City of Night (69 page)

But that magic, and the magic that began to fill the room, were not the same. He smiled for a moment as he glanced at the color of the light that was apparent to his eyes; it bore his signature, folded among the lattice of white and gray.

“What now?” he said, as the power grew stronger. “I’m a busy man, and I don’t have time for insignificant interruptions. I’ve students, patricians, and merchants clamoring for attention; you’d best set yourself apart from them very quickly.”

The voice that replied caused him to lift his head; it was a young voice; too young for The Terafin’s Chosen. “We need your help,” it said. “The Terafin is about to be—”

“We call upon you,” an older, and male voice broke in. “To fulfill your bond. I am Torvan of the Chosen, and I summon you to The Terafin’s side.”

At last.

He let curiosity about the girl’s voice dissipate, and he lifted his face so that he could see, in the lines above his desk, the face of the man who now summoned him. He recognized him as Torvan ATerafin, although he had not troubled to hide his identity.

With a simple gesture, he changed his robes from the plain and unremarkable robes of the Order to robes that shifted in light, gray and white and all colors in between.

“Torvan, what is the danger that you perceive?”

Torvan, however, did not answer the question, not directly. Instead, he turned and spoke a single word. “Jewel.”

“My lord,” the girl said, and as she spoke, the vision shifted to frame her face. She was young; by Averalaan standards, not quite adult, although she hovered at its edge. Her eyes were dark, and her hair a brown that suggested auburn; his magic did not convey such nuances well.

“We—I—there is an—an assassin on the grounds. He looks like a friend, but he—but he’s not human.”

Obviously the girl was not accustomed to speaking in public. Or to speaking clearly at all. In spite of this, Meralonne was curious; it was to this girl that Torvan of the Chosen had deferred.

“Not human? What is he?”

“I don’t know. But he—he jumped off the top of a three-story building and made a hole in the road.”

“I see. I take it he then continued to move?”

She nodded.

He lifted a hand, and he gestured; along the relay he had placed just the hint of compulsion. It was not, strictly speaking, legal. Nor did the lack of legality trouble him; the girl was clearly unlearned and not therefore adept at maneuvering the nicety of Imperial Law. “You will wait until our business is done, for I wish to speak with you further.”

She nodded, silent, and then, to his surprise, she broke from his gaze and turned to look off to one side. To Torvan.

“I will come,” Meralonne told them both. “Step back.”

And so, he thought, rising from his desk and arming himself, it begins. At last.

Carver watched as the wall burned. White flames, with hearts of orange and gold, scoured stone engravings clean. It should have been impossible, but the man who now stepped
through
that solid rock surface was a mage, and mages defied the possible. He wore robes that looked as if they were made of fine, fine steel, and when the last of those robes cleared the wall, the rock cracked and settled at his back.

While he watched, Jay grim and silent by his side, Torvan shouted orders. This room, the one he had led them to, was filled only by guards. By, Torvan had said, the Chosen.

Those guards now obeyed his commands, but they weren’t wordless.

“You’d better be right about this,” a tall and grim- faced woman said. She was older than Torvan, and shorter, but her shoulders were broad and her arms suggested that the weight of armor meant less to her than cotton gauze would have to Carver. She wore a sword at her hip, and she carried a helm in the crook of her left arm.

Torvan said quietly, “I know.” He meant to say more; Carver saw that, and it made him wonder who this woman was.

But the mage clearly didn’t give a damn. “Where is your intruder?” His voice was cool, clipped; Carver would have said he was irritated or annoyed, but something about his eyes were wrong for that. They were gray, those eyes, and right now they glimmered like steel reflecting light.

Torvan, however, didn’t find the interruption off-putting. “We believe that he is either with, or on his way, to The Terafin.”

“Then let us repair to her quarters in haste.”

The guards nodded, and Carver tried to find the tail of their six-man escort, so that he and Jay could slip behind them and follow. But the mage walked only as far as the wall opposite the one his arrival had seemed to destroy.

