Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (27 page)

Was there any hope of them proving useful allies against the Mandarkin? Hosh couldn’t sail away from the island alone but now there were enough of them to make up a crew. Though of course they would need a seaworthy boat.

And they would need to defend themselves against the other Aldabreshi. Hosh walked quietly to the herb trough where he’d hidden Ducah’s discarded sword. Retrieving the blade, he walked around the terrace to go down the pavilion’s front steps, the sword pressed against his side. He had already decided where to hide it on the furthest pavilion’s terrace.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

The Esterlin Residence, Relshaz

16th of For-Autumn

‘S
O WHAT DO
we think he is doing with these wretched mageborn today?’ Mellitha studied the scrying spell floating on the surface of the water.

Jilseth didn’t answer. She had become used to the comfortably plump magewoman’s habit of asking such questions as she worked her magic in this luxurious salon looking onto the carefully tended garden of her well-appointed home.

Would they ever see some clue as to what the Mandarkin intended? Jilseth had no more idea what the mysterious northern wizard was up to than she had when she had first arrived here.

Any more than she had fathomed why Planir had sent her away from Hadrumal so abruptly. Had Troanna been so grievously offended by Jilseth’s unbidden magic invading her scrying? Though, granted, Jilseth knew she was the obvious person to explain the trick of blending the bitumen into a scrying to Mellitha—

‘Madam mage?’ Mellitha looked across the silver bowl, her expression as serene as ever. ‘Your full attention, if you please?’

Jilseth realised that the glob of bitumen was threatening to escape her frighteningly erratic affinity. She quickly brought her full attention to bear on the molten pitch and the reflection brightened.

‘How many are missing this morning?’ Mellitha’s dark eyes darted this way and that as her generous mouth twisted wryly. ‘Two more lost lambs. Your scrying, madam mage,’ she said lightly.

Jilseth summoned up all her resolve and the emerald spell darkened. The touch of Mellitha’s wizardry was as gentle as a mother’s caress as the older magewoman relinquished the scrying but Jilseth’s mage senses were still as raw as scalded flesh.

A heady scent rose from the ensorcelled water to vie with the fresh-cut flowers in the vases by the long muslin-draped windows.

Mellitha had been among the first mages to experiment with perfumery essences in scrying and she was wont to release their oils by warming the water beneath them. Jilseth marvelled at her ability to command elemental fire while working water magic. Had there ever been another wizard born to this affinity so skilled with the antagonistic element? Yet again, Jilseth had to wonder why this elegant magewoman wasn’t given the credit she was due among Hadrumal’s halls.

A sharper note underlying the fragrance cleared Jilseth’s head with all the efficacy of a blademint tisane the morning after too much wine. She had noticed that before. What else might Mellitha be doing with her magic? Something she didn’t want Hadrumal to know about?

‘The missing mageborn?’ Mellitha prompted.

Jilseth concentrated once again. This dismal search offered some balm for her bruised pride. Only a necromancer could scry for the dead. Only an earth wizard could master such eerie magic to pursue and to commune with the dead. Jilseth was one of the very few born to her affinity who chose to pursue the little known discipline in recent years.

Though like any winning rune, such expertise had its grim reverse. Jilseth would much rather not be looking for the fresh corpses of those captive Aldabreshi mageborn. But so many had chosen to flee beyond all recall from whatever fate they feared the heavenly compass predicted. Or whatever they feared the Mandarkin mage intended for them.

Jilseth sent the scrying magic in search of cold and clotting blood; that unique combination of elemental water infused with so many aspects of essential earth. Immediately the spell was drawn to the corpses littering the far shore of the island where the corsairs had first fled.

She refined the magic further, spurning the ooze sinking into the sand beneath the deliquescing dead. Though her affinity hadn’t nearly recovered its full strength, she was becoming ever more attuned to those subtlest of changes which inexorably followed once life and breath had left a body.

She sighed. ‘The woman with furrowed hair.’

For whatever reason, she had come here to die; the woman whose hair had been her pride and ornament. Jilseth had never seen anything like it; tight black braids sculpted across her scalp in waves to gather in the nape of her neck.

‘At dawn, as near as I can guess.’

Greedy flies clustered thickly around the gashes in the woman’s forearms where she’d spilled her own blood rather than live cursed by her unsuspected magebirth. ‘And the other one?’ Mellitha queried.

Jilseth frowned as she sent the scrying skimming along the waterline. There was something on the very edge of her wizard senses.

‘Is that—?’

Red-clawed crabs clustered thickly around something half buried in the wet sand but that sad remnant was much longer dead.

‘There!’ The scrying blazed vivid green as Mellitha’s magic fought Jilseth’s for an instant.

‘I see him.’ Jilseth yielded the scrying nevertheless.

Mellitha flung the spell right to the the far end of the charnel cove. A tall beardless man was stripping off his clothes and folding them into a tidy pile. They watched him tug a plaited band of silver from his wrist, the braided wire criss-crossing polished agate.

‘The unscarred swordsman.’ Mellitha grimaced.

