Lightborn Page 13

  “Floria said—lights were enspelled by more than one mage,” she said tentatively. “Perhaps this also involved more than one Shadowborn. We know there are at least two.”

  “So does this taint she bears come from ensorcellment, or contact with this putative talisman?” Vladimer said. “Tell me, when you interviewed Tercelle Amberley, did you or di Studier sense such a taint around her? You did not mention it.”

  “No,” she said. “But—Tercelle may not have seen her”—she threw herself at the word—“lover—since—they were last together.” He received the opinion as mere fact, to her relief; another man might have leered or reacted with distaste at such indelicacy. Emboldened, she said, “And if she had been ensorcelled, she might not have fled to Balthasar, since everything that has happened suggests the Shadowborn did not want Balthasar involved.”

  “Then we have several possibilities. The Temple colluded in the assassination of the prince. Or there is a form of ensorcellment that no mage can sense. The alternative that comes to mind is an impersonation by Shadowborn. And the other concern I have is whether a talisman created to annul light might also be created to cast light.”

  Telmaine shivered with horror. Vladimer, catching the shiver with his sonn, smiled narrowly. “Had I been sufficiently prescient, I should not have sent Ishmael into the Borders. As it is, I must rely upon you. It is entirely likely I shall need you again tonight, so please hold yourself in readiness.”

  Telmaine

  Vladimer summoned her again shortly after the midnight meal, another savory but solitary repast picked at without appetite. She was trying to compose a letter to her daughters, well aware how poor a substitute it would be for her presence, for either sender or recipients. So Vladimer’s note was almost welcome.

  This time, the footman escorted her to Vladimer’s own chambers, tucked well in the depths of the older part of the palace and doubtless connected via hidden passageways to a dozen other halls and rooms. The footman announced her at the door and left her. She wondered what Vladimer had done with Kip—Kingsley.

  Vladimer was sitting in an armchair, cane to hand. By the evidence of the plates on the table to his right, he had made an indifferent essay at his own lunch. A bottle and a small medicine glass sat beside the plates, the glass drained of its contents. His sling was nowhere in evidence.

  “I am about to have a visitor,” he said without preamble. “I would have preferred to meet her elsewhere, but my physicians—and my brother—insist I should not be going about. They are concerned about fever.”

  They should be concerned about more than that, Telmaine thought, if they were paying attention. His vitality shimmered with unnatural intensity.

  “I want you within reach but not within sonn. My visitor will be quite aware of you, but I fully expect you will discourage any unseemly interest: she is merely of fourth rank.”

  “A mage?” she breathed.

  “By the name of Magistra Phoebe Broome.”

  She caught her breath in mingled social shock and fear. Vladimer continued. “Ishmael speaks well of Farquhar Broome’s and his daughter’s loyalty, though the elder Broome reportedly is quite deranged. Phineas Broome is a vocal republican and no friend to the nobility. Ishmael commended Magistra Broome to me as the most reliable of the three.” Telmaine, her face warming, wondered if Vladimer knew that Phoebe Broome had been Ishmael’s occasional lover.

  “You asked her to come here!”

  “Believe me, I would much rather not. You can imagine the uproar were Kalamay and his ilk to find me consulting with mageborn. Even Sejanus would not be best pleased. But she will be able to give me answers you cannot. I, however, need you to tell me if she has any Shadowborn influence about her.”

  “Lord Vladimer—,” she began. One did not refuse the archduke’s brother. But surely a lady might—must—say no to a proposition that threatened her virtue, as this did. And might expose her secrets, as this might.

  “I might remind you,” he said, “that you depend upon my silence. But I think I am a sufficiently good judge of your nature to think I might better remind you who it was gave me into your keeping. I will show you where you are to sit.”

  Teeth clenched, he levered himself out of the chair. She did not move, gathering herself to object. “Lord Vladimer, I—” Mage sense, extended throughout the palace, rippled and flinched back from a sudden intrusion. “They’re here,” she said, in a half whisper.

  “They?”

