Jonathan Moeller - The Ghosts 09 - Ghost in the Surge (3 page)

Corvalis snorted. “Compared to some of the other things we’ve done, this is a pleasant afternoon stroll.” 

He had a point. 

Caina tucked the ring beneath her jacket and donned her shadow-cloak. 

It was a wondrous thing, black as night and lighter than the finest silk. The Ghost nightkeepers created them using a secret method, fusing shadows with the silk of spiders. The cloak weighed nothing at all, and it blurred and merged with the shadows, allowing her to move through the darkness with great stealth. Additionally, so long as she pulled up the cowl, the cloak shielded her from both spells of divination and mind-controlling sorcery. 

The cloak had saved her life more than once. 

Corvalis donned his own shadow-cloak. It transformed him into a hulking, silent shadow. He moved with just as much stealth as she did, but he had learned stealth in far grimmer circumstances. His father had sold him to the Kindred assassins as a child, and they had brutalized him into an efficient, skilled killer. Yet he had left the Kindred to rescue his sister and had joined the Ghosts. 

“Corvalis,” said Caina.

She stepped closer, lifted their masks, and kissed him long upon the lips. 

“That was,” said Corvalis when they broke apart, “unexpected.”

“I love you,” said Caina. 

“I love you, too,” said Corvalis. He grinned. “Let’s go break into a Lord Governor’s study.”

They donned their masks and departed the Rusalka’s Kiss.

###

It was a cold, damp night, a thick mist rolling off Mornu’s harbor. In the gloom Caina could just make out the glow of the lighthouse, but saw little else. That was good - the weather would make it all the easier to enter the mansion unseen.

The Lord Governor’s residence sat on a hill overlooking the town, fortified by its own low wall of gleaming white stone. It resembled a townhouse in the Imperial capital, complete with a colonnaded arcade and a peaked roof of red clay tiles. A watchman stood guard at the gates, but it was a simple matter to avoid him, jump the wall, and make their way to the mansion proper. 

Lord Nisias did not seem the sort to bother himself unduly about security. Which was odd, if he was kidnapping people and selling them to slavers. Perhaps Varia Province’s distance from Malarae had made him complacent.

If so, he would pay for it tonight.

Caina slipped the rope from her belt, unhooked the grapnel, and threw it. The rope uncoiled, and she felt the grapnel catch upon the clay tiles of the roof. She tugged it a few times, making sure the rope would support her weight. 

Then she nodded to Corvalis. He vanished into the shadows behind a bush. Caina took a deep breath, gripped the rope with her gloved hands, and scaled the wall.

The plan was simple enough, and they had used it before to good effect. Caina would break into the Lord Governor’s study and retrieve his records from the trapped drawer, while Corvalis kept watch from the mansion’s grounds. If he saw any signs of alarm, he would create a disturbance, and Caina would escape in the chaos. 

But she did not think that would be necessary. The mansion of even a minor lord in Malarae had a dozen guards, locked and barred windows, even sorcerous wards shielding the entrances. Lord Nicias’s residence had none of those things. 

Again she wondered at his complacency. A man breaking the Emperor’s laws and consorting with the enemies of the Empire usually took greater care. Perhaps Nisias was simply a fool. Or perhaps Ryther had set them upon the Lord Governor’s trail for reasons of his own.

Caina intended to find the truth. 

After a moment she reached the third floor and braced her boots against the wall, her arms tight with strain. Caina was grateful for all the long hours she had spent practicing the forms of unarmed combat. The climb had been difficult, but nonetheless well within her strength. 

She hung motionless for a moment, considering the Lord Governor’s study. It occupied a solar with tall, high, shuttered windows built in the Imperial style. The shutters could be opened, but given the chill and damp weather of Varia province, Caina wondered if Nisias ever bothered. 

She drew a dagger and slipped the blade into the gap between the shutters. A simple tug of the blade popped the latch, and the shutters swung out. Caina went over the sill and into the solar, her boots making no sound against the floor. The windows had not been locked, and she saw no signs of mechanical or sorcerous traps.

Very strange. 

Either Nisias was one of the dumbest slave traders Caina had encountered, or he simply wasn’t involved.

