Forging Divinity (18 page)

“If you hurt the child, I will kill you slowly over the course of centuries,” the woman said in a warning tone.

“Peace,” Jonan said, raising his hands above the curtain. He still wasn’t sure if she could see him or not, but he was starting to suspect some middle-ground – much like he had been able to see her outline in the dark. “I am not here to hurt anyone.”

“Then why are you here?” She sounded incredulous, slightly shifting her stance.

Well, hrm. Now that I’ve made the mistake of talking, I suppose I need to make another one. “I’m here investigating reports that Rethri have been kidnapped.”

The shadow-woman folded her arms. “And why would you care about such a thing?”

Well, I work for a Rethri god, but I’m certainly not going to tell you that.
“My organization is concerned that one of the factions in this city might be working against the Rethri. This would be disadvantageous for us as well.”

“These children are afflicted by a plague. We have been attempting to research a cure,” the woman offered in a strangely sad tone.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Jonan risked. “The burns around their eyes are too regular. And the man who was just in here touched one of them on the head – you don’t do that with a plague victim. And one locked door is hardly enough security-“

“You seem to be here out of concern, not malice. Drop your spell and surrender. I will make sure you are treated fairly.” He heard her footsteps approaching the curtain, causing Jonan to awkwardly reach for his own dagger.

What am I doing? I can’t fight her.

He bolted instead.

The woman’s approach had taken her just out of the doorway – and that was all the space he needed. While she advanced to react to the sound of his steps, he raced around her. Her arm shot out as he approached, but he waved a hand, creating an image of the dawnfire in front of her. The Rethri reeled back, apparently blinded by the trick, and he rushed down the corridor.

Her footsteps sounded only an instant behind him.

Resh, I was hoping that spell would hold her longer.

There was visible light once Jonan emerged into the corridor – apparently, her darkness spell only covered the room itself. The daylight from the windows was only momentarily disorienting, but it revealed that his vision was blurred to near-uselessness. Maintaining his invisibility spell for so long had taken a significant toll on his sight, and the spell for seeing in the dark had only made it worse.

“Guards! We have an intruder!” the woman shouted.

Something grabbed his leg, and as he fell forward, he realized that he was being dragged down to the floor by his own shadow.

He hit the ground hard, rolling awkwardly as the glue-like pull of his shadow dragged him against the floor. No illusion of light could vanquish the shadow – it would still be there even if he could not see it.

And so, with great hesitation, Jonan conjured flame.

A blast of fire with the heat of a furnace melted the tiles beneath his hand, the incendiary burst momentarily scattering his shadow. He felt a chill as the heat from casting his spell left the body, but the grip of the shadow waned from iron to elastic, allowing him to break free with a burst of momentum.

“Eshav!” the Rethri woman called. It was a popular Liadran expletive, and Jonan grinned in spite of himself. He loved winning.

Jonan half-ran, half-stumbled his way back to the stairway, which came up on him much faster at a running pace. A hand caught his shoulder just as he reached the stairs, and he spun, a ball of fire forming in his hand.

The Rethri woman, her features still entirely wrapped in shadow, stood unarmed behind him. Jonan hissed as his glove caught fire and hurled his sphere of flame into the floor. His will forced the sphere to combust, the explosion hurling the pair apart. Jonan slammed into the wall next to the stairs, his eyes swimming, his body convulsing from the sudden expenditure of too much heat.

Without so much as a moment of hesitation, the shadow-wrapped Rethri bounded back to her feet. The darkness around her seemed to have absorbed the detonation of his spell harmlessly – unlike his shadow, her shroud had not dissipated at the touch of flame.

She loomed over him now, but Jonan’s head was swimming, and it took all his will just to push himself into a sitting position.

“I was careless to expect that your illusions meant you would be harmless,” the Rethri woman said. “But you chose not to hit me directly with your fire, when you easily could have.”

Jonan lifted a hand to the back of his head, feeling something wet. Blood, probably.
Great.
“Yeah, I don’t always make the best decisions.”

“Neither do I,” she said, turning around. “Your invisibility spell is down. You will need to recast it before you leave. Never come here again.”

She seemed to glide along the floor as she left, making no sound that he could recognize. He felt a measure of gratitude that she had chosen to leave, though it was hard to feel too positive when his head felt like it was about ready to combust.

Rubbing his temples, Jonan slowly pushed himself to his feet. He nearly collapsed, catching himself on the opposite wall and shivering for several moments.

Gods, I need to not do that again.

He reached into his pouch, withdrawing his glasses kit. After a few moments of fumbling, he opened it to produce a heavier pair, tucking his current glasses inside. The heavier glasses eased the blur of his vision, and he waved a hand to renew his invisibility.

The world swam around him again, but he couldn’t tell how much of that came from the over-expenditure of sorcery and how much of it came from his head injury.
I’ll need to get that looked at,
he noted, half-consciously staggering to the stairs. He was forced to awkwardly dodge a handful of guards as they rushed the stairway, apparently reacting to the woman’s earlier call.

Jonan’s head pulsed with agony as he made his way to exit from the same entrance he had entered, finding an opportunity to sneak out the door as a concerned looking man shouldered it open to leave. He neither saw nor heard any sign of Lydia – but he hadn’t planned to. And right now, he barely had the strength to shiver his way back home on his own.

Jonan woke in a bed he had never slept in before. His eyes cracked open, showing him only a vaguely room-shaped blur. A heavy layer of blankets entombed him, and he brushed them aside, hands searching for glasses.