“What is he doing?” Jay asked Torvan, in something close to a whisper.

“He made this room, these walls, and these arches. That wall, the one that he’s standing in front of, leads through the fireplace into The Terafin’s audience chambers. We must follow; wait for us here.”

She glanced, briefly, at the third wall with its stylized engravings, but she didn’t have the courage to ask what it was for. Not now, and maybe not ever. Carver nodded, but he knew she had no intention of being left behind; if it came to that, neither did he.

Of course, he was stupid. Jay had no excuse.

The mage touched the wall, and the stone beneath the carved arch began to lose the consistency of rock. Carver had seen it happen once already, but it was still jarring to watch stone fade into something that resembled gray-and-white mist.

Through those mists, pale and insubstantial at first, Carver could see the unmistakable figure of The Terafin. She was not seated; she stood.

He had thought she might be in the room they had first entered, but the room the mist slowly parted to reveal was grander and larger, with paintings, and small statues in recessed alcoves in the wall, adorned on either side by glassed cases. She appeared to be alone.

But she looked up, and her eyes widened slightly as she saw who sought entry into her room, and why. “What is this?”

Torvan did not reply; instead, led by the mage, he entered the room, along with the other Chosen, Jay and Carver himself, who almost thought the better of it when he saw the expression on the face of the woman who ruled this House.

But he followed, and before anyone could answer her question—and Carver could understand why no one wanted to—he froze.

Standing between the Chosen and The Terafin, well-dressed, clean-shaven, and unarmed, was Old Rath.

 

The Terafin stood, silent, Ararath before her, and behind him, outlined by the wavering shape of an entirely magical arch, her Chosen, the mage whose services Terafin retained, and, all but hidden by both, two of the street children that she had chosen—for her own reasons—to take into her House. Only one of these people was welcome, had been welcome, even if that welcome had been fraught. Not even Morretz was in this room, because Amarais had some dignity, and she had been surprisingly uncertain how this interview would go.

She had not seen her brother for years. For decades. At one point in time, she could number the days. Nor had she expected to see him again. She saw him now, older and careworn; the streets had not been as kind to Ararath, in the end, as the House had been to her. When she had received word of his probable death, she had felt—carefully—nothing.

When she had received word of his
presence,
that nothing had crumbled, like an ancient and poorly kept wall—but what it would reveal, not even she could be certain. And yet, uncertain, she had agreed—in haste—to meet with him, choosing the function rooms that only the most important of her visitors might see.

She had thought to preserve privacy. To preserve the part of the past that she, foolish in ways that years had not completely eradicated, had both hidden and, in the end, cherished.

Yet he had not spoken four words, and those a stiff and formal greeting, before she had seen the wall, and the great mantel that was the centerpiece of this room, shiver and become translucent, as if made of glass and smoke.

Her own words, she was now forced to choose with care. “Gentlemen,” she said, each syllable as sharp as any harsh word she had ever spoken, “while it’s been a pleasure to have your company, unless we can come to an understanding of circumstance, I will be forced to ask you to leave.”

The Chosen were inscrutable. But she saw the flicker of her captain’s eyes as Alayra’s gaze brushed Torvan’s profile. Her own glance strayed to Ararath; he had not moved.

She forced her hands not to gather in fists at her sides. “I have, as you can see, a visitor who arranged to speak with me.”

That visitor now frowned. “If I’ve come at an inopportune moment, I can return at another time.”

And would he? He had not come when she had been granted the Terafin name; he had not come while she had struggled to survive the war that had led, in the end, to the Terafin Seat upon the High Council in
Avantari
, the Palace of Kings. If she let him go, now, all of her words and all of his would remain unspoken. She could barely believe he had come at all. He would vanish; the streets would once again swallow him.

“No.” She turned to look at her Chosen; she could not keep the ice from her voice, and no longer bothered to try. What her expression told them, she did not know, and did not, at this particular moment, care. “Gentlemen?”

