Gerran was busy opening his strongbox, without even a glimmer of concern. “Too bad you didn’t keep him unconscious,” he said, pulling out stacks of gold and silver bars.
“The delay at the gate was too long, and the yeleran wore off.” Try as I might, the words still came out sharp.
“It was a difficult job, Dev, but you’re being amply rewarded.” He counted out a gleaming pile of gold bars and laid a plain velvet bag on top. “Your fee and your gemstones, as agreed.”
I opened the bag and spilled out a sparkling rainbow of stones onto his desk. Silently, he offered me a jeweler’s glass. I checked each gem for flaws, keeping a wary eye on the hovering muscle twin. “Tell your men to return the cart to a guy named Silas, at a cabin a mile north of the gate.”
“Not a problem,” Gerran said. “Here’s the paperwork.” He handed me documentation that showed I’d profited from a sale of silerium ore, and a second set naming me as a gemstone courier to Ninavel, which I’d need in order to safely store the gold and gems in a warded vault. The Alathians kept nearly as close an eye on their banking houses as they did on the border.
I wrapped up the lot, my nerves jumping. Gerran’s promises notwithstanding, I half expected his man to leap on me the minute I turned my back. But I exited and crossed to the cart unmolested. Gerran’s door remained shut, the yard silent, as I unhitched and saddled the horse. The first muscle twin was nowhere in sight. He must’ve stayed with Kiran, wherever they’d stashed him. I jerked my gaze away from the warehouses surrounding the yard. Whatever they’d done with Kiran was no business of mine.
I repeated that to myself as I rode away. A small fortune sat in the pack lashed to my saddle. I’d replaced all I’d lost to Jylla, and could finally give Melly the safety and the future Sethan had so desperately wanted for her.
Hell, I should be proud. I’d managed to complete the job in the face of avalanches, snowstorms, and angry mages. I ought to be going out celebrating tonight, damn it.
The thought only swelled the guilt gnawing at my guts. I clenched my hands on my reins. People were bought and sold in Ninavel all the time. Khalmet’s hand, I’d been sold twice over, and it hadn’t hurt me any. So what if I’d lied—so had Kiran. He’d been using me like I was using him, and he’d only told the truth when I forced it out of him. I didn’t owe him anything. He’d murdered Harken and a score of others, endangered my friends, and cost me my future as an outrider.
None of it eased the memory of that terrible look in his eyes. Fuck. I kicked my horse into a heavy trot, but I couldn’t outrun the other memories that chased me. His despair in the cave, when I’d seen the blood mage sigil; his white, pinched face after he’d pushed me clear of the rockfall; and worst of all, his blindingly bright smile when I’d first returned to the cabin.
Damn it, maybe I’d feel better if I made certain the mystery buyer wasn’t Ruslan. I didn’t see how it could be—why should Ruslan bother to pursue us across the mountains, otherwise? Yet I couldn’t figure why anyone else would want a runaway blood mage apprentice so badly.
I’d been to Gerran’s compound enough times over the last few years that I had a fair idea of his security measures. Breaking and entering in Alathia was far easier than in Ninavel, where anyone with enough coin could place seriously nasty wards. Gerran surely used deadly Ninavel-made wards inside his office, hidden from the Alathian authorities, but the wards scribed over his compound’s outer fence met the Alathian legal standards and were laughably weak.
Gerran had placed his wards well, and no gaps existed in the protections on the sturdy fence. But the biggest failing of Alathian wards was their limited field of effect. I’d long since noticed that a good climber might scale the wall of a neighboring grain barn to a height that’d place him safely above the reach of the ward energies. One long jump would clear both wards and fence and give access to Gerran’s storage yard. The barn wall was made of tightly fitted, weather sealed boards, making the climb a tricky prospect, but thanks to Red Dal, I’d had years of practice with exactly that kind of balance work.
Gerran had told his men to take Kiran to the third level, and only one of his warehouses had more than two floors. When I’d glanced that way after leaving Gerran’s office, I hadn’t seen any wards on the warehouse walls, only around the doors and windows. An old smoke vent sat high up under the eaves, a hole just big enough for a small, wiry person like myself to squeeze through into the maze of rafters beyond. Alathians rarely bothered with internal sealing for mere storage buildings, due to the expense, so likely there’d be cracks between ceiling boards wide enough for me to peek through to the rooms below. Soon as I’d secured my pay, I’d sneak into Gerran’s compound and find where they’d stashed Kiran, take a look at the buyer...maybe even figure a way to provide Kiran a little anonymous help before I left Kost.