  “Two of them.”

  “So she brought an escort,” Vladimer said, sounding almost amused. “Or the escort brought himself. Not what I would expect of the lady.” He did know about her from Ishmael, Telmaine thought.

  “I sense no Shadowborn,” she said, in faint hope that he would be satisfied and release her.

  “Here,” said Vladimer, swinging open a panel in the wall, opening up a cubby with a single seat and a tiny table with a writing frame, stylus, and sheets of paper.

  “They’ll know I’m here,” she protested.

  “I count on it,” he said, leaning against the panel. “But your husband’s sister is a mage, is she not? And all the years she has known you, she has never discovered you.”

  Clutching that as a desperate hope, she yielded to his will, drew her skirts around her, and slipped into the alcove. He closed the panel on her.

  She heard him summon a footman to tidy away the residue of his neglected meal and set out a chair for his unexpected guest. Her heart was beating so hard from combined fright and the expectation of discovery that she was surprised the mesh was not jingling. Through the rush of her own blood she barely heard Lord Vladimer’s guests announced and the woman’s breathless, “Lord—V-Vladimer.”

  Phoebe Broome, she knew, had social ambitions and an unqualified admiration for the nobility. That stammer might have been excitement or fright or a sudden attack of social uncertainty. Whatever it was, Vladimer responded with a smoothly ironic “Magistra Broome . . . and this is Magister Phineas Broome, I presume.”

  The man with her was something else: masculine energy and revolutionary ardor looking for an outlet, and finding it in that tone. The upsurge of hostility alarmed her; its sudden shift toward her, even more. “What’s that?” and followed with a bruising She repulsed him, hard.

  “There’s another mage here,” Phineas said, in a tone so shaken that she felt contrite.

  “Yes, Phineas Broome,” Vladimer said, calmly. “And as you have obviously just discovered, one quite capable of making you mind your manners.”

  “What do you want?” Phineas Broome demanded; he was obviously the kind who would fight if surprised or set back. “Why did you bring us here?”

  “As I recall, it was your sister I invited, not you,” Vladimer said. “No matter. There is a force at work in the city using magic for assassination and mayhem in an effort to—I believe—destabilize both the Darkborn and Lightborn states, set Darkborn and Lightborn against each other, and possibly ready us for invasion.”

  “Your kind fancies conspiracies everywhere,” Phineas sneered. “You know your days are numbered.”

  “On account of a rabble of posturing intellectuals who cannot even agree on the wording of their own manifestos?” Vladimer retorted. “I get full reports of your meetings, though frequently I mistake them for reviews of theatrical farces.”

  Telmaine winced, wishing Vladimer could get out of the habit.

  “Phineas,” Phoebe Broome said—in a tone that suggested kindred feeling, “please. You’ve often enough said the same.” There was a brief silence. “Lord Vladimer, I should say that Baron Strumheller told us you had been ensorcelled when he left us the last time. I am very glad to know you have recovered.”

  “Am I?” Vladimer said, narrowly.

  “Yes,” she said, steadily. “I sense no trace of ensorcellment about you. Though I do not think you are entirely well.”

  “Ensorcellment leaves a trace, then?” Vladimer said, in that same sh
arp-edged manner.

  “Unless the mage releases his or her victim, or dies.”

  “Dies, then. Courtesy of Ishmael di Studier.”

  “I am so relieved. I was very worried about Ishmael. His household sent us an urgent summons, and we found him more dead than alive. He had overspent himself badly, doing what, he would not say. I feared he would be permanently impaired.”

  “He never could accept,” Phineas said snidely, “that the noble Baron Strumheller himself could be only first-rank.”

  She had not, Telmaine decided, slapped him nearly hard enough. She sensed a ripple of magic passing between sister and brother; she trusted it was a sharp rebuke.

  “How much did di Studier tell you?”

  “Neither my sister nor I,” Phineas said, “will be answering any more of your questions until you tell us why you wanted us here. You’re no friend to the mageborn, whatever your lackey believes.”

