No.
He clung to the sigil, even though he could no longer remember why it was so important to resist.
Power stung his chest. Simon was tracing Ruslan’s mark with a bloodied finger, over and over. “Remember the moment when he gave you this? When he linked you, marked you, bound you? Think of that, Kiran...” Simon’s voice murmured on, constantly asking, constantly reminding, as grasping tendrils sought to tear apart Kiran’s myriad chains of images.
Kiran clutched the sigil tighter yet. After a timeless interval, the tendrils withdrew. A dull wash of relief rippled through him. His hold on the sigil wavered, but he refused to release it.
A lance of power speared into his mind with the force of a catapulting boulder. The shock dispelled the haze of disconnection enveloping Kiran. He gasped, abruptly aware of the sweat soaking his body, of Simon’s fiercely intent face hovering over his own.
And beside Simon, Iannis was contorted in agony, her wrist clamped in Simon’s hand. Simon was stealing her life, fashioning her
ikilhia
into a battering ram to smash through Kiran’s maze to his true memories beyond.
Simon’s blows shook Kiran to the core. Desperately, he held his focus. If he continued to resist, Iannis would die...but surely her life was an acceptable sacrifice, given the stakes? This wasn’t like Ruslan’s avalanche, where hundreds of innocents would have died if he’d chosen his safety over theirs—or even like Dev on the cliff. This woman was no ally of his. She’d shown no hint of compassion for his plight, and she was old, nearing a natural death...
If you let someone die to protect this memory, of all memories, then you betray everything I believed in.
Alisa shimmered into existence beside Kiran’s focus sigil, her amber eyes accusing.
Killing for your own gain is wrong—or did you lie, when you told Ruslan that? Are you truly the murderer he desired you to be?
Iannis’s breath was faltering, her face waxen. Power hammered Kiran’s mental walls.
I’m not a murderer
, Kiran told Alisa. With a silent cry of mingled defiance and regret, he let the sigil blur into nothingness.
Simon’s presence burst from the dissolving maze, rifling through Kiran’s mind with chill, eager fingers. Memory welled up to drown him.
Kiran stood in darkness, his sight and hearing still cut off by Ruslan’s spell. Magic twined around his body, making his nerves prickle and the hairs on his arms stand on end. So much power! He’d never felt anything so strong before.
Hands lifted the fabric off his eyes. Abruptly, his vision cleared, though the world remained silent.
A staggeringly complex set of channels had been inscribed on the workroom floor, hundreds of silver lines twisting over and around each other to spiral inward to the center where he stood. The lines closest to him already burned with a sullen red glow, full of energy. Mikail stood in the channeler’s position on the far side of the pattern, his hands extended and his eyes shut. He was completely intent, so still he might have been carved from marble. Kiran couldn’t see the pattern’s anchor stone, his view blocked by Ruslan in front of him, but he knew the anchor must be massive indeed for a spell requiring so much power.
Ruslan dipped a needle-fine brush into a silver bowl of blood and traced sigils on Kiran’s forehead and arms. Kiran didn’t twitch, his muscles locked in place by the power coiling around him. Ruslan stepped back a pace, careful to avoid the channel lines, and studied his work. He nodded, satisfied, and stepped in close once more, this time opening the front of Kiran’s robe.
He drew a silver dagger, wet it in the blood, and cut a sigil into the skin over Kiran’s heart. It hurt, but Kiran kept his gaze steady as Ruslan worked. Ruslan smiled at him approvingly, and lifted the bowl of blood to Kiran’s lips.
Kiran drank. Underneath the warm, salty sliminess, magic traced fire down his throat. The power surrounding him flared up higher yet, pressing inward with a force that squeezed a gasp from his lungs.
Ruslan turned and moved aside, revealing the spell’s anchor point, an enormous chunk of glassy black onyx. And for an instant, Kiran’s mind refused to take in what he saw there.
It was Alisa. His beloved Alisa lying naked on the bloodstained stone, her wrists and ankles bound in silver chains, her tearstreaked face turned toward him. Her eyes were white-rimmed, her face drawn with fear, her lips shaping his name, over and over. As Ruslan crossed out of the maze of channels, Kiran’s sense of hearing returned.
“Kiran, help me! Please, Kiran—oh gods, why won’t you help—!” The ragged desperation in Alisa’s calls stabbed through his ears.
