Magic Steps tco-1 Page 9

  Yazmнn got to her feet. "Perhaps I should go," she said politely. "My lady, you and your boy can stop by my school whenever you like."

  "I see no reason for you to leave, if we may be assured of your discretion," said the duke. "Unless you have pressing errands elsewhere?"

  Yazmнn resumed her seat. "None, your grace. You have my word that nothing said here will ever be repeated by me," She touched an index finger to her lips and kissed it in promise of silence. The duke smiled.

  Sandry raised her eyebrows. Was Yazmнn flirting? She glanced at Lark, who winked at her. Now, here's an idea, Sandry thought as Wulfric pulled up a chair and the maid left them. Uncle needs someone who can make him laugh. Maybe a romance would do him good. It's been years since his wife died. I know he's lonely.

  You aren't even sure Yazmнn is interested, she told herself.

  "Is anyone eating these?" asked Wulfric, eyeing the pastries. The duke told him to help himself and he did.

  Soon the maid had returned with another tray and a glass for the provost's mage. Once she was gone, Wulfric looked at the duke and said, "I experimented with the magic Lady Sandrilene took off your Guardsmen. We've a problem and a half. The half is dragonsalt. The mage who cast that dark magic is an addict."

  "How do you know that?" Sandry asked, fascinated.

  Wulfric smiled. "At Lightsbridge, where harrier-mages train, they teach all manner of spells to detect things. I've only performed the dragonsalt cantrip twice before, but I'd a hunch it might work."

  "Wulfric," the duke said, quietly amused, "if we may continue with your report? You and my niece may talk of magical practice another time."

  "My report. Oh, right." Wulfric buttered a scone. "Well, if our mage is a dragonsalt addict, it could be his supplier is in Summersea. My lady provost has the street Guards looking for a 'salt peddler. My guess is, whoever brought the mage brought the drug. The locals won't sell it, not with your grace's penalties."

  "Dragonsalt is the most vile drug brewed. I won't have it here," the duke said firmly. "You claim a problem and a half, Wulfric. If dragonsalt is the half, what is the whole?"

  "We've a mage who deals in—," Wulfric hesitated. "Unmagic' is the best term. Its—nothingness."

  "The absence of all else—of light, magic, existence," Lark said, her eyes troubled. "You're certain, Master Snap trap?"

  “I've been at this for thirty years, Dedicate," Wulfric informed her tardy. "I'm not likely to mistake something that marked."

  "My apologies," replied Lark. "It's just so rare…"

  "You never mentioned it," remarked Sandry, puzzled. "None of you mentioned it to us." She meant herself and her three friends.

  "There was no reason to," Lark replied. "None of you showed the least aptitude for it, Mila and Green Man be praised. Unmagic is so rare we never thought you'd encounter it."

  "It's a blight as much as magic," Wulfric muttered.

  "What can you do with it?" Sandry asked.

  "Murder people in plain view, it would seem," remarked the duke, grim-faced. "Walk past human guards and protective spells with no one to suspect you're there."

  "People also use it to collapse distances and walk between places, if they can bear it," Lark added. "One man who jumped from Lightsbridge to Nidra through unmagic lay in a fever for a year, raving. Later he wrote that his senses all went dead; he was trapped inside his own mind."

  "Can you find who's using it, now that you know what it is? inquired Yazmнn. "If no one minds my asking," she added when they all looked at her.

  "It's not that simple," Wulfric replied.

  Lark nodded. "It's an absence more than anything. It's hard to track nothing down. I'll bring it before our mage council, but I don't believe there's any way to pick it out, because it isn't really here."

  Yazmнn shivered, "It sounds like you'd have to be crazy to use: it."

  "That's the one thing we can be sure of," replied Wulfric. "The poor bleater that's using it is going mad. That's the nature of it, don't you see. When you have magic, you have life itself. That's what it's made of but this nothingness, it's the absence of life, isn't it?»

  "The absence of hope, feeling," continued Lark, "The more it's used, the greater its hold on the mage. And if he's taking dragonsalt to manage it, that just makes it worse. The gods help anyone who gets close. His madness will spread, infecting those around him."

