with pirate types.
Figures he'd marry him some whorin' sneak."

Brannis could abide many slights, but his father's
casual venom toward Soria was too much. He started across the room for Pa
Hinterdale, only to have Kedan bar his way. Kedan had often taken Kyrus's side
as a boy, doing chores for him when he grew tired or did them poorly in his
carelessness. But Kedan had always kept Kyrus in his place as well, roughing
him up whenever he saw the need. Kedan still had an advantage of heft on
Brannis, but now there existed nowhere near the same disparity as there once
had been between Kedan and his true half-brother. As Kedan put his hands onto
Brannis's chest to push him back, Brannis laid his own forearm across Kedan's
collarbone. He had leverage and knew he could force his way past Kyrus's
brother, but allowed himself to be restrained.

"I didn't come back here for this,"
Brannis snapped. "I came to see how the family fared, and let you know
that I wasn't all they claimed. Looks like I needn't have bothered."

Soria snickered softly behind him. Brannis whipped
his head around to see what could possibly have amused her at a time like that.

"Sorry," she told him. "I'll explain
it later." She had dropped all pretense of disguising her Kheshi accent,
he noticed.

"Get out then. We're farin' just fine. That
slaggard Harwick's already been and told us all, months back. Even tried to buy
us quiet. But he ain't buyin' my opinion outta me. Get gone, be you witch or
pirate or both. Don't you bring that harlot back, neither."

Brannis followed Soria out the door, slamming it
shut with a crack behind them.
Did he know all these years that I wasn't
his? Was this just father's excuse: blaming Soria?
Kedan followed them out,
muttering apologies for their father, but he did nothing to dissuade them from
leaving as he helped them retrieve their horses.

As the two of them rode away, Brannis calmed enough
to ask Soria what she had found so amusing during his argument with his father.

"You," she answered. "You slipped
back into some country yokel dialect of Acardian, probably what Kyrus spoke as
a boy in that house. You actually started a bit earlier in the day, but I
didn't say anything about it. I just figured it was the thought of home. Then I
realized that even though you still aren't completely convinced you're Kyrus,
you just started speaking with an accent that
you
never used in your
life."

Brannis frowned, but found that he could not keep
with it. To his chagrin, he smiled, forced to admit to himself that, yes, it
was funny.

* * * * * * *
*

It was early evening when they reached Scar Harbor.
The brief stay at the Hinterdale Farm had been far briefer than their guesses.

"You're in a foul mood already. Want to just go
see Lord Harwick tonight?" Soria asked. "I mean, what news could he
have that would upset you further?"

"Aside from blaming me for Caladris's death and
trying to exact revenge on the spot? I suppose not much. I already know his sad
tale, and the retelling cannot be much worse, I would imagine."

"That's the spirit," Soria said to him.
She laughed and trotted on ahead of him. Brannis followed her, feeling reckless
taking his horse so fast on crowded city streets.

The ride to Tomas Harwick's manor house was not a
long one. A servant at the gate told them that they were expected and took
their horses with no fuss. When Brannis asked about Lord Harwick, the man just
shook his head and would not meet his eye.

"There you are, blast you!" Lord Harwick
bellowed down from the upstairs landing upon their arrival. "Get up to my
study. This cannot wait." Lord Harwick disappeared down the hallway. Soria
and Brannis exchanged a wary glance before following after him.

They caught up with him in his study. Lord Harwick
was already slouched back in his chair, a bottle of some clear liquor clenched
in one hand. With the other, he shoved a piece of paper across the desk at
them.

"Read this," he ordered. Lord Harwick then
took a long pull from the bottle.

"What is it?" Brannis asked. Harwick waved
for him to just read it, not so much as taking his mouth from the bottle.

The Honorable Tomas Harwick:

Being that you are of most
prestigious and respectable lineage. Being that you are of moral and ethical
good standing. Being that you are of sound judgment and admirable intellect, I
hereby request with all humility that you would accept a position that would do
honor to my family and my people.

Brannis skimmed a while, taking note that most of it
seemed to follow a very legalistic form, though not of Acardian cadence. The
hand that wrote it knew Acardian script well enough though, and the calligraphy
was professional. It was signed at the end.

The office of Her Highness,
Princess Fjong Shilasdaughter

"What's the trouble?" Brannis asked.
"It looks like they want Tomas for an ambassador to Khesh. This would be a
real coup for a man of his age." Brannis felt odd referring to the youth
of a man who was eight summers his elder, but it was true. Ambassadorships were
typically granted to old pensioners of the army or noblemen who never
inherited.

"The trouble? I received the letter this
morning, that is the trouble," Lord Harwick said. "But Tomas was
kidnapped last night while I was down at the Society for a few drinks and a
game of chess."

"I am sure the Kheshi will understand—"

"The Kheshi are the ones who took him!"
Lord Harwick thrust himself from his chair and stalked the room, bottle in
hand. "The letter is a leash about my neck so that I can neither pursue
him nor make a proper complaint to the Kheshi embassy. We've been
outmaneuvered."

"Outmaneuvered by who?" Soria asked.
"What would anyone want with Tomas?"

"Rashan. It has to be," Lord Harwick said,
closing his eyes and shaking his head. His eyes opened and fixed on Brannis who
could see dark bags beneath the bloodshot whites of his eyes. Lord Harwick took
a step closer to him, and Brannis could also see that his late uncle's twin had
not shaved. The stink of whiskey on his breath came as no surprise, but it
threatened to turn Brannis’s stomach. "What happened?"