Kiran fought to move, to respond to her, to tell Ruslan there had been some terrible mistake. He’d known, of course he’d known that real magic involved blood and death, but Ruslan had always told him the easiest way was to use men sentenced as criminals by the merchant houses. “Thieves and murderers, they’d die for their crimes regardless. We merely give their deaths a purpose.”
The hot copper of Alisa’s blood still stained Kiran’s mouth, and he couldn’t even spit it out.
“I should be angry with you, Kiran,” Ruslan said, coming to stand behind the anchor stone. “After all my warnings, still you disobeyed, and not just once, but repeatedly and often.” He ignored Alisa, his eyes locked on Kiran’s face. “But in the end, your foolishness was a boon. I needed the lives of thirty men for Mikail, but for you, I only need this single one. Love and betrayal will give her blood a hundred times the power of another’s.” He smiled, beatifically, and raised the silver knife.
Kiran tried to scream, tried harder to call power; but he was bound by the channeled magic around him, helpless to do anything but watch as the knife sliced Alisa’s flesh and she shrieked in agony. Ruslan took his time, using the knife expertly. Fear and terror and pain added their fuel to the spell, magic beating in Kiran’s head with the force of a sledgehammer. Alisa screamed for a long time, first pleas for Kiran to save her, for him to make it stop. Later, her cries turned wordless as the black stone ran red with her blood and the power built, channels flaring into life.
The horror was so great Kiran’s mind buckled under the weight of it. Darkness danced around the edges of his vision, but he refused to faint. He wouldn’t shut his eyes or look away. Alisa deserved a witness.
He watched with burning eyes as her life ran out under Ruslan’s knife, and weathered the shock when she finally died and channels blazed with sudden power.
I know what you are now
, he thought at Ruslan.
And I will never forget it
.
Ruslan raised his head, looking directly into Kiran’s eyes. He extended his gore-streaked hands to grip the sharp edges of the anchor stone. Blood from his palms ran into the channels to mix with Alisa’s. “With this power, I name you, Kiran ai Ruslanov. I mark and bind you, your soul to mine, forever.”
Ruslan shut his eyes in concentration, strain etching deep lines on his face. The channels nearest the anchor stone exploded into searing white. Power raced toward Kiran along the spiraling paths. And beneath, the slow roil of the confluence shifted, realigned, echoing the pattern and infusing it with energy a thousand fold greater than before.
The block on Kiran’s voice released as it hit. He screamed as the power slammed into him, ecstasy and agony all at once, ripping him apart and remaking him, sweeping away his attempt to block it as easily as a man flicking away an ant, blasting his consciousness into darkness...
Kiran struggled upright, fighting free of the hands gripping his wrists, and threw up over the side of the bed. He hung there, shuddering and retching, bile searing his throat.
“How melodramatic. I should have known.”
Kiran raised his head, glaring at Simon through sweat-soaked tangles of hair.
Simon shook his head. “Honestly, you and Ruslan are more alike than I realized. All this nonsense about love.” His contempt shifted into frank appraisal. “Although I see you share his depth of talent along with his weakness. You nearly cost me a good servant.”
Iannis lay in a huddled knot at Simon’s feet. Her back was to Kiran, but from the quivering of her shoulders, she still breathed. Relief pierced the miasma of lingering horror. At least his surrender hadn’t been in vain. But if Simon realized he could force Kiran’s compliance by threatening the lives of
nathahlen
, Kiran would lose all hope of opposing him.
“Nearly? She looks at death’s threshold, to me.” Kiran hoped he’d achieved the right tone of petty, vindictive triumph, despite the unsteadiness of his voice.
“Oh, she’ll be useful still, with a little assistance.” Simon bent and gripped Iannis’s shoulder. His eyes shut, and his lips moved.
Iannis jerked. Gasping, she tottered to her feet. Though her formerly steady hands now trembled and her breath wheezed, her expression remained inscrutable as ever. Kiran wondered if she were in shock.
“There, you see?” Simon smiled at Kiran, gently. “Your resistance, while admirable in strength, has cost me nothing. And now I have what I need, rest assured that soon you’ll be mine to command as wholly as this
nathahlen
.” He turned to Iannis, and stabbed a finger at the puddle of vomit on the floor. “Clean that up.”
Iannis bobbed her head. As Simon strode for the door, her gaze followed him, her black eyes hard as obsidian.
The moment the door shut, Kiran spoke in a rush. “I’m sorry for what Simon did to you—I yielded to him, to save your life! You know how monstrous he is—will you not help me against him?”