Or Ryther had sent her here for another reason.

Caina kept the dagger in her left hand and went to the desk. 

It was a massive slab of polished Ulkaari oak. The drawers were large enough that Caina could have hidden herself within them, if she squeezed. Had Nisias felt like it, he could have concealed corpses within them.

Caina felt a twinge of unease at the thought, and then went to work on the drawer Ryther had indicated. As the magus had warned, it was trapped with a fiendish mechanical device, one that would unleash a spray of poisoned needles on anyone who attempted to force the lock. Fortunately Halfdan had taught her to pick locks long ago, and Caina’s time as a Ghost had given her a great deal of practice. She pried aside a wooden panel on the side of the drawer and jammed the intricate gears and springs that powered the trap. Then she slid a pick into the lock, probing for the tumblers. After a few moments, the lock clicked, and Caina slid the drawer open.

A single massive, leather-bound ledger rested within the drawer. Caina lifted it toward the dim light leaking through the window and turned the pages. Nisias Druzen kept careful, detailed records. He listed every slave his hired thugs had kidnapped from the province, their age, their health, and how much money he had obtained from their sale to the Istarish slavers.

It was even in his own handwriting. 

Caina shook her head in disgust and closed the ledger. Nisias had condemned himself with his own hand. She would return to Corvalis, and together they would plan a fatal accident for the corrupt Lord Governor. 

She tucked the ledger under one arm, turned, and stopped.

Something smelled…wrong.

Caina tugged her mask down far enough to uncover her nose and sniffed the air.

She smelled blood. 

Her eyes swept the solar. Had she cut herself on the trap, perhaps on a blade smeared with numbing poison so she would not feel the wound? No, if she had lost enough blood to smell it, she would have become light-headed by now.

Which meant the smell was coming from somewhere else.

There were two other doors in the solar. One opened in the corridor, leading to the other rooms on the mansion’s top floor. The other was on Caina’s left, and if the mansion had been built in the Imperial style, it led to the Lord Governor’s private rooms. 

She saw a dark puddle spreading from beneath that door.

Blood. Freshly spilled. 

Caina hesitated. One part of her mind argued for retreating back down the rope and enlisting Corvalis’s aid. Another part urged her forward at once. 

She glided forward, careful not to step in the spreading blood, and put her ear to the door. 

Nothing. Utter silence.

Caina tucked the ledger into her satchel and opened the door, dagger ready.

Beyond she saw a well-furnished sitting room, dotted with overstuffed chairs and gleaming tables. Wooden shelves held books that looked as if they had never been read, and busts of long-dead Emperors and nobles. The intricate Anshani carpet was thick and soft.

A dead woman lay by the door, her blood soaking into the carpet.

Caina stepped over the blood and examined the woman. She looked like a Szaldic townswoman of middle years, her face lined and her hands callused from years of work. Blood soaked her neck and the front of her dress, her glassy eyes gazing at the ceiling, her face slack. 

Her right hand clenched a bloody dagger, and a disturbing thought worked its way into Caina’s mind.

The dead woman had cut her own throat. 

She had cut her own throat so violently that she had almost decapitated herself. That meant she had stood there, sawing away with the dagger, until she finally collapsed from blood loss. 

It was a terrible way to commit suicide.

Unless she had been forced to do it. 

Caina touched the dead woman’s forehead. It was still warm, and the blood had not even begun to dry. Most likely she had killed herself while Caina had still been climbing the rope up the wall.

But why?

She heard a muffled groan, and raised her dagger.

A half-open door stood on the far side of the sitting room. Caina crossed the room and pushed the door open the rest of the way. Beyond she saw a bedroom dominated by an enormous four-poster bed. Two more corpses, a man and a woman, lay upon the floor, daggers clutched in their hands, their throats cut.

Lord Governor Nisias Druzen lay upon the bed, still wearing his finery, his eyes staring unblinking at the ceiling. For a moment Caina thought that he was dead, that he had also slashed his own throat. But his chest rose and fell, and the skin of his neck was unbroken.

He was alive…and stared at the ceiling while two corpses bled out around his bed.