  '"Me, I handle it with gloves and glass instruments," said Wulfric, his eyes bleak. "'I don't want it getting under my skin."

  Lark, got to her feet with a, sigh, "You were right, Master Snaptrap, I need to let the mage council know as soon, as possible."

  She returned to Winding Circle, but the rest of them stayed, and Baron Erdogun joined, them. Sandry heard then that those Rokats still in Summersea were being placed under increased guard, one that even killers spelled to be nothing would have to be wary of.

  * * *

  They were getting clever, Alzena thought as she watched the house on Tapestry Lane. It was the home of Fariji Rokat, one of the Rokat House clerks. In their inspection the previous night, she and Nurhar had sensed watchers. Two large beggars dozed near the corner of Yanjing Street, in a neighborhood where servants quickly sent riffraff on their way. The maids who opened the doors and shutters on the houses facing Rokats were very muscular. They didn't look like civilians at all, but like guards out of uniform. Archers patroled the rooftops along the street. A trip through Cod Alley behind the house showed gardeners and menservants who played dominoes with hands that were blue-knuckled and callused from fighting.

  It was to be expected after the first two murders. Alzena and Nurhar had provided for it. This Rokat's protectors were no more imaginative than the Rokat guards in Bihan and Janaal had been.

  They had not thought to put more than one disguised guard in front of the stable on Cod Alley that served the Tapestry Lane houses. They had not thought that Nurhar could pass the guard unseen, to leave a small keg of the very flammable jelly called battlefire in the hayloft.

  They had not thought that the bunch of rough types—draymen, coal carriers, and the like—that came roistering down Tapestry Lane now, after a night of spending Nurhur's coin in a nearby wineshop, might have an argument not far from Rokat's house. Hiring the rough folk had been the trickiest part, unless watched they would drink up their fee before they were needed. Nurhar had stayed with them until half an hour ago, doling out coins one at a time, buying food to make sure a few heads would be clear enough to remember their orders,

  Alzena stepped onto a window ledge on Rokat's neighbors house. Her target's roof was less than a story below. Scouting the areas around some of the less wealthy Rokats' homes had been a task she and Nurhar had done before they went near Jamar. This location had been the best; they had saved it for when Duke Vedris decided to give protection to the Rokat scum. Before dawn Alzena had. walked across roofs; to get here, unseen and unsuspected, by the 'archers, and had entered her current place: through the rooftop door. The house's occupants were up and around, but Alzena ignored them. Her sanctuary was their unused nursery. No one had entered it yet that morning, which saved her the trouble of killing them. From here it was a, four-foot leap to her target's flat roof.

  The roughs were a hundred yards away, lurching closer' as they argued.

  Peering through the slit in the spells that hid her, Alzena saw a cloud of smoke rise behind the houses. Nurhar's fire arrows had set the Cod Alley stable roof ablaze.

  The roughs were fifty yards off. A hamlike fist swung; Alzena heard furious snarls. Two of them waded into each other. Their friends tried to pull them apart, then joined in. Alzena watched. A few house doors opened: those suspicious looking servants peered out. If they were Provost's Guards in disguise, they would be uneasy. This was a prosperous street. Peacekeepers here moved troublemakers on in a hurry. It would go against their training to stand by during a brawl.

  Here came the supposed beggars to watch, maybe to interfere. Now all of the
roughs were punching, kicking, wrestling. One of the beggars moved in and went flying. A manservant ran out of a house and dove into the fight, as did the second beggar.

  Alzena grinned. Now the other false servants would watch their comrades in the fray—not Rokat's house, or anything that took place three stories overhead.

  Hot air patted her; a flat boom sounded from the alley. The keg of battlefire in the burning stable had caught and exploded. Bells pealed and horns called, summoning everyone to fight the blaze. The archers on top of Rokat's house ran to the back of the fiat roof.

  Alzena checked her rope to make sure it was properly anchored, then jumped out and across from her window to her target. She landed with a thud that went unheard in the fire alarms' racket. Off with the rope. Walking cat-footed, Alzena reached the door to the house, and eased herself inside. The archers, watching the fire as it tried to jump from the stable to the neighboring buildings, never looked behind, them.