No whip had ever marked this man’s smooth skin. Even diminished after all this half-season’s privations, his physique was impressive.

He waded into the sea amid the putrid carrion sucked into the shallows by the rise and fall of the tides.

‘He’s waiting for the sharks,’ Mellitha realised with distant compassion.

‘Is that bravery or cowardice?’ Jilseth couldn’t decide.

‘Or something else entirely, to honour some Aldabreshin belief?’ Mellitha shook her head, unable to answer her own question.

If only—

Jilseth let the unspoken words escape her lips as a soft exhalation. Despite all their command of magic, there was nothing which she and Mellitha could do short of plucking the man bodily from the water. She didn’t imagine that he would thank them for that.

‘Must we—?’

Before she could ask, the man scored a deep gash across his chest with a knife.

‘It’s as well to know that someone is truly dead.’ Mellitha watched, unblinking. ‘Especially a wizard.’

‘But these are not wizards!’ Jilseth looked away as the water seethed with the seemingly insatiable sharks. ‘They are barely mageborn. If they had any affinity worth the name, they would have been discovered long before now.’

‘And suffered the ghastly fate which Aldabreshin custom decrees.’ Mellitha winced as the man vanished beneath a flurry of pink-tinged foam.

‘Their magebirth may be stronger than we think. Don’t forget that abject fear or sufficiently strong intent can suppress magebirth’s manifestations,’ she reminded Jilseth. ‘We know of such constraint among the Mountain Men and the Forest Folk, for fear of being exiled by the Aetheric adepts who make their laws.’

She shook her head, regretful, as the screaming man’s head broke the water’s surface, silently vanishing a moment later beneath a pallid finned flank streaked with gore.

‘These Archipelagans know nothing of wizardry so how would they know to fear their own nature? I cannot believe these mageborn have an affinity which Hadrumal would judge worth training,’ Jilseth insisted stubbornly.

‘That’s a debate for another time.’ With only one hand on the scrying bowl, Mellitha drummed her painted nails on the satiny fruitwood table set between their silk-upholstered chairs. ‘We need to know what this Mandarkin intends for these remaining unfortunates.’

In the blink of an eye, the scrying returned to the pavilions by the anchorage. Mellitha drew the spell aloft to show them each of the three terraces where the remaining mageborn were usually found.

‘Does he really think he can buy their loyalty?’ This baffled Jilseth.

The Mandarkin had sent his Caladhrian slave with gifts of food and clothing and handfuls of his loot to his unwilling guests. Then he left them to their own devices; to hang themselves or take up a knife and end their miserable existence as they chose.

Mellitha was still absorbed in her own thoughts. ‘Why has he been making them presents of those artefacts?’

Jilseth picked out the Caladhrian slave with the misshapen face on the terrace of the furthest pavilion. The one who wore that curious arm ring. She made very certain to ward her earthly affinity against the bauble’s insidious lure.

How many ensorcelled objects did the Mandarkin have in his stolen hoard? Jilseth had felt curious earthly resonances several times as they had surveyed the captive mageborn. What of other elemental magics that didn’t speak so directly to her affinity? What spells woven of fire, air and water had been locked into those artefacts once prized by unknown mages of ages past, now looted all unknowing by the Aldabreshi?

‘We need to hear his cozening and cajoling. Until then we may as well be blind as well as deaf.’ Mellitha withdrew her remaining hand and the scrying vanished. ‘We need a clairaudience woven into this scrying.’

‘Planir won’t countenance it,’ Jilseth protested. ‘He says there is far too much danger of the Mandarkin sensing the working. Then he’ll renewhis veiling to hide from us again.’

‘Not with Velindre weaving the air to listen in on him,’ Mellitha assured her.

The magewoman crossed the sunlit salon and stooped to another polished table beside an upholstered daybed. She rang a silver hand bell. ‘Do you wish to fetch a wrap before we take the carriage? There can be quite a breeze close to the docks.’

She picked up her own shawl, a lacy confection of knitted silk a few subtle shades lighter than her teal gown. Both might have been chosen to complement the leaf-green rugs on the dark wood floor and the watered silk wall-hangings.

‘No, thank you, I’ll be fine.’ Jilseth had opted for long sleeves and a high neckline when Mellitha’s favourite seamstress had visited to take her measure on her arrival, returning the following day with three gowns besides this one, its silk as iridescent as the inside of a pearl oyster’s shell.

As she spoke, one of the household’s well-trained lackeys opened the double doors at the end of the salon. He was another singularly well-favoured lad with the black hair and tanned skin that spoke of mixed Archipelagan and mainland blood.

‘Tell Tanilo I want the carriage. Thank you.’

‘Couldn’t we bespeak Velindre and ask her to join us?’ Jilseth looked at the fireplace for a spill or a candle but such humdrum necessities didn’t sully Mellitha’s mantelpiece. There were four miniature paintings there, the handiwork of the magewoman’s artist son. Jilseth guessed that he and his brother favoured their respective fathers while their two sisters showed what a beauty Mellitha must have been when her chestnut hair was untouched by the white now frosting it.