The Mirrored City (13 page)

The warm glow of Light spread from his fingers. To anyone’s knowledge, he was the only person in Creation to be both a Stormlord and healer. People who were born to it, like Jessa and Sireen, couldn’t master other forms of theurgy. And since becoming a Stormlord himself, Heath had felt his Light depleting. Still, it was enough to heal the cuts, broken shoulder, and most of the bruising. The other pain he could endure as he scuttled off the rooftop lawn down to the streets below.

“The Patriarch? Are you fucking kidding me?” Maddox shouted as he waved the crumpled broadsheet in Heath’s face.

Heath sat at his desk quietly penning his letter of condolence. “He had a long fruitful life of exploiting people’s religious beliefs for his own gain. He refused to even speak with me, so I had to advance our agenda.” Heath dipped his quill into the ink pot and continued writing.

“You’ve been a Stormlord for exactly nine months, and the first person you kill is the head of a democratically elected government. By the Guides, who in the hells are you? I thought you were trying to have a conscience.” Maddox tugged at his hair.

Heath smiled. “The old me would have murdered him for pocket coin, no questions asked. This is about
building
something that will last when I’m gone.”

“I fail to see how that’s an improvement.” Then Maddox admitted, “I’ve been a Stormlord before. Their brains don’t work like ours… it changes you.”

“What I’m doing,” Heath said calmly as he made his signature on the paper, “is ensuring Assembly support for the retaking of Thelassus for our friend, Jessa. Now if there had been any valid reasons for Qaadar’s refusal to assist us, I would have addressed those. However, there were no reasons aside from a bigoted hatred of societies that don’t conform to his narrow set of values. The world does not need that kind of person in any position of power.”

Maddox nodded. “Okay. That’s fair, but what about people who
murder
other people for their personal beliefs?”

Heath folded his hands together. “When those beliefs affect the people I care about, they aren’t personal.”

Maddox sighed and plopped down on the overstuffed chair in front of the fire. “They are going to come after you with everything they have—”

“Why would they even suspect me?” Heath asked incredulously.

Maddox shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Stormlords have a reputation for
assassinating
people. You’re a highly trained
assassin
who’s also a Stormlord. You come to town and hey—look at that—someone who disagrees with you is
assassinated
within weeks of your arrival.”

“And?” Heath asked. “It would be stupid of me to actually do it, especially when it undermines my negotiations with the other houses of which the Assembly vote is just a piece. Plenty of people who want Ibiq dead, many of them in his own family, might use this time as an excuse to make a regime change.”

“Except you did it!” Maddox protested. “When they subject all the suspects to the Veritas Seal, none of them will be lying when they say it isn’t them. Someone is going to point a finger your way, and they are not going to put you in a magic fishbowl while they build a case. Satryn pretty much ruined diplomatic courtesy when she destroyed half of Rivern with water tentacles.”

“It won’t come to that.”

He frowned. “I just wish you’d have talked to me. You bring me all the way here to the ass end of the Protectorate and you fucking ignore me. You won’t so much as let me kiss you because it would be a ‘distraction.’ Every time you see this face, you see Maddox and, buddy, how you treat Maddox
sucks
.”

“None of this is easy for me.” Heath stood and grabbed Maddox’s shoulders. “When I came home after slitting that old man’s leg open and watching him bleed out… do you know what thought kept me awake?”

“Planning your next murder?” Maddox ventured.

“I was worried about
you,
both as Maddox and my best friend Sword. I want you back as my partner, and I want Maddox to be happy. But I can’t have you as both.”

“You still love him,” Maddox said. It was always odd to hear him talk in third person.

“Gods no,” Heath chuckled. “There isn’t a word for what I feel about him. Protective maybe?”

“I’m two out of three people in a love triangle, and I’m still the odd man out. Unbelievable!” Maddox threw his hands up in exasperation.

“Once Maddox is safe, I’ll find you a body that isn’t as capable of these feelings. And things will be like they were before between us. Not all your incarnations are this… needy.”

Maddox turned and walked out the door. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Where are you going?” Heath asked.

“To give your name to the authorities. Where do you think?”

If Heath had thought there was even a chance Maddox meant it, he would have been dead before he could slam the door and clomp angrily down the stairs. Heath let Maddox go.

Heath shook his head and grumbled to himself, “I will not miss this drama when I finally separate those two. It’s like being married forty unhappy years to an alcoholic with the maturity of a teenager.”

He had work to do.

T
HIRTEEN

Awakening

S
OREN

Those born under the sign of the Twins express duality. Readings can sometimes be difficult because those born at the same time under the star share an interconnected fortune.

It is said that every person born under the sign of the Twins shares a soul with another. They may never meet, but their lives are intertwined. When reading someone under this sign, the Diviner must always consider the existence of a paired destiny.

