Liar's Moon (28 page)

“Your mother’s?”

She nodded. “At first it seemed like a perfect plan. The Ceid are discreet, after all, and they can afford a little
risk. I think Mother even liked the adventure, although her main interest was obviously financial, not humanitarian.” She took a sip of her drink, loops of gold hair swaying gently around her face. “Things were going well. And then Durrel entered the picture, and after that, everything got
very
complicated.”

“How does Karst fit in?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was just one of Mother’s
employees. Sometimes he went along to guard the shipments. But you think he killed her?”

“When did you learn they were involved with Ferrymen?”

“Not until after she died!” Koya looked so distressed there that I believed her. “We heard that Karst had been hassling some of the passengers, leaning on them for extra money, but Ragn told me Mother promised to take care of it. Maybe she didn’t
get a chance,” she said. “They quarreled, and Karst killed her.”

“It’s more than that,” I said, and explained what Raffin had told me, about Karst selling some of his Sarists to the Celystra. Karst clearly had ambitions of his own, and maybe Talth had wanted a piece of that little side business with the Inquisition. Or maybe she’d merely been in Karst’s way. From everything I’d been told,
killing Talth did seem the only way to budge her.

“What are you thinking?” Koya asked, her voice tentative.

I frowned at my lightless fingertips. “That this almost makes sense. And
almost
means something is wrong.”

I probably should have stayed at Cartouche, and Koya suggested
it, but I wasn’t ready to sit still yet. There were too many jumbled thoughts buzzing around in my head, and I needed time and movement to sort through them. I was dodging curfew, but tonight it didn’t seem to matter. As I crossed through Markettown, there were people abroad like I hadn’t seen in months. A cluster of townsfolk with jugs and laundry baskets gathered by a neighborhood fountain,
chatting into the night; people argued outside a closed stall in Market Circle . . . It was all so bustling and odd I wanted to stop and ask someone what was going on, but I spotted a patrol of the Night Watch in the crowd, and ducked into the shadows.

In the Temple District, it was just as lively. Before I was in sight of the tavern or the churches, I heard shouts and banging, the whinny
of an alarmed horse.

A gunshot.

Somebody smart would have taken off in the other direction, but I ran
into
the circle, where a knot of men in military uniforms hassled a wagoner. His cart was overturned, and in the light from the Temple’s open doors, I made out its cargo of casks of wine or ale, no doubt destined for Eske’s customers. Two of the soldiers had the wagoner by his collar,
while the others raided the barrels, hoisting them aloft or tapping them in the street. One knelt on the ground, lapping up spilled wine like a stray dog.

Another gunshot broke the night, followed by a sharp, clear shout in a voice I recognized, and this time the soldiers heeded it. Eske stood in the Temple threshold with a musket, her dark mask and wild hair making her look more like the
Nameless One, delivering the swift, fiery justice of the gods, than our ever-jovial high priestess.

“Halt!” she cried, and her voice alone was enough to stop the soldiers short. “That man is a servant of the gods on sacred business of Tiboran, and you will unhand him now or suffer the Masked God’s wrath.” She lowered the barrel of the musket straight at the soldier holding the wagoner. He
dropped the man’s collar so quickly the wagoner stumbled.

But these were king’s men, trained soldiers in the Green Army, and it was a hot summer night in Gerse, and they were angry. I heard the whisk of a sword drawing, saw an arm flick in Eske’s direction —

“You don’t want to do that, friend,” said a low, even voice, and another masked Temple worker melted out of the shadows, a long,
steel blade leveled at the armed soldier’s head. “Come back into the Temple and let this man get about his work.”

“But that’s
our
wine,” somebody groused.

“And you’re welcome to it,” Eske said smoothly. “But it leaves the Temple in your bellies, not on your backs. I have no say in the new rations, but the taps at the Temple are always ready, and we’ve never turned away a man yet.”

Amid this, the wagoner had slinked away, and Eske’s man had easily circled around the back of the crowd. Finally the armed soldier lowered his own weapon, and the group broke up, still grumbling. Most of them crawled back into the Temple, but a handful left across the circle, while at least one paused to help right the wagon and rescue the stock. Eske stood in the doorway, shaking her head.

