The Fragile Threads of Power, page 33
Which exploded out with sudden, violent force.
Tes had never made an elemental bomb before, had no idea if she’d given the magic enough kick, not until the air slammed out, splintering wood and shattering glass and shaking the entire building.
Even the counter, bolted to the floor, groaned beneath the percussive force of the explosion, and in the ringing aftermath she couldn’t hear the assassins, didn’t know where they were, if they’d been killed by the blast or merely rattled.
But Tes knew better than to wait.
She grabbed the bundled doormaker and the dead owl and hurled herself out from behind the counter, toward the back of the room and the curtained doorway that led to her quarters. There she stopped, and looked back, saw the woman, Bex, tangled in the limbs of a buckled metal shelf, the man, Calin, slumped against a far stone wall. But they were both still alive, and already starting to recover.
Tes slammed her hand against the doorframe, and the spell she’d woven there. The first thing she’d ever built in Haskin’s shop, and it wasn’t for a customer, it was for herself, in case she had to run again.
Tes loved the shop, but it was just wood and stone and a painted door, and she didn’t hesitate. She laced her fingers through the threads and pulled, as hard as she could.
Cracks ran out from her hand, shooting across the walls and over the ceiling and through the floor. As they did, Tes turned and bolted through the curtain and the narrow quarters at the back of the shop, past the little table and the lofted bed and the life she’d made there, and out the back door, just as the entire building sagged, and the roof caved in, and the whole place came crashing down.
VI
Over the years, a great number of people had tried to kill Calin Trell.
His body was a map of failed attempts, times he’d been stabbed and burned, hacked at and cursed. He’d broken most of his bones, lost a good deal of blood, and been buried more times than he could count.
Which was to say, it would take more than a fallen house to keep him down.
The girl had been quick, he’d give her that. The blast of wind had slammed his head into the wall, rattling his skull, and in that ringing second, he’d almost missed the follow-up assault—almost, but not quite. He’d had just enough time to throw his power out and up, blocking most of the stone and wood and metal as it came crashing down.
Now Calin stood among the settling debris, a mountain of rubble to every side. Blood ran into one eye where something sharp had found the skin over his brow, but otherwise, he was unscathed. Let Bex Galevans keep her steel, with all its flourishes, he thought. Earth work was blunt, but effective.
Speaking of Bex—he hauled himself up out of the makeshift hole, stood atop the heap that used to be Haskin’s shop, before the little bitch had brought the whole thing down on top of them. He shifted his feet, and the rocks and timber groaned beneath him. He paid no mind to the spectators now pouring into the street, some shocked, others merely curious. This was, after all, the shal, whose unofficial motto was: Mind your own business.
He looked around. No sign of Bex.
With any luck, she was dead beneath the wreckage.
Not that Calin ever had much luck.
He turned, scanning the buildings to either side, the alley and the road, and caught a twitch of movement, a girl-shaped shadow, sprinting away into the dark.
Calin smiled, blood and dust in his teeth.
He’d always been fond of the hunt.
He leapt down from his perch atop the ruins and landed hard, boots hitting the stone road. More blood dripped into his vision, and he wiped it away. The cut in his brow was deep—it would scar. One more mark to add to the tally.
Calin drew a blade from his belt, and started down the road.
* * *
Tes wove between the buildings in the dark.
She knew the shal better than the rest of London, knew it as well as anyone could when they weren’t born and raised among these narrow streets, knew it was a different place at night. The roads were always narrow, a warren of alleys, few wide enough for a carriage or a cart, but in the dark, those winding streets blocked out the light as well. Here and there, the Isle’s red glow tinted rooftops crimson, but no river or lantern could truly push the shadows back.
Luckily for Tes, and her strange eyes, the threads of power shone so bright that no place in the world was ever truly dark. But her feet were clumsy with panic, and unlike the rest of the city, the shal didn’t sleep at night; it came alive as the sun went down, despite the heavy dark, or perhaps because of it. Tes twisted her way through a midnight market, avoiding half a dozen low-lit stalls, only to collide with a group of bodies as they spilled out of a tavern, apologies tumbling out as she pushed past, Vares still shoved in her pocket, and the broken doormaker bundled against her chest.
The roads in the shal weren’t straight lines so much as circles, funneling you deeper in instead of out, as if the warren didn’t want to let you go, and while her head filled with the single, pressing need to run, her feet could only carry her so fast, so far, and she needed to get away, not just out of the shal, or even London, but somewhere no one could follow, and that was how she ended up kneeling in a darkened dead-end alley, the bundle open on the damp ground, the disassembled doormaker filling her vision.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she whispered as her hands flew over the threads.
She suddenly wished she hadn’t done such a thorough job taking it apart, but she’d always had a good memory for patterns once she’d made them work, and it was much easier to repeat a thing a second time than do it for the first.
The dead owl twitched and fluttered nervously in her pocket as if to say, Hurry, hurry.
“I know, Vares. I know.”
Her fingers moved quickly, reconstructing the pattern, tying off the knots she’d torn.
“Almost there.”
