Shadowborn Read online

  “Y’can’t afford to give Mycene reason to demand a search of the manor under th’archduke’s warrant,” Ishmael said, stoically. “Not with a cellar full of munitions bound for the Isles. I’m grateful you took my report in full. My sense is that whatever’s coming is coming soon, now they’ve broken into th’open in the city.”

  Stranhorne balanced his glass on his fingers, shoulder against a crammed shelf. “But what’s coming? That is the question.” He sonned Ishmael. “You know I have material collected from the period of the Curse and after.”

  “Aye,” Ishmael said. “I’d heard that. But asking after it would have been treading too close t’matters you’d asked me not to speak of.”

  “True,” Stranhorne said, soberly. “A dictate I hope not to live to regret.”

  Surprising himself as well as Stranhorne, Ishmael laughed. “In all truth, it never occurred to me t’ask. Even before m’father sent me on my road, my tutors had to nail my breeches to the chair. Heresy, in this household, but there ’tis.” He set down the glass, still half full, and said more seriously, “But I’d be glad of the dunce’s version. First of all, who might be in th’Shadowlands?”

  “I know nothing for certain,” said Stranhorne. “In the second and third century after the Curse, multiple expeditions went into the Shadowlands. Those that returned reported a barren land—previously, magic had been used to alter the weather patterns to bring rain—that was otherwise uninhabited. Those that passed beyond a certain line some two hundred miles in never returned; we do not know why. Shadowborn entered the written record late in the third century, and became an increasing nuisance through the fourth, leading the archduke eventually to withdraw support for campaigns into the Shadowlands.” Which led to the establishment of the Borders baronies, and eventually to the Borders uprising and the war of Borders’ independence, and the order of six twenty-nine that limited the Borders’ standing forces. That history Ishmael had not only had hammered into his thick, juvenile skull, but had personally contended with these past twenty-five years. Stranhorne continued. “But if there are men in the Shadowlands—and I remind you I have no support for this—I might speculate that they are descended of the mages who were involved in the laying of the Curse, though why they should have waited eight hundred years to make themselves known, I can’t say.”

  “Known other than by the Shadowborn and th’Call,” Ish noted. The Call—the Call to the Shadowlands—was Ishmael’s personal curse, a bizarre ensorcellment that was a legacy of his years roaming around the Shadowlands. Nobody knew what made it take hold, but every year, dozens of bordersmen and -women followed the Call, and none was ever heard from again. Stubbornness, distance, trusted guards, and, on occasion, chains had kept Ishmael on the right side of the border. “Lord Vladimer had it in mind for me t’go and find out. He was concerned that there was mischief behind the unnatural quiet of this summer.”

  “He was right, but that was risky for you,” Stranhorne said, which amounted to gushing concern. “You are assuming that the Shadowborn—as we know them—are related to this. Suppose they are not. Suppose they are an entirely separate problem.”

  “From where I sit, th’separation seems academic.”

  The corner of Stranhorne’s mouth quirked at the slight truculence of tone. “Though if there are such mages, their quiescence is still unexpected, given the type of . . . powers attributed to the mages prior to the Curse.”

  “There’s fair magical strength on the Lightborn side,” Ishmael noted. “Maybe the Shadowborn hesitated to tangle with the Lightborn, and we’ve been the beneficiaries.”

  “Which raises two more questions in my mind: first, how much do the Lightborn already know about these occupants of the Shadowlands, assuming they exist.”

  Ishmael spread his gloved hands. Minhorne, as well as being the seats of both governments, was also the headquarters of the Mages’ Temple, which ruled magic on the other side of sunrise, and, effectively, among the Darkborn as well. There were few Darkborn mages whom the Lightborn recognized as strong, the Lightborn having carefully cultivated strength among their lineages while the Darkborn left mages to arise by chance and scrabble for survival when they did. The Temple was not given to advising Darkborn of their doings, much less allowing them a say.

