The Guild (40 page)

“Do it. I’m going to the Vortex armory to get some weapons—Pioton, man the talker-box,” he ordered.

“I was about to offer to go with you,” the mage stated. “You’ll need all the mages you can get, even with the Holy Knight’s help.” At his side Jenden nodded, including himself.

“I’ll do that,” Gabria offered immediately. “It’s probably Marta on duty. I’ll let her know you’re on your way with mages to help, then I can go back to scrying for what’s happening in the temple. I won’t go
near
it, but I will watch what’s happening and send word when I can.”

“I’ll give you a communications Artifact that will allow you to reach me immediately,” Orana offered, moving to the younger woman’s side as Gabria took over the earpiece from Alonnen. Once again, Ora’s hands moved to the deep cuffs of her robes. “I’ve based it on an idea I saw while staying on Nightfall Isle . . .”

“The Vortex?” Pelai prompted Alonnen. “If these are the demon summoners, and you fear for the life of this Master Longshanks, then if we can seal off the ability to cast Portals of any
kind, we can prevent the summoning that is the
reason
for Longshanks’ capture. If nothing else, it should delay them as they check their warding runes to see why the summoning is not working.”

“You know how to summon demons?” Alonnen asked, wary.

The tall woman gave him a pointed look, one hand going to her hip. “I also know exactly where to stab a human so that they bleed to death from one of their major arteries, either at throat, armpit, or groin. Do you see me stabbing anyone? Fetch me pen and paper, and I shall write an oathbinding that forswears my using your Fountain’s powers for anything that would harm anyone you care about. That would limit my use very strictly to just implementing the aether disruptions, as that will not hurt anyone.”

He had to trust her. Alonnen’s older brother was very good at his job, but Rogen was no mage. No one in the militia was a mage. The more of those Alonnen had on his side when riding in to rescue Rexei, the safer everyone would be . . . and that meant leading
his
guild into battle. Gabria’s reluctance to go anywhere near that temple was not a fear he himself could afford to display. So he had to trust Pelai of Mendhi.

Nodding sharply, he gestured at his desk. “There’s a charcoal pencil on my desk and plenty of paper. Start writing your oath. I’ll be back to witness it as soon as we’ve been to the armory. Pioton, Jenden, I’ll handle the inner circle; the two of you divide up the middle ring and snag any mage willing to come fight.”

“Barclei’s off-duty and more than willing to face down the priests,” Jenden told him. “He’ll know the names of the others who are equally ready.”

“None of us are ready,” Alonnen muttered, grabbing his glasses and scarf from their resting places near the door. “We have less training, incomplete knowledge, limited numbers . . . The one thing we’re
good
at is shielding and blocking spells. Orana Niel, I’m
afraid you’ll have to be our main cannon in this fight. Make every shot count.”

Nodding with that same constant level of calm she had always displayed for as long as he could remember, the Darkhanan Witch followed Alonnen and the other two Guildarans out the door. Behind them, Gabria listened at the talker-box, craning her neck to stare at the mirrors every few seconds, while Pelai crossed to the desk and sat down.

• • •

T
hey left Rexei in one of the cells with the order to, “Sit down,” but no other commands. So she sat on the edge of the cot and waited, bottom still feeling a little sore. The strangers left the cell room first, while Archbishop Elcarei glared down at her. Rexei kept her gaze unfocused and aimed across the room, as if unaware of his presence, though her peripheral vision strained, as did her ears, for any sign she was in immediate danger from the middle-aged man.

Finally, he left, doing nothing more dangerous than closing the door. A key
ka-chunked
in the lock a few seconds later, and a hint of magic shimmered across the door, sealing her inside. Rexei slowly counted to ten, ears straining for any sounds. There was a bit of muffled talking right outside her door, but she couldn’t make sense of it. After a few moments, the noises went away.