—DIVINER’S GUIDE TO THE STARS

SOREN STRODE THROUGH
the circles of couches and patterned folding screens that dotted the open atrium of the Palace of Keys, shaking hands and slapping the backs of the clients. He had been astonishingly cheerful these past few days and felt like he was bursting with energy. He flirted and smiled. For the first time he could remember, he wasn’t burdened by illness or hunger.

He kept well fed, and his arms started to fill in nicely, even though he hadn’t been that active. He’d taken to wearing his tunic open so he could feel the appreciative brush of a client’s hands on his body. He liked being touched, the sensual warmth of another person’s hand on his skin. It wasn’t sexual, although he did find himself erect more often than he ever remembered as a teenager in the orphanage.

“I hear you hand out keys or some shit in this place,” an older gentleman, maybe twenty-six, with messy brown hair and green eyes said impatiently. He was slight of frame, and his breath reeked of alcohol. Soren didn’t recognize the man, so he was probably new.

“I can do that.” Soren walked over to his podium to choose a key from the cubbyholes. They were numbered for each of the rooms. His eyes rested on the one for the room beneath his, where he had heard the screaming. He avoided giving it to any of the guests, but inwardly… he wondered if management would suspect him if he
didn’t
hand it out. He had a good thing at the Palace and didn’t want to end up on the street again for breaking a rule.

He took the key for room twenty-six and handed it to the stranger. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. He’d learned from chatting with patrons that people liked all sorts of strange things done to them. “Here you are. Right up the stairs at the top.”

The man accepted the key from Soren’s hand.

When their skin touched, Soren thought he was having another episode. But he realized he wasn’t falling ill. He felt a jolt of energy like with Rebekah, only stronger. It was nearly magnetic, and he found himself lost in the stranger’s rough beauty. Something about him left Soren speechless.

The man tugged the key out of Soren’s hand, narrowing his eyes. “Thanks.”

Soren stood dumbfounded by his profound fascination. He never found men attractive. That sort of thing happened at the orphanage because it was only boys, but he had allowed Keltis’s brutal affections mainly out of survival.

The man rolled his eyes. “What?”

Soren gulped. “Nothing.”

The man was already marching up the stairs.

Samantha was curled into her usual spot on the couch, basically ignoring everyone as she worked on her poetry. Since Soren had started, she barely talked to anyone and didn’t seem to mind his being the new face of the Palace. She spared him a brief glance and nodded gravely in a way that gave Soren a chill. She knew more than she said, but it was better not to ask.

At the end of the night, the stranger had not emerged from the room. Soren learned from Sam that some rooms had back exits, to preserve the secrecy of what was inside. Soren busied himself collecting glasses and dumping out the uneaten fruit. They had staff to do that, but he felt uncomfortable not tidying. At the orphanage he’d be punished for keeping a messy common area.

He carried two fruit bowls to the back room and tossed out the picked over bunches of grapes and a couple of bruised apples. The rest could last until tomorrow. Satisfied that he’d tidied up, he headed back to his room but froze when he stepped into the atrium.

A stunning woman with flawless, nearly jet black skin reclined on one of the couches with a handsome but nondescript man with straw blond hair. “Hello, Soren,” the woman said.

“We’re closed,” Soren said.

“We are,” the woman agreed. She had a posh Thrycean accent that made everything she said sound like a formal decree. “We’re your employers and this is our establishment.”

“Oh.” Soren shuffled nervously. “Hi.”

“Do not be alarmed,” the woman said. “We are pleased with the work you do here. Very pleased, aren’t we, Ryon?”

“Very,” Ryon said. His face betrayed no emotion.

“I don’t know your name.” Soren smiled and offered his hand.

“Sybil,” the woman said, looking at his extended hand. Her tone was pleasant, but she made no motion to reciprocate his handshake. “You have been very good at your job, Soren.”

Soren awkwardly withdrew his hand and brushed it on his leg. “Thanks. I don’t do that much.”

“Have you ever studied the
Arcane Principia of Chaos
?” Sybil asked.

Soren shook his head. “I didn’t have much school.”

Sybil laughed and cocked her head appraisingly. “No, I don’t imagine you did.”

Ryon spoke, “The ancient wizards imagined that there was a pattern to seemingly random events, provided they were truly random. The problem is that when you start to record random events, the act of measuring them influences the outcomes. It becomes very hard to find truly random representations of the will of Creation.”

Soren offered a grin and a shrug. “I don’t understand.”

“That might explain it,” Sybil said to Ryon casually. “His unawareness may give him clarity in the selection of the keys.”

“Yet the outcome did not favor us, and he had never drawn that key before,” Ryon argued.

“Why did you choose to hand out the key to room twenty-six?” Sybil asked.

“I realized that I never gave it out, and I wanted to follow the rules,” Soren said.

“That key can only be noticed under very special circumstances,” Sybil explained.