"You mean after ... Rashan ..." Brannis
stumbled through the words.

"Yes, after he killed me," Lord Harwick
said. There was a trapped look in his eyes, which seem to flit about, looking
for some escape from his head. "Brannis, the other morning I awoke
screaming, scared my butler out of a year's life. Veydrus was gone in an
instant. I still know it is there, like a man with a missing leg who still
feels an ache in it. I never asked my brother what it was like when he died
there. It seemed a morbid, thoughtless thing to ask. I wish I had, because I have
not slept since. I know I cannot hold out forever, but ... but I do not want to
see the nothingness that must greet me next."

Brannis shook his head. He had no answers for the
questions to which Lord Harwick most wanted answers, but he could provide what
he knew. "Rashan killed most of the Inner Circle. Your loyal assistant
sold your secret to Rashan to avoid marrying you once Aunt Faeranna died."

"Did you flee?" Lord Harwick asked.
"Did you drive him off? What happened when he turned on you?"

"He did not ... or at least he has not,
yet," Brannis admitted.

"You mean you did nothing?" Harwick
demanded. "You sat there, like a dragon on high, able to shift the balance
of power in that chamber at a whim and just watched?"

"I protected the emperor. Our plans had always
envisioned attacking Rashan from ambush, catching him at a moment when he was
off his balance. Being caught on the wrong end of his ambush was the worst time
to reveal myself. I would be right here alongside you, crying into a
bottle." Brannis was unsure of the latter. However bleak things had looked
before, he had never sought refuge in the bottle, but he was beginning to
wonder whether Lord Harwick had gone mad in the wake of Caladris's death and
how much blame he might throw Brannis's way. Lord Harwick was still a
formidable sorcerer.

"You are probably right," Lord Harwick
admitted. He sighed and wiped his brow with a sleeve, his bottle of gin angling
dangerously toward spilling its contents. "You need to find another chance
to kill him. I will give you anything I can to help. You can study on the
way." Lord Harwick set the bottle down and took a key from his pocket.

"On the way where?" Soria asked. "We
just got back."

"To Khesh," Lord Harwick replied as he
fumbled with the lock of his desk drawer. "Your ship, the
Poet's Hammer
leaves with the morning tide."

"You already booked passage for us?"
Brannis asked. "How did you know we would be back? We left no itinerary
for our visits."

"The tide waits for no man, but the ships can
be held to the next. The captain may well be inconvenienced, but I have the
authority to hold ships in port. He should be grateful to have his leave to
sail on the morrow."
"How has Abbiley taken his disappearance?" Brannis asked. He felt
Soria's glare on him without having to look her way.

"She was taken as well. It looked as if they
were made to pack in some haste, or someone packed many of their
belongings," Lord Harwick said. "We have been outmaneuvered badly, I
am afraid. I think that Rashan may have had more agents in Tellurak than I had
realized. I had thought I was his only substantive contact."

"What can he want by this? If he wanted to kill
you here as well, why not just be about it—no offense, of course—rather than
involving your son?" Brannis asked. "It makes no sense."

"I can only imagine that it is a hedge against
you. He still believes that he has you by Abbiley's leash. If he takes her, he
can ensure that you cannot act against him without losing her," Lord
Harwick said. He turned toward Soria, cutting her off as she seemed about to
protest Abbiley's irrelevance. "I know as well as you that Abbiley is not
the deterrent Rashan would like to think she is. That is not what matters here.
What matters is that two innocents, my son among them, are about to be kept as
pawns by some Kheshi princess toward ends they have no say in. I lack the
capacity to hunt after them. I leave them to you."

"Why should we?" Soria asked. "You
got them involved in this. He's your son. You got the girl involved to snare
Kyrus and caught Brannis instead. He's slipped that net though, and he's with
me now. We don't have to do anything at all about this. Complain to the king,
and get his help with the Kheshi."

"This is where it grows complicated. I have
lost control of the flow of information. Rashan has another contact—he must. I
have no further link to Veydrus besides you, but I need you here to act.
Whoever is behind these Kheshi dealings is working with Rashan in Veydrus. If
you can trace them, maybe you can find a way to twist them back to our side and
betray him. That is always the risk with plots between worlds: the same
absolute secrecy works both ways."

Lord Harwick managed to open his desk drawer and
draw out a stack of papers, piling them in front of him. He turned to look for
something among the shelves.

"What is all this?"

"All that I had been planning to teach you.
There may be no time for it now. You are no threat to me any longer in Veydrus
so you might as well have them. You managed a transference spell on your own,
so I doubt you need my hand-holding over the basics of them. You will just have
to settle for painting portraits with an axe-head without my guidance. At least
I will not have to witness your shoddy spells." Harwick turned with the
last little jest to display a smile. He wobbled a bit, holding onto the
bookcase with one hand to steady himself.

He found a handful of scroll cases and began
stuffing the notes into them. Brannis cringed as drunken fingers mashed the
valuable documents into the tubes. He took up a case and helped fill it to
limit the damage.

"Learn this stuff, Brannis, as much as you can.
Hang me if I know any weakness that that bastard has, but I think maybe you
could face him head-on if you just get enough practice. Promise me you will
send word if it comes to combat between you. I must know if he is dead or if
you fail."