Lightborn Page 9

  And he had, despite what he had heard, and found a perilous teacher and a true friend.

  “I need your help,” he said now.

  Lukfer had been staring at him from the moment he entered. Eye and pointing finger converged unerringly on Tam’s pocket. “What is that?”

  He should not have been in the least surprised, though he had tried to shield the thing before carrying it into the tower. He drew out a small pouch and, handling it with his fingertips, set it down unopened on the wide arm of Lukfer’s chair.

  “This—inside—was in the prince’s chambers.” He faltered, wanting to warn the other man, who suffered so from his sensitivity.

  Lukfer’s eyes narrowed; magic pulsed; the pouch twitched and spit out its contents. The item skidded across the arm, stopped just before the edge.

  It was a tiny, octagonal box, less than a palm span in diameter, such as the Darkborn used for blocks of scent. It was exquisitely carved in scrolls and sprigs of tiny flowers, but from unevenly hued wood and stained ivory. The craftsman capable of such carving should have rejected such unsightly variations. Had he been able to see them. It still smelled of sandalwood, but the magical aura of it was like a charnel stench. Lukfer’s massive body shuddered, his nausea threatening to overset Tam’s control. Reciprocity would have them vomiting their hearts out. “Sorry—” Tam snatched the pouch and brought it down over the box, as he would net a poison beetle. Lukfer’s black-gloved hand closed on his wrist. “Leave it.”

  Tam gulped and, as Lukfer released him, backed away. From the door—as though that made any real difference—he watched Lukfer carefully remove his gloves to touch it with his bare hands. Tam swallowed harder.

  Lukfer laid it down. “Now you can cover it.”

  Bare hands gripping the arms of his chair, Lukfer watched Tam net the vile little thing with the bag and jerk the laces violently closed.

  “Have a seat,” Lukfer said.

  Tam toppled into a chair, sapped of strength by renewed exposure to the sense of darkness.

  “I have been offered a c-contract, by the prince, to investigate his father’s death,” he said. “M-Mistress White Hand brought me the message. The contract hasn’t been negotiated or formalized yet—I haven’t spoken to Fejelis—the prince; I don’t think anyone knows. I went by Isidore’s rooms first, wanting—wanting to see them as soon as possible. And I found that. There were other mages there, but—but they didn’t even seem to sense it. I didn’t know whether they were pretending or—but when I palmed it”—a skill he had mastered in his first months in the city—“nobody acted as though they noticed.”

  Lukfer let out a breath. “Keep it that way. Now, open the curtains, would you.”

  The curtain was stiff with disuse; it took a magical push to send it lurching back. A broad stroke of golden sunlight fell across the bloated figure in his chair. Beneath his olive complexion, Lukfer was ashen. Tam half rose. “Master, what is it? Are you all right?”

  Lukfer waved his concern away.

  Tam sat down, watching him worriedly. “That’s a talisman of some kind, isn’t it? Is it possible that that—is what nullified the magic in the lights?”

  “You tell me.” That sounded more like his teacher.

  In sudden horror, he snatched up the pouch and started out of his chair. Lukfer’s magic snagged him, making him stumble. “Boy,” Lukfer said, brusquely, “I thought of that; that’s why I had you open the curtains. There’s no magic so powerful as can quench the sun. Put it down.”

  He did, hands shaking. “Master Lukfer, do you know whose magic this is?”

  Lukfer watched him with an unreadable expression, eyes honey yellow in the sunlight. “If you mean to do more than pay lip service to that title, then decline that contract, and forget this ever happened. Will you do that, for both our sakes?”

  “I—can’t,” he said.

  “I tell you, as your master, that this concerns mysteries of the Temple that have nothing to do with a mage like yourself.”

  “I’ve sensed this before. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve sensed this before.”

  “Tam, as you love your life, let the matter be.”

  “The f-first time I sensed it,” Tam pressed on, “was when the Rivermarch—that Darkborn district—burned. I was one of those called to put out the blaze, lest it spread. I felt it then. I didn’t realize that no one else had, not then. The second time was—a day or so ago, just after sunset, from the Darkborn district, the covered railway station. The third was with this box, here.”