***
(Kiran)
Ever since he’d taken the hennanwort, Kiran felt trapped in a nightmare. A terrible smothering numbness engulfed his mind, his inner senses vanished as completely as a severed limb. Wavering colored halos shimmered in disorienting array over his sight, and the distances between objects grew and shrank with no discernible pattern, as in some bizarre dreamscape. Every time he reached for power, he felt nothing but a sickening void, and his thoughts scattered and skipped like striderbugs in magelight.
He couldn’t move. Sometimes he thought he was bound to a chair in a small, bare room with wooden walls. Other times he was certain he remained in Ruslan’s workroom, held immobile by wards, and his memories of the mountains nothing but a dream and a lie. Had Dev betrayed him yet? He wasn’t sure. Perhaps he was still huddled in the darkness of the abandoned cabin, waiting for the Alathians to come...
A squealing sound scraped across Kiran’s consciousness like a file. A door, opening...he looked up with a sense of awful inevitability. Ruslan had come; he was certain of it. It was always Ruslan, in his nightmares.
For an instant he even saw Ruslan, tall and sardonic, a cold light in his hazel eyes. But as panic sliced through the haze in his head, his vision cleared, and Ruslan’s image vanished. Instead, two men stood watching him, blurred by flickering halos. Muddy gray danced around an older, spectacled man whom Kiran recognized in a vague way, and a blaze of lurid yellow outlined a man he didn’t know, slender and dark-haired, with the brown skin of an Arkennlander, though he wore formally cut Alathian clothes in shades of somber gray.
Alathia; he was in Alathia, yet still in danger. His surroundings wavered and solidified. Ropes crossed his chest, arms, and legs, binding him to a sturdy wooden chair.
The unfamiliar man’s eyes met his, and he jerked against the ropes in uncontrolled reaction. The man didn’t look anything like Ruslan, but his eyes burned with arrogant confidence the same way Ruslan’s always had. He wore no sigils, but Kiran knew without a doubt he was a mage, and a powerful one.
The mage smiled at his flinch. Cold fear speared through the fog blurring Kiran’s thoughts. Ruslan might have smiled so, faced with a victim helpless against his magic.
The mage reached out and ripped Kiran’s shirt open downward from the neck, exposing Ruslan’s
akhelsya
sigil. Triumph flamed in his eyes.
“Get out,” the mage told the older man. The words bounced and echoed in Kiran’s ears. The older man began a protest. The mage turned, and the other’s face went ashen. He backed out of the room so fast he tripped on the threshold. The door squealed shut.
“What is your name?” the mage asked Kiran, his voice now cold and clear as if it rang form the icy heights of a mountain. Kiran took refuge in the thick, drowning folds of numbness, and didn’t answer.
“I can see we’ll need to get better acquainted,” the mage said. With dreamlike slowness, he pulled a slender dagger from his belt. The sinuous writhing of the silver halos framing the blade entranced Kiran, until red stained them. His scattered thoughts abruptly focused. A thin line of blood streaked the mage’s hand, and the knife now approached Kiran’s arm, just above the ropes that bound it to the chair.
Blood magic! Kiran strained desperately against the ropes. He budged not an inch. The blade sliced his skin in a burning line. The mage’s bloody hand closed tight over the cut, and Kiran cried out, miserably, as a sharp sting of power pierced the numbness enveloping him. Magic raced under his skin, freezing everything in its path. A silent flash seared his vision white.
Slowly, the world faded back into being. Kiran raised his head, cautiously. His inner senses remained numb, but the halos and odd visual effects had vanished, and the confusion of his thoughts had cleared.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” The mage’s voice no longer echoed strangely. “Let’s try again. What is your name?”
Kiran stayed silent. Names had power. Not nearly so much as blood, but enough to be dangerous.
The mage made a slight gesture, and Kiran’s muscles seized, caught in the grip of a tightening vise. He heard his own voice speak in a ragged gasp. “Kiran.”
“Kiran ai Ruslanov, I think you mean.” The mage flicked his fingers. The pressure holding Kiran released. He slumped in the ropes, sick with realization. The mage had worked a binding on him through the blood-to-blood contact. Only a simple snare-binding, too minor of a working to trigger the Alathian detection spells, and yet impossible for Kiran to fight without access to his magic.