  “You realize,” Stranhorne said, “that that might make sense of the prince’s death, if the Lightborn have formed an alliance with the Shadowborn. Second,” he continued, while Ishmael was still taking that in, “tradition says that the magic that laid the Curse killed all those involved. But am I mistaken that all our experience of present-day magic is that any persistent magical effect—talismanic magic or ensorcellment—depends on the survival of the mage responsible? As the saying goes, magic dies with the mage.”

  “Aye,” growled Ishmael. It was an adage entrenched in law—the legal penalty for sorcery being execution—and the one sure way to free the victim of all influence. Ishmael’s growl was less at the reminder of his own jeopardy than at what Stranhorne implied. Magic, rooted as it was in the vitality of the mage who worked it, never outlived the mage—with the one great exception. After all these centuries, nobody gave thought to the possibility that the Curse was not the exception, even with the example of the long-lived Lightborn archmages before them. “You’re saying that you think one of the mages who laid the Curse survived?”

  If they, whose Curse the Lightborn lineages had for centuries tried to break, were the Shadowborn, then even he must despair.

  “It is entirely speculative, you realize,” Stranhorne reminded him judiciously. “I think it highly unlikely that those involved in the laying of a malevolent curse eight centuries ago would have waited all this time to make themselves known to us—not when it has been evident for centuries that we would prosper. But it is the simplest explanation for the anomaly.”

  “Curse it, Stranhorne,” Ishmael said, with deep feeling, “not even Vladimer had that notion.” He had to remember, though, the first time he and Vladimer had spoken about this, Vladimer had no more to go on than the extraordinarily quiet summer in the Borders. And the second time, Vladimer was newly awakened from ensorcellment and very shaken.

  “Vladimer’s a man of the modern age,” Stranhorne said. “I am a historian.... There are ruins in the south desert that date back thousands of years, and outside the Sundered Lands I’m told there are other ruins, other deserts, oral traditions of other magical catastrophes. Perhaps this is merely a cycle that repeats itself.”

  Ishmael drained his brandy glass, wishing it were three times the size.

  “When you first called on me,” Stranhorne said, “I considered forbidding you my halls. To this day, however, I have not regretted my decision to receive you. Although,” he remarked in a lighter tone, “some of my peers—and particularly their wives—were appalled at how you have corrupted my daughters.”

  “I had th’inborn proclivity to work with,” Ishmael said, shakily.

  “I’m quite sure it came entirely from their mother.” There was a silence of weighing and sorting of words. “My prejudices obscured my recognition that that domination was not the only seduction magic offered. You were born with as much secular power as any man could wish, and yet at the age of sixteen, you rejected that for magic.”

  “M’father had more t’do with that than me.”

  “You need not have brought your magic to his, or anyone else’s, attention,” Stranhorne pointed out.

  As Telmaine had, gifted with far greater power—and greater sense, perhaps—than he. Facing back across the years, he considered the stew of conviction and rebellion that had led him to compel his father to recognize the magic in him.

  “When your father disowned you, I spoke up in support of it. When he reinstated you, I knew he had been forced to it. When you inherited, I wrote the archduke, urging him to refuse to sign the order of succession.”

  “I knew that at the time,” Ishmael said. “I fully expected y’to run me off your lands that
first time.”

  “I gave it some thought,” Stranhorne said. “Even though everything I had heard of you was to the good. It is the virtues of mages, the good they do, that persuades people to discount the evidence of history—and so the cycle repeats. . . . How soon will you be back?”

  The unexpected question took him by surprise. “I’ll be—” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be working t’get loose the moment we clear your gates—you can count on that. If I’m brought to th’city, I’ll have Vladimer’s backing, and his testimony that I meant him no ill.” Though with a charge of sorcery and a suspicion of influence, that might be less an advantage than otherwise. “But if th’situation changes here, you can be sure mine will.”

  Stranhorne set his glass down and relieved Ishmael of his own. “Our ten minutes are up, I think. I’ve sent for Jeremiah Coulter from the Crosstracks, to test that warrant. If there’s any crack to be found in it, he’ll find it.”