  “That, that was not the third,” Lukfer said.

  “Not?” Tam faltered.

  “There was at least one other.”

  He had thought, when he finally heard the gossip about Lukfer, that Lukfer had said, “When you have control—” for Lukfer’s comfort. Only later did he realize Lukfer meant it for Tam’s safety, too. Though after the first few meetings, after he had met and passed Lukfer’s tests, and Lukfer had begun to relax with him, he had lost his fear of the older mage, and then he began to love him. But fearing or loving, he had never been able to lie to Lukfer.

  “It was on Floria White Hand, too,” he sighed.

  “Ah,” Lukfer said quietly, unsurprised. There was a long, long pause. “Have you ever visited the Borders?”

  “The Borders?” he said, bewildered at the irrelevance. The Borders had been left to the Darkborn so long ago that hardly a trace of Lightborn remained, all their works swallowed by the land or dismantled by the Darkborn for the building of byres and field walls that had in their own turn gone to ruin. The only Lightborn who lived in the Borders were those who had gone to work for the Darkborn railroads and agreed to tend the track through the Borders—antisocial, miscreant, eccentric, fugitive, or simply desperate for work.

  “Some years ago, I had reason to,” Lukfer said.

  Tam remembered Lukfer’s absence, unique for him, but at the time Tam himself had been under punishment, exiled from the Temple, with his magic bound. Lukfer never had said why he went to the Borders; he did not say now. “Do you have any notion as to why Lightborn by and large do not live there?”

  “I—when I thought about it at all, I assumed it had to do with safety from the Shadowborn. But what has that to do with—?” He gestured toward the talisman.

  “Yet the Darkborn stayed, handicapped as they are by their blindness and lack of magic, to hunt these creatures and drive them back across the Borders. . . . I’ve exchanged a few letters with one of their Shadowhunters, a weak mage himself. You have heard of glazen, creatures that ensorcell men and then slowly devour them alive.”

  Tam had heard the stories told by children to their credulous peers. Wise in the ways of bullies, he had accepted none of them. He said so.

  “Monsters out of fantasies, maybe,” Lukfer said. “But that”—a gesture toward the pouch—“is no fantasy. The mage I corresponded with recognized my description of what I sensed.”

  It took Tam a moment to understand. “You think that is Shadowborn magic.”

  “I know it is; I have sensed it before.”

  “Then that is why we left. That sense.” That Tam could believe.

  Lukfer interlaced his fingers, staring steadily over them at something Tam could not see. “You said none of the mages in the palace behaved as though they sensed the box. It is my belief that no mage bred in the Temple lineages could have sensed this box.”

  Tam stared at him in disbelief.

  “Have you seen anything around you to suggest they might have?”

  “Wouldn’t the masters of lineage realize that? Surely they would breed it back in?”

  The golden eyes shifted to him. “I do not doubt they tried. They may have failed. Or they may have succeeded, but not cared for the results. Perhaps with the ability to sense comes a diminution of power—sports as strong as ourselves are rare. Even for the masters of lineage, breeding strength is not that precise an art.” He shifted his shoulders beneath black-trimmed carmine. �
��Whatever the reason, lineage mages cannot sense—or manipulate—a form of magic that is potentially deadly.”

  “Mother of All Things,” Tam breathed. It seemed completely implausible, and yet it explained why this small, deathly object should have passed unnoticed. “Master, the archmage and the others—do they know that this magic is in the city itself?”

  “No,” said Lukfer, mouth setting hard. “And you will not tell them.”

  “But—”

  “The Temple looks after its own interests, boy,” Lukfer rasped. “We’ve made vast fortunes from our magic, and the magic as much as the compact protects us against retribution from our greed. But what would happen if the earthborn knew that there was a form of magic that Temple mages could not sense and counter, and was powerful enough to quench enspelled lights and kill a prince? They are already restless beneath the inequity; you know that better than any. This could mean the magic and mind of any mage who knows it, and the life of any earthborn—do you understand?”