  Two guards in the garret below had gone to stare out of the tiny dormer window at the fire. Alzena was past them and down the stairs, into the house proper, with no one the wiser.

  The family's protectors had moved them to the nursery, the biggest room on the floor below the garret. A nursemaid was playing with the baby in its crib while the young mother spun and told a story to the little girl. Fariji Rokat paced, his dark, face tight.

  Alzena drew her knife and killed the baby first, one cut, while the maid stared. When she screamed, the mother leaped up so quickly that she knocked over the little girl and the spinning wheel. The mother raced over to see what had become of the infant. Alzena killed the girl-child as she began to cry..

  Fariji looked right at them. What did he see? Her knife was spelled with unmagic, like the, sword she now drew from, the sheath on, her back, Rokat wouldn't see the blade, only his little girl as she fell over, bleeding.

  He gasped and lunged for the child, just as his wife had gone for the baby. Alzena stepped into his rush and cut at his neck, smiling. He had seen his children die. That was good.

  She stuffed his head into her carry-pouch and turned to regard the woman and the maid. They stared at Fariji Rokat's headless body, screaming. Alzena hesitated. Was the woman pregnant again? She was young; they had seemed much in love.

  No use taking chances, Alzena thought, and ran the woman through. Going to the side window, she climbed out. Below her was a first-story addition to the house. She dropped onto it with a clatter of tiles.

  She felt an arrow's bite. It took her in the calf, punching through the bulge of muscle to the other side. Alzena cursed and rolled off the tile roof. She landed easily on the pile of hay that lay on the ground, waiting for the servants to cover the garden for the winter. More arrows flew around her—the quick-witted archer was shooting fast, trying to hit what he couldn't see. She waited until a man ran out the back door, then slipped into the Rokat house. The real servants had been sent away—only warriors in street clothes were here now, and most of them were running upstairs in answer to the nursemaid's shrieks.

  In the room near the front door Alzena stopped to deal with her injury. First she broke off the arrowhead, then yanked the shaft from her leg. Both went into her carry-pouch with the head; she dared not leave them for any harrier-mages to use. There was some blood, not a lot, and most was going into her boot. If she tried to bandage it here, people would see the bandage apparently floating in midair outside the nothingness spells.

  She limped out of the house and into the street. The roughs were still fighting. From the sounds that came from Cod Alley, the fire was out of control. She hobbled down Tapestry Lane, shaking her head.

  There ought to be fun in this victory over the hated Rokats. Even the prospect of her family's pleasure in what she did seemed unimportant now. Before corning to the house she had worried about killing the children, but when her work got to that, she had been cold. What was the point to any of this, if she felt nothing?

  * * *

  After lunch, Sandry remembered that she needed some copper beads for a trim on one of her uncle's tunics. Like any noble she could have asked the merchant, whose shop lay on Arrow Road in the eastern part of the city, to send a clerk to her with a selection, but it was too nice a day to stay indoors. The bead merchant, a woman she and Lark dealt with often, was delighted to see her, and had a dozen new types of bead to show her. With a number of packages tucked into her saddlebags, Sandry and her guards turned back toward Duke's Citadel. They decided to crosstown on Yanjing Street rather than tangle in the afternoon crowds on streets like Harbor, Gold, and Spicer. They were a block west of Market Square when Kwaben pointed out a billow of smoke ahead, marking a fire. As they rode closer—the blaze was on one of the little streets that emptied onto Yanjing—they began to hear talk a bunch of drunks brawling had started it, some people argued. Others said that Provost’s Guards were protecting a merchant from assassins, and the killers had started the fire.

  Hearing that, Sandry and her guards followed the gossip past the alley where the fire was and onto Tapes try Lane. The Provosts Guards had set wooden barri cades there. Inside them a group of tavern roughs sat, faces sullen, roped together as prisoners under three Guards eyes. Another Guard questioned a young woman in a nursemaid's cap and apron who sat on the steps to a house. She rocked back and forth, weeping, scarlet hands pressed to her face.

