Shadowborn (12 page)

Too late to regret that, either. He said, “Troops have been on th’alert or on the move all summer. Reynard’s had the ducal order, and he’s had Hearne’s account. If the rider reached th’station, and the telegraph wires aren’t cut, then they’ll be moving fast as they can. Reynard’s no trooper, and he knows t’stay out of the way. And even if he doesn’t, Noellene will set her hand to it.”

Stranhorne smiled at the mention. “She will, that.” He was fond of Ishmael’s sister, and she of him, though not fond enough to marry, much to the vexation of Reynard’s then wife. She had schemed for Noellene’s respectable send-off from Strumheller. After Reynard’s divorce, Noellene had settled in once more as chatelaine, and seemed likely to stay there. Notwithstanding her dainty beauty, citified airs, and expensive tastes worthy of Lady Telmaine herself, Noellene understood the Borders defense as well as her brothers. If Reynard needed spurring, she would apply the spurs.

“So, t’answer your question, I’m hopeful of it.”

“But we should plan to hold out for the day,” Stranhorne finished for him. “If we’re not forced to retreat. Any hint of Shadowborn—inside?” he appended.

“Truthfully, be difficult for me t’tell, but I’m on it. Where’s Mycene?”

Mycene and his men were in the courtyard, having reinforced the squad guarding the main gate during the worst of the attack. The Shadowborn had again made targets of the leaders, more successfully than on the roof. The defenders’ mind-set had been too slow to shift from thinking of Shadowborn as unreasoning beasts capable of savagery but not tactics. Stranhorne probably owed the integrity of its north gate to Mycene and his men.
That is a less uncomfortable notion than hitherto,
Ish thought, slightly amused at how differently they greeted him, having now met Shadowborn for themselves. Mycene was no friendlier, since he still had every reason to suspect—or maintain the appearance of suspecting—Ishmael’s involvement in his fiancée’s death. However, Ishmael doubted he would ever again liken the profession of Shadowhunter to that of rat catcher, as his father had done more than once in Ishmael’s hearing. Ish exchanged nods with Mycene’s men and words with Mycene, noted they were down to eight, and accounted for three wounded—one seriously and two of whom they expected back shortly—and the hapless di Banneret, who knew no better than to eat sausage from a street vendor’s cart.

Which made him think of the wounded, and wonder how Balthasar Hearne was holding up. He shied from entering the dining room, ward for the most seriously wounded. Arrant cowardice, he knew. He would have found it hard even when Stranhorne’s prohibition against using his magic was on him, and now, now that he knew he was no longer able to help, he faltered at the door, at the sounds of murmurs and groans and of someone—a woman? a young boy?—sobbing brokenly.

As he stood there, a woman made to push past him, and he recognized one of Stranhorne’s housekeepers, a sharp-tongued, sharp-witted woman who was an exacting manager for her portion of the staff. He could rely on her to know exactly who was doing what and where. He caught her arm. “Dr. Hearne, Dr. Balthasar Hearne—could y’please tell him that I’d like a word with him?”

“But, Baron,” the woman said, startled, “he hasn’t returned since he left with you.”

Balthasar followed the orderlies carrying the stretcher for his last case into the ballroom to assess the next, and found Ishmael standing inside the dining room–turned-ward, hands pushed deep into pockets and shoulders hunched. “I need a quick word,” the baron said, curtly.

“Is it your arm—”

“Nothing medical,” said the baron, his expression strangely unreadable. “Nothing needing done here. I just need a word.”

Balthasar’s first thought was of Telmaine—that Ishmael had sensed more from Telmaine. That thought had him untying his apron even as he truthfully protested, “I don’t have long. I shouldn’t leave at all.”

“A moment—that’s all I ask.”

Balthasar trailed Ishmael’s hurrying heels across the ballroom, up the east stairs. Ishmael brusquely deflected attempts to accost him with a “Later” or “Ask the baronettes.”

Their room on the fifth floor was in use. Ishmael steered him to one on the second that was now largely cleared of furnishing and carpets, except for a dozen beds bare of mattresses. He recognized the packs propped against the near wall as belonging to members of Mycene’s troop—this was where the troop had been billeted. The beds themselves would have been stripped of their mattresses to hold refugees and wounded.