  Phoebe said, with the air of a woman trying to salvage a hopelessly blighted conversation, “My lord, he set out to catch the day train as soon as we could get him back on his feet. He had time to give us no more than an outline. But he had told us about the sighted babies, earlier, if there is a connection.”

  “Had he indeed?” Vladimer said, sounding not at all pleased.

  “He thought then that these children might be the products of sorcerous interference. We—our community—deal with sorcery wherever we can, rather than rely upon the Lightborn. We had but barely begun to investigate when the Rivermarch fire . . . but just before he left, he told us it was Shadowborn magic.”

  “To which I say he’s finally cracked,” Phineas said.

  “Do you?” Vladimer said. “Then I submit certain items for your consideration. Item one: the Shadowborn raiding patterns have changed; in fact, there have been no raids into the Borders this summer. Why? For what purpose might they be withholding their forces?

  “Two: the children you spoke of were born and were put into foster care, and two days later the physician who had attended their birth was severely beaten in an attempt to make him divulge their whereabouts. Which, to his credit, he did not. To my knowledge they have not been found.

  “Three: their mother was murdered, and an attempt was made to entrap and kill Ishmael di Studier at the scene. He is still being hunted in connection with the murder.

  “Four: my own ensorcellment, which occurred around the same time, at the ducal summerhouse while it was full of guests.

  “Five: the Rivermarch fire, a fire that defies natural explanation.

  “Six: di Studier and others broke into the ducal summerhouse in time to prevent my assassin from completing his task. I have reliable testimony that, upon death, the assassin’s face and aspect changed; I have Ishmael’s testimony that the assassin’s aura was that of a Shadowborn; and I have his speculation that the assassin was capable of changing his appearance. My prompt awakening established that this was the same mage as had ensorcelled me.

  “Seven: on my return to the city, I had a second unpleasantly close encounter with a Shadowborn and his agents. Fortunately my—lackey, as you term him, sent the other off with his tail between his legs.” Telmaine, her breath held, waited for a challenge from either of the mages to that “he.” It did not come.

  “Eight: the Lightborn prince was assassinated last night by what has been suggested was talismanic magic used to annul the lights in his room.”

  Phoebe Broome drew in her breath sharply. Even Phineas was silenced.

  “In short, a series of events that cannot be explained without considering magic.” He paused. Waiting, Telmaine thought, for protest that he would summarily dispatch.

  There was none. He continued. “The archduke sent a ducal order to the Borders yesterday, permitting the raising of troops from reserves beyond those allowed by the order of six twenty-nine. With the death of the Lightborn prince, the archduke has extended his ducal order to the north, giving Mycene and Kalamay, among others, leave to activate reserves and move armaments into the city.”

  “That’s—not good,” Phoebe said, faintly.

  “No, Magistra, it is not.”

  Phineas broke in. “It would be like you to try and entrap us into something you could call sorcery before the courts.”

  “I sincerely hope,” Vladimer returned, “you have had nothing to do with any of this, or I would have to kill you, here and now.”

  “You could try,” Broome growled.

  “I would succeed,” Vladimer said, “in the same manner that Ishmael di Studier and his ally killed my would-be assassin. Ishmael’s strength as a mage was, in this case, irrelevant, and I assure you I am every bit as good a shot.”

  Telmaine pressed her hand to her mouth, tasting bile. He had given her no intimation that this was in his mind. He had summoned them to accuse them, to provoke an attack, knowing she must protect him. And then, as Ishmael had the Shadowborn, he would have executed them.

  She hardly heard his next words for the blood surging in her ears. He would entirely deserve it if she fainted and made herself useless to him, but fainting would leave her vulnerable to Phineas Broome’s intrusions. She braced her elbow on the small table and propped her head on her hand. She heard Vladimer say, “The individual—we are presuming a Shadowborn—who attempted to assassinate me was powerful enough to take the shape of either man or woman. What does that tell you, about its power and that of my ally?”