  Lukfer’s magic suddenly surged against him from all directions, a fierce pressure mounting to pain. Tam held it off, gasping with the effort, and sagging as it withdrew as abruptly as it had come.

  “Sorry, lad,” Lukfer said. “But if anyone should tell them, it will be myself, alone.”

  Tam started to remonstrate; Lukfer slammed his hand down on the arm of his chair. Around the room, ornaments burst into fine shards of glass and then spun themselves together again. Lukfer’s voice rasped, “You have no sense of history. Amongst high-ranked mages, you are still a child in years, and you have no lineage and therefore none of the—received awareness that mages pass amongst themselves, parent and teacher to child and student.”

  “Indoctrination, you mean,” Tam said, unfairly—he well knew what Lukfer meant, the magical transfer of knowledge from mage to mage, master to student. No one was likely to give him such a gift, and Lukfer’s magic was too uncontrolled for him to bestow it. “They did their best with me.”

  Lukfer shook his heavy head in rebuke. “The archmage is three hundred and forty years old. He was raised within the Temple by members of the first generation to emerge with real power, who were bred and trained in utter secrecy, in fear of what the earthborn would do when they learned the Temple was trying to rebuild magic. His attitude, and that of many of the high masters, is at its root shaped by the Temple’s situation five and six hundred years ago, when the earthborn still had the ability to eradicate us. The high masters may have grown powerful enough to disdain earthborn, and would never admit to fearing them, but that first fear lives on in them, in that place that fears acquired in childhood do.”

  “This magic killed the prince.”

  “Not magic,” Lukfer said, “the mind behind the magic.”

  It was a distinction frequently underscored by Temple mages, and Tam detested the hypocrisy of it. No high- ranked mage took a contract he did not agree with, not anymore. “We cannot let this go on—magic or mind—killing unchecked. If we cannot take it to the high masters, we have to find that magic and its users, and, if need be, destroy them. In other words, if we cannot go to the Temple Vigilance, we must be the Temple Vigilance.”

  Slowly, Lukfer nodded.

  Fejelis

  I have one friend at least, Fejelis thought as he returned his practice épée to the rack and crossed the salle to greet Magister Tammorn. A servant approached with towel in hand and he waved her away, preferring to spare only just enough attention to track her whereabouts rather than weigh the possibility of subtler threats.

  He studied the demeanor of the mage, instead. Disregard the wan cast that that scarlet shade lent him, and it was still a burdened man who stood there. Stricken with grief for the prince, or for another reason? “Magister Tammorn,” he said formally. “Welcome.”

  “Your brightness,” said the mage, with a small dip of the head. “What may I do for you?”

  “. . . Come with me while I wash,” Fejelis said. He turned and led the mage between the pistes, conscious of the tapping of the other’s hard soles on the tiles. His own feet, in their soft soles, squeaked intermittently. Their mirrored images tracked them along all four walls of the room; at this time of day, only the skylight was clear to the sky. Two of the four walls were also windows, and reflected only when in shadow, as now, with the sun on the far side of the palace. Fejelis preferred his practice at this time of day: exertion in direct sunlight was tiring, and shade did keep down the audience.

  Locked doors played their part, too, at least for ordinary courtiers, though no locked door could keep out a mage.

  He waved the servants out of the dressing room, too. He wanted no witnesses to this conversation, and the servants seemed—they were—more nervous than usual. He was not greatly concerned: he could attribute that to his sudden elevation, the rumors around his guilt, or the company he kept.

  He turned to Tam, emotion closing his throat at the sight of the mage’s face. He had urged his trainers to drive him hard, so as to force everything else out of his mind but the moment. Now, however—unable to trust his voice, he put out his arm to be clasped in greeting. The mage used the grip to draw Fejelis against him in an importunate but welcome hug. “Jay,” he said against the prince’s ear. “Oh, curse it, Fejelis. I am so sorry.”

  Fejelis allowed himself to rest against Tam’s peasant-bred strength, a strength that had nearly fifty years of living behind it, and not always easy living, either. Then he eased himself away. Above all, he must remain clearheaded and clear-eyed. Grief was for men secure in their position.