“Have—Is it Telmaine?” Balthasar said as soon as the door closed.

“Telmaine?” said Ishmael, startled. “What about Telmaine?”

Not, then. “Have you found an infiltrator?”

Ishmael smiled. “In a manner of speaking.”

Balthasar felt the heart within him chill, as though he had suddenly gained the sense of Shadowborn magic that Telmaine had described. That smile was no expression of the man he knew, for all the cast of face and the scars were the same. Sweet Imogene, he himself had warned Ishmael of just this eventuality. But, tired and caught up by the false Ishmael’s urgency, he had let down his guard, missed the clues of the lapses in accent and Ishmael’s failure to show concern for Telmaine—indeed, now he thought of it, Ishmael’s expression down in the ward had been wrong, oblivious to the suffering around him. Balthasar had been caught by the very ruse he had warned others against.

He swallowed and said, “This cannot possibly work. Ishmael himself is in the manor.” He prayed this was still so, but surely the Shadowborn could not have caught Ishmael off guard.

“I
know
he’s about, curse him,” the Shadowborn said, hands fisted. “But it already
has
worked.”

On him, for whichever reason the Shadowborn wanted him. “I’ll be missed,” Balthasar said, steadily. If the Shadowborn killed him and took his form, only Ishmael would be able to tell—until or unless the Shadowborn found himself faced with a chloroformed patient on a surgical table. The thought in itself was bleakly cheering; the prospect of how far the Shadowborn might go in his masquerade, sickening.

He kept such thoughts off his face and out of his voice. “You came with Mycene’s men, didn’t you? You were the young man—di Banneret—who lent me a coat. A coat that was too big for me—and for you.” That was the inconsistency that had been nagging him, why a guardsman traveling light would carry a coat that did not fit him. Sweet Imogene, if he’d only remembered in time . . . “What is your name?”

“My
name
?” said the Shadowborn, taken aback at the unexpected civility.

Good; keep him off balance.
“Do you not exchange names amongst your people?”

That smile again, a triumphant malice in it. “We
do
. Oh, we
do
, and you’ll
like
learning mine. . . .” The Shadowborn abruptly moved with a crack of floorboards quite unlike Ishmael’s near-noiseless tread. Balthasar recoiled, his sonn ringing off the bones in the other’s skull as he pushed his face up to Balthasar’s.

“Where are my sons, Balthasar Hearne?”

I should have shouted out,
Bal thought,
while I still had a chance.
A claw balanced his carotid pulse on its tip, and his mind went blank with terror. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Truly, I don’t know.”

“You sent them away,” the Shadowborn breathed in his face. “Where to?”

“I thought they’d be safer if I didn’t know,” Bal whispered in turn. “Can you not read the truth from me?”

It was not a safe question, but an urgent one. He had thought the Shadowborn who had impersonated his brother, Lysander, claiming to be the father of the twins, had tormented him merely for the pleasure of it. But if not, if these Shadowborn could not touch-read, and if he survived to convey the information . . .

The claw tip stroked downward; he clutched at his throat, but his fingers found merely a stinging gash and a trickle, not a gush or even a spurt of blood.

“Truly,” he gasped, “I meant them no harm. Or their mother, either.”

“What did she tell you about me?”

“She said you had come to her in the daytime, traveling through the day. She was afraid the children would not be fully Darkborn. And they were—
are
—not. But they are also beautiful, healthy little boys, for whose safety I pray.”

“But
she
was not safe,” the Shadowborn said, in Bal’s face. “She’s
dead
. So why should
I
care about your stupid prayers?”

“I am deeply sorry about Tercelle,” Bal said. “But my prayers are my own. I would not dare to ascribe their value to anyone else. Much less a member of a people about whom I know virtually nothing.”

“You think you know nothing about us?” the Shadowborn said, grinning savagely. Then the grin tightened, as at some mental or physical effort, and the bones of it
shifted
. There was something intrinsically revolting about bone moving like muscle beneath the skin, but even if there were not, he had already met the phenomenon, lying pinned on Vladimer’s bedroom floor as his brother’s semblance warped to that of a stranger’s and the nails of his poised hand elongated to shredding talons. Ishmael’s face re-formed as a much younger but still familiar one. The young man—boy, no more than sixteen—smiled his older brother’s mocking smile.