Her frown intensified when she saw me. “I understand this plan of yours,” she said. “But all I can say is, it had better work fast. You’ve put us right in the middle of the fight, and I’m not sure that’s where we want to be. And
you
, young lord,” Eske said severely, then beamed. The masked barman with the sword had stepped up to us and was sheathing his blade. “I should kiss you, but I doubt
our girl here would approve.”

I spun around. Durrel — of
course
that level voice and blade had been Durrel’s. He gave me a crooked half smile. “I’d better make sure they’re not in there causing trouble,” he said, and jogged easily up the short stairs.

Eske smiled, but there was a shadow across her face as we watched Durrel move through the bar. “I like him,” she said. “And we’re happy
to keep him here as long as necessary, but that boy is not meant to be one of Tiboran’s. He belongs to Zet, and the sooner you get him back in his rightful place, the better.”

I understood what she was saying; Zet was the patron of nobility, and as much as Tiboran liked things topsy-turvy, the world had its proper order, and it was dangerous to defy that order for too long. “I’m working
on it.” I sighed, and followed her inside.

Durrel had found a table upstairs and doffed his mask. He looked hot and disheveled, his eyes rimmed in red, and I remembered that the last time I’d seen him he’d been heading off to get drunk. He linked his fingers together on the table, the knuckles of his left hand raw and bloody.

Neither of us spoke for a long time, but Durrel finally broke
the silence. “How’s Raffin?”

“He’ll be fine.” I didn’t know what to say next. There was so much going on, and I wanted to talk to somebody — to Durrel — but I couldn’t decide where to start. “Where did you go?”

He shrugged. “Just — here. Along the water. I went past my house, but . . .” he trailed off. “I knew she didn’t like me,” he said, and it was obvious he meant Talth. “And I accepted
that. I knew she was cold, and hard, and never let a drop of warmth or affection go to waste. I even knew she was a terrible mother. But to find out that she was involved not just in extorting and exploiting vulnerable people, but — this
thing
that Raffin told us . . . How could
anyone
do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He turned those dark, anguished eyes to me. “And my father?”

“No
,
”
I
said, my voice rough with relief. “He wasn’t involved. Koya explained it to me.”

He looked perplexed. “Koya?”

I had forgotten Durrel didn’t know that Koya and Ragn were working together — because I’d only just figured that bit out before poisoning myself. I recounted what Koya had told me tonight, finishing with, “It was only Karst and Talth who were involved with the Inquisition.” Koya
had just said Karst, but she hadn’t had the benefit of Raffin’s intelligence regarding her mother’s involvement. “Your father didn’t do anything wrong.”

He nodded slowly, still looking troubled. Eske appeared at that moment, bearing a ewer of mead. “Busy night?” she asked, and I choked on my drink.

“You have no idea,” I said before she slipped away again. It had started with a visit
from my brother and ended with the discovery that I’d killed my own magic, and it seemed unbelievable that everything that had happened between could fit into the same evening.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Durrel reached for my hand and I pulled it back. “Did something else happen?”

I shook my head. I didn’t really want to talk about it, but I told him anyway. “I figured out what the poison
was for. It — quells magic.”

“Quells?” Durrel looked hard at me for a moment as this sank in. “Damn, Celyn. Are you all right?”

“Koya said it’s temporary,” I said — but she couldn’t know for sure. Koya had never dealt with a magic like mine. There was no telling what the Tincture of the Moon might have done to my singular power.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He looked helpless, and there
was concern threaded all through his voice. He did take my hand then, refusing to release it when I tried to tug away.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I lied. “Is there any more mead?”

The rest of that night involved a great deal of the Temple’s best offerings and a concerted effort to blot out our mounting mysteries for a few hours. I woke late and muzzy-headed and just a little surprised to find myself alone in what seemed to be my own room at the tavern. I got myself more or less put together, in time to see a note slip through the crack
beneath the door. We’d had a message from Koya, calling Durrel and me to a meeting at an address I didn’t recognize. I was suspicious, but Durrel confirmed the hand and knew the house, so we set off that hot, drowsy afternoon, squinting against a damnably bright sun.