They offered no answer.

But Ararath said, in a sharper voice, “What are you doing?”

The Terafin glanced briefly at the painting that rested, in a gold frame, above the mantel. It was not merely decorative, although it was pleasant enough; a seaside painting, with brief sand dunes broken by waves and two large, standing stones. The sky in the painting, however, paled or deepened in the presence of magic.

The sky was, at this moment, the color of storm to her eye.

“Meralonne.” The word was just short of command. Meralonne APhaniel was, as most of the Magi, fractious and difficult. He was not, however, like many, overfocused and under-sensitive. He could choose to offend, if it took his fancy; he could choose to charm in equal measure.

But he seldom chose magery as a greeting.

“Please explain your presence here
at once
.” But even asking, she knew. She knew, and she, who had risen to power by trusting her instinct and her knowledge, chose to glance away from it now. It was bitter; she was no longer a child, and even as a child she had seldom been one who preferred not to see, not to hear, not to know.

But life taught, always.

“I am here,” he replied, “at the behest of your Chosen.” He stepped forward, standing neither in the room nor beyond it, interposed as he was across the mantel itself. She remembered—it was ludicrous, but memory was often like that—the argument she had had about the mantel and its value when he had proposed this strange security measure.

She had thought it odd, then.

She understood, now, that it had been deliberate.
This
was what he had built for. This moment.

And she wondered if she would ever forgive him for it. “Obviously.”

He stepped forward, now, into the room; the Chosen followed him like a moving, metallic wall. They knew her anger, and they moved anyway.

“Please accept my apologies for the unannounced use of magecraft in your presence. And you, sir, if you would accept my most humble apologies.”

“For what?” Ararath replied, but his expression was once again smooth and slightly weary.

“Indeed, Meralonne,” The Terafin said, the cold in the words like a winter storm. “For what?” Because she could not, not quite, let go.

She had chosen the men and women who now accompanied the mage because she could trust them. It took effort, to remember that now.

“I merely attempted to negate any . . . illusion that might have been present.”

“Illusion?” His voice was so familiar. Even changed by decades, the surprise and incredulity was entirely his. “Are you saying that I’m a mage?”

“Please accept my apologies. Terafin, it appears that I have been summoned in error.”

She wanted to believe this. “Who summoned you?”

“I did.” Torvan ATerafin stepped forward, and lowered himself to one knee, his helmed head bowed before her.

Torvan. She bowed her head in turn. “We will speak of this later.”

“Lord.”

As one man, the Chosen turned to leave. They passed through the arch, and returned to their chamber, sparing a glance for the two urchins who had waited in safety within.

But the mage left last, and she saw, with a pang, that it was not yet over. She glanced at her brother, at her brother’s face, and she examined her desire as dispassionately as she could.

Ararath,
she thought, but she did not speak, did not gesture; instead she moved, changing in unnoticeable ways not her posture, but her position.

When Meralonne APhaniel turned at the edge of the arch, she was not surprised.

“I will take my leave,” he said.

She nodded, miming permission. Aware, as she met the steel of his bright gaze that he was not yet done. Aware, as well, that Ararath had already dismissed them all from his thoughts.

“But I think that I have not been summoned without cause.”

He lifted one slender hand, and gestured. No fire left his fingers, no lightning, no sign of violent magic. Instead, for just a moment, the room was suffused with the fragrance of summer on the Isle. Of summer, she thought, in Handernesse, when the garden was in full bloom, a riot of scent and color, attended by bees and small birds, by men and women, and by her inquisitive, annoying, adoring younger brother.

She watched Ararath; even before the scream of pain and surprise left his lips, she saw the widening of recognition in his eyes. Saw, as well, the sudden narrowing of the same eyes, as pain was transformed by some emotional alchemy into rage, and a fury that she had never, ever seen on her brother’s face.