Humming hard in her mind, she tested the spell on the collar. She already knew her legs could move. Her arms could move. She could even twist as she sat on the bed, and she was able to set down the carefully cradled, half-smashed paper cockroach . . . but getting up off the wool-draped pallet was not easy. In fact, it triggered a painful shower of sparks through the backs of her eyes. Dizzy from the moment she reached her feet, she had to brace one hand
on the wall. She
could
move, but only slowly, gingerly feeling her way; the pain interfered with her sense of balance.

She almost tripped over the refresher, and she bruised her hip on the sink, but she made a full circuit of the crystal-lit cell. She could see better, and it was getting easier to move with each hummed bar of her warding spell, each second she stood and walked instead of sat, but it did exhaust her. Sinking back onto the bed let the pain fade, but it also made her leg muscles tremble from the effort.

So I
can
move, though it’s a struggle to fight the spell. Thank the Gods that Mekha isn’t around anymore
, she thought, rubbing her hands over her face.
I don’t know how many other mages have meditations they could have done—probably not many, beyond my mother—but even without His will enforcing the spell, I can see why those first well-trained mages found it impossible to resist and escape once the drainings had begun.

It was not a pleasant thought; in fact, it churned her stomach. Rexei forced herself off the cot and over to the refresher, bracing one hand on the glazed rim of the sink. That made her think of another need, one starting to grow urgent in spite of the blinding headache the
Sit down
command had given her. Taking advantage of her moment of privacy taught her that
any
seat would do, to the point that standing up again was not pleasant on several levels. The bed, however, was a far safer seat to be found at than the porcelain one.

She had no idea when they’d come for her or when they’d discover she was a female not a male. Nor did she know what was involved in a demonic summoning, nor how long she had left to live. But Rexei did know she wasn’t going to wait to be killed. Nor could she be sure that anyone had seen her on her walk through the temple. The first step was to try to get the others to see her, despite being locked in a room without a functional paper roach.

Turning to the crushed, folded bug on the mattress, she picked
it up and started gently pulling it back into a puffed-out shape, in the hopes that that was all it would need to work.

How did they know I’d be coming out of the Consulate by the front door and headed that way?
she wondered, thinking about her half brother’s note. She pulled it out.
Is . . . is this even Lundrei’s handwriting? I don’t remember. I don’t remember what any of their handwriting looked like, save for I think I remember Mum’s handwriting on the jars of preserves we made together.

A sick feeling churned in her gut.
Did
he
do this? Lundrei, my own kin? I’d
like
to think he wouldn’t have done it of his own free will . . . but there are nearly twelve years between the half brother I knew when I was ten years old and the man I met last night.
She swallowed down the uncomfortable thought and felt her throat muscles pressing against the metal circling her neck.
Of course, I could be mentally accusing him of the wrong things.

I
know
the priests had their hands on my cap and coat for a while. Long enough to find hairs. And I’ve heard rumors of mage-kin being tracked down despite changing their names, identities, regions . . . They might have used a location spell on him, something the Hunter Squads use. And if they caught up with him last night and slapped one of these collars around his neck . . . wait,
would
anyone hunt down one of my kin just to . . . ?

She all but slapped herself on the forehead; only the delicate, half-crumpled paper bug in her fingers kept her from doing so.
Of course they would
, Rexei thought, wincing.
I made a fool of the Archbishop of Heiastowne. And not only did I make a fool of him for two months,
and
gain a Guild rank elevation out of it, I’m now the head of the Holy Guild, utterly supplanting everything he and his cronies enjoyed, stood for, and gloated about for the whole length of their perverted, power-hungry lives.

I’m more surprised he hasn’t personally carved me up yet, now that I think about it.

The paper roach shimmered and moved. Freaked, Rexei
jumped. The good thing was, she confined the urge to scream into a throttled-down squeak. The bad thing was, the enchanted cockroach—which now looked disturbingly real—moved again, making her instinctively fling it away from her. It hit the ground with the faintest
papf
sound as one of the fluffed-out bits crumpled . . . and the roach stopped moving again, turning back into mere, if colorful, paper.