“What’s this about?” I asked, as if Durrel knew any more than I did.

“I don’t know,” Durrel said, “but I’m glad to finally
be doing something besides sitting around the Temple waiting for something to happen.”

“I’m sure it’s very onerous,” I said crossly. “Being anonymous among all those masked women.”

“I’m only interested in one masked woman,” he said, and was rewarded with my most withering scowl.

The address Koya provided was in a middle-class district, on a street with a view down the Oss to the
city wall. I felt a stab of concern as I saw that black iron bars were lowered over the river.

“They’ve closed the gates?” Durrel’s disbelief mirrored my own. But the queue of vessels backed up thickly in the water, and the frustrated buzz of conversation all along the riverside, was plain enough. To protect the city from invasion by Prince Wierolf’s troops, Bardolph had ordered all the gates
sealed, cutting off transit in and out of Gerse, closing docks, and shutting down shipping. It had been hard enough for ordinary people to enter or leave town for months, but at least we knew food and goods and information still passed through the gates. Now I felt my chest constrict a little, as if Bardolph’s grip was literally closing around me, and not the city.

Durrel stopped to question
a merchant standing outside his shop and shaking his head at the sight. “Been some kind of incident,” the fellow explained. “A fire at a house down Sixth Circle way — burned half a dozen soldiers in their beds,
and
the family they were staying with.” At this last, he spit on the ground.

A woman drawing her washing in from a cramped courtyard told us more. “They say it were deliberate,” she
said. Somehow the home’s doors and shutters had been fixed shut, ensuring that there would be no survivors. “And a purple handprint, right there on the front door.”

Durrel and I exchanged alarmed glances. “That purple handprint again,” he said in a low voice as we moved on. “Just like those dead Greenmen.”

“Well, whoever they are, they’ve progressed to killing civilians,” I said grimly.

Eventually we turned down along the river and stopped at a modest town house painted sky blue, its narrow balcony overlooking the water. “We’re here,” Durrel said.

“Where?” I looked the place over; I saw no wall, no guards, just a well-tended patch of garden and a sleepy, white cat draped sinuously across the doorstep. What was Koya up to now?

“Ah — this is Stantin’s house,” Durrel
said, his voice a little tight. “Koya’s husband.”

I drew back in surprise, but the door swung open, and a tall man with white hair stepped over the cat and bowed briefly to Durrel. “Your lordship,” he said in a smooth voice like warm wine. “And Mistress Celyn. The others are here. Come.”

“Others?” But Koya’s husband just ushered us inside, making polite inquiry about the weather, as
if we were ordinary visitors. He led us upstairs to a cozy sitting room overlooking the river. The balcony doors were thrown wide, lightweight curtains lifting in the air. Koya and one of her sighthounds had taken over a delicate, turned-wood bench, and she was deep in conversation with Lord Ragn and another man about Stantin’s age (Claas, Durrel quietly informed me). In her beaded velvet she looked
utterly out of place here, but turned a relaxed face to us when we entered.

I felt Durrel tense up beside me when he saw his father, but Lord Ragn rose and embraced him firmly. “Is he being careful?” Lord Ragn demanded of me. He looked windblown and weary, as if he’d ridden hard to get here. “This will be over soon,” he added — and I wanted to ask what he meant, but was forestalled by Stantin
bearing a dish of fruit and a pitcher of wine.

“How did you get strawberries?” I asked instead.

“I’ve been at Favom,” Lord Ragn said. “They’re falling off the vine, they’re so ripe, and the fields are black with crows feasting on them. I’m afraid they’ll rot, since there’s no way to get them from the farm anymore.”

“Lucky you made it back before they sealed the gates,” Durrel observed.

“Only just,” his father agreed.

“How are Lady Amalle’s friends?” I heard the edge in Durrel’s voice.

Lord Ragn stiffened. “Safe,” he said curtly. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to speak with our hosts.”