Something crashed behind her, and she jerked around, but it was just a drunkard, knocking a planter from a sill as he stumbled home. A few seconds later, a window slammed closed overhead. This time, she didn’t jump. Nor did she look up when she heard the footsteps trudging past the alley.
Not until they slowed. And stopped.
“Well, well,” said a voice like a mouth full of rocks.
Tes’s hands slid from the box as she turned to face him. Calin stood at the mouth of the alley, the green of his magic lighting him better than a streetlamp, glancing off the dagger in his hand, the lank hair plastered to his face. Dust and debris clung to his shoulders, and blood dripped from his temple to the corner of his mouth. His tongue swept across his lip, and found it.
“Bex was right,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “You are hard to kill.”
His gaze flicked to the alley behind her, which ended in a wall. “Nowhere to run,” he pointed out.
“You’d be surprised,” she said, meeting his gaze. “Erro.”
She heard the little box unfold, felt the door rise up behind her. Saw, out of the corner of her eye, the edge of the doorway carve itself across the air, felt the veil, and the draft coming through, carrying the scent of smoke and damp stone.
Calin’s eyes widened, his mouth twisting into a snarl as Tes stepped back, over the threshold. The world shuddered, and blurred, and through the veil, she saw the shape of him surging forward, his arm flung out.
“FERRO.”
The door obediently slammed shut, erasing Calin, and the shal, and the rest of London.
Tes stood, gasping for breath, not in an alley but on a lamplit street.
It was raining; not a heavy rain, but a light and steady drizzle, and the doormaker sat on the cobblestones at her feet. The night looked strange, and dim, but that made sense, it was a different night, a different world.
She’d done it. She was safe.
Tes let out a small, startled laugh that quickly died because it hurt.
She winced as a strange ache rolled through her stomach, warmth blooming across her front before sharpening into heat, and at first she thought it was just the aftermath of the blast, the chase, but when she looked down, she saw the strangest thing: a dagger’s hilt jutting out above her hip. But that was silly, she’d know if she’d been stabbed. She reached out, and touched the hilt, and as she did, the blade moved and the pain caught up, a blinding, burning thing beneath her ribs.
She acted on reflex—wrapped her hand around the blade, and pulled it out.
That, it turned out, was a horrible idea.
The pain turned white-hot, and Tes sagged to her knees in the street, stifling a scream.
Blood spilled between her fingers. She pressed down hard, even though it made her heart pound and another cry rise up her throat.
“Get up,” she hissed between clenched teeth, saying the words aloud to give them strength. Her body didn’t listen.
“Get up, get up, get up,” Tes chanted, as if it were a spell, and at the same time another voice called out, the words foreign, but almost familiar.
How strange, she thought, head spinning, it sounded like they were speaking High Royal. She and her sisters had all been taught, but it had been years now, language had gone stiff, unused, and she tried to translate now, but the pain made it hard to think. The voice shouted again, and this time, she swore she could make out the last word.
Street.
And then another sound, much closer; this one she recognized as the clatter of hooves, and Tes looked up just in time to see a horse and cart barreling toward her in the dark.
The driver yanked on the reins and the horse reared, turning hard, and the cart wheel broke, and the whole thing began to fall toward Tes and the doormaker on the ground. Her limbs came to life, and she swept up the box and dove out of the way just before the cart crashed down, splintering wood and spilling crates into the street where she’d just been.
Somehow, Tes kept moving. She half stumbled, half ran, trying to put distance between herself and the crash, made it half a block before the pain in her side dragged her to a stop. She sagged to the curb beneath an awning, one hand on the doormaker and the other on her wounded side. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to think, but her thoughts were sluggish, slow to answer. She opened her eyes. Her vision was slipping, darkness creeping in, or so she thought, until she realized why the night light looked so strange.
There were no threads.
Not in the rain, which should have shimmered with strands of pale blue light.
Not in the lamps, which should have been shot through with tendrils of yellow.
Not in the road itself, which should have been woven with strands of earthy green.
In fact, the only threads she could see were the ones coiled around the doormaker, or spilling down her front, each drop burning with a filament of crimson light that faded moments after it fell.
A world without magic.
It might have been a nice reprieve, if she weren’t dying.
No, she told herself. Not dying. Not yet. She could fix this. Tes was very good at fixing broken things. Admittedly, she did it using magic, and there was no magic here, and she was a person, not a thing, but she was hurt, and hurt was a kind of broken, and she could fix it. She had to.
The owl in her pocket was fluttering nervously, and she was glad, at least, that he still worked. Glad she wasn’t alone. Even if the movement of skeletal wings against her wounded front hurt enough to make her stifle a sob.
She needed to stop the blood, she knew that much. Close the wound. Quiet the pain. The streets were lined with shops. Perhaps one had something she could use. It seemed like a lot of work.
Tes wanted to close her eyes again. To rest. Just for a moment.
Instead, she took a deep breath, and got to her feet.
* * *
Calin leaned against the alley wall, picking his nails.
“Why the fuck are you just standing there?” said a grating voice.
Still alive, then, he thought, as Bex stormed down the alley toward him. And they said he was hard to kill. She was bleeding from two or three places, and favoring one leg. It wasn’t as good as dead, but he’d take what he could get.