  “Shape changing is—not a form of magic we know, Lord Vladimer,” Phoebe said, sounding dazed at his frank ruthlessness. “I—expect it is an extension of healing, the reshaping of tissues, but it does not seem to have any beneficent purpose. After Ishmael told us about the infants, we started to investigate the possibility that there was a mage working in—tissue shaping.”

  “And have you found those infants, or any other evidence of that mage?”

  “I thought you had a dead Shadowborn,” Phineas said. “You’ve not left it out in the sun, have you?”

  “The body was destroyed in the attack at the train station.”

  “How vexing,” Phineas said, with heavy sarcasm.

  “Exceedingly,” said Vladimer, in an identical tone. “But entirely in keeping with the general turn of events.”

  “Lord Vladimer,” Phoebe said, forcefully, “we—our community—had nothing to do with any of the events you described. Our activities are entirely within the law, if not within custom.”

  “I am pleased to hear that.”

  “What do you want?” Phineas demanded.

  “Information, first of all. The city is under threat, I am sure of that. If the Darkborn mages are not the source of that threat, then the source is either the Lightborn or some other party. Magistra Broome, by just how much do the Lightborn exceed yourselves in numbers and magical capacity?”

  “Considerably,” said Phoebe Broome. “But the Lightborn hardly concern themselves with our doings, as long as we avoid what they—and we—would consider sorcery.”

  “We’ll return to that point in a moment. Please quantify ‘considerably. ’ Take, for instance, the sixth rank—how many Lightborn and how many Darkborn?”

  “Nine to one,” Phineas said. “We’re not telling you numbers.”

  “I have a fair sense of yours already. What is the overall ratio of all Lightborn to all Darkborn mages?”

  “Three or four to one,” Phineas said, through set teeth.

  “So they are succeeding in concentrating power at the higher levels.”

  “Lord Vladimer,” Phoebe said, “the Lightborn mages have no interest in doing us harm.”

  “Magistra Broome, please do not come the naive schoolgirl with me. It is common knowledge in the Lightborn court that the Lightborn mages aim to rediscover or re-create forms of magic lost since Imogene’s time. The Temple’s exploitation has beggared the Lightborn state, no matter how pretty the facade that remains. The Darkborn state has been protected largely by the distrust of its leadership, because sunset is no
barrier to magic. But as mages you are outnumbered and, to borrow Ishmael’s phrase, outgunned.”

  “And what are we supposed to do about that?” Phineas Broome demanded. By the sound of movement and the shift in his voice he had come vehemently to his feet. “It’s persecution by people like you that have cost us our numbers and our learning, so don’t come weeping to the door at sunrise. Phoebe, let’s go; we’ve heard enough. And you—mage—I hope you’ve been listening.”

  Phoebe Broome said, slowly, “Lord Vladimer, our faith and philosophy is that magic is a gift, from the Mother of All Things Born, a largesse that has been sorely abused, but not rescinded. Magic should not be used as the Lightborn use it, or as Imogene and her fellows used it, to twist nature and control the lives of others.”

  “In any contest concerning power, the one willing to use it to dominate always wins.”

  “There are many kinds of power.”

  “But few that matter,” Vladimer said. “Do not weary me by preaching ‘moral power.’”

  There was a silence. “There are certain types of power one has to experience to know,” she said, with quiet conviction.

  Vladimer said sourly, “Sit down, Magister Broome, if you are staying. Leave if you are going.” He sounded stung. Perhaps even he was susceptible to virtue, Telmaine thought. Which was an odd opinion for a respectable lady to form about a woman who was both a mage and a loose woman, but there was an undeniable uprightness about Phoebe Broome.

  “As you pointed out, unless something has substantively changed, for the Lightborn mages to mount such an elaborate and oblique attack on us makes no sense—and the Lightborn head of state appears also to have fallen victim. Which, finally, leaves the Shadowborn. Ishmael di Studier describes their magic as having a particular quality—repugnant and chilling. That description has been confirmed by a second mage, who has never visited the Shadowlands. So I return to my original question as to whether you might have sensed something similar recently.”