Iannis’s stone-faced mask cracked. Her lips drew back from yellowed teeth, her eyes glittering with a hatred so intense it stopped Kiran’s breath.
“Help you?” She spat in his face. “A mage-born whelp like you should’ve been strangled at birth. You’re all monsters, every one.”
Kiran wiped her spittle from his cheek with a shaking hand. “But...I saved you! And if you help me, I can free you—”
Her mouth curled. “Death is the only freedom from a blood mage’s grip. If you speak truth, you’ve stolen that from me today. I hope he flays your soul to screaming shreds for it.” She turned her back on him and stumped out of the room. When she returned with bucket and mop, her face was blank as sand-smoothed stone again. Kiran’s continued pleas might have been shouted into a void, for all the attention she paid him as she cleaned.
When the door shut behind her, Kiran sank onto the bed and buried his face in his hands. Flashes of the ritual leaked through his control. Alisa’s ragged screams, Ruslan’s hot triumph, the taste of blood in his mouth; all overlaid by the bitter hatred in Iannis’s eyes.
I should have let Iannis die.
No
—
surely saving Iannis had been right, regardless of her feelings. Alisa would have been proud of his choice. Kiran tried to picture the brilliance of her smile, the fond warmth in her eyes...but saw only her bloodstreaked face, twisted in agony as Ruslan cut her life away.
He returned to the most basic of centering exercises, taking deep, slow breaths and counting each one. He couldn’t change Alisa’s fate. Yet if only he could anticipate Simon’s plan, he might still change his own.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
(Dev)
O
nce again, I found myself chewing my nails on the roof of the Silver Strike’s stables. Only this time, my jangled nerves were for Cara’s sake, not my own. The man laughing it up with her in her candlelit room wasn’t some lusty trader. It was Pello.
One evening’s work was all we’d needed to draw him straight to her. One evening, in which Cara held forth to gossiping traders in the Silver Strike’s common room that rumor had it wrong—I was the cause of all the convoy’s woes, not Pello. When curious listeners asked for her evidence, she’d shaken her head and muttered darkly that it wasn’t good for the health to repeat anything overheard from mages.
The lure of information wasn’t something a shadow man could resist. Sure enough, the next day Pello had sent Cara a message asking to meet. She’d played it like I asked, starting off willing but wary at a riverside tavern. She had let him buy her drinks and ply that smooth tongue of his in a series of convincing lies supporting his innocence, while she gradually softened but still refused to speak of Ruslan’s visit to the convoy. He’d turned up the charm, asking if he might see her again. Tonight they’d begun with more drinks and talk in the Silver Strike common room—and now here he was, ripe for Cara to put the first part of our plan into action.
Cara’s quick wit and brash demeanor made her a natural at this kind of game, but I still didn’t like it. Her main protection was that Pello thought himself the hunter, with no inkling of any hidden motives on her part. A good cover, but I couldn’t shake the fear that he’d pick up on something we’d overlooked.
In the bedroom, Cara swaggered over to her pack and withdrew a sealed bottle of
hekavi
spirits. Pello made properly appreciative faces as she cracked the seal and poured out two cups of thick, honey-gold liquid.
I held my breath. Now came the part that knotted my stomach. If Pello detected even the slightest false note in Cara’s playacting...
They tapped cups and drank. Pello sipped, while Cara tossed hers back with abandon. She spluttered and broke out into red-faced coughs. Waving off a soliticious Pello, she crossed to the crooked table by the door, shoved the chair aside, and reached for the jug of water beside the empty washbasin. Missed her reach, and knocked the jug over. Water splashed in a gleaming arc to soak the oiled leather of Pello’s coat slung over the chair back, and spill onto the muddy-soled boots lying on the floor below.
Perfect.
Get it on both his coat and his boots, if you can,
I’d told her. The jug hadn’t contained pure water. I’d spent the last two days working out an updated form of the dye trick I’d used to track Kiran. I’d haunted herbalist shops and experimented with mixtures of plant extracts until I found one that wouldn’t stink or stain when applied to leather, yet remained concentrated and distinctive enough for a find-me charm to locate. The mixture wasn’t nearly so good a key as blood or hair—based on my experiments, the effect would be too weak outside of a half mile from the target for the charm to work, but that distance was more than enough for safe shadowing. I’d had an herbalist make me a nice big batch, so I’d have enough to key a find-me several times over. I could track Pello now for a solid day, if necessary.