“We have a problem,” said Calin.
“Where is she?” demanded Bex.
“Gone.”
“And you didn’t go after her?”
“Couldn’t,” he said. “She closed the door.” He nodded at the faint scar in the air as he said it. He might not have even noticed the echo of it in the dark, if he hadn’t seen the door with his own eyes, the place where it had come—and gone.
“So she did have it.” Bex tried to hide her surprise, but Calin saw it, memorized the arch of her eyebrow, the slight part of her lips. One day when I kill you, you’ll make that face for me. His mouth twisted at the thought, but Bex was already kneeling on the alley floor, unrolling a city map.
“What are you doing?”
“That lying little bitch owes me a finger,” she said, drawing a series of marks on the map. Calin had never bothered much with spells. The way he saw it, you could be decent at a lot of things, but only great at a few. He’d rather spend his energy on killing. Plus, a spell like this took the fun out of the hunt. And yet, as he stood in the alley, waiting for Bex or a better idea, he admitted, if only to himself, that a finding spell came in handy at a time like this.
He watched her pull the knotted lock of hair from her pocket, the one she’d cut from the girl’s head, and tug free a strand, dropping it into the center of the map. She said a few words and the marks and the hair caught fire, turned to cinder. This was the part, he guessed, where the cinders were supposed to point the way, to draw a line from them to the girl.
But they didn’t. They just sat there, waiting for a light breeze to blow them away.
“Anesh?” he asked, impatient.
Bex kept her eyes on the map, but he saw her shoulders tighten, hackles raising the way they did whenever she was mad. Normally he would have savored it, but his head was beginning to ache where it had met the shop wall, and he’d lost a perfectly good knife.
Bex was muttering to herself.
“Well?” he asked again.
Bex sighed. “For once in your life, you’re right about something,” she said. “We do have a problem.” She looked up. “According to this map, the girl’s not here.”
“Obviously,” he said, gesturing at the empty alley, but Bex was already shaking her head.
“She’s not just not here, you mindless lump of coal.” Bex swept the ash from the map. “She’s nowhere. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”
“Maybe you’re just shit at spells,” offered Calin. “Or maybe I killed her.”
He had seen the knife go in, right before the door slammed shut.
Bex shot him a dark look. “Let’s hope, for both our sakes, you aren’t that stupid.” She stood, staring down at the blank map for a long moment. “Fuck this,” she muttered, shoving past him. As she did, she made a half-hearted attempt to slide a dagger between his ribs.
Calin knocked the blade away.
“Where are you going?” he asked, trailing her out of the alley.
“We’re going,” she said, “to tell the boss.”
VII
WHITE LONDON
Everyone had the sense to let the queen go, except, of course, for Nasi, who trailed her up the spiral stone stairs until the hall below was out of sight.
Kosika wasn’t in the mood. “Go back,” she said as she passed the first landing. “I’d hate for you to miss the party.”
“You did not have to scare Reska like that,” said Nasi. “It was petulant, and small.”
Kosika rounded on her friend, the air tightening around them both. She hadn’t even meant to conjure it—lately things had begun to follow the shape of her mood, the curve of her temper. Nasi stiffened, sensing the change, but unlike the Vir, she didn’t retreat. Instead she continued up the steps, stopping on the one just below so they stood eye to eye. She studied the queen’s face. “Why are you so mad?”
Kosika’s gaze dropped to the stairs, the sounds of revelry rising from below. “The people down there are opportunists, following the current. Half of them knelt to the Danes before they knelt to me.”
Nasi shrugged. “If you punished every soul who bent their head as evil passed, there would be no one left to follow you. But there is a difference between fear and devotion.”
“Devotion,” muttered Kosika, sagging against the wall. “Forgive me if I’m in no mood to be paraded through the castle like a puppet.”
Nasi quirked a brow. “Last I checked, you had no strings. You cut them all away.”
“Then why do they still treat me like a doll?”
“They treat you like a queen,” countered Nasi, huffing in exasperation. “That is what you are. The symbol of their strength. The power that restored the world.”
“It is Holland Vosijk’s power. They should pray to him.”
“Holland Vosijk is dead,” said Nasi grimly. “And you are not.” She stepped close, laid a hand on the shoulder of Kosika’s bloodstained cloak. “You resent them because they do not live and breathe the stories of the Summer Saint, as you do. But they do not follow the Saint. They follow you. As far as they’re concerned, you are the reason the crops grow in their fields. You are the reason they can summon wind into their sails.” Nasi rolled her free hand, and a flame bloomed in the air. “You are the reason they can call fire to their hearths.” Her fingers closed, and the flame went out. “You are their queen, and tonight they celebrate, but today they bled, because you willed it.”
“They bled because it serves them.”
“It serves us all. Isn’t that the point?”
Kosika looked down at her own hands, crusted in blood. “And if the magic dried up again? If the power bled out of the world? Would they still follow me?”
“Oh, no,” said Nasi cheerfully, “then they would surely turn on you.” Only she could say such a thing with lightness in her voice. “This is London, after all. But you and I both know they will not need to. Because you would open your veins into the Sijlt before anyone tried to cut your throat.”