He turned away, but his path was blocked by Koya. “Ragn,” she said softly, “let them help.” Leaving him no room to object, she steered us all toward the sitting area. “Tell him
what you’ve told me,” she said to me, and Durrel and I explained what Raffin had said about Karst and the Sarists he’d sold to the Celystra.

Disturbingly Lord Ragn’s face betrayed no surprise or alarm at this information. “We’d feared something like this might be going on.”

“Something like
what
?” I said.

Instead of answering me directly, Ragn shifted in his seat. “Your ability
to sense magic seems to be unique in the world, Celyn,” he said. “But there’s always been the question of how the Inquisition seeks out and identifies magic.”

“Beyond random accusations, you mean?” Durrel said.

“Right. But we know from firsthand accounts that their techniques do occasionally turn up an authentic magic user or artifact.”

“The lodestones, the treated silver,” I said.
The Confessors had tools to detect the presence of magic, but they were only a noninvasive first step. The other
techniques
came later and weren’t so kind.

“Exactly,” said Lord Ragn. “But
I
wouldn’t be able to work the lodestones; Lord Durrel wouldn’t know how to tell the difference between altered silver and ordinary.”

“And altered how?” Durrel put in, obviously tracking his father’s
line of thought. “You’d need —”

“Someone like me.” Listening to the Decath’s analysis, I felt cold all over. They were right. How would ordinary people craft a lodestone to respond to magic in a room? The stones themselves weren’t inherently magical, so how did they work? “Somebody inside the Inquisition must have magic.”

Lord Ragn’s face was set, and I realized he must have come to
this conclusion ages ago. Why had I never thought about it?

“Well, I can hardly imagine Werne putting very many wizards on his payroll,” said Durrel.

But I could. What had he wanted
me
to do, after all? I looked between father and son, willing it not to be true. “Karst’s prisoners.”

Lord Ragn nodded grimly. “It would appear that at least some of the Ferrymen’s clients who come
short of their ransom aren’t killed outright by the Inquisitor’s men.”

“Wait,” Durrel said. “You think Talth and Karst turned people over to the Greenmen, who subsequently put them to work charming chains and rocks so the Confessors could track down their fellow Sarists even more efficiently?”

It was a horrible thought, and one that had too much of the ring of truth about it. “We know
Werne’s tried to recruit me,” I said. “And it explains what Raffin saw.”

Lord Ragn gave me a barely perceptible nod, but Durrel looked alarmed. “And this is why Karst killed Talth? Some dispute over this — arrangement with the Celystra?”

“We’ve been trying to find evidence,” I added. “But all we have right now is the word of a disgraced Greenman.”

Koya’s cool voice broke into the
conversation. “We actually called you here for a more urgent matter.” She rose from her seat and drew closer to us, giving Lord Ragn a pointed look. “
Tell
them.”

He looked stubborn, but finally acquiesced. “There’s been a delay in the arrival of one of our shipments,” he said.

It took me a moment to understand what he meant, and then I wished I didn’t. “You have missing Sarists?”

“The last clients we contracted to move through Mother’s firm,” said Koya. “There was an arrival the day she died, but there were — people absent. Passengers we know had arranged for the journey somehow did not reach Gerse with the others, and we fear there may also be others we were unaware of, people she added on her own.”

Something heavy settled on my chest as I took this in. “They’d
already turned them over to the Celystra?”

“Fortunately I don’t think so,” Lord Ragn said. “It was Talth’s habit to put them to work in her own enterprises while bleeding them of their money. Only when they were worked half to death or the gold had run dry did she turn to the Inquisition.” There was a bitter edge to his words, and I couldn’t blame him. “No, as far as we can tell, they just
never arrived.”

“So they’re still out there?” Durrel sounded horrified. “It’s been
weeks
! They could have suffocated in some cargo hold, or —”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Lord Ragn put in gently. “But that is one reason Koya and I have been so concerned.”

“We have to find them,” Durrel said, an accusatory note to his voice.

Koya reached for him. “That’s what your father’s
been trying to do,” she said. “He’s been traveling, making inquiries —”

“But unfortunately the one person who definitely knew what happened to them is dead, and her colleagues have not been forthcoming either.” Ragn stood and paced behind the bench. “I’ve tried to suss out information from sources inside the Celystra or the Council —”

“And I’ve asked what I could of the Ceid,” Koya
added.