“I’m not Ruslan’s. Not anymore,” he said defiantly. The mage leaned forward to trace a finger over Ruslan’s mark.
“True enough. Now you’re mine, though I doubt you’ll prefer it. Ruslan was always such an idealist about apprentices.” The mage gave a contemptuous chuckle.
“You...you know Ruslan?”
“Oh, yes.” The mage showed his teeth in a smile. “Thanks to your erstwhile master, I’ve spent the last twenty years exiled in this godsforsaken backwater of a country instead of enjoying my rightful place in Ninavel. A situation I intend to rectify, now that I have you.”
The mage’s expression softened in a way that lifted the hairs on the back of Kiran’s neck. “You have no idea how delighted I am that you chose to run to Alathia.” He stroked a hand down Kiran’s cheek, then cupped his chin. “I’ll enjoy this even more than I imagined. Ruslan has good taste, I’ll give him that.”
Kiran tried to jerk his head away, but the mage tightened his hold. “I won’t be yours, either,” Kiran spat through clenched teeth.
“You won’t have a choice, I’m afraid,” said the mage. “That’s the difference between me and Ruslan.” He touched Kiran lightly on the forehead, and the world went dark.
***
(Dev)
I watched though a crevice between ceiling boards, my stomach churning, as Kiran went limp and the mage stepped back.
Shit. Now I had answers, all right, but I didn’t much like them. Gods, the way the mage had smiled when he’d done—well, whatever he’d done, when he’d covered Kiran’s cut arm with his bleeding hand. Kiran had keened and jerked like he’d been scorched by a burning brand, his head cracking backward into the chair so hard I’d winced to hear it. And all the while, the mage had worn the soft, contemplative smile of a man savoring a fine wine.
Below me, the creak of an opening door. I reapplied my eye to the crack, and nearly fell off my rafter when I spotted a familiar sharp-chinned, coppery face under a mop of dark curls. Pello! What the fuck?
“You summoned me?” He looked thinner than I remembered, and a hell of a lot more exhausted. No fucking wonder—he must’ve killed his horse under him to reach the border this fast. Even then, he shouldn’t have made it, unless this bastard had somehow given him a helping hand.
“This is the boy you shadowed from Ninavel?” The animation the mage had displayed while talking to Kiran had vanished, leaving his voice cool and dry as a desert in winter.
Pello nodded. I grimaced. He’d been working for this asshole from the start?
“What evidence did you detect of a mage hunting him?”
Pello described with a shadow man’s exacting eye for detail every damning incident from our time with the convoy. The unseasonally strong thunderstorm, Kiran’s panicked flight into the catsclaw, and the blackened patches afterward. My searches of his wagon—Shaikar take him, he’d figured out I’d disabled his message charm, though he admitted he didn’t know how. Kiran’s reactions to his conversational goads at Ice Lake—gods, but Kiran had left a lot out of his account—and Kiran’s accidental reveal of himself as a mage. For the first time, Pello’s dry recounting took on an edge.
“You didn’t warn me he was a mage, and a blood mage at that,” he said, in a tone just short of accusation. Ha. At least I wasn’t the only one who’d been kept in the dark.
The mage gave him a look, and I had to give Pello points for guts. He didn’t back down, though his hands clenched at his sides.
“I might’ve died by that lake,” Pello said. “I’d have taken more precautions, if I’d known the boy could kill with a touch. And the next day, the avalanche...” He described the diverted path of the slide, and his own near demise and rescue. The way he told it, Kiran’s intent to kill him wasn’t in doubt.
The mage shrugged. “My protection served you well enough, it would appear.”
Pello’s scowl said he wanted to dispute the point, but he went on with his tale. I wondered exactly what protection the mage meant. A charm? Something more?
When Pello described his search of the unconscious Kiran, and his discovery of both the blood mage sigil and Kiran’s amulet, the mage held up a hand.
“This amulet you describe...he’s not wearing it now.”
I tensed. The amulet lay around my own neck. I’d thought it might help shield me from Gerran’s wards.
“Gerran may have taken it. Or the outrider courier, Dev.”
Trust Pello to bring my name to a blood mage’s attention. I held my breath.
“No matter,” the mage said. “I have seen its like before, and know its capabilities. The boy might well have escaped his master’s control, wearing such a charm. Evidence indeed that he represents a genuine opportunity, and not a trap. Good.” He stroked Kiran’s bowed head, possessively, and waved a hand at Pello. “Continue.”