  Ishmael

  The Stranhornes had managed to pen Mycene in the ballroom, even if Laurel’s smooth delivery was sounding rather strained as they came through the door. Ishmael’s pursuer was almost toe-to-toe with the lady, though he was at a disadvantage thereby, being a good six inches shorter than she. His face was distinguished from commonplace by its asymmetry; one cheekbone noticeably higher and narrower than the other, one eye slightly offset relative to the other, nose slightly displaced by an old break. His hair was fine, straight, and pulled back from a high forehead into a braid or a queue, which had been tucked into his collar. He wore a greatcoat split for riding, heavy weight and of highest quality, and well-rubbed breeches. A holster rode on one hip, and the sheath of a long knife on the other.

  A half dozen of his men were lounging or sitting about, seasoned troopers conserving energy. The remainder must have been delegated to tend the horses. Dr. Balthasar Hearne was standing slightly to one side, haggard and road worn and, except for a too-large jacket of Borders style, still dressed as Ish had left him, but alive and apparently uninjured.

  “Ishmael di Studier,” Mycene challenged him. “I have here a warrant for your arrest for the murder of my betrothed, Lady Tercelle Amberley, and for suspicion of sorcery against Lord Vladimer Plantageter.” His head twitched toward a man leaning against the wall with folded arms and a cynical expression on his face. If he’d never met the man, Ish would have taken him for a smuggler. Which he was said to have been in his youth; nothing teaches a clever man the law like the evasion of it. Sensing their sonn, Jeremiah Coulter shook his head slightly; the warrant was sound.

  As Stranhorne had said, and Ishmael had expected. The brandy or Stranhorne’s conversation, or the combination, had stunned him sufficiently that “I surrender myself to your hands” came out evenly. But he was glad that Lavender was in the cellar. Laurel merely chewed on her lower lip.

  Mycene seemed perplexed, as a man is who pushes hard at a supposed obstruction, only to find it yield. “Right,” he said. “Hand over your weapons. We’re going north.”

  “There isn’t a train until tomorrow,” Stranhorne said. “The northbound express will have gone by the time you reach the station.”

  “Then we’ll ride,” Mycene said.

  With a quiet sigh, Balthasar Hearne swayed and slid to the floor in a dead faint. There was a slightly embarrassed silence at such unmanly behavior, and then Laurel settled carefully to her knees beside him, feeling his pulse. Before her pregnancy, the Strumheller surgeon had frequently drafted her as his assistant, for her cool head, steady hand, and ready understanding of terse orders.

  “This man’s exhausted,” she reported. “He won’t be traveling any farther today, unless it’s in a coach.”

  Mycene shook his head in curt disgust. “Then we’ll take a coach.”

  Stranhorne said, “You have maybe four hours to sunrise, which will put you in the inner Borders. I daresay you will be able to find lodgings from one of the households, but then you have—what?—another ten hours the next night, at best. A coach would slow you down even further. And given the ducal order, I think I would be fully within my rights to refuse you the use of fourteen or fifteen horses from my stables until this crisis is over, despite your warrant.”

  His lawyer gave a buccaneer’s grin.

  “I offer you the hospitality of my household until tomorrow night,” the baron continued, reasonably. “We will deliver you and your prisoners to the station, where you will be able to catch the train up to the Summerhouse Terminus, and the first day train to Minhorne.”

  Boris was failing to conceal his dismay—no wonder his sisters always cleaned him out at cards. Ishmael was impressed by Stranhorne’s nerve, and alarmed at the risk he was willing to run—on Ishmael’s behalf? With a cellar full of munitions and an active plot to support the Isles, Ish would have punted his enemies out the door as fast as possible, never mind decent. Or perhaps Stranhorne hoped to continue that intensely disturbing conversation.

  Ish would rather be carried off north in chains.

  “I accept your invitation,” Mycene conceded, sourly. “But I’m setting a guard on both those men. Di Studier’s under arrest for murder and suspicion of sorcery, and Hearne for aiding and abetting. I’ll have you up for aiding and abetting if they’re not both on the train north tomorrow.”