“Not such a stranger, am I, now?
Uncle
Balthasar.”

The smile was there, the lips and narrow nose were there, but the cheekbones were more pronounced and the eyes more wide set. Lysander’s features, mingled with another’s. Mingled, as Balthasar’s were with Telmaine’s in their two small daughters.

Balthasar broke for the door. There was no planning in it, simply a raw impulse of flight. The Shadowborn caught him on his first stride, arm around his chest. A callused palm slammed up underneath his jaw, pinning his mouth closed; fingers closed on his nose, blocking off all air. Bal bucked and thrashed, staggering with the Shadowborn, bringing them both to their knees. As they toppled, the Shadowborn twisted them both, throwing Bal down beneath him. Bal’s injured cheek ground into the floor. His head pounded with air deprivation; he convulsed with the urgent need to breathe. His head struck the Shadowborn’s jaw, and he frantically jerked it up again. The Shadowborn gasped out, “I am
not
letting you go. You
will
obey me.”

And Balthasar
felt
the ensorcellment enwrap him, turn his muscles to meltwater and his will to . . . nothing at all. “Lie still,” the Shadowborn said in the boy’s voice, and he could not move, stripped of even the most primitive survival reflexes. He was all but unconscious when the Shadowborn released his mouth and nose and let him gasp in air.

“You are my father’s brother,” whispered the boy against his ear. “You are
family
, and so you should love me. Love me the way you love your own children. And
obey me
. The way you would obey your
God
.”

With hopeless fascination, Balthasar observed the fragmentation of a mind from within. The ensorcellment would not extract from him a father’s love or a believer’s obedience, but it would crudely exact a slave’s devotion. Even so, he recognized the plea in the demand, and some part of him responded to it with pity—this monster was little more than a child. A third portion of him weighed the experiences of Vladimer and Tercelle, the knowledge he had through his sister, Olivede, of magic abused, and knew that he was lost. And a fourth knew both reason and resistance, silently enumerating the ways the Stranhornes and Ishmael were equipped to deal with the enemy in the house.
Ishmael
must sense this ensorcellment. He choked on the slave’s cry of warning and ground his aching cheek against the floor to stifle it.

“Get up,” said the boy, in Ishmael’s voice. Reason said,
Test his power
; the slave said,
Obey
. The conflict made him as clumsy as a partly strung puppet, but the slave brought him to his knees. The boy slapped him with sonn, jerking him to his feet. Reason said,
Ishmael’s sonn was never so coarse.
“That’s the way,” the voice said, fully Ishmael’s once more. “I want you”—a pause, to ensure the message was understood by Balthasar and the ensorcellment—“to go down to the ground floor, to the eastern gate, and
open it
. And don’t try to warn anyone.”

“I . . . will not,” Balthasar said. Even as he did so, he felt himself take his first step toward the door.

“You will so.” He smirked. “
She
didn’t want me to learn how to do this, but I learned it all on my own. So go downstairs—don’t worry; they won’t eat you. They’ll know you’re mine.”

“Guarded,” Balthasar said, unable to stop himself.

“It won’t be, by the time I’m done with”—the carpet in front of Balthasar burst into an arc of flame; he had barely enough time to register the heat before it was quenched—“my little diversion.”

I
shmael turned at the sense of someone beside him. Laurel di Gautier was at his shoulder, blanket trailing from her shoulders. “I heard,” she said in a low voice.

He bit his tongue on suggesting she go back to her rest. He needed another mind on this, one not distracted by a clawed arm, the Call, and the miasma of Shadowborn weather-working. “We need t’find Hearne and this Shadowborn. Any ideas?”

“You are quite certain,” she said, “about Dr. Hearne? He met these Shadowborn earlier than any of us, didn’t he? I was less worried about him because I didn’t expect Shadowborn to have his skill.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Linneas Straus wouldn’t have just anyone working in his surgery.”

“Unless th’Shadowborn are subtler by far than I take them for, the man I touched not an hour ago was th’same man I met seven days past.” Unless along with the shapes they stole, the Shadowborn were also capable of stealing memory and knowledge; if so, only their actions would reveal them. His heart started to race, making his left arm throb in tempo. His fingers found their way to his holstered revolver.