Panting, she forced herself to calm down.
Just a spell . . . just a spell . . . Guildra,
she prayed, staring wide-eyed at the enchanted paper on the stone floor,
help me to get out of here! I don’t want my nerves to break . . .

It took her a few more moments to calm her racing heart. “Come on, Rexei,” she whispered to herself, knowing that standing up and fetching the paper back would hurt. “Come on . . . stand up and get it back . . .”

Bracing herself with a deep breath, she pushed to her feet . . . and felt no pain. That startled her into freezing—and that was when the pain started to creep into range, pushing her limbs forward. Toward the paper spy on the ground.

Oh! Ohhhh . . . I’m already touching the collar, and my mind isn’t so deeply sunk under the weight of Mekha’s will that I cannot even think . . . so I can give
myself
orders that the collar forces me to obey? Oh,
thank
you, Guildra!

For a moment, she thought she heard the faintest whisper of,
You’re welcome
, but the pain was getting in the way. Letting it go, Rexei stooped and carefully plucked the roach from the ground then returned to the bed. The new order cancelled the compulsion to
sit down
, but if she didn’t sit, she might get caught
not
sitting, since there was no telling when the priests would come back.

And if I can think . . . Oh yes. I never apprenticed to the Locksmiths
or
the Law-Sayers, but I know exactly what to do.
Thinking swiftly as she gingerly re-plucked at the corners and curves of the paper bug,
she stated aloud, “I am to completely ignore any and all spell-based compulsions forced upon me by this collar, following the completion of this order. I will be free to act in any way I desire, or not act, and I command myself to use the power of any reinforcing spells on any other commands to instead reinforce this order: I will have complete and total free will from this point forward. This is the only order that will apply to me from this point forward.”

There
, she thought, smiling.
That takes care of that. Now to pick this open again . . . and . . . almost got it . . . eurghh, it’s moving—ick!
she thought, wrinkling her nose at the lifelike roach now perched on her hand. From a scrying mirror, they had looked a lot more paperlike, but she supposed that was just the scrying spell’s method of letting a mage know which cockroaches were the paper ones without tipping off the people being spied upon to the reality underlying the carefully folded, mobile illusions.
This reminds me of those tenements back when I was in the Cobblers Guild, learning how to repair shoes . . .

I had to get a room in the “young apprentice” building in that town. I appreciated the adults who kept an eye on us, making sure we had food and such, but the other kids didn’t always know how to seal up food inside jars and things to keep the roach population at a minimum. Of course, I’d trade a room infested with roaches and other bugs any day over
this
priest-infested Netherhell-hole.

Unfortunately, if she couldn’t figure out how to communicate with the mages back at the Vortex via this illusionary bug, she’d find herself quite dead inside a real Netherhell soon.

The sound of a key in the lock gave her a few seconds of warning. Tossing the roach onto the corner of the cot, where it would hopefully pass unnoticed, she quickly shifted into an approximation of the pose Elcarei had last seen her in, with her hands on her thighs and her gaze unfocused across the room. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the door open, admitting an apprentice with a cup in one hand and a bowl in the other; the handle of a
spoon and a bit of steam rose above the rim of the bowl. She hadn’t interacted much with the lattermost male, but she thought his name might be Kurt or something like that.

Behind him entered Archbishop Elcarei, and behind
him
was the foreign mage, Torven. Stepping up to her, Elcarei leaned over and touched her collar; the other touches had been given by the men holding her arms, outside her field of view. This time, she saw it coming. “When we are done questioning you, you will take this bowl and eat the food in it, drink water to keep yourself hydrated, use the refresher and the sink to ensure you stay clean and healthy, and when you are tired, you will sleep in this bed. You will drink a few sips of the water now, then you will answer our questions.”

The apprentice priest—not the one who had been violating that one woman mage, thankfully—held out the cup. Rexei felt her arm moving before she could even think of doing so deliberately. The moment she instinctively tried to resist, testing the horrible theory racing through her thoughts . . . the pain came back in a prickle that forced her fingers to open, then close around the curve of the ceramic cup. That same spell-command forced her to bring the goblet to her lips and drink.