  “Less risk having him here than rousing his suspicions as to what we had to hide,” Stranhorne murmured to Ish a few minutes later, on the stairs. By the fourth flight, they had opened up a little distance between themselves and Mycene’s guard, who had had a hard ride in his train. “We’ll keep him and his men well fed and wined, and make sure they don’t go wandering and meeting locked doors. We know who to keep away from them, too.”

  “And y’blame Lavender on your wife.”

  Stranhorne cocked a half smile at him. “Of course. It’s Laurel who’s all mine. . . . We’ll dine just after the sunrise bell.”

  Balthasar Hearne was sitting up in bed when Ishmael came in, Stranhorne having persuaded Mycene to leave the guards outside the rooms his prisoners were to share. Balthasar was still fully dressed, except for jacket and boots, with a quilt thrown over him. He seemed tired but quite alert. He waited until Ishmael had closed the door, and said, abashed, “It was all I could think of to delay them. I’d already exhausted every other argument.”

  “It was convincing,” Ishmael allowed, relieved and privately amused. Curse it. A man yearning after a married woman had no business liking the woman’s husband.

  “Not bad,” Laurel allowed, judiciously. “For a man.” To Ishmael she said, “Father managed to stall them? Then I’d better go and find something to occupy Lavender—it’s too late to send her out again—and check with the housekeeper about dinner.” She swept out.

  Ishmael clasped hands with Balthasar. “Good t’find you again,” he said, and sat down. “Did you make it to the manor?” Since the age of sixteen, he never had been able to refer to Strumheller Manor as “home,” for all his sister’s chiding.

  “After a delay. Mycene was waiting at the station,” Balthasar said, the tightness around his mouth betraying what his stoic face tried to conceal. “They questioned me.” No small ordeal for a man beaten nearly to death under questioning less than a week ago. “They affected not to believe me and they took me up to the manor, claiming you might somehow have got past them. It was close to sunrise, anyway.” So Reynard and Noellene had had the dubious pleasure of entertaining Mycene and his arresting party over a day. “Your sister was gracious and most relieved to learn that the reports of your death were mistaken. Your brother could not be faulted as a host, but he . . . gave me a message for you. He said that this time he would settle the inheritance in court.”

  “Ah, well, that’s no surprise,” Ishmael said. “He’s not a bad man, m’brother, just too often disappointed.” Even Reynard’s marriage, arranged by their father, had been a disappointment. After ten years of childlessness and increasing estrangement, his wife had insisted on a divorce. “I’m lik
e one of those alley cats, always turning up when y’think you’ve sonned the last of it.”

  “Your sister expressed her disappointment that you did not send your brother a personal letter.”

  That made him grin: Noellene had been born when Ishmael was sixteen, and had inherited their city-born mother’s beauty and refinement—but she was enough their father’s daughter to strip hide with her tongue when truly riled. She was probably right about the letter, but what was done was done. “Y’could explain as well as I could . . . And then you came on tonight. Hard ride, was it?”

  “I cannot say I remember the last half,” Balthasar admitted. “I just concentrated on staying with the horse.”

  “No mean feat, in that company. Now, I’ve some news t’give you, and it’s not good. I think Stranhorne and I both need to hear your take on it—given you’ve served terms on th’Intercalatory Council, and live shoulder to shoulder with a Lightborn.”

  “Floria, yes.”

  “This does concern your—” He wasn’t sure how he could, or should, characterize Balthasar’s relationship with his neighbor. They were as intimate as a man and woman could be who would never meet in the flesh; that he knew. And he knew how Balthasar’s wife felt about it. “Mistress Floria,” he said, sidestepping awkwardness. “Since she’s vigilant to the Lightborn prince. Isidore’s dead.”

  “Dead? How?”

  “Lights failed in his rooms during the night.”

  “That’s—not possible,” Balthasar said. “The prince’s lights would be enspelled by multiple mages. They could not fail unless all those mages died at the same time.”

  “Or unless the magic was released or annulled.”

  “Not . . . possible,” Balthasar insisted.

  “Unless the Temple lifted its protection from Prince Isidore.”