Disturbed, Caina moved closer. Nisias made no reaction, and Caina bent over him. The appearance of a hooded shadow holding a dagger would get a reaction out of most people, but Nisias only blinked. He did not move, did not try to defend himself.

He only blinked.

Caina frowned, and gave his hand a gentle jab with the point of her dagger.

Again he only blinked. 

Caina sniffed his breath. Had he been drugged? She knew of a few drugs that could induce a peculiar, trance-like state, though she could not imagine why the Lord Governor might have taken them. Perhaps the dead people on the floor had taken some sort of drug and gone berserk, killing themselves in their mania…

Caina smelled nothing but wine and expensive cheese upon his breath, but she felt a sharp, crawling tingle. She put one hand upon his forehead, and the tingle sharpened. 

Sorcery. 

As a child she had been scarred by a necromancer, and ever since then she had been able to sense the presence of active sorcery. The ability had become only more acute as she grew older, and now she could often distinguish between the degree and intensity of spells. 

Someone had put a spell upon Nisias. A mind-controlling spell, unless she missed her guess. 

Suddenly the corpses upon the floor made a great deal more sense. Certain forms of sorcery controlled the minds of its victims, forcing them to fight in defense of the sorcerer.

Or to cut their own throats. 

Nisias flinched as Caina straightened up, and she felt the sharp tingle of the spell intensify.

“The door,” rasped Nisias, and he pointed at the wall.

Then he went limp, his arm falling to the bed.

Caina turned and saw a faint glimmer of light in the wooden paneling of the bedroom wall.

A secret door. 

Caina examined the wall and found the trigger. The hidden door swung open without a sound, revealing a set of stairs spiraling into the depths of the mansion. It was not unusual for a noble’s mansion to have at least one or two hidden passages. The stairs might lead to an escape tunnel, or it might lead to a hidden vault beneath the mansion, where Nisias kept his treasures…or where he could carry out activities unobserved. 

Given the corpses upon the carpet, Caina suspected the latter.

But since Nisias lay trapped within a spell, perhaps someone else was carrying out secret activities in the vault.

She returned her dagger to its boot sheath and drew a throwing knife with her left hand. With her right she pulled her curved ghostsilver dagger from its scabbard. Ghostsilver was proof against sorcery, and had the power to penetrate defensive spells. 

Caina thought she might need the dagger sooner rather than later.

She went down the stairs, moving without sound against the rough stone steps. Enspelled globes had been embedded into the curved wall at regular intervals, throwing their harsh glow over the stone. The walls grew cold and clammy as Caina descended beneath the earth.

Then the stairs ended in a large stone vault, and Caina stepped into an abattoir.

And a dark scene from her memories. 

Six steel tables stood throughout the vault, and upon each rested a corpse in various stages of dissection. Shelves held books, scrolls, organs floating in jars of brine, and knives and scalpels caked in dried blood. A wooden worktable stood at the far end of the vault, laden down with more books and scrolls and papers covered with arcane diagrams.

Oberon Ryther stood before the worktable, smiling at her.

“Ah,” said Ryther. “I see my trap has caught a fly. A nasty, buzzing little fly.”

“Then it was you,” said Caina, using the rasping, disguised voice Theodosia had taught her. “It was you all along. The slavers, Nisias, everything. You…”

“Oh, don’t bother with the stage voice,” said Ryther with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I know exactly who you are, Caina Amalas. A Ghost nightfighter and a woman of many disguises…and the whore of the First Magus’s miserable bastard son.” 

Caina’s alarm sharpened. Only a few people outside of the Ghosts knew who she really was, and even fewer knew that Corvalis was Decius Aberon’s son. And there was no way that Ryther could know that, no way at all.

Unless…

“I see you met the Moroaica,” said Caina, using her normal voice, cold and hard.

“Getting closer,” said Ryther. “Yes, I’ve known the creature called the Moroaica for some time. Probably longer than you have been alive. A cruel mistress, to be sure, but she has taught me many useful things.”

“She will destroy you,” said Caina. “Her disciples are tools. She keeps them so long as they are useful, and then casts them aside in the end.”

Ryther’s smile was chill. “I know this, Caina of the Ghosts. Far better than you. But you should know this by now. For we know each other very well, do we not?”