A red-crowned blur loomed over him a moment later. Startled, Jonan pushed himself backward and upright.

“Looking for these?” came an amused voice from the crimson blur. A pale blur – a hand, he realized, as it approached – offered him an object.
Glasses.
He snagged them out of the hand greedily, donning the spectacles in an instant.

Lydia formed in front of him, and his memories cleared somewhat along with his vision. He was in his home – in his false bedchamber, the one above his real one. He had managed to stumble this far on his own – Lydia must have found him shortly thereafter.

“Thank you,” he managed to mumble. A shiver ran through him, and he pulled the pile of blankets back atop him. Lydia withdrew from her looming, but only to take a seat at a nearby chair. He tilted his head toward her, noting that she was carrying a half-closed book in her off-hand, a stray finger marking her place within the pages. “How long have I been out?”

“Just about an hour.” Lydia flipped the book back open, looked at something, and then closed it completely and set it aside. “If you keep shivering like that, I’m going to need to take you to the palace for treatment.”

“Oh, that would end well,” Jonan mumbled.

“I see your sense of humor is uninjured, at least. How about the rest of you?” Lydia leaned forward in her chair.

“What, you didn’t check?” Jonan lifted his blankets and glanced downward half-heartedly. “The important bits seem to be there.”

“I didn’t want to presume,” she replied with just a hint of laughter in her tone. “Did you find anything interesting?”

Jonan looked back at the sorceress. “Under the blankets, or at the research facility?”

Lydia folded her arms. “At the research facility.”

“Ah, it’s all business with you. Well, yes, actually. In both places. At the research facility, I discovered something rather important – there’s a room on the second floor filled with Rethri children. They appear to be unconscious, perhaps through sorcerous means. The children have some kind of burns or unusual markings around their eyes.”

“And under the blankets?” Lydia leaned forward a hint further.

“Um, what?” Jonan stammered.

“What did you find that was so interesting under the blankets?” She grinned, adjusting her glasses.

Jonan pulled back instinctively as Lydia leaned over, causing her to laugh.

“You tell me I’m all business, and then when I play along, you don’t know what to do with yourself,” Lydia pointed out.

“I was just startled, is all. Let me start over. ‘You’d really have to see it to believe it.’”

“Better,” she replied, her grin transcending into smirk. “But you need more conviction. Anyway, business. Rethri with strange marks around their eyes.”

“Right, business.” Jonan let out a sign of relief.
What a strange woman.
“The markings were in a circular shape. I think they were deliberate, given that Rethri eyes are tied to their Dominions.”

Lydia’s expression shifted into a glower. “Tell me more about these marks.”

“Not much to say, I’m afraid. They looked like blisters, possibly from burns. They were in a roughly circular shape.”

“Did they look like letters?”

I wish I knew.
“None that I could identify, but if this was done through some kind of branding process, blisters and scabs could easily conceal the original shape of the markings.”

Lydia glanced away from him, her expression grim. “Sounds like they could be the same type of markings that you found around the esharen.”

“Potentially,” he admitted. “I thought of that, but it was too hard to tell.”

“Did you check several different people to see the marks on any of them were easier to identify?”

I probably should have prioritized that,
he considered,
but I had other things on my mind.

“I didn’t get a chance to do much poking around. Someone discovered me in the room – in spite of my invisibility. I promise, I wasn’t making a lot of noise, either. She was a Rethri woman – wearing the robes of a court sorceress.”

Lydia sat up straight in her chair. “A Rethri woman? What did she look like?”

“Looked like she was about your age, indigo eyes, brown hair, skin was about as dark as mine,” he explained.

Lydia steepled her fingers, then rested her chin on them. “We have a problem. That wasn’t a court sorceress.”

Jonan quirked a brow. “Oh?”

“There’s no court sorceress that fits that description. I’m fairly sure you’ve just described Vorain, the fourth god of Orlyn.”

Jonan shivered, and he couldn’t be sure it was due to the cold that lingered in his veins. “Well,” he considered, “That complicates things. But at least she wasn’t trying to kill me.”

Lydia quirked a brow. “What happened when she discovered you?”

“I should mention that she passed me once earlier, on the way to the room – and I didn’t think she noticed me at the time. I followed an older human man into the room with the Rethri, and then she got his attention and led him outside. That was when she came in and found me. She told me she knew I was there, and she wanted to talk.”

“What did she want to talk about?” Lydia cracked her fingers, leaning forward again.

“She wanted me to surrender. I told her I was there looking to find kidnapped Rethri. She told me the kids I had found were not captured – they were plague victims that were being treated. I insisted that they probably weren’t, given how regular the burns were around their eyes. That was most likely a mistake,” he continued, noting that Lydia was leaning closer, apparently transfixed by his story.

“So, the sorceress – or goddess, if you prefer – blocked the doorway. She wanted me to appear, and to surrender. I think she really did want to protect those children. I refused, of course. I was forced to dazzle her with some astounding spellwork – it really was quite impressive, you should have been there – and flee the area.”

Lydia closed her eyes after that, apparently contemplating in silence for a moment.

“I’d show you the spells I used, but I’m afraid I’m a bit too shivery at the moment. And also half-blind.” The world around him was sharper with his glasses on, but anything more than a few paces past Lydia was still barely recognizable.

“That’s fine,” Lydia said absently, waving a hand with a dismissive gesture. And then she went quiet again.

I guess she needs a moment.
He sat up, taking a moment to consider for himself. His head swam in the opposite direction, reminding him of his brief head-to-wall collision.
That’s going to be irritating for a while.

Okay, what do I know?