  “. . . I know, Tam,” he said, huskily. “It’s far too soon to lose him, and in such a terrible way. But we both knew the risks.” His watchful eye caught Tam’s distress, and he made note. What risks did Tam know about that he did not?

  “What are you going to do?”

  “. . . Survive,” Fejelis said, simply. “Father would be thoroughly disappointed in me if I did not.” Then with irony, “I’m rather offended that anyone might think me fool enough as to have my father assassinated on the very night I came of age.”

  “Others have, or at least attempted it,” Tam pointed out.

  “Well, I’m not one of them. And if you yourself have any doubts, let us lay them to rest now.” He offered his bare hand. If it trembled slightly, it was with muscle fatigue. He intended to sleep well tonight. Whether he might safeguard himself by taking up with one of his erstwhile dancing partners, or merely add to his danger, he had yet to decide.

  Tam sketched a gesture deflecting the touch. “I trust you.”

  “. . . Then you’re probably unique,” Fejelis said. “. . . Mistress White Hand told you I want you to investigate his death. Are you willing?”

  To a man who had schooled himself to pay attention, Tam’s open face could be as readable as a child’s. “. . . You already know something, don’t you?”

  For a moment he thought the mage would object that there was no contract between them, no payment negotiated, no public declaration made. That would have been a lawful objection, and the puddle of muck that remained of his father attested well to the consequences of a broken law.

  But this was Tam, the mage who had acted outside contract and compact to save a dying child. “I—can’t tell you, yet. It’s a Temple matter.”

  “. . . Does that mean you are declining the contract through conflict of interest?”

  “I am not declining the contract,” Tam said, flushing, though the question was entirely proper at such a juncture. “This is something that . . .” He caught himself. “Who exactly killed your father, and who else was involved, is not something I can tell you at present, because I do not know.”

  Fejelis weighed the answer. “. . . If you cannot tell me who was responsible, perhaps you might be able to tell me who is not? It would help if I know whom I might trust.”

  “. . . Yes,” the mage said.

  “. . . Shall we discuss terms of payment, then?”

  With an air of
challenge, Tam named a sum that matched a skilled artisan’s wages.

  Fejelis laughed, the first laugh he had enjoyed since he had learned of his father’s death. “You mean that, don’t you? How do you ever plan to become obscenely rich, as befits your rank?”

  The mage’s revealing face showed not irritation but frank anger. “You know why,” he said, grimly.

  Fejelis already regretted his reaction. Indeed he knew why. Tam had lived the consequences of the beggaring of the provinces, the poverty that broke spirits and bodies, the desperate ignorance. “. . . I do,” he said, soberly, “and I respect you for it. I am sorry to deny you the chance to express your principles, but I cannot have this contract seen as a mockery of my father’s death.”

  “Then offer what you think fit. I do not care,” the mage said. He ran a hand over his face. “I would do this unpaid if I could, for your father, and you.”

  “. . . And wouldn’t that be a scandal.” Fejelis turned to ply the lock of his cabinet. From within the cabinet, he took two bottles, examined the seals of both with care—intact—and offered one to the mage. Then he pressed the lever to reset the lock, and closed the door. Leaning against the cabinet, he took a long swig of water.

  “. . . There’s an estate on the outskirts,” he said. “Nine acres and a manor house. I’ve been trying to think how to get it to you for some time. With some work it would be suitable for the hostel you’ve spoken about.” The mage had been contributing to the city’s charities for destitute immigrants since he had a coin to spare. “. . . Or you could turn it into a workshop for our friends the artisans. You’ll have to figure out the Temple tithe yourself. . . . Be warned; Mother had some notions as to what I might do with it. Did she have a part in Father’s death?” he asked, launching the question without a beat’s hesitation.

  “I . . . can’t say,” the mage said, the momentary pleasure at Fejelis’s offer leaving his face.

  “. . . You do have the information? Or hesitate to say? Please tell me that, at least.”