  The Provosts Guards would have liked to keep Sandry outside the barriers on both ends of the street, but they couldn't refuse a noble who was also a mage. Grudgingly they let her through. Passing the barricade, Sandry glimpsed dark smears on the steps and walkway before the house where the guard questioned the nursemaid. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

  She dismounted and took her mage's kit out of a saddlebag. Then she backed Russet to the other side of the barrier, blocking Kwaben and Oamawhen they would have followed. "Stay there," Sandry told them. "There's something I need to see."

  "My lady,” protested Oama.

  Sandry shook her head. “I’ll be within view unless I go inside—and, there's plenty of provost's folk about, aren't there? Sandry looked at the female Guard holding the barricade, who nodded. "So inside I'll be safe, too. The fewer people who walk around here, the better. Close up," she ordered the Guard.

  The woman swung the barricade into place. "I don't know that you should monkey about here, my lady," she said, eyeing Sandry's kit with mistrust.

  "Master Wulfric Snaptrap will vouch for me," Sandry replied, though she wasn't sure of that at all. What she was sure of was that those smears of darkness, if they were the same as those on Guryil and Lebua the night before, had to be protected until Snaptrap could look at them himself. Does this stuff rub off on people? she wondered, approaching the Rokat house slowly, inspecting the ground before her and on either side. Would it stick to anyone as it had to Lebua and Gury? She couldn't take a chance on whether it might or might not.

  She reached the house without seeing any smears between it and Yanjing Street. "So far, so good," she murmured.

  The Guard who spoke to the crying nursemaid turned away from the woman in disgust. He looked at Sandry. "Who let you in?" he growled.

  “I’m Sandrilene faToren, the duke's great-niece," she said, examining the steps for dark smears. A number of them stretched from the door along one side of the steps to disappear under the sobbing woman. Sandry glanced at her and swallowed hard. The woman's hands, which from a distance looked as red as paint or dye could make them, were covered in blood. Her cap, apron, skirt, and blouse were splotched and her shoes nearly black with it.

  Sandry took a breath to clear her head of the giddiness of shock, thinking, I have got to get smelling salts. To the unhappy Guardsman she said, "Can she move? There are signs of magic here, and she's sitting right on them.”

  "Of course there's magic," said the Guard bitterly. "Murdering beasts walk by twenty-four of us to hack up four people, two of them kids—you bet there's magic in it," He bent down and gripped the woma
n by the elbows, lifting her, "Up, wench—you're sitting on magic."

  Sandry stared at him. "Two kids?" she asked, horrified.

  "Two little ones. This girl was their nurse," explained the Guard. "Says they all died in front of her, and she didn't see what done it."

  Sandry met his eyes. "She probably didn't," she whispered.

  "I know," replied the man, grim-faced. "Story's too stupid to be true elsewise."

  "You'll have to take my word for this," Sandry told him, "but I can see traces of the magic they used to hide themselves. It comes straight down these steps from the house, and goes that way," She pointed down the street. "I'm going to cover it, to protect it, till your harrier-mages can see it."

  The Guard raised his eyebrows. "That's right sensible of your ladyship," he said, his manner more respectful than it had been earlier. "Go ahead, do it."

  In her kit she normally kept a number of spelled cloth squares she could use to handle things she didn't want to touch with bare skin. She used some on the marks on the steps between the door and the street, then warned the Guards in the house away from the broad streaks she could see on the wall beside the door. They wouldn't let her inside. Sandry accepted that and followed the marks down the street instead, covering each with a cloth square and murmuring the words that would start its protective spell. Anyone about to touch one of those squares would instantly want not to. They'd want to get away from the square and whatever it covered.

  She ran out of them where the marks turned onto the walkway. Now what? she thought, looking at the smears, they led straight toward the far barricade. The more she saw, the stronger was her urge to cover them, to protect others from them, but she had never imagined a situation where she'd need more than fifteen of her cloths. She supposed she could send her guards to a cloth merchant. The problem with that was that she would have to wait here idly, while anything might happen to the unprotected marks.