“But it’s delicate work, inquiring after Sarists, and I’ve found no sign of them. I’m afraid only Talth’s close associates know where they are.”

“How many?” I asked, my voice very small.

Ragn took a breath before answering, looking over my head to the river outside. “At least six.”

“Hells,” Durrel said. “What can we do?”

Here Koya looked at me. “That’s one of the
reasons I reached out to you, Celyn. I thought you might —” She broke off, shaking her head.

In a sudden, awful rush I understood what she meant. “I can’t,” I said.

“We wouldn’t ask you to expose yourself,” Ragn said. “But if there were some way you could turn your gift to this matter, you would be doing a very great service for the cause of good.”

I stared at him. Why hadn’t Koya
mentioned this? “No, I mean I really
can’t
,” I said. “I took the tincture.”

From the look of dismay on Lord Ragn’s face, I knew he understood precisely what I meant. “And you’re sure — you sense absolutely nothing?”

“Father, please. If you knew what she’d been through, you wouldn’t ask her. There’s got to be another way.” Durrel leaned forward in his seat. “Are you sure the refugees
made it to the city?”

Ragn lifted his hands in defeat, but said, “To the best I could figure out. I’ve been able to trace them as far as a checkpoint outside Tratua, but after that the trail runs cold. But Talth preferred to keep her assets close; she didn’t like to leave things unaccounted for.”

“The city it is, then,” Durrel said. He shoved aside a pile of books on a little table and
started to trace a figure on the table’s surface — a wide circle representing Gerse. “You’ve already checked the docks, I hope,” he said.

“Of course,” his father said, sounding cross. “All Talth’s shipments have been accounted for. And the warehouse near Bal Marse, where we know she’d held people before.” He marked a spot on the table with the stem of a strawberry.

“Here,” said a low
voice, and there was Claas, spreading a rolled-up parchment across the little table. “It’s a bit dated,” he added apologetically, as the image of Gerse opened before us. “Which is why we were allowed to keep it.” He was being generous. The fragile document lacked at least two major bridges crossing the Oss and the Big Silver, and Markettown appeared to be a pasture. Still, it was good enough for
our purposes.

“Didn’t you tell me Talth owned houses in Markettown?” I asked Durrel, pointing to the general area on the map. “Where we saw the plague flags?”

Koya slipped in closer. “Barris told me he sold those properties. Ragn?”

Durrel’s father frowned at the map. “It’s something,” he said, not sounding particularly hopeful.

“Let’s go look.” Durrel stood up, but his father
shook his head.

“We can’t simply rush straight into a quarantine,” Ragn said. “We need to consider our next move carefully.”

“How much time do you think they have?” I asked. “If Karst realizes we know what he’s doing, he’ll get rid of them. I’m with Durrel on this.”

“Karst
won’t
realize, because I have gone out of my way to keep from arousing his suspicions,” Ragn said.

“But
we haven’t,” Durrel said heavily. “He’s seen Celyn, and I’m obviously not where the Ceid put me for safekeeping. We need to find those refugees.”

Their argument continued, Durrel wanting to leave
now
, and his father urging caution. I was starting to feel a little sick, from the heat, and last night, and the whole awful weight of what this meant finally settling on me. The idea that I could
somehow use my skill to track magic users had always repulsed me, but now that I absolutely
couldn’t
do it, when it might have been used to save people instead of condemn them — I squeezed my eyes shut and bent my head to my knees, wishing all of this would just go away.

A few moments later, I felt a gentle arm around me. I looked up, expecting Durrel or Koya, but it was Claas sitting beside
me, offering me a drink. He was watching me, a strange, sad kindness in his warm eyes, and there was something here that I almost,
almost
understood. I swallowed hard, rubbing at my chest.

“They’re gathering for dinner,” he said. Lord Ragn and Durrel had disappeared to the dining room next door. “Why don’t you step outside for some air? There’